Redemption of a Bad Situation

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One of my experiences that repeatedly astonishes and delights is to find a situation joyful and right that seemed lost, wrong, backward, devastating, awful. I suppose this a variant on the alchemy idea that I've blogged about before: what seemed a defeat turns out to be a blessing.

It's on my mind a lot because of last year, an “Annus Horribilus.” Last year was devastating for me, when everything went wrong that could go wrong, and I felt that I died in a very real sense.

But I not only recovered but am now humbly grateful, not just for surviving that year or so, but for having the devastation.

So I'm reading Huston Smith's “The World's Religions” last night and I come across this passage in his discussion of Hinduism:

Hindu literature is studded with metaphors and parables that are designed to awaken us to the realms of gold that are hidden in the depths of our being. We are like beings who, falling victim to amnesia, wander our kingdoms in tatters not knowing who we really are. Or like a lion cub who, having become separated from its mother, is raised by sheep and takes to grazing and bleating on the assumption that it is a sheep as well. We are like a lover who, in his dream, searches the wide world in despair for his beloved, oblivious of the fact that she is lying at his side throughout.

There is a story like that in the Lotus Sutra, where a father sends his son out into the world with just a ragged overcoat, but has sewn a valuable jewel into the back of it, unknown to the son.

Smith's book is fifty years old but is clearly a classic. Bill Moyer's blurb on the jacket says “This is the one book on world religions I can't do without. I return to it often – and always with reward.”

Here is just one more quote, this time from the introduction, in which he expresses caution about the institutionalization of religion, or of many other things, I imagine:

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain, and standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him: but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success – that he had seized hold of the Truth – Satan was unperturbed. “Don't worry,” he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it.”

Laughter

You will laugh at this. I came across it while looking for something else and got to laughing so much I couldn't bear it. There is something very human about laughter and the “contagion” you see here. I tend to be too serious and this was good medicine.

Oh, well, I've gone this far in making a fool of myself, I might as go all the way. Here's one more:

 

George Jones

I bet you didn't know that George Jones was the US's second-best singer, after Frank Sinatra. Neither did I. But Keith Richards, in his recent memoir, “Life,” quotes Sinatra as saying exactly that.

So it gives me great pleasure to be able to present right here for your heart George Jones singing what is probably his most loved song:

Be true! Be True! Be True!

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book, “The Scarlet Letter,” is often on “Great Book” and academic reading lists. Some people absolutely hate the book. James Dickey once dismissed it as “all this pother about fornication.”

But I was born, raised, and lived many years in that area just outside Boston in which the book is set, and am deeply familiar with its Puritan background. The fundamental problem of authenticity was, is, stark in that culture, as you see in “The Scarlet Letter,” but exists everywhere even if less easily noticed.

I first read it exactly fifty years ago and then again this last week. There was one sentence in the story which I had remembered verbatim over all these years and which perhaps catches the central point of the book:

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Multi-faced Mitt Romney comes immediately to mind and Cornel West recently rather harshly described Barack Obama as “a Rockefeller Republican in black-face.” I suppose it is difficult to get elected President of the United States or anything else, or to have any other socially important part, if you tell the truth. You and your loved ones will be “living under the constant threat of death,” to use Martin Luther King Jr.'s words. But Hawthorne writes:

“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:-'Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!'”

You get the feeling when reading Hawthorne's book, or Thoreau's “Walden” or Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath” or Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” that the author himself has managed to remain authentic. I'm sure there are many more such authors, but what you more often see and feel are those whose true intent is to get published, make a mark, make money, feed the ego, be famous, please ancestors who lived many years ago, or a thousand other shallow things.

Alchemizing Suffering

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One of my friends has been suffering deeply.

This suffering thing, the horror, seems always to be close at hand, as the First Noble Truth.

The first inkling, the first clue, that I can remember in my own life that suffering could be alchemized, lead turned to gold, was when one of my teachers, a chemist, once said in an offhand way that “The only problem that does you any real good is the one you can't solve!”

