In October 2008, my friend Will posted on his blog, A Journey Around My Skull, his discovery of a Japanese illustrator, Rokuro Taniuchi. The image of a looming figure on the horizon by Taniuchi reminded me very much of the cover art for a book I read in 5th grade titled Creatures from UFO’s (1978) by Daniel Cohen. On my recent trip back to Cincinnati I fetched the paperback from my old bedroom bookshelf and scanned the cover. Unfortunately, Archway, the publisher, didn’t see fit to credit the cover art illustrator for this book in its young adult series of non-fiction publications. Please comment if you can identify the artist.

The cover artist drew inspiration from chapter 5 of the book, “The Mississippi Fisherman,” that recounts the fascinating tale of two men in Pascagoula, Mississippi on the night of October 11, 1973. Before I continue I should say that I think hypnogogic or hypnopompic states help explain the vast number of encounters with frightening extraterrestrials, angels, demons, ghosts, or molemen depending on the century and culture framing the disturbing experience. Like dreams, these visions tells us more about ourselves and the world of our imagination than the world of nature. Cohen writes,

A door suddenly appeared in the side of the craft. Three strange-looking creatures came out. They didn’t walk. They floated about three feet off the ground.

The two men said the creatures were about five feet tall. They were covered with grayish, wrinkled skin. It was like “the skin of an elephant,” Hickson [one of the two witnesses] said. The creatures didn’t have real faces. Where the nose should have been there was a carrot-like growth. Two similar growths were where ears should have been. The mouth was just a hole. They didn’t have any eyes.

The creatures had two arms, but no fingers. The arms ended in claw-like pincers, like the claws of a lobster. They had what looked like two legs, but the legs seemed to be stuck together. This is why they didn’t seem able to walk. But since they could float they didn’t need to walk…

The story continues to describe how the men were abducted, examined by a machine that resembled a giant eye, and released. I read plenty of books like this when I was in 5th grade, but of all of them, the cover art of this book stuck with me, and so did the story. It reminded me of the tale of the three angels that visited Avraham after his circumcision in Genesis Chapter 18. The fused legs of the UFO creatures reminded me of the idea in Jewish angelology, following Ezekiel’s description of the Ḥayot in Ezekiel 1:5-7,

.וְרַגְלֵיהֶם, רֶגֶל יְשָׁרָה; וְכַף רַגְלֵיהֶם, כְּכַף רֶגֶל עֵגֶל, וְנֹצְצִים, כְּעֵין נְחֹשֶׁת קָלָל. וְאַרְבָּעָה פָנִים, לְאֶחָת; וְאַרְבַּע כְּנָפַיִם, לְאַחַת לָהֶם. וּמִתּוֹכָהּ–דְּמוּת, אַרְבַּע חַיּוֹת; וְזֶה, מַרְאֵיהֶן–דְּמוּת אָדָם, לָהֵנָּה

And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. 6 And every one had four faces, and every one of them had four wings. 7 And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass.

In imitation of angels, the Talmud in Berachot 10a explains the Jewish practice of standing with one’s feet together during the standing meditation prayer called the Amidah. The idea of a single leg is also related to that of a pedestal (literally, foot stand), the base of a pillar and the foundations of a philosophy.  Note the challenge spoken by a Roman soldier to the sages Shammai and Hillel the Elder, recorded in Tractate Shabbath 31a: “Accept me as a proselyte on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand al regal achat (on one foot).” (See below in the illustration by Arthur Szyk.)

In antiquity, to ‘stand on one’s foot,’ was a figure of speech.  Horace in his Satires (1.4.9-10) wrote concerning Lucilius, “ in hora saepe ducentos, ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno.” (In an hour he used to dictate two hundred verses, as a great feat [while] standing on one foot.) But the Hebrew word regal (foot) also sounds similar to the Classic Latin word regula meaning “basic principle.” (Regula is the root of the modern word “regulation”). Hillel’s clever answer reveals the basic principle of the Torah that can be learned by anyone standing on one foot for a short length of time: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah — the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”

In some way, I think this notion of a single premise provides an added ethical meaning to the mythic idea of an Even ha-Shettiyah, the Foundation Stone — that a geological foundation of the world is synonymous with or perhaps even signifies a basic code of ethical behavior.  What then is the stone that was cast away that shall become the foundation stone? The considerate and sensitive treatment of each other that is lost and forgotten in times of war and selfish struggle.

As a side note, those actually born with fused legs suffer from Sirenomelia, or Mermaid Syndrome, a rare congenital deformity manifesting in 1 out of 100,000 births. It is usually fatal within one or two days of birth due to related abnormal kidney and bladder development and function.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: Am I channeling some sort of zeitgeist? Less than a month after this post, this lovely new resource, On1Foot :  Jewish Texts for Social Justice was established. Check it out this amazing user-contributable archive of relevant source texts.

