At the Feet of the Arkans

At the Weekly Wonders two weeks ago I posted about the Cainites. There have been lots of versions of the descendants of Cain—vampires, monsters, non-vegetarian barbarians—but I was looking at a specific, and very obscure, tradition from Jewish mysticism. It was said that Cain’s children were led by God into a dark cavernous world or place and where each given two heads. Their bicephaly was possibly a reminder of Cain’s brother Abel, who he killed, and thus the need for peace between siblings, but in the stories it usually seems to be a symbol for internal conflict. Solomon rules that Cainites are merely two-headed people rather than sets of twins sharing a body, and so the fact that one head is often pious while the other is wicked is taken as an external, visible sign of every human’s dual nature. Solomon, however, was wrong: two minds in two brains means there are two people. That is all the evidence you need. The land in which these Cainites were said to live is usually called Arka, so I tend to think of them as the Arkans.*

At the end of the Weekly Wonders post, I wondered what Arkan culture might look like:

But more interesting to me is to wonder what the society of Arka […] would be like: What would be their laws? How would they marry? (Note that, in Israel, the Cainite took only one wife rather than two.) What attitude would people with no exclusive claim to their own bodies have toward the ownership of property? What would be the history of their philosophy? Similar questions are posed, and some answers ventured, in other works featuring societies of bicephalic twins: Shelley Jackson’s novel Half-Life and Alluria Publishing’s Remarkable Races: The Taddol RPG supplements. But I would appreciate fuller answers, so you should feel free to offer your own.

No one took me up on that question—or not yet, anyway—but I’d still like to hear possibilities.

As I indicate, Alluria Publishing’s taddols are interesting. Their anatomies have particular implications for their culture: for instance, they do not practice strict monogamy or even marriage, I assume because taddols cannot participate in the sort of sexual exclusivity we tend to (rightly or wrongly) imagine is a central component of marriage. But what’s more interesting to me is that they do not have any sense of private property: with their stuff as with their own bodies, their attitude is “You can use it if no one else is.” What they are possessive of is their ideas. The supplement specifically mentions that taddols will hold long grudges or even start battles over philosophical disagreements (though the examples given have a really impoverished sense of what a philosophical disagreement might entail). I trouble following this logic, though: if a taddol is possessive of her ideas because it is the only thing that is truly hers, this implies a contrast to her body, which she shares with her sister. The implication is that she might have different ideas than her sister. However, the supplement suggests that you should play as taddol twins who have significantly different moral alignments, since it would be needlessly difficult to have your characters squabble over every decision, and the description of their culture suggests that taddols tend to do more than quarrel when they disagree.

It seems to me that Alluria Publishing is somewhat mistaken: taddols would be likely to have better, not worse, ways of living with disagreement than we singletons do. And this is why I want to speculate about Arkan culture. I suspect that Arkan culture must contain some wisdom that helps in conflict resolution and living despite disagreement. (I’m thinking of Wade Davis’s suggestion in The Wayfinders that different cultures contain, or even simply are, techniques for addressing different challenges or questions; I discussed that when I wrote about the Majesty 2: Monster Kingdom game.) In real life, there’s been some interest in how conjoined twins resolve their differences; Alice Dormurat Dreger’s One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal deals with this somewhat, but also see the video interviews with Abby Hensel and Brittney Hensel, who freely admit to arguing fairly often. But conjoined twins don’t have a tradition. There’s little sense that they can learn from conjoined twins before them, since conjoined twins rarely even meet anyone else like them, let alone have a chance to learn from them. Each pair must produce their own conflict resolution techniques on their own. The Arkans, though, would have a whole culture which would address this problem. I’ve written before that living with disagreement is a concern of mine, and even used conjoined twins as a brief example; living with disagreement must be done, but I’m still not entirely sure how.

What I’d love is if I had a cosmogony machine with which I could make worlds. I’d create a world which contained Arkans, and let them live for a hundred generations or so. I would let them build a civilization, or civilizations. I would let them write a literature and produce aphorisms and so on. I would give them time to forge a culture. And then I would visit them, and I would sit at their feet and learn.

Or would I? There are, today, experts in conflict resolution. Peacekeepers and diplomats exist. Once upon a time my own country was known for them, though not since our current PM destroyed that reputation with his tactlessness. There may not be a culture of living with disagreement, but there is a scholarly literature in it. I am sure I could sit at the feet of those experts and learn, but I do not. It is easier to imagine perfect teachers and lament their absence than to seek out the ones which exist.

----

*I shoddy writing a fantasy story in which Arkan citizens petition to be recognized as two persons, meaning they can cast two votes (one per person) and cannot consent to an agreement for one another.

Good People and Going Wrong: Index

In the last year or so I have been wrestling with concerns about ethics, due in part to certain biographical events that I will not bother getting into here and in part to my ongoing intellectual curiosity. I do not feel that I am anywhere close to answering my questions, but maybe I can air some of these ideas out here. Even if no one helps me by posing new questions or offering answers, the mere discipline of writing it out might be helpful long-term.

Specifically, I am wondering about what I suppose people call meta-ethics. The truth, uncomfortable or otherwise, is that we must live in societies which contain people who have different moral beliefs than we do. (In fact, you, my reader, are probably such a person to me, and I to you.) How do we manage this? How do I act in respect to your morality? What can I expect of you? What can I expect you to expect of me? These are very hard questions. I am overwhelmed in my attempt to answer them. I am framing this in exactly the way I'm tempted to frame it: is a person who acts according to incorrect moral principles still a good person? Maybe that framing is wrong, and I'm open to any alternatives.

Something else I've been trying to do lately is stop acting like I'm such an expert on things and start admitting when I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm OK with sounding like an idiot, so that's not why I want to hedge my claims; I want to hedge my claims because I want people to react toward what I'm saying as provisional, as a work in progress. I want input, and I'm starting to realize that my style might prevent people from commenting because they are daunted by this veneer of authority I somehow managed to develop. (This is more of an IRL thing, but it might have migrated to my online personas, too.) The funny thing is that asking questions, rather than giving answers, has been my primary internal mode for quite a few years now, so in a sense this will not be so much a case of changing who I am but of changing how I communicate who I am.

And this time I have no fear of giving a table of contents that I will fail to fulfill because I've already written all of the posts and am just rolling them out over time to make reading it less daunting! So here goes:

1. Which Sense of "Right"?
In which I talk about morality and correctness.

2. I Prefer Honest Hypocrites to Deluded Saints
In which I talk about being a hypocrite and being a self-satisfied jerk, and how those differ.

3. What Kind of Character is a Virtue Ethicist?
In which I show off my philosophy education, probably to my embarrassment. In which I also talk about why I haven't yet discussed deontology, consequentialism, et al.

4. Do I Choose My Ethical Beliefs?
In which I think that psychology is at least as important to this conversation as philosophy is.

5. How Much Tolerance Can We Tolerate?
In which I start out talking about a particular meta-ethical question, then find out that it's actually just a reformulation of the whole problem I'm dealing with, and then get really writerly and meta-fictional on top of meta-ethical.

6. Is Judgement Ethical?
In which I question everything I've done so far and then try to summarize it anyway.

I'll link as the posts come up. I might not be terribly timely.

