Review: Cunegonde’s Kidnapping by Benjamin Kaplan

Cunegonde’s Kidnapping by Benjamin Kaplan is a microhistory of a region on the Dutch-German border, engulfed in religious passions, in late 18th century. Microhistory’s value, he writes, is twofold: bringing to life obscure and illiterate voices; and changing our understanding by focusing on individual phenomenon and raising questions about it. Kaplan mentions in the beginning how until recently historians did not “study how ordinary people of different faiths interacted and related to one another in daily life. That was partly due to an exclusive focus, now long outdated, on great men and great news”. He states how inter-religious marriage of a Christian to a Jew or Muslim was illegal and hence the term ‘inter-religious’ or ‘mixed marriage’ meant a marriage between Christians belonging to different churches. The region on which this book is based is Vaals, famous in Holland for being a Drielandenpunt, ‘Three Countries Point’, where Netherlands, Belgium and Germany meet. From “1839 to 1919, it was even, uniquely, a four countries point, since there existed then a tiny sliver of an artificial country named Moresnet”.

Cunegonde Mommers was a German Catholic in Aachen, her brother Hendrick had married a Dutch Calvinist from Vaals named Sara Maria Erffens. Sara gave birth to a baby boy, Mathias Hendrick, on Tuesday, 13th April 1762. Her first infant had died before turning one. The sparks of friction were generated soon after the birth of their second child when the midwife Anna asked Sara about how the infant was to be baptised, being born to a Calvinist mother and a Catholic father. Hendrick and Sara themselves had made four different agreements on the religious upbringing of their children. These combined with pressures from their respective religious communities and support from their families resulted in: Cunegonde, who had some kind of mental disability, trying to kidnap the infant from a Protestant church during his baptism, either on her own insistence or at that of Father Bosten; being caught by the authorities; getting freed by group of Catholic youths; being incarcerated for more than five years later on; and, most importantly, in a protracted hateful and violent disposition by Catholics towards Protestants, whose own disposition was to attack images, symbols and objects associated with Catholic worship; and also, not in the least, the use of religious reprisals in Europe as a tool for ensuring safety of their own kind somewhere else by threatening the practice of others in one’s own region. The intricacies of laws back then, the beliefs in ghosts and rituals, combined with economic disparity due to Protestants being merchants while Catholics being craftsmen all resulted in an extended religious war of attrition in Vaals. This violence took place during “the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a defining stamp on European culture”. Kaplan also questions the generally accepted scholarly narrative that “thanks to Enlightenment, in eighteenth century, violent religious conflict in Europe became a thing of the past”.

Cunegonde never married and died at the age of thirty-one in 1771; Hendrick died when thirty-seven years old; their third infant also died in 1772; Mathias Hendrick died in 1787; and Sara, now a childless widow, died in 1818 after having married a fellow Calvinist Gijsbert Verbrug, who also died four years after their marriage.

Kaplan however doesn’t restrict itself only to the finer details of the case, but gives a fine broad overview of the religious enmities of the Europe from the sixteenth till eighteenth centuries and the various arrangements, like Peace of Westphalia, made between differing factions to maintain a semblance of toleration. Kaplan has done extensive work on primary sources like documents from Father Bosten’s trial, resolutions of governing local and national bodies, dossiers from court cases, correspondence, birth and death registers, chronicles by Catholic and Protestant contemporaries and more for a rich blend of story-telling, drama and suspense. However, owing to the inconsistency in the accounts of various witnesses, he states his rule of thumb was “to recount things as matters of fact if the account of them given by a source was never contested, if they are attested by multiple sources that do not differ substantially, or if the evidence for them is overwhelming”. He notes how early modern justice had a high price tag, where everyone involved was paid for his work, and it was the party who lost a case, not the state, who bore the charges. Reproduction of maps from the eighteenth century and photos of various places of interest in Cunegonde’s history make this work highly accessible to the general reader and at times full of action, betrayals and fervour, reflective of the times gone by.

