"To See What is In Front of One's Nose" Part II

Finding the Truth: Oral Cultures and Literary Means

NB: If you’re curious to read an unruly Part I, you can find it here. But it’s not necessary to understand the argument. Part II stands on its own. This essay is longer than most will be, hence its tardiness. Apparently, 14 days will not always be enough time to say what I have to say. I will sometimes have to take a little longer. I appreciate your patience.

Last time out I tried to back my way into a discussion about the difficulty of talking about the present by parsing the relationship between oral and literary cultures, and intimating that there is a certain kind of writing that might help us do it. It helped me begin to tease out some threads that are tightly woven together, but it also exposed the difficulty of explaining why someone might want to do something like this. Why not just say…

It’s really hard to untangle your vain aspirations from your spiritual aspirations. It’s really hard to be in the world and say something about the world that isn’t overdetermined by the world.¹

It’s certainly shorter to confess that, but as soon I do a host of questions arise, the most basic being: what do I mean by “spiritual” aspirations?

So let’s start there. By spiritual I mean “productive paradox”: yoked to freedom; supplicated to sovereignty; faithful to doubt; indifferent to finitude. In short, I mean the entire gamut of contradictions I wrestle with when I aspire to transcend the social speculums that describe me. These are sometimes called religious commitments, but you could also call them transcendent aspirations, numinous encounters, ultimate concerns, maybe even existential party music if you were trying to take yourself a little less seriously.² And that’s really hard to do. Indeed, if you were trained in a certain kind of critical theory, as I was, you might believe the task impossible, quixotic even—a fool’s vanity.

But as Dolly Levi says in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, “There comes a moment in everybody’s life when he must decide whether he’ll live among human beings or not—a fool among fools, or a fool alone.” I believe in my marrow that to give up this folly is to give up on being human amongst other humans. To accede to the task’s impossibility, that is the task of saying something numinously true, something real that can’t be reduced to a mere psychosocial urge, is to surrender the world to the brutes, the Khans, and the mercenary ghouls. Those who view every social relation as a low-stakes bid to satisfy an appetite, optimize an outcome, or frustrate a rival, whether political or personal, study at the knee of Qin Shi Huang. I refuse to do that.

But I’m no monk. No mendicant. My blood runs hot. Even as I aspire to the verities, I’ve no desire to excise the brute’s erotic edge from the human world. If we give up the potency and pleasure of taking and winning, struggling, overcoming, and holding for a little while some kingdom, whether of body or mind, we commit ourselves to the dismal bureaucracy of the middle managers who are forever deferring their agency to some network beyond their control. I refuse to do that too.

Moral progress is not an illusion. Spiritual insights are not equal. To discover these truths for oneself is the highest calling, and to bring them back to civilization’s firelight is the most urgent obligation.

So this is what I mean by spiritual aspirations. To strive and fail, over-and-over-and over again until my hip is out of joint, and my ego is blighted by the effort. What is left over after that, that residuum, no matter how infinitesimal, can be deposited into eternity’s vault. But what does this have to do with oral cultures? What does this have to do with literary cultures?

Oral Culture

We are submerged in oral culture. It’s all around us. Literary culture did not supplant it. We are caught in the current of this 100,000-year-long river, and we will be deposited like silt along its banks as it runs to the limits of all human history. You can’t straddle it. You can’t stand outside of it. Foucault called it “discourse” but that’s an effete’s shame.³ It’s not “discourse” in his sense of frustrated agency. It’s the prosocial cognition of an unruly body endlessly adapting to a world of competing wants.⁴ But your path within the current is inflected by your own quirky affinities. You are not simply a product of this cognition. You are the cognition.

Most of this current⁵ gives shape to, or energizes, our strategies to either alleviate our disaffections or titillate our affections. This is something pretty close to what the Buddha meant by dukkha.⁶ This current is you every day in your most mundane everydayness—washing, wiping, weeping, whispering, wriggling and wild. This is you raging about Trump or Biden, or fretting over white people, or idling about capitalism. This is you feeling shame at the laundromat⁷, or indignant pride at the laundromat, or indifferent but impatient at the laundromat because you can’t wait to watch pro-wrestling when you get home. This is you scripting your way through the world with vetted observations and righteous indignations. But it’s also you glancing back at what you’ve done and wondering over its consequence. This is most of what most of us do all day everyday.