I'll give you some extra resources to help you get a sense of where I am. The first resource is a post that I wrote following a public lecture by Judith Butler. The second point, on left-right politics, and the final point, on community and conflict, bear on my discussion. The second resource is a novella, Three Worlds Collide, that everyone on the Internet seems to link to when they discuss meta-ethics. It is about space-faring humans encountering alien life for the first time, and having a terrible meta-ethical crisis as a result. I've read the piece and I did not find it helpful. I'm linking it as a preemptive strike, and also so I can tell you what kind of story I would find more helpful: the short story I would like might be about conjoined twins that fundamentally disagreed about ethics, were unable to convince each other, and could not opt out of their necessarily cooperative existence. Deciding whether to blow up aliens with whom I have no emotional engagement, with whom I would not have to cooperate if I chose not to, and with whom I have no shared vulnerability, is not the kind of meta-ethics which applies to my life or to my voting. We're all enmeshed with each other, and that's what makes ethics so difficult.

The Problem of the Augmented Body

or, What is our body? part 3

I return to this series somewhat more hesitant about it than when I began. Much of the reason there has been such a gap between instalments is that I realized I had little to say. Or, alternately, that what I had to say was not very well considered. In my discipline, literary analysis, there is a lot of discussion of bodies; how we relate to them, how they are represented, how they interact, and what they are. So when I say that I know nothing much about them, I do so in a field in which theorizing about bodies is taken very seriously and is done a great deal. Perhaps this in part explains my trepidation to proceed.

But proceed I will, because I still feel as though I can say something that will be new at least to some people, maybe even ones that will read my blog (especially if Leah continues giving it publicity). What I can perhaps offer is a sense of how the more postmodern, English department-style of thinking about things can impact such a question. I think I’d just like to bracket this post off as somewhat provisional, subject to revision. Or, even better, maybe we should think of it as a starting point for further inquiry.

And don’t worry. I will have a lot more to say, with more confidence, later in the post, once we move away from this issue of raw bodies.

Let’s catch up on the ground we’ve covered here. In my first post I considered a very biological, organic, cellular, genetic sense of body: bodies are made of continuous living tissue, distinct from one another based on disconnect. I used a number of case studies to indicate how this conception must fail. Continuous living tissue is not sufficient to any definition of a body, and I mean this in more than one sense: that which defines one body from another is not continuous living tissue. But I have not ruled out that it might be necessary. That is, it might be one component of a more complex picture.

In my second post I considered an instrumental sense of body: my body is that which I have motor control over. I used a number of case studies to indicate that this cannot be a necessary definition of body. There are things I do not have motor control over (my teeth, my heart) which are my body. I want to clarify, though, that I do not mean to say that instrumentality is not sufficient to being part of my body: perhaps motor control over something is enough to make it my body.

It cannot be the case that continuous living tissue is necessary but not sufficient and motor control is sufficient but not necessary because there is at least one instance in which people have motor control over an object but do not have a continuous living tissue connection. That instance is possession of a prosthetic limb. (Which is the issue that sparked the whole controversy over at Unequally Yoked.)

So let’s get some examples. We have limbs which replace typical human appendages and have some motor function determined by synapses. This is a fairly commonplace example and is fairly easily conceived. While you might from the outset disagree, I think most of us could at least understand why a person with a prosthetic might consider it part of his or her body: it replaces a part of the body which is formerly there. If you replace a computer component with a new one, that new one is now part of the computer. If you replace a body component with another one, we could analogously consider it part of the body. This breaks down somewhat when you realize that prosthetics are not necessarily replacements: they are sometimes function where a person did not already have a limb or they sometimes offer functions which the “original” limb did not have. However, I think it’s a good place to start thinking about prosthetics. We could also say that the addition of a new periphery becomes part of the computer when added even if it does not replace anything that formerly existed there. If you would consider a transplanted heart as now part of the new owner’s body, I think I can expect the onus to be on you to explain how a non-organic heart would be any different. (If you wouldn’t consider the transplanted heart to be part of the new owner’s body, I would like to hear you explain why. The idea is alien to me.)

Let’s move in another direction for a moment. Let’s consider the Emotiv EPOC, a console device which allows you to play the video game simply with your mind. You wear a device on your head and, after a calibration process, it lets you move characters around on the screen with your thoughts. It does this by reading your brain waves. I must admit that I am personally less comfortable taking the characters on the screen to be part of my body. I must also admit that I would be less comfortable taking distant objects also moved only by synapse/circuitry to be part of my own body. To suggest that a remote control car is “me” because I can move it with my mind seems deeply problematic. That such a situation isn’t unimaginable given the EPOC indicates that we must take it seriously.
(And to forestall any complaints that this is not the same as a prosthetic, I’ll point out that some prosthetics operate on this technology and not through nerve-circuit interface.)

The point I see being appropriate here is that the Emotiv is not part of my body because I do not identify with it. That is, I specifically disagree with the claim that identification is not relevant to the conversation. Certainly it is not sufficient: no matter how badly I may identify with your body, that does not mean it is part of my body. But I think it is a component of what is going on. The physical attachment of a prosthetic encourages the owner to define it as part of her body; even when removed, in fact, it may still be considered part of her body due to her identification with it over time. Motor control also plays a role in this, of course; sensory feedback would play even more, and is perhaps part of why the EPOC, lacking as it does in tactile response, does not have the same identification.

But I am merely asserting that identification is relevant. I cannot, actually, back that up, but for two points which might be suggestive. The first is that many people with prosthetics say that those prosthetics are part of their body. While this doesn’t prove anything, I want to point out that we as a society have done a pretty bad job of listening seriously to minority groups. Once we do start listening, we often learn a surprising number of things from them. So maybe listening would be a good idea in this case; to simply say that they are wrong because they go against our own predetermined ideas is not a good idea politically, rhetorically, or epistemologically. The second point is also the destination of this post:

My opinion, as it stands and for whatever it’s worth, is that there is no way of determining, definitively, what a body is or who it belongs to. What we have instead are a number of competing ideas that almost work but that always, somewhere, break down. In the previous instalment I said that if we want a universal definition, it must apply to all bodies. Since I do not think we can find a definition that does apply to all bodies, then we cannot have a universal definition. I want to suggest, in fact, that we not only have no way of writing such a definition, but that the category of a discrete body might not exist outside of our idea of it anyway. There are not discrete bodies.

However, it is important that we act as if there are. (Imagine what rape would look like in a society which did not recognize discrete bodies.) But this doesn’t mean that we pick a definition of body and stick to it regardless of the consequences. Instead I suggest we ride definitions as far as they go until they break down. When they break down, we look around, see what the issue is, and draft a new definition that we can use until it stops working. What becomes crucial, then, is to listen very closely to what the people with those exceptional bodies are saying, because they’re the ones who have the best insight into what a body is in that situation. (And so I circle back to my first suggestion.)

So, to be clear: I would say that if people with prosthetics define body such that that prosthetic is part of their body, then it is part of their body. However, how we define bodies is not so simple because it must take into account the society we live in. I will address this a forthcoming section. In the meantime, I will spend a few instalments dealing with the opposite half of the dualist equation: the mind.

Series Index

Catch-Up

Looking through my archive, I see that I have not given you all an update of my life since 25 February. My apologies; I assure you that I have been quite busy. If you take a look at that last 7 Quick Takes, you'll see that I bought some journals, which means that I actually have a record of what happened in the meantime. Fancy that. Let's dive in.

1. I have become a sidesperson and a liturgical assistant-in-training at my church. I am a member of the church for real. In the instance of the latter, I get to wear an alb again. Regular readers will know that this pleases me. What's even more exciting is that my church does not have albs big enough for me, so I get to wear the priest's spare clergy alb. One of the unexpected privileges of being a liturgical assistant-in-training is that I am sometimes asked to serve the priest the Eucharist.

2. I gave up tea for Lent. It was difficult but I survived. I also planned to write a sonnet each week; I only got two written. Not so good. If you want to see someone who succeeded at a more daunting sonnet Lenten devotion, go visit Miss Lazarus' site.

