Cleverness, Information, And The Third Brother In The Fairy Tales

The art and wisdom of fairy tales are way beyond the understanding of professional academics but within the reach of little children.

The irony and depth of that thought often come to my mind as I follow the daily news about war, environmental degradation, torture, militarization of community police, the corruption of political life by money, the destructive effects of education systems and athletics, economic collapse,  the scandal of professional medicine in the USA, the dishonesty of TV and other media, and a host of other serious social problems.

I follow the discussions of such massive issues relatively closely, taking them to heart, and agonize over how to make a contribution toward dealing with them, no matter how small such contribution might be. I believe it is necessary to do at least something, no matter how small, for the larger love as well as in order to keep one's own soul together, rather than just despairing or suiciding or getting depressed or going crazy or something like that.
 
Fairy tales can provide a surprizing amount of help in that situation.
 
First of all, you find that you're not alone: many people before you and beside you have been in the situation, as documented in the ancient origins and persistence and popularity of the tales. That itself is of no small help. It helps you to believe what your own eyes are telling yourself in the face of the abundant contemporary insanity around you.

The tales are also clear demonstrations that profundity is a quite different quality than cleverness, sophisticated intellectual versatility, and the accumulation of data. Some of my academic colleagues have accused me of “promoting ignorance” in saying this, but unquestioned, unguarded cleverness always results in massive stupidity and “ignorance.” In fact, a good example and definition of “ignorance” might be the “ignoring” of what I am saying here.
 
This reality is well-expressed in the fairy tales that speak of three brothers, two of whom are clever and the third is simple. Some examples of Grimm's tales which have this motif are “The Golden Bird,” “The Queen Bee,” “The Three Feathers,” “The Water of Life,” and “The Golden Goose.”
 
These tales, which have been in my mind for seventy years, typically feature three brothers who are sons of an ailing King, two brothers being clever, false, calculating, and arrogant. The third brother is typically “simple,” kind, unassuming, decent, guileless, respectful of “the animal” and the “small,” and seen as naïve and not likely to amount to anything.
 
So, last night I am reading before bed the justifications of torture by Richard Cheney and numerous other professionals who “know more about it than I do,” and I am thinking about the recent poll that says that over 50% of USA people think torture is all right. How is a person to face that, to deal with it inwardly, and to make at least one small contribution to resolving such an immense problem?
 
My book of Grimms' fairy tales is always right beside my bedside lamp, and I reach out for it and open it to the tale, "The Water of Life," which has three brothers in it whose father, the King, is ill. A wise old man declares that what the King needs is a drink of "the Water of Life." Each of the brothers goes out in turn to find it, because if he brings it home and heals the ailing father, then he will inherit the kingdom. Marrying a beautiful Princess and a few other delightful details are involved, too.
 
But finding the water of life is not easy. Each of the brothers encounters a dwarf, who happens to know where it is. The two older brothers are arrogant with him, dismissive, and insulting. "Stupid little fellow, what business is it of yours?" - stuff like that. The dwarf doesn't take this well, and puts a curse on the two older, arrogant brothers such that their path narrows as it goes into the mountains and they get jammed and cannot move backward or forward.
 
The third, guileless, son comes along, encounters the dwarf, and the dwarf asks him where he is going:
 

The Prince: "I am searching for the Water of Life, because my father is dying."

The Dwarf: "Do you know where it is to be found?"

The Prince: "No."

The Dwarf: "As you have spoken pleasantly to me, and not been haughty like your false brothers, I will help you and tell you how to find the Water of Life. It flows from a fountain in the courtyard of an enchanted castle."

I have seen a few interpretations of this motif that were written by highly respected academics who simply have no clue as to what is being said in the tale, and it seems obvious to me that the reason they don't understand it is that they are clever, well-informed, well-read, respected scholars and educators who accept the widespread delusion that they know things.

As for me, I feel that if I can share this fairy tale with even one person, even a child, then that is a good thing.

Emily Dickinson (2)

There are two passages from Emily Dickinson's letters that I share with you this cold, rainy December morning. She wrote these two letters to her sister-in-law and best friend, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, on the occasion of the death by typhoid fever of Susan's eight-year-old son, Gilbert Dickinson. Gilbert lived next door and was a favorite of Emily.

Gilbert Dickinson

She sat with Gilbert at the time of his death, and wrote of his words:

"Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me," was Gilbert's sweet command in delirium. Who are waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know - Anguish, at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents' feet - All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it's name!

