Why Such Things Happen
It was with them
all as though their entrails turned over within them and the undermost came
uppermost so that they could have brought it all up, for the words and bearing
of the dying man had about them something aboriginally indecent; something
grisly, yet primevally, pre-religiously sacred, which lay beneath all the
civilized layers in the most unregarded, and ultra-personal depths of their
souls and had been turned uppermost by the death of Yitzchak, with nauseating
effect; an obscene apparition out of the far-away and deep-down past of the
animal that was God, namely the ram, the god-ancestor of the race, from which
it came down, and whose divine and tribal blood they had once in that
unspeakable aforetime poured out and consumed, in order to strengthen the bond
between the tribe and the beast-god.[1]
When
we first discussed triggers and triggering devices, it was necessary to put
aside for the moment several subordinate considerations necessary to explain
the phenomenon of how a person engaged in a folk-play or other popular festival
of blood and justice slips from the conscious game—wherein he or she knows that
they are playing a fictional role in a symbolic and stylized cosmos such as
Lucian Blaga described for Romania with its “mioritic space” based on the
thousands of regional and period variations of the ballad MioriĊ£a, even
though it also has a certain degree of transformative power for the entire
community constituted by the ensemble of players and the spectators who
observe, hear and feel the excitement of the performance—into a trance-like
state of forgetting, absorption into the game as a new reality, and so
substitutes real violence and destruction for symbolic actions.
Thomas Mann, several years before Freud
published his Moses and Monotheism and other studies that would provide
a deeper anthropology of religion and myth, provides a set of clues to the
deepest, uncanny and unthinkable aspects of the psyche that provide the
container, the material and the energies for the kind of slippage we have been
discussing. The German novelist explores the complexities of personality-formation
amongst peoples who have not yet distinguished individuality from group or
tribal identities, who experience time less as a chronological and progressive
sequence of generations transcending one another than as a convoluted
geological layering of strata thrown up, twisted back on itself, pressed down
by forces of sea, continents and volcanic eruptions, wherein persons seem to
appear, disappear, re-appear and inhabit one another’s bodies, social roles,
and consciousness. Closer to our own present time, scientists have discovered
the investment of dialectic processes between mothers and infants who gaze
intently and for sustained periods, with their mutual stimulation of hormonal
chemicals to shape,[2]
unshape and configure neuronal patterns in the brain and the mobile rhythms of
conducting the ways in which genetic codes are expressed, meaning that much of
what is evolutionarily encoded into the DNA becomes effective in a variety of
reversible triggers within the brief periods of such endocrine excitement.[3]
In particular—tension, anxiety, fear and
nervousness on the part of both the mother and the child, as well as
deprivation or over-abundance of sensory stimulus, nutrition and soothing
sounds[4]—lead
to eccentric neurological features, such as disassociation of responses from
the real world, creation of defensive or aggressive multiple personalities,
psychotic rages and so on. For most individuals growing up in communities with
a high degree of shared child-rearing practices, the environmental protection
and discipline leads to relatively normal response patterns. Women in such
societies only partly achieve completing the disrupted or distorted neuronal
and hormonal connectivities in their brains caused by abuse and deprivation in
their own infancy, reinforced by discriminating pressures and social control as
they develop into wives and mothers, and hence they pass on to their offspring
unintentional and unrecognized fears, anxieties and pains. Males, as they grow
up into adolescents and then take on the responsibilities of adults, including
fatherhood, project their own fears, rage and inadequacy on to their sexual
partners and their own progeny.
The essentially archaic or ancient
societies regulate a child’s formal and informal education, reinforcing shared
reactions and expressions of discomfort or anger through ritual celebrations.
Re-enactment of primitive myths, albeit often disguised as historical fictions,
and recitation of choral sound and movement provide the patterns of what is
normal and generally accepted belief about how to think and feel in the world.
Discomfort, humiliation, anxiety, fear and anger are thus distanced into mythic
time and space, transformed into symbolic actions, and so individuals proceed
into the next period of profane experience relatively at peace with themselves
and those around them. But sometimes, for very eccentric personal reasons, and
over-excited by threats and dangers from the outside—sudden shifts in climate,
foreign invasions, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami—something in the
ritual suddenly touches a raw nerve and powerful stimulants race up from deep
in the pre-textual matter of the performance, such as Mann describes as
occurring shortly before the patriarch Yitzhak (Isaac) dies—he brays like a
sheep and his family are shaken from their respectful grief in the early stages
of the funeral performance.
