Friday, January 29, 2016

"Indispensable" A Sermon by the Reverend Rachel J Bahr


"The members of the body that seem to be 
weaker are indispensable"

I. Corinthians 12:22
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“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” Amen to that. In any group, no matter how seemingly homogenous there is diversity and fault lines ready to rip own chasms that have been building up pressure for years. Yet however temperamental, anyone who has a family knows a truth, whether one you were born into or chosen later in life, the truth that it is in our differences that we are strong. It is because we have feet, those who will do the legwork, that me make progress in the world. It is because we have hands, those who will offer welcome, embrace and support, that we survive. It is because we have eyes, diverse gifts of perception that allow us to see the world, see secrets, see new truths.

In the scripture of our family, in the passion of our faults, in the testament of our differences, in the commandments of our love we see us how God sees us: as one body with many members. My family knows something about difference within unity. My partner sometimes describes our family in this way, she is a goldilocks surrounded by a family of bears. The truth is the Bahr women are fiercely independent; we enjoy our autonomy within the Bahr kin-dom, adults and bear cubs each wanting to direct the path in our own ways. “Indeed,” scripture tells us, “the body does not consist of one member but of many.”

Clementine is like a pair of hands, she is known for staking claim on people, things, and new territory, like a bear. Once I found she moved all of her belongings into my bedroom, in an attempt to colonize. Things didn’t explicitly have Mom written on them was her explanation. She believes in claiming things. Once she marks you, you are a part of her territory, and she is fiercely protective. She looks out for her own, often behaves like a little mom, to her sister’s annoyance. But the hand she lays on things is of love, she wants to keep you secure & close.

Nora is like a pair of feet. Since she was old enough to crawl to me, upon coming home she always demanded to engage in play before we could do anything else. Nora’s games often involve the adult running themselves ragged, while she sits and laughs, expending little energy. Don’t leave anything out or it becomes a material in her world to smear on the walls. She’s a kid who enjoys all things messy. She likes seeing things move, people, things, thoughts, feelings. She is a kid that wants to set the world into motion, to take static things, the neat and organized, and fill them with a spirit of action.

Having gifted girls often means there is competition when one is praised. The other speaks up, “What about me?” Fearing that raising up one will bring down the others. Many of us fear this I think. But scripture like a mama bear says, “if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.” You are not any less part of the family for being different. Although sometimes, when each bear wants her way it can feel like that.

In our family, Gabby, the Three Bears' Goldilocks, often knows how to bring us all together. She is a unique pair of eyes. She reminds us that we need one another, especially when we all are demanding things go our own ways. She reminds the den: “The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” She helps each of us, including me, see fault lines as scars on the road to healing, to see hope and wholeness in the worst of divisions, to see the old in new ways.

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The Reverend and the Doctor
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Our scripture today is all about seeing the old in new ways. In seeing the scripture in our family, in the passion of our faults, in the testament of our differences, in the commandments of our love, all saying that we are one body with many members.

But as many of us know, it is our family and even our bodies that challenge us most. In our scripture today, Jesus was visiting his hometown and synagogue. Do some of you know what its like to go away for a time and then come back to the church where you grew up? How many of you came back to the church a new person with a new vision. As long as Jesus followed the “usual” customs he was going to be safe.

But what does Jesus do? He reads from the book of the prophet Isaiah, words familiar to those listening but shows it to them with new vision. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” The year of God’s favor was called the year of Jubilee. Every 50th year Jews were called to forgiveness and liberation. All debts were released, the poor were to be emancipated from slavery, all prisoners were to be released, and even physical impairments would be healed. Jesus reads Isaiah for a reason. Isaiah’s prophetic words foretell what will happen when the anointed one would come, the Messiah, the one who would restore Israel to God’s Vision.

Jesus finishes reading and says to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Folks just stare at him, wondering what this all means. He likely received blank stares. Some of you may know what this feels like, when you return home, to see family, to an old church and you are saying things that shake things up and people are clearly uncomfortable.