3. I picked up a new webcomic, Order of the Stick. I'm no table-top RPG player but I still find it delightful. Genre-savviness makes me swoon, what can I say?

4. I went to a Contemplative Prayer service or two in the elapsed time. In the most interesting I was introduced to the Anglican Rosary. I am a fan; I wish I had one. I am not sure what makes it different from a Catholic Rosary.

5. For class I have read a number of interesting works, some new to me and some familiar: "Death and the Compass" by Borges, The Tempest by Shakespeare (as well as other things by him, but that's in my opinion the most interesting of them), Waiting for Godot by Beckett, a host of stuff on reported speech, including an article by one Wooffitt on mediums reporting (supposedly) the speech of spirits.

6. I have officially (for myself, at least) moved towards Universalism. I'm aware that it's not fully worked out, but I consider the problems with Arminianism and Calvinism more insurmountable than those of Universalism. This move was entirely instigated by the series over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog.

7. I have started running. Twice a week, that is, in the morning, with a friend of mine. Athleticism is such a strange concept for me yet I've fallen into this routine easily enough. The trick is, will I continue over the summer?

8. I saw a Green College production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you can believe it, I'd never seen nor read it before. I quite enjoyed it.

9. I also attended the EndNotes conference, the UBC English Department annual graduate conference. This year's theme was "Beyond the Book." I heard friends and colleagues give papers on how the Twilight franchise has impacted the community of Forks, Washington; how Canadian history and archive is explored in the comics of Seth; how V's mask relates to reader identification and the genre conventions of melodrama (theatre) in V for Vendetta (the graphic novel); how narrative pornography has begun to rise with Pirates and what this has to do with the potential for feminist pornography (that one was a bit controversial, you can imagine); how Girl Talk enacts the Death of the Author; and how intertextuality and copyright operate in the Arthurian legend of Swamp Thing #87, in which Merlin draws Swamp Thing back in time to Camelot to defend the kingdom against Mordred. It was an exultation of grad student nerdiness and I loved it.

10. I wrote two papers. One concerns a particular type of self-reporting speech which I examine in detail in order to learn more about self-reporting. The other concerns the constitution and perversion of the ideal male military body through its parodic inversion in the Coventry and Gloucestershire muster scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV respectively. (Those are Shakespeare plays, in case you are not fully read up on your early modern drama.) The process of researching, writing, and editing was, of course, harrowing.

11. Immediately after submitting my papers I graded about 50 student essays (each of my 25 students had to write two essays for their final exam, as well as do an identify-and-state-the-significance-of section) and calibrate my final grades for submission. I did this perforce over the Easter weekend, which I found quite distasteful. During this process, I crashed a little bit.

12. For these essays, I read papers and books on the early modern English constitution of masculinty and on the dynamics of everyday speech. For the former, may I suggest Gary Spear's article "Shakespeare's "Manly" Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida" and Patricia Cahill's Unto the Breach; for the latter, may I recommend Goffman's Forms of Talk. (His Frame Analysis is also interesting and was written earlier, so perhaps you should skim it first. Both are tomes.)

13. I have given substantial thought to some things other than my papers during this time, among which has been what friendship is and what sorts of requirements come with it. Altruism has always been important to me but certain interpersonal issues seem different when framed by general ideas of altruism than when framed in a context of friendship. As I make and solidify new friendships here in a new city, these question gain some immediacy.

14. Some time in the midst of the above, I finished One of Us, which I wrote on before. I'd like to share another excerpt, one I thought worthy of copying out in my journal: "But what if we understood such twins as people who are no more broken than anyone else? What if we stopped thinking of biological anomalies as the sworn enemies of humanity, and started recognizing their full social nature, perhaps even their social potential? In the long run, we can do more than try to guarantee every child a 'normal' body. We can try to guarantee a just world. If you take seriously what conjoined people have said about their bodies and their lives, you realize they are still experiencing what Mary Wollstonecraft felt in the late eighteenth century: 'It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.' Let us now stop referring to children who undergo massive normalizations as 'real fighters,' and start recognizing that we are the ones who construct what they are fighting against." [emphasis mine]

Now I'm free; I'm very tired at the moment, but I'm loose in the world again. And, who'da thunk it, but it's spring! (Actually, it's been spring here for months now. Vancouver is like that.)

The Problem of the Obedient Body

or, What is our body?, part 2

If what does and does not count as part of my body is not determined by organic attachment (or at least not entirely), then is it possible that obedience does determine it? That is, can we say that whatever obeys our mental commands is part of our body? This is the sort of reasoning Leah at Unequally Yoked suggests, along with some commenters. Explaining why she thinks a prosthetic counts as a part of one's body, she says, "It's attached to me and serves my will." Presumably, then "regular" body parts are governed by the same principle: that which is obeys your will is part of your body. It is not this particular claim that I'm interested in refuting, but a similar one. That is, that our body is that which obeys our will. Perhaps (I'm not yet conceding this point) whatever we can command is part of our body, but I am going to suggest that not all of our body is especially obedient. In the course of this post, I am going to suggest that obedience can only be part of the story because our bodies have a knack for disobedience.

First I want to notice briefly that our bodies have physical limits. We cannot, for instance, bend our elbows beyond a certain angle no matter how hard we will it. We cannot bend where we do not have joints. We cannot expect our eyes to smell or our noses to hear. We can only will our body parts to perform the functions they can perform. This seems obvious and does not seem to me to suggest that the body is disobedient. One could easily enough stipulate that we're only refering to a body's normal functioning. (I am using "normal" deliberately because I plan to indicate later how big of a problem normativity is in this question.) Again, I am going to use a list to indicate ways in which bodies are disobedient.

1. Paralysis Bodies sometimes do not act when willed to act; they are paralyzed. This can be permanent or temporary, caused by nervous tissue damage, psychoactive chemicals, or psychosomatic disorders. Whatever the details, sometimes our bodies, even when physically capable of the action we will, do not move. If obedience alone determined what counted as our body, would we then be required to say that a paraplegic person's lower torso is no longer part of their body? This seems to me to be a highly problematic move.

2. Conjoined Twins and "Two Headed" Snakes You may recall that last time I worried that, by the definition of organic attachment, conjoined twins could not distinguish their bodies when it seemed clear that they should be able to. In this post I want to suggest instances in which conjoined twins actually cannot distinguish between their bodies. Since I do not know of any human twins to whom this applies, I will refer to snakes. (Note on phrasing: it is typical to refer to human conjoined twins as plural people but to refer to animal conjoined twins as a single two-headed organism. This seems an arbitrary distinction to me. Insofar as animals have consciousnesses, two conjoined animals would have separate consciousnesses and therefore be distinct animals. So I am continuing to use the phrase "conjoined twins" rather than "two-headed snakes" to emphasis that these are two snakes sharing a body, not one snake with two heads.)

If you watch the video, you should be able to see that the two snakes here share (or, perhaps more accurately, compete for) control over their body. Both control the body; put differently, the body is obedient to both snakes, except when they compete. In this instance I think it would be quite fair to suggest that at least some of their body is shared. That is, it is part of the left snake's body and part of the right snake's body. However, obedience as an indicator of being part of a body is complicated by the possibility that your body could obey another. Further, it makes more complicated the idea of what a "body" is. The left snake's head is not part of the right snake's body, I shouldn't think. But both of these are attached to the parts of the body which the share. Conceptualizing the body as some sort of concrete "thing" is therefore pretty problematic. That human conjoined twins have never been reported to share motor control does not, to my knowledge, mean it could never happen. Further, conjoined twins do sometimes share tactile perception. (Abigail and Brittany Hensel, I have heard, can both feel touch on the skin between their spines. Do their bodies not just connect but overlap in this instance?) And what of internal organs that "obey" signals from both brains? Not conscious willing, no, but signals which help moderate chemical production in digestive and reproductive organs. This does occur in human conjoined twins, and suggests that we cannot simply write of these problems as ones belonging exclusively to conjoined animals.

