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Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie

2012-02-12T16:56:00.003-05:00

What Did Mrs. Nixon Think of Mr. Nixon?

That’s the question. She did not want a public life, so, beyond a certain point, she didn’t want RN involved in politics at all. He reentered the race despite her desires. Consider this: She was an actress. I’m not suggesting that because she appeared as Daphne Martin in the play The Dark Tower, her character described as “a tall, sullen beauty of twenty,” Mrs. Nixon glided on stage at the Republican National Convention with equal ease, being – as I would describe her – “a woman of average height, light-haired, attractive but no beauty, in her forties.” But, because of training, she was accustomed to ignoring stage fright and simply proceeding. Also, the plays she had acted in or was aware of, such as The Glass Menagerie, had some things in common, and it seems reasonable to assume the play’s ideas affected her, as well. Our literature defines us, and, in those days, I think plays were generally considered more important than they are now.

Mrs. Nixon also had a role in the movie version of Becky Sharp (though she was cut from the final version.) Becky Sharp was published with the subtitle “A Novel Without a Hero” – a common concept now, but less usual when Thackeray published his novel. Becky’s rise in society has to do with climbing the social ladder, marrying well, traveling. She is primarily interested in being a well-off, notable person…a woman having to work within social constraints, but willing to do any number of things, go any number of places, to get ahead. Becky Sharp has entered the vocabulary to describe a particular kind of ambitious woman, the same way Kato Kaelin awakened people to the fact that there are people who are not exactly servants, who have vaguely defined roles in wealthy people’s lives while sponging off them.

The Dark Tower is set in the France of the Sun King, and Act I requires two props of Richelieu: “Richelieu hat and gloves under a glass dome” and “Picture of- Richelieu – on stairs.” World War II is the backdrop of The Glass Menagerie. All have in common families as the dominant social reality, subtexts of unhappiness or even despair, the theme of unrequited love, as well as the idea of the enterprising woman who takes charge of her own life – or its flip side: the woman or women (The Glass Menagerie) who literally or metaphorically collapse, done in by their frustration.

As people know, if their older relatives lived through the Depression, that generation learned to live frugally and never forgot doing without; therefore, they do not make long-distance phone calls (except sometimes to report a death) and have a very strange reaction when looking at restaurant menus. Thelma Ryan’s family was poor. Her father died of tuberculosis contracted in the mines. They barely had enough of anything. There was, however, a piano that had come with the farm Mrs. Nixon’s parents bought, and in mentioning her grandmother’s piano playing, Julie Nixon Eisenhower remembers the following song: “The music she most often chose was the plaintive song of the Indian maid Red Wing, who ‘…loved a warrior bold, this shy little maid of old. But brave and gay, he rode one day to battle far away.”

Lyrics like these get instilled in children’s minds: the nobility involved, but also the sadness and inevitability of the beloved going off to war. Every girl must identify with Red Wing (unless she is the one doing the leaving – and those song lyrics don’t leap to mind). Mrs. Nixon was left alone by people she loved (who left her by dying.) Mr. Nixon left, too, enlisting in World War II and going to the South Pacific. Our civilization carries countless variations on the theme: every woman a Penelope, every man Ulysses. Women are expected to be strong. Mrs. Nixon, like so many wives, wrote her husband daily and worked for the war effort. She was patriotic, recognizing our flag, rather than the man-in-the-moon face, in the moon, and she could not understand young people who didn’t share her version of patriotism, who marched against the war in Vietnam, who waved signs at the White House urging an end to the war, who wore crazy-looking clothes not because they were poor but because they had enough money to cut holes in their jeans when they didn’t have time to wear out the material, who had enough time to tie-dye T-shirts into smashed kaleidoscopes of color because they didn’t have to do the weekly wash, and to take over universities in their copious spare time.

Youth’s counterculture never made sense to a lot of people of Mrs. Nixon’s generation. Perhaps if she had reflected on her reading of, and performance in, plays, such rebellious youths would have been more accessible. Becky Sharp fights her way out of society’s expectations, and the women of The Glass Menagerie pay a terrible price for not questioning the prescribed roles of men and women. It might have helped Mrs. Nixon to see Mr. Nixon as a Williamsesque “gentleman caller”; not necessarily reliable, or who he claimed to be, and certainly not a knight in shining armor. When she resisted him initially, it was because she was interested in going against the script and and making a life for herself: to act; to travel; to do whatever seemed compelling. Socially, things were beginning to open up a bit –especially because women were needed to work during the war – so there was a little less emphasis on marriage and motherhood. Though she had to work, she must still have thought that she had quite a bit of autonomy. Didn’t Becky Sharp, and the other women she knew from plays?

It was to her workplace that Mr. Nixon sent the engagement ring. Instead of putting it on and dancing in circles, we have Julie Eisenhower’s report:" For a few seconds, she started at it blankly. All morning she had anticipated her future husband’s arrival, the unveiling of the ring, the romantic moment when he would put it on her finger. And now, here it was, in a May basket. Impulsively, she shoved the offering a few inches away from her.” Another teacher is described as entering the classroom: “Look, you are going to put on that ring and right now” How much did Mrs. Nixon intuit about her future husband by the gesture he made? Did she want more romance (his presence), or merely a conventional scenario (a personal presentation), or might she have wanted none of it and reacted spontaneously in a very significant way? The possibility is skipped over, as if anyone might have such a reaction.

What happened in those moments between Mrs. Nixon seeing the ring and the friend’s walking into the classroom, seeing the basket, seeing the ring, and putting it on Mrs. Nixon’s finger?

That’s where we may have our answer, but no one’s talking.

In a way we are always dressing up and dressing down political figures. The press takes note of anything out of the ordinary, whether it be a belt buckle or a slightly different haircut. As a public figure, Mrs. Nixon knew she was being scrutinized, and her response was to scale everything down to make sure her clothes were never worthy of comment: conservative; well pressed; well chosen. She hoped to hide behind her attire, to seem proper and invisible at the same time. This is how she proceeded generally as First Lady. She did things behind the scenes when possible. She did not search out the camera lens like Princess Di. She appeared proper- always proper. She let herself be defined by her acts, whether she was a representative of the United States or simply a housewife visiting schoolchildren. She wanted to be able to do what she did more or less unnoticed…She opted for protective coloration. She was the generic president’s wife, suited, modestly slipping into sensible shoes, conservatively coiffed. Yet her husband, when asked what he would like for his wife’s birthday, responded: “A walk on the beach, with a breeze in her hair.” He knew that she loved the breeze, representing freedom.

If the Nixons came to my house in Maine, they would be over-dressed. Thin people, they would be cold on the back porch and sweaters would have to be brought out, some quite ratty. Music they did not recognize would be playing in the boom box in the kitchen (Music I do not recognize, either.) There would be a lot of food, but they wouldn’t be able to figure out the majority of the ingredients. There would be mismatched plates, and wine would be served in the wrong glasses. The ice bucket would be holding a plant, rather than ice. The view would be of a lovely field that is zoned commercial, with only two restrictions on its use: no head shops; no auto dump. The Nixons would take off their shoes, as we do, and when it is time for dinner, they could sit at our square picnic table, with its so-bad-it’s-hip sixties tablecloth (more sedate than Edward Cox’s underwear, but still pretty deranged). I would of course know to pour superior French wine for Mr. Nixon, though the rest of us could drink plonk.

My mother used to rock me to sleep. One of the songs was about paper dolls: “I’m gonna but a paper doll that I can call my own, a doll that other fellows cannot steal.” She had quite a repertoire of old songs. A nice voice, too. Once, she got so enthusiastic we rocked over backward. That same rocker – the one she’d sat in while pregnant, the one she later rocked me in – is still rocking on my back porch, badly in need of repair.

That might be a conversation starter. At least, with Mrs. Nixon.

We have to wonder if Mrs. Nixon’s phone was also tapped. It’s difficult to believe it wasn’t, just as a precaution, just for the hell of it. Though she was ignored as much as possible by Halderman and Ehrlichman, nothing could be lost listening in on her calls. When she died, her tombstone bore the epitaph “Even when people can’t speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.” Tapping her phone might have revealed just how much love.

If Mrs. Nixon could have put one word into her husband’s vocabulary, it might have been Rashomon. It had a quality she understood: it’s a complex situation, I don’t know everything, no one knows everything. The movie had established itself as part of the culture: the part the President didn’t trust, though he still might appreciate it in his own defense. For a man who thought he knew exactly what had happened, and exactly what right and wrong were, it was a timely concept – one that could excuse him, if he could use it to generate enough uncertainty and confusion. Rashomon hadn’t already permeated his consciousness as a radical reappraisal of how to look at reality, but it was worth a try. Rashomon was one of those fancy concepts, probably out of the academy. Out of the movies, worse still. Not to dismiss movies altogether; he watched Patton over and over (Now there was a man who would have had nothing to do with Rashomon.) And true, he hired his staff from the academy, Kissinger came from Harvard, others from Yale, where probably unknown to Nixon, the pointy-heads – French pointy-heads! – were deconstructing the very idea of agreed-on truth. Rashomon theory!

Mrs. Nixon; A Novelist Imagines a Life by Ann Beattie; Scribner, 2011

Deadly Monopolies by Harriet A. Washington

2012-02-11T20:36:00.002-05:00

“I don’t see why special effort should be demanded from the pharmaceutical industry. Nobody asked Renault to give cars to people who haven’t got one.”-Bernard Lemoine, director of the French National Pharmaceutical Industry Association.

“The plea of impossibility offers itself at every step, in justification of injustice in all its forms.”- Jeremy Benthham

What has this book’s catalog of greed, imperiled health, failures, infuriating injustices, and inspiring visions taught that can help us forge a better system of incentives and rewards for needed medical research and healthcare? Perhaps we should first take a step back.

The monopolies enabled by the Bayh-Dole Act and related laws of the 1980s have successfully allied for-profit corporations and universities. This pharmaceutical-academic alliance through patents certainly did succeed by some measures. It provided a way to more quickly develop the university innovation that lay fallow by allowing academia to transfer patents and licenses to private corporations.* The number of these developed patents has soared beyond five thousand, and hundreds of biotechnology firms sprouted as technology-transfer offices proliferated and earned their institutions at least $45 billion. This innovation has been a huge financial success, making tens of billions in profits for both universities and corporations: until recently, pharmaceutical firms constituted the most profitable industry on the planet.

But the relationship proved asymmetrical: when corporations bought and licensed university patents and funded post-patent research and development, they also began to dictate the terms under which these patents were developed to generate income, giving for-profit corporations sway over the means, timing and methods of U.S. medical research itself, to say nothing of their ability to determine which research would be carried out and what research directions would be ignored. In this manner they usurped the traditional role – and the traditional cultural values, directed at the public weal – of university medical research.

The system has failed for U.S. patients, who pay more for health care and receive less. Too often, they cannot afford the industry’s very expensive medications. Moreover, the bodies and body parts of Americans have been appropriated for marketable tissues and mined for their genes. Recently, Americans have even been given over to non-consensual research with a profound lack of transparency.

In place of the collegial collaboration that marked pre-1980’s research, today’s investigators find silence imposed on them that strictly prohibits sharing data, theories and findings at conferences. Data sharing, which was once the norm, is even criminalized. Some researchers see their drug trials brought to an abrupt end by a drug maker’s insistence that the drug be a financial blockbuster as well as a medical success. Others, such as investigators seeking better breast cancer, Hepatitis C, and hemochromatosis treatments, are prevented by a patent from pursuing their research. Drug companies go to court to gain exclusive control of tissue samples vital to research on drugs to combat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, liver and prostate cancer.

Today, profit-driven medical monopolies also present problems for physicians and hospitals, who are sometimes sued for treating patients in strict compliance with the law but against the monopolistic interests of patent holders such as Bayer Healthcare. Other physicians cite a fear of lawsuits as a deterrent to giving necessary tests.

Monopolistic medical research has not worked out for the poor in the developing world, either, because the system has neither pursued nor provided remedies for the diseases of poor people. Instead, it profits hugely from its ability to conduct cheap, rapid research with relatively poorly informed subjects who live amid a health-care vacuum that causes them to grasp desperately at any proffered medical straw, even a medical-research study without the usual Western protections of informed consent and without the provision of standard treatment for control groups, risks usually unacceptable but sometimes practiced in minority communities in the developed world.

Frankly, though, aside from the very limited focus of preserving colonial subjects’ fitness for work, the medical needs of poor people in the developing world were never a priority of Western health care, even before 1980. However, the need to maximize patent profits and ‘intellectual’ property rights has spurred pharmaceutical firms to offer a legitimizing discourse for this long-standing indifference, blaming ‘poverty, not patents’ for the medical misery of those for whom it chooses not to develop desperately needed drugs.**

The current systems failures for all these groups should be quite enough to spur us to create a new paradigm, but there is one more group that seems to be faltering: the pharmaceutical companies themselves. They have lost their fiscal primacy. They still earn billions profits are falling despite their flouting of FDA laws and their perversion of the medical-publication process by ghost-writing, faux medical journals, payola to drug evaluators and prominent medical ‘thought-leaders’. The artificial “clinical trials” aimed at selling pills in volume, the courting of customers via direct-to-consumer advertisements, the churning out of cheap doppelganger “me too” drugs and other strategies to extend the life of their patents by decades have not saved the pharmaceutical companies from losing ground.

For years, the $1-billion-a-year blockbuster drugs have been drying up, falling off the ‘patent cliff’ with little innovation in the pipeline to replace them. Pharmaceutical firms’ widespread strategy of buying up biotechnology companies to supply the missing innovation is unproven, and, frankly, it smells of desperation. Whether most firms will admit it or not, this particular patent-based system is no longer working for them either.

So what will work to attain the dream of affordable medical innovation for all without rendering universities and pharmaceutical companies destitute and unable to function, and without sacrificing medical progress?

What has been abandoned in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act is patient primacy and altruism. Researchers once derived their satisfaction from the prospect of becoming a famous benefactor by devising the means of healing many people. They also desired the intellectual challenge and the fame of achievement, and were motivated by such rewards instead of merely by money. To return such motivations to center stage we should uncouple the conduct of medical research from the pressure to protect monopolies at all costs that is exerted on researchers today by their institutions and sponsoring corporations.

Placing the welfare of patients first is the responsibility of the government that funds the initial research on which the drug makers’ patents rest. U.S. medical research is possible only because of the taxpayers’ huge investment in colleges and universities, so it is the business of the federal government to ensure this investment goes into generating medications that Americans really need – and can afford. We have a moral responsibility to the developing world to provide the same for them, especially because they now supply the means to conduct research that produces medications more cheaply and efficiently than we can do ourselves.

We must explore the remedy of eliminating the influence of corporate lobbyists in the development of health care legislation and explore the possibility of badly needed drug-price controls. We should also restructure the manner in which pharmaceutical companies contribute to the FDA budget in order to eliminate the obvious conflicts of interests that are currently embodied in that agency’s approval process. Pharmaceutical companies and medical investigators should be required to report all their data, not selectively cherry-pick positive findings so that ‘the appellation ‘peer-reviewed’ regains its authority.

The patent system itself could benefit from fine-tuning, for example, to curtail excessive patent protections which injure the public health or prevent important research from going forward. We could, for example, build in a six-month “comment period” during which anyone can criticize or applaud the awarding of a patent and make a case for its revocation or permanent adoption. This would free millions of dollars now gobbled up in patent suits for research and development.

In recent years some progress against the abuses of the last three decades has been made. Patents can only be obtained on materials and processes which are novel ( previously unknown) and this represents a significant opportunity for the practitioners of Open Medicine to publish their findings gratis on the internet and thus prevent their use in the construction of commercial monopolies. Alternative models to compensate drug companies in proportion to their products effect in ameliorating pressing health concerns and reducing disease are in development. Various groups like Harvard’s Partners in Health and the Gates Foundation have been instrumental in bringing health care to deprived counties. In fact, in 2011, following the Gates foundation Advanced Market Commitment initiative , major pharmaceutical firms shattered expectations when they announced that they were slashing prices on vaccines to save the lives of desperately poor children in countries such as Brazil, Nigeria and rural India. These reductions are estimated to save the lives or benefit as many as $250 million children by 2015.

The means to rectify the abuses of the past and initiate substantially positive reforms in the health and healthcare of people not only in the U.S. but through-out the developing world are at hand. It would be much better for the drug companies themselves if they got on the band-wagon instead of fighting tooth and nail to maintain their monopoly profits.

*Public Citizen, Merrill Goozner, and the TB Alliance accounting of the Research and Development costs for new drugs brought to the market between 1994 and 2000, based on PhRMA’s own data, range from $71 million to $150- million ($250 million for the atypical NMEs.) The $800 million figure so widely touted by the drug companies is just a thinly disguised advertisement for the pharmaceutical industry to justify continued price-gouging.

**While some analysts and virtually all pharmaceutical companies blame poverty, not their patents and the resulting high drug prices, for the preventable deaths and plummeting life expectancies of poor foreign nations, the data tell a different tale. To be sure, health improved and life expectancy first extended in developed countries as the result of the better nutrition and sanitation, such as cleaner water supplies that resulted from higher incomes. As a result, death rates in the U.S. fell most precipitously between 1700 and 1910, at an adjusted rate of 70 percent, before the advent of important medications. But poor countries today are governed by a different dynamic, where life expectancy has increased dramatically when access to medications and medical technology has improved, even while poverty has remained static.

Harriet Washington is the author of the award-winning (National Book Critics Circle, 2007 PEN Oakland, 2007 American Library Association Black Caucus Non-Fiction) Medical Apartheid
.

She has been a fellow at the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University.

The End of Richelieu by Jean-Vincent Blanchard

2012-02-03T20:21:00.001-05:00

With each day, Richelieu’s health deteriorated. Louis appeared to be as melancholic and sickly as ever. The question courtiers and diplomats asked was not so much who would have the upper hand, but, rather, which of the two would go first. Eventually, Richelieu left Rueil and came to Paris. He felt an urgent need to indulge in his cherished pastime, the theater. For a long time now, the cardinal had wanted to celebrate his political accomplishments in grand style. After months of collaboration and effort with his favorite playwright and producer, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, he was ready to present a machine-play titled Europe. There could be no blazing gala at the Palais-Cardinal under such circumstances. On November 19, however, the cardinal asked his servants to lift him off his bed and transport him to his theater, where the comedians staged a dress rehearsal for him.

The play’s title character, Europe, is ravished by a prince named Ibere – an allegory of Spain – after she refuses his advances. Enter Francion, the French hero who will save the damsel from Ibere’s lurid designs.

[Ibere] can speak of peace, but I know how to procure it.
He runs away from peace and even fears it;
I seek peace and put my hopes in it.
He insists that all he desires is common repose,
Then suddenly his actions his intentions expose.
It is I, with no pretense of being a lover of peace,
Who will actually define common liberty.

Richelieu came back to Paris thinking that he could survive the king. This time, however, he would not have his way. A week after the performance of Europe, on Friday, November 28, he complained of a sharp pain in his side. A high fever took hold of him. Doctors diagnosed a kind of pleurisy. Both the pain and the fever grew through that Sunday. Fearing the worse, his relatives the Marechaux de Maille-Breze, de La Meilleraye, and Madame de Combalet decided to stay for the night at the Palais-Cardinal. On the following Monday the cardinal coughed blood and could hardly breathe. Doctors recognized there was nothing they could do.

Since the beginning of this illness, courtiers advised Louis that a visit to his dying minister would be appropriate. On Tuesday, December 2, at around two o’clock in the afternoon, the king entered Richelieu’s bedroom in the company of several captains of his guard. With Louis by his bedside, Richelieu declared that he would die with the satisfaction of leaving France at a high point. He asked the king to protect his relatives and recommended to him those he esteemed capable of helping him rule his kingdom after his passing, men such as Mazarin. Louis appeared genuinely moved. He fed the cardinal two egg yolks. To exit the Palace, as he returned to the Louvre, Louis crossed the grand gallery where the cardinal had hung his own portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, alongside that of the king, and of other illustrious men in French history. One of these figures was Sugar, an abbot-statesman who had been a regent of the kingdom. Louis took time to stroll through the gallery and observe the paintings. For some reason he burst into laughter, a laugh that was heard as far back as the chambers of his dying servant.

Cardinal Richelieu’s fever and pain in the chest worsened later that evening. He asked for communion, which the priest of the Church of Saint-Eustache delivered. “Here is the judge who will decide my fate,” said Richelieu before the Eucharist. “I pray with all my heart that He will convict me if I have ever had any other intention than the good of religion and the state.”

At three o’clock in the morning, the priest performed the last rites before a swell of onlookers, including the inconsolable Madame de Combalet, and many dignitaries of the Church and government. By all accounts, the cardinal showed courage, constancy, and genuine piety in his agony. He prayed constantly, worshiped, and kissed his crucifix.

On Wednesday, December 3, a doctor from Troyes who had a reputation as a wise man gave him a pill that improved his condition. The cardinal rallied. Enough to raise hopes for his recovery. But it was merely a sedative, probably an opiate concoction. Louis came to pay a last visit at the end of the afternoon. His words to the cardinal were gentle. He assured Richelieu that he would continue his minister’s work with diligence, that he would obtain a lasting peace with the Hapsburgs in terms honorable to France. The king, many Parisians thought, seemed liberated, and much less chagrined than one would have expected.

Cardinal Richelieu’s condition improved once more the next morning, enough for rumors to spread that he was out of trouble. Most of those who watched over him went to have their luncheon. But around eleven , Richelieu felt great dizziness and his body became drenched with cold sweat. The doctors, the relatives, and the priests came back at once and filled the room with sobs and prayers. The cardinal offered more signs of religious devotion. To Madame de Combalet, who was nearby, he said: “My niece, I am not well at all, I am going to die. Please excuse yourself. Your tenderness already touches me so much.”

Shortly after she left the room, he sighed and passed away. It was Thursday, December 4, 1642. Armand –Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu, was dead at the age of fifty-seven. He had been the principle minister of King Louis XIII for eighteen years.

On a night not long afterward, parents, friends, members of the clergy, and his entire household accompanied Cardinal Richelieu’s casket to the church of the Sorbonne. The procession made its way from the Palais-Cardinal to the Left Bank, through crowded streets. A six-horse carriage, decorated in black velvet with a chevron motif of white satin, representing the Richelieu arms, carried the casket Every marcher held a large white candle. The streets of Paris, says the Gazette de appeared as bright as if it were still daylight.

At the same time, for a large part of France’s population, Richelieu’s death came with relief, because they had come to associate him with public executions and the heavy tolls of a seemingly endless war. One eighteenth- century historian of Louis XIII’s reign, the Jesuit Henri Griffet, wrote of old men who remembered the joyous bonfires that lit up France when the news of the cardinal’s passing spread. But those who revered him – and even many who loathed him- understood that Richelieu was an exceptional statesman.

After the siege at La Rochelle, the Huguenots remained subdued. Visions of bloody scaffolds* discouraged rebellion in the high nobility. Perpignan in the Roussillon, Pinerolo and Susa in Savoy, Lorraine and Franche-Comte, Brisach in the Rhineland, Arras and Hesdin in Flanders – all these contested territories and outposts constituted a defensive belt from which the French King threatened the possessions of the Habsburg monarchs Philip IV and Ferdinand III. The French navy, which was non-existent when Louis came to power, was rebuilt, and a new generation of capable men of war had emerged.

In the context of a France made up of a mosaic of institutions and corporations, each with its own regional specificity and privileges, the minister had affirmed the king’s power with his extraordinary judicial commissions, or by laying the foundations of a national administration, notably when he increased the number and responsibilities of his intendants. These were crucial assets on which Mazarin could build to assert France’s influence in 1648, sic years after Cardinal Richelieu’s passing, when the Treatise of Westphalia delineated a new European map based less on religious orthodoxy than political sentiment, and in 1659, when the Treaty of the Pyrenees put an end to the war with Spain, to France’ advantage.

Cardinal Richelieu’s oeuvre might have been a work in progress when he died, so much so that his successor had to live through one last jolt of princely and parliamentary independence, the Fronde, but still, he allowed his countrymen to think of a grand future for themselves, and that is no small legacy for a leader

*Bloody scaffolds, no kidding! When it came time for high profile executions of princely rebels, Richelieu seemed always to lack, on one excuse or another, the services of a real professional; the result being grisly ‘hack-jobs’.

Eminence; Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France by Jean-Vincent Blanchard (Swarthmore College); Walker Publishing,, N.Y. 2011

Dirty Feet by Andrew Graham-Dixon

2012-01-28T15:56:00.000-05:00

Caravaggio was kept busy by other commissions as well as by the demands of the Mattei family during the first three years of the century. Early in 1602, several months before painting The Betrayal of Christ, he had learned that he was required once more at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Although more than a year had passed since Caravaggio had finished the lateral canvasses for the Contarelli Chapel , the completion of the whole decorative scheme had been delayed by the prevarications of Jacob Cobaert. At the end of January 1602 the tardy Flemish sculptor finally delivered his marble altarpiece of Mathew and the angel, still partially incomplete. It was instantly rejected by the increasingly irritable and fractious coalition of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors. Just eight days later Caravaggio was asked to replace the sculpted altarpiece with a painting of the same subject. Mathew was to be shown writing his gospel. The contract specified that he must be depicted taking dictation from an angel; those were the only two figures required. It was a clear brief, but its execution would prove to be far from straightforward and Caravaggio would end up having to paint two visions of the picture. The root of the problem would be his depiction of the saint’s feet.

Caravaggio’s first Mathew and the Angel for the Contarwelli Chapel eventually passed to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Like the lost portrait of Fillide, it was destroyed by fire during the Second World War, but a record of its appearance is preserved in black-and-white photographs. The painter created a powerfully sculptural composition. Mathew and his attendant angel, a tender winged boy who guides the saint’s writing hand, form a single monumental group. The evangelist sits with his body twisted effortfully around the great book in his lap. His shoulders are hunched, his neck arched forward so that he can peer at the text. The gleaming white pages of the book and the dark jerkin that he wears obscure and interrupt much of his anatomy. His body is reduced to its component elements: balding, bearded head on a bull neck; gnarled hands and forearm; bare legs and heavy feet; toes thrust almost into the viewers face. His Mathew in an aggressively inelegant, proletarian figure, conceived along the lines of St. Peter in the Cerasi Chapel and very different from the pale-skinned tax-gatherer or the heroic fallen priest depicted in Caravaggio’s earlier pictures for the chapel. The suggestion is that he is both writing and reading for the first time, like a peasant made suddenly and miraculously literate.

Because Mathew has just started writing his gospel, the painter shows its opening lines: “The book of the generation of Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Mathew, aided by the angel, is about to finish the next phrase, ‘Abraham begat’, which marks the start of the gospel’s tracing of the lineage of Christ. As the bloodline leading to the salvation of mankind is announced, Mathew stares in wonder… a wizened, sunburned figure receives the very first divinely inspired Christian text, Mathew is bathed in light. Through him the whole world will be illuminated.

As so often during this phase of his career, Caravaggio defines his own art by contrast with that of Michelangelo. Once more, he has the Sistine Chapel in mind, specifically the vast, sculptural figures of the prophets who sit enthroned at the level of the pendentive arches. Michelangelo’s monumental figures, like Caravaggio’s Mathew, are shown in the spasms of divine revelation, reading or writing the prophesies vouchsafed to them by God. Also like Carrivaggio’s Mathew, they are barefoot, and often accompanied by inspiring angelic figures.

Caravaggio’s St Mathew, however, perfectly reverses all the properties of the Michelangelesque figure of the prophet. Michelangelo’s prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Mathew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare. Michelangelo depicts troubled intellectuals, straining to grasp God’s veiled meanings, but Caravaggio’s sainted peasant is a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation. Whereas Michelangelo’s prophets sit on carved thrones of marble, Caravaggio’s apostle sits on a simple wooden chair, the same savonarola chair already used for the Calling of Mathew and the Supper at Emmaus.

Perhaps the most touching aspect of the painting is the intimacy of the relationship between the stooped saint and the tender young angel, whose wings enfolds the whole scene in a hushed embrace. The angel is God’s messenger but also the embodiment of Christian love – a love so generous it encompasses even those as ragged and gnarled as the cross-legged, doltish St. Mathew. The contrast between the two figures is the contrast between extreme youth and encroaching old age. Frailty is being overcome, an old man is being made young by the teachings of a child, which are the teachings of Christ himself, and the writing of the first word of the gospel marks the very instant when the Old Testament is being replaced by the New.

Despite or more likely because of its brusque singularity Caravaggio’s picture ‘pleased nobody’, according to Baglione. The St Mathew was rejected as soon as it was delivered. Bellori gave the fullest account of events: ‘Here something happened that greatly upset Caravaggio with respect to his reputation. After he had finished the central picture of St Mathew and installed on the altar, the priests took it down, saying that the figure with its legs crossed and its feet rudely exposed to the public had neither decorum nor the appearance of a saint.’ That was, of course, precisely Caravaggio’s point: Christ and his followers looked a lot more like beggars than cardinals. But the decision of Mathieu Cointrel’s executors was final. Saving Caravaggio’s blushes, Vincenzo Giustiniani took the painting of St Mathew for his own collection and then prevailed upon the congregation to allow the painter to try again.

The resulting picture, the second version of St Mathew and the Angel was accepted without demur. It remains on the altar of the chapel. Mathew the shockingly illiterate peasant has suddenly been turned into Mathew the dignified, grey-haired sage. The a scholar-saint kneels at his desk, quill pen at the ready. He is draped in red robes and has been equipped with an expression of dignified attentiveness. Rather than guiding his uncertain hand, the angel now counts off the verses as he dictates them. The pages of the book are no longer visible, but since the angel has got to the index finger of his left hand – number two, in the gestural rhetoric of the time, since Italians counted the number one with their thumbs- it seems that he has once more got to the start of the second verse, and Abraham’s begetting of Christ’s lineage. The angel’s airborne arrival from behind Mathew closely echoes the composition of Tintoretto’s Virgin Appearing to St Jerome, which Caravaggio may have seen in Venice. There is no suggestion of intimacy here. A message is not vouchsafed tenderly as an act of love, but handed down from on high as an emanation of divine authority.

Caravaggio’s second St Mathew and the Angel is a much diluted, dutifully toned-down version of his original idea. Mathew’s poverty and humility are not rudely proclaimed, but politely whispered. The most tellingly emphatic of the painter’s several adjustments relate to the apostle’s feet. They are shown in profile rather than thrust towards the viewer, still bare but unlikely to offend anybody.

For the first but not the last time, Caravaggio’s work has been censored. His sin when painting the first St Mathew had been to make holy poverty and humility unpalatably real. On this occasion his embarrassment was spared by Vincenzo Giustiniani, but Giustiniani’s purchase itself created a paradox. A work of art expressly designed to articulate ideals of popular piety to appeal to the broadest possible audience*, had been deemed unsuitable for mass consumption. Instead, the picture had found a home in the collection of a noted connoisseur. The implication was that there was something dangerous, even seditious, about Caravaggio’s emphatically humble vision of the origins of Christianity. In a prominent church, such an intoxicatingly powerful painting might serve as a rallying cry. It might have an influence. Its visual language might help shape the visual language of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church. But confined to the collection of a rich man, it became something much less potent: an interesting work of art, an experiment in a new style, but altogether too strange and adventurous for anyone but a sophisticate and his friends to appreciate

*following the important influence of Milan’s Cardinal Borromeo on Caravaggio’s early development.

Caravaggio; A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon; W.W. Norton &Co.; New York, 2010

On Patriotism by Randall Kenedy

2012-01-24T16:24:00.001-05:00

Ever since Obama emerged as a serious contender for the presidency, he has had to contend with racially inflected insinuations questioning his Americanism and patriotism. He has responded by stressing his “normalcy”. Like his predecessor, Obama repeats time worn versions of the American narrative –celebratory stories that venerate the Founding Fathers ( despite their slave-holding), laud the pioneers who “won” the West (despite their participation in the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans), and applaud America’s soldiers (despite their involvement, often as draftees, in imperialistic or otherwise misguided ventures.) Like his predecessors, Obama sends flowers to commemorate the Confederate dead* . Like his predecessors, Obama expresses belief in the divinely ordained superiority of the United States. Like his predecessors, Obama proclaims loudly, unreservedly, and often that he loves his country.

There is, however, an alternative opinion that African- Americans ought not to love the United States. Holders of this view see African-American patriotism as a pathology akin to “love” that exploited wives feel towards their battering husbands or that mistreated children feel towards their abusive parents. Often ignored, this tradition attracted a bit of attention during the frenzied controversy over Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I know this tradition well. My father espoused it. His view of the United States was more unforgiving than that voiced by Reverend Wright. Some will think that my father, too, was “crazy.” They are wrong. He was an intelligent, thoughtful, loving man, who, tragically, had good reason to doubt his government’s allegiance to blacks, and thus to himself.

My father, Henry Harold Kennedy, Sr., never forgave America for its racist mistreatment of him and those he most loved. Born in 1917 in Covington, Louisiana, my father attended segregated schools, came to learn painfully that because of his race certain options were foreclosed to him despite his intelligence, industry, and ambition, and witnessed countless incidents in which blacks were terrorized and humiliated by whites without any hint of disapproval from public authorities. He bore a special grudge against police, all police, because, in his experience, a central function of police was to keep blacks in their “place”.

I saw with my own eyes why he developed such a loathing. On several occasions in the 1960s when he drove his family from Washington, D.C., to my mother’s ancestral home, Columbia, South Carolina, my father was pulled over by police officers not because he had committed any legal infraction but simply because he was a black man driving a nice car. I am not making an inference here. This is what the police openly said. And then, noting his Washington, D.C. driver’s license, they would go on to say that things were different in the South than up North, and that my father should take care to behave himself. “Okay, boy?” Then there would be a pause. It seemed as though the policeman was waiting to see how my father would respond. My dad reacted in a way calculated to provide maximum safety to himself and his family: “Yassuh,” he would say with an extra dollop of deference.

Incidents of this sort profoundly alienated my father. In his view, they justified his refusal to view the United States as “his country”. He felt neither that he belonged to it nor that it belonged to him. He attempted to make the best of his situation and, in the view of many, succeeded admirably. A post- office clerk married to a schoolteacher, he was often happy, had many friends, was widely respected in his neighborhood and church, and owned a home. He sent each of his children to Princeton University, and lived to see them all become lawyers (one is a federal judge). It could be argued that my father’s life is a vivid embodiment of the American Dream. But my father did not see it that way. Like Malcolm X, he believed himself to be the victim of a terrible and ongoing injustice that white America refused to acknowledge satisfactorily.

My father echewed any sentimental bond with the American government or the American nation. He rejected patriotism. I once asked him why he enlisted in the Army during the 1940s. His response? “I joined in order to eat” He offered no talk about wanting to serve his country. Rather, he candidly declared that the only attraction he saw in military service was refuge from want. Years later, during the Vietnam War, he maintained that any black man drafted by the United States government should go to Canada rather than risk his life for a nation that, out of racial prejudice, continued to subordinate black folk. He relished Muhammad Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never called him “nigger”.

My father’s alienation was such that in virtually any conflict between the United States and some other country, especially any Third World country, he sided presumptively with America’s foe. In the 1980s, when American officials railed against the Ugandan head of state Idi Amin, my father defended the dictator, reasoning that any black man who got white folks that mad had to be doing something right. In the 1990s, during the first Gulf War, my father hoped for America’s defeat:

“You don’t see Bush pulling out the stops for black folks catching hell right here, do you? You don’t see him going the extra mile to get straight with black folks after having vetoed the civil rights bill or having helped that racist Jesse Helms, do you?...These white people here had to be positively shamed into doing anything, even the least little thing, against the South African government. And when those damn South Africans whipped up on poor Angola and Mozambique, all that white officials over here could do was try to figure out how to join in… And just watch what happens after the war in Kuwait. Bush will talk about helping Kuwaitis rebuild their country, while black communities here starve for attention…And watch what happens to the black soldiers coming home. Do you think they will get and special hand for “serving their country.” Hell, no! They will probably get kicked in the butt like I was…They’ll be told they don’t qualify for this and they don’t qualify for that. They’ll be told in so many words that all they’re good for is cannon fodder, and that if they don’t like it they can get in line for prison where there are already enough black veterans of Vietnam to outfit a good-sized army… Boy, you just don’t know how evil and nasty these white folks can be.”

There was is much that was objectionable in in the statements in Reverend Wright’s various statements publicized during the presidential contest in 2008. His suggestion that a government plot is behind the AIDS catastrophe is a baseless and destructive canard. His unqualified praise for Louis Farrakan offered support to a figure whose record includes forays into anti-white racism, anti-Jewish bigotry, and intraracial intimidation. Reverend Wright’s critique of American racism, moreover, is all too one-sided and static – as if the struggles of the Civil Rights Revolution have failed to bring about dramatic and positive changes in race relations even amid the stubborn and frustrating continuation of racial injustice.

But there is also much that is deserving of criticism in the negative reaction to Rev. Wright. First, the air of outraged wonderment that suffused many responses reflected a notable ignorance of the spectrum of belief one encounters in the black community. As journalist Gary Kamiya noted, “the great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright’s sermons in preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land.”
And it is notable that candidate Obama, too, expressed shock in some of his varied responses to the Reverend Wright imbroglio. It is hard to believe, though, that he was truly unaware of the sentiment and rhetoric that generated the uproar.

The fact is that much of what Reverend Wright voiced strikes a chord with many black people; his anger at American unwillingness to face squarely the two great social crimes that haunt United State’s history – the removal of the Indians and the enslavement of the Africans; his suspicion that white America fears the emergence of strong, autonomous racial-minority communities. This is not to say that blacks uniformly or even predominantly embraced the particulars of his message. Many of Reverend Wright’s black congregation understood him to be engaged in a performance that makes liberal use of exaggeration and parody. Moreover, some of those who clapped and shouted appreciably were expressing approval of what they saw as his courageous articulation of figurative, as opposed to literal, truths.

The great mass of politically involved blacks regretted that Reverend Wright’s sermons redounded to the detriment of Obama’s candidacy. And most turned against Reverend Wright when he insisted on defending himself in a fashion that seemed, at best, indifferent to the Obama campaign. But there was no groundswell in black America to repudiate the basic message of the remarks that so infuriated white America.

Second, many observers abjured Wright simply for daring to denounce the United States at all –as if that is, in and of itself, illicit- as if the governing authorities of the United States have never done anything that could possibly justify someone calling for divine retribution ( though such calls were made in the past by both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln!). Reverend Wright’s signature declaration –“God Damn America”- was part of a sermon in which he criticized various social problems; baleful developments like massive increases in rates of incarceration that are so shameful in their production of avoidable pain that they do constitute a moral atrocity warranting God’s damnation!

The other statement by Reverend Wright that led to the ideological quarantine put upon him came in the sermon he delivered soon after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. In “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall” Wright offered a variety of criticisms of American political culture. Presciently anticipating the military interventions to come , especially the war in Iraq, Wright complained that “far too many people of faith in 2001 A.D…have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks, and we don’t care who gets hurt in the process.” He went on to chastise Americans for assuming what he saw as a false posture of innocence. After all, he declared, Americans have unleashed violence to accomplish their ends all over the world. “The stuff we have done overseas,” he said, “has now been brought home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.”

Many people, including Barak Obama, have fulminated against Wright’s statement. Yet it contains a useful message that was especially important to articulate after the 9/11 attack. His message was that the United States is also tainted by worldly sin – its imperialism, its dispossession of the Indians, its subordination of blacks, its use of atomic weapons, its misadventures in Vietnam, Chile and Nicaragua; and still other misdeeds about which too many Americans are ignorant or indifferent. How could anyone, especially an American, say what he said about the United States, especially in the those of grief immediately following 9/11? In the eyes of many he was stepping over the line of political incorrectness- the intolerant, parochial conformism of the patriotism line.

Yes, Reverend right’s remarks were marred by hyperbole, one-sidedness, and an irresponsible willingness to perpetrate erroneous folktales. Worse, however, is the complacent smugness from which arose the feverish anger that Wright provoked and that temporarily posed a threat to Obama’s presidency. Neither of these alternatives is inevitable. Both should be abjured. If pushed to choose, however, between Wright’s excessive denigration of America and the excessive exaltation epitomized by his most severe detractors, I’ll take the former. Its consequences tend to be less lethal.

* Obama was, however, the first president to send a wreath to the D.C. memorial that honors African-American veterans of the Civil War

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton, and his law degree from Yale. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The Case of Amanda Knox by Nina Burleigh

2012-01-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

Was the American girl, the star of the trial, guilty as charged or culpable in some other way? Amanda’s behavior looked suspicious, even though the police were not able to pull together convincing material evidence. She was unable to show sorrow after the murder, and in many instances afterward, when she might have shown empathy for her dead friend, she did not. Listening to her make gurgling death sounds during her trial testimony was chilling. At that moment, it was easy to see what the colpevolisti (those who side with the prosecution) saw behind the pretty blue eyes.

British psychoanalyst Coline Covington, writing after the conviction on the U.K. news aggregator called The First Post, diagnosed Amanda as psychopathic:

“Our deepest fear is that the ‘girl next door,’ whom we trust and see as innocent and loving, turns out to be a vampire or a murderer. This is the stuff of horror movies and we all want to believe that in real life these horrors don’t occur. We also want to believe that we are not capable of doing evil deeds. Evil is something done by others – not one of us. Knox’s narcissistic pleasure at catching the eye of the media and her apparent nonchalant attitude during most of the proceedings show signs of a psychopathic personality. Her behavior is hauntingly reminiscent of Eichmann’s arrogance during his trial for war crimes in Jerusalem in 1961 and most recently Karadzic’s preening before the International Criminal Court at the Hague.”

A girl monster of that stature is truly something to behold, and – contrary to Covington’s assessment – people do want to believe that in real life ‘these horrors’ walk among us. In fact, so many people wanted to believe that Amanda was one of “these horrors” that many spectators and investigators in the Kercher murder refused to believe it wasn’t so, even when presented with convincing evidence…

The Meredith Kercher murder hooked into the global psyche because the story is filled with ancient female archetypes – rewarded good girls, punished evil girls, virgins and whores, the monster of insatiable female sexual desire – that people across many cultures instantly recognize. Amanda Knox inadvertently fed these archetypes by the ways she behaved in public, and advertised herself on the web, and, eventually, in her own compulsive writings from prison. Despite her short lifetime of writing exercises, and her outwardly confident mien, she didn’t possess the language, the words, the maturity, the style, the true self-confidence that comes from being emotionally whole, to define, let alone defend herself. Meanwhile, others – stronger, smarter, older, more eloquent – were eager to define her. Locked up, she might have all the pencils and notebooks she wanted and still not match the authority of other people’s words.

The Perugians didn’t know what to make of this unusual, slightly damaged girl with the inappropriate emotional responses, whose overconfident exterior masked a person with a deep aversion to conflict. Needing to solve the high-profile crime, they made a deduction about her and extracted a statement that put her at the scene. Everything in the investigation evolved from that, including the subjective calls on low-copy-number DNA.

Then, the whole world was watching.

To admit they’d been wrong was not an option. “The imperative which they implicitly obey in all their decisions,” wrote Barzini, of his fellow countrymen, is non farsi far fesso – not to be made a fool of. “To be fesso is the ultimate ignominy, as credulity is the unmentionable sin. The fesso is betrayed by his wife…falls for deceptions and intrigues. The fesso, incidentally, also obeys the laws, pays the taxes, believes what he reads in the papers, keeps his promises and generally does his duty.”

The fesso might be fooled by a pretty American girl who is, in fact, a murderess.

Those who recognized the mistake responded by circling the wagon. Other persisted in the belief and blustered on.

All the fraudulent embellishments that were never proven nor officially corrected but which so captured the media and public mind –sex game, googling bleach, the mop and bucket, “mixed blood DNA,” Raffaele supposedly deviously calling police after police arrived, Amanda’s bare footprints supposedly being made in blood – were elements of an injustice, of a sort of sadly not uncommon in courts and police departments in the United States, only more fascinating because this one involved women, beauty, and sex in the Anglo-Saxon playpen called Italy.

By filing slander suits against not only Amanda Knox but also her parents ( for testifying that the police slapped her in the back of the head during interrogation), by kicking them while down (after her conviction) the Perugians reminded the world that vendetta is in fact an Italian word.

The spired settlement on the hill has been under siege countless times before. As it has for millennia, the walled city will hold out.

Bismarck by Jonathan Steinberg

2012-01-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

Bismarck, the living human being; Bismarck, the genius-statesman: Bismarck the Iron Chancellor as icon, make up a complex legacy. Patriotic biographers left out the uncomfortable aspects of his actual life and the editors of documents omitted or censored them. A generation of conservative German historians exalted the wisdom, moderation, and vision of the statesman; the public and propagandists exalted the strong man, the essential German. The real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac, and misogynist, only appeared in biographies late in the twentieth century. What the three Bismarck images have in common as phenomena is the absence of redeeming human virtues: kindness, generosity, compassion, humility, abstinence, patience, liberality, and tolerance. Bismarck the man, Bismarck the statesman, Bismarck the icon embodied none of those virtues.

There are deep ironies in the career of Otto von Bismarck: the civilian always in uniform, the hysterical hypochondriac as the symbol of iron consistency, the successes which become failures, the achievement of supreme power in a state too modern and too complex for him to run, the achievement of greater success than anybody in modern history which turned out to be a Faustian bargain. For twenty-eight years he crushed the opposition, cowed cabinets, poured hatred, scorn, and anger on political opponents in public and private. It required courage of a high order to resist the Chancellor. Almost nobody did. He smashed the possibility of responsible parliaments in 1878 when he used two attempts to assassinate the Kaiser to destroy moderate bourgeois liberalism. He persecuted Catholics and Socialists. He respected no law and tolerated no opposition. His legacy in culture was literally nothing. He had no interest in the arts, never went to a museum, only read lyric poetry from his youth or escapist literature. He paid no attention to scientists or historians unless he could enlist them like Treitschke. He was the most supple political practicioner of the nineteenth century but his skill had no purpose other than to prop up an antiquated royal semi-absolutism – and to satisfy himself. The means were Olympian, the ends tawdry and pathetic. All that fuss to give Kaiser William II the ability to dislocate rational government and cause international unrest. Sir Edward Grey compared Germany to a huge battleship without a rudder. Bismarck arranged it that way; only he could steer it. He gave the German workers social security but refused them the protection of the state. He preferred to shoot workers rather than to listen to their com[plaints. He made his Junker friends into enemies and then ridiculed them. He mocked their Christian belief and offended their faith and values.

In “Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany” (1918) Max Weber asked ‘what was the legacy of Bismarck?’

“He left a nation totally without political education…totally bereft of political will accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them. And further as a result of his improper exploitation of monarchial sentiment to conceal his own power politics in party battles, it had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of ‘monarchial government’”.

Bismarck saw politics as a struggle but when he talked about politics as the ‘art of the possible’, he meant that in a limited sense. He never considered compromise a satisfactory outcome. He had to win an destroy his opponents or lose and be destroyed himself. Whoever has power in a normal political system may win a round but then must continue the struggle to reach consensus. That was not Bismarck’s way. He set out to ‘beat them all’ and he did. In a political system where principle stood at the center of political activity, he had none but the naked exercise of his own power and the preservation of royal absolutism on which that power rested. If politics according to Bismarck were ‘the art of the possible’, but without compromise, what sort of art or craft was it? And to what end?

The Gerlachs were not wrong that principles matter in politics. Neither reality nor power has unequivocal or objective meanings. Human beings have values, faiths of various kinds, and preferences. The Bismarckian assumption that a master player can ‘game’ the system worked only to a point at which irrational emotions, violence, confusion, incompetence, began top mix themselves up with his plans. What is the purpose of the art of politics if not to serve some cause, to improve the conditions under which people have to live, to make societies freer, more just and more humane or, with the Gerlachs more Christian? Bismarck practiced his wizardry to preserved a semi-absolute monarchy and, when it suited him, he would preserve the rights of a narrow, frugal, fiercely reactionary Junker class, who hated all progress, liberalism, Jews, socialists, Catholics, democrats, and bankers. He differed from them only in his ruthlessness.

Bismarck; A Life by Jonathan Steinberg; Oxford University Press, 2011. Mr. Steinberg is the Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Savage's "Jurisprudence" by Janet Malcolm

2012-01-14T20:41:00.005-05:00

The Queens (N.Y.) Supreme Courthouse was built in 1960 and is an example of the civic architecture of the period, whose pointless ugliness cannot wither, and whose entrance lobby was rendered a complete aesthetic catastrophe by the post – 9/11 array of security equipment brutishly installed across its width. I had been coming to the courthouse for weeks before I noticed the mosaic that covers the space over the entrance leading to the elevators and the adjacent walls. The mosaic is a wondrous sight, but, as people hurry through the security barrier towards the elevators, they do not take it in. I noticed it only because one day, during a long recess, I was walking around the courthouse looking for things to notice.

It is a work of the most extreme complexity and strangeness. Its creator was the artist and sculptor Eugene Francis Savage ( 1883-1978), who did murals for the W.P.A. and for Yale, Columbia, and Purdue universities, and designed the Baily Fountain at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. The piece is a sort of mad allegory illustrating concepts – spelled out along its bottom – that relate to a court of law: Correction, Exoneration, Rehabilitation, Security, Plea, Inquiry, Evidence, Error, and Transgression, along with the deadly sins of Vanity, Envy, Hate, Lust, Sloth, Perdition, and Avarice.

Over “Correction” stands a grim man with lightening coming out of one wrist; “Avarice” is represented by an ugly old woman wearing a blue dress and pearl necklace and bent over a box of money and jewels. Near the grim man, a small mean-looking fellow crouches at the entrance to a tunnel out of which another unpleasant person, carrying tools, crawls. A hooded figure with arms out-stretched, holding a golden tape measure, a naked guy with a bow and arrow, a bare-chested man kneeing near a pile of books on top of which there is a hammer and sickle, a woman with nice breasts, a hideously grimacing black man – these are some of the other figures, set in a sinister landscape crowded with waterwheels and mountains and roads and rainbows and blue bowls filled with gold. The eye doesn’t know where to rest. A vertiginously tipped scale of justice hovers over the allegory, one of its golden pans poised high in the air and the other swinging close to the ground.

Oddly, the pan poised high in the air holds a book with the word LAW on its cover, while the pan low to the ground holds nothing but a sort of peach pit. Is this a comment on the weightlessness of the law? Or is it just Savage exercising his gravity-defying artist’s imagination- secure in the knowledge that the fate of public art is to be invisible to the public that never ordered it?

Iphigenia in Forest Hills; Anatomy of a Murder Trial by Janet Malcolm; Yale University Press, New Haven; 2011

No photo of “Jurisprudence” available.

The Duty of Vengeance by Eva Gabrielsson

2012-01-13T20:18:00.004-05:00

Stieg Larson was a generous man, loyal, warmhearted, and fundamentally kind. But he could also be completely the opposite. Whenever someone treated him or anyone close to him badly, it was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” He never forgave such an affront, and made no bones about it. “To exact revenge for yourself or your friends,” he used to say, “is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.” Even if he sometimes had to wait for years, Stieg always paid people back.

In the first volume of the trilogy, Henrik Vanger speaks for Stieg when he tells Mikael Blomkvast, “I’ve always had many enemies over the years. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s never get in a fight you’re sure to lose. On the other hand, never let anyone who has insulted you get away with it. Bide your time and strike back when you’re in a position of strength – even if you no longer need to strike back.” In the third book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest , Mikael explains to Anders Jonasson, the doctor who takes care of Lisbeth Salander, that he must help his young patient even if it’s illegal to do so, because he may in good conscience break the law to obey a higher morality. For Stieg, Lisbeth was the ideal incarnation of the code of ethics that requires us to act according to our convictions. She is a kind of biblical archangel, the instrument of The Vengeance of God, the working title of the fourth volume of The Millennium Trilogy.

When he was a boy in Umea, Stieg got into fights everywhere and often. One day a boy broke one of his front teeth, so Stieg had to have a gold false tooth implanted in his jaw. Long afterward, he lay in wait for his attacker one night and took him by surprise. Stieg never had another problem with him – or anybody else. Yes, revenge is indeed a dish best eaten cold.

FIAT JUSTITIA, pereat mundus. Let justice be done, though all the world perish.

This dilemma between morality and action is in fact what drives the plot in The Millennium Trilogy. Individuals change the world and their fellow human beings for better or for worse, but each of us acts according to his or her own sense of morality, which is why everything comes down in the end to personal responsibility.

The trilogy allowed Stieg to denounce everyone he loathed for their cowardice, their irresponsibility, and their opportunism: couch-potato activists, sunny-day warriors, fair- weather skippers who pick and choose their cause; false friends who used him to advance their own careers; unscrupulous company heads and shareholders who wangle themselves huge bonuses… Seen in this light, Stieg couldn’t have had any better therapy for what ailed his soul than writing his novels.

“There Are Things I Want You To Know About Stieg Larsson And Me” by Eva Gabrielsson with Marie- Francoise Colombani; Seven Stories Press, N.Y., 2011

On Hemingway by Paul Hendrickson

2012-01-11T12:13:00.001-05:00

“It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.” – Norman Mailer

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Most of the talk was in Stein’s suite at the Algonquin Hotel, although some of it took place while they were out marching on Madison Avenue. The “conversation” as the piece was titled when it appeared in print several months later, was about the terrible thing that happens to American writers: how they feel they must create a new literature; how they get to be thirty-five or forty and the juices dry up, and then what happens? They stop writing altogether or they begin to repeat themselves formulaically. It was all so sad and tragic.

You could almost hear what was coming next. “What about Hemingway?” the interviewer asks, venturing his own opinion that Hemingway was good merely until after A Farewell to Arms – say, into the first years of the 1930s.

Oh no, Stein says, he wasn’t really any good after 1925. In the early short stories, he had it, but then he betrayed himself. You see, she said,

When I first met Hemingway he had a truly sensitive capacity for emotion, and that was the stuff of his first stories; but he was shy of himself and began to develop, as a shield, a big Kansas City – boy brutality about it, and so he was “tough” because he was really sensitive and ashamed that he was. Then it happened. I saw it happening and tried to save what was fine there, but it was too late. He went the way so many other Americans have gone before, they way they are still going. He became obsessed by sex and violent death.

She elaborated, testing a stubby finger in Manhattan hotel-room air.

It wasn’t just to find out what these things were; it was the disguise for the thing that was really gentle and fine in him, and then his agonizing shyness escaped into brutality. No, now wait – not real brutality, because the truly brutal man wants something more than bullfighting and deep-sea fishing and elephant killing or whatever it is now, and perhaps if Hemingway were truly brutal he could make a real literature out of those things; but he is not, and I doubt if he will ever again write truly about anything. He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other half is the man.

Obsessed by violence and sex. Developing a shield, your big Kansas City-boy brutality, because your sensitivity to life deeply shames you. A mask for the thing in you that’s really gentle and fine.

I’ve always wondered if at least part of the reason that Ernest Hemingway so grew to revile Gertrude Stein was because he understood how close to the bone he could scrape. A writer and Hemingway friend named Prudencio de Pereda once used a baseball analogy to describe some of the better psychological tries by Hemingway’s detractors: the ball looks beautiful from the instant it leaves the bat, seemingly headed straight for the upper deck, clear homer, only to veer off in the last seconds to just this side of the foul pole. It ends up another strike on the batter, but, damn, wasn’t it fine watching that thing fly?

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Appreciating the uncelebrated life of Walter Houk has helped me to appreciate all over again and in new ways the myth-swallowing life of Ernest Hemingway. It’s as if he’s single-handedly brought him back around – the goodness, in and amid all the squalor. In astronomy there’s a technique known as “averted vision.” The idea is that sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you’re not looking at it directly. It’s as if what you’re really after is sitting at the periphery rather than at the center of your gaze. Something of this same hope and principle was at work in telling Arnold Samuelson’s story. But the “Maestro’s” life was a mirror opposite.

Walter Houk is in his mid-eighties, as I write. He is a small, trim, learned, meticulous, and sometimes fussy and nitpicky man, a widower, an accomplished former journalist, a failed painter, an ex-outdoorsman and naturalist, an ex-Foreign Service officer, a once-long-ago midshipman, who lives alone, has long lived alone, quietly, unobtrusively, a little sadly, in a comfortable house, on an ordinary street, in a tucked-away corner of greater Los Angeles. That house, which is kept as tidy as the officers’ quarters on a submarine, is full of old Hemingway photographs, nautical charts, unpublished book-lengthy Houk manuscripts, Esso highway maps of Cuba in the 1950s, Havana bar menus, Christmas cards with Hemingway’s greetings on them – and a lot more. Entering his house is like walking into a hidden Hemingway museum.

Walter Houk, who keeps insisting he won’t be around too much longer, has set down his pencil. His own words have tripped something in him. He is growing weary and needs to nap. At dinner tonight, stoked with a vodka martini and a glass of wine, he’ll say:

You see, for a long time in my life, I avoided a consideration of all the negatives about Hemingway. It was just so politically correct to dislike the man. I didn’t know what to argue against, or where to start arguing. I didn’t want to be bothered. It wasn’t going to change anything I knew. My whole experience with Ernest Hemingway is the conventional diswisdom. He didn’t wreck my life. It was a hugely positive experience to be around him, for those several years in the fifties, getting to go out on the boat and all the rest. I was half his age. He treated me kindly. He treated my wife, Nita, kindly. It was as if we were sort of kids around the place, and I think he liked that, because his own kids so often weren’t there, and he missed them. He wanted to help us with our lives. The vultures have long ago gathered around the Hemingway corpse and rendered their judgment. But their judgment’s wrong; at least its incomplete. I don’t think the terrible vile side defines him. It was a facet of his character. He was a great man with great faults. We should not allow the faults to overshadow the accomplishments. He said in a letter once – I think it was to one of his children – that ‘a happy country has no history.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that was his point. You could say a happy man has no biography – who’d want to read it? I think of him as a Beethoven, for the way he changed the language. He’s a Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians. He threatens all the little academics sitting at their computers. Somehow or other you’ve got to try to help rescue him from all that.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

In all his fiction Hemingway made up things from what he knew, telling terrific lies about real people; conflating, rearranging, conjoining and transposing different characters and events from his life so what he made up was somehow truer than if it had actually happened. Lies built on deeper truths.

The great literary historian Malcolm Crowley once wrote that cable-ese for Hemingway “was an exercise in omitting everything that can be taken for granted,” another way to understand how he arrived at his literary method, an attempt to relay as much information as possible in as few words as possible.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Emily Dickinson) is another approach to understanding Hemingway’s (symbolist) method.

In all of Hemingway’s work, you end up feeling more than you necessarily understand: another core Hemingway writing value.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

If Walloon doesn’t often appear by name, lakes are nonetheless present in some of Hemingway’s finest Michigan stories. Sometimes their presence is ghostly, and at other times you can smell the dried fish guts and smeared nightcrawlers wedged down into the floorboards of a rowboat- oars creaking and groaning in their locks – making its way across the unnamed water.

Sunny arrived in the summer of 1910, when Hemingway turned eleven. She was an eighteen-footer in a dory style, meaning that she had a flat bottom and fairly high sides and a sharp bow. She was powered by a sputtery Gray Marine inboard motor that was perpetually hard to start and leaked rainbows of oil on the surface of the lake, which made the head of the family sputter mild oaths like “Oh rats.”

The Farm by Paul Hendrickson

2012-01-10T14:10:00.001-05:00

Walter Houk (the only friend Hemingway had who is still alive) was born to working-class folk in Mission Hospital, on June 14, 1925, in a little nondescript community on the eastern edge of Los Angeles called Walnut Park. That was the summer of The Sun Also Rises – its seemingly miraculous, falling-out-whole, first draft, which in effect was the final draft. Another story of that summer, not nearly so well known, might be thought of as the first node of connection between someone destined to be very famous and someone who’d achieve a startling lot in his life, even if none of it was destined for the front page, which is only the story of the rest of us.

Two days before Walter Hauk was born, and half a world away, on the Left Bank of Paris, twenty-five- year- old Ernest Hemingway and thirty-three year old Hadley Hemingway, who live so reputedly broke and happy with their baby boy above the high whine of a sawmill, had gotten into their gladdest glad rags and gone to a major art opening. It was the first one-man show at the Galerie Pierre for the Spanish Catalan surrealist painter Joan Miro. Hemingway got seized that evening to own a canvas called La Ferme (The Farm). For some months he’d glimpsed the painting as a work in progress in the artist’s studio. The next day, saying that he wished it as a birthday present for his wife, he put a five-hundred-franc note as a down payment, with the balance due in the fall.

A small complication was that the gallery owner had already promised the painting to Hemingway’s friend Evan Shipman, the sometime American poet and lover of the horses at Longchamp and Auteuil. The day after that, at Shipman’s urging, the two nonheeled writers decided to do the sporting thing and roll the dice. Biographers would disagree on whether the painting’s full price was thirty-five or five thousand francs ($175 or $250), but either figure would have represented something mountainous to Hemingway ( the big canvass now hangs in the National Gallery of Art, its value in the millions).

In another two weeks, Hemingway and his wife would leave for Spain and the festival at Pamplona, and within little more than a year he’d no longer be poor or unknown or living with Hadley – one of the self-admitted biggest mistakes of his life. But the connecting point here is that he’d thrown the dice and held his breath and won his Miro on the same day Walter was born – and twenty-five years later, in an impromptu tour of his home, Hemingway would be showing off the painting to Walter, whom he’d met about twenty minutes before. And who, in his own way, would feel transfixed by The Farm, as he’d be struck by the other modernist oils hanging casually throughout the house: the Paul Klee, the Juan Gris, the Georges Braque, the Andre Massons. But most especially the Miro, hanging on the south wall of the dining room,. “You see,” Walter once said, knowing nothing of the dice story, “I’d never met anyone before who owned paintings of this quality. And since I was a painter myself, doing it in my spare time, trying to put together a show at a small gallery in Havana, this was eye-opening. Looking at those paintings with him that first day, listening to him talk about them with such pride, especially the Miro, with its technical precision, may have been my first clue that there was some other kind of man here.”

“Gallantry of An Aging Machine”; Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson

The Sentence by Ernest Hemingway

2012-01-08T13:29:00.002-05:00

Entirely absurd and ill-fitting to Green Hills of Africa itself, the sentence begins five lines down on manuscript page 223 and isn’t over until the third line of sheet 228. Immediately before, the author is talking about trying to make yourself responsible only to yourself, and the feeling that comes of that when you’re an author. He starts out arrogantly and defensively but along the way seems to catch up with himself to say what he really wants to say. Was he even fully aware of what he was doing, or, as with the best of all writing, had his subconscious done its work in his sleep, so that in the actual writing a kind of auto-didacticism, a sort of trancelike state, had taken over?

Ostensibly, The Sentence, which has very few cross-outs and revisions, is about the Gulf Stream, that mythic warm current named by Ben Franklin two centuries ago, deep as the bottom itself in places, sixty to eighty nautical miles in places, which forms in the Western Caribbean Sea, flows into the Gulf of Mexico, courses through the Straits of Florida, hooks left, and moves up the southern coast of America to Cape Hatteras, before switching directions again, to the northeast, and breaking up into several other currents and crosscurrents of the Atlantic system.

He starts out so calmly, in the middle of a paragraph with the words “That something.”

That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they all say it is a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream, will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable parts going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with the occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in the ten miles along the coast it is clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing – the stream.

Hemingway’s Boat; Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 – 1961 by Paul Hendrickson; Knopf, 2011

Watch-Out Situation by Colleen Morton Busch

2012-01-03T20:24:00.004-05:00

On June 21, 2008, lightning strikes from one end of drought-dry California to the other ignited more than two thousand wildfires that stretched from the Trinity Alps in the north to Santa Barbara in the south. One of the blazes turned toward Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur. For weeks the resident monks prepared for the fire’s arrival, committed to staying to defend the monastery despite repeated orders to leave.

If you lived on the West Coast, you knew about the fires. If you lived in California, you smelled the smoke. The situation at Tassaraja was featured in the national news. Connections to the monastery, famous for its hot springs, food, and peaceful environs, extended around the world. Even those who’d never been to Tassajara or heard of it before were intrigued by the seemingly paradoxical image of a fire monk. Suddenly, people who ordinarily spent a good deal of time sitting cross-legged in front of a wall faced a situation that required decisive action. What did that look like? How could sitting still and doping nothing prepare you top act, and to act fast?

As a Zen student and regular visitor to Tassajara over the past ten years, I followed the fire closely. As soon as I read Tassajara director David Zimmerman’s account of the fire’s arrival, I wanted to tell this story – from as close as possible but also with a wide lens. What was it like to meet a wildfire with minimal training in firefighting but years of Zen practice to guide you? I believed others might benefit from knowing, the fire being a perfect metaphor for anything that comes uninvited and threatens to hurt us or the people and places we love.

Thursday, July 10, 2008, one p.m.

Nothing Mako had read when she was fire marshal at Tassajara prepared her for the actual experience of witnessing an advancing fire front. “It had this feeling of being ferocious and unrelenting and aggressive and just, you know, consuming,” she told me later, making explosive gestures with her hands. The entire sky boiled above her head, a canopy of fire. Thirty-foot flames tore down the mountains into Tassajara. Holy crap, she thought, I’m going to die.

A wildfire has a head, a tail and flanks. The fire blasting over Flag Rock, Hawk Mountain, and the Overlook ridge seemed to have two or three heads, maybe more. But then this head met the moisture hanging in the air from Dharma Rain and transformed into fingers of flame before their eyes.

[Dharma Rain was a system of sprinklers fed by water from the brook and the pool through a system of pumps and standing pipes, mounted on the roofs the the main buildings]

Maybe they didn’t have to hunker down in the stone office after all. Maybe Tassaraja wasn’t going to burst into flame at once, so that only the Buddha would be left, buried in a moonscape of blackened tree trunks and soot-smudged rocks. Maybe they could do something.

The five monks remaining at Tassajara didn’t have much experience as trained firefighters and were in violation of some of the established guidelines for staying safe in the field – what are known as the Ten Standard Orders and Eighteen Watch-Out Situations, or more simply, “The Ten and Eighteen”. They didn’t post a lookout. They didn’t have a plan or clear assignments. No one was in charge. But they’d mastered one order: “Be alert. Keep calm. Think clearly. Act decisively.” And they had two essential safety tools in abundance – readiness and attention. “We didn’t set up a command structure,” Abbot Steve told me later. “We set up a communications structure.”

Each of the five carried a small two-way Motorola walkie-talkie. They used them through-out the day to check in with one another, to announce their whereabouts, and to ask for help when they needed it. But they were in a Watch-Out Situation- they couldn’t see the main fire and weren’t in contact with someone who could.

Some fire managers insist that the Ten Standard Orders are fundamentally non-negotiable, never to be broken. Ted Putnam, wildland fire investigator and longtime meditator, disagrees. “You only think you can follow them if you have never observed your own mind in meditation.” In On The Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, one former seasonal firefighter wrote that the Ten and Eighteen “are too much to ask of ground-pounding crew members engaged in the controlled chaos that is firefighting. These rules are “ideally possible but practically unattainable.”

Ideally possible but practically unattainable sounds a lot like the vow to save all beings that residents at Tassajara (and Buddhists everywhere) make on a daily basis. That the vow cannot be upheld does not mean its not worth making. The five at Tassaraja may not have been trained in the Ten and Eighteen, but they knew intimately the importance of having signs on the path that point the way towards what is often called “right effort”. And they also knew you shouldn’t hold on to any rule too tightly. Reality doesn’t follow directions. The fire you want or expect will not be the fire you get!

Friday, July 11…

The day after the fire, felt to the five like the day after a marathon. “I was so dehydrated, I don’t think I peed for a couple of days,” Colin told me. The smoke gave them headaches. The by-products of exertion and adrenaline pooled in their muscles, sapping their energy. They were used to going without sleep and enduring pain during long stretches of meditation, but this was different. “It was something deeper in the bones than normal sleep deprivation”, Mako said but the road was still closed. The mountains around them smoldered. Despite their exhaustion they needed to stay active and alert.

Abbot Steve’s dawn patrol doubled as a post-fire inspection. A few buildings would need to be entirely replaced: the pool bathhouse, the woodshed at the flats, the birdhouse cabin and the compost shed. Many structures and some of Tassajara’s infrastructure would need repairs: sections of fence, the bathhouse, front gate and garden, some decking at the pool, wooden steps at the yurt and the trail to the solar array, the lumber truck windshield, the radio phone, and the spring box – the source of Tassajara’s drinking water.

But the center of Tassajara was untouched. The grass glistened a deep green on the stone office lawn. The wisteria-draped trellis shaded the gravel walkway, as it had for decades. A cluster of tall sycamores fanned the bocce ball court. The creek continued to flow down the length of Tassajara, continuous, selfless, ever-present. If you blocked out the periphery and the hoses strewn about, you could imagine there hadn’t been any fire. But lift your eyes a little and you saw the blackened hearth the fire had made of the mountains, the remains of the buildings the fire had consumed. Life and death, right next to each other, braided together, as they always were.

Colleen Morton Busch’s nonfiction, poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide range of publications from literary magazines to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tricycle, and Yoga Journal, where she was senior editor.

Smokey Bear Sutra by Gary Snyder

2012-01-02T09:24:00.004-05:00

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings--even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

"In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature."

"The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."
And he showed himself in his true form of

SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display--indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains--

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him...

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED"

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT
...thus we have heard...

(may be reproduced free forever)

The Autobiography Of An Execution by David R. Dow

2012-01-01T17:14:00.002-05:00

I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is. If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist, unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued far more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policemen routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallop poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you to no end.

I don’t mean any disrespect by this, but police officers are some of the best liars in the world. Their philosophy seems to be, so far as I can tell, that they are the good guys fighting the forces of death and darkness and that entitles them to break the rules when they think they need to and lie about it later when they deem it necessary. Some would swear a lie on their dead mother’s grave if he they thought it would help convict someone they were certain was guilty. If I know anything, I know that. But knowing means nothing. Proof is what matters. Every second I spend fantasizing that some cop is going to confess to lying in court was just another second I might as well spend in prayer, for all the good it would do my client.

In the beginning of my career as a death-penalty lawyer my focus was on the law, on why some legal rule or principle meant that my client should get a new trial. The problem with this lawyerly approach is that nobody cares about rules or principles when they are dealing with a murderer. The lawyer says that the Constitution was violated every which way, and the judge days, Yeah, but your client killed somebody, right? The problem for the death-penalty lawyer is that in jurisdictions such as Texas the courts consist of judges who are utterly unprincipled and hostile to the rule of law. They look for ways to uphold death sentences even where constitutional violations are egregious.

In recent years an appeals court upheld a death sentence of a black inmate who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors systematically removed every potential juror of color from serving. It upheld the death sentence of a mentally retarded inmate after his lawyer, who was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, neglected to point out the inmate’s IQ score. It upheld the death sentence of an inmate who was probably innocent on the ground that his lawyers had waited too long to identify proof of innocence. It upheld the death sentence of an inmate whose lawyer had literally slept through the trial. These judges get to be judges not because they are wise, but because they are friends with their U.S. Senator, or a friend of a friend. They are smart, however. That means they are very good at hiding their lawlessness inside of recondite-sounding legalese. They look for reasons to ensure that a death row inmate will get executed, and they usually find one. And not very many people care. Do you care that the rights of some murderer was violated? Most people say that the murder got treated better than his victim, and that pretty much sums up the attitude of the judges on the court of appeals too.

Justices on the Supreme Court are slightly better. They could hardly be worse. But the big problem with counting on winning a victory in the Supreme Court is that the justices are so inundated with cases that they don’t have time to be sticklers for principle, even when they are so inclined.

For all our so-called progress, the tribal vengefulness that we think of as limited to some backward countries is still how our legal system works. Deuteronomy trumps the Sixth Amendment every time. Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedure is a shouting lunatic whom people look at curiously and then walk by.

This is the reality: when you know that you are not going to succeed, and that your client is going to die no matter what you do, and that it does not matter a whit whether the facts and the law are on your side, you can either do nothing and accept defeat, or modify your definition of success, but what you also have to realize is that even if you choose the latter route and opt to redefine the meaning of winning, and therefore count it as a small victory (for example) when you don’t sit quietly by while a district attorney puts on his black face and carries on for the cameras with a egregious display of overt racism, your client is still going to get escorted into the execution chamber, strapped down to the gurney, and put to death.

There are some philosophers who say that we create the world we live in with our language. I am sorry to say that this is not how it works. Reality is a relentless and crushing force, and it cannot be thwarted or outrun with a lawyer’s effete semantics.

I understand death-penalty supporters. I used to be one. I can relate to the retributive impulse. I know people I want to kill. I’ve tried my hardest to save all my clients, but some executions don’t make me cry. There are people who commit acts of cruelty so monstrous you have to barricade your senses from contemplating them because if you don’t their images will ruin every pleasure you know. When you are petting your dog, hugging your son, kissing your wife, they will slither in between you and the object of your affection and make you ashamed to be human. That’s why I shower when I get home from the prison and wash my clothes in a load of their own. I have friends who quit doing this work because they couldn’t keep the images from burrowing deep down into their consciousness and stealing all their joy.

I doubt the evil men I know were born that way, but maybe some were. Nobody really knows. But I’ll tell you this: Even the worse people I’ve ever known are sympathetic strapped to a gurney. They’re no longer cruel or evil. Some are repentant, some aren’t. What they all are, at that moment, are helpless, deeply broken men. Often my job is just to listen, send the condemned inmate some books or magazines and to fight for him no matter how difficult or impossible it is to win, so as to be sure he does not have to face death alone. My goal is to save my clients, but that objective is beyond my control. All I can control is whether I abandon them or not.

David R. Dow is the University Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and litigation director at the Texas Defender Service, a non-profit legal aid corporation that represents death-row inmates.

Unknown Bards by John Jeremiah Sullivan

2011-12-29T19:06:00.002-05:00

Rarely did James McKune attempt published aesthetic statements of any kind, but when he did he repeated one word. Writing to JVM Palaver in 1960 about Samuel Charters’s then recent book, The Country Blues, McKune bemoaned the fact that Charters had concentrated on those singers who’d sold the most records, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Brownie McGhee, whose respective oeuvres McKune found mediocre and slick. McKune’s letter sputters in the arcane fury of its narcissism of minor difference, but the word he keeps getting stuck on is great. As in “Jefferson made only one record I can call great”(italics McKune’s). Or, “I know twenty men who collect the Negro country blues. All of us have been interested in knowing who the great [his again] country blues singers are not in who sold best.” And later, “I write for those who want a different basis for evaluating blues singers. This basis in their relative greatness.”

When I saw that letter in Marybeth Hamilton’s book (In Search of the Blues), it brought up the memory of being on the phone with Dean Blackwood, John Fahey’s partner at Revenant Records, and hearing him talk about his early discussions with Fahey over the phantoms project. “John and I always felt like there wasn’t enough of a case being made for these folks’ greatness,” he’d said. “You’ve got to have their stuff together to understand the potency of their work.”

Before dismissing as naïve the overheated boosterism of these pronouncements, we might ask whether there’s not a simple technical explanation for the feeling being expressed or left unexpressed in them. I believe that there is and its this:

The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ‘n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumerism to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s “Woman Woman Blues,” his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, “She got coal black curly hair.” Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening, for grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground.” It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar.

We have again to go against our training and suspend anthropological thinking here; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the type who don’t stop to ask if the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high – or higher – art forms might have originated with the folks themselves.

If there is a shared weakness in these two books (Elijah Wald’s Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and The Invention of The Blues, and Hamilton’s The White Invention of Black Music), it’s that they’re insufficiently on the catch for this pitfall. “No one in the blues world was calling this art,” says Wald. Is that true? Carl Sandburg was including blues lyrics in his anthologies as early as 1927. More to the point, Ethel Waters, one of the citified ‘blues queens” whose lyrics and melodies had a funny way of showing up in those raw and undiluted country-blues recordings, had already been writing self-consciously modernist blues for a few years by then (for instance, “I can’t sleep for dreaming…,” a line of hers I first heard in Crying Sam Collins and took for one of his beautiful manglings, then was humbled to learn had always been intentionally poetic).

Marybeth Hamilton, in her not unsympathetic autopsy of James McKune’s mania, comes dangerously close to suggesting that McKune was the first person to hear Skip James as we hear him, as a profound artist. But Skip James was the first person to hear Skip James in that way.

The anonymous African American people described in Wald’s book, sitting on the floor of a house in Tennessee and weeping while Robert Johnson sang “Come On in My Kitchen”, they were the first people to hear the country blues that way. White men “rediscovered” the blues, fine. We’re talking about the complications of that at last. Let’s not go crazy and say they invented it, or accidentally credit their “visions” with too much power. That would be counterproductive, a final insult even.

from Pulphead Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y, 2011

Poems by Bertolt Brecht

2011-12-28T19:34:00.008-05:00

Of the Friendliness of the World

1
To this windy world of chill distress
You all came in utter nakedness
Cold you lay and destitute of all
Till a woman wrapped you in a shawl.

2
No one called you, none bade you approach
And you were not fetched by groom and coach .
Strangers were you in this early land
When a man once took you by the hand.

3
From this windy world of chill distress
You all part in rot and filthiness (yet),
Almost everyone has loved the world
When on him two clods of earth are hurled.

Counter-song to ‘The Friendliness of the World’

So does that mean we’ve got to rest contented
And say ‘That’s how it is and always must be’
And spurn the brimming glass for what’s been emptied
Because we’ve heard it’s better to go thirsty?

So does that mean we’ve got to sit here shivering
Since uninvited guests are not admitted
And wait while those on top go on considering
What pains and joys we are to be permitted?

Better, we think, would be to rise in anger
And never go without the slightest pleasure
And, warding off those who bring pain and hunger
Fix up the world to live in at our leisure.

This Babylonian Confusion

This Babylonian confusion of words
Results from their being the language
Of men who are going down.
That we no longer understand them
Results from the fact that it is no longer
Of any use to understand them.
What use is it to tell the dead
How one might of lived
Better. Don’t try to persuade
The man with rigor mortis
To perceive the world.

Don’t quarrel
With the man behind whom
The gardeners are already waiting
Be patient rather.

The other day I wanted
To tell you cunningly
The story of a wheat speculator in the city of
Chicago. In the middle of what I was saying
My voice suddenly failed me
For I had
Grown aware all at once what an effort
It would cost me to tell
That story to those not yet born
But who will be born and will live
In ages quite different from ours
And, lucky devils, will simply not be able to grasp
What a wheat speculator is
Of the kind we know.

So I began to explain it to them. And mentally
I heard myself speak for seven years
But I met with
Nothing but a silent shaking of heads from all
My unborn listeners.
Then I knew that I was
Telling them about something
That a man cannot understand.

They said to me: You should have changed
Your houses or else your food
Or yourselves. Tell us, why did you not have
A blueprint, if only
In books perhaps of earlier times –
A blueprint of men, either drawn
Or described, for it seems to us
Your motive was quite base
And also quite easy to change. Almost anyone
Could have seen that it was wrong, inhuman, exceptional.
Was there not some such old and
Simple model you could have gone by in your confusion?

I said: Such models existed
But, you see, they were crisscrossed
Five times over with new marks, illegible
The blueprint altered five times to accord
With our degenerate image, so that
In those reports even our forefathers
Resembled none but ourselves.
At this they lost heart and dismissed me
With the nonchalant regrets
Of happy people.

Still, When the Automobile Manufacturer's Eighth Model

Still
When the manufacturer’s eighth model
Is already reposing on the factory scrapheap (R.I.P.)
Peasant carts from Luther’s day
Stand beneath the mossy roof
Ready to travel.

Flawless.
Still, now the Nineveh is over and done with
Its Ethiopian brothers are surely ready to start.
Still new were wheel and carriage
Built for eternity the wooden shafts.

Still

The Ethiopian stands beneath the mossy roof
But who
Travels in it?

Already
The automobile manufacturer’s eighth model
Reposes on top of the scrap iron
But we
Are traveling in the ninth
Thus we have decided
In ever new vehicles – full of flaws
Instantly destructible
Light, fragile
Innumerable –
Henceforward to travel.

The Gordian Knot

1
When the man from Macedaemon
Had cut through the knot
With his sword, they called him
Of an evening in Gordium, ‘the slave of
His fame’.

For their knot was
One of the wonders of the world
Masterpiece of a man whose brain
(The most intricate in the world) had been able to leave
No memorial behind except these
Twenty cords, intricately twisted together so that they should
One day be undone by the deftest
Hands in the world – the deftest apart from his
Who had tied the knot. Oh, the man
Whose hand had tied it was not
Without plans to undo it, but alas
The span of his life was only long enough
For one thing, the tying.

A second sufficed
To cut it.

Of him who cut it
Many said this was really
The luckiest stroke of his life
The cheapest, and did the least damage.
The unknown man was under no obligation
To answer with his name
For his work, which was akin
To everything godlike
But the chump who destroyed it
Was obliged as though by a higher command
To proclaim his name and show himself to a continent

2
If that’s what they said in Gordium, I say
That not everything which is difficult is useful
And an answer less often suffices to rid the world of a question
Than a deed.

I’m Not Saying Anything Against Alexander

Timur, I hear, took the trouble to conquer the earth.
I don’t understand him;
With a bit of hard liquor you can forget the earth.
I’m not saying anything against Alexander
Only
I have seen people
Who are remarkable –
Highly deserving of your admiration
For the fact that they
Were alive at all.
Great men generate too much sweat.
In all this I see just a proof
That they couldn’t stand being on their own
And smoking
And drinking
And the like.
And they must be too mean-spirited
To get contentment from
Sitting by a woman.

Difficulty of Governing

1
Ministers are always telling the people
How difficult it is to govern. Without the ministers
Corn would grow into the ground, not upward.
Not a lump of coal would leave the mine if
The Chancellor weren’t so clever. Without the Minister of
Propaganda
No girl would ever agree to get pregnant. Without the
Minister of War
There’d never be a war. Indeed, whether the sun would rise
In the morning
Without the Fuhrer’s permission
Is very doubtful, and if it did, it would be
In the wrong place.

2
It’s just as difficult, so they tell us
To run a factory. Without the owner
The walls would fall in and the machines rust, so they say.
Even if a plough could get made somewhere
It would never reach a field without the
Cunning words the factory owner writes the peasants: who
Could otherwise tell them that ploughs exist? And what
Would become of an estate without the landlord? Surely
They’d be sowing rye where they had set the potatoes.

3
If governing were easy
There’d be no need for such inspired minds as the Fuhrer’s.
If the worker knew how to run his machine and
The peasant could tell his field from a pastryboard
There’d be no need of factory owner or landlord.
It’s only because they are all so stupid
That a few are needed who are so clever.

4
Or could it be that
Governing is so difficult only
Because swindling and exploitation take some learning?

The Buddha’s Parable of the Burning House

Gautama the Buddha taught
The doctrine of greed’s wheel to which we are bound, and
advised
That we should shed all craving and thus
Undesiring enter the nothingness that he called Nirvana.
Then one day his pupils asked him:
What is it like, this nothingness, Master? Every one of us
would
Shed all craving, as you advise, but tell us
Whether this nothingness which then we shall enter
Is perhaps like being at one with all creation
When you lie in the water, your body weightless, at noon
Unthinking almost, lazily lie in the water, or drowse
Hardly knowing now that you straighten the blanket
Going down fast – whether this nothingness, then
Is a happy one of this kind, a pleasant nothingness, or
Whether this nothing of yours is mere nothing, cold, senseless
And void.

Long Buddha silent, then said nonchalantly:
There is no answer to your question.
But in the evening, when they had gone
The Buddha still sat under the bread-fruit tree, and to the
others
To those who had not asked, addressed this parable:

Lately I saw a house. It was burning. The flame
Licked at its roof. I went up close and observed
That there were people still inside. I opened the door and
called
Out to them that the roof was ablaze, so exhorting them
To leave at once. But those people
Seemed in no hurry. One of them
When the heat was already scorching his eyebrows
Asked me what it was like outside, whether it wasn’t raining
Whether the wind wasn’t blowing perhaps, whether there
was
Another house for them, and more of this kind. Without answering
I went out again. These people here, I thought
Need to burn to death before they stop asking questions.

Truly, friends
Unless a man feels the ground so hot underfoot that he’d
gladly
Exchange it for any other, sooner than stay, to him
I have nothing to say. Thus Gautama the Buddha.
But we too, no longer concerned with the art of submission
Rather with that of not submitting, and putting forward
Various proposals of an earthly nature, and beseeching men
to shake off
Their human tormentors, we too believe that to those
Who in face of the approaching bomber squadrons of Capital
Go on asking too long
How we propose to do this, and how we envisage that
And what will become of their savings and Sunday trousers
After the revolution
We have nothing much to say.

New Ages

A new age does not begin all of a sudden.
My grandfather was already living in the new age
My grandson will probably still be living in the old one.

The new meat is eaten with the old forks.

It was not the first cars
Nor the tanks
It was not the airplanes over the roofs
Nor the bombers.

From the new transmitters came the old stupidities.
Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth.

War Has Been Given A Bad Name

I am told that the best people have begun saying
How, from a moral point of view, the Second World War
Fell below the standard of the First. The Wehrmacht
Allegedly deplores the methods by which the SS effected
The extermination of certain peoples. The Ruhr industrialists
Are said to regret the bloody manhunts
Which filled their mines and factories with slave workers. The
Intellectuals
So I heard, condemn industry’s demand for slave workers
Likewise their unfair treatment. Even the bishops
Dissociate themselves from this way of waging war; in short
The feeling
Prevails in every quarter that the Nazis did the Fatherland
A lamentably bad turn, and that war
While in itself natural and necessary, has, thanks to the
Unduly uninhibited and positively inhuman
Way in which it was conducted on this occasion, been
Discredited for some time to come.

On Hearing A Mighty Statesman Has Fallen Ill

If the indispensable man frowns
Two empires quake.

If the indispensable man dies
The world looks around like a mother without milk for her
child.
If the indispensable man were to come back a week after his
death
In the entire country there wouldn’t be a job for him as a
hall-porter.

On The Death of A Criminal

1
He, I hear, has taken his last trip.
Once he’d cooled they laid him on the floor
Of that ‘little cellar without steps’
Then things were no better than before:
That is, one of them has done the trip
Leaving us to deal with several more.

2
He, I hear, need not concern us further
That’s the finish of his little game
He’s no longer there to plot our murder
But alas the picture’s still the same.
That is, one need not concern us further.
Leaving several more whom I could name.

Song of The Ruined Innocent Folding Linen

1
What my mother told me
Cannot be true, I’m sure.
She said: when once your sullied
You’ll never again be pure.
That doesn’t applied to linen
And it doesn’t apply to me.
Just dip it in the river
And its clean instantly.

2
At eleven I was sinful
As any army bride.
In fact at only fourteen
My flesh I mortified.
The linen was greying already
I dipped it in the stream.
In the basket it lies chastely
Just like a maiden’s dream.

3
Before my first man knew me
I had already fallen.
I stank to heaven, truly
A scarlet Babylon.
Swirled in a gentle curve
The linen in the river
Feels at the touch of the wave:
I’m growing slowly whiter.

4
For when my first man embraced me
And I embraced him
I felt the wicked urges fly
From my breast and from my womb.
That’s how it is with linen
And it’s how it is with me
The waters rush past swiftly
And all the dirty cries: see!

5
But when the others came
That was a dismal spring.
They called me wicked names
And I became a wicked thing.
No woman can restore herself
By storing herself away.
If linen lies long on the shelf
On the shelf it will go grey.

6
Once more there came another
As another year began.
When everything was other, I saw
I was another woman.
Dip it in the river and shake it!
There’s sun and bleach and air!
Use it and let them take it:
It will be fresh as before!

7
I know: much more can happen
Till there’s nothing to come at last.
It’s only when it’s never been used
That linen has gone to waste.
And once it is brittle
No river can wash it pure.
It will be rinsed away in tatters.
That day will come for sure.

Antigone

Emerge from the darkness and go
Before us a while
Friendly one, with the light step
Of total certainty, a terror
To the wielders of terror.

You turn your face away. I know
How much you dreaded death, and yet
Even more you dreaded
Life without dignity.

And you would not let the mighty
Get away with it, nor would you
Compromise with the confusers, or ever
Forget dishonor. And over their atrocities
There grew no grass.

Bertolt Brecht; Poems 1913 – 1956; edited by John Willet and Ralph Manheim with the cooperation of Erich Fried; Theatre Arts Books, Routledge, N.Y. 1976, 1987 revised edition.

The Accidental Death of John F. Kennedy

2011-12-16T15:24:00.005-05:00

Howard Donahue was a Baltimore ballistics expert who became involved in the JFK investigation when he was called by CBS in the spring of 1967. CBS had constructed a mockup of Dealey Plaza, complete with a little track which pulled a moving target repeatedly through the “Plaza” at 11 miles per hour. CBS was trying to see whether they could find anybody who could hit the target three times in 5.6 seconds. Donahue fired three shots into a three inch circles in 5.2 seconds – and became fascinated with the weapons-and-ballistics aspects of the assassination.

Donahue’s theory, developed over the following twenty years, is that Lee Harvey Oswald did in fact fire two shots at the President that warm November afternoon, with or without the assistance of a vast array of unknown conspirators. He missed with the first shot, although a fragment ricocheted up and hit the President in the neck. His second shot hit Kennedy and Governor John Connally, and his weapon jammed when he attempted a third shot. Unfortunately, a Secret Service man, George Hickey, grabbed a weapon and jumped when he heard the first shot. Hickey’s weapon accidentally fired, and that bullet, from Hickey’s gun, mortally wounded the President.

On first hearing this theory, almost no one believes it could be right. It sounds like just another helium balloon by someone who watched too many Mission: Impossible re-runs as a child. But I have read Donahue’s book Mortal Error carefully, and I have to tell you, if there is a flaw in his argument, I don’t see it.

Donahue is a ballistics expert who has testified in many criminal cases in that role. His ballistics argument include:

1.) The trajectory of the fatal bullet, plotted very carefully based on the entrance and “exit” wounds and the position of Kennedy’s head at the moment, traces a line behind Kennedy, and directly back to the Secret Service care which was following at a distance of about five feet.

2.) The bullet which hit Kennedy in the head disintegrated after impact, which a bullet fired from Oswald’s rifle would not have done, but a bullet fired from an AR-15, carried by Hinkey, would have. “The Carcano round (Oswald’s round) simply did not have the velocity – either rotational, from the rifling of the barrel – or linear, from the gunpowder charge in the skull – to completely shred the thick metal jacket and disintegrate the lead inside upon impact… the startling fact was that the bullet that hit Kennedy’s head ha not behaved like a full metal jacket at all.”

3.) A Carcano round, fired at the distance between Kennedy and Oswald at the moment of the fatal shot (believed to be 261 feet), could not have transmitted as much energy as the fatal round obviously did,.

4.) A .223 bullet, as fired from an AR-15 (Hickey’s gun), creates a little ‘lead snowstorm” in its target, as some of the lead actually melts on impact, then cools again in the tissue. A Carcano round has no similar effect. According to Donahue, exactly such an effect was described to him by Dr. Russell Fisher, a member of the pathologists panel which reviewed the autopsy results in 1968. (The President’s brain disappeared from the national archives shortly after that, making it impossible to confirm this allegation.

5.) The bullet fired by an AR-15 is 5.56 millimeters in diameter. A Carcano round is 6.5 millimeters. The entrance wound in the back of the President’s head was only six millimeters wide – making it seemingly impossible to put a 6.5 millimeter round through the hole.

Donahue’s material is stupefyingly dense but the situation is not as complicated as the language in which it musty be stated. If you can wade through the math until you get an intuitive feel for what the argument is about, you can figure things out. Let’s start with the fact that the fatal shot “entered the rear of the President’s skull and exploded out the right side of his head.” But Oswald was positioned to the right rear of Kennedy, behind him and to the right. That should mean that a shot from Oswald should have exited the left side of Kennedy’s head. Put the book down, take your fingers and point; you’ll see what I mean.

Not only that, but Oswald was way up in the air. The Warren Commission reported that the fatal shot was fired at a downward angle of 16 degrees. But, also according to the Warren report, the fatal bullet, as it exited, blew a hole in Kennedy’s skull; about two inches from the top of his head- above the hairline. A descending bullet should have created and exit wound through Kennedy’s face, about the height of his nose- not through his skull.

The Warren report defenders avoid this quandary by supposing that Kennedy’s head, at the moment of impact, is turned sharply to the left (25 degrees) and tilted sharply forward (40 degrees). Kennedy’s head was turned to the left and tilted forward at the moment of impact- but not nearly enough to explain the anomalous location of the exit wound…On the other hand, the exit wound is exactly where it should be if the fatal bullet was in fact fired from Agent Hickey’s weapon.

Let us deal with the circumstantial observations of the critical seconds:

1) Secret Service agent George Hickey carried an AR-15, which is the civilian version of the M-16, the rifle used by U.S. military ground troops in the Vietnam era. Numerous eyewitness reports state that Hickey had grabbed this weapon and was waving it around within seconds of the first shot.

2) One eyewitness, S.M. Holland, told the Warren Commission interviewer that “just about the same time the President was shot the second time, he (Hickey) jumped up in the seat and was standing up…now I actually thought when they started up, I actually though he was shot, too, because he fell backwards just like he was shot, but it jerked him down when they started off.” Holland also observed that agent Hickey had his weapon in his hands at the moment.

3) Special agent Winston Lawson was in the first car of the motorcade, the car ahead of Kennedy’s on that day. His job was to look steadily backward at the President. Maintaining constant visual contact. In his statement written December 1, 1963, agent Wilson wrote that:
“As the Lead Car was passing under this bridge I heard the first loud, sharp report and in more rapid succession two more sounds like gunfire. I could see persons to the left of the motorcade vehicles running away. I noticed agent Hickey standing in the follow-up car with the automatic weapon and first thought he had fired at someone.”

4) Secret Service Agent Glenn Bennett, seated next top Hickey in the follow-up car, says that when the second shot hit Kennedy he yelled “He’s hit” and reached for the A-15 on the floor of the vehicle- only to realize agent Hickey already had it. Secret Service Agent Emory Roberts, who was in charge of the agents in the follow-up car, reported that just after the shooting he turned and saw Hickey with the rifle, and said “Be careful with that.”

5) While the sound reports from the scene are confusing, many ear-witnesses that that one or more shots had originated from near the President. Austin Miller, watching from the overpass, thought that the shots had come “
from right there in the car.” Royce Skelton, also watching from the overpass, said that he thought the shots came “from around the President’s car.” Mary Elizabeth Woodward, standing just in front of the grassy knoll, described the third shot as “
a horrible ear-shattering noise.”

6) Several individuals who were part of the resident’s motorcade reported smelling gunpowder. Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the mayor of Dallas, was riding in an open convertible, four cars behind the death car. She saw the barrel of the rifle projecting through the open window, and immediately after that reported smelling gunpowder. Other people riding in the motorcade also reported the smell of gunpowder, including Tom Dillard, a journalist who was riding in an open car about a block behind the President, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was in the care immediately behind Agent Hickey’s

If in fact the only shots fired that afternoon were from Oswald’s rifle, sic stories in the air and inside a building, I have a very difficult time understanding why numerous eyewitnesses would smell gunpowder at ground level and in the path of the presidential limousine.

From there on, what we have in support of the Donahue thesis is a series of after-the-fact observations, culled by Donahue from dozens of Kennedy books.

1) Jim Bishop, in The Day Kennedy Was Shot, reported that Secret Service agent Clint Hill phoned the White House from the hospital. “There’s been an accident,” he reported, apparently overheard by the reporter.

2) According to LBJ: The Way He Was by Frank Cormier, Lyndon Johnson hated to have the Secret Service agents tailgating him, and once, on a hunting trip, threatened to shoot out their tires if they didn’t keep a safe distance. Another time, Johnson told Cormier that “If I ever get killed, it won’t be because of an assassin. It’ll be some Secret Service agent who trips himself up and his gun goes off. They’re worse than trigger-happy Texas sheriffs.”

Donahue’s theory is that nobody intended to kill the President, other than Oswald; it was an accident. It was an accident which happened to occur in such a manner that it was very unclear, to the persons on the scene, what had happened or what was happening. Once this terrible accident had occurred, very few people would have to have knowledge of what was going on. It is quite possible that Agent Hickey himself did not realize what had happened.

And those few people who did, faced with a fait accompli, have a powerful incentive to keep quiet about it. Look at what happens if they talk:

1). Agent Hickey’s life is destroyed

2). All of the agents involved are professionally destroyed.

3).The Secret Service, a government agency with an annual budget of many millions of dollars, is seriously compromised.

There have been other incidents of men being accidentally killed by their bodyguards- indeed, a book argues that this is what happened to the Kingfish, Huey Long. Ross Perot argued during the 1992 presidential campaign that the Secret Service was a vast waste of money, that it was used for political purposes, that it was used to disguise perquisites of office, and that it should be disbanded. There is much truth to this argument; certainly no journalist close to the President would deny that the Secret Service is routinely use to enable the President to “stage” events.

If, in addition to these abuses, it became known that the Secret Service had accidentally shot President Kennedy, do you think the public would still be willing to shell out millions for this “protection”? I’m not an investigative reporter; I’m just a guy who reads a lot of crime books. To me, Mortal Error remains the most persuasive account of the tragedy in Dallas.

Popular Crime; Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James; Scribner. 2011

The Good Night by Bertolt Brecht

2011-12-14T13:27:00.003-05:00

The stable they’d found in spite of all
Was warm, with moss lining the wall
And in chalk was written on the door
That this one was occupied and paid for.
So despite all the night was good
And the hay proved warmer than they thought it would.
Ox and ass were there to see
That everything was as it should be.
Their rack made a table, none too wide
And an ostler brought the couple a fish on the side.
And the fish was first rate, and no one went short
And Mary teased her husband for being so distraught.
For that evening the wind, too, suddenly fell
And became less cold than usual as well.
By night time it was very nearly warm
And the stable was snug and the child full of charm.
Really they could hardly have asked for more
When the Three Kings in person turned up at the door
Mary and Joseph were pleased for sure.

Never Ending War by Doris Lessing

2011-11-20T12:39:00.006-05:00

My father was twenty-eight when the war began. He was lucky twice, he said, once when he was sent out of the Trenches because of his bad appendix, thus missing the Battle of the Somme when all his company was killed, and then, having a shell land on his leg a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, when, again, no one was left of his company.

He was very ill, not only because of his amputated leg, but because he was suffering from what was then called shell shock. He was in fact depressed, the real depression which was like - so he said - being inside a cold, dark room with no way out, and where no one could come in and help him. The ‘nice doctor man’ he was sent to said he had to stick it out, there was nothing medicine could do for him, but the anguish would pass. The ‘horrible things’ that my father’s mind was assailed by were not as uncommon as he seemed to think: horrible things were on everybody’s mind but the war had made them worse, that was all. But my father remembered and spoke often about the soldiers who, ‘shell-shocked’ or unable to get themselves out of their mud holes to face the enemy, might be shot for cowardice. ‘It could have been me,’ he might say, all his life. ‘It was just luck it wasn’t.’

My father was not the only soldier never, ever, to forgive his country for what he saw as promises made but betrayed: for these soldiers were many, in Britain, In France, and in Germany, Old Soldiers who kept that bitterness till they died. They were an idealistic and innocent lot, those men: they actually believed it was a war to end war. And my father had been given a white feather in London by women he described as dreadful harridans – and that was when he already had his wooden leg under his trouser, and his ‘shell shock’ making him wonder if it was worth staying alive. He never forgot that white feather, speaking of it as yet another symptom of the world’s ineradicable and inevitable and hopeless insanity.

He had to leave England, for he could not bear England now, and he got his bank to send him out to the Imperial Bank of Persia, to Kermanshah. And there I was born on the 22nd October, 1919.

My mother had a bad time. It was a forceps birth. My face was scarred purple for days. Do I believe this difficult birth scarred me – that is to say, my nature? Who knows. I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important. How could it not be? Unless you believe that every little human being’s mind is quite separate from every other, separate from the common human mind. An unlikely thing, surely.

The war does not become less important to me as time passes, on the contrary. In 1990, the year I began to write this book, I was in the south of France, in that hilly country behind the Riviera, visiting the delicious little towns and villages which began centuries ago as hill forts, and in every town or village is a war memorial. On one face is a list of the twelve or twenty young men killed in World War One, and this in tiny villages that even now have only half a hundred inhabitants. Usually every one of the young men of the village was killed. All over Europe, in every city, town, and village is a war memorial, with the names of the dead of World War One. On another face of the shaft or obelisk are the two or three names of the dead of World War Two. By 1918, all the healthy young men of Europe, dead.

In 1990 I was in Edinburgh where in a cold, grey castle are kept the lines of books recording the names of the young men from Scotland killed between 1914 and 1918. Hundreds of thousands of names. And then in Glasgow –the same. Then, Liverpool. Records of the slaughter, the First World War. Unlived lives. Unborn children. How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, and those children and grandchildren had been born, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?

Not long ago, in a cinema in Kilburn, they showed Oh What a Lovely War!, that satire on the silliness of World War One. As we came out of the dark into the street, an old woman stood alert and alive at the exit, and she looked hard into every face, impressing herself on every one of us. That film ends with two females stumbling, wandering through acres, miles, of gravestones, war graves, women who never found men to marry and have children with. This old woman, there was no doubt, was one of them, and she wanted us to know. That film expressed her: she was telling us so.

During that trip through the villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish: my parents’. I felt, too, incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? The American Civil War, less than a century before, had shown what the newly invented weapons could do in the way of slaughter, but we had learned nothing from that war. That was the worst of the legacies from the First World War: the thought that if we are a race that cannot learn, what will become of us? But the strongest emotion on that trip was the old darkness of dread and of anguish – my father’s emotion, a very potent draught, no homeopathic dose, but the full dose of adult pain. I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak.

We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.

A war does not end with the Armistice. In 1919, all over a Europe filled with graves, hung miasmas and miseries, and over the whole world too, because of the flu and its nearly thirty million deaths.

I used to joke that it was the war that had given birth to me, as a defence when weary with the talk about the war that went on – and on –and on. But it was no joke. I used to feel there was something like a dark, grey cloud, like poison gas, over my early childhood. Later I found people who had the same experience. Perhaps it was from that war that I first felt the struggling panicky need to escape, with a nervous aversion to where I have just stood, as if something there might blow up or drag me down by the heel.

Under My Skin; Volume One of My Autobiography to 1949

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

2011-11-06T15:57:00.002-05:00

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it.

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.

I loath Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years, with the approach of a far more thorough and still more risible disintegration, which nowanights, I confess, detracts much from the routine terrors of sleep, I have grown to accustomed to my bedtime ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar ax is coming out of its great velvet-lined double-base case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing- except one token light in the potentially refulgent chandelier of Mademoiselle [my Nanny’s] bedroom, whose door, by our family doctor’s decree (I salute you, Dr. Sokolov!), remained slightly ajar. Its vertical line of lambency (which a child’s tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle.

In 1908, the year selected here, I still shared a nursery withy my brother. The bathroom assigned to Mademoiselle was at the end of a Z-shaped corridor some twenty heartbeats’ distance from my bed, and between dreading her premature return from the bathroom to her lighted bedroom next to our nursery and envying my brother’s regular little wheeze behind the japanned screen separating us, I could never really put my additional time to profit getting to sleep while a chink in the dark still bespoke a speck of myself in nothingness. At lengthy they would come, those inexorable steps, plodding along the passage and causing some fragile glass object, which had been secretly sharing my vigil, to vibrate in dismay on its shelf.

Now she has entered the room. A brisk interchange of light values tells me that the candle on her bed table takes over the job of the ceiling cluster of bulbs, which, having run up with a couple of clicks two additional steps of natural, and then supernatural brightness, clicks off altogether. My line of light is still there, but it has grown old and wan, and flickers whenever Mademoiselle makes her bed creak by moving. For I still hear her. Now it is a silvery rustle spelling “Suchard”, now the trk-trk-trk of a fruit knife cutting the pages of La Revue des Deux Mondes. A period of decline has started: she is reading Bourget. Not one word of his will survive him. Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.

The inevitable happens: the pince-nez case shuts with a snap, the review shuffles onto the marble of the bed table, and gustily Mademoiselle’s pursed lips blow; the first attempt fails, a groggy flame squirms and ducks; then comes a second lunge, and light collapses. In that pitchy blackness I lose my bearings, my bed seems to be slowly drifting, panic makes me sit up and stare; finally my dark-adapted eyes sift out, among entoptic floaters, certain more precious blurrings that roam in aimless amnesia until, half-remembering, they settle down as the dim folds of window curtains behind which street lights are remotely alive.

How utterly foreign to the troubles of the night were those exciting St. Petersburg mornings when the fierce and tender, damp and dazzling artic spring bundled away broken ice down the sea-bright Neva…!

Miranda's Grandmother by Yoram Kaniuk

2011-10-17T16:18:00.013-04:00

The grandmother lived in Sea Bright, New Jersey, in a not-to-large house between the ocean and the river. Whenever the river rose and flooded this strip of land, she’d be evacuated by helicopter. Sea Bright is a summer resort town, but the old lady lived there throughout the year. She was about five nine, a real beauty with violet eyes. Her hair was tinted blue and she had meticulously trained her three poodles to bark like German shepherds. They were small, irritable, and well groomed. She made a habit of spraying them with fine French eau de cologne. She called her house Malgre Tout, which in French means ‘in spite of it all”.

Her last husband, or perhaps it was the one before last, had been a peacetime general who like most of the generals of the time didn’t know how to shoot and had lived with her for a few years in an American camp in the south of France. She was renowned for her escapades in her youth; for instance, a famous duel was fought because of her between a betrayed lover and a cuckholded husband and had been the talk of the town in Philadelphia, once upon a time. She had had several love affairs in her lifetime and had been ostracized by Philadelphia’s high society. And despite the fact that there was a Scots nobleman in her own family tree – Mary Queen of Scot’s right-hand man , in fact – she called the Puritans who fled to America in the seventeenth century “riff-raff” because her own ancestors, when they came, came as noblemen – not to seek refuge but to reign over the land. When Miranda’s mother and aunts got married, the old lady hadn’t been allowed to attend the weddings. She was obliged to hide outside the church windows and peek in.

Her blend of arrogant nobility and ignorance seemed to be a legacy from several generations’ worth of relatives who did nothing but live lives of self-indulgence and alcoholism and tennis and cricket, and then the crash of 1929 pulled the rug out from under them. Her somber cuckholded husband, who owned a distinguished bank, lost everything in a single day, then climbed up his favorite oak tree and shot himself with a gun gripped in white-gloved hands. She kept the ancient pennant of a savage Scottish clan to which she felt kinship in her house in Sea Bright. She had a French companion living with her, an orphaned named Nina, whose huge eyes blinked through the fog in her brain at the woman she worshiped and with whom she lived and of whom she was absolutely terrified. During an angry phone conversation the old woman told Miranda’s mother that it was inconceivable for Miranda to marry a Jew. She said - so Miranda’s mother told me – that she had never met a Jew in her entire life, and Miranda’s mother added that there was no need for me to go out to see her, but I wanted to and someone let us borrow their car so we drove out to see the old lady.

The windshield wipers struggled heroically against a heavy rain, the road was virtually empty, Miranda sat beside me in silence. I thought about Penn, after who the state of Pennsylvania is named – Pennsylvania meaning, more of less, "the woods of Penn” – who was one of her ancestors, likewise one of Theodore Roosevelt’s wives, who was herself the descendent of Jonathan Edwards, who had been an important philosopher and theologian and had been one of the first presidents of Princeton University, and whose grandson Aaron Burr had been Washington’s Vice President, who in turn dueled with and shot dead America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who was in fact one of Miranda’s father’s forebears.

I was wearing a suit for the second time in my life. I had borrowed it from Miranda’s younger brother, and I wore a tie at the advice of Miranda’s mother. We were shown in a stood shivering in front of a blazing fireplace. Nina brought a tray with drinks while the old lady lurked upstairs. We could hear the rustling of her dress up there. She was waiting for the right moment to make an entrance. Nina was nervous and stared at me in alarm from the staircase. She apparently knew that she was supposed to ignore me, but the water dripping from me was the same water that was dripping from Miranda. The sound of the ocean intensified outside, becoming a roar and then abating, and at last the old lady started coming down the stairs. Her enormous conceit was perfectly encapsulated in her staged descent down those stairs, in perfect confidence. Even with her blue hair , she looked like an ancient Greek goddess of Vengeance. Even from the topmost stair, she had already done everything she could to show me her scorn. Her every step was angry. Her height was emphasized by a light that shown directly down on her. When she reached the bottom step, she didn’t even glance in my direction; she opened her arms and waited for Miranda to fall into them. She embraced her granddaughter as you might embrace a recently widowed woman.

After this embrace, she simply stared at Nina who was standing and trembling and shooting frightening glances at me and the old lady said aloud: You! – she used a quite correct tone of voice, she must have practiced for hours – you can see how difficult this is for me because of you. Please wait for me in the morning room, and Nina led me into a small room overlooking the ocean. Attractive old paintings. Books bought by the yard. Large windows that seemed to tame the storm. A cabinet and several old armchairs, and a large table with a huge jigsaw puzzle on it. She let me wait for a while and I heard the barking dogs outside the door and then she entered.

She sat with her better side facing me. She asked me what time it was and I told her that it was twelve noon. And she waited a moment. Then she picked up a small silver bell and tinkled it gently. Nina came in carry a tray with a bottle of bourbon, a small pitcher of water, and a glass with ice cubes. The old lady mumbled, poured a little water into the glass that she filled with bourbon, and swirled the glass gently so the ice cubes clinked. I looked at her glass and smiled. The great lady turned towards me and looked at me directly for the first time since we arrived. Something in my appearance disturbed her and I could see the furrows on her forehead deepen uncomfortably. She said, But you people don’t drink, do you? I said, If you people drink them sometimes we drink too. She gestured with her hand and Nina ran out of the room and I could hear weeping. Nina returned with another glass that had apparently been prepared in advance and mixed bourbon with water without asking me how I liked it. Then the old lady, who had apparently forgotten what she’s said before, grumbled that Jews probably drink first thing in the morning. Silence fell because I didn’t respond. She allowed Nina to leave and suddenly rose from her chair, went over to the table with the puzzle, picked up a piece, looked, found a place for it in the appropriate space, looked at me with a sense of triumph, and sat down again.

She waited for the right moment and said: I don’t understand why a Jew wants to force himself into our family. There’s never been a Catholic in the family, let alone a Jew. You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met. She sounded angry and afraid as she said it. Something about me didn’t set well with her expectations. She looked disappointed and drank bourbon. She leveled a glance at me, an almost personal glance I’d say, and said, You don’t look like you should. I told her that perhaps her education as to Jews was lacking and she didn’t respond. She began trying to make it obvious that she wasn’t listening to me. She began naming the presidents and generals and distinguished people and inventors that her family had been blessed with. She said she was proud of her pedigree. That sort of thing couldn’t be bought with sycophancy or new money. She talked about the ear-locks of ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crooked noses and all the thieves and cheats who were my people and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She said nothing would help, we’d never be really respectable, that we had no brains or honor or heroes or leaders and now, she said, you’re pushing yourselves where you are not wanted.

She called Jews “Hebrews” and spoke to me only in the second-person plural. However, there was something off about her performance. I was getting a kick out of being referred to as “you people” straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but at the same time she sounded a little embarrassed and wonderstruck. She kept asking if “you people”, namely me, if we weren’t by any chance French, if we weren’t perhaps Frenchmen impersonating Jews. She didn’t want me to marry her granddaughter, but if I were French, even a Catholic, she would reconsider, and since I looked French to her, But why are you people trying to infiltrate us, pretending to be Jews?

I told her I had to be excused for a moment. She asked me where I thought I was going. I asked her if her bathroom had running water and toilet paper because otherwise I’d have to asked Miranda for some tissues. She tried to get angry, restrained herself, and said of course there was. She was serious. She wasn’t going to rise to my banter. In the bathroom I made an effort not to make a sound. I tried to make sure not a single drop dripped on the floor. With the tips of my fingers I took some of her soft pink toilet paper and then worried that maybe she’d prefer that I use some other paper just in case she or Miranda had to go in eventually and powder their noses.

When I returned she seemed deep in thought. The storm out the windows had intensified and it was raining in sheets. She said that even the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word Jew as thief. You’re all thieves. your Talmud is packed with lies and malice. What would happen if you wanted to drink Miranda’s blood on your Jewish Easter? She looked at me again. She couldn’t understand where the nose from the illustrations in the Dickens books and the newspapers she had seen all her life had disappeared to. I was supposed to have a dirty straggly beard, a crooked nose all the way to my mouth, but I didn’t. At last she said, And where’s that nose? She said, Your Talmud is packed with agitation against Christians. She said that her best friend, Mr. Freedley, who produced the Ziegfeld Follies and was an aristocrat and an honest man, was going to send his Rolls-Royce for her to take her to New York to buy clothes, but not in the New York of the Jews; not the New York where Miranda’s parents lived with the Communists and the Jews. She’s spend a few days with Freedley. He always knew how to make a woman feel like a lady. The last of the great cavaliers in America is courting me and yet here you people come wanting to marry my rare flower, my Miranda.

I sensed her defeat long before she herself sensed it. She was already actually looking at me every time she addressed me. She admitted sadly that she like me. That was why she suddenly told me about Mr. Freedley, because he was supposed to protect her from the truth she saw on my face with her own eyes that wanted to be strong and had now become weak. She no longer spoke so passionately about her hatred of ‘you people”. Hatred was apparently the only intellectual virtue she had been blessed with. She waited for me to say something. I decided not to speak, not yet. I wanted to hear more from her. He asked how I intended to support Miranda and I told her that I was a partner in a factory for frozen falafel. Wanted to help her and told her that I was twenty-eight and divorced, that I was a man of no means, but like all Jews I was sure to get a windfall from one shady business or another. I thought that the frozen falafel would be sufficiently rare and mysterious for her. It was apparent that she was trying to understand what frozen falafel was without revealing her curiosity. She said, You know very well how to cheat the innocent. I saw the contempt oozing out of her eyes, you could see it from miles away. She didn’t want to waste any emotion on me, but she was legitimately concerned. She suffered in silence and drank more bourbon and again forgot to offer me some.

I was surprised at how little she annoyed me. She didn’t get anywhere near the place inside me where I’m an angry Jew, my grandfather’s grandson. I was having fun. I was young. I could see that, unwillingly, and despite her meticulous planning, she was liking me more and more. She went on drinking and her look softened. We stood up and went to the bell room where we joined Miranda and where Nina was nervously waiting for us next to the gong to call us in for lunch.

What the grandmother actually wanted was for me to fall in love with her like all the men in her life. All her dreadful words about the inferior Jewish race, those Jews who trample over decent people and drink all the time and take revenge against good Christians and then run back to their ghettos, about how the Jewish character is irrevocably twisted –despite these words, or perhaps because of them, she wanted to steal me away from her granddaughter. It was all she knew how to do. Throughout her life she had stolen men’s hearts left and right and then stranded her suitors at the starting line; they seldom if ever really caught her. What she had learned in the enormous house on Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia up to the age of seventeen was all she had at her disposal for the rest of her life.. That was it. She’s learned nothing since. The loathing she felt for me was too abstract for it to touch me. I had to leave revenge to luck. I thought, “Luck be a Lady Tonight.”

I wasn’t sufficiently angry to know so early on how to get her back. She fought with a pathetic, ancient enthusiasm, like seltzer that had lost its bubbles. The bourbon also did its part to slow her down. She waited for the gong and Nina rang it and then we went into another room to eat lunch. She looked tired and sleepy as we started eating. Nina served eagerly. After making a huge effort to finish the meal Miranda’s grandmother stood up and went upstairs, saying that she had to rest. Miranda and I went out into the storm and were swallowed up into it.

At dinner, for which she had changed her dress, she drank coffee and wanted to know about my family. There was a seductive tone in her voice now. Her eyes were veiled. After a few more words about the inferior Jewish race, I said I was a descendant of Joseph. She asked who Joseph was. I told her he was Jesus’s father. She stifled a shriek of alarm and said, Yes, yes, and added that due to the distress I was causing her she would have to watch some television. I don’t watch television very much but this evening its important, she said in a bracing voice. I already knew before we came, from Miranda’s mother, that the old lady was addicted to Scrabble and television. I told her Miranda and I would join her. She yielded with disinterested dignity. She went upstairs with restrained enthusiasm. She switched on the television and watched her first program. She stole a glance towards Miranda and suddenly appeared childlike. It was the Jack Benny Show.

She immediately laughed because she remembered what had happened at the end of the show the previous week, and told us all about it. And then she stared at me in contempt. The program gave her strength. Benny was a real person, not like me. Shedding all the Jewish problems she’d been having that day, she said, I’m crazy about him, just wait until he plays the violin. I waited a moment and said, Yes, he really is a wonderful Jew. Her face caved in a kind of a twitch and she wanted to protest, but I could see she was running out of weapons to use against me – though her anger reinvigorated her. She waited for the next program. This one was with Danny Kaye, who was her favorite, so she said, and then on another channel they were showing The Postman Always Rings Twice, with the magnificent John Garfield, as she called him, and then we went on to watch a program about a man she called her genius, Gershwin, and then a short movie with Tony Curtis, something with Lauren Bacall, an old Josef von Sternberg film, and then a late-night conversation with Irving Berlin, as she flicked from channel to channel (though there were only three in those days); hours passed, she gradually wilted like a flower in the hot sun, and I didn’t show her any mercy: a Jewish God had gone into battle this night to destroy the poor woman. It hurt me and it hurt Miranda, but I was caught up in the battle: it wasn’t me who was fighting, the Good Lord spared me that, no, it was Melvyn Douglas and Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar, and she drank one glass after another. She reeled again and again from the impact of my words, “Also a Jew.” Kirk Douglas was beneath the belly, as was Eddie Fisher. She sat defeated and stunned.

And then, late a night, in her defeat, she suddenly looked cheerful- though the bourbon made her cheerfulness somewhat melancholy. I knew what she was waiting for. I had looked through the TV Guide while she waited to ambush me. There was a sad smile on her face. She smoked one cigarette after another, her blue hair speckled with light from the wall lamp, and Miranda fell asleep. Nina also fell asleep. Three of us remained – Miranda’s grandmother, me, and the God of Israel. We sat tensely. Waiting for the last movie of the night. Then, at one o’clock in the morning, hours past the time she was accustomed to retiring, the movie she was waiting for was finally shown: The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard. She wanted Leslie Howard on her side, you see, more English than the English, more British than the British, she needed him for one victory over my loathsome race, she needed him in order to vanquish me. She said, Look at the funny Englishman. Charming. Witty. Astute. Elegant. Athletic. He was her lifeline. Her last chance. And she said in a tone saturated with compassion, Now you can’t possibly tell me that he…but I silenced her with a laugh. The blow had to be a painful one. I waited for the right moment, I didn’t want her smile to vanish at once, I wanted t see her blood, and then I drew out the words, Leslie Howard Steiner, that’s right, his mother’s English, but Jewish, and his father’s a Jew from Hungary. And then the old lady burst out laughing too and Nina woke up and rushed out to fetch a glass of cold water. She switched off the television.

I told her the name Leslie comes from Lazlo and that he was a distant relative of my mother’s. He wasn’t really, but I wanted a personal stake in the old woman’s defeat. Now, her deep sorrow was without anger. She stood up, stretched her body and slowly and proudly went to her room. All her beloveds were Jews. One cold night the God of the Jews who hadn’t defeated Hitler managed to defeat Mrs. Anderson Elliott Brooke of Sea Bright, New Jersey. Now she is sitting in Heaven with all her beloved Jews, singing all the songs she loved so much and that were written for her by Jews. With her ancient ignorance, where else could she have gone? God probably treats her like an honored prisoner of war.

Paradox by Maggie Nelson

2011-10-14T16:44:00.002-04:00

A paradox is more than the coexistence of opposing propositions or impulses. It signals the possibility – and sometimes the arrival – of a third term into a situation that otherwise appeared to consist of but two opposing forces. Roland Barthes elaborates this third term – which he calls the Neutral - with the utmost beauty and intelligence in his 1977 – 78 series of lectures titled The Neutral . Barthes’s Neutral is that which throws a wrench into any system ( doxa) that demands, often with menacing pressure, that one enters conflicts, produce meaning, takes sides, choose between binary oppositions (i.e. “is cruel/is not!”) that are not of one’s making, and for which one has no appetite.

As it disrupts such demands, the Neutral introduces responses that had heretofore been unthinkable – such as to slip, to drift, to flee, to escape. In a world fixated on the freedom to speak and the demand to be heard, the Neutral proposes “a right to be silent – a possibility of being silent… the right not to listen…to not read the book, to think nothing of it, to be unable to say what I think of it: the right not to desire.” It allows for a practice of gentle aversion: the right to reject the offered choices, to demur, to turn away, to turn one’s attention to rarer and better things.

Preserving the space for such responses has been one of this book’s primary aims. Of equal importance has been making a space for paying close attention, for recognizing and articulating ambivalence, uncertainty, repulsion, and pleasure. I have intended no special claim for art and literature – that is, no grand theory of their value. But I have meant to express throughout a deep appreciation of them as my teachers. For, as Barthes suggests, insofar as certain third terms – however volatile or disturbing – baffle the oppressive forces of reduction, generality, and dogmatism, they deserve to be called sweetness.

A Sexual Biography of My Wife by Eugene Pota

2011-09-04T10:02:00.003-04:00

That title tickled others too.

Pota cherished the giggly warmth with which it was embraced each time he disclosed it in conversation. Dolores howled with laughter. Even Fred, her husband, still writing critically in academic publications and reviewing books there critically too, unbent a bit and chortled audibly from the rear of the car on the drive to the seafood restaurant in Montauk harbor for a standard Sunday lunch in summer.

Nelsa was gleefully curious. And her husband Jordan, glowed and grinned in silent relish at the hundreds of salacious jokes he envisioned unrolling from a bottomless cornucopia of lascivious humor. There were occasional puzzled exceptions, mainly demure women, but only for the first instant of unbelieving surprise. And his wife Polly too, of course. Each time the subject came up, Pota was cheered by the quizzical stares that darted inevitably and almost furtively to Polly’s reddening face, seeking to divine how the idea of such a book was sitting with her. Polly, as foreseen by him now whenever the subject did come up, fidgeted always in the same mute manner of embarrassed discomfort and said nothing and laughed along quietly.

“It’s not about me,” she might argue almost peevishly, but only when directly asked. “At least I don’t think so. And adding with a strained titter: “He doesn’t know enough.”

“It’s a novel, for Christ’s sake, not a history book,” Pota would insist with a jocular absence of sincerity, trying deliberately to appear unconvincing. “Don’t look at Polly. After all, I’ve had three wives, not just her. And frankly, I don’t think I’d want to write a book about any of them, or about me. I don’t think that all our sexual experiences combined are worth a book. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend three or four years about any one of us, or any of you either. I have to invent, you know. I don’t think any real person I ever met has been phenomenal enough for the subject of a whole novel. Do any of you think you are? Let me know about your extraordinary sex life.”

The topic certainly proved a merry one for lively table conversation, calling forth unexpected admissions surprising even to the husbands and wives of those making them in follow-up discussions to questions Pota posed devilishly in the innocent guise of objective research. He had only to touch on masturbation in a mixed group to see women squirm as though compromised and the men perk up waggishly in buccaneering remembrances. Between Pota and Polly the badinage about this sex book had become something of a teasing practical joke.

Judging from the reactions of his small audiences, it did seem to be a sure winner. Edith and Alan asked to see the pages as soon as he’d written them. So did Ken and Ken’s wife, Marissa, who without admitting anything about herself, volunteered to poll her female childhood friends about all their earlier sex events if Pota wanted her to. Just about everyone who knew of it foresaw felicitous prospects. A best-seller of large dimensions- the kind he’s all his professional life secretly pined and pined for.

Certainty, the subject matter suggested by the title encircled an ocean of recognizable material to which every reader in the world of all ages and both sexes could in one way or another relate from some degree of personal experience, conjectural or actual. Even Paul, Pota’s favorite editor, responded with an untypical guffaw when Pota, with solemn mien, first made known the title of his new book to him. And Paul did not laugh easily.

“Are you serious?”

Paul always turned solemn in the presence of a book or an idea he thought much of. Having worked as a conscientious editor all his life, he had suffered too many disappointments not to feel always in dread from the start in anticipation of the jumbled configuration of pitfalls that might lie ahead.

“Yes, I am, I think I am,” said Eugene Pota. “Fred Karl loves the idea too.”

“How does Polly feel about it?”

“Guess,” said Pota. “But she also agree it might be a sure thing for a novel, and she never interferes.”

Tell me,” asked Paul. “If you want to now. What’s the plot, the main story? How does it go?”

“That” said Pota, “is just the problem.” And now Pota was chuckling. “I guess I’ll have to put some work on that part, won’t I? I’ve no idea yet.”

In truth Pota had not yet one distinct idea who or what it was to be about. The title was all he’d been able to get. To an author who took pride in, and had received praise from textual critics for, his keen openings and endings in even his less successful volumes, it was almost horrifying to find himself unable to think of even one good sentence with which to begin.

Exasperating to him also was that the one ideal sentence that did keep popping back relentlessly into his head had already been conceived by the English novelist Julian Barnes for the starting words in his first novel Metroland. The words, Pota recalled with a kind of pouting admiration, were something like these, also by a first person male narrator: “The first time I watch my wife committing adultery was in a large movie theatre at…" and so forth along that course. The clarification that followed was equal to the anticipation evoked: his wife had been a movie actress playing an adulterous role in the film on view.

Could Pota be blessed with a line like that one, he felt, he would be off in a flash. He yearned for one as good, an opening sentence commensurate with the unspoken promises implied in his godsend of a book title. Each time he sat staring in the unremitting futility at the words already printed by him on a sheet of paper purporting to resemble a title page, “A Sexual Biography of My Wife, A New Novel, by Eugene Pota,” the line by Julian Barnes reappeared to haunt him, and he regretted each time as though in mourning that it had not been his own.

“What would Flaubert do if he had a title like that one” Can you imagine Madame Bovary from the point of view of the husband? Do you think we really have to have anything printed inside between the book covers? Paul, couldn’t we just have blank pages?”

“Sure,” said Paul “Or,” he added, with a broad smile, “we can cut production costs and just publish the book jacket. We can forget the pages.”

“Would it sell?”

“It would sell, I think. At the beginning. But not for twenty-five dollars. Maybe for ten cents. Then word of mouth would kill us. What would your author’s royalty on a book jacket price of ten cents?”

“Then I will have to think of something to write, won’t I?”

“Start thinking of something.”

“It shouldn’t be hard. There’s so much sex around.”

“Something good, “ said Paul, who was no longer treating the thought as a practical one requiring immediate decision. “Are you really serious about writing that particular sex book?”

“No, of course not,” admitted Pota. “But let’s not tell any one yet.”

“So? And meanwhile?

“Meanwhile?”

Meanwhile, I next put into Pota’s head a dynamic, resonating, taunting opening sentence for something different I knew he’s pounce upon and then would not know what to do with:

“The kid, they say, was born in a manger, but frankly I have my doubts.”

Pota as predicted soon had his doubts too and resumed thinking about Hera again and the humorous character he had started to give her, the handsome homemaker goddess in female rivalry with the saucy Aphrodite, her husband the randy Zeus, the big cheese on Mount Olympus – there might be more opportunity in that one, after all. And then, as he was already thinking about god’s and goddesses, I had him turn aside, unfruitfully as it proved, in a wasteful digression of several weeks, to: God’s Wife.

- Joseph Heller -

Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B Toklas

2011-09-01T17:17:00.002-04:00

Cook-books have always intrigued me and seduced me. When I was still a dilettante in the kitchen they held my attention, even the dull ones, from cover to cover, the way crime and murder stories did Gertrude Stein.

When he first began reading Dashiell Hammett, Gertrude Stein remarked that it was his modern note to have disposed of his victims before the story commenced. Goodness knows how many were required to follow as the result of the first crime. And so it is in the kitchen. Murder and sudden death seems as unnatural there as they should be anywhere else. Food is far too pleasant to combine with horror. All the same, facts, even distasteful facts, must be accepted and we shall see how, before any story of cooking begins, crime is inevitable. That is why cooking is not an entirely agreeable pastime. There is too much that must happen in advance of the actual cooking. This doesn’t of course apply to the food that emerges from the deep freeze. But the marketing and cooking I know are French and it was in France, where freezing units are unknown, that in due course I graduated at the stove.

In earlier days, memories of which are scattered among my chapters, if indulgent friends on this or that Sunday evening or party occasion said that the cooking I produced wasn’t bad, it neither beguiled nor flattered me into liking or wanting to do it. The only way to learn to cook is to cook, and for me, as for so many others, it suddenly and unexpectedly became a disagreeable necessity to have to do it when war came and Occupation followed. It was in those conditions of rationing and shortage that I learned not only to cook seriously but to buy food in a restricted market and not take too much time in doing it, since there were so many important and more amusing things to do. It was at this time, then, that murder in the kitchen began.

The first victim was a lively carp brought to the kitchen in a covered basket from which nothing could escape. The fish man who sold me the carp said he had no time to kill, scale or clean it, nor would he tell me with which of these horrible necessities one began. It wasn’t difficult to know which was the most repellent. So quickly to the murder and have it over with.

On the docks of Puget Sound I had seen fishermen grasp the tail of a huge salmon and lifting it high bring it down on the dock with enough force to kill it. Obviously I was not a fisherman nor was the kitchen table a dock. Should I not dispatch my first victim with a blow on the head from a heavy mallet? After an appraising glance at the lively fish it was evident he would escape attempts aimed at his head. A heavy sharp knife came to my mind as the classic, the perfect choice, so grasping, with my left hand well covered with a dishcloth, for the teeth might be sharp, the lower jaw of the carp, and the knife in my right, I carefully, deliberately found the base of its vertebral column and plunged the knife in.

I let go my grasp and looked to see what had happened. Horror of horrors. The carp was dead, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair, with my hands still unwashed reached for a cigarette, lighted it, and waited for the police to come and take me into custody. After a second cigarette my courage returned and I went to prepare poor Mr Carp for the table. I scraped off the scales, cut off the fins, cut open the underside and emptied out a great deal of what I did not care to look at, thoroughly washed and dried the fish and put it aside while I prepared CARP STUFFED WITH CHESTNUTS…

It was in the market of Palma de Mallorca that our French cook tried to teach me murder by smothering. There was no reason why this crime should have been committed publicly or that I should have been expected to participate. Jeanne was just showing off. When the crows of market women who had gathered around her began screaming and gesticulating, I retreated. When we met later to drive back in the carry-all filled with our marketing to Terreno where we had a villa I refused to sympathize with Jeanne. She said the Mallorcans were bloodthirsty, didn’t they go to the bullfights and pay an advanced price for the meat of the beasts they had seen killed in the ring, didn’t they prefer to chop off the heads of innocent pigeons instead of humanely smothering them which was the way to prevent all fowl from bleeding to death and so make them fuller and tastier. Had she not tried to explain this to them, to teach them, to show them how an intelligent humane person went about killing pigeons, but no they didn’t want to learn, they preferred their own brutal ways. Discussing food which she enjoyed above everything had been discouraged at table. But her fine black eyes were eloquent. If the small-size pigeons the island produced had not achieved jumbo size, squabs they unquestionably were, and larger and more succulent squabs than those we had eaten at the excellent restaurant at Palma.

Later we went back to Paris and then there was war and after a time there was peace. One day passing the concierge’s loge he called me and said he had something someone had left for us. He said he would bring it to me, which he did and which I wished he hadn’t when I saw what it was, a crate of six white pigeons and a note from a friend saying she had nothing better to offer us from her home in the country, ending with But as Alice is clever she will make something delicious of them.

It is certainly a mistake to allow a reputation for cleverness to be born and spread by loving friends. It is so cheaply acquired and so dearly paid for. Six white pigeons to be smothered, to be plucked, to be cleaned and all this to be accomplished before Gertrude Stein returned for she didn’t like to see work being done. If only I had the courage the two hours before her return would easily suffice. A large cup of strong black coffee would help. This was before a lovely Brazilian told me that in her country a large cup of black coffee was always served before going to bed to ensure a good night’s rest. Not yet having acquired this knowledge the black coffee made me lively and courageous. I carefully found the spot on poor innocent Dove’s throat where I was to press and pressed. The realization had never come to me before that one saw with one’s fingertips as well as one’s eyes. It was a most unpleasant experience, though as I laid out one by one the sweet young corpses there was no denying one could become accustomed to murdering. So I plucked the pigeons, emptied them and was ready to cook BRAISED PIGEONS ON CROUTONS…

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook; Harper & Row, 1954

Egyptian Childhood by Philippa Shaplin

2011-08-20T19:01:00.007-04:00

One of my earliest memories is waking to the clucking of poultry and female Arabic voices raised in altercation. They were on the other side of a mud brick wall which divided our living quarters from those of someone called, I think, Abd el Hady. These walls were of endless fascination to me and my brother, for they incorporated not only the Biblical straw fragments, but also tiny shells which could be dug out with one’s fingernail (it was fifteen years before I learned the geological explanation of this phenomena).

I was two and a half years old, and we had come to live at Sakkara, near the Step Pyramid, and in the former quarters of the great French archeologist Mariette. Today the building has vanished; it has been replaced by a rest house for tourists convenient for visiting the Serapeum and various Old Kingdom tombs. We lived there until I was four, bathing in a portable tine tub and playing in the world’s biggest sandbox.

We had an English nanny as well as various Egyptian servants. Among these, Fathy, who appears from old photographs to have been about fourteen, accompanied us when Nanny took us out to play. He was in charge of our transportation, a donkey with specially made basketry paniers in which we rode. He had a long stick with the top of a large tin can fastened to one end which rattled and reflected the sun, and when we got off the donkey to play he stood by with his stick, which I have always assumed was meant to frighten off the scorpions and snakes. But the desert was a wonderful playground. Instead of a conventional hobby horse we had a miniature stone lion (Roman) to ride – we called it ‘the sphincus”- and all sorts of treasures might turn up in the sand; coins, pottery fragments and sometimes a tiny clay jar, whole and unbroken. Above all we loved the bones. There were plenty of them (human, although we didn’t know it) and it was fun to search for good long ones that could be planted upright in the sand to make fences, or featured in a favorite game called Mr. Firth’s Wine Bottles.

In the heat of the day we played in the sheltered entrances to the tombs of Ti and Ptahhotep. Our nanny sat in the shade and sewed, always in full uniform including the traditional veil. There is no doubt that we were considered ‘cute” by the visiting tourists, as my father has described in his Recollections of an Egyptologist, and when I revisited those tombs nearly fifty years later the dim interiors with their picturebook walls were strangely familiar. But more vivid, perhaps, is the memory of Nanny losing her scissors in the sand and the praise I received for finding them.

Not only scorpions but also sandstorms were hazards to be feared. I remember the anxious excitement when one of our servants was bitten, and how we were strictly confined to the house during high winds, where we watched the sinister line of sand drifting in and piling up before the crack in the front door.

We must have been very spoiled by the many visitors who came to Mariette’s House during those years. Among them were aunts, uncles, grandmothers and archeologists like Ambrose Lansings, who brought their little boy to play with us (he later married my as-yet unborn sister). I have an old photograph, taken in front of the house, showing my two-year-old brother, our parents, an aunt and uncle and two unnamed visitors. Forty years later a dear friend of mine found its duplicate among the effects of her deceased father, the distinguished English architect A.J. Davis, who had taken the original picture while on his honeymoon in Egypt in 1924, and had evidently sent my parents a copy. My friend identified one of the two “visitors” as her mother. No doubt these and other travellers made much of us with our tiny pith helmets and English accents.

In the spring of 1925 when I was four we acquired a new nurse, Nanny Ethel. I remember her first night with us at Sakkara and how shocked she was that we had not yet been taught the Lord’s Prayer. Shortly after this we moved to Maadi, a suburb of Cairo. My sister’s arrival was imminent and my father was leaving his work at the Step Pyramid to return to the Harvard Camp at Giza.

Our new house was very different from Mariette’s. It had stairs, a garden and water tanks where you pulled a chain instead of the familiar earth (or rather, sand) closet of Sakkara. On the third floor was a porch, open to the sky, where the whole family sometimes slept out on hot nights under mosquito nets. One early dawn I was awakened by the blast of a shotgun. It was my father frightening away thieves who had broken through the hedge to steal apricots from the garden. Between the house and the street was a ditch spanned by a little bridge which you had to cross to reach the garden and front door. The house had high ceilings, shuttered windows and a tiled roof – in fact, it was a sort of Italian Villa. In 1972 we took a taxi out to Maadi to see if we could find it again, but alas, what had seemed unique to me as a child was only one of dozens, and Maadi itself had grown into such a maze of suburban streets that we had to give up our quest.

In Maadi there were other children to play with and even an English school and church. Each day we went to the Sporting Club where there was a sandbox and swimming pool. We were taught to swim suspended on a rope. There were trees and flowers, purply-blue jacarandas, bamboos, eucalyptus and oleander; the smell of these last two will always evoke Maadi for me, along with the taste of fresh figs and apricots.

During our two years in Maadi the outstanding events, at least through the eyes and ears of a child, were essentially domestic. There was the arrival of a baby sister, going to school for the first time (where I was frequently sent out of the room for misbehaving), the thrill of learning how to swim, and to read, joining the Brownies, provoking a typhoid scare when I drank some water in which a neighbor’s donkey had just been washed (the whole family got “shots”: and only I, the guilty one, failed to have a reaction) and, greatest of all,. Nanny Ethel’s wedding to a gloriously kilted Scottish soldier stationed in Egypt, at which I played bridesmaid in a crepe de chine dress, carrying a basket of artificial flowers.

But what of archeology, the justification and purpose of this volume? We did not see our father as an archeologist, but as a kind and gentle man who rarely punished us and was full of jokes and stories. Every day he went off in his Model T Ford to work with “Poppa George” whom I remember only as my brother’s godfather and the possessor of a large gold watch. I believe my mother must often have accompanied him, for years later, while doing research for an undergraduate thesis on Egyptian pottery, I came across her handwriting in the Objects Registers of the Harvard excavations at Giza. We were taken to visit the Harvard Camp as a great treat, and I remember holding my father’s hand as we stood on the edge of what seemed like an enormous precipice while hundreds of men in long white nightgowns and turbans, carrying baskets of dirt on their heads, sang what I now know to be the characteristically African “call and response.” “They are making up verses especially for you,” said my father. Of course I went down the tomb of Hetepheres in a basket, a terrifyingly endless but thrilling descent. There was a hot, stuffy little room, with nothing of interest in it, at the bottom.

In 1927 the day finally came when we were told we would be leaving Egypt to go a live in America. Except for a few weeks during the previous summer I had not seen Americas since babyhood, and both my brother and sister had been born abroad. We wondered what the new school would be like, and knew that we would sorely miss our friends, Mohammad and Abd el Aziz, although Nanny and her husband, Alec, were to come and keep house for us. We had been brought up by an English mother, aunt, grandmother and nannies, but we had met many American relatives and visitors, and we realized our greatest problem was going to be our accents. A few days before leaving, my brother and I wandered into the garden with its tall hedges and apricot trees. Firmly holding our noses, we practiced what we fondly thought to be American speech.

Only four years of my childhood were spent in Egypt, but they were formative ones. Of course we lived as ‘colonial” children – wearing our little pithy helmets in the noonday sun, playing only with other Europeans, surrounded with and protected by legions of servants. We slept under mosquito nets and rank boiled milk. Yet the smells and colors linger on, together with a faint aura of past glamor. After all, it’s not everyone who has the opportunity to grow up under the Sphinx and Pyramids as part of a familiar childhood landscape.

Studies in Ancient Egypt, The Aegean, and the Sudan; Essays in Honor of Dows Dunham on the Occasion of his 90th Birthday, June 1, 1980; Edited by William Kelly Simpson and Whitney Davis; Dept. of Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 1981

Earthly Confrontation by C.A. Burland

2011-08-19T16:16:00.005-04:00

The driving power behind the Aztec dominion over Mexico was the belief in their god, Blue Hummingbird, one of the aspects of the great demiurge, Tezcatlipoca. He was the power of magic, the mysterious Smoking Mirror in which visions were seen. To him the Aztecs attributed the glories of their conquests, and for him the great temple in Tenochtitlan towered into the sky. Blood was constantly offered in his temple at the top of the pyramid. In the dark interior priests poured bowls of human hearts in front of his image glowering in the gloom. No Aztec would have denied that this god had led the tribe from poverty to power, yet they all knew very well that this great ‘shadow’ was also a being of unrelenting cruelty.

The last Great Speaker of the Aztecs, Montezuma, knew better than most that the god of the Aztecs was unreliable. In the early years of his reign the Aztecs had suffered terrible disasters. An army of 16,000 warriors had been destroyed in western Mexico when they had been caught up in a violent mountain storm and hurricane winds. Some were crushed, most were drowned, and few survivors returned to Tenochtitlan. Nevertheless, other wars were started, and they brought in streams of prisoners to be fattened and sacrificed, so that the tribe could become rich, and its terrible patron appeased.

In the midst of the great city, Montezuma was splendid in his isolation. He had at last, by 1508, brought about the fulfillment of the ancient promise that the god had made to his people. The Aztecs ruled all of Anahuac, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In his day, the city was splendidly colorful, its markets constantly busy, its people were well dressed, and its warriors were feared throughout the land. Because of his earlier training as an astrologer- priest Montezuma was well aware of the mutability of fate. Everyday at sunset, midnight and dawn, he observed the sky from his palace roof to divine the course of events. To him, the signs in the sky marked the marching of fate, and his policies were dictated by the positions of the starry symbols of the gods in the night sky, their relation to the planets, the appearance of comets and meteors, all of which gave information to help him amplify the indications in the Tonalpouhalli, the sacred book of fate.

There was, however, a central dichotomy in the spiritual world of Montezuma. He was properly elected to the leadership of the Aztec people, and was therefore dedicated to their patron god, Huitzilopochtli. Their fate and welfare, he realized, depended upon the devotion the nation showed through him to this mighty power. But Montezuma himself was born on a day sacred to the Morning Star, Quetzalcoatl. He was thus directly involved in the strange conflict between these two deities.

From our modern standpoint Tezcatlipoca can be seen as a projection of the ‘shadow’- dark instinctive- side of human nature; a god of war identified with suffering and sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl can be seen as a projection of the fully conscious intelligence of mankind who in all matters of beauty and art was thought to breathe life and inspiration. In Mexican mythology these two gods were part of a great complexity of divinities but the inevitability of their conflict is as clear from the legends in the painted books as it might well be to a psycho-analyst today. Montezuma was well aware of the conflict and strain and must have also believed, possibly because of his own descent from the Quetzalcoatls of the Toltecs, that one day the power of Quetzalcoatl would be restored. The possibility of this return was divined to occur in a year called Ce Acatl (one, arrow-reed), which was the name of Quetzalcoatl as Morning Star, and on the day Chiconaui Ehecatl (nine, wind) which was the birthdate of the first Quetzalcoatal. This combination occurred every 52 years and it was expected only once in the lifetime of Montezuma, in the spring of the year 1519.

In the year 1508 there had been a solar phenomena which the Great Speaker must have seen. A tiny black speck moved slowly and steadily across the face of the sun. It was not the usual sun spot, which might have been confused with it, and Montezuma was well aware that it was the planet Venus in transit. This was a rare event and the jade figure of Quetzalcoatl wearing the sun as his neck ornament, which is now in the collection of the British Museum, was probably a memorial to it. Such a rare event, occurring only once in 300 years, must have been seen as a first warning of the events to come.

Stories came to Mexico a few years later of a strange phenomena. From the eastern coasts, in the Maya country, and soon after from the coasts of the Totonac lands ruled by Montezuma, came tales of strange, giant canoes with wings. From them had come men clad in stone who killed by pointing sticks at people. In many places these strange, black-bearded creatures landed and bartered with the people. Then they sailed away northwards. Montezuma felt that this was the second appearance of the deformed people whom Quetzalcoatl had taken away with him on his retreat from Mexico generations previously. This was, in fact, the trading voyage of the Spanish adventurers Solis and Pinzon. Their map was published in Spain, though the sailing directions had been falsified. It is probable that gossip had spread back to Cuba where young Hernando Cortes was running a small plantation, worked by Carib slaves.

At this period Cortes did not know his fate, but he was hoping one day to make his fortune in some profitable foray among the islands. He was a gentleman of high birth but low fortune. Physically, he was short, and well-groomed, though a fall rom a lady’s window had broken his leg and left him permanently lamed. His complexion was a soft brown, and his black hair and neat beards sett off luminous, dominating eyes. That he would one day be regarded as the symbol of a deity returning to Mexico can never have entered his dreams, though he was fated to live that part.

The third figure in the approaching drama was the the Princess Malinalli of Painalla. She had been born on the day Ce Malinalli (one, grass of sorrow), under special symbols in the sky which indicated that she would, throughout her life, be opposed to the terrible war god of her Aztec people. To protect the child her mother showed a false daughter to the priests, a baby girl that had been born dead to one of her saves, and sent her own child to the Maya people in Yucatan. Later on she was to be known to the Spaniards, who could not pronounce her name, as Marina, and because she was of noble birth they called her Dona Marina. Through her translations and knowledge of Aztec culture, Hernando Cortes was able to capture Montezuma, and conquer the Aztec people.

It had long been known that just as Quetzalcoatl had been overthrown in the past, so in the come time he would return and overthrow his adversaries, and bring a reign of greater peace and justice. This messianic hope was to be realized in a sad and cruel way when the Spaniards arrived in Mexico (spring, 1519) and proceeded to overthrow the Aztec empire. The new Quetzalcoatl appeared as a most ruthless warrior, who not only opposed the god of the Aztecs themselves, but caused the overthrow of all other rival deities throughout Mexico. The debacle was complete and terrifying.

Among the common people, once the terrors of conquest and the accompanying plagues were over, the teachings of the missionaries were accepted. Those black-robed priests, who wore garments very similar to those which had clothed the ancient god, were messengers of Christian peace, and their god had offered himself as the once and only sacrifice for the benefit of all mankind. It seemed to the Mexicans that prophesy was fulfilled, and that the new Quetzalcoatl was a god of peace and justice. They flocked in their tens of thousands to be baptized, to receive the blessing of this new aspect of the Morning Star. Although thy had ample reason to distrust the Christians, who had been enjoined to teach them religion, they held to the new faith. In many ways they translated it into their own ways of thought, so that Easter festivals were though of as celebrations of the return of the god, and of the sweeping away of old evils. In this manner the ancient cult of Quetzalcoatl survived as an aspect of Christianity, but the name of the old god and the temple rituals disappeared, along with the images and cults of many other deities.

In modern Mexico the figure of Quetzalcoatl often replaces the more familiar Santa Claus at New Year parties or in department store windows. The bearer of gifts wears a plume of feathers, and a mask representing the old god, as the bringer of life, of gifts and of happiness to people. In this he has assumed a place that was not really his in the old days, because he was not a god of the regular calendar at all, nor of the changing of the year. Nevertheless, the idea of the gifts of good things are matters in which both the ancient Aztec religion and Christian imagery could well come together. The cult of the god and the poetry associated with him, however, remains as a province of artists and archeologists, rather than the mass of Mexican people. The god appears with tremendous vigor on some of the new frescoes, particularly those by Jose Clemente Orozco, which represent Quetzalcoatl as a great power, like a wind destroying the old dead past and bringing a new era of hope for mankind, and for Mexico in particular.

Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror by C.A. Burland and Werner Forman; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1975

Edgemont Drive by E.L. Doctorow

2011-08-04T11:13:00.004-04:00

With age, you see how much of it is invented. Not only what is invisible but what is everywhere visible.

I’m not sure I understand.

Well, you’re still quite young.

Thank you, I wish I felt young.

I’m not talking about one’s self-image. Or the way life can be too much of the same thing day in and day out. I’m not talking about mere unhappiness.

Am I merely unhappy?

I’m in no position to judge. But let’s say melancholy seems to suit the lady.

Oh dear – that it’s that obvious.

But, in any case, whatever our state of mind life seems for most of our lives an intense occupation – keeping busy, competing intellectually, physically, nationally, seeking justice, demanding love, perfecting our institutions. All the fashions of survival. Everything we do to make history, the archive of our inventiveness. As if there were no context.

But there is?

Yes. Some vast – what to call it? Indifference that slowly creeps up on you with age, that becomes more insistent with age. That’s what I am trying to explain. I’m afraid I’m not doing a very good job.

No, really, this is interesting.

I get very voluble on even one glass of sherry.

More?

Thank you. But I am trying to explain the estrangement that comes over one after some years. For some earlier, for others later, but always inevitably.

And to you, now?

Yes, It’s a kind of wearing out, I suppose, As if life had become threadbare, with light peeking through. The estrangement begins in moments, in little sharp judgments that you instantly put out of your mind. You draw back, though you’re fascinated. Because it’s the truest feeling a person can have, and so it comes again and again, drifting through your defenses, and finally settles over you like some cold, very cold light. Maybe I should stop talking about this. It is almost to deny it, talking about it.

No, I appreciate your candor. Does this have something to do with why you’ve come back here – to see where you used to live?

You’re perceptive.

This estrangement is maybe your word for depression.

I understand why you would say that. You see me as the image of some colossal failure – living on the road in a beat-up car, an obscure poet, a third-rate academic. And maybe I am all those things, but I’m not depressed. This isn’t a clinical issue I speak of. It’s a clear recognition of reality. Let me explain it this way: it’s much like I suppose what a chronic invalid feels, or someone on the verge of dying, where the estrangement is protective, a way of abating the sense of loss, the regret, and the desire to live is no longer important. But subtract those circumstances and there I am, healthy, self-sufficient, maybe not the most impressive fellow in the world but one who’s managed to take care of himself quite well and live in freedom doing what he wants to do and without any major regrets. Yet the estrangement is there, the truth has settled upon him, and he feels actually liberated because he’s outside now, in the context, where you can’t believe in life anymore.

The Starling from Segringen by Hebel

2011-07-31T13:47:00.005-04:00

A starling may find it useful to have learnt something, but a man even more so.

The barber in a very reputable village – I shall call it Segringen, though it didn’t happen there, but hereabouts, and the one that it happened to (the man, not the starling) is perhaps reading this right now – the barber at Segringen had a starling, and his apprentice, who’s well-known in the district, taught him to speak. The starling not only learnt all the words set in these language lessons but also on his own accord copied what he had heard his master say, for example, ‘I’m the barber in Segringen.’ His owner had other expressions as well that he repeated on every occasion, for example, ‘So so, la la’, or ‘par compagnie’ (that means in company with others); or ‘God’s will be done!’ or ‘You fool!’ You see, that’s what he used to call the apprentice when he poured half the plaster on to the table instead of the cloth, or sharpened the back of the razor instead of the edge, or broke the medicine glass. In time the starling learnt all these phrases.

The barber also sold brandy, so there were many customers in his shop every day, and often there was much to laugh about when they were talking among themselves and the starling threw in a phrase and it fitted just as if he knew what it meant. And sometimes when the apprentice called to him, ‘What are you doing, Johnny?’ he answered, ‘You fool!’ and everyone in those parts could tell you about Johnny! Then one day when his clipped feathers had grown again and the window was open and the weather fine the starling thought: ‘I know enough by now to get by in the big world outside’, and he was out the window in a flash.

His first flight took him to the fields where he joined a flock of other birds, and when they flew up he went with them, for he thought, ‘They know the lie of the land better than I do.” But unfortunately they all flew together into a net. The starling said, ‘God’s will be done!’ When the birdcatcher came and saw what a big catch he had made he took the birds out carefully one by one, wrung their necks and threw them on the ground. But when all unsuspectingly he stretched his murdering hands towards one more catch, that catch cried, ‘I’m the barber of Segringen.’ Just as if he knew it would save his neck! The birdcatcher was scared at first, thinking something really weird was happening, but then when he recovered from his shock he laughed so much he nearly died. And when he said, ‘Johnny, I didn’t expect to find you here, how did you get into my net?’ Johnny replied, ‘Par compagnie.’

So the birdcatcher took the starling back to its owner and was well rewarded for his find. The barber’s business prospered, for everyone wanted to see the remarkable Johnny, and now everyone from miles around who wants to be bled goes to the barber at Segringen.

Remember: such things seldom happen to starlings. But many a young fellow who felt like spreading his wings and getting away from home has got into a mess ‘par compagnie’ and not got out of it.

Two Stories by Johann Peter Hebel

2011-07-30T15:06:00.004-04:00

A Shave as an Act of Charity

A poor man with a black beard came into a barber’s shop and asked, for the love of God, not for a piece of bread, but a shave: would the barber kindly take off his beard so that he looked like a decent Christian again? The barber picked up his worst razor, thinking, ‘Why should I blunt a good one when he’s paying less than nothing?’ While he was scraping and hacking away at the poor wretch, who couldn’t complain since the bad job was being done for nothing, the dog started howling in the yard outside. ‘What’s up with Rover,’ said the barber. ‘to make whine and howl like that?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Mike. ‘Don’t ask me,’ sad Johnny. But the poor devil under the razor said, “ He must be being shaved for the love of God too, like me.’

Well Spoken, Badly Behaved

A farmer on a nobleman’s estate met the schoolmaster in the fields. ‘Schoolmaster, do you still stand by what you were telling the schoolchildren yesterday: “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”? The schoolmaster said, ‘I can’t change a word of it! It’s written in the gospel!’ So the farmer boxed his ears, both of them, for he had a long-standing grudge against him.

Meanwhile the nobleman was riding by a little way off with his gamekeeper. ‘Go and see what those two are up to over there, Joseph!’ And as Joseph came up, the schoolmaster, who was a sturdy fellow, boxed the farmer’s ears twice too, saying ‘It is also written: “With the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. Good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom”!’ And with that text he gave him another half dozen good blows to the side of his head. Joseph went back to his master and said, ‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir, they’re only discussing Holy Scripture among themselves!’

Remember: You must not try to argue about Holy Scripture if you don’t understand it, least of all the way they did. For that same night the nobleman had the farmer locked up for a week; and the schoolmaster, who should have had more sense and more respect for the Bible, was sent packing when school closed in the spring.

The Treasure Chest ( Schatzkastlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes, 1811) by Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826); translated from the German by John Hibberd, Penguin Books, 1994.

The Wretched Donkey by Elias Canetti

2011-07-26T16:25:00.006-04:00

I liked to return from my evening strolls through the streets of Marrakesh by way of the Djema el Fna. It was strange, crossing the great square as it lay almost empty. There were no acrobats any more and no dancers; no snake-charmers and no fire-eaters. A little man squatted forlornly on the ground, a basket of very small eggs before him and nothing and no one else anywhere near him. Acetylene lamps burned here and there; the square smelled of them. In the cookshops one or two men still sat over their soup. They looked lonely, as if they had nowhere to go. Around the edges of the square people were settling down to sleep. Some lay, though most squatted, and they had all pulled their hoods of their cloaks over their heads. Their sleep was motionless; you would never have suspected anything breathing beneath those dark hoods.

One night I saw a large dense circle of people in the middle of the square, acetylene lamps illuminating them in the strangest way. They were all standing. The dark shadows on the faces and figures, edged by the harsh light thrown on them by the lamps, gave them a cruel, sinister look. I could hear two native instruments playing and a man’s voice addressing someone in vehement terms. I went up closer and found a gap through which I could see inside the circle. What I saw was a man, standing in the middle with a stick in his hand, urgently interrogating a donkey.

Of all the city’s miserable donkey’s, this was the most pitiful. His bones stuck out, he was completely starved, his coat was worn off, and he was clearly no longer capable of bearing the least burden. One wondered how his legs still held him up. The man was engaged in a comic dialogue with him. He was trying to cajole him into something. The donkey remained stubborn, he asked him questions; and when he refused to answer, the illuminated onlookers burst out laughing. Possibly it was a story in which a donkey played a part, because after a lengthy palaver the wretched animal began to turn very slowly to the music. The stick was still being brandished above him. The man was talking faster and faster, fairly ranting now in order to keep the donkey going, but it sounded to me from his words as if he too represented a figure of fun. The music played on and on and the men, who now never stopped laughing had the look of man-eating or donkey- eating savages.

I stayed only a short time and so cannot say what happened subsequently. My repulsion outweighed my curiosity. I had long before conceived an affection for the donkeys of the city. Every step offered me occasion to feel indignant at the way we were treated, though of course there was nothing I could do. But never had quite such a lamentable specimen as this crossed my path, and on my way home I sought to console myself with the thought that he would certainly not last the night.

The next day was a Saturday and I went to the Djema el Fna early in the morning. Saturday was one of its busiest days. Onlookers, performers, baskets, and booths thronged the square; it was a job to make one’s way through the crowd. I came to the place where the donkey had stood the evening before. I looked, and I could hardly believe my eyes: there he was again. He was standing all by himself. I examined him closely and there was no mistaking him; it was he. His master was nearby, chatting quietly with a few people. No circle had formed around him yet. The musicians were not there; the performance had not yet begun. The donkey was standing exactly as he had the night before. In the bright sunshine his coat looked even shabbier than at night. I found him older, more famished, and altogether more wretched.

Suddenly I became aware of someone behind me and of angry words in my ear, words I did not understand. Turning, I lost sight of the donkey for a moment. The man I had heard was pressed right up against me in the crowd, but it became apparent that he had been threatening someone else and not me. I turned back to the donkey.

He had not budged, but it was no longer the same donkey. Because between his back legs, slanting forwards and down, there hung all of a sudden a prodigious member. It was stouter than the stick the man had been threatening him with the night before. In the tiny space of time in which I had had my back turned an overwhelming change had come over him. I do not know what he had seen, heard or smelled. But that pitiful, aged, feeble creature, who was on the verge of collapse and quite useless for anything more except as the butt of a comic dialogue, who was ‘treated worse that a donkey in Marrakesh’, that being, less than nothing, with no meat on his bones, no strength, no proper coat, still had so much lust in him that the mere sight absolved me of the impression caused by his misery. I often think of him. I remind myself how much of him was still there when I saw nothing left. I wish all the tormented his concupiscence in misery.

The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti; translated from the German by J.S. Underwood; Marion Boyars, London; 1982 (1967)

Our Leading Technician of Otherness by Terry Eagleton

2011-07-21T16:57:00.003-04:00

Like the rough ground of language itself, cultures ‘work’ exactly because they are porous, fuzzy-edged, indeterminate, intrinsically inconsistent, never quite identical with themselves, their boundaries continually modulating into horizons. They are sometimes, to be sure, mutually opaque: but when they can be mutually intelligible it is not by virtue of some shared metalanguage into which both can be translated, any more than English can be translated into Serbo-Croat only by dint of some third discourse which encompasses them both. If the ‘other’ finally lies beyond my comprehension, it is not because of cultural difference but because he is finally unintelligible to himself as well.

The case is put most suggestively by Slavoj Zizek, one of our leading technicians of otherness. What makes communication between different cultures possible, so Zizek argues, is the fact that the limit which prevents our full access to the Other is ontological, not merely epistemological. This sounds like making matters worse rather than better; but Zizek’s point is that what makes the Other difficult of access is the fact that he or she is never complete in the first place, never wholly determined by a context but always to some extent ‘open’ and ‘floating’. It would be like failing to grasp the meaning of a foreign word because of its inherent ambiguity, not because of our linguistic incompetence. Every culture, then, has an internal blindspot where it fails to grasp or be at one with itself, and to discern this, in Zizek’s view, is to understand that culture most fully.

It is at the point where the Other is dislocated in itself, not wholly bound by its context, that we can encounter it most deeply, since this self-opaqueness is also true of ourselves. I understand the Other when I become aware that what troubles me about it, its enigmatic nature, is a problem for it too. As Zizek puts it: “ The dimension of the Universal thus emerges when the two lacks – mine and that of the Other- overlap… What we and the inaccessible Other share is the empty signifier that stands for the X which eludes both positions.”*

The universal is that breach or fissure in my identity which opens it up from the inside to the Other, preventing me from fully identifying with any particular context. But this is our way of belonging to a context, not a way of lacking one. It belongs to the human situation to be ‘out of joint’ with any specific situation. And the violent disruption which follows from this connecting to the universal to a particular content is what we know as the human subject.

Human beings move at the conjuncture of the concrete and the universal, body and symbolic medium; but this is not a place where anyone can feel blissfully at home!

*Slavoj Zizek; The Abyss of Freedom/ Ages of the World (Ann Arbor, 1997) pp. 50 and 51
Terry Eagleton; The Idea of Culture; Blackwell Manifestos 2000

Friedrich Schiller by Frederick Unger

2011-07-18T13:07:00.002-04:00

Don Carlos was first performed in Berlin in 1788. Schiller had reason to be satisfied with the initial success of his play. Yet, although he fully realized that he had produced a work immeasurably superior to his first three plays, he could not free himself from gnawing doubts about his qualifications as a dramatist or as a poet and creative writer in general. His habitual self-criticism did not allow him to overlook the fact that there were serious gaps in his education, both in knowledge and understanding.

A particularly impressive example of Schiller's thinking at this time is found in a letter addressed to his friend and early patron Gottfried Korner:

"It was with gentle shame - a feeling which does not depress but arouses a manly decision - that I looked back to a past I had abused in the most unfortunate dissipation. I sensed the bold inherent disposition of my talents, the failure of Nature's perhaps great intentions for me. One half was destroyed by the insane method of my education and the ugly mood of my fate, the other and greater one by myself. All that I felt most deeply, and in the general ferment and ardor of my feelings, my heart and my head were at one in the herculean vow- to make up for the past and star out anew in the noble race for the highest goal."

He did not feel that he was ready to satisfy the exacting requirements he expected every creative writer and poet to fulfill. Thus he reached a decision to dedicate the ensuing years to a rigorous discipline of self-training, accepting freely the implication that for a long time he would have to renounce all manner and form of poetic work. In fact, for fully a decade he wrote nothing for the stage and for several years not a single poem. The perseverance with which Schiller applied himself through-out the following years to his studies, first of history, then of the literature of the ancients, and finally of philosophy indicated the seriousness and severity of his self-criticism. It was not a passing mood.

Schiller’s subsequent historical writings, however, made such an impression on the public that many thought Schiller had only now found his true profession. The History of the Thirty Years’ War, published in three volumes between 1889-1791 had the greatest sales success ever enjoyed up to that time by a work of non-fiction in the German language! His historical work and other writings, combined with fee-per-student teaching responsibilities, were produced, however, by dint of fourteen hour workdays and with a complete disregard for his health. A consequence of this continuous exertion was physical collapse. Schiller developed a high fever, violent chest pains and pneumonia, for which the medical science of the day could offer nothing but palliatives.

Schiller’s recuperation progressed very slowly. The abdominal spasms and the pressure in his chest persisted with rare intervals of relief. On the basis of recent research, which is borne out by Schiller’s own precise statements, it is probable that suppuration from a pleurisy infection spread through his peritoneum and brought on a progressive paralysis of his abdominal organs. In the months and 14 years that followed he continued to suffer series of painful spells of dyspnea and came to realize that his days were numbered.

The pride and strength of a great soul rising triumphantly above toil and torment even while succumbing to it, the heroic greatness of mind and soul which he demanded as a thinker and depicted as a poet, he himself was now called upon to practice. It was a basic tenet of his philosophy that the true stature of a man is measured by the degree of his inner freedom, self-determination- his ability to flourish as an individual- for beyond the realm of matter there is a higher life which can only be won by the triumph of the spirit over the misery of the body and every form physical, social, economic and political misfortune, even in the face of death itself. He rose to the occasion. He lived his ideals

Friedrich Schiller; An Anthology For Our Time with an Account of His Life and Work by Frederick Unger; Unger Publishing; N.Y. 1959

Lenin in Zurich by Elias Canetti

2011-07-12T21:33:00.005-04:00

I was twelve when I got passionately interested in the Greek wars of liberation, and that same year, 1917, was the year of the Russian Revolution. Even before his journey in the sealed freight car, people were talking about Lenin living in Zurich. Mother, who was filled with an insatiable hatred of the war, followed every event that might terminate it. She had no political ties, but Zurich had become a center for war opponents of the most diverse countries and sentiments. Once, when we were passing a coffeehouse, she pointed to the enormous skull of a man sitting near the window, a huge pile of newspapers lay next to him; he had seized one paper and held it close to his eyes. Suddenly he threw back his head, turned to a man sitting at his side and fiercely spoke away at him. Mother said: “Take a good look at him. That’s Lenin. You’ll be hearing about him.”

We had halted, she was slightly embarrassed about standing like that and staring (she would always reproach me for such impoliteness), but his sudden movement had struck into her, the energy of his jolting turn towards the other man had transmitted itself to her. I was amazed at the other man’s rich, black, curly hair, which so glaringly contradicted Lenin’s baldness right next to him; but I was even more astonished at Mother’s immobility. She said: “Come on, we can’t just stand here,” and she pulled me along.

A few short months later, she told me about Lenin’s arrival in Russia, and I began to understand that something important was happening. The Russians had had enough of the killing, and soon it would be finished, whether with or against the governments. She never called the war anything but “the killing.” Since our arrival in Zurich, she had talked about it very openly with me; in Vienna, she held back to prevent my having any conflicts in school. “You will never kill a person who hasn’t done anything to you,” she said beseechingly; and proud as she was of having three sons, I could sense how worried she was that we might too become such “killers” some day. Her hatred of war had something elemental to it: Once, when telling me the story of Faust, which she didn’t want me to read as yet, she disapproved of his pact with the devil. There was only one justification for such a pact: to put an end to war. You could even ally yourself with the devil for that, but not for anything else.

On some evenings, friends of Mother’s gathered in our home, Bulgarian and Turkish Sephardim, whom the war had driven to Zurich. Most of them were married couples, who were middle-aged but seemed old to me; I didn’t particularly like them, they were too Oriental for me and spoke only about uninteresting things.

One man came alone, widower, Herr Adjubel; he was different from the others. He carried himself erect and had opinions that he advocated with conviction, and he calmly and chivalrously let Mother’s vehemence, which afflicted him harshly, run off his back. He had fought in the Balkan war as a Bulgarian officer, had been seriously wounded, and left with an incurable ailment…

I preferred him to stay till the last. From his arguments with my mother, I learned a lot of things that were new to me. Herr Adjubel was in a very difficult situation. He was devoted to the Bulgarian army, perhaps even more than to Bulgaria. He was filled with the traditional pro-Russian sentiments of the Bulgarians, who owed Russia their independence from the Turks. And now he was having a rough time of it because the Bulgarians were on the side of Russia’s enemies. He would have certainly fought under these circumstances too, but with a tortured conscience, so perhaps it was good that he couldn’t fight. Yet now the situation had gotten more complicated through the new turn of events in Russia.

The fact that the Russians were leaving the war spelled, he thought, the destruction of of the Central Powers. The infection, as he called it, would spread, first the Austrian and next the German soldiers would want to stop fighting. But then what would become of Bulgaria? Not only would they have to bear the mark of Cain – ingratitude- towards their liberators forever, but all the powers would pounce on them as in the Second Balkan War and slice up the country among themselves. Finis Bulgariae!

One can imagine how Mother grabbed each point of his argument and tore it apart. Basically, she had everyone against her, for even though they welcomed a speedy end of the war, they regarded that end as a dangerous threat if brought by the activities of the Bolsheviks in Russia. They were all middle-class people, more or less well-to-do; those among them who came from Bulgaria feared the revolution would spread there; those who came from Turkey saw the old Russian foe, albeit wearing a new garb, in Constantinople. Mother didn’t care one way or the other. All that mattered to her was who truly wanted to end the war. She, who came from one of the wealthiest families in Bulgaria, defended Lenin. She couldn’t see the devil in him, as the others did, she saw a benefactor of mankind.

Herr Adjubel, with whom she actually fought, was the only one to understand her, for he had an opinion himself. He once asked her (it was the most dramatic moment of these get-togethers): “And if I were a Russian officer, Madame, and I were determined to keep fighting with my men against the Germans- would you have me shot?” She didn’t even hesitate: “I would have any man shot if he opposed the end of the war. He would be an enemy of mankind.”

She was not discouraged by the horror of the others –compromising businessmen and their sentimental wives. Everyone spoke at once: “What? You would have the heart to do that? You would have the heart to shoot Herr Adjubel?”

“He’s no coward. He knows how to die, he’s not like the rest of you – isn’t that so, Herr Adjubel?”

He was the one who agreed with her. “Yes, Madame, from your point of view, you would be right. You have the intransigence of a man. And are a true Arditti!”

These last words, which were a tribute (to her family, whom, in contrast to my father’s, I didn’t like at all), appealed less to me, but, I have to say, despite the vehemence of those exchanges, I was never jealous of Herr Adjubel, and when he succumbed to his illness a short time later, we both mourned him, and my Mother said; “It’s good that he didn’t live to see the collapse of Bulgaria.”

The Tongue Set Free, Part Four, ‘The Skull’ by Elias Canetti; translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977

The Oracle at Claros by Robin Lane Fox

2011-07-04T13:29:00.005-04:00

“Apollo at Colophon” is the god of the great oracular shrine at Claros, a major seat of the gods’ wisdom in the second and third centuries A.D. We have come to know it through excavation and finds of inscriptions. With their help, we can recapture the course of a consultation, for the ruins of the site support our best ancient description, a paragraph by Iamblichus, written in the early fourth century. He was not writing from personal experience, but he had found a good authority.

Visitors to the temple at Claros entered the sacred valley and approached through the big triple gate which stood before the shrine. Beyond it stretched the sacred grove, where there is now only dust, and a hundred yards or so to the north stood the alter and Doric temple of Apollo. The approaches were lined with statues on stone bases, many of which were statues of Romans from the late Republican age. The alter was enormous, as were the colossal statues of Apollo, Artemis and Leto, up to twenty feet high. On coins, we can see the particular type of Apollo, a huge half-naked divinity, seated at ease, whose right hand holds laurel and whose left rests on a lyre.

The god, we are told, was questioned by night, although not every night was fit for an inquiry. While visitors waited for a sacred night to fall, they prepared for the process which lay ahead. At the beginning of the second century A.D., we only know of a “prophet” in the inscriptions that have so far been published. This single spokesman fits the picture of the oracle which was drawn by the historian Tacitus, himself a governor of Asia Minor, and thus able, if he wished, to learn about the site. A priest, he said, was chosen from a fixed number of families and “generally summoned from Miletus.” This priest heard only the number and names of the consultants; then he went down into a “cave” and drank the sacred water. Although he was “generally ignorant of letters and poetry”, he gave responses on the “topics which each questioner had in mind.” Tacitus implies that the man’s method of answering was something of a miracle, and we must try to account for it. If the priest did not ask for his questioners’ questions, his verse responses can only have been general and rather stereotyped. Perhaps the god kept to certain familiar verses and “inspired” his priest to utter one or other set. One hostile visitor, Oenomaus the Cynic, called at the site, perhaps c. 120 A.D., and alleged that the same obscure verses were given out to different questioners.

By the mid-130s, however, the inscriptions reveal a change. The prophet is joined by a “thespode”, or “singer of oracles,” and unlike the prophet, this thespode serves for life. He brought a greater expertise, and the giving of the oracle was split between a priest, a prophet, the thespode and a secretary. How are they likely to have shared out the work?

Iamblichus tells us that “many religious rites” were performed before the god was consulted. A sacrifice on the great alter was surely one of them, and a natural official for this rites was the priest. We know, too, from inscriptions that some of the visitors were initiated into a mystery rite, apparently as a preliminary to the consultation, As elsewhere, these rites would involve expense: one leader of a city’s delegation to the oracle assisted the initiation of all the young choirboys who he led, “out of love of honor and the god,” and presumably paid the bill himself. These secret rites greatly enhanced the occasion. Meanwhile, the envoys were waiting for the appointed night, and while they waited, they talked. No doubt they talked to the priest and the secretary and probably the thespode, too, telling them about their city and their problems, and starting the simple process by which a good counseling service works. They gave away enough to suggest and answer before they asked the question for which they had come. The temple staff listened innocently and so, therefore, did Apollo. There was no conscious fraud, no insincerity. Mortals could not bother gods without preparation, as god would rebuke a questioner who asked to abruptly for too much.

As the night approached, the prophet himself was absent. Iamblichus tells us that he fasted for a day and a night before the consultation began, and he also tells us of his withdrawal to “shrines untrodden by the crowds,” where he abstained from human business and prepared to receive the god “untarnished.”

When the sacred night fell and the lamps had been lit in the sanctuary, the staff and questioners met by torchlight before Apollo’s temple. Above them loomed the colossal statues of the gods. The prophet reappeared, and together they prepared for the journey to the inner shrine. “Entering” or ‘crossing of the threshold” was an extra ceremony which only a few of the clients chose, on the evidence, those who had been initiated into the mystery’s rites.

By the light of torches, the prophet, thespode and perhaps the secretary stooped into one of the two low tunnels which ran underground to Apollo’s sacred spring. They bent themselves for a journey through a low, narrow corridor which was roofed in marble of a deep shade of midnight blue. The corridor ran for some thirty yards and changed directions seven times before it stopped at the door of two underground chambers. Here was Tacitus’s “cavern”, vaulted suitably in stone. The sides of the first room were fitted with stone benches and housed an “omphalos,” or navel stone, of deep blue marble, like the famous omphalos at Delphi. It signified that they had reached the oracular center of the earth.

A narrow corridor led from the first chamber to the second room, where the god kept his sacred spring. The spring survived to reward its French excavators only thirty years ago, for the water table is high at Claros, and its rise hampers access to the tunnels. The prophet, we must assume, passed into this inner chamber. Iamblichus states clearly that the prophet, not the thespode, drank the water, and on this point, too, we must follow him. He helps us make sense of their relationship. The prophet has not eaten for a whole day, and was primed by his rites and his hours of isolation. Whenever he drinks the god’s water, says Iamblichus, he “is not in control of himself and does not follow what he is saying or where he is so that he finds it hard to recover himself even after uttering his oracle. Was this inspired utterance really cast immediately in neat iambic verse? Some of the surviving oracles are metrical tours de force and they make this notion impossible. There was, after all, a thespode. First came the incoherent sounds of inspiration, induced by the solemn occasion and the expectations which surrounded the sip of Apollo’s water. Then came the second, ordered voice, the voice of the thespode, or “singer of oracles,” who put into intricate verses the basic message which Apollo had inspired. The thespode had had a day and more in which to reflect and to listen to his questioner’s news. By divine insight, Apollo’s verses neatly matched the problem in hand.

Questioners who had stayed above ground heard these sounds at a distance as they echoed through the underground corridors of stone. If they were sitting in the antechamber, they had the thrill of closer proximity. Perhaps the secretary sat with them on the benches, taking down the thespode’s version in the recently developed skill of shorthand before the words had slipped from human memory. Together again, the temple staff and their clients branched off down a second tunnel and turned seven times through a similar maze of midnight blue. Then they emerged into the sacred night, the blaze of torches and the lingering smoke of incense.

Such was the consultation which lay behind the words inscribed on the walls of the city of Oenoanda. The “questioners,” surely, were people from that city who had gone to the oracle at Claros to ask “What is the nature of God?” The prophet muttered, the thespode took up the challenge in verses of the best oracular theology which was known to his age:

Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire,
Such is God: we are a portion of God, his angels.
This, then, to the questioners of God’s nature
The god replied, calling him all-seeing Ether: to him, then look
And pray at dawn, looking out to the east.

Preface to Ancient Chinese Poetry by Arthur Waley

2011-06-28T20:23:00.005-04:00

… And now a word about the subjects with which the poems deal. The most conspicuous feature of European poetry is its pre-occupation with love. This is apparent not only in actual “love-poems”, but in all poetry where the personality of the writer is in any way obtruded. The poet tends to exhibit himself in a romantic light; in fact, to recommend himself as a lover.

The Chinese poet has a tendency different but analogous. He recommends himself not as a lover, but as a friend. He poses as a person of infinite leisure (which we should most like our friends to possess) and free from worldly ambitions (which constitute the greatest bars to friendship). He would have us think of him as a boon companion, a great drinker of wine, who will not disgrace a social gathering by quitting it sober.

To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the average Chinese poet it is something commonplace, obvious – a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions. These he reserves entirely for friendship. I have been criticized for saying something like this; but the vast mass of classical Chinese poetry amply confirms my view. Accordingly we find that while our poets tend to lay stress on physical courage and other qualities normally admired by women, Po Chu-i is not ashamed to write such a poems as “Alarm at entering the Gorges.” Our classical poets imagine themselves very much as Art has portrayed them – bare-headed and wild-eyed, with shirts unbuttoned at the neck as though they feared that a seizure of emotion might at any minute suffocate them. The Chinese poet tends to introduce himself as a timid recluse, “Reading the Book of Changes at the Northern Window,” playing chess with a Taoist priest, or practicing calligraphy with an occasional visitor.

I do not mean to say that the gentle and reflective attitude traditional in Chinese poetry in any way gives us a key to the whole of Chinese life. Martial vigour, administrative ability, romantic love, all played their part; but in the whole bulk of classical poetry, say from the seventh to the fourteenth century, how minute a proportion for a moment touches any of these themes!

Alarm At Entering the Yang-Tze Gorges by Po Chu-i

2011-06-28T20:16:00.006-04:00

Above, a mountain ten thousand feet high:
Below, a river a thousand fathoms deep.
A strip of green, walled by cliffs of stone:
Wide enough for the passage of a single reed.
At Chu-t’ang a straight cleft yawns:
At Yen-yu islands block the stream.
Long before night the walls are black with dusk;
Without wind white waves rise.
The big rocks are like a flat sword:
The little rocks resemble ivory tusks.

We are stuck fast and cannot move a step
How much the less, three hundred miles?
Frail and slender, the twisted-bamboo rope:
Weak, the dangerous hold on towers’ feet.
A single slip- the whole convoy lost:
And my life hangs of this thread!

I have heard a saying "He that has an upright heart
Shall walk scathless through the lands of Man and Mo.”
How can I believe that since the world began
In every shipwreck none have drowned but rogues?
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
Often I fear that these un-talented limbs
Will be laid at last in an un-named grave!

The Goat by Elias Canetti

2011-06-22T09:10:00.003-04:00

That evening the talk was not of his beliefs and principles. He had set them out in many well-written and highly readable books. There would have been no point in expressing his convictions about free love at Mrs. Phillimore’s dinner table. In that respect, she had all the Victorian prejudices, and she was determined not to countenance any of his “amoral” views. He was cheerful, and spoke of literary subjects. Every word came out of his mouth sonorous and well formed, it was clearly articulated, there was none of the lazy mumbling that is so prevalent among educated Englishmen. People said he had taken classes in rhetoric; well, if he had, they were worth it. He was presently working on a collection of stories that later came out under the ironic, provocative title, Satan in the Suburbs.

In his mouth, English sounded as serene and immaculate as one might expect it from the great writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [Ben Johnson, John Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, John Aubrey, Bunyan, George Fox, Hobbes – on his own a titanic figure]. But he ended his speech with a goat-like laugh that was so wild and dangerous as to be shocking. He refused to end it, drew it out, one could sense how hard it was for him to part with his laughter. Even Mrs. Phillimore, who must have known him well, was shocked by it. All the animalism in his nature was expressed in this laugh, a very small, but energetic and indefatigable satyr. This laugh made a curious trinity with the piercing malice of Mrs. Phillimore’s eyes and the helpless stammer of Aymer…

I met Bertrand Russell once more, but this time in a large group, among many people. The magazine Nineteenth Century, which was trying to re-launch itself by the simple expedient of calling itself Twentieth Century, was throwing a large party in a house in Mayfair, that had been hired for the occasion. People were invited to meet Mr. Pannikar, the Indian Ambassador to China, who enjoyed a ringside view of events during the years following the revolution, and was now retiring from his post. A trained historian, Mr Pannikar was in the process of writing a book about his experiences. There was an opportunity to meet him, and ask questions. He was a civil and polite gentleman, prepared to speak on anything we had to put to him.

Bertrand Russell, who had published his own book on China a quarter of a century before, was there, and I stood near him as he spoke to Pannikar. It was the most exhaustive interrogation I have ever witnessed.

The dialogue came thick and fast. Pannikar was no less quick on his feet than his interlocutor. In the space of twenty minutes, provided you paid attention, and did not allow yourself to be distracted, you learned more than you could have done reading a thick tome. The questions overlapped and, in the most extraordinary way, light was shed on matters that were not explicitly talked about. These things were so illuminated by what was said before and afterwards, that you could swear you had heard them talked about. There was something about the flighty spirit of Bertrand Russell that allowed the Indian to appear distinguished. He was certainly no one to be despised, I read his book later, but this questioning was really something else. It turned a clever, methodical and experienced man into a profound thinker. It lifted him, so to speak, from the obligations of ordinary logical connections. What was lost in terms of order was gained in spontaneity.

One had the impression that Pannikar was driven to think for the first time about the things he was talking about. That could not in fact have been the case. But thanks to Russell’s zigzag leaps and bounds, it had to appear that way. Trivial and everyday things, things that a newspaper reader might have known, didn’t even crop up. An “innocent” listener, who merely read a decent newspaper – and there was always such in England – would have no idea what was going on. Some others had noticed what was going on, and clustered round the two men, listening intently. The cream of the intellectual and political society of London was there. I think all those listening held their breath, they were as rapt as I was. My own response was only more apparent than theirs, because- not being English- I made no effort to dissemble it.

But I had not immediately plunged into the heart of this evening. Before that, I wandered round various rooms, perhaps to scout out who was there. But possibly I was a little on the lookout for Bertrand Russell, because I had read his book about China, which had taught me much, many years before. Suddenly I heard the cackle of a goat, so loud that I took fright, it could only be him. I went in the direction of the cackle, and found him just as he was beginning his dialogue with Pannikar. I did not know what had caused him to whinny so loud and long, because now he got his teeth into the conversation, which took his full concentration for certainly twenty minutes.

As it came to an end, it unbent a little, I could tell from the way that only now did I begin to scrutinize the people who formed a tight circle around the two talkers. I didn’t get very far in my research, because quite close to Bertrand Russell, diagonally behind him, stood a strikingly beautiful young woman, whom I had first noticed on my first wandering round the rooms, a while before the familiar cackling made itself audible. There were quite a few beautiful woman at this gathering. (The beauty of the upper-class Englishwomen is something that had already struck Dostoevsky, more than a century ago, when he paid a short visit to Alexander Herzen in London.) Every generation was represented, they belonged to powerful and famous men, who had every reason to show themselves with these women on their arms, but this one, who was standing so close to Bertrand Russell that she almost touched him, a little over twenty, was by far the most beautiful.

It would be tempting to describe her, but she vanished too quickly. No sooner had Russell put his last question than he sensed her behind him, and quickly turned around. One could tell from his expression that he had never seen her before, he immediately burst out into the goatish laughter, so loud that Pannikar’s answer was quite engulfed by it, and no-one heard what it was. Then, as if they had had an assignation, they promptly left together, the eighty-year-old and the twenty-year-old. As he left, he continued to laugh, while she became more beautiful with every stride.

Astrology by Stendhal

2011-06-12T08:19:00.003-04:00

Some minutes since Frabrizio had taken the road again; he passed the hill that forms the peninsula of Durini, and at length there met his gaze that campanile of the village of Grianta in which he had so often made observations of the stars with Priore Blanes. “What bounds were there to my ignorance in those days? I could not understand,” he reminded himself, even the ridiculous Latin of those treatises on astrology which my master used to pore over, and I think I respected them chiefly because, understanding only a few words here and there, my imagination stepped in to give them meaning, and the most romantic sense possible.”

Gradually his thoughts entered another channel. “may not there be something genuine about this science? Why should it be different from the rest? A certain number of imbeciles and quick-witted persons agree among themselves that they know (shall we say) Mexican; they impose themselves with this qualification upon society which respects them and governments pay them. Favors are showered upon them precisely because they have no real intelligence, and authority need not fear their raising the populace and creating an atmosphere of rant by aid of generous sentiments! For instance, Father Bari, to whom Ernesto IV has just awarded a pension of 4,000 francs and the Cross of his Order for having restored nineteen lines of a Greek dithyramb!

“But, Great God, have I indeed the right to find such things ridiculous? Is it for me to complain,” he asked himself, suddenly, stopping short in the road, “has not that same Cross just been given to my governor in Naples?” Fabrizio was conscious of a feeling of intense disgust; the fine enthusiasm for virtue which had just been making his heart beat high changed into the vile pleasure of having a good share in the spoils of a robbery. “After all,” he said to himself at length, with the lusterless eyes of a man who is dissatisfied with himself, “since my birth gives me the right to profit by these abuses, it would be a signal piece of folly on my part not to take my share, but I must never let myself denounce them in public.” This reasoning was by no means unsound; but Fabrizio had fallen a long way from that elevation of sublime happiness to which he had found himself transported an hour earlier. The thought of privilege had withered that plant, always so delicate, which we name happiness.

“If we are not to believe in astrology,” he went on, seeking to calm himself; “If this science is, like three quarters of the sciences which are not mathematical, a collection of enthusiastic simpletons and adroit hypocrites paid by the masters they serve, how does it come about that I think so often and with emotion of this fatal circumstance: I did make my escape from the prison at B--, but in the uniform and with the marching orders of a soldier who had been flung into prison with good cause?”

Fabrizio’s reasoning could never succeed in penetrating farther; he went a hundred ways round the difficulty without managing to surmount it. He was too young still; in his moments of leisure, his mind devoted itself with rapture to enjoying the sensations produced by the romantic circumstances with which his imagination was always ready to supply him. He was far from employing his time in studying with patience the actual details of things in order to discover their causes. Reality still seemed to him flat and muddy; I can understand a person’s not caring to look at it, but then he ought not to argue about it. Above all, he ought not to fashion objections out of the scattered fragments of his ignorance.

Thus it was, though not lacking in brains, Frabrizio could not manage to see that his half-belief in omens was for him a religion, a profound impression received at his entering upon life. To think of this belief was to feel, it was a happiness. And he set himself resolutely to discover how this could be proved a real science, in the same category as geometry, for example. He searched his memory strenuously for all the instances in which the omens observed by him had not been followed by the auspicious or inauspicious events which they seemed to herald. But all this time, while he believed himself to be following a line of reasoning and marching towards the truth, his attention kept coming joyfully to rest on the memory of the occasions on which the foreboding had been amply followed by the happy or unhappy accident which it had seemed to him to predict, and his heart was filled with respect and melted; and he would have felt an invincible repugnance for the person who denied the value of omens, especially if in doing so he had had recourse to irony.

Fabrizio walked on without noticing the distance he was covering, and had reached this point in his vain reasonings when, raising his head, he saw the wall of his father’s garden…

Cemeteries by Elias Canetti

2011-06-01T09:21:00.004-04:00

Also in the chapter The Survivor in Crowds and Power

The attraction of cemeteries and graveyards is so strong that people visit them even if no-one belonging to them is buried there. In foreign cities they make a pilgrimage to the cemetery and walk about there as though it were an amenity specially provided for them. It is not always veneration for some famous man which draws them there. Even where this is the original motive, the visit always turns into something more. A cemetery very soon induces a special state of mind. We have a pious habit of deceiving ourselves about this mood. In fact, the awe we feel, and still more the awe we exhibit, covers a secret satisfaction.

What does someone who finds himself in a graveyard actually do? How does he move and what occupies his thoughts? He wanders slowly up and down between the graves, looking at this stone and that, reading the names on them and feeling drawn to some of them. Then he begins to notice what is engraved beneath the names. He finds a couple who lived together for a long time and now lie together for always; as they should; or a child who died quite young; or a girl who just reached her eighteenth birthday. More and more it is periods of time which fascinate the visitor. Increasingly they stand out from the touching inscriptions on the headstones and become simply periods of time as such.

Here is a man who lived to be thirty two; another, over there, died at forty-five. The visitor is older than either of them yet they are already out of the race. He finds many who did not get as far as he has, but, unless they died particularly young, he feels no sadness for them. But there are also many who surpassed his present age, living for seventy or, now and again, for over eighty years, as he can still do himself. These arouse in him a desire to emulate them. For him everything is still open; his life span is not yet fixed, and in this lies his superiority; with effort he may even surpass them. He has, anyway, a good chance of equaling them, for the advantage is his in any case: their goal is reached; they are no longer alive. They are there for him to compete with, but all the strength is on his side; they have no strength, but only a stated goal; and even those who lived the longest are dead now. They cannot look him in the eyes as man to man and he draws from them the strength to become, and to remain for ever, more than they are. The eighty-nine-year-old who lies there acts on him like a spur. What is to prevent him from living to ninety?

But this is not the only kind of calculation which occupies the man who stands between the rows of graves . He begins to notice how long it is that some of the buried have lain there. The time that separates him from their death is somehow reassuring and exhilarating: he has known the world for that much longer. In graveyards which have old memorials going back to the 17th and 18th centuries the visitor stands patiently before the half-effaced inscriptions, not moving until he has deciphered them. Chronology, which is normally only used for practical purposes, suddenly acquires a vivid and meaningful life for him. All the centuries he knows of are his. The man in the grave knows nothing of the man who stands beside it, reflected on the span of the completed life. For him time ended with the year of his death; for the other it has continued right up to the present. What would he, long dead, not give still to be able to stand by the side of the visitor! 200 years have passed since he died; the other is, as it were, 200 years older than him. Many of the things which happened during those years are known to him; he has read about them, heard people talk and experienced some of them himself. He is in a position where it would be difficult not to feel some superiority, and the natural man does feel it.

But he feels more than this. As he walks among the graves he feels that he is alone. Side by side at his feet lie the unknown dead, and they are many. How many is not known, but the number is very great and there will be more and more of them. They cannot move, but must remain there, crowded together. He alone comes and goes as he wishes; he alone stands upright.

Immortality by Elias Canetti

2011-06-01T07:31:00.004-04:00

From the chapter entitled Survivor in Crowds and Power; translated from German by Carol Stewart, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1960

Consideration of literary or any other private immortality can best start with a man like Stendhal. It would be hard to find a man less sympathetic to religion and more completely unaffected by its promises and obligations. His thoughts and feelings were directed wholly to this life and he experienced it with exactness and depth. He gave himself up to it, enjoying what could give him pleasure; but he did not become shallow or stale in doing so, because he allowed everything that was separate to remain separate, instead of trying to construct spurious unities. He thought much but his thoughts were never old. He was suspicious of everything that did not move him. All that he recorded and all that he shaped remained close to the fiery moment of genesis. He loved many things and believed in some, but all of them remained miraculously concrete for him. They were all there in him and he could find them at once without resort to specious tricks of arrangement.

This man, who took nothing for granted, who wanted to discover everything for himself; who, as far as life is feeling and spirit, was life itself; who was in the heart of every situation and therefore had a right to look at it from the outside; with whom word and substance were so intuitively one that it was as though he had taken it upon himself to purify language single-handed – this rare and truly free man had, none the less, one article of faith, which he spoke of as simply and naturally as of a mistress.

Without pitying himself, he was content to write for a few, but he was certain that in a hundred years he would be read by many. Nowhere in modern times is a belief in literary immortality to be found in a clearer, purer and less pretentious form. What does a man mean who holds this belief? He means that he will still be here when everyone else who lived at the same time is no longer here. It is not that he feels any animosity towards the living as such; he does not try to get rid of them, nor harm them in any way. He does not even see them as opponents. He despises those who acquire false fame and would despise himself too if he fought them with their own weapons. He bears then no malice, for he knows how completely mistaken they are, but he chooses the company of those to whom he himself will one day belong, men of earlier times whose work still lives, who speak to him and feed him. The gratitude he feels to them is gratitude for life itself.

Killing in order to survive is meaningless for such a man, for it is not now that he wants to survive. It is only in a hundred years that he will enter the lists, when he is no longer alive and thus cannot kill. Then it will be a question of work contending against work, with nothing that he himself can do. The true rivalry, the one that matters, begins when the rivals are no longer there. Thus he cannot even watch the fight. But the work must be there and, if it is to be there, it must contain the greatest and purest measure of life. Not only does he abjure killing, but he takes with him into immortality all who were alive with him here, and it is then that all these, the least as well as the greatest, are most truly alive.

He is the exact opposite of those rulers whose whole entourage must die when they die, so that they may find among the dead all they have been used to on earth. In nothing is their ultimate powerlessness more terribly revealed. They kill in death as they have killed in life; a retinue of the slain accompanies them from one world to the other.

But whoever opens Stendhal will find him and also everything which surrounds him; and find it here, in this life. Thus the dead offer themselves as food to the living; their immortality profits them. It is the reversal of sacrifice to the dead, which profits both dead and living. There is no more rancor between them and the sting has been taken from survival.

David Dows

2011-05-21T21:40:00.004-04:00

If the writer of this short biography was asked to preface what he has to say with a text suggestive of his subject he would select the words, “There were giants in the earth of these days – the same became mighty men –men of renown.”

There is no country of modern times, and history does not point to any of ancient times, that has raised, as it were, into such prominent and gigantic proportions as the United States.

This marvelous development is not the growth of centuries, or of periods, or of any of those divisions of times that have heretofore marked the rise and fall of great nations, but it is the outgrown of the years and months and days, in lifetimes of men whose energies have been concentrated upon great purposes, and whose courage and enterprise and never-failing faith in the possibilities of the future, have worked out to a successful issue the problems they have undertaken to resolve.

It is true that the field in this country is a wide one, and that men of Anglo-Saxon extraction, standing on the broad platform of American independence of thought, conscience, and action, have opportunities that are unsurpassed, and which are not possible in the Old World.

