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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Speaker 1 0:00
We might think of turning away, we might think of like covering one's face as a mode of inattention or indifference or disengagement from the world, but what I noticed was that oftentimes when artists and poets and philosophers depict these moments in which a figure is covering their face or turning away that it often suggests that that person is deeply engaged with the thing or the person or the event that is causing them distress or discomfort or anger or grief.
PJ 0:41
Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Ben Saltzman, associate professor of English language and literature at the University of Chicago. And we're here to talk about his book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture. Dr. Saltzman, Ben, wonderful to have you on today.
Speaker 1 1:02
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
PJ 1:05
So, tell me, Ben, why this book?
Speaker 1 1:09
Yeah, so this book really started with a moment of recognition, a moment of curiosity. I was looking through a medieval manuscript, actually, with a poet that contained a poetic translation of the book of Genesis, and that translation is accompanied by these illustrations, and I was looking at the illustrations, the drawings depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, and was rather surprised to find them covering their faces. I thought, you know, most of the time they're represented covering their genitals in that moment of shame, trying to conceal their newly recognized sexual bodies, and and here they were covering their faces, they're standing before one another with their hands over their eyes, and I thought, why, why are they doing this, what does it mean, and as I began to think about that question, and explore that question. Not only did it kind of unfold in relation to the text in front of me, and the images in front of me, right there, reflecting the moment in which Adam and Eve, their eyes are suddenly opened when they eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Their eyes are opened, and with that opening of their eyes comes the need to shut them, the need to grieve and anticipate their own mortality, the need to stand before their naked bodies and cover their eyes out of respect, for instance. All of these different kind of reasons started unfolding, and at the same time, I was, is this was about 2014 2015 you know, grappling with, I think we all were, and have been ever since, all the more so, ever since grappling with this world in which we live, in the horrors that we confront on a daily basis, and wondering, how are we meant to respond to those pains of this world, and what does it mean when we respond by turning away and by looking away, and so the more that I began thinking about this, the more I saw this gesture everywhere I turn, and so I would say I would kind of start the conversation, maybe by just saying that this is a book that was written in conversation with colleagues and friends, and so much of it was built out of and developed out of people coming to me and saying, hey, have you seen this work of art where this person is covering their face, what do you think about it there, and I would just kind of pass that experience along to right off the bat to your, your listeners, your viewers, and say enter this conversation with me. Right, I'm looking forward to talking with you, PJ, about this, but you know, reach out to me, send me an email, respond in the comments, I don't know, say where you notice where you notice this gesture, maybe in a work of art, in a, in a big museum, maybe on the street as you're walking, walking by, maybe in the cinema, or the film, or television, or some experience, but, but I think it means a lot of different things, and it means a lot of different things to each one of us, and that experience is really what kind of motivated this book was to really dig in and try and figure out why we turn away. What does it mean when we turn away, and what has it meant from antiquity to the present?
PJ 4:38
Thank you. A beautiful answer, as we kind of look at this, your background is English language and literature, I think, said something about hermeneutics. There is, you know, you talk about seeing this on the street. Are you talking about seeing it with actual people when you talk about seeing on the street?
Speaker 1 4:56
Yeah, I mean, we encounter that we encounter this phrase a lot, right? Don't turn away, do. Look away, the kind of moral obligation to look, but I also think that we encounter this gesture, this posture in ourselves. I think it's very difficult to go through life without actually, without ever turning away or looking away. And so, wait, I sort of, I want people, as they read this book, to notice more, right, and notice when, when they, when we find ourselves looking away, and taking that as an opportunity to reflect, and to notice, and to pay attention to, to our own, our own mode of response, or our own kind of reflection, or potential to think there's a lot, there's a lot going on.
PJ 5:43
Yeah,
Speaker 1 5:44
we'll talk about, but yeah, but yeah, it's about it's about noticing both in life, but also in art, and thinking about the relationship between life and art.
PJ 5:54
Yeah, the reason I ask is I want to focus in on the subtitle you talk about the poetics, because I think a lot of people immediately kind of think of psychology, or they might immediately think of this word, but think of the phenomenology of turning away. What is.. what do you mean by the poetics of this gesture?