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Review: Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson

Waking, Dreaming, Being

For those who are sceptic, religion acts as a repellant. The moment someone mentions some line of thought emanating from thousands of years ago and then goes to praise a religion, one feels a darkness of blind faith and gullibility surrounding that person. However, it makes sense to separate the rituals and practices of any religion from the underlying, core philosophical thoughts and then immerse in analyzing these thoughts. By doing this, one not only abstains from the pure, senseless ritualistic conventions, but also comes to terms with something that is more inherent and satisfying than unquestioning faith. So when I came across this book by Evan Thompson, there was something in the subtitle which attracted my attention: neuroscience, consciousness, and self. So this didn’t look like a typical faith sorta book. I found myself blindly rejecting any philosophical or inquiring thoughts emanating from religious schools on the basis of the outward practices engaged in by most of the followers of any religion. Sadly though, the truth is that most of the followers of any religion nowadays are least concerned with the base thoughts of their religion, but more with the physical aspects of prayer, chanting, sacrifices and the like. This book has opened a new world of inquiry and made me open to a critical inspection of meditation, the question of self, consciousness, and above all, the awareness of “being” or “I”, and a neutral way of looking towards Hinduism and Buddhism. For those who are already deep into meditation or belief (in Hinduism or Buddhism), this book will take your thoughts a step further by combining scientific probing with Eastern philosophies. And for those, like me, who were ardently uptight about not poking their noses into anything with the letters G-O-D on it, will be taken to an altogether realm of deeply satisfying questioning and experience. The general reader is going to come out of it much more reflecting, considerate and possibly with an enhanced outlook of the world and self. I can’t recommend this enough and goes straight into one of the best books I could have come across till now.

In essence, the believer has full faith in his belief; the agnostic wants to escape the burden of being accused of tilting on one side; and the atheist takes absence of evidence as evidence of absence and has full faith in his non-faith.

There are ten detailed chapters, each to some extent building up on the previous ones. Though the author does state that most of them can be read independently and gives a guide-frame for doing this, but it would be much more fruitful to go sequentially. He begins with consciousness, the oldest answer “to which comes from India, almost three thousand years ago. Long before Socrates interrogated his fellow Athenians and Plato wrote his Dialogues, a great debate is said to have taken place int he land of Videha in what is now northeastern India. Staged before the throne of the learned and mighty King Janaka, the debate pitted the great sage Yajnavalkya against the other renowned Brahmins of the kingdom”. The kings questions result in an answer which moves “from the distant, outer, and visible to the close, inner, and invisible”. The debate ends with Yajnavalkya’s famous declaration: “The self is ‘not this, not this'” (neti, neti). Thompson often gives a background to the origins of such philosophical treatises, for example, the four states of consciousness – waking, dreaming, deep and dreamless sleep, and “the fourth”, or pure awareness is mentioned in Mandukya Upanishad. He explains the one syllable OM/AUM: A expresses the waking state; U the dreaming state; M the deep-sleep or blissful state. Consciousness is described and borrowed from Hindu/Buddhist descriptions as luminous, which reveals everything and itself too. But here too there are multiple camps, one on the side of ‘self-illuminating’, the other preferring that “for a conscious experience to be revealed, there needs to be a second, higher-level cognition of that experience”. But Thompson personally doesn’t agree with the latter and says that it falls in the trap of an infinite loop, for every level of consciousness, if not self-aware, needs to be apparent to a higher level. Through Buddhist beliefs and validated by scientific investigations, he brings to light the nature of consciousness: perception happens through successive periodic cycles instead of as one continuous process. Like a miniature version of the wake-sleep cycle, neural systems alternate from moment to moment between phases of optimal stimuli, and phases of strong inhibition, when they’re “asleep” and least responsive.

Then he moves to waking and sleeping, pure awareness, dreaming, witnessing, imagining, floating, dying and finally the self. The treatment of each topic is completely accessible and rigorous, leaving one desirous of knowing more. Sometimes however his deductions aren’t convincing because of the approach: when Thompson believes in or agrees with a concept, he is ready to take witness or self-professed accounts at face value, but when he disagrees, he questions whether such testimonies can be accepted without brain scans. And he does accept that brain scans also don’t reveal the complete picture. Science, as he admits, still has lot to catch up with Eastern philosophy. It is impossible to cover the breadth of this book in a review without risking too much revelation. However, the following lists some important topics which have been written about and explained: hypnagogic state, synesthesia, sleep patterns classified as REM & Non-REM, sleep spindles, observer memory and field memory, lucid dreams, lucid awakening, dream within a dream, downward causation, Nyaya & Advaita Vedanta schools of Hindu thought, soteriological accounts, bardo cosmology, thukdam, annihilationism, reificationism, neuronihilism, his own ‘Enactive approach to the Self’, mereological, and many many more.

