I'll Will Never Leave You, Ever, Even through the End of the World

Ivan Turgenev

The protagonist in Turgenev's Smoke loves this woman who is married into vapid, corrupt, respectable, rich society, but who says that she in reality loves the protagonist. The crisis is at hand when she has either to leave with him or stay in her phony situation, and he says the following words to her:

Hear my last word: if you don't feel capable to-morrow, to-day even, of leaving all and following me – you see how boldly I speak, how little I spare myself,- if you are frightened at the uncertainty of the future, and estrangement and solitude and the censure of men, if you cannot rely on yourself, in fact, tell me so openly and without delay, and I will go away; I shall go with a broken heart, but I shall bless you for your truthfulness.

The teaching of that passage strikes me as applicable to every reality, every situation, we face. I immediately thought of words attributed to Christ that we have to give up everything and follow love: “But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions” and then “Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.”

It's not necessary to get into what language Christ used or even whether Christ existed or not – the thought in one form or another can be found even in the fairy tales, such as the Grimms' Fundevogel.

One scene that I will always remember even to the end of the world is in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago where a prison official makes a young girl stand outside in the cold for a long period, needlessly, maliciously. Solzhenitsyn wrote of her: “I will never forget you.”

Another event that I will remember even to the end of the world is Martin Luther King Jr's “A Knock at Midnight” speech, embedded below, in which he hears the words. The speech is sometimes known as his sermon on “Why Jesus Called a Wise Man a Fool” and was, I believe, his last speech before he was assassinated. I feel that the whole of my life, the essence of everything I am and see, are in these words of King, and Solzhenitsyn. 

The War Geniuses

The thing that most struck me during Memorial Day/Decoration Day yesterday was a quote that Amy Goodman used in her Memorial Day article:

Thomas Paine wrote in the March 21, 1778, edition of his pamphlet The Crisis, 'If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war...he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds the nation to death.'

I suppose that it struck me so strongly because I have been reading a new book by Fred Kaplan entitled The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.

Petraeus and his people recognized that the there was a necessity to deal with insurgency in Iraq and thus became a sort of “insurgency” themselves withing the US military establishment.

These military people are all highly intelligent and experienced. They have unlimited financial backing; they take time off to get Ph.D.'s; write books; fly off to high-level conferences; get visas and permits easily; have access to every source of information there is. I have known some of them. I am aware that they have far more information and sheer brain power than I do.

However, I see again and again as I read Kaplan's book that all that talent and experience and money was worse than wasted – it was detrimental. The Iraq war was, as one of these highly-powered people himself said, “a colossal blunder.” It was the opening of a vein that bleeds the US to death. The Viet-Nam war was the same thing. I think that one of the ancient traps for the highly intelligent and subtle and powerful is that they make an initial assumption that is wrong and get started down a wrong road, and all their intelligence and subtlety is used to continue down that road past all kinds of great obstacles until they reach the dead end. There is then no hope but going back to the beginning, to the naked human being, the Child of God, the mutual humanity of us all.

The Greatest Thing Muhammad Ali Ever Did

 Muhammad Ali, “The Greatest of All Time,” has probably been loved by more people than almost anyone who ever lived and the good he has done around the world is incalculable. I know that there are still people who very passionately hate him but my hope and faith are strengthened whenever I go back and listen to his speeches.

He gave a speech at Harvard once in which he shared one of his poems, which he called the world's shortest poem:  

Me? Whee!

He said in a Life magazine interview that the greatest thing he ever did was to refuse to go to the war in Viet-Nam.

I remember very well the time when he refused, because I did the same thing at that time. It's difficult to imagine the murderous hatred the act elicited unless you lived through those years. The USA sentenced him to five years in prison, fined him $10,000, took away his passport and boxing title, banned him from boxing in the USA, took away his livelihood, as well as vilifying him. He took his case to the US Supreme Court where the conviction was reversed and he went on to further greatness after that. He says in an interview which I embed below that the damage done to him was actually less than the damage done to people like me, who didn't have his resources, but the damage all around done by the USA's Viet-Nam war was so immense that it will continue for untold generations.

It looks on the surface as if it is all forgotten very

quickly. The USA wanted to go to war in Iraq and all the old familiar hatred and justifications immediately came up again, just as if nothing had happened: “Whose side are you on?!” and vehement anger at anyone who raises questions or seeks the truth, and the exact same words, the same phrases, as ridiculed by Mark Twain in his War Prayer.

There are many videos around of interviews with him but this is one of the best, in my opinion:

The Sword in the Stone or Anvil or Lake

The images of a sword in a stone, or in an anvil, or in a lake, and the stories behind those images, are important because they help give direction and meaning when it seems that there is simply nothing we can do to change the world for the better.

The image at the right is a reminder of the Disney film, “The Sword in the Stone,” and you will notice right away that this sword is actually in an anvil, not a stone. This symbolic sword also often appears in images and legends as being in a lake. 

There is a vast literature and scholarship around this sword but I have yet to see even an attempt to understand the obvious connection between the stone and the anvil, or the lake. But the connection becomes immediately understandable if you take the approach that these images, like all the images of myths and legends, are exactly the same reality as dream images.

