Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method

One of the great pleasures in my life is having gone to grad school but having not pursued an academic career. I would love to be sure an academic gig, but only if I could jump the ten years plus that I’m striving for tenure (or however long it might be, less or more) and go straight to the part where I’m so tenured I only have to worry about showing up for the few classes I’m asked to teach. That way, I could read whatever I want and have a ton of time to do it. As it stands, I have summer vacations, and for my entire teaching career I have read what I pleased, as I pleased to. No need to keep up with ever little detail in my field.

That said, I studied history in school because I liked it, and I can say that I like reading academic history more than histories intended for the general public, most of the time. I say this not to sound elitist, but because the best academic history operates on a much greater level of detail than popular histories, and I find that detail interesting. One of my big questions as a person is that of the relationship between general and specific.

A number of years ago a friend TA’d for a course in which the prof had assigned Carlo Ginzburg‘s The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, which on my friend’s recommendation I purchased. I began reading it, liked it, got distracted, and gave it away with the rest of my library when I moved to Senegal. In the intervening years, however, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and for my birthday I asked my parents each to get me some Ginsburg books. This one, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, I actually bought myself to round out the set, breaking my rule about not buying books any more. The library didn’t have it, I say in my defense.

The book is a series of articles, the contents of which I checked out before buying it, which seemed most interesting to me when they focus on what Ginsburg is justly famous for: documenting popular culture, witchcraft particularly, using sources hostile to the subject. One title explains the basic point: “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist.” We might actually as a general rule reverse the two and note the Anthropologist as Inquisitor, had not Vine Deloria already done so so beautifully. Ginzburg, however, is dealing with an extreme example of the basic methodological question in history, which is that of source material. Ginsburg uses inquisitorial records of heresy to examine popular religious belief. To do this, he needs to compensate for the inherent bias of the source material, in particular the tendency of inquisitors to understand statements of the accused as recitations of the Church’s notions of heresy–everything leads up to the Witches’ Sabbat–rather than as statements in and of themselves. Nor are the accused speaking freely. Everything the accused says is an attempt to on the one hand be credible to the inquisitor and at the same time innocent of capital crime.

This to me is a fascinating inquiry. As such, the most interesting–and without question, my primary concern to me in reading anything is whether or not I happen to find it interesting–articles in the book are the ones that deal with popular religion and methodology. Codification of eros in Titian is of abstract interest to me, but I’d rather have been told the point in conversation with someone over pints than have taken the time to read the article. I did so as a point of principle, having paid for the book.

Definitely not a starting point for Ginzburg’s work. The Night Battles or, I am told, The Worms and the Cheese are certainly worth anyone’s time. I have those both waiting near my bed to finish by summer’s end.

“Body & Soul”

“Body & Soul” (1997) from The Bathroom Mirror.

“Body & Soul (live)” (2005) from Live at Keith Danner’s House.

I smell my pillow and I hear a sound.
My eyelids open and I’m earthward bound.
Pretty soon the sisters wheel me around.
“Body & Soul.”

It’s Tuesday morning so they wash my hair.
The interns greet me as I pass the stair.
I start to mumble and the sisters hear a prayer.
“Body & Soul.”

I hear the Father‘s footsteps up and down the hall.
He’ll take all morning but he’ll see us all.
I hear him whisper and I hear him call.
“Body & Soul.”

The dishes break and then a rolling train goes by.
My head jerks backward and I shut my eye.
My head sees Heaven and the swirling angels sigh.
“Body & Soul.”

The sunburnt courtyard.  The dusty hill.
The metal grating on my windowsill.
The wooden beads and all these crushed-up pills.
“Body & Soul.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tune lately, as I’m going to perform it in a couple weeks and I believe I will be able to convince my harmonica-playing pal, Colin, to up and join me on this one and likely a few others.  He and I played for the first time in 20 years last spring, noted in a previous post on “Full Tank of Gas,” and when I went to his pad one afternoon about a month later this was one of the things we did.  Predictably, it worked well.