There’s a poignant exchange in Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow between the main characters Shigekuni Honda and Kiyoaki Matsugae, in which they lament how indistinguishable their aspirations will be from the currents of history. I don’t have the patience to find it right now. But it’s enough to say that our submission to the current is so near total that stories of those who don’t submit entirely become myth before they become fact. Because its origin is lost and its destination is unknowable it is no wonder that you evolved to crave the pleasure of its surge. Your power to alter its course is one electron orbit away from zero, so the safest move you can make for your own sanity is to forget it’s not zero. I get it. I feel the same urge.

But like Honda and Matsugae, some part of you waxes as you apprehend history rushing by, and you glimpse how little of you dwells within it, and you begin to wonder. And you’re right to wonder. Arjuna was right to question his role in the slaughter of his brothers in the Bhagavad Gita. You’re right to second guess your support for shaming the unvaccinated, right to second guess your suspicion of immigrants, right to wonder if your political frustrations have more to do with dissatisfaction in your marriage or career. Inside of every individual nurtured to be such is an angelhair-thin fiberoptic connection to a queer possibility.⁸ And it is this queer possibility that makes us the best kind of fools. Because if frustrated desires were all of it, if that were everything, if it were all just negotiating the social codes of living amongst other living things who are trying to eat your apples, we wouldn’t have begun burying our dead. Everything would be pictograms. Venus would be a pile of stones to dash strangers’ babies upon. And perfumery would be the highest science.

But this isn’t the sum total of history. It isn’t just “one damned thing after another.” Some gluon of your you binds the world’s wild and brutal splendor to another possibility. And the degree to which you embrace it is the degree to which you are free to flicker in and out of this mysterium. That has probably always been true. One must be yoked to be free. Shamans, griots, poets, Harriet Tubmans, pratyekabuddhas, Socrateses invented, or sustained—depending on the time period—the possibility of being human.

May their tribe increase.

Literary Cultures

Even though cultures who possess the technology of writing are economically, militarily, and politically orders of magnitude more powerful than cultures who do not, literary culture is still a tributary of oral culture. The process of inculturation, of becoming a scribe, a professor, an intellectual, a pundit, a master of literary culture and the technology of writing, regardless of the way the writing is encoded,⁹ is always already almost entirely oral. Find one scribe who has not been the well-cared for servant of some empire and I will show you a dead or broken scribe. This means that scribes must always be the product of the power dynamics that produce these behemoths. Successful scribes must simp for power, which is one reason academia is ossified with such rigid hierarchies, and will always be ossified in this way. No, that doesn’t mean that professors of [whatever you like] are simps, but it does mean that most have learned to compartmentalize the more distasteful aspects of scholarly culture in order to chase the subtleties that call to them. And those who haven’t are insufferable. But I pass no judgment (well, okay, on the latter I do). Tenure is a gift, and life is very long. I wish for more professors of [whatever you like] rather than fewer.¹⁰ But this misprision causes humanists who are ensorcelled by the written word no shortage of consternation. They chase after books to find the source of things that live beyond them.¹¹

I don’t want to go too far with this, though. There are plenty who have bucked this trend. Many are friends. But because literary education is handmaid to the epistemic machinery that undergirds complex societies, this wild goose chase distorts the proper relation between literary and oral culture. Literary culture is whatever the oral culture, that is the culture of the everyday interaction of humans within and around human institutions and practices, says it is. This was pretty infamously illustrated when Donald Trump stood in front of St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1st, 2020 after the George Floyd riots/protests and held the Bible upside down for a photo-op. Sure, whether you care or not that Trump was holding the Bible upside down says something about your social habitus,¹² but that everyone everywhere understood that holding up a book means something, and something important at that, says something about our culture per se.

Put simply, most writing serves the oral culture it is a tributary of. Some scholars call this kind of writing secondary orality and tie its emergence to the birth of new media. I spent time in Part I talking about secondary orality, and you’re welcome to explore it, but the point is that secondary orality’s attributes aren’t new; they are scaled up versions of what’s been going on since writing became an economic activity about 5,000 years ago.¹³ But as with oral culture, that’s not all of it. And that “not all of it” is the point I’m trying to make in a variety of ways. There is some vapor in our animal cognition, a hitch in our predatory gate that draws us inside of ourselves and towards another world, one that isn’t found in nature. It draws our scribes away from the letter of the sovereign’s law towards the Epic of Gilgamesh, towards Siduri the alewife who reminds us to rejoice in life’s mortal splendor. If there were no secret urge there would just be debits and credits, debtors’ jail, and horse thieves. The symmetry, I hope, is clear. But the difference shouldn’t be glossed over. It matters.

