Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor
From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle, a description of the Egyptian Statue of the Healer Djedhor (320 B.C.E.):
The statue includes a wide variety of magical, biographical, and dedicatory inscriptions, and we find a dual system of basins carved into its plinth. The first of these, running around the main figure, allowed for the collection of water poured over both it and the stela, while the second, sculpted deeper and connected to the first by a channel, formed a sort of reservoir into which a container might be dipped. The two basins were clearly intended to be the statue’s magico-medical end point. From evidence pointed out by Lacau, we can see that the object was intended primarily for a procedure of “washing” rather than for reading. … The magical inscriptions are generally positioned so as to face the healer figure, notably so with the second basin, in such a way that they appear intended to be read not so much by the officiating priest, but rather by the statue itself. … The artifact was principally activated by the running of the water that the sick person, or an intermediary, would then draw from the basin. The liquid poured over the surface of the object is a substitute, therefore, for the ritual of incantation. But how are we to understand this piece of legerdemain? What could authorize such a slippage? It is hard to believe that the invocation, whose importance is so well known in ancient Egyptian culture, might have been entirely sidelined, at least conceptually. The solution is most likely to be found in the analogy one could make between the act of reading and the running water. The contact and the movement of the water were possibly likened to the experience of reading: the physical action of the water, running from top to bottom and adapting itself to all the reliefs and hollows of the engraved object, must have seemed equivalent to the work of the reader’s eyes, moving down the sculpture from the top to the base, activating the magical potential of the written story. … The liquid, as it is poured over his body and over the stela of Horus, might be likened to the flow of a murmured voice. Essentially, the water would be called upon to activate an always possible, potential reading. … The water running over the stela carries out a process that reading aloud is unable to achieve, mixing image and text in a flow that makes no distinction between these two material parts of the object. It gathers the trace of the images and writing into a material, dynamic, and continuous substance, creating thus a remedy that, still active and in motion, could then be taken and given to the sick person.
The statue includes a wide variety of magical, biographical, and dedicatory inscriptions, and we find a dual system of basins carved into its plinth. The first of these, running around the main figure, allowed for the collection of water poured over both it and the stela, while the second, sculpted deeper and connected to the first by a channel, formed a sort of reservoir into which a container might be dipped. The two basins were clearly intended to be the statue’s magico-medical end point.
From evidence pointed out by Lacau, we can see that the object was intended primarily for a procedure of “washing” rather than for reading. … The magical inscriptions are generally positioned so as to face the healer figure, notably so with the second basin, in such a way that they appear intended to be read not so much by the officiating priest, but rather by the statue itself. … The artifact was principally activated by the running of the water that the sick person, or an intermediary, would then draw from the basin. The liquid poured over the surface of the object is a substitute, therefore, for the ritual of incantation.
But how are we to understand this piece of legerdemain? What could authorize such a slippage? It is hard to believe that the invocation, whose importance is so well known in ancient Egyptian culture, might have been entirely sidelined, at least conceptually. The solution is most likely to be found in the analogy one could make between the act of reading and the running water. The contact and the movement of the water were possibly likened to the experience of reading: the physical action of the water, running from top to bottom and adapting itself to all the reliefs and hollows of the engraved object, must have seemed equivalent to the work of the reader’s eyes, moving down the sculpture from the top to the base, activating the magical potential of the written story. … The liquid, as it is poured over his body and over the stela of Horus, might be likened to the flow of a murmured voice. Essentially, the water would be called upon to activate an always possible, potential reading.
… The water running over the stela carries out a process that reading aloud is unable to achieve, mixing image and text in a flow that makes no distinction between these two material parts of the object. It gathers the trace of the images and writing into a material, dynamic, and continuous substance, creating thus a remedy that, still active and in motion, could then be taken and given to the sick person.
Djedhor healing statue with Horus on the Crocodiles. Photograph by Onceinawhile, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
From David Fishkind’s debut novel, Don’t Step Into My Office (Arcade):
I glanced over my shoulder. I withdrew a homemade weed edible from my wallet and unwrapped it in the shadow of the Reliquary Arm of St. Valentine. Flecks of baked sativa sprinkled to the floor. I tried to catch them unsuccessfully, and I swallowed the rest whole.
From Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown) by the Friends of Attention (D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt):
In his 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove, Henry James depicts a crucial, if fleeting, encounter between a fatally ill patient (female, sensitive, anguished) and an esteemed medical doctor (grand, humane, busy). It is a charged rendezvous, and a rushed one. For various reasons, they will have only a few moments together—the time must be stolen from the exigencies of ordinary life and obligation. They sit. And here is how James evokes the redemptive power of that moment, making use of the language of attention, and figuring it as a gift of pure imminence: “So crystal clean, the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table.” This isn’t quite indefinite waiting, although there is something of the infinite in the cup’s emptiness. And it isn’t triggering action either, although we sense in the simplicity of the doctor’s gesture the possibility that the cup is already, somehow, unaccountably full. There is presence here, a welcoming, an invitation that is also a generous and vital offering. In this fashion, James’s account rescues attention from the jaws of antinomy. Attention is no mere tool; it creates a space beyond the stultifying operational logics of technology and capital. Yet it is not an endless, sublime adjournment, either. It moves in the world of frailty and pain. It bears the promise of healing—or at least of consolation. It is the true gift of the open. It is where we meet in that openness, and make space for what unfolds. This may be the best account we have of what attention can be if it is to be truly ours, if it is to be the stuff of care, and the ethereal medium out of which we make our relationships—to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
In his 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove, Henry James depicts a crucial, if fleeting, encounter between a fatally ill patient (female, sensitive, anguished) and an esteemed medical doctor (grand, humane, busy). It is a charged rendezvous, and a rushed one. For various reasons, they will have only a few moments together—the time must be stolen from the exigencies of ordinary life and obligation.
They sit. And here is how James evokes the redemptive power of that moment, making use of the language of attention, and figuring it as a gift of pure imminence: “So crystal clean, the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table.”
This isn’t quite indefinite waiting, although there is something of the infinite in the cup’s emptiness. And it isn’t triggering action either, although we sense in the simplicity of the doctor’s gesture the possibility that the cup is already, somehow, unaccountably full. There is presence here, a welcoming, an invitation that is also a generous and vital offering.
In this fashion, James’s account rescues attention from the jaws of antinomy. Attention is no mere tool; it creates a space beyond the stultifying operational logics of technology and capital. Yet it is not an endless, sublime adjournment, either. It moves in the world of frailty and pain. It bears the promise of healing—or at least of consolation. It is the true gift of the open. It is where we meet in that openness, and make space for what unfolds.
This may be the best account we have of what attention can be if it is to be truly ours, if it is to be the stuff of care, and the ethereal medium out of which we make our relationships—to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
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