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the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving her past or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.”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.