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Actual cathedrals of learning
“Oxford made me,” Jan Morris says in her memoir Conundrum, speaking of her first boarding school, her undergraduate years, and adult home. She is speaking of transcendent purpose embodied in a physical place. “I know its fault too well,” she admits, but “it remains for me nevertheless, in its frayed and battered integrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.” She adds: “For near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.”
She was brought as a child to “the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford.” She says:
“Every day for five years, holidays apart, I went to service there, and its combination of architecture, music, pageantry, literature, suggestion, association, and sanctity powerfully affected my introspections. I knew that building almost as I knew my own home…An ancient holy building is conducive to secrets, and my secret became so intermingled with the shapes, sounds, and patterns of the cathedral that to this day, when I go back there to evensong, I feel an air of complicity.”
Similarly, Judith Shulevitz:
"He [Paul de Man] and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hills Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.
All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire."
Steven Connor in The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019):
"Universities have a fondness for these structures, which sometimes, as with the University of London's Senate House, impractically and overheatingly house libraries. Berkeley's Sather Tower, a campanile whose carillon still plays regularly, houses fossils of animals retrieved from the tar pits of California, as though to figure the transformation of life into stone and then stone into the second life of knowing. When I first visited the University of Pittsburgh I thought the name 'Cathedral of Learning' given to the 160-metre (535-ft) structure that dominates the campus must be an affectionate joke. But that indeed has been its official name since the first class was held in it in 1931. It is in fact only the fourth tallest educational building in the world, after the main building of the Moscow State University, the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo (so named because its curved shape, resembling a bud, seed or pair of praying hands, suggests a nurturing structure for those it contains) and the helical Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya."
Differentiating "women's knowledge" from the default knowledge that men have
A comment by Ursula LeGuin.
"So I began to think: If I’m a woman, why am I writing books in which men are at the center and primary, and women are marginal and secondary — as if I were a man?
Because editors expect me to, reviewers expect me to.
* * *
I didn’t know how. It took me a while to learn. And it was other women who taught me. The feminist writers of the sixties and seventies. The women authors of older generations, who’d been buried by the masculinist literary establishment and were rediscovered, celebrated, reborn in books like The Norton Anthology of Women Writers. And my fellow fiction writers, mostly younger than I, women writing as women, about women, in defiance of the literary old guard and the genre old guard too. I learned courage from them.
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light.
But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
* * *
We’ve lived long enough in the dark. We have an equal right to daylight, an equal right to learn and teach reason, science, art, and all the rest."
read it on Google Books, pp. 85-86
Lists
Edward Said wrote in Orientalism: "Flaubert felt in the Orient, first, that ‘the more you concentrate on it [in detail] the less you grasp the whole,’ and then, second, that ‘the pieces fall into place of themselves.’ …this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Orientalism existed."
Reification
Saskia Vogel:
A book as an object seems so absolute, so fixed, hallowed and concrete. I’ve come to think of this as a sort of intrusive thought. I acknowledge it, and hope the thought will leave me alone. I prefer to think of a text as a transmission and a book as something that pulps in water.
The idea of the hallowed book has its origin in my early education and perhaps in my early years as a reader, in awe of books and what they hold. Perhaps also in my writing ambitions: how does a person write a book good enough for it to be published? For a long time, these questions ran alongside ideas of 'perfection.' But nothing is perfect. And the more I think about literature, the less I need it to meet any sort of ideal or expectation. I’m most interested in how a book will spring to life inside a reader, how they will carry it with them and pass it on. The life the book lives without me."
Caprification
The opening of A. V. Marraccini's book, We the Parasites:
"The female fig wasp burrows into the male fig, called the caprifig, and the process, in turn, is called caprification, when she lays eggs and those eggs hatch. The hatchlings are blind, flightless males and young females. They have incestuous sex. The now pregnant female wasps, the ones Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation, but to be fair the actual mechanism is hard to discern such that the biology of it is still a topic now.
The female fig needs to be pollinated to fruit. Bees can’t do this, nor wind, because the inverted flower is sealed up inside itself. So sometimes a female wasp doesn’t crawl into a male fig, where she can lay eggs. Sometimes she crawls into a female fig, where she starves and dies, but in the process pollinates the inverted flower, which can then fruit. The body of the wasp is absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig. You do eat it, in a sense, but you wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told you.