One could argue these things, but I don’t think I’ve written a better tune that would fall into the “blues” category than “’Body & Soul.’”  Interestingly, I’ve also not written a tune that I can recall that so completely resists orchestration of any sort.  The House Carpenters recorded this one evening as we taped our rehearsal, and while I was fairly pleased with the results, nobody else liked it.  Most likely, it was the tune I was happy with, not the arrangement.

More than one person, in praising my tunes, has pointed out that I give a sense of place in them, and I’ve always felt I couldn’t get a higher compliment.  I read Vine Deloria’s God is Red a couple years ago, and it really had an impact on me, aside from being a pure pleasure to read because of his prose.  Contrasting Christianity as it is practiced in North America with a generalized Indian—that is, North American Indigenous—religious practice, the fundamental distinction is that North American Christianity has totally abstracted itself from any sense of place while Indian practice is entirely predicated on the specificity of place.  I’ve thought a lot about that, and it really seems to me that things would improve a lot in this country if we (collectively) started to deal with the specificity of place as well as deal with dreams, as in dreaming consciousness.

The place in the tune is specific, if imagined.  There is not to my knowledge any Catholic hospital in Riverside, CA that offers the kind of care described in the tune.  I don’t even think there’s a Catholic hospital.  That said, the land is absolutely there.  The “dusty hills” are the same as in “The Man From Manila”:

These hills rise above me, devoid of all plant life.

The live version of the tune, above, was recorded at a house concert just below those hills as I imagine them in both of these tunes.

I have at times introduced this tune as a blues number about mind/body dualism.  I don’t actually buy into the concept, I’d state clearly, but I imagine that someone who is quadriplegic would find great meaning in it even if one rejected the idea ultimately.  It would seem to reflect one’s life.  It’s interesting to me that some people are placed by circumstance to live in a totally existential sense, certain philosophical or religious concepts that I learned about in school or read in books.  I saw this a lot in Senegal, where I knew some deeply spiritual people, in a very true sense, but also who at some level had so little materially that it seemed that they almost–I know how problematic it is putting this way, but the sense is still there–had no choice but to detach from material things.

I’d read in the few years before I wrote this tune a lot of William Blake, as well as some critical literature on him and his work alongside a biography.  So, Blake had visions.  Of interest to me was a contrast between people who placed his visions into scientific categories–he suffered from some sort of mental illness which may or may not have played a role in his economic difficulties–and those who simply reported that he had visions.  E.P. Thompson, whom I’d discovered in grad school and really liked, wrote what was for him a short book on Blake, and placed him in his very specific religious context, that of radical London religious dissent, that is to say, Protestant but not Church of England, and very much in tune with notions of individual revelation, rather than ecclesiastical authority.  Not only Blake had visions, but lots of people in the fair number or small churches he attended did.  It’s just what you did when you were a radical English religious dissenter in the eighteenth century.

It’s really troubling to me when I look, from the outside, at Christianity in the United States, though by no means is the following characterization applicable to individual Christians or all churches.  It seems as secular a phenomenon as I could dream up, because it seems more of a social network or social identity then a means to some actual, experiential spiritual or religious anything.  The social network aspect of it can manifest in very good and important ways, as in for example The Catholic Worker movement, or in the business cards I’d find on my door in Riverside for gardeners offering their services, cards with the Christian fish symbol on it.  I imagine that putting that symbol on the card actually worked to drum up business.  The social aspect of modern American Christianity can be seen of course in its most negative aspects as well in some of the hatred people spew in the name of religion, and though I’m well aware that this is a virulent minority I also know that it’s very important to pay close attention to these people.

The tune, to bring the digression above back to the song, contrasts the nuns and priest, who obviously do good work but who are going about their day in a world that seems to them to be exactly as it appears, with the main figure in the tune, who has ecstatic visions.  I suppose that in my life that the satisfactions I’ve found become fewer and fewer as I go up the chain of any hierarchy.  I appreciate Blake more than I do any Christian leaders, and I appreciate that Hui Neng was an illiterate woodcutter.  I had a professor at Pitzer who taught the Tao Te Ching, and when going over the passage that reads something like, “the Tao is like water: it seeks the low places that men disdain,” he asked, “isn’t this a loser philosophy?”  He then added, “I’m not saying it isn’t true.”