What happens in the story is that a stone or an anvil appears in unexplained manner and has a sword lodged inside it. People become aware of it and of the idea that whoever is able to extract the sword will be the king. Many try to extract it but can not, but then a simple person comes along and just does it. People don't believe their eyes at first but it becomes evident over time that this simple person is indeed the future king. The version where the sword is in the lake has it that there is lady living in the lake who gives it to him.

The stone can readily be seen as a symbol of solidity, individuation, integrity, as in the imagery of the Philosopher's Stone. It is that rock within us, our quintessential being, or true self. When the stone has a red tincture it indicates its living nature. An anvil also connotes unshakable solidity but brings out the aspect of taking severe blows and enabling the forging of metals. The water of the lake is like the subconscious and the Lady of the Lake is the agency hidden in it that helps us.

The overall idea, then, of the sword in the stone/anvil/lake stories and imagery is that we can derive effective power “simply” by being what we were originally intended to be, integrated and without pretension.

That is an important point, in my opinion, because I have been so often disappointed and even appalled at the results of so many conscious, deliberate attempts to help other people. I think often of Mark Twain's comment that when someone came at him to do him good, he would run the other way as fast as possible, and of Thoreau's comment that he had lived some thirty-odd years on this planet and had yet to hear the first word of valuable or even earnest advice from his seniors. “Doing good to others” can and often does actually do harm to others if it is done without solidity and integrity. This is an area in which politicians and public statesmen can easily fail, because they try to be effective without first having achieved the “stones.”

The situation is so complex and full of paradoxes that it seems that all you can really do that improves the world is to become simply true. That does not entail passivity in the face of social wrongs such as unjust wars – I found myself saying when my own society asked me to participate in the Viet-Nam killing: “No, do what you will to me, and even if no other person in the world refuses to do it, and even if my refusal fails to stop or hinder the killing in any degree, I am not going to do it." It seems to me that what the sword in the stone/anvil/lake vision is telling us is that such solidity is ultimately effective, and that it is readily available to the “simple.” I hate to use the word “simple” because it is actually a great accomplishment in the circumstances, but that's the way the fairy tales often say it.

Dann kommt der grosse, graue, Böse Wolf aus dem Wald

There is a day care facility across the street for children of the employees of the hospital there. I can often see the children, who seem to be about 3- to 6-year-olds, shouting, running, playing with swings and small bikes and beach balls. They are obviously full of energy and sheer life, running around there like spring lambs on this early May day.

Those children increasingly break my heart for some reason and I had difficulty when I recently tried to articulate why for a friend.

We all know about and are horrified by the sorrow of children, particularly when it is caused by deliberate malice. Dostoyevsky pays especially memorable attention to it in The Brothers Karamazov. I regularly see it in in department stores and other public places. And it is, of course, in the fairy tales.

But it is the fact that I am more pained by the thought of it than ever that strikes me now. Part of the story of growing older is that you are expected to accept realities but here I am into my seventies and I find myself more horrified than ever by what these children face.

The best I can propose to explain the increasing horror I feel from watching these life-filled children is that I am more truly experienced and aware. The extent and severity and subtlety of how wrong the situation really is have become more and more accessible to me.

But I suppose that redemption, dealing with it, alchemizing it, IS possible even although it seems such an immense task and difficult to accomplish.

Kim Phuc and Her Son Thomas

Daily Kos has an update on Kim Phuc, “The Napalm Girl,” with some good links. The following photo of Kim now, with Thomas, is taken from that article.

Kim Phuc and her son, Thomas

There are many images from the war in Viet-Nam, such as the one of Kim then, that burn in my mind and others' minds, and always will. The image of the military shooting college students in Ohio is another one of those images.

Now there is this image of Thomas and his mother, now Canadians, to remember.

This struck me particularly strongly this morning because I just finished reading La muerte de Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes. There is much to say about the book but the main point that comes to me right now is the question of there being any redemption from crimes of this magnitude. Fuentes writes of them in the context of Mexico and has his protagonist envisioning redemptions just before he dies. Here is one vision near the end of the book:

“But here life will already have begun the next phase, ceasing to be the past....Innocence will perish, not at the hands of guilt, but at the hands of amorous astonishment...”

The Press Is Despicable

Todd Gitlin wrote an article this week in which he reviewed some of the major failings of journalists over the last fifty years, and which struck me as being very accurate because I lived through those failings and remember them very well. There were a very small number of journalists who were true, like I.F. Stone, but the hatred with which they were treated at the time is as remarkable to me still as it was then. I remember vividly each one of those incidents that Gitlin mentioned and the reaction when the truth about them first started coming out.

The reaction to Patrick Kennedy's “the press is despicable” speech, given just before he left the House, strikes me as being almost the perfect example. There are new examples appearing constantly of the phenomenon but “the press is despicable” example is pure.

I remember the reaction to that speech perfectly: remarks about his father's failings, booze, the Kennedy family, assertions of moral superiority, all the usual kind of personal hatred and dismissal. The fact that every word that Patrick said was absolutely true was mentioned only by a very small number of people, and the delightful thought for me was that this small number included equally both conservative/Republicans as well as liberal/Democrats.