The Seductiveness of the Metaxy

The Interval is the metaphysical space between the eternal world of Forms and the perishable world of perceptible things, between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the immanent and the transcendent, between Being and becoming. It is the mystical medium which enables communication between the higher and the lower regions of the spirit. It is the eschatological liminal space between heaven and hell. It is the neutral, morally ambivalent intermediate zone between good and evil.

When we speak of the metaphysics of the Interval we are, however, using a term whose primary meaning could not be more mundanely material. For, the interval is a dead metaphor that originates in the earthworks of Roman military architecture. The intervallum was literally that which lay between two lines of stakes (a vallum, or palisaded entrenchment); it was the space between the ramparts of a legionary camp. In Greek, however, “the interval” is abstract from the outset, referring to spatial or temporal relation rather than to any definite physical space. It is τὸ μεταξύ, the metaxy, a substantival use of the compound adverb/preposition μεταξύ (“in the midst of”, from μετά “between” and ξύν “together with”), used of place (“between”) and time (“between-whiles,” “meanwhile”). In grammar, τὸ μεταξύ is the name for the neuter gender, the class of declensions that are neither masculine nor feminine. Derived from μεταξύ, the noun metaxytês (ἡ μεταξύτης) is another term for the diastema (τὸ διάστημα – “space between”), or interval in music. In the sixth century A.D., the Greek philosophical scholiasts of the late Roman period, for example Olympiodorus Philosophus, who wrote commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, coined the term metaxylogia (μεταξυλογία) to refer to a digression, an intermediate passage within a text, a temporary lapse from the main subject. The text that follows might therefore also be named a metaxylogy, in the sense that it is a digression in between texts arising from the “Seductiveness of the Interval” exhibition installed within the space of the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Art Biennale, but also in the sense that it is a discourse, a logos concerning the Interval, or metaxy.

In the singular, τὸ μεταξύ does not occur as such in the extant works of Plato, although Aristotle (Metaphysics, 987b) reports that his teacher admitted an “in-between” (μεταξύ) class of things, in the interval between things perceptible to the senses (τὰ αἰσθητά) and the Forms, or Ideas (τὰ εἴδη), knowable by the mind; these are the objects of mathematics, eternal and immutable like the Forms, but unlike them multiple. The interval is therefore necessarily a space of multiplicity, participating in both the immutability of the eternal and the plurality of the temporal. Indeed, it is as a neuter plural (τὰ μεταξύ), referring to “intermediate” or “in-between things”, that the metaxy occurs in Plato’s Gorgias (468a), where Socrates discovers through dialogue with Polus that there is a neutral class of things, qualities, states and actions which are neither good nor bad (τὰ μήτε ἀγαθὰ μήτε κακά). While our actions may in themselves be neutral or intermediate (Socrates gives the examples of sitting, walking, and running), we always act in pursuit of the good, however. Even evil actions are committed for the sake of the good; they are evil as a result of their agents’ perverted understanding, whereby the Good and the Truth become obnubilated in the soul. Similarly, in the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus, the metaxy occurs with the masculine plural definite article: men are οἱ μεταξύ (“the in-between ones”), in the middle place between gods and beasts (Enneads, III, 8, 10-11). Just as the earth lies in the middle point of the heavens, so man is suspended between god and beast, matter and spirit, time and eternity, corruption and perfection. This position is not, however, one of inertia, but rather one of continual tension: caught between the lower and upper strata of the cosmic order, man alternately inclines towards both (ῥέπει ἐπ᾽ ἄμφω).