The two best chapters are about Death (wherein his own experience of meditation and trying to accept its inevitability would cause the reader to come to grips with something which we know is going to happen but we choose to ignore it all the time) and Self. One cannot but stop debating when reading the chapter about Dreams: how can reality be a dream? If we are dreaming even while waking, meaning that our lives and our realities are nothing but dreams, then how come we are affected through our bodies? Why does working out in a gym make one feel good? If it is a dream, it shouldn’t matter whether I work out or not. Why do my muscles develop at all if it is a dream? Why do I meet people in my dreams and emote with them? Are they also their dreams merging with mine? And if merging with mine then which mine is it, the one being dreamt of right now or the one dreaming it right now? What about germs and bacteria which make me sick? Do they make me sick only in dream, but not outside of it? Why make me sick at all? If all of this is dream then why is there so much destruction, hatred? If it is all dream, why should love matter so much in Buddhist philosophy? Why can’t hatred also be tolerated, after all it is a dream. Why do I feel hungry if I am living a dream? Why? But yes, it cannot be said that ‘it is nothing but a dream’ because a dream is never nothing, it emanates from something. As he gives example, dreams are not had by congenital blind people, so that don’t have that visual experience to create visual dreams. So does this mean that dream is related to sensory experiences? What about a child who is born healthy and normal, due to some infection or disease goes to coma and ultimately becomes vegetative – what about his consciousness, will it ever evolve? Why can’t a child think in the same way like an adult if consciousness is the same and doesn’t change? Is the dream real or the real a dream?

Thompson quotes Indonesian poet Sukasah Syadan, with which I would like to end this review:

Dream
last night
I dreamed
that I dreamed
that I awoke
a sleepless man
posting
on what I dreamed
last night

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Review: Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano

Suspended Sentences

Suspended Sentences (Yale University Press) is a collection of Patrick Modiano’s three novellas; translated by Mark Polizzotti, who accepts the difficulty of translating the titles from French to English: “direct translation worked perfectly for Flowers of Ruin” but “not the case with Remise de peine – literally, a stay of sentence, but also a deferral of pain” and Chien de preintemps for which he “decided to forgo the original altogether”. Modiano’s writing has been described, to the point of being banal, as an “art of memory”. It seems, however, that there is no better way of describing it.

Afterimage is set in Paris where the protagonist meets a photographer, Francis Jansen, while being seated in a cafe with his girlfriend. Jansen takes a photograph of the two and draws them into his world. He starts learning about Jansen through his albums, his friends who he meets sparsely, lady Nicole who is desirous of spending time with Jansen, and through his own participation in the city’s life. Characters appear at moments which need them, but then leave no trace of their existence or departure when not needed. And they have have no assigned purpose or intentions to linger around like long evening shadows which take forever to depart after having announced one with the settling sun. The protagonist’s memory at times merges with his present; making the past that is behind his years one with the many futures that exist ‘unexperienced’ in front of him. There is no hurried presence of excitable emotions; nor characters which would do something charged and ruin the slow, uneventful, peaceful flow of the narrative. The subtle misdirections of philosophical thought often pervade – when Jansen wonders if one could create silence with words like with photographs; distances to be covered in time; the dust of time in rooms deserted; the narrator becoming Francis Jansen in a dream; the shadow of an unknown namesake merging with the self.

