I do not remember myself ever not reading. I do remember, though, the first books I read with an intentionality budded by sheer breath-held interest, books that I requested as birthday and Christmas presents, books that I embraced and which embraced me back, books that bridled my imagination and led it to the pasture of small-town Bayport: the Hardy Boys books. It’s true. The gesso that readied my life-long love of reading, that underlay my forty plus years of studying, teaching, and writing about books, was the intrepid sleuthing adventures of teenaged amateur detectives Frank and Joe Hardy.
What, after all, was there not for a young boy to like? Frank and Joe lived lives canopied by fast-forward action, mystery, and a shuddery, seeping atmosphere of noir. Their dad Fenton did not sell insurance or cars or hardware, did not occupy a nondescript cubicle as a nondescript drone in a nondescript office, did not farm or bake or plumb or excavate. No, he was a professional detective. He unsecreted secrets, unbaffled the baffling, clarified the recondite, explained the inexplicable, penetrated the impenetrable—and best of all, he often sought his sons’ assistance. They had girl friends and frolicked at beach parties and barbeques. They had cool friends, my favorites being roly-poly Chet with his yellow jalopy and buff Biff with his fearsome pugilistic skills always at their service. They went to school but never sat in a classroom. School made no claims on their time: they never had to study, do long division, or memorize all the states and their capitals. They never experienced the distress of bringing home a report card. They had a car, motorcycles, and a boat. They spoke Spanish. They regularly bested adult authority figures. Frank and Joe garmented the collective id of the planet’s prepubescent males with velvety wish fulfillment.
Inevitably, the Hardy Boys books have drawn the lofty disdain of critics. The rasp of literary theory and its critical pieties has zested the Hardy Boys rind. For some, the books are aesthetically moribund: lackluster prose coupled with templated plots conjoined with wholly absent character development. For others, the boys epitomize, as their name suggests, the hardness and hardiness of the militantly gendered male personality, and their stories reinforce the relations of a patriarchal social structure, a world of male struggle for success, a world in which mothers and girl friends appear in supporting roles only. For others, the stories perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes or inscribe social class hierarchies. For others, bent on queering the books, the girl friends and fraternal relations mask a homosocial, perhaps even a homoerotic, thematic. For still others, noting the strange ineptitude that seemingly subverts Fenton Hardy’s professional and paternal authority, the books enact a totemic dance around the figure of the vanquished father.
While these criticisms may have merit, I think they are ungenerous because they overlook the value of the books as narratives, as ordered encounters with lives not our own, lives that report experiences not our own and from which we can learn. I passed from my world, with its choices and contingencies and vicissitudes, to the Hardy boys’ world and I experienced it. I saw it, heard it, even felt it. The space between those worlds shrunk with intimacy, and if there was a line of demarcation between them, a border of some kind, I passed over it with the passport of a willing imagination. And then I returned, if not a better person, then certainly a smarter one. David Abram, philosopher and environmental ethicist, observes that the tales told in oral cultures carry “nested in their narratives much of the accumulated knowledge of the culture,” that they convey the “practical knowledge” necessary “in one’s daily actions and interactions,” and that once those narratives were written, they became unchanging and autonomous, losing their grounding in the specific contexts of situation and character that called them forth. I would assert, however, that written narratives can perform the same function Abram ascribes to oral narrative.
Reading the Hardy Boys books, I learned that sibling relations did not need to be as fraught as was my brother Dennis’s and mine. I learned that fathers and sons can share interests and confidences, and that fathers were sometimes fallible. I learned that mothers love without qualification and that spinster aunts are all bark and no bite. I learned that, despite the enshrined cultural narrative that celebrates them, small towns can harbor people with dark intentions, can be cosseted enclaves filled with jeopardy and intrigue. I learned that analytical thought required one to track and trace, decipher heralding signs, and draw conclusions. Most important, perhaps, I learned that no difference need obstruct the stimuli of words on a page and the stimuli of imagination. Those words and I became a conjoined focus, a coming together of the external me reading an arrangement of letters and internal world of the narrative. The subtle and large gestures of a character’s eye or face or body; the gradients of event; the tonal resonance of voice and mood; the depth and dimension, the cavities and densities of place—these were as carnal, as enfleshed, as I was, as alive as I was, their inhalations and exhalations as rhythmic as my own. I made my mark on those stories; they made their mark on me.
I still have those Hardy Boys books, boxed and carefully stored in the basement. I recently pulled out and reread one that I remember being a particular favorite, The House on the Cliff. I expected to be recognized, welcomed, like some prodigal son returning from a far-off country. Instead, it shunned me and sent me away. I was not stirred by the forbiddingly secret caves, was not shaken by the always lurking, drug-smuggling villains, was not pinwheeled by the slipstreaming danger that enveloped the boys seemingly in every chapter. My interest in this book, so foundational in my reading life, was a lost drachma that no amount of light, no amount of careful sweeping, could uncover. I should have known better. The boys and their adventure were carapaced in timelessness, while I had become a creature of time. I was not the same reader. I changed, and suddenly the books that had become transparent in my hands, unmediated media, grew opaque, caused a vague dissatisfaction, seemed somehow monochromatic, limited, a threshold I felt an urging to cross. The very books that had brought me to reading had spurred me to reach beyond them to a relationship with more complex texts. Exactly why, I cannot say. It’s a mystery, one worthy, perhaps, of Frank and Joe.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
My MRI Experience
Yesterday morning I had an MRI, an experience that, were I a Calvinist, would have convinced me of that faith’s two fundamental propositions: that I had, in some way unknown to me but blindingly apparent to omniscient Providence, sinned grievously; and that no affliction is unaccompanied by the catalyzing grace needed to overcome it.
My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I’ve managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day’s coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county’s hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I’d be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I’ve answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I’ve filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I’ve been told this or shown that—all of which I’ve done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.
At 7:15, the hospital’s lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve been to my doctor’s office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn’t drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I’m getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet.” Truth be told, I’m no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take “pleasure in complaining” and “delight in viewing only evil.” But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5th question, I said, “Look, let’s save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind.” He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the “no” boxes, and had me sign a form saying I’d been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.
In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. “You know,” I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, “I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I’m not a little pissed off that I’ve had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it’s probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!” “Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the attendants said; “it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor’s office and the MRI scheduler.” A “miscommunication occurred.” Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient’s anger. Well, I was having none of it. I’m not an English teacher for nothing. “That may well be the case,” I said, “but, you know, I’m not in the mood to be Strother Martined.” They looked perplexed. “You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate.” They hadn’t seen the movie.
The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to “provide contrast.” Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I’ve always been good at dissociating.
And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. “Good job, Jerry,” one of the attendants said, “we’ve got clear images.” This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my “good job” being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that’s a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.
It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, “I smash all obstacles.” Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, “All obstacles smash me.” Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka’s cane.
My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I’ve managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day’s coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county’s hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I’d be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I’ve answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I’ve filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I’ve been told this or shown that—all of which I’ve done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.
At 7:15, the hospital’s lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve been to my doctor’s office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn’t drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I’m getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet.” Truth be told, I’m no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take “pleasure in complaining” and “delight in viewing only evil.” But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5th question, I said, “Look, let’s save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind.” He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the “no” boxes, and had me sign a form saying I’d been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.
In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. “You know,” I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, “I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I’m not a little pissed off that I’ve had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it’s probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!” “Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the attendants said; “it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor’s office and the MRI scheduler.” A “miscommunication occurred.” Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient’s anger. Well, I was having none of it. I’m not an English teacher for nothing. “That may well be the case,” I said, “but, you know, I’m not in the mood to be Strother Martined.” They looked perplexed. “You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate.” They hadn’t seen the movie.
The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to “provide contrast.” Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I’ve always been good at dissociating.
And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. “Good job, Jerry,” one of the attendants said, “we’ve got clear images.” This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my “good job” being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that’s a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.
It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, “I smash all obstacles.” Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, “All obstacles smash me.” Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka’s cane.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Best Gifts
I am shockingly ungifted with the gift of giving gifts. A backward glance at the history of my gift-giving reveals a mosaic of singular ineptitude, a frieze of nincompoopery, arrested moments of unrivalled duncitude. If my gift-giving were a sonnet, it would have 13 lines; were it Romeo and Juliet, it would lack the Capulets; were it a raiding Angle or Saxon, it would have taken the wrong off-ramp to Britain; were it a 100 meter dash, I’d be running it in a spacesuit. The gifts I have given have been ergo sum without the cogito; they have been lime green cargo pants at a faculty tea; they have been bags bursting with botches; they have been premeditated acts with shallowness aforethought. Seeking inspiration, I have lit votive candles to the art of gift-giving, to be rewarded with only a slipstream of silence. I have milked the cow of gift-giving, only to have skim splash into the bucket. When it comes to choosing gifts, my brain shutters its cognitive shop and retires to a back room for a toddy and a nap. Like the demonic sages in Paradise Lost, I have “reason’d high” about gift-giving and found myself “in wandering mazes lost.” The Buddha describes an Eightfold Path to enlightenment, but, when it comes to gift-giving, I cannot find Path #1, and it does not register on my Garmin.