Perhaps someone at this point will object that these are not normal bodies with normal functioning. There are two problems with this objection. The first is that if we want a universal definition of what constitutes a body, it needs to account for ALL bodies. The second is that we will have trouble defining what a normal body is. "Normal" is a problematic word, in the first place, because it has a normative element: that is, normal is how things should be. And just switching for "typical" isn't going to work. If we say that we're only talking about "typical" bodies and then define bodies as we are used to them, we're still saying that these atypical bodies are somehow uncategorizable according to the rules we've set up, recreating a standard by which bodies are considered "typical" or "atypical", with these terms functioning identically to "normal" and "abnormal." But if you remain unconvinced, I have two parallel examples remaining which apply to all bodies.

3. Inert body parts Some of our body parts do not obey our will. I was somewhat interested that in Leah's post on transhumanism she suggested that our teeth obey our will. Do they really? I haven't ever commanded my teeth to do anything at all. I don't think they would do anything if I did command them. And this is something slightly more than limits to their functionality: there is literally no way that they can obey my will. Neither can my bones or fat deposits. Like a person with paralyzed body parts, not all of my body can obey me. Therefore obedience cannot possibly be the only marker of what counts as my body, unless I wish to forfeit my bones and teeth and fat.

4. Body parts that do things "on their own" Sometimes body parts seem to act of their own volition. The other day I got into an argument and immediately afterwards I was shaking so badly I had to sit down. My legs buckled without my ordering them to; in fact, they continued buckling even when I tried to stop them from shaking. Of course I am sure this was a result of things going on inside my nervous system, but if we're defining according to will, then I must say they weren't obeying my will, even though they were fully capable of doing so. There are numerous physical states and phenomena which have the same effect; off-hand, I can think of nervous tics, hyperventilation, and unwanted physical arousal. In each of these cases, one or more organs act in ways counter to our conscious will. If you are still skeptical, let me suggest an exercise for you (don't actually do this). Turn on one burner of your stove range. Wait five minutes. Touch the burner. Don't pull back. See if your body obeys you. (Even if you succeed in keeping your body there, I am rather sure your arm and finger will be "attempting" to jerk back in ways you did not will.) In the case of paralysis or inert body parts, sometimes parts of our bodies do not obey our will but are nonetheless part of our body. In the case of some conjoined twins and some physical states/phenomena, our bodies will do things we did not will, either because a conjoined sibling willed it or because of a command given by the nervous system outside of a conscious will. While I might be able to say that something is part of my body if it obeys my will, I cannot say that obedience to my will is the only feature which could make something part of my body.

Series Index

The Problem of the Organic Body

or, What is our body? part 1

For most of us, this seems a fairly simple question because we have something to which we can refer. I can point toward my body and say, "This is my body." This is not a definition (description) but an indication. What happens, however, when we rely entirely on indication for our definitions is that we don't actually have a useful definition. Trying to determine what exactly defines your body as yours is a difficult question. (It might seem to be a useless question, too, if it weren't the case that a number of controversial ethico-medico-legal issues--abortions, amputations, and separation surgeries--are directly concerned with what is whose body. I'm not going to trace these particular problems out in this post, but if you're concerned that this is all fruitless philosophizing, I'd think again.) So I'm going to take a crack at it.

One of the positions I think I detected among the commenters on Leah's blog (see the introduction to this series for a summary) holds that what something (an organ, say) is part of your body because it is 1) attached with living tissue and 2) composed of living, organic cells. So my hand is part of me because it is attached and organic. If my hand were chopped off, it would no longer be part of me. If it were replaced with a prosthetic, that prosthetic would not be part of me because it is not organic. No matter how strenously I insisted that it was part of me, I would be mistaken.
I would suggest that there are people who would wish to add that those cells must be genetically identical (or at least genetically similar) to those that make up most of your body. I do not want to suggest that the commenters I mentioned have this requirement, but I imagine that someone does. After all, there are parasitic animals that fuse themselves onto their hosts (or live deep within their hosts) such that there is a band of continuous living tissue extending from one organism to another. Genetic markers could be a way of differentiating one body from the next.

Either way, I'm going to suggest that this is the wrong way of finding the edges of your body. Once again, I am not looking so much to prove through syllogism as provide instances in which this sort of definition seems entirely unhelpful.

1. Organ and tissue donation

I cannot systematically prove that a transplanted heart becomes part of the new owner in some metaphysical sense. What I will suggest is that we have a number of reasons for wanting to think so, primary among them practical and legal concerns. I will spend more time discussing this issue in part 3, but let's for the moment identify a few traits: the new organ was formerly part of another person (or their body, at any rate), and most likely carries a quite different genetic signature. If we say that a new heart is part of the person who received it, we must conclude that at the very least the genes do not determine what is or is not part of your body. I suppose you might want to argue that the transplanted heart isn't really part of your body, in which case my next example might prove harder to refute.

2. Chimeras

No, I don't mean the Greek mythological monster. I refer to tetregametic chimerism, in which a person has two genetic lineages. Chimerae are people (or animals) who either developed from an egg fertilized by two sperm or from two non-identical zygotes which fused into one. This means that some of their cells have one genetic code and some of their cells have another. This could result in pigmentation or hair-growth unevenness or in intersexed anatomy, but it may very well go undetected. (Which is to say, you could be a chimera and not know it.)
I hope you can see what I'm driving at. This is one body, satisfying the connected living tissue requirements, that contains multiple genetic markers. Unless you want to claim that a chimeric person has two blended bodies, genetic material cannot constitute a useful distinction.
If you really want to push it and say that at least the cells are related on the level of siblings, I'll observe that researchers have created chimerae lab rats from two non-related zygotes... and other chimerae from zygotes of different species.

3. Conjoined Twins and Parasitic Twins

(Some people may not be surprised to see this example come up. I assure you that it will appear again in this series.)
The connected living tissue requirement is a problem when there are people (genetically identical) who are connected with living tissue. Consider Violet and Daisy Hilton (right), connected at the base of the spine. At their point of connection it would be exceptionally difficult to determine which tissue was Violet's and which tissue was Daisy's. Furthermore, since they (along with most if not all conjoined twins) have connected circulatory systems, it would be impossible to say whose blood is whose. We might want to make some kind of argument based on whose "side" the blood is on, but ths is a problem (and here's the real kicker) if we're defining bodies based on connected living tissue because under this definition Violet and Daisy Hilton have one body. You could trace a path of continuous connected living tissue from the centre of Violet's brain through to Daisy's brain. Under this definition, there is no way to distinguish Daisy's body from Violet's.
I think it might be worth distinguishing the instance of conjoined twins from supernumary limbs or digits. An extra thumb or arm does constitute (I would suggest) part of your body. Additional pieces don't fall outside this category. This is interesting because parasitic twins are like supernumary organs in some respects and are like conjoined twins in others (origin, say). Parasitic twins do not have brains or consciousnesses, so do they count as separate bodies? However, we are here moving into a new way of defining body or self, and so I shall rest with the observation that it seems that connected, genetically identical, living tissue is at the very least not sufficient in defining where your body ends. I will return to this topic again in the part 3.

Finally, I will point out an interesting piece of etymology that will help segue into the next post. Organic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary On-Line, can mean a number of things. The entry most representative of common use seems to be the following:

Having organs, or an organized physical structure; of, relating to, or derived
from a living organism or organisms; having the characteristics of a living
organism (OED).

