Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Redacting “M. C. Escher and the Magen David” / W. C. Bamberger
Keywords: Art History; Cultural Studies; Literature.
<1> Late in 2006 I received a query from Rob Reginald at Borgo Press asking if I would be interested in gathering my scattered essays and publishing them as a collection. My relationship with Rob had begun nearly twenty years earlier: in 1993 he had published my second book, William Eastlake: High Desert Interlocutor. Rob had left the publishing business for a few years, but now he was back. Borgo had become an imprint of Wildside Press (specialists in Fantasy and SF titles), and Rob was quickly adapting to the new protocols of publish-on-demand, e-books, et al. He had already agreed to publish 43 Views of Steve Katz, my study of the brilliant, neglected novelist, written in forty-three non-sequential chapters—a book I had thought destined to stay in word processor electron limbo forever. I was grateful to Rob, and I trusted him to know what he was doing; I agreed to shuffle through my back pages.
<2> In searching my shelves I found that I had a few essays that might be worth reprinting, although hardly enough to form a collection. As I began assembling the essays the jackdaw in me grew conflicted. I had published essays on writers, artists and musicians, and there was also a short story from back in the time tunnel that I felt was pedantic enough that it could hold its own in essay company—as well as being an oblique recognition of the fact that essays, in their selective premises and idiosyncratic conclusions, are nearly as much “fiction” as are stories. I had written these pieces unsystematically, following my shifting interests wherever they led. Now, gathering them up, I was (perhaps a bit too) pleased by their eclectic range, by the jackdaw gene that years of concentrated reading and listening and looking had spliced into me. It worried me, as well. The individual essays had held their own in their periodical appearances, but I wasn’t at all sure they would hold together between covers.
<3> A book is an object, but it also is a claim. “A book,” even “a book of,” asserts that it is in some way a whole, a territory with borders (a “bound” territory?), within which the prospective reader can profitably—and cumulatively—explore. (Open access or otherwise cooperative texts change the nature of this claim, but do not dismiss it.) A published book of essays with stand-offish contents, pieces that have nothing to say to or about one another, that do not lead readers to see more depths in each as a result of their mutual relationships, personally leave me cold. They seem arbitrary, give even the most revelatory writing a cast of being dashed; such collections strike me as only stacks of pages, loose sheets behind a door. Yet a book with contents too tightly bound around a single narrative becomes claustrophobic, hectoring, succeeds only as propaganda. Either would feel to me a failure.
<4> I didn’t know when I’d have another chance to publish a book of essays and I wanted this one to hold together, in my mind if in no one else’s, as a book. The solution was obvious: I needed to write more essays, fill in those blanks that had only become blanks when I decided on the already-extant essays I would use, to find the overarching structure that would unite them in the way I had in mind. Several ideas for new essays had found their way to me over the previous few months, and were impatiently waiting for my attention. I decided I would use Rob’s query as the occasion to let those ideas show me what they wanted to say. It sounded simple enough: I asked the publisher for three months; in the end, I took a year.
<5> Anyone reading the annual Best American Essays collections (to point to only one convenient gathering) will have noticed how, over the years, the selections have steadily moved from wide-ranging, deeply-thought core samplings of ideas, to a bland and nearly indistinguishable stream of personal narratives written in simplest possible language, memoirs, homilies about bringing out one’s “creativity” with the same brisk efficiency one brings a vacuum cleaner out of a closet, heart-tugging scenes from the bittersweet of life—having known a dying person is gold in them there pages. My ideal for an essay remains a very different one: Milton Klonsky’s "Art & Life: A Menippean Paean to the Flea; or, Did Dostoevsky Kill Trotsky?” which I first read in American Review in 1974.[1] Klonsky was an authentic “Village Intellectual,” a surly loner who had published in Commentary, Partisan Review, even Esquire. “Art & Life” looked at Robert Hooke’s invention of the microscope, William Blake, Russian politics, Christopher Smart and much more, tied them all together and wound up with a “jump from star to * .” My individual essays didn’t have Klonsky’s dizzying range, but I hoped that the collection might come close. To accomplish this, I decided, I would need to find some structure that would make them feel like a whole—if a whole as obliquely and surprisingly jointed as Klonsky’s piece, and, ideally, even find a way to end the collection with my own version of Klonsky’s ecstatic leap from star to asterisk.
