What Do We Believe?

Water Music in the Sonora Desert

2007-01-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

Aravaipa River spouts from stone and flows over the desert floor like musical notes across a staff. It nourishes a bed of willows, cottonwoods, ash trees, and sycamores. Swifts and swallows buzz the water surface and a black phoebe watches them, calls fee-bee, and snaps up a skimmer. Just above us a vermilion flycatcher perches on a branch like a ruby embedded in a crown. There is plenty of food for the fish and plenty of fish for the hawks. We follow the lush trail the river paves west. Its water plays over rounded rocks. From here, where the canyon walls are high, we can forget that we’re in a desert.

We are however: the Sonora Desert, which spreads from this land in southeast Arizona aslant to Mexican Baja. Sonora isn’t a desert the uninitiated would expect, who bring Lawrence of Arabia visions of sand dunes and Bedouins. (Though there is something American Bedouin about many of the people who move there, something migratory and unfixed.) In relation to Sahara, Sonora is verdant, its slopes covered with cactus and other obstinate scrublife. If we had come here in spring we would be shocked by a profusion and palette of wildflowers: golden Mexican poppies, red fireweed, and white chicory rising from what literally is a rubble of rocks. (By some glorious poetic justice the grisliest plants here produce the most gorgeous flowers. Witness the papery delicacy of the prickly poppy’s bloom or the burst of sunset hues from the prickly pear.)

Sonora gets twelve inches of water a year. As a comparative yardstick, during Hurricane Frances in 2004 some places in central Florida received twelve inches in one day. Then what is all this greenery doing here? How can it be that a desert is recognizable by its flowers? And what about Aravaipa, that diapason of singing life, the apotheosis of Eden-like fertility?

Water, not dunes or camels or quicksand, is the strongest presence in Sonora. Like the ghost rattling chains in an old mansion, water’s potency and power is increased by the eerie fact that it is not in substance there. But in every direction you can find its signs and symbols and mostly its warnings. To come to Sonora is to become more acutely aware of water than ever before; it is to learn, through plain habit of survival, to adduce its coded speech and to seek out its sources like a pilgrim on a path to Truth.

But it’s a hard path, and despite ourselves, it’s time to leave the generous anomaly of Aravaipa. Sure enough, as we travel west the river loses momentum and soon piddles out, though the soil has moisture enough to carry on the flow of trees. As we draw upward and look down on the land, we’ll see a thinning defile of Arizona Sycamores, unmistakable by their blanched, bone-white bark. We see that Aravaipa ends at the San Pedro River, which is also dry and even more barren.

In Sonora the first thing to learn is that a river is still a river if it is empty. Dry rivers cut in all directions over southern Arizona like scars or skid marks from some dramatic episode long ago. Tucson is located on the confluence of three, Tanque Verde, Rillito, and Santa Cruz. But that the land was once a watershed is just a quaint piece of lore today: the Santa Cruz dried up over a century ago. How can a dry depression still be called a river? It is a title retained by stubbornly hopeful people. When it does rain, especially in August during the monsoons, they gush with water exactly as other rivers do. It’s best to allow for a broader definition. A little bit of deluded optimism is quite simply needed to persevere here – and sometimes persistence is rewarded. Anyone who follows his divining rod far enough south on the San Pedro will eventually find that the river is in fact extant just before he reaches Mexico. Spongy soil, great blue herons, and the whispering shade of cottonwoods are his prize.

But as we look down on this dry debouchment it is neither the season for wildflowers nor for monsoons – it is June, the temperature under the sun is one hundred degrees, there is no rain and there is no chance of it. The ground burns, but also has some respite of shade: this basinland is studded with a series of ranges, rounded eroding buttes and mesas that pounce thousands of feet against the skyline. What we’re overlooking is a four thousand foot butte – it’s not tall enough to provoke rain, yet it is relatively advantageous for life anyhow.

Pick out the thin veined seams projecting downward from the summit. When the monsoons do come, the water collects in these grooves. As it tumbles down it takes with it particles of dirt. The more ground matter it holds the “harder” it becomes. Like an avalanche gathering speed and strength the water can now dislodge huge chunks of earth and carry down boulders – here is the real danger of the infamous flash floods that strike and kill every desert year. There is no shield against the debris in that sudden tide.

We see that the seams in the range have enlarged considerably in the descent, so that the depression is now roughly half the width and depth of the riverbeds. This is called a barranca, an arroyo, or a wash, depending on its size and your mood at the time. A wash is usually a reliable way to peak a hill, even if it meanders some. In and around them – anywhere on this range where speeding water churns up the earth and makes it loose and rubbly – cacti have their best chance for survival. The mightiest of all is the Saguaro Cactus, which can grow to be thirty feet tall. How can something so hearty and plump exist in parched soil? The Saguaro survives because it is a master hoarder – its roots don’t sink very deeply, but radiate to cover a large surface area, and can retain up to two tons of water at a time. Moreover, the cactus has no leaves through which water can evaporate, its chlorophyll instead working where the bark of other trees would be.

Every plant and animal in this rocky desert (with one notable exception) has adapted to meet the strict requirements water shortages impose. Leaves, which are major culprits of transpiration – the release of oxygen into the air; the “breath” of a plant – are either absent or very small on the branch. Creosotebush leaves are shielded by a waxy integument that inhibits water loss. When the ocotillo gets too dry it sheds its leaves and goes dormant until times are riper. In the animal world, the kangaroo rat doesn’t drink at all, instead metabolizing what it needs from its diet of seeds.

And even having been so flexible, having bent to the limit in nature’s unsympathetic vise, survival is still dependant on a stingy trickle-down largesse. These plants are peasants bowing before water’s royal processional, their fates resting on its arbitrary alms.

We can follow the wash for a long way beyond the butte, but the reduction of flora indicates the decrease of water’s welfare. By this point runoff momentum has diminished and the flow has only the power to carry microscopic pieces of earth. When even these particles drop out they pack together and form a floor as dense and impenetrable as concrete. Here is the alluvial basin: it has neither soil nor space for roots. Water cannot enter, so it sits on the surface and burns away, scorching the ground. We will see only creosotebush, and even those are sparse because every bush secretes a poison to insure that nothing can encroach on its space. We don’t even see birds here.

A frightfully big portion of Sonora consists of the deathly alluvial basin, and once you are in it, there is no way of finding water. Unless, that is, you know about the exception.

In the mid nineteenth century white prospectors seeking gold – those famously foolhardy forty-niners – began to search for routes to the fertile vales and climes of Southern California. They followed what was called the Coronado Trail, and known as the Devil’s Highway, between the northern frontier in Mexico to the Colorado River in Yuma, a barren pioneer’s path with tenfold the hazards. (It is easy enough to imagine the rigors of this trail: take your car to Highway 10 and drive anywhere between El Paso and the San Bernadino Mountains in Palm Springs. Even in a car you’ll feel the onset of inanition that the grim landscape brings.) The trail was a tenuous connect-the-dots westward, a zigzag between watering holes. But there weren’t nearly enough Aravaipas for a smooth travel; moreover, the perennial springs and streams were naturally under the jealous lock and key of American Indians who made strongholds of the hills and would not be completely dislodged for another century. The pioneers could only roam the dessert in summer, when Indians seeking verdure would have less interest in harassing them.

There was therefore only one unpalatable option for water. When rains fall in the desert the water is either absorbed into the soil and plants or else it is promptly vaporized and reclaimed by the clouds. But putting water in a bucket or jar safeguards from absorption and retards evaporation. In Sonora there are natural jars, named by the Spanish equivalent tinaja. These are depressions carved over eons in protruding stone. Sealed by a lid of fetid-smelling algae, some of these resultant pools can be abundantly plentiful. And for the prospectors, this foul standing water was the stuff of life, as saving as that which burst from stone for the Israelites wandering the desert with Moses. Losing the trail meant extinction; and finding the tinajas insured nothing more than hope. A tinaja is not a cornucopia and sometimes the horn was sucked dry by the thirsty travelers who had come before.

With these morbid thoughts it is a relief that we begin again to rise from the funereal basin that inhumed so many pioneers and ascend a mountain tall enough to turn the deadly climate completely on its head. Continuing south, we’ve reached the Catalina Mountains, a sheer burst of igneous in line with the long arm of the Rockies. At first our elevation is as before, with cactus life in the winding narrowing washes. But now, at about five thousand feet, we notice a change. Saguaros disappear, replaced by junipers and pinyon pines. Ground squirrels and other rodents show themselves, no longer needing to hide underground during day. Jays and lesser goldfinch make a hubbub. The terrain is greener, grassier, and scrubby. We go higher. Now we have Ponderosa pines – and quickly a forest full, their rich black trunks evidence to the fecundity they help promote. Under the mothering canopy of these wind-twisted pines there is actual soil, protected by a duff of soft needles. In these glades are some of the only cushions from the fierce rock that is general to the skin of Sonora.

And when we go higher still, to the nine thousand-foot peak of Mount Lemmon, there are Douglas firs and Quivering Aspens, trees that the mind must associate with Colorado and the high Canadian Rockies. How does a few thousand feet carry us to a world a thousand miles away.

Rain, of course rain. Above the basins there is no rain (monsoons being the exception that proves the rule) because the warm water vapor – the precious little that remains after the San Bernadinos claim their lode – stays low. The Catalinas force it to rise just as we rose; the vapor cools in the thinner air (as we have cooled) and condenses. Amazingly, snow is just as likely as rain in the winter, and the small lodges in Summerhaven before us are seasonal ski resorts.

The snow packs up knee-high. The soil takes its keep and runoff flows to pools and washes and canyons. In spring, when the sun scorches again, Romero Pools and Tanque Verde Falls and other natural reservoirs are boisterous hubs of life, where humans and other animals have followed the lute-song to congregate. (Some humans are far too lemming-like in their response: a few drown each year in the falls.) And thus we come to understand water’s natural transience in Sonora: for looking now, these playgrounds are virtually empty, all dry ditches and empty limestone waterslides, and the lone drake dabbling in shallows appears lost and pitiable.

But as soon as we think we comprehend something of the seasonal cycle of water and life we are challenged afresh when we crest the Catalinas and see below us – Tucson! It is a shock indeed to come from a nearly empty desert basin and now overlook its topographical twin turned into the second largest city in the state. When we descend back below five thousand feet we pass the first mansions. The houses, notched into the foothills, are all of a design that might be called colonial-adobe. The Manichean style doesn’t take, but the homes do offer new founts in our quest for water. Now there are swimming pools, man-made lakes (in which we spot a few sailboats), ponds for Japanese gardens, gargling terra cotta cherubim fountains, and, perhaps more commonly than might make us comfortable, spouting sprinkler heads. Such plenty out of nothing! It is as if Moses’ stone will provide forever. Coyotes and bands of collared peccaries creep past the guards of the gated communities to the open water’s edge. Mountain lions do too, but if they are ever seen the city hires bounty hunters to tranquilize them and ship them away.

We’ve left the Catalinas behind, but the city sprawls on, subdivision upon subdivision in ever-increasing concentricity around the small downtown, the houses meaner now but still filled with thirsty consumers. Beside a well-manicured golf course and the dusty Santa Cruz River there is a fenced-in marsh and smokestacked factory. This is the wastewater treatment plant and beneath it is what remains of Tucson’s watershed. Today the water table is five hundred feet underground. It verges on exhaustion, and what is left cannot provide for the city on its own. And so all this life – and that is what we are looking upon, the extravagant trappings of human life – hangs from a pipeline that starts in Havasu City on the Colorado River.

The Central Arizona Project canal is in truth not a pipe but a deep narrow trough; in any case it is the city’s literal lifeline. In a year twenty billion gallons of water are pumped through and blended with the scanty groundwater that remains, a 336 mile odyssey to help a Tusconan rinse after brushing. Having seen all that we’ve seen, this strikes us as pointedly unnatural, a meddlesome tampering with the ebb and flow of desert tides. Hitherto life was the slave of water, conforming to appease its harshness, adapting hidden tricks and cunning, killing its cousins for their share; and still surviving only by chance and fate.

But humans have evolved differently. Like it was a pet we’ve husbanded water, domesticated it, and kept it on a short leash. There is scarcely any more staggering human accomplishment than the Hoover Dam, which metes out hydroelectric energy to the entire southwest United States, from Tucson to Los Angeles (with Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the country in between). To build it we blasted a hole through the canyon wall and forcibly shifted the entire course of the Colorado River. Human hands diverting a river: Moses indeed!

But we are different desert dwellers from the wandering Jews; we don’t rely on a providing God. And we are different from every other plant and animal around us, because the average human can take for granted water conservation entirely. The balance of our survival is weighed thus: we have pitted our intellect against the naturally occurring resources of the earth. By choosing to live in the desert we are tacitly pledging a trust that scientific ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of its environmental limitations and will always countermand any scarcity. We live by the power and glory of the engineer: as long as he can coerce, contrive, or create water in Sonora we’ll be all right. And so far his ability to sustain a city like present day Tucson must exceed anyone’s expectation.

But let us at least recognize the battle of brinkmanship we’ve waged with the earth. And likewise remember that if we ever go to the tinaja and find it empty, with all of our intellect, we’ll be at nature’s mercy, like any shrub or rodent.

We hasten south once more over an alluvial wasteland. The desert is predominant again, though human development persists: we pass Sahuarita, Amado, Tumacacori, Tubac – different names for the same sort of flyspecks with a few hundred houses pinioned together like ships in a squall. They seem like such meager fruits of battle, and so precariously upheld. In the wilderness beyond the towns, nearer the border, we might spot small orange flags. The flags are markers for plastic tubs with a nozzle and a reflective sticking reading “agua,” placed in the desert by some hopeful Samaritans (and now the hopefulness seems tinged with desperation) to save the lost border crosser. They imagine a Mexican adrift like Hagar in Arabia, her baby left to die of thirst in the bushes, stumbling across the orange beacon of this well of Zamzam. It is an act of planned providence. In the desert mercy comes only from humans – we have seen enough to know that it is a term unknown by nature.

Gradually – and then suddenly – we enter chaparral again, brown-green with sere grass and muscly Live Oaks. This new landscape of steady humps and shoulder blade ridges is an eroded caldera, the remains of an ancient volcano that collapsed on its own core and went dormant. We buzz a juniper tree and a dozen canyon wrens burst forth with taunting trills. There are even deer here and quail – it’s a place with a hunting season. And then, following the slope of the ridges we spot it, our long lost telltale: the trail of bone-white sycamore trunks. And finally we return to a gracious earth.

