rocket science

We must act knowing that today’s victories will be only partial.

--Barack Obama, January 21, 2013

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

-- Matthew 5:48 (NRSV)

How could the founders have declared that all men are created equal while owning and exploiting human flesh?

On the other hand, how could they not?

Ask it the other way around.  How could a nation that bought, sold and exploited human beings declare that all men are created equal, turning its future against itself? Isn't it strange? Isn't it remarkable?

It all depends on the order of your thoughts, on what you take for granted and what you choose to be surprised at.

Fernand Braudel subtitled one of his works of social history "The Limits of the Possible."  What he meant was that the physical and social structures of everyday life present a limited menu of choices.*  You can't for instance choose -- it's almost impossible to imagine -- private life in a world where there are no private spaces.  Which is why Western individualism was born in the envious lust of lower classes for the privacy of aristocrats, who were once the only people who could shut a door when they wanted to.  Bourgeois and working-class imitations of the baron's castle -- the detached home with multiple chambers and doors, the expensive and laborious "yard" or "garden" -- made it possible to re-conceive privileges of the well-born as universal human rights.  Bonaparte and Adam Smith described England as a nation of shopkeepers, but it was the shopkeepers of America who charted their nation on a map of unalienable rights.

For the founders, Eden wasn't on the menu.  Some of them owned human flesh directly, and the rest had profited indirectly from such ownership.  They could declare 1) a country that was tainted with slavery, or they could declare 2) no country at all.  Those were their two lamentable choices, and yet out of their colloquy came a remarkable third choice: "2b" we might call it.  They declared a country that was both soiled by slavery and pledged to universal, unalienable rights.  This act was a contradiction, but I rejoice that they chose it rather than either of the internally consistent options before them.

There's no question which of our two propositions was heard round the world, as Emerson put it.  Slavery was already on the defensive, an embarrassment among the nations, and we have spent two centuries of blood and treasure, prophecy and confession, abolishing it and owning its legacy.  In that time our declaration went round the world, inspiring good and bad revolutions, resounding in the texts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of human rights.

So I am glad that someone wrote that document; for without it, or something very much like it, the modern ideas of justice and civil peace could never have entered the world.  I rejoice that the person who wrote it, with help from a committee, was an American.  I am happy that the American who wrote it was no outlier but an eventual president.  And I am proud that the author was, like me, a Unitarian.  I am not proud that he owned slaves, that he fathered children by a person who had no power to refuse him, or that his writing, his research, his architecture and his politics were financed with stolen labor.

As an adult living in the real world, it is my obligation to distinguish between good and evil, particularly as they appear in the same person, the same institution, the same nation.  But it's not rocket science.  If we pretend that the distinction is difficult, if we wait for our country, our city, our family, our self to be perfect before we love them we shall wait forever.  Indeed, one of the ancient corruptions of character is to wait for the perfect before committing to what is good.  The good is not a metaphysical but an operational term: "good" means "better than what we have."

Another timeless corruption is proudly to imagine that our present plan of reform will bring an end to history and to sin; to imagine that we are not ourselves sinful as we put it forward, with scores to settle that we have not owned; to fantasize that as we prevail we will not love the power and long to bring down our boots on the necks of adversaries.  Both we and the ancestors are judged; but judgment is a sifting, a separating out of the noble from the shameful in us.  My headmaster used to say that the best of us are molded out of faults,** and since we do not get the noble without the shameful, we must hope that, whatever there is that answers to the name of God, It is merciful.

As a Unitarian I stand in footprints of people who rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, condemning it as immoral and unbiblical.  I don't know whether I speak Burke's conservatism or Niebuhr's liberalism when I say there is a strange loopiness about the world, and there is no place to stand that is not off its kilter and sagging under our weight.  We play, like one of the Mikado's criminals, "on a cloth untrue, with a twisted cue, and elliptical billiard balls," and we know not what we do.  It is this fallenness of the world, and of ourselves in the world, invested from birth as we are in its gripes and grievances, flights of fancy and body noises -- this is what the ancient doctrine tried to describe.  I don't think the world is strange because my first progenitor tried to know right from wrong, but rather that in his reach for knowledge he learned that the world had always already*** gone strange.  Again I remember Beckett's character who said you're on earth, there's no cure for that.