Wonka’s oblique answer references the first stanza of a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, the “Ode” featured in his collection of poems from 1874, Music and Moonlight. I didn’t understand Wonka’s response to Veruca Salt until I read the entire poem. The meaning provided me a key to understanding the story, who the mysterious character Wonka represents, what his motivations are in finding a child to give his factory to, and what Charlie Bucket really means for him. Read the poem below, and I think you might understand too.

ODE.

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming–
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we !
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry–
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

The premise of Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) asks: what would an industrial factory engaged in mass production look like if it was built by a fantasist, dreamer, and romantic in a world dominated by pragmatists, realists, and materialists. In this lonely island, Wonka wonders who will inherit his life’s work and hopes that in the next generation of children there might still be romantics. His sampling of youth via the lottery tickets provides a referendum on Charlie’s generation. The selected tourists to Wonka’s candyland are a fools gallery of technocrats, capitalists, hedonists… and opportunists. The latter is what Wonka makes of Charlie Bucket.

Poverty does not make Charlie a finer candidate than any of the others or even more sympathetic to Wonka. But the moral challenge that Charlie meets in the face of his family’s dire poverty does affect Wonka. For Charlie to give back the stolen everlasting gobstopper means returning to Wonka’s competitor Oscar Slugworth empty handed and to his family with only tales of Oompa-Loompas. Wonka is so resigned to the absence of new romantics in the world that he is willing to give up everything to Slugworth by letting Charlie walk out with the gobstopper. By returning the gobstopper Wonka is enlightened to Charlie’s enduring romantic virtue. Charlie’s elevation of an abstract moral good over an immediate material good justifies his embrace of the young lad as the rightful recipient of his vast empire of imagination.

If these insights were intriguing, note that they don’t apply to either Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) nor the screenplay he wrote for the film. Rather, credit is due to David Seltzer, an uncredited Jewish screenwriter who wrote at least 30% of the final script. Seltzer was responsible for all of Wonka’s literary references throughout the film including Wonka’s quotation from O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” and his quote of Portia from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the end of the film, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” ( Seltzer later directed another film representing the tribulations of an alienated romantic youth, Lucas (1986).)

Dahl, furious with the casting of Gene Wilder over Spike Milligan and Seltzer’s focus on Wonka rather than Charlie Bucket, later forbid a film adaptation of his Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972). Focus on Dahl’s anti-Semitism often focuses on his 1983 outburst: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity … I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” It’s intriguing to speculate that a decade earlier Dahl’s animus might have been expressed in his frustration with Gene Wilder and David Seltzer’s reinvention of Wonka, the romantic industrialist, as a Magical Jew.

I mention Tolkien since one of his intentions in inventing the fairy tale geographies and histories of Middle Earth was to provide a national myth for his beloved England. The Hobbits of the Shire represented the rural peoples and provincial attitudes familiar from Tolkien’s youth. The threat and conquest of the Shire by the evil minion of Sauron were reflected in the terrible trauma suffered by the English people in the first and second World Wars.

It is not an exaggeration to say that for both religious and secular Judaism the past cannot be reached without first crossing the gaping abyss of despair and traumatic survival that describes our storytelling and documenting of the Holocaust. In Defiance, the story of the exodus from Egypt and the travails of the wilderness are retold through the true story of the Bielski brother’s trek through the forests of Belarus. This is the story of Frodo and Sam Gamgee writ large and real. And if the Jews feet aren’t as hairy as Tolkien’s hobbits, they do at least live in earth sheltered dwellings.

True Holocaust stories have assumed the role of epic sagas for the Jewish people. These aren’t the stories imagined for us by 19th century Jewish romanticists. But unlike Tolkien’s fiction, the lived experience of the Holocaust helped drive a national liberation movement to realize a sovereign state in the ancient homeland of its people, revived religious and ethnic roots among disaffected and assimilated Jews, and continues to provide a focal point for secular ethnic identity in both Israel and the Diaspora. It’s not that stories of previous persecutions don’t exist and aren’t revisited often in the Jewish calendar of fast days and period of mourning. What differentiates Defiance is that it revives the tales of defiance to oppression, from Moses to the Macabees to Bar Kohba’s rebellion against the Romans. It’s been almost two millennia since Bar Kohba’s failed uprising. Adaptation to the Diaspora and repeated disappointments from the Spanish Expulsion to Shabbtai Tzvi, put a note of skepticism at the end of every prayer for the appearance of a Messiah. What is surprising is that the film doesn’t overtly link the success of the Bielski brother’s self-reliance with the parallel struggle of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. On the one hand, perhaps it doesn’t need to. On the other, the film does such an excellent job of weaving the expectations of Jewish Messianism with the reality of harrowing circumstance that it almost makes sense for the Bielski borthers to live happily ever after growing their trucking company in New York City. Defiance isn’t a messianic fantasy, nor is it ideological. Hunger strips the non-essentials. This forest tale is reality tempered.