The creek in Sycamore Canyon spouts from stone and floods south to Mexico. It starts as a tinkling prelude but soon deepens and rushes fugue-like. Cataracts from canyon walls pour down in accompaniment, and now the desert has vanished – rather, water has transformed it. The stream runs in spate and, our cups running over, we stand in wonder, stunned in the rapture of music.

Eight Weddings and George Eliot

2006-09-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterward,” wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch. It is one of the many potent and marvelous lines that season her novels, and like so many tone-perfect epigrams it is not, in the strictest sense, true.

As to the first part of the quote, unless a woman possesses an outstandingly dictatorial nature, she is not likely to be much in command while planning for her wedding. In fact it is the event itself that dominates her, with its implacable role-call of traditions, customs, and expectations imposed from without by family, in-laws, friends, and, in usual cases, no less invitee than God himself. For a woman, planning a wedding is more like herding unruly cattle over strange terrain for eight months in order to lead them all into a small pen at the exact right moment; the groom may be subservient, but more in the way of a useful hand, or, depending on the case, another head of livestock.

I have never been married, but in the last fourteen months I have attended eight wedding, so I feel I’m in some position to comment. This has been my first wedding year. When I was twelve I attended a Bar Mitzvah virtually every Saturday. Soon will arrive the year of christenings and brises. And go round and round and round in the circle game.

Marriage is the most elaborate, the most spectacular, the most gratuitous of all the life cycle cynosures (perhaps rivaled in ceremony only by the life cycle event I have superstitiously declined to name). Weddings are maddeningly complicated and no one has the faintest idea why. Consider the slip of tissue paper that comes in all wedding invitations. That tissue paper is an inviolate order, no less quintessential than Mendelssohn’s March or the honeymoon – and there are hundred upon hundreds of slips of tissue paper that must stack and decorate before a man and woman can become a husband and a wife.

Yet weddings almost always are beautiful, and the most beautiful moment is invariably the processional (in spite of the cursed March). I know of no other ceremonial instant that captures the rapturous sensation of – relief. All has somehow come together. Family and friends, normally blown to all quadrants by time’s seed-dispersing ways, have miraculously congregated under a single roof, and are sitting and standing in the very places they are supposed to sit or stand. Rare indeed is the clergyman who does not seem tedious presiding after the processional. It is the climax of all public climaxes; and all the beauty and happiness that comes after it refers back to the bride and her train’s slow slow walk down the aisle. The wedding is for all intents and purposes finished once the bride and groom touch hands, which is why liquor, cocktail shrimp, and dancing are necessary to carry the rest of it off.

And then, according to Eliot, the bride gracefully traipses into a life of subjection. Is this true? For it is a relatively benign thing to hew unquestioningly to the established customs of a wedding ceremony (well, the cost is not benign), but it is another thing to commit to the expectations inherent in marriage without completely understanding what they mean.

Is it true that submission is underwritten into marriage? Such a thing is of course not explicitly stated in the marriage vows, which speak instead to unconditional fidelity and honor. But those vows have, in the lingo of Constitutional Law, emanations and penumbras; I don’t think there’s much question that men and women – but especially women – understand in some inchoate way that they are pledge to an oath of servility.

Servility implies ownership. One who was going to defend traditional marriages would look to refute any question of ownership by explaining that the bond is really a matter of union – of two people become one: spiritually, and in many ways physically, joined.

I take no issue with spiritual union and I’m not for a moment trying to denigrate the very real and wonderful feeling of love that makes people want to declare their willingness to attach their lives to another. Nor am I equating the personal sacrifices that must go into love with servility. And lastly, it is also not my aim to churlishly suggest the ephemeral nature of so many desires for union. Actually, when people tell their intended that they want to with him or her as long as they live, I believe a great number of them mean it.

What I’m saying is that total union between two people can only be approximately reached by eliminating all the facets of each person that aren’t shareable. Should a person have a habit to be in any way different when his or her spouse is not present – well, such behavior, as well as the deep-seated, even genetically-coded, impulses behind such behavior, is looked at with suspicion and eventually put under the ban. So predilections, urges, hopes, habits, tastes, and even loves, if they are not harmoniously fitted in the union, face proscription; at least their expression is severely curtailed.

But the part of a person that causes the most trouble in an ideal union is his or her past – that is, the life lived before the spouse came onto the scene.

I wish again to emphasize that I am not assailing the idea of sacrifice in a relationship. Sacrifice is obviously related to the word sacred, and I loudly promote the connection. (In fact, my etymology dictionary alerts me that the sense of the word meaning “something given up for the sake of another” was first used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet!) (I can’t where in the play though – any help out there?) But a person’s past is not a thing to be sacrificed or censored, ever. The past, too, because it is the remnant of life lived, is sacred.

Yet because they are not completely communicable to the person one has wedded, past and memory are held under the deepest distrust in marriage, and usually an assiduous effort is made by both parties to scourge their spouse’s past from the record. Other relationships are severed if they serve as any kind of reminder of life before marriage (and especially if they are meaningful in themselves). Certain personality traits are effaced. Ambitions are squelched. And worst of all, feelings – honest joys and sorrows, which still would have the power to fill a person with joy and sorrow – are choked off. Revisiting the pre-marriage past in one’s mind becomes taboo. Entire years – decades – of life, possessing the unlimited richness that memory revives in them, are made to fade out and, often, vanish forever.

This may sound exaggerated, but I don’t think it is. I myself have already been told by a friend that I must never contact her again because she married; while this might be an extreme case, I think it’s just a formal and abrupt was of effecting an end that otherwise happens gradually and informally. This severance was actually more honest than the more popular method of not returning calls, dropping unhappy hints, and becoming in every way increasingly remote.

Insisting that another person forfeit his or her past is a kind of subjection and it is always wrong. It’s also wrong to be compliant in the execution of such a demand. Our pasts are every bit as real and as important as our present lives – surely we all agree that the two are entangled. The past’s beholdens are genuine and vital. If life really does mean anything worth meaning then we are obliged to respect and cherish all of it, not just the bits that make marriage easier and lower-risk. The truth is that marriage creates responsibilities that come after a great many other responsibilities (even those not certified by the state), and to pretend that the marriage duties render all those others null and void, like the fatal little box on scratch-off lottery tickets, is small and evasive in the extreme.

It is perhaps unnecessary at this point to add that submission of this kind breeds intense misery and disaffection with life. Such are the natural consequences of undergoing and then completing a self-lobotomy.

I think the answer begins with the wedding vows, where the expectations of the coming marriage are all stated and sublimated. Every couple ought to be required to work together to formulate their own vows, a task that would prefigure the dynamic of the marriage itself. (Of course, necessary in this is that those vows carry actual, applicable weight.) Couples should have to think deeply on what promises they will make, and what things, already promised, cannot be infringed upon.

If I were to make a marriage vow I hope that two of my pledges would be trust and support: trust that wherever my wife’s personal life takes her she’ll still make it her business to look out for my feelings and be there when I need her; and support for all her rovings even if I can’t be wholly made a part of them.

I hope that I would never resent and fear the things in her that were not also in me. I hope I would try not to gain control over those things. And I devoutly hope I would never pressure her to renounce any part of her life, and all that’s packed into it, merely because it had the temerity to take place before I had shown up.

Of Rebellions

2006-06-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

The Boxer Rebellion was a homegrown Chinese insurgency that erupted at the turn of the twentieth century with particular spectacle and grisliness during an era perpetually shaken by upheaval and instability. The Boxers were a martial cult with mystical rites and beliefs and, during the rebellion, one very practical goal: the elimination of foreigners in China.

The cult first became popular during a spread of warlordism that filled the vacuums after the Sino-Japanese War, when China’s borders and interior were in anarchy. The Boxers were local protectionists, like a mafia that also claimed numinous otherworldly powers. They had no central authority, but were a loose coalition with many regional variations. But all the rites were exemplified by a combination of martial arts and a kind of spirit possession that sent its initiates into dervish-like trances and was believed to make them literally invulnerable to attacks, even to bullets. Women, known as Red Lanterns, attended them and were believed to be able to float off the ground.

China in the nineteenth century, after the Opium War opened the floodgates, had become increasingly occupied by British, French, German, American, Russian, and Japanese parvenus. Amongst themselves, these nations seemed to coexist tentatively and diplomatically, largely content with their provincial stakes of territory and exportation. There was certainly some talk of formally dividing China into colonies, but the opinion seems to have been that this would have been a difficulty incommensurate to its worth. Civil servants, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers lived in and around their respective consular headquarters doing by their lights what was good for them, their countries, and for China, and doing it with an arsenal of civilization.

In 1900 the Boxers organized and, passively encouraged by the Qing rulers (in particular the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi), attempted to kill or rout all these foreigners from the mainland. Their methods were not subtle. Foreigners they found they killed, and usually dismembered and put on display. The same treatment often extended to the Chinese who had converted to Christianity and lived with whites. The Boxers called their targets devils. Their spree lasted not quite through the summer until foreign legions regrouped and laid siege to Peking. Many of the westerners had been able to hole up inside the legation walls until relief came. The most vulnerable were the dispersed missionaries and many hundreds of these people were killed before the uprising was quashed. After it was put down the Allied forces sacked and looted Peking, exacting retribution on all suspected Boxers. The Empress Dowager, who had fled from the Forbidden City, was ultimately invited back to rule on extreme sufferance. However, foreign enthusiasm (save Japan’s) for occupying China were dampened by this bizarre and terrifying insurgency, and Western presence to some degree diminished in the coming years, as bigger fish were tossed on the fry pan of Europe itself.

It is interesting to consider how we regard the Boxer Rebellion now, to the extent we do consider it. (In not quite twenty years of formal education, I never heard of it.) It reveals a telling inconsistency. Were this event to happen now, we would be aflame with outrage; but when it comes to history, we are inured to massacres to the point of boredom, so that the slaughter of a few hundred unarmed people is small beer. Does it matter that they were missionaries? It sure as hell would if it happened tomorrow. But, as much as missionaries take inspiration from past martyrs, it seems unlikely in the extreme that those who died in service in China have set a popular example. And why is it that invocation of the Boxers, obviously a fanatical cult proudly employing terrorism, arouses no vehemence or even disgust anymore?

Well, for one thing, the Boxers are gone and no one can worry about them terrorizing the world and killing one’s family. But I’m thinking more about the values suggested by historical perception. The Boxer Rebellion is explained now principally in economic terms, the revolt of the poor, and this lends to it a kind of deterministic inevitability that robs it of interest. The movement began in the northern province of Shantung, whose impoverished populations was further depressed by foreign technology (like the steamship and railroad) that put thousands out of work to the gain of the selected few, that few unusually and not coincidentally being foreigners. It was the destitute and unemployed that became Boxers or supported them or believed in them as saviors. And although there are lots of other things to be understood to fully grasp the phenomenon – the close relationship between Boxer ceremonies and Chinese folk traditions was evidently very significant – it is largely satisfactory to have the explanation that awful and desperate deeds are committed by people in awful and desperate situations.

How strange that the one way a reductive approach to history could be useful is never put to any use at all. It’s almost seems if a truth is too plain and axiomatic it must be ignored. The mind-numbing litany of revolutions, rebellions, and riots catalyzed by the reactive poor is so long it ceases to stand out. If an explanation is prosaic we evidently don’t care to look for lessons in it. Westerners in China in 1900 had enormous collective experience with colonization and mutinous subjects in every corners of the planet. Yet it can be safely assumed that the rebellion – “one of those emotional movements not unusual in Asia,” in the words of Herbert Hoover, who was there at the time to make money from untapped natural resources – was originally explained in racial and anthropological terms.

There has been one coherent, organized uprising in Iraq since the United States invaded and occupied it in 2002, and this was the short-lived insurgency led by a Shiite cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. For a very brief time militants under al-Sadr captured a few cities in the south of the country and held them against occupational forces until the US coordinated a powerful military response to rout them out and disperse them (combined with limited diplomacy, armistices being given on extreme sufferance). The al-Sadr uprising, like many of the less cogently visible terrorist groups, found solidarity and divine justification in a religion distinct from that professed by the occupying foreigners (whom the fanatics involved called devils) and its targets were both the foreigners and the Iraqis thought to be complicit with the occupation.

And of course the uprising found whatever numerical strength it had in the support of the poor. Mark Etherington, the British Governate Coordinator of the southern city Kut writes in his war memoir Revolt on the Tigris that “Moqtada al-Sadr’s steadfast opposition to us had framed the ideological battle in terms of the poor and the unemployed, and we wooed them assiduously.” Etherington is a sensitive and thoughtful official (in the annals of British history, the quantity of sensitive, thoughtful, and humane civil servants who have presided over failed occupations is remarkable), but one wonders what this “wooing” consisted of, if not just sops and half-sincere promises. Notice that the poor are thought of as a political element that should be appeased and neutralized. They are no more real than as a demographic, a “them” to be won over to “our” side through the time-sharpened powers of persuasion. If only their culture and language weren’t so strange, and them so hard to understand!

The defensive and usual way of looking at this uprising was to point out that al-Sadr and his regime were utterly discreditable, and therefore not a reaction worth heeding, or, once again, altering anything in response. Al-Sadr had been characterized, almost certainly accurately, as a power-hungry vulture and demagogue who made cynical use of his family’s religious repute without the interests of Iraqis anywhere in mind. The much less convincing label of Islamifascism has been applied, a bogus and paternalist term because it means everything to westerners and little to Iraqis, who might very honestly support clerical rule and the imposition of Sharia law without feeling any warm affiliation with Mussolini.

Naturally, nothing significant has changed since the uprising. Revolts are always dismissed at first with sociology and anthropology and political science, and the specifics of these dismissals always look foolish fifty years later. We earnestly examine the Koran for the violence it preaches. We study the undemocratized culture of the Middle East and intone psycho-historical pronouncements about civilization jealousy and power complexes. With magnificent innocence we read and write long treatises analyzing the question, Why do they hate us? In all cases the poor who are, if not the mouths and plotters, the heart and body of all uprisings, are nothing to us but pawns in a political power play. They are always understood to be essentially stupid and impressionable, blind to the natures of goodness and badness in the forces that swept them to and fro. And we will never consider this about the al-Sadr revolt, that any group of people thinking that this discreditable man’s leadership was preferable demonstrates how deeply discreditable our own must be.