And then there is this:

Dear Sue -
The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled -
How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the Sea, we find surprises us-
Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets -
His Life was panting with them - With what menace of Light he cried "Dont tell, Aunt Emily"! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me. Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!
He knew no niggard moment - His Life was full of Boon - The Playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his -
No crescent was this Creature - He traveled from the Full -
Such soar, but never set -
I see him in the Star, and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies - His Life was like the Bugle, which winds itself away, his Elegy an echo - his Requiem ecstasy -
Dawn and Meridian in one.
Wherefore would he wait, wronged only of Night, which he left for us -
Without a speculation, our little Ajax spans the whole -

Pass to thy Rendezvous of Light,
Pangless except for us -
Who slowly ford the Mystery
Which thou hast leaped across!

I notice that Emily has a birthday coming up next week, on the tenth of December, which I will celebrate as my own.

The Ringing of the Bells

It's the dying season as well as the holiday season, the next two months having the highest death rates of the year. The loved ones I have lost are particularly close at this time of year, as I suppose fits with All Souls and the Day of the Dead and such events coming around now.

I notice that there aren't any “scientific” explanations for the mortality statistics, which pleases me greatly. The temperature outside, for example, doesn't correlate with the death rate across climate zones. I just love it, because it tells me that, yes, people are in tune, people do love. It's immediately understandable from the human perspective why people should decide to go at this time of year. The “scientists” dismiss the human heart, the soul, the inner life, because they can't get meter readings on it.

But it's “Thanks to the human heart, by which we live,” as Wordsworth says in his poem.

It's pathetic, actually, just to keep on that materialist, “empirical,” path in the mistaken belief that we are only particles of “matter.” I see the loss of loved ones to be of the greatest help in shaking a person out of that view. The loss of loved ones provides the best opportunity I can imagine to question whether or not the particles theory doesn't have something seriously lacking.

And there is this additional 

gift, too, that the loss gives us the occasion to deepen, to purify, our loves of those who have gone. Here's a blunt statement of it by C. S. Lewis, from his book, “A Grief Observed:”

We are “taken out of ourselves” by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving her past or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.”

This seems way, way out there, but it rings the bells.

Emily Dickinson!!!

Emily Dickinson is a joy and a hope, a light and a delight - right in the heart.

I started reading her again after a lapse of forty years, and I can barely believe what I am now seeing, and that I missed so much before, and have since then.

The first thing that strikes me now is that she has provided the best resolution I've found of the Puritan, New England, Congregational, cultural issues that marked my own soul so deeply. I, too, was born and raised in Massachusetts in that same tradition as she was. Reading her now just bowled me over. Robert Frost's remark about her goes through my mind: “When she started a poem, it was 'Here I come' and she came plunging through.”

An unknown photo of her seems to have surfaced in 2007:

1859 Photo believed to be of Emily Dickinson (left) with a friend.

Here is a previous photo we have of her:

Emily Dickinson, 1847, about sixteen years old.

Her early letters from South Hadley have “it” as do the letters and poems right up until the end, but if I could pick out only one poem for you, it would be the one that begins “Because I could not stop for death...”

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –

The Dews drew quivering and Chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

The fact that she refused to publish, or even to title, her poems makes perfect sense to me, but what a loss it might have been, but for her friend, Sue! There is now an astonishingly large scholarship on Emily and I think I can detect that same feeling, of our great luck, in such places that normally seem so cold.

Dostoyevsky on The Matter with Kansas

“And why are you so firmly and solemnly convinced that only that which is normal and positive, in a word, his well-being, is good for man? Is the reason never deceived about what is beneficial? It is possible that, as well as loving his own welfare, man is fond of suffering, even passionately fond of it...I am sure that man will never renounce the suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge.”

You, like me, may often wonder why USA voters – and others – do things like vote for politicians who want to take away poor people's health care, or to ask the obscenely rich to pay less tax, or to remove environmental protections against corporate predators, or to burden students with insurmountable personal debt, or to subordinate women – in a word – to make life more difficult for everyone.

I think Dostoyevsky was on to a major part of the explanation in the above passage.

There are undoubtedly a lot of things that go into the creation of the Big Absurdity, but this need to confront the unknown, agonizing realities has to be central. You see USA people, right here in Dayton, living in some of the most luxurious circumstances the world has ever known who are nonetheless as unhappy, dishonest, murderous, suffering and selfish as anyone ever. They see, with an edge to it, the killing or dispossessing millions of people in Viet-Nam or Iraq or elsewhere, and represent it as just the way life is.

It's not like we don't see the situation. Everybody knows. This richest of the wealthy nations has the highest child-poverty rate? Trickle-down economics? Militarization of local community police? Lowering wages for the 99%? Hospitals, medicine and prisons for outlandish profit? The economist's profession? The academy? Psychiatry? Or take Elie Wiesel being conned out of big bucks by Bernie Madoff – it's basic that you can't con a mark who has no larceny in his own heart. It's not that we don't see. We have to own up to it

It's like in “Crime and Punishment” or “The Scarlet Letter.” I think Churchill's statement that the USA will exhaust every alternative possible before choosing to do the right thing applies generally. There is all this suffering and agonizing falsity until the truth is acknowledged.

