If confession is good for the soul, then the process of that unburdening has gotten easier. An aid to absolution is just a click away with Confession: A Roman Catholic App. Well, why not? The so-called “self-quantifiers” have created personal tracking apps to chart stress, memories, caffeine consumption, moods, fatigue, emotions, and exercise routines. And now, Catholics have an Internet-enabled conscience-tracking device. Need to be shriven? There is an app for that.
The Confession app, available from iTunes for $1.99, is not intended to replace the obligation to visit the confessional at least once a year. Rather, the app is designed to enable the penitent to “prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penitence.” It does so by facilitating an examination of conscience, offering prompts for each of the 10 Commandments. Penitents can then take their iPhone or iPad with them to confession. The password-protected app includes a description of the confessional ritual, a calendar for keeping track of the time elapsed since the last confession, and is customizable by age, gender, and marital status. Sins not included in the 10 Commandments prompts can be added.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has endorsed the Confession app, giving it their official Nihil Obstat to indicate that “nothing hinders” its use: it is doctrinally accurate and poses no threat to faith or morals. According to the bishops, the app responds to Pope Benedict XVI’s call for Catholics to engage the digital world in “the service of their faith,” as a means of fostering “personal growth,” and better preparing themselves “to serve society.” The app is also intended to invite back those 45% of Catholics who, due to time constraints or uneasiness with the process, have lapsed in their confessional obligation. I think, however, it is unlikely to do so. Were it a flame, it would draw few moths.
The Confession app may expedite the audit of one’s conscience, but it does nothing to ameliorate the experience of confession, and that experience can be latticed with unease. For one thing, it is claustrophobic: to enter a confessional is to be cubicled in a cubicle, in the dark. For another, penitents must recount their sins, venial and mortal; must admit their grievous culpability, their offensive sordidness, their fall from grace and alienation from the community of the faithful; must make an act of contrition, be “heartily sorry,” and detest their sins, not from legal fear of losing heaven and suffering the pains of hell, but from offending an all good and loving God. And all this to a man behind a curtain, a man who is, indeed, all powerful, a successor to the Apostles upon whom Jesus bestowed prodigious authority: “If you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound;” a man before whom one kneels as a powerless supplicant, all agency hijacked; a man free to probe and poke and prod and chastise the privative and interior, the exquisitely sensitive sense of subjective shame, one is expected to reveal. It is a piercing abjection, a thrown-downess, a belittling littleness, barbed and briared. No one wants to appear shameful to themselves; no one wants to confront the silhouette behind the screen attesting to their lack of integrity. Unless one has an app to surmount that, I’d guess few of that no-show 45% will view an iPoded device to chart their conscience as an occasion to renew their participation in the rite of reconciliation.
And yet, I think they should, we all should, in one form or another at least. Yes, there is a part of me, a snide and snarky part, perhaps the fallen-away Catholic part, that wants to ridicule the seeming incongruity of a sacrament instituted by Christ himself, an instrument of grace, being facilitated by a tricked-out mobile phone. I find, however, that I cannot, for I believe, whether in a religious or a self-examining secular sense, that confession enhances our well-being—that it promotes our foliation as human persons.
We need to be more penitent than we are. We need to more often pluck the string of self-reproach, be more aware of the wounds and wrongs we cause, the duties we leave unperformed, the responsibilities we leave unmet, the loyalties we betray, the what we owe to ourselves, families, communities, employers. Confession, however or wherever we do it, modifies us, allows us to see that we can be different, better. It exonerates and reconciles; it chamfers the keen-edged narcissism our fulfill-yourself culture urges us to adopt; it admits our kindredness, the tug of our shared humanity, the deep syntax that lifts us out of the loneliness of our overly reflexive individuality—and binds us together in a human community. We never fully inhabit our own lives. Always, always, we touch on and are touched by others--the truth of our human being.
If the Confession App hones that sensibility, if it enables us to shorten, even the least little bit, the chasm between what we are and do, and what we know we should be and do, it’s all to the good. It isn’t necessary though. Its capacity for recognition and absolution, its injunctions to “go, and sin no more,” is within our own repertoire of powers. It requires only the honest, inward look. Huck Finn, struggling with his own conscience, notes that “a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.” In confession, wherever and however we perform it, we find the humility to suspend the game of moral peekaboo we too often play with ourselves.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Internet Kissing
The first time I kissed a girl with romantic intent, which is to say, on the lips—I had, of course, Georgie Porgied several girls’ cheeks in my early elementary school years—I was in eighth grade and on a double date with my best friend at the time, Chuck Seaverton. It was an awkward affair, from beginning to end. At the end of the evening, standing outside my date’s house, Chuck pulled me aside, told me that he was going to invite his date into the garage to favor her with a goodnight kiss, and that I should do the same after he emerged. A tongue of panic descended upon me, not concerning the kiss—I had no objection to that—but concerning technique.
