I built the bookshelves upon which my books stand, soldierly, at attention, spine out, though in places they break ranks in a jumbled stack. In my twenties I used boards laid across cinder blocks for bookshelves, and idea I plagiarized from my best friend Jim, who seemed on constant hailing frequency to all things chic. But cinder blocks are, well, cinder blocks, about as aesthetically pleasing as the drone of a vuvuzela. So, I replaced them with red bricks, and later replaced them with a variety of designer bricks. At some point I decided to build my bookshelves. Perhaps I was haunted by Willy Loman’s contemptuous comment to his sons that a man who doesn’t know how to use tools isn’t a man. Or maybe I decided that my books deserved a better display than boards laid across bricks—that I should give back to them in physical energy what they had given me in mental energy. The line of books on woodworking, power tools, fasteners, and do-it-yourself home improvement projects mark the evolution of that decision.
And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.
On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.
I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.
The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.
My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.
The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.
That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Philosophy of Education in One Paragraph
For the past 25 years, I have professed English at a small, liberal arts university in Iowa. Like most such post-secondary institutions, it has sought ways to chamfer the sharp edge of the recent economic scimitar. My institution has, I think, taken an approach both prudent and wise. The prudent part: it has expanded its online and on-campus vocationally-oriented degree programs. The wise part: it has reaffirmed its commitment to the liberal arts. Compressed in the original definition of “liberal arts” is the idea that a course of study can be freeing (Latin: liber, free), empowering students to successfully transition from parochial and limiting perspectives to the sensitivities and flexibilities demanded by the world’s widening zone of complexity, a world at once increasingly diverse and increasingly interrelated. I believe the liberal arts can prepare students for all careers; indeed, even in those careers commonly construed as vocational, such as business and medicine, liberal arts coursework is being integrated into business and medical school curricula. As part of my institution’s reaffirmation of a liberal arts education, it has tasked a group of faculty with creating the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). A key question facing CLAS (or any college, school, or program for that matter) is how it can enhance student learning. What follows is my contribution to that discussion—an educational philosophy in one paragraph.
I assume certain fundamental skills underlie all learning, no matter the discipline. I also assume all learning is a matter of training, which is the only way of getting better at something. Now, assuming my assuming isn’t some slippery seed stubbornly impervious to the grasp of reality, I see a way to both make our CLAS distinctive and enhance student learning. If learning, real, genuine, take-it-with-you-into-the-“real world” learning, results from training, what should we be training students in? Intellectual depth. And how do we train students in intellectual depth? Through organizing our courses around teaching styles, assignments, and classroom activities that encourage reflection, research, reasoning, analysis, interpretation, and critique; that foster formulating questions, identifying assumptions, discerning implications/conclusions, and adopting multiple perspectives; that promote application (that is, can students do something on their own, as a result of our instruction, in novel circumstances) and self-evaluation (which, of course, students will need to be taught to do); and that emphasize writing, which ligatures thought and adorns it, making it doubly compelling. This kind of training is the biggest issue facing liberal arts and sciences (its reason for being, actually), and its source of academic excellence. One other thing: we should never, not once, even for a moment, forget that students have lives that far exceed our particular interests and that the shape and making of those lives have had, have, and will have far more impact on the men and women they are and will become than we will. The challenge to us all is captured in Prospero’s question to Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What see’st thou else.” We cannot transform students, not in the strict sense of the meaning of “transform,” but we can help them see the “else,” and in that small way (which is really a big way) maybe show them that instead of being swept along by events they have the means to wield the broom.
I assume certain fundamental skills underlie all learning, no matter the discipline. I also assume all learning is a matter of training, which is the only way of getting better at something. Now, assuming my assuming isn’t some slippery seed stubbornly impervious to the grasp of reality, I see a way to both make our CLAS distinctive and enhance student learning. If learning, real, genuine, take-it-with-you-into-the-“real world” learning, results from training, what should we be training students in? Intellectual depth. And how do we train students in intellectual depth? Through organizing our courses around teaching styles, assignments, and classroom activities that encourage reflection, research, reasoning, analysis, interpretation, and critique; that foster formulating questions, identifying assumptions, discerning implications/conclusions, and adopting multiple perspectives; that promote application (that is, can students do something on their own, as a result of our instruction, in novel circumstances) and self-evaluation (which, of course, students will need to be taught to do); and that emphasize writing, which ligatures thought and adorns it, making it doubly compelling. This kind of training is the biggest issue facing liberal arts and sciences (its reason for being, actually), and its source of academic excellence. One other thing: we should never, not once, even for a moment, forget that students have lives that far exceed our particular interests and that the shape and making of those lives have had, have, and will have far more impact on the men and women they are and will become than we will. The challenge to us all is captured in Prospero’s question to Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What see’st thou else.” We cannot transform students, not in the strict sense of the meaning of “transform,” but we can help them see the “else,” and in that small way (which is really a big way) maybe show them that instead of being swept along by events they have the means to wield the broom.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Poetry Rules
I like reading poetry, though I realize that such an activity, and my liking of it, places me in a group of people who could be listed on a Post-It note, with room left for The Aeneid. Perhaps that is because, as Adrian Mitchell says, “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” I do not like reading all poetry, however; I only like poetry that follows two rules, both of which insure that poetry does not ignore me.
Rule 1: A poem must be comprehensible on its first reading.
Making meaning of the poem will come later, interpretation being a second order process, but first I must understand the poem as it is on the page, what it expresses, its saying. After all, unless one lights votive candles and burns incense to the art-god Poetry, why compose a poem that stiffarms a reader? Why the deliberative murk, the churn of obscure allusion, the black hole verse that compacts clarity of expression into an unintelligible pinpoint? Why write a poem that pistol-whips its reader? No, a poem’s lucidity must be robust, efflorescent. A poem must be as clear and inviting as summer water. It must solicit me, not bypass me in service to some mediating theory or other. It must not depend for its intelligibility on something independent of my immediate experience of it. A poem must like me for me to like it. A poem should seduce me.
Here are the first few lines a poem that does not like me, that has the seduction of a soggy saltine:
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%.
The remainder of the poem, called “Fact,” goes on like this for a full page. It is a listing of the ingredients of which paper is composed. It is cold and cerebral, a poem smitten with itself as an instrument of theory, in thrall to postmodernism, and intent, as near as I can tell, on disenchanting the act of writing, and reading, poetry. “Fact” in fact subjects the reader to the poem’s animating theory and, thus, practices a kind of coercion, a politics of control.
“Fact” is an example of conceptual poetry, the philosophy which, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its foremost practitioners, intentionally employs
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; . . . and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language . . . as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, . . . illegibility, unreadability.
Such poetry is wantonly arrogant; it willfully disdains its reader. It provides no perch upon which understanding can land. It stages a fixed cage match between the reader and the poem in which the reader, finally, inevitably, suffers a smackdown. It is poetic Calvinism, spurred to a self-flagellating purity of purpose from the conviction that language, like all things human, is irredeemably fallen. It glamorizes negativity. It disorients and ruptures without the prospect of a payoff—poetry as a perpetual gesture of skepticism.
Here’s another small sample, a stanza from Charles Wright’s “Tattoos”:
Liplap of Zuan’s canal, blear/ Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest/ Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps/ Along the casements. O blue/ Feathers, this clear cathedral . . .
Why the arcane allusiveness? Why am I banished from the act of reading and sent off to discover that Zuan’s canal is in Venice, where Wright was stationed while in the army; that Tintoretto is a Venetian painter; that Turner refers to Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British painter whose Venetian watercolors make striking use of light and color? Why should the footnotes to the stanza take up more space than the stanza? This stanza positions me as a dunce, more Homer Simpson than Homo Sapiens. It isn’t an insult to my intelligence; it’s a felonious assault.
