Eliot Weinberger's Commitment to the Eclectic

"What do we look for when we read for pleasure? To see ourselves through the eyes of another?" asks David S. Wallace in "Unfamiliar Tongues: Eliot Weinberger's Travels in the Republic of Letters" at Los Angeles Review of Books. Weinberger’s newest collection of essays, The Ghosts of Birds (New Directions), is a "dive into early accounts of Adam and Eve from Georgian and Ethiopian sources, Old Irish romance, explorers of the American West, Zoroastrian fragments, and a wide variety of Classical Chinese texts, just for starters." More:

Weinberger’s deep erudition shows on the page with both the force and the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But beyond this display, there is beauty and strangeness in the fragments Weinberger has plucked from half-forgotten texts. Consider one short Odyssey-like episode from the Voyage of Máel Dúin, which Weinberger includes in his essay “Islands in the Sea”:

They came to an island with great flocks of sheep divided in two by a bronze wall. On one side the sheep were all black, on the other the sheep were all white. An enormous man was sorting the flocks. He would take a black sheep and throw it over the wall and it would turn white. He would take a white sheep and throw it over the wall and it would turn black. The men were afraid and did not land.

Though sourced from a saga of medieval warriors, here it reads like a surrealist fragment: there’s no fixed significance for the color-shifting sheep, and no commentary from Weinberger about what it might mean, but the passage is pregnant enough to set the mind running with possibilities. Weinberger’s best essays feel like portals into places or times of which you may have heard, vaguely, but which surprise you with their specificity. Although Weinberger is usually classified as a nonfiction writer, his work is marked by the appearance of the enigmatic, the magical, and perhaps even the “exotic.” This emphasis can make the boundary between the informational and the imaginative pleasingly difficult to discern.

In some of Weinberger’s strongest essays, a wide variety of information is synthesized around a particular thing, as in “A Calendar of Stones”:

The Aka of northeast India venerate their ancestors, who inhabit yellow stones.

Sir Walter Raleigh claimed that Amazons, the warrior women of the Orinoco, would trade the Spaniards plates of gold for green stones.

It is said you’ll sleep much better if you go to bed with blue stones.

When Orpheus played his flute, the stones arranged themselves around him.

The essay wanders through Kabbalah (“A stone is hard and endures; therefore it is in flux”), D. H. Lawrence, Japanese poetry, the Jains, as well as more obscure points of reference. No particular thesis is advanced, but the pathway that can be traversed across all these points is surprising.

One signature of Weinberger’s creative work is this commitment to the eclectic. In our increasingly hyper-specialized world, “eclectic” can seem like a belittling adjective, but it reflects a lofty aim: Weinberger truly attempts to think universally about literature...

Read the full review at LARB.