“How are you going to do it,” I asked. “I mean, what are you going to say?”
“I’ll suavely ask her if she’d like to step into the garage,” Chuck replied, “and once we’re in there, I’ll ask her if she’d like to do something drastic. When she says yes, I’ll cup her face with my hands and kiss her.”
“But what about noses. I don’t want to bang noses with her.”
“Tilt your head, dummy.”
“But what if she says no.”
“She won’t. Trust me.”
And she didn’t. I followed Chuck’s blueprint, but the kiss, so avidly anticipated, so incensed and candled, so invested with amorous drama, was engineered, clumsily mechanical, tabbed and slotted, crowbarred and jimmied. There was no transport, no sense of being flung, at warp-speed, along the curve of space-time. I felt ungainly, gawky, graceless, and gauche, vortexed in ineptitude, mortified at being such an artless bungler.
This ponderously awkward scene came to mind after I had read a story about a Japanese lab, Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory, having created a “Kiss Transmission Device,” a contrivance that enables person-to-person kissing over the Internet. The device is a small oblong box with a protruding plastic tube which a user manipulates the tube with the tongue. The tube’s movement is stored in a computer program and transmitted to another device, causing its tube to mimic the movement. The remote French kiss has been birthed.
The Kiss Transmission Device is, its inventors claim, intended to console the yearning of lovers in long-distance relationships with the palpable sensation of a shared kiss, a sort of erotic version of quantum entanglement, whereby particles, even if separated by a galaxy-wide distance, respond to each other’s motion. Who knew that the chime of romanticism rang amid the pragmatic spaces of laboratory science? Still, I suspect the inventors know that there’s money to be had. A Justin Bieber, say, could store a kiss and sell its download to his adoring fans. Just what every father wants: his daughter getting a mechanical French kiss from whatever pop culture icon whose quarter hour of fame has yet to expire. “Each kiss a heart-quake,” Byron said. For said father, more like a myocardial infarction. But on the bright side, the Kissing Transmission Device does bypass the nearly 300 colonies of bacteria that thrive in the average human mouth.
Now, kissing has been around almost as long as human have been around. Given its prevalence and diversity—90 % of the world kisses—Darwin theorized that kissing is an innate behavior, evolved possibly from the suckling experience or, perhaps through a kind of pheromonal tasting, from an effort to judge biological fitness. Kissing appears in Sanskrit texts as early as 1500 BCE; Homer depicts King Priam kissing Achilles’ hand when pleading for the return of his son Hector, and Ulysseus being kissed by his slaves upon his return home; and the Old Testament is a veritable brochure of kissing occasions: leave-taking, affection, hoodwinking a blind father, idolatrous practices, homage, brotherly love, parental affection, kin affection, reconciliation, and the rather salacious entreaty in Canticles 1 of the bride to the bridegroom: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”
Throughout history various things have been kissed: rings, hands, feet, robes, hems of garments, the ground, relics, cheeks, the air alongside of cheeks, asses--though this is typically kissed metaphorically to indicate either an ingratiating bootlicker or a contemptuous attitude—and, of course lips. Politicians are obligated to kiss every baby in sight. We commit larceny when we attempt to steal them. The redemption of fallen humankind began with a betraying kiss. Kissing has even been used to seal contracts: the illiterate’s signature X kissed to formalize the deal—which accounts for our use of X to symbolize kisses. In popular culture, the word “kiss” is associated with a small, teardrop-shaped piece of chocolate; an often coconut-flavored meringue, a heavy metal band; the advertising slogan “keep it simple, stupid;” the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, mistletoe, the slight contact of one billiard ball with another, close cousins, an 1896 film by Thomas Edison—who knew the Wizard of Menlo Park was so prurient?—and a 1963 film by Andy Warhol—who did not know that the wizard of The Factory was—and, now, inevitably it would seem, the Internet.
If, as Shelly said, “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” then, it seems to me, Internet kissing is irredeemably flat-souled, as exciting as stuffing breadcrumbs in a turkey. You can draw cubes, but that does not make you Picasso. The scientific study of kissing, “philematology” (from the Greek philema, kiss) tells us that lip-on-lip kissing unleashes such euphoric chemicals as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and a hootenanny of other assorted endorphins. The heart rate hammers; the blood vessels dilate; wings of warm desire spread and flutter. It is difficult to see how a waggling straw can provide a comparably percussive jubilee for body and brain; how an experience mediated by a computer screen and a hand-held box can even approximate the intimate, pulse-pounding physical contact, the fusing wrapped-up-inness, the now, right now, this moment gale-force livingness of a physical kiss. Or the license-to-thrill spontaneity of it, its unscheduled and unspoken structure of feeling and gesture and suggestion, for, after all, an Internet kiss would need to be prepared for, timetabled, penciled in.