Whereas for Plotinus man is the interval, the middle term between lower and higher, between beasts and gods, with a shift of metaphysical perspective man himself might become the lower term, with a further interval opening up between him and the gods. Likewise, the earth, instead of being the middle point, might equally be seen as the lowest point on a vertical scale at whose pinnacle are situated the heavens. In a dialogue entitled On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, by Platonist philosopher Plutarch, we learn (the speaker at this point in the text is Cleombrotus) that there is an interval between earth and moon (μεταξὺ γῆς καὶ σελήνης). Far from being void, this interval is filled with air (ἀήρ, “(lower) air”, as opposed to αἰθήρ, the “upper air”, “aether”, or “heaven”), which, were it removed, would destroy the consociation (κοινωνία) of the universe. The lower air is also the abode of the intermediate race of daimons (δαιμόνων γένος), whose function is interpretative, hermeneutic, and without whom man would either be severed from the gods altogether or subject to the confusion of unmediated contact with them (De defectu oraculorum, 416e-f). According to Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (De somniis, I, 141), on the other hand, the daimons of the philosophers are, in fact, the “angels” of “the divine word” (ὁ ἱερὸς λόγος) of Hebrew scripture, intermediaries of the Interval, who convey back and forth (διαγγέλλουσι) the exhortations of the Father to His children and the wants of the children to the Father.
The plastic image of this traffic or commerce between the world above and that below, which occurs within the ambi-directional space of the Interval, is, of course, the ladder. Philo of Alexandria, in his commentary on Jacob’s vision of the ladder (Genesis, 28:12), says that κλῖμαξ (“ladder”) is a figurative name for ἀήρ, whose base (βάσις) is the earth and whose top (κορυφή) is heaven (De somniis, I, 134). Furthermore, just as the universe is, figuratively, a ladder, or interval, so too is the soul. Here, the foot of the ladder is sense perception, corresponding to the earthly element, while the top is the mind, the nous (νοῦς), corresponding to the heavenly element (De somniis, I, 146). Like the angels, the words of God move up and down the entire length of this ladder, reaching down through the interval to draw the mortal mind upward.
The mind’s ascent of the ladder is an arduous undertaking, an exertion of the soul that Philo names ascesis (ἄσκησις, “exercise, training, practice”). The ascent is not continuous, but rather oscillates, with the practiser/ascetic alternately gaining and losing height, now wakeful, now asleep, pulled in opposite directions by the better and the worse (De somniis, I, 150-152). The practisers thus dwell in the interval; they are “midway between extremes” (μεθόριοι τῶν ἄκρων). At the topmost extreme dwell the wise, who have always striven for the heights, and at the bottommost extreme dwell the wicked, who have ever made dying and corruption their practice.
Man’s condition as one of “those-in-between,” pulled between good and evil, inclining now toward base perdition, now toward the transcendent, is conditional upon his existence within time, within becoming. For those in Hades or Olympus, in hell or heaven, which exist outside of time, further change is impossible, however. Yet even at this eschatological level there is an interval, an intermediate state that is neither good nor evil, wisdom nor wickedness, hell nor heaven, angel nor devil. According to a mediaeval popular tradition, traces of which can also be found in the legend of the Voyage of St Brendan, there was a third, neutral faction of angels during the revolt in Heaven, who were neither for God nor His enemy, Lucifer. These angels were cast out of Heaven, but rejected by Hell. Instead, they dwell in the interval between the two eschatological planes, an indeterminate zone that is neither good nor evil. In the Divina Commedia of Dante, they are to be found in the vestibule or threshold of Hell, among those who are neither dead nor alive, “the sect of caitiffs, hateful to God and to His enemies” (“la setta dei cattivi, / a Dio spiacenti ed a’ nemici sui” – Inferno, 3, 62-63).

The interval as threshold is also the locus of a peculiar, intermediate genre of literature, the σπουδογέλοιον or joco-serium (“serious-jesting” or “jesting-serious” – серьезно-смеховой), whose history is traced by Mikhail Bakhtin in Chapter Four of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The genre springs from the tradition of the Socratic dialogue, of which, apart from Xenophon, Plato is the only extant exponent. In itself a discursive form of the interval, a polyphonic intermediation whereby latent truth and knowledge are brought to birth by the participating speakers, or “ideologues”, as Bakhtin names them, the σπουδογέλοιον is an eschatological “dialogue on the threshold” (Schwellendialog, or диалог на пороге, in Russian) that takes place in the interval between earth and underworld or between earth and heaven. One of the most famous classical examples is Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification), a parodic apotheosis, in which the Emperor Claudius, having given up the ghost via the back passage, is turned away from the gates of Olympus.

Menippus, Diego Velázquez

The chief protagonist of the serious-jesting eschatological dialogue on the threshold is, however, Menippus of Gadara, a third-century B.C. Cynic philosopher of Phoenician origin, who is said to have been the originator of this literary genre, known also as “Menippean Satire,” although none of his writings are extant. (In Lives of Eminent Philosophers (6, 101), Diogenes Laertius reports that Menippus composed, among other writings, a Νέκυια, or Journey to the Underworld.) Menippus, as satirical ideologue of the Interval, is the central character in a number of dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, all of which take place on the threshold between worlds: for example, the Icaromenippus, in which the Cynic fashions himself wings and flies to heaven to discover the (less than flattering) truth about the gods; and the Necyia, possibly inspired by the lost writings of the Gadarene, in which he descends to Hades to mock at the miserable fate of kings and millionaires in the afterlife.
The σπουδογέλοιον continues as a distinct, recognisable genre until as late as the seventeenth century, a fine example being the monumental anthology Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (Amphitheatre of Jesting-Serious Socratic Wisdom), published by Caspar Dornavius in 1619. The Amphitheatrum contains liminal, intermediate texts, ambiguously situated between high and low, which treat derisory subjects in a grandiloquent way, or which are simultaneously scholastic and absurd, such as the Disquisitio Physiologica de Pilis (Physiological Disquisition on Hair) by Joannes Tardinus, which painstakingly exhausts all the philosophical, theological, historical, geographical, medical and scientific possibilities of the subject, or the De Peditu eiusque Speciebus, Crepitu et Visio, Discursus Methodicus, In Theses digestus (On Farting and its Species, the Loud and the Silent, Methodical Discourse, Arranged in Theses), by the pseudonymous Buldrianus Sclopetarius, a mock philological, historical, scientific and even musicological tract whose title speaks for itself.