Jesus is challenging the status-quo, the forces that maintain that some folks have more worth or value than others. Jesus is challenging who’s in and who’s out, in his own hometown. Jesus is communicating God’s Vision of Wholeness. We’re not leaving anyone out! We will live out being open and affirming!

This revolution Jesus is calling for, is one that he knows folks will run from, it terrifies them, and yet he begins in his hometown. Where he had the greatest potential for criticism, and folks questioning his identity. Jesus is coming out to them, saying things he’s never said to them before, laying it out on the table. People who know us, who knew us from our youth, are the hardest to come out to. Because they want to keep you as they knew you. As safe, domesticated, if sometimes troubled children. They want to keep what they knew rather than turning to face the strange. This was Jesus’ challenge sharing the good news, the radical welcome laid out in God’s Vision, how could he share this good news without rejection? How do we challenge people to welcome the rejected? And this is what the people do to Christ. They run him out of town. They take Christ literally out of their lives. How do we respond?

How do we see ourselves as Christ sees us without domesticating ourselves, without falling back on divisions in order to give us the feeling of safety?


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Clementine
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This last week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr, a man who knew something about the dangerous promise of seeing us as Christ sees us, seeing how in the scripture of our family, in the passion of our faults, in the testament of our differences, in the commandments of our love God calls down with radical inclusivity that we are one body with many members.

In the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr writes about his disappointment with the domesticated white moderate saying:

(1)“who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice… who… believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises [the oppressed] to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”

Some would say that hiring a queer pastor, enacting serious support for transgender persons is too much too quick. Some would beg us to wait, slow down, so we can hold onto our hate or fear a little bit longer. But this holding on to hate is what Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. says is killing us, killing black and queer and trans youth in the streets or alone in despair, and is killing us all spiritually. Waiting can be a sensible compromise, and radicalness can go too far, but we cannot wait to affirm life and we cannot go too far in the work of love. Love, as the late David Bowie tells us, challenges us to care for those on the edge of the night and in so loving to care for ourselves. It is never too soon to see the ignored, it is never too much to heal the wounded, there is no peace without justice, especially when we see ourselves in the isolated, suffering, and devalued. It is never beyond Christianity to see as Christ sees.

Dr. King continues: 2) “There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace."

At youth at General Synod this past summer our young people, some from this congregation attended a UCC Polity and History class with the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who with Rev. Bernice Jackson spoke about the civil rights movement, and other movements such as the Occupy Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement as all having a common thread. They were begun by young adults who were tired of standing by, doing nothing to make society change. They reminded us if you don’t have a mortgage it’s much easier to join the movement, you’re more willing to take risks for your own or another’s liberation.

The revered Dr. King continues his argument: 3) “Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are.”

We have the impulse to turn away from MLK’s honest critiques, embarrassed that now over 50 years later, his message is still relevant, that Christ’s call two millennia later is still desperately needed, that in the scripture of family, the passion of our faults, in the testament of our differences, in the commandments of our love, we still need help to see ourselves as God sees us: as one body with many members. But in closing I say for us all: “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” We are not unchristian for our brokenness and divisions for it is ever by Christ through those that the Church is continually resurrected. There is hope. We are the Church of the poor. We are the Church of resurrection. And Hope is always with us. Amen.


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Nora
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The family reading together
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Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Becoming Crip, Becoming-Hermaphrodite in Mandeville's Travels


"I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe"

The Travels of John Mandeville
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The Normate World Falls Apart