It is difficult to see how anyone could consider Internet kissing as less than what Umberto Eco called “the absolute fake,” a simulacrum, a copy, that displaces and usurps the reality of the original. Internet kissing is to actual kissing as viewing an animatronic alligator is to confronting a genuine alligator, as staying in the Luxor Las Vegas is to actually being in Egypt amid pyramids and before the Great Sphinx of Giza, as every pasteurized Main Street USA development is to authentic small-town living. How, one wonders, can Internet kissing be anything other than a disembodied and pale imitation, a denatured replica, a hardcore counterfeit of the reality of real kissing? To think otherwise is to think Karmelkorn is health food, the Snuggie is haute couture, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is just some guy talking smack.
Human intelligence is a fine and wondrous thing. We are not classified taxonomically as Homo sapiens—knowing or wise man—for nothing. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, each with a tendril connected to the tendrils of other neurons. From that buzzing tangle emerged the less than enticing Kissing Transmission Device. In this case, I agree with e. e. cummings that actual “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
“How are you going to do it,” I asked. “I mean, what are you going to say?”
“I’ll suavely ask her if she’d like to step into the garage,” Chuck replied, “and once we’re in there, I’ll ask her if she’d like to do something drastic. When she says yes, I’ll cup her face with my hands and kiss her.”
“But what about noses. I don’t want to bang noses with her.”
“Tilt your head, dummy.”
“But what if she says no.”
“She won’t. Trust me.”
And she didn’t. I followed Chuck’s blueprint, but the kiss, so avidly anticipated, so incensed and candled, so invested with amorous drama, was engineered, clumsily mechanical, tabbed and slotted, crowbarred and jimmied. There was no transport, no sense of being flung, at warp-speed, along the curve of space-time. I felt ungainly, gawky, graceless, and gauche, vortexed in ineptitude, mortified at being such an artless bungler.
This ponderously awkward scene came to mind after I had read a story about a Japanese lab, Tokyo’s Kajimoto Laboratory, having created a “Kiss Transmission Device,” a contrivance that enables person-to-person kissing over the Internet. The device is a small oblong box with a protruding plastic tube which a user manipulates the tube with the tongue. The tube’s movement is stored in a computer program and transmitted to another device, causing its tube to mimic the movement. The remote French kiss has been birthed.
The Kiss Transmission Device is, its inventors claim, intended to console the yearning of lovers in long-distance relationships with the palpable sensation of a shared kiss, a sort of erotic version of quantum entanglement, whereby particles, even if separated by a galaxy-wide distance, respond to each other’s motion. Who knew that the chime of romanticism rang amid the pragmatic spaces of laboratory science? Still, I suspect the inventors know that there’s money to be had. A Justin Bieber, say, could store a kiss and sell its download to his adoring fans. Just what every father wants: his daughter getting a mechanical French kiss from whatever pop culture icon whose quarter hour of fame has yet to expire. “Each kiss a heart-quake,” Byron said. For said father, more like a myocardial infarction. But on the bright side, the Kissing Transmission Device does bypass the nearly 300 colonies of bacteria that thrive in the average human mouth.
Now, kissing has been around almost as long as human have been around. Given its prevalence and diversity—90 % of the world kisses—Darwin theorized that kissing is an innate behavior, evolved possibly from the suckling experience or, perhaps through a kind of pheromonal tasting, from an effort to judge biological fitness. Kissing appears in Sanskrit texts as early as 1500 BCE; Homer depicts King Priam kissing Achilles’ hand when pleading for the return of his son Hector, and Ulysseus being kissed by his slaves upon his return home; and the Old Testament is a veritable brochure of kissing occasions: leave-taking, affection, hoodwinking a blind father, idolatrous practices, homage, brotherly love, parental affection, kin affection, reconciliation, and the rather salacious entreaty in Canticles 1 of the bride to the bridegroom: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of the mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”
Throughout history various things have been kissed: rings, hands, feet, robes, hems of garments, the ground, relics, cheeks, the air alongside of cheeks, asses--though this is typically kissed metaphorically to indicate either an ingratiating bootlicker or a contemptuous attitude—and, of course lips. Politicians are obligated to kiss every baby in sight. We commit larceny when we attempt to steal them. The redemption of fallen humankind began with a betraying kiss. Kissing has even been used to seal contracts: the illiterate’s signature X kissed to formalize the deal—which accounts for our use of X to symbolize kisses. In popular culture, the word “kiss” is associated with a small, teardrop-shaped piece of chocolate; an often coconut-flavored meringue, a heavy metal band; the advertising slogan “keep it simple, stupid;” the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, mistletoe, the slight contact of one billiard ball with another, close cousins, an 1896 film by Thomas Edison—who knew the Wizard of Menlo Park was so prurient?—and a 1963 film by Andy Warhol—who did not know that the wizard of The Factory was—and, now, inevitably it would seem, the Internet.
