CORRESPONDENCE
From: "Joel Weishaus" to: "Alan
Sondheim"
Subject: Cybermidrash
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Alan:
Wondering if you'd like to collaborate on a project with me. What I have in
mind is taking a text and around it writing commentaries, and commentaries
on commentaries, opening and tearing the text, in different typefaces, sizes,
colors, a large page of Cybermidrash. (Re-reading Daniel Boyarin's, "The
Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic." Critical
Inquiry, Spring 1990. Maybe the original text can come from this.) What
do you think?
From: "Alan Sondheim"
To: "Joel Weishaus"
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Joel:
I keep thinking about the originary
text - perhaps something from the Torah? Given the state of things
at the moment... Would also be up for a chapter from the Tao or Chuang
Tze - the problem being we'd have to look at the Chinese. There's
also the NT passages re: rendering unto Caesar etc. - Let me
know what you think. I wouldn't mind Blanchot. My mind also goes towards
Marco Polo, perhaps in relation to Coleridge's Xanadu -
From: "Joel Weishaus"
To: "Alan Sondheim"
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Thursday, March 13, 2003
Too much commentary on Blanchot
already. Coleridge too. The right text is of course very important.
Maybe someone not usually discussed. Someone no one would think to
write commentaries on. One paragraph is all we need to begin. Give
me today to think about this.
Do you have a copy of Edward H.
Schafer's, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens?
This paragraph on p.114: "Consort Fu, the anthropomorphized
Lo goddess, here becomes the light-footed goddess of the moon. So
she presides not only over an earthly river but also over its celestrial
counterpart--both were, as she was, exemplars of the yin principle.
But Li Shang-yin has handled the ancient metaphysical belief as a
mere literary conceit. The best that could be done with the figure
of the wave treader was to insist on her as a model for geishas and
court beauties. Yet she was outshone by a courtesan who lacked both
the glitter of water surface and the sheen of moon. I refer to the
fourtheenth of Lo Ch'iu's poems in praise of the woman he had murdered.
It says that if Ts'ao Chih could have glimpsed such a one as Hung-erh,
he would not have emotions left to hymn the Spirit of the Lo. In
both cases the supernatural allusions are mere powder and rouge." I
don't know the references, Lo Ch'iu's poems, for example, but this
paragraph is pregnant from mythology, literary criticism, history,
psychology, metaphysics....
From: Alan Sondheim
To: "Joel Weishaus"
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
I don't have this... I'd still like to work with a primary, instead of a secondary,
text, if you're in agreement. For example, the Koran LIII, 19, fascinates me
- it mentions older non-Islamic goddesses. It doesn't have to be that, but
to spend time otherwise for me is to return almost to graduate school - I mean
closely reading secondary sources, digging through them, answering them. On
the other hand, I once taught a humanities course at Atlanta College of Art,
emphasizing for the first few weeks, the 10 commandments - looking closely
at the language, and analyzing them from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It was
fascinating to do that... Let me know what you think?
From: Joel Weishaus
To: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Thursday, March 13, 2003
It's not a secondary text, but so well written that it does sound like one!
But I like your idea about the Koran. Where can I read this passage?
From: Alan Sondheim
To: Joel Weishaus
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
The Koran passage is in... the Koran!
I think you could even find the Koran online. I also have the Islamic Encyclopedia
here - which is an enormous project that was reduced to one large book for
public consumption (the whole has been going on a century I think). That has
helped. And then there are various things here and there I've been looking
at.
One reason the Koran might be good - the times were in, and at
least my relative ignorance...
From: Joel Weishaus
To: "Alan Sondheim"
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Thursday, March 13, 2003
I'll look it up. Was wondering why this particular passage. Well, don't tell
me, I'll look at it and know.
I like the idea of the Koran, especially after.... wrote me that horrific letter
about how the Koran is evil. Of course he's never read it.
You know the line I wrote, "Today I am
a Muslim, praying as I fly to the last vestiges of my fledgling life..."?
I had Yevteshenko's poem "Babi Yar" in mind, where he
declares himself a Jew in the anti-semitic Soviet Union. In this spirit, today
I am a Muslim.
From: Joel Weishaus
To: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Friday, March 14, 2003
I realized last night that
I can't write commentary on a "holy book." It seems pretentious.
Don't you think? Maybe we need to keep looking, as the text--and I think it
should be no more than a paragraph, is the stepping off place.
Yes, one of the wonderful things about Judaism is the argument. Jabès built
his aesthetic on this. While Hillman said that "Philosophy is about keeping
the conversation going." The French are doing a good job in the UN by
acting as a barrier to war, which is the end of the conversation. the failure
of dialogue. War is humanity's bleeding heel.
From: Alan Sondheim
To: Joel Weishaus
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Friday, March 14, 2003
Have you seen Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish? Or Marc-Alain Ouaknin's The
Burnt Book? - You should know both these works; they've had a great influence
on me and are definitely midrashic. The latter is brilliant, the former
slow and mournful exegesis...
From: Joel Weishaus
To: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: Cybermidrash
Date: Friday, March 14, 2003
I just ordered The Burnt Book via interlibrary loan, as no library
here has it, nor bookstore. I know of his other books, but haven't seen this.
Thanks for telling me about it. Maybe we can find a paragraph in it?
From: Joel Weishaus
To: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Collaboration
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
I came across this, in The Burnt Book, from Levinas, this morning:
"So transmission contains a teaching that becomes apparent in the very receptivity
of learning and that continues it: real learning consists in receiving the lesson
so profoundly that it is transformed into a necessity of being dispensed to the
other person; the lesson of truth cannot be limited to the mind of one man, it
bursts out toward others."
What do you think about using this as the threshold of a route?
From: Alan Sondheim
To: Joel Weishaus
Subject: Re: Collaboration
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
This sounds excellent - do you have the page? Also, what is the original source?
My copy of The Burnt Book is somewhere in the midst of my others -
it's disseminating from a distance!
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