On The Good Of Desolation

Ruth's comment on my Shakespeare, Jail and Assassination piece kept me busy for the few following days. She is thinking, as I see it, of why it is so easy to forget the value of desolation.

The question goes far beyond my powers, but here's what happened. 

Saint John of the Cross' book, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” came immediately to mind because he explicitly deals with the good that desolation does us. So I read it for a couple days.

One point that struck me most strongly was his saying that we often feel when we experience desolation that God has abandoned us.

Oh, how many times have I been through that!

I think it was the problem that Christ was addressing in his last moments with the words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

I agree with those who believe that Christ was quoting the first words of Psalm 22, sometimes called “Christ's Psalm.” Everyone would have known that Psalm immediately just from those first words. Psalm 22 deals with our repeated experience of feeling that God has abandoned us, and then discovering that it's all to the good.

Perhaps what makes us so slow, even stupid, about seeing the value of desolation is at least in part this feeling that God has abandoned us. I know that when I have that feeling, I am just turned to stone, just obliterated. Sometimes it has taken me years to recover, to alchemize some devastating experience, to come to a redemption through it. But it has always ultimately been redemptive.

I noticed for the first time that John of the Cross did have to do the jail thing. He was in a tight solitary cell for nine months where he wrote this book, and lashed at least once a week, before he escaped through a small window.

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The Superiority Thing

The competition that I was discussing in my last post seems to me to be just another aspect of a problem with many other appearances.

There has been a relatively common understanding that racism is a strategy, and attempt, by a person to feel better about himself by putting down other people on some meretricious group basis like skin color. A first sign that a person doesn't feel very good about himself is if he's always trying to denigrate others.

I was reading a comment last night by a lady who, to the external eye, seemed quite respectable but who was asserting that President Obama “loves” abortions. I've heard the same assertion by Rush Limbaugh that certain political leaders “Never saw an abortion they didn't like.”

Now, the assertion is obviously untrue and there is no instance of anyone ever saying that they “love abortions.” If it is for polemical success, it won't work because it is clearly untrue. So where does it come from? From where does the assertion come that someone “loves” abortions?

From within themselves, of course. The assertion that others “love” abortions is very useful to me, to us, because it is proof of my, our, superiority. I may not feel very good about myself, but, by God, I am holier than they are. I am for life, and they are for death. What better proof that I am not inferior to them? Thank God.

I was talking recently with a lady in Alabama who really didn't have all that much going for her, but on this issue of abortion, she clearly felt her superiority. It was quite striking, and her pastor was with her on it. Thank God for abortions, for otherwise we wouldn't have very much.

This ploy is made easier by the fact that the enemies, the inferiors, in this case are primarily poor and young and defenseless women who are, after all, having SEX!

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All I Really Want To Do

I never really understood the competition thing, the idea that being better than someone else is a good thing.

It's all around us, the belief that it's good for someone to be greater than you are, run faster than you, know more, have better grades, have more respect, more votes, jump higher, throw more rubber balls through a hoop, whatever.

I can understand it among the animals to some extent, as a result of heredity and environment, natural selection, survival of the fittest and all that. Even what appears to be cooperation among the animals, such as when a pack of dogs take down a prey together, can easily be seen as selfish or natural.

But among humans, competition, the exaltation of self above others, runs contrary to the rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," the core of every ethical system.

Christ's disciples were arguing among themselves - as they still do - as to which of them was the greatest, and he turns to them and tells them that whoever would be first shall be last.


I see competition glorified all around me - right now it's the NCAA basketball tournament, NASCAR races, the educational system, the political "horse race - all shot through with self-aggrandizement.


The early Bob Dylan wrote a song, the first stanza of which goes:


     I ain't lookin' to compete with you
     Beat or cheat or mistreat you
     Simplify you, classify you
     Deny, defy or crucify you
     All I really want to do
     Is, baby, be friends with you.

I remember telling some of my students that I would like to see that as our national anthem, this being near the end of the Viet-Nam war when the killing was dragging on and on because our leaders were afraid that if they ended it they wouldn't look good.

But I saw Dylan recently saying how he had done something no one had ever done before, and I wondered if maybe Warhol really was right about him, or as Joni Mitchell recently said, "Everything about him is phony, even his name." Maybe, maybe not.


The subtlety with which competition sneaks into our lives may well be beyond our power to trace.

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Studs Terkel

I heard some piercingly beautiful music this morning and it brought me to that place where I was ready and willing to die right then. There is some way that is what I feel whenever I think of my friends past and present.