If, as Shelly said, “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” then, it seems to me, Internet kissing is irredeemably flat-souled, as exciting as stuffing breadcrumbs in a turkey. You can draw cubes, but that does not make you Picasso. The scientific study of kissing, “philematology” (from the Greek philema, kiss) tells us that lip-on-lip kissing unleashes such euphoric chemicals as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and a hootenanny of other assorted endorphins. The heart rate hammers; the blood vessels dilate; wings of warm desire spread and flutter. It is difficult to see how a waggling straw can provide a comparably percussive jubilee for body and brain; how an experience mediated by a computer screen and a hand-held box can even approximate the intimate, pulse-pounding physical contact, the fusing wrapped-up-inness, the now, right now, this moment gale-force livingness of a physical kiss. Or the license-to-thrill spontaneity of it, its unscheduled and unspoken structure of feeling and gesture and suggestion, for, after all, an Internet kiss would need to be prepared for, timetabled, penciled in.
It is difficult to see how anyone could consider Internet kissing as less than what Umberto Eco called “the absolute fake,” a simulacrum, a copy, that displaces and usurps the reality of the original. Internet kissing is to actual kissing as viewing an animatronic alligator is to confronting a genuine alligator, as staying in the Luxor Las Vegas is to actually being in Egypt amid pyramids and before the Great Sphinx of Giza, as every pasteurized Main Street USA development is to authentic small-town living. How, one wonders, can Internet kissing be anything other than a disembodied and pale imitation, a denatured replica, a hardcore counterfeit of the reality of real kissing? To think otherwise is to think Karmelkorn is health food, the Snuggie is haute couture, and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is just some guy talking smack.
Human intelligence is a fine and wondrous thing. We are not classified taxonomically as Homo sapiens—knowing or wise man—for nothing. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, each with a tendril connected to the tendrils of other neurons. From that buzzing tangle emerged the less than enticing Kissing Transmission Device. In this case, I agree with e. e. cummings that actual “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Dad Thought Better
When I was a boy, Dad practiced a ceremony whenever I asked him to buy me something. Let’s call it the refusal-surrender ritual. It went something like this:
Vignette 1: Scanning the sports section of the Cincinnati Post, I noticed an advertisement for go-carts—we called them jitneys back in the day—for $99. It was a no-frills jitney, basically a pull-start lawn-mower engine mounted on a bare-bones steel frame with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and solid rubber wheels. Still, the prospect of my having a small motorized vehicle seemed enticingly grown up, and an enticingly less arduous mode of transportation than my labor-intensive Huffy. So, I showed the jitney ad to Dad and asked if he’d buy me one.
“No! You’re too young to be driving one of those things. Besides, you need to be 16 to drive in the streets.”
“But, Dad, . . .”
“I said no. You’re too young to be operating something like that. Let alone take care of it.”
“But . . .”
And here I got the “dad stare,” the nonverbal equivalent of “End of discussion, so don’t push it.”
Three days later, a Saturday, while I was at the breakfast table spooning up Sugar Pops, Dad approached me with the ad in hand and said, “How about we go take a look at those jitneys.” We looked, he cautioned, he bought.
Vignette 2: Several weeks before my birthday, I asked for a BB gun. Most of the boys in the neighborhood had lever-action,Winchester-like Red Ryders, and I was keen to have one so I, like them, could be Daniel Booned and Kit Carsonized and participate in the “hunting expeditions” they related with such stirring enthusiasm. So, when Dad asked what I wanted for my birthday, I immediately replied, “A BB rifle.”
“A BB rifle! What, are you crazy? A gun? Do you know how dangerous those things can be”?
“But, Dad, it’s just a BB gun”!
And I swear, some 27 years before A Christmas Story appeared, Dad said, “Yeah, and with `just a BB gun’ you can put out your eye. Or somebody else’s.”
“Well, I’d be careful. Besides, everybody else has one.”
“So, if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?
Dad had me there. We’d driven across the 100 foot-high Roebling Suspension Bridge several times on forays into Kentucky. No way I’d jump from 100 feet in the air, even if my best friends Jeffrey Baker and Terry Finklemeier did.
