It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer. Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it. On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, incompetence sung in the key of clamoring ungainliness, an anvil upon which his equanimity was hammered molecule-thin. Angels wept at the sight. But, as poets are sometimes wont to do, Frost turned his frustration into poetry. It offered catharsis.
Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.
Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*
Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.
The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.
And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.
I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.
*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.
Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.
Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.
I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.
I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,
And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall
Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.
Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic
My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.
Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.
Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway
As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.
The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.
Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.
But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.
In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupҫon of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.
Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.
Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered
I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.
All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.
They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.
But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.
The Emperor of the Golf Swing
Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.
Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Prayer
In yet another scientific study that tells us something we already knew, research to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that prayer calms anger. In the study, participants who received demeaning comments on an essay they wrote displayed less anger and aggression when they were asked to pray for, rather than simply think about, the person who made the insulting comments. This anger management effect held despite religious affiliation or frequency of church attendance. According to study co-author Brad Bushman, “prayer really can help people cope with their anger, probably by helping them change how they view the events that angered them and helping them take it less personally.”
How, I wonder, can this study constitute what the article describing it calls “emerging research”? In Matthew 5:44, we are told Jesus counsels us to “pray for those who persecute you”? I was not aware that Jesus’s injunction to adopt the benevolent perspective of disapproving the action but not the person required scientific validation. Who knew an empirical basis was necessary? I always thought the truth of it was self-evident. And how, I wonder, do the results of this study differ from the advice many of us received when young to count to 10 when angered, precisely to avoid responding in kind? As a newly-fledged teen, I had, as they say, anger issues, which, of course, I blamed on the temperament I had inherited from the Italian side of my family. My mother, much too wise to countenance a my-ethnicity-made-me-do-it excuse for a personal failing, finally took me to task for my volatile and incendiary temper, offering this advice, her version of the count-to-10 rule:
“Jerry, what’s the most pleasant thing you can think of”?
“Well, I guess that Little League game where I struck out the side with nine pitches. Seven fastballs, two curves.”
“OK; the next time you feel yourself getting angry, think of that, think of those nine pitches, and if you’re really angry, like you might lose control, think of the person you’re angry at as one of the three you’ve struck out and sent back to the dugout.”
Fifty years later, I still use that strategy. It works. It works as well as prayer did for the study participants. In fact, I would argue that the technique my mom advised is a form of prayer.
* * * * * * *
I’m sure I scandalized a rather religious-minded colleague recently when, during a conversation we were having about prayer, he asked me if I prayed.
“Kind of,” I replied.
“How do you `kind of’ pray? What do you ask God for?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really pray to God, and I don’t really ask for things. Emerson says that kind of prayer `is meanness and theft.’”
“Jesus specifically says in John that `You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.’”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to resist a bit of Scripture-quote jousting, “but in Mark He says `whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ See, that ‘believe that you have received it’ is a kind of qualification. It’s more about the psychological stance than a divine gift. If your prayers are answered, it’s more you than God.”
“Well, but how can you pray even ‘kind of’ if you don’t pray to God? Isn’t prayer by definition addressed to God? I mean, if not to God, who do you pray to? And if not for things, what do you pray for?”
“Myself, for myself.”
He made a noise in his throat, as if a particularly spiny piece of mesquite was lodged there, and, despite my not having denied the existence of God or the value of prayer or even the imprecatory nature of it, he walked off, convinced, I fear, that my heretical assertions made me a fit subject for police surveillance.
* * * * * * *
The best prayer I know was written by one of the most spiritual persons I am acquainted with: Henry David Thoreau. Here is Thoreau’s prayer:
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Thoreau’s “Prayer” may seem irreverently self-regarding, but it really asks for nothing more than the courage of his “firm faith,”—the courage to avoid hypocrisy, the courage to persist in it despite his friends’ disappointment that he hasn’t adopted a career and made a life for himself, the courage to neither underrate nor exaggerate the end for which he believes the created order was intended. Thoreau’s “Prayer” is really about seeing himself clearly and being himself clearly, not as others “think or hope” him to be. He purposely uses the word “discern,” which, etymologically, means “to sift apart,” and the sifting he has in mind is a rigorous, truth- telling kind of self-analysis that reveals how well his life accords with the gifts by which he has been “distinguished.” In short, I take the prayer’s theme to be contained in the second line: “that I may not disappoint myself.” It was this appeal I had in mind when I told my colleague that I prayed to myself for myself.
* * * * * * *
Henry Ward Beecher is surely right when he says “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.” Herman Melville may be right when he says that prayer “draws us near to our own souls.” It depends, as so much does, on how one defines “soul,” and whether that definition occupies the space of a leaflet or the wide-ranged expanse of a novel. But I particularly admire Frederick Douglass’s resolutely unmetaphysical perspective: he prayed, he tells us, for twenty years for freedom, and his prayer went unanswered “until I prayed with my legs.” Prayer as doing, not seeking to receive; prayer as remastering a higher fidelity version of the scratchy vinyl we tend to become; prayer as mustering the energy to better ourselves, to strain, like a dandelion pushing itself up through the tarred gravel of a macadam road, toward the summer florescence of our full potential.
