new jersey

. . . a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

-- Macbeth V. v.

When I came to see her again she was sitting as before in the armchair by her window, looking across the river at New Jersey's bluffs.

She was glad to see me, but she was discouraged.  She didn't see the point of going on.  "What kind of a life is this?"

The are others worse off, I could have said.  She was sitting upright.  She was alert and sharp.  Not in pain at the moment.  No tubes running out of her body.  But if she had been worse off she wouldn't have known her grief, couldn't have described the difference between the live body and the wasting soul, couldn't have brought her crisis into focus.  This is where she was.  You meet them where they are.

"I never wanted to be a burden to others."  Proud and autonomous she was.  The time still to be lived seemed a mockery of everything precious.

We looked across the river together.

I named it.  "You're grieving," I said, "for who you were."

We think grief is for those left behind, but the ones who are leaving grieve as well.  They anticipate the end of loves, the disappearance of possibilities, the finish of tunes whose cadences they will not hear.  The mask won't stick to the face, the body won't perform the old theatrical tricks, and they don't know who they are.  They can't take care of things, and they watch themselves become a thing to be taken care of.  We can assure them it's not like that, but that's how they see it.

The social worker came in to say it was all arranged, the patient was leaving the hospital.  She would go this evening to one of our residences.  "We call it the penthouse.  You can order a filet mignon if you want."  (Clinical irony there, which we usually keep to ourselves, but this client was one of those who crave it.)  She was quite literally going to a better place, with nurses round the clock but with amenities and decor more human than those of the hospital.  And better food.

"Any day you leave a hospital," I said, "is a beautiful day."

"I don't want my money spent," she said, "just to keep me alive."

It was a beautiful day on the bluffs of New Jersey, across the Hudson River.

Here's the hard thing, the thing you have to keep learning.  You can't bring the good news with you.  Not in a book, or in a prayer, or in an exhortation to faith.  You can't bring the good news unless it has already arrived.  You can only, with grace and skill and good fortune, sometimes reveal it.

You want to make things better.  Of course you do.  Anybody would.  Friends and relatives often try.  You say, cheer up, it's not so bad.  You say, have faith.  You say, God doesn't send you more than you can bear.  You can't stand to see them suffer, so you argue.  That's your role, you think -- to vanquish their suffering.  If they don't cheer up, you feel offended and futile.  And your militant cheer defends you from infection.

And this is the simple thing we keep learning, over and over again.  If you're gong to help, you have to enter their world and walk the road with them.  That's where the good news is to be found, somewhere on their path of fear and grief and regret.

"That money was for my niece.  I love that girl more than . . . "

She couldn't finish the sentence, so I ventured.  "Perhaps she already has a gift from you.  Perhaps she wants to give you something in return."

As clouds shifted shape over New Jersey, I thought, I've put my foot in it now.  How could I so lose my nerve? Why commit myself, so soon? Why was I arguing with her?

She didn't know how to own the life that remained to her.  And I couldn't tell her.

That's the rule.  That's what we're supposed to know, and must learn again every day.  It's not a sermon.  It's a revelation, a discovery, an apocalypse.  She says the life ahead of her has no meaning, that it signifies nothing.  But it's not as if there is a something, a significance that should be brought to her.  She doesn't need something; what she needs is negation of the nothing.  If she knew what there was to do, what the next step might be . . . 

"You haven't given up yet.  You love that young woman.  You want to make her life better."

She thought about this.

"We call it generativity -- that as a person nears the end of life, they take care of the youth.  You care about the world that you're leaving.  You're pouring your love into the future."

From a picture window on the ninth floor of a Manhattan hospital, you can see the sun set over New Jersey.

"You've helped me," she said.

I was stunned.

"I feel better than I did when you came.  You didn't argue with me.  You let me live in my sadness.  You didn't try to talk me out of it.  And I feel better."

Can I believe this? it's too good, I thought.  I've talked too much, and been too smart, and now she's seen my vanity, praising me in the tropes of our textbooks, seducing me; -- or else she's saying the things that will get me out of the room.

