I Am Not a Man of Fashion

Whenever someone compliments me on something I’m wearing on or carrying with me—a belt, a pair of shoes or pants or gloves, a shirt or sweater, a watch, my backpack, my wallet, even my cellphone—I am forced to make an embarrassing admission: “Thanks, my wife Kathy bought it for me,” or “My stepdaughter Alma gave it to me as a birthday present,” or “Kathy’s mom Cora got that for me,” or “My mom sent it to me.” Everything I wear or carry that shows the least bit of the current taste or fashion or style, everything that exhibits the smallest hint of being chic or dapper or Esquired and GQ-ed, was given to me by the women in my life. In the realm of fashion, I must foreswear the active voice in favor of the passive: I do not dress and accessorize. I am dressed and accessorized.

One morning I came downstairs wearing a short-sleeved knit shirt that I thought rather becoming, but before I got out the door, Kathy uttered what are perhaps six of the more fearsome words in the English language: “You’re not wearing that, are you?” It was, I knew, the launch sequence of a disquisition that would “chasten me sore.” “Well, yeah,” I said; “what’s wrong with it?” She replied with four more fearsome words: “Where do I begin?” Evidently, the shirt was an eyeball kick to the current style: its colors, collar style, cut, and fabric were, I was informed, hideously antiquated, a relic from a bygone era of fashion. Where had I been, she wanted to know, when the caravans of style had each had their stopover at the oasis of prevailing fashion, then disappeared into the desert of forgetability? I thought the shirt was a classic look. She thought it was a Jurassic look. I changed the shirt.

How is it that I have watched this planet swing around the sun for more than sixty years and still remain an avatar of fashion ignorance? How is it that what I know of au courant style is the size of a finger bowl with room left over for a cantaloupe? How is it that I find the world of men’s fashion such a terra incognita, its map so filled with white spaces, that, to enter and circumnavigate it, I must rely on the female Magellans and Columbuses related to me by blood or marriage? When, exactly, was it that I was inattentive? Was a lesson presented at some point during which some Zen master should have rapped me on the head with a keisaku to corral my stray thoughts and restore them to the present? Is there a fashion gene missing from my genome? Surely such a gene would be evolutionarily adaptive, smartly attired forebears being more likely to secure mates by thus advertising their affluence. Why, then, has evolution given me the stiffarm? Why have I been rendered deficient in whatever region of whatever cortical fold contains the neuronal resources for recognizing the vogue?

Now, I could, I suppose, plausibly defend my fashion blockheadery. I could offer the “critical age hypothesis.” My mother laid out my clothes each morning until I was 14 years old; thus, as with language, having passed puberty without exposure to the syntax of fashion, I lost the capacity to speak it with confident fluency. I could offer the “maturation fixity thesis.” Having come of age in the 60s, where relevance, authenticity, and nonconformity defined our existential credo, fashion represented irrelevance, inauthenticity, and capitulation to “the man.” I could offer the closely-related “professionalization bias thesis.” As an English professor credentialed to profess literature, ever on the interpretive lookout for the inflections and innuendos of deep meaning, a concern with fashion seems flat-souled and trivial. I could offer the “context-impoverishment thesis.” It quickly became apparent to me, upon a desultory scan of the fashion catalogues that periodically arrived mysteriously, as if by elfin hands, in my mailbox, that the context in which fashionable people moved—the boat parties, the club scene, indeed, any occasion in which the smart set dressed so smartly—was not the context in which the tenor and pulse of my life was situated. Finally, I could trot out the old standby, the “socialization thesis,” and claim that being born male and learning to perform maleness, made my interest in fashion about as likely as witnessing the process of evolution happen right before my eyes.

Rather than defend the impervious density of my fashion ineptitude, I could rectify it. I could read the fashion press to discover the designers and their creations that will, in five or six months’ time, insistently shout from the florescent covers of glossy-paged magazines over the rooftops of the world. I could carefully consider what the celebrities, the glitterati, and the anointed opinion leaders are wearing and saying. I could debate the relative merits of cotton and wool and corduroy and denim and gabardine and polyester and tweed and twill, analyze the aesthetic intricacies of pinstripe and windowpane check and solid and plaid and herringbone. I could study the pages of Ralph Lauren—Marc Jacobs—Michael Bastian—Calvin Klein--Michael Kors—Giorgio Armani catalogues, taking notes, annotating, thoroughly metabolizing the latest spasm of trendy sports-casual-business-evening out on the town wear.