The only serious error in the truism that the poor will eventually revolt if their situation is dreadful enough is in the determinist spin we can put on it so to make the matter seem out of our hands, as though there were some formula that could predict insurgencies like hurricanes, as though humans were not humans but creatures with pre-programmed response-stimuli. It seems to me that it would behoove us to stop thinking of poor people as being blind and witless and without will, or just as bad, to classify them as a sort of lower species whose biological instincts make them lash out when too far encroached upon.

It is not just poverty, or even mostly that, which makes prompts men to fight back. Lots of Iraqis have died as a result of our occupation, but it is probably not even the deaths either. David Howarth, in his book about the Norman Invasion, writes that after William the Conqueror’s victory, “It took him five years of ruthless oppression to put down the active revolts and put the rest of the country under his power”; in reference to the revolts Howarth then notes, “Strangely, it was not the mortality itself that most affronted the English; the sudden or lingering deaths could most clearly be seen as the vengeance of God. Human injustice offended them much more.”

Perhaps we ought to take more care in the line of human justice. There are no poor Westerners in Iraq, none that don’t receive clean water and sufficient food, and there must be precious few that don’t have air conditioning, electricity, and transportation. The employment rate for Westerners is 100 percent. Considering the instability of the country, Westerners usually live in highly secure compounds, protected by bunkers and armed guards. Even the Iraqi overwhelmed with gratitude by the ousting of Saddam Hussein must have winced to see Hussein’s palaces promptly inhabited by the new invading Army who, no matter what good they may have done, were never invited in the first place. Every Iraqi is made constantly aware that everything they do is subject to the approval and oversight of the United States, and if the US deems it necessary approval can be withheld in a pinch. (The first steps taken against al-Sadr before his revolt was the closing of his newspaper.) Yet this final authority is by and large incapable of addressing their most fundamental concerns, those of health, safety, employment, and a decent standard of living. Then there is the business of the prisons and torture, which is sufficiently known to everyone on the planet.

All of this, and more, is plainly unjust. Almost none of it is mitigable, as we would know if we were experiencing it. It is explainable, of course: it is common, it is expected. The refrain among war profiteers is always that we have a right to the money since it’s our boys who are dying. The status quo ever justifies its own perpetuation. It is rarely mentioned that any profits taken – wealth floutingly collected in the face of the poor – only increase the likelihood of our boys dying.

Reacting to injustice is not a blind atavism. On the contrary, it is something that reasonable, thinking and feeling human beings should do. Perhaps we are so comfortable in our privileges that we take for granted that others (like Arabs) don’t enjoy them equally due to some predestined plan. Yet in most quarters of the world, not excluding America, basic equity and justice must be scratched out.

No one should murder for it. No one should commit that crime, mete out that reciprocal injustice. But it is a little sickening that making this avowal against murder has become a prerequisite for anyone questioning America’s inherent superiority, just as not so long ago it was necessary to constantly publicize one’s aversion to communism. For fuck’s sake, of course suicide bombing is awful and wrong! It is no less terrible to hack to death a family of foreign missionaries. But where do we get off with our trumpetings and rallies and noisy attestations of righteous indignation? Is our concept of virtue so feeble and retarded that we think haughtily deploring murder signifies anything? If our anger were only toward the evil people exploiting the desperate situation, it might make sense, but then in that case it would be much more focused and much less bilious; in fact we make no distinctions. We would be better off truly mourning the man so desperate and short of options that he embraces the movement of a cynical poseur, or, much worse, embraces the ineffaceable crime of murder. It does not excuse or even extenuate the crime to say that it was spawned from injustice. Even Lucifer, in the story, fell because he perceived this exact thing.

We are so sure we are above and outside the world of injustice and revolt. Never mind the riots that explode reliably in our cities every decade. Never mind American history in general. Forget Pottawatomie Creek and its offshoots. The guns held by the unjustly taxed farmers in Shays’ Rebellion must have been only for show. (Postcolonia-fascists? One of those emotional movements common in New England? Even if there were a grain of truth in these characterizations, does anyone think they touch the heart of the matter?)

Only recently one of our preeminent authors wrote a novel about a terrorist, and to “research” his character he hired a car to drive him through a New Jersey inner city. This fact was duly reported (and even admired), but it went uncommented that we have neighborhoods so impoverished that people are afraid to enter them and only ever do so in the name of anthropology and fictional verisimilitude. (Do gangbangers where their hats backward, sideways, or facing front? Gotta get that right!) Much less do we consider that we might have the slightest connection to such a neighborhood, or hold any accountability for it. Such places are common, they are mundane, they are beyond thinking about. Virtually the entire country of Iraq is in a condition that Westerners won’t travel through it without a hired car and armed escorts. With that in mind, shouldn’t it be said that Iraqis are on the whole choosing violence as a response to their predicament much less often than many people have?

Denouncing a crime is the most facile and least meaningful way to respond to it. Concocting elaborate theories about it is very nearly as worthless. If justice means anything – and unless our souls are quite dead, it does – than it is a standard for everyone. No good is ever done by people who pose as grand arbiters that stand outside the world and judge. Our potential for crime is no less real than anyone else’s, nor is it less realized. Let us look to our own wrongs if we sincerely want to lessen them on Earth. There are enough of them to keep us busy all our lives.

The Dreariness is All: Philip Roth's Everyman

2006-05-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

One of the peculiar conventions in Western literature is the relationship between old men and young, beautiful girls. Anyone who plans to verse himself in novels from the 19th century, for example, had better learn to accept that in many cases the stock happy ending was the wedding of a poor post-adolescent knockout to a wizened (though virtuous) clergyman or landed aristocrat. Ladies, take note – it was a truth universally known in the Victorian Era that your wrinkly hermetic bachelor made the truest, tenderest husband. So when the authors we cherish most from that time presented the scenario in a less than worshipful light it often seems that they were satirizing not just the wealthy codgers who monopolized the young, but also the literary tradition that presumed that such a match was what all girls should most desire. One of Dickens’ most depressing couples is Mr. Bounderby and Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times: “I have watched her bringing up,” says Bounderby of his young wife, “and I believe she is worthy of me.” And who cuts a grislier figure in American letters than cuckolded Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter? But the definitive portrayal of this pairing might be found in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in the doomed marriage of earnest Dorothea and the hidebound pedant Causabon. At first Causabon appears to possess strength and stature in comparison to his feckless younger rivals; but in time Dorothea discovers that in binding herself to a dried-up traditionalist she has locked her spirit in a cell.

In the modern novel the loveship between the aged and the barely of-age has not gone out of fashion, but since Freud and the sexual revolution this subgenre has been approached in a highly specific way. If perhaps there was always a buried element of wet dreaming in these love stories in the past, now it can be said that little more than the gross aftereffects of the wet dream remains. The relationship seems to have become the exclusive property of old priapic men whose perspectives are, to say the least, one-sided.

Everyman, the new novel-cum-tract by Philip Roth, is exactly one of these books, and one of its central episodes is the affair between the nameless fifty-something main character and a twenty-four year old Danish model named Merete. Here are some of the attributes the affair shares with those you can find throughout the fiction of Saul Bellow, John Updike, John Cheever, and Louis Begley, to name a few: 1) The affair must always compare unfavorably to an earlier relationship with an older and less carnally desirable woman. In Everyman, Nameless has picked Merete over his second wife Phoebe, a responsible and longsuffering woman who was so good and reliable that, by the immutable law of the modern novel, he had no choice but to cheat on her and then bloat up with remorse. 2) The sex must be lewd, graphic, and delivered with all the magic of a gynecological seminar. Roth dwells endlessly on Merete’s “little hole,” a source of boundless (almost wrote bottomless) delight for her and Nameless, and her vaginal fluid is lovingly described as “slime.” 3) The young woman must not be a real human being. Merete is really nothing more than an obliging asshole; another character describes her as “an absence and not a presence,” which is one of the most ingenious methods I’ve ever read for rationalizing a flat, unreal character. 4) There must be no attempt to explain why the woman would want to be with the older man. Does Merete actually like Nameless? Or is she like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who thinks the best husbands are old, rich, and impotent? (“So help me God, I laugh when I think / How pitifully I made them work at night.”) 5) Most importantly, the relationship must be primarily a symbol for the man’s waning sexual drive, which itself stands as a symbol, as portentous as a pale horse, for the man’s approaching mortality.

Everyman begins in a cemetery at Nameless’ funeral, in which his loosely bound family – he was thrice-divorced – scoots around on their chairs in awkwardness and offers tepid eulogies. No one, clearly, will miss him except his angelic daughter Nancy. Nor was his death unexpected. Although Nameless lived self-sufficiently into his seventies, his life is condensed into an unrelieved series of medical woes from his childhood hernia operation to a quintuple bypass to the angioplasties he had to undergo on an annual basis beginning in his sixties. “Eluding death,” Roth writes, “seemed to have become the central business of his life.” It is in the context of Nameless’ faltering health that we read of his ruinous marital history, his disconnection from his loved ones, his defeatism resulting from sexual decrepitude, and his existential “malaise.” From his home on the New Jersey shoreline, “the profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die.” Retired, he takes up painting and then gets tired of it. He watches on as acquaintances (he has no real friends) pass away. He makes a last stab at nailing a young woman who jogs past him every morning and is rejected. And through the emptiness and boredom he steels himself with the euphemism, “Just take it as it comes.”

In the lonely passage of time the scales tip from malaise to despair and he is prodded by thoughts of suicide. Everyman’s final scene returns to the cemetery, where Nameless has a long conversation with the gravedigger who will very shortly dig his grave.

Roth’s strength as a writer is the restraint and precision of his prose. To be sure, it is uninteresting prose with few hallmarks of style and it is too given to robotic turns of phrase like “She manifested no fear and allowed none in her voice.” But it has a certain effectiveness when dealing with Nameless’ many surgeries; indeed, it has the spotless, antiseptic quality of hospital rooms, and after a half-dozen sedulously described operations Roth has successfully endued the reader with the shock and weariness that overwhelms his protagonist.

Weariness, however, is where Roth’s ambitions end; the rest of the novel is just a kind of droned hymn to resignation: “The aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and the waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know.”

Everyman is a pastiche of a medieval morality play of the same title, and Roth’s bleak faceless figure is meant as an update on the psychology of the “average human being” who has now exorcised the bogeyman of God and all faith in an afterlife. With the gravedigger scene he is also of course invoking Hamlet, a play about another man whose loss of mirth and purpose led him to no little amount of existential kvetching. Well, since Roth has invited the comparison with Hamlet, it is only fair to follow it through. For Hamlet is an Everyman play as well, despite the hero’s exceptional status as a prince and avenger of a regicide. “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,” Hamlet says, to desegregate himself from the groundlings, “Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

Human beings, in Hamlet, have the stuff of heroism – they are “infinite in faculties,” “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” Love is passionate. Friendship, as we see in Horatio, is true and noble, a thing worth dying for. This is why all the latent evil and decay in the world, whether from the oppressor’s calculated wrongs or the random slings and arrows of bad luck, are so devastating and universal. A death can only possibly be tragic if the life that led to it was great. To Shakespeare, life is sublime and its destruction is heartbreaking; to Roth, life is banal and tawdry and its end is disinterested and awkward. For Hamlet, who by the play’s conclusion has gained a stoic’s acceptance of the prospect of death, “the readiness is all;” for Roth’s condescending version of the Everyman, dreariness is all and readiness is nothing.

Moreover, it is not beside the point to mention that even if you don’t identify with Hamlet, the play still offers poetry, humor, vivid side characters, and sword fighting. But for anyone who isn’t predisposed to agree with the underlying assumptions of Roth’s novel, who doesn’t think that anomie is the only honest response to an empty universe, who doesn’t already genuflect at the idea that hope and love are delusions fueled by the libido, which shrivel away once we can no longer fuck young hotties – for anyone who isn’t, in short, a nodding choir member in the First Church of Roth, there is almost nothing in Everyman to care about.

I write the above because I expect that there are a lot of people prepared to acclaim Roth for setting down some hard, unstinting truths about old age and death without any sentimental sugarcoating in the forms of virtue, belief, philosophy, or the basic joy of everyday existence. Certainly, anyone searching for validation for a dull and cheerless life will find Everyman a satisfying read. Yet there is evidence that not even Roth buys into his book’s preachy desolation. Its “to be, or not to be” moment comes near the finish and reads, “How does one voluntarily choose to leave our fullness for that endless nothing?” This is a fine phrase and could have been memorable if it were founded on anything in the story that preceded it. Instead, it is a polished cliché. In this lazy, tendentious novel there is no fullness of life and there is barely even the paltriest effort to create it.

Of the Soul

2006-03-30T19:57:00.000-08:00

I would like to set down a few unoriginal statements about the value of life. I think that life has a worth that can be detected but can’t be proven, defined, quantified, or isolated. I think that the essence of this worth is the same as what people have been talking about when they have spoken of the soul. And I think it is a measure of the importance of this intrinsic worth that people who have spoken of the soul have usually considered it sacred.

These are indeed unoriginal sentiments, but they are terribly difficult, for me at least, to grasp cleanly and install as abiding tenets in my daily conduct. The soul (as I may as well call it) does not fare well in the world I live in. It is expected to justify itself, and by its very nature that is the thing it can’t ever do; I am inclined to say that, on the contrary, the soul is the standard by which everything else must find justification.

Of course my difficulties are not novel either. It’s likely that some of the richest social – and artistic – understanding of past civilizations can be found in the ways that humans contrived their worldview to reconcile the soul with what was detectable by the senses. The attempt has spurred humans to their most imaginative and inspired. In this context it is wonderful to learn about a subject like Middle Ages cosmology, which otherwise seems absurd and intellectually procrustean. But that extravagant celestial infrastructure – of concentric orbs, the primum mobile where God dwelt, and the sinful, central sublunary Earth, as well as the complementary theology of Satan’s rebellion, man’s fall, and his redemption – was a collective process of organizing reason with the irrational value of life. The same can be said for the worldviews of Plato, the authors of the Old Testament, the American transcendentalists, and no doubt many other groups I neglect to name.

I don’t think I overstate the case when I say that today, in the world to which I am accustomed, the soul and the physical world are completely incompatible. I don’t know if the cleavage between the two has ever been so wide; in any case, it is imposing.