Speaker 1 6:13
Yeah, it's a.. that's a really important question. So I originally was thinking that the subtitle would be something more like variations on an ancient gesture as a way to imply that this book is partly about antiquity and the Middle Ages and the way that this gesture goes back into kind of deep history but also the ways in which it really does resonate into modernity and into the present day and into contemporary artists and 20th century artists, and right, there's all these resonances of this gesture that pick up meaning over time, and I wanted to lean into the way that this gesture not only has such a wide variety of meanings, but the wide variety of ways in which it shows up again, art life, but like in so many different ways, so so I was thinking variety or variations on an ancient gesture, but my editor and I, and I think this is this is absolutely right. Really, felt like it needed a disciplinary grounding, right? It needed a kind of reference point that says, okay, this book is primarily coming out of a discipline like poetics, and poetry, you know that word, poetics, or poetry is a really expansive word, right? It simply comes from Greek, meaning employing, meaning to make, to create, and so I think it allows the book to investigate the creation of meaning, the creation of this gesture, but also implied in that is a kind of the like the human instinct behind the gesture, the way that this is a gesture that we don't, that we often kind of enact unthinkingly, enact instinctively, but also sometimes perform as a rhetorical move or as a as a display before others, so I wanted to kind of get at the range of meanings, while also recognizing that that it, that it's that the kind of the critical approach of the book comes out of the discipline of literary studies, even though it's a book that is deeply interested in visual art, for instance, there's 90 images in the book, it's a very visually rich project, but a lot of my approaches to the material come out of my training as a literary scholar, whether that be close reading, paying close attention to the kind of details in a text, for instance, and drawing out meaning from those really almost microscopic details that most, that most of us kind of pass by without noticing.
PJ 9:19
So, there's several threads that I want to tug on there, but let me, let me start first.
Speaker 1 9:24
Yeah, I know. Yes,
PJ 9:25
just awesome. No, I love it. That's, I mean, that's why I'm excited you're here today. You're the form of the book is really fascinating. You have it. I will say, I do think we can't just like say now it's really interesting you use the Greek stage directions, the stage chorus to outline your book, because I think most people, myself included, need a little help understanding Greek stage chorus directions, but so you, you went with Greek chorus, the Greek chorus, as it five. Or six sections.
Speaker 1 10:02
Well, let me, yeah, yeah,
PJ 10:03
yeah.
Speaker 1 10:04
Maybe I'll take a step back.
PJ 10:05
Sure.
Speaker 1 10:06
And, like, and kind of describe the structure of the book as a way into, as a way to sort of answer your question about kind of where the Greek course comes into, into play.
PJ 10:18
Yeah,
Speaker 1 10:18
which is, which is there as a, as a kind of playful metaphor, in a way, as a, you know, we use, we use concepts like prolog, or afterward, or introduction, or whatever, and so I wanted to do something a little different, but, but I'll, but let me explain, yeah, the shape of the book,
PJ 10:38
yeah,
Speaker 1 10:39
yeah, which is to say that each chapter of the book starts with a single archaic scene, and then from, and I use this metaphor of like rocks being tossed into a pool of water, so each chapter starts with a rock, the kind of the core of the chapter, that ancient scene in which a figure covers their face or looks away, and and then I toss that rock into the pool of water, and it creates ripples that, that you know, move outward concentrically, and then I toss another rock in the second chapter and another rock in the third chapter, and those ripples refract off one another, and I'm really interested in the way that the the kind of esthetic energy of this gesture moves through and in relation to those refractions across time, but also around as they kind of refract around a concept, so each chapter not only starts with a single archaic scene, and then sees how it, how it moves across time, but also begin, like you know, focuses in around a particular concept. So, let me just, I'll give an example, which is to say, the first chapter, which is what you were referring to, is entitled Parados, which is the Greek term for the opening song of a of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, and that felt resonant to me, because this is often such a trait, so characteristically tragic gesture, but I was also very intrigued about the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy as a kind of their their actors that are both kind of participating in the play, but also narrating it and helping the audience understand what is, you know, what is unfolding before their eyes, and so I kind of recognize that as my role as an author and as a critic in this book, is to point out to you, here's a work of art, here's where the gesture is happening in the background of this work of art, and here's what to notice in it, and recognizing that those are decisions that I'm making that are influencing your own experience of reading this book and encountering this gesture in a sequence of works of art, and so that's kind of what the chorus does in Greek tragedy, and so I thought, what better way to title the introduction of the book than to adapt to this, this concept, this, this opening song of the chorus, but that chapter, parados, is is also really, it's not only a kind of way in to the book, a kind of