Suspended Sentences is a reminisce of childhood, the innocent assumptions one makes and unmottled conclusions one hence reaches. Patoche, a blissful idiot of ten years, through whom the author tells us of his childhood, often mixed with locations of Paris and its suburbs, and sometimes coloured in young imagination and giggly laughter, lives with his brother outside of Paris with his mother’s friends. His parents are on tour in North Africa with a dramatics company. His experiences of being schooled, getting expelled from one and admitted into another, running off with his brother and a nephew of one of his mother’s friends to a chateau, eying the American convertible of a friend of the caretakers, merge later with his life as a first time writer in Paris, struggling to hold his place in crammed walls of penury. Their fascination for circus and smiling men diffuses with surmisings of what the adults share amongst themselves secretly, the hothead which they have heard exists beneath the pleasing face of their recently baptised godmother, and something serious they keep hearing about from grown ups. Patoche and his brother’s attempts at invading the chateau in the dead of the night to meet the marquis, whose traces would be hidden by a faithful servant who would on the former’s arrival sweep apart the dead leaves but put it all back to cover to suppress hints of presence, would not extend beyond the fifty yards of the night and beyond the tomorrow to which everything was assigned. Some of the friends of the caretakers became known for reasons the idiot couldn’t fathom later, and some of their memories refused to extend themselves after very serious something occurred. Thoughtful imbuings work their charm, when people seem to be hanging themselves in summer and drowning in others, his vain searches for a garage to create missing memorials of his father and finally his lost faith in garages as keepers of traces and echos.

Flowers of Ruin is a gentle stirring of a thriller and an autobiographical recollection of time spent in Paris with the central them of a suicide of a young couple, Urbain T and Gisele T, on an early Sunday morning of 23rd April of 1933. As the narrator, which is the author himself, tries to unravel the mystery of the double-suicide, one comes across places plucked out of his memories, people appearing from the shadows of guilt of being a part of the suicide, and the blurring of dishonesty with reality. His girlfriend of that time, Jacqueline; his father’s saviour Eddy Pagnon; the possible routes taken by the couple, covering a bar in Montparnasse or Cafe de la Marine or Cabaret des Isles or dance hall in Le Perreux or the restaurant-nightclub on Quai de l’Artois; Claude Bernard who bought books from him; and Pacheco – who is the most layered character but with peppered falsities about his truth; all, and all of the preceding, mould together to leave a hint of excitement and smell of suspicion off every character, while, in Paris, “one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner”.

In all of Modiano’s writings there is a subtle doubt in every character, they appear from mist and disappear in fog, leaving only traces in memory which half-remembers and half-forgets. There are no sudden twists in the happenings, no frightful bursts, neither contrasting bright suffusion of people, nor hindering overt descriptions of appearances. Emotions exist as thin veneer, and even their presence doesn’t discolour the looming melancholia of the past, which always merges with the present.

Victoria Best writes that “the contemporary roman noir in France (particularly works of Modiano and Japrisot) rewrites the elements of crime fiction, presenting texts without these triumphant conclusions”, the ‘conclusions’ referring to ‘locating the crime’ and ‘identification of the criminal’1. Stephen Steele analyses Modiano’s work and states, “old addresses almost always turn out to be a dead end for Modiano’s characters. They find themselves in a space from which former acquaintances and experiences are absent, in a present whose connection to the past is riddled with obscurity”2. While Alan Morris attempts to interpret “Modiano’s chien (the dog in Afterimage) to the one that features in Joseph Losey’s film on the wartime persecution of Jews in France, Mr. Klein (1976)”3. Modiano’s work has been critically studied many a times, especially as postwar literature, but will continue to be analyzed with differing themes.

References
1 Life Beyond Death: Reading for the Demonic in the texts of Modiano and Japrisot – Oxford Journals (French Studies, Vol. LX, No. 2, 218-231)
2 MODIANOBIS – Oxford Journals (French Studies, 1995)
3 Un Chien (DE) Perdu, Deux De Retrouves: Patrick Modiano’s Chien De Printemps and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein – Oxford Journals (French Studies, 2005)

Review: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and The Fall by Albert Camus

Siddhartha & The Fall

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and The Fall by Albert Camus are too famous to have another review. This is going to be a reflection on some stinging realities which these two works bring to light, and how many of their themes were rooted in the accepted societal beliefs, unable to break free from them.

