SEOUL, March 2 (Yonhap) — The Navy conducted its first military exercise near its new base on the southern island of Jeju on Wednesday to improve readiness to intercept suspicious vessels and submarine infiltration by North Korea....After 23 years of preparations and having spent more than 1 trillion won (US$810 million), the Navy opened the seaport base last week on the southern coast of Jeju.
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At first glance, Jeju Island is not remarkable as an island. But when in 2013,  our network, Peace for Life held the People's Forum on Jeju, assembled at GangJeong village, I was transfixed by the counter-assemblages of the construction of the naval base and resistance to this.

Jeju Island is South Korea's tourist island and also named an island of peace after a disastrous massacre of 10 percent of its population -- 30,000 women, children, and elderly people were shot down and villages were burned -- after a revolt in 1948. The assault was conducted by a rightist regime with the cooperation of occupying US military.  If the Jeju tourist trade requires some amnesia of this catastrophe, it also needs blinkers for this return to militarization.

This January, 2016 the South Korean government opened their new deep water naval base at the southernmost part, displacing the sleepy Gangjeong Village. The Joon Gang Daily calls this new base,  “the spearhead of the country’s defense line." The base already hosts US Aegis missile destroyers, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines. The government had lost two other sites due to citizen resistance and they were not going to be deflected again.  If you look on a map, you can understand the strategic location.  This Catholic comic, sets up the story.

In Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues along with others that we need a  political economy of things, that  "thing power" offers a new ethical imperative.   We need to discard the subject-object relationship of humans to nonhuman others..  If we understand assemblage as a mix of human-object actants, and that smaller parts make up the larger, we move away from a human-object binary to a more enmeshed system of action.  We are constituted by multiplicities – colonies of life forms make up our biome, our bone, ideas lodged in gray mushy matter, nerve trackings. The smallest things have dangerous power: memes, pixelated surveillance maps, the fine flour of eucharist host, the sonorous bell of awakening.

Why does this matter in the case of Jeju Island? Because this is a trans-figuration, a dis-figurement in discourse and practice in a hypermilitarized zone.  Note that above that the base opens with an "exercise,"   a praxis of dis-figuring.

If there is an assemblage of dis-figuration, this is it. Samsung's massive machines dredge the sea,  destroying coral reefs and blast the Geurombi a kilometer-long porous volcanic shelf at the lip of the sea, displacing the human population for its naval operation.  That Geurombi, the sacred rock shore, pourous and soft, destroyed.  Everyone who referred to this were sad and wistful, as if about a passing friend.  And deeper down, Bronze age artifacts unearthed.

There is an assemblage of story-telling.  One might wonder whether the Jeju sacreds retrieved by the Gen X, Y & Z activists who have gathered to resist are contemporary bricolage of goddess, earth-tales, seawall, hegemon and loss. Those nature gods looked crippled and sad. One guide ushers us through a wooded area to a volcanic crop of rocks overlooking a bilious green stagnant pool.  This is a sacred pool, they say.  You wonder what they mean by that.  Sacred should make a show for itself.  It hasn’t rained, it’s lower than it’s ever been, and it used to be fresh.  Some of us climb around on the rocks for a while.  Then he takes us a few minutes the other way to a 1,000 year old tree.  People come here to pray, he says.  But that old tree doesn't have the face of devotion.  She wears a saggy string of stained faded white and pink prayer flags, dusty candles stubs sunk in the busom of the tree. A few parts of the trunk plastered with cement. It sinks into the hard earth like crusty old elephant.  Humph. Hard to feel the power of this place. I think: if there is a goddess power acting on this place, she's been denuded.

But Yeoungdeun the goddess has more storm in her than she first conveys. The navy didn't count on the wind. Wild typhoons whip this point each year.  One left $35 in damages, ripping out the casings sunken into the seafloor to create a port for the submarines. They have to be rebuilt. Rock is blasted, coral shattered,  red crab scuttled.  So the transformation of coral bed to concrete slab offers just new forms of organic and inorganic- nuclear fuel, steel, casings, uranium - are also matters of meaning.

The convergence at GangJeong village brought together an assemblage of resistances – of people, police, priests, hosts, kayaks, water, coral, tree, rock, concrete, sea water, wind all acting against the construction of the base, and Samsung, US and Korean construction workers pushing against each other.  Seven years.  Four year without help, last three with activists, last two with Catholics.  Skeletons of the massacre amidst tangerine orchards, a steady line of Chinese tourist buses passing a steady cluster of international, ecumenical, environmentalist, anti-militarist activists, Peace for Life among them. 