<6> When I took a editor-eyed look at what I had at hand, I found seven pieces I could use: essays on the writers Harry Mathews, Kenward Elmslie and Anne Waldman; one on the painter Trevor Winkfield, and another on guitar genius Gary Lucas; I had the short story, which concerned Navajos guarding their language against contamination, and a memorial essay I’d written about novelist William Eastlake. The first three writers formed a natural grouping (they are, in fact, long-time friends); the short story and much of Eastlake’s work were set in the Navajo country of the Southwest, and so made another mutually reinforcing pair. The Winkfield and the Lucas, however, were orphans.
<7> Without knowing what I needed, I began—began, in fact, by being simplistically literal about “beginning.” While writing reviews for a small review paper in the 1980s I had come across an issue of a magazine called Transformations. Its cover was a collage of hairy male torsos in bondage, but inside I found an essay titled “The Seduction of Eve,” by Jonathan Brent. Brent examines the language of Genesis, the puns and other wordplay in the original Hebrew that run through this deeply serious book. A favorite example:
[A] pun occurs in the attribution of the snakes as “subtle,” a word that is etymologically related to the word for “naked,” which is used to characterize Adam and his wife in the verse just preceding the snake’s appearance. [2]
<8> Brent was my introduction to the world of Biblical philology, or “scientific criticism,” and I read a number of books on this approach, which is also known as “the scientific method.” Experts in this field hold that the Bible has been assembled from a great number of sources, including disparate legends that predated the appearance of the Jews and a number of accounts had been blended together by a figure known as the Redactor. It seemed logical to begin with the beginning, to write about Genesis.
<9> One question that stayed with me as I reread Brent and other studies of Genesis was the question of why, if someone had been so bold as to revise and edit such sacred texts, he or she or they hadn’t gone on to refine them into a seamless whole. The Old Testament is notoriously ill-jointed, with inconsistencies and contradictory accounts and even within a number of important stories. Thinking through this as a provincial intellectual atheist rather than as a religious believer, I wondered if perhaps the Redactor had not wanted the process of wondering and interpretation to end, and so had deliberately left problems for his religious intellectual descendents to grapple with.
<10> Strictly defined, a Redactor (the capitalization is mine; I stand by it) is someone who “reduces,” who sorts and concentrates, and this is the meaning that inheres to the standard use of the term in this kind of Biblical criticism. But in my reading, in the idealized intellectual persona I impose on this figure, the goal is not to reduce or to concentrate. Rather, the Redactor I glimpse in looking at Genesis and the other books, was attempting to capture a spirit, to find the right combination of pieces, the just-right arrangement that would make clear the moral approach the texts are meant to capture and convey down through the ages. And this moral approach, while dictating strict rules of conduct, thought and even diet, is as much based in the imperative that Man has to think and decide for himself as it is in holy edict. The Biblical Redactor, this particular atheist’s vision of this Redactor, didn’t want to make things too easy for his readers.[3] To have done so would have been to violate something bigger than textual unity.
<11> The image came to me of the Redactor gathering in a mountain of texts, sorting and refining them, working toward the pinnacle of achievement we call the Old Testament. I titled the essay “Genesis Ziggurat,” after the sort of pyramid that proceeds upward as a series of steps rather than as a smooth incline. I ended my essay with a description of the Redactor’s pyramid being topped by a second, balancing precariously atop the first, its point downward, spreading up and out from the point of the Redactor’s triumphant moment as argument and interpretation immediately began (re-)widening the range of the readings.