I have committed unpardonable acts of gift-giving. Were the skin of every inhabitant of this planet a manuscript upon which offenses against the art of gift-giving were inscribed, mine would, as Jonathan Edwards said describing his sinfulness, “heap infinite upon infinite.” Over the years, I have given my wife a set of Revere Ware pots and pans—well, it is cookware with a pedigree stretching back to Paul himself; a 30 pound bag of carrots—well, she does like carrots and they are brimming with Vitamin A; a Subway gift card—well, she is an on-the-go woman with a jones for the grilled chicken on asiago bread; and a massive package containing 72 rolls of toilet paper—well, it was a deal too good to pass up and proof positive that I had mastered the art of the deal. I once pilfered my best friend’s golf shoes, polished them, and gave them to him as a birthday present—a gag gift he found as amusing as a computer virus. I have given my grandkids underwear and socks—you simply cannot have too many of these items, don’t you know. I have given my mom calfskin driving gloves, only to learn that she no longer drove. I have given my dad a box of freshly picked, organically grown strawberries, forgetting, somehow, that he suffered from diverticulosis. I have given a colleague a rather nice California merlot, forgetting, somehow, that his religion proscribed “stimulating” beverages. Somehow, for some reason known only to God or Oprah or Joel Osteen, I have managed to turn the act of gift-giving into an incessantly plucked string of self-reproach. St. Francis of Assisi said that “it is in giving that we receive.” I have received a zettabyte of mortification. Emerson says “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My portion, it would seem, is capaciously meager.
I could, for solace, turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift-giving ritual. A self-cancelling paradox, Derrida claims, lies at the heart of gifting. To give a gift is to enter a tangled exchange which incurs an obligation on the receiver’s part, a debt to be repaid, even if that repayment is no more than saying “Thank you.” A gift, to be received as a genuine gift, must disguise itself, must not appear to be a gift, must transcend the fraught cycle of giving and receiving, must locate itself beyond self-interested calculation or strategic deployment. Givers must be anonymous, Derrida concludes, even to themselves, lest they fall prey to the beguiling snare of prideful self-worth. The gift must not be a given thing, and the receivers must have no awareness that they have received a gift. In effect, a genuine gift annuls itself.
Clever, is it not? A swashbuckling concept, philosophically considered, festooned with panache, but, I suspect, of minimal value in chamfering the sharply disappointed looks of my grandkids when they found the raisins and oranges I anonymously placed once in their Christmas stockings. Like so much of postmodern theory, Derrida’s deconstructed gift is all ad hocery, without wider application and as practical as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
The best gifts are really two gifts: that which is given, and, behind it, the unsurpassed gift of attention. The best gifts mean that the receiver has, at some point, been the singular focus of the giver’s concentrated attention and purposeful planning. They mean that the receiver has been placed on the giver’s icon-laden cognitive desktop and singled out, attended to, deliberated on. The best gifts mean that the receiver has been experienced in the consciousness of the giver. They mean someone has watched the receiver wander off to a certain store aisle, linger in front of something. Someone has looked at the receiver looking. The best gifts mean that someone has listened to the receiver talk, wonder, express a frustration, reveal a desire or need or anxiety. Someone has taken in the receiver’s words; someone has made them a part of their awareness and introspection. The best gifts mean that someone has looked and listened and archived that looking and listening away, to be accessed when a gift-giving occasion arrives. The best gifts mean that in an era that scatters reflection, that startles time and chases it into the underbrush of mass distraction, someone has given the receiver the best gift of all: their undivided attention.
The seemingly simple but surprisingly difficult act of paying attention, of observing and listening, of curating the seen, the heard, and placing it in a small mental annex labeled “possible gift items”—this is the gift behind the gift. I’m working on it. One day I will master it. One day. Until then, I channel Bohr and Heisenberg, experiencing my own little uncertainty principle. Until then, I will be saying what I recently said to my wife Kathy: “Have you decided yet what I am getting you for Christmas?”
I have committed unpardonable acts of gift-giving. Were the skin of every inhabitant of this planet a manuscript upon which offenses against the art of gift-giving were inscribed, mine would, as Jonathan Edwards said describing his sinfulness, “heap infinite upon infinite.” Over the years, I have given my wife a set of Revere Ware pots and pans—well, it is cookware with a pedigree stretching back to Paul himself; a 30 pound bag of carrots—well, she does like carrots and they are brimming with Vitamin A; a Subway gift card—well, she is an on-the-go woman with a jones for the grilled chicken on asiago bread; and a massive package containing 72 rolls of toilet paper—well, it was a deal too good to pass up and proof positive that I had mastered the art of the deal. I once pilfered my best friend’s golf shoes, polished them, and gave them to him as a birthday present—a gag gift he found as amusing as a computer virus. I have given my grandkids underwear and socks—you simply cannot have too many of these items, don’t you know. I have given my mom calfskin driving gloves, only to learn that she no longer drove. I have given my dad a box of freshly picked, organically grown strawberries, forgetting, somehow, that he suffered from diverticulosis. I have given a colleague a rather nice California merlot, forgetting, somehow, that his religion proscribed “stimulating” beverages. Somehow, for some reason known only to God or Oprah or Joel Osteen, I have managed to turn the act of gift-giving into an incessantly plucked string of self-reproach. St. Francis of Assisi said that “it is in giving that we receive.” I have received a zettabyte of mortification. Emerson says “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My portion, it would seem, is capaciously meager.
I could, for solace, turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift-giving ritual. A self-cancelling paradox, Derrida claims, lies at the heart of gifting. To give a gift is to enter a tangled exchange which incurs an obligation on the receiver’s part, a debt to be repaid, even if that repayment is no more than saying “Thank you.” A gift, to be received as a genuine gift, must disguise itself, must not appear to be a gift, must transcend the fraught cycle of giving and receiving, must locate itself beyond self-interested calculation or strategic deployment. Givers must be anonymous, Derrida concludes, even to themselves, lest they fall prey to the beguiling snare of prideful self-worth. The gift must not be a given thing, and the receivers must have no awareness that they have received a gift. In effect, a genuine gift annuls itself.
Clever, is it not? A swashbuckling concept, philosophically considered, festooned with panache, but, I suspect, of minimal value in chamfering the sharply disappointed looks of my grandkids when they found the raisins and oranges I anonymously placed once in their Christmas stockings. Like so much of postmodern theory, Derrida’s deconstructed gift is all ad hocery, without wider application and as practical as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
The best gifts are really two gifts: that which is given, and, behind it, the unsurpassed gift of attention. The best gifts mean that the receiver has, at some point, been the singular focus of the giver’s concentrated attention and purposeful planning. They mean that the receiver has been placed on the giver’s icon-laden cognitive desktop and singled out, attended to, deliberated on. The best gifts mean that the receiver has been experienced in the consciousness of the giver. They mean someone has watched the receiver wander off to a certain store aisle, linger in front of something. Someone has looked at the receiver looking. The best gifts mean that someone has listened to the receiver talk, wonder, express a frustration, reveal a desire or need or anxiety. Someone has taken in the receiver’s words; someone has made them a part of their awareness and introspection. The best gifts mean that someone has looked and listened and archived that looking and listening away, to be accessed when a gift-giving occasion arrives. The best gifts mean that in an era that scatters reflection, that startles time and chases it into the underbrush of mass distraction, someone has given the receiver the best gift of all: their undivided attention.
The seemingly simple but surprisingly difficult act of paying attention, of observing and listening, of curating the seen, the heard, and placing it in a small mental annex labeled “possible gift items”—this is the gift behind the gift. I’m working on it. One day I will master it. One day. Until then, I channel Bohr and Heisenberg, experiencing my own little uncertainty principle. Until then, I will be saying what I recently said to my wife Kathy: “Have you decided yet what I am getting you for Christmas?”
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Past Is Not Past
With some frequency lately, shards of bygone times and elsewhere places, unbidden and unannounced, have arrived at my mental doorway, edged their way into the foyer, and then, with a cheek kiss and shoulder clap, stride boldly into the living room. They map the coordinates, the longitude and latitude, of a once world through which I passed and in which I left traces, ghostly connections, specters of before, that have now been aroused from their slumber to echo forth from the well of time. I have been beset by nostalgia, that peculiar archeology which reveals the truth of William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Student Lives
Reading student essays this semester, I was reminded of something I have always known but too often forget: students are not biographically invisible. They are not simply, only, generically, students.
One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.
Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.
Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.
Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.
Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.
One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.
Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.
Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.
Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.
Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
A Change of Season
The squirrels have been unusually active in recent weeks, scampering down the elm and maple trunks, venturing out across the backyard to scrounge out and secure whatever edible nuggets they can find, then scampering up again and across the skywalk of limbs to stock the larder of their nests. They are hunkering down in anticipation of winter. I, too, have been hunkering, clearing eve troughs, raking the leaves that I am convinced have conspired to deposit themselves in my yard, detaching hoses from spigots, transporting cans of paint from the garage to the basement, winterizing the lawn mower and tiller and chain saw, putting up shrink film on windows whose storms will prove insufficient against the cannonade of frigid air winter will hurl against them. The old earth is tilting. A change of season has sent its calling card, several times, and this past weekend an advance party swept in on waves of cold rain and tumultuous winds. Soon, so soon, it will be arriving, a state visit, in full equipage, trumpets fanfaring and pennants flying, that will last for months on end. I find in myself a deep dismay, visceral and embodied, about this fast-approaching caller. I find myself feeling inhospitable.
It wasn’t always so. In my youth I spoke, loudly and fluently, the deep grammar of winter. No temperature-plummet, no weather-inclemency kept me indoors. Snow storms were to be encountered; they were meant to be in the midst of, embedded in, its exuberant energy confluent with my own. With the neighborhood boys, I built snow forts in preparation for snowball battles, sledded on the seemingly perpendicular hill above the playground at St. Antoninus elementary school, and played a mad-scramble hockey on Schott’s Lake, with sticks retrieved from along the shoreline and someone’s knit cap as the puck. Later, into my adolescence, winter meant flooding a large swath of Goerke Field for a community ice skating rink, complete with warming house and recorded music. Budding romances were nurtured by the rituals of carrying a young lady’s skates, lacing them up for her, and, hand-in-hand, clambering up the wooden ramp and onto the ice. Winter meant tobogganing and ski jumping at Bukholt Park; it meant cross-country skiing and snowmobiling; it meant an aesthetic awakening to the eye-dazzling glitter of branches cathedraled with ice and the masonry of wind-troweled drifts; it meant snow shoveling competitions with my dad which, somehow, always ended in a tie, and my mom’s “secret recipe” chili, its magma-like, chile-peppery heat instantly defrosting numbed fingers and toes.