In contrast, here’s a poem that likes me, Billy Collins’ aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry.” It contrasts his and his students’ attitude toward reading poetry. I side with Billy.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
A good poem invites us in. It welcomes us, allows us to examine, listen, explore. It respects us enough to value our meaning making. And it initiates this process by being penetrable, straightforward, uncluttered—by summoning us “to waterski across the surface.” To riff on Robert Frost, like ice on a stove, we ride on the poem’s melting. We do not need to pummel it into submission. It will unfold to us, but first we must be granted entrance.
Rule 2: A poem must provide what T. S. Eliot called a “shudder;” that is, it must provoke a visceral response.
Somehow, in whole or in part, a poem must embody itself in me, must stimulate shock or surprise, must conjure a sense of dread or reverence, must enchant me with its charm, must leverage a mood, must engage me in the density of a half-glimpsed perception. It must provide a form of feeling, heightened, boldfaced; a texture of experience to attend to, to regard, to make me examine my first-person connection to human being. Emily Dickenson declared that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” An overstatement, no doubt, but a poem must contain within it that which is volatile. For the moment of reading, and often for inarticulate reasons, the poem must elicit my subjective response, must provoke or evoke or invoke, must trigger an irruptive physical reaction that lets me take the measure of my subjectivity and that leads me, finally, to think about that reaction.
Here is a small inventory from American poetry of such moments, with brief explanations for their transfixing power. What I cannot explain, however, and what remains for my further exploration, is precisely why I find them powerful.
· The crushing sense of contingency and mutability contained in the concluding stanza of Frost’s “The Hill Wife,” a lonely farmer’s wife who one day slips into the woods never to return. Her husband discovers that “Sudden and swift and light as that/ The ties gave,/ And he learned of finalities/ Besides the grave.”
· More Frost: The stark loneliness in “Desert Places” of a twilit field filling with snow described as “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express.” Or the tragic vulnerability at the end of “Reluctance:” “Ah, 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,/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or a season”
· The unnerving “somewhat” in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” responding to an English teacher’s assignment by arguing for the mutual entailment of black and white Americans: “As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me--/ although you’re older—and white--/ and somewhat more free.”
· The exuberant humanism of Whitman claiming “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” and how “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”
· The stunning heresy prompted by the indifferent violence of nature in Emily Dickenson’s figuring of an autumn frost as a “blonde Assassin” that “beheads” a “happy Flower,” while “The Sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another Day/ For an Approving God.”
· In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Lake,” an ecology of nature and human nature glimpsed in the closely observed intricate beauty of a sunfish she has caught:
I knew the place it came from
was deeper than I could ever see or dive to
that beauty could come up from a dark and cold place
and mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn.
· The frightening ease with which violence and maternal love can intersect and, more horrifying yet, the self-revelation in her daughter’s knowing look that Sharon Olds describes in “The Clasp.” Grasping her four-year-old daughter’s wrist as she is about to turn her sleeping one-year-old brother face down, Olds says
I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,. . .
she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeplyopen eyes took me in, she knew me,
in the shock of the moment
she learned me.
· The artlessness, sweet and deep, of Li-Young Lee’s reaction in “The Gift” to the gentleness with which his father removed a splinter, a gentleness the poet carried into his adult life: “I did what a child does/ when he’s given something to keep./ I kissed my father.” And while of the subject of fathers and sons, the felt need of a father for his father in Simon Ortiz’s opening lines of “My Father’s Song:” “Wanting to say things,/ I miss my father tonight.”
Each of these poems is a small world built of language, its plainspoken explicitness as well as its gestures, suggestions, and insinuations. Each lets us be, in event of its reading, a citizen of elsewhere, no passport required, no bureaucratic snarl at the border crossing. Each beckons us to enter and experience ourselves. It lets us make it our own, lets us, finally, be its subject.
Rule 1: A poem must be comprehensible on its first reading.
Making meaning of the poem will come later, interpretation being a second order process, but first I must understand the poem as it is on the page, what it expresses, its saying. After all, unless one lights votive candles and burns incense to the art-god Poetry, why compose a poem that stiffarms a reader? Why the deliberative murk, the churn of obscure allusion, the black hole verse that compacts clarity of expression into an unintelligible pinpoint? Why write a poem that pistol-whips its reader? No, a poem’s lucidity must be robust, efflorescent. A poem must be as clear and inviting as summer water. It must solicit me, not bypass me in service to some mediating theory or other. It must not depend for its intelligibility on something independent of my immediate experience of it. A poem must like me for me to like it. A poem should seduce me.
Here are the first few lines a poem that does not like me, that has the seduction of a soggy saltine:
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%.
The remainder of the poem, called “Fact,” goes on like this for a full page. It is a listing of the ingredients of which paper is composed. It is cold and cerebral, a poem smitten with itself as an instrument of theory, in thrall to postmodernism, and intent, as near as I can tell, on disenchanting the act of writing, and reading, poetry. “Fact” in fact subjects the reader to the poem’s animating theory and, thus, practices a kind of coercion, a politics of control.
“Fact” is an example of conceptual poetry, the philosophy which, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its foremost practitioners, intentionally employs
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; . . . and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language . . . as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, . . . illegibility, unreadability.
Such poetry is wantonly arrogant; it willfully disdains its reader. It provides no perch upon which understanding can land. It stages a fixed cage match between the reader and the poem in which the reader, finally, inevitably, suffers a smackdown. It is poetic Calvinism, spurred to a self-flagellating purity of purpose from the conviction that language, like all things human, is irredeemably fallen. It glamorizes negativity. It disorients and ruptures without the prospect of a payoff—poetry as a perpetual gesture of skepticism.
Here’s another small sample, a stanza from Charles Wright’s “Tattoos”:
Liplap of Zuan’s canal, blear/ Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest/ Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps/ Along the casements. O blue/ Feathers, this clear cathedral . . .
Why the arcane allusiveness? Why am I banished from the act of reading and sent off to discover that Zuan’s canal is in Venice, where Wright was stationed while in the army; that Tintoretto is a Venetian painter; that Turner refers to Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British painter whose Venetian watercolors make striking use of light and color? Why should the footnotes to the stanza take up more space than the stanza? This stanza positions me as a dunce, more Homer Simpson than Homo Sapiens. It isn’t an insult to my intelligence; it’s a felonious assault.
In contrast, here’s a poem that likes me, Billy Collins’ aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry.” It contrasts his and his students’ attitude toward reading poetry. I side with Billy.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
A good poem invites us in. It welcomes us, allows us to examine, listen, explore. It respects us enough to value our meaning making. And it initiates this process by being penetrable, straightforward, uncluttered—by summoning us “to waterski across the surface.” To riff on Robert Frost, like ice on a stove, we ride on the poem’s melting. We do not need to pummel it into submission. It will unfold to us, but first we must be granted entrance.
Rule 2: A poem must provide what T. S. Eliot called a “shudder;” that is, it must provoke a visceral response.
Somehow, in whole or in part, a poem must embody itself in me, must stimulate shock or surprise, must conjure a sense of dread or reverence, must enchant me with its charm, must leverage a mood, must engage me in the density of a half-glimpsed perception. It must provide a form of feeling, heightened, boldfaced; a texture of experience to attend to, to regard, to make me examine my first-person connection to human being. Emily Dickenson declared that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” An overstatement, no doubt, but a poem must contain within it that which is volatile. For the moment of reading, and often for inarticulate reasons, the poem must elicit my subjective response, must provoke or evoke or invoke, must trigger an irruptive physical reaction that lets me take the measure of my subjectivity and that leads me, finally, to think about that reaction.
Here is a small inventory from American poetry of such moments, with brief explanations for their transfixing power. What I cannot explain, however, and what remains for my further exploration, is precisely why I find them powerful.