And yet, with our twisted cues and elliptical motives, we must do good, and seek truth.  We must expand our fleeting glories, growing our contained and compromised gardens of virtue into fruitfulness. 

Lady Bracknell said (among other things) that the whole theory of modern education is radically unsound, and it is a blessing therefore that education produces no effect whatsoever.  The harm of education comes when, instead of rewarding the achievement, it punishes the mistake.  I never learned anything valuable without making mistakes; and the learnings that made me what I am came when I allowed myself to get it wrong a hundred times.  Only then could I begin to grow up, for growing up is a risky business, requiring compassionate governance of oneself and guidance from others.  This is how we learn to master an art, or to love a person, or to write an essay.

There are those who lament the extinction of the pen and paper, or more recently the typewriter, both of which devices forced one to think ahead before committing to the word.  But I have thrived in the digital age, when I could plant myself in the middle and enlarge my thoughts forward and backward, setting down any nonsense that comes into my head with the surety that it can be changed, expanded, destroyed, and rearranged as many times as I want before it goes before other eyes.  My mistakes do not signify.  They do not even need to be crossed out.  All that matters is that there is some rightness about the last version.   

So we must own the twistedness of our mothers and fathers, as well as their achievements and their truth, for their truth is inseparable from their twistedness, as ours shall be.  History doesn't present us with the menus we would like, and our choices are usually between unappetizing options.  But some of those options are better than others.  That is to say, some of them are the good choices, the right ones.  And occasionally, in the colloquy of irreconcilable and detestable alternatives, a novel alternative appears, an option 2b that changes life for the better by miraculous birth of a welthistorische contradiction.  And when that happens, we must not be put off by the humility of its birth or the sordidness of its conception.

"Behold," says Isaiah's God (43:19), "I'm doing something new here.  Don't you see it?  Even now it's coming to fruition."  A movie came out recently about Lincoln, that shows him bribing and bullying and lying, so that he can get the thirteenth amendment passed, to make slavery no longer possible in the nation he preserved.  We all know that what followed was not freedom for our brothers and sisters but another century of terror and exploitation, before we began seriously to address the assurance of their rights.  But can we honestly say we are not proud that Lincoln did these things?  As he walks down the hallway, in the scene that should have ended the movie, into the light and on the way to Ford's Theatre, does he not grow larger as he recedes?

It's not rocket science.

*Les structures du quotidien (1967), which was Vol. I of Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XV^e-XVIII^e siècle

**He attributed this saying to Abraham Lincoln; but Lincoln must have been quoting Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, V. i.: "Best men are moulded out of faults.")

***"Always already" was of course a strategic phrase of Jacques Derrida, who deconstructed great texts of European philosophy, and was oxymoronically followed by the locusts of Deconstructionism.

no denim

If the cities of the world had not been deserted, they would have been destroyed.

-- Clifford D. Simak, City

When I made a living as a performer, I would go to the plains in September with a farm equipment company.  In Nebraska, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, or Illinois, on a site with permanent infrastructure used three days a year, in a sawdust arena under the sky with twenty-foot high entrance doors, I summoned, dismissed, named and praised, sometimes drove the latest tractors, for the delight of farm families.  They dressed me like the kind of person who might buy a tractor: no denim, khakis, flannel plaid shirt, the latest baseball cap in company colors, and on cold days a barn jacket.  They thought my midwestern moonface fit the product well, and so they paid me enough to bridge the rough patches of an actor's business. 

I had the gig for ten years.  When I started, the bleachers were often packed, and we might average five hundred spectators six shows per day.  The farm show site, an evanescent city of ten blocks square, was jammed with grandpas and grandmas, moms and dads and kids, the smallest of whom were towed down the street in little red wagons.  There was something for everyone at the farm show -- if you lived on a farm.

Ten years later the bleachers were often empty, and the streets clear.  There weren't as many farm families.  Agriculture was still a healthy business, but it was changing.  There were fewer buyers, and they bought more machines, and they didn't have to come to a farm show to make their decisions.

There's a strain of science fiction that fears the success of cities.  And there's another strain that rejoices in forecasting their failure.  The city, that place after which they've seen it, you can't keep them down on the farm.  The place your child runs away to and is lost, and comes back later as a different person who doesn't belong on the land.  The place where everything changes and traditions go to die, but there are a hundred ways to live and everything is up for grabs.