This is called commensalism, a form of parasitism in which the parasite doesn’t actively harm the host. More properly, it’s even a mutualism, dead wasps and male fig husks aside, because the fig and the wasp need each other to reproduce." (pp. 5–6)
It goes on:
"Criticism is a mutualism as parasites like me go, or at least a commensalism, pollinating novels to make more novels; Winckelmann’s halls of beautiful young men in Greek sculpture making the hot breath of living beautiful young men into bildungsroman, which in turn end up in marble of their own. The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft central flesh of the tree bud. (p. 7)
It’s a sexual reproductive process, yet “somehow queer. Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge." (p. 7)
To reveal the reason why I'm referencing this metaphor here, I must show this comment too:
"You don’t become a fig wasp on the flanks of the neoclassical tradition without having inhabited it, parasitized it yourself first as practice. This is an education. You tell yourself you are Achilles (or sometimes, Patroclus), you rationalize your world with these models, themselves parasitic on a tradition that you did not yourself make. You learn to be by being them, by pushing into them and unfolding your wet wings." (p. 8)
Otherwise, you might find yourself not the parasite, but the host:
"This is what happens when you get too close to art, undiluted, when criticism isn’t there. It lays its eggs in you. It breeds. It becomes your first kiss, your first lover, your first experience of everything before you even open your eyes. It is there, coursing along in your blood like a pleasing contaminate you can’t ever filter out. ... You contemplate, at some point, if you are merely somebody else’s, a dead author’s perhaps, a psen, laid in the fig of a book." (p. 12)
The Outside Folds In
Erik Davis in High Weirdness:
...psychogenic networks stage the 'production of interiorities,' and they do so precisely by crossing inside and outside. In his account of indigenous spiritual beings, Latour declares that such entities 'are no longer representations, imaginings, phantasms projected from the inside toward the outside; they unquestionably come from elsewhere, they impose themselves.' Here the 'inside' of subjectivity appear as an uncanny fold of the outside, a site where the exteriority of signs and of a-signifying forces impress themselves within.
Lacan coined a marvelous term for this fold: extimacy (extimité), a portmanteau of exterior and intimacy. Extimacy is the intimate other, the unconscious that intrudes from the outside.
Omnology
One might want to study everything broadly. Howard Bloom calls it "'omnology,' a field dedicated to the most zoomed-out cross-disciplinary search for knowledge." For most people, however, this is generally not a reasonable or useful goal. You can't build a beautiful cathedral out of Anything and Everything.
Megalogue
Veering in another direction, one might have a hyperfocused interest in just one subject and hope that everyone else wants to discuss the same thing. Amitai Etzioni calls this a "megalogue." Among "moral megalogues," as he wrote in 2009, "Recent issues have included the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and whether gay couples can legally marry. In earlier decades, women's rights and minority rights were topics of such discussions. Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society's culture and its members' behavior." James M. Gustafson said that "participation in a serious moral dialogue moving toward consensus is more important than the consensus itself...[because] participation in moral discourse deepens, broadens, and extends [people's] capacity to make responsible moral judgments."
Data bank
A more modern idea is that a giant data trove of beliefs and thoughts could be used to reconstruct a human personality and give it life inside a robot. This is a bit different from the idea of a cathedral, because, while a building designed for worship pays homage to a larger tradition, a personality data bank pays homage only to oneself.
Architecture as attitude
"...I tell people what they don’t want to hear with a hood punk doll aesthetic. When I think about my aesthetic, I think about architecture. In some ways, when it comes to my personal style, architecture inspires me almost as much as music does. When I think about what I want to communicate through my style, I think about open concept spaces. I think expansive, liberated, present and I’m drawn to wear things that make me feel big, expanded, and beyond societal expectations that fit within a container to make people most comfortable." — Bunny McKensie Mack, quoted in "Everything And More: On the Makings of Bunny McKensie Mack," by Tempestt Hazel, May 18, 2022, Sixty Inches From Center
Another association with 'cathedral'
"Longtime readers will be familiar with Curtis Yarvin, who blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin founded neoreactionism AKA the Dark Enlightenment, a political movement popular among certain tech circles. Neoreactionism calls for the fall of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy. Shockingly, neoreactionaries believe that new aristocracy should come from tech and business. Yarvin's writing fixates on the power of the so-called 'Cathedrals': media, academia, and government institutions which he and his followers believe shape public opinion and rule America. (It's worth noting that Yarvin's parents were government civil servants.)"
— Vance-Thiel-Yarvin 2024: The Neoreactionary Dream Team. From JD Vance to Project 2025, how Peter Thiel and a guy who wants the US to be a monarchy (really!) are driving Trump’s MAGA agenda. Melissa Ryan. July 21, 2024.
You May Also Be Interested
Related topics are on "Re-envisioning ‘Environment’". It's an 8-minute read on Medium. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.
Sources
Jan Morris. Conundrum. 1974. Chapter 2.
Judith Shulevitz. The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. New York: Random House, 2011.
Saskia Vogel, “The Same River Twice: Notes on Reading, Time, and Translation,” Words Without Borders, Jan. 23, 2023
A. V. Marraccini. We The Parasites. Seattle, Wash.: Sublunary Editions, 2023.
Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019. 2.3.0: Experiments.
"Grand Inquisitor" by Nando Pelusi, on the work of Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Psychology Today, January/February 2008, p. 41.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 41.
James M. Gustafson. "The Church: A Community of Moral Discourse." in The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 83-95. Quoted in James Calvin Davis. In Defense of Civility: How Religion Can Unite America on Seven Moral Issues that Divide Us. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. pp. 168-169.
Cathedral ceiling by James Henry from Pixabay
