This essay is part of a review panel of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that took place at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Read the full panel here.
I’m grateful to Rafe Neis for creating the wonderful book that is When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven. At a fundamental level, as someone who is not a scholar of rabbinic literature, I learned a great deal. My lack of expertise in the book’s main area also means that my response to the book in this forum does not involve any narrow scrutiny of Rafe’s scholarly achievement. Based only on my knowledge of animal studies and gender studies, my sense is that their achievement is considerable. But rather than delving into the contributions that the book makes in those disciplines, I’d like to talk here, as non-experts do, about the pictures.
Image 1. Rafael Rachel Neis, Becoming Flora, Becoming Fauna (2018), mixed media on paper; When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, fig. 5
When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven is a rich dialogue between text and image. Sometimes the images are arranged in comics with their own texts, and sometimes they stand alone, providing a beautiful and often strange counterpoint to the academic prose. The juxtapositions of text and image are entertaining and enlightening, and as I read and studied them, I became very interested in the work that they do to help the reader and viewer participate in the work of the book. As Marcel Duchamp explained in his 1957 speech “The Creative Act”: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”[1] It is energizing, if a little vertiginous, in the case of Neis’s work, to be drawn in as a participant in looking at likenesses in a book that is about the act of looking at likenesses, and about the act of deciding just how alike those likenesses are. What does it mean for the offspring of a human to look like a raven? Just how much like a raven do they actually look? The images that Rafe offers ask us to linger in that question sensorially rather than moving quickly to turn it into a question that is secretly about something else: imperialist taxonomies, perhaps, or the limits of ancient and modern vocabularies of gender. Instead, faced with the visual work of the book, we need to stop and imagine what a raven-human actually is. Like the rabbis who are some of the actors in this story, we must decide what our work of likeness-making or difference-making, of commensuration or care, should or could be. This is useful. The time we spend training our senses to try to make sense of another world can change the way we write both about that world and about our own, and I think this is what this book is asking us to do.
Image 2. Rafael Rachel Neis, Quackborg (2015), pen and ink on paper; When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, fig. 9
I am reminded of what the mid-twentieth-century painter Elmer Bischoff said about his turn, or return, from abstract expressionism to figurative painting. In 1952-53, having failed to find another teaching job after losing his first position in a series of budget cuts, Bischoff supported himself and his partner by working as a cargo delivery driver for the Railway Express in San Francisco. The work was so physically demanding that he painted very little, but he spent time on his breaks “drawing figures at every opportunity. I parked my truck outside of a Foster Cafeteria and sat in the truck with a pencil and pad and spent lunchtime sometimes taking more lunch than I should, drawing people through the glass, drawing people sitting, having lunch, drinking coffee, chatting at the tables and so forth. […] I was tremendously keyed up and felt that these stupid, simple things of people sipping a cup of coffee were really loaded…. It was not so much an excitement about form as an excitement about the heart of the matter.”[2] Bischoff would become one of the leading artists in the Bay Area Figurative school of painting, integrating the gestural and color qualities of abstract expressionism into his figurative work. What I see in Neis’s work is something like a form of history that moves back and forth between figuration and abstraction. It helps that some of the figuration in When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven is very literal. But this figuration both embodies and invites our attentiveness to what Bischoff calls the “stupid, simple things” –What does a human look like? What does a raven look like? What happens when you look at them for long enough to see something like yourself? And then you look even longer? –and there is something about being asked to attend to these things that gets at the heart of the matter.
