Tribaldos of the book and his darts

Penned on the first some ten folios of manuscript 894 of the Biblioteca Nacional Madrid are Luis Tribaldos de Toledo’s (1558-1636) additions to what he must have encountered as a manuscript in medias res. At the end of the summer of 1622, he notarized an abbreviated copy of Gonzalo de Arredondo y Alvarado’s (1450 - 1518) Chrónica de Fernán González missing its prologue, a history regarded by Arredondo’s contemporaries and many of Tribaldos’ as archaic in style and uncritical in its management of sources. Whether Tribaldos really wanted to notarize this skeptical chronicle, one with few dates and substantial investment in figures of dubious existence, such as Bernardo del Carpio, is not entirely clear. He did, however, take the opportunity to fill some thirteen folios that had fallen out, or that had, rather, been torn out, with a lengthy proem and a nearly unrecognizable version of what Arredondo had written some one hundred years earlier as prologue. All this in a hand and layout that mimics a printed page, and with a dose of self-promotion of enough force to grab hold some 387 years later.

The book itself, which is visibly fragmented only in the sense that the quires and watermarks indicate that the Tribaldos contributions were added after some anterior ones were lost, does not convey a 387-year-old Tribaldos. In reading Tribaldos’ contributions to what is even now a comparatively unpopular codex, the historical Tribaldos, the chronology of his life, works, accomplishments and missteps, is replaced by a Tribaldos of this book. The meaning that happens in reading here is one in which the relationship between the referents and several pieces of words is bound to the series of added pages and their movement from notarization, the development of a proem, and the prologue that Tribaldos presents as Arredondo’s. In order to enter this neighborhood, I have to imagine why and how I would go about carrying out my duties as notary, and then proceed to create two texts, both somewhat in the name of Arredondo, if I were he. In this regard, the book Tribaldos’ most present age is about 30, since that is about mine. He is part my habitus, my knowledge of the historical Triabaldos, codicology, and inaccurate readings of philosophy, but also properly an alter ego. He is the sort of guy who might get you in trouble with the teachers because he does not tell time well and uses metaphysics like darts against thinking academics.

These very darts account in part for why the book Tribaldos, besides being somebody of my own head, is so convincingly real. In his proem, when he defines history as truth and what really happened in the past, and also as the mirror of things, beyond following the Greeks, he must have considered or decided to actively take advantage of the belief that everybody knows what truth means unless they try to define it. Then, by cataloging errors in histories spanning from Antiquity to the Conquest of Peru, misattributions (in Pliny and Virgil), confusion over the place of death of certain heroes in Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada), omissions in both Livy and Orosius, and false accusations and cases of mistaken identity, particularly those in the death of Francisco de Pizarro’s man Fuentes at the hand of Rodrigo Ordóñez, he creates an irremediable, universal problem–that everything on earth is flawed–each and all having a “pequeña mezcla de aprocripho,” or “alguna poca apariencia de lo incierto.” Chronological time goes by the wayside, replaced subtly, without our knowing, with the flowing, very medieval, dateless time of Arredondo’s history, which strangely, also allows him to be so present today.

The book Tribaldos, then, shows himself to be very savvy and also very much alive, thanks to his darts. In his critique of histories of all ages up to his own, he arrives beyond a 17th century stab at debating the relative credibility of histories. In his insistence on truth as the definition of history, the book Tribaldos is able not only to back a flawed history, betting on the fact that truth, while it should always be held as the center of history, is rarely attainable, since everything and everybody around us is flawed. Since truth can only be believed, and since time is not of much object here, the easiest thing to do is to believe him.

Tea for the lonely, bitter for the feeling bad

A wise person told me recently I have putting the whole of the theoretical argument of my dissertation in footnotes. This is totally true, and so is he.

These days I have been reading Richard Rorty on truth in an attempt to think about a pragmatic “presence,” one that works in a more active way for the big Humanities. I am determined to subject presence to time and to make it say what time it is, if and when it is sick with metaphysics, and to make it mean until it hardens into something boring (and something else). I think if I do this, my friend and I will know why it is that what she sometimes calls things outside language in her project on humans and poetry and what I call really real, and today, we said also said hope, is talking to the same problem.

