A Miscellany for the 47th Anniversary of the Discovery of Charon
Readers will have noticed that I’m increasingly doing these sort of weekly-digest-of-everything-I-have-to-say posts. Seems more sustainable (for me) and less annoying (for you). Sometimes you have a short email’s worth of something to say and it seems more considerate to aggregate several of those rather than troubling people’s inboxes multiple times a week.
Also, I have not abandoned the media ecology series. Those posts are just time-consuming, and my schedule keeps being disrupted by travel (much as I have enjoyed those trips). Walter Ong is on the way.
I’ll paywall portions of some newsletters and not others. Newsletters that include installments in series that I have promised to write for paying subscribers will, of course, be paywalled.
Lamech and Jay-Z
(this is a really rough excerpt from that popular book about the history of literature that I keep telling myself I’ll write someday)
Those of us who grew up devout Bible readers know that the Old Testament, as Christians call it, is liberally strewn with passages that seem designed to thwart a student’s progress. One of the first occurs in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Cain, the son of Adam and Eve (the first people), and the first murderer (of his brother Abel), has been sentenced by God to wander the earth, which turns out to be inexplicably well-populated. (Sunday school teachers will tell you that the other people are just other, previously-unmentioned descendants of Adam and Eve — who like all the people in these early chapters of Genesis led fantastically long lives. This is a possibility. Another is that neither the authors nor the compilers of these books were as interested in consistency as we’d like them to be.) Cain marries and begets children. His descendants become the first musicians, the first miners, and (by implication) the first makers of weapons. After several verses of dry description, one of these children bursts into song:
Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech:
for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
—Genesis 4:14-24.
What does this mean? What is this inappropriately grisly passage doing here? The critic and translator Robert Alter points out one possible meaning: it tells us that human evil is escalating. Cain, from envy, killed one guy—after what we must imagine was a long period of brooding. Abel was his brother, which, if it makes the crime in one way more awful—who kills his own brother?—also makes the crime, in another way, more explicable. Family resentments can curdle the heart more completely because family matters so much. If Cain’s evil is great, so, we must assume, is the timeframe in which that evil grew. But Lamech? Lamech is just an asshole. Abel, however innocently, stood as a challenge to Cain’s way of life for however many years. Lamech’s rage flares up in response to a mere momentary “wounding.” And, depending on how we read the line, the number of targets may have multiplied as well: He kills a “man” for his wounding, and a “young man” too. Alter suggests that “young man” is ambiguous: it could mean a mere adolescent. It’s not clear that these are two people—Hebrew verse, like much Ancient Near Eastern poetry, is big on parallelism (“My car is yellow. Lo, my Kia is as the leaves of the canary”), so this could be two descriptions of the same killing. That it may not be is strongly suggested by the next line: “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” If you come at Cain, God will kill your family. If you come at Lamech, he’ll kill your village. This is offensive two ways: Not only is Lamech a bully who responds to violence with massacre, the kind of guy who escalates everything, he has also taken God’s place. God has promised to avenge Cain (which vengeance, if it’s anything like God’s “vengeance” for the death of Abel, may not involve murder at all); Lamech has appropriated that right for himself.
Cain’s murder — like most murders — is situational: however evil, it arises out of a longstanding misalignment in the relationship, and is regretted after the fact. (Even Cain’s craven fear of God suggests that he on some level appreciates the gravity of what he’s done.) But Lamech is a dispositional murderer: it’s part of who he is. He sings about it. He’s proud. (Television and film would tell us that these are who most murderers are; in fact they make up such a small percentage of convicted murderers as barely to count.)
But still, what an odd way for the author/compilers to tell us this information! Lamech’s children are arguably more important than Lamech — there’s Jabel, the first dairy farmer; Jubal, the first musician; Tubalcain, the first metallurgist (and probably the first maker of weapons). Between them, these guys more or less invent civilization. If bare summary sufficed for them, why preserve this brief, terse, and deeply assholish bit of verse? And why does it conclude this section of the Bible, the section where civilization as we know it essentially begins?
The first thing to notice about Lamech’s song, as song, is that it’s not quite as exotic to us as it first appears. Let’s set Lamech’s boast up against some more recent specimens of the same genre.
Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech:
for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
—Lamech, sometime in the second millennium BCE
Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube
From the gang called N——s Wit Attitudes
When I’m called off, I got a sawed-off
Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off
—Ice Cube, 1988
Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know
That we riddled some middleman who didn’t do diddly
—Big Punisher, 1998
OK, first things first, I’ll eat your brains
Then I’mma start rocking gold teeth and fangs
‘Cause that’s what a motherfucking monster do
—Nicki Minaj, 2010
Hip-hop reminds us that Lamech is not merely the initiator of civilization in all its violent glory, but the father of a literary genre that has never really gone away: the short, boasting lyric poem of a successful wrongdoer. This tradition has had to live underground, in some ways, perhaps because the kind of person who picks out and codifies as “literature” a tiny sample of the billion poems, stories, rhymes, snatches of prose out there is more likely to be either Lamech’s victim or his secret employer than to be, well, Lamech. But it’s always been around, part of oral culture, and with rap — the most commercially successful version of oral poetry in history — it takes on an unignorable prominence.