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Studs Terkel’s last interview came up in my last post on "the experts." Studs' best known book is probably his collection of interviews with people who lived through the Great Depression, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, thus his qualification for being asked in that interview for the lessons of the Great Depression:

"The lessons of the Great Depression? Don’t blame yourself. Turn to others. The big boys are not that bright."

"Those are my wife's ashes on the window sill next to the daisies, which have got to be fresh daisies, which were her favorite flowers. And I want my ashes mixed with hers and spread over Bughouse Square. You got to know what Bughouse Square is."

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On Appreciating Experts

Another one of my “things” - there is that magnificent word again - is the experience of going to an expert for help and finding the expert to be more harmful than helpful.

A friend who has often had that experience says to me, “How many times do I have to go through this to learn the lesson?!”

Now, it seems to me that if a person is innovative, believes she (or he), can do just about anything she sets her mind to do, she's going to have to develop a strong sense of the harmfulness of those who are commonly supposed to know.

My own theory is that we can't just dismiss experts, pay no attention, but rather we must enter into their perspective so deeply and widely as to be able to understand what they are missing.

Today, I called ten air conditioner repair shops listed in the Dayton yellow pages before I was able to talk to one person who seemed competent. But I felt that even he really didn't want to touch my machine, and he told me that it would be $62 for him to look at it, and $1 per minute to work on it. So he advised me, “Buy a new one.”

This particular air conditioner costs $450 new, so I pulled it apart by myself this afternoon, followed whatever tips I could garner from the Internet, put it back together, and it is putting out cold air again, at least for now.

It pleases me that my 23-year-old car and my 18-year-old pickup are still running reliably even though I was told several years ago by professional car repair people on different occasions that both were “dead.”

I wasted thousands of dollars, had many days out of service and nightmare experiences when I was an owner-operator trucker before I discovered the Mahoney brothers diesel service in Brentwood. If I had to visit a repair shop out on the road, I was sure to regret it, and so I always tried to hobble home to New Hampshire if it was even remotely possible.

Everyone I knew in the trucking industry (except one mechanic) told me when I decided I would buy my own truck, get my own operating authority, and truck around the States and Canada, “You will fail.” These experienced, knowledgeable people were wrong.

I did hire a professional consultant, for $400, to help me meet the proper D.O.T. and other requirements but he also had flaws which were almost fatal to my operation. I knew something was amiss when I found him asking me about certain regulations. He knew absolutely nothing about cabotage, which nearly got me arrested in West Hawk, Manitoba. I was carrying Ontario-origin freight into Manitoba - “cabotage” for a U.S. carrier – and one of the guys at the West Hawk inspection stations say to me, “You understand, don't you, that if you were a Canadian doing cabotage in the U.S., they would have you face-down on the ground, hands cuffed behind your back, with your freight and your truck impounded?” I told him, “I can do this. My consultant said I could.” I think one of the reasons, besides their natural decency as Canadians, that the guys at West Hawk let me off that day with only minor punishments was that they felt sorry for my naiveté about my expert consultant.

One last instance of this thing, this matter of the unhelpful experts, that keeps coming to mind is from ten years ago when I got Lyme Disease. I went to three physicians and one joint specialist because I didn't know what was wrong with me. I could barely walk, was constantly tired beyond description and often could barely stay awake. One day after these four doctors, lots of dollars and despair, a nurse friend calls me and says, “Val, I think you may have Lyme Disease. Why don't you come into the clinic and let us give you a test?”

* * *

Studs Terkel in his last interview:

“The big boys aren't that bright.” 

                                                      

* * *

Prediction

Today was one of those days when absolutely nothing happened the way I expected. Nothing negative, just entirely different from what I had planned when I got up this morning. I was a little discomfited by it for a while, but soon realized that, no, this day was good.

My reflection tonight is that the various “behavioral” sciences that I studied along the way usually posited that prediction was essential to those “sciences” being considered “science.” The idea was that a scientist associates variables with each other, so that prediction of a dependent variable from a knowledge of an independent variable would be possible. The scheme gets very sophisticated but that was considered the basic scheme and if that was not possible then you weren't doing science.

But I think that what is characteristic of people is that you really can't predict what they will do, not just because there is so much uncertainty and non-determination, such as in my day today, but because we think.