So many went protests, arrests, incarcerations. 

​And also rituals of resistance. Each day: 7am 100 bows of gray-garbed monks and then at 11am, Fr. Moon's vigil Mass - wine, host and dancing at the construction site.  If there was an collectivity of spiritual forces, it was palpable those mornings.   

What next?  Here, read Save Jeju Now.

1. Under the instruction of the God of Life and of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, we oppose the construction of the Naval Base in Jeju. This is the desperate desire of the residents of Gangjeong Village, who have lost their livelihoods, the decision of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea, and the unchanging wish of those citizens of Korea who love life and peace on earth.
2. First of all, we want to know why the Naval Base has be constructed by destroying Korea’s cleanest and clearest ocean, around Jeju Island, while advertising the intent to protect the natural heritage of Jeju. While they boast of Jeju’s status as a preservation area, world natural heritage, and GEO park designated by UNESCO, and even they are internationally advertising that it be selected as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, they have blasted Gureombi Rock, a gift of nature, with explosives to construct a large-scale port for navy ships, and are attempting to build a concrete bank. This is the result of punishment incurred from uncontrolled greed and ignorance.
3. The reason why we are against the construction of Naval Base starts from the illegality and non-democracy. The Government announced that they will respect opinions of residents, but this is not true. 725 residents participated in a survey on ‘Voting For or Against the Naval Base,’ and 680 (or 94%) of the total village residents are opposed to the construction of the Naval Base. Nevertheless, the Navy and Jeju government continued the construction and have suppressed the opposition of the residents with physical force.
4. The Government insists that the Naval Base is necessary to deter North Korea’s provocations, protect our marine territory, and secure the ocean route and underwater resources. However, the substantial power to reduce conflicts between countries and maintain peace comes from neither military bases nor weapons, but from wise diplomacy pursuing co-existence and the level of policy and economy. This has been continuously proved throughout the history of the world.

Many experts say that the Naval Base in Jeju will become a US base to maintain the supremacy in Northeast Asia, unlike our expectations, and it even provokes tension around the Korean peninsula. This consideration is very practical. The conflict between China and Japan in the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands predicted the unfortunate future of Jeju.

1. The moment the construction began, artifacts from the Bronze Age were excavated. So the National Assembly and the Cultural Heritage Administration suggested that the Navy stop the construction. However, the Navy disregarded the suggestion and continued with the blasting. We cannot understand why they are in a hurry, although this is not urgent matter. In particular, the violent power exercised by the Police reminds us of that terrible historical event, ‘The 4.3 Massacre.’ We declare that if these acts of violent suppression, arrests, and captivity are repeated, then we will rise against it with an even more powerful disobedience movement.
2. Today we established the ‘Catholic Church Solidarity to Make Peace on Jeju Island’ according to the Gospels of Christ, which requests that we defend lives and peace, and we declare and require the following in the names of 4,567 Catholic priests and monks.
   

Declaration and Requests

1. We oppose the construction of the Naval Base which threatens the peace of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia.
2. The Government must fully revoke the plans to construct a Naval Base on Jeju, and politely apologize to the residents of Gangjeong Village and Jeju Island for the illegal means by which the location of the Naval Base was selected!
3. The navy must immediately stop the construction according to the advice of the Cultural Heritage Administration, and actively cooperate in the excavation of cultural heritages.
4. The National Assembly must cut the budget for the construction of the Naval Base on Jeju Island.
5. The Government must consider the wounds of the residents of Jeju, worry about repeating the 4.3 massacre, and apologize for the misuse of the state power!
6. The Government must make full efforts to restore the natural environment which was been seriously damaged by the construction!

October. 31. 2011

The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of SEOUL / The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of DAEGU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Archdiocese of GWANGJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of ANDONG / Justice & Peace Committee of BUSAN Diocese / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese CHEONGJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of CHUNCHEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of DAEJEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of INCHEON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of JEJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese JEONJU / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of MASAN / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese SUWON / The Committee of Justice & Peace Diocese of WONJU / The Solidarity of priest Diocese of UIJEONGBU / Association of Major Superiors of Women Religious in Korea / Korean Conference of Major Superiors of Men’s Religious Institutes and Societies of Apostilic Life

Cambodia, 2003
I wrote this after an evaluation trip to Khmer Rouge "reintegration areas" in western Cambodia. I consider the idea of witness and narrative. 