One of our fantasies is that cities will eat our souls, interring us in coffins of steel and concrete.  The other is that the cities will devolve into ghost towns, leaving us only savage lives to live.  We know without having to figure it out that everything modern comes from the urban landscape, but on alternating days we change our mood about modernity.

The bourgeoisie (burghers, literally people of the town) arose in the cities, making so much money that kings had to parley with them in a parliament before they could fight their wars; and popes damned them for buying and selling on the market rather than at eternal prices.  When the bourgeoisie get in a sour mood about the cities, they may go to the country to live by what they imagine is rural simplicity, and then god help them.  Brook Farm and New Harmony broke up after a few years, and that is the more benign ending of this plot; the less benign ends at Jonestown.

Clifford Simak thought that technology would relieve us of the need to live near each other, and then we would disperse ourselves in manors about the countryside.  But it is the countryside, not the city, that is depopulated; and driving through the plains, off the interstate highway, you'll see ghost farmhouses.  I have two fantasies about my later life: a Manhattan apartment and a Vermont farmhouse.  I'm not rich enough to have both, and I have chosen the Manhattan apartment.  It's a simple life, and an ecologically sound one, in which I share heating and cooling, transportation and greenery, facilities and infrastructure with thousands of neighbors.

The most wasteful lifestyle is the isolated farmhouse.  There was once of course an economic rationale for living in splendid isolation, but now a single operator can farm hundreds of acres from an air-conditioned cab with stereo and internet, the equipment controlled by a satellite that knows where you are within three feet of tolerance.  Most farmhouses are now a self-indulgence.

And the city is where they figured out how to do this.

The values by which cities are condemned were born in the cities.  We think too much of the Israelites as desert nomads or as subsistence farmers.  Their scriptures, including the splendid Deuteronomic History that tells of the tragedy and division, destruction and redemption of David's Kingdom, were shaped (or "redacted," as the scholars say) in the time when Judean exiles, descendents of those sent into captivity in Babylon, returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and to restore (recreate) their ethics, their values and their religion.  In Jerusalem they argued about their origin, their laws, their gods, their identity.  We see the signs of their argument in their statements of the Law, and in the outrage of their prophets.  In the city heroism and cowardice, righteousness and sin, justice and corruption, are displayed and judged.

The god who would destroy the cities of the plain must have been there, and failed.

so loud

The process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.

-- George Saunders*

I guess I am a man who likes chick-flicks.

Tonight I saw again how Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, a kept man and a kept woman, doing what was necessary, discovered their souls in each other while traveling on other people's money in first class, crossing the Atlantic in an ocean liner. . .

How elegant they were, not a fiber out of place.

O once, in a time gone by, it was possible to tell an entire sexual history without popping a single button! without naming a single body part or position thereof!  And how grown-up, how mature it seems, from this receding shoreline of juvenility, to view through the long telescope of nostalgia those ballrooms of our mothers and fathers where sublimation partnered art.  More literal than the naked wrestlers of our day, Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire actually went dancing in the dark, and when they got back in the carriage their intertwining fingers told us all we need to know about the meaning of their moving, fully clothed.

. . . and how having found true love on the tab of false loves, Cary and Deborah vowed on landing in New York to do their dirty work, liberate themselves from liaisons, support themselves and meet again in six months' time to consummate their longings, at the top of the Empire State Building.  And how an accident prevented that meeting and gave rise to misunderstanding.  And he was so angered that he became a real artist.  And she so injured that she became a humble teacher of her art.  And how his grandmother reached out from the grave with a gift that brought them together.  And his gift of his art to he knew not whom betrayed the proud secret of the woman he loved.  And how . . .

This film was a remake.  And a remake was made of it.  And then the meta-remake, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.**  It's a successful property, this story.

Oh well, it seems I like chick-flicks.

"Your money or your life."  There was once a comedian who made America laugh, week after week, with a slow take to the audience.  "I'm thinking!" he said.  Now some of my favorite comedians, people who have plenty of alternatives, think they cannot make me laugh without bleep-words.  I don't watch them for the bleep-words.

In The Bridge on the River Kwai there was exactly one explosion, blowing up the pretension that there can be laws of war.  There's an assumption in the movies now that all fights must last at least fifteen minutes, with blows that sound like wrecking-balls as they land, and tiresome explosions that bloom like nuclear fireballs.