If romanticism maps historic and mythic landscapes and practices onto the present, then identifying Defiance as romantic might seem a bit of a stretch. But if it’s hard to see, then one would also be blind to the major romantic themes in Judaism: pining for the restoration of the Temple, for the revelation of the hidden messiah, and the return to the Land of Israel. These are the same themes that enabled a secular Zionism to be so easily adopted and communicated, for Yiddish to be replaced by a rehabilitated Hebrew, for urbanized Jews to embrace the field of the kibbutz. After a century of German mystic antisemites advancing the notion that Materialism was synonymous with Judaism, and convincing many that unlike the German people (rooted as they were in the deep and mysterious old European forests) Jews were a spiritually shallow people without a motherland to nourish them, the ancient desire to be rooted in the land of Israel was freshly revived. Just as Europeans were seeking out and publishing their ancient folk traditions as a historic validation of their new national identities, so Hayyim Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky did the same with the Sefer Ha-Aggadad published in Odess in 1911. But the use of storytelling to derive a single identity within the diverse Jewish communities is an ancient one.

The imaginative exercise to “tell the story of the exodus as if one had themselves fled from Egypt” is what is at play in Defiance. This annual Passover tradition (actually a religious obligation) at the root of Jewish religious and ethnic identity is nothing if not romantic. What makes Defiance compelling, beyond it being an amazing true story, is that it helps the viewer place themselves in the wilderness with these Jewish survivors, as they themselves re-enacted the story of exodus without the benefit of magical interventions or prophecy.

There are other romantic aspects as well. The film presents rural Jews as capable and hardy outdoorsmen, even as it allows for the more familiar trope of urbanized ghetto Jews completely unfamiliar with the rigour of wilderness living. But in this way the viewer (who is also likely to be an unaccomplished survivalist) may experience the Byelorussian winter vicariously through the story of the Jews. The desire to rehabilitate Jews as capable fighters rooted in nature affected all of the Zionist youth movements. The idea drew heavily from the German romantic tradition. That Defiance shows ghetto Jews in the role of resistance fighters and backwoods survivalists makes this a Jewish romantic tour de force.

Simon Schama had already described Jewish familiarity with the rural European landscape in his prologue to Landscape & Memory (1995), but for those who hadn’t read it, Defiance provides some witness to the truth of this. Here is what Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory (p.27-29). It should be read by every Jewish romantic.

I had always thought of the Jews of the Alte Land as essentially urban types, even when they lived in villages: tradesmen and artisans; tailors and carpenters and butchers and bakers; with the rebbe as the lord of the shtetl; microcosms of the great swarming communities of Wilno and Bialystok and Minsk. And so it often was, but the villages we walked through, these picture-perfect rustic cottages with their slanting timber eaves and crook-fenced gardens, had once been Jewish houses. “Seventy percent, eighty percent of the people here and here and here,” said Tadeusz, “-all Jews.” So even if they had not worked the earth with their hands or cut hay in the fields, these Jews had been country people, no less than the villagers of the Cotswolds or the peasants of the Auvergne. And one group among them, people known to everyone in the border country of Poland and Lithuania, had even been people of the forest, the wilderness puszcza.

Among them, somewhere, was my family. My mother’s father, Mark, who did become a butcher, left this region along with three brothers, at the turn of the century, driven by the horseback terror of the Cossack pogroms. But his father, Eli, like many other Jews, made his living cutting timber from the great primeval forests, hauling it to the tributaries that fed the Niemen and floating the logs north to the sawmills of Grodno or, even farther downstream, all the way to the old provincial city of Kowno. The waters were full of these Jewish river rats, sometimes spending weeks at a time on the rafts , sleeping in crude cabins constructed from logs propped on end in the company of chickens and each other. During the brutal Lithuanian winters when the rivers were frozen, he would transport the timber on long sleds driven by big Polish farm horses or teams of oxen. From Kowno or Wilno on the river Viliya the lumber would be sold to the Russian railway companies for ties, or freight wagons, or shipped further downstream in rafts of a thousand or more logs, to the Baltic for export, usually handled by other and grander Jewish timber companies.

Somewhere, beside a Lithuanian river, with a primeval forest all about it, stood my great-grandfather Eli’s house; itself made of roughly fashioned timber with a cladding of plaster, surrounded by a stone wall to announce its social pretensions. My mother, who was born and grew up in the yeasty clamor of London’s Jewish East End, retains just the scraps and shreds of her father’s and uncle’s memories of this landscape: tales of brothers fending off wolves from the sleds (a standard brag of the woodland taverns ); of the dreamy youngest brother, Hyman, falling asleep at the loading depot and rudely woken by being tied to a log and heaved into the river. Was this family as improbable as the Yiddishe woodsmen of Ruthenia I had seen in an old Roman Vishniak photo, poling logs in their sidelocks and homburgs; lumberjacks mit tzitzis?