I wish I had gotten that recipe before it, and mom, disappeared behind the veil of Alzheimer’s Disease. And, these days, the only competition snow shoveling poses is with fatigue. I have, it seems, become, almost without my noticing, a tattered coat upon a stick, and my soul’s clap has become an increasingly diminished thing. My season has changed. Winter still sings, but I am no longer in harmony with its song. I no longer watch with rapt attention the whitewashed air of the storm, but eye the plummeting temperature and begin to dread the stiletto-sharp thrust of cold despite being bundled and layered almost to immobility, dread its “hard, dull bitterness,” its checking “mid-vein, the circling race/ Of life-blood.” I no longer delight in “the frolic architecture of the snow,” but wonder how I can muster the strength to clear it, finding myself doubtful whether it will be in me “to arise with the day/ And save [myself] unaided.” I feel, before I feel it, the invasive wet. Yes, winter still sings, but its lyrics tell me of a treacherous terrain where a fall could fracture a hip, where drivers abandon all caution and common sense, and ice-coated branches crack, with rifle-shot clarity, only to fall on rooftops and awnings. Those lyrics tell me of a world from which time has excommunicated me. It’s all I can do to resist the impulse to pull an afghan up to my chin and hibernate, dreaming, perhaps, of the golden shouts of July, the humid hug of August.
In the quantum mechanics of my change of season, there is no Heisenbergian uncertainty. I know my position and momentum simultaneously. They are entangled, for sure. Yet, it is strange, the disappointment I feel at having met with such punctuality the stages of aging: the graying hair, the gastric reflux, the bifocals, the decreased muscle strength, the constricted range of motion, the fine motor skills that are no longer so fine, the intolerance to cold, the disrupted sleep patterns, the achy joints and limbs and sinews that, like Job’s, “know no rest,” the neurons that seem, in increasing numbers, to be cliff diving into pools of oblivion. Somehow, I had thought I was better than that; somehow, I thought I would blaze unconsumed, but I see that biology gives you a poke you cannot ignore, then defriends you without a backward glance. I don’t like it at all, this declensional narrative, this being a “martyr to a motion not my own,” this being ambered in the gummy secretion of time. But what to do, what to do? Resistance is foolish; there is no emancipation from the imperative of matter, which is older than hope, older than prayer, older than memory. Despair is unacceptable; it is an anguished repudiation of the imperative of spirit, a defilement of the heart’s tabernacle. I think I will adopt an unwilling surrender. I hear winter coming; I feel its rasp of difficult truth, and in the liminal space between its advent and presence, I will be stubbornly disobliging, unresignedly resigned, sharing the mood of the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance”: “When to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things,/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ And bow and accept the end/ of a love or a season?” There is, I think, a grace, perhaps a benediction, in such ungraceful yielding.
It wasn’t always so. In my youth I spoke, loudly and fluently, the deep grammar of winter. No temperature-plummet, no weather-inclemency kept me indoors. Snow storms were to be encountered; they were meant to be in the midst of, embedded in, its exuberant energy confluent with my own. With the neighborhood boys, I built snow forts in preparation for snowball battles, sledded on the seemingly perpendicular hill above the playground at St. Antoninus elementary school, and played a mad-scramble hockey on Schott’s Lake, with sticks retrieved from along the shoreline and someone’s knit cap as the puck. Later, into my adolescence, winter meant flooding a large swath of Goerke Field for a community ice skating rink, complete with warming house and recorded music. Budding romances were nurtured by the rituals of carrying a young lady’s skates, lacing them up for her, and, hand-in-hand, clambering up the wooden ramp and onto the ice. Winter meant tobogganing and ski jumping at Bukholt Park; it meant cross-country skiing and snowmobiling; it meant an aesthetic awakening to the eye-dazzling glitter of branches cathedraled with ice and the masonry of wind-troweled drifts; it meant snow shoveling competitions with my dad which, somehow, always ended in a tie, and my mom’s “secret recipe” chili, its magma-like, chile-peppery heat instantly defrosting numbed fingers and toes.
I wish I had gotten that recipe before it, and mom, disappeared behind the veil of Alzheimer’s Disease. And, these days, the only competition snow shoveling poses is with fatigue. I have, it seems, become, almost without my noticing, a tattered coat upon a stick, and my soul’s clap has become an increasingly diminished thing. My season has changed. Winter still sings, but I am no longer in harmony with its song. I no longer watch with rapt attention the whitewashed air of the storm, but eye the plummeting temperature and begin to dread the stiletto-sharp thrust of cold despite being bundled and layered almost to immobility, dread its “hard, dull bitterness,” its checking “mid-vein, the circling race/ Of life-blood.” I no longer delight in “the frolic architecture of the snow,” but wonder how I can muster the strength to clear it, finding myself doubtful whether it will be in me “to arise with the day/ And save [myself] unaided.” I feel, before I feel it, the invasive wet. Yes, winter still sings, but its lyrics tell me of a treacherous terrain where a fall could fracture a hip, where drivers abandon all caution and common sense, and ice-coated branches crack, with rifle-shot clarity, only to fall on rooftops and awnings. Those lyrics tell me of a world from which time has excommunicated me. It’s all I can do to resist the impulse to pull an afghan up to my chin and hibernate, dreaming, perhaps, of the golden shouts of July, the humid hug of August.
In the quantum mechanics of my change of season, there is no Heisenbergian uncertainty. I know my position and momentum simultaneously. They are entangled, for sure. Yet, it is strange, the disappointment I feel at having met with such punctuality the stages of aging: the graying hair, the gastric reflux, the bifocals, the decreased muscle strength, the constricted range of motion, the fine motor skills that are no longer so fine, the intolerance to cold, the disrupted sleep patterns, the achy joints and limbs and sinews that, like Job’s, “know no rest,” the neurons that seem, in increasing numbers, to be cliff diving into pools of oblivion. Somehow, I had thought I was better than that; somehow, I thought I would blaze unconsumed, but I see that biology gives you a poke you cannot ignore, then defriends you without a backward glance. I don’t like it at all, this declensional narrative, this being a “martyr to a motion not my own,” this being ambered in the gummy secretion of time. But what to do, what to do? Resistance is foolish; there is no emancipation from the imperative of matter, which is older than hope, older than prayer, older than memory. Despair is unacceptable; it is an anguished repudiation of the imperative of spirit, a defilement of the heart’s tabernacle. I think I will adopt an unwilling surrender. I hear winter coming; I feel its rasp of difficult truth, and in the liminal space between its advent and presence, I will be stubbornly disobliging, unresignedly resigned, sharing the mood of the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance”: “When to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things,/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ And bow and accept the end/ of a love or a season?” There is, I think, a grace, perhaps a benediction, in such ungraceful yielding.
Monday, October 18, 2010
My Friend's Suicide
In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s much-anthologized poem “Richard Cory,” the title character, a man blessed with wealth, a man admired and respected, “ schooled in every grace,” and “always human when he talked,” goes home “one calm summer night” and puts “a bullet in his head.” That poem, and the mystery it contains, became staggeringly real to me when last week, one calm autumn evening, a colleague and a friend, a man blessed with the wealth of imagination and an intellect that pierced to the heart of things, a man graced with a gift for writing poetry, a man respected and admired and, while never on social terms with mediocrity, always human when he talked, walked into the woods and, emulating Richard Cory, took his own life .
Upon hearing of his suicide, I asked the question that I think most people ask on similar occasions: why? A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that such a question, because it gestures toward the irrationality of the act, is impertinent. The decision to end one’s life, so momentous in its conception, so final in its outcome, must be more than an impulse-imbued act lacking in deliberative judgment, must have a compelling reason, a reason perfectly clear, perfectly sensible, a reason that it is not our business to know. Trish Crap, in “Moon Poem,” writes that “life leans/ and fattens, one part joy/ two parts loss, and our job/ is to make it come out even.” For whatever reason, my friend had decided that he could not strike a balance. For whatever reason, he decided that while life may have a rhythm, it had no melody; that it had a grammar, but no catalyzing words. For whatever reason, he decided to stop inhaling time, for its back-of-the-throat taste had grown acrid and unsavory. For whatever reason, he decided that life had become too small because it had become too large, its possibilities somehow thwarted, his love for it somehow unrequited. For whatever reason he decided it no longer deserved tribute and the silvered notes of heraldic trumpets—and respect demands that we leave off being cognitive voyeurs, looking for the sense of it all to quell our own curiosity, our own fear, and acknowledge that reason, even if it is not given us to know it.
But more than impertinent, the question why is futile, unanswerable. Neuroscientists tell us that we are born with a “Theory of Mind” and with a capacity for empathy. We are innately capable of ascertaining the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, of predicting their actions and reactions, of imaginatively locating ourselves in their place. But we do this only on analogy with our own minds; we impute and predict and empathize only from our perspective. What can we ever know, C. S. Lewis asks, “of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” We simply cannot penetrate, directly and immediately, the minds of others. We cannot access their subjectivity, their felt experience of being, cannot inhabit their anger or fear or joy, cannot feel the assault of their despair or anxiety, cannot feel their islanded remoteness. At best we can know only fragments. It cannot be otherwise unless we know all the places, and events, and people that were and are meaningful to, did and do contribute to, the person we say we know.