introduction, but it's also about how this gesture pulls you in, and so the, the ancient scene at its center, the initial scene that I, that I talk about is this famous painting by the painter Timantes, depicting Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the original painting doesn't survive a copy, or some work thought to be a kind of close copy of it, survives from Pompeii, and is now held in the Naples Archeological Museum, but the original doesn't survive, but the reason it's so famous is because early rhetoricians, Roman rhetoricians, like Cicero and Quintilian and Pliny the Elder, they all wrote about it, and the reason they wrote about it was they were fascinated by the painter's decision to cover Agamemnon's face with his hand, with his cloak. Why would he, why would he do that in the moment, and the explanation that they all came up with was that the emotional intensity of the scene, the father having to sacrifice his own daughter, the extreme state of grief, the extreme state of inner conflict, the love, the loss, the betrayal. There is no way the paint brush they wrote would have been adequate to the task of representing this extreme state of emotion, and so the painter had no choice but to cover the face entirely, and you know, later, later critics and other critics would say, you know, the 17th, 18th century, they. Say, well, he was just a bad painter, if he, if he had any skill as a painter, he could, he could paint the face of Agamemnon in such a state of aggravated emotion, but, but nonetheless, the point is that from the very start of this project, I kind of recognize the start of the book. I recognize that this is a gesture that shows up not only in moments of really extreme emotion, but also at the very limits of representation, at the very limits of representing emotion, and in ways that often, because it conceals, because it often conceals the expressive content, it conceals the face of the person who is experiencing this emotional torment, it leaves it to the beholder, it leaves it to the reader, to the viewer to imagine what that person is feeling right, and that therefore it's all the more powerful, so that it pulls you in right, and so that's a kind of example of how this, how the kind of chapter unfolds, and we can, I'm sure, we'll talk about other, other examples as we, as we move forward, but at least I think that gives you a taste of the kind of structure of the book, and and the way that it follows the ripples from each, from each archaic scene at its, at its center.
PJ 16:27
Yeah, absolutely. As we look at it, I see there's this real moral center to this moral statement about attention and this moral statement about turning away that I think you use maybe to critique our current situation. I think you've kind of hinted at it a couple times here. Can you talk to that kind of moral center that you, that you have in the book?
Speaker 1 16:58
Yeah, so I guess one of the most surprising realizations that I had over the process of researching this, this book was that, you know, we might, we might think of turning away, we might think of like covering one's face as a mode of inattention or indifference or disengagement from the world, but what I noticed was that oftentimes when artists and poets and philosophers depict these moments in which a figure is covering their face or turning away, that it often suggests that that person is deeply engaged with the thing or the person or the event that is causing them distress or discomfort or anger or grief, and it's and that that surprised me, and so it made me reflect on our own moment and our and the way in which all the more so today we are not only kind of confronting a visual culture of of one image after the other of atrocities and death and suffering around the world, and with kind of great ease, we encounter these things on our phones, probably most commonly now, and, and with them, really, I think, since the second half of the 20th century, for good reason, has come a has they've been accompanied by this sense that to that looking away is equated with a kind of moral failure that we have a moral obligation to look to pay attention and and so I began kind of thinking about that and thinking about that in relation to this realization that I had about the kind of really powerful experience of looking away, and it allowed me to, I guess, make a distinction right between something like indifference, which is, which strikes me as a real danger, and turning away or looking away, which strikes me as a deeply human way of encountering the pains of this world. Right, it's it's something that we often cannot avoid doing. It's something more importantly that when we when we find ourselves looking away, a whole lot, a whole bunch of things happen, but one thing that that we may kind of not realize is that we've already seen the thing that we are turning away from, we've already anticipated it, and in that moment of turning away, in the right circumstances, we kind of, we might question, or I. Find myself questioning my own act of turning away. Why did I turn away in that moment? Why did I turn away from that person? Why did I turn away from that footage? Why could I not bear to look at it? And it's in that questioning and in that reflection that I think something really powerful happens that indicates to us that something is again worthy of our attention, worthy of our action, worthy of our intervention, worthy of a response, even if we are repulsed by it, and we should be like by a lot of these things that we inherit, we should be repulsed by them, and so I tried to kind of disambiguate something like indifference, where you go about go through the world in a state of kind of apathy and I have become again kind of worried that we're that we're very much heading in that direction where they're kind of the the requirement to look without caring for instance is getting in the way of our ability to reflect and to think and to grieve and to feel anger and to and to respond,