For more than a decade, I'd been a tutor in Minneapolis,  staff at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center,  worked with at-risk Cambodian boys and girls in projects of West Oakland, or a researcher in the bright new offices of hyphenated Cambodians—American, French, Australian, Swiss, who had returned to Phnom Penh to participate in its transition to democracy. 

For them, I was an ambivalent figure, a compatriot of sorts, witness to their discursive feat defending hybrid citizenship as a necessary aspect of new Khmer nationalism. (Within the Cambodian domain of peacemaking, local Cambodians treated foreigners with more equanimity than former refugees who had to negotiate twice for authenticity—with both homeland and naturalized countries.)

********
It might have been our close call with ex-Rogue soldiers that inspired Kennaro to talk.

He was translator for interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers and their experience in new “integration zones” since the massive KR defection in 1998.  We'd bounced along deeply rutted roads from Battambang to the infamous Sampot, the Khmer Rouge stronghold in far western Cambodia.
 
Sampot was desolate, wide swathes of parched plots devastated by rampant logging, and cut off from the world.  When we got to the ramshackle town,  it took some time to rustle up the "focus group"  of toughened Khmer men and women to talk about their plans for integrating into a contentious Khmer "democracy".  I cast a glance at the dingy cots and decided we would drive back to Battambang that night. Kennaro agreed. But he knew better than me what came in the dark.  

Slowy, painfully, the van heaved over potholes along the former KR highway. It was as black as the belly of a whale. 

The headlight five men wildly waving.  Then I saw the rifles, then in one sickened moment, I realized what it meant. Kennaro had already gripped the driver’s shoulder, speaking urgently in Khmer.  The driver pumped down on the old car. It tumbled foward.  They called out, garbled drunk and angry. But they didn't shoot. And they waved us past.

We sat in a blank silence.  Then Kennaro began to talk. He was a Khmer Rouge soldier, he'd chosen to survive. At the end, when the Vietnamese arrived, he fled with two buddies to the Thai border. It was a moonless rainy night.  "We walked on to a muddy minefield," Kennaro's voice dangled in the dark. Tripping over mangled bodies, they realized too late.  There was one explosion. The two waited, called out, waited. Then, inching forward,  one step, next. Kennaro heard a second blast. His second friend, weak with shock, cried that his legs were gone. "I crawled across the border." He landed in the hands of casually cruel Thai border police who conscripted him as their servant.

There were a thousand thousand stories. In the Philippine camp, we'd collected them from families enroute to America. Each story its own horror.

But this story was a painful particular gift,  this testamony in the dark. I remember this story as I stared at the headlight tunnel before us.   Maybe Kennaro told it because of the afternoon among Khmer Rouge, maybe the near escape from a KR bandit’s “jackpot”– a foreign woman with no body guard in a car on a dark passage in the poorest and least patrolled part of Cambodia.

What we escape and how we retell it.  What it means to witness.

Lederach offers a way to think of "the past that lies before us" through a set of embedded circles to explore the cycles of violent conflict.   Lederach offers us this:  a group's ability to survive is woven through the chosen narratives. Which stories we embed our in  lived histories and inside remembered histories, can determine the path we walk through the conflict minefield and thereafter.  Sometimes a group, an individual, chooses a witness to hear that story, and to help them "re-story," re-frame the story, to imagine a different future.

This is a reflection on those who tell the story. But not those who are chosen to receive it.

 My return to the Philippines on a Fulbright in 2003 reoriented my placement as a witness. Bush had declared the Philippines a “second front” of the war on terror. I was investigating how an ecumenical women’s group theologically framed the relationship between the Philippines main two insurgencies — Muslim and Communist— and the US war on terror.

I wanted to know about "sisterhood after terrorism."

Here, I was subject to my own interviews, a Taglish-speaking “Manila girl,”  my first seventeen years raised there (see Manila Days, blog memoir) with "fraternal workers" on church and social justice.  I was also white, an American,  aligned with one or more divides of the left.  Here, my parents, my credentials, and who had “spoken for me” barred or opened access.  