<12> Having written the essay for the beginning, I wondered what I could write as a concluding essay. I kept coming back to the image of the tip-to-tip pyramids in the first essay. If I could do something with triangles in conclusion, that would give me a nice set of bookends to hold my pages together. I thought of triangles side-by-side and base-to-base, but nothing came of the images. I considered the possibility of writing about Buckminster Fuller’s geodesics and icosahedrons, forms Fuller built up from triangles, in gradual accumulations, the way corals build up reefs. That coral reefs and Fuller’s Spaceship Earth ideas were both dying was true enough, but took me too far out along a tangent from my base, the triangle. Scribbling triangles again and again on some of my daughter’s 4-by-6 index cards, I eventually saw how, if the topmost pyramid were lowered to symmetrically overlap the bottom pyramid, they would form a “Star of David.”
<13> My primary association of the Star of David (or Magen David) is not with the Israeli flag, but with the negative one of it being used as a culling symbol, of how the Nazis forced Jews to wear armbands or sewn-in badges to make them easier to separate from the herd of the subject populations they conquered. It would be difficult, I knew, to find a new angle on this horror, so I temporarily put the idea aside while I assembled notes for other essays. One of these was to be on the art of Darragh Park. Park was little-known, but I had come across some of his work in the mimeoed and stapled literary magazines that published the New York Nexus writers I favored—Mathews, Elmslie, James Schuyler. It turned out that Park had long been a friend of the man I consider to be the most interesting of all living artists, Trevor Winkfield. Park had also done covers for the books of poet James Schuyler. I owned a pencil study for the cover of A Few Days, and had recently begun a by-phone friendship with Park. We soon discovered that we had a common interest—how the mind processes unfamiliar visual information. Park had done a number of paintings and drawings that tried to capture the moment of initial visual disorientation; I had written an intellectual biography of a brilliant perceptual researcher named Adelbert Ames, Jr., and our conversations led me back to Ames yet again. Ames was the inventor of, most famously, the “Distorted Room,” a specially built “impossible” room where adults can appear smaller than their children and water can appear to run uphill. (These were a staple of 1950s roadside attractions, and are still included in a number of science museums across the country.) Some of Ames’ ideas, I knew, had by a circuitous route influenced the later graphic work of M. C. Escher. This route, this triangle—Park to Ames to Escher—led me to my closing essay, “M. C. Escher and the Magen David.”
<14> As is the case with anyone with even a mild interest in graphic art, I was familiar with and appreciated most of the common Escher images—the eternally climbing stairs, the interlocking animals and gnomes, “impossible objects” (it was these that Ames’ work influenced), et al—and I owned several illustrated studies of his work. In rereading these books about Escher’s life I became intrigued by the fact that during the years leading to and those of World War II, he had been hounded from country to country as he tried to find a society where he could work undisturbed and where his family would be safe. He left Italy, for example, because his son was being forced to wear a uniform and to give the Fascist salute at school. Escher eventually returned to his home country of the Netherlands and settled there, even though the country was under Nazi occupation.
<15> Escher biographies always note that one of his first graphic arts teachers was Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. De Mesquita was Jewish and when Escher returned to the Netherlands he found that de Mesquita was required to wear the yellow armband with the Magen David. Escher periodically traveled to visit his old teacher, until de Mesquita was finally taken away and gassed. After this murder, Escher went to de Mesquita’s home and gathered up what prints he could find, in his teacher’s empty house, loose pages behind doors and scattered on the stairs, and donated them to the Netherlands’ national museum. A print reproduced in one of the books had the dirty imprint of a hobnail boot on it. Escher failed to save his teacher, I noted, but had made a point of saving the art. It seemed to me there was an essay here, particularly after I also read that Escher hadn’t cared much for his fellow man, was in fact a curmudgeonly misanthropist, and hated meeting or talking to people. He particularly disliked anyone who spoke—“made a fuss”—about their problems. I wondered why he hadn’t tried to do something to save his old teacher—an unfair question, I knew, but one that persisted.