In the musical education of my childhood, you had to listen to the music -- not because the music was holy but because if you didn't listen you wouldn't hear it.  Classical music, in its long-form journeys, actually varies its loudness from moment to moment.  This is one of the tools of musical narrative, and if you can't calm down after the bravura moment to hear the little motif of a single note, or god help us the silence that follows it, then you've chosen not to understand.  Folk music (by which I mean the actual music of our folk) requires that we listen to the words.  Broadway and Tin Pan Alley married words to tunes for a listening public who sanctioned urbanity, knowledge, irony and poetry.

Now it doesn't matter whether you listen or not; it's so loud, it will pillage you despite resistance.  It's in the DNA of rock-and-roll to blow away the corrupt discourse of the elders.  Neither Mozart, nor Joan Baez, nor Perry Como can enter the Hall of Rock without being atomized.  The music is not an object for your consideration but a physical assault on your body, an assault that lots of geezers still come back for, and geezers now perform.  Those maximal unrelenting volume levels were never accidental, but always essential to the purpose.  And the essential conventions of rock have been universalized to other genres, so that the word "music" in public places now means "Sound So Loud You Can't Ignore It." I've sat in a Broadway theatre to watch an awarded and literate musical comedy, my chest wall vibrating in sympathy with the sound system, hearing not a word because everything was so damn loud (pardon my french).

This is the contemporary meaning of the word debauchery.  F. M. Alexander*** said that the wisdom of the body is debauched, meaning not that we have too much sex but that, whatever we're doing, we don't know when to stop because we can't feel anything until it's hurting us.  We mistake the damage for sensation, which was supposed to protect us from damage.

We've given up on saying things in favor of doing things.  People of my age and class and nationality have a lot to do with that change.  I went to a college where activism was an extra-curricular activity, and I graduated in the year when prophets were gunned down and riots broke out across the country.  We were tired of leaders who talked.  We wanted them to act.  The rules had been proven corrupt, and so we would stop playing by the rules.  Civil disobedience was our code, soon to become uncivil, as civility itself fell into dishonor.  But that was OK, because we were the good guys.  We were making a difference.

Well, everybody else learned the game.  We taught that the personal is political, and our opponents have learned how to make the political personal.  If you doubt me, turn on the AM radio at noon eastern time.  You'll learn that if you don't dance to the bloviator's tune you are a liar, a fascist, a socialist, a terrorist, a traitor, a hater of America, a feminazi, a slut.  The bomb-throwers have made a difference, and we don't like dodging their grenades.  We live in a time when a serious presidential candidate can disparage education because it fosters critical thinking.  Appalling as such a statement is, it continues an anti-discourse that people like us started.

We wanted to stop saying things, to stop making sense.  We wanted to do things directly, short-circuiting the slough of despair, the swamp of discourse.  Nobody had taught us that direct action is the thug's game, not ours; or that when we resort to it, we can find out pretty quick that the other guys are more practiced than we are.  Their big brothers are bigger than ours.

What we didn't know then, what our civilization has discovered since that time, is that when you say it right you've done something.  Our history is in the hands of people who write code and by doing so make things happen.  Our very existence is written.  DNA is a language of finite characters, in which an infinite number of creatures can be stated and made real, and the best hope for a cure of cancer is a technique for re-writing the code, correcting its mistakes.

Isaac Asimov wrote a story ("The Last Question") in which human intelligence, and then artificial intelligence, ponders the problem of entropy while the universe flickers out, at which time the results come in: "Let There Be Light."  Asimov wrote before the digital revolution, but he foresaw a time when we could once again understand how utterance makes fact.

So perhaps we will remember that, since the universe is written, it may be important to get the writing right.  My high school friend went to Amherst College, where he was required to take Freshman Comp from the writer and critic Benjamin DeMott.****  No collaborator with sloppy thinking, DeMott gave rigorous brief assignments and covered the pages of his students with comments.  My friend took this well.  He showed me his one-page paper on the assignment "Describe the Objects on Your Desk."  He laughed uproariously as he pointed to DeMott's sentence at the top of the page: "This paper is clawed by beastly errors."

Thank you.  This paper is clawed by beastly errors.  Indeed.


*from Joel Lovell, "'Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts:' The Beautiful, Brutal Vision of George Saunders," New York Times Magazine (January 6, 2013), p. 26.