While in Cambodia interviewing Cambodian Americans, I was an authoritative citizen. In the Philippines, I was, as I sometimes ruefully put it, “target practice.”  I was standing in for the enemy.

What do we mean by Chiasm? 

As an organ of sight:
1. The optic chiasm or optic chiasma is an X-shaped space just in front of the pituitary gland where optic nerve fibers pass through to the brain. Fibers from the nasal half of the left eye and the temporal half of the right eye form the right optic tract; and the fibers from the nasal half of the right eye and the temporal half of the left form the left optic tract.

As a literary device:
2. A chiasm (or chiasmus if you rather) is a writing style that uses a unique repetition pattern for clarification and/or emphasis: Two parallel clauses, in which the order of elements in the second clause inverts the order of the first.

3. As Merleau-Ponty's  notion of the body as flesh, the intertwining of touch and vision,  in The Intertwining—The Chiasm (find Here) crossing over of both objective and subjective experience.   You must read and read again to understand what M-P is trying to do in his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible, a dense phenomenology of sensibility.  Given my interest in the invisible, I first wanted to understand Merleau-Ponty's characterization of this "intertwining" in phenomenology.  But I was lost in the chiasm, and turned to feminists to help me out.

So, what is feminist phenomenology? (Think Butler, Marion Young, Grosz, Irigaray) Merleau-Ponty counters Descarte's split body/ consciousness with an affirmation of the  interconnectedness of body-mind.  If this sounds so corporeal, is there a feminist cautionary? Elizabeth Grosz notes that feminists find in Merleau-Ponty first an ally and then a disappointment in his avoidance of sexual difference and specificity. Only Irigaray takes on the Chiasm, his last work on The Visible and the Invisible which turns to the flesh and its reversability.  Cecilia Sjöholm's  reading-of-Irigaray-reading-Merleau-Ponty on the "chiasm" is a way to think through human  perception, which is, after all, M-P's project. 1 

For M-P, we are sensible to the world through touch and vision, an interactive process of reversals. The most familiar example of M-P is the hand that touches its other hand. One hand as subject touches; the other as object experiences the touch. Though both are part of the same body, they do not merge. They are mutually constituted. And so it is with the look, he argues. The look "envelops, palpates, espouses visible things: So sight has the same ambiguous nature as touch, and it is from its own 'objective' side that the objectivity of the visible world is generated.”  These reversals constitute the flesh which Sjöholm describes as  "an excess produced in the intertwining, introducing otherness in relation to the corporeal subject's selfsameness." One sees and is seen but cannot see how this occurs. One cannot see oneself seeing, is only be aware of this though the way things become visible; they in some manner look back at me. This is a kind of narcissism of the flesh, says M-P, 

Once again, the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 146)

French feminist Irigaray's argument, even when charted by Sjoholm, is difficult to track. But ultimately she argues that M-P's self-sustaining body represses the presence of bodies it chooses not to see. It creates the invisible. Irigaray challenges the notion that subject and object can hold reversible positions.  Sjöholm reminds us, "the subject engulfs or envelops, receives or rejects, caresses or eats the object, but never replaces it."  

Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty's metaphors, though sexual, do not refer to a sexualized ontology. Thus the sexualized relationship hides sex and since the male (through the vision, the gaze) is dominant, the female (through the tactile). Thus M-P's flesh has implicitly endowed with attributes of the female, and M-P does not claim any debt to maternity. (Grosz 1994) Merleau-Ponty's concern about the invisibility of the flesh sends him into increasing regressions that end in the womb. Sjohom argues what we suspect already: this regressive chiasm is linked to the exclusion of the female body, which cannot foreclose sexual difference. "What Merleau-Ponty's chiasm lacks is a distinct, symbolic division between self and other. 2  Irigaray problematizes the alterity that one makes visible.

1. Cecilia Sjöholm  "Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions” Hypatia 15.3 (2000) 92-112

Evans, F., & Lawlor, L, Eds, Chiasms. Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000
Grosz, Elizabeth,  “Lived Bodies: Phenomenology and the Flesh" in Volatile Bodies. Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994
Merleau-Ponty, M The Visible and the Invisible, Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin, Routledge, 2004.  
130-55 
Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, Eds. Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, Penn State Press,  2010

Garcia Marquez's story of the shipwrecked sailor is supposed to be journalism, but it reads like a preface to a terrible magic. (Garcia Marquez 1986)

Luis Alejandro Velasco was the "shipwrecked sailor" Garcia Marquez interviewed for El Espectador of Bogota.  He survived a ten day ordeal at sea without food or water before landing at Categena.  Their naval vessel was so overladen with contraband, it shifted badly in a swell, sending him and seven mates overboard.  He landed on a raft with no provisions, while the other men drowned. Luis Rengifo, one mate  barely close enough to catch hold, was caught in a wave. His specter appeared to Luis as he drifted on the raft.  