In conclusion, as a space of tension between two static extremes, it is only the existence of the metaxy that enables the possibility of ambi-directional movement, thereby creating a medium of communication. The metaxy can also be ambivalent – Bakhtin would say “carnivalesque” – abolishing and merging hierarchical opposites. And hence the seductiveness of the metaxylogical.

(c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009
Published in The Seductiveness of the Interval. Romanian Pavilion - 53rd International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia 7th June-22nd November 2009 by the Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm

Note toward the "Malbrough theme" (тема Мальбрука)

Johannes Ravisius, in his Officinae epitome (Seb. Gryphius: Lyon, 1560), gives an extensive catalogue of famous cases of unnatural death recorded in classical antiquity. These include those who met their ends by fever (Febre mortui); by apoplexy (Apoplexia mortui); by bleeding to death (Sanguinis fluxu mortui); by the gout (Podagra [mortui]); by dysentery (Dysenteria [mortui]); by drowning (Aquis submersi); by falling off horses (Equorum lapsu mortui); killed by snakes (A serpentibus occisi), lions (A leonibus occisi), or dogs (A canibus occisi); suffocated by smoke or steam (Fumo aut vaporibus suffocati); dying of merriment and laughter (Gaudio et risu mortui); engaged in a sexual act (In venereo actu mortui); by excessive eating and drinking (Cibo et potu nimio mortui); by hunger and thirst (Siti et fame mortui); struck by lightning (Fulminati seu fulmine percussi); swallowed up by the earth (Terra absorpti); etc. etc.

Ravisius also dedicates a short section (vol. 1, p. 93) to those who died or were slain in the privy (In latrinis mortui aut occisi). In fact, the cases cited all involve murder: Heliogabalus and Cneius Carbo were assassinated while in the jakes at stool; Foelicula, Valerianus, Ireneus, and Abundius were Christian martyrs whose torments culminated in them being thrust down a latrine (in cloacam detrudi).

The subsection "In latrinis mortui aut occisi" is cited by the anonymous authors of Bibliotheca Scatologica (Scatopolis [Paris]: Chez les marchands d'aniterges, l'année scatogène, 5850 [1849], p. 17), who approve "avec plaisir" the mention of debauched third-century Roman emperor Heliogabalus (Elagabalus), but are surprised at the omission of fourth-century heresiarch Arius (perhaps the most notorious case of death in the latrine recorded in history). Moreover, they regret the fact that Ravisius did not also provide a list of famous figures born in a privy: "Ravisius aurait dû donner la liste des hommes célébres qui sont nés là où les précédents sont morts, et il est à regretter qu'il ne l'ait pas fait"

In Histoire de la merde (Paris, 1978), Dominique Laporte, evidently without having consulted Ravisius, and relying on a cursory reading of the entry in Bibliotheca Scatologica, unwittingly creates an apocryphal tome dedicated to the subject of death (and birth) in the privy:

The stercus could be as much a principle of life as death. The literal resonance of this belief is illustrated by Gryphius's work [Gryphius is, in fact, the publisher, not the author -- my note], In latrinis mortui et occisi, from 1593, in which the author proposes nothing less than a comprehensive census of eminent men and women who were born or died in infamous places -- namely, in latrines.

History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002, pp. 36-7

The concept of stercus as a principle of life and death of course derives from Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque, in which death and defecation are fundamentally ambivalent, implying not corruption and destruction, as in the moralising view of life, but rather regeneration and rebirth. For Bakhtin, carnivalesque representation of the evacuations of the “material-corporeal substratum” (material'no-telesnyj niz) is a liberating debasement (sniženie) of fear and death. The ‘Malbrough theme’ (tema Mal'bruka) is the term he uses to denote those instances in literature or folklore where the moment of death coincides with the act of defecation (ispražnenie) or breaking wind (ispuskanie vetrov). The throes of death, childbirth and defecation are interwoven in the carnivalesque continuum. As an important variant of the theme Bakhtin also mentions involuntary defecation provoked by terror, by the throes of fear (Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekovaja i Renessanca, Xudožestvennaja literatura: Moscow, 1965; 2nd edition, 1990, p. 167-8).