**Love Affair (1939, Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne), Love Affair (1994, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening), Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

***Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), the Australian actor and voice teacher whose observations inspire the "Alexander Technique" studied by many musicians, singers, actors and others.

****Benjamin DeMott (1924-2005).  The subtitles of several of his books include the phrase "Why Americans Can't Think Straight."

poor creature

Unaccommodated man is nothing but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art!

-- King Lear, III. iv.

When they ask me what I do for living, when I am so foolish as to answer them, there is a silence that seems to last the space of half an hour.  Their jaws drop, their heads turn to the side and they get a watery look in their eyes.  Oh, what a special person you are!  How can you stand it?  So much grief!

The easy answer is that some are cut out for it and some not.  It's a little harder to say, "I don't experience it like that.  I don't lose people, I find them."  To enter so many stories, so many homes -- of rich people and poor, gay and straight, Anglophone and other-phone, is more real than a hundred novels.  I'm not a better person than you, but these people made me a better person than I was.

A sick man lay in bed with his wife.  None of us knew he would die the next morning.  She twined around him, played with his hair, ran her fingers down his arm.  We spoke softly of his symptoms, of relieving his pain, of reducing his fever.  It was a hard thing she was doing, but she would bless herself for doing it.

Not the first time I was admitted to such a scene.  A young man talked with me once about a vacation he would take with the woman he loved.  He said that she was above all things for him, and that if she was with him it was all he needed.  "You hearing this?" I said to her.  She came in from the kitchen and lay down with him.  They cradled each other, mindless of my presence -- no, mindful of my presence and admitting me.  "I'm hearing it," she said.

Walking in Alphabet City a year or two later, I heard the word "Chap!" (that's what she had called me, short for "chaplain").  Strong, lean, tall and black in her long coat, she called across the street to me the whitest of men, who had once been a witness of her courage.  "Chap!" she called.  Nothing more to be said.  She crossed the street and put her arms around me, and we held each other for half a minute.  Nothing more to be said.

Yes, the veil has parted for me, and I have walked on the other side.  I don't deserve it, but I don't have to deserve it.

A recovering perfectionist, born with addiction and raised in a way to nourish it, I know that if I don't do the thing exactly right it isn't the best, and if it isn't the best it's worthless.  There's a voice that says I have to deserve my blessings, and show exactly why I deserve them.  Perfectionists can get a lot of things right, but you can't spend time with them: they're always going somewhere else.  I keep moving on, and mostly can't bear the sight of anything I made more than three years ago.

But I think I shall retain these scenes of recent years.  I have no reason to reject them.  They have nothing to do with me.   They aren't exploits of mine.

To say I am recovering is to say that I name my addiction, and every day remind myself of its power to set the excellent against the good, inhibit growth, avert blessings, impoverish the banquet and make of the garden a desert.  For instance, I have a gift for languages which never produces mastery.  I have an actor's ear, and when I speak a foreign phrase people start chattering at me as if I could understand them.  I ought to be competent in Spanish, but something holds me back.  The insecure child in me, I suppose, can't stand mistakes.  He hears the voice pronounce its judgment -- not good enough -- and so I do not learn.

And yet when this lazy soul walks out the door in the morning he has a reasonable chance of seeing something beautiful before he comes home.  It's honest work.  It's real work.  It's not a test.  I don't measure up to the standard of my imagination, but that's my problem, and signifies nothing as I go to meet the people.  The trick is to lose yourself to find them, and in them find yourself again.

"Mercy imposes no conditions," said Dineson the storyteller.  "Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another."  The truth is I am no better than I should be, but "Everything we have chosen is granted to us.  And everything we rejected has also been granted. .  . . for mercy and truth are met together."*

A lot of us suffer without deserving it, but all of us are blessed when we haven't earned it.  We are poor forked animals together, glorious sometimes in the eyes of compassion, transfigurable by mercy.

Sometimes I walk on the other side of the veil.  I haven't earned it.  But I don't have to.

*Isak Dineson, "Babette's Feast," as adapted by Gabriel Axel in his screenplay.  The passage is a riff on Psalm 85:10: "Mercy and truth have met together.  Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another."

build it

A poem should not mean

But be.

-- Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"

I meet people who are in a real jam, running toward or away from the simplest reality, that as Forrest Church said we are alive and must die, and we know it.  Tolkien said we were given the gift of mortality, meaning that we must make our immortality, fashioning it of shabby stuff and with broken tools.  This is a paradox and if you don't know what I mean I can't explain it to you.