We are limited beings, physically and cognitively, but that it hardly a flaw. It simply means we can create the best self it is in us to be, and not some other self. Lucifer fell from heaven; our fall was garden-level. We can, as poet Amy Clampett says, “fall upward.” We are not neurochemicaled; we are not DNAified. “Human limits structure human virtue,” Martha Nussbaum points out, “and give excellent action its significance.” I pray that I don’t disappoint myself. I pray to articulate and reflect on what I am, what I can be, and how to bridge the difference.
How, I wonder, can this study constitute what the article describing it calls “emerging research”? In Matthew 5:44, we are told Jesus counsels us to “pray for those who persecute you”? I was not aware that Jesus’s injunction to adopt the benevolent perspective of disapproving the action but not the person required scientific validation. Who knew an empirical basis was necessary? I always thought the truth of it was self-evident. And how, I wonder, do the results of this study differ from the advice many of us received when young to count to 10 when angered, precisely to avoid responding in kind? As a newly-fledged teen, I had, as they say, anger issues, which, of course, I blamed on the temperament I had inherited from the Italian side of my family. My mother, much too wise to countenance a my-ethnicity-made-me-do-it excuse for a personal failing, finally took me to task for my volatile and incendiary temper, offering this advice, her version of the count-to-10 rule:
“Jerry, what’s the most pleasant thing you can think of”?
“Well, I guess that Little League game where I struck out the side with nine pitches. Seven fastballs, two curves.”
“OK; the next time you feel yourself getting angry, think of that, think of those nine pitches, and if you’re really angry, like you might lose control, think of the person you’re angry at as one of the three you’ve struck out and sent back to the dugout.”
Fifty years later, I still use that strategy. It works. It works as well as prayer did for the study participants. In fact, I would argue that the technique my mom advised is a form of prayer.
* * * * * * *
I’m sure I scandalized a rather religious-minded colleague recently when, during a conversation we were having about prayer, he asked me if I prayed.
“Kind of,” I replied.
“How do you `kind of’ pray? What do you ask God for?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really pray to God, and I don’t really ask for things. Emerson says that kind of prayer `is meanness and theft.’”
“Jesus specifically says in John that `You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.’”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to resist a bit of Scripture-quote jousting, “but in Mark He says `whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ See, that ‘believe that you have received it’ is a kind of qualification. It’s more about the psychological stance than a divine gift. If your prayers are answered, it’s more you than God.”
“Well, but how can you pray even ‘kind of’ if you don’t pray to God? Isn’t prayer by definition addressed to God? I mean, if not to God, who do you pray to? And if not for things, what do you pray for?”
“Myself, for myself.”
He made a noise in his throat, as if a particularly spiny piece of mesquite was lodged there, and, despite my not having denied the existence of God or the value of prayer or even the imprecatory nature of it, he walked off, convinced, I fear, that my heretical assertions made me a fit subject for police surveillance.
* * * * * * *
The best prayer I know was written by one of the most spiritual persons I am acquainted with: Henry David Thoreau. Here is Thoreau’s prayer:
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Thoreau’s “Prayer” may seem irreverently self-regarding, but it really asks for nothing more than the courage of his “firm faith,”—the courage to avoid hypocrisy, the courage to persist in it despite his friends’ disappointment that he hasn’t adopted a career and made a life for himself, the courage to neither underrate nor exaggerate the end for which he believes the created order was intended. Thoreau’s “Prayer” is really about seeing himself clearly and being himself clearly, not as others “think or hope” him to be. He purposely uses the word “discern,” which, etymologically, means “to sift apart,” and the sifting he has in mind is a rigorous, truth- telling kind of self-analysis that reveals how well his life accords with the gifts by which he has been “distinguished.” In short, I take the prayer’s theme to be contained in the second line: “that I may not disappoint myself.” It was this appeal I had in mind when I told my colleague that I prayed to myself for myself.
* * * * * * *
Henry Ward Beecher is surely right when he says “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.” Herman Melville may be right when he says that prayer “draws us near to our own souls.” It depends, as so much does, on how one defines “soul,” and whether that definition occupies the space of a leaflet or the wide-ranged expanse of a novel. But I particularly admire Frederick Douglass’s resolutely unmetaphysical perspective: he prayed, he tells us, for twenty years for freedom, and his prayer went unanswered “until I prayed with my legs.” Prayer as doing, not seeking to receive; prayer as remastering a higher fidelity version of the scratchy vinyl we tend to become; prayer as mustering the energy to better ourselves, to strain, like a dandelion pushing itself up through the tarred gravel of a macadam road, toward the summer florescence of our full potential.
We are limited beings, physically and cognitively, but that it hardly a flaw. It simply means we can create the best self it is in us to be, and not some other self. Lucifer fell from heaven; our fall was garden-level. We can, as poet Amy Clampett says, “fall upward.” We are not neurochemicaled; we are not DNAified. “Human limits structure human virtue,” Martha Nussbaum points out, “and give excellent action its significance.” I pray that I don’t disappoint myself. I pray to articulate and reflect on what I am, what I can be, and how to bridge the difference.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Being Average
For Thoreau, social conformity creates a dull and deadening averaging tendency. He ends Walden with a parable about a “beautiful bug” that, having been deposited as an egg some sixty years previous in an apple tree, gnaws its way out of the kitchen table built from the wood of that tree. “Who knows,” Thoreau asks, “what beautiful and winged life . . . may unexpectedly come forth . . . to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!” For Thoreau, we capitulate to being average; it is not our destiny.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
iConfession
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.
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.
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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