This public acknowledgement is seen here negatively as “apologizing for America.” Sen. George McGovern said that the walls of the senate chamber reeked with blood, during his attempt to stop the Viet-Nam war, but we weren't ready. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that the US was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. We had to agonize some more rather than face up and admit it. Almost no one in the Senate now thinks the Viet-Nam war was a good idea, as Jim Webb phrased it not long ago. Very few now think invading Iraq was “a good idea.”

Diane Ravitch's first and most important recommendation for improving education in the USA in her recent book,“The Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is that we provide every pregnant woman with proper prenatal health care. It's obviously true, but the country needs to suffer a whole lot more – teacher degradation and firings, more teaching to tests, more fear and agony, more personal debt, more loss, more humiliation and discipline, more recrimination and ressentiment - before it can confess and possibly choose to do the necessary thing.

A Pilgrimage to Oshawa

I made a pilgrimage last week back to Ontario, or, it may be better called a “sentimental journey home.” It's the place where I have had the most loved ones and whose people with whom I can most easily identify, even though I've never had a legal address there.

Robert Frost's famous definition of home as “the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in,” has always seemed a travesty to me and I've often wondered why people quote it or think it's funny or something.

There was one grave site in Oshawa in particular where I prayed during this pilgrimage that felt like real home. This was the grave of a lady who lived a very difficult eighty-four years of hardship capped off at the end with a few years of Alzheimer's. She had no formal education, no money, no worldly fame nor power, but she did the true things all along the way and was utterly humble. Whenever I pointed out to her the magnificence of something she had done for someone, she would reply something to the effect that God had just put it in her path to do, that no credit was due to herself.

She adopted an infant whose parents had died shortly after his birth and raised him alone, as well as caring for many other children. It's a long story of many difficulties, but of a true woman. She taught me so much.

Here is a photo of her that I took one day when we went for a pilgrimage back to her own childhood home shortly before her death. I would take her places in my big truck whenever I was in Oshawa, even to church, and she was never embarrassed by it. I always found it very refreshing that she never felt embarrassed by me, who am distant from respectability and rich people.

She was only about four years old when her mother died and often thought of her mother as she went through her difficult life. I think she silently hoped that they would meet again on the other side. I trust it's so.

New Teacher Advice: “Don't smile until Christmas”

“Don't smile until Christmas.” That used to be standard advice to any first-year teacher in secondary school. If you smile, they'll discover that you're human and then you'll really be in for it. You will have “discipline problems.”

It was one of those things that they didn't usually tell you in the Fundamentals of Teaching course at teacher's college, but rather was just practical, experience-derived, realistic, friendly advice.

I remember one particularly difficult student during my first month of teaching in a secondary school. This poor kid was constantly causing trouble, so I talked with him, respectfully, about it after school one day. The following were his exact words:

“You really want to know why I do it? You really want to know? It's because you have these big soft eyes that just ask for it.”

It was a magnificently human moment, for me, and I hope and believe for him, too. I would love to talk with him now, fifty years later, to learn whether or not our talk made a difference in his life.

I resigned from the job, and from secondary-school teaching, after Christmas. The world was too big, with too many people and places to see, for me to stay in that job.

One of my students, who was particularly funny, laughingly said to me after a study hall – one of my duties was to “patrol” a study period in the auditorium filled with 200 energetic high school students - “What you really need is a German Shepherd dog that will go after them as soon as they move.”

Some of my students felt by that time that I was “a prophet” - their word – and others felt that I was from outer space.

But certain parents became really hostile, demanding of the principal that I be fired. “I don't want my son to grow up to be a hippie.” Exact words. There had to be more to life than fighting this particular battle.

I laugh to myself now because I have come to feel, after all these years, that probably the large problem of “inhumanity,” of which the above is just a particular example, is the central work of my own life and our times.

There are two articles in today's New York Times - In Ferguson and Beyond, Punishing Humanity – NYTimes.com and How Righteousness Killed the World Economy – NYTimes.com - which were very much about our situation after thirty-five years of conscious, programmatic, considered, selfishness. These articles are only two among many new indications that the whole Margaret Thatcher “There's no such thing as society” and Ronald Reagan “Government is the problem” thing is showing cracks.

Sheer, Simple Humanity

The above photo taken by Koran Addo in St. Louis is the centerpiece of a blog by Shaun King at Daily Kos today.  King asks, “What does the photo mean to you? What connects with you most about it?”

The Kossacks had some excellent responses, but the photo is so good that there is a lot more to be said.  Two main thoughts immediately came into my own mind on seeing it.

The first thought that came to my mind was that this is a magnificent little boy and that “they” will see it, too, but would want to shoot him with their precious, powerful, state-of-the-art, automatic weapons. There is something about sheer, pure, simple humanity that drives them crazy.