Jewish lumbermen, Ruthenia (Roman Vishniac)

And just where, exactly, was this place, this house, this world of stubby yellow cigarettes, fortifying pulls from grimy vodka bottles, Hassidic songs bellowed through the piny Poylishe velder? “Where was it?” I pressed my mother while we sat eating salad in a West End hotel. For the first time in my life I badly needed to know. “Kowno gubernia, outside Kowno, that’s all we ever knew.” She shrugged her shoulders and went back to the lettuce.

The history of the country only deepens the uncertainty. For “Lithuania” is not coterminous with the present borders of the shrunken Baltic republic; still less with its language and religion. For centuries it covered an immense expanse of territory stretching all the way from the Black Sea in the south to the Bug river in the west to the Baltic in the north. In 1386 its hunter-king Jagiełło married the Polish queen Jadwiga, creating by their muon the Great Polish realm. Over time the cultural identity of the south and west of the country was colonized by Poland. Its landowning gentry can1e to speak and write Polish and call themselves by the Polish name of szlachta. In the late eighteenth century Poland was brutally and cynically partitioned and the pieces devoured by its neighbors-the Prussians, the Russians, and the Austrians. The Lithuanian heartland became Russian, and its Polish-speaking poets came to think of it as the captive homeland.

With no formal frontiers to cross, itinerant Jewish traders migrated within the Russian Empire as family connections or economic incentives beckoned, north from the Ukraine or Byelorussia, south from Latvia, magnetized by the great center of piety and cultural passion in Wilno. My great-grandfather and his four boys, like so many other wood-shleppers, were outriders of this Judeo-Lithuanian world, by Yiddish standards, real backwoodsmen, as at home with horses and dogs and two-handled saws as with prayer books and shabbos candles. We drove further north from Giby, past synagogues with drunkenly undulating gables and whitewashed walls (the wooden structures having all been burned by the SS and their local collaborators), cutting through darker woodland dominated by spruce and fir. I remembered someone in a Cambridge common room pestering the self-designated “non-Jewish Jew” and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a native of this country, about his roots. “Trees have roots,” he shot back, scornfully, “Jews have legs.” And I thought, as yet another metaphor collapsed into ironic literalism, Well, some Jews have both and branches and stems too.

So when Mickiewicz hails “ye trees of Lithuania” as if they belonged only to the gentry and their serfs, foresters, and gamekeepers I could in our family’s memory lay some claim to those thick groves of larch, hornbeam, and oak. I dare say that even the lime tree, worshipped by pagan Germans and Lithuanians as the abode of living spirits, lay on Eli Sztajnberg’s leds and carts waiting to be turned into the clogs and sandals worn everywhere in the Lithuanian villages…

Although the day, month, and season Brian Eno met Laraaji Nadabrahmananda in Philadelphia’s New York’s Washington Square Park in 1979 is unknown, their meeting led directly to an important album, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980). In commemoration of this creative encounter, the Philadelphia Ambient Consortium is at the beginning stages of organizing an outdoor music festival, tentatively titled Day of Radiance, to take place in Philly’s own Washington Square Park on the day Laraaji and Eno met. Over the coming months, Philadelphia ambienteers and space music enthusiasts will be working to realize this event which we hope will become an annual celebration of Philadelphia’s long thriving experimental music scene.

Washington Square Park is perhaps Philadelphia’s loneliest park, so any celebration there is bound to cheer the space up. And in return, the space will bring us cheer and inspiration for further creative encounters. Please contact me if you would like to help plan and participate in this project.

(Image of Washington Square Park, Philadelphia, modified from Flickr user chingers7′s original image. Used with permission via creative commons share-attribution non-commercial license.)

Before they were made famous as one eyed monsters in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, the cyclopes were known as primordial blacksmiths who could fashion the power of the universe into tridents and other weapons wielded by gods. It’s not such a far leap to see La Forge (lit. the forge!) as a current incarnation of the cyclopaean archetype. According to a hymn of Callimachus, the Cyclopes were helpers at the forge of Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths and craft. I can even see La Forge as a reconstituted Polyphemus, once blinded, but liberated from the darkest depths of Tartarus through the intervention of Technology.

The depiction of a cyclops by Odilon Redon (see below, The Cyclops) follows less from Hesiod’s tale than from an antediluvian idyll. The cyclops in this garden to me appears to be modeling a primordial desire: a rather sheepish, male gaze. Is the cyclops of Redon a representation of the Edenic snake, the single eye symbolizing phallus and desire, staring at Eve? Or perhaps the cyclops is one of the mysterious נפלים (Nephilim), who in Genesis 6:1-4 desires of the daughters of Adam? The story is expanded on in aggadic literature both in Rabbinic midrash and in pseudepigrapha. There these Watchers and their progeny are giants that share some of the attributes of the Greek cyclops. In both myths, these divine figures possess useful technological knowledge. In the Book of Enoch it is the sharing of this knowledge with men that leads to the dissemination of evil on Earth. It should also be mentioned that Goliath, the foe of David singularly defeated by a single blow to the head from a slinged projectile, was characterized in midrash as the last of the race of Giants.