So tonight, just by chance, I'm looking through my notebooks and I come across this little gem from Jung in Memories, Dreams and Reflections:

There is no guarantee – not for a single moment – that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer – at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

A brilliant sociologist, Herbert Blumer, gave his presidential address to the American Sociological Association on “Sociological Analysis and the Variable,” in which he very clearly indicated how it is that we can't predict what people will do when they think. He told me years later, however, that no one in the field of sociology subsequently ever even mentioned his address.

I recently saw a panel of economists being questioned on why almost none of them foresaw the recent economic disaster. There were lots of defensive smiles and accusations and such, but none of them seemed to doubt that their “science” was about prediction.

And this, finally, raises a question that I have been working over for many years: Why is it that academics, of all people, would hold that people are predictable?

Oh, Yes, Wild Ronald Laing in The Divided Self: " So the person who says he is a machine is mad, while many of those who say men are machines are considered great scientists!"

        
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Not Unplugged

Bucky Fuller was an important other for me along the way. I went to some of his talks in Boston while I was living there and I just loved his presentations - the spontaneity, the child-like enthusiasm for his subjects, the openness and uninhibited passion - as much as the words. He had all these astonishing inventions and ideas, but he explicitly rejected the suggestion that he was “a genius. ” He said that, in fact, he was “very ordinary.” He said that we are born with all kinds of faculties, abilities, but we get “unplugged” from those capacities as we grow older. “I didn't allow myself to get unplugged,” he said.

There are four children in the adjacent houses in my neighborhood who are five years old and who are just alive with possibility. Bright as can be. I was talking with one of them about Cinderella and I could see that all the neurons were firing, none unplugged. She did, I must say, seem to think that the Disney version was the story. Cinderella in my understanding exists in some form in most cultures and my version changes each time I tell it, although I am definitely partial to the Grimm brothers' telling of it. The Grimms begin the story (Manheim's translation):

A rich man's wife fell sick and, feeling her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said: “Dear child, be good and say your prayers; God will help you, and I shall look down on you from heaven and always be with you.” With that she closed her eyes and died. Every day the little girl went out to her mother's grave and wept, and she went on being good and saying her prayers. When winter came, the snow spread a white cloth over the grave, and when spring took it off, the man remarried.

Now, even that bit right there has so much in it for conversation with a five-year-old or a not-unplugged adult that I just can't stand it. Too much.

* * *

Here is a nice passage from Reading With Children, by Anne Thaxter Eaton, first published in 1940, on the subject of bringing books and children together:

It is not a simple task. It means knowing children and knowing books so thoroughly that we may help the dreamer see the wonder and romance of the world around him, and the matter-of-fact child to enter the realm of imaginative literature...We must have retained or we must recapture for ourselves something of the child's own attitude toward life and the world.

Something close to that was very much at the center of what I was trying to do in my ten years of teaching and then my ten years of book-selling. I think it's not usually understood that it is not a simple task because the reader should believe, if you've done it correctly, that it was all just an unfolding of what was already within her. It looks as if it was all done by the student, which is true in a sense, yet setting that up by a teacher or book-seller or book-giver or book-recommender is often a task requiring immense reading and experience and empathetic ability. And in the academy, particularly, you have to fight against the widespread but mistaken view that education is the filling of a container rather than the kindling of a fire, as Plutarch put it.

* * *

If you've had a look at Frances Yates' bibliography, to which I linked in my last post, you could get some sense of hers being a not-unplugged mind. Here is my favorite photo of her.

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Take physic, pomp

I told my friend several years ago that I would rather be with her during the hard times more than in the good times, although, of course, I loved being with her any old time. That thought seems even more true to me now.

These are hard times for many people here in Dayton, Ohio. My neighbor came over yesterday and asked me if I could give him something to eat, since he had nothing. He's in his fifties, good, intelligent, sensitive, distressed, and thin as a rail. I made up some spaghetti and we had a good long talk, particularly about poets. He finished his food, then brought me a book of poems that a friend of his wrote while doing time in prison, poems that were so utterly sincere, such pure productions of the human heart right up against the very worst, that I'm still stunned.

Wordsworth was on to this paradoxical fact of the blessings of defeat in “The Poem,” as my friend calls it, the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” I also remember Solzhenitsyn writing about the same fact in The Gulag Archipelago. I believe this is very much what is being said at great length in The Book of Job, and especially, for me, when God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. Job has taken what seems to me a merciless devastation but in the end, we have a very different appreciation.

Here we have King Lear speaking from in front of the hovel in the storm:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

I feel that my own life is on the ragged edge and that my death will happen any day now and I see the horror all around me here, but at long last I feel certain that it works out far better than I could ever imagine.