However, there are other meanings, some of which are obsolete. One of these offers a second way of thinking about what does or does not constitute part of your body (the one advocated in some form or another by both dbp and Leah):

Serving as an instrument or means to an end; instrumental. Obs. (OED)

To Series Index

Reading One of Us

I recently got One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal from the library. It is apparently the kind of book I would get from the library, or so I've been told. If you want to see details, here's a link to the Amazon site. The official blurb on the back is very minimal:

One of Us views conjoined twins and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics.

The rest of the back is quotations from book reviews.

It's the sort of book one would encounter in academia, so for those of my readers missing university thought, perhaps you can indulge yourselves vicariously through me here. I haven't even finished the introduction yet, but I want to quote portions of what I have read. There's a lot, but I wanted to preserve something like the thrust of the discussion. It's fascinating.

...The truth is, most of us go through minor anatomical 'normalization' procedures every day, changing our bodies ever so slightly to fit the identity we wish to present socially. We brush the plaque off our teeth, in part to keep them healthy but also so that they won't disgust others with a smell or appearance that would signal we are unclean (and therefore, by the rules of anatomy and identity, slovenly or poor or ill). We wash and style our hair and put on clothes meant to signal who we are underneath (man, woman, corporate team player, professor, artist, rebel). We add a wristwatch to enhance our imperfect internal clocks, to keep our bodily movements well timed in relation to others'.
We shave various parts of our bodies depending on what kind of sexuality we wish to signal. We put on eyeglasses or slide into a wheelchair to compensate for the anatomical deficits that might otherwise keep us out of the stream of human life, which largely requires sight and autonomous movement. We worry about getting too fat, knowing that fat is widely equated with weak will and ill health, and we so [sic] step on the scale, choose the diet soda, go to the gym for a workout.
[...]
Nevertheless, some people are born with anatomies that don't fit the social rules so far as anatomy and identity are concerned and that cannot be "normalized" by any simple procedure like shaving or the donning of glasses. These people are born with anatomies that complicate efforts to easily categorize them. Cheryl Chase, for example, was born with mixed sex anatomy, internally and externally, which made it hard for people to figure out whether to expect her to become a boy or a girl. Lori and Reba Schappell were born conjoined at the head, an anatomy that can make a new acquaintance unsure whether they are to be approached as one person or two. Ruta Sharangpani is profoundly nearsighted but can see just enough to manage without an obvious aid like a can or dog; she also has an eye that can't quite meet your because it shakes and wavers. Danny Black has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, and though he is middle-aged he inhabits a body whose proportions are supposed to characterize only the immature.
[...]Most of us are so used to dealing with people who fit invisibly into the standard categories of anatomy and identity that it is jarring when we meet someone who doesn't. And it is the recognition of this awkwardness, the recognition of how comfortable it can be to be considered normal, how uncomfortable it can be to be considered abnormal, that motivates adults to want to surgically normalize children born with unusual anatomies, to separate the Loris and Rebas, to make the Cheryls look like "real" girls, to stretch the limbs of the Dannys, to make the Rutas look fully sighted.

Often the adults who impose such a normalization understand it as a charitable manifestation of pity. And no doubt it is. But "pity" is defined as sorrow for another's suffering and misfortune, and that's exactly why it is experienced by many people born with unusual anatomies as not only unsupportive but actively oppressive; for pity implies that the subject must be suffering and unfortunate. When I asked Lori Schappell how she felt when people treated her with pity, she bristled, saying that as soon as she saw such a "pity conversation" starting, she would end it or leave it. Trying to fight the degradation of puty, Ruta Sharangpani told me once, is "like trying to climb a glass wall. There are no handholds, no way to talk to a pitying person, because she or he does not see the disabled person as a competent individual." So, however unintentionally, pity silences the person who might otherwise speak to defend the value of her person and her life.[...]
[...]
By considering conjoined twinning and other "deformities" within the larger historical context of anatomical politics, [this book] argues for a more radical understanding of "abnormal" bodies. It seeks to change assumptions made about people born with unusual anatomies, and by doing so it seeks to change the context built around those people. The typical story told about such individuals is one in which the child's anatomy is changed to fit the social context. This book seeks instead to change the social context by exposing the breadth and depth of that context. It endeavors to show what something as rare as conjoinment could have to do with the rest of us.

In the next part of the Introduction, Dreger focuses on conjoined twins. [Boldface mine.]

...But the reason [conjoined twins] are treated so differently from others is not simply that they are rare; it is that people in general expect, quite reasonably, that any individual they meet will be the only person inhabiting his or her skin. Because most singletons--by which I mean people born with no anatomical bond to anyone but their mothers--understand psychosocial individuality as requiring anatomical individuality, they tend to assume that conjoined twins are trapped in such a way that makes a happy, normal life impossible. Only surgical separation could truly make them free.

New York Magazine vividly exemplified this assumption when it printed a photograph of infant twins Carmen and Rosa Taveras in November 1993--several months after they'd been surgically separated--under the headline "FREE AT LAST." But as Chapter 1 demonstrates, such a headline would make little sense to people who are conjoined, because most people who are conjoined do not feel physically entrapped. They do not wish they had been born into singleton bodies. Indeed, Laleh and Ladan Bijani, who chose to be separated in 2003 at the age of twenty-nine, were the first conjoined twins in history to consent to separation surgery. Though it may seem shocking, in none of the hundreds of previous separation operations performed were surgeons givern permission by the patients themselves to do the surgery. This is not simply because most conjoined twins fear the risks of separation. It is because [...] people who are conjoined typically feel that their bodies and lives are perfectly normal and acceptable--sometimes even preferable. They don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with being conjoined. Thus, one of the ways in which conjoined twins are like almost everyone else is that they tend to readily accept, and even prefer, the anatomy with which they were born.[...]

A friend of mine (Sunny) was unsurprised that almost no conjoined twins want to be separated. While some may think that conjoined twins could not be happy, she would think you couldn't be happy with major physical trauma. Well put, I think.

2010 in 10 Books

Subtitle: Because I'm a Huge Nerd Like That

[Once I posted the first bit I realized that this post will be enormous when it's done. This is going to rival some of Jon's stuff.]

I don't usually get too worked up about New Year's Eve; the arbitrariness of it prevents my taking it seriously. That being said, many people treat it as a point of reflection on the last secular calendar year and since I love collective actions--especially on the Interwebs--I shall indulge in a bit of the same. Thus I shall do a review of the year in books. (I couldn't really think of any other topic and, anyway, I'm a huge nerd.) I will note that I recommend all of these books to everyone, provided you are a critical reader and not a mindlessly absorptive one. (I'm pretty sure you're the former.)


1. Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

This was likely the first book I read in 2010. Leacock gives us an episodic account of life in a small Ontario town shortly after Confederation. The genre is emphatically a comedy. I loved it. It reminded me of my own country-boy roots and with my increasingly urban living conditions this is something I like. Perhaps the removal from the rural space was necessary for me to fully appreciate this book. The epilogue after all makes it quite clear that it is written for an audience that is removed from the small town but nonetheless remembers that life. I don't know how well this registers with people who have lived their whole lives in urban culture (though Cait likes it, maybe she can tell us why); for me, the sharp and almost accusatory nostalgia of the book's final pages forced me to become aware of my own urban position.

I can no longer orient myself as being in the country, in the small town. Fort McMurray--where I lived reading the book, where I am writing this--is not a small town. It's not a metropolis like Toronto or Vancouver and I know lots of people from metropolises (metropoles?) see anything smaller than Edmonton as a small town, but compared to most communities Fort McMurray is large. It's just isolated and lacks certain amenities. Kingston, the city in which I had most recently built a full life when I was reading this book, is no small town, either. Recognizing that I am more urbanite than hick was an odd thing for me and is something with which I am still coming to terms. I prefered thinking of myself as a hick than as an urbanite largely because I like thinking of myself as having an outsider's perspective.