The Cyclops (1914) by Odilon Redon

The first modern adaptation of the cyclops must be credited to the robot Gort from the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Here too, there seems to be some syncretism between ancient Greek and Hebraic myth, except that the technology the heavenly beings wish to share with earthkind is wholly good, and it’s only our xenophobia and paranoid tendencies which cause mayhem. Fear of subjugation and the unknown replaces the earlier myth’s fear of sexual conquest of earth women (a common enough trope in other period sci-fi films).

The slit eyed helmet of Gort seems the obvious root of the robotic fashion leading up to Urs Amann’s cover art to Klaus Schulze’s Audentity (1983). A closer antecedent influencing Amann may have been the design for the Cylon Centurions in the TV show Battlestar Galactica (the original series, 1978-1980). Pictured below, Cyrus, a Cylon from the episode “The Return of Starbuck” (aired May 5, 1980). Battlestar Gallactica was famously rife with biblical adaptations, from the wandering of the “twelve colonies” to the character of Adamah. It’s no surprise that the fecund imagination of the Mormon writer, Glen Larson, managed to stuff so much biblical myth into a show that aired at the peak of 70s fascination with UFOs and new age religion. Larson’s story of war between the civilizations of robotic Cyclons and space faring humans (developed to greater depth in Star Trek’s war withthe Borg) is another shade of the antediluvian battles described in the Book of Enoch and Jubilees.

Come to think of it, the Borg character of Hugh, rehabilitated by La Forge in the Star Trek Next Generation episode “I, Robot” (1992)totally parallels the Cylon character of Cyrus, reconstituted by Starbuck in “The Return of Starbuck.”

No discussion of mute cyclopean monsters would be complete without mentioning Maximilian, Disney’s homicidal robot from The Black Hole (December 1979). (Poor eviscerated Dr. Durant (played by Anthony Perkins), just another casualty of Disney’s adventurous post-Walt, pre-Eisner decade of dangerous entertainment experiments.)

With these antecedents in mind, looking above back to Audentity, note Amann’s translation of the cyclopean cliché from robot to human; Amann is depicting some sort alienated audiophile listening to Schulze’s Kosmiche Musik. This is the cover Schulze should have had for his 1973 album Cyborg. Here is man like machine but not as automaton — rather, man as desocialized being, completely self-centered, and focused inwardly on processing piped in audio and perhaps also visual stimulus. The commercial realization of this ideal has been evolving over the past 15 years with a profusion of (the not-yet-quite popular) head mounted displays (aka video goggles and video glasses).

Early reports of nausea and neck cramps prevented these consumer products from gaining too much popularity. Every few years gadget bloggers report that the technology has improved and that the price has dropped some. (See below, a protoype 360° immersive environment by Toshiba.)

Even as the realization of this dream has (so far) failed consumers, the obverse of this ideal has been realized in the torture of prisoners of war by our horrible Bush administration. Insanity is the natural consequence of sensory deprivation inflicted on these prisoners. (See below Jose Padilla being led to a dentist, December 2006.) Others must endure the torture playlist.

Where once the cyclopean eye represented the focal point of untold and mysterious power in the creature of Gort, in the characters  of Maximillian and the Cylon Centurions the eye is demoted to the unblinking, unwavering madness of automatons that lack free-will and empathy. The bold vision of bringing sight to the blind depicted in Star Trek’s 25th century techno-utopia is perverted at the dawn of the 21st century. In Guantanamo (and presumably elsewhere) our society brings blindness and madness to the sighted and sane (imprisoned under suspicion of terrorism).

Our blinding of presumed terrorists (officially, to prevent communication through blinking) recalls Odysseus’ blinding of the cyclops Polyphemus. But really, who now has become the myopic monster of yor, the blinder or the blind? I write with great hope that we will soon end this era of manufacturing suitable monsters, and suitable blindness.

Hopefully, in three weeks.

Some unanswered questions to inspire further exploration in the labyrinth of myth:

What do the single eyes of the cyclopes of Greek myth symbolize? The sacred inner eye turned outward? The realization and beneficence of inner knowledge expressed and realized in the outer world?

How is the cyclops eye related to the single eyes (and the lost eyes) of Odin and Ra in Norse and Egyptian mythology? Does one eye represent empathy while the other a sort of panoptic embrace of all creation? If so, which eye is lost?

Are the Cyclopes eyes related to the biblical character of Cain and the sign on his forehead? Are the extra-biblical myths of the Nephilim related to the Cyclopes who are renowned for their productive and creative capabilities?

How might the eye of the cyclops be related to the shining light of the Tzohar or the brilliant eye of the Leviathan? Is this a kind of primordial eye that has not yet been divided into two (or more) eyes at a later stage of the cosmogony?