I could sing in the key of design, cut, color, and cloth, the only iPod-ed songs of a true fashionista. But I won’t. I would hate to be known as a “man of fashion.” Fashions are fads, and I prefer exercise other than jumping onto bandwagons. For me, a “man of fashion” connotes a man for whom taste is dogmatic frivolity, a man not fully present to himself, a man on a pivot, continually monitoring, 360 degrees, the fashion centers and designers of the moment for his marching orders, a man uniformed and uniform, stepping in time to the incantatory music emanating from Paris and Milan and New York and London. A “man of fashion” ignores the 1800-year-old advice of the Greek Stoic Epictetus: “Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.” A “man of fashion” does not really adorn himself according to who he is, but, rather, according to what and how he wants others to think he is. His adornment is an image of an image, a tailored tailoring. He does not really wear clothes; clothes wear him. I would rather be a man who is never out of fashion, a man fashionable beyond fashion, a man for whom self-expression is not a pose, a man reflective not reflecting, a man committed to Mark Twain’s observation: “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.” I doubt keeping a tidy soul requires owning a Yigal Azrouel anorak or a Bastian cotton khaki suit or knowing that olive green is the color of the season. I would rather be a man who holds his hue in all seasons.

Besides, were I to become style-conscious and fashion-competent, I would complicate what, for the women in my life, is an easy choice about gift-giving for their benighted husband, step-father, and son. And I would suffer as well: I would no longer receive Kathy’s wifely lectures on the current trend in male garmenting. Now, these lectures largely fail to achieve their aim. I still consider fashionable whatever does not cause statues to flee their pedestals. But I relish those lectures nonetheless, not for what they say but for what they mean. Kathy cares how I look, how I present myself to the world, how I cut a figure in it, even if I am unable to muster much enthusiasm for acquiring that knowledge. In other words, it is her way of saying, in other words, I love you. And that beats a Kors chunky cardigan or a Bastian thin-wale corduroy sports jacket any day.

Squirrels, A Student, and My Next-Door Neighbor

I am often diverted from my oatmeal breakfast watching squirrels make their way across the tops of the towering elms and maples that line my backyard. There is drama as one gingerly edges toward the end of an impossibly thin twig of a branch of a limb, eyes the span of space between it and the impossibly thin twig across from it, leaps, hurling itself over the chasm of air, and lands, clutching the twig, the branch plunging slowly downward—surely it will break from the force of the squirrel’s weight, surely it will snap, sending the squirrel into an 60 foot freefall—but, no, the branch rights itself and the squirrel scampers off, perhaps to fling itself outward, over empty space, several more times before reaching home.

There is comedy, too, as two squirrels, defying the stern physics of gravity, chase each other, spiraling with dizzying speed up and down a tree trunk, two compact bundles of energy with enough wattage to klieg light even the darkest night sky. And there is mystery as well, as a squirrel, in its mid-branch meander, suddenly halts and chirps and begins to undulate its tail, the successive waves looking surprisingly like a series of semaphore-flashed question marks.

I’d like to think that the drama is a leap of faith, performed, like an Angelus, morning, noon, and night, but I know the squirrel is guided by the keen surety of instinct. I’d like to think the comedy is a raucously exuberant game of tag or hide and seek, but I know mating, not play, is propelling a male to chase a female, or to chase off a rival for her affection. I’d like to think the question-mark tail signals a metaphysical moment, an interrogation, perhaps, of the Rodentia condition, but I know that chirps and tail movement are the grammar of squirrel discourse.

I know that a walnut-sized brain cannot possibly support the interiority, the purposeful agency and mindfulness, that I have imagined. I am suborned by facts. Still, I find myself leagued with Robert Frost, who says, “I have a mind and recognize/ Mind when I meet with it in any guise.” And with Walt Whitman, who says animals “bring me tokens of myself.” The impertinence of facts is no excuse for an abridged imagination.

____________________

Last spring, a student in my Introduction to Mass Media class told me, with not a little pride, that he had never in his life read a novel.

“You’ve never read a novel?” I asked, unsuccessfully suppressing my incredulity.
“Nope.”
“Why not”
“I don’t like to read. It’s too slow. And anyway, it’s fiction,” he said, emphasizing “fiction.” “It’s just made up stuff; it’s not real life.”
“So, how do you spend your free time?”
“I do Facebook or I hang with friends. We work out or watch movies and play video games.”
“But movies and video games are fiction,” I point out. “They’re not `real life.’”
“Yeah, but they’re more interesting, and, besides, I can do them with my friends.”