When my birthday arrived, after the cake and ice cream, Dad went into his den and emerged with two wrapped boxes. I knew from the shape of one that it was a BB gun—and what a BB gun: a Daisy Pump-Action Rifle, with wood grip stock, front sight, adjustable rear sight, and a screw-in spring-loading tube that held 52 BBs—no frustratingly inefficient gravity feed with this gun. The Daisy Pump-Action was a high-performance BB rifle, easily the most powerful and accurate on the market. Red Ryders paled into pipsqueakery compared to the shotgun-like Pump-Action. And the second present? A Daisy BB pistol. Thus fully weaponized, I allowed my imagination to swell and thicken with images of me leading my friends on the next trailblazing excursion into the “wilds,” a microwoods three blocks away consisting of a miserly stand of trees and some undergrowth scrub.
I did not ponder Dad’s dialectic of denial and capitulation, and I certainly did not question him about it, for that would surely rouse a pillaging jinx from its slumber. When I thought of it at all, I considered it as something akin to the unaccountable, unmerited dispensation of grace the Dominican sisters at elementary school told us about. Sometimes, of course, the “no” stood: bunk bed (vetoed due to my brother Dennis’s vehement opposition), hamsters (“big rats”), night-vision goggles, electric guitar, in-ground swimming pool (no “no” necessary; the look of incredulity said it all). Sometimes, “OK” was the immediate response: books, sports equipment, chemistry set, Lionel Model Train set, board games, acoustic guitar. Still, Dad’s strange alchemy of converting the base metal of “no” to the gold of “yes” occurred on enough occasions that I developed my own small ceremony: request—wait—celebrate.
Years later, talking with Mom about some of Dad’s peculiarities (“I’d need a brand-new ball point to list them all,” she claimed), I mentioned how I wondered about Dad’s propensity to flatly refuse my boyish requests for a jitney and BB gun, and then refuse the refusal. “Oh, that,” Mom said; “after he said `no’ he thought better of it.” Thought better of it. I was struck by that clause, and what it could mean.
Of course, in common usage it means to change one’s mind, to revise, upon reflection, an initial decision. Interestingly, brain scanning cognitive psychologists claim empirical evidence supports that interpretation. It seems that, when faced with a decision, rational thought is a second-order response. Emotions precede reason. Scans indicate that decision-making begins in an emotion-processing part of the brain’s limbic system, then hitches its way to reason’s jurisdiction, the neocortex. Once there, however, reason rationalizes the original gut reaction, a process known as confirmation bias. This bias is modified or overcome in a social context, in talking with others and being exposed to alternative perspectives. And while she never said so, I know that it was Mom who provided Dad with that perception-altering context.
Still, I wondered about the nature of that alteration. Yes, Dad “thought better of it,” and it’s likely talking with Mom caused it, but what underlay the cause to give it triggering persuasiveness. And here I focused on the words “thought better.” What does it mean to think better? I would venture this: I had made a claim to Dad’s consideration. He could have let that initial “no” be the final word, could have dismissed my little boy wants as irresponsible, as a brochure of unnecessary needs, as blinkered immaturity. He could have thought no more about it. But, no; instead, he thought better. He regarded me, was mindful of me, treated me with solicitude, attended to me, beyond the “no.” He absorbed my desires and made them as important as his own. He imagined his way into my interior space, that place of wanting, and felt his way around, charted its contours, took measurements. He held me in his regard, as surely as he held my hand when we crossed a street, as surely as he clasped my shoulder after I pitched the winning game in the Little League World Series, as surely as he held my eyes in his when we talked about my upcoming marriage, as surely as he cradled the back of my neck as he lay dying and whispered “I’m glad you’re here.”
Dad held me in his regard. Prompted by Mom, the messenger RNA in my folks’ helix information exchange. He thought. Better. Deeper. He pondered me. Not from outside my small desiring world. Inside. I was ponderable. All the way down.
Vignette 1: Scanning the sports section of the Cincinnati Post, I noticed an advertisement for go-carts—we called them jitneys back in the day—for $99. It was a no-frills jitney, basically a pull-start lawn-mower engine mounted on a bare-bones steel frame with a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and solid rubber wheels. Still, the prospect of my having a small motorized vehicle seemed enticingly grown up, and an enticingly less arduous mode of transportation than my labor-intensive Huffy. So, I showed the jitney ad to Dad and asked if he’d buy me one.
“No! You’re too young to be driving one of those things. Besides, you need to be 16 to drive in the streets.”
“But, Dad, . . .”
“I said no. You’re too young to be operating something like that. Let alone take care of it.”
“But . . .”
And here I got the “dad stare,” the nonverbal equivalent of “End of discussion, so don’t push it.”
Three days later, a Saturday, while I was at the breakfast table spooning up Sugar Pops, Dad approached me with the ad in hand and said, “How about we go take a look at those jitneys.” We looked, he cautioned, he bought.