But it has something to do with the loaves and the fishes, a parable not by Yeshua but about him.  The crowd was to be fed, and nobody had planned for it.  Be sensible, Teacher, they said -- we have only so much to give, only this many loaves and that many fishes.  He said, break the loaves and share the fishes.  And there was more than enough.

That's how they remembered their life with him.  It couldn't possibly work.  There was no business plan, no visible means of support.  He depended on the kindness of strangers.  How could he set out to feed the thousands?

He told his lieutenants to act as in a theatre, as if there was enough.  Build it, and they will come, says the mystical voice in a novel.  But this was a voice more radical: Proclaim it, and they will build.  We don't ask our leaders to do the work, but rather to create the world in which the work can be done.  Behave as if a dream is possible.  Our dreams may not come true exactly, but dreamers change things.  My father dreamed I would be a great scholar, and I am at least irremediably educated.

There are those who stand by the literal truth: they say that if we had been there with a videocam we would have seen the few loaves and fishes multiply, replenish as each fragment was broken off -- we would have marveled at a miracle.  And there are those other apologists for parable, the rationalist ones, who look for sensible explanations: they say that some of the crowd ran to the nearby village and brought out the foodstores.  But it's not important to explain the story.  Explanation is irrelevant, beside the point, de trop, impious even.

It's a parable.  It's meant to bend your mind, and if your mind isn't bent you're not reading it right.  It bends your mind toward something you know is true but fear to admit, that the boundary of the possible expands as hope presses against it.  Despair is a choice, and hope is a choice.  You don't know what imagination can do, and your confident pronouncement of what it cannot do is without foundation.  When we worship the impossible we surrender our birthright.

Which is not to say that everything is possible, or that there is always enough silver in the lining to pay for a grief.  The father of a dying child said to me today, "God doesn't send us more than we can bear." I'm not going to contradict him, but to you I say, I've seen lots of people who try to bear more than they should have to.  Some of them succeed, but if they fail I cannot blame them.

The soul, however, is who you are when you've lost the thing you thought you were.  And from the soul's point of view, adversity and grief are opportunities: like an understudy she goes on for the star who broke her leg.  The star turn we hoped for will not come to pass, but something else, a new star, is ready to be born.

I went to seminary with Christians, and when I said to them that the story is a trope, a rhetoric of hope, they would get a starved look in their eyes.  For them, it has to be more than rhetoric, more than trope.  For them it has to be true.  Now "truth" means different things to different Christians, but if I say the mysteries are metaphors they mostly get nervous.  How can you say that the articles of faith are mere metaphors? they say.  But I didn't say mere metaphors.  I said metaphors; the "mere" is something they supplied on their own: for them, it seems, there cannot be a metaphor that is not mere.

When did rhetoric get such a bad name?  They accused Socrates of making the worse appear the better cause, but in the agora the better also had to appear, for what it was.  A bad person may sell a lie, but a good person must sell the truth if it is to prevail over the lie.  Milton told us to let truth and falsehood grapple, and rhetoric is that grappling.  Truth doesn't grapple on its own: like a muppet, it must be animated.  He who knows the truth and does not sell it, who fails to hawk it in the marketplace, might as well be lying.

But people of faith are in unspoken alliance with people who think they have no faith.  They think there is only one kind of truth, and truth is the same thing as fact.  Fundamentalist and atheist agree -- it must be a fact that the Red Sea parted, because if it isn't a fact the story is worthless, a mere lie, and its liberative power falsified.  Fundamentalists think the story is a fact, and atheists think it is a lie, agreeing on the standard of truth.  But for those who find a way where there is no way, the story is true in spite of fact -- the Red Sea parts for them.

Every now and then one of my clients says to me "Art is my religion," and I know what they mean.  I don't know where art ends and religion begins.  And it is sacrilege to speak of mere art, of mere rhetoric, of mere metaphor.  Theology also is metaphor; the godly murderers are the ones who forget that theology is metaphor.

Wittgenstein said that if a thing cannot be spoken we should pass over it in silence; but he also said that there were many ways to speak, many games that language can play, each with its own victory conditions.  It matters not so much what the words mean as what you are trying to do by saying them.  The faith should not mean but be.

high c

It's very clear

Our love is here to stay.

Not for a year

But ever and a day.