He is an intelligent young man, I have no doubt, but he is irredeemably social, unable or unwilling to expose himself to the slow-pulse experience of himself, to enter the cloister of his own uninterrupted thoughts. Having never read a novel, he has never inhabited, fully and particularly, a time or place different from his own, has never brought an other’s mind or heart close enough to sympathize and understand it, has never wholly imagined something other than that which he has always known. I worry about his success should he come to a span of space requiring a cognitive or emotional or imaginative leap. I wonder what, if anything, he will question.

_________________________

My next-door neighbor bought the property after the previous owner’s house burned down. The first thing he did, once the charred debris was removed, the small cellar was filled in, and the land was graded, was hire surveyors to determine the exact line that separated our lots, a line duly marked by buried iron pins, a paint line on the sidewalk, and a stake tied with a pink ribbon, a kind of fence, I suppose, to make us good neighbors. The second thing he did was hire a crew to remove half a dozen old-growth maples. “They don’t fit my vision of the yard and the house I’ll be putting in,” he told me.

For over 90 years those maples had softened the blow of the hammering southern Iowa sun in the summer. For over 90 years they had blazed scarlet, deep orange, and gold in the fall, a talismanic thrum of beauty, perhaps the best approximation of grace and benediction we can experience on earth. They were balm for my eyes and heart each time I turned the corner onto our street. I looked forward to that turn, that sight. In a matter of days, though, they had sunk to grief under the implacable buzz of chain saw and stump grinder. And the new owner’s vision of yard and house responsible for this massive gesture of exclusion? A denuded, indifferently green square and a nondescript beige-sided oblong. He is a man of geometry, of austere lines and angles; a man whose doing leaves little room for imagining; a man more given to the what is rather than the what should or could be.

I hope the squirrels he evicted when he removed the trees found shelter in mine. I’d guess he makes no leaps of faith, or leaps of any kind. A retired farmer, his feet are firmly rooted to the earth. No ragged hem of doubt or supposition will edge his day. I’d guess he is immune to unchecked caprice, that he plays no games except the zero-sum kind, and that he seldom, if ever, seeks to tag his hiding self. And I’d guess that rarely, maybe never, does he feel an inarticulable desire, or an indefinable promise, or the need or necessity to question the cocooning certitudes within which he lives and moves.

Golf, The Amish, and The Catholic Sensibility

On a sunny Sunday morning several years back, before I gave up playing golf—before, that is, I fully realized that “golf” spelled backwards precisely names the applied masochism the game entails—three horse-drawn buggies containing three Amish families on their way to Sunday service passed by on the road near the green I was approaching. As they passed, each occupant in each buggy turned to look at me. I wondered, do they think I am profaning the Lord’s Day by being on a golf course instead of in a church? Then, almost immediately, unable to pass by myself, I wondered, am I?

And there it was. The Catholic sensibility. The earth has spun around the sun forty times since I was a practicing Catholic; forty times since I actively embraced the faith into which I was born, upon which I had been raised, and in which I had been educated; forty times since I had been to Sunday Mass; forty times since I had conscripted myself in the capacious army of the fallen away. And still, still, that persistent, low-frequency hum of Catholic sensibility from which a periodic, stiletto-sharp, consciousness-piercing pulse of guilt erupted.

Catholic sensibility is the Mariana Trench of concepts, deep enough for every human being on the planet, and, possibly, elsewhere, to validate the assertion of that sage semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For me, Catholic sensibility is a set of principles that ligature experience—of the world and of oneself—and keep the soul right side up. It is not the prose of doctrinal conformity, so much as a mindfulness of the poetry of spiritual immanence and a determination to shape one’s life by the stern claims of its entailments. It is the stance of Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogium, declared he wrote as “one who seeks to understand what he believes,” “understand” here meaning thorough knowledge in the service of accomplished performance. It is the stance of Aquinas, whose prescription for salvation is to know what we “ought to believe,” what we “ought to desire,” and what we “ought to do.”

I have found, and continue to find, myself bruised in the encounter with the last of Acquinas’s oughts: “ought to do”. Catholicism makes performative demands, and for me they are a “reflexive” confessional, Emerson’s term for the standards by which I “absolve me to myself.” By that standard, I remain unshriven. Belief, I believe, is not doctrinal assent; that is merely passive fundamentalism. Rather, belief is basic theological principles practiced. The good of any activity, its virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says, is internal to the practice of it. I know what I ought to believe and believe it; I know what I ought to desire and desire it. I believe in a natural law that reveals universal moral precepts and desire to conform myself to them. I believe in the reality of conscience, free will, and individual responsibility and desire to be alert to their dictates. I believe, with Aquinas, that human reason is “rather like God in the world” and desire to be an analyst as well as a witness. I believe in Jesus’s second great commandment and desire to seek the well-being of my neighbor with the same alacrity with which I seek my own. I believe that the Mass is a ceremony commemorating atoning sacrifice and conferring benediction, and that, at its heart, in a time when the word is so casually applied, lies a miracle.

