Babel
Arc de Trump doesn't speak French
Countless moons ago in my weekly musings here, I mapped out the many rings of Hell and the spaces surrounding (Limbo, Purgatory).
The precarious construction of the Underworld looks something like this according to classic artists who try to envision the depths of suffering based on words from writers like Dante:
Take this upward funnel and revert it and you have this sort of sandcastle below known as Babel. When we hear the word Babel we think of precarious, like a leaning tower of Pisa, but, you have to admit—compared to Hell—this version looks quite stable:
Babel is something of a Ziggurat, or a temple in the form “of a terraced compound of successively receding stories or levels,” which seems like sounder construction to me.
But other artists like oft-goofy Brueghel take the mythic tower to the wobbly extremes originally intended:
The story of Babel—though the word Babel doesn’t actually appear in the Bible—is in the book of Genesis and, as a generic if awful tower, is meant to explain the origin of different languages and cultures. A wobbly construction of competing words.
According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia), where they agree to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh, observing these efforts and remarking on humanity’s power in unity, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other and scatters them around the world, leaving the city unfinished.
The confusion of tongues (Latin: confusio linguarum) resulting from the construction of the Tower of Babel accounts for the fragmentation of human languages: God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood and so God brought into existence multiple languages, rendering humanity unable to understand each other.
Biblical things that make you go hmmm. Lessons I derive from this to apply to our own whack times: human leaders should not try to erect structures competing in size with their egos because they are too dumb to understand history, language and culture.
Give me confusio linguarum any day over whatever garbled tongue this man speaks:
Since I came upon the Library of Babel newsletter on Substack, I’ve sort of applied this term to a short book I just finished reading, a wild rant of a novella published in 2022 by Storybook ND, called Spadework for a Palace by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki, and handed to me by a friend.
Verses my previous musings on if “bad” men have any consciousness about their badness, this book is 100 percent consciousness. Stream of consciousness in the flood (as we might try to build above), the subtitle is “Entering the Madness of Others,” with a epigram: “Reality is no obstacle.” Our protagonist is a library clerk, bored and distracted with his endless notebook entries where he articulates his obsession with his namesake, Herman Melville; dreams of constructing a library of books that just exists inaccessible to anyone with no entrance; contemplates art and architecture from his immersed angle; and meanwhile provides hints in the foreground of his life unraveling (wife leaving him, job ejecting him, now he’s in a mental ward).
On art:
Art is a cloud that provides shade from the sweltering heat, or a flash of lightning that splits the sky, where in that shade’s shelter, or that lightning’s flash, the world simply becomes not the same as before, a space is created that’s suddenly very cold, or very hot—in other words, due to some ineffable agency, every single particle of a given space all at once becomes something other than its surroundings.
The madman attempts to plunge the depths of fathoming where he is/what’s it about underneath in a way that only certain artists even begin to broach. A rare moment where the author takes a breath and uses punctuation and white space is when he’s really making a point or quoting someone special:
WHERE ARE WE.
I’m not sure whether all this is now sufficiently clear.
That we are in Manhattan.
And that Manhattan lies on top of a rock.
And this rock is a giant whose size, mass and weight bring about the most intricate interconnectedness between us and the monumental forces of nature.
And the present-day and, I am sorry to have to write, the future prevailing situation in Manhattan hides this interconnectedness.
And that it is the architecture of Manhattan that hides it.
And that the architecture that took shape in modern cities hides our exciting connectedness to the question of WHERE ARE WE.
More about this rock, this artifice of Manhattan:
So that in fact here in Manhattan we have nothing to do with the Earth we live on, and therefore have nothing to do with reality, that is to say everything is covered up, reality is covered up, and an artist’s or a philosopher’s task is to demonstrate the plain structure of the relationship that may restore the connectedness between the Earth and humans.
Around this rock, there is ocean, and what’s way down there? This odd little book’s Melville fixation makes me really want to take up the quest again of reading the giant Moby Dick, which I actually loved in college for its moments of tantalizing weirdness (memorably Queequeg and Ishmael in bed, for instance).
And these tantalizing Ahab attempts of trying to get to the real meat of the matter, as the author quotes here:
Ahab addressing the severed head of the whale, as Hamlet addressed the skull, here it is,
“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which though ungarnished with a beard, yet there and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secrete thing that is in thee. Of all divers, though hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful waterland, there was they most familiar home.”
And so from this frigate earth, I present you this week with these somewhat nonsensical Babel babblings of minor non sequiturs, because I like words, meaning, and exploring the impossible depths. These are worthy subworldly missions. To chase the great white whale or circuit the dark side of the Moon or diagram the rings of Hell or ponder the absurdity of such structured Manhattan. Our President, star of this wayward reality show that is killing us all, and only crazy in the worst ways, has torn up the East Wing and aims to build a monumental arch for the country’s 250th anniversary (or rather for himself) that would dwarf other structures with its 250 feet (vs. 99-foot Lincoln, 164-foot Arc de Triomphe) and celebrate not these wonders but rather the demise of democracy.
As I hope even his most ardent (former?) fans are realizing, he is not here to build but destroy, so let’s let our batty author of The Palace riff on that a bit:
Destruction is going on every single moment, and the astounding meaning of Woods’s message is that the whole works, the entire workings of the universal is destruction and annihilation, devastation and ruination, how on earth can I say this right, in other words there is no dichotomy at work here, no such thing exists, it is imbecilic to talk about antithetical forces, two opposed sides, a reality describable in terms of mutually complementary concepts, silly to talk about good and evil, because all is evil, or nothing is, for total reality can only be seen as continual destruction, permanent catastrophe, reality is catastrophe, that is what we inhabit, from the most miniscule subatomic particle to the greatest planetary dimensions, everything, do you understand, and again I am not addressing anyone in particular, everything plays the roles of both perpetrator and victim in this drama of inevitable catastrophe, therefore we simply cannot do otherwise than acknowledge this, and deal with the makeup of destruction, for instance the enormous forces that are shaping our Earth at every moment, we must confront the fact of war on Earth, because there is war in the Universe, and here comes Melville again with his brutal notion, that there is all of this and God is nowhere, that benevolent God the creator and judge is nowhere to be found, but instead we have Satan, and nothing but Satan, do you understand?!
Comprenez-vous? Some nonsense makes a ton of sense. If good literature can teach us anything: choose your madman wisely.
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Feels like the massive wealth being built by all these fuckwad billionaires is a hidden Tower of Babel streaming further towards an impossibly high target including but not limited to going to space itself. Not long before we are all virtually looking out for bitcoins falling from the sky as it all comes tumbling down.
The more exaggeratedly large the monument, the more insecure the leader, it seems to me!