The next clue I got was in studying The Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law wherein one encounters the lovely Lotus Flower growing from the muck at the bottom of the pond.

Then there was Solzhenitsyn's writing in “The Gulag Archipelago” that there is this secret that defeat in war does you more good than victory. His sentence was short, small, but for some reason it really stuck. He also describes in there how he wanted so badly to get a certain outside job at the labor camp, prayed for it, thinking it would enable him to survive, but someone else got the job – who quickly died from the resulting exposure to cold. He marvels at how often in his life it happened that getting what he wanted turned out to be disaster and not getting what he wanted turned out best.

St. John of the Cross goes over and over and over it again in “The Dark Night of the Soul,” saying how indispensable annihilation is for us. I spent a lot of time with that book over the years.

Oh, and then the “Alchemists” and “Alchemy” – even the Incomparable Newton himself spent a lot of time on that. Old Newton was something else. Frances Yates once told me that Newton was far more interested in angels than in physics.

All this is very humiliating to me. What the hell do I know?! One could read such things forever and still suffer like a pig. A quote from Nietszche – the rogue – now comes to mind: “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”

But it does creep up on me in time, if I am patient, that things work out better than I could have imagined, as I was saying in my recent post, It Gets Better, Better than Before.

Hobo's Lullaby

This Pete Seeger version of “Hobo's Lullaby” brought me to tears last night:

My best guess as to why it hit me so strongly is that it reflects the experience that I, and so many others, have had as the result of trying to be true.

Several other versions are around – I think of those by Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie in particular – but what I think makes Seeger's version so powerful is that it is so utterly sincere, basic, un-sugared, yet with understanding, and with a feel for the relentless rails.

Leight, Rasch und mit Feuer

It was a bright, cool, perfect Tuesday morning this election day in Dayton, Ohio, when I got out my old bicycle and went over to the polling place. The people there were quite civil and friendly despite both sides feeling that major issues were at stake. No waiting, no lines, computer voting but with paper printout.

I can understand the thought of “What does one vote mean?” and “My vote won't make a difference.” And yet, beyond the remote but real effectiveness of that one vote, there is the additional fact involved that voting is an acknowledgement and reaffirmation of the fact of humanity, and all that it entails, which is infinite. I came out of the polling place feeling “Light, Rash, and with Fire:”

It seems almost incredible now that women were excluded from voting in the United States even during my mother's lifetime – a fact that she mentioned with anger even beyond the year 2000. The new suffrage law that resulted in the 19th Amendment passed the House by only one vote in 1918, because one representative's Mommy called him and told him to do the right thing. Just incredible. Florida and South Carolina did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1969, Georgia and Louisiana until 1970, North Carolina until 1971, and Mississippi until 1984.

John Knox published in 1558, “The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” pointing out among other things that it was un-Biblical to allow women such decision-making. Apparently Queen Elizabeth felt that Knox was, shall we say, a person in error. I heard when I was living in the UK in the 1990's that phrase “the monstrous regiment of women” used by women with that high-level, refined irony and sophisticated sarcasm of which the British seem so well endowed.

About Thirty-Five Years Ago

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Many people have asserted that something went wrong with the USA “about thirty-five years ago.”

USA Conservatives think that there was a turn to the Left, likely caused by “the hippies,” and are yelling “STOP!” They see “America” in decline and say they “want their country back” and perceive an increase in communism and threats to their individual freedom.

USA Progressives, like ElizabethWarren, say there was a turn to the Right:

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research — less to build a future.

I think it is true that something happened about thirty-five years ago and have given it a lot of thought during that time, particularly because it was the reason I left my primary career teaching sociology and social psychology. I was interested in social problems and issues but my students and colleagues turned consciously and committedly selfish. I had been involved in civil rights and the anti-poverty program and the community college idea and anti-war activities, but my students, their parents, administrators and my colleagues distanced themselves from all that. It became clear to me after sufficient battles and blood on the ground that I didn't belong there. I think the straw that finally broke it all for me was one of my fellow sociologists saying to me, “Val, you're right, but you can't ask me to stick my neck out, I have a family to support.”