And my second thought that immediately followed was of a passage at the end of Abraham Johannes Muste's essay “Of Holy Disobedience” that goes as follows:

Precisely on that day when the individual appears to be utterly hopeless, to 'have no choice,' when the aim of the 'system' is to convince him that he is helpless as an individual and that the only way to meet regimentation is by regimentation, there is absolutely no hope save in going back to the beginning. The human being, the child of God, must assert his humanity and sonship again. He must exercise the choice which no longer is accorded him by society, which, 'naked, weaponless, armourless, without shield or spear, but only with naked hands and open eyes,' he must create again. He must understand that this naked human being is the one real thing in the face of the machines and the mechanized institutions of our age. He, by the grace of God, is the seed of all the human life there will be on earth, though he may have to die to make that harvest possible.

Please write your own response to the photo in the comment box below and let me know what you think.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has many fans, including me, who would like her to be President of the United States, but fully understand her refusal. We have an immediate appreciation of her.

And her opponents abhor everything about her.  She relates in her new, tenth, book, “A Fighting Chance,” how President Obama's senior advisers explained to her why he wasn't going to nominate her to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she conceived, created, loved and chaired in its first months. They acknowledged her competence and appropriateness for the job and said: “But ...for some reason, you are like a red-hot poker in the eye of Republicans.”

Now, when Elizabeth, or anyone,  draws out such strong emotional responses like that from both sides of aisle, you can be fairly confident that she is touching very basic issues. I think also that our emotional responses to her are of such great depth and strength that they must be “over-determined.” That is to say, there has to be more than just one item, one reason, one cause, of feelings of such depth and strength.

Elizabeth is not trivial, inconsequential, game-playing, bought, beholden, stupid, uninformed nor emotionally stunted. She confronts her opponents with the real issues that go deep, basic issues that they don't want to face, and she doesn't leave anyone an out.

One of those issues is that  the system is rigged, “hijacked by the rich and powerful,” rigged in favor of the “haves,” but the “haves” simply do not want to admit this. An example of this is the fact that the big banks, and she is quite knowledgeable about them, can easily buy off publicly-elected politicians. There is absolutely no denying this fact on the conscious level. She writes of preparing to give her talk at the Democratic convention in Charlotte:

“The system is rigged. That's what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government has been hijacked by the rich and powerful. How it didn't have to be this way. How we could do better.”

Another issue Elizabeth presents unavoidably is the woman question. She is so far ahead of her opponents in her clarity and standing on the issue that they don't have the remotest conscious clue of where she is. I mentioned Christina Romer's comment in a previous post on first meeting Elizabeth: “Why is it always the women? Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

There is a male strutting that goes on by men who consider themselves important, superior, more experienced, more knowledgeable, wiser, tougher, and all that. They dress and posture for the role, and feel free to talk over you when you are talking, and they cultivate a million ways to express how superior and important they are. Sometimes it's hilarious even and sometimes it is just pathetic. In any case, they pick up fairly quickly when you're not buying into it and therefore are not pleased with you. Not a bit. You are then a lethal enemy to everything they “are.” You are like a red-hot poker in their eye.

Jimmy Carter, “A Call to Action”

Jimmy Carter says in his new book, “A Call to Action,” that the most important issue the world needs to face is the enhancement of women's lives. The first sentence on the flyleaf reads: “The world's discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter's call to action."

I thought several times as I was reading the book of Diane Ravitch's writing that the the first step in true reform of education is to assure adequate prenatal care for women.

Carter went on the Charlie Rose Show recently to promote and to discuss his book, but Rose seemed just to want to discuss Israel. Carter politely told him a couple times that he wanted to discuss the book, but Rose clearly was not interested. However, I heard enough to know that I had to read the book.

Jimmy Carter has an awe-inspiring list of accomplishments. Just his eradication of Dracunculiasis, called guinea worm disease (GWD), in Africa is inconceivably magnificent, in my eyes. He has done so much more and is still very much doing it at ninety years of age.

He writes a lot in his first chapter about the misinterpretations of religious scriptures that promote the destruction of women's lives. Rightly so, but I was more struck by the passages later in the book in which he points out that it is actually women who make things work.