<16> In searching for what an essay will eventually turn out to be about, I have always found it useful to go directly to the heart of any associated cliché and apply a bit of “cleavage,” as the English Marxist music critic and radio host Ben Watson might put it, to split apart the “given” ideas and see if anything new might be found within them. The cliché I chose to split open in Escher’s case was the thought-saving device that the mature, post World War II, Escher had turned away from his early landscapes and portraits to making designs that had nothing to do with humanistic concerns simply because of his interest in the mathematics of such designs. This seemed to me more likely to have been a result of the terrible things he had seen and been subject to in the late 1930s and 1940s. Writing my way through this cliché, finding Escher’s misanthropy concealed within it, led me back to de Mesquita and his armband. I then noticed the similarity of the Magen David to an “impossible object” of the kind for which Escher was so well known. Why, I wanted to ask, had he been interested in “impossible objects” that had nothing to do with humanity, and yet seemed disinterested in the Magen David his friend and teacher was forced to wear? Again, I knew this was an unfair question, but I was drawn to it nonetheless.
<17> When I had finished a draft of the part of the essay that describes de Mesquita’s murder, I decided I should note how long Escher outlived him (28 years, as it turns out). I was at work, stealing time from my job to finish the essay, rechecking some facts in one of my Escher books, when, on impulse, I also checked to see what Escher’s final completed print had been, hoping I might find some subtle parallel I could draw between de Mesquita’s end and Escher’s. The final print is “Snakes,” first printed in July 1969, more than a quarter century after de Messina’s death. The print includes three of the title creatures, symmetrically arranged and intertwined, coiling through what appeared to be a netting of chainmail . . ..
<18> And then I saw it. We all tend to discount stories we hear that have too pat or too neat a conclusion, but this is exactly what occurred: I carried the book to a copy machine, photocopied “Snakes,” then sat down with a ruler and a red fine point pen. I connected the heads of the three snakes, and then connected the furthest points of the three coiling bodies where they curved out beyond the circle of chain mail. The two overlapping triangles that appeared formed a Magen David. This was a gift, a revelation—the snakes, with their associations of evil, a mirroring of the snake’s appearance in the Genesis I had begun with, snakes that I had analyzed philologically—an unrecognized Escher fact coming to me from nowhere, forming the exact image I was investigating.
<19> I transcribed the discovery into the essay, left it without comment as the final word. I wanted readers to look at this open-ended conclusion and begin their own thinking-through of what it might mean.
<20> There are a number of obvious questions that might be asked: Was this simply a coincidence or did Escher, who was not Jewish, intend it? A more complex version of this question might be, was it meant as some kind of symbolic compensation for what Escher the misanthropist had been either unable or unwilling to do for de Mesquita? Was it meant as some kind of oblique compensation or even self-recrimination? These are among the questions that I hope any readers will ask themselves after reading “M C. Escher and the Magen David.”[4]
<21> The primary question I have to ask myself is, of course, how much credit can I take for this essay? A triangular trail—not quite an accidental one, as the paths were brought into being by way of some of my most persistent interests—had led me to the perfect conclusion I had sought with no certainty that it existed. Who or what deserves most of the credit? How much goes to “the writer” in me, how much to coincidence, to my unconscious, to the Nazis’ heavy-handed taste for visual symbolism, how much to Escher’s misanthropy? I’m unsure. But I am sure of one thing: in this case more than in most of my work, I was less an author than a (small “r”) redactor.
Notes
<1> This was reprinted in the posthumous Klonsky collection, A Discourse on Hip, ed. Ted Solataroff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). This reprint doesn’t, however, include the seven-page insert of illustrations that accompanied the original publication. (And, as U. K. Marxist music critic Ben Watson pointed out to me, Klonsky name doesn’t even appear on the spine of this book!) Anyone interested in reading “Art & Life” should seek out a copy of American Review 20.