How little we know of others. Literature has continually taught us the essential unknowability of others: the masquerade in Fielding’s Tom Jones; the inscrutability of Melville’s Bartleby or the impossibility of trust in his The Confidence Man; the theme of concealment, of hidden pasts and hidden motives in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Shakespeare’s Iago, Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado,” “Ligeia,” and “A Man of the Crowd;” Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; Conrad’s Verloc in The Secret Agent, Prufrock’s anguished “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all;” DeLillo’s Richard Elster in Point Omega, the held-at-arm’s reticence of Sethe at unveiling her past in Morrison’s Beloved. All these, and many, many more, teach us that human behavior is more complex, more opaque, more cabined, that we are perhaps prepared to admit. The affective experience and the behavior of each individual is multisourced, overwritten, a palimpsest of traces and annotations. It is at once micro and macro history.
So, where does that leave us? Where does my friend’s suicide leave me? Perhaps it leaves us, me, questioning whether we know even ourselves as intimately as we believe we do. Perhaps it confronts us with our own darkness. As Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, observes “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.” Perhaps it tells us that the imposture that all is normal, all is well, can no longer hold. Perhaps it leads us to realize that the Exodus has yet to be completed, that we still wander, still seek the pillar of fire that will light our way to a barely-glimpsed, ever-receding Canaan. Perhaps we will heed the call of the trained mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island to pay attention to the “Here and now!” Perhaps it will make us see, with Matthew, that our treasure lies where our heart is, and we will hoard those we love. Perhaps it will make us take stock, take inventory, liquidate last year’s, last week’s, yesterday’s models of thinking and being. Perhaps it will convince us to lift our heavy eyelids and scan the horizon for some gleam, some bright innuendo, that will draw us away, even if momentarily, from the dark, dark prose of the world. Perhaps. Maybe.
Two weeks before he took his life, my friend sent me an email to tell me he was reading the essays in my blog, that he liked them, and was considering creating a blog himself. He included, “for what it’s worth,” he said, a new poem. It was a searing and satirical indictment of the peculiar dynamics of American pretense, of our propensity to proclaim our virtue, our “Unimpeachable Goodness,” to counter “the weight of our emptiness.” It noted that lately “the real is straining against belief,” and that straining “real” urges us to peer “into the thicket of the human heart.” Since his death, I have combed every word of that email and poem for some hint, some clue, some trace of what lay two weeks ahead. And while the proposed blog appears affirmative, I am haunted by the deprecatory “for what it’s worth” that introduced a poem that now, suddenly, seems troubling, ominous. Did this gifted poet somehow feel his talent ebbing? Was the poem’s satire self-directed? I don’t know, can’t know, can’t even surmise or suppose. We are all, finally, the imperfect curators of a museum we call the self, and its exhibits, while open to the public, tell only a partial story, for much, most, of the inventory remains secured in hidden rooms and basement vaults, stored away in inner recesses, inaccessible and unknowable.
”
Upon hearing of his suicide, I asked the question that I think most people ask on similar occasions: why? A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that such a question, because it gestures toward the irrationality of the act, is impertinent. The decision to end one’s life, so momentous in its conception, so final in its outcome, must be more than an impulse-imbued act lacking in deliberative judgment, must have a compelling reason, a reason perfectly clear, perfectly sensible, a reason that it is not our business to know. Trish Crap, in “Moon Poem,” writes that “life leans/ and fattens, one part joy/ two parts loss, and our job/ is to make it come out even.” For whatever reason, my friend had decided that he could not strike a balance. For whatever reason, he decided that while life may have a rhythm, it had no melody; that it had a grammar, but no catalyzing words. For whatever reason, he decided to stop inhaling time, for its back-of-the-throat taste had grown acrid and unsavory. For whatever reason, he decided that life had become too small because it had become too large, its possibilities somehow thwarted, his love for it somehow unrequited. For whatever reason he decided it no longer deserved tribute and the silvered notes of heraldic trumpets—and respect demands that we leave off being cognitive voyeurs, looking for the sense of it all to quell our own curiosity, our own fear, and acknowledge that reason, even if it is not given us to know it.
But more than impertinent, the question why is futile, unanswerable. Neuroscientists tell us that we are born with a “Theory of Mind” and with a capacity for empathy. We are innately capable of ascertaining the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, of predicting their actions and reactions, of imaginatively locating ourselves in their place. But we do this only on analogy with our own minds; we impute and predict and empathize only from our perspective. What can we ever know, C. S. Lewis asks, “of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” We simply cannot penetrate, directly and immediately, the minds of others. We cannot access their subjectivity, their felt experience of being, cannot inhabit their anger or fear or joy, cannot feel the assault of their despair or anxiety, cannot feel their islanded remoteness. At best we can know only fragments. It cannot be otherwise unless we know all the places, and events, and people that were and are meaningful to, did and do contribute to, the person we say we know.
How little we know of others. Literature has continually taught us the essential unknowability of others: the masquerade in Fielding’s Tom Jones; the inscrutability of Melville’s Bartleby or the impossibility of trust in his The Confidence Man; the theme of concealment, of hidden pasts and hidden motives in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Shakespeare’s Iago, Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado,” “Ligeia,” and “A Man of the Crowd;” Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; Conrad’s Verloc in The Secret Agent, Prufrock’s anguished “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all;” DeLillo’s Richard Elster in Point Omega, the held-at-arm’s reticence of Sethe at unveiling her past in Morrison’s Beloved. All these, and many, many more, teach us that human behavior is more complex, more opaque, more cabined, that we are perhaps prepared to admit. The affective experience and the behavior of each individual is multisourced, overwritten, a palimpsest of traces and annotations. It is at once micro and macro history.
So, where does that leave us? Where does my friend’s suicide leave me? Perhaps it leaves us, me, questioning whether we know even ourselves as intimately as we believe we do. Perhaps it confronts us with our own darkness. As Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, observes “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.” Perhaps it tells us that the imposture that all is normal, all is well, can no longer hold. Perhaps it leads us to realize that the Exodus has yet to be completed, that we still wander, still seek the pillar of fire that will light our way to a barely-glimpsed, ever-receding Canaan. Perhaps we will heed the call of the trained mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island to pay attention to the “Here and now!” Perhaps it will make us see, with Matthew, that our treasure lies where our heart is, and we will hoard those we love. Perhaps it will make us take stock, take inventory, liquidate last year’s, last week’s, yesterday’s models of thinking and being. Perhaps it will convince us to lift our heavy eyelids and scan the horizon for some gleam, some bright innuendo, that will draw us away, even if momentarily, from the dark, dark prose of the world. Perhaps. Maybe.
Two weeks before he took his life, my friend sent me an email to tell me he was reading the essays in my blog, that he liked them, and was considering creating a blog himself. He included, “for what it’s worth,” he said, a new poem. It was a searing and satirical indictment of the peculiar dynamics of American pretense, of our propensity to proclaim our virtue, our “Unimpeachable Goodness,” to counter “the weight of our emptiness.” It noted that lately “the real is straining against belief,” and that straining “real” urges us to peer “into the thicket of the human heart.” Since his death, I have combed every word of that email and poem for some hint, some clue, some trace of what lay two weeks ahead. And while the proposed blog appears affirmative, I am haunted by the deprecatory “for what it’s worth” that introduced a poem that now, suddenly, seems troubling, ominous. Did this gifted poet somehow feel his talent ebbing? Was the poem’s satire self-directed? I don’t know, can’t know, can’t even surmise or suppose. We are all, finally, the imperfect curators of a museum we call the self, and its exhibits, while open to the public, tell only a partial story, for much, most, of the inventory remains secured in hidden rooms and basement vaults, stored away in inner recesses, inaccessible and unknowable.
”
Friday, October 8, 2010
Stop and Smell the Roses
In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was given a piece of advice in the form of a cliché. Now, as a writing teacher I don’t just warn students to avoid clichés; I scorn them most unmercifully. I execrate them, I inveigh against them: unlovely lumps of language, lexical ossification, verbal riffraff, impoverished expression, jejune junk rusting on the philological landscape, vacuous verbiage, lazy locution, handy pegs upon which to hang shiftless thinking. Confronting a cliché, I have the tolerance of a pillaging Anglo Saxon and the subtlety of barbed wire. And yet, for reasons I cannot account for, my colleague’s cliché mugged my self-righteous scorn and left me silent, my linguistic pockets empty and turned inside out. It resonated, and I have been thinking about it ever since. He told me, “Jerry, you’ve got to stop and smell the roses.”
Previously, I had considered “smell” the pivot upon which this cliché turned. Smell being one of the sense, I took the cliché to be a warning against being too cerebral, against living in the shallows of abstraction, an implicit appeal to the flesh, to breath and pulse, to direct and immediate intimacy with the sensuous surround. After all, who could deny that the beauty of a rose deserves more homage than a passing glance, that it in fact deserves a glance inflamed to a gaze? Who could deny that it deserves being experienced with a fully embodied sensory appreciation that savors its obviousness and its nuance, the delicate fold of each of the 50 cupped petals, their velveted tactility, their gradual unfurling as they whorl outward from a densely packed center, the reddish conical thorn tapering to a white tip, the intense olfactory assault of fragrance. Who could not apply to roses what Wallace Stevens imputed to the whistling blackbird: the beauty of their inflections and the beauty of their innuendos? Who would not agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that roses “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.” Who would not understand Robert Burns comparing his love to “a red, red rose” or Robert Herrick’s advice to “gather ye rosebuds” while we can? For me, then, my colleague’s cliché had in the past emphasized the filagreed grace of nature’s aesthetic expression, the importance of its felt texture to our all too often distracted lives, an experience experienced as an experience.