Here are some quotes from the book, for the truth of them, and to provoke your interest in the book, and simply for sharing:

p.70. Of even greater significance is what we have learned about the vital role that women can play in correcting the most serious problems that plague their relatives and neighbors. Almost everywhere, we find that women are relegated to secondary positions of influence and authority within a community but almost always do most of the work and prove to be the key participants in any successful project.

p.156. There have been surprising reductions [of Female Genital Cutting] in Kenya and Central African Republic. It is not clear why this is so, but it seems obvious that outside pressure has had little effect except in encouraging the education of young women...A public opinion poll that same year [2008] revealed that only a third of the younger women wanted to see the practice continued, while two-thirds of the the older women supported its continuation. Because the decision to perform FGC is made almost exclusively by mothers, without consulting their husbands, these numbers give hope that the next generation of daughters might be spared.

p.193, quoting Ela Bhatt: “I have faith in women...In my experience, as I have seen within India and in other countries, women are the key to rebuilding a community. Why? Focus on women and you will find an ally who wants a stable community.”

p.35. There are now more than five times as many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I was president and the number of incarcerated black women has increased by 800 percent! An ancillary effect is that this increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial programs The cost of prosecuting executed criminals is astronomical. Since 1973, California alone has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of each prisoner...Despite the proliferation of excessive imprisonments, the number of pardons by US presidents has also been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year term, and in their eight-year terms, Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack Obama issued only 23.

Leonard Cohen on Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again. [The first paragraph of “Montreal”]

There is a short piece of prose, entitled “Montreal,” in the recent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets selection of Leonard Cohen's poems and songs, a book well worth owning.

The city of Montreal has been particularly important to me because I lived there for four years as a student, attending the same university that Cohen attended. It was an overwhelming experience for me, even annihilating, so I've given it a lot of thought over the fifty years since then, trying to bring bits and pieces of it together.

Now, this "Montreal" poem feels clarifying, solidifying and delightful to me. I find that it pulls together most of my experience of Montreal. I've often thought of how Cohen once said that he “realized” that “Suzanne” was a Montreal song, because I felt that it was, too, but now I see Montreal in many other places in his thought.

I believe also that what Cohen says about Montreal in this poem applies to every other gathering of people I've experienced – annihilation then a protection. Finding or developing the protection can take fifty years or more, however!

Here's the remaining paragraph of “Montreal:”

  

We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist defectors from the Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church. Long ago the Catholic Church became a pebble beside the rock on which The Church was founded. The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. The Church despises your tiny works of death and The Church declares that every man, woman, and child is protected.

Cohen recently said that his long-term depression "has lifted” but my own view is that we are, or should be, rightly very troubled at how upside down and backward the world has become, or is, and that it takes one's whole lifetime's thought-work to resolve the big questions of our unique souls with regard to the situation.

He has a new album, “Popular Problems,” coming out later this month, on his 80^th birthday.

Joyce on the Infinite and the Infinitesimal

Taking the largest possible perspective on things makes me appreciate them more deeply, even though it sometimes seems like this is a cold, heartless, annihilating approach. Taking the largest perspective possible draws me closer to my loved ones and makes me appreciate them more while I am here.

I happened to be reading James Joyce's “Ulysses” recently and came across a passage in which he is writing about what I am calling “the large perspective.” He writes about the incomprehensible expanse out there as well as inside the small. I've elsewhere read a few attempts (Here is one which also quotes Joyce directly) to express this large perspective which were a little clearer than Joyce's attempt. Yet his is worth reading and goes as follows:

   The heaventree of stars hung with humid lightblue fruit.

   With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

  Meditations of  evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of the equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901; of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

   Were there meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

   Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatazoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

I take this humbling increasingly seriously as I come closer to death, although it is only too easy to lapse into the shorter perspective in which I think that things like “survival” are important.

But it doesn't involve a coldness or lack of love and appreciation. Just the opposite is true. Perhaps there is some way in which the vastness really is not that important or annihilating after all. Perhaps we know immediately that love is the central point and all the rest is derivative or secondary to it.

The Ferguson Photos

The recent photos of over-armed police pointing guns at unarmed people in Ferguson, Missouri, have a special resonance with me and apparently to many other people. I've thought a lot about the question of why this is, why these images are so exciting to me, why they are so deeply familiar and meaningful.

The best understanding I can come up with, that I keep coming back to, is that these photos express exactly how I have personally felt going to school and college, living in the USA during the Civil Rights fight and the Viet-Nam and the Iraq wars and  the Reagan-plus years of programmatic selfishness and the hatred-of-Obama years.

The very popularity of such photos as these is a great ray of hope because it suggests that humanity is alive and even unkillable despite all these years.

That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine

Gene Autry wrote a song in 1932 entitled “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” The first time I heard it was about twenty years ago, shortly after my own father died, when I happened to be wandering around an old antiques shop in Massachusetts near where he was born. The shop was playing it as background music but it had a great effect on me at the time and I've often thought of it since then.

Many singers have covered it. Marty Robbins' version, below, has been one of the most popular and is worth hearing, although I myself am partial to Mac Wiseman's version. Wiseman has done some Romantic things that seem simply incomparable to me.