Vignette 2: Several weeks before my birthday, I asked for a BB gun. Most of the boys in the neighborhood had lever-action,Winchester-like Red Ryders, and I was keen to have one so I, like them, could be Daniel Booned and Kit Carsonized and participate in the “hunting expeditions” they related with such stirring enthusiasm. So, when Dad asked what I wanted for my birthday, I immediately replied, “A BB rifle.”
“A BB rifle! What, are you crazy? A gun? Do you know how dangerous those things can be”?
“But, Dad, it’s just a BB gun”!
And I swear, some 27 years before A Christmas Story appeared, Dad said, “Yeah, and with `just a BB gun’ you can put out your eye. Or somebody else’s.”
“Well, I’d be careful. Besides, everybody else has one.”
“So, if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too?
Dad had me there. We’d driven across the 100 foot-high Roebling Suspension Bridge several times on forays into Kentucky. No way I’d jump from 100 feet in the air, even if my best friends Jeffrey Baker and Terry Finklemeier did.
When my birthday arrived, after the cake and ice cream, Dad went into his den and emerged with two wrapped boxes. I knew from the shape of one that it was a BB gun—and what a BB gun: a Daisy Pump-Action Rifle, with wood grip stock, front sight, adjustable rear sight, and a screw-in spring-loading tube that held 52 BBs—no frustratingly inefficient gravity feed with this gun. The Daisy Pump-Action was a high-performance BB rifle, easily the most powerful and accurate on the market. Red Ryders paled into pipsqueakery compared to the shotgun-like Pump-Action. And the second present? A Daisy BB pistol. Thus fully weaponized, I allowed my imagination to swell and thicken with images of me leading my friends on the next trailblazing excursion into the “wilds,” a microwoods three blocks away consisting of a miserly stand of trees and some undergrowth scrub.
I did not ponder Dad’s dialectic of denial and capitulation, and I certainly did not question him about it, for that would surely rouse a pillaging jinx from its slumber. When I thought of it at all, I considered it as something akin to the unaccountable, unmerited dispensation of grace the Dominican sisters at elementary school told us about. Sometimes, of course, the “no” stood: bunk bed (vetoed due to my brother Dennis’s vehement opposition), hamsters (“big rats”), night-vision goggles, electric guitar, in-ground swimming pool (no “no” necessary; the look of incredulity said it all). Sometimes, “OK” was the immediate response: books, sports equipment, chemistry set, Lionel Model Train set, board games, acoustic guitar. Still, Dad’s strange alchemy of converting the base metal of “no” to the gold of “yes” occurred on enough occasions that I developed my own small ceremony: request—wait—celebrate.
Years later, talking with Mom about some of Dad’s peculiarities (“I’d need a brand-new ball point to list them all,” she claimed), I mentioned how I wondered about Dad’s propensity to flatly refuse my boyish requests for a jitney and BB gun, and then refuse the refusal. “Oh, that,” Mom said; “after he said `no’ he thought better of it.” Thought better of it. I was struck by that clause, and what it could mean.
Of course, in common usage it means to change one’s mind, to revise, upon reflection, an initial decision. Interestingly, brain scanning cognitive psychologists claim empirical evidence supports that interpretation. It seems that, when faced with a decision, rational thought is a second-order response. Emotions precede reason. Scans indicate that decision-making begins in an emotion-processing part of the brain’s limbic system, then hitches its way to reason’s jurisdiction, the neocortex. Once there, however, reason rationalizes the original gut reaction, a process known as confirmation bias. This bias is modified or overcome in a social context, in talking with others and being exposed to alternative perspectives. And while she never said so, I know that it was Mom who provided Dad with that perception-altering context.
Still, I wondered about the nature of that alteration. Yes, Dad “thought better of it,” and it’s likely talking with Mom caused it, but what underlay the cause to give it triggering persuasiveness. And here I focused on the words “thought better.” What does it mean to think better? I would venture this: I had made a claim to Dad’s consideration. He could have let that initial “no” be the final word, could have dismissed my little boy wants as irresponsible, as a brochure of unnecessary needs, as blinkered immaturity. He could have thought no more about it. But, no; instead, he thought better. He regarded me, was mindful of me, treated me with solicitude, attended to me, beyond the “no.” He absorbed my desires and made them as important as his own. He imagined his way into my interior space, that place of wanting, and felt his way around, charted its contours, took measurements. He held me in his regard, as surely as he held my hand when we crossed a street, as surely as he clasped my shoulder after I pitched the winning game in the Little League World Series, as surely as he held my eyes in his when we talked about my upcoming marriage, as surely as he cradled the back of my neck as he lay dying and whispered “I’m glad you’re here.”