But hearing it this time, now, it struck me that the resonant word was “stop.” Measured by most psychosocial metrics, we are afflicted with busyness, little different from the way Thoreau 160 years ago characterized us as “in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” The leaden foot on the accelerator of making a living inches downward, and we neglect living. We see that living has a length and forget, as Diane Ackerman observes, “the width of it as well.” We somehow fail to see that busyness is densely caloric but without nutritional value, that every article that appears touting some scheme for time management to organize our busyness leaves unchallenged and, thus, naturalizes the assumption that we should be engaged in frantic activity. It is telling, I think, that we so often define our self-worth by how busy we are, by how often we confuse being productive with being busy, how often we equate not being busy with a lack of self-management, with how often we consider not being overscheduled, not multitasking, not being stressed and pressed a sign of indolence. We read, or hire, lifestyle consultants to organize our days and little regard the style of our lives. The kiss of the rose is given only to those who stop long enough to receive it.
To stop is to reflect, and perhaps that is why we don’t. It can be, often is, disheartening to be the audience of our own performance. Reflection necessarily involves not instrumental knowledge but what Hans Kung calls “orientating knowledge,” a knowledge that cleanses mental space of debris, a knowledge of the congruence between the persons we are and the persons we most want to be, of the values we accept with unthinking dogmatism and those we most want to commit ourselves to. Tangled in the traces, we canonize our autonomy without understanding that the granite substrate upon which it rests is our capacity for self-reflection, our capacity to disentangle, to step out, to conjure ourselves standing beside ourselves, and regarding, really regarding, the who and what and why and where and how we are and ought to be. It is hard work, harder and busier than any work we do to get a living. It interrogates the fine-structure constant of our individual universe, corrals our scattered thoughts and returns them to the mindful present. But it is the busyness that we should more often make it our business to mind.
I recall coming home late one Saturday afternoon to find my dad sitting on the family room couch, feet up and hands behind his head, staring, it seemed, at the point where the wall met the ceiling. I had seen him in this posture before and it always struck me as strange. This time, however, I inquired:
“Dad, what are you up to? Is something wrong?”
Oh, no; I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well, you know; things.”
My dad. The systems analyst. He wasn’t mowing the lawn or fixing the toaster or reorganizing the garage, wasn’t writing a report or outlining a presentation, wasn’t pouring over the specs of the latest line of IBM office computers or calculating whether or not they would improve efficiency at the Cincinnati office. No. He was far too busy for all that.
Previously, I had considered “smell” the pivot upon which this cliché turned. Smell being one of the sense, I took the cliché to be a warning against being too cerebral, against living in the shallows of abstraction, an implicit appeal to the flesh, to breath and pulse, to direct and immediate intimacy with the sensuous surround. After all, who could deny that the beauty of a rose deserves more homage than a passing glance, that it in fact deserves a glance inflamed to a gaze? Who could deny that it deserves being experienced with a fully embodied sensory appreciation that savors its obviousness and its nuance, the delicate fold of each of the 50 cupped petals, their velveted tactility, their gradual unfurling as they whorl outward from a densely packed center, the reddish conical thorn tapering to a white tip, the intense olfactory assault of fragrance. Who could not apply to roses what Wallace Stevens imputed to the whistling blackbird: the beauty of their inflections and the beauty of their innuendos? Who would not agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that roses “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.” Who would not understand Robert Burns comparing his love to “a red, red rose” or Robert Herrick’s advice to “gather ye rosebuds” while we can? For me, then, my colleague’s cliché had in the past emphasized the filagreed grace of nature’s aesthetic expression, the importance of its felt texture to our all too often distracted lives, an experience experienced as an experience.
But hearing it this time, now, it struck me that the resonant word was “stop.” Measured by most psychosocial metrics, we are afflicted with busyness, little different from the way Thoreau 160 years ago characterized us as “in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” The leaden foot on the accelerator of making a living inches downward, and we neglect living. We see that living has a length and forget, as Diane Ackerman observes, “the width of it as well.” We somehow fail to see that busyness is densely caloric but without nutritional value, that every article that appears touting some scheme for time management to organize our busyness leaves unchallenged and, thus, naturalizes the assumption that we should be engaged in frantic activity. It is telling, I think, that we so often define our self-worth by how busy we are, by how often we confuse being productive with being busy, how often we equate not being busy with a lack of self-management, with how often we consider not being overscheduled, not multitasking, not being stressed and pressed a sign of indolence. We read, or hire, lifestyle consultants to organize our days and little regard the style of our lives. The kiss of the rose is given only to those who stop long enough to receive it.
To stop is to reflect, and perhaps that is why we don’t. It can be, often is, disheartening to be the audience of our own performance. Reflection necessarily involves not instrumental knowledge but what Hans Kung calls “orientating knowledge,” a knowledge that cleanses mental space of debris, a knowledge of the congruence between the persons we are and the persons we most want to be, of the values we accept with unthinking dogmatism and those we most want to commit ourselves to. Tangled in the traces, we canonize our autonomy without understanding that the granite substrate upon which it rests is our capacity for self-reflection, our capacity to disentangle, to step out, to conjure ourselves standing beside ourselves, and regarding, really regarding, the who and what and why and where and how we are and ought to be. It is hard work, harder and busier than any work we do to get a living. It interrogates the fine-structure constant of our individual universe, corrals our scattered thoughts and returns them to the mindful present. But it is the busyness that we should more often make it our business to mind.
I recall coming home late one Saturday afternoon to find my dad sitting on the family room couch, feet up and hands behind his head, staring, it seemed, at the point where the wall met the ceiling. I had seen him in this posture before and it always struck me as strange. This time, however, I inquired:
“Dad, what are you up to? Is something wrong?”
Oh, no; I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well, you know; things.”
My dad. The systems analyst. He wasn’t mowing the lawn or fixing the toaster or reorganizing the garage, wasn’t writing a report or outlining a presentation, wasn’t pouring over the specs of the latest line of IBM office computers or calculating whether or not they would improve efficiency at the Cincinnati office. No. He was far too busy for all that.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
I Am Not a Man of Fashion
Whenever someone compliments me on something I’m wearing on or carrying with me—a belt, a pair of shoes or pants or gloves, a shirt or sweater, a watch, my backpack, my wallet, even my cellphone—I am forced to make an embarrassing admission: “Thanks, my wife Kathy bought it for me,” or “My stepdaughter Alma gave it to me as a birthday present,” or “Kathy’s mom Cora got that for me,” or “My mom sent it to me.” Everything I wear or carry that shows the least bit of the current taste or fashion or style, everything that exhibits the smallest hint of being chic or dapper or Esquired and GQ-ed, was given to me by the women in my life. In the realm of fashion, I must foreswear the active voice in favor of the passive: I do not dress and accessorize. I am dressed and accessorized.
One morning I came downstairs wearing a short-sleeved knit shirt that I thought rather becoming, but before I got out the door, Kathy uttered what are perhaps six of the more fearsome words in the English language: “You’re not wearing that, are you?” It was, I knew, the launch sequence of a disquisition that would “chasten me sore.” “Well, yeah,” I said; “what’s wrong with it?” She replied with four more fearsome words: “Where do I begin?” Evidently, the shirt was an eyeball kick to the current style: its colors, collar style, cut, and fabric were, I was informed, hideously antiquated, a relic from a bygone era of fashion. Where had I been, she wanted to know, when the caravans of style had each had their stopover at the oasis of prevailing fashion, then disappeared into the desert of forgetability? I thought the shirt was a classic look. She thought it was a Jurassic look. I changed the shirt.
How is it that I have watched this planet swing around the sun for more than sixty years and still remain an avatar of fashion ignorance? How is it that what I know of au courant style is the size of a finger bowl with room left over for a cantaloupe? How is it that I find the world of men’s fashion such a terra incognita, its map so filled with white spaces, that, to enter and circumnavigate it, I must rely on the female Magellans and Columbuses related to me by blood or marriage? When, exactly, was it that I was inattentive? Was a lesson presented at some point during which some Zen master should have rapped me on the head with a keisaku to corral my stray thoughts and restore them to the present? Is there a fashion gene missing from my genome? Surely such a gene would be evolutionarily adaptive, smartly attired forebears being more likely to secure mates by thus advertising their affluence. Why, then, has evolution given me the stiffarm? Why have I been rendered deficient in whatever region of whatever cortical fold contains the neuronal resources for recognizing the vogue?
Now, I could, I suppose, plausibly defend my fashion blockheadery. I could offer the “critical age hypothesis.” My mother laid out my clothes each morning until I was 14 years old; thus, as with language, having passed puberty without exposure to the syntax of fashion, I lost the capacity to speak it with confident fluency. I could offer the “maturation fixity thesis.” Having come of age in the 60s, where relevance, authenticity, and nonconformity defined our existential credo, fashion represented irrelevance, inauthenticity, and capitulation to “the man.” I could offer the closely-related “professionalization bias thesis.” As an English professor credentialed to profess literature, ever on the interpretive lookout for the inflections and innuendos of deep meaning, a concern with fashion seems flat-souled and trivial. I could offer the “context-impoverishment thesis.” It quickly became apparent to me, upon a desultory scan of the fashion catalogues that periodically arrived mysteriously, as if by elfin hands, in my mailbox, that the context in which fashionable people moved—the boat parties, the club scene, indeed, any occasion in which the smart set dressed so smartly—was not the context in which the tenor and pulse of my life was situated. Finally, I could trot out the old standby, the “socialization thesis,” and claim that being born male and learning to perform maleness, made my interest in fashion about as likely as witnessing the process of evolution happen right before my eyes.