-- Ira Gershwin

He never met me, but I feel the death of Leonard Bernstein as if I had known him.  I could never be cool like he was, but he helped to raise me.  He confided his passions to me in countless television appearances.  And here's something even stranger: the death of George Gershwin, gone in his youth ten years before I was born, pummels me every time I hear a song of his.  If Bernstein was an uncle, Gershwin is a lost elder brother, his framed portrait taunting me from the top of my bureau.

It's not their accomplishments, their welthistorische Kunstwerken, that so inspire and berate me.  It's not so much what they did as what they were.  In youth they captured something I still chase in my age.

In the theatre there's a long and unprofitable argument about the head and the heart, between supposedly authentic emotions and the skill required to infect others with those emotions.  We rarely admit the scandal: those emotions of which we make such a fetish are manufactured, and the person to whom they adhere doesn't exist.  Lear and Loman are, quite simply, not here.

And yet --

Something is supposed to happen.  Something so compelling that we pretend we don't know that Lear is absent, that Willy never existed, just so that we can experience that event.  This is what Coleridge meant by "suspension of disbelief."  In another context, he called it "temporary half-faith."

It's a tall order.  The "act" of an actor is emotional; he is moved by it, but the emotion is his own and ours, not the emotion we take it for.  The gasp, the sob, the guffaw and roar of the crowd, are not Lear's feeling but a tertiary effect of an imagined feeling, as signified, presented, by an impulse of the celebrant's body.

After quantum mechanics we know that vision is always revision, and seeing changes what it is.  There is truth, but it rises to meet our vision of it.  Every fool knows that truth appears, is born, as the curtain goes up.  It is called into being.  It is revelation.  "Words words words" says Hamlet, when asked what he was reading.  When words leap off the page and become an act, giving rise to what Herbert Blau called "blooded thought," in the theatre as in a church we might call this the incarnate word.  A tall order.  But not impossible.  From time to time, incarnation happens.  Which is why people keep coming back to theatres.  And to churches.

I know for a fact that people do not die speaking blank verse or bellowing a high C.  The fact of death isn't like that, but that's how art represents death, and art speaks truly because our seeing of death changes what it is.  If I come to a deathbed, I am there to translate, traduce brute fact into an act.  I am there to change it by seeing it, a healing by vision rather than medication.

I once read a post-apocalyptic story, in which the ruined world was saved by a pianist who played a sonata the way -- for once -- it should have been played. What is at stake in art is the redemption of real life.  Art is a sacred matter, and sacred matter must be artful.  God cannot, as a matter of fact, be here.  God's busy, and would burst our flimsy integuments by appearing among us.  It's no wonder then that those famous shepherds were "sore afraid," which is a polite and sonorous way of saying that their bowels were giving way.  We must remove our sandals, and perhaps visit the water closet, before we approach.

Incarnation, whenever and wherever and however, would therefore be the greatest of prestidigitations, a shabby timeless song and dance in the biggest house of all.  So my uncle and my older brother closed the gap of head and heart, high and low, master and servant, classical and popular, soul and body, discretion and passion, domination and subversion.  These two musicians model the life-long goal of an intuitive introvert.  Blessed or cursed from birth with an intellect and with the schemes of others for its fruition, I'm still getting a clue how to own that power and put it to the work of passion.  Poets keep hoping that their words words words will stay stay stay put, that their amor will survive their vitam brevem in an arte longa.  But perhaps this purpose is itself a distraction; if the word once becomes flesh, who cares if it lasts?  That would be for sure an eternal now.

shorter words

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

-- 1984*

We are blessed in our English by a multitude of words.  We are a Germanic people who ate a Romance language for lunch, and have two vocabularies for everything; we juggle the words of Saxons with the words of Norman aristocrats who conquered them.  Hastings has been refought for a thousand years as these alternate vocabularies compete for influence, and perhaps that is why the English, accustomed to muddle from the beginning, have shamelessly borrowed words from all over the world, while other peoples (the French most notoriously) created academies to protect the purity of their argot.  At any given moment you and I may be speaking German, French, Urdu, Iroquois, Nederlands, Spanish, Welsh, Cantonese or Irish, all within the playing field of our own language.  How dare we?