Siddhartha says, to Govinda, that “knowledge has no worser enemy than the desire to know it, than learning”, thereby implying that knowledge exists outside our realms and it is already there and we, by trying to learn it through our efforts, are belittling  it or misinterpreting it. But can knowledge exist without any existence at all? Can there be any known thing without the presence of any living being in whichever form, the bacteria, the single-celled, the microbes – none of it. But that probably takes us to a state of nothingness when nothing would have existed. So is Siddhartha (or Hesse) saying that Knowledge is like a magnetic monopole? That it can exist on its own without the need of existence? It is difficult to agree with this. Can nothing still encompass knowledge when there is nothing but nothing? Here, however, one needs to take things in context. Siddhartha believed in oneness of all things and experienced the flow of river as something which doesn’t have any past, no future but only the present. It is present at different places at the same time. And as all the past, the present and the future exist at the same time, time does not exist. Scientific American described time in 2006 as: “The world is a series of events strung together by time. We see change, and change is the variation of properties with respect to time. Without time, the world would be completely still. Although time may not exist at a fundamental level, it may arise at higher levels—just as a table feels solid even though it is a swarm of particles composed mostly of empty space. Solidity is a collective, or emergent, property of the particles. Time, too, could be an emergent property of whatever the basic ingredients of the world are”. But if no change at all happens, can time be detected or its flow felt? So Siddhartha’s view of time here is merely theoretical and incorrect too: that the past, the present and the future can all exist at once. There can be no denying about the sequence, that is the before and after, of any event even if time is not used for describing that sequence.

 

At one point of time, Siddhartha feels he has lost himself in the process of searching for himself and by dissecting and removing all his peels of layers to uncover the core of all peels, nothing has remained of him. But realizing that nothing is of all us and there is no “core of all peels” in all and any of us is what doesn’t happen often and even he missed it. That all of our existences are a mere coincidences no matter however important we would like to feel about ourselves is a realization which doesn’t go down well in our current state of frenzied rush after everything temporal. He tries to learn from himself, looks around and finds the colours beautiful, the world full of interesting things like stars, moon, sun, mountains, animals and the like. But does he not realize that only in non-human things and beings does he see beauty? How could he miss it? Beauty, contentment, peace and mere unselfish existence only belong to non-humans and it is us, the humans, who because of our evolved brains are always in search for the noble truth which doesn’t exist. He talks of an inner voice commanding him and his desire to dwell on nothing but what the voice asks him to dwell on. Inner voice? That is again reflective of a passed-down belief that our inner voices tell us what to do. It is nothing but gut feeling, which also draws from experience. Certain experiential and existential abilities are genetic – like a hand put in fire for the first time will kick-start the instant reaction of pulling it back, or having a stone in mouth instead of food will make us instantly vomit it out. But inner voice is never passed down. Each of us have to go through the whole cycle of experiences of elation and dejection to learn from it. Non-human knowledge, if it can be called so, is something which is passed down genetically – like the instinct of fear, knowing when to escape, the expression of anger are all present in animals. They don’t need to taught those. But we humans need to learn all the other things. That which we call knowledge has to be acquired and it is not at all genetic, and this again squashes Siddhartha’s belief that knowledge exists and our effort to learn it is an enemy. But Siddhartha’s search for experience is only reflective of this just discussed reality – that because human knowledge and human experience cannot be passed down genetically, one has to sin to be able to live again. This should not be a short lived moment of excitement that we have come to know of it, but should rather be accepted as a static reality which doesn’t change. But can we evolve in the millions and billions of years to come in such a way that even experiences and human knowledge can be passed down genetically? We can never answer that because we are as good as a tree in predicting things. Towards the end, Siddhartha stops fighting his fate. Fate? He acts on two counts which clearly indicate his alignment with accepting things – listening to inner voice to guide him and giving in to fate. That his fate already has been decided and that he is a mere actor playing along sequentially is evidence of his beliefs in a higher power.

 

Siddhartha’s assertion that one needs to find in life rather than search in life is a practical one – that often one looks for happiness with only that in mind, and forgets to experience whatever else one goes through. He does realize that there is no meaning to our existence and life and just resigns himself to this, and stops comparing the world to some perfect world he imagined and starts loving and enjoying being a part of it. He talks of how a stone is not just a stone but might become a human someday. He says how one thing is everything and everything is just one. This is an appealing idea, that when we die we just get converted from our current forms to some other forms – our feelings, our emotions – they vanish – but our bodies, they get converted to other forms, either by being eaten or swallowed or burned. So our physical existence just takes another form, but our mental doesn’t. This, that our mental doesn’t, is not at all stated by Siddhartha and probably doesn’t think about it. That for us, we are our minds first then our bodies. But for many we are our bodies first and then our minds. But ultimately we are a mixture of both. But we always strive to give more importance to our minds and that is why this endless cycle of running around, creating self-importance and projecting ourselves as somebody above the other beings on earth. Our yearning to separate the mind from the body is what lies at the core of everything – our happiness, our sadness.