It would be easy – and to some extent accurate – to blame the divide on the prevailing religious atmospheres in this country and, really, almost everywhere else. Orthodox and fundamentalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in proscribing easily verifiable facts about the physical world. Every religious worldview has had to insist (futilely) on some limit to human inquiry, but the level of incuriosity demanded now is staggering. The metaphysics offered by these groups is so haphazard and anachronistic that it is impossible for me to understand how any probing and open-minded person could rest content in them; with their arbitrary but fixed designs they exclude most of the educated world.

But as fun as it is to jeer fundamentalism, their influence is, for me at least, probably academic. After all, there are plenty of sects that have more harmonious and adaptable relationships with science. But whichever religious sect I chose, no matter how accommodating it might be, it will have God as its centerpiece. And I have no belief in God.

This is meant neither as a grand nor especially interesting statement. I don’t mean it to carry any implication; it is not code, it is not argument; it comes with neither historical nor political baggage. I don’t think it’s good or bad. (Though I have of course sometimes been ashamed of it and sometimes proud of it – these are moods, and I also experience them concerning girlfriends and haircuts.) It is simply true that I don’t believe in God, and while I think there is tons to learn from those who do, it would e nonsensical to search for finality in one of God’s houses.

There is an inexorable habit among secular humanists (with whom I may as well align myself) of outsourcing moral responsibility to religious groups and then grousing that those groups are derelict with their charge and don’t deserve it anyway. But it’s crazy to expect a temple to serve as the caretaker of your morality if you don’t give yourself over to the temple’s creed. If a person decides that he doesn’t believe in God, then God must become absolutely irrelevant to his understanding of the world. I can neither rely on believers nor blame them for my own difficulties.

One of the prime difficulties, moreover, is separating the soul from the domain of God, where it has rested for millennia. But, for my part at least, it is an essential challenge, since I believe in one and not the other. Only precedent combines the soul with God, and precedent is important but not inviolable.

I would be pleased to find myself mistaken, but it seems to me that the path to serious secular understanding of the soul is not particularly well trod. The most ambitious methodologists, those who have offered some sort of sketchy Key to All Mythologies on the way of the world, usually nix the soul, ascribing it to physical phenomena we haven’t yet figured out. Such proponents range from the arrogantly inept Daniel Dennett to the sweet and, when it comes to the Arts, almost naïf E.O. Wilson. (Wilson, however, along with his lifetime of research gave us a splendid word for the task I’m trying to describe here: concilience.)

The late Stephen Jay Gould proposed a paradigm that, in its becalmed neutrality, seems at first blush like a nice reconciliation. The realms of faith and science are, in his oft-repeated phrase “non-overlapping magisteria.” That is, they are separate but equally significant.

I don’t discount the success that Gould had with this formulation in his own life, but it seems to me that, as happily non-confrontational as the idea is it is not remotely true. And this is why the dilemma matters. What we know from faith and what we know from fact do overlap, ineluctably, all the time, in the hearts and minds of every person. Everything we do and everything done to us is the product of some mingling of faith and fact. The two can never be strained apart, and for that reason one is always being shrouded and compromised in our perceptions by the other. Our difficulty – at least mine – is less the limitations of fact (I for one very rarely run up against the terminus points of science and scholarship) than the inadequate recognition of the soul.

What does it mean to say that life possesses an unquantifiable, ineffable, and sacred worth? Because I believe it, I must be tacitly guided by the belief, but all is otherwise murky and unformed, hesitant and undeveloped. But surely the knowledge of the soul should be of the same bedrock importance as the knowledge of gravity, so that just as I would not do something that by the laws of gravity I would regret, I would not do something that my understanding of the soul would also make me regret, as certainly as if it were also a natural law.

And here, before I devolve into total abstraction, I wish to say that it is through creative art that the soul often takes the clearest and most distinct shape, pressing out under the skin of its physical form or glowing with a light not know in nature. So in art, just like in us, soul and matter effortlessly commingle. But the great artist, through innumerable crafts (and maybe some ineffable aid), can organize experience and capture what is formless and fleeting; whereas in real time we are dizzied by details and only seem to apprehend the incalculable worth of life by accident and by a glance we can’t recover.

The Stars of Savior Rock

2006-03-14T20:06:00.000-08:00

Those wishing to observe Lent this year have the standard habits to choose to go without. But instead of depriving yourself of cigarettes, red meat, or, God forbid, sex, I hazard to suggest an alternative: this year, for a single month, abstain from Bono.

It will be challenging. Bono’s decision to cross the artistic fourth wall into politics over the issue of African debt relief has proved to be worth the risk, and whether or not Africans have reaped much benefit from his solicitude, he has certainly been rewarded. Time’s Persons of the Year are with us forever (even Newt Gingrich), and that cover shot of Bulgari-ed Bono all but crowding out the unctuous, non-famous face of Melinda Gates is sealed in our cultural shrine. U2’s clean-up at the Grammy’s was pure anticlimax in comparison.

How does a rock singer get so big? Well, there are all those hits, of course, that still sound great to us twenty years later. But does that explain it – couldn’t it be that a higher power is at work? Bono, when asked about his fame, has said that he often feels like a dazzled fan on the outside, so enormous has U2 and his image become. This is intended as self-effacement, but notice it implies that his stature has grown greater than mortal hands could craft. “Not what I will, but what You will,” said Jesus, and no doubt Bono feels a closer kinship to the Gospels than the preachment on vanities in Ecclesiastes. But beware the artist who suspects he’s been appointed to help the world: he’s liable to give his pop album such a name as How to Dismantle an Atomic Weapon. (The reaction to this title was interesting. All the world knew it to be fatuous affectation, and all the world inclined to praise U2 for it anyway. Is our interest in nuclear disarmament so unreal that we could admire someone for blowing hot air about it?)

Of course there have been many hopeful cultural icons to spring from pop music and the present contender is unquestionably Coldplay’s Chris Martin. Martin’s songwriting was never deep, exactly, but the lyrics on Coldplay’s excellent first two albums have a romantic abandon and lovelorn pathos that are pretty damn charming when rendered in boyish falsetto. So I was unprepared for the case of the willies I experienced listening to X&Y. A brief sampling: “You’ll tell anyone who’ll listen but you feel ignored / And nothing’s really making any sense at all / Let’s talk.” “You see no meaning in your life / You should try.” “Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too.”

For this is the new Martin – Oxfam spokesman, husband of Gwyneth, megastar – and he too has been called upon to save us, in a style that creepily combines Jesus, L. Ron Hubbard, and Anthony Robbins. The single “Fix You” begins with a cathedral organ and builds to the catchy hook:
Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
The modesty of “try” is overwhelmed by the positively transfigurational image that precedes it.

“The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me,” sang John Lennon, who, for all of his proselytizing, at least could ridicule the messiah complex as it formed around him. Bono and Martin are too in awe of it to dare make jokes.

And to some degree we shouldn’t blame them – how can fifty million fans be wrong? We’re all numbingly familiar with seeing fame confused as intelligence (Donald Trump), fame confused as rebellion (Madonna, Fifty Cent), and fame confused as beauty (Paris Hilton!), but this incarnation – fame confused as virtue – is the most disturbing because it highlights the bottomless credulity of the human race. No kidding cults succeed, if people actually want Chris Martin, singer of rock songs, to fix them. I do hold out some faith, however, and believe that no one, not the least self-aware among us, want Bono anywhere near a nuke. At least not until he rises on Easter.

Democracy in America Today: Part 2

2006-02-28T11:26:00.000-08:00

Continuing the train of thoughts from the previous partial entry, I find that I still want to use an outsider’s perspective to make the most of my assessments, and I’ll still try to gain that toehold using the observations of Tocqueville. It is an odd thing to do, I readily admit, to look at a place I know directly and intimately from the platform of a time I hardly know at all; but Democracy in America is such a bright and lucid book I’m emboldened to keep trying.

Which brings us to the question of democratic involvement. How are Americans active in democracy now, and how do we insure that the government truly represents us? Most of the forms of participation we find enshrined in the Constitution, of which I pick out open elections, the right to vote, trials by jury, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and the right to petition the government.

Some of these rights very small roles in the lives of Americans. Jury duty is an excellent feature of our judicial system, because it makes citizens ultimately responsible for the conviction or exoneration of a fellow citizen. The system, flaws withal, seems to do fairly well in avoiding both Draconian extremes and anarchy, and the juror comes into closer touch with the complexities of law and civic justice. But an American sits for jury duty once or twice in his life, if at all. It is the most irregular of services, and easy to dodge due to its slightness.

Voting is more frequent; here is a duty we are called to perform once a year, though the one-or-the-other (or-the-other) decision for whom to cast the ballot consumes many months. But despite the apparent activity that surrounds elections, voting is another duty much ignored: at most, only half the population will be bothered to do it, and in small elections the percentage may not reach half of that. This must be one of the strangest features of America’s growth. On one hand, the equality of suffrage has caused some of the most tenacious social crusades in the country’s history; on the other hand, there has been a steady decrease in the number of people to care to enjoy this right.

The obvious reason that people don’t vote is that people think there’s no point to it. The paradox seems to be this: the elections on which average citizens can most effect the outcomes are local and close to home. But, as I wrote last entry, local governments are empowered for little more than comparatively petty concerns. The important the issue and the greater the chance that it has to arouse the passion of a person and inspire him to get involved, the higher up that issue is consigned within the chain of government. And the higher up it rises, the less accessible it is to the public. Governmental hierarchy is like an inverted pyramid, where the many gawp up at the broad roof of power from the plane of the tiny base immediately in their grasp. Even Americans that do vote cannot shake a sense of futility in the procedure – it’s rare that they’ll feel like they’ve just played a significant part of their own future by pulling the lever (or tapping the screen). The abiding sense that voters are incidental to the voting process is exacerbated not just by recent election scandals (though certainly by these), but by the concentration of campaigning in a very few happenstance portions of the country. This enervates the public zeal for campaign involvement, because to serve any purpose the campaigner usually has to leave his town, his state, and even his time zone.

I don’t mean to imply that the federal government is a walled fortress in which nothing meaningful can be accomplished. This is clearly not so. But it does seem that the current state bears out one of Tocqueville’s many predictions, when he suggested that government participation will be increasingly relegated to government professionals, those for whom campaigning and lobbying are careers as much as democratic duties. Thus government is left in the hands of the pros, who are paid to devote all their time to its services. These are assumed to be the only people who can get anything done.

It may be that Americans most successfully participate in democracy through collective organization and collective speech. The right to petition the government must be the most purely symbolic of all civil rights (it occurs to virtually no one to waste his or her time on it), but the force and momentum of associations seem equipped, through strength and volubility, to penetrate the central government. Tocqueville marveled at the quantity of news presses in America, which however biased or illiterate demonstrated the triumph of the average citizen making his voice heard. Likewise, Tocqueville was taken by the spontaneous generation of so many social action groups who demonstrated for causes ranging from abolition to temperance. This love of assembly and disseminated opinion seems to me to be still very much alive and important in American existence. Certainly we define ourselves to some degree by the parties and associations we belong to and the media sources from which we get our news, and certainly it’s through these party and group channels that we can practice some measure of self-government.

But even here I am beset by reservations. I fear that the measure of self-government is, in reality, so minute that it is almost negligible. For one thing, the media has evolved in the same inverted manner as central government, with more outlets consolidated into fewer hands. Needless to say, the more remote a newspaper and news program grows from the public, the more it will use them and the less it will serve them. Growth has also gelded much of the potency of assemblage. It seems as though there was a time when a concerted gathering of a few hundred people signified a movement that must be reckoned with, if not heeded – and to picture an auditorium full of united people is to think there is justice in granting the collection some amount of clout and attention, whether they are in the wrong or in the right. Yet it is almost laughable to imagine this sized grass roots organization making any waves in government at all.

Associations must have money (to purchase connections), and therefore the only really effective groups are the small corporate oligarchies that manage the country’s huge businesses, or else the immense composite groups that amass wealth through sheer volume. The former excludes the people, while the latter neutralizes them.

One recent example of large-scale assembly and demonstration seems to me to exemplify the current condition of these rights. One the eve of our latest war over 250,000 people (an extremely conservative estimate) gathered in 150 different cities here to protest the government’s intentions. This was a large assembly by any standards, without even considering the concomitant protests in the rest of the world. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that its effect on the government was nil. It’s not that the demonstration was disallowed. It’s that, apart from a few press statements, it was simply, and blandly, ignored. And while I would never suggest that a collective mass ought to be able to control policy, that such a large outcry could be met by impregnable, unflinching indifference seems to indicate a change in the working definition of democracy from earlier expectations.

I think a remarkable thing has happened here (made no less remarkable because Tocqueville predicted it): without having to forcibly abrogate the basic right of its constituents, a democratic government has, in the fullness of time, rendered these rights ineffectual. There exists a widening chasm between government and the people it was created to serve, but this separation has been forced without the recourse of tyranny and violence. Tocqueville described this state and I must now give him the floor.

“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observer is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest…he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, and mild… It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances… It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided. Such a power…does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

What is the point of government? The best answer I have heard – simple, cogent, yet comprehensive – is: to insure freedom for its people. If there is a single lesson I take from Tocqueville it is that freedom only means something if you've worked to earn it. Few people need work for it in America now – it is more like a legacy we’ve inherited – and therefore we’re content with a diluted, impotent form of it, a shadow of freedom.

The long passage quoted above, which would we now call Orwellian, does not exactly match with present reality, but much of it rings true. The loss of self-government would explain the pervasive sense of disaffection and psychological lethargy amongst Americans; it would explain the self-absorption and petty fixations with which so much of our art and culture is absorbed. How else could it be that we could possess so much wealth, the luxury of so much free time and space, technical innovations of amazing intricacy that provide unparalleled convenience, comfort, and stability, and yet still want for inspiration and, indeed, well-being? I do not want to appear ungrateful for the gifts I inherited simply by being a citizen of this country. But it seems clear that we are losing or have lost the democratic responsibility to work directly for our and our country’s future; and there is no other conclusion to draw but that but the abdication of one’s fate to a ruling body is a characteristic not of freedom but of slavishness.