Rather than defend the impervious density of my fashion ineptitude, I could rectify it. I could read the fashion press to discover the designers and their creations that will, in five or six months’ time, insistently shout from the florescent covers of glossy-paged magazines over the rooftops of the world. I could carefully consider what the celebrities, the glitterati, and the anointed opinion leaders are wearing and saying. I could debate the relative merits of cotton and wool and corduroy and denim and gabardine and polyester and tweed and twill, analyze the aesthetic intricacies of pinstripe and windowpane check and solid and plaid and herringbone. I could study the pages of Ralph Lauren—Marc Jacobs—Michael Bastian—Calvin Klein--Michael Kors—Giorgio Armani catalogues, taking notes, annotating, thoroughly metabolizing the latest spasm of trendy sports-casual-business-evening out on the town wear.
I could sing in the key of design, cut, color, and cloth, the only iPod-ed songs of a true fashionista. But I won’t. I would hate to be known as a “man of fashion.” Fashions are fads, and I prefer exercise other than jumping onto bandwagons. For me, a “man of fashion” connotes a man for whom taste is dogmatic frivolity, a man not fully present to himself, a man on a pivot, continually monitoring, 360 degrees, the fashion centers and designers of the moment for his marching orders, a man uniformed and uniform, stepping in time to the incantatory music emanating from Paris and Milan and New York and London. A “man of fashion” ignores the 1800-year-old advice of the Greek Stoic Epictetus: “Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.” A “man of fashion” does not really adorn himself according to who he is, but, rather, according to what and how he wants others to think he is. His adornment is an image of an image, a tailored tailoring. He does not really wear clothes; clothes wear him. I would rather be a man who is never out of fashion, a man fashionable beyond fashion, a man for whom self-expression is not a pose, a man reflective not reflecting, a man committed to Mark Twain’s observation: “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.” I doubt keeping a tidy soul requires owning a Yigal Azrouel anorak or a Bastian cotton khaki suit or knowing that olive green is the color of the season. I would rather be a man who holds his hue in all seasons.
Besides, were I to become style-conscious and fashion-competent, I would complicate what, for the women in my life, is an easy choice about gift-giving for their benighted husband, step-father, and son. And I would suffer as well: I would no longer receive Kathy’s wifely lectures on the current trend in male garmenting. Now, these lectures largely fail to achieve their aim. I still consider fashionable whatever does not cause statues to flee their pedestals. But I relish those lectures nonetheless, not for what they say but for what they mean. Kathy cares how I look, how I present myself to the world, how I cut a figure in it, even if I am unable to muster much enthusiasm for acquiring that knowledge. In other words, it is her way of saying, in other words, I love you. And that beats a Kors chunky cardigan or a Bastian thin-wale corduroy sports jacket any day.
One morning I came downstairs wearing a short-sleeved knit shirt that I thought rather becoming, but before I got out the door, Kathy uttered what are perhaps six of the more fearsome words in the English language: “You’re not wearing that, are you?” It was, I knew, the launch sequence of a disquisition that would “chasten me sore.” “Well, yeah,” I said; “what’s wrong with it?” She replied with four more fearsome words: “Where do I begin?” Evidently, the shirt was an eyeball kick to the current style: its colors, collar style, cut, and fabric were, I was informed, hideously antiquated, a relic from a bygone era of fashion. Where had I been, she wanted to know, when the caravans of style had each had their stopover at the oasis of prevailing fashion, then disappeared into the desert of forgetability? I thought the shirt was a classic look. She thought it was a Jurassic look. I changed the shirt.
How is it that I have watched this planet swing around the sun for more than sixty years and still remain an avatar of fashion ignorance? How is it that what I know of au courant style is the size of a finger bowl with room left over for a cantaloupe? How is it that I find the world of men’s fashion such a terra incognita, its map so filled with white spaces, that, to enter and circumnavigate it, I must rely on the female Magellans and Columbuses related to me by blood or marriage? When, exactly, was it that I was inattentive? Was a lesson presented at some point during which some Zen master should have rapped me on the head with a keisaku to corral my stray thoughts and restore them to the present? Is there a fashion gene missing from my genome? Surely such a gene would be evolutionarily adaptive, smartly attired forebears being more likely to secure mates by thus advertising their affluence. Why, then, has evolution given me the stiffarm? Why have I been rendered deficient in whatever region of whatever cortical fold contains the neuronal resources for recognizing the vogue?
Now, I could, I suppose, plausibly defend my fashion blockheadery. I could offer the “critical age hypothesis.” My mother laid out my clothes each morning until I was 14 years old; thus, as with language, having passed puberty without exposure to the syntax of fashion, I lost the capacity to speak it with confident fluency. I could offer the “maturation fixity thesis.” Having come of age in the 60s, where relevance, authenticity, and nonconformity defined our existential credo, fashion represented irrelevance, inauthenticity, and capitulation to “the man.” I could offer the closely-related “professionalization bias thesis.” As an English professor credentialed to profess literature, ever on the interpretive lookout for the inflections and innuendos of deep meaning, a concern with fashion seems flat-souled and trivial. I could offer the “context-impoverishment thesis.” It quickly became apparent to me, upon a desultory scan of the fashion catalogues that periodically arrived mysteriously, as if by elfin hands, in my mailbox, that the context in which fashionable people moved—the boat parties, the club scene, indeed, any occasion in which the smart set dressed so smartly—was not the context in which the tenor and pulse of my life was situated. Finally, I could trot out the old standby, the “socialization thesis,” and claim that being born male and learning to perform maleness, made my interest in fashion about as likely as witnessing the process of evolution happen right before my eyes.
Rather than defend the impervious density of my fashion ineptitude, I could rectify it. I could read the fashion press to discover the designers and their creations that will, in five or six months’ time, insistently shout from the florescent covers of glossy-paged magazines over the rooftops of the world. I could carefully consider what the celebrities, the glitterati, and the anointed opinion leaders are wearing and saying. I could debate the relative merits of cotton and wool and corduroy and denim and gabardine and polyester and tweed and twill, analyze the aesthetic intricacies of pinstripe and windowpane check and solid and plaid and herringbone. I could study the pages of Ralph Lauren—Marc Jacobs—Michael Bastian—Calvin Klein--Michael Kors—Giorgio Armani catalogues, taking notes, annotating, thoroughly metabolizing the latest spasm of trendy sports-casual-business-evening out on the town wear.
I could sing in the key of design, cut, color, and cloth, the only iPod-ed songs of a true fashionista. But I won’t. I would hate to be known as a “man of fashion.” Fashions are fads, and I prefer exercise other than jumping onto bandwagons. For me, a “man of fashion” connotes a man for whom taste is dogmatic frivolity, a man not fully present to himself, a man on a pivot, continually monitoring, 360 degrees, the fashion centers and designers of the moment for his marching orders, a man uniformed and uniform, stepping in time to the incantatory music emanating from Paris and Milan and New York and London. A “man of fashion” ignores the 1800-year-old advice of the Greek Stoic Epictetus: “Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.” A “man of fashion” does not really adorn himself according to who he is, but, rather, according to what and how he wants others to think he is. His adornment is an image of an image, a tailored tailoring. He does not really wear clothes; clothes wear him. I would rather be a man who is never out of fashion, a man fashionable beyond fashion, a man for whom self-expression is not a pose, a man reflective not reflecting, a man committed to Mark Twain’s observation: “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.” I doubt keeping a tidy soul requires owning a Yigal Azrouel anorak or a Bastian cotton khaki suit or knowing that olive green is the color of the season. I would rather be a man who holds his hue in all seasons.
Besides, were I to become style-conscious and fashion-competent, I would complicate what, for the women in my life, is an easy choice about gift-giving for their benighted husband, step-father, and son. And I would suffer as well: I would no longer receive Kathy’s wifely lectures on the current trend in male garmenting. Now, these lectures largely fail to achieve their aim. I still consider fashionable whatever does not cause statues to flee their pedestals. But I relish those lectures nonetheless, not for what they say but for what they mean. Kathy cares how I look, how I present myself to the world, how I cut a figure in it, even if I am unable to muster much enthusiasm for acquiring that knowledge. In other words, it is her way of saying, in other words, I love you. And that beats a Kors chunky cardigan or a Bastian thin-wale corduroy sports jacket any day.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Squirrels, A Student, and My Next-Door Neighbor
I am often diverted from my oatmeal breakfast watching squirrels make their way across the tops of the towering elms and maples that line my backyard. There is drama as one gingerly edges toward the end of an impossibly thin twig of a branch of a limb, eyes the span of space between it and the impossibly thin twig across from it, leaps, hurling itself over the chasm of air, and lands, clutching the twig, the branch plunging slowly downward—surely it will break from the force of the squirrel’s weight, surely it will snap, sending the squirrel into an 60 foot freefall—but, no, the branch rights itself and the squirrel scampers off, perhaps to fling itself outward, over empty space, several more times before reaching home.
There is comedy, too, as two squirrels, defying the stern physics of gravity, chase each other, spiraling with dizzying speed up and down a tree trunk, two compact bundles of energy with enough wattage to klieg light even the darkest night sky. And there is mystery as well, as a squirrel, in its mid-branch meander, suddenly halts and chirps and begins to undulate its tail, the successive waves looking surprisingly like a series of semaphore-flashed question marks.
I’d like to think that the drama is a leap of faith, performed, like an Angelus, morning, noon, and night, but I know the squirrel is guided by the keen surety of instinct. I’d like to think the comedy is a raucously exuberant game of tag or hide and seek, but I know mating, not play, is propelling a male to chase a female, or to chase off a rival for her affection. I’d like to think the question-mark tail signals a metaphysical moment, an interrogation, perhaps, of the Rodentia condition, but I know that chirps and tail movement are the grammar of squirrel discourse.