· The crushing sense of contingency and mutability contained in the concluding stanza of Frost’s “The Hill Wife,” a lonely farmer’s wife who one day slips into the woods never to return. Her husband discovers that “Sudden and swift and light as that/ The ties gave,/ And he learned of finalities/ Besides the grave.”
· More Frost: The stark loneliness in “Desert Places” of a twilit field filling with snow described as “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express.” Or the tragic vulnerability at the end of “Reluctance:” “Ah, 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,/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or a season”
· The unnerving “somewhat” in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” responding to an English teacher’s assignment by arguing for the mutual entailment of black and white Americans: “As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me--/ although you’re older—and white--/ and somewhat more free.”
· The exuberant humanism of Whitman claiming “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” and how “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”
· The stunning heresy prompted by the indifferent violence of nature in Emily Dickenson’s figuring of an autumn frost as a “blonde Assassin” that “beheads” a “happy Flower,” while “The Sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another Day/ For an Approving God.”
· In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Lake,” an ecology of nature and human nature glimpsed in the closely observed intricate beauty of a sunfish she has caught:
I knew the place it came from
was deeper than I could ever see or dive to
that beauty could come up from a dark and cold place
and mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn.
· The frightening ease with which violence and maternal love can intersect and, more horrifying yet, the self-revelation in her daughter’s knowing look that Sharon Olds describes in “The Clasp.” Grasping her four-year-old daughter’s wrist as she is about to turn her sleeping one-year-old brother face down, Olds says
I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,. . .
she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeplyopen eyes took me in, she knew me,
in the shock of the moment
she learned me.
· The artlessness, sweet and deep, of Li-Young Lee’s reaction in “The Gift” to the gentleness with which his father removed a splinter, a gentleness the poet carried into his adult life: “I did what a child does/ when he’s given something to keep./ I kissed my father.” And while of the subject of fathers and sons, the felt need of a father for his father in Simon Ortiz’s opening lines of “My Father’s Song:” “Wanting to say things,/ I miss my father tonight.”
Each of these poems is a small world built of language, its plainspoken explicitness as well as its gestures, suggestions, and insinuations. Each lets us be, in event of its reading, a citizen of elsewhere, no passport required, no bureaucratic snarl at the border crossing. Each beckons us to enter and experience ourselves. It lets us make it our own, lets us, finally, be its subject.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Sisters of St. Antoninus
I was born, raised, and educated in the bosom of the Catholic Church, which, of course, makes me wonder, not without a twinge of guilt, why I used the word “bosom.” My Catholic education began at St. Antoninus Elementary School. Antoninus was a Dominican who in the 15th century served as the bishop of Florence. “Antoninus” means “little Antony,” likely an affectionate reference to his making himself small through inordinate humility. The Dominican sisters who taught at St. Antoninus were, to those of us in their charge, anything but small. They were wholly other figures, talismanic and imposing, their power welded to the authority of the Church and consecrated by the gold wedding band emblemizing their marriage to Jesus, possessing, so we thought, a bionic capacity for inducing in us the humility characteristic of the school’s namesake.
We were certain the sisters conspired nightly in their convent to devise the means necessary to liberate our natural inclinations to reduce all things to the small, tight circle of our prepubescent egos. The evidence of a conspiracy was irrefutable.
· Every sister carried a ruler, at all times and in all places, for the sole purpose of bestowing quick, hard raps on hands that misheld a pencil, on heads that peered out the window instead of at a sheet of long-division problems, on rear ends that moved too fast or too slow in the myriad lines that formed our mode of travel to lunch, or the playground, or Mass, or the gymnasium for polio shots. The ruler measured our misbehaviors which, like the devil it was meant to expel, were legion.
· Every sister utilized the “claw,” a technique whereby, after a stealth approach from behind while we were daydreaming or conversing with a neighbor, she would bury her fingers, up to the first knuckle it seemed, in our shoulder’s trapezius muscle. I made the mistake of describing this technique, and its effectiveness, to my mother, who promptly adopted it. Thank goodness I kept silent about the ruler.
· Every sister sent miscreants to an indeterminate sentence of kneeling on the hard linoleum, back to the class, in a corner at the front of the room, an unrivalled method of penitence, symbolically mimicking the postural humility of Mass but without the comfort of the padded kneelers. Many years later, reading Agamemnon, I understood completely Aeschylus’s comment about “the pain of pain remembered.”
· Every sister warned us about Elvis and the blasphemous hips that threatened the legacy of natural moral law stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas. I discounted this warning, however; my mother was an Elvis fan and bought all his records. I simply could not see my mother as a barbarian at the gate of Church teaching. Besides, my father preferred the sister-approved Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and to my mind that defused whatever anti-foundational potential my mother’s affection for Elvis harbored.
And every sister told us a version of the following story: “Boys and girls, one Sunday morning two boys decided to ship Mass and go fishing. Well, while standing to pull in a fish, their rowboat flipped over. Both boys drowned and went to Hell for all eternity because they committed a mortal sin. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Well, imagine that the Earth is a steel ball and every ten thousand years a bird flies by and brushes the ball with its wing. When that ball is worn down to the size of a BB, that’s only the beginning of eternity.” At first, aghast and dumfounded, we were silent; then, as the sheer enormity of what the sister had told us began to slip-stream into our imaginations, we cried. We wailed with a ballistic ferocity that undoubtedly rivaled that of the Enfield, Connecticut, congregants who listened with mounting horror to Jonathan Edwards’ description of sinners in the hands of an angry God being dangled over the gaping mouth of hell. The sister’s story was a subtle as molten lava, but it achieved its purpose. In an economy of saving souls, a glimpse of sin’s dark energy often pays the bills.
It occurs to me now that perhaps that glimpse was underpriced. To say the sisters were flinty disciplinarians compliments both flint and discipline. We did not fear them necessarily nor consider them inhumane; after all, they were married to Jesus, who, to our minds, would not countenance gratuitous cruelty in his spouses. No, grievances did not fester. Discontent did not simmer. Rather, we considered them obstacles, stalwart in their effort to bring order to the architecture of our id-addled prepubescent beings. They issued a summons to a beyondness, to a beckoning world that did not take our impatient desire for instant gratification as its measure, that did not operate on the principle that each of our impulses should be nanoseconds from satisfaction. We were children, not yet ready to put away childish ways. We did not understand, had no context for understanding, that they hurled themselves against the rock-hard obduracy of kid nature. Living healthily on a steady diet of frappes and kettle corn would have carried a higher probability of success. Only later, as adults, seeing other adults who had not put away childish ways, did the necessity of their Thermopylaen labor become apparent. Only later did I see that the management of desire they attempted to foster through stricture gave us an immanent apprehension of ethics, the principles of deportment, self-command, and a realization of consequences, by which social relations are regulated. Only later, when I was ready for it, was the sisters’ lesson learned.
One winter day, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy with my “satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail” from the bus drop off to school, I noticed a “snow sister” in the yard in front of the sisters’ convent. It was a bust, actually, and everything about it was exquisitely sharp and detailed—every fold in the hood and scapula, every bead in the rosary hung from the neck, the crucifix in place directly over the heart—everything except the face. It was a nonface, really, a vague gesture toward a face, a non-individuated abstraction meant only to embody the garments that signified the sisters’s consecration to what they took to be who they were and what they did. Even I, for whom the Hardy Boys books constituted the height of aesthetic achievement, recognized the loving application of artistic skill the bust exhibited. Only years later, however, living in a culture of undiluted self-absorption, did I tag it with meaning. It was a self unselfed to assume the larger self of sisterhood, or, perhaps better, a self reselfed as icon but not symbol, for that bust did not represent something else, it was the something else, the totalizing experience of being a Dominican sister, the continual reverence and humility that emblemizes their mindfulness of their lives’ moral context, of their living before the face of God. In his book Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes such a context as “something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses.” All Dominican religious have the initials O.P. after their name, an abbreviation for Order of Preachers. “What see’st thou else,” Prospero asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The “else” I now see is that the snow bust the sisters of St. Antoninus sculpted preached. I’ve grown up, put away childish ways, fallen away from the Catholic Church. Still, though, the sisters of St. Antoninus are imposing, large in having made themselves small.