Hank Snow, the Canadian singer, wrote a sequel to it, in which he has the father responding to the regret by saying “Just come see me.”
                                    

Now, it goes through my mind that the versions of this old Gene Autry song are not as well known or respectable as, say, the parable of the Prodigal Son or Rembrandt's painting of the silver-haired, old father embracing the repentant son, but that they are working on the same thing. Old, popular classics often carry the mythic with them.

In a vine covered shack in the mountains
Bravely fighting the battle of time
There's a dear one who's weathered life's sorrows
It's that silver haired daddy of mine.

If I could recall all the heartaches
Dear old daddy, I've caused you to bear
If I could erase those lines from your face
And bring back the gold top your hair.

If God would but grant me the power
Just to turn back the pages of time
I'd give all I own if I could but atone
To that silver haired daddy of mine.

I know it's too late, dear old Daddy
To repay for the sorrows and cares
Tho’ dear Mother is waiting in Heaven
Just to comfort and solace you there.

Yelling at Children

The fourth of July celebrations of USA Independence Day seemed unusually hollow this year to me because of the reaction of USA citizens to the arrival at the USA-Mexico border of large numbers of war refugee children and mothers. These poor children and their mothers were seen here as “a threat to our very existence,” had their buses blocked by USA patriots and even received death threats.

The best single comment I read on the occasion was from Duncan Black:

     “July 4th:  Should we yell at some poor children or something?”

This occasion seemed to me to be a new low for the US and I tried writing something out to that point, but soon realized that it was not at all a new low.

Canada Day 2014 - My Appreciation

I used to love going to Canada, particularly between 2001 and 2008, when I had a big truck. I had some very good friends there, too, and lots of memories.

But something went wrong over time so that I got “flagged” in the Canadian customs/immigration computer for something- they never tell you what it is, why – so I eventually came to feel that this country I loved so much had something against me. Every time I would cross the border, I would get detained and grilled and then seemingly grudgingly and suspiciously admitted.

I talked with an older, decent, kind, truly experienced Canadian customs official about this one day when I crossed the border into Cornwall, Ontario. He relieved a lot of the sourness I was developing by saying to me: “Don't take it personally, it's just the rules,” and by recognizing my love of Canada and sharing his love of Canada with me. I told him about how I used to feel coming across that high bridge over the St. Lawrence and seeing the lights of Cornwall spread out down there before me on the other side. He spoke of Manitoba. That old guy represents Canada to me. Yes, Canada has its problems, but here was the heart of it.

Crossing the other way, from Canada into the US, was an entirely different matter. I was not “flagged” in the US customs for anything. The trouble I ran into there had nothing to do with “rules,” and in fact the problem was just the opposite – no rules. The absolute worst US customs officials and border guards were at Port Huron, Michigan, where you come in from Sarnia, Ontario. These guys were simply sadists – swaggering, violence-obsessed, self-important, vicious bullies. I don't have the vocabulary.

The idea that “It's just the rules” does apply in Canada, in general.

The idea in the US is that rules and justice are bullshit, and that the essence of “America” is exactly that. I will do just whatever the hell I want and screwing you over, eventually destroying you, is the best part of that.

Speaking Truth to Power

One of the surprising things about being "old, alone, and at the edge of death" is a new redeeming perspective on telling truth to power.

The powerful do not like having truth spoken to them, as anyone who has ever tried it knows only too well. Solzhenitsyn cites an old Russian proverb at the end of his Nobel Speech which goes: one word of truth can change the world. Tolstoy says similar things in many places, in one of which he says that the rulers of the world know this very well, so they zealously guard against its emergence.

They say things to you like “You'll never work in this town again,” in its many variants but probably they just do their destruction on you long before you know a thing about it. A favorite twist on it is to threaten your family.

Some contemporary truth speakers who come to mind are Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Ellsberg.

I just loved McGovern confronting Donald Rumsfeld at a lecture that Rumsfeld had just given in Atlanta. McGovern took up Rumsfeld on his lie that he knew where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were – north, east, south and west of Tikrit and Baghdad. The audience started getting physical toward McGovern for being such a rogue, so impolite, as to confront Rumsfeld on an obvious lie. You know just from the way Rumsfeld cited each of the four directions, that he was pulling it out of his butt. They started going for him physically and he said “Hey, this is America!” It was a brilliant thing to say to such people, and it worked.

That little bit of truth speaking may have saved far more lives and had a bigger effect on the world that was first apparent. The reaction of the crowd was just everything I despise. A courageous, truthful man speaks the truth and thereby does untold good, and “Real Americans,” patriots, wannabes and hangers-on-to-the-system and apparatchiks and the arrogant try to stop, even to murder him with their mindlessness. If you try some truth-speaking you will likely get death threats, and when you go to the police for protection on these occasions you find out very quickly who side they are on. The police told me on one such occasion, “Well, if I were you, I would get out of town for at least three days.”