"We both have places to go," I said.  "You have a new place to live, and I have to go home."

"Be sure you wash your hands on the way out.  Mustn't take any unexpected gifts home from the hospital."

I turned to her.  "You're taking care of me.  You haven't given up."

Sitting up in her chair, she was grinning at me.  I never saw her in a bed.  The record says that an hour after I left, they moved her to the new residence.  An hour after that she died.

familiar shape

O quam tristis et afflicta

Fuit illa benedicta.

-- Stabat Mater

There was something familiar about the picture.  The mother, holding the child at knees and shoulders, in what would be her lap if the child were smaller.  And the child a zigzag from dangling feet up to her knees and down to hips and up again to shoulders, the head falling back.  "Mami," she said.  "Mami aqui," said the mother.  Mami.  Aqui.

This went on.  "I'm here, silly girl.  Don't you know I'm here?"  Then with an eye toward me: "I don't think she knows what's happening."

That's the hardest thing, to be there for someone who doesn't know you're there.

"Do you get any sleep?" I asked.

"Not much.  She wakes up at two or three, and I'm the one she asks for."

The next day I remembered the thing I could not place, the familiar form of the picture.  This was a Pietà.

Congratulations to those who mourn, for they may be comforted.

Where is her comfort?

She said that members of her prayer group tell her to accept the will of God.  They say she should not complain, but be of good cheer and grateful.  They say there's some purpose in this, and she must pray for it to be revealed to her.

They are like Job's friends, those archetypes of bad counsel, who come to tell him there must be some good reason, you must deserve it somehow, God won't tolerate your anger -- or worst of all but true to the book, it's a test of your character, an ethical teaching.

"I don't see it," she said.  There's a Mary on the stage now in New York,* who refuses her testament to those who request it because she knows "what they want me to say."  This Mary bore the child and watched him die, and now she sees what others wish to make of it.  She doubts it was worth it.

This mother before me -- her name is not Maria, but she is a mater dolorosa, and her pose a Pietà.  Shocking in their actuality, not mere ideas or images, songs or sculptures, but an incarnation.  She holds the child, who calls for her and does not know she is there.  She speaks short sentences to the child and longer ones to me.  She says, I don't see any purpose in this.  I'm a good mother.  I stopped working so I could take care of this baby.  I have money problems.  Her father is nowhere.  I'm tired.

She doesn't have to mention the injustice to the child, or the despair of watching this part of her body suffer.  She says she knows women who gave up their children so they could be with a man.  She knows women who have sent their children to relatives, women who leave their children alone at night.  I'm not one of them she says.  I'm here for her in the morning, here in the middle of the night.

All this time she caresses the child, rocks her, cajoles her, tells little jokes in her ear.  

I am not here to correct her mood, to say suck it up and be of good cheer.  I am not here to say that this burden is fair, or that it's part of a divine plan.  If this were part of a plan, I would vote no confidence in the planner.  Unlike Abraham, if the plan requires the death of my child I'm not signing on.  It's one thing to sacrifice oneself, quite another to sacrifice the innocent for faith.

No meaning adheres to these events, no meaning at least that I would bet life on.  If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger, they say; but there's nothing good to say about what fails to kill you.  The thing that doesn't kill you is the enemy.  You get through it as you can, and you remember.  Perhaps you remember how you got through it, that you did the best you could, and it made a difference for those who went through it with you, which means that it changes your life as well.  Perhaps it occurs to you that you were the one to do these things, that you were needed there and then.  And so you come to own your past pain, knowing it is unalienable because it makes your present life possible.  In this way, retrospectively, reaching back into history, we make the meaning of our suffering.  But the meaning is not there until we make it.  There's nothing good to say about suffering, but good things can happen in the face of it.  Some day this will be over, and Mami will go on to other tasks, other loves, other stories.  When she looks back on this time, I hope she remembers that she stood fast.

So this is what I told her.  I've never had such experience thank god, and I hope I never will; neither I nor anyone else should tell you how to feel about it.  This is a hard thing that has fallen on you, the worst of curses.  You and your child don't deserve it.  There is no lesson to learn.  But you are the one who gets up at two and three in the morning, you are the one who holds the child who does not know you are there.  Your patience, compassion and humor do not run out.  The light that shines in this darkness is you.

*Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary, dir. Deborah Warner, performed by Fiona Shaw

hard music

. . . And the night shall be filled with music.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The  Day Is Done"

It's hard to sing while you're weeping.  And yet singing is akin to weeping.  That's why so many of our favorite songs are sad ones, so many of our favorite plays are tragedies, and so many of our favorite stories are tales of loss.

I couldn't get through a certain part of the song* without breaking down.  I wasn't the only one.  At the pub afterward, I learned that my daughter and several others had also been blubbering their chords.

Art-works that refer to themselves (the canvas about painting, the play about acting, the song about singing) attack the bodies of artists intimately.  And in this case when the poet, who has begged his loved one to give her voice to verse, reports that the night is now filled with music, while the basses drop by a fifth to low D flat, then those who make music together, agreeing on a chord that sets the room to shudder, feel their fundamental glue dissolve.  It's black magic, or sinister science.  But we have to get over it.  We're artists.  We're paid to sing (or in the case of our chorus,** who do other things for their supper than sing, we reward ourselves by singing); we're not paid, or rewarded, to weep.  The singing uses the same muscles as weeping, but stops the weeping; or more precisely, it proves that weeping has stopped.  It pulls together what has been dissolved.  And that's why the old sad songs that every generation writes again, you know the ones, the songs that say your love is lost or your child is dead or you'll never see Innsbruck again, or Paris or Vienna or San Francisco, or your friends from the good old days, or the old country -- that's why those songs make us so damn happy.  And that's why our happy songs can in a moment bring us to tears.

Singing resembles the spontaneous utterances of the body: the scream of pain, the grunt of labor, the fart of laughter, the cry of fear, the ululation of grief.  It's as difficult as these utterances but it isn't any of them; it's the body's report on them.  And in reporting, the body sends a message.  I am still alive, it says.  Alive and striking back.  Alive and still in control, if not of the world, at least of myself.  Whatever it is I have suffered, I am still here to see it, and to make you know that I was here seeing it.  And for as long as some of you are hearing my song, I am still here, rising above the unfortunate accident of my mortal pain.  O grave, where is they victory?

It's after midnight in Paris, and this evening I go to one of the great churches and join with fifty others in singing one of the saddest songs ever written, the Stabat Mater.  In thirteenth-century Latin it tells of Mary standing at the foot of the cross where her child had died a ghastly death, "morientem desolatum."  We sing this song in the setting of Francis Poulenc, about whom there is much fuss now in France because he died fifty years ago.  Among the things one should know are the meanings of the text; one should know exactly what the poet is saying as you sing it.  And yet it's dangerous to know such things, for the black magic of verse and sound can undo us.  It's hard to sing when you're weeping.  Somehow Poulenc and the unknown poet of eight centuries ago pull a rabbit out of the hat: from our grief comes the hope of a triumph.  Not the least of triumphs are Poulenc's snappy rhythms, his chords chock with blue notes, his tunes that take the singer from church to the cabaret and then to outer space.

It's hard music.  Shall I be worthy?  I must pull it together.  I must sing this.

In Les Mis they say that to love another person is to see the face of God, but I think there's at least one other way.  The spheres are said to have a music of their own.  When you stand in a room with dozens of others as the ten notes of a chord click in, the room sings back to you and you give up your body to the sound.  Then the veil may pull back a little so God can look in.  Though the dress code requires black shoes, I think I should remove my sandals before entering such holy ground.  For this time there shall be no doubt; we shall know what to do and when to do it.  We poor mortals whose bodies threaten to dissolve are pulled together, reformed and improved by the song.

So it doesn't matter what the song reports.  Not in comparison to the act of reporting -- of putting pain in a bracket and setting it on the side, so we can rise from it.

A song is a prayer.


*Stephen Paulus's choral setting of the poem (adapted).

**New York City Master Chorale, cond. Thea Kano http://www.nycmasterchorale.org 

wonderful counsellor

The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.

-- Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature*

A child has been born for us, . . . and he is named . . . Prince of Peace.

-- Isaiah 9:6 (NRSV)

One of Christianity's great contributions to the world is its dissemination of the Hebrew scripture, of its history, poetry and prophecy.  One of Christianity's great crimes is its misappropriation and willful distortion of that scripture.

Every reader has the right to see his own experience in what he reads.  That's how literature survives, how ars becomes longa.  Every youth maturing into a rotten Denmark can see himself in Hamlet, his "most royal" life postponed by his father's ghost demanding an inconvenient revenge for his own decease.  Is my life really all about you, Dad?  Who among us does not contend with his parent's ghost?  Every raging, shriveling curmudgeon, his reach exceeding his grasp, can see himself in Lear, sinned against by the sycophants he favored, saved by the friends whom he betrayed.  Couldn't you just have said no to me?  Who among us should not have grown wiser before they grew older?

The enslaved have a right to see in the Hebrew exodus a campaign plan of their own liberation.  We have a right to see, in the prophetic longing for peace, a foreshadowing of our own.

Isaiah and Micah gave us the words for peace; swords, they said, would be beaten into plowshares, and the nations would no longer prepare for war, and each person could sit under his own vine and his own fig tree without fear.  The prophetic words can shape our hope because the prophets knew so much about violence, much more than we do.  They spoke for a tiny kingdom besieged by enemies, caught between the hammers of Assyria and Babylon, and the anvil of Egypt.  They saw their city razed, their temple smashed, their homes violated.  Horrible things were done to them, and the horrible things they did in the name of security are recorded in their deuteronomic history.  Israelites and Judeans knew firsthand about violence, and looked forward to peace not as an ideology but as an infrastructure for salvation and survival.

So when Christian pastors say "Jesus is the Prince of Peace,"** they commit cultural crimes of a high order.  They are saying that when the prophets spoke they didn't know what they were speaking about; that the prophets were robots programmed by a disdainful God, speaking nonsense to their own audience but predicting the leader of an unborn religion concealed two thirds of a millennium in the future; such pastors claim ownership of tropes to which they have no right, and attempt to alienate those tropes from their authors.  This appropriation asserts an ancient accusation, that the Jews to whom Jesus came were "his own, and his own people did not accept him" (Jn 1:11), that they babbled about his coming but did not know what they were saying.

Jesus was not the Prince of Peace.  Or rather, the Prince of Peace is not Jesus.  Jesus appears to have been a peaceable fellow, to the great disappointment of some of his disciples.  But the Prince of Peace would have been, among other things, a military hero.  If we assume that Isaiah, Jeremiah and Micah knew what they were saying, and that what they said was more or less what they meant to say; if we read the prophecies in their entirety, and not just the verses that made it into Handel's Messiah, we learn that the Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counsellor, was a mighty king whose "authority will grow continually," who will re-establish "the throne of David and his kingdom" (Isa 9:7).  Jesus's kingdom was "not from this world" (Jn 18:36), and was founded in weakness, to be inherited by those who suffered for the sake of righteousness; but the Wonderful Counsellor's kingdom would be real, here, now, founded in the power of a righteous and legitimate king.  It was power that would make peace possible.

Has it not always been this way?  Turning the other cheek may be a good way to save a soul for the kingdom of another world, but rarely produces revolution in this one.  Lions do not lie down with lambs unless there is a power to feed and restrain them.  Nevertheless, lions do sometimes lie down with lambs: and our nation founded in racial sin has re-elected its first black president.  This would not have happened if the 101st Airborne division had not gone to Little Rock in the autumn of 1957.  Nor could it have happened without the Civil Right Act of 1965.

The worst thing about Christian usurpation of the prophets is that it conceals what the prophets were trying to tell us: that the world will be saved, not by hoping we will be kind to each other, but by creating institutions, instruments and traditions of justice.  These works of civilization are never perfect.  They're just the best we've got so far, which is no small thing to say.

*The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 692.

**"Become Doers of Peace," Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, Sojourners (February, 2013), p. 22.

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."