Anne Sofie von Otter and the Erlkönig

The Erlkönig piece by Goethe, Schubert, Berlioz, and others, captures how a father doesn't want to see what his son sees. This point should be taken much more seriously than it is normally taken.

An excellent parallel translation into English can be found at this link, but the German, as in Anne Sofie von Otter's rendition, below, is incomparable. My reaction on watching this video clip was jumping joy that humans are capable of such things – singer, song, orchestra, and filming - despite the failure it describes. It is especially moving, given Anne Sofie von Otter's special consciousness of the German World War II experience.

Children do see how upside down the world is. They take it all in on some level. I see that in old lynching photos, in which  a crowd has killed a black person and you can see among the crowd the occasional face of a child, the face of a young white girl, who knows that true evil has been committed, that this is wrong. Such children definitely have my prayers go with them forever and ever.

Such a child has seen a lot by the time she is twenty. She can see it just in the way sensitive children are treated at school. I could see it as a child even in the way people drove their cars out of the church parking lot on Sunday mornings after having listened to all those fine Christian teachings about love. Or, take high school athletics heroes, and adults making a big deal over such heroes, throwing a ball through a hoop, when you know very well how admirable they are not: applause, names in the newspaper, jackets and letters, banquets, cheerleaders. You don't have to be a genius to see through all that, nor to see that the adults are pretending not to see what's actually going on. Albrecht Haushofer's Moabit Sonnet on the Olympics comes immediately to mind:
                                                  

The resulting horror, the “death” in the piece, is surely what is behind so much youthful suicide, as well as parental grief and loss. I often found in discussing suicide in my teaching years in sociology that as many as half the students in a class had attempted suicide. The NIH reports that there are 13.1 attempted suicides for every single successful suicide, but I am certain that suicide statistics, defined and collected for adults by adults, are great underestimates as well as that suicide has other forms than just death of the body. Surely, much of what is currently called autism is a withdrawal from what a child is seeing, a sort of suicide.

Can you imagine what it's like for a child to witness a typical high school, never mind a lynching, and then being taken to a psychiatrist because it depresses you and you have thoughts of suicide, and then have the respected doctor start talking about transmitter neurons, serotonin, brain chemistry or electric shocks? It's asking a lot of a child, especially if she has never met a single other person who admits to seeing what she sees, nor has read a book by another person who sees what she sees. She is much more likely to hear something like “These are the best years of your life. Just wait until you grow up and have to support a family. Then you'll know what 'having a problem is.'”

Viet-Nam Again

A very good friend, who has known me for seventy years, recently surprized me by saying, “That war really affected you, didn't it?” She said this because I had just spoken of the Viet-Nam war as a matter of course, as I often do, but hadn't realized how often. She was right. It did affect me deeply and I think about it every day of my life.

I refused when I was a young man to participate in that war and did everything I could to stop it. That refusal was costly over the course of my life in many ways, but now, in my old age, I feel exactly the way Muhammad Ali did when he said, “The greatest thing I ever did was not go to Viet-Nam.”

There are many images of atrocities that come to mind whenever I think of that war, and of the “neckties,” the best and the brightest of the U.S., defending the war and dragging it on and on despite knowing that “we were wrong,” as Robert Macnamara put it. Right at this moment I think of one particular video among many others readily available on YouTube, of smiling U.S. soldiers burning down thatched huts while old people who lived there begged them not to do it. But here are three images that occur regularly to my mind which are of a different kind.

1. I am sitting in a restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge, MA, having lunch with a friend named Chris who has brought her ten-year-old niece along for the occasion. I am saying to Chris that I just can not understand how it is that the U. S. leaders just keep on with the war, dragging it on year after year, even though every one knows it is wrong and the costs are beyond all measure. The ten-year-old niece pipes up with these words: “It's because they're afraid of being called 'Chickin.'” Chris and I are silent, we look at each other, and we know that even a ten-year-old could see exactly what was going on.

2. I have received my “Greetings” letter, in which I was ordered to report to the Boston Army Depot for “induction,” and I am talking with a fellow teacher who had also just received his “Greetings” letter. He and I have a beer and knockwurst and red cabbage at the old Wursthaus in Harvard Square every Thursday night, and it is one of those nights. I explain how there is just no way that I am going to participate in this insanity and killing. Al is literate, informed, a graduate of a respected university, sensitive, able, interesting, a good math teacher. But this is exactly what he says in explanation of why he is going to go to Viet-Nam: “I know, but if I don't go I will have a black mark on my record for the rest of my life.” (Someone told me years later that Al died in Viet-Nam).