The triggers, or stimulants and
excitatory words, gestures, or other physical phenomena in the constituent
elements of the performance are not recognized as such by actors or audiences,
or, if in hindsight they do stand out, are denied as conductors of extraneous
or inherently too weak to cause the disruptive event that seemed to require
some explanation: reasons are sought in a personality defect in one or more of
the players, an accidental convergence of forces unrelated to the play, a
subversive interference by someone or other seeking to hide behind the
otherwise entertaining and therapeutic production. The triggers are not
operative in all performances, either in terms of players who change through
time and over generations, or in terms of specific words, staging devices or
occasions for the ritual, which seem to be always re-made in order to keep the
performance appropriate and comprehensible to all involved in its production.
The slippage from symbolic universe to real world violence occurs rarely and
almost randomly.
While on occasion a player may become
obsessed by his or her role and seem to forget the boundaries of permitted
words and acts, the other persons involved can usually maintain the contours
and substance of the whole performance. Groups of subversive activists may
sometimes slip into the acting company, manipulate the organization of the play
and take advantage of the crowds who gather to ignite a violent, disruptive
event that otherwise has nothing to do with the normal social functions of the
festival, but this intrusion does not change the nature of the original
occasion, except insofar as the deaths, injuries and trauma created may effect
a halt to further enactments for several years or cause censorship to be
applied by civic, ecclesiastical and juridical authorities. Small changes may
be made in texts, stage-directions, crowd-control or timing of the festival.
These minor adjustments—rewritten songs, redesigned sets, new costumes, and
even shifting of responsibility for the actors from one group to another within
the town or city that maintains the festival for its own historical
reasons—seem not to deal with the essential problem of the slippage.
But how and where do these shifts in
attention and self-awareness occur, if not in the formalities of the
performances themselves? Michael Fishbane, recollecting his own experiences in
reading Aby Warburg the iconographer and cultural historian, remarks,
...I
came to realize that a textual surface [here the perceived and recollected folk
event that suddenly runs off the rails and becomes the occasion for physical
destruction and violence] may conceal deeper dimensions and one should be ready
to plumb their hidden reserves through the nuances of casual comment...[5]
These
casual comments and details, whether inadvertent or calculated, prove to be
points of entry that rabbis have traditionally used to dig into obscure or
seemingly bland texts, to tear apart concepts, images and received opinions in
order to find the materials out of which to construct new narratives,
conversations, arguments and complex allegories. But what Fishbane suggests
from his meditation on Warburg’s experiments is that modern interpretations
weigh up and measure the dimensions of these previously hidden or overlooked
materials as historical residue, fragments of once highly potent archaic myths
and rituals: such prehistoric shards and textual remnants may once have been
articulated or performed in cultures whose ideas and insights no longer make
sense in the world we have inherited, yet nevertheless come down to us with
their potency ready to be utilized again. The energy they embody, no matter how
long they have rested dormant or seemed to have been discharged of any
remaining power to stimulate thoughts, feelings and actions, can be brought
back to life.
Warburg called such things Pathosformeln,
“formulae of feelings.” Fishbane explicates the phenomenon in this way:
...the
rich vocabulary of (of images and words) that gives expression to deeper
sensibilities and emotions. They provide the evidence of depth pathos....each
instance encoding depths of feeling about existence, variously amenable to our
understanding in proportion to our knowledge.[6]
This
profound depth of long-lost sensibilities or pathos is, however, not merely a
non-textual experience or a mnemonic image encoded into ritual gestures, but an energizing force that reconnects with the
investigator’s exegetical processes, intellectual, rational and logical. For it
is not that archaic peoples knew more and better than we do or can know because
they were closer to the root of all mythic experience; that would be fall into
the trap of Renaissance magicians who sought the prisca scientia, the
original and pure mysteries by various Gnostic and Neoplatonic techniques, a
game we now understand as a rationale to escape the bonds of medieval
Scholasticism and Catholic theology. The act of exegesis generates the new
modes of seeing, feeling, remembering, cataloguing and applying knowledge
instead of extracting the lost paradigms of knowing, as we can see when
Chaucer—manipulating the expression of the Prioress who tells the tale that
bears her name—midrashes her words so as to expose both her own private rage
against abuse and the generic exposure of Christian hypocrisy.