Times change. Religious callings have diminished. The Dominican sisters no longer teach at St. Antoninus, replaced by lay teachers. Many of the sisters no longer wear habits. They live in apartments rather than convents. But last winter, after a snowfall, I suddenly wondered if a group of sisters somewhere made a snow sister. And, if they did, did it have a face a habit? Did it have a face?
We were certain the sisters conspired nightly in their convent to devise the means necessary to liberate our natural inclinations to reduce all things to the small, tight circle of our prepubescent egos. The evidence of a conspiracy was irrefutable.
· Every sister carried a ruler, at all times and in all places, for the sole purpose of bestowing quick, hard raps on hands that misheld a pencil, on heads that peered out the window instead of at a sheet of long-division problems, on rear ends that moved too fast or too slow in the myriad lines that formed our mode of travel to lunch, or the playground, or Mass, or the gymnasium for polio shots. The ruler measured our misbehaviors which, like the devil it was meant to expel, were legion.
· Every sister utilized the “claw,” a technique whereby, after a stealth approach from behind while we were daydreaming or conversing with a neighbor, she would bury her fingers, up to the first knuckle it seemed, in our shoulder’s trapezius muscle. I made the mistake of describing this technique, and its effectiveness, to my mother, who promptly adopted it. Thank goodness I kept silent about the ruler.
· Every sister sent miscreants to an indeterminate sentence of kneeling on the hard linoleum, back to the class, in a corner at the front of the room, an unrivalled method of penitence, symbolically mimicking the postural humility of Mass but without the comfort of the padded kneelers. Many years later, reading Agamemnon, I understood completely Aeschylus’s comment about “the pain of pain remembered.”
· Every sister warned us about Elvis and the blasphemous hips that threatened the legacy of natural moral law stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas. I discounted this warning, however; my mother was an Elvis fan and bought all his records. I simply could not see my mother as a barbarian at the gate of Church teaching. Besides, my father preferred the sister-approved Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and to my mind that defused whatever anti-foundational potential my mother’s affection for Elvis harbored.
And every sister told us a version of the following story: “Boys and girls, one Sunday morning two boys decided to ship Mass and go fishing. Well, while standing to pull in a fish, their rowboat flipped over. Both boys drowned and went to Hell for all eternity because they committed a mortal sin. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Well, imagine that the Earth is a steel ball and every ten thousand years a bird flies by and brushes the ball with its wing. When that ball is worn down to the size of a BB, that’s only the beginning of eternity.” At first, aghast and dumfounded, we were silent; then, as the sheer enormity of what the sister had told us began to slip-stream into our imaginations, we cried. We wailed with a ballistic ferocity that undoubtedly rivaled that of the Enfield, Connecticut, congregants who listened with mounting horror to Jonathan Edwards’ description of sinners in the hands of an angry God being dangled over the gaping mouth of hell. The sister’s story was a subtle as molten lava, but it achieved its purpose. In an economy of saving souls, a glimpse of sin’s dark energy often pays the bills.
It occurs to me now that perhaps that glimpse was underpriced. To say the sisters were flinty disciplinarians compliments both flint and discipline. We did not fear them necessarily nor consider them inhumane; after all, they were married to Jesus, who, to our minds, would not countenance gratuitous cruelty in his spouses. No, grievances did not fester. Discontent did not simmer. Rather, we considered them obstacles, stalwart in their effort to bring order to the architecture of our id-addled prepubescent beings. They issued a summons to a beyondness, to a beckoning world that did not take our impatient desire for instant gratification as its measure, that did not operate on the principle that each of our impulses should be nanoseconds from satisfaction. We were children, not yet ready to put away childish ways. We did not understand, had no context for understanding, that they hurled themselves against the rock-hard obduracy of kid nature. Living healthily on a steady diet of frappes and kettle corn would have carried a higher probability of success. Only later, as adults, seeing other adults who had not put away childish ways, did the necessity of their Thermopylaen labor become apparent. Only later did I see that the management of desire they attempted to foster through stricture gave us an immanent apprehension of ethics, the principles of deportment, self-command, and a realization of consequences, by which social relations are regulated. Only later, when I was ready for it, was the sisters’ lesson learned.
One winter day, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy with my “satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail” from the bus drop off to school, I noticed a “snow sister” in the yard in front of the sisters’ convent. It was a bust, actually, and everything about it was exquisitely sharp and detailed—every fold in the hood and scapula, every bead in the rosary hung from the neck, the crucifix in place directly over the heart—everything except the face. It was a nonface, really, a vague gesture toward a face, a non-individuated abstraction meant only to embody the garments that signified the sisters’s consecration to what they took to be who they were and what they did. Even I, for whom the Hardy Boys books constituted the height of aesthetic achievement, recognized the loving application of artistic skill the bust exhibited. Only years later, however, living in a culture of undiluted self-absorption, did I tag it with meaning. It was a self unselfed to assume the larger self of sisterhood, or, perhaps better, a self reselfed as icon but not symbol, for that bust did not represent something else, it was the something else, the totalizing experience of being a Dominican sister, the continual reverence and humility that emblemizes their mindfulness of their lives’ moral context, of their living before the face of God. In his book Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes such a context as “something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses.” All Dominican religious have the initials O.P. after their name, an abbreviation for Order of Preachers. “What see’st thou else,” Prospero asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The “else” I now see is that the snow bust the sisters of St. Antoninus sculpted preached. I’ve grown up, put away childish ways, fallen away from the Catholic Church. Still, though, the sisters of St. Antoninus are imposing, large in having made themselves small.
Times change. Religious callings have diminished. The Dominican sisters no longer teach at St. Antoninus, replaced by lay teachers. Many of the sisters no longer wear habits. They live in apartments rather than convents. But last winter, after a snowfall, I suddenly wondered if a group of sisters somewhere made a snow sister. And, if they did, did it have a face a habit? Did it have a face?
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Me O'Clock
String theory describes the physical universe, its particles and forces, as composed of vibrating filaments of energy. Jello’s “Me O’Clock” TV commercial for its Mousse Temptations is a vibrating filament of promotional energy without a particle of lucidity but with a troubling force in its address to and reflection of current cultural values.
The ad features a smartly dressed middle-aged woman languorously reclining on the gigantic hands of a clock, beginning to spoon up some Mousse Temptations. In the background Charissa Nielsen sings—or, rather, engages in a melodious kind of babble, a prelanguage whose only distinguishable words are “It’s My Time.” We’re told that Mousse Temptations is “rich and airy,” a seeming paradox considering that the main ingredient of this enticing confection is water, followed by xylitol, an artificial sweetener. “Airy” for sure; “rich,” well, only by the most ardent linguistic leveraging. Indeed, this mugging of language quickly becomes a felonious assault, for we are then told that Mousse Temptations is the reward for “washing the bills and paying the dishes.” Me O’Clock has arrived and, to reinforce that timeless state of self-gratifying ontological enchantment, the numbers on the clock slip from their position and are kicked by the woman into oblivion. The ad closes with the woman licking the spoon in a manner so erotically charged that it would surely send Freudianism to number one with a bullet on the psychology charts.