Can the myth that masturbation leads to blindness be rooted in some sort of cyclopaean/phallic conflation? What then would the blinding of the cyclops represent for Odysseus?

Strange questions to ponder in sleep with my inner eye open in dream.

I was having a conversation with a mathematician, Yaakov, at the University of Maryland recently, and he was struggling with aesthetic questions on what is good or bad art, so I suggested an alternative more useful question as rather, “what is this art good for?” recalling Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 essay, The Creative Act:

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The verdict of the spectator is separate from the activity of the artist. The spectator might very well take umbrage if the art object, the object of fascination (or boredom) had been or had not been toiled over, had or had not been the expression of a theory or movement, had or had not been the work of an artist at all. As a spectator, my verdict is not whether art is or is not art, but whether the art is useful — and useful only in the sense of whether it has opened my eyes and expanded my conscious awareness as to the existence of wonder in the world of relationships and things outside of frames and pedestals, galleries and museums — whether appreciation of the art object has brought me to appreciate everything else in the Everything Else room in the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum.

In a related sense, as much as I ponder myth in Judaism specifically, and religion in general, I return to this concern, that these ideas, while interesting to me, while stimulating and enriching an emerging creative expressive innerverse within me, that these ideas should also hopefully be useful for others. That if they are not, that they are trivial, and that this whole project is a delusion of self-indulgence. I will be honest with you, that I am not wholly convinced that this is not, but I am writing — with the intention that these labyrinth of ideas I’m exploring and sometimes getting lost in — that I will bring back along my wayfinding thread/trail of breadcrumbs/umbilical chord, something useful.

I’m hopeful that just as art becomes useful by revealing to an observer the greater wondrous reality outside the frame of (framed) Art, that my insights into myth and religion might also be useful for helping to reveal a greater wondrous imaginary world only hinted at within the source text of religious doctrine and dogma. Myth and storytelling thus convey the promise and potential of enduring creative liberty and the subversion of religious control to generations of eager children and aging heresiarchs.

Having said this, let me share with you something totally weird that I just found (on wikipedia, where else) that blew my mind. An Arabian myth of a creature called Bahamut (بهموت‎) which unlike the Behemot is not terrestrial, but like Leviatan, inhabits the endless depths of the ocean. This is mind blowing to me because the tradition in Sefer Chanoch, that the Leviatan is the mate of the Behemot seems much more plausible (in a sort-of mythic taxonomy) if we imagine both of them as sea dwellers rather than as opposites on a terrestrial/aquatic scale.

Just for review, I’ve written about the Behemot in Jewish myth, how it seems to relate to Apsu, the ancient ur-deity in Babylonian mythology, the personification of heavenly fresh water. I’ve written how the Behemot is imagined as a cosmically large hippopatamus dripping with condensation, and referred to in midrash as the “Ox of the Pit.” I’ve wondered whether the Pit was a reference to the t’hom, the primordial abyss, the abstraction of the other Babylonian ur-deity and personification of saltwater, Tiamat. How Leviatan seems to be synonymous with Tiamat in biblical writings. How Behemot/Leviatan are mated to one another in Sefer Chanoch. The Talmud also prefers the notion that Leviathan and Behemot were each created like all other creatures, male and female. So the existence of a myth where Behemot takes the form of a non-terrestrial sea creature like the leviathan seems significant.

From the wikipedia article on Bahamut:

Bahamut (Arabic: بهموت‎ Bahamūt) is a vast fish that supports the earth in Arabian mythology. In some sources, Bahamut is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant.

If that’s not enough of a teaser, here is the entire fantastic entry on Bahamut written by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Margarita Guerrero, Norman Thomas di Giovanni). I want to point out that I find it significant that similar to the Behemot tradition, the Bahamut myth describes the creatures with hippopotamus features.

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.

From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs: God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown. So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa ( Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.

The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

The story of Bahamut is thus a variation in a wide tradition of cosmic creatures said to be supporting the world. In Hinduism, the creature is Akupara, a ginormous tortoise. Or elsewhere in the Vedas, as the turtle being Kurma, second incarnation of Vishnu. In Greek myth, it is the titan, Atlas. If you’ve read any Terry Pratchett, you might also be reminded of the turtle that supports his fictional Discworld.