Writing did not open this new vista. Literary culture is not the source of Siduri’s wisdom. Reading Moby Dick or learning Sanskrit won’t summon nobility ex nihilo, but it can curate and amplify the gallery of whispers which house are grandest ambitions. Literary culture is an exponential intensification of oral culture—for better and for worse. Far more powerful than oral cultures who do not possess the technology of writing, literary cultures extend our embodied oral cultures across time and space, creating secondary ecosystems nearly as wild as the material environments that drive biological adaptations. This cultural extension can be represented as an exponent’s exponent of its base, in which the literary production’s power is both a product of the oral culture and productive of culture.

\(oral^{oral(literary)^{literary(oral)}}\)

Stroll through the religion or philosophy section of The Strand in Greenwich Village or a Barnes & Noble up the street and you can see and feel and touch the remainders of oral traditions long past. The dead are all around you. And they call to you. Even covered in ISBN numbers and currencies of exchange they inspire and discomfit with their centuries old hectoring. Though the humans who lived the sacrifice of their achievement are bones and mud, their vitality persists. They were here.

In the 3rd century the Carthaginian Christian women Perpetua and Felicity were torn apart by wild animals for public spectacle during the reign of Septimius Severus before Perpetua guided the executioner’s sword to her own throat.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī began a homoerotically charged spiritual affair with Shams al-Dīn Tabriz in the 13th century capital of the Seljuk Sultanate. Engorged with divinity, he produced ecstatic poetry ‘til dawn and danced wildly in the streets until his scandalized family (probably) murdered his lover.

“But it’s a translation!” “Martyrdom is political!” Yes, it is. Yes, to both. We can’t lose our heads about the provenance of the literary traditions we’ve inherited, but we shouldn’t lose our hearts either. People will be loving Rumi long after critical theory becomes a curiosity for future scribes, and Christians will still be inspired to get in their trucks and drive hundreds of miles to help storm victims because they weigh their sacrifices against people like Perpetua and Felicity. These people: Rumi, Perpetua, Felicity were here. Right here. As much as you and I are here, and they left something behind. What will you leave behind? What will I?

An entire universe of signification has evolved alongside our oral culture, a niche construction that emerged out of the slipstream that first led us to bury our dead and mimic birdsong.¹⁴ It is a universe of things, a landscape of deserts and mountains, oceans and archipelagos. It is filled with ruins and artifacts. It is not a void. It is not inert. It has a will of its own. It is alive and wild and filled with the echoes of the living. It isn’t necessary to inhabit this literary universe to gain clarity about our present moment. No one needs to read or write to feel themselves. But this is the world that I inhabit. I will do my best to see this time and place as it is and write it as I can. Maybe I’ll catch a favorable wind. Maybe I won’t. The effort will be mine but the judgment will be left to others.

I hope to produce writing that finds you, writing that disorients you, that calls to you, urges you to shake off the “institutional amnesia”¹⁵ that twists your thinking back on itself. That is the kind of writing I mean to work at. Not quite scholarly, not quite commercial. I have no plan other than to follow the sentences where they lead, out into the wilderness where I hope to find you too and sit with you for a while.

When I say there are ways to tell the truth, there are ways to remember death, there are ways to neither exaggerate your import nor surrender your splendor, this is what I mean.

“…to see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” Orwell said at another time and place, for other ends, to different purposes than mine. But he was right forever. It isn’t a cliche if you don’t let it be. It isn’t a cliche if you feel what he meant. If you crane your neck, bend your ear, hover for just a moment in the current that is rushing towards the ocean called “when all is said and done,”¹⁶ you can hear him calling to you.

I am calling to you too across the marronage of time.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. For those of you who are fans of Walter Benjamin, yes, I’m drawing inspiration from his famous description of the flâneur for this formulation, but not for my understanding. As it is typically transmitted in freshman seminars all over the Western World, Benjamin was drawing inspiration from Baudelaire when he elevated the flâneur to an object of admiration in his fragmentary and unpublished Arcades Project. Never mind that the germ for this bewildering figure was Edgar Allen Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” who heavily influenced Baudelaire. This bit of trivia might be communicated, but it is also quickly forgotten by American intellectuals who compete against each other to see who can obsequiate themselves the hardest to a European tradition that disdains them. But if you get pleasure from prostration, please don’t take this as a broadside. I’ve genuflected with the best of them, and have enjoyed Benjamin for many years. However, his understanding of the flâneur is cramped by capitalism and limned with historical amnesia. His secular monk cuts a curious figure—an intuitively sharp observer astride an impotent vole who scurries about history afraid of his own shadow.