Image 3. Elmer Bischoff, The Yellow Lampshade (1969), oil on canvas, De Young Museum, San Francisco; photo: author
What does it mean to write history between figuration and abstraction? Neis’s work moves the reader, or viewer, between an illusion of representational transparency into a messy opacity and then gives us new, rougher, more indeterminate figures, different than we might expect, and not quite aligned with the realities we may reflexively want to see. Take for example Lilith. In Chapter 5 of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, Neis examines the Aramaic incantation bowls that represent Lilith, by tradition a demon who interferes with human reproduction. Neis outlines the scholarly approach to Lilith in which she is understood as a malevolent female being who is utterly abject or completely degraded and sexualized.[3] This Lilith is knowable, because she is what we expect a demon to be like. But as Neis shows, the Lilith of the incantation bowls is much harder to know than this. If we take away the assumptions embedded in the modern sexgender binary, the broad-shouldered, long-haired nude Lilith depicted in the incantation bowls is opaque; their relationship to humans is not one of simple antagonism, but is so intimate that the text of the bowls requires the language of legal divorce to end it. This Lilith is not what we expect. For this reason, what we see when we see this other Lilith, or the world around them, has shifted. Lilith is still there, but not transparently so; their contours are less clearly defined. Who is the Lilith who is in the middle of human marriages and in the middle of human generation? Who are the humans who are married to Lilith? And how do these human-spirit entanglements create what we see as life? Seeing Lilith less clearly, or less as we expect a demon to be, allows us to get at more fundamental questions about the universe in which Lilith exists, and that, too, is getting at the heart of the matter.
Image 4. Rafael Rachel Neis, Lilith. Rendering of image in the interior of “Incantation Bowl Representing the Demon Lilith,” Musée des Explorations du Monde, Cannes; When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, fig. 13.
Neis’s visual work adds more to this productive disorientation, for it reminds us that we know things in many ways, not just verbal. It takes away our sense that the words we read and write offer a complete or transparent account of the world we read and write about, and it once again pushes us into a messier and more indeterminate realm. What is a mixed-species family, and how might all families be parts of many species? Confronting the indeterminacy in what we think we know, moving that knowledge from one genre to another, often results in unusual insights. Some of the visual insights in When a Human Gives Birth to A Raven, especially on the sheer fecundity of the world Neis depicts, are extremely beautiful, as in images 1 and 6 in this essay. Other visual observations or commentaries in the book on the “stupid, simple things” in rabbinic literature are also very funny. In this sense Rafe’s work is less like the lush romanticism of Bischoff and more like the wit of the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla. Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash also hovers between figuration and abstraction as it mimics and explores the physics of movement as well as the early twentieth-century markers of species, gender, and class.
Image 5. Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), oil on canvas, Albright Knox Gallery. Public domain photo, available here.
Neis’s closing (tragi-)comic, “Those Rabbis!” fig. 14 of the book, does something similar. Neis illustrates the story of a raven-human and their happy mixed family but ends with an ominous rabbinic admonition: since the raven-human’s face is not human, “you would tell him, ‘Come, let us slaughter you!’” The simple ink on paper drawings that Neis uses to tell this story add a surprising lightness leading up to this point; the drawing of the raven and their mixed-species friends celebrating their human brother’s wedding is especially winsome. And this lightness itself does interpretive work. It shows us a vision of a world in which the things we find strange, unlike us, or uncertainly close to us, nonetheless have a place with us. They are our next of kin. As Neis says, they matter. The lightness of the drawings also makes plain how disturbing and absurd the final gallows-humor exhortation to slaughter these beings also is. As it turns out, careful observation and immersion in the worlds of ravens and humans, reveals that the heart of the matter is sometimes simultaneously beautiful, profound, dark, and without sense.
Pushing our medium of knowledge from verbal to visual and in-between allows us to engage with ancient material in new and expanded ways. I find this task extremely valuable, and I’m grateful to Rafe for inviting us to take it on. So the core of my response to When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven is actually not just these words that you have been reading, although I do mean all of what I have written here. When Rafe and I talked about this forum, we wondered what it might be like to push the expansion of sensory engagement even further, into performance or some other time-based genre. I settled on making a sound piece, partly for fun, and partly to try to capture the experience I had of reading and learning about the world that Rafe describes. That world is dense and complex and multilayered, and it is also beautiful and awkward and unpleasant and sometimes a little silly. It is made up of things we recognize and things that we don’t. Here is the piece, Sound for Ravens, which is a short sonic tribute to Rafe’s work. It is meant as a gift for them, as a token of respect and thanks.
Image 6. Rafael Rachel Neis, Canine Metathesis (2018); Scribal Errors Series; mixed media on paper; When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, fig. 6.
Catherine Michael Chin is Professor of Classics at UC Davis.
[1] Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 140; see also the discussion of Duchamp in Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” in Molesworth, Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing about Art (London and New York: Phaidon, 2023).
[2] Quoted in Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 64.
[3] When A Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 177-78.