I know that a walnut-sized brain cannot possibly support the interiority, the purposeful agency and mindfulness, that I have imagined. I am suborned by facts. Still, I find myself leagued with Robert Frost, who says, “I have a mind and recognize/ Mind when I meet with it in any guise.” And with Walt Whitman, who says animals “bring me tokens of myself.” The impertinence of facts is no excuse for an abridged imagination.
____________________
Last spring, a student in my Introduction to Mass Media class told me, with not a little pride, that he had never in his life read a novel.
“You’ve never read a novel?” I asked, unsuccessfully suppressing my incredulity.
“Nope.”
“Why not”
“I don’t like to read. It’s too slow. And anyway, it’s fiction,” he said, emphasizing “fiction.” “It’s just made up stuff; it’s not real life.”
“So, how do you spend your free time?”
“I do Facebook or I hang with friends. We work out or watch movies and play video games.”
“But movies and video games are fiction,” I point out. “They’re not `real life.’”
“Yeah, but they’re more interesting, and, besides, I can do them with my friends.”
He is an intelligent young man, I have no doubt, but he is irredeemably social, unable or unwilling to expose himself to the slow-pulse experience of himself, to enter the cloister of his own uninterrupted thoughts. Having never read a novel, he has never inhabited, fully and particularly, a time or place different from his own, has never brought an other’s mind or heart close enough to sympathize and understand it, has never wholly imagined something other than that which he has always known. I worry about his success should he come to a span of space requiring a cognitive or emotional or imaginative leap. I wonder what, if anything, he will question.
_________________________
My next-door neighbor bought the property after the previous owner’s house burned down. The first thing he did, once the charred debris was removed, the small cellar was filled in, and the land was graded, was hire surveyors to determine the exact line that separated our lots, a line duly marked by buried iron pins, a paint line on the sidewalk, and a stake tied with a pink ribbon, a kind of fence, I suppose, to make us good neighbors. The second thing he did was hire a crew to remove half a dozen old-growth maples. “They don’t fit my vision of the yard and the house I’ll be putting in,” he told me.
For over 90 years those maples had softened the blow of the hammering southern Iowa sun in the summer. For over 90 years they had blazed scarlet, deep orange, and gold in the fall, a talismanic thrum of beauty, perhaps the best approximation of grace and benediction we can experience on earth. They were balm for my eyes and heart each time I turned the corner onto our street. I looked forward to that turn, that sight. In a matter of days, though, they had sunk to grief under the implacable buzz of chain saw and stump grinder. And the new owner’s vision of yard and house responsible for this massive gesture of exclusion? A denuded, indifferently green square and a nondescript beige-sided oblong. He is a man of geometry, of austere lines and angles; a man whose doing leaves little room for imagining; a man more given to the what is rather than the what should or could be.
I hope the squirrels he evicted when he removed the trees found shelter in mine. I’d guess he makes no leaps of faith, or leaps of any kind. A retired farmer, his feet are firmly rooted to the earth. No ragged hem of doubt or supposition will edge his day. I’d guess he is immune to unchecked caprice, that he plays no games except the zero-sum kind, and that he seldom, if ever, seeks to tag his hiding self. And I’d guess that rarely, maybe never, does he feel an inarticulable desire, or an indefinable promise, or the need or necessity to question the cocooning certitudes within which he lives and moves.
There is comedy, too, as two squirrels, defying the stern physics of gravity, chase each other, spiraling with dizzying speed up and down a tree trunk, two compact bundles of energy with enough wattage to klieg light even the darkest night sky. And there is mystery as well, as a squirrel, in its mid-branch meander, suddenly halts and chirps and begins to undulate its tail, the successive waves looking surprisingly like a series of semaphore-flashed question marks.
I’d like to think that the drama is a leap of faith, performed, like an Angelus, morning, noon, and night, but I know the squirrel is guided by the keen surety of instinct. I’d like to think the comedy is a raucously exuberant game of tag or hide and seek, but I know mating, not play, is propelling a male to chase a female, or to chase off a rival for her affection. I’d like to think the question-mark tail signals a metaphysical moment, an interrogation, perhaps, of the Rodentia condition, but I know that chirps and tail movement are the grammar of squirrel discourse.
I know that a walnut-sized brain cannot possibly support the interiority, the purposeful agency and mindfulness, that I have imagined. I am suborned by facts. Still, I find myself leagued with Robert Frost, who says, “I have a mind and recognize/ Mind when I meet with it in any guise.” And with Walt Whitman, who says animals “bring me tokens of myself.” The impertinence of facts is no excuse for an abridged imagination.
____________________
Last spring, a student in my Introduction to Mass Media class told me, with not a little pride, that he had never in his life read a novel.
“You’ve never read a novel?” I asked, unsuccessfully suppressing my incredulity.
“Nope.”
“Why not”
“I don’t like to read. It’s too slow. And anyway, it’s fiction,” he said, emphasizing “fiction.” “It’s just made up stuff; it’s not real life.”
“So, how do you spend your free time?”
“I do Facebook or I hang with friends. We work out or watch movies and play video games.”
“But movies and video games are fiction,” I point out. “They’re not `real life.’”
“Yeah, but they’re more interesting, and, besides, I can do them with my friends.”
He is an intelligent young man, I have no doubt, but he is irredeemably social, unable or unwilling to expose himself to the slow-pulse experience of himself, to enter the cloister of his own uninterrupted thoughts. Having never read a novel, he has never inhabited, fully and particularly, a time or place different from his own, has never brought an other’s mind or heart close enough to sympathize and understand it, has never wholly imagined something other than that which he has always known. I worry about his success should he come to a span of space requiring a cognitive or emotional or imaginative leap. I wonder what, if anything, he will question.
_________________________
My next-door neighbor bought the property after the previous owner’s house burned down. The first thing he did, once the charred debris was removed, the small cellar was filled in, and the land was graded, was hire surveyors to determine the exact line that separated our lots, a line duly marked by buried iron pins, a paint line on the sidewalk, and a stake tied with a pink ribbon, a kind of fence, I suppose, to make us good neighbors. The second thing he did was hire a crew to remove half a dozen old-growth maples. “They don’t fit my vision of the yard and the house I’ll be putting in,” he told me.
For over 90 years those maples had softened the blow of the hammering southern Iowa sun in the summer. For over 90 years they had blazed scarlet, deep orange, and gold in the fall, a talismanic thrum of beauty, perhaps the best approximation of grace and benediction we can experience on earth. They were balm for my eyes and heart each time I turned the corner onto our street. I looked forward to that turn, that sight. In a matter of days, though, they had sunk to grief under the implacable buzz of chain saw and stump grinder. And the new owner’s vision of yard and house responsible for this massive gesture of exclusion? A denuded, indifferently green square and a nondescript beige-sided oblong. He is a man of geometry, of austere lines and angles; a man whose doing leaves little room for imagining; a man more given to the what is rather than the what should or could be.
I hope the squirrels he evicted when he removed the trees found shelter in mine. I’d guess he makes no leaps of faith, or leaps of any kind. A retired farmer, his feet are firmly rooted to the earth. No ragged hem of doubt or supposition will edge his day. I’d guess he is immune to unchecked caprice, that he plays no games except the zero-sum kind, and that he seldom, if ever, seeks to tag his hiding self. And I’d guess that rarely, maybe never, does he feel an inarticulable desire, or an indefinable promise, or the need or necessity to question the cocooning certitudes within which he lives and moves.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Golf, The Amish, and The Catholic Sensibility
On a sunny Sunday morning several years back, before I gave up playing golf—before, that is, I fully realized that “golf” spelled backwards precisely names the applied masochism the game entails—three horse-drawn buggies containing three Amish families on their way to Sunday service passed by on the road near the green I was approaching. As they passed, each occupant in each buggy turned to look at me. I wondered, do they think I am profaning the Lord’s Day by being on a golf course instead of in a church? Then, almost immediately, unable to pass by myself, I wondered, am I?
And there it was. The Catholic sensibility. The earth has spun around the sun forty times since I was a practicing Catholic; forty times since I actively embraced the faith into which I was born, upon which I had been raised, and in which I had been educated; forty times since I had been to Sunday Mass; forty times since I had conscripted myself in the capacious army of the fallen away. And still, still, that persistent, low-frequency hum of Catholic sensibility from which a periodic, stiletto-sharp, consciousness-piercing pulse of guilt erupted.
Catholic sensibility is the Mariana Trench of concepts, deep enough for every human being on the planet, and, possibly, elsewhere, to validate the assertion of that sage semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For me, Catholic sensibility is a set of principles that ligature experience—of the world and of oneself—and keep the soul right side up. It is not the prose of doctrinal conformity, so much as a mindfulness of the poetry of spiritual immanence and a determination to shape one’s life by the stern claims of its entailments. It is the stance of Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogium, declared he wrote as “one who seeks to understand what he believes,” “understand” here meaning thorough knowledge in the service of accomplished performance. It is the stance of Aquinas, whose prescription for salvation is to know what we “ought to believe,” what we “ought to desire,” and what we “ought to do.”
I have found, and continue to find, myself bruised in the encounter with the last of Acquinas’s oughts: “ought to do”. Catholicism makes performative demands, and for me they are a “reflexive” confessional, Emerson’s term for the standards by which I “absolve me to myself.” By that standard, I remain unshriven. Belief, I believe, is not doctrinal assent; that is merely passive fundamentalism. Rather, belief is basic theological principles practiced. The good of any activity, its virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says, is internal to the practice of it. I know what I ought to believe and believe it; I know what I ought to desire and desire it. I believe in a natural law that reveals universal moral precepts and desire to conform myself to them. I believe in the reality of conscience, free will, and individual responsibility and desire to be alert to their dictates. I believe, with Aquinas, that human reason is “rather like God in the world” and desire to be an analyst as well as a witness. I believe in Jesus’s second great commandment and desire to seek the well-being of my neighbor with the same alacrity with which I seek my own. I believe that the Mass is a ceremony commemorating atoning sacrifice and conferring benediction, and that, at its heart, in a time when the word is so casually applied, lies a miracle.