We are always at one remove from the food we consume. We really don’t eat food; we eat the idea of food, an idea that ads like Me O’Clock encourage us to adopt as the appropriate interpretation. And what interpretation does Me O’Clock frame for us? Simply this: the only flow experience, the only thoroughgoing focus of motivation, that counts is the experience of and immersive focus on the self. Consider the grammatical gyration of “washing the bills and paying the dishes,” the consummation of which heralds the advent of Me O’Clock, my time. Undoubtedly, this violation of cross-referencing rules it meant to humorously suggest the virtue of delayed gratification. But what does it really suggest? I’d venture this: that such mundane but necessary tasks as paying bills and washing dishes are so tedious and trivial, so impertinent and incidental, that they do not even merit linguistic sanction. They are the unsayable, beyond the pale of grammatical warrant. They are not an accomplishment; they are the absence of accomplishment, and, thus removed, only the business self-gratification remains.
Consider also that Jello has given us Mousse temptations, and that this temptation comes surplused in three flavors: Caramel Crème, Dark Chocolate Decadence, and Chocolate Indulgence. Note the Frenchified spelling of cream, complete with diacritical mark, a grave. Consider the words “temptation,” “decadence,” and “indulgence.” What Jello offers is not food; it offers the exotic, the transgressive, and the forbidden. It offers epicurean poetry to replace the stoic prose of the adult world of responsibility, eroticism to replace wearying and insipid task orientation. It offers abandonment, and with that abandonment a license to never again have to turn one’s gaze from the self-reflecting pool. It offers a redefinition of personal growth that is actually regression, of wholeness that is actually immaturity, and of subjective well-being that is actually a compacted circle of self-absorption. It encourages, finally, the unmediated state of infantilization, a return to early childhood where the expectation is that every desire is on the cusp of immediate fulfillment. Where are the virtues that living in an adult world requires--duty, perseverance, fortitude, commitment, self-command? No time for them when it is always Me O’Clock.
The ad features a smartly dressed middle-aged woman languorously reclining on the gigantic hands of a clock, beginning to spoon up some Mousse Temptations. In the background Charissa Nielsen sings—or, rather, engages in a melodious kind of babble, a prelanguage whose only distinguishable words are “It’s My Time.” We’re told that Mousse Temptations is “rich and airy,” a seeming paradox considering that the main ingredient of this enticing confection is water, followed by xylitol, an artificial sweetener. “Airy” for sure; “rich,” well, only by the most ardent linguistic leveraging. Indeed, this mugging of language quickly becomes a felonious assault, for we are then told that Mousse Temptations is the reward for “washing the bills and paying the dishes.” Me O’Clock has arrived and, to reinforce that timeless state of self-gratifying ontological enchantment, the numbers on the clock slip from their position and are kicked by the woman into oblivion. The ad closes with the woman licking the spoon in a manner so erotically charged that it would surely send Freudianism to number one with a bullet on the psychology charts.
We are always at one remove from the food we consume. We really don’t eat food; we eat the idea of food, an idea that ads like Me O’Clock encourage us to adopt as the appropriate interpretation. And what interpretation does Me O’Clock frame for us? Simply this: the only flow experience, the only thoroughgoing focus of motivation, that counts is the experience of and immersive focus on the self. Consider the grammatical gyration of “washing the bills and paying the dishes,” the consummation of which heralds the advent of Me O’Clock, my time. Undoubtedly, this violation of cross-referencing rules it meant to humorously suggest the virtue of delayed gratification. But what does it really suggest? I’d venture this: that such mundane but necessary tasks as paying bills and washing dishes are so tedious and trivial, so impertinent and incidental, that they do not even merit linguistic sanction. They are the unsayable, beyond the pale of grammatical warrant. They are not an accomplishment; they are the absence of accomplishment, and, thus removed, only the business self-gratification remains.
Consider also that Jello has given us Mousse temptations, and that this temptation comes surplused in three flavors: Caramel Crème, Dark Chocolate Decadence, and Chocolate Indulgence. Note the Frenchified spelling of cream, complete with diacritical mark, a grave. Consider the words “temptation,” “decadence,” and “indulgence.” What Jello offers is not food; it offers the exotic, the transgressive, and the forbidden. It offers epicurean poetry to replace the stoic prose of the adult world of responsibility, eroticism to replace wearying and insipid task orientation. It offers abandonment, and with that abandonment a license to never again have to turn one’s gaze from the self-reflecting pool. It offers a redefinition of personal growth that is actually regression, of wholeness that is actually immaturity, and of subjective well-being that is actually a compacted circle of self-absorption. It encourages, finally, the unmediated state of infantilization, a return to early childhood where the expectation is that every desire is on the cusp of immediate fulfillment. Where are the virtues that living in an adult world requires--duty, perseverance, fortitude, commitment, self-command? No time for them when it is always Me O’Clock.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Why Am I a Vegetarian?
When I decided 25 years ago to become a vegetarian, I joined a large tribe with many clans. Of course, vegetarianism renounces eating all animal products; however, vegetarians slip the stringency of that renunciatory gesture. The term “vegetarianism,’ I soon discovered, was a linguistic wormhole opening into multiple universes of practice. Vegans, the prototypical vegetarian clan, will not have their eating be the consequence of any animal’s death; thus, they eat plant foods only. Fruititarians extend vegan doctrine to plants and eat fruits, nuts, and seeds only. Then there are the clans that permit limited indulgence in certain animal foods: Lacto-vegetarians eat dairy products; ovo-vegetarians, eggs; lacto-ovo-vegetarians, diary and eggs—justifying themselves, perhaps, by the fact that the production of eggs and dairy require no sentient creature to suffer the abbatoir. Among the smaller clans, pollo-vegetarians will eat chicken; pescatarians, fish, reasoning that chicken and fish are a healthy, and more convenient, means of obtaining the complete protein that vegans can obtain only through the arduous process of protein complementarity. Finally, flexitarians, attuned to the way of all flesh, periodically trade the salad bowl for the fleshpot, eating the occasional veal cutlet or Big Mac or corn dog. Flexitarians know that the spirit may be willing, but, when faced with a Meat Lover’s pizza, the flesh is weak—and oh so tasty.
The term “vegetarian,” it would seem, is more evocative than referential, more connotative than denotative, more a play of signification than a ligature to a singular reality. We are, as Kant long ago asserted, categorizing beings. We partition and name our experience of the world, including our experience of ourselves and our behaviors, to wrest control from chaos and erect distinguishing boundaries. Vegetarians doubly distinguish themselves, as vegetarians and as particular types of vegetarians. They narrate themselves and, like all narrations, they do so according to different genres. I like that the deep grammar of “vegetarianism” finds utterance in the surface grammars of “vegetarians.” This, I think, is, for those who celebrate diversity, a good thing: from the unum of “vegetarianism” springs the pluribus of “vegetarian.”
As is natural when a group of people conscript themselves under some banner or other, ancillary institutions arise: societies, organizations, and associations devoted to providing services, events, education, and advocacy; books and magazines; online sites; a Museum of Vegetarianism; a vegan prisoner support program; a vegetarian dating service; vegetarian cruises, cycling tours, and cooking vacations; and vegetarian body care products. Essentially, these institutions constitute what Peter Berger calls “mediating structures.” They stand between vegetarians and vegetarianism and empower the concept by fostering its value. Also natural is compiling a list of luminaries to lend both glamour and gravitas to the enterprise. Indeed, the roster of vegetarians, past and present, is impressively large and impressively famous. Jesus was a vegetarian, at least according to Isaiah who, in predicting Christ’s birth, declares that “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good." Symbolic, undoubtedly, for Luke tells us that, appearing before the apostles after his death, Jesus requests food. They give Jesus “a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them." Seemingly, Jesus was a posthumous pescatarian; however, the passage from Luke is the only biblical verse referring to Jesus eating meat, and there is no evidence that he partook of the fish he miraculously made multiply, on two separate occasions, to feed the thousands in his audience. And he does refer to himself in John as “the bread of life,” Still, Jesus was not a proselytizing vegetarian, for nowhere in the Bible does he advocate it. Buddha, however, was a proselytizing vegetarian, not surprising in a man who sought to relinquish not just meat but the desire for food itself—and ultimately, desire itself--on his austere, Garmin-less journey to nirvana. Other vegetarians include Plato, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dr. Spock (and Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock), Clint Eastwood, Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Julia Roberts—and, since 1985, me. Heady company, indeed.