PJ 21:07
and let me just see if I'm tracking with you. There's a, there's, there's a couple distinctions that are forming in my mind. You're talking about the difference between the engaged eye and the jaded eye,
PJ 21:20
yeah,
PJ 21:20
and, and in some ways, we could talk about there's turning away, which is on access with the thing that you were looking at, and there's passing by. Would that be, would that be one way to talk about it? But the difference between, like, the person who keeps walking and their face turns away, but it's on a totally different access versus someone who's truly engaging and responding, is that one way to think about
Speaker 1 21:45
it? Yeah, I mean, I liked your, your, your use of the example of passing by, because you know, one, you know, recognizing that what we're dealing with here is most governs a lot of our lives as metaphors, right? We're, we use metaphors all the time to explain and to compel people to see the world in a particular way, and so when we use a metaphor like turning away, let's say, or don't turn away, or don't look away, it calls to mind a specific kind of bodily contortion, but it can also be as simple as sort of scrolling past something on your phone, or passing by someone on the street, or whatever, any number of different kind of, again, variations on that, that metaphor, but there, there seems to me a kind of real risk that scrolling on our phone, right, and sort of looking at, you know, the way in which we encounter images of atrocity today can feel like or be justified as a kind of mode of paying attention. Oh, I'm doing a moral good here by paying attention to what's happening in the world, even if ultimately it's a kind of empty, empty act of looking, and so what we really need to be doing is is paying attention in a much more engaged way.
PJ 23:17
How does that work with your next chapter on ambivalence.
Speaker 1 23:21
Yeah, yeah, so, so the second chapter of the book, it starts again, the rock right of that chapter is this, this anecdote from Plato's Republic, and this is in a moment of the Republic where Socrates is trying to explain that the soul is divided into three parts, and the reason he needs to explain that the soul is divided into three parts is because if the soul were unified, then you couldn't, then you couldn't explain those situations in which we are pulled in separate directions, where we want to do one thing, where we think we should do one thing, but we do another thing, or where we want to do one thing, but also want to do the opposite thing at the same time, and where we're kind of conflicted, and so if, if the soul were a single entity, then it couldn't kind of move in two directions at once, and so, according to Socrates, so he has to divide it into three parts, and to exemplify a soul that is divided and has these parts pulling at one another, he tells the story of Leontius, who is walking along one day, and he, he notices a pile of corpses next to the executioner, and at first he turns away, he's repulsed by it. He turns away, and then he struggles with himself, and he covers his eyes, and then he eventually gives in, and he forces his eyes open, and he yells at his own eyes. He condemns his own eyes, and he says, "Take your fill of that beautiful sight. So he gives. In and he looks at this, this pile of corpses, and what's really interesting is that in the grammar of Plato's Greek, here all of these different movements are happening at the exact, they're all simultaneously are all happening at the same time, even when Leontius, he's already noticed the Greek verb is eistome, nos, he's already noticed the corpses when he's turning away from them, and he's feeling repulsed by them, and he's at the same time covering his face, and it's at the same time that he's then forcing his eye, like there's no way for me to explain or retell this story without it making, making it seem like it's stretching out over time, but in fact, in the grammar of that passage, it's all happening at the same time, and so it, for me, it's not, it's actually not a kind of like ethical mode, like the reason, the reason Socrates is telling this story is not to say, like, oh, he should have been looking or he shouldn't have been looking, but instead to get at the, the kind of, in some ways, the like, the arrhythmia, the kind of distorted nature of the soul when we're in this kind of ambivalent tension with ourselves, where we're unsure about whether we should be looking or not looking, or where we're like angry at ourselves for looking, but it, it, what it made me realize, and the kind of point of the chapter is really about that ambivalence that we experience, that even when we're turning away from something, it's not purely an act of turning away. It's also oftentimes an act of turning towards, or at the very least, a kind of oscillation between turning towards and turning away. That it's not a simple kind of one directional movement, oftentimes, but instead this kind of like inner conflict, this push and pull between looking and looking away.
PJ 27:00
Yes, and if I understand correctly, the very first rock is really, if I can continue with your metaphor, is Adam and Eve, right? And then the second rock is Agamemnon, and the third rock here is Leontius, if I'm saying that right. And interesting, you know, to see the slight shifts, and this is what you're, you're enjoying and digging into the refractions here with Adam and Eve, and with Leontius, there's a, there's a real thread of knowledge where it seems like, and I could be wrong here, but Agamemnon, it's more about the passion of it, the, the overwhelming, which you also get with Adam Neeb. Do you want to talk a little bit about how those three interact?