There were many times over the course of my life when I spoke truth and received that response. A big one was my refusal to participate in the Viet-Nam war. Another instance, perhaps even more dramatic in its clarity for me, was when I addressed the faculty of the community college where I had taught for about ten years. The community colleges where visionary, progressive, hopeful places when they first started, but as usually happens with such vision and hope, they became sclerotic, mind-numbing inferior copies of the same old repression that they were designed to overcome or at least ameliorate. A great vision soon becomes co-opted into its exact opposite: what was once a great movement accrues people who are really after money and respectability or ancient ego or hidden malice and they destroy it.

So I spoke to the faculty of this college about it, citing the implications of Plutarch's description of the mind as a fire to be kindled rather than a receptacle to be filled. I was, of course, vilified and voted down for telling the truth. I resigned the job, relatively well-paying and having tenure, at the end of that semester. There were only one or two faculty out of a hundred that supported me, and a third person said,”you are right, but I have a family to support.” She herself had tenure but she was still full of such fear and already so corrupted as not to come out openly in support of me. The anger at me over the meeting was so intense, and faces so red, that I felt things could have gotten physical, although they did not.

So now, in my old age at the end of my life, and having paid the price for truth-speaking, I have come to the realization of redemption. It's easier than ever for me and other old people to speak the truth – you're going to die any day now anyway, so it doesn't really matter even if they come shoot you in the heart, destroy your ability ever to get job again, or lock you in solitary for the rest of your life. That is actually true for anyone, taking anything like a large perspective. Life passes so very quickly.

I can now see with thanks and delight how good it was for me to have stuck with it despite the price, and I see, without any gloating or vindictiveness, what happens to those who do not stick by it. They become so debased and corrupted that they are incapable of redeeming themselves. It's much too long a task - I would say impossible - if they have a massive load of lies they have lived on and under.

There have been late-in-life “conversions,” at the death bed, and all that. But William James would say that such conversions are not immediate acts, but have been in preparation for a long time previously, on the subconscious level particularly.

Every word I have written here is the truth, and I know that there are people out there in the USA who would gladly kill me for writing it, but it doesn't bother me now, yes because I've had ”a glimpse of the promised land,” but also death will definitely happen any day now.

Let's Be Logical Now. Rational.

One of the best descriptions that I have read of the limitations of the “Let's be logical, now,” mindset just seemed to jump off the page at me from a paragraph in Swedenborg (Coelestia Arcana, vol. 2) last night. The context of this piece is his explication of Sara laughing upon being told that she is going to have a child, Isaac (“laughter”), in her nineties. Her husband is 100. “Shall I truly bear, and I am become old?” She laughs. I guess it didn't seem very logical to her.

Swedenborg has a lot to say about this Sara-to-Sarah story but here is the part ( §2209) that was so striking to me last night:

As regards the rational in general, when it thinks about divine things, especially from its own truth, it cannot possibly believe that there are such things; both because it does not apprehend them, and because there adheres to it the appearances born from the fallacies of the senses by which and from which it thinks; as is evident from the examples adduced above; to which the following may be added by way of illustration. If the rational be consulted, can it believe that the Word has an internal sense, and this is so remote from the literal sense as has been shown? And that the Word is that which conjoins heaven and earth, that is, the Lord's kingdom in the heavens with the Lord's kingdom on earth? Can the rational believe that souls after death speak with each other most distinctly, without the speech of words, and yet so fully as to express more in a minute than a man does by his speech in an hour? And that the angels do the same, but in a speech still more perfect, and one that is not perceivable by spirits? Also, that on coming into the other life all souls know how to speak in this way, although they receive no instruction in so speaking? Can the rational believe that in one affection of man, nay, in one sigh, there are such wonderful things as can never be transcribed, and yet are perceived by angels? And that every affection of man, nay, every idea of his thought, is an image of him, being such as to contain in a wonderful manner all the things of his life? Not to mention thousands upon thousands of such things. The rational, which is wise from sensuous things, and is imbued with their fallacies, when thinking of such things, does not believe that they can be so, because it is unable to form any idea of itself except from such things as it perceives by some sense...

This is all definitely “nonsense,” non-sense, the exact word used, to logical positivism, linguistic analysis, operationalism, etc.

The increase in love and humility that can come with age, though - the burning away of ego-centrism - seems to make it much easier to understand what Swedenborg is saying here. No joke!

Recovery of the Castle

A 15-year-old boy, whom I know very well, was a student at Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Massachusetts, at the time. It was the day before the annual Thanksgiving Day football game between Concord-Carlisle and Lexington High School and there was a “rally” occurring in the school auditorium. Concord and Lexington are old, historic, educated, expensive suburbs of Boston that are considered to have superior schools.