Democracy in America Today: Part 1

2006-02-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

I have written elsewhere that Americans would profit from a reevaluation of the ideas Alexis de Tocqueville set down in Democracy in America in the 1830’s. I am not the person to do this – but on the other hand, I’ve explicitly created this blog to house my and my friends’ beliefs and observations, so I’m going to try, in miniscule proportion, to do it anyway. Democracy in America is, naturally, a study of American government, very much an experimental thing in 1831 when Tocqueville came here, but it’s also a study of American character with an especial eye on how the two inform one another. I’m going to take all my cues from Tocqueville; therefore, this essay will be, perhaps refreshingly, light on moral declaration and have more to do with analysis and assessment. Still, I won’t pretend to absent myself from my observations, and so judgments of some sort probably won’t be far from my lips.

A person raised in a mansion finds nothing extraordinary in the size and luxury of his home – it’s the smaller, weatherworn houses that he’ll find oddly lacking and deficient. Anyone who has grown up in America in the last half century – at the very least the last quarter century – will likewise take it for granted that they are part of a wealthy empire; it is a mere matter of fact that our country is the most powerful and influential in the world. How could it be any other way? we think. One of the many virtues of Democracy in America is, for this reason, perspective. The America Tocqueville chronicled was a republic, which in fact, to his eyes, still bore the attributes of a confederation of states. To cap my analogy, to be an American was more like growing up in a log house your family had built themselves.

This is just to say that the signal force that’s been at work between 1831 and 2006 is growth. There has been growth in geographical territory, growth in population, growth in capital, growth in foreign interest, and growth in central government. I have no doubt that a political scientist with a ratiocinative mind and a Stoic’s attitude could explain the inexorability of this growth (indeed, Tocqueville predicts a lot of it), but for the time being my concern is not how modern America happened, but what it is.

With the exception of purchases like Alaska and of the constellation of farflung islands and military outposts owned or leased by our government, most of America’s geographic growth is interior. In this, I think it resembles the sort of expansion Tocqueville saw and dubbed a “double emigration.” Foreign immigrants flocked to the eastern cities while established citizens moved progressively west. It is much the same today. Cities fill up and their pressure is relieved by suburban expansion; suburbs diffuse into exurbs and then into ruralities; real estate developers – our modern day prospectors – must stake out ever more recalcitrant land and make it habitable. Los Angeles and Phoenix are respectively the second and fifth largest cities in the country, and both have limited natural resources making them utterly unsuited to support such growth: their populations are maintained entirely by costly technical contrivances of astonishing ingenuity and almost blind and unthinking perseverance. The infrastructure of growth may be more precarious and incredible, but it is not new. The Coronado Trail begat the Transcontinental Railroad begat Route 66 begat the TransAir hourly shuttle. I think the Hoover Dam is essentially of the same tradition as the Erie Canal. Land is still thought of pragmatically, there for he who can use it, which is what makes America’s passion for preserved parks a remarkable example of a check such as exists between the branches of our government.

But this check that public servants possess to retard the dangerous excesses of private enterprise has not produced a stable balance. The government finds it fairly easy to dominate most private or small-community interests; small groups and individuals have a much harder time slowing the expansion of government. (What effect they do have I want to address shortly.) Today, federal and state government owns forty percent of the country’s land. (This percentage is not so self-explanatory - a lot of it is Alaska - and a breakdown can be studied at www.nwi.org/Maps/LandChart.html.)

But even though private citizens, even when organized, can place no long-term brake on government acquisition, in the main the government and the ambitious citizen are partners in this sort of interior growth. Related to this is the fact that there has never been any serious effort to curb immigration. Closed borders – really, any move toward isolationism – are inimical to the American spirit. It’s not only that Americans insist upon having chips in the pots of every foreign country; Americans also want to import the fruits of these cultures. True, whatever enters our country almost immediately is hybridized, possibly diluted, possibly altered to retain nothing but symbolic purpose. But for even provincial Americans, cultural commerce is a cherished given, and the only real question is whether, in observation of the golden rule of capitalism, buy low, sell dear, we are getting the best of the trade. Americans may resent the immigrant, but always empathize with and approve of the immigration.

(A resulting discrepancy is worth noting. Although immigration has never waned, the citizenship process has become more selective and gridlocked. What we have, then, are an increasing amount of illegal imigrants who, except that they are shut out of governmental processes and perks and are always in peril of deportation, live and work and raise families like anyone else. A recent approach to this discomfiting paradox has been to grant employee rights to non-citizens, making them something like half-citizens.)

But the population growth in the United States is only sympathetically related to the simultaneous growth of government. It can be seen that while the head count increases, a correspondingly smaller percentage of the population plays an active and significant role in the country’s governance. Government controls much, much more and is consolidated into far, far fewer hands.

During the time of Tocqueville’s visit, municipal and state governments were the most important civic bodies in an American’s daily life. This is demonstrably no longer the case. I don’t mean to say that the functions of smaller government are irrelevant, but their provenance is, on average, petty compared with the magnitude of the concerns dealt with by the federal government. On issues of health, prosperity, rights, freedoms, security, war, and peace – to wit, everything that most matters – Americans don’t look to their town center or state capital but to Washington D.C.

For the sake of focus and brevity (here’s hoping), I want to look at only two examples that characterize the expansion of the federal government. The first is the national draft. It is true that the draft is not presently in effect and the government that reinstated it would face considerable resistance and outcry (though I can’t help but think there would be even more along the lines of grumbling acquiescence). The point is that the government can reinstate the draft if it decides to, and this power has by no means always existed.

It certainly did not exist in 1831. Though there was a brief form of conscription in the wake of the War of 1812, it really took three destructive years of civil war, which had initially been fought on a volunteer basis, before a draft was imposed. Its imposition triggered one of the worst riots in the country’s history. Thus, through war, a line was crossed, and once done would be crossed with greater ease in the future. An inconceivable thing need be done only once before every one can conceive of it. The draft has recurred consistently over the last century and today males between eighteen and twenty-five are required to register with the Selective Service System, whose mission is simply to facilitate the draft when it’s next recalled. The important point is that Americans are now fairly well acclimated to the idea that the government has the right to conscript them into military service when it decides to invoke that right, and this constitutes no small change from the mentality of the early 19th century American who would have anathematized the notion that central government arbitrates the freedom to fight or not fight.

The second example regards taxation, and while it may seem less dramatic, it is perhaps a more salient demonstration of the pervasiveness of central government. The inevitability of taxes is axiomatic, but the forms that taxation takes are always in revision. Federal income tax is what most concerns the majority of Americans. And once again, this tax first appeared during the Civil War. (We should never take for granted how devastating this war was for our country, how much it redefined the role of government and the values we now live amidst.) Again, income tax was dropped after the war and the federal government, like the states, relied on excise taxes, indirect taxes based on consumption or use of goods and services like coal, sugar, transportation, bonds, and so on. (This is, needless to say, a cursory tax history with large omissions.) Interestingly, when income tax was first revived, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional because it was not apportioned, that is to say distributed proportionately based on populations; it was instead applied directly to the income of each person, bypassing state and census distinctions. In response, Congress passed the sixteenth amendment nullifying the obstacle of apportionment.

The upshot of this finagling is that the government now has the theoretical right to directly tax one hundred percent of an American’s income and to allow no deductions at all; moreover, no matter the implausibility of this extreme, Americans accept that a firsthand right to their money is inherently vested in their government. This too is no quibbling change.

I have painted a grim, libertarian-looking portrait of the draft and taxation to underline their not always conspicuous presence. But obviously the reality is there’s no draft today and there are of course tax limits and refunds. I haven’t forgotten that America is a democracy with a government still circumscribed by the desires of its constituents. What I would now like to examine are the ways we, the people, influence and participate in our government, and how this evolved relationship affects American culture and character.

But I have a fear of excessively lengthy entries on this site, so I have to beg your forbearance and save these thoughts for another installment, and in the meantime hope with you that they will prove more satisfactory and substantial than what came before them.

A Longer Look at a Street Pigeon: Part 2

2006-01-23T14:36:00.000-08:00

The contemporary question of animal rights, which took off about twenty-five years ago with such excitement and velocity that it almost immediately overshot the curve of reason, has been swamped in part, I think, because of the confused use of the word “rights.” Look again at the pigeon, with all its emotions and mysterious instincts. What are his rights and where did they come from? Did God grant him rights that we can divine from holy texts? The Golden Rule does not seem intended for pigeons.

Did humans give him rights? Are humans really his steward, as the old story goes? This might feel closer to the point. Feral pigeons, after all, are the derivative of domestic doves, the legacy of escaped pigeon-pets; they’re all over the Americas because, originally, our ancestors brought their ancestors here.

On the other hand, we have long ago stopped encouraging the street pigeon’s success – and it succeeds spectacularly. As with rats and mosquitoes, our generous stewardship to the pigeon has been utterly accidental and in spite of our general wishes, which rather gives the lie to the notion that we’re its stewards at all.

People, if they really set themselves to it, might be able to eradicate all pigeons, and is this sense we play a large and somewhat malevolent role in their fate; but this is no reason to pretend that we determine their rights. People can just as easily kill other people, but it won’t follow that my right to live is merely a preferment bestowed by someone with a loaded gun or a violent temper.
Does a pigeon even have a “right” to live? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are yet more assumed rights that don’t transfer to pigeons, or even really to two-year-old children. Such right hold in the context of social interaction between humans – they’re socio-political in context. But no one will invoke constitutional guarantees in the rare chance he’s menaced by a mountain lion. Likewise, nobody uses the word injustice when a peregrine falcon kills a pigeon cock and its squabs, chases off the mother, and steals the nest. There’s no injustice in an action that’s part of the nature of the longstanding inimical relationship between falcon and pigeon. It’s an uncomplicated relationship: one is predator, one is prey. The relationship between humans and street pigeons is pretty slim considering the close quarters we share, but it might be mildly more complex. In Trafalgar Square in London, for example, pigeons perch on people when people feed them, and habit has made this practice a pigeon’s right. In Trafalgar Square they may do it – it’s the rule – and to punish a pigeon for it would be an obvious violation and wrong. I would protest.

What are the inalienable rights between pigeons? I don’t know of course – as the preceding entry exposed, I’ve read only a few books on the bird – but I could make a few harmless and nonbinding leaps. The social contract between pigeons guarantees a certain fidelity between mates. If the cock didn’t sit on the egg and help with the feeding, no hatchlings could survive. Such behavior would be absolutely anathema. Pigeon families also need some separation and privacy from the roosts of others; they will fight very aggressively for this living space: it seems to be a right, if an unattractive one.

Be all this as it may, little of the above is typically intended when animal rights are at issue, which is why I’ve come to interpret animal rights as being in fact not more or less than another facet of human rights, and why I’ve come to think that when we hypothetically ask whether an animal has a right to live, we are really asking whether we have the right to kill it.

Do we have a right to kill street pigeons? Well, yes. At least I am unable to find any moral injunction that forbids it. We’ve got no special deal going with pigeons. They’ve grown to profusion in our cities due to their own hearty and parasitic initiatives, and almost entirely to our chagrin. Their populations inflate to their own peril. Pigeons are sensitive to territoriality, so it’s apt, in a way, that they suffer a price for infesting the territory of stronger, smarter others.

But a right does not necessarily equate to a good or reasonable thing. To refer for the millionth time to that great expression and distillation of human rights that is the U.S. Constitution, just because the KKK is vouchsafed the right to broadcast their views does not make their public processions any less ugly and pathetic. We engage in pigeon culling all the time, utilizing poisons and stupefying narcotics to make them easy to catch. This is our rights as stewards of ourselves, and it is also virtually always boneheaded and futile, predicated on ignorant scapegoating and the misinformed fear that the presence of pigeons is somehow unhealthy, more so than, say, the refineries hugging the city or the stuff of our fast food.

Humans have an obligation not to be stupid and vicious. We have an obligation not to be barbaric. These obligations are not part of any contract we have with pigeons, or with “Nature” as a whole (no such contract exists), but part of what we owe to other humans, certainly to our friends and family, unquestionably to ourselves.

Look again at the street pigeon. Familiarity has rendered him invisible, or else loathsome, but the slightest investigation makes him new and interesting again. His complexity confounds our egos. He lives a full and eventful life despite our indifference to it; and if we did suddenly decide to force its fate we might be offended to find the pigeon relatively nonplussed by our solicitude. Except in cases where people actually adopt a pigeon into their homes, we can only interest him shallowly. He’s still predominately occupied with mating, brooding, fighting, and feeding. Open a bag of bread and you’ll win his attention for a little while. Beyond that, our influence can only be harmful.

The pigeon possesses sensory abilities that humans can’t entirely fathom, much less imagine in ourselves, and therefore it struts about in defiance of the other implacable human conceit of ennui. When we decide to be bored by existence we imply that the world had somehow let us down: it’s not all we thought it was going to be. What exactly the human plagued by ennui is looking for is never made clear (“More than this,” might be the redundant reply). Complexity and mystery are not enough, at least for starters? And there both are, in the sooty, vaguely verminous bird bobbing its head and strutting about the sewage under the curb outside. The adamantly bored person expects that the world will perform for him. Yet the merest amount of engagement of his own volition would yield wonders; for if the pigeon contains wonders, so must everything.

Finding a street pigeon interesting is probably not the stuff of revelation, but it is important nonetheless. Maybe simple interest and appreciation are the proper starting points in our relationship with it. We’ve gone astray by pretending that environmental protection is part of some lofty philanthropic project, the largesse of humans toward all underdeveloped but still cute creatures – that it’s not actually all about checking our own self-destructive excesses. Environmentalism is almost strictly self-interested and self-preservative. But maybe it’s only when we cease to regard ourselves as the center of creation will we start to do a better job looking out for our own well-being.

In one of her splendid nature essays Annie Dillard wrote, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Her springboard to eloquence was not the poor pigeon (actually, it was a mockingbird), but the concept could still apply to this most overlooked of animals. It’s worth looking harder. An unclear notion of cosmological rights and responsibilities is not going to much hinder our uncanny urge to despoil our own habitats. That urge, fed by blindness, will only be tempered by active interest in the complex and wonderful lives of species not ours, and the recognition that the beauty and wonder outside the glass is elemental to our well being within.

