Embracing Evasion: The Exotic by Peter Cole

Perhaps the primary obstacle facing the contemporary reader of medieval Hebrew poetry is the overstuffed critical baggage of its ornament, which the textbooks would have us drag about on our way from line to line and poem to poem. Again and again the poetry is described as decorative or ornamental, without our ever stopping to ask what that means. The tacit assumption of modern art-talk is that ornament is unnecessary or quaint (domesticating). Baroque theories of the fold notwithstanding, we think of it often as fluff, or a lie. "Arabesque," for Ezra Pound, was the ultimate put down, the representative figure of evasion and flight from the real. "The world is still deceived with ornament," we hear in the Merchant of Venice, at the heart of another age of embellishment. "Thus ornament is but the gilded shore to a most dangerous sea ... the seaming truth which cunning times put on to entrap the wisest." Also prominent in the anti-ornament camp is Adolf Loos's equation of "Ornament and Crime," as the title of his 1908 essay on the subject has it, and his saying elsewhere that "the less civilized a people is, the more prodigal it will be with ornament and decoration.... The Red Indian within us," he urges, "must be overcome."

There are, however, less mechanical or reductive ways to think about ornament. The apocryphal book of Ben Sira says: "To a sensible man education is like a golden ornament, and like a bracelet worn on the right arm," a reasonably familiar sentiment. But then it says: "A mind settled on an intelligent thought is like the stucco decoration on the wall of a colonnade." (22:17), already a much more interesting notion.

For the phenomenon is cosmetic, though in saying so we unwittingly arrive at the root and truth of the matter, the complex of definitions that accrue around the Greek word for the verbal form of the term, kosmein, that is, to order, and, secondarily, to ornament. It is from this cluster of meanings that we get our "ordered world," "a cosmos," as in in the pseudepigraphic Prayer of Manasseh: "He who made the heaven and the earth with all their embellishment [kosmo]...." Which returns us to Bezalel and the sanctuary designed to "adorn Him."

Several modern writers who look at ornament in the visual arts and without condescension bring us closer still to the heart of the matter. The art historian A.K. Coomaraswamy traces the development of the word in Sanskrit, Greek, and English, from cult to court and on to the swamp of pretension and the dismissal of "arts and crafts." At the outset, he notes, ornament was "that which makes a thing itself"; and ornamentum in Ecclesiastical law didn't convey superfluous decoration, but the equipment of the sacred service. Discussing the various words used in traditional art-theory to express the phenomenon he says: "Most of these words, which imply for us the notion of something adventitious and luxurious,... originally implied a completion or fulfillment of the artifact or other object in question [... with a view to proper operation] ... until ... the art by which the thing itself has been made whole began to mean only a sort of millinery or upholstery that covered over a body that had not been made by 'art' but rather by 'labor'."

And Oleg Grabar states in The Mediation of Ornament: "Ornament is, to coin a word ... calliphoric: it carries beauty with it." Echoing Coomaraswamy he observes that the words used to express the act involved in ornamentation imply "the successful completion of an act, of an object, or even a state of mind or soul." He notes the daemonic, intermediary nature of ornament, and its extraordinary capacity as part of the work of art to shape our lives and thought, to question meaning with the pleasure it channels, or to use that pleasure to cultivate meaning and intensify relation to value.

All of this might be summed up in the artist-craftsman Eric Gill's saying that "a pendant on the neck is useful and possibly more so than a trouser button."

The issue's relevance comes into focus when we look at one of the most conspicuous ornaments in medieval Hebrew literature, the kind of biblical allusion that has coe tobe known as shibbutz, which means "setting" or "inlay," whereby elements of the biblical text are woven through the "fabric" of the verse. In that nineteenth-century term, a parallel to theGerman for "mosaic style," we have a classic case of distortion in East-West transmission, a failure of sympathy. For the term itself, shibbutz, implies an effect that is static while the use of biblical phrasing was brough over, in part, from Arabic literature, where it was based on the Quran and was known as iqtibas, "the lighting of one flame from another." It implied a source and transfer of energy. Far from constituting a rote application to an otherwise useful but plain poetic surface, biblical quotation and other ornaments of this poetry act like tiny turbines to the current of the verse, thousands of finely constructed stations-of-power set out along its flow.

Apart from quotation, what do we mean here by ornament? Nearly everything that contributes to the unparaphrasable weave of the writing -- alliteration, assonance, irony, metaphor, rhetorical and rhythmic effects, manipulations of tone -- the ceremonial equipment of the verse that makes it a poem and not a theme: "The little weddings between the words," as Israeli novelist Dan Tsalka has put it. All that's exotic to reduction's impulse.


[from "Solomon Ibn Gabirol: An Andalusian Alphabet" in Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Princeton University Press, 2001), translated by Peter Cole]