 

We now move to Camus’ work. Jean-Baptiste says that “being master of one’s moods is the privilege of the larger animals”. But are we, humans, the larger animals, master of our moods? We can to some extent affect our moods, it is a sort of physio-psychological effect which one can exercise and to some extent affect the release or suppression of chemicals in one’s brain. Job, family and organized leisurely activities, which will give a “good clean life”, are indicators of the Marcuse’s one-dimensional-man. The feelings of satisfaction and self-esteem keep us moving forward, he states. But later, as he acknowledges, these aren’t feelings of satisfaction or self-esteem in isolation but only in the midst of a societal audience. That we play a role in and for the society doesn’t escape him. His opinion that no one meditated in cells or prisons but only on accessible heights is a sharp observation: it points that we position meditation and such thoughtful activities directed towards us in becoming thoughtless in such a way that we visualize ourselves being on a plane higher than that of others, that we have already become enlightened and peaceful just by thinking of it and risen above the plane of everyday doings and ascended to a phase of higher-self. Baptiste’s energetic youth in which he was at ease with everything but satisfied with nothing can be looked at as being a caustic remark even on the current and all the future generations as well. We are satisfied by nothing (which is the presence of everything) and nothing (which is the absence of everything) is a dreadful hell we wish to avoid at all costs. Our fledgling morals are touched upon and well criticised – that our slaves must not be called slaves and we must never admit it which will presuppose our guilt. To avoid our own suffering we must deny of somebody else. His brief reflection on death relieving us of the compulsions of relationships, especially those of love and that many marriages are nothing but formalized debauches, is too short-lived. The desire to be free of the clutches of love, only death can deliver it. But it frees as well as chains. The memories would haunt one forever till the mind is numbed. His thoughtful scrutiny of of our behaviour with those who are superior to us is charming – we rarely confide in somebody better than us; our weaknesses are shared with the likes; and hence we never want to be improved or bettered. Our efforts of passing unnoticed are efforts at garnering more attention when the audience realizes its folly of ignoring or forgetting us. We hide to be called out; we cry to be cajoled; we laugh to be called mad; we get hurt to be nursed; we fight to become friends; we come closer to go away; and live to die with the hope that we would die and live as we couldn’t when we lived.

“Ghent Altarpiece E – Just Judges (original painting)” by Jan van Eyck. Photo: Max Friedländer – http://english.rkd.nl/archive/featured/copy_of_uitgelicht-1. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Truth, he says, is a colossal bore. And he is right. Who wants truth when the lie is beautiful, joyous and enticing? Who wants to examine when the unexamined is a thousand times attractive? The guilt of us all and the confusion over our innocence; that men are enough to create guilt and punish; that murdering a man will always have and need reasons, but his continuing to live needs none and how crime needs lawyers but innocence needs only rarely – all of this, all of it, just makes too much sense to be ignored. In the past, Baptiste continues, we were sentimental about lakes and forests but now about prison cells speaks of our fall. Freedom, he goes on, is a solitary race, a court sentence, and heavy to bear when down, lonely or distressed. But why does loneliness worry him so much? What is about being lonely that he thinks is missing out by being with others? Did his realization that he played out only for others and its dispensability not make him wise on this count? It did not, somehow. He became afraid of freedom and the solitariness of death. Yes, he did say that slavery is collective. And it is true. His right to judge us as he accuses himself all the more is nothing but another form of making one’s self equal to or lower than others and then bringing them down. It is a variant of what he had said earlier, that we share weakness only with the likes.

Towards the end, Baptiste, just like Siddhartha, accepts duplicity than being upset about it. They exist despite of existentialism. They both become enlightened and find comfort, after which they were throughout their lives, in that duplicity. But how can duplicity at all be comforting? That they could be content with the ways of life and be okay with accepting their own anti-behaviour? How can one ever accept it? That they could deride everything and still live in complete acceptance of that derision? How?

And, more importantly, why? Why at all?