Jay-Z, in his memoir/literary-critical treatise Decoded (2010), has written with great insight about what this genre of poem offers its readers, or, more often, listeners: “People connect … to the character Jay-Z. Like I said, rappers refer to themselves a lot in their music, but it’s not strictly because rappers are immodest. … Rappers are just crafting a character that the listener can relate to.” Since Jay-Z is a man born extremely poor and black in a racist and classist country, who later made money selling a life-destroying and addictive drug, before becoming such a successful artist in a difficult but popular form that he could unironically (and blasphemously) compare himself to the Biblical God (Hova), and then a businessman who hangs out with Warren Buffett, and the husband of Beyonce—and since his “character” is open about all these things—one would assume that most of his listeners would have trouble relating. You could relate to one component of his biography but not the others. Few people have led his life (and if some of the Diddy-related allegations are true, we should be especially glad not to have done so). Jay has plainly heard this criticism many times, and he has, a few pages later, a revealing response: “But when people hear me telling my stories, or boasting in my songs, or whatever, they don’t hear some rapper telling them how much better than them he is. They hear it as their own voice. It taps into the part of them that needs every now and then to say, Fuck it, allow me to reintroduce myself, n—a. And when I’m really talking shit … I don’t think any listeners think I’m threatening them. I think they’re singing along with me, threatening someone else. … And they might apply it to anything, to taking their next math test or straightening out that chick talking outta pocket in the next cubicle.” I suspect Jay is right. And I suspect that he’s inadvertently described why artful threats and brags, as such, haven’t figured larger in descriptions of the literary tradition: when I listen to Jay-Z, personally, I do feel attacked. Instinctively, I think of the poor sap he’s threatening to murder and hope someone buys the guy a bus ticket before things get any further out of hand. Like many obsessive readers, I have more often been in the position of the peon than the successful bully, and when I have been the latter, I didn’t much like it. Neither, of course, do the best rappers, which is why, if they survive long enough, they end up writing verses far more nuanced and self-critical than Lamech’s. (“Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” by the Geto Boys, is among the most complex and moving of these.)
Lamech’s boast appears in Genesis, in all likelihood, because it was popular, a bit of oral/aural culture as inescapable as a Jay-Z song circa 2002. Listeners were likely attracted by its semantic parallelism, a trivially easy achievement for cultures that use writing but one requiring considerable nimbleness and artistry and memory for a bard composing-remembering on the fly. They also probably enjoyed rhythmic and sonic features that the English translator can only faintly imitate. But notice where the Bible places it: at the beginning of a long train of human ingenuity, artistry, economic achievement, and violence. Many centuries after Genesis reached its final form, another Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, wrote that “There is no act of civilization that is not also an act of barbarism.” Here, the Genesis passage says, are your musicians and artificers, your cattle ranchers and patriarchs. Here are your popular songs. Remember this one? It’s all built on murder. And the point is not (as some have suggested) to glorify the supposedly “simple,” rural life at the expense of sinful city livin’: Lamech’s people are still more or less nomads. It’s that humanity’s beauty and its ugliness are inextricable, in the city or in the desert. This was, so far as I have read, a new note in world literature.
I Think Raechel Is On To Something Here
The description of pointing, specifically, strikes me as exactly right. Unfortunately, as I have noted in the comments to Raechel’s post, I cannot dance.
An Excerpt From a Novel I Was Trying To Write Ten Years Ago, Which I Suspect I Will Never Finish, Though I Will Cannibalize It
I was on the computer one morning, delaying work as usual. More than usual. I found myself watching a time-lapse satellite video on the Internet in which a glacier the size of New York City melted down, within the space of a few year-seconds, to a gathering of little gnarled archipelagos. The headline above the video read “You won’t believe this glacier!” I clicked the video. I clicked it again, then again, waiting for an emotional reaction to form inside me. I was like a person forlornly pushing buttons on a stuck vending machine. Idly, in an attempt to force something from myself, I began to think about the Buddhist monks who once set themselves on fire in order to protest the Vietnam War. To my 1,003 followers I wrote, If u set self on fire to protest global warming wd that increase carb footprint. I ate a bowl of Froot Loops. I checked to see whether my sentence had been reacted to in any way, which it had not. I took a nap on the couch.
Phil, I would read the shit out of a book that was like your excerpt on Lamech and Jay-Z.
man this is so good. think im gonna physically print this out and tuck it in my bible for reference