[2] Jonathan Brent, “The Seduction of Eve,” Transformations (v.3, #3, Winter 1987), 88. Because I am always carrying this around, rereading it, puzzling over it, I rarely remember where I last put it down. I had to lift this citation from a footnote in my “intellectual autobiography” in-progress, to be titled In the Fourth a Whisk Broom. (From a comment by Kierkegaard.) A few years back, I contacted Brent at Yale and asked if he had written other such essays. He answered that he had once planned to write an essay on each book of the Old Testament, but had drifted away from the project. He now writes detailed, perceptive books on modern Russian history and Stalinist politics. At some level I can feel but not yet articulate, the hermeneutics of these two subjects seem to have deep similarities—and the Russian material creates very real connections with the Klonsky essay that underlies everything here.
[3] I’m open to charges of projection, but I don’t think this invalidates my claim.
[4] See W. C. Bamberger, And, In Conclusion, I Would Also Like to Mention Hydrogen (Borgo Press, 2009), 155–165.
Appendix: Interview
Alistair P. Benjamin: You write that you sought to create an overarching structure. . . .
W. C. Bamberger: To find one. . . .
APB: To find an overarching structure because you felt that would unify your collection. Your essays range across a number of what a library catalogue would call “subject areas,” but they all have of course been shaped into life by your personal aesthetic sense, have your narrative style in common. Doesn’t persona provide form? Why didn’t you trust the essays to come across as unified simply by having all been shaped by your writing self?
WCB: Because I have a suspicious mind. As you say, I write about a number of things, whatever idea snags my interest at a given time. I write less to tell “what I know” than to find out things I don’t. But, I’m not an inexhaustibly imaginative person, and I always suspect there are connections I have missed available within and between every one of my essays, connections that others reading them may well find. If I don’t search until I find the arrangement that reinforces the connections I want to make, highlights (even if only subliminally) the ideas I want to amplify between the separate essays, a reader could easily hear harmonies that, to me, would be “wrong.” Or so I suspect.
APB: That would be reasonable enough if we were talking about sorting and arranging a selection of previously published essays. But you tell us that you wrote essays to fit in the blanks created by your preliminary but incomplete selection and arrangement of the seven essays you had on hand. Doesn’t it interfere with the free flow of an idea when there is a predetermined conclusion—or role to play in a form—to which it has to conform?
WCB: Ideas are hardier than you are giving them credit for. One thing I hope my essays in general will illustrate is the fact that there are any number of ways an idea might develop itself as you write, that an idea has any number of paths, of secrets within it. Ezra Pound was one of the most ego-crippled writers in history, but he had it right when he said “Make it New.” That is, one of a writer’s responsibilities is to avoid writing in the same old way about the most easily glimpsed aspects of an idea. Finding the way to an idea’s most hidden secrets can be difficult; the easy road tempts us all, and we all have to find our own way to not succumb to it. The Symbolists and Expressionists enjoyed deranging themselves with drugs and drink and the delusion that they were Poe reincarnated. I’ve found that setting out a few structural gates that have to be passed through—like those flimsy poles downhill ski racers zoom between—can help lead me to new ways of ideas and thinking interacting, new means of tempting the unexpected to emerge from the ideas that inhabit me, of providing them with new levers to work the clumsy mannequin we think of as “thinking.”
APB: Setting up structural gates for words to pass through sounds like OULIPO territory.
WCB: The French writing fraternity (are there any female OULIPIANs?) that uses strict structures, logarithms, the banishment of selected letters of the alphabet, and such devices to generate their texts, right. Harry Mathews is a member.
APB: And one of your essays is on Harry Mathews. How big an influence is he?