* * *

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

                                                                                         - Robert Frost

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Ancestors, Jung and Yates

I often think that the social nature and origin of our minds is particularly evident in how we become aware in time how much more our ancestors play in our thinking than we at first realize.

Jung wrote in several places about our minds having people playing in them who lived even centuries ago. Here is one from “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual:”

The significance of the father in moulding the child's psyche may be discovered in quite another field – the study of the family. The latest investigations show the predominating influence of the father's character in a family, often lasting for centuries.

And one more, from The Red Book:

These figures are the dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging of the dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of the dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

Now you know why you lodged the simplest and most easily explained matters in just that spot, why you praised that peaceful seat as the most secure; so that no one, least of all yourself, would unearth the mystery there.

I think it cannot be denied, whatever one thinks of Jung, that he is correct in saying that our minds contain people who are still quite active, long before we realize it. This is important since, as I mentioned in my last post, the implications of our minds and individuality being built after, upon, our social experience are vast and quite contrary to what is commonly believed.

* * *

Jung's writings, particularly on the interpretation of dreams and myths, have been important to me over the years and I keep coming back to them with profit.

I once asked Frances Amelia Yates about some comment Jung had made, and she quickly answered, “Jung is a fraud!” She said it vehemently, with disgust, so I didn't ask further. Her face told me all.

Frances was a highly-regarded historian whom I came to know because she was related to me through my mother. Frances was formidable. I hope to write a little about her in a future post, particularly because Jones' recent biography of her, in which I am discussed, has a couple serious flaws.

Shakespeare, Jail and Assassination

I'm reading Shakespeare again now, fifty years after having “read” him in school and passed the examinations. And the thought that most often comes through my mind as I now read Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, is that making a young student's career and livelihood dependent upon passing a test on Shakespeare, before the student has had the experience to understand it, has to do more damage than good.

"My desolation does begin to make a better life. 'Tis paltry to be Caesar,” says Cleopatra.

That is what my brother would call “a hard teaching,” and if I tried teaching it in a high school, the parents would demand my immediate firing. “We don't want our child to be a hippie, that's not why we're paying your salary.”

Impossible. So what is a teacher to do? Falsify what Shakespeare is really saying, of course, all the while praising him to the skies.

I have often felt that I was lucky that I wasn't jailed nor assassinated for such truth as I was able to teach and to live. There were a few close calls, such as when I refused to go to Viet-Nam and when I was working as a sociologist in Alabama in the 1960's and Massachusetts in the 1970's. I received what some might say were analogous punishments but not those.

A Russian friend who was jailed and tortured in the 1950's in the Soviet Union for speaking and living the truth says that being put in solitary confinement was nothing, but being put in an asylum with genuinely crazy people was very hard to take.

I feel even luckier to have known such people, even to know of them, than to have escaped jail or assassination. Thinking of Norman Morrison, as I often do, still is breath-taking for me – it literally affects my breathing.

Introduction and Purpose of the Blog

Introduction and Purpose of the Blog

The thing is, the issues that interest me the most, that trouble me the most, are basic problems that we all experience but that are only too easily evaded by sliding into, hiding within, secondary or even delusional matters.

* * *

There is an impulse that we recognize in ourselves while reading Thoreau to try to be as true as we can and not to waste our lives on things that really don't matter.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;

A. J. Muste mentions in one of his essays - I don't know where he learned this fascinating fact, but it fits - that Walden was the book most commonly carried by GI's during World War II.

And I often think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s “The Drum Major Instinct” sermon, given shortly before he was assassinated, foreseeing his own funeral, in which he said:

I'd like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody… And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say.

Another statement of purpose that I like is: “For this reason was I born and for this reason came I into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”

* * *

Language, our most useful and characteristic tool, is social through and through, and I include music as language. Countless others created and sustained it before we were born. We may use it to create and to express our individuality, but we got it from others. The names we give “things” are shared. The word “thing” itself comes from Scandinavia to indicate a social matter.

I mention this now because a large part of our world does still not recognize to this day that the other is essential to the self. What we considered to be “in here” is not separate from what is “out there.” as is still commonly believed.

That discussion of what is self and what is other gets complicated very quickly, as in contemporary particle physics and professional philosophy and depth psychology. But I have seen that it doesn't have to be that way.

* * *

Suicide note left by a boy who attended an upper-middle class high school:

I love you Dad but I just can't stand those bastards.

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