The second lesson I got from this book is that one can mix idyll and irony. The narrator treats the characters--and perhaps himself--with a gentle mockery which makes you like them more, not less. This is important: we can still care for the characters in spite of, maybe because of, their faults. This book is built on this blend more than anything else. Humanity is flawed right through, but we're nonetheless likeable. What's important is that the narrator could have presented the characters as flawed and unlikeable, but instead chose to gently, caringly point out these flaws. That specific chosen perspective is an important one.

2. Wade Davis' The Wayfinders

The emotion of the posts that this book spawned should indicate its importance to my 2010. The import of this book comes on two levels.

First, the premise of this book is eye-opening and perhaps liberating: Davis thinks of non-Western civilizations as ones that have the same creative intellectual resources that we have but invested those resources not into the Enlightenment project but into other endeavours entirely. Most of his book explores different endangered cultures which exemplify his premise. I think this is a very important idea, not only in countering the ideas of liberal progress that run rampant through our culture, but also in giving us ways of re-imagining what our society could be like if we started doing things differently. In this respect Davis' book is one of hope, that hope that things can be different.

Unfortunately, opening one's eyes can be a painful experience. The reason Davis' book is hopeful, not complacent, is that there are a lot of things wrong with the world today. As a result, this book sent me into a week-long bout of hopelessness, nigh on despair, with the state of the world. The aftershocks are on-going. This book then marked the beginning of my rocky relationship with the entire idea of hope. I am still working on what kinds of hope are productive and what kinds of hope are deadly.

3. Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light

If The Wayfinders sent me into despair, A Ring of Endless Light helped me get back out of it. This is a young adult novel about a girl named Vicky dealing with death: the recent death of a family friend, the impending death of her grandfather, the deaths of animals (birds, dolphins), the death-seeking of a potential lover. The book is therefore also about love, the full spectrum of friendly, familial, and romantic. Vicky has three potential lovers, and so it triggered one of my theoretical interests (polyamory), but this was not the most fulfilling part of the book. The novel's treatment of love and death coalesce into an exploration into the role hope plays in a dark world.

It is this interest in hope that made the book important to me. I read it following The Wayfinders and this book was part of what pulled me out of that slump. Others will tell you that it's a beautiful book but to me in particular, at that moment, it was necessary. It has also been part of the context in which I have worked through ideas of hope. This is an on-going project, one I can date as beginning in 2010 but cannot date as ending there, as it has not yet ended.

The primary downside to this book is that, like most of L'Engle's books, it made me self-conscious about my own lack of life experiences. Having hit fewer 'maturity markers' than a teenage protagonist is a bit depressing. I hope that my earstwhile readers will not have similar experiences reading it.

4. Walter Truett Anderson's The Truth About the Truth

I picked this up used in a Goodwill; I realized that I didn't really know what postmodernism was and thought remedying that would be a good idea. As it turned out I had been trained in postmodernism for four years at university and just hadn't encountered it as a coherent, labeled theoretical framework. That story is here, here, and here. I am not a postmodernist--I believe in truth, for instance--but I recognize that many of the insights that postmodernism has produced are relevant and important. Postmodernism has significantly changed how I view human identity and has been important upon returning to an English Department. This book not only helped me understand in retrospect exactly what it was I did in much of my undergrad, but it helped me understand the culture in which I will be studying and working for the next few years (at least).

I am not done with postmodernism yet; while I do not agree with the whole package, it has importantly impacted by ongoing thinking. Expect future posts clarifying this.

5. John Milton's Paradise Lost

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. (I'm classifying it as a book, even though that designation doesn't quite work.) I was supposed to have finished reading it a long time ago and decided that it was time. Theologically it's iffy but poetically it works fairly well. I am still confused about the number of pro-Satan readings I hear people produce; having read it straight through now I agree that Satan is a charismatic and understandable villain, but he is nonetheless a villain. What is fascinating is Milton's ability to remain ambiguous about the Ptolemaic versus Copernican universes while elaborately describing the world. Beyond which it's beautiful poetry.

I include PL not only because I finished and enjoyed it, but because I recognize it as one of the touchstones of our current culture. Its vision of the Christian universe has had a lasting impact on societal and cultural understanding of religion (which is ironic, considering it's theological iffiness), and its images have been revisited and revised in subsequent literature. If anything, it has reminded me that drawing on the ideas and images of predecessors is an honourable, perhaps necessary, literary enterprise. Whether or not it has all been said before, it can still be said again, differently. There is still room for poetry.

6. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

If you ever thought reading fiction is unimportant, you may want to read this book. It is non-fiction about how reading fiction is important, especially when the going gets tough. In these memoirs, Azar Nafisi recounts her time as a professor of English in post-revolutionary Iran teaching students, including and particularly a group of young women, how to read the classics: how to read them critically, yes, but also how to learn from them. Thus the novel is divided into four sections called "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and "Austen." She deals with the intersections of the attempt to control others' dreams and censorship, the intersections between the refusal to accept uncertainty in fiction and the refusal to accept uncertainty in personal beliefs, and the intersections between the failure to understand characters and the failure to empathize with real people. Nafisi's life, the other characters' lives, and her observations on Iran are captivating enough to make an interesting book, but the moral strength of the book earns it a place on this list.

If you have read some of my past posts about fantasy or the suspension of disbelief, you will recognize some similar themes. This book has impacted my thinking and has rekindled my faith in the power of and study of literature. In case you were unaware, it is all but a professional requirement that students of literature agonize over their own relevance. Reading Lolita in Tehran has convinced me all over again that reading fiction matters.

7. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics

When you move from a high style or theme to a low style or theme, it is called bathos. That is what's happening with Book #7. Where Nafisi's book was inspirational, McCloud's book is fun, interesting, at best instructive.

McCloud's Understanding Comics explores sequential art, the technical term McCloud gives for comics and graphic novels. His interest is not in superheroes, though; his interest is in the form itself. What happens in the gutter (the space between panels)? Is there a difference between realistically-rendered characters and cartoon ones? How does sequential art relate to other forms of art?

McCloud's Reinventing Comics digs into much more technical elements of drawing, panelling, inking, etc., but even in this he is often very theoretical and many of his concerns apply to all artistic production. Thus if Understanding Comics is more interesting to people who are interested in comics (or the rare duck like me who is interested in genres generally (haha! PUN!)), Reinventing Comics has something to offer anyone involved in the production of narrative art. It is in this book that he also unveils an idea about artistic motivations, which he calls campfire. I began exploring that idea and, to those interested in that exploration, I do intend to finish it sometime. Maybe.

8. The Book of Alternative Services

I borrowed this from St. Thomas' in Fort McMurray. I may have taken it with me to Vancouver. If I did not intend to return it this might bear some resemblance to theft. Which would be ironic, right? (There's a scene in M*A*S*H where Father Mulcahy discovers Klinger has been selling him stolen Bibles. I tried to find it on YouTube but no luck. Sorry, folks.)

To those not in the know, The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada is the standard book for Canadian Anglican services. It contains the responsive readings that characterize any Anglican service; the BAS is important in churches that do not use projector screens because this is how the congregation knows how to respond during certain parts of the liturgy. This is especially true of seasonal events and prayers, as congregation members could not possibly be expected to memorize responses they use once a year. You can get a PDF of the full text here.

