January 2012 – Page 4

Wednesday's flowers

unforgettable fabrics of memory

A sixty-nine-year-old woman living in New York City remembered an event in her life as a ten-year-old girl living in a Polish village in 1937. Here is her permanently stitched memory:

After he came to my defense in a fight with my friend, my brother Ruven was afraid to come home, knowing that my mother, who had heard about the fight, had threatened to beat him. He spent the night in the horse barn. In the morning, after my mother left, I fixed him a bowl of borscht and crawled through the kitchen window to bring it to him.

Ruven was the girl’s older brother. The girl’s fight with her friend evidently was serious. So too was her older brother’s intervention and her mother’s response. The girl probably fought physically with her friend. Her older brother probably physically intervened on her side and perhaps even did some minor physical harm to her friend.

The moral universe of those events differs significantly from that of many children in New York today. In that Polish village, the threat of police action and state-directed punishment was less relevant to interpersonal relations. Children then did not have continuous adult supervision. Girls and boys were physically strong and physically active. Parents physically chastised children within normal bounds. But an older boy physically fighting with a younger girl who was his ten-year-old sister’s friend — that would be gravely forbidden. For the younger sister in these circumstances, the older brother’s physical intervention would be extraordinarily heroic.

The sixty-nine-year-old woman living in New York City remembered a later memory. After catastrophic human violence had destroyed her earlier life and inscribed horrors in her mind, she remembered her punished brother and that borscht:

When I returned to my house after the war and found a Polish family living there, I walked into the kitchen and stood in front of the window with my eyes closed, wanting to relive the feeling of that time when I sat close to my brother and watched him eat.

How could that specific memory, after a massive, general catastrophe, be remembered? How can a massive, general catastrophe be remembered in all its specific details? The best answer is the living experience of memory connecting particular, personal events to the deep, fear-inspiring nature of humanity and the world.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s sublime fabrics of memory unforgettably remember the Holocaust in details. She was that ten-year-old girl fighting with her friend. She was a Jewish girl living in the Polish village of Mniszek. The Nazi’s program to exterminate the Jews put to death her older brother, two of her three sisters, her parents, her grandparents, and almost all the Jews in Mniszek and millions of Jews across Europe. Only Esther and one of her sisters escaped and eventually settled in the U.S. Beginning in 1977 at age 50 and working for about two decades, Esther created thirty-six needlework and collage fabrics showing her experiences growing up in Poland and living through the Nazi horrors. These fabrics are unsentimental representations of specific, personal events and circumstances. Esther made these fabrics to pass on her memories to her children.

Esther’s fabrics of memory have great, universal significance and deserve to be preserved forever and within everyone. Fortunately, Esther’s children are generously sharing her memories. Ester’s fabrics are on display at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center in Washington, DC, through January 29, 2012. In addition, the Art & Remembrance website offers images of the fabrics, as well as an exhibit brochure and a teacher’s guide to the exhibit. If you can get to the Ripley Center to see the actual fabrics, go. Large and richly textured, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz’s fabrics of memory are stunningly memorable.

the sexual allure of old women in early Persian literature

A scholarly authority on womanly beauty in seventh-century Persia counseled men against having sex with aging women. This authority declared:

Avoid in particular intercourse with an aging woman, for she is like a worn-out skin, sapping your strength and bringing sickness to your body. Her water is deadly poison and her breath speedy death. She will take everything from you and give you nothing.

He described in contrast sexual intercourse with a young woman:

A young woman’s water, on the contrary, is sweet and pure, her embrace is delightful and exciting; her mouth is cool, her saliva sweet and her breath fragrant. Her vagina is narrow, and she will add strength to your strength, vigor to your vigor. [1]

Giving advice about sex, eating, drinking, urinating, and defecating was standard practice among physicians for thousands of years.[2] Ancient physicians’ recommendations concerning ordinary human behavior varied nearly as much as modern dietary recommendations. Nonetheless, many men today, while schooled enough not to say so, would consider a physician’s recommendation not to have sex with old women to be rather peculiar. For a man bound in love to an old woman, such a recommendation is cruel to man and woman. For men making ongoing sexual choices, such a recommendation implies that choosing an old woman was not uncommon.

The allure of old women wasn’t a peculiarity of seventh-century Persia. A physician in eleventh-century Damascus, like many other scholars in the ancient Islamic world, wrote poetry. Here’s one of his short poems:

When a woman is over fifty, try not to see her;
Leave the old hag alone and look for a younger one instead.[3]

That’s unkind and shallow poetry. It would be of literary interest only from a consummate stylist such as Ovid. In today’s advanced democracies, a man might have a body part chopped off for writing such poetry. However, considered economically, this poem describes a man’s choice between an older and younger woman. The physician-poet urges the male reader to “try not to see” sexually a woman over fifty. That effort signifies the sexual allure, at least in the ancient Islamic world, of the woman over fifty.[4]

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] HP p. 212. The scholarly authority is the physician Nafi al-Harith ibn Kalada of Thaqif. Al-Harith also advised against frequent sexual intercourse. HP p. 214 records:

Harb ibn Muhammad, on the authority of his father, reports: “Al-Hārith ibn Kalada said that four things ruin the body: sexual intercourse after overeating, a hot bath on a full stomach, eating dried meat and cohabiting with an old woman.”