Speaker 1 27:45
Yeah, sure. So it's interesting, right? The way that you write a way that you write a book doesn't always follow the, I guess, the order in which you write a book doesn't always follow the order of chapters, right, or the order in which the reader encounters them, and so, yeah, I had started the project by writing about Adam and Eve, but then ended up placing that as the final chapter in the book, and I'll say a few words about why, and it was one of the last chapters that I wrote, I wrote the, the introduction at the, at the very, very end. The Timantes piece was the last, was the last part that I wrote in terms of the order of composition, but the Adam and Eve, the Adam and Eve material. One thing, one other thing I'll say is that the experience of reading the book, each chapter, I guess the ripples expand outward in more outward, more widely as each chapter progresses, right. So the chapter on Plato's Republic is fairly tightly focused on Plato's Republic in that moment with Leontius, and thinking about, like, the history of translating certain words in that passage, but it reaches out a little bit into, for instance, Philip Gorevich, the author of the New York New Yorker journalist, the author of the book about the Rwandan genocide. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we would be killed, along with our families. He uses that passage about Leontius as the epigraph to his book, and so, and he writes about it a little bit, and the experience of seeing and confronting the mass graves in Rwanda, and comparing it to that experience by Leontia. So, again, you can kind of see how these ancient scenes resonate into contemporary 20-first century, 20th-century life. And then, by the time you get to the final chapter on Adam and Eve, the. Ripples are expanding outwards in really wild directions, and so you know, thinking about the way, for instance, that that famous fresco by Masaccio in Florence, representing Adam and Eve, as they're being expelled from paradise, and Adam has his hand tucked, you know, bowed into his, or sorry, his head bowed into his hand, and they're the kind of really intense emotion of that scene, the shame, the pain, the expulsion, the displacement, and, like, you know, I found these really amazing, like, mid 20th century Works Progress administration posters, informational posters about syphilis, and the importance of getting tested, and the importance of not letting shame get in the way of being tested and, and treated, and and they use the similar kind of iconography of two figures, almost as though they're like Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise as a way to kind of capture the tendency to feel shame around that, right. So you can see kind of already how the range of materials, or Salvador Dali has this amazing painting called Untitled from 1930 entitled Ion Tell, and it, and it's, it's a painting in which it's a kind of representing, or meant to represent, or thought to represent, no one never really knows, with Dali, but it, but it's meant to represent his expulsion from his family, from his family parrot in the Paradiso Go Seaside village of Kada case, and he, and he's sort of picked him himself naked with his genitals kind of covered by a bush, facing a dark forest, and kind of covering deeply, covering his face, while he points back at a kind of father figure, which I won't go into all the details, there's some wild, wild stuff there, but, but it's this, this, this work that you know, it's calling attention, and it's pointing in so many different directions, but it's so clearly a work that is referencing back Adam and Eve and their expulsion, and also making a kind of obvious reference to the way that Dali and the father figure are pointing at one another to that the famous representation by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel of God creating Adam, right. So there's all these references, but that chapter you asked about knowledge, so maybe that's the, like, heart of your question, right? Is about
PJ 32:43
knowledge I'm along for the ride, I'm enjoying this.