WCB: I have to split poor Harry in half, I’m afraid. I was an avid and awed reader (and inept imitator: my unpublished surrealist novel manuscript, Waterwheels, was written in imitation) of Mathews’ Tlooth for years before I learned of the existence of the OULIPO and its procedures. What drew me and kept me coming back was Mathews’ style, the sound and the mystery, and most of all the truly amazing inventiveness of the mechanical devices found in his books, remain a very strong influence to this day. Read any of my fiction and you’ll find it lurking there. But as for the OULIPIAN procedures? I once asked Mathews’ friend, poet Kenward Elmslie, what he thought of the ideas that worked themselves out by way of the OULIPO. He told me that, for him, they were too much like French cooking—overly fussy. Elmslie said that he preferred to make up his own structural limiters hit and miss, “frontier style.” I would echo that answer. Steve Katz’s work has many brilliant and unique structural aspects and he also creates them by feel rather than by algorithm; by listening to and responding to what his ideas tell him. And that’s how I shape my essays, as well.
APB: I’ve noticed, in your essay above and in this conversation, that you tend to speak of ideas as if they were separate entities, things that exist independent from us, that direct a writer rather than the other way around. Is this how you think?
WCB: I think it’s obvious that ideas are sentient, that they are entities with their own agendas. I’ve written about this at length in “The Haven of Difficult Discourse,” an essay that, for your convenience, is only to be found on a website at the University of Helsinki (https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/15299). In this essay I set out my reasons for thinking this, and of some ofthe implications. Anyone who finds it too incredible to believe is free to smile and look at it as just another kind of non-narcotic derangement: just as the position that “a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg” can help break habits of thought, so “a thinker is only an idea’s way of creating more ideas” can do the same. I, however, mean it literally.
APB: That’s all my questions. Do you have anything you would like to add?
WCB: I’d like to betray my basic beliefs and offer a little advice to anyone trying to write.
APB: Offering advice to other writers goes against your basic beliefs?
WCB: The best advice I or anyone could offer would be, “Don’t start, don’t even think about it. Writing is miserable and destructive. . . .” and more in the same vein. To offer anything else is to knowingly encourage destructive behavior. This is not a joke.
APB: OK. And the second best advice you would reluctantly offer is?
WCB: Find more patience. When you run out of patience, find more, and when that runs out start over from the beginning. If it makes you feel better you can honestly equate patience with some pale French poet’s laudanum—patience truly is derangement because it keeps you from settling for the known thing, for the arrangement already present in your thinking. Having patience means you’ll wait for the unexpected to come along, wait for an idea to finally relent and give you something you could never have imagined writing—or finding in a graphic of snakes.
Tapping into an artesian well of patience will also help keep you from having to confront some of the writer’s smallness in yourself. When I finished “M. C. Escher and the Magen David” I immediately submitted it to The American Scholar, a prestigious magazine that informs writers that it accepts only about 2% of unsolicited submissions. Very soon after, I received a response: my essay had been accepted, I was being sent a big check, the essay would appear in the next issue. I received the check and cashed same. I finished the other essays for my collection, but delayed its publication while I waited on The American Scholar. After three issues had gone by without my essay appearing, I wrote the editor. “Issue after next,” I was told. Three more issues went by, and I finally told Borgo to issue the book. Maybe six weeks after And, In Conclusion, I Would Like to Mention Hydrogen was made available, I received an email from an editor at The American Scholar. He had been assigned to edit my essay for the forthcoming issue but in doing a search he had found that it had already been published. They would not be publishing it, after all. I told myself that instead of appearing in a famous literary magazine where it would have been read by many thousands of people, “M. C. Escher and the Magen David” had appeared in a book that in six weeks had sold six copies. And this is how I (re-)discovered that smallness. . . .
APB: I’ll remember to put those parentheses and hyphen in the transcription.
WCB: Thank you.
Alistair P. Benjamin began writing as a private in the U. S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944. As a young boy in the mid-1950s he was adopted by a white ranching family in New Mexico. This is only his second appearance in print this century.
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