Dad held me in his regard. Prompted by Mom, the messenger RNA in my folks’ helix information exchange. He thought. Better. Deeper. He pondered me. Not from outside my small desiring world. Inside. I was ponderable. All the way down.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Prefixed and Suffixed: The Grammar of Our Lives
I am prefixed and suffixed. I am a college teacher (er—one who performs an action) who teaches literature (ure—function, process) and composition (ion—result of an act or process). I rhapsodize (ize—engage in an activity) about Moby Dick but sometimes sneak off to see such cultural (al—of or relating to) Karmelkorn as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I have hypothyroidism (hypo—under; low; ism—state or condition). I tend to vote democratic (crat—member or partisan of; ic—character or nature of). I am a vegetarian (arian—believer, advocate). I am friendly (ly—like in manner or nature) and can be social (al—tending to, fit for) but prefer solitude (tude—quality or state). I do not own a smartphone (smart—too techie for me to operate) or a smart anything, except, occasionally a mouth. Age catches me out these days, and I often feel seniorclysmic (OK, I made that up). I was overweight (over—over, duh!) as a young man, but now my physician (ian—skilled in) worries that I am too skinny (y—characterized by), which is strange considering my near mitochondrial Reese’s Peanut Butter Cupitudinarianism, a craving I am able to resist about as successfully as attempting to thread a needle while being tickled. Faced with a RPBC, my willpower comes out with its hands up.
All of who I am, it seems, is defined by bits of language that are located six doors down from the corner office of actual words—mere slivery, splintery units of linguistic structure, snippets, really, tittles and tidbits, runts in the lexical litter. And yet, they have meaning, which means that hanging them on the fore or aft of words gives them the power to broker the coordinates of my identity. I don’t mind. They can, I believe, teach us something about the grammar of our lives.
Prefixes and suffixes—along with infixes, which English does not have, except for such mildly profane exclamations as “absodamnlutely”—are classified as áffixes. There are two types of áffixes in English: inflectional and derivational. Only eight inflectional áffixes remain in English, all of them suffixes. Two tell us whether nouns are plural or possessive; four tell us whether verbs refer to actions that are past, present, or ongoing; and two tell us whether adjectives are comparing two things or evaluating one thing among many as superlative. Inflectional suffixes thus refine the meaning of the word they are attached to, but more than that, they establish a word’s relationship to other words in the string of words containing it. The “s” at the end of “grammarians” means more than one and would require the use of the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” when referring to them and the verb “are” in the sentence “Grammarians are fond of horseradish on their ice cream.” The “en” on “eaten” requires a form of “have” as a helping verb and means the eating occurred in the past before another past action: “The grammarians experienced digestive distress after they had eaten horseradish ice cream.”
Now, indulge me in a metaphor here: because inflectional suffixes work outside the word, ligaturing to and affecting other words, let’s consider inflectional suffixes to be socially oriented.
Derivational áffixes allow us to derive new words either by changing the part of speech of the word to which they attach or by altering the word’s meaning: add able to the verb “sustain” and, voilá, you have the adjective “sustainable.” Add the prefix un to “sustainable and, revoilá, the meaning changes. Add ster to “hip” and you get a noun and one very irritating guy; add ize and you verb him into action; add tion and you’ve got “hipsterization,” a monstrous transformation worthy of a horror film; add de at the beginning and you’ve returned him to human form.
All these additions are far from arbitrary. Grammatical rules dictate what can be added to what and in what order the addition will proceed. The suffix able attaches by rule to verbs to make adjectives (compare-comparable). The prefix in attaches to adjectives to render another adjective but with a different meaning. Thus, the order of attachment for “incomparable” would have to be able first, then in. In other words, the structure of words with affixes is hierarchical. It occurs in steps; it spools in a precisely ordered sequence.
Now, metaphor time again. Because the derivational áffix process occurs in words rather than, like inflectional suffixes, across words, because it is internal to a particular word, changing its, and its only, meaning and identity, ligaturing to and affecting no other words in the string of words containing it, let’s consider derivational áffixes to be individually oriented.
So, what, then, is the take away for the grammar of our lives? The “social” nature of inflectional suffixes teaches us to possess the capacity for plural perspective taking; to attend to the tense, the historical context and contingencies, that shapes and governs the lives with which we interact, to compare qualities and ideas, and to assess them for their superiority. The lesson of inflectional suffixes is to imagine, analyze, and evaluate; to broaden our horizons, not practice the idolatry of merely reinforcing our views; to realize that, while circumstances emplace us, we can think beyond them.
The “individual” nature of derivational áffixes teaches us deliberative and purposeful change—that who we are, what we are, what we think and feel and do and perceive can be reconfigured; that the categories in which we are placed, in which we place ourselves, can be revised; that the meanings we hold can be transformed. Derivational áffixes instill a disposition for growth.