My invocation of this formulation, on the other hand, draws on deeper strata, recalls a more elementary lineage. This tradition, this in the world but not entirely of the world tradition, is very, very old. Far older than Benjamin, Baudelaire, or Poe for that matter. And it’s driven history for tens of thousands of years. Unfortunately, so much of our education goes to shore up our psycho-social insecurities that we miss the bounty our belatedness bestows upon us. We are grappling with the same forces Jacob grappled with in Genesis 32, with the same apparitions who tempted Gautama in the Padhana Sutta. We have been in the world but not of the world since we began accoutering our dead for the longest voyage. That the population of men and women who have time to contemplate this duality has exploded in the last 2,500 hundred years doesn’t alter its venerability or limit its universality.

2. I’m going to get to a discussion of religion, as a category of experience, when I’m ready. But don’t worry. I’ve already checked in with Kant, and he’s willing to help us clear the floor so we can discuss it with some kind of fidelity. It’ll just have to wait a little. I have some other things to work out first.

3. “Many people, I think, share a desire to be free of beginning, share a desire to meet, from the outset, on the other side of discourse, without having to consider its surface, ponder its strange, formidable, sinister aspect,” Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse.

4. I’ve always liked the archaeologist’s definition of culture: it is the primary mode of nonbiological adaptation to one’s environment. When you spend a lifetime collecting the detritus of human history, this pared down definition emerges nearly unbidden. To see the diffusion of tools, the architectural innovations, and the advancement in weapons and money is to see the fruits of culture which must always be oral for human animals.

5. “Current” has many valences, electrical, hydraulic, temporal (current), economic (currency). I imply all of them.

6. “Suffering” isn’t a great translation of this term. Riding in a cart with a broken axel is often used to describe this feeling of disaffection. However, it should be remembered that dukkha is also the relief from these moments of disaffection because it is the unpredictable variability that engenders dissatisfaction.

7. The laundromat is a very handy shorthand for class. I doubt most of the readers of this essay have had to wash their clothes at a laundromat (outside of travel) in decades, if ever. I grew up in laundromats. We couldn’t afford a washing machine until I was almost a teenager. Confessing this allows me to position myself in a moral order slightly askew and slightly above those who have never had to do so. How and why? Our shared oral culture. This little story has currency. It doesn’t need to be written down or elucidated to have a kind a priori cultural weight. It was waiting to be spoken or written. In fact, for maximum prosocial cognitive impact I should have left this unremarked. But I didn’t because there’s a larger point to be made.

8. In true American fashion, queer has been swamped by material signifiers—gender surgery, sexual preference, and sports. Queer’s likely German roots meaning off-center, or oblique has ironically come to imply an intensification of the binaries that mortify thinking. This is especially true of progressive political discourse, in which too-on-the-nose-you-couldn’t-write-this men with feminine traits are conscripted into the rigid biological classification of “woman” and women with male traits as “man.” Gender roles are as retrogressive as the American 1950’s, only now they’re dressed in the drag of liberative rhetoric.

9. Here I am referring to “secondary orality,” and writing’s many and continually proliferating offspring, which we call “media.”

10. But I also wish for more plumbers, machinists, and tailors.

11. For example, the religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith spent a career methodically dismantling the essential nature of the category “religion.” His arguments are invigorating, even if they feel themselves a little too much. His (relatively speaking) famous claim that religion is a “creation of the scholar’s study” is a little like claiming physics is a creation of the scholar’s study. It’s true, of course. There is no physical process in the universe of elementary forces that is to properly be understood as physics qua physics. But physics as a discipline is the delimitation of phenomena for the purposes of analysis. Religion is the same thing, if a bit messier. What Smith groks is that there is no essential doctrinal content in any of the world religions. What Smith misses (in the arguments I’m familiar with) is what I’ve spent some time here discussing. Religion is a process taking place in the observable universe. It’s the disposition of the dead part to which humans are called, and that the literary culture of bibles, sutras, and tablets are tributaries of.

12. I’m gesturing at Pierre Bourdieu here because he’s a shorthand for the kind of observation people are comfortable with when it’s not directed at them. He’s a kind of intellectual toothpick. Great at digging out the things you don’t want, but irritating when someone else pokes you with it.

13. I promise to make this argument plain in a later essay. If you’re skeptical, I welcome your skepticism, and ask for your patience.

14. Frits Staal makes the argument in Ritual and Mantras: Rules Without Meaning (1990) that the earliest vedas were modeled on the pattern of birdsongs indigenous to the Indus Valley.

15. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (1986).

16. “Keep Me In Your Heart ,” Warren Zevon.