Shakespeare could sing like a Norman when he wanted, saying what Macbeth's hand would do ("the multitudinous seas incarnadine"), and in the next line could turn Saxon on us ("making the green one red").**  This double-turn of English consciousness has to be one of history's richest folds of thought, encompassing the worlds of master and slave, and their respective powers of domination and subversion.  Four centuries after Harold's defeat, Chaucer brought English back to court, and our language has always been biased toward the underdog.

The Irish virtually lost their language under English domination, but their authors, rather than reviving it, followed perhaps the wiser course of capturing the master's tongue.  Even Padraig Pearse wrote his poems in English.  The children can make a living in English, and the masters now can't speak their own language without quoting Irishmen.

And America's involuntary immigrants from Africa, robbed of their languages, have so inflected English from below that, like it or not, black and white in America are one people.  In a tradition from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison, and from Bert Williams to Fats Waller to Lead Belly, the formerly enslaved have mastered the master's language, changing it so that it travels around the world in a liberative culture-wave.  It's not for nothing that tyrants fear American slang.

And that's why it breaks my heart when I see that some communities of the poor, people for whom the theologians have declared a preferential option, have despaired of language, their own and mine.  In a subway car I once heard the long rant of a beaten man: "Ain't no f*****g book can make a n****r go free!" he shouted.  What a failure of leadership, I thought! from all directions! Someone should have sung that man a better song, and with better lyrics.  Frederick Douglass was groaning from his grave.

Ayn Rand was right about one thing: if you can't say it you don't know it.  A person lives in the world that his vocabulary describes, and if you know only three adjectives, all of them excretory and thoroughly Anglo-Saxon, then you're fouling your world faster than help can arrive.

And yet, it isn't just a matter of knowing nicer words.  There's a self-improvement product sold on talk radio stations that promises to make you successful by enlarging your vocabulary.  Their slogan is "People judge you by the words you use."  There's no short course to eloquence I say, with a humanist sniff.

"Brevity is the soul of wit," said a famous bore who could not stop talking.  My teachers taught that if you could say it shorter, you should.  Not just shorter sentences but shorter words.  They taught me the Hemingwayan preferential option for Anglo-Saxon words (love over affection, height over altitude, shit over excrement).  Four times a week for four years, our English teachers made it clear that those who thought they could rise to the top by implementing schedules for the utilization of resources, driving their Cadillacs purchased by credit on streets that cash-bought beamers ruled, would be caught in the headlights and exposed as parvenus.

Yes, people do judge you by the words you use.  I was one of the judges.

Grandiose verbiage is a power play of the insecure.  Doctors say "ambulate" rather than "walk" because "ambulate" means more than "walk;" it means "the patient was walking and I'm a doctor."  So the other clinicians, nurses, social workers, technicians, also say "ambulate."  But not this clinician.  I also am a health care worker.  I also have a degree and a certificate.  And I shall never say the patient ambulated, I will say he could walk.  Nor shall I say he "verbalized," I will say rather that he "spoke."  It's my job to make sure that Reality appears at the worksite.  Death and Suffering fight dirty, and they laugh at big words.

I was born and shall die genteelly poor, an oarsman mortally vulnerable to the next big wave or eddy, and our high-priced politicians have made sure that, to all of us for whom money must be an object, the seas shall be stormy.  But the theologians remind me that I was born with privileges, advantages that others lack in the storm.  Among them is that for four years I was made to write something each week that would be judged as writing.  I have sometimes thought that to teach writing is the noblest profession of them all, and wished that the course of my life had placed me in that work.  But I know that I haven't the patience for it.  Now I realize the enormity of the gift my teachers gave me.  Every week they applied their sensitive eyes to handwritten sludge, fresh from the minds of privileged male adolescents.  They undertook this suffering for love of the mind, of our particular minds, and of me.  So now, too late, I thank them.  I cannot repay the debt I owe to Frank House, Maurice Brown, Spencer Grey and Alan Wise.  I am one of a precious few who were given such a gift.  And if more of my fellow-countrymen had received such a gift, my beloved nation might not now by sliding quite so fast down the slope of idiocy and instantaneous forgetfulness.

Learning to write and to speak is learning to think.  And if you can't say it, you don't know it.  No, there's no short course to eloquence.  It takes a lifetime of hearing and speaking, reading and writing.  Heavens shield us from those who have learned new big words and can't wait to show them off.


*George Orwell, ed. Sonia Brownell Orwell (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987), p. 125

**II. ii. 61-2.