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.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)