Presence, in its positive, furry, “Hegel-feeling” (Ed Jonker) sense, and as I think I have come to want to think of it, is a nice cup of tea for lonely people. It says things like: Close your shutters, take a nap. When you wake up, your favorite friends will be holding your hand and spooning you perfect bites of a cake with your name on it, in a lovely cursive. In its traumatic manifestation, presence is like pouring tea in the eyeballs, an event whose most positive point may be a few seconds of melancholy. Runia’s lovely stowaway metaphor is spit out with awful scratches from the carousel and that 7th sense is one miserable clarity. I am not sure anybody wants to claim that presence, except in theory.

In any case, it is good to consider what the point of academia is, and especially for medievalists, why we are still talking about medieval literature. I am not convinced that in my lifetime we will come to redefine our relationship to objects and animals and arrive to a non-anthropomorphic history (Ewa Domanska), nor do I want it frankly. If we can get more from objects, if they can make us feel more full and less fragmented, I’d like that.

A little closer.

I am planning to write a text about feeling close to something convincingly past through the strange time that happens in a few codices that display varying degrees and different sorts of coherence. These old books are not miscellaneous, if that word implies random or simply unintellgible to us, but projects that changed directions in the hands of copiers of texts and document collectors.

I was thinking of writing about hands, about the change of hands in these books, the marks the owners and collectors left on them, because I thought it was a nice metaphor of contact. An inroad to those beautiful manuscript moments that I hope to push on students when I grow up. But this involves an awful lot of arduous paleography, deciphering change to change, comparing with many other manuscripts in which those same hands might appear, and standing on a good two hundred years of the heads of bibliophiles and catalogers and philologists researching
provenance, comparing and identifying texts, doing philology.

The reason why hitting below the epistemological level in literary studies is not enough and does not reach things that will keep literary studies going for hundreds of years more is a similar one to the reason why suggesting that one can write disserations and books about manuscripts unhermeneutically is problematic and maybe impossible. At work, it is hard to forget our education: historicize! historicize, put the meaning, signifcado, sens, ¿Qué quiere decir? Identify, same, similar, no tiene nada que ver. To study has always been to find answers, or at least, to know more, even if the more is not particularly quantifiable.

I am working on something called closeness because I think I am being encouraged to show how my project is a manuscript-specific development of presence (mostly Gumbrecht’s and Runia's) or how it is not presence at all. Closeness refers to a moment or series of moments in which the modern user reaches a sense of heightened proximity with the protagonists of the manuscripts, as well as with the writing and images the books contain that enables, in turn, a sense of “real” contact with the people and the texts. This closeness responds to a desire for completeness and connection with something perceived as past. The proximity sought here is not historical in nature, nor can it be reduced to the acquisition of empirical knowledge, which, in turn, comes to constitute a past. It is rather, above all, reaching with these manuscripts what I argue is the reason for which the distinction “material culture” is becoming increasingly popular in the field of Medieval Studies: the desire for an experience with a manuscript that convincingly, again, not in a historical or cognitive sense, communicates that these people, authors, and texts really once were real and can be part of us, and that we too, have the capacity to be intimately connected with the Middle Ages. My primary thesis is that this too, is an answer to the age-old concern of incompleteness and reconstituion in Medieval Studies, and an answer that reaches towards the why of reconstitution in the present, i.e. Why is incomplete unattractive in the space of the book and today, 2) What constitutes “past” and the meaning of “medieval” in the present? 3) These days, what is it that we want from literature and material objects?

I have done a lot of thinking and missing these past few days, thinking about loving and what is important. And I can’t help but think, more than just a little bit, of those times where nothing happened except for made up things, like swearing to have seen live fire coming out of a kid’s ear that’s orange, but doesn’t burn, of a big dream of writing a beautiful book that changed literature university teaching called Dear You, of moments in extreme heat or cold where the two people felt nothing but heavy time and thick motion, and that, yes, yes, she is actually a spy and one day, coming soon, she will surprise a friend by locking him in a painful pose and whispering a prayer in native-sounding Russian into his ear. And all the times I thought wouldn’t count, but did.

I wonder if going for this closeness, or the thing itself, is what Regina Spektor would call the “sweetest downfall.” What do you think?

Work in Progress

It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work,
but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (Avot 2:21).

There is a book of poems by the poet Gabriel Levin, born in France, and raised in the US and Israel, called Ostraca (1999). Not so much inspired by a multitude of regions and times, the poems are some versions of Cyprus, Lebanon, Jeruselem and Palestine, even, and perhaps especially, for those most ignorant of the life and people in these places. The kind of real in this poetry book is of the sort of the fakery in my writings about shingles and pieces pulled from bindings. Better than it sounds, even though it doesn’t sound very good, the idea is that “real feeling,” not necessarily actual recuperation of events, texts, and people that did exist, is at the bottom of many philological studies already.