The hallucinatory details of Velasco's story  require a fuller telling than I can offer here. It includes his encounter with prescient sea gulls, the ghost of his mate, and towards the 10th day, his best friend Jaime Majarrés converses with him through the night. Do these visitations haunt the young sailor as testifies against corruption despite pressure from the military? This solitary tale is not unlike Gabriel Marquez' novels that depict magical appearances, heroes tormented by guilt, and a corrupt magical state.  

According to Gabriele Marquez, his stories are not examples of magical realism. Consider them "fantastically accurate."   Rushdie cautions us not to forget about magic in the service of truth (2014).  The point Gabriel Marquez also makes in his Nobel Prize speech,  "The Solitude of Latin America," is more about the blurry line between magic and truth.  The distinction is a matter of perspective: what is the difference between a hallucination and a spectral visit?  What are the politics of either? It is the West's insistence on maintaining this divide that drives Savransky to call  ‘solitary’ the "entities whose epistemological and ontological status" remains ambivalent." (2012, 352)

Some time ago, on Facebook I posted this lovely quote from Savransky     

"Politics of knowledge" refers to the way our knowledge claims are justified. Feminist, post-colonial and post structuralist critiques of the 1990's challenged a neutral Archemidean point outside reality, a God's eye view of the world.   Feminist philosopher Sarah Harding (1991:109) indicates that conventional epistemological questions must be tethered to their historical situatedness, so we must ask

• who can be the subjects or agents of socially legitimate knowledge? what kinds of tests must beliefs pass in order to be legitimate knowledge? what kinds of things can be known?
• can historical truths or socially situated truths count as knowledge?
• what is the nature of objectivity?
• what is the appropriate relationship between the researcher and his or her research subject?
• must the researcher be disinterested, dispassioniate and socially invisible to the subject?

• can there be 'disinterested knowledge' in a society that is deeply stratified by gender, race and class.

 If knowledge is historically situated, then our representations are also. By representation we mean a production of meaning through language. (Hall 1997)  A radical reformulation of the "disinterested knowledge" requires the inclusion of what Foucault has called "subjugated knowledges,"  other ways of knowing, and the 'epistemic disobedience'  towards those who, in the West, claim universal knowledge. 

This has worked to open a space for non-human entities (spirits, ghosts, gods) speaking in the realm of knowledge.  I've noted in the introduction to Invisible Aid, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued for a space for gods spirits in the depiction of subaltern Indian history. But, as Savransky notes, the argument in post colonial theory is based primarily on representation. The problem of posing the existence of ghosts and gods is that there is no space in Western epistemologies, so the representational argument may not be adequate for different religious and cultural modes of being. Savransky thus takes these figures (mythological, ghostly, superhuman) to be postcolonial “solitary entities,” whose “solitude” is a result of their absence from Western epistemologies.

This shift from representation turns us to ontology, what anthropologists have called the "ontological turn."   There is thus a collapse of symbolism, not separate from the object but "concepts and things are one and these same." (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 13 cited in Paleck and Risjord 2012)  In this extended mind hypothesis considers a wider ambit for the the mind - beyond the brain and by extension to objects and bodily actions. Paleck and Risjord refer to using the abacus as the same as calculating in one's head. 

​Thus, they argue, objects create relationships, power and persons. We are to assess not what we think the objects are doing, but what they do. 