There was a time when anyone announcing themselves as a vegetarian was looked upon as some odd ethnological specimen fit only for museum display, or possibly for police surveillance. Thankfully, that time has passed. Still, I am often asked why I became a vegetarian. In response I generally temporize, for the truth is I’m not quite sure. I do, however, know the reasons that did not motivate my turn to vegetarianism. To inquirers, I will sometimes quote Thoreau--“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal”—but that’s not a perspective I share. I find it difficult to accept its implicit disgust, its shame at a supposed impurity of desire in our creaturely being. It is essentially a moral position, with carnivorous eating not so much an evil as a retardant to humankind’s evolution to a more perfect condition. “It is the destiny of the human race,” Thoreau declares, “in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals.” This is applied Kant, used to justify vegetarianism. Kant believed in humanity’s innate and inevitable advance toward moral clarity, a belief that nowdays would earn you an askance look or a sympathetic headshake at your Panglossian blockheadedness. One must wonder, though, if Kant would be pleased to find a diminished desire for, say, pork roast a signal of moral refinement. But, as a Transcendentalist, committed to spiritual growth, sieving the world for nuggets of the numinous, the “higher law” that will galvanize humanity’s moral evolution, Thoreau is in haste to leave all brute traces of creaturely being behind. Still, I use the quote, but it’s really a non-answer, no more than using Thoreau as a phaser set on stun—an attempt to daze through a kind of moral elevation and, I may as well admit, dazzle in the process.
For Thoreau, vegetarianism is not about food so much as metaphysics—a way of correlating the nature of the world and the creatures in it with an ethics that inscribes our actions with a meaning that points beyond them. Many have concurred that the fullness of our lived experience is profaned by eating other creatures. Emerson says, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” Tolstoy says “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” Einstein, seemingly channeling the spirit of Thoreau, says “It always seemed to me that man was not born to be a carnivore,” and, thus, “I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” though I’m not quite sure how a conscience can be somewhat guilty. Relativity, I suppose. The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, convinced that spicy food invites lust, concocted the graham cracker, bland and whole-grainedly healthful, as a kind of moral rampart to repel “venereal excess” among the supposedly defenseless middle class and its susceptible offspring—a rampart reinforced by Graham’s fellow traveller John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek birth of breakfast cereal. Today, of course, graham crackers have morphed into the white-floured and sugared confection his course-grained, sugarless, high-fiber crackers were designed to replace. Should Dr. Graham walk the aisles of any Wal-Mart superstore today and see what bears his name, he would no doubt rent his garments in abject distress. Kellogg, too.
While I respect the willingness of these culinary fundamentalists to send their moral yawp over the rooftops of the meat-eating world, I did not turn to vegetarianism from a sense of carnivorous shame, nor a sense of slaughterhouse complicity, nor a guilty conscience—even a somewhat guilty conscience. Nor did I share Graham’s belief that every sexual impulse was only nanoseconds from gratification. Indeed, moral reformers like Graham give me the willies, for their crusading requires them to create, even relish, the very evil they proscribe in order to power their crusade. Morally, that’s a paradox, loved by postmodernists, but, for us ordinary folk, just a little shady.
Nor did I become a vegetarian for the reason that motivated George Bernard Shaw: “Animals are my friends,” Shaw said, “and I do not eat my friends.” Possibly Shaw had Thoreau’s moment of communion with a woodchuck in mind: “We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences.” Or, he may have taken to heart Walt Whitman’s declaration in Song of Myself that he’d like to “live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained” and never “whine about their condition” or “discuss their duty to God” or suffer the “demented. . .mania of owning things.” Still, Whitman’s animal amity extended only to poetry. He was not a vegetarian, so his willingness to eat those among whom he wished to live is disturbing. Poetic license, possibly, though Whitman would surely be viewed by those tranquil animals as a frenemy. Whitman does, however, leave himself an escape hatch at the end of Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes).” Well, Emerson did say that a foolish consistency is the bogeyman of little minds.
I’d guess it more likely that Shaw’s vegetarianism was a morality as metaphysical as Thoreau’s, but based not on purity but, rather, reciprocity and an ethic of care. Certainly, to consider animals friends betrays an anthropomorphism that assigns intentions to, and, thus, personifies them—a fusion of the human self and the creaturely other, since we ourselves have intentions and, in projecting them outward, can feel related to and have an impact on the other. In her The Sacred Depth of Nature, cell biologist Ursula Goodenough posits “our deep genetic homology with all of life” and “our capacity to experience empathy with other creatures and respond to their concerns as our own.”
I’d like to think that Shaw, who. like all true vegans, would not even wear clothing or shoes made from leather, experienced the sense of covenant Goodenough describes. Such a covenant undoubtedly fuels the current debate over animal “personhood,” whose proponents argue that since some animals can be taught to communicate using sign language or abstract symbols, and that others solve problems, display empathy and cooperation, and deploy tools, the dividing line between human and animal is smudged. Indeed, such a line is assigned rather than innate, they contend, a constructed concept, historically contingent upon ethnic or religious affiliations and the vogue for a cognitive style based on analytic thinking. Implicit in Shaw’s friendship with animals is the notion that to see the creatures we consume as oblivious to themselves, driven only by blind instinct, is nothing more than an instrumental justification for killing and eating them. I admire Shaw’s position. It infuses animals’ lives with value and meaning. I like its summons to turn our reverent gaze from the self-reflecting pool, to lower the self-exalting plinth upon which we have placed ourselves. We are, after all, told in Genesis that God’s covenant relations extend well beyond us to include “every living creature of all flesh.” It would seem imprudent to consume creatures with whom we share such a sacramental relationship. Yet, despite the talismanic attractiveness I find in it, such an ethical summons did not lead me to become a vegetarian.
I did not turn to vegetarianism for the reasons Benjamin Franklin did. In his Autobiography, Franklin tells us that at age 16 he “happen’d to meet with a book. . . recommending a Vegetable Diet” and “determined to go into it.” Franklin wanted to rise in the world and vegetarianism provided a ticket to ride. He was able to save half his wages as “an additional Fund for buying Books” and made “greater Progress” in his course of self-study “from that Clearness of Head & quicker Apprehension which usually attend Temperance in Eating & Drinking.” I do not think my decision was so calculatingly utilitarian. I think I was more charmed by the idea than motivated by its maximization of value. Besides, as a graduate student so strapped for cash that I often ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I had no half to save. Indeed, I was a quasi-vegetarian already. Why not just go whole hog, uh, whole textured soy protein? As for clearheadedness, No-Doze worked just fine.
Franklin eventually abandoned vegetarianism. In a cage match between his “Resolution of not eating animal Food” and his great love of fish “hot out of the Frying Pan,” resolution suffered a smackdown. And while he returned “only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet, my resolution has never wavered. So, why am I a vegetarian? Maybe because at the time of my decision I was working nights in a health-food store and the nostalgic ethos of the unreconstructed hippie owners rubbed off on me. Or maybe because I was dating a young woman heavily into roach clips, ergonomic chairs, and meatless cuisine and, like young men from the beginning of time, I sought to ingratiate myself with her. However, while such motivations may explain why I became a vegetarian, they do not explain why I remained one.