But, despite knowing what I ought to do, I falter. I am too often decentered by glibness and cynicism and self-absorption and inattentiveness and lack of trust and stubbornly imperviousness to the needs of others. I am too often weak, just plain weak, and without the moral arrowroot that would thicken my fortitude. Catholicism demands that what I believe and desire be fully integrated into all aspects of my life, that it be the lived texture of all my relations with the world. Knowing that, and knowing as well my capacity for indolence and indecisive lassitude, suborns me; it leads me to accept the flat-souled givenness of my doing instead of its oughtness. That is, in me, the Catholic sensibility that gave me pause before the gaze of those three passing Amish families.

Perhaps their being Amish keyed open the door of my Catholic sensibility, for their lives bear witness in every way to Paul’s description in Romans of the practice of belief: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.” “Test and approve,” action incorporated, embodied: thus the simplicity of dress to act humility; thus the refusal of connection to electrical grids to act a disconnection from a world that demands conformity to its structures of thinking and feeling; thus the lack of car ownership to act a communal equality of status, wealth, and power; thus the Ordnung to act a way of life governed not by statute but by a tradition absorbed so undilutedly into the community’s capillary system it need not be spoken. And thus, while I played golf, three families committed to service and holy living, to transformation and renewal, on their way to their church district’s Sunday service.

By the end of that round of golf I had resolved to never again play on Sunday. One year later, I quit playing golf entirely. And to this day I am still thinking, still wondering, still almost but not quite prepared to listen to the still small voice that tells me I ought to return to Sunday mass.

The Mickey Mouse Episode

At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature.

To understand, you need to know two things about me.

First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.

I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.

Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.

On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.

I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.

I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.

Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.

Battling Mom's Alzheimer's

My brother Dennis called to warn me.

Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.

Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.

When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.

Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.

Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.

Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.

Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.

Mysteries

I have long been attracted to lonely roads, the ones “less travelled by,” but I have not ventured down any. The attraction is enough. I have long been enticed by abandoned farm houses, but I have not entered any. The enticement is enough. I have long been beguiled by the nooks and cubbies in old Victorian homes, but I trust I am not a “nook dweller,” that term of contempt Nietzsche applied to “colorblind utility men.” Besides, it’s the being beguiled that is so beguiling. I am fascinated with string theory and quantum physics. But I am not consumed with knowing whether or not eleven dimensions exist, or whether particles can, as was reported of Moby Dick, be in more than one place at a time, or exactly how electrons vast distances apart manage to synchronize their spin rates. That string theory and quantum physics fascinate me is enough. I really don’t need to know if the Voynich Manuscript, a 16th century text written in an unknown language, is a medieval version of Web MD, or what actually happened in the ancient Athenian town of Eleusis during the annual rituals in which initiates were inducted into the worship of the grain goddess Demeter. That they beckon me, intrigue me, captivate me is enough.

All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.

I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.

Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.

I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.

Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.

Tracked and Profiled

My small southern Iowa hometown boasts a recreational train that stretches 2.2 miles from the east side of town to the freeway and, on the west side, 2.5 miles to Liberty Hall, a restored Victorian home and museum. The east trail follows the long-abandoned CB&Q railroad track. To enter it is to enter a tunnel of mature forest of oak, white ash, basswood, and maple. In the spring, the blossoming wild plum trees conjure a confederation of angles. Yellow and purple coneflowers, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild rose line the trail. Gooseberries, currants, and serviceberries, those clever blueberry imposters, provide a savory diversion for those out for exercise. The west trail, though dotted here and there with pale blue cornflowers and purple prairie clover, is mostly untreed, unflowered, and unberried. It winds through gently rolling open fields and past small tucked-away, reed-surrounded ponds. Around one bend, off to the south, a small, solitary stand of hickory shelter huge bundled wheels of hay that appear to have been forgotten by their owner. In contrast to the shadowed and canopied east trail, where the sound of your motion echoes among the branches and makes you feel large, the west trail offers pure vista, the fields and hills running off as far as the eye can see, making you feel small, a humble point of movement in an expansive landscape. Two trails, two personalities, made one by the recent addition of a connecting segment that runs through town.

The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.

Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”

Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.

Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.

What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?

No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.