A Longer Look at a Street Pigeon: Part 1

2006-01-15T17:43:00.000-08:00

It’s winter in the city and the view outside is bleak. No one’s on the street. Unused scaffolding smothers the opposite apartments and the dormant, leafless trees are beribboned with plastic bags. We might wish heartily that it were spring, that the blossom was bright on the locust trees, that the neighbors were walking around, barbecuing on the corner, telling stories (we’ve already forgotten how irritating we find their loud music). But we’re desperate and all that’s out there is a fat, strutting pigeon, bobbing its head and walking around the black, greasy water under the curb. And yet it happens that in that one bird there is a story.

No one has ever noticed it, or even considered noticing it, but our fat pigeon has been coming to this street corner every day for over three years. There’s a food stand and so French fries and crumbled buns are usually flecked across the street and walk. In any event, our pigeon’s making no attempt at secrecy: unlike other identically plumaged birds, his colors give him away. He the one with the checkered back and rump, the little sprigs of white above the tail and in the coverts, and dark-gray primaries, toughened up by their melanin contents. He’s on the corner every day if you want him.

What does he do there? He eats, mostly: this is one of his feeding grounds. Our pigeon, like his brethren, is wonderfully incurious about most of the great world around him, is sturdily oblivious to most everything that moves past, even more so than the passing humans, but he is methodical about food. A lot of eating is experimentation, and like a connoisseur he’s got to sample the street jetsam before deciding if he can eat it – although no such regard is needed with the manna that is a cold French fry. He’s also got to digest his food, so for crop and stomach grit he pecks at building mortar, which also has calcium-rich lime.

A human has over 9,000 taste buds. Our pigeon has thirty-seven. So his connoisseurship, though terrifically catholic, is not so refined.

He’s alone right now, but there’s a flock he sticks with that has just flown on to the next feeding ground. He’ll go eventually, but the truth is that our pigeon is bobbing along the gentle downslope of old age. He’s virtually never seriously alarmed – except for the rare car sideswipe and the rarer hawk or owl attack there’s nothing to kill him – and he’s no longer aroused. For whatever incalculable reason, he’s lost interest in mating, even though the flesh and feathers are still strong.

It wasn’t always so! Our pigeon’s salad days began around two years ago, on this very corner. It was a large hearty bird even then and it hadn’t needed to be around a mating ritual but a few times before the urge came on him and, with an absolute lack suavity or stealth, he waddled up to a female with becoming blue wing-bars (though it wasn’t all her looks that drew him) and towered over her, craning his next and doing something very like standing on tiptoes. Then he bowed, walked a bit dragging his fanned tail. The female was charmed. Eventually their foreplay would include companion preening and the placing of one's beak in the other’s – but at this moment our swain stood on his lady’s back and in the few seconds of upheld balance he fertilized her.

A feeling of triumph and uncharacteristic abandon flooded him after the deed, impelling him charismatically, almost violently, to flight. He coursed like an arcing missile over the roofs, twisting now, showboating, and clapping his wings over his back with such force that some people on the walk glanced up and then, seeing only a pigeon, looked back down.

And so commenced, in a matter of unpremeditated instants as it is with every species, our pigeon’s life of parenthood and husbandom. The change was not altogether apparent. He still came every day to this corner, still squabbled with other birds over wretched pieces of trash, and still strutted around with the preposterous gait that seems one part fussy and one part moronic. Yet these days his life was full of pitch and moment. There were constantly nests to build with his wife in the top floor of an excellent gutted building: he supplied the material and she made rather pitiful platform nests from it. There were eggs to sit on, a job necessarily shared. There was a home to guard, usually from starlings, who were never large enough to depose our pigeon, but were pertinacious in their attempts anyways.

Then there were squabs to raise. Over half would ultimately die early on, which was always distressing, but with six broods a year for over two years at two eggs a brood our couple more than replenished themselves. At first the squabs subsisted on a repulsive curd-like crop-milk regurgitated by their mother; but quickly they matured enough to take the tastier regurgitations of their parents’ diet. When they fledged they tended to stay with the flock for a while longer, if not permanently. But our single-minded pigeon had new eggs to worry over and ceased to regard the adolescents as his responsibility – or even as his kin.

His lady was a constant mistress of marvelous fertility, but she had a slighter constitution and so died of old age advanced somewhat by various nagging parasites and diseases. Our pigeon had been equally constant, affectionate, and reliable in the discharge of all his duties; now he forgot his wife ever existed. He returned to a perforce more lackadaisical routine. These days he takes more naps. He preens like it’s prom night to no end but his own comfort. He sunbathes and is easily drawn to a succulent sunny patch of concrete. He has never lost his taste for French fries.

He doesn’t reflect, consider, imagine, hope, regret, or remember. Basically he’s wholly absorbed by the possible edibility of a spent match by the curb, and such absorption is hardly more than an impulse. But sometimes his impulses acquire an extraordinary vigor, and when he’s on the wing the former post-coital passion streaks through him. He can still hit forty miles per hour when he flies, and he could easily fly hundreds of miles without a rest. With a combination of homing devices, such as sight navigation, magnetic sensitivity, ultrasonic recognition, and even an advanced sense of smell, together so subtle that humans can’t figure them out, he could be removed from the state and fly straight back to his roost. He has incredible powers unpolished and unspent.

He’ll never spend them. He ends his flight a mile away at the next feeding spot, with monumental indifference rejoining his flock.

Our pigeon has disappeared from the street and the window-tableau is totally empty and this voyeur, now alone, realizes that his essay has not yet met the stated purpose of this blog. That will have to come in the thrilling second installment of this entry!

Speaking for Others

2005-12-16T20:16:00.000-08:00

It is one of the peculiarities of experience to discover that loneliness is only partially the result of being alone, and often an unmentionably minor part at that. The bromide is too odd to be taken on straight trust, but eventually its truth becomes plain: the loneliest people are frequently the busiest and the most social.

Without wishing to trespass on the territory of pharmaceutical companies, I would merely venture to suggest the connection between being lonely and preponderating one’s time with artificial interactions. A half-dozen layers of cotton will make you much colder than a single wool sweater.

But if being alone is thought well of as a reprieve from day to day distractions and chickenshit, it isn’t a condition extended much value beyond the medicinal. Usually it is considered not so good to be alone. Physically it can be unsafe – take a friend or two when going out. In the world of thoughts, the idea that attempts to survive on its own is even more imperiled, even more vulnerable to being blotted out by the tide of contrary opinions and social pressures. An idea, too, wants support. And just as we’d like the people we go out with to be capable of defending us, we want our views backed up in the most persuasive ways possible.

But this gets troublesome. Humans are exasperatingly variable. A man who has agreed with you nine times is prone to disagree the tenth. Or perhaps his stature will decline from one week to the next – his support will no longer carry any weight; it might even be a liability. The truth is that the person who seconds your point of view can’t be trusted as far as he can be thrown. He is perpetually apt to betray you with an idea of his own.

I dwell on this because I would like to be able to explain the universally human habit of turning to dead historical figures in order to justify a present day opinion. It’s a curious tendency because it’s an isolated one. After all, the study of history is not exactly a vogue these days. There is little public importance attached to understanding the views of humans whose bones have been dust for centuries. It is more or less assumed that the gone are bygone and that history is better left to the specialists. When it is taught it is done so in the condensed, recapitulated, repackaged form absent of primary texts (the actual writing of historical figures) and preservative-heavy with dates, place names, and lessons to carry away.

And yet when a person prepares to voice a conviction, his first move is usually to demonstrate that certain eminent dead people agree with him.

Consider the current employment of America’s Founding Fathers. These interesting, learned, revolutionary, periwigged white gentlemen have become the end-all arbiters of political, social, and even moral thought in the United States; but their authority, it seems to me, is less vested in what they actually said and did than in their unimpeachable mythological status as our “Fathers” – and in their convenient position of deadness.

It’s these qualifications that make them such excellent rhetorical trump cards, and that they recorded a lot of compelling and multifarious ideas is merely an added benefit. In a pinch, with a little skillful perusal of old texts, at least one of these men can be made to support any opinion it’s possible to take. If you’d like them to be God-fearing penitents of humble cloth, it’s easy to make them talk this way; if you’d prefer them to be gruff heretical atheists, this is easy too. You can make them noble and you can make them wicked in the same amount of time (because just as they can be used to bolster a sentiment, by showing them to be evil they are equally useful in weakening a competing opinion).

We see this work most visibly, and most farcically, in politics, where interpreting the words of the Founding Fathers is not just an expedient, but an official government process. It has ever been (probably accurately) assumed that humans are incapable of working together and figuring things out for themselves, and so must revert for their decisions to the Constitution. America obviously has a superb constitution or else it would not have persisted as it has, but even so there is something touchingly pathetic about people of no little brilliance giving all their talents to trying to extract from a few writings how the Fathers would have felt about Affirmative Action, Internet file sharing, and the public display of the Ten Commandments, issues so beyond the pale of these men’s experiences that they couldn’t possibly have had a thought about them. The result is a legal charade of contorting the words of dead people to sound perfectly applicable in the modern instance. (And the results of this, very often, are our laws.)

This sort of circumscription on thought might be a necessary evil in matters of government, but why would we want to impose it upon our personal lives? Nobody actually hinges their convictions on the approbation of Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, smart as those men assuredly were. The promiscuous way in which the words of all these men are routinely tweaked, filtered, and bowdlerized gives the lie to most alleged respect for them: we make them say what we want said.

The only Founding Father I’ve really studied in depth is Thomas Jefferson, an individual worth one’s time if there ever was one. What a restless mind he had, at this moment grappling with theories of social justice, at the next the botany of tidewater Virginia; reading him provides points where you want to cheer out loud for his bravado and brilliance and others that make you groan over some squirely pomposity. I’ve felt almost grateful that Jefferson compromised his personal life enough that he is less vacuously mythological in public discourse. But conversely, even his personal views are now taken as pretext to patronizingly assume his voice.

A book was recently published called The Jefferson Bible, and it is extremely interesting food for thought. It’s basically his redaction of the Gospels, in which all the miracles are deleted, which Jefferson thought were the later inventions of apostles, leaving mostly the parables, the sermons, and the other elements of moral instruction. You might think that this book could speak for itself, but it is accompanied by a preface by Percival Everett to make sure that it doesn’t. In the preface Everett concocts an imaginary interview between himself and Jefferson in which Jefferson utters exceedingly stupid and racist remarks, and therefore defines himself as an exceedingly stupid and racist person. The point seems to be to make sure that the reader knows what Jefferson is about, according to Everett, before he traipses unprepared into the man’s own writing.

Even here in his own book he must not be allowed to speak for himself. We must always speak for him, to make sure that one way or another he confirms us in our own opinions.

In fact, what happens when we read Jefferson without being inclined to suborn him to our own devices is that, apart from learning a lot, we find the same exasperating human nature we find in living people. I have said that it is important that such men be dead and literally unable to speak for themselves, but the magic of the recorded word is the effect of telepathy it can give between writer and reader. By really studying people’s words they do come alive; we begin to know them personally; we may love them, we may heatedly dislike them, and, as so often happens, we may feel a paradoxical mingling of the two; sometimes, by the mysterious process ever at work in determining such things, we may get to know them as friends.

The dead person most frequently connected to by these means is of course Jesus Christ, the apotheosis of the mythological figure in Western Civilization. By saying that I’m giving away my disbelief in him as an actual God (such a belief hangs simply on a certain faith, which many possess and I do not), but I do see him as being godlike, resembling no other deity than ancient Proteus.

Jesus is remarkable because people can interpret him to be absolutely anyone and anything they want. He can be all nationalities, races, and ethnicities; he can be a socialist, a centrist-conservative and an absolute monarchist; he can be a slaveholder and an abolitionist (as Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out, he was presumed to be on the side of both the Confederacy and the Union, though what Lincoln extrapolated from this observation has always seemed to me less than clear). Jesus can be a fiery warmonger and a lamblike pacifist; a canny businessman and an antimaterialist ascetic; a head-in-the-clouds loner and a devoted and loving friend; a sagacious stoic and an nervous post-adolescent drawn to whorehouses; a Jew all the way from sidecurl to circumcision and a merely nominal Jew-deploring Jew; a teetotaler and a wine-lover; a family man and one who urged all to abandon their families; a calm, probing teacher and a frenetic millenarian; one quick to forgive and one quick to condemn. A friend of mine much given to introspection once told me (in different words) that he found the keystone to understanding Jesus in his forty days and nights of meditation. When I relayed this to another friend, a manual laborer not in the least given to meditation, he was thrown into a mild pique: “Jesus was a carpenter,” he said. To him this was the much more important attribute. But of course both are justified. Jesus can epitomize the diligent tradesman and the motionless meditator.

I tend to like this person-to-person shape shifting, because very often (so I’ve noticed) Jesus is fashioned into the personal ideal that the fashioner, in his or her best moments, aspires to. As may be obvious from these posts, I also feel a kind of adulation for this fellow – I think it’s hard to feel otherwise after reading the Gospels – and have also used the vivid but factually scant material of his life to create him in an (admittedly ambiguous) image that I can connect with.

I can therefore agree or disagree with what Jesus said and what I imagine him to have been. But what I can’t do is pretend that he agrees with me, that he is metaphysically ratifying my beliefs and annulling those of others, at least without performing the sort of macabre ventriloquism that accompanies so much argumentation. The extreme pole of this thinking, which is nevertheless arrived at with unnerving regularity in the progress of humans, is something like the auto-da-fe, but at its lowest frequency it transmits a smugness and social bullying that lames individual thought and every other right we might consider inalienable. There is really no more depressingly dead Jesus than the character a man props up beside him in order to appear strong and unassailable. Jesus is not just reduced to a vapid sloganeerer in these circumstances – he’s reduced to a slogan.

Having already suggested that loneliness is increased by meaningless interactions, I can only suggest further that a terrible sterility and emptiness hovers close behind the habit of treating others as though they are little more than impressive receptacles to fill with one’s own words. There’s really no honest way of making people agree with us all the time. A person, I think, does indeed have to stand alone with his ideas, and even in his actions. But he looks to friends for the strength to do so – not expecting that they think the same as him, but that they buoy him up notwithstanding any disagreement. It is another eye-opening discovery to find reliable friends in a variable world. And if we allow the authors and characters of the past to speak their own, we might find that we should never be lonely.

The Fiction Machine

2005-12-14T20:15:00.000-08:00

In R.K. Narayan’s novel, The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear and the hapless man squanders the family savings.