Speaker 1 32:46
Yeah, in the spirit of knowledge, right? Yeah, so, but it really is this, I guess, this idea that what happens with the fall is that Adam and Eve gain knowledge that they didn't have before, and the Latin, for instance, is et aperti sun docile boreum, and eyes both of them are opened, right? So they, they gain this knowledge, scientia science, literally, that tree is the tree of knowledge, and, and with that, I think they like introduces the possibility, the need to turn away, and poets like Milton, John Milton, and Paradise Lost kind of recognize this, this, this way in which, as humans, especially post laps area and post fallen humans, like this is an a kind of integral aspect to the way in which we encounter the world, right, the way in which we encounter it, not, not kind of totally transparently, sort of before the fall, the world was encountered in this like totally perfect, transparent way, but suddenly now we see things through shadows, right? We see things imperfectly, we see the pains of the world, all these things that we might not prefer not to see, and, and, and it all gets like captured in this gesture across so many different works of art, across so many different periods, and one kind of, I guess, unexpected place where it shows up, maybe the kind of most distant place is in this really stunning work of art by Joseph Wright of Darby, which is entitled The Experiment on a Bird and an Air Pump. Now, what is it? I should get the exact title for you. All right, an Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. So you can, you can view this online, but it's, it's a, it's a painting that captures this experiment, in which a natural philosopher, standing at the center, kind of theatrically operating the experiment, is is trapping a bird in a vacuum and seeing what happens to the bird without air, and gathered around this kind of dark candlelit table are various people, various ages paying attention, noticing this experiment. Some, you know, some are sitting there, taking almost like taking notes, taking time, you know, really, really kind of focused on the scene, right, as a kind of science experiment, there's lovers on the on off to the side who are just couldn't care less, right, they're in their own world, but there's these two girls, two young girls standing on the other side, and the youngest is kind of looking up at the experiment in, in kind of like in awe of pure curiosity, like what is happening here, but the slightly older child is covering her eyes, and she can't, she like can't look at this bird suffering in the name of science or in the name of knowledge, and the father, or the kind of father figure who's standing above these two young girls is pointing kind of in an instructional manner, saying, "Look, look, pay attention to this, and what that scene does for me, and it's interesting because it comes about in a moment where actually, like, experimentation, scientific experimentation, is on the rise and as part of the kind of debates about the role of science and the role of experiments, Adam and Eve have this, this kind of really central place, because the question is, can can science bring us back to the kind of perfect knowledge of Adam and Eve before the fall, or are we stuck with our human, you know, our deficient human knowledge that Adam and Eve bestowed to us because of the fall, and, and so, you know, one way of thinking about it is that because of that deficient knowledge, we have, like, the only way that we can gain knowledge about the world is through observation, which is going to be deficient, because we're not gods, but through kind of experimentation, experimentation by means of observation, repeatable experiments, and so this was one of them, and and that painting, though, captures like this thing that happens as we age, where we begin to become aware of how complicated knowledge is, and how difficult it can be, and how you know, in the name of knowledge, animals sometimes have to suffer, or whatever, right? Like, and that in the name of science we have to do cruel things or things that make us feel uncomfortable, and those two children capture that, like that kind of transition from innocence to experience, but yeah, that was a really long way of no, let me adding into the question of knowledge, but there it
PJ 38:22
is. What I.. that was a.. I think a beautiful place, because what I noticed in all the examples we've talked about so far is the knowledge of death, right? Like, that's that's Adam and Eve leaving, and I think there's nothing that shows it clearer than literally the cost of the knowledge of, hey, what happens to a bird in a vacuum? I think most people would think of as a gruesome sight. It's the cost of knowledge is death, which seems to be.. I mean, we see this with Leontius. Interesting. We don't have the knowledge as much with Agamemnon, but again, he's turning away from death, right? Am I, am I tracking there?
Speaker 1 39:03
Yeah, I mean, one could do all kinds of interesting things with it, like Agamemnon. He, you know, he, he goes back and forth about whether or not, like, it, the reason he needs to sacrifice his daughter is because he's received a prophecy that says to him, basically, that in order for the winds to return, such that the Greek ships can set sail again, and they can, that he must sacrifice his daughter, and so he, at first, he doesn't want to do this, obviously, and then he kind of gives in and sends a letter for his daughter, tell basically calling for her to come under the pretense of a false, the false pretense of a marriage, and but then he he changes his mind again and sends a secret letter tell. Her warning her off and telling her not to come, and then the secret letter is discovered, and then he's accused of being a kind of traitor and disingenuous, and so you know, again, like that is that if you read that story in in that way, and with an attention to knowledge, right, that's that's kind of what's at stake, right? Is like, how does knowledge unfold? What do people want to know? What is what needs to be kept secret or concealed?
PJ 40:29
Part of what you were saying with the ambivalence side, I see too, is that there's almost always a pull in two directions, right? In a way that if your eyes are focused, there everything is together, but you're always when you talk about even Dali pointing back, and like this, there's always that the turning away creates it's a physical representation of ambivalence.