This ceremony consisted of the members of the football team being introduced, one by one, as each ran up on onto the stage, to great applause, punching on their way a hanged effigy of a Lexington High School football player having ketchup on its jersey to simulate blood.

My hero, the 15-year-old boy, was disgusted so he left the auditorium and went downstairs to the metal-working shop. The Vice-Principal soon appeared and asked my hero what he was doing. My hero replied to him that he thought the rally was really stupid and so he had come down to the shop to work. The Vice-Principal then said, “Do you mean to tell me that everyone else in the school is stupid and you are the only smart one?” He then sent my hero home from school.

Now, I have related this true story since it happened many years ago to a number of people whom I judged to have the courage and honesty to face it, to understand it. Old Frances Yates just laughed and giggled when I told her. My most recent hearer was a nurse who replied “I would have told the Vice-Principal, 'Yes, they are all stupid and you are the worst of them.'”

This football rally incident in these two classy USA towns strikes

me as almost worthy of fairy tale status, because it does all work out correctly in the end. The true-at-heart eventually strikes the fiery dragon in just the right place, deflates the bloated pest, recovers the dragon's ill-gotten gold and historic hoard, marries the princess, and they become King and Queen, the laughing green leaves come back out on the trees, the castle reanimates, and they live happily ever after.

Hospital Observation

There is a massive modern hospital just across the street from where I live in Dayton, Ohio. I had occasion last week to be in there for fairly serious surgery, and what struck me most about the experience was the contrast between the high-quality, experienced, older caregivers – mostly women – and the younger, arrogant, insolent, staff who lacked even the remotest sense of compassion or humanity.

I've reflected often since then as to why the contrast was so striking to me, and the issue that seems most important to me is whether one sees the human being as a collection of particles, atoms, molecules, electro-chemical entities or whether one sees the human being's essence as a love, a soul, or spiritual entity.

I hold the latter view, and the way I sometimes express it is that we are spirits having a physical experience in this world, rather than physical objects without soul or spirit. I think immediately as I write this of Wordsworth's “Ode: On The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” particularly of it's ending lines which go:

   Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

William Wordsworth

   Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
   To me the meanest flower that blows can give
   Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.



That is actually a hard-earned position, given the nearly universal view around here that electro-chemical particles are all there is, that money is the measure of value, that technological wizardry represents progress, that humans are essentially computers, and forty years of Ayn Randian selfishness, greed and exploitation have been good.

The worst offenders seemed to me to be the arrogant, contemptuous, male, rich weasels. And it seemed nothing short of miraculous that the mature, decent, capable and kind women were even able to survive in such an environment.

Grief Books

The first Kushner Book,When Bad Things Happen to Good People, has been one of the most popular books to give someone who is grieving since it first came out in 1981. Another has been the C. S. Lewis book, “A Grief Observed.” I suppose everyone has his or her own special book for solace during the dark night of the soul, and I am always interested in such books.

I remember turning to the films of Ingmar Bergman during a particularly devastating period several years ago and finding solace in the truthfulness of them. I ordered and watched every single one of Bergman's films at that time. There is another Swedish film titled Elvira Madigan that I have seen about twenty-times that has given me untold solace because of its truthfulness. There is something very comforting about seeing the truth in a difficult, complex situation, the truth which is being avoided and denied by almost everyone around you.

A person I respect recently recommended that first Kushner book to me in support of a book I am currently writing, so I re-read it for the first time in thirty-five years. It never really rang my bell and I have wondered what I missed in that first reading so many years ago. It is always intriguing to me when millions of people see something valuable in a book or film or game or country or whatever, and I just don’t see much of anything in it.

Kushner does make some cogent comments on the Old Testament book of JOB, particularly on the three friends who seem to mean well but who actually do Job more harm than good. His wife would have him just curse God and die. That’s just about where Kushner leaves me after my recent reading of his book.

Here are two sentences that just jumped out of Kushner’s book at me this time, waving red warning flags:

p. 28: “Sometimes, because our souls yearn for justice, because we so desperately want to believe that God will be fair to us, we fasten our hopes on the idea that life in this world is not the only reality. Somewhere beyond this life is another world ‘where the last shall be first’ and those whose lives were cut short on earth will be reunited with those they loved, and will spend eternity with them.”

“Neither I nor any other living person can know anything about the reality of that hope.” (My emphasis)

p. 29: “…since we cannot know for sure, we would be well-advised to take this world as seriously as we can, in case it turns out to be the only one we will ever have, and to look for meaning and justice here.”

Oh, wheee! There is a lot more of this kind of thing in the book which would not have been so offensive to me when I was fourteen years old but which now seems not only demeaning and patronizing and plain old dishonest, but horrifies because it comes from an honored, respected Rabbi who has sold it in great numbers to people who are in their weakest moments, to people who need truth, not disparagement, nor deception.