There is a deep structure to our lives, a biological grammar. It develops, perhaps according to Erik Erikson’s eight-staged theory of psychosocial development, or Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, or Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Beck and Graves’s nonlinear Spiral Dynamics model, or the Seven Ages of Man the melancholy Jacques outlines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It matters little to which theory we subscribe. What matters is what we make of our life’s stages, how we experience the urgent energy of them, how we imagine and embody them, the parameters we set within them. What matters is not the deep structure but the surface structure, the way we express our lives, in small ways and in large. We can change; we can catalyze ourselves, be emergent, and not simply a lingerer in a room with a wavy-glass window and a caged parrot, waiting for our number to be called. We may be áffixed, but we are not affíxed.
All of who I am, it seems, is defined by bits of language that are located six doors down from the corner office of actual words—mere slivery, splintery units of linguistic structure, snippets, really, tittles and tidbits, runts in the lexical litter. And yet, they have meaning, which means that hanging them on the fore or aft of words gives them the power to broker the coordinates of my identity. I don’t mind. They can, I believe, teach us something about the grammar of our lives.
Prefixes and suffixes—along with infixes, which English does not have, except for such mildly profane exclamations as “absodamnlutely”—are classified as áffixes. There are two types of áffixes in English: inflectional and derivational. Only eight inflectional áffixes remain in English, all of them suffixes. Two tell us whether nouns are plural or possessive; four tell us whether verbs refer to actions that are past, present, or ongoing; and two tell us whether adjectives are comparing two things or evaluating one thing among many as superlative. Inflectional suffixes thus refine the meaning of the word they are attached to, but more than that, they establish a word’s relationship to other words in the string of words containing it. The “s” at the end of “grammarians” means more than one and would require the use of the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” when referring to them and the verb “are” in the sentence “Grammarians are fond of horseradish on their ice cream.” The “en” on “eaten” requires a form of “have” as a helping verb and means the eating occurred in the past before another past action: “The grammarians experienced digestive distress after they had eaten horseradish ice cream.”
Now, indulge me in a metaphor here: because inflectional suffixes work outside the word, ligaturing to and affecting other words, let’s consider inflectional suffixes to be socially oriented.
Derivational áffixes allow us to derive new words either by changing the part of speech of the word to which they attach or by altering the word’s meaning: add able to the verb “sustain” and, voilá, you have the adjective “sustainable.” Add the prefix un to “sustainable and, revoilá, the meaning changes. Add ster to “hip” and you get a noun and one very irritating guy; add ize and you verb him into action; add tion and you’ve got “hipsterization,” a monstrous transformation worthy of a horror film; add de at the beginning and you’ve returned him to human form.
All these additions are far from arbitrary. Grammatical rules dictate what can be added to what and in what order the addition will proceed. The suffix able attaches by rule to verbs to make adjectives (compare-comparable). The prefix in attaches to adjectives to render another adjective but with a different meaning. Thus, the order of attachment for “incomparable” would have to be able first, then in. In other words, the structure of words with affixes is hierarchical. It occurs in steps; it spools in a precisely ordered sequence.
Now, metaphor time again. Because the derivational áffix process occurs in words rather than, like inflectional suffixes, across words, because it is internal to a particular word, changing its, and its only, meaning and identity, ligaturing to and affecting no other words in the string of words containing it, let’s consider derivational áffixes to be individually oriented.
So, what, then, is the take away for the grammar of our lives? The “social” nature of inflectional suffixes teaches us to possess the capacity for plural perspective taking; to attend to the tense, the historical context and contingencies, that shapes and governs the lives with which we interact, to compare qualities and ideas, and to assess them for their superiority. The lesson of inflectional suffixes is to imagine, analyze, and evaluate; to broaden our horizons, not practice the idolatry of merely reinforcing our views; to realize that, while circumstances emplace us, we can think beyond them.
The “individual” nature of derivational áffixes teaches us deliberative and purposeful change—that who we are, what we are, what we think and feel and do and perceive can be reconfigured; that the categories in which we are placed, in which we place ourselves, can be revised; that the meanings we hold can be transformed. Derivational áffixes instill a disposition for growth.
There is a deep structure to our lives, a biological grammar. It develops, perhaps according to Erik Erikson’s eight-staged theory of psychosocial development, or Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, or Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Beck and Graves’s nonlinear Spiral Dynamics model, or the Seven Ages of Man the melancholy Jacques outlines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It matters little to which theory we subscribe. What matters is what we make of our life’s stages, how we experience the urgent energy of them, how we imagine and embody them, the parameters we set within them. What matters is not the deep structure but the surface structure, the way we express our lives, in small ways and in large. We can change; we can catalyze ourselves, be emergent, and not simply a lingerer in a room with a wavy-glass window and a caged parrot, waiting for our number to be called. We may be áffixed, but we are not affíxed.
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