For Bakhtin the Malbrough theme in particular and scatological images more generally are intrinsically linked with the image of the underworld (s obrazom preispodnej). Within the order of the carnivalesque cosmos, the material-corporeal substratum is contiguous with the bowels of hell. However, again, in this context Bakhtin, like Ravisius, omits to mention what was probably the most famous instance of the "Malbrough theme" in the ancient and mediaeval world after that of the Emperor Claudius, namely the death of Arius, the originator of the heresy that the Son of God was a created being subordinate to the Father, condemned by the Ecumenical Council at Nicea in the year 325. Indeed, "the strange and horrid circumstances of [Arius's] death", as Edward Gibbon puts it in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (cap. 21), were decisive in the defeat of Arianism, and seen as divine intervention. The sceptical Gibbon concludes that "those who press the literal narrative of the death of Arius (his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy) must make their option between poison and miracle."

Arius

Fifth-century Constantinopolitan church historian Socrates Scholasticus describes Arius's demise as follows:

On approaching the place called Constantine's Forum, where the column of porphyry is erected, a terror arising from the consciousness of his wickedness seized him, accompanied by violent relaxation of the bowels: he therefore inquired whether there was a convenient place near, and being directed to the back of Constantine's Forum, he hastened thither. Soon after a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations of his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died. The scene of this catastrophe still exists at Constantinople, behind the shambles in the piazza: and by persons going by pointing the finger at the place, there is a perpetual remembrance preserved of this extraordinary kind of death. So disastrous an occurrence filled with dread and alarm the party of Eusebius bishop of Nicomedia; and the report of it quickly spread itself over the city and throughout the whole world. The verity of the Nicene faith being thus miraculously confirmed by the testimony of God himself, the emperor adhered still more zealously to Christianity.

The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, anonymous translator, London 1853, p. 78

The death of Arius combines the main elements of the Malbrough theme: death during defecation; defecation caused by terror. However, its eschatological import could not be farther removed from Bakhtin's concept of the Rabelaisian grotesque. The hellish eruption of Arius's bowels is an image and consequence of the infernal origin of his heretical doctrine. It is ambivalent in that is a divine epiphany, but one of the intestinal, infernal underbelly, devoid (voided) of the fertilising, regenerative virtue and merry carnivalesque ambivalence that characterises the "Malbrough theme".

(c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009

Mariya Yudina

Mariya Veniaminova Yudina (1899-1970) was perhaps one of the greatest classical pianists of the twentieth century. She was openly critical of Stalin and, in spite of the climate of fear created by militant atheism and religious persecution, made no attempt to conceal her Christian faith, as a Jew who had converted to Orthodox Christianity. Although she was sacked from her teaching position at the Petrograd Conservatory in 1930, she escaped arrest during the Terror, unlike many of those from her intellectual circle who perished, including Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) and Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938). The reason she was spared is no doubt because Stalin himself was an admirer of Yudina's piano playing. (Likewise, it is known that Stalin, who took a personal interest in the arts, gave orders for Mandel'shtam to be "isolated, but preserved", until the poet's withering attack on the tyrant in his suicidal "kremlyovskiy gorets" epigram of November 1933 made his destruction inevitable). There are a number of versions of a story about how Stalin heard Yudina play Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 23 on radio one evening and demanded that a copy of the disk be brought to him the next morning, not realising that it had been a live performance. The following account is from Caterina Clark and Michael Holquist's biography of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), who was a friend of Yudina:

"When Stalln heard Yudina playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 over the radio, he liked it so much that he telephoned the station and asked them to send over the record. This caused great consternation because the performance had been a live one and there was no record. It was decided to make him one on the spot. Yudina and an orchestra were summoned to the studios. The conductor was so nervous that he had to be replaced, but his replacement was no better, and only with a third conductor did they manage to make a record. Yudina was unruffled throughout. Stalin was so pleased with the record that he sent her a large sum of money. In her thank you note, she told Stalin that she had given the money to her church and then declared, 'I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive you for your great sins before the people and the country.' Everyone expected Yudina to be arrested forthwith, but Stalin, who perhaps had a weak spot for people of the church as a holdover from his seminary days, did not react. Her recording of the Mozart was reportedly found on the turntable in Stalin's dacha when he died."

(Mikhail Bakhtin. Caterina Clark and Michael Holquist. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 107)

I cannot agree with the assertion that Stalin may have had "a weak spot for the people of the church". It is more likely that he had a superstitious fear of the "yurodivyy", the holy fool, who, since St Prokopiy of Ustyug, Fool-for-Christ, has had such a long tradition in Orthodox Rus. Certainly, Yudina would fit the bill: she is described as wearing "an old raincoat of her father's, a beret, and tennis shoes" and as having no fixed abode. In spite of her impoverished circumstances, she donated Stalin's gift of money to the Church. Shostakovich maliciously called her a "religious hysteric". However, the strength of her religious faith made her utterly fearless, as is evident in the fact that she could dare to tell Stalin himself that she was praying for God to forgive his sins.

The recording of Mozart's Concerto no. 23 can be found here:

http://www.mariayudina.com/