Cited
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Translated by Randolph Hogan, Knopf, 1986

Hall, Stuart.  Representation, meaning, and language. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, pp. 15–30. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 1997

Harding, Sandra Whose Science/ Whose Knowledge? Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991

____________, “Standpoint Theories: Productively Controversial”,  Hypatia 24(4) 2009: 192-200.

Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds). Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 2007

Palecek, Martin and Mark Risjord, Relativism and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2013 43: 3 originally published online 17 October 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0048393112463335

Martin Savransky (2012) Worlds in the making: social sciences and the ontopolitics of knowledge, Postcolonial Studies, 15:3, 351-368, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2012.753572 

Rushdie, Salman, Magic in the Service of Truth, Sunday Book Review, New York Times, April 21, 2014

When medieval historian Carolyn Walker Bynum writes about medieval wonder (2001), she quotes a wall slogan from the Paris student revolution of 1968 tacked up in her office: “Toute vue des choses qui n’est pas étrange est fausse.” (Every view of things that is not strange [i.e., bizarre or foreign] is false.) (2012)  Her work on medieval wonder is wonder-ful in that it questions what those communities, already so familiar with the unfamiliar, thought of the miraculous, a subject that tests our own boundaries of the real, the natural and what is "un" or "super" to it.  I would love to teach a class on a "genealogy of supernatural" -- here's one delicious medieval version.

I've since found myself wandering about in early Celtic religiousity. There is quite a bit on Celtic spirituality these days, mostly romanticizing it.  These posts below are post-its from saint stories of early monastics in rural Ireland 400-700s as Patrick and others arrived to Christianize.  The monastic movement was sweeping through Egypt, Palestine and Asia Minor at the time, better known to us the "desert fathers" and mothers. I'd never connected the clover of St Patrick with the desert sands of St. Anthony. Since Ireland had not been absorbed into the Roman empire and was so rural, it did not easily conform to the episcopate model of Roman Britain. Instead, monasticism flourished so that abbots and monks were leaders of the church, entangling saint-stories with pre-Christian practices.

Thought this might help situate these texts as forms of wonder, or at least wonder-ful for us: animal converts. I particularly love the delicate piety of the bees.  I paste these stories from A Book of Saints and Wonders, Lady Gregory, 1902 More here

Ciaran and his vegetarian monks
St Kieran 516AD-540AD was founder of the great teaching monastery at Clonmacnoise.  Died of the yellow plague, his feast day is Sept 9. He is also remembered for having a number of colorful legends associated with his life. 

Blessed Ciaran and his Scholars
The first of the saints to be born in Ireland of the saints was Ciaran, that was of the blood of the nobles of Leinster. And the first of the wonders he did was in the island of Cleire, and he but a young child at the time. There came a hawk in the air over his head, and it stooped down before him and took up a little bird that was sitting on a nest. And pity for the little bird came on Ciaran and it was bad to him the way it was. And the hawk turned back and left the bird before him, and it half. dead and trembling; and Ciaran bade it to rise up and it rose and went up safe and well to its nest, by the grace of God.

It was Patrick bade Ciaran after that to go to the Well of Uaran, the mering where the north meets with the south in the middle part of Ireland. "And bring my little bell with you" he said "and it will be without speaking till you come to the Well." So Ciaran did that and when he reached to the Well of Uaran, for God brought him there, the little bell spoke out on the moment in a bright clear voice. And Ciaran settled himself there, and he alone, and great woods all around the place; and he began to make a little cell for himself, that was weak enough.

And one time as he was sitting under the shadow of a tree a wild boar rose up on the other side Of it; but when it saw Ciaran it ran from him, and then it turned back again as a quiet servant to him, being made gentle by God. And that boar was the first scholar and the first monk Ciaran had; and it used to be going into the wood and to be plucking rods and thatch between its teeth as if to help towards the building. And there came wild creatures to Ciaran out of the places where they were, a fox and a badger and a wolf and a doe; and they were tame with him and humbled themselves to his teach ing the same as brothers, and did all he bade them to do.

But one day the fox, that was greedy and cunning and full of malice, met with Ciaran's brogues and he stole them and went away shunning the rest of the company to his own old den, for he had a mind to eat the brogues. But that was showed to Ciaran, and he sent another monk of the monks of his family, that was the badger, to bring back the fox to the place where they all were. So the badger went to the cave where the fox was and found him, and he after eating the thongs and the ears of the brogues. And the badger would not let him off coming back with him to Ciaran, and they came to him in the evening bringing the brogues with them. And Ciaran said to the fox "O brother" he said "why did you do this robbery that was not right for a monk to do? And there was no need for you to do it" he said "for we all have food and water in common, that there is no harm in. But if your nature told you it was better for you to use flesh, God would have made it for you from the bark of those trees that are about you." Then the fox asked Ciaran to forgive him and to put a penance on him; and Ciaran did that, and the fox used no food till such time as he got leave from Ciaran; and from that out he was as honest as the rest.