Sometimes it is nice to read badly and out of context. Is it true, or do we do it most of the time? Here it yields a wonderful feeling. In his poem “Medusa,” Levin writes as the second stanza:

And though the Ethics of the Fathers speak
of vestibule and banquet hall, I prefer
your plainspoken, ”room upon room,”
in the great metaphysical house by the sea,
where you wandered, dazed,
as a young man–room upon unearthly room,
in which the venturing mind glanced off the objects
of its quest, and recoiled; for you were quick
to realize, even as you thought to taste such strange,
unrealizable fruit, that the dreams had no core.
So you tossed and woke uncomforted,
restless, driven, you might have said, from pillar
to post, by a desire for wholeness, if not
perfection, and queried by day, by night, the bare
lambent being, washed ashore.

“Medusa,” Ostraca. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1999 (17-18).

The boy who gives up the unearthly rooms only to find himself seeing himself washed ashore on the beach not only luminous, but musical.

Did he eventually find the wide secrets of the sea-rooms, or did he know, even at first glance, that there was no whole in that place? He would have to wash over the rocks, over and up on, maybe in Pepsi cans and the wish bones of plastic thongs, until he glowed. I imagine this man as the poetic voice in the poem “Ostracon 1.” I think it is the shard itself, whom the books tell was born in the 6th century BC, but that was actually made to live on a day between 1932 and 38, having come to light with the debris of a destroyed guardroom. His first words in the whole, and on the first page of his history to be written for good, read: “This very day, this very day...” (16).

Nuestro autor.

The current chapter I am writing started out about two manuscript fragments, two philologists, and a family who seems to be in love with a red tile with an erased verse probably from the Libro de Apolonio, a poem inspired in some version of the Poema de Fernán González, and a series of drawings and symbols, signed Philosopho. My latest assessment of some of the main ideas was:

Vitality in the philologies of Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Paul Zumthor
Perception of whole and part
What hole are the material books of the Middle Ages filling not in literary history, but in daily life? (Or does nobody seem to care?)
What do some philologists, owners of fragments, librarians, and novelists want from what they consider the Middle Ages?
Does anybody want anything from the material objects? What? When?
What sort of texts happen when the object is the research subject?

A text about a certain type of educated human seeking, totally ineffectually, contact with the past and themselves via nebulous categories like Middle Ages, while at the same time, conceiving of the thing they understand as Middle Ages as only a half-good non-thing to begin with, then giving up when these forms of supplement (typologies, the metaphors, nearby historical landmarks and figures) don’t work.

I finally received the other article written in the last decade on the Villamartín tile, “Hispano Diego García en la interpretación del ostrakon de Villamartín sobre el Poema de Fernán González.” Here the author, J. Hernando Pérez, chooses to fill the holes in the tile and its initial and current contexts with the character of Diego García de Campos and his Planeta (1218). Through a complex of symbolism and anagrams directly inspired in the Planeta, Pérez provides a possible author to some of the tile material, the meaning of all of it, and what he sees as the reason for its existance.

This article has proven useful not for the content and the interpretations, but for its repeating the unexceptional phrase of nuestro autor, as well as his sytematic supplement of the tile such that in his view, it makes sense and participates more effectively in fulfilling a determined place in literary history.

But whose literary history? And who and when is nuestro? Philologists? Farmers? Freelance authors? Novelists? Gradeschool kids?

These must be some of the questions. The reasons why the blanks are there and with what we think to fill them. What is ours to be had and what has the Medieval done for us lately?

New woods.

Talking Shakespeare as overgrown adolescents educated in American schools in the 1980’s and 1990’s brings about a strange experience–there is groaning over memories of multiple choice quizzes about mood and main parts, the recitation of a pair of lines from a soliloquy once entirely memorized. A nod for plot and theme and a fair glance for days without thoughts of hundreds of pounds of paper and font dedicated to literary criticism. The passages are even better now, though. I read this one in the woods just days ago, and again yesterday wandering back to my ugly car among few, but happy cardinals:

O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.

The Tempest (5.1.206-13).

Worried about my project’s reception and other things, and lacking confidence that a peaceful harbor will eventually result from a roof that leaks purple-colored acid (In one voyage...?) I am trying to reclaim a piece of the project’s center:

What role does the idea of incompleteness and the way in which incompleteness is supplemented or left alone play in conceptions of the medieval period?