3. Here is one last image of this kind. I am teaching social psychology at a community college in Massachusetts and many of my students are damaged Viet-Nam veterans. One of these men comes frequently, for many hours, to my home and discusses in depth his experiences in the war. We tape-record most of these sessions with the idea that someday he may write them up and publish them. He was a Marine, had seen a lot of combat, and has serious soul-injury. I am sitting at my kitchen table one night, reflecting with him, and I say to him, “Why didn't you refuse to go?” He laughs and says: “If I had refused, my mother would have killed me!” I do remember that he later mentioned that “John Wayne movies” were a big part of his pre-war outlook.

These images might seem trivial in comparison with the actual battleground images, but I have been haunted, rightly or wrongly, by them almost constantly in the forty-five to fifty years since they happened. They were truths across my path, and it is only recently, in my old age and after countless hours of thought, that I have had a few glimpses of resolution.

Isaac, Laughter

I get almost embarrassingly excited sometimes when I encounter certain passages in books that I read. I  find such writings sometimes in the most obscure places, which only adds to my delight in the vistas they provide.

Here is such an one that I recently encountered in Emanuel Swedenborg's “Arcana Coelestia,” volume 2, where he is interpreting the legend of Sara and Abram's development toward becoming Sarah and Abraham, and the birth in their “old age” of Isaac, “Laughter:”

“The case is this: unless the knowledges, which in childhood have performed the use of making the man rational, are destroyed, so that they are as nothing, truth can never be conjoined with what is celestial. These first memory-knowledges are for the most part earthly, corporeal, and worldly.”

The Sara, Abram, Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac story is filled with all kinds of goodies about the development of the soul and of wisdom, and how such development requires an appreciation of it being absolutely necessary to get beyond materialism, the particles, the electrical impulses of the senses, in order to understand the message of dreams, myth, the symbolic.

This particular story was written down a couple thousand years after the supposed events happened, for which there is no archaeological evidence, and it was written in Hebrew, translated into Latin by Swedenborg, then much more recently translated into English. So, it seems clear to me that any attempt to relate the story to some “actual” or “historical” or “material” material events, has to be destroyed.

The name “Isaac” means “laughter.” That is a far more pregnant and interesting and useful and delightful vision than any number of speculations about the possibility of Sara/Sarah “actually” having a baby in her nineties.

Ingmar Bergman uses this story in his masterpiece, “Wild Strawberries,” my favorite film, drawing on Sara and Isaac. He names his protagonist “Isaac” and has Bibi Andersson as “Sara.”The film is available on YouTube in its entirety in excellent definition, but here is a short sample scene from it:

Maria Chapdelaine

Reading Maria Chapdelaine had me in tears this last week and I wondered why. What was it about this book that is so piercingly beautiful, and why was it that I had never even heard of it, never mind read it, before now?

A young Frenchman, Louis Hémon, wrote it one hundred years ago about French-Canadian life in the rural area around Lac-Saint-Jean far up the Saguenay River above Chicoutimi, Quebec. He sensitively portrays the lives, environment and choices of the people there.

Maria, her parents, family, suitors, neighbors, were immediately recognizable and familiar to me, probably because I myself am of French-Canadian descent, and there are memories that carry on inside us for hundreds of years, even though we may not be aware of them.

Hémon names, for his artistic purpose, François Paradis as Maria's great love, although Paradis is in fact a very common name in that part of the world, and the source of my own surname before it got anglicized.

But I think that another reason I was so engaged with this book is that it presents the stark, basic reality of  nature, life, work, love, sickness and death, so very clearly. I immediately feel those stark realities because of my own conscious and unconscious French-Canadian spirit, yes, but equally because they are the matters that all of us encounter. Hémon catches the universal in that particular.

And why had I not heard of this book before now? Perhaps it's because I myself somehow live out there above Lac-Saint-Jean in 1914.

Chapdelaine Country by Clarence Gagnon

"Je ferai ce livre comme s'il m'était destiné," écrit Clarence Gagnon quand il s'engage à créer les illustrations pour une édition de luxe de Marie Chapdelaine, le roman de Louis Hémon devenu l'incarnation du patrimoine culturel canadien-français.
- Source

USA: Homicidal Psychopaths?

There was a recent Firedoglake article about the eleventh anniversary of the Iraq Invasion, particularly mentioning the numerous respectable people who promoted and supported that invasion but who have not been held accountable.

One of the comments following the article had immediate resonance with me because I have often had the same thought, but which I think requires careful qualification.