Certainly health was a factor. Ignoring the preponderance of evidence suggesting that animal food contains a health-pillaging brew of saturated fat, triglycerides, low-density lipoproteins, cholesterol, tranquilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones would be as logical as trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. But I suspect quality of life was only part of the reason. Some have theorized that the attraction of vegetarianism lies in its restriction of choice. Faced with abundant alternatives, the prospect of making a choice, they say, becomes fraught with doubt, with paralytic second, third, and fourth guessing. Vegetarianism, thus, is a craven retreat from choice to a comforting enclave of limitation. I find that view proof positive that milking the cow of theory too exuberantly splashes only skim into the bucket. It plunders the human capacity for self-scrutiny based on practical reason, to set ourselves at a distance from the buzzing welter and chart a self-chosen direction. I agree that choosing to be a vegetarian involves restriction of choice, but hardly a retreat from it. My restraint was itself a choice; it was willingly undertaken discipline—rather like exercising every morning a dawn. What has kept me at it for 25 years, I think, is the experience of self-command, of a fortitude forged from foregoing, a voluntary surrender to being determined by what I found meaningful. A suspension of agency? A forked-over autonomy? Hardly. I think of it as a self-benediction. By and large, we are swept along by events. They are, as Emerson observed, “in the saddle and ride mankind.” I wanted one small annex, some narrow latitude, some islanded arena, where I could wield the broom, and I found it in vegetarianism. It was a matter of self-esteem, not conferred by others but by me on me. I think Thoreau would understand. I suspect Jesus would approve. Buddha, not so much.
The term “vegetarian,” it would seem, is more evocative than referential, more connotative than denotative, more a play of signification than a ligature to a singular reality. We are, as Kant long ago asserted, categorizing beings. We partition and name our experience of the world, including our experience of ourselves and our behaviors, to wrest control from chaos and erect distinguishing boundaries. Vegetarians doubly distinguish themselves, as vegetarians and as particular types of vegetarians. They narrate themselves and, like all narrations, they do so according to different genres. I like that the deep grammar of “vegetarianism” finds utterance in the surface grammars of “vegetarians.” This, I think, is, for those who celebrate diversity, a good thing: from the unum of “vegetarianism” springs the pluribus of “vegetarian.”
As is natural when a group of people conscript themselves under some banner or other, ancillary institutions arise: societies, organizations, and associations devoted to providing services, events, education, and advocacy; books and magazines; online sites; a Museum of Vegetarianism; a vegan prisoner support program; a vegetarian dating service; vegetarian cruises, cycling tours, and cooking vacations; and vegetarian body care products. Essentially, these institutions constitute what Peter Berger calls “mediating structures.” They stand between vegetarians and vegetarianism and empower the concept by fostering its value. Also natural is compiling a list of luminaries to lend both glamour and gravitas to the enterprise. Indeed, the roster of vegetarians, past and present, is impressively large and impressively famous. Jesus was a vegetarian, at least according to Isaiah who, in predicting Christ’s birth, declares that “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good." Symbolic, undoubtedly, for Luke tells us that, appearing before the apostles after his death, Jesus requests food. They give Jesus “a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them." Seemingly, Jesus was a posthumous pescatarian; however, the passage from Luke is the only biblical verse referring to Jesus eating meat, and there is no evidence that he partook of the fish he miraculously made multiply, on two separate occasions, to feed the thousands in his audience. And he does refer to himself in John as “the bread of life,” Still, Jesus was not a proselytizing vegetarian, for nowhere in the Bible does he advocate it. Buddha, however, was a proselytizing vegetarian, not surprising in a man who sought to relinquish not just meat but the desire for food itself—and ultimately, desire itself--on his austere, Garmin-less journey to nirvana. Other vegetarians include Plato, Pythagorus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dr. Spock (and Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock), Clint Eastwood, Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Julia Roberts—and, since 1985, me. Heady company, indeed.
There was a time when anyone announcing themselves as a vegetarian was looked upon as some odd ethnological specimen fit only for museum display, or possibly for police surveillance. Thankfully, that time has passed. Still, I am often asked why I became a vegetarian. In response I generally temporize, for the truth is I’m not quite sure. I do, however, know the reasons that did not motivate my turn to vegetarianism. To inquirers, I will sometimes quote Thoreau--“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal”—but that’s not a perspective I share. I find it difficult to accept its implicit disgust, its shame at a supposed impurity of desire in our creaturely being. It is essentially a moral position, with carnivorous eating not so much an evil as a retardant to humankind’s evolution to a more perfect condition. “It is the destiny of the human race,” Thoreau declares, “in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals.” This is applied Kant, used to justify vegetarianism. Kant believed in humanity’s innate and inevitable advance toward moral clarity, a belief that nowdays would earn you an askance look or a sympathetic headshake at your Panglossian blockheadedness. One must wonder, though, if Kant would be pleased to find a diminished desire for, say, pork roast a signal of moral refinement. But, as a Transcendentalist, committed to spiritual growth, sieving the world for nuggets of the numinous, the “higher law” that will galvanize humanity’s moral evolution, Thoreau is in haste to leave all brute traces of creaturely being behind. Still, I use the quote, but it’s really a non-answer, no more than using Thoreau as a phaser set on stun—an attempt to daze through a kind of moral elevation and, I may as well admit, dazzle in the process.
For Thoreau, vegetarianism is not about food so much as metaphysics—a way of correlating the nature of the world and the creatures in it with an ethics that inscribes our actions with a meaning that points beyond them. Many have concurred that the fullness of our lived experience is profaned by eating other creatures. Emerson says, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” Tolstoy says “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” Einstein, seemingly channeling the spirit of Thoreau, says “It always seemed to me that man was not born to be a carnivore,” and, thus, “I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience,” though I’m not quite sure how a conscience can be somewhat guilty. Relativity, I suppose. The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, convinced that spicy food invites lust, concocted the graham cracker, bland and whole-grainedly healthful, as a kind of moral rampart to repel “venereal excess” among the supposedly defenseless middle class and its susceptible offspring—a rampart reinforced by Graham’s fellow traveller John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek birth of breakfast cereal. Today, of course, graham crackers have morphed into the white-floured and sugared confection his course-grained, sugarless, high-fiber crackers were designed to replace. Should Dr. Graham walk the aisles of any Wal-Mart superstore today and see what bears his name, he would no doubt rent his garments in abject distress. Kellogg, too.
While I respect the willingness of these culinary fundamentalists to send their moral yawp over the rooftops of the meat-eating world, I did not turn to vegetarianism from a sense of carnivorous shame, nor a sense of slaughterhouse complicity, nor a guilty conscience—even a somewhat guilty conscience. Nor did I share Graham’s belief that every sexual impulse was only nanoseconds from gratification. Indeed, moral reformers like Graham give me the willies, for their crusading requires them to create, even relish, the very evil they proscribe in order to power their crusade. Morally, that’s a paradox, loved by postmodernists, but, for us ordinary folk, just a little shady.
Nor did I become a vegetarian for the reason that motivated George Bernard Shaw: “Animals are my friends,” Shaw said, “and I do not eat my friends.” Possibly Shaw had Thoreau’s moment of communion with a woodchuck in mind: “We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences.” Or, he may have taken to heart Walt Whitman’s declaration in Song of Myself that he’d like to “live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained” and never “whine about their condition” or “discuss their duty to God” or suffer the “demented. . .mania of owning things.” Still, Whitman’s animal amity extended only to poetry. He was not a vegetarian, so his willingness to eat those among whom he wished to live is disturbing. Poetic license, possibly, though Whitman would surely be viewed by those tranquil animals as a frenemy. Whitman does, however, leave himself an escape hatch at the end of Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes).” Well, Emerson did say that a foolish consistency is the bogeyman of little minds.
I’d guess it more likely that Shaw’s vegetarianism was a morality as metaphysical as Thoreau’s, but based not on purity but, rather, reciprocity and an ethic of care. Certainly, to consider animals friends betrays an anthropomorphism that assigns intentions to, and, thus, personifies them—a fusion of the human self and the creaturely other, since we ourselves have intentions and, in projecting them outward, can feel related to and have an impact on the other. In her The Sacred Depth of Nature, cell biologist Ursula Goodenough posits “our deep genetic homology with all of life” and “our capacity to experience empathy with other creatures and respond to their concerns as our own.”