The investigation here focuses on the
way in which performers in folk plays slip out of their traditional roles—and
by “traditional” we mean not ancient but those continuously reconstructed even
into the present—and speak and act in ways that humiliate, maim and kill others
for reasons that seem to make no political or psychological sense. An
explanation that makes psychohistorical sense, because it is based on long-term
study of group trances, shared fantasies and the mutual creation of social
alters as a mechanism for coping with traumatic abuse and violence, springs to
mind:[7]
the dysfunctional development of hormonal connectivities in the brain among
those who are deprived of caring and loving parents through abandonment,
neglect or harsh disciplinary codes of child-rearing, the tendency of persons
who were continually beaten, locked in closets or forced to perform disgusting
acts on themselves and others to suggestibility and thus a proneness to
disassociate from normal personality development and to engage with
fantastically-constructed simulacra and scenarios. When such victims enter into
the performative games that culture imposes on them, unlike most individuals who
can cope by recognizing the limits of the fictional disguises and the dramatic
scripts, they react to the apparently marginal, minor, subdued triggers in the
event: seemingly incomprehensible jargon, ludicrously inappropriate gestures,
patently unconvincing rationalization for acts of self-denigration or insult to
those undeserving of the slurs... in other words, the triggers are there
virtually in pure sound, movement, materiality or false reasoning, specific
details that persist after centuries and generations of smoothing out,
refinement and bowdlerization. The triggers stimulate responses that originate
in the very earliest of human experiences, whether in the foetal state, the
birthing process, the engagement with maternal gaze, that is, with the primary
orchestration of gene expression, hormonal rhythms, nerve arborescence and
muscle tonality. These are the fundamental feelings that Warburg and Fishbane
mean by Pathosformeln.
Pathosformeln can be
discovered, in other words, hidden in the pre- or at least non-verbal,
iconographic and choreographed elements of the folk performance at a festival
of blood and justice. Robert C. Creed showed how this worked in epic poetry.
When he called the language of ancient, medieval and modern folkloric heroic
songs, from all parts of the world, a storage language, he did not only mean
that the individual lexical units, formulaic phrases and mnemonic motifs or narremes
encapsulated for diverse societies their traditional lore, historical,
juridical, medical, and other modes of knowledge.[8]
That had already been discovered and discussed in regard to ancient Greek
choral texts for Athenian tragedy, where initiates into manhood and sometimes
girls passing through puberty to marriageable status learned the essential
wisdom of the culture by means of song and dance: what was stored both in the
words and the movements of the chorus was needed to operate effectively and
strategically throughout their lives, both in terms of a specific content of
cognitive information that was deeply embedded in the proverbs, catch-phrases,
set-piece prayers and oaths, along with descriptions of human and natural
occupations, but also to think and feel as organized groups in the musical
harmonies, dance steps and rhetorical gestures.[9]
What Creed also meant by “hoarding language”[10]
appeared in the sounds, muscular patterns of gesture and action, and
stimulation of hormonal feelings; these triggers he found repeated in ancient
Greek, classical Sanskrit, and modern Yugoslav heroic songs, virtually disconnected
to the normal grammar and lexicon of the languages, the rhythmic pattern of the
verses followed in musical accompaniments to the singer-of-tales, and the
meaning of the epic adventures understood by the audiences.
Lloyd DeMause has shown how different
kinds of child-rearing practice develop slowly in history, with, of course, a
great deal of overlapping, since only a few individuals and families move
towards greater modes of caring and loving, while most people remain or regress
towards those more primitive versions in which suggestibility and non-buffered
or porous personality structures predominate.[11]
Because memory is not a stored body of information, cognitive and affective,
but a pattern of nervous reconstitution each time some stimulus excites the
mind to revert to earlier patterns of imagery, the ritualization of children’s
behaviour forms the basis of the collective knowledge that is shared and
demonstrated in festivals. The function of myth, then, insofar as it exists as
more and other than a verbal text sung and danced, is to seem fill the gaps
between large fragments of meaning articulated as history and law, to smooth
out contradictions in acts of heroic bravado, and to silence obj
In the memorable speech of the oral
tradition, only what can be remembered can be spoken or understood, all else
falling quickly away into silence and invisibility. What can be remembered
moreover is what can fit into the already existing units of iconography,
choreography, orchestration and celebration, so that existential moments as
they pass from the now of history into the memory of recollection are reshaped
to fit the moulds. Memorable speech in an oral tradition stands less against
the written record of literate society than against the silence and
invisibility of its own dysfunctional consciousness.[12]
Words have high-energy content and thus the ability to excite the nervous
system in the brain to activate memories, but also, when over-stimulation
occurs due to memory of childhood trauma—or due to the memory of past over-stimulation,
as in cases of abuse—the controls of social ritual and festival occasion prove
unable to maintain the boundaries between symbolic action and real violence. In
this essay, we have attempted to provide some explanation for the unexpected
and seemingly fortuitous acts of extreme violence perpetrated against Jewish
children by other children. In a few historical cases, the evidence available
indicates that political reasons lie outside the child criminals’ awareness or
understanding, and therefore explanations have to be sought elsewhere: we
suggest in a psychohistorical analysis of folklore and literary recreations of
festival performances. Literary authors, like Chaucer, sensitive to the
hypocrisy and ironic misunderstandings of individuals and groups, explore the
implications of such unexpected outbursts of hatred that are rationalized as
the search for justice through the shedding of blood. More than professional
historians, political scientists or sociologists, such as Thomas Mann, may
break through the protective coating of rationality and denial that hides these
psychotic moments from our eyes.