Chapter thirteen ends with an admission that his quest to physically travel and represent all the diversity in the world is a failure. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," (1896-1897). It is significant that this admission comes directly after his description of the hermaphrodites in lines 1892-1895. It is as though the hermaphrodites, while not being the last of the diverse people he describes, sit in the exact middle or cross beyond of the available tools of categorization (both meanings for the prefix "trans"). After the hermaphrodites, Mandeville has reached his breaking point and has to stop speaking. Mandeville's silence, the absenting of a voice that has dominated and structured the world through narrative, acknowledges the other peoples in the world and the other voices that may now be allowed to speak for themselves. In the Defective Middle English version, he admits his limitations for containing diversity by leaving room for other travelers and writers. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe, things I haven’t mentioned or described, because many people very much like and desire to hear new things" (Anthony Bale 124). From the onset, Mandeville's second pilgrimage was motivated by the desire for diversity which he calls the desire "to hear new things." In one sense, Mandeville has accomplished this in the goal of his journey to the margins, he has described many things pushed away from the bodies and imagination of England. Yet in another sense, he can only accomplish this goal by stopping his narrative and allowing other voices to speak. For to hear new things means not only to hear about them, but to hear from them directly. Mandeville cannot and does not speak for the hermaphrodites.

Mandeville choses to end his narrative travels, yet the text goes further, suggesting that no man, even a powerful, ablebodied, cisgender Christian man, can physically embody the diversity of the whole world by speech or deed. At last, as though gasping for air, Mandeville concludes by admitting that his pilgrims narrative cannot possibly contain all the marvelous things in the world: "There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly" (Bale 123-124). Despite giving the impression of semi-omnipresence and omniscience in his mapping of places and peoples, it is at the end of his journey that he finally confesses the limits of being a body moving through space. He is becoming conscious of the instruments and methodologies of his pilgrimage. Mandeville has limited vision, he can only see in his way and cannot see other things, in other ways. Furthermore, he is limited in his ability to speak. His words do not reveal all things as an object truth but are shaped by the limits of his capacity to know and communicate. More information would require the gaze and voices of other people. "Moreover," adds Mandeville, "in countries which I have visited there are marvels that I haven’t described, as it would take too long" (Bale 123-124). Mandeville's pilgrimage produces a kind of mappa mundi but one limited and distorted by the shape of his travels. Pilgrimage as more than static maps but rather  it is the embodied movement and limitations of movement through space that shapes places and peoples of the world. The mappa mundi and the pilgrim change from nouns with pre-determined forms, objects of transcendent truths, into the actions and productions of mapping, worlding, embodying, peopling, and pilgriming. 

In fact, reversing the traditional promise of the first pilgrimage to the center of the Christian world to make a person healed and whole, the conclusion of the second pilgrimage to the islands of the anti-loca sancta is to make Mandeville into a broken and diverse embodiment of the margins. By the end of the second pilgrimage, he has not only stopped speaking, he has effectively lost the ability to speak. This occurs, in part, because he has lost the ability to walk. In the Cotton version of the text, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of an "arthritic gout" (185). Losing the ability to move as he had in his pilgrimage takes away Mandeville's power to structure space by moving through it. Instead, he becomes more like the place-locked peoples he describes, like the hermaphrodites and Amazons. In any case, his desire to contain difference at once fringing on neurotic and his ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things is proven impossible, wearing down his body. Thus, not only does Mandeville become spatially locked like those on the margins but his body becomes crip, loses its status as ablebodied that he had when he was living in the center of the Christian world. Mandeville leaves Jerusalem like one of the people of power and returns to it as one of the freaks from the margins. Indeed, it is Mandeville's choice to offer his body to Rome as embodied cultural authority that transform pilgrimage from a process of healing into a process of marginalizing, cripping, freakening. The last work of his pilgrimage is to make Mandeville into a monster, a body that shows the diversity of the world and the diversifying effect pilgrimage has on space and the body. Rather than merely look and recording the difference of the Hermphrodites, Mandeville becomes crip and becomes hermaphroditic.