Speaker 1 40:55
Yeah, but it's also, you know, it occurs in in time, and so St. Augustine, who I write about in a chapter that is about sensation, and what you know, what is it about vision that's capable of being turned away, as opposed to some of the other senses, like hearing, which is much harder to shut off, and I can talk more about that, but I'll just kind of use this one description that he has about the importance of memory in the way that we encounter objects in the world, and so he says, for instance, when we're looking at a statue, a three-dimensional statue, right, the way that we take it in is we look at one, the side in front of us, and then we begin to move around the statue, and as we move around the statue, we lose sight of the side that we saw at first, and we begin to gain sight about the next side, and progressively gain more and more, gain more and more visual information about the statue, but we have to use our memory in order to kind of piece those images together and and obtain an image in our minds of the statue as a whole, and you know one could extrapolate that to to the experience that that you're talking about, where you know, even when we're turning away from something, where we, we have already, we've kind of already seen it, or in the act of turning away, it takes place in time and memory and anticipation, those are those are really kind of crucial factors, right, and that it's that it's never, I guess it's never complete. It's never that is turning away is never complete. It's never absolute. It's never perfect. It's never, and and we're always kind of caught in this turning, and even when we turn away from something, we're often turning towards something else. When we turn, say, turn away from the world, cut off our senses as a whole in order to turn inward. We're turning inward, right? And there's something powerful about that as well, the kind of the introversion, the turning inward as well. So can do a lot,
PJ 43:14
and I really appreciate that you draw clear connections to modern day things, great example of the clear iconography of a syphilis health awareness poster using Adam and Eve, which is really like you're talking about refractions, like that's like whoa, like there's a lot going on there. What are some ways that you see these, even that people aren't aware of, but the way that meaning is embodied and played out. There's this kind of theme of mimesis all the way throughout, you know, I mean, that's throughout all literature, that's not like, but when you're talking about, like, the phone, for instance, what does turning away look like today? How does that show up today? And how has the way that the world is changing, even now, you've alluded to this a couple times, make turning away different, and yet, how does it remain the same?
Speaker 1 44:22
Yeah, I mean, I think I think one thing I've learned is just that turning away is a deeply human experience, whether we like it or not, whether we condemn it as a moral failure or not, whether we insist that you know, insist on sort of not trying not to turn away. It's, it's kind of always there, and it's the kind of thing that, that again, looking historically, looking back across time, tells it gives us a lot of information, useful information about our own, our own moment, right. We're not living. In isolation, we've inherited all of this kind of iconography, all of these images, all of this meaning over the centuries, millennia, and it's easy to think of ourselves as being in a.. and I do think we're living in a unique moment, everyone, you know, every moment in history thinks of itself as living in a unique moment that's completely radically different from the past, and yet we're inheritors of the past, we are, and, and I think we gain something, and this is the, in many ways, the real value of the humanities and the arts is that we gain something by reflecting on the traditions and conflicts and and and works of literature and works of art that we've inherited and that have informed who we are today, whether we like it or not, and, and so, yeah, I make, I'm excited by what I, what I perceive to be a kind of general public interest in encountering works of art from across history and visiting museums and walking through museums and looking at works of art, both contemporary works of art and works from the 19th century and the 18th century and the 17th century and antiquity and the middle ages, right, people are deeply interested in this and and I think it's because it helps us understand ourselves, it helps us feel connected to a kind of longer history, a longer trajectory, and when we think about what the future will bring, it helps us grapple with that unknowability.
PJ 46:57
Beautiful answer. I want to be respectful of your time. If I can ask you one last question, besides, besides buying and reading your excellent book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Jester, always want to make sure that final plug. Yeah, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, what is something you would tell the audience who has listened for close to the last hour to do in either to either go out and do or to meditate on in response to this.
Speaker 1 47:33
Yeah, I would just return to where we started and invite our listeners, your audience, if you know, if you're so moved to read this book, and then find this gesture in the world to, yeah, send, reach out to me. I love, I just received like this amazing typewritten letter in the mail out on my desk, this like typewritten letter, typewritten of someone saying, you know, I know I noticed this gesture, and giving me three more examples of it, and I just love the way that you know, and have to, in some ways, apologize to you, because you'll now, I think, you will now see it in a lot of different places, you'll see it, and when you're watching television at home, or when you're in the museum or again in the world around you, and I'd love to hear about that, and love to hear your reflections on how you know what, what meaning you derive from that, that experience or that encounter.
PJ 48:39
Dr. Saltzman, wonderful to have you on today. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1 48:44
Thanks. It was, it was really fun being in conversation with you. I appreciate
Unknown Speaker 48:47
it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai