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.

Whoever Owns a Yacht

A little two-year-old boy was crying this morning in a waiting room where I also happened to be. His father, who was “taking care of him” while his mother was in seeing the doctor, kept yelling at the child to “Stop crying!” The child's only word through his tears was an occasional “Mommy.” This went on for a half-hour, until the father took the child outside into the rain, muttering threats.

The father was hostile from the moment this little family came in the waiting room. Both parents were under twenty-five years of age. The mother was pregnant. The little boy was surprizingly sociable with two little girls who happened to be there waiting.

I found the scene just unbearable. Excruciating. There are several such incidents that have been burned into my memory over the course of my lifetime, particularly from the years when I lived in the UK. The UK scenes were so frequent that I sometimes wondered if there might not be something in the British culture that is particularly conducive to cruelty to children. It seemed to be some kind of joke there, to say with a smile, that Brits valued their cats more than their children, Ha. Ha. Ha. “We had a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals before we had a society for the prevention of cruelty to children.” More knowing smiles. But I have seen enough of it here in the USA and even in Canada. And I realize that I have only had the slightest glimpse. I have no knowledge of the statistics in “anglo” countries for cruelty to children, nor in non-anglo countries either, although I have no doubt that the statistics everywhere minimize its extent. The effects on children of the USA's “wars of choice” are particularly annihilating.

It's impossible to grasp the sorrow of children I've seen since I was born in 1941, but it has been enough to cause this thought often to go through my mind during that time: “Whoever owns a yacht or similar luxury in a society in which there is even one child suffering from lack of dental care, is wrong.”

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.
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