In modern Western philosophical debate, an anecdote relating the myth of Bahamut or Akupara is sometimes referred to as “Turtles all the way down” (explanation below). The anecdote has been used by enlightened moderns lampooning the logical fallacies of irrational belief systems since the 17th century. Or as the wikipedia describes it, the anecdote is used “to humorously illustrate both infinite regress, in cosmological imagery, and the perils of religious/mythic myopia.” This is how Stephen Hawking relates the anecdote in his A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Russell probably wasn’t the scientist to have been the recipient of this retort. Most identify the scientist in this popular anecdote as the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. But Hawking can be forgiven for thinking so since Bertrand Russell, said the following in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian (1927):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

William James’ godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may very well have been acquainted with the story from his peer, Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his journal in 1852,

Men are making speeches… all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

So whether the Turtles anecdote originated with Russell or James, it is clear that myths representing cosmological proofs were useful arguments of ridicule for enlightenment rationalists and other freethinkers. In 1690 John Locke may have been the first western philosopher to refer to this myth in a philosophical argument on what the substance is of an object being empirically investigated. From book 2, chapter 23 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke writes,

If anyone be asked what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before-mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on, to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.

Perhaps the Indian said, “Bahamut.” Bahamut, the imaginary foundation of the world of myth.

Above: illustration of Bahamut for The Book of Imaginary Beings by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece.

Robyn and I purchased our tickets and waited patiently in the long exhibit queue where we had an opportunity to look at Diego Rivera’s Liberation of the Peon (1931). Once through the entrance, we accepted the audio guides and commenced our study of the work of Frida Kahlo. Narration on the tour was provided by a device contained a small LCD screen, a keypad, and pause, stop, and play audio buttons, as well as attached earphones.  To play the commentary for a particular image, one would simply press in the keypad the number listed next to the painting on the wall of the gallery. In addition to the audio commentary, informative text was also silk screened onto the walls of the gallery adjoining the paintings and photographs displayed.

This exhibit originally began its tour with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The fancy Antenna Audio gadget that had been used in these earlier Kahlo exhibits was for some reason not used for this show at the PMA. I’m not certain why. Also, the audio provided was not that of the exhibit curator Hayden Herrera, or her assistant Elizabeth Carpenter, but from some other British man. I’m still trying to find out who this is. I’d like to ask them a question:

Namely, why did the curator introduce Kahlo as having been born of mixed German and Mexican Indian heritage and not mention her Jewish heritage? This is what the narrator said:

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a southern suburb of Mexico City, the third daughter of a German father and a mother of Spanish and Native American descent.

So I want to know: was Kahlo’s father Guillermo (née Wilhelm) Kahlo’s Hungarian-Jewish ancestry so irrelevant and besides the point to exclude it? Kahlo’s Indian heritage and Mexican socialist nationalism is well known because they are so much a part of her art work. But Kahlo herself claimed to be the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews that emigrated to Germany in the 19th century. Isn’t that significant? In an article on a 2007 Kahlo exhibit, Gannit Ankori, an art historian specializing in Frida Kahlo provides the details,

Kahlo testified “many times” about her Jewish identity, “stressing that her paternal grandparents, Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Kahlo, were Jews from the city of Arad.” Further, many people who knew Frida and Wilhelm, such as Frida’s biographer, Hayden Herrera, and Frida’s husband Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, personally repeated this fact.

It seems a mistake to omit the fact that expatriate Eurpoean Jews made up an important core of the radical progressive political and art scene that Kahlo and her husband Diego inhabited, the most famous of whom was Leon Trotsky. This is an important point because socialism, communism, and anarchism, and the arts were secular programs that accepted the contribution of Jews at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment was profound and ubiquitous. Although antisemitism persisted (and still persists) in the Left, Guillermo Kahlo and his daughter, could find sanctuary among more enlightened contemporaries. And they did.

Perhaps the lack of attention or unwillingness of the art historian narrating the exhibit to be fully forthcoming about Kahlo’s Jewish heritage stems from ambivalence and ignorance of what Judaism is in general, let alone specifically how Kahlo and her father understood it as relevant to their self-identity. Judaism is correctly understood as not only a religion, but also as a civilization with an enduring culture the re religious aspect of which is not easily (or honestly) excised, as well as the inspiration of a modern nationalist and socialist movement of liberation and self-determination (Zionism). If Kahlo’s Jewish ancestry was only understood to be a religious identity then commenting on her Jewish parentage would correctly be considered irrelevant and misleading. So, what did Kahlo think of her Jewish heritage? How did she self-identify?

The answer to these questions was dealt with in 2003 at a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Jewish Museum, “‘Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture.” In that exhibit, Israeli curator Gannit Ankori recognized an extremely important point revealed in Kahlo’s painting, “My Grandparents, My Parents and I.” Grace Glueck for the NY Times Art Review explains,

”My Grandparents” shows Frida as a small child, standing naked in the courtyard of the Casa Azul, the comfortable home built by her father in Coyoacán, then a village south of Mexico City, where Frida spent most of her life. (She died there, and it is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.) In her right hand she holds a ribbon that flows upward on either side of the picture to support floating portraits of each set of grandparents; the Mexican couple on the left, the Hungarian-Jewish pair on the right. (From her Kahlo grandmother, Frida apparently inherited those awesome black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of her forehead.) [emphasis mine]

The subject of Kahlo’s Jewish identity was returned to again in a 2005 book on Guillermo Kahlo’s photographic work, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo, by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle. The historians reveal that contrary to Frida Kahlo’s own claim, her father was the scion of a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. If this was indeed the case, then the curiosity remains why Kahlo claimed herself to be of Jewish ancestry. Was it a family legend encouraged by her father? Was it in vogue to have Jewish ancestry in artsy socialist circles in Mexico City? Or was Kahlo, in identifying her genealogy with Jews during the 1930s, declaring solidarity with another ethnic minority oppressed by fascists at the onset of Hitler’s campaign of extermination?