Still, if Narayan floated the idea ironically forty years ago, today a short story machine is probably within technology’s grasp. Given a set of common parameters, say a five thousand word story with three scenes for introduction, development, and climax, and a finite field of predetermined variables – character names, settings, activities, dialogue tropes, and so on – a literate engineer could surely create a serviceable program for a break-up story, for an adultery story, and for other like favorites in the field.

This is but fancy; however, I was reminded of Narayan’s machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006, an anthology of stories from young writers guest edited by Jane Smiley. The book gives such a desultory vision of the future of American letters that one can only hope it is wrong. Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person. Almost the same percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a Presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree – in any event the things the characters do is always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts. From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty; but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found.

Even the style of writing, which ought to be the distinctive thumbprint of every author, displays a numbing verisimilitude. The first person voice is always a lazily generalized vernacular at significant moments jazzed up with consciously poetic frills in the exposition.

Finally, most of these stories end with a symbolic “moment of clarity” in which nothing happens, but a change has been imperceptibly arrived at. Two examples will make the point. Melanie Westerberg’s “Watermark,” about an aquarium employee fretting over her missing sister, ends: “When I resurfaced, I floated on my back. I kept my eyes open and followed the contours of the ceiling, held gently inside a round room.” The end of Jamie Keene’s “Alice’s House” reaches an apogee of immobility: “It’s a little after midnight when the phone rings again. It seems as if it’s ringing forever, but finally it stops, abruptly and absolutely. And it’s quiet again, and I’m alone.”

The stories in this collection are heavily indebted to a certain “type” and that is why it is no surprise that every one of the writers included have one more thing in common: they have all attended writers’ workshops, either in graduate programs or in similarly organized writing fellowships.

Writers’ workshops, for their ubiquity, are presently the most significant phenomenon influencing American literature. Enrollment into them has become de rigueur for people with a calling to write, and is assumed by increasing numbers (including publishers) to be as necessary a first step toward a writing life as college is toward a professional life. But because the self-styled “Best” of these workshops comprise such a poor lot of dull, mechanical stories, it becomes necessary to reevaluate the growing dependency on workshopping. What goes on in these programs, and how do they influence today’s writers, for ill or for good?

A bit of disclosure is needed to begin. I attended the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing program between 2002 and 2004, from which I received an MFA. This was almost entirely a good experience: I had great friends amongst my peers and beyond, I came to love the odd and beautiful city of Tucson, and, because I held a Teaching Assistantship, I received a generous stipend for work that still left me huge spaces of free time in which to write, a luxury I’ve thought wistfully of ever since.

There is, then, nothing invidious about my criticism of writing programs. If I find fault, it’s not as an alumnus, but as an avid reader who has had the advantage of seeing first hand how these programs work.

Not that my experience was necessarily definitive – I would only be entitled to that claim if I had attended what is roundly agreed to be the sine qua non of writing programs, the Ur-Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Indeed, the creative writing degree program began here as far back as 1897, and the Workshop (with breezily unconscious arrogance, the capital “W” is still used) started in 1937. The early decades were remarkably distinguished, both for the student body and the professors – names like Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver are still spoken of reverentially as leading figures in an era when Iowa City was almost what Paris and Greenwich Village had been to literature before it. The Workshop (and I am only focusing on fiction, though the same went for poetry) prided itself on being an elite corps – as a teacher in the sixties, Roth wrote that “Part of our function is to discourage those without enough talent” – and for however much this made for snobbery (like Paris and Greenwich village, it must have been a rather snobbish place) the ultimate aim was not just elitism but great writing.

This was many years ago. In the passing generations Iowa’s once rich bloodline has become increasingly anemic; the truth is that, with the possible exception of Marilynne Robinson, who teaches there, no major writer has come out of the Workshop in decades. Yet today, when workshops (with a lower case “w”) are found in nearly every University across the country, these glory days are perpetually referenced, in, perhaps, an involuntary need by workshop participants to justify themselves. In another such apologia, a professor of mine once regaled our class with stories about the famous friendship between Ernest Hemingway and his mentor Gertrude Stein (of which Hemingway renders an ungratefully one-sided picture in A Moveable Feast). “That,” my professor said, spreading his hands toward us in an expansive gesture, “was a workshop.” By implication, what we were doing in that classroom followed directly in the footsteps of the masters.

Wine and discussion of writing in Stein’s Parisian parlor room may or may not be rightly called a workshop. Nevertheless, it bears no resemblance to the workshops at present. And it is not so very hard to strip away the nostalgia, defensiveness, and self-sustaining bias to see, with pretty fair objectivity, exactly what today’s writing programs are.

First of all, the writers’ workshop is an academic institution. Creative Writing students don’t think of themselves as having any kinship with medical or business students, and this difference is to some extent confirmed by the total academic leniency they enjoy. Even so: every year ten to twenty new students will arrive (again, not taking into consideration poetry, screenwriting, or nonfiction students) and the same number will shuffle away with diplomas. Most programs are two years in length and usually the size of every individual workshop is proportional to class size: a dozen people is about average.

Immediately we have nullified perhaps the most crucial aspect of the “workshops” of lore. The tête-à-tête mentorship between Stein and Hemingway, Flaubert and de Maupassant, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and even John Fante and Charles Bukowski are impossible in this setting. Twelve is a small class for other studies, especially those based on lectures, but it is unwieldy to say the least for the cultivation of something as personalized as writing. Even the most remarkable professor could not be expected to strike up an intimate and meaningful rapport with an aspiring artist – and all great mentors must also be friends – when there are literally a score of new bodies plopping down before him or her every twelvemonth in search of a guide.

More on these professors. The only prerequisite to teaching in an MFA program for writing is that you have published a book – or, if not a book, enough stories to buff up a resume. Of course, it’s not easy to publish a book, but of all the ways in which to claim instant legitimacy and mastery in a field, publishing a novel or book of stories is one of the easiest as it circumvents the years and years of understudy research academicians must put in before they may don the title of professor.

Due to the huge proliferation of workshops, you need not be, or write anything that exists in the same galaxy as, Flaubert and Tolstoy to assume to honored mantle of respected “expert” on the art of writing. Consider the fiction professors at the University of Houston and Johns Hopkins University, which I have chosen here for no reason except that the schools were tied for second (behind Iowa) in a U.S. News & World Report ranking for Creative Writing Programs: Robert Boswell, Chitra Divakaruni, Antonya Nelson, Robert Phillips, Daniel Stern; Mark Farrington, William Loizeaux, and Paul Maliszewki. Now, admittedly, it is not quite fair to pick out these names – these men and women may in fact be exceptionally devoted teachers and fine writers to boot. But as a sample cross-section, they are certainly not names that cry out “literary mastery” – and because there are so many teaching slots and so few truly accomplished writers, a large proportion of professors will be men and women of mediocre talent who, like most writers, published or no, have yet to create anything great, anything that will live beyond them.

The conclusion you invariably draw from seeing the endless lists of mediocrities and unproven talent that comprise the faculties of writing programs, fellowships, retreats, and seminars is that these people ought to spend more time writing and less time holding forth on the art of writing for money. But this brings us to the second fundamental fact of the writers’ workshop: professors teach primarily as a means of supporting themselves as writers.

This was in fact one of the founding intentions of the writing program – a way to give writers time and money to write; a form of patronage – and it was a noble intention indeed until writers began to make half-hearted careers out of what was meant as a short term sinecure. The plan began to go awry once writers became so accustomed to the relatively cushy role of “professor” that they took for granted – as is universally taken for granted today – that they were qualified to teach writing without even having arrived as great writers themselves. An enfeebling paradox results: professors with little calling to teach give only part of their attention to their classes, yet they devoutly cling to their positions, sometimes for the rest of their lives, vacillating in a vocational purgatory, neither wholly writing nor wholly teaching.

Let us briefly recapitulate. Large, impersonal, ever-shuffling workshops are led by writers of, on average, mediocre ability who throw only part of their energy into helping their students. The result of all this is as predictable as it was inevitable: writing is taught by rote. Limited in time and care and needing to satisfy at once a wide range of very different would-be writers, professors must rely on the crutches of formula.

This means rules. This means, as I see it, doctrine.

It might be thought that every professor would teach differently – and it is true that one of the challenges of being a workshop student is sussing out the varying tastes of your professors in order to qualify their criticism. But the far larger trouble is the extent to which the rules that are taught agree. As in psychology and law (and franchise coffee shops) a workshop-specific lexicon has been born, and its terminology is common, with minor variations, to every writing program in the country. And thanks to the noisome cottage industry of “Books on Writing” – invariably authored by people who have never written anything of significance – the buzzwords may be standard usage to the reading public too.

A Story, as it progresses, is counterbalanced by a Backstory, which informs the reader what of importance happened beforehand. Both Story and Backstory must have a pronounceable Why Now, a meaningful reason that they are being told (an Aboutness). Regarding meaning and significance, the writer should Show Not Tell through recurring Central Metaphor rather than through dry explanation of what is being felt. Furthermore, a good story has an apt and memorable Voice and conveys a strong Sense of Place.

I’ll stop there, though I could continue. These rules of Craft – for every workshop maintains the defensive distinction that while you can’t teach writing you can teach Craft – of course have a lot of original validity. Certainly, for example, there’s much to be applauded in the art of evoking a character’s anger without writing, “He was angry.” (Though sometimes “He was angry” suits just right.) And if the term Show Don’t Tell were one tool out of many that a perspicuous teacher used to aid a specific student in a particular situation, then it would be all to the good.

But recall that except in exceptional cases professors need a common denominator with which to teach a group of students of all degrees of talent and taste. Consequently, Show Don’t Tell becomes one of the rules in a standardized how-to checklist. The rules, I think, come to resemble the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which is used to boil down matters of deep complexity for easy consumption by the masses of the laity. A few objections to the rules may have already crossed the reader’s mind: books such as War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Ulysses shatter all notion of common law rules of fiction; what is great about the stories of Chekhov, Isaac Babel, and Eudora Welty can’t remotely be explained in the way they toe a structural line; or, as I have already tried to show, although every story in Best New American Voices 2006 is infallibly faithful to workshop formula, none are noticeably good. All of these objections should be immediately fatal to the premise of didacticism in craft, yet they are all routinely shrugged off as caveats (Moby Dick as a caveat!), explained away by the one all-obliterating fallback “rule” that I’ve heard in every workshop I’ve ever attended: You Can Do It If You Can Get Away With It. Tolstoy, Melville, and Joyce “Got Away With It,” but, by implication, you probably can’t and shouldn’t try.

These are some of the rules encountered by graduate students and more advanced participants of writing seminars. The rules for undergraduates are even more invasive. Here the discrepancy between class size and professorial involvement is stretched even further – to the point that workshops are taught by graduate students and the only whiff a young aspiring writer will get of a writing instructor is in a packed lecture hall. The class that I taught was assigned a course packet and there, on the first page, were the following rules: Never begin a story with a character waking up in bed; Never write a scene where a character looks at himself in a mirror; Never use the word “stuff.” And on and on.

These rules aren’t exactly arbitrary. Having a character gaze into a mirror is evidently an involuntary reflex for amateurs and writers without talent. But the rule makes no allowances for the possibilities of a mirror scene in the hands of a writer with talent. (See, for example, Katherine Manfield’s “Prelude.”) This gets to the crux of the danger of the workshop: doctrine is imposed with the working assumption that everyone is a mediocrity. If obeyed, it grades down the spiky brilliance of the talented and leads to the limited elevation and refinement of hacks.

Students are generally complicit in the dilution of literature through formula – the second-hand experience of a catechism instead of an immediate connection to God to, perhaps, strain my comparison – because it spares them the possibility of being unceremoniously told that they’re not good enough. The prevailing atmosphere of study, then, can hardly be called rigorous. Most of the assigned books are contemporary works; things written before 1920 are largely ignored; ancient classics (which often times Universities relegate to a Classics Department, separate from the literature program) are even more difficult to synthesize into the workshop paradigm and are generally left untouched. Given the choice between studying great books and learning rules, students tend toward the latter, which is why more read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and E.M. Forster’s Aspects of a Novel than actually study the fiction of these writers. (But truly, does this not have a striking resemblance to the old Church policy of having an exclusive synod explain what the Bible says while discouraging followers from reading the thing themselves?) As for grammar and mechanics, the only aspects of writing actually governed by rules, they are considered beneath the contempt of creative minds and are likewise omitted from study.

Such diminishing standards are made possible by what is the final fact about writers’ workshops: success as a student is gauged by the act of publication.

On one hand, publication – the approbation of a certain editor – is a good thing and a real watermark in many writers’ growths. But with such a vast amount of obscure small presses – the ratio of literary journals to writing programs is almost one to one – the importance of having a story picked up is extremely mitigated. Or it should be, but is not because of the tangible benefits a few minor publications can afford a writer, regardless of the actual quality of the stories. Publication, which is often aided by the commendation of a professor, can lead to a teaching position. (Remember that literary journals are normally run out of Universities.) And so as each generation perpetuates itself with a system of high rewards for low returns, and grows progressively weaker through inbreeding, the formulaic doctrine of Craft is ever more cemented into the consciousness of writers. Completely lost in this self-fulfilling rigmarole is any notion of writing something great, something for the ages.

A popular anecdote that sheds light on an earlier epoch of American literature has F. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh out of Princeton, saying to his fellow alumnus Edmund Wilson, “I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?” There is naiveté in the statement and there is hubris, but the boast also expresses a serious pursuit of greatness that is beautiful and quite spine tingling to any young writer who also feels within him or her the powerful welling of undeveloped talent. But today, such a statement would most likely be met with muffled embarrassment in a workshop, which values the practical ends of publication and employment over this sort of dreaming.

I have no doubt, similarly, that some readers have found the peppering of names like Tolstoy and Flaubert throughout this essay to be mildly grasping and pretentious, irrelevant to the contemporary state of things. But isn’t it discreditable, even insulting, not to hold today’s writers to the very highest standards existent? If we admire trailblazers and iconoclasts from the past, why is it any less the artist’s duty today to independently make his or her own rules, through study, trial and error, intuition, and, yes, help from friends?

Possibly no writers who are indeed appointed for greatness will be much affected by the dangers listed here. Perhaps they will glean what is good in a workshop – the wonderful encouragement to write, the literary camaraderie, the free time, and, if they are very lucky, the close and caring tutelage of an experienced author; and perhaps they will ignore all that is doctrinal to take their own road. But the evidence from books like Best New American Voices volubly suggests otherwise. And as workshops grow in number, expanding to inculcate more and more impressionable minds, we can only wonder what is being lost amidst an institution that, unintentionally but inexorably, conspires to discourage daring greatly as both irregular and impractical.