But, despite knowing what I ought to do, I falter. I am too often decentered by glibness and cynicism and self-absorption and inattentiveness and lack of trust and stubbornly imperviousness to the needs of others. I am too often weak, just plain weak, and without the moral arrowroot that would thicken my fortitude. Catholicism demands that what I believe and desire be fully integrated into all aspects of my life, that it be the lived texture of all my relations with the world. Knowing that, and knowing as well my capacity for indolence and indecisive lassitude, suborns me; it leads me to accept the flat-souled givenness of my doing instead of its oughtness. That is, in me, the Catholic sensibility that gave me pause before the gaze of those three passing Amish families.
Perhaps their being Amish keyed open the door of my Catholic sensibility, for their lives bear witness in every way to Paul’s description in Romans of the practice of belief: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.” “Test and approve,” action incorporated, embodied: thus the simplicity of dress to act humility; thus the refusal of connection to electrical grids to act a disconnection from a world that demands conformity to its structures of thinking and feeling; thus the lack of car ownership to act a communal equality of status, wealth, and power; thus the Ordnung to act a way of life governed not by statute but by a tradition absorbed so undilutedly into the community’s capillary system it need not be spoken. And thus, while I played golf, three families committed to service and holy living, to transformation and renewal, on their way to their church district’s Sunday service.
By the end of that round of golf I had resolved to never again play on Sunday. One year later, I quit playing golf entirely. And to this day I am still thinking, still wondering, still almost but not quite prepared to listen to the still small voice that tells me I ought to return to Sunday mass.
And there it was. The Catholic sensibility. The earth has spun around the sun forty times since I was a practicing Catholic; forty times since I actively embraced the faith into which I was born, upon which I had been raised, and in which I had been educated; forty times since I had been to Sunday Mass; forty times since I had conscripted myself in the capacious army of the fallen away. And still, still, that persistent, low-frequency hum of Catholic sensibility from which a periodic, stiletto-sharp, consciousness-piercing pulse of guilt erupted.
Catholic sensibility is the Mariana Trench of concepts, deep enough for every human being on the planet, and, possibly, elsewhere, to validate the assertion of that sage semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For me, Catholic sensibility is a set of principles that ligature experience—of the world and of oneself—and keep the soul right side up. It is not the prose of doctrinal conformity, so much as a mindfulness of the poetry of spiritual immanence and a determination to shape one’s life by the stern claims of its entailments. It is the stance of Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogium, declared he wrote as “one who seeks to understand what he believes,” “understand” here meaning thorough knowledge in the service of accomplished performance. It is the stance of Aquinas, whose prescription for salvation is to know what we “ought to believe,” what we “ought to desire,” and what we “ought to do.”
I have found, and continue to find, myself bruised in the encounter with the last of Acquinas’s oughts: “ought to do”. Catholicism makes performative demands, and for me they are a “reflexive” confessional, Emerson’s term for the standards by which I “absolve me to myself.” By that standard, I remain unshriven. Belief, I believe, is not doctrinal assent; that is merely passive fundamentalism. Rather, belief is basic theological principles practiced. The good of any activity, its virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says, is internal to the practice of it. I know what I ought to believe and believe it; I know what I ought to desire and desire it. I believe in a natural law that reveals universal moral precepts and desire to conform myself to them. I believe in the reality of conscience, free will, and individual responsibility and desire to be alert to their dictates. I believe, with Aquinas, that human reason is “rather like God in the world” and desire to be an analyst as well as a witness. I believe in Jesus’s second great commandment and desire to seek the well-being of my neighbor with the same alacrity with which I seek my own. I believe that the Mass is a ceremony commemorating atoning sacrifice and conferring benediction, and that, at its heart, in a time when the word is so casually applied, lies a miracle.
But, despite knowing what I ought to do, I falter. I am too often decentered by glibness and cynicism and self-absorption and inattentiveness and lack of trust and stubbornly imperviousness to the needs of others. I am too often weak, just plain weak, and without the moral arrowroot that would thicken my fortitude. Catholicism demands that what I believe and desire be fully integrated into all aspects of my life, that it be the lived texture of all my relations with the world. Knowing that, and knowing as well my capacity for indolence and indecisive lassitude, suborns me; it leads me to accept the flat-souled givenness of my doing instead of its oughtness. That is, in me, the Catholic sensibility that gave me pause before the gaze of those three passing Amish families.
Perhaps their being Amish keyed open the door of my Catholic sensibility, for their lives bear witness in every way to Paul’s description in Romans of the practice of belief: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.” “Test and approve,” action incorporated, embodied: thus the simplicity of dress to act humility; thus the refusal of connection to electrical grids to act a disconnection from a world that demands conformity to its structures of thinking and feeling; thus the lack of car ownership to act a communal equality of status, wealth, and power; thus the Ordnung to act a way of life governed not by statute but by a tradition absorbed so undilutedly into the community’s capillary system it need not be spoken. And thus, while I played golf, three families committed to service and holy living, to transformation and renewal, on their way to their church district’s Sunday service.
By the end of that round of golf I had resolved to never again play on Sunday. One year later, I quit playing golf entirely. And to this day I am still thinking, still wondering, still almost but not quite prepared to listen to the still small voice that tells me I ought to return to Sunday mass.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Mickey Mouse Episode
At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature.
To understand, you need to know two things about me.
First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.
I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.
Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.
On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.
I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.
I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.
Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.
To understand, you need to know two things about me.
First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.
I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.
Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.
On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.
I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.
I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.
Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Battling Mom's Alzheimer's
My brother Dennis called to warn me.
Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.
Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.
When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.
Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.
Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.
Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.
Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.
Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.
Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.
When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.
Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.
Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.
Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.
Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Mysteries
I have long been attracted to lonely roads, the ones “less travelled by,” but I have not ventured down any. The attraction is enough. I have long been enticed by abandoned farm houses, but I have not entered any. The enticement is enough. I have long been beguiled by the nooks and cubbies in old Victorian homes, but I trust I am not a “nook dweller,” that term of contempt Nietzsche applied to “colorblind utility men.” Besides, it’s the being beguiled that is so beguiling. I am fascinated with string theory and quantum physics. But I am not consumed with knowing whether or not eleven dimensions exist, or whether particles can, as was reported of Moby Dick, be in more than one place at a time, or exactly how electrons vast distances apart manage to synchronize their spin rates. That string theory and quantum physics fascinate me is enough. I really don’t need to know if the Voynich Manuscript, a 16th century text written in an unknown language, is a medieval version of Web MD, or what actually happened in the ancient Athenian town of Eleusis during the annual rituals in which initiates were inducted into the worship of the grain goddess Demeter. That they beckon me, intrigue me, captivate me is enough.
All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.
I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.
Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.
I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.
Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.
All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.
I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.
Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.
I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.
Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Tracked and Profiled
My small southern Iowa hometown boasts a recreational train that stretches 2.2 miles from the east side of town to the freeway and, on the west side, 2.5 miles to Liberty Hall, a restored Victorian home and museum. The east trail follows the long-abandoned CB&Q railroad track. To enter it is to enter a tunnel of mature forest of oak, white ash, basswood, and maple. In the spring, the blossoming wild plum trees conjure a confederation of angles. Yellow and purple coneflowers, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild rose line the trail. Gooseberries, currants, and serviceberries, those clever blueberry imposters, provide a savory diversion for those out for exercise. The west trail, though dotted here and there with pale blue cornflowers and purple prairie clover, is mostly untreed, unflowered, and unberried. It winds through gently rolling open fields and past small tucked-away, reed-surrounded ponds. Around one bend, off to the south, a small, solitary stand of hickory shelter huge bundled wheels of hay that appear to have been forgotten by their owner. In contrast to the shadowed and canopied east trail, where the sound of your motion echoes among the branches and makes you feel large, the west trail offers pure vista, the fields and hills running off as far as the eye can see, making you feel small, a humble point of movement in an expansive landscape. Two trails, two personalities, made one by the recent addition of a connecting segment that runs through town.
The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.
Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”
Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.
Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.
What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?
No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.
The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.
Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”
Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.
Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.
What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?
No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Palimpsests
Until quite recently, I did not know what I was, exactly. I knew I was something, and I was assured that that something was special. The culture told me, insistently, relentlessly, that I was unique, an irreducible genre of one. Advertising proclaimed that it is Me O’Clock or Me Time, that I deserved or was worth whatever product or service was being promoted, that I could customize my credit card to suit my personality, that I could demand a hamburger made just for me, that a taco was my taco, that I could buy a car that adjusts to me, that I could an app for my every heart’s desire.. Self-help gurus admonished me to cultivate myself, reach in and touch myself into being, and that now, now, now is my time. Popularized history endlessly recounted to me the storied story of rugged individualism, of the westering impulse, the restless journeying of men and women to possess the bright flame of self-actualization, each embarked on their individual manifest destiny. I was bludgeoned with the discourse of self-esteem, told I was a majority of one, an autonomous, self-referential being of unequaled exceptionality. Reality TV showed me makeovers of every sort, where I saw a genuine self can break free into the golden summer splendor of its exclusive July. I was assured from every cultural corner that I was unprecedented, one-of-a-kind. And yet, I did not know what that means. I certainly did not feel unique. I didn’t even know what feeling unique would feel like.
I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.
I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.
Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.
The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.
The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.
We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.
That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”
I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.
I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.
Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.
The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.
The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.
We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.
That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”
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