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the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving her past or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.”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