Al-Harith’s counsel seems to have influenced Tayādūq (also known as Baradiq) (d. 708), who served as physician to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf while al-Hajjaj was governing provinces in Iraq and Persia under Umayyad Caliph `Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. Tayādūq advised al-Hajjaj:

Four things ruin life and may even destroy it:

Taking a bath on a full stomach.

Having sexual intercourse after a meal.

Eating dried and salted meat.

Drinking cold water on an empty stomach.

Having intercourse with an old woman is hardly less injurious than any of the aforementioned.

HP p. 232.

[2] The increased credibility of medicine in recent years has shifted physicians’ discussions with clients strongly toward what medicine to take.

[3] HP p. 795. The poem is from Shaikh Abū al-Hakam `Ubayd Allāh ibn al-Muzaffar ibn `Abd Allāh al-Bāhilī, from Murcia in Andalusia. Abu al-Hakam worked as a physician in Damascus, wrote poetry for Damascus political leaders, and died in 1154.

[4] While the physicians’ counsel to men to avoid sex with older women was narrowly physical, men in practice may have had a broader context of interests. In particular, in choosing sex partners, men in the ancient Islamic world may have found old women more accessible, more eager, more intellectually interesting, less costly, and possibly even remunerative. Such broader interests should not be understood to debase men’s physical interests.

Reference:

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

gibberish: how to open doors magically

A Greek text from Egypt, apparently copied about 350 GC, describes a spell for opening doors:

Taking the navel of a male crocodile and the egg of a scarab and a heart of a baboon, put these into a blue-green faience vessel. And when you wish to open a door, bring the navel to the door, saying, “By THAIM THOLACH THECHEMBAOR THEAGON PENTATHESCHI BOTI, {I call on you} who have power in the deep, for myself, that there may now be a way open for me, for I say to you, SAUAMBOCH MERA CHEOZAPH OSSALA BYMBEL POUO TOUTHO OIREREI ARNOCH.” [1]

Unlike the much later concocted open sesame, this spell was probably used by a man to open the door of a particular woman for whom he had developed an acute amorous interest.

An independent, individual ritual-services entrepreneur (magician) apparently peddled the spell to potential customers. The spell draws upon ancient Egyptian temple culture. However, the copyist inserted glosses that greatly simplify the material. For “the navel of a male crocodile” the copyist added “he means pondweed.” For “a heart of a baboon,” the copyist added “he means myrrh, perfume of lilies.”[2] The learned often revel in arcane terminology. Practical businesspersons just want to know what will get the job done.

Mystification has practical uses. The modern editor of the door-opening spell described “the navel of a male crocodile” as:

an example of the secret magical vocabulary by which everyday things were given pretentious names, partly to make magical rituals impracticable for chance readers, partly to impress the ignorant. [3]

That’s only one possible business strategy. A twelfth-century Egyptian physician and philosopher had a different business strategy:

Ibn Rahmun would compose medical and philosophical tracts in the language of the common people {Egyptian vernacular} which were absurd, meaningless and of no use at all. He sent them to persons who would thereupon request him to elucidate them. He would then explain them as he saw fit, on the spur of the moment, without due consideration. These tracts are quite ludicrous. [4]

This description smells of professional jealousy. Although they may have been ludicrous, the tracts evidently were quite successful in the popular market.[5] Both secret, magical vocabulary and absurd, meaningless texts remain in widespread use even in our age of secular reason. That’s simply a reality of communication economics.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] PGM XIII. 1065-1075, trans. Betz (1992) p. 195, glosses omitted above, and reported subsequently. Id., p. 181, suggests a copy date about 350 GC for PGM XIII.

[2] Id.

[3] Id. p. 195, n. 144. Another magical text copied at the same time as the door-opening spell described itself as the eighth book of Moses. That’s three books beyond the Pentateuch. This eighth book addressed the reader:

Now I shall add for you, child, also the practical uses of this sacred book, the things which all the experts accomplished with this sacred and blessed book. As I made you swear, child, in the temple of Jerusalem, when you have been filled with the divine wisdom, dispose of the book so that it will not be found.

PGM XIII. 230-234, trans. Betz (1992) p. 179. Betz describes this text as “pretentious hokum.” Id. n. 56.

[4] HP, p. 720. Ibn Rahmun is Salama ibn Rahmun, in full Abu ‘l-Khair Salama ibn Mubarak ibn Rahmun ibn Musa. He was an Jewish Egyptian physician who was active c. 1116 GC. In the Islamic world, the language of serious scholarly communication was Arabic, not Egyptian.

[5] Ibn Rahmun achieved enough prominence to be harshly criticized: “At first, he harmed people by his talk alone / But now he has began to injure by both words and deeds.” Id.

References:

Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. 1992. The Greek magical papyri in translation: including the Demotic spells Vol. 1, [Texts]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.