But when these psychotic moments break
out and their effects ripple outward in a series of concentric circles across
the lake of history, each one seeming to be less and less violent, have we the
right to connect the lesser, outer circles to the core of primeval trauma from
which the explosion of anti-Semitism takes its origin? That is what we shall discuss in the next and
final section of this essay.
[1] Thomas Mann, The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichte
Jaakobs, 1933) trans. H.T.
Lowe-Porter collected in one volume as Joseph and his Brothers (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) p. 122.
[2]In a 1995
article Blakeslee reports, for instance, “All animals, including humans,
develop a control point in early infancy for the amount of stress hormones they
will release in particular conditions, said Dr. Michael Meaney, a psychiatrist
at McGill University in Montreal. Animals experiencing high stress levels in
infancy develop a highly reactive system, he said, while animals raised in
relative calm have quieter systems.” Blakeslee goes on to explain: “Other
researchers are studying how a mother’s touch literally helps shape her baby’s
brain... Missing the needed stimulation in this critical period [of development
after birth, the neonates’ neuronal arborations] fail to grow normally, even
when adequate amounts of growth hormone and insulin circulate in their
tissues.” See Sandra Blakeslee, “How a Bad Beginning Can Affect the Brain” International
Herald Tribune (31 August 1995) p. 10.
According to Dr Myron Hofer at the New York State
Psychiatric Institute in New York, Blakeslee goes on, “mothers provide similar
modulators [as those found in test animals. Hofer said, through rocking,
touching, holding, feeding and gazing at their babies.” Most importantly the
report explains: “a baby knows when its mother is being cold or distant,
despite her ministrations to physical needs.” Then citing Hofer’s exact words,
Blakeslee writes: “In the first six months of life, ‘the infant is laying down
a mental representation of its relationship to its mother....These interactions
regulate the infant’s neural mechanisms for behaviour and for feelings that are
just beginning to develop.’”
[3] This discussion is based on what
is called “neural Darwinism,” as expounded by Edelman, “the idea that higher
brain functions are mediated by developmental and somatic selection upon anatomical
and functional variance occurring in each individual animal. The key aspect of
Darwinism, population thinking, was embedded in the theory of neuronal group
selection and was used to explain the manifestations and bases of perceptual
categorization—the ability of certain organisms to categorize novelty and
generalize upon that categorization as a basis for learning” (Gerald M.
Edelman, The Remembered Present: A
Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.1989) p. xvii).
Because neuronal arboration continues long after birth, with more nerves
destroyed than allowed to grow, the shape of the transmission pathways belongs
to the extra-foetal period of development and thus—because it is stimulated and
inhibited by such factors as nutrition, physical comfort, and maternal
gazing—falls within the scope of history. History is here understood to mean
the actions and conditions created by communities, even the smallest group of
mother and child. Pressure on the mother externally to conform to social norms
and internally by her own need to complete the disrupted development of her own
brain development do not occur with any conscious understanding of the
motivations and implications of the situation. Nevertheless, in many pre-modern
societies, ritualization of child-rearing by sound, dance, toilet-training
play, eating games and so on prepare the child to participate in festivals,
where group behaviour is disciplined and shaped.
[4] Under normal social conditions
mothers tend to cradle their infants against their left side and hum lullabies.
These new-born and suckling children, although they as yet lack language
comprehension, understand the physical pleasures of nursing, resting tightly
against the maternal breast, and the comforting tones and rhythms of the hummed
melodies. Mothers who are tense, hold their babies too tightly or on the right
side, and intone hate-filled songs of revenge and murder, and above all, fail
to gaze intently and lovingly into their offspring’s eyes, create children who
grow up prone both to trance-like disassociation from real-life situations and
uncontrollable rage. See for instance, Hunt 1996.
