Starting (another) new feature today: something more akin to an actual newsletter, which I’m given to understand is the stated purpose of this platform, detailing the week’s news, such as it is, along with a miscellany of things I’ve come across this week- books completed or started, things seen, the occasional article of note, a curious fossil or plant, who knows- and which might be of interest.
This week I published on my personal website two items, the first in a while- in general I’ve been much more in good spirits this week than has been the case lately, and to be entirely honest I’m certain a major portion of it has been the cool weather we enjoyed right up until today. For much of the past week or more it’s been positively autumnal here in the Mid-Atlantic, though today the late summer heat came back, and promises to remain for the foreseeable future. But while it was here the fine weather certainly raised my mood. Anyway, the longer item is a translation, with accompanying short essay, of an important and fascinating passage from an eighteenth century travel-cum-autobiographical account by the Kurdish sufi and poet and traveler (among other things) Ṭāhā al-Kurdī: Ṭāhā al-Kurdī Meets His Spiritual Master. I’ve long been fascinated by the so-called ‘history of the self’ and the emergence (into wider spread literary form at least) of various forms of subjectivity in the early modern period, and how we ought to think about these subjectivities and emotional expressions within the long arc of human history.
I also published a short poem, the first I’ve written in a long while. For whatever reasons, after a few years of fairly productive poetry-writing, which included what I still find to be some decent poems, I hit a long a dry spell, which I have struggled to overcome. Hoping the proverbial muse will stick with me a while longer (though you may think otherwise!).
Nocturne, First of August
an open window, first night of August, I
know in my bones and my blood coursing
that the babel of human endeavor is all vain
the ambient aural field of the insects’ nocturne
shimmers and fills without, in peace come and depart,
the flow of creatures awake to themselves and alive
to Wisdom, in order and rhythm without human ken,
from before and through and after us on earth.
the dark is a full emptiness,
all is symbol and every symbol is all itself.
the ocean of the world washes upon every shore, and is
in dreams and waking. wisdom—let us attend
and the attending stands to in us, whether we will
it or not. on the crickets go, ceaselessly, night, night,
song upon song, and I, to sleep and to wake and to sleep
again
The week was on the whole fairly uneventful, with the exception of visiting, for the first time since last March, 1) the Library of Congress and 2) the stacks at my university’s library, which until this week had been closed to public access since last March when our indefinite era of covid began. As part of my work as a Mellon postdoctoral research I had been in touch with the LOC staff in the Middle East and North Africa section about securing a large number of randomly assorted books in Arabic and Persian in order to do a survey of typographic variations in that corpus, from the earliest print down to the present. The gears of the Library’s bureaucracy move slowly, and we had finally come to an arrangement in March of 2020; the rest as they say is history.
The atmosphere of the Library was rather uncanny, as only staff and scheduled researchers are permitted entry, so the great crowds of tourists that are usual fixtures there were absent, and the cavernous halls and corridors empty and echoing. Rather cheerier was my campus library- it was a great pleasure to be back in the stacks and to be able to browse, which as absurd as it sounds is one of the draws of the academic life, for me at least, the rows and rows of books each suggesting at least the possibility of new intellectual horizons opening up.
Wynne took the kids to our neighborhood library, also recently re-opened, and they were very excited, and remain so, even though I’ve been requesting and bring home a small trickled of children’s books from the university library. Being there is something else entirely, of course.
The fall semester is only a few weeks away (and hoping very much we are not compelled to move back into dreaded remote teaching), so I have begun in earnest working on my syllabus and lectures for my offering this fall, the history of Islam and Islamic societies from 1500 to the present, which I will be teaching at Catholic University of America in the District (fortunately just a quick train ride down from Takoma, more convenient really than the University of Maryland). As such I’ve been, among other things, building up a visual library for the 19th and 20th centuries, the periods I have not taught before, but which of course have ample representation in image, audio, and film. Here are a couple images from the archives of the American Colony in Palestine and one from the holdings of the V&A that I found especially striking, offered here only with the repository-supplied captions:
A musical discovery this week: the wonderful Chronos Ensemble , featuring primarily Russian Orthodox liturgical music, but not entirely limited to that genre. Have a listen first to the following, but really everything I’ve sampled of theirs is excellent:
In books read this week, I’d like to note a couple:
Leor Halevi, Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865–1935: read through part of this recent volume this week, and along with another recent book, Reading Darwin in Arabic, it does much to illumine the considerably more complex parameters of Islamic and Arabic (in the case of the latter book, including Christian and non-religious thinkers as well) thought and practice in the late nineteenth into early twentieth centuries, including the currents of reformism often seen as straight-forward progenitors of today’s political and militant Islamists. The actual interface of ‘modernity’ and Islam was rather more complex and surprising.
Clive Gamble, Settling the Earth:The Archaeology of Deep Human History: started this one today, can’t say much about it other than it looks excellent, bringing together many avenues of evidence and theory and methodology to explore the truly deep time of the human, and pre-human, past, in a way that I think will prove useful to myself in thinking about these issues and working with them pedagogically. I may write a longer engagement in the future once finished.
Finally, I leave you with a lovely passage from Gary Snyder’s essay ‘Ancient Forests of the Far West’ from his collection of essays The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990) which I had begun reading some time ago and finally finished this week:
How curious it would be to die and then remain standing for another century or two. To enjoy “dead verticality.” If humans could do it we would hear news like, “Henry David Thoreau finally toppled over.” The human community, when healthy, is like an ancient forest. The little ones are in the shade and shelter of the big ones, even rooted in their lost old bodies. All ages, and all together growing and dying. What some silviculturists call for—“even-age management,” plantations of trees all the same size growing up together—seems like rationalistic utopian totalitarianism. We wouldn’t think of letting our children live in regimented institutions with no parental visits and all their thinking shaped by a corps of professionals who just follow official manuals (written by people who never raised kids). Why should we do it to our forests?
“All-age unmanaged”—that’s a natural community, human or other. The industry prizes the younger and middle-aged trees that keep their symmetry, keep their branches even of length and angle. But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them: they are like the Chinese Immortals, they are Han-shan and Shin-de sorts of characters—to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They almost make me look forward to old age.