It seemed to me at the time that the country had rejected decency and concern for the others, particularly for the vulnerable, and had made a turn to desultory and even hostile selfishness. But the sanctimonious selfishness thing had always been there, of course, hidden behind “fine Christian teachings” and such – all I needed to do is remember Huckleberry Finn.

Fascinatingly to me, I recently saw a young student in the seat beside me on a train reading Howard Zinn's “A People's History of the United States, 1492 to the Present” and learned that it is now a widely-used textbook!

I think that what happened “about thirty-five years ago” was not a turn to selfishness – selfishness has always been there, hidden by self-serving, hypocritical rhetoric – but rather that there were many widely-publicized events that made selfishness more conscious. Elizabeth Warren is correct in that there was a conscious commitment to selfishness, exemplified in the works of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the Malthusian/Social Darwinian ecologists. And the Conservatives are correct in that one of the necessary concomitants of any consciousness is differentiation from the contrary view: in this case, by consciously exalting selfishness there has been a concurrent understanding that this means the destruction of the most vulnerable among us, perhaps even 99% of us. Consciousness of the reality that somehow “we are in this together after all” is in fact a “loss” of the country as it was.

Here is a short list of some of the events of “about thirty-five years ago” that made the selfishness question more conscious:

• “The civil rights crowd,” as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas calls us, brought about desegregation and many other social changes despite widely-publicized resistance, beatings, riots, killings, and assassinations.
• The resistance to the Viet-Nam war succeeded to the point where even Robert Macnamara admitted that he “was terribly wrong,” from a time when Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were the only Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The domestic and world-wide effort to stop that war succeeded, despite highly-publicized beatings, jailings, insurrections and killings.
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  And, Yes, “The Hippies,” if by that I may designate all the visionaries in the arts, especially in popular music, film, and literature; people who spoke out, who stuck out their necks, who came out and said No, this can not go on, life doesn't have to be like this, this is wrong. Neil Young's “Ohio” immediately comes to mind, and Daniel Ellsberg, and so many others. The counterculture has been so successful that there is now the possibility that, in some States at least, innocent and responsible people will not be given mandatory jail sentences for personal use of marijuana.

Much more could be said on the subject of what happened “about thirty-five years ago” and why both Progressives and Conservatives both see that as a critical, crucially consequential time. I will be spending a lot more time thinking it over, so if you have any observations that you think will help, please leave a comment!

It Gets Better, Better than Before

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Wendy Lustbader's book, Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older, is one of those books that I wish I owned when I was young and was going through those horrible years when the angel-headed had no place to go and no hope, except for a word here or there from one person or one book.

Here is the first paragraph from the front flap of the dust jacket:

From our earliest years, we are told that youth will be the best time of our lives and everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is often not the golden era it is made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with tension, confusion, and the angst of uncertainty. As we get older, Lustbader asserts, we gain self-knowledge, confidence, and an increasing capacity to be true to ourselves.

U.S. President Obama recently gave an excellent talk on the subject:

That is what I would like to say to every single young person who sees the truth of how insane, upside-down, the world is in which we are living, where the first are last and the last are first, where those who are respected and supposed to know things are not what they seem, and that the stone that was rejected ultimately becomes the headstone of the corner. I would like to write a book like Lustbader's and just say what she and President Obama are saying here, only more so!

William James once wrote “I take it that no man is truly educated who has not dallied with the thought of suicide.”

I think this is why Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” has been the most important book in so many people's lives. The protagonist, a young person, Holden Caulfield, sees how screwed up and insane the world is. He's still in it at the end of the book, with work to do before “it gets better,” but if he doesn't get too discouraged or too hurt, he can come out to a place that is not only “better than before,” (one of Cohen's “Old Ideas”) but is magnificent beyond what he ever could have dared to believe. It's a very real "Going home to where it's better than before."

Lustbader says (p. 1), “Everything gets better – you just have to get through your twenties.” I think it's a life-long struggle but the worst of it seems to be, I would agree, when you're young.