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Back to the Center

While the end of the traditional pilgrimage is to return from the center to the margins, the cycle of the second pilgrimage is to come back from the margins to the center of Christianity, "tornyng homwarde to Rome" (2840). While supposedly from England, Mandeville calls Rome home. The margins may give rise to the diversity of crip, trans, and intersex bodies of pilgrims yet while most pilgrimages involve a return to these places of origin, Rome or Jerusalem continue to signify "home" for many Christians. These Loca Sancta are the physical embodiment of the City of God on Earth. Indeed, the allegory of the pilgrims journey is the leaving behind of the earthly point of origin to end at last in Heaven, used in varying levels of transparency but perhaps most famously portrayed in the 17th century Pilgrims Progress. However Mandeville challenges the norms of the pilgrim's journey by traveling from the center of the Christian world to the margins, he nonetheless ends his travels and his narrative back in Rome. This return marks the limits as well as the strategy of Mandeville. He can challenge but not totally resist the power Rome has to orient space and bodies toward it. Yet throughout his narrative, Mandeville demonstrates the ability to turn expectations towards his alternative agenda. Although Mandeville returns to Rome, he is not the same man. Mandeville has become different, become crip, become hermaphroditic, transgressing boundaries of place and embodiment. In returning to Rome, Mandeville presents himself central authorities in order to evidence that his loop is more like a spiral, containing more every time is leaves and never totally resolving back into itself.

The purpose of the trip back to the centers of Christianity is for Mandeville to present himself and his book as proof of the diversity of the world, "to showe my book to the holy fader, the pope, / and telle to hym mervayles whoch Y hadde y-seye in diverse contrees"  (2840-3). Mandeville and his book have effectively become "monsters" working to show the center the truth of the diversity that exists on the margins. In turn, Mandeville hopes that the central authorities of the Christian world would verify his account of diversity, "so that he, / with his wise / consayl wolde examine hit with diverse peple that beth in Rome" explains Mandeville. "For / ther beth in Rome evermore men dwellynge of diverse nacions of the worlde." Unexpectedly, Mandeville trust in Rome to verify his embodiment of diversity is based not on the innate centrality and wholeness of the people there but because the center itself has become a collection of diverse peoples with whom the Pope can seek advise. By the end of Mandeville's second pilgrimage, perhaps as soon as the conclusion of chapter thirteen, diversity has turned from a marginal quality to escape into a point of authority. Mandeville's vision of authority is a council with the diverse nations, from the various peoples and places of the world. Does this include representatives from the Island of Amazons and Hermaphrodites? The monsters of the world move from the margins to the center of knowledge and Mandeville's hope is that this world council will authorize that his book embodies that diversity.

The need for this authorization is that no one body or pilgrimage can embody the whole diversity of the world, "for as moche as many man troweth noght but that they se with her owen / eye other that they may conseyve with her kyndely witte" (2838-2839). The "kindly wit" means the power of generosity to perceive others and it also means the limits of a mind to comprehend difference only in terms to what it knows and is, of what is of like "kind" to it. The movement towards the other, the anti-loca sancta, is an encounter with a difference that challenges and breaks down traditional forms of knowledge, yet the return to the center acknowledges that this difference will be framed and distorted by the kinds texts and contexts that pre-exists its the same limited archive. The radical "troweth" of the other becomes limited by the "eye" and "witte" of the self. Indeed, despite the diverse peoples present to consul the Pope and authorize Mandeville's second anti-loca pilgrimage, the final word on his narrative is premised on a pre-existing text in Rome that prefigures (and predetermines) all he says. 

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Cycles of Change


In Rome, after Mandeville presents his challenging account of the world, the central authorities offer him a book of their own, "a Latin book containing all this and much more, according to which the book Mappa mundi is made, a copy of which book he showed to me" (124). Even the vernacular English (as well as other languages) used to describe the new content must be translated and confirmed in the authoritative Latin. Only after this pre-text confirms the new that veracity is known, "[t]herefore the Holy Father the Pope has ratified and confirmed my book in all topics" (Bale 124). For the medieval mind, it was not the new and innovative that was trusted but the old, traditional, and familiar.  The center (Jerusalem, Rome, God) functions like a quilting point, returning back only to extend out again among new and unheard of peoples and places. Put another way, Rome functions like the Latin Book to which all authorities must reference: the Bible. As far as Christian authorities travel to include more and more into its world, just as Augustine in response to the existence of Hermaphrodites, in the end the Christian world must find room for it in the pre-existing text at the center of the Faith. In returning to the Book and the City at the center of it all, it changes each time the pilgrim returns to it from some Anti-Loca Sancta with new eyes and new wits. In the end, pilgrimage is cyclical in reflection of Christianity's phases of life, death, and resurrection that are played every year through the liturgical seasons. Christmas gives way to Lent and in turn to Easter. In a temporal mode, the passing of time functions like the circular movements of the pilgrim. On each turn and return, the pilgrim sees the center and the margins in new ways.