Yet it must not be forgotten that opportunities are simply means, and become dead letters if neglected or passed by unperceived. Opportunities cannot make the man, but the man who has perseverance, courage, and the ability to see and grasp the opportunity may become great; and such a man is DAVID DOWS.

It is also true that in this earnest struggle for place and development, utilitarian results have been more sought after here, more than in older continental countries might be judged healthful or beneficial for the general good; but it must be remembered that those who first emigrated to these shores were not not the most enlightened or philanthropic people of Great Britain and Europe, but were from the middle classes, who could not brook the intolerant spirit of those who were in authority, and were willing to suffer for conscience sake; or else from the working classes who were crowded out to make room for their more opulent neighbors and who hoped for immediate benefit to themselves from the change.

The Dows or Dowse family is of English origin, hailing from the neighborhood of Colchester and Bellerica in Essex. The first mention that we have of any prominent member is of Eleazer Dowse, who attached himself to the fortunes of Oliver Cromwell, and became a colonel in the army of the British Commonwealth.

A short time prior to that period ( about the year 1630) two brothers of Eleazer, named Ebenezer and Maximilian, emigrated with many others to the colonies, and under the leadership of Governor Winthrop helped to found Boston, and subsequently settled at Charleston, Massachusetts

Eleazer, the father of David Dows, and of the fifth generation in the United States, was born in 1764, and at the age of fifteen became a soldier in the American Army, serving under General Sullivan at Newport, Rhode Island, where he frequently saw Lafayette, and subsequently at West Point, when the traitor Benedict Arnold was in command.

After the war he went to New Hampshire to reside but in 1788 he moved to Saratoga County and purchased a farm in the then wilderness, about nine miles from the town of Schenectady. His energetic and determined spirit made him the leading man in that section of the country, and to the little village that sprang up near his residence he gave the name Charlton.

In 1790 he took to himself a wife in the person of Linda Wright, daughter of Capt. John Wright, of Ballston (an officer in the Revolutionary Army). By who he had twelve children – six girls and six boys.

David Dows, the youngest of the boys was born in 1814. He was the eleventh in order of birth and he worked on the farm until he was fourteen years of age. He received such educational advantages as the District School could give, with now and then an opportunity of showing forth his proficiency to the somewhat eccentric and celebrated Reverend Ammi Rogers, a fast friend of his father and the Episcopal Church missionary who had charge of the spiritual condition of all that region of the country.

Luke, David’s older brother, followed his father’s vocation and became a farmer; but the family counsel, reinforced by the Rev. Roger’s dictum decided that the other boys should adopt a business career and, as each became old enough to leave the paternal roof he received his father’s blessing, and set forth to make his way in the world.

John, the second oldest brother and a man of remarkable shrewdness andforce of character and many years David’s senior, had already established himself in partnership with Ira B. Cary, as a forwarder on the Mohawk River, and subsequently on the Erie Canal, withy headquarters in New York. In 1828 he obtained for David a situation as a clerk in the dry-goods store of Isaac W. Statts, of Albany.
David entered the store in vigorous health and full of hopeful ambition. He soon won the respect and confidence of his employer, who, although adhering to the financial part of their contract, gave him time for physical and mental improvement.

He remained in Albany till the close of 1832, after which he went to the office of his brother Ammi in Utica for a few months, and in May, 1833, upon the invitation of John, he removed to New York, and accepted a clerkship withy the firm of Dows and Cary, who meanwhile had added a commission department to their business, and were gradually withdrawing from transportation.
In 1834 the firm of Eli Hart, Dows &Co was formed, consisting of Eli Hart, Jas. M. Hoyt, John Dows and Ira B Cary, and David went with them as their employee. In 1836, Eli Hart, Dows & Co. dissolved and formed two firms- those of Eli Hart & Co., and Dows and Cary. David remained with the later and the year following was admitted to partnership in that firm. John Dows died in 1844, leaving David his executor and an equal partner withy Mr. Cary, in a business that had greatly extended its proportions since David’s advent to New York.

The following year was a most disastrous one to all persons interested in the grain and produce trade in the United States. Prices were unusually low, the demand was limited, many country dealers had failed to forward the produce on which their city factors had already advanced; confidence was much shaken, and money became exceedingly stringent.

After manfully struggling to weather the storm, Dows and Cary, in the spring of 1846, were forced to suspend of those acceptances which had not been covered by shipments of property, but so thoroughly did they enjoy the confidence of their creditors that they were enabled almost at once to effect a compromise without any serious interruption of their business.

The year following, the law of compensation asserted itself. The firms operations were unusually successful, the Irish famine demand stimulated prices, and very large profits (for those times) were realized. Not only were the compensation notes of the firm all cared for before maturity, but that portion of their obligations that had been compounded and legally cancelled was paid in full with interest, and the credit and honorable intent of the firm more firmly established than ever before.

Soon after this Mr. Cary’s health became partially impaired, and he was obliged to withdraw from the more active management of the firm’s affairs. This was David’s opportunity, and with a cool head and a firm hand he grasped it . His comprehensive mind had already taken in the situation. He saw that water transportation had done much, but the railroads were destined to become the main factors in bringing the United States, as a great commercial country, to the front.

Under this appreciative and far-reaching policy, new avenues were opened up and the business of Dows &Cary rapidly increased. The strict justice of their dealings, their honorable record and high credit, together with their ability to make advances on property, shipped in large volumes from the interior, made them the most popular commission house in New York.

In 1854 Mr. Cary died (for the times a wealthy man) leaving David his managing executor, and the sole owner of the largely increased and rapidly increasing business. Mr. Dows keenly felt the loss of his old and tried friend, for whom he entertained the warmest regard; but, for the reason that his partner’s long sickness had taught him to depend upon his own judgment and resources, the business progressed almost without a ripple. Many flattering offers of partnership withy large capital facilities attached were tendered him, but all were refused.

But although his spirit was irrepressible the physical conditions began to assert themselves. As the volume of business continued to increase and could not be kept down, the strain caused by the panic of 1857 warned him that he must have some relief; therefore in 1858 he induced his brother Ammi, who had a few years before retired from the firm of Dows and Guiteau, to accept an interest; and the firm name was changed to D&A Dows & Co. Three years of continued prosperity followed, but the cares and anxieties caused by thye financial crisis that immediately followed the election of President Lincoln, in the autu,n of 1860, together with the weight of accumulating years, induced Ammi (who was eleven years the senior of David) to retire in 1861.

This was at the breaking out of the War of the Rebellion; but the emergency had stimulating effect on David Dows. Patriotism had much to do with his decision. To his mind courageous and enterprising merchants were just as essential in sustaining the Government and re-establishing the integrity of the Union, as thye brave soldiers and sailors who were so manfully upholding the flag at the front. He accepted two new partners and continued the firm as David Dows &Co.

Large as the business had been before, the fact that the firm had successfully weathered the winter of 1860-61- while so many others (together withy very many financial institutions throughout the country) had suffered shipwreck – seemed to give it largely increased prestige with western shipping merchants, and its resources and ability to care for the ever increasing consignments were taxed to the utmost.

Meanwhile the old conditions were fast changing – gold had passed from being a money factor into an article of merchandise. A new currency had been created, and a system of banking, the most magnificent and comprehensive that had heretofore been conceived and which was predicated upon the faith and stability of the Government, had been inaugurated, armies were being raised, equipped, and fed, and Government loans aggregating enormous amounts were being, and would still have to be negotiated. In all these conditions the country was without the benefit of previous experience; they were the sudden inventions of the great and pressing necessity, and yet in looking back upon that period of our history from the standpoint of the present day, how very few mistakes seem to have been made – Great men were holding the helm, and great minds were ready withy their counsel. It was the crisis of the Republic, and it was bravely and nobly met.

In many of these emergencies David Dows was consulted, and his active cooperation cheerfully given. It was soon apparent that customary methods must be abandoned, and that in provisioning the large armies in the field the old systems in vogue with the Washington authorities were entirely inadequate. On the subject David Dows &Co were called upon to advise and suggest a remedy. This they did; but as their ideas prohibited divided responsibility, and conflicted with the established rules of the War and Treasury Departments, there was a long struggle withy “red tape” before the urgency of the conditions compelled that the efficiency of their plan should be thoroughly tested.

AS the first transaction was experimental and required the disbursing of several millions of dollars, and the negotiation of a large amount of United States securities by his firm on behald of the Government, the following letter from the Commissary-General of the United States Armies gave David Dows the keenest satisfaction and completely vindicated the soundness of his judgment:

[ Letters to be included at a later date]

The result of this experimental operation was to sweep away any further opposition, and David Dows & Co. continued to serve the Government as occasion required til the close of the war and the disbandment of the armies of the Rebellion; although the firm never permitted that fact to appear upon the surface of their large transactions.

Nor were these dealings without, now and then, some amusing features. In one instance the Commissary-General complained that he was much troubled obtaining supplies in some large western cities because of combinations formed to advance prices whenever the Government appeared in the market as a purchaser, and named Cincinnati as being exceedingly aggressive in this respect. He was advised to withdraw his advertisements and announce that the needs of the Department had been provided. This was done, and a day or two later- and without the slightest premonition of where the supplies came from- the morning papers announced that the Commissary Department was the recipient of several thousand packages of provisions, and that more were on the way. The Cincinnati speculators were demoralized; they acknowledged their defeat, and the contest was never again renewed.

When the national banking system was first inaugurated, the Secretary of the Treasury, Hon. Salmon P. Chase, came to New York and urged a prominent National Bank should be at once organized, so as to give character, standing and confidence in the system to the country. There was much hesitancy, for the old established banks were not cordial, and very many financial sages feared the new departure would prove a failure.

David Dows and other earnest patriotic spirits with him were then applied to and they at once organized the Fourth National Bank with a capital of $5,000,000. They agreed that the books should remain open just four days, and that all the stock not then subscribed for, they would take in addition to their original large subscriptions. Their confidence and pluck inspired the doubting withy courage, and the enterprise proved a grand success. Mr. Chase returned to Washington encouraged and hopeful, for he saw that the National Bank problem, to which he had devoted so much time and thought, had taken root and would become the back-bone of the financial system that was to carry the Northern States successfully through the terrible struggle in which they were then engaged.

These are only samples of what took place in those stirring times. Men were just as truly patriotic then as in 1776; and with a like wonderful energy, which served in times past to build up this great nation, did they rally to the support of the Government in the face of European jealousies and outside discouragements, and secured a result that has never been equaled in ancient or modern history.

The business of David Dows &Co was strictly a commission one. Almost all the prominent houses in the the produce trade of the West and North-West have been its clients. They received and sold the agricultural products of the United States at the Eastern seaboard, and when their correspondents desire the advantage of foreign markets they forwarded such consignments to their agents in British or Continental ports. They had branch houses in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Paul and Duluth, opened from time to time as the country developed. It was the policy of the firm to to follow closely the pioneering railroad, and be ever ready to lend a helping hand in stimulating and forwarding all those interests that gave to the agriculturalist and inland merchant the largest return for their labor and enterprise. They helped build elevators wherever they were needed, including their own elevators on the Brooklyn shore. And were largely the means of making New York the American seaboard granary of Great Britain and the Continent.

In furtherance of these ends, Mr. Dows early in his career became identified with railroad construction, and urged it forward with all the energy of his active nature. When he left his father’s farm, in 1828, there were less than twenty miles of railroad in the United States; today there are over one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and of almost all the opening of the Great West and Northwest, he has helped to build, and taken an active interest in their management…
Nor in all this railroad building and Western development did Mr. Dows overlook an urgent need that lay nearer to home, even at his very door, the lack of which was recognized by him as a great desideratum to the more rapid growth of New York into the Metropolis of the United States. The peculiar formation of Manhattan Island permitted of the extension of the city in only one direction- that towards the north. The omnibus and the horse-car-road had each been tried and, up to a certain point, had done good service, but as the homes of existing means of transit was beginning to stunt the City’s growth, and to aid in building up towns and villages in a neighboring State at a very rapid rate.

Mr. Dows was a believer in Elevated Roads operated by steam or some other power equally effective. Experience had taught him that passenger trains weighing three hundred tons and over could be moved at the rate of forty to fifty miles an hour over surface roads, supported at places fifty feet and more above the ground, with perfect safety, and hence he argued that trains weighing less than one hundred tons could be moved at fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour upon elevated structures from fifteen to twenty-five feet above street-level with equal safety.

After much opposition, largely emanating from horse railroad companies, in 1866-67 a company was organized and a charter obtained to construct and elevated road from the Battery, through Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue to the Harlem River, to be exclusively operated by means of stationary engines and revolving cables. In 1868 this charter was amended so as to permit of the use of steam, but the directors did not avail of this privilege. Although much opposed to the cable system of propulsion, yet for the reason that any kind of rapid transit was a step in the right direction, Mr. Dows was one of the few persons who subscribed to its capital stock but declined to take any part in the management of the company. In the early part of 1870 the road was completed as far as 30th Street, but the stationary engine and endless rope system proving an utter failure, the company was unable to proceed further, and the Grand Jury having declared the structure a public nuisance, a bill was introduced into the Legislature to have the charter repealed. At this point three gentlemen, John F. Tracy, William L. Scott and David Dows, came to the rescue. They first abrogated the cable traction system, then contributed the ways and means, and strengthened the superstructure so as to admit of the use of the Locomotive, and for nine months successfully operated the road from Dey Street to 30th Street, although the compliment of passengers carried only averaged three hundred and fifty per diem.

Having demonstrated the efficacy of steam and inspired courage among the doubting, Mr. Dows helped to organize the New York Elevated Railroad Company (…) in 1872 and was its first Treasurer.. He then served in the same position in the Metropolitan Elevated Company and was until very lately one of the trustees of its Mortgage obligations. From the beginning and until this important question of rapid transit was solved, Mr. Dows was an energetic leader, although he would not permit it top so appear, never doubting that the modest passenger record of three hundred and fifty in 1871 would swell into the daily aggregate of five hundred thousand in 1888, and that the Upper Wards, in time, would vie withy the lower in value and in sources of revenue to the City for all time to come.

In matters of finance, he became prominent as a merchant. Mr. Dows has stood at the very front rank. He helped to organize or direct many of the New York and Chicago banks, among which may be mentioned the Corn Exchange, the Fourth National, the Central Trust Co., the Merchant’s Bank – all of New York, - and the Union National Bank of Chicago, and has ben urged to join the boards of many others, but was obliged, for lack of time, to decline. He has also been identified in the formation and management of many large insurance companies, both domestic and foreign, and he organized, and for many years was the President of the New York Corn Exchange, out of which in later years the Produce Exchange has grown to its present grand proportions.

In politics M. Dows is a staunch Republican, but has never taken any prominent place in his party or accepted any Government position. He believes I his party because of the results of its great work – the abolition of slavery, and the preservation of the Union, - and although at times he can discover errors of judgment and faulty nominations to high places by the leaders, he charitably remembers tha men are human, and he is therefore loyal with his support.

Mr. Dows is a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church and has been for many years Senior Warden of St. George’s Church, where for over thirty years his old friend, the Reverend Stephen H Tyng, D.D. was the rector.
In 1852 Mr. Dows married Margaret E., daughter of Horatio Worcester, Esq., of New York, by whom he had nine children: Annie, wife of Richard M. Hoe; Linda, wife of George b Cooksey; David Dows, Jr. Margaret Worcester, wife of Carroll Dunham; Susan, wife of Dr. C.; A Herter; Mary and Tracy, and two boys, Harry, and Stephen Guion, who died in infancy. His home during the winter is on Fifth Avenue corner of 69th Street, and in the summer at his handsome residence in Irvington, one of the most beautiful locations on the Hudson River.

Although Mr. Dows is in his 74th year, time has dealt kindly with him. His tall commanding figure is but slightly bent, and though his hair is mixed with gray, and a benevolent and patriarchial condition asserts itself, yet the large well-shaped head, the clear intellect, the quick penetrating eye, the firm compression of the mouth that speaks of energetic will, the genial temperament and thye social magnetism that attracts all who come within his sphere of influence, are just as potent as they ever were in his younger days.

Such is David Dows in the midst of one of the happiest of homes – esteemed and loved and honored by unnumbered friends. His elevated example is cherished by his contemporaries. The impress of his life will be a valuable legacy to his generation; and to the younger merchants of his country it will be pointed to as the sure results of enterprise and good morals. What an enviable position this great and good man enjoys! He can look back on the labor of his life – labor, because no good work can be done in any field without genuine labor- without a shade of egotism, and know and feel that his country and his country-men are better because he has lived. He has proved himself to be an unpretending practical philanthropist, who, while working for himself and those dear to him with his head, pursued a policy that was meanwhile improving the condition of his neighbors, elevating and upholding the claims of American enterprise and American labor, and furnishing the ways and means of living to thousands and tens of thousands wage winners, who work with their hands.
A zealous, upright merchant whose name is a household word in commercial circles from the Atlantic to the Pacific; - a good citizen who stood by his country in its greatest and darkest hour of need, and an upright Christian gentleman, David Dows well deserves the success that has crowned his life work and the place in the annals of his country’s history, which the mercantile world, that has so long adorned his talents and his virtues, so gratefully and proudly accord him – a position in the very foremost rank of the famous men of this more than famous nineteenth century.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Be it remembered, That, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway Company, held at the General Offices of the Company in the City of Chicago, State of Illinois, on the third (3d) day of June, 1890, the meeting was addressed by the Hon. George G. Wright as follow:

Mr. President: If goodness is greatness – if integrity is nobleness – then David Dows, for so many years connected with our deliberations, and whose death we, and a circle of friends seldom equaled, this day mourn, belonged to the nobility of manhood. Such greatness I do not measure by a too short sectarian yard-stick, weigh in scales constructed and balanced by popular judgment, nor guage by those instruments so often, yet incorrectly, used in estimating moral worth and mental strength. A life, however seemingly exemplary, shadowed by fear, or stained by temptation, is not great; for there is not apt to be any principle of true manhood involved therein. He who squares his conduct by the popular verdict, is too often inspired by debasing, and not ennobling influences. His moral perceptions are not enlarged nor developed when thus guided and colored.

The man, on the other hand, who does what enlightened Christian conscience dictates; who has love of country, not for gain, but as a part of his true and real life; who believes in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; who has a sincere desire, and labors to make the world better; who has an everlasting life current which runs still, and yet strong; who has brains to know the right, and the honesty and courage to do it; whom the lusts of office cannot buy, nor the clamor of men deter; who, without flagging or flinching, bragging or boasting, can tell and act the truth, whoever may oppose; who utterly abhor all show, all pretence, all tricks to deceive, all indirection to mislead, -such a man is truly great, and by the enlightened judgment of the world should “step from the topmost round of the ladder of earth to his home in the skies.”

I am fully conscious that not infrequently friendship seeks relief for its sorrow in the extravagance of eulogy. I know, too, that as flowers placed on the bier of our friends by the hands of flattery or the fingers of insincerity would perish and decay, so would words of mere fulsome eulogy be out of harmony with his quit and unostentatious every-day walk, and the estimate of his family and friends of his true and upright life. And yet in no spirit of eulogy, but with a satisfaction which death can neither extinguish nor qualify, I, with you, may bear testimony to his high character, and say in all truthfulness, he belonged to the class I described.

His leading characteristic was a modesty seldom paralleled, in the discharge of every duty. Firm and tenacious in his own views, he was free from dogmatism which purposely offended. Ready to assert and maintain his own, he was never-the-less mindful of the rights of those around him. As a rule unwilling to impute fault, he was tender of the feelings of those with who he associated. Possessed of a love of country which, if unselfish, is always the surest guaranty of national safety and unity, he often shamed the unseemly greed and acts of those much higher in public estimate. His was a humanity broad as the universe, active as the human heart can prompt; and thus he was led to honesty in the marts of trade, and lived the life of a true Christian, whether in pew or office. If of such men we would know the best, we should follow them from office or marketplace to their homes, to the quiet of domestic life, where children respect their words, and acts of kindness are a matter of course rather than subjects for praise or encomium.

He was the friend of the poor, and struggling men everywhere, now and for time, will rise up and call him blessed. And so was each day of his life, whether in the quiet of his loved home, or in the discharge of his multiform duties, on this board or elsewhere, he erected for himself a monument which time cannot efface nor possible criticism tarnish. For he ever realized that –

“True worth is in being, not seeming,
In doing each day that goes by,
Some little good – not in dreaming
Of great things to do by and by.”

And also that –
“There is nothing so kingly as kindness,
And nothing so royal as truth.”

And thus we have a man, who, by the judgment of those who knew him – and those who knew him best will readily concur – is entitled to be called good, and hence great.

But pardon me that I speak too long, especially in the presence of those who knew him more intimately, and with better opportunities to speak of his worth.

I present for consideration, the following brief memorial and resolutions:

DAVID DOWS, son of Eleazer Dows, was born in 1814 in the county of Saratoga, State of New York, and died at his residence in the city of New York, March 3, 1890.

A farmer’s son, he only had such educational advantages as the schools of those early days could give. While still young he left the home roof to seek success in the business world. His was an ambition full of hope and health most vigorous. How like a romance it sounds, and especially to the doles, foppish, listless young men of our times, to know that this man, afterwards so useful in life and so impressing himself upon all the material interests of our greatest city – as also his state and nation – started life as a clerk under three years contract, boarding and clothing himself, for the meager salary of little more than $150.00 per year. And yet, as we consult their lives, thus have our best and truest men started and been made. That he hade the confidence of his first employer, a he continued to have of all those with whom he was afterwards associated, goes without saying.

Starting in Albany, then going to Utica, in 1833 he accepted a clerkship in New York, where he remained, growing withy the growth of that marvelous city, and was most intimately connected with almost its every financial interest, until his death. Briefly it may be said, that he organized its strongest banks; took an active interest in all the important methods of municipal transportation, so intimately connected with the commercial interests of the city, as also in the great lines of railway, west as well as east, taking upon himself trusts public and private of the most onerous and responsible character; aided the government in its hour of greatest need by the liberal use of his wealth, manifesting his confidence in the stability of the Union, and accumulating by honest efforts a fair fortune, which made him not narrower and more sordid, but broader and more liberal and catholic in all his views as the weight of years came upon him. Thus, in brief, he lived and died, loved and mourned as few others in that great metropolis and throughout the nation.
This paper would, however, be quite incomplete, and especially on this occasion, without reference to his connection with this company- an organization in which he had the most unbounded confidence. Elected a director of the old, or original Chicago and Rock Island Company, in 1857, member of the executive committee in 1860, and vice-president in 1877, he, save for three months – March 6 to June 5, 1868 – held those positions continuously, in the old and consolidated companies, until his death. Always elected without dissent, among the largest, if not the largest holder of our stock, his several official relations are without parallel for lengthy of tenure, and seldom equaled for fidelity to his trust or the value of his advice and counsel. His was not a nature to tear down, but rather to build up and extend.

Though conservative, he still earnestly and warmly seconded every movement calculated, in his judgment, to extend the area of our operations with benefit to the company. While he labored to advance the interests of the company in which he was so largely interested, he discountenanced all improper warfare on others, appreciating that this was a rich and growing land, replete withy infinite possibilities, that the welfare and prosperity of all were inter-dependent, and that to unnecessarily antagonize and disparage others was neither wise nor just. Than him this company has never had a more sincere friend – one who took greater pleasure in its success – nor one whose counsels were of greater value or more highly appreciated. In a word, as one very near to him writes, “whether as a trusted official of this company, or whatever the trust exercised or the work to be done, he ever sought what was right: principle was always paramount to expediency – money and money-making subordinate to the demands of truth and justice.”

In view of such a life and his long connection with this board, we may appropriately pause in the discharge of our duty to pay tribute to his memory. Expressive of our appreciation of the man, and our deep sensibility of his loss to us as a friend and coworker, it is resolved:

First. – That we have learned with the most profound regret of the death of DAVID DOWS at his home in the city of New York on the 30th of March last, one so long prominently and usefully connected with this company as director, vice-president and member of our executive or working committee, whose words were listen to for more than thirty years with the consciousness that they were prompted by integrity – were wise in their conception and the outgrowth of the ripest experience.

Second.- In his death this company has lost not only a most valuable officer and counsellor, but the city of his adoption a leading citizen, his state one almost without peer among those laboring for its advancement and prosperity, the nation a faithful, fearless advocate of its highest and best interests, we as individuals, a friend, who was such amid the storms of adversity or the the sunshine of posterity, and his family a husband and father who, honoring him, were honored by him.

Third.- That a copy of this memorial and these resolutions be spread upon our records and a copy transmitted to his family signed by the President and Secretary, with expressions of our sincere condolence and sympathy in their deep affliction.

The Memorial and Resolution were adopted by the unanimous vote of all the Directors present.

State of Illinois
County of Cook

I, W.G. Purdy, Secretary of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway Company, do herebt certify that the foregoing is a true copy of an extract from the records of the meeting of the Bioard of Directors of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway Company, held on the third day of June, 1890, as fully as the same appears of record in my said office.
In TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the seal of the said company on this third day of June, A.D., 1890.

W.G. Purdy.
(signature is consistent with other published examples of such)

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Rock Island Line

It’s cloudy in the west
Looks like rain
Bought me a ticket on a railroad train
Pour on the water
Shovel on the coal
Stick your head out the window
See the drivers roll –

Refrain:

Oh, well the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road
Oh, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride
The Rock Island Line it is a mighty good road
Well if you want to ride it you got to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line.

Verses:

The seven forty five was always late
But arrived today a quarter to eight
The engineer said when they cheered his name
We’re right on time but this is yesterday’s train

Refrain (…)

The engineer said before he died
There’s two more drinks I would like to try
The conductor said what can they be?
A hot glass of water and a cold cup of tea.

Refrain (…)

The east bound train was on the west bound track
The north bound train was on the south bound track
The conductor hollered Now ain’t this fine
What a peculiar way to run a railroad.
Refrain (…)
Words and Music by Huddie Ledbetter, edited by Alan Lomax

http://www.donatelifenewengland.org/

2011-05-20T09:05:00.003-04:00

Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace

2011-05-14T20:22:00.002-04:00

I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can fly through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words.

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time that we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. - and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, relations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way – exponentially faster, unimaginably faster – when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole lives flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t that far off – although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you were born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc. which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life’, meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime.

It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life’. Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstanding of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and truer with anybody else…

The whole my life flashed before me phenomena at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware that there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there as a whitecap you might act and talk as if you know you’re just a whitecap, but deep down you don’t think think there’s really an ocean at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or liker a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s a part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it…

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, as it turns out, is a matter of perspective. The big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seemingly endless back-and forth between us has come and gone and come again in the very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner, and your stepfather packs some tobacco down with his thumb, and Angela Mead uses an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair off her blouse, and Melinda Betts inhales to respond to something she thinks her husband just said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.,. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must of happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991, like what sort of pain or problems might have driven the guy to get in his electric-blue Corvette and try top drive with all that O.T.C. medication in his bloodstream – David Wallace happening to have a huge and totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and impressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as well as of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or expression on this guy’s part whenever David Wallace struck out looking in Legion ball or said something dumb at a party, and of how impressive and authentically at ease in the world the guy always seemed, like an actual living person instead of a dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person David Wallace knew himself to be.

Verily a fair-haired, fast-track guy, whom in the very best human tradition David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly undaunted by voices telling him that there was something wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate and even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. Male, all this stuff clanging around in David Wallace 81’s head every second and moving so fast that he never got a chance to hold and try to fight or argue against it or even really feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in his real parent’s kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs in the grass along the sides of the Legion field (all of whom already probably saw through the sham at the outset anyway, he was pretty sure)- in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the seconds his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way- with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever really know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into sort of an inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged with quite a bit more firepower that he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that the other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eyes and saying, almost aloud, “Not another word.”

Concentrated Deskwork by David Foster Wallace

2011-04-22T13:02:00.006