Oh those blessed bees...

St. Modomnoc was a special patron of the bees. Not sure if this is his story.

The Priest and the Bees
There was a good honourable well-born priest, God's darling he was, a man holding to the yoke of Christ; and it happened he went one day to attend on a sick man. And as he was going a swarm of bees came towards him, and he having the Blessed Body of Christ with him there. And when he saw the swarm he laid the Blessed Body on the ground and gathered the swarm into his bosom, and went on in that way upon his journey, and forgot the Blessed Body where he had laid it. And after a while the bees went back from him again, and they found the Blessed Body and carried it away between them to their own dwelling place, and they gave honour to it kindly and made a good chapel of wax for it, and an altar and a chalice and a pair of priests, shaping them well out of wax to stand before Christ's Body. But as for the priest, when he remembered it he went looking for it carefully, penitently, and could not find it in any place. And it went badly with him and he went to confession, and with the weight of the trouble that took hold of him he was fretting through the length of a year. And there came an angel to him at the end of the year and told him the way the Body of Christ was sheltered and honoured. And the angel bade him to bring all the people to see that wonder; and they went there and when they saw it a great many of them believed.

I'm attracted to French philosopher Paul Ricoeur by association. First, because I love Irish philosopher Richard Kearney's work on the imagination influenced by Ricoeur, and second because Ricoeur taught at U of Chicago when I was there, and hallowed the halls with his erudition.  He is so prolific that his ouvre overwhelms. His focus, quite simply, is an anthropology of the self. He argues for  narrative unity of a human life, and responsible action. By the 1970's he was developing a hermeneutic phenomenology. (The link offers a good  explanation.)

Ah, UofC, symbolized by gargoyles leering down at us from those greystone arches. I endured both terror at the intellectual arrogance and boredom mining ponderous texts. There was also ecstasy when you finally understood a concept that set your brain on fire. I first heard of  "second naiveté" in a class I was auditing at the Divinity School.  I try it on from time to time. Ricoeur's second naiveté offers a way of "re-reading" the world. He deals with sacred text. Ricoeur offers a hermeneutics where one understands ones' self "in front of" the text, and learns to taken in new possibilities of being.

In order to get to these postures, Riceour travels through the "philosophy of suspicion."  Since hermeneutics is a search for the hidden, beyond manifest content, Riceour reviews strategies of demystification of this "philosophy of suspicion" from its three masters: Marx, Nietzche, and Freud.  They consider "surface" reality as false. They address the problem of false consciousness of the self, society, and religion. But this suspicion turns on its head, because "The lie of consciousness, of consciousness as a lie, suspicious as to consciousness claiming absolute knowledge...the genuine Cogito must be gained by the false cogito that masks it." (1970, 161)   This move only deconstructs; it does not rebuild.  What is the opposite of suspicion? According to Ricoeur, it is faith.

Ricoeur turns to a "hermeneutics of metaphor" to find a way out of suspicion, but a hermeneutics of sacred text, itself a minefield for the protagonists of suspicion.  He take up (because he's only considering the bible), the mythopoetic language of psalm, proverb, parable.  He offers us two approaches to sacred text, both set as naivetés.  In the first naiveté, the text is taken at face value.  This naiveté cannot stand the onslaught of suspicion. Ultimately, the reader  steps back, takes a "critical distance" from the supernatural affirmations of the story.  We often do stay there.. "Beyond the desert  of criticism, we wish to be called again." (1967, 349).  The hermeneutics of the second naiveté is “a retrieval of the original meaning of the symbol.”  (1978, XX)

For Ricoeur metaphor is the nature of language where literal meaning has collapsed. This is the tension between the  "is" and "is not" of metaphor. The second naivete is a way to embrace both elements.  Now reading the text symbolically,  we attend to its meaning "in the full responsibility of autonomous thought." (1967, 350) We engage the texts for ourselves, not mediated by religious authority. This is a hermeneutics of testimony. By this he means a two-fold act of self-consciousness and "historical understanding based on the signs the absolute gives of itself. The signs of the absolute's self-disclosure are at the same time signs in which consciousness recognizes itself." (cf Hall, 2012, p78)

This second naiveté is a “hermeneutics of restoration.”  I'm planning to walk into that. 

Ricoeur, Paul.
______The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
______Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 (1965).
______The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978 (1975).
Hall, David, Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice, SUNY Press, 2012