The complex construction of Kahlo’s identity and its relationship to anti-Nazi Jewish sympathies is the subject of 2007 article in the Jewish Press by Menachem Wecker on Kahlo exhibit in Washington, DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Wecker writes,

[Ankori] cited the position that Kahlo sought to distance herself from the Nazis based upon the fact that testimony about Wilhelm Kahlo’s Jewish background surfaced most frequently between 1936 and the 1940s. But she said over email, “I think in light of the new findings , these issues require further investigation. What is of great interest to me is not Wilhelm Kahlo’s ‘real’ religion, but Frida Kahlo’s construction of her self-image” insofar as it “impacted Kahlo’s self-image as manifested in her art.”

But later in Wecker’s article, Ankori does consider Wilhelm Kahlo’s “real religion” to be of interest, since besides Kahlo’s penchant for and mastery of her self-constructed image, she may very well have building a family tree to satisfy any doubts of her father’s identity in terms of both halakha (Jewish ritual law) and the Nazi’s ancestry laws. In short, what is relevant for Kahlo herself is whether her genealogy is Jewish enough to be murdered with her adopted semitic compatriots.

To Ankori, the question is whether Henriette Kaufmann was Jewish, since her Jewishness would make Wilhelm Jewish “according to both Jewish Halakha and Nazi laws.” If instead Wilhelm was a German Lutheran (Ankori says Lutheran, while Ronnen wrote Protestant), “why would Frida Kahlo ‘create’ a Hungarian Jewish genealogy for him and for herself?” Ankori wondered.

Even after Franger and Huhle’s book, for Jason Steiber, archivist at the NMWA, Kahlo remains a Jewish artist.

“I believe, without a doubt, that Frida Kahlo was a Jewish artist,” said Jason Stieber, archivist at the NMWA, through e-mail. But Stieber said other aspects of Kahlo’s identity played much greater roles in her life and work. “Frida was many things … and she embraced wholeheartedly everything that she was,” he said, noting that Frida “was proud of this lineage” and greatly delighted in “wheedling anti-Semites in America,” such as her famous inquiry put forth to Henry Ford of whether he was Jewish. Although she was an atheist, “she abhorred the Catholic religiosity of her mother,” and she “did embrace her Jewish ethnicity, if not the tenets of Judaic faith.”

“So yes, Frida was a Jewish artist,” Strieber continued, “however, I think she would have been more likely to refer to herself as a Mexican artist. Mexico held a very special place in heart and in her art.”

So I’ve been thinking about all of this and I’m left with an important quote that Wecker brings from an email in conversation with, Robin Cembalest, executive editor of ARTNews magazine, reveals the other side to the fascination with the question of Kahlo’s heritage.

“In my world the process of defining Jewish art, or what is Jewish in art, is both parlor game and intellectual exercise,” Cembalest wrote. “Either way, clearly it reveals as much about who is doing the assessing as it does about the figures we are claiming for our team.”

I think this is a remarkable statement as it rings both true and hollow — true in the sense that, yeah, ethnic pride is commonly expressed in appropriating the achievements of individuals as evidence of community capabilities. Hollow in the sense, that if art historians can not see beyond chauvinist ethnic boosterism to understand the importance of identity politics in the lives and art of artists then they are willingly blinding themselves to significant contextual meaning.

Kahlo’s creative philo-semitism is just one example of her passion for the liberation of all peoples. I, for one, am proud of Frida Kahlo’s defiant solidarity with Jews in the face of fascism, her storytelling in the face of a geneology and ritual law that would deny her a more rigorous and truthful connection with my people.

But I think the more significant thing about this album is the cover art. Check out those slit glasses. Remind you of anyone?

Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)

And speaking of slit glasses. How come I can’t find them anywhere? Why if fashion repeats itself has it taken so long for these to make a comeback? From my blog to your ears, Soho fashion geeks. I mean, take a look at this young gangster from John Carpenter’s whimsical 1986 synth-pop opera, Big Trouble in Little China.

I should also note that the soundtrack to Big Trouble in Little China by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth is excellent. Here’s a quality review of it written back in 2003 by the fantastically named, Messrob Torikian. I don’t have a copy of the soundtrack. It is rare! It is also expensive. If you have it, please share it with me. Also, if you know of a supplier for retro sunglasses, please pass on my request.

UPDATE: Some follow-up thoughts to this post are blogged about here.