Containing people, books, and maps of all the diversity of the world, Rome demonstrates that the center contains the margins. It is literally and figuratively a world power, Rome, that takes the place of God to be the universal translator of all difference. All things come from God and return back to God. In the Cotton version, Mandeville ties his second pilgrimage, to the anti-loca sancta, back into the final Christian authority, the divine map of the world, "who is three in one, without beginning and without end, without good quality, without great quantity, present in all places, and containing all things and whom no good can improve nor no evil harm" (185). Without this description of God as the great unifier across difference and place, the Defective version nonetheless concludes with a prayer to Divine authority as well as a nod to the Worldly authority of the Church in Rome. Yet with this prayer, Mandeville confirms that his vision of the worlds diversity is not only present in the diverse peoples and texts of Rome's earthly authorities but in the divine mind itself. Mandeville (and the Pope) possesses a limited knowledge that will always alter the truth of difference to fit into pre-existing categories, languages, and maps. The eternity of God then is represented in the pilgrimage not only as a singular central point, a Primium Mobile from which God never turns, but as a kind of infinite loop. God is constantly flowing out into the world, towards the margins, and back into itself as in a pilgrimage. This image of God then need not make all things the same in its oneness. The divine map knows "all places" differently and "all things" in their diversity. Unlike the "kindly wit" of humanity, Mandeville's image sees God in present everywhere and in all things in their particularity, as C.S. Lewis writes, "He can think of all, and all different" (Perelandra).

By the end of the book, Mandeville has wandered so far and wondered so much that the narrative has almost forgotten its initial orientation towards Jerusalem. After several chapters in which dozens of diverse lands and peoples are viewed very quickly almost as though Mandeville is speeding up in his travels and narration in an orgy of difference, trying to jam as much in as possible, reveling in multiplicity.  An image of this center, as an able-bodied white Christian male, Mandeville is nonetheless drawn across boundaries, longing to contain difference that will always escape him, suggesting the cyclical nature of the pilgrim himself as at once one and multiple, like and unlike, here and there, center and margin. Without explicitly identifying with all his different places and peoples, Mandeville nonetheless rejects static boundaries for the self or his world. He may not be "transgender" but he may be "gender fluid," rejecting a definitive place, orientation, physical state or national State for his body. In this sense, he is "trans." Instead of an orthodox English or Christian nationalism, he exhibits trans-nationalism, a cross identification with peoples of other nations. In the process Mandeville's narrative imagines him as a man of crossed, straddled, and blurred boundaries. He shows himself on the road as pilgrim working towards becoming-diverse, becoming-crip, becoming-Amazon, becoming-hermaphrodite. Even if he never arrives at absolute difference and dissidence to the central forms of authority, Mandeville suggests an allegiance to orthodox centrality yet remains ever in tension with a heterodox marginality that keeps its story open at its ends. 

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Anti-Loca Sancta: John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage


"Now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple"

The Travels of John Mandeville
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The Fifty-four Isles

The Book of John Mandeville is effectively two books and two pilgrimages. The first half of the book, lines 1 to about 1,425, concerns Mandeville's travels from England to the Holy Land. The second half of the book, 1,425 to about 2,850, tells the story of a new pilgrimage, starting from the center of the Christian world towards India, China, and various islands. In many respects, this is a reversal of the standard pilgrimage genre followed in the first narrative, where he moves from the margins towards the center of the medieval mappa mundi, to the loca sancta of Jerusalem. Erring from this well established flow of biopower, Mandeville walks down and away from the holy city on the mount to explore elsewheres, moving from the center to the margins. During these treks, Mandeville visits various prominent lands with the major kingdoms being given one or more chapters devoted to them. Chapter Thirteen, "Dyverseteis of Peple and of Contreis," stands out as a representative of the major mission and theory of this second pilgrimage. Not only does it begin with Mandeville offering what constitutes a new introduction, much like the one given in chapter one, but contains more lands than any other chapter, in excess of fifty-four individual islands. Chapter thirteen is particularly large, making up around 18%, approximately 1/5 of the whole Travels. 