I’d like to think that Shaw, who. like all true vegans, would not even wear clothing or shoes made from leather, experienced the sense of covenant Goodenough describes. Such a covenant undoubtedly fuels the current debate over animal “personhood,” whose proponents argue that since some animals can be taught to communicate using sign language or abstract symbols, and that others solve problems, display empathy and cooperation, and deploy tools, the dividing line between human and animal is smudged. Indeed, such a line is assigned rather than innate, they contend, a constructed concept, historically contingent upon ethnic or religious affiliations and the vogue for a cognitive style based on analytic thinking. Implicit in Shaw’s friendship with animals is the notion that to see the creatures we consume as oblivious to themselves, driven only by blind instinct, is nothing more than an instrumental justification for killing and eating them. I admire Shaw’s position. It infuses animals’ lives with value and meaning. I like its summons to turn our reverent gaze from the self-reflecting pool, to lower the self-exalting plinth upon which we have placed ourselves. We are, after all, told in Genesis that God’s covenant relations extend well beyond us to include “every living creature of all flesh.” It would seem imprudent to consume creatures with whom we share such a sacramental relationship. Yet, despite the talismanic attractiveness I find in it, such an ethical summons did not lead me to become a vegetarian.
I did not turn to vegetarianism for the reasons Benjamin Franklin did. In his Autobiography, Franklin tells us that at age 16 he “happen’d to meet with a book. . . recommending a Vegetable Diet” and “determined to go into it.” Franklin wanted to rise in the world and vegetarianism provided a ticket to ride. He was able to save half his wages as “an additional Fund for buying Books” and made “greater Progress” in his course of self-study “from that Clearness of Head & quicker Apprehension which usually attend Temperance in Eating & Drinking.” I do not think my decision was so calculatingly utilitarian. I think I was more charmed by the idea than motivated by its maximization of value. Besides, as a graduate student so strapped for cash that I often ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I had no half to save. Indeed, I was a quasi-vegetarian already. Why not just go whole hog, uh, whole textured soy protein? As for clearheadedness, No-Doze worked just fine.
Franklin eventually abandoned vegetarianism. In a cage match between his “Resolution of not eating animal Food” and his great love of fish “hot out of the Frying Pan,” resolution suffered a smackdown. And while he returned “only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet, my resolution has never wavered. So, why am I a vegetarian? Maybe because at the time of my decision I was working nights in a health-food store and the nostalgic ethos of the unreconstructed hippie owners rubbed off on me. Or maybe because I was dating a young woman heavily into roach clips, ergonomic chairs, and meatless cuisine and, like young men from the beginning of time, I sought to ingratiate myself with her. However, while such motivations may explain why I became a vegetarian, they do not explain why I remained one.
Certainly health was a factor. Ignoring the preponderance of evidence suggesting that animal food contains a health-pillaging brew of saturated fat, triglycerides, low-density lipoproteins, cholesterol, tranquilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones would be as logical as trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. But I suspect quality of life was only part of the reason. Some have theorized that the attraction of vegetarianism lies in its restriction of choice. Faced with abundant alternatives, the prospect of making a choice, they say, becomes fraught with doubt, with paralytic second, third, and fourth guessing. Vegetarianism, thus, is a craven retreat from choice to a comforting enclave of limitation. I find that view proof positive that milking the cow of theory too exuberantly splashes only skim into the bucket. It plunders the human capacity for self-scrutiny based on practical reason, to set ourselves at a distance from the buzzing welter and chart a self-chosen direction. I agree that choosing to be a vegetarian involves restriction of choice, but hardly a retreat from it. My restraint was itself a choice; it was willingly undertaken discipline—rather like exercising every morning a dawn. What has kept me at it for 25 years, I think, is the experience of self-command, of a fortitude forged from foregoing, a voluntary surrender to being determined by what I found meaningful. A suspension of agency? A forked-over autonomy? Hardly. I think of it as a self-benediction. By and large, we are swept along by events. They are, as Emerson observed, “in the saddle and ride mankind.” I wanted one small annex, some narrow latitude, some islanded arena, where I could wield the broom, and I found it in vegetarianism. It was a matter of self-esteem, not conferred by others but by me on me. I think Thoreau would understand. I suspect Jesus would approve. Buddha, not so much.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Monetized Education: "Pays for A's"
Sometimes, the snappy salutes TV and the tribunes of consumerism give each other become so noxious that not even a ladle-ful of Estee Lauder could fragrance the relation enough to make it fit for company. Our local NBC affiliate and a suburban mall have teamed up to offer a program called “Pays for A’s.” Students bring their report cards to the mall’s guest services and for every A will receive their choice of a free scoop of ice cream, a pretzel, or a sour rock candy stick—and, they are entered into a drawing for the grand prize: 20 tickets to an IMAX film plus free pop and popcorn for each guest. Now, I understand the principles of stimulus-reward behaviorism; after all, it’s how B. F. Skinner got pigeons to play ping pong. But, putting aside the triviality of the rewards and the fact that “Pays for A’s” is designed to draw children into the mall, that shining citadel of getting and spending, this program is, for me, as healthy as a bucket of Karmelkorn—which, inexplicably, was left off the prize list.
Of course, the steady encroachment of commercial values into noncommercial areas has, by now, a well-established pedigree. The problem is that commercial values do not admit a sense of some purpose beyond the materially transactional. An activity that cannot be monetized lacks substance or significance. There is no sense that activities have value in themselves. There is no good but goods. “Pays for A’s” subordinates learning to materialist ends and assumes that such ends are the essence of human nature. So much for John Dewey’s notion of ends being the means for further ends unfolding in ordered richness. Instead, students are taught to be impatient with activities whose values are deferred in a process that, like education, occurs over time. “Pays for A’s” denies collateral learning, “ah ha!” moments, self-insight, and the self-esteem that comes from accomplishment. Just commit crystallized lumps of data to memory, rehearse them at test time, earn an A, and get a prize. Kind of like Cracker Jacks.
The program also assumes that with pecuniary motivation all students can get A’s, which simply ignores the reality of individual difference. Students who work hard to raise their grades from, say, C’s to B’s go unrewarded. Those already earning A’s are simply encouraged to not slack off. To see the sense of this would require several Long Island Ice Teas. It is wrongheaded and elitist.
Perhaps my view of education, of what it means to become educated, floats on rose-scented air. Still, I can’t help but feel that in gaining a price it has lost its value.
Of course, the steady encroachment of commercial values into noncommercial areas has, by now, a well-established pedigree. The problem is that commercial values do not admit a sense of some purpose beyond the materially transactional. An activity that cannot be monetized lacks substance or significance. There is no sense that activities have value in themselves. There is no good but goods. “Pays for A’s” subordinates learning to materialist ends and assumes that such ends are the essence of human nature. So much for John Dewey’s notion of ends being the means for further ends unfolding in ordered richness. Instead, students are taught to be impatient with activities whose values are deferred in a process that, like education, occurs over time. “Pays for A’s” denies collateral learning, “ah ha!” moments, self-insight, and the self-esteem that comes from accomplishment. Just commit crystallized lumps of data to memory, rehearse them at test time, earn an A, and get a prize. Kind of like Cracker Jacks.
The program also assumes that with pecuniary motivation all students can get A’s, which simply ignores the reality of individual difference. Students who work hard to raise their grades from, say, C’s to B’s go unrewarded. Those already earning A’s are simply encouraged to not slack off. To see the sense of this would require several Long Island Ice Teas. It is wrongheaded and elitist.
Perhaps my view of education, of what it means to become educated, floats on rose-scented air. Still, I can’t help but feel that in gaining a price it has lost its value.
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