Here is the comment:

it is a great sadness contemplating the past. and the idiocies of so many of my “friends”. all of whom were able to duck military service. and there i was, a mennonite faced with either being drafted or enlisting. in the indochina invasion era.

well, no one i knew then is any less a “jingo” today. even women who care about creating life seem to be keen on eliminating life. as long as the lives are those of the wogs.

long ago, i decided to do life solo. there was no way that i could endure living with homicidal psychopaths.

and that, in the main, is what the u.s. citizenry is. homicidal psychopaths.

sure, they attend church, you know. but they seem to have missed the message of the new testament.

Now, I immediately recognize the thought of that. The lesson of the Milgram Obedience Experiments seemed to be similar: USA people would just as soon murder you as have a can of coca-cola. The USA is filled with murderous maniacs, homicidal psychopaths.

Some of my European friends have spoken to me with dismay and confusion about how it is that the “Americans,” as they call USA people, do such horrible things, and yet they have met some “Americans” who are good people.

I have a Swedish friend, a minister who studied at Harvard Divinity School, who says this to me in a quizzical way: “There are some good Americans.” She sees what the USA has done in Viet-Nam, Iran, Iraq, South America, elsewhere, and throughout its history, and she sees USA Christianists' enthusiasm for everyone carrying guns and their electing Bush II a second time, but she also sees “some good Americans.”

It is not easy to understand and to explain to such a decent person as my Swedish minister how it is that half of the USA considers giving health care to poor people as equivalent to Nazi or USA extermination policy. And I don't think that personal, psychological explanations are adequate to the task.

The problem is similar to racism. One of the finest men I've know, a white man here in Dayton, says just the most awful things about Blacks. He is intelligent, experienced, kind, yet he is big into guns and not into Blacks. I've never seen him do an unkind act.

I think the best explanation I can give to my Swedish friend is that society has a group structure, as well as an individual structure. That is, people sometimes do act as individuals, but they also often act from the standpoint of a group. And society consists of groups planning out and coordinating courses of action as well as of individuals. Sometimes what you're seeing is a person acting as a group member rather than what he himself is, the way they do in gangs.

That's why they get all patriotic about going off to wars and become 'homicidal psychopaths' toward you for raising questions about the wisdom of the war-making. The first thing they say is: “Whose side are you on?” They see you as lacking the correct group identification. You're not a patriot. You are on the enemy's side. You are to receive the same treatment therefore as the enemy: extermination.

The fact that society has a group structure has many other implications. One of those implications is that, if you want a society to change its course, you often need to go through the leaders of a group, who then bring along the followers toward the change. It's not enough to go it on your own.

Tony Benn and Bill Gates

Tony Benn was a sane Brit whose existence was a solace to me during the years that I lived in the UK. There was an article in The Guardian after his death yesterday in which there were several representative quotes, one of which was this:

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

The reference there to how we can protect ourselves against Bill Gates is particularly important to me, not just because I despise Microsoft's manipulative methods and Gates' social darwinist, competitive, standardist, elitist, cocksure, influence on education. What concerns me most is that there is nothing we can do to mitigate his influence, “to get rid of” him, in Benn's words.

I'm not alone (see the Mercola article) in my disbelief in the goodness of philanthrocapitalists, and Gates in particular. It's obvious that the philanthrocapitalists will never do anything in opposition to predatory capitalism or business's interests. The philanthropocapitalism thing allows them to cover up their own consciences, to deceive others about the hidden costs of greed, to avoid taxes and to acquire leverage and lobbying power, and to publicize their supposed good intentions when actually they probably are the most destructive people on the planet.

Fundamentalist Christianist churches take the same same self-righteous, hypo-critical attitude and advantages from their activities.

I can easily imagine some one saying to me, for example, that the billions Gates has “given” to support genetically engineered crops to feed many people, and what have I done?

But it may well be that genetically engineered crops are harming us now, and will harm us worse in the end.

And as for the “What have you done?” retort, the remarks that Christ made, about the widow giving her two mites being far more than what the wealthy give, seem simply irrefutable to me.

Spring: Eliot and cummings

The very first signs of spring have come to Dayton and I appreciate them now, in my seventy-third year on this planet, more than ever.

T. S. Eliot

Crazy T. S. Eliot wrote a famous opening line that goes “April is the cruellest month.” That was supposed to be a big deal, The Wasteland, and all incoming freshman at my university were required to study it, and a whole lot more of Eliot, and we were supposed to regard it as very advanced, very wise, very insightful, very good, a masterpiece.

And yet I've never actually met anyone in real life who believed that April was cruel. Not one.

I've come to view my university now as insanity and poison, but also I've come to see that it's actually our problems and our trials and our sorrows that enable us to distinguish the true beauty that is all around us, even down to the most common flower that grows.

Dear Esteemed and Learned Mr. Eliot, how about this little poem from Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses instead?

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Or, how about thinking of good old e. e. cummings when spring comes upon us?

e. e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Or:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)