Bringing his first pilgrimage from England to Jerusalem to an end, Mandeville begins chapter thirteen with a new commission that would take him from Christianity's loca sancta towards place on the margins; in a sense, inverting the proper flow of bodies in space. "And sithen Y have devysed byfor the Holy Londe and contrees ther aboute, and many weyes and to the Mount Synay, and to Babyloyne, and other places," recounts Mandeville of his many travels to the conventional places of religious significance, "now wole Y telle of yles and dyverse peple and bestes" (Ln. 1378-1382). The "now" marks in time the moment of departure on a new pilgrimage with new goals. Rather than privileging the central places and forms of embodying Christian ideals, Mandeville will be leaving these peoples and places behind to show the diversity of the world that has been shoved away elsewhere, to the margins. The need to tell of these places and people are evident because of their alienation from central Christian public life and discourse. Other pilgrimages and travels may make note of monsters and wonders, demonstrating them as freak-shows, places of interest that one may pass on the way to proper loca sancta. But Mandeville makes a point to announce the margins not merely as curiosities of the road but as goals in and of themselves. In this way, he establishes the margins as a kind of second, alternative loca sancta. These places and people become a kind of "anti-loca sancta" by attracting pilgrims away from the center of the world and culture and thus establishing through movement a reorientation of values.

Many of the lands are named and many are not. At one point, Mandeville is devoting one or two sentences per isle in an attempt to cram as many in as possible. Yet while as a narrator, Mandeville is quite loquacious in describing the diversity of peoples and places, even he is unable to contain the great number referenced in chapter thirteen. After going through a litany of places, each given shorter and shorter descriptions, at last he puts a pin in the project. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," writes Mandeville by way of confessing how much is left out of his book that he witnesses in the diversity of the world. While the center of the world is structured to remain the same, gaining its power through its definite orienting place, the power of the margins is that they keep on going. The people of the mountain enter into a siege position, cloistered in the mechanisms that work to make the structure of embodiment and location fixed. Yet those at the bottom, along the edges, can keep on moving and changing. Rome must be fixed and tangible to maintain power, while Paradise and it's islands can keep on cresting just over the next horizon.
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The Mountain of Adam's Tears

While the mountains of Jerusalem collectively form the loca sancta of Christianity, an implicit and integral part of Mandeville's second pilgrimage to the margins is based on the potentially superseding holiness of Eastern sites for the faith. Jerusalem may be located in the center of the T and O map but Paradise is positioned in a privileged place is at its top. As Mandeville moves away from the earthly Jerusalem, towards the margins, he moves towards the earthly Paradise. The garden of Eden is imagined in other medieval sources as the Anti-Loca Sancta to Jerusalem and Rome. Dante's Divine Comedy positions Paradise high atop a mountain on the far side of the world. Yet like Dante, Mandeville's journey to Paradise is not direct but wandering.  "A te convien tenere altro vïaggio," says Virgil, warning Dante to take an indirect path ('It behoves you to take an alternative way,' Dante. La CommediaCanto I). While the center of the Christian world is fixed, or should be if the geopolitical world were a settled thing, the elsewheres open up a vast variety of possible trajectories and modes of emplotment that open up alternative pilgrimage narratives. A fourteenth century reader knows what to expect from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, indeed Mandeville has already gone through many of those motions by the midpoint of his Book in his first pilgrimage. This second pilgrimage towards Paradise is not as familiar a tale. Mandeville is not as constrained by convention either in literary narratives nor in historical pilgrimages, although he has plenty of sources from which to draw ideas. By being Mandeville's second Loca Sancta, this alternative pilgrimage can amalgamate to it a vast diversity of places and peoples; expanding the narrative world map in the process.