The Itinerant Mind

2005-12-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

In his endlessly thought-provoking book, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan attempts to give meaning to an aspect of Jesus’ life that most people consider incidental, that is his role as an itinerant healer and preacher.

Sometimes itinerancy is merely practical, Crossan writes, as was the case with the missionary Paul of Tarsus, and this would also have been true of Jesus if he had moved about so frequently simply to elude Roman authorities who wanted to arrest him. But Crossan reads more into it. The Roman Empire, in which a few had a lot and most had little, functioned socially on the basis of patronage, wherein power and wealth could be bestowed from a rich patron to a poorer client, usually through the brokerage of some kind of middleman. “Patronage and clientage, at their best, gave hope or chance to individuals among the lower classes, but at their worst they confirmed dependency, maintained hierarchy, sustained oppression, and stabilized domination.” Yet such a hierarchy was the norm and Jesus was entirely expected to live within it, once his exploits as a healer and man of particular supernatural powers became apparent. “What Jesus should have done, as any Mediterranean family knew, was settle down at his home in Nazareth and establish there a healing cult. He would be its patron, the family would be its brokers, and as his reputation went out along the peasant grapevine, the sick would come as clients to be healed. This would have made sense to everyone, would have been good for everyone…but instead Jesus kept to the road.”

Jesus chose itinerancy, to the confusion and annoyance of his family and Disciples. (Crossan pinpoints Jesus’ words upon leaving Capernaum, where he had astonished all and sundry with miracles, as rendered in the first chapter of Mark: “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out.”) By staying on the move, he is denying the servitude implicit in the patron-client hierarchy. And he will give no specific place the mythic power that would make its overseers masters above its visitors. “Instead,” Crossan concludes, “[Jesus and his followers] go out to the people and have, as it were, to start anew each morning. But, for Jesus the Kingdom of God is a community of radical or unbrokered equality in which individuals are in direct contact with one another and with God, unmediated by any established brokers or fixed locations.”

The calamity that results from investing a place with irrational powers is pretty amply demonstrated by, amongst other sites, the ongoing tragedy of Jerusalem, for ownership of which many millions of people have killed and been themselves slaughtered. I have visited this city and prostrated myself before its holy shrines and I can absolutely attest to the power and sense of timelessness that radiates from its old gray stones, and which do even feel divine. Yet I know that no sane person, if given the stark choice, would prefer the death of a single innocent to the immediate demolition of the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Garden of Gethsemane.

But I am interested here in considering itinerancy on a personal level, because I have come more and more to believe that it is a pertinent and too easily discarded aspect of a moral life. Why move, and why especially if you have begun to carve a comfortable niche in your present situation? Why give that up to have to start again from scratch?

Moving, it seems to me, is closely related to learning. Why learn anything new, it could also be asked, if you can get along well enough with what you already know? This is of course an objectionable idea, yet the hardships of tackling a brand new subject are not at all mitigated by the consensus that the work has value: studying new things cold is intimidating; it is humbling; it is quite frequently humiliating.

Likewise, everyone who has moved or simply traveled in a manner not completely air-bagged and insulated by creature comforts knows the experience to be by turns exhilarating and traumatic. To certain, perhaps most, temperaments (and, it seems, for many age groups) the trauma outweighs the excitement, and once the turbulence of a move has passed, many will initiate an aggressively passive-aggressive process of settling down, with the aim of never suffering the discombobulation of moving again.

You can’t blunt the traumas of itinerancy without also ruining what’s salutary about it, so the question that remains is whether there can possibly be something valuable in any amount of trauma and humiliation. I suggest that there is, though I do so with appropriate caution.

Crossan has already pointed out for us the dangers in settling down into a society, with its steel-and-stone hierarchical infrastructure. Itinerancy in that sense is a form of non-participation in social wrongs. John Steinbeck, who was not religious and instead inclined to take the biological long-view of existence, made the same point in Travels with Charley, giving a dissenting opinion on the usually accepted value of planting roots: “Only when agriculture came into practice – and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history – did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence. But land is tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands. Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it. Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions.”

These social perspectives are stimulating and they are also utopian, impossible to impose in a widespread way without disaster, and even hard to reconcile personally. Already having recommended some amount of humiliation, I’m not very keen to argue for the perpetual kiboshing of worldly gain that forever skipping town would require.

But consider the oppression and the welfare within a society as a macrocosm for the behavior of a single person. A person can be kind and can be cruel, both just and unjust. A person is also prone to act one way or the other depending on what type of person he or she is dealing with. Interpersonal conduct is frequently settled by an a priori hierarchy – this sort of person will be treated generously, this sort with distrust and a closed fist, and so on.

What I am trying to describe here is a life in the institution of personal prejudices. In stable, peaceable times, when the mind and conscience may relax, prejudices pick up the slack. They rather resemble values, but are not more than hollowed-out simulacra of them, the synthetic byproducts of real values being run again and again through the sausage factory of safe routine. In this fashion everyone knows the Golden Rule in the same way that everyone knows the name of their state, and many can recite the beatitudes with the facility of the multiplication table. But because a stable daily existence demands no more than lip service to a creed (if it even demands that) the inhered valued come to nothing.

When will a person care about the meek? Only when he or she has been meek once too. Why will a person choose not to take advantage of, and actually protect, the vulnerable? Because he or she knows what it is like to be vulnerable. And what on earth does it mean to treat others as you would be treated? It means to look upon another and see there some aspect of yourself; to see in his strangeness your time as a stranger; in his awkwardness, fragility, and need all that has been and may still be your own. Itinerancy removes the cushion from between our beliefs and our actions and unsettles us toward constantly thinking on our connection with others. This is precisely the point of the great and worthy challenge of starting anew each morning.

I have traveled a certain amount, and nothing apotheosizes the meaning of the experience for me than walking beside a back highway alone and unarmed in an unfamiliar state with the nearest towns a few miles away in either direction. I’ve done it a number of times, but am not even remotely hardened to it. Exposed and alien like this (it didn’t matter how benignly law-abiding the area was known to be) even the smallest and most momentary encounters drilled indelibly into my consciousness. It’s here that I’ve felt most deeply what it means to be bullied, what it means to be shunned, and what it means to be cared for and looked after. With this I’ve come to think it is impossible to hold a sound conception of mercy without having been at some point at the mercy of others.

The touchstone here is vulnerability, a condition that rarely fares well in standard perceptions, as it seems to betoken weakness and immaturity, the trait of the shellfish who hasn’t been around long enough to form a proper shell. But on the contrary, voluntary – or to use Crossan’s favorite adjective, radical – vulnerability requires courage, especially if it’s embraced after any period of self-assurance and relative ease.

And because it is the heart and not the appearance of things that matters, itinerancy is not the same thing as, say, vagrancy: wandering blindly comes to the same end as sitting in a dark room. Indeed, the principle of itinerancy can be greatly satisfied, I should think, with very little physical relocation at all. It is true that, in New York City for example, to move a distance of three blocks can precipitate the kind of sea change that comes from expatriating to a different continent. It is also true that by working a new job, spending time with different people, and simply reading different sorts of books we experience the bracing shocks and excitements of starting from scratch. In this way itinerancy is not just related to learning, but is synonymous with it. Neither can have a terminus. The leap we must constantly make into the unknown disarms us of our prejudices and makes us vulnerable – and from there comes a (sometimes painful) awakening that stimulates the conscience into active reckonings of right and wrong.

What Is This Site About?

2005-12-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

I’m beginning this blog based upon a recent feeling of incredibly poignant conviction, a direct sense of rightness and importance that comes upon all of us from time to time with the calm and steady presence of revelation, and which is seemingly impossible to articulate afterwards in terms that don’t appear vague or meaninglessly general. So I expect that my – and I’m hoping our – entries here will be written in pursuit of that elusive but, all things considered, common enough feeling from which we draw otherwise groundless words like hope, love, and truth.

So this is the largest and most abstract aim of the site, and because I’m already using vague terms to describe a feeling of piercing clarity and already becoming prolix in search of a few perfectly distilled words, I think we’re best moving on to other goals, keeping this one perpetually on call in the backs of our minds. I take it as a matter of faith that we all want understanding.

The concrete aim of this site, then, is to state values; to say, explain, and argue for – and therefore need to think seriously about – what is wrong and right. It is, you realize once you begin, extraordinarily difficult to do this. Hazards lay everywhere in the process. On one side sits the rock of judgmentalism, when a so-called value becomes a weapon, good for little more than bludgeoning other people. On the other side is the whirlpool of vacuity, a kind of moral absenteeism posing as an ethos. We see voyagers wracked upon these extremes everywhere, and partly for this reason I suggest that the idea of holding values has become unpopular, something that most people would find inconsistent with a normal, tenable way of life. Values make a person either an asshole or a flake – and in both cases a hypocrite. Better to stand ethically agnostic.

There will be very few basic principles for the writing on this site, but one of them sits in unbudging defiance of the above assertion. I contest that knowing what you think to be right and wrong and true and false is not only realizable but also utterly necessary – in fact, by the standards of this site, it is the highest responsibility of every single human being.

Already the site seems to be heading down a very narrow, specific, and well-trod path and I need to head it back to open field. “Values” is a loaded word. Its connotations are remarkably precise, but, also remarkably, different from person to person based upon what each individual looks to as his or her central value dispenser. Whether we are prone to think politically, religiously, scientifically, and so on, we tend to grab instant answers from leading institutions. I would like to say that things like governmental and church bodies have hijacked the word, but that would imply that anybody was struggling to take it back. This does not seem to me to be the case and it’s a serious and harrowing problem. We have allowed the word to be institutionalized, like an unwanted family member, because it was too hard to have to deal with everyday on our own. But whenever a word is co-opted by a large group its meaning loses its primacy and, I fear, its meaningfulness. A belief is blown away with the passing of a fad if it’s not forged from personal experience and intuition. So, for the sake of this site, institutional values don’t count, at least not as things to be recited. If we can never be equal in privilege, there is a poignant egalitarianism in the shared burden of every human to think his or her own mind.

Again we threaten to run afoul of common usage perceptions with the encouragement of different and clashing opinions. Discourse, debate, and dissent are words with great historical cachet, cherished as founding principles of this country, that are now used to define and justify almost anything, even practices utterly contrary to them. Stump speeches and sermons are something, but they are not discourse; bullying, coercion, and willful polarization are not debate. Perhaps, in a more subtle way not easily comprehended by me, these words have also been institutionalized. The most grievous loss is that of dissent, which, rather astonishingly, is generally used by people who demand that everyone in fact agree. Dissension has been reduced to merely meaning agreement with the views held by people with less power. And once again, the amputation of a personalized word from its personal context – and the abjuring of all individual responsibilities therein – was performed without much struggle.

(As a point of clarification, the dissent I’ll now advocate does not refer to the academic practice of arguing from both sides of an issue, an exercise perhaps as useful as but no more meaningful than doing push-ups.)

Actual dissent, which is the invariable consequence of thinking for oneself, is another of the central pillars of this site, a principle saved from the charge of rancorousness by the core assumption that disagreement is in and of itself a good thing. Dissension will not be merely tolerated here (tolerance is yet another word slain of all significance, no longer much celebrated and nurtured, but grudgingly and superficially hewn to, like an outdated law, until relief is provided by some behavior insufferable enough that it can be revoked) but encouraged and delightedly looked forward to. At this site we will truthfully feel glad that other people disagree with us, even adamantly, even irreconcilably.

How can this be? Again, I point to the original tenet already stated: Our beliefs are real and of unparalleled importance in our lives. Therefore, agreeing to something we don’t actually believe is a direct transgression of human responsibility and a hurtful diminution of our natural capacities. We are all different but we all hold each other to the same high standard: we are happy when that standard is aspired to: we are glad for disagreement. QED.

But I want to suggest, with less logical surety but no less conviction, that something more is effected when real dissent is in the air. I believe that dissension promotes, oddly enough, understanding. Not, I hasten to re-emphasize, agreement. Not even necessarily conciliation. The art of mediation is hugely useful in pragmatic matters, but to give in to some more facile middle ground is craven and negligent where ethics are concerned. Our goal, impossible as it may or may not be, is to clear up the gray area in which our notions of right and wrong are blurred – not expand that fuzzy space to hold more people in communal blurriness.
When I use the word understanding, I mean something more akin to empathy. When people think for themselves, we feel a sense of shared humanity with them. We perhaps are troubled by what they say, but we realize – and the realization is startling, moving, and to me, beautiful – that they are just as profoundly human as we are. We disagree, yet we connect.

I think there’s little need to justify the self-evident worth of this kind of bond. But with it comes the question of what sort of influence empathy combined with rhetorical persuasion will have on us. Well, there’s little doubt about it – being exposed to the ideas of others will change us, and to what degree no one can say. It is a possibility that doing so will change us drastically. And with this admission, I’ve neared one more potential dead end in the progress of this explanation. Somehow in our world, change has come to be commonly construed as weakness, to be shunned, whereas obduracy is seen as admirable. Why we would glorify a characteristic derived from rocks I can’t really say. Perhaps change is a weakness, but only insofar as it is a permanent condition of our mortality. The dead are honorably immutable; but we are alive.

Being attentive to dissenting voices both fosters a bond of fellowship and changes, to a degree great or minute, our own values. The final pillar upon which this site is supported, then, is the notion that to be changed by a smart and heartfelt utterance is to be changed for the better.

This site is an experiment, a kind of ant farm for ideas. It’s predicated on the beliefs that there is greater and more exotic variety in the values of humans than in all the diversity of nature; that we should be grateful to someone for having thought and felt deeply enough to have introduced us to a new species; and that through embracing and celebrating a free exchange of ideas we grow prosperously.

I’ve said a lot. And I have no wish to further circumscribe the form these guidelines will take in others. If the spirit groped for in these paragraphs interests or moves you, I hope you’ll contribute with an essay of your own, which I’ll post with your name and email address or else anonymously, whichever you prefer. I hope that you will write thoughtfully on whatever you feel passionately about. Thoughtfully, passionately: those two adverbs modifying the way that we can live comprise the holies of holy of this site.