I arrived to this piece in the last week thinking about constitution and reconstitution and writing yet another description and outline for my project. For Jean Luc Marion, in order for any object to achieve phenomenality, it must be constituted. Yet in this constitution, and in bringing the object together, some or many things are necessarily left at bay, or out, a cloud which he calls invu, that or those things in the object that cannot reach visibility in its appearing:

In effect, the phenomenality accomplished by constitution gives rise, negatively, to a halo of invu around every phenomenon, in proportion to which it renders the phenomenon visible. For when concentrated on the object, constitution must “stick to it.” It can only accede to the lived experiences of consciousness as much as the object manages to assimilate them. Now, the object always imposes two unbreakable limits on phenomenality. First, it imposes the limits of its own finitude, which necessarily excludes the infinity of all the lived experiences, sketches, and points aimed at that consciousness does not nevertheless cease to receive concerning it. Next, it imposes the limit of the finitude of intuition in it, which either stays in the background concerning meaning or, more rarely, equals it (it is then a question of the facts), without our ever envisaging that it can go beyond it and in this way be liberated from the horizon of the object (109).

What it is then, about constitution of manuscript fragments that is unique? I suspect that there is an additional process of putting together in dealing with ripped-up fragments. In addition to the normal constitution that must “stick” to the object, there is a pre-halo of ideas about what constitutes complete and incomplete, whole and part. This pre-halo goes beyond a set of expectations and a habitus for manuscript fragments; less or more, less is more, or more or less, permeates every part of at least some human existences. Now or never mind? Ordered closet, bookshelf by author, or dirty dish shoved under the couch. Sticky Coke allover the car cup holder, smashed crackers, Kleenex, and pen stains at the bottom of a canvas bag? Are third-rotten strawberries OK to eat with those parts pared? 2 days expired milk... throw or keep until it actually tastes rancid? 4 minutes enough to talk or why bother? Is a half-truth worth telling?

Regarding the limits of phenomenality, in terms of fragments, it could be said that intuition not only stays in the background and sometimes equals meaning, but that it is challenged by both the pre-halo of ideas about part and whole and then by the invu that results from the constitution. Maybe this pre is not actually pre, but it is, in any case, another layer of sorts in the air with fragments.

Back to the woods, deep-in, where, just maybe, nobody quite owns themselves. Living in those woods are all the highs of book projects that eventually failed. It is the beautiful writing that never made it into the publication, or that only did. These are wood-neighbors to intuitions that later got stuck in the background of attempts to uncover meaning. And then there are, resting in the boughs, the big questions of Empty or Full. They never go to bed at all.

My Project

Today writing about the stains of reagents on the Roncesvalles fragment in conjunction with the rub marks as a result of its once being used as a bag, a sickening thought emerged. A few weeks back, a friend and I sat in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and talked for an hour about Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The milkshakes were disgusting, but the worst is that we both thought I was doomed to offend almost everybody, and appear as though I were trashing this great master, in this paper I am writing about a shingle, something once a bag, then bookmark, and a vandalized panegyric.

“That’s no longer intellect,” Ulrich said, explaining the general amazement,” “it is a phenomenon like a rainbow with a foot you can take hold of and actually feel. He talks about love and economics, chemistry and trips in kayaks; he is a scholar, a landowner, and a stockbroker” (203).
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1., Sophie Wilkins trans. Vintage, 1996.

I begin by attempting to characterize the vitality of Menéndez Pidal’s writing through long citations of several passages of his prose, evoking Zumthor’s “poetic intelligence.” This sets up a discussion of the things that show how a bracketing of the material object and the scars found on it are no longer viable. Without the opportunity to be the first to publish the fragment, without having had the experience of hearing medieval songs in the voices of beautiful modern women, without, I would say, not only a penchant for invention, but a desperate belief in it as a source of life and a legitimate pedagogical tool, we have to look for another way to bring the Middle Ages to us. This is part of the point of my project, love and economics, chemistry and trips in kayaks. Scholarship, ownership. Money. Resistance to the material object as a result of failed attempts to resolve an apparent conflict between ready and present to hand; between "scientific" philology and the shock of the look of the material object itself.

A rainbow with a foot. In the case of Menéndez Pidal, this is not a gratuitous comparison. I think the problem is that beauty and mystery are only brought back subtly. Reading Nancy, I have had this experience. In the process, I always think of a card game in which I am trying to cheat by modifying my hand from one under the table. I want the answer, a physical answer. But a beautiful man, totally absent from any reality, slaps my hand.