In the introduction of his second pilgrimage, Mandeville draws a strong association between the diverse places and people he will be visiting with the earthly Paradise in the utter East. "For ther beth many diverse peple and bestes and contrees, which beth departed by the foure flodes that cometh out of Paradys Terrestre," claims Mandeville (1378-1382). Diversity itself seems to flow out Paradise as the waters separate places and peoples from one another like the precious stones said to be deposited by its outlets. Indeed, Mandeville tells of these stones and their power of healing but only if the carrier holds them on his left side, pointing them towards the East (W.T. Fernie 69). Paradise calls its scattered stones back to itself with interest in the form of bodies it brings back with it. The East calls bodies from the Center (Rome and Jerusalem) for a different kind of healing if they are willing to move toward the Anti-Loca Sancta. Paradise in this way functions as an opposing signifier for the Holy Lands. Eden represents a wholeness that breaks apart into division, whereas the mountains of Christ's death and the mountain of the Vatican represent the place where division is brought back together. All roads lead to Rome but all rivers lead away from Paradise. The common descent of diverse peoples, including monsters, is a key component in Augustine's examination of Hermaphrodites in De Civitate Dei (Augustine XVI.viii). It is likely that the author of Mandeville's Travels was aware of this discussion when this narrative was composed. Following the project of imagining elsewheres, Mandeville's narrative mapping echoes Augustine's assertion that monstrous peoples share a common descent from Adam and his choice of Hermaphrodites as a key example of an othered group that nonetheless likely shares kinship.

Between the mountain of the first Adam, Eden, and the mountain of the second Adam, Golgotha, is located a way station where the first humans mourned their tribulation. In the eastern islands, near the Isles of the Amazons and Hermaphrodites, writes Mandeville, "There is a mountain in this land and in the middle of this mountain there is a plain with a great pool with a large quantity of water in it. Local people say that Adam and Eve wept on that mountain one hundred years after their expulsion from Paradise, and they say that the water is their tears" (Bale 85-86). This mountain top pool of sorrow shared a bitter similarity to the mountain of Hermaphroditus, cursed waters where the child of Hermes and Aphrodite was raped and transformed. These anti-loca sancta are not always places of joy. Sometimes places can become sites of pilgrimage out of great sufferings, confinements, and exiles that occurred there. These places become troubled middles in stories that do not always have an evident end. They become places of pause, where the divisions of life can be contemplated. It is perhaps not so surprising that Mandeville soon turns to peoples such as the Hermaphrodites and Amazons who seem stuck on their islands, unable to move beyond their place on the margins. Indeed, as in the anti-queer, anti-trans, and anti-intersex arguments of many doctors, these peoples seem stuck in what may now be called, "disorders in sexual development." Such medical professionals see transgender and intersex as diversions or delays in the progress towards wholesome forms of embodiment and masculinity, towards the central norms of society; sometimes due to personal trauma. In recent years, Critical Transgender and Intersex Studies in and outside of medicine have debunked the trauma theory of gender in favor of a diversity or liberation model. Yet there remains a draw to return and dwell with places of isolation and exile that long defined gender alterity even as the movement works to gain the power to move elsewhere.