My first encounter with the BAS was in St. Pauls' Lutheran Church, the swamp church I attended during my elementary school and high school years. After Confirmation (grade 8), however, I stopped attending services upstairs and stayed downstairs to teach Sunday school. In university I went to a non-liturgical church, so it wasn't until I attended St. Thomas' that I encountered liturgical services again. While a child I respected but did not understand or appreciate liturgy. I was afraid of getting things wrong; it seemed like it was all rules for their own sakes. I found that I missed liturgy in university, especially as the sort of church I went to had unspoken expectations (which are even worse, in my opinion, than written ones). It was therefore with great relief that I discovered St. Thomas had responsive readings, albs, acolytes, and coloured vestments. It was like coming home.

At the end of 2009 I began training to be a server, but I did not borrow the BAS until 2010. I borrowed it so that I could better learn my role as a server and I also thought about using my literary analytical skills on it, but instead I have mainly used it like a book of poetry. For some reason I love reading the Penitential Rite (page 46 of the PDF I linked to); I can say it from memory but I still read it from the page, savouring its rhythm. (OK, I'm weird.) Perhaps part of my appreciation of it is that I know it is all true when I saw it; it is a performative truth.

This is not why I include this book in the list, though. I include it because I am finding myself more and more in love with liturgy. It is a complicated love, for sure; I do not know absolutely that it is enough, or that I understand how to use it to approach God as fully as I would like. But it offers a lot. I find narrative, symbol, and structure powerful tools and liturgy uses them well; I find liturgical language is beautiful and can reveal the beauty of God; I find the communitarian elements of corporate speech and act also useful during Communion. (I am using "Communion" over the more typically Anglican "Eucharist" to make a etymological point.) The BAS is the crux of my liturgical experiences both in St. Thomas, Fort McMurray and St. Faith's, Vancouver, and this is why it makes this list.

9. Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan

This play, about the revolution, trial, and death of Joan d'Arc, was assigned to the class for which I was a TA last term. I had never read Shaw's plays before, though I had seen Caesar and Cleopatra at the Festival. I found Saint Joan to be a quick and enjoyable read; it is also substantial enough for an English major like me to have fun with. Given that I was teaching the text to the class, after the professor for the class gave it a lecture, I decided that that's what I would do in discussion: we would have fun with it.

I went in early and arranged the room so that in the midst of the tables was a set, with chairs and tables set up according to the stage directions. When the students came in, I cast them in roles and we played out Joan's trial. It was one of the best classes I had; I had many volunteers to read the parts and there was no problem getting the non-actors to comment on the action. Every so often I would stop the play and we would comment on what just happened, focusing on specific characters and asking them to describe how the stage itself impacts their character's emotional state and so forth.

Saint Joan is a fun, quick, and easy read, but it's substantial enough to hold one's interest (or at least my own). In it Shaw is not interested in the truth of religious claims, but in how religion and politics intersect on the social stage. That in and of itself is an interesting literary choice. Like Shaw, I consistently had to separate the truth of religious claims for how religion operates with texts. This wasn't a challenge insofar as I never want to proselytize but it was a challenge insofar as I was wary of students misreading atheist propaganda into the assigned readings (many students of many backgrounds did this; it seems that to lots of students, whether Christian, atheist, or agnostic, there are unrecognized athiests hiding in the canon). But it's not why I include it on the list. I include it on the list as one success as a TA. It changed the dynamics of the class and it got us on our feet. It was fun and critically detailed. You can't ask for much more than that.

10. Linda Medley's Castle Waiting Vol. 1

With the exception of the largely unplacable Book of Alternative Services, this list has been chronological--until now. If I were to insert Castle Waiting Vol. 1 properly, it would have to precede Paradise Lost, the reading of which I interrupted to read this graphic novel. However, this book may have been the most important and therefore deserving of the capping #10 spot, and its direct influence continues into 2011, which also justifies its placement at the end of the list.

Castle Waiting is about the eponymous castle, in which a number of adventures happen. At first it follows the story of Sleeping Beauty in an extended prologue, but following this the story changes signficantly: Castle Putney is all but abandoned and becomes Castle Waiting, a sanctuary for assorted runaways and misfits. The story travels with Lady Jain, pregnant and battered, as she flees her husband and her reputation to the legendary refuge. Upon her arrival, the story shifts again, becoming a catalogue of the daily adventures and exchanges of the Castle's residents (Rackham the anthropomorphic stork, Simon the large and simple boy, the heartbroken Iron Henry, Sister Peace of the Order Solicitine, the reclusive and perpetually masked Dr. Fell, numerous Poltersprites...), as well as the long biographical tales Sister Peace tells involving bearded women, a travelling circus with gypsies and giantesses and conjoined twins, a woman martyr and her developing hagiography, and a greedy mill owner. It deserves the description on the back of the book: "A set of linked nouveaux fairy tales, this graphic novel extends the story of Sleeping Beauty into a modern, feminist Chaucer."

I was visiting my brother while he worked on his group film when his girlfriend and co-animator lent me her copy of the book to read between scanning for them and going on sushi-and-juice runs. I loved it immediately and the book stayed in my mind thereafter. When I got to Vancouver I decided I wanted to own it and promptly took the opportunity of numerous Chapters to make that happen. I re-read it.

The first reason that this book is significant is that it told me in no uncertain terms that you can have a successful fantasy (in this case more fairy-tale-esque, but the line between the two is indistinct if extant) book without making it an adventure story with wars and monsters. That's not to say that the book is without suspense or risk, but rather its emphases are friendship, community, redemption, sanctuary, and storytelling. This book is a powerful reminder that fantasy can be a lot more than it usually is. Which is to say, Castle Waiting has changed my idea of what sorts of things I would like to write.

The second reason that this book is significant is that I lent it to Melissa. She loved it as much as I did and we spoke about it for some time, speculating what would happen next, what fairytales all of the characters came from, and so forth. I also recommended it to Cait and to Julia, a friend from back home. If I recall correctly, Cait also liked it. (Did I get that right?) And then, just before I returned home for Christmas, I lent it to The Rev'd Paula +, the priest at St. Faith's. (I found out today, Jan 9, that she loved it--as did Owen, who I presume is a child.) I bought my brother's girlfriend Vol. 2, which my brother bought me for Christmas. (Melissa is currently reading my copy of it and has lent me a book she got for Christmas. So it goes into 2011...) This book has become, though repeated recommendations, lendings, and givings, a social nexus connecting me to a large number of people spread over significant geographical distances. The people it has connected me to are also very important to me and it has helped strengthen those bonds. I think, given the themes and mood of the book, that Linda Medley would be pleased.

Honourable Mentions: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion; Heather O'Neill's lullabies for little criminals; somebody or another's Saturday; Michael Ingham's The Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multi-Faith World; Coetzee's The Life & Times of Michael K; Gruen's Water for Elephants; Kostova's The Historian

Some Thoughts on the Decision to Review 2010 by Means of Books

With a few exceptions, reviewing my year through books makes me look like a shut-in who has no friends. I would like to say this is untrue, but I think the specific books chosen makes clear that it was true and stopped being so. I only have three books that relate to my time in Vancouver, and two of those are more related to my time in Fort McMurray. (I have also lent The Wayfinders out, but it has played a far less important social role than Castle Waiting has.) This is directly related to the sorts of books I read in Vancouver: I read assigned material. The syllabus is often interesting and mentally enriching but it does not impact my life in the same way these ten books have. (In fact, the only one that made the Honourable Mentions is Coetzee's.) More importantly, however, books in general have not impacted me as much because people impact me more, and you can see this in the final three books. The first (or eighth) is liturgical and concerns my place within churches; the second (or ninth) was assigned and concerns my role as a TA; the third (or tenth) became a social artifact and concerned my relationship with friends. We thus see a shift from introverted significances to extraverted significances in the books I have chosen, and I think that is reflective of 2010 itself.