[7] But the mind, whether my own or
someone else’s or even some notion of a collective mind, is in itself a most
difficult concept to deal with. The two main understandings for the nineteenth
century and hence our own in the century just passed are, according to Walter
Kaufmann that of Newtonian science, as Kant propounded, or that of Goethe, who
broke with the Platonic noumenal view
espoused by Kant; and who was followed by investigators who conceived of the
mind as purely spiritual and separate from the physical universe. Goethe
“showed how the mind could be understood only in terms of development”, that
is, in a sequence through time via feelings, emotions, thoughts, desires,
dreams and actions (Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind: Goethe, Kant, and
Hegel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980) pp. 25, 28). The Kantian vision lacks a
sense of historical development and the way in which human consciousness
creates itself through a lengthy engagement with the real world around it and
the mechanisms by which that engagement is pursued in the physical brain.
[8]
Robert Payson Creed,
“Beowulf and the Language of Hoarding” in Medieval Archaeology: Papers of the
Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Studies, ed., Charles I. Redman (Binghamton, NY: SUNY, 1989).155-167. “The best
hypothesis to account for the fact that the prosody of the [Old English or
Anglo-Saxon] poem consists of an isorhythmic grid built around capsules of
information consisting of two or three sound-linked syllables: the poem is a
performance of the Memorable Speech of the western branch of the Germanic
peoples. Memorable Speech exploits what later generations will call ‘poetic
devices’—alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, rhythm, and meter—in order
to preserve important information by making it memorable to the ear” (idem:
156).
[9] Where Vygotsky sees gestures as
preceding verbal language, I would suggest that the origins of symbolic thought
begins in a combination of co-ordinated motor experiences, sound-production in
rhythmic outbursts, and attempts to shape material such as clay and inscription
of lines, curves and other forms on stone, antler, wood, with verbal discourse
a very late and incomplete phenomenon. Vygotsky also argues that infantile
perceptions take place in a context of objects and movements, not as isolated
objects or forms; and I would again extend his ideas to take in the importance,
fundamental and foundational, of maternal gaze and soothing that guides both
what is seen and how it is recollected in the mind. It is not only that “the
child sees one thing and acts differently in relation to what he sees” L. S.
Vygotsky, Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes,
eds., Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, Ellen Souberman
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 97; thus gaining independence and
self-realization as a distinct entity, but that the child is also fused into
the mother’s unconsciousness and the community that shapes her emotional life,
and these primary fusional channels become the hidden points of stimulus in
periods of crisis later in life. My disagreements and modifications of the
Russian’s statements rest on my attempt to move away from the literate
prejudices of his cognitive psychology, both in regard to the relationship
between speculative thoughts on prehistorical evolutionary developments of
consciousness, language and abstract thinking and the developmental processes
wherein each individual child comes into a pre-existing society and culture,
its mother and her environment.
[10] In “Beowulf and the
Language of Hoarding” (1989), Creed used the term “hoarding” from
archaeological studies related to Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon research,
drawing the analogy between actual treasure troves of material possessions and
the collections of tribal lore and traditions in verbal form. To generalize
further from this limited zone of discussion, I have chosen to designate the
phenomenon as “storage language.” I wish to acknowledge not only many long
conversations with Bob Creed both before and after his retirement from the
University of Massachusetts in Amherst and especially on long walks around Lake
Wyola (Shutesbury, MA) where he lived, but also for a very special summer early
in the 1990s when he asked my wife and to house-sit for this cottage and thus
had an opportunity to read through all his books on this topic, including his
perceptive and provocative pencil annotations. I take full responsibility,
however, for the psychohistorical expansions on his ideas.
[12] Although his study lacks a focus
on infancy and the mother-infant dyad, Englefield did point out that most of
what we experience today does not register in verbal form, but plays out in
“visible signs,” so that he credits the origins of language itself to gestural
procedures. However, while this still assumes a rather crass and simplistic
notion of consciousness as equivalent to symbolic thinking, it does point
towards a more complex developmental psychology and an ontology of cultural
crystallization in primary pre-verbal movements, sounds, and other sensory
pattering. “Vocal language depends on the introduction of convention and taxes
the memory more than other modes of communication because in a language of
sounds it is difficult to retain any palpable associative link between sign and
meaning, such as is usually possible both in picture-writing and in
gesture-language” (F.R.H. Englefield, Language: Its Origin and its Relation
to Thought, eds., G.A. Wells and D.R. Oppenheimer (London: Elek/Pemberton,
1972) p. 25).
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