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Peoples of the East

The Islands of the Amazons and the Hermaphrodites are two key places described in chapter thirteen but around them are the accounting of over fifty-four islands that imagine the great diversity of possible genres of embodiment. These numerous islands were confederated under a single ruler operating out of the Island of Dodyn. "The kyng of that ile is a gret lord and myghty," writes Mandeville, "and he hath under hym 54 iles, and ech of hem hath a kyng" (1885-1900). Within the King's own land, "ther / beth many diversytees of men" (1869-1870). Yet his Kingdom was marked, as are many other places on the margins, by cannibalism. Cannibalism has a variety of significances in the Middle Ages and particularly in early European narratives about far off peoples. Among these meanings include a lack of civilization, usually equated to proper Christianity and Western Patriarchy. Furthermore, as medieval Animal Studies scholars, such as Karl Steel have argued in How to Make A Human, humanity is defined against bestiality in the Middle Ages by the taboo against eating human flesh. The act of cannibalism sets the margins apart from the central human community, where the line blurs between animal and human, person and monster. Importantly, it also blurs the distinction between inside and outside, as well as insider and outsider. The text says that the people who live under the King each family members as well as friends, husbands consuming wives, children eating fathers. Violence is not an act against an Other but committed on those of the same blood and flesh. Cannibalism of this kind may be seen as what happens when insularity, isolation, and consolidation become incestuously close-circuited.

Under the King are the fifty-four islands that are not all directly described as cannibals but who challenge the limits of human embodiment in other ways. Directly around the Island of Hermaphrodites are people with one eye, people with their face in their chests, or two small holes for eyes. After the hermaphrodites, Mandeville describes people with holes for mouths who must consume food through straws. One people have "oon eye, and that is in the myddes of her forhede," (Mandeville). Another, have "noon heed, and her eyen beth in her shuldres," (Mandeville). Another have "a plat visage withoute nose and eye, but they have two smale holes instede of eyen," (Mandeville). In each case, the placement and kind of eyes are prominent. Indeed, among the islands described, there is a fixation on the diversity of faces. The face is a key signifier for humanity. In traditional Islamic art, there is a directive not to illustrate eyes because it too closely resembles the act of giving life reserved for God. For Mandeville and his readers, there is an anxiety that while they gaze on the freakshow of the East, the freaks may be looking back at the center. The intermixing of hermaphrodite bodies with other monstrous peoples puts intersexuality within the spectrum of crip embodiment and marginalization. Hermaphrodicism is yet another way to be a monster, a freak, or an infirm. Modern intersex and disability politics further the implicit argument nascent in Mandeville's islands: there is not intersex and non-intersex bodies nor disabled and non-disabled bodies, rather there is bio-diversity. While the definition of the ideal body promised by the loca-sancta of pilgrimage as the goal of travel and salvation, the definition of marginalized bodies includes more diversity than can be contained in a single book. There is one way to be the same but countless ways to be different.

While pilgrimage functions by drawing bodies from the margins to loca sancta, thereby subordinating bodies to its dynamics of place, there is a privilege in being able to move. It is by movement that power systems of place are reinforced or challenged. Thus a second level of subordination becomes enforced by pilgrimage: those who move through space and those who are rooted in place. As a mover, Mandeville distinguishes himself from the places and peoples he observes in his second pilgrimage. They may orient and attract his movements but are themselves immobile. The people of and around India, including the Hermaphrodites and Amazons, are effectively disabled by their environment. "For they / dwelleth under a planete that men clepith Saturne... And for Saturne is of so late steryng, therfore / men that dwelleth under hym and that clymate haveth no good wyll to mech / styryng aboute," writes Mandeville (Ln. 1543). The freaks, monsters, hermaphrodites, and amazons are all disabled by the place where they live and the planet that governs it. This in part explains why Mandeville is permitted to travel to see them while they remain rooted in place. He is socially, physically, even super-naturally able to move because of the affects of his environment. "[I]n our contré is all the contrarye, for we beth in a clymate that / is of the mone and of leyght styryng, and that is the planete of way," writes Mandeville (Ln. 1543). "And therfore / hit gyveth us wyll to be moch steryng and to go into diverse contreis of the worlde, / for hit passeth aboute the worlde more leyghtlych than another planete." Although England and the Eastern Isles are both on the margins, they exist under different astrological powers. It is thus by the authority of the natural environment that the English are empowered with mobility and the peoples of the east are disabled. The English may enact the power to reify or resist the structuring of space while the bodies of Indians, hermaphrodites, and Amazons are bound to their place. In this way, the Isles are anti-loca to the Holy Lands but also to England.

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