Next year, perhaps, I will be able to offer you 2011 in 11 somethings other than books.

Or maybe I'm too much of a bookworm for that to ever be likely.

7 Quick Takes (66)

1. After writing my 7 Quick Takes last week, I heard a knock on my door. I opened it to my housemate who wanted to go slack-lining. So out we went to the park, where he taught us (a friend of his and I) how to sword-fight and where we did some slack-lining. It was a deal of fun, and his friend apparently comes from near Fort McMurray. She grew up in Edmonton, but had family in Lac La Biche. It was a good night, but my feet ended up being pretty cold after the slack-lining. I am also better at sword-fighting after even one session. To the right is a photograph of me falling from the line that night. I did land on my feet, which tend to get pretty filthy when slack-lining.
It started snowing that night.


2. Snow and photography. An unseasonable amount for British Columbia. There is good news: winter photography is as excellent as spring, summer, and autumn photography. It can be especially interesting in British Columbia, with snow on lush ferns and palm trees. I am glad that I got some decent shots of totem poles with snow on them. As a result, I started worrying (again) of cultural appropriation and my own commission of it. This to an extent made it impossible for me to uncritically enjoy putting up photos of the totem poles. But I am still going to put some on here, I think. You can decide whether there is anything problematic with the practice of taking and distributing images of cultural artifacts in museum spaces. (It's also easy to read this as some sort of attempt at using these artifacts as Canadian national symbols, especially when snow-clad. I won't pretend that I don't think of snow in patriotic terms.)

3. On Saturday, after spending some time working, I went to a dance recital/ competition in which a friend was participating. Some other friends were going to accompany me, but one backed out for reasons I can't recall and the other, at the last minute, messaged that she was too sick. I went alone, therefore, to cheer for three. Given my general lack of physical coordination and my general ignorance of dance, it was a bit awkward. Most of the audience was composed of dancers. Nonetheless I enjoyed watching; skill is always fascinating to see.

3. On Wednesday I attended the last seminar of my Asian Canadian Studies course. In it we were to read a chapter of Judith Butler, this one on mourning and politics. Butler asks who we are able/allowed to mourn, and what it means to theorize mourning. It's really a good article. She problematizes the word "we" in her own ways (as well as problematizing "I"), but that got me thinking (and talking in class) about the inherent ambiguity of that pronoun. In speech, "we" can mean [I + you], [I + they], or [I + you + they]; regardless, a person who uses "we" in speech necessarily claims to be speaking on behalf (or at least to be speaking about the condition of) not just themselves but also another person. In writing there are other possiblities, including [I + I]. You'll see the [I + I] formulation when two or more co-author a text without indicating who wrote which portion. Then one imagines the voice of the text being their shared voice or something even more ambiguous. (If you watch the documentary on them, you'll learn that the Hensel twins use pronouns and third-person nouns in interesting ways when Instant Messaging.)
It seemed appropriate that in the last seminar of this course, in which we are often compelled to destabalize things we had previously been taking for granted, we ended the day with the destabalization of basic pronouns. We've broken so much down that we can't even describe "our" own action.

4. For the class for which I am a TA, we read Coetzee's The Life & Times of Michael K. I rather enjoyed that book, but I find it hard to access. Like lots of good books, it seems easy at first, perhaps because of the clean, clear prose. One of the most fascinating things about this book is that it is set in South Africa, and yet Coetzee never makes clear a) when it takes place (Apartheid? post-Apartheid? near future?) or b) what the protagonist's race is.

5. In the context of my research for my Asian-Canadian paper, I encountered the interesting idea of the American civil religion. Wikipedia has a brief and insufficeint description of it. The Wikipedia article (and perhaps the original coiner of the term) seems to imply that American civil religion is somehow an outgrowth of or intrisically related to Christianity, especially Protestantism. This is not always true. The article in which I discovered this idea (Jane Naomi Iwamura, "Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion." Immigration and Religion in America. Ed. Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh Dewind. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.) has a good description:

"Civil religion," according to Bellah (1975: 3) is "that religious dimension found . . . in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendet reality." For many in United States, this "transcedent reality" is shaped by both the Christian tradition and Roman republicanism, which, in turn, lends meaning and justification to the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "equality" before the law. Americans affirm their faith in these principles and to the nation through a shared set of "beliefs, symbols, and rituals" (e.g., the Bill of
Rights, the Lincoln Memorial, the inauguration of the president). Civil religious institutions are historical creations, yet they need no justification. For instance, the Constitution "does not call upon any source of sacredness higher than itself and its makers." Ultimately, civil religion has an integrative function and binds the individual citizen psychically and spiritually to her fellow Americans and to the nation-state (Albanese, 1992; Wuthnow, 1998b).

For some time I have struggled to understand the peculiar sort of patriotism and nationalism that certain American citizens hold; the idea of civil religion helped me come to some sort of terms with it. I have no problem with patriotism, but I do have a problem with American exceptionalism. The unquestioning appeal by many Americans to Constitutional documents, the founding fathers' intentions, and whether something is "American" or "unAmerican" (as if either is a remotely useful or definable adjective) has also baffled me for some time. Now I think I have a better grasp on the sort of sociological forces that undergird these phenomenon, but I still don't feel like I have a real grasp on the way this tendency is left unquestioned. Are there any American readers willing to explain the invocation of these ideas (Constitution, founding fathers, "American" v. "unAmerican") to me?
(Please note that I am aware that some Canadians are equally guilty of using strange adjectives, like "unCanadian," without a decent explanation of what they mean. It just seems more prevalent, and it seems to hold more rhetorical weight, in the United States than it does here.)

6. Among other wastes of my time, I have been laughing a lot this week over at Reasoning With Vampires. (Anyone else think blog titles should be italicized?) I don't always agree with her comma vendetta, as in fictional prose the use of commas is justified if you are creating rhythm. One needn't always be as minimalist as a newspaper in fiction. In general, though, I think what this woman is doing is fascinating. She takes fierce grammatical, stylistic, and content editing and turns it into visual art. Paradoxically, I now want to read at least one of the Twilight books. It's sort of a detective-work thing. If the books are as bad as people say they are, and if they are as bad as Reasoing With Vampires repeatedly demonstrates that they are, then what I wonder is why they have the popularity that they do. They must supply some need or desire that their readers are not getting elsewhere (as distinguished from "cannot get elsewhere"). What is that need or desire?
And how can I harness it?

7. Below is the Grooveshark playlist I listened to while writing this post and trawling Facebook. It is akin to what I've been listening to all week and is not akin to what I would normally listen to (with the exception of Bear McCreary).

"Jacob's Ladder," Rush
"The Trees," Rush
"The Spirit of Radio," Rush
"You Really Got Me," Van Halen
"Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love," Van Halen
"The Call," Regina Spektor
"Love Affair," same
"On the Radio," same
"Lady," same
"Oedipus," same (really like this one)
"Us," same
"Eet," same (stuck in my head)
"Samson," same
"Fidelity," same
"Evelyn Evelyn," Evelyn Evelyn (stuck in my head)
"You Only Want Me 'Cause You Want My Sister," Evelyn Evelyn
"Love Will Tear Us Apart," Evelyn Evelyn
"Hurt," Johnny Cash
"I Hung My Head," Johnny Cash
"O Verona," Craig Armstrong
"Gaeta's Lament," Bear McCreary
"The Shape of Things to Come," Bear McCreary
"All Along the Watchtower," Bear McCreary
"Kara Remembers," same
"A Good Lighter," same
"Kara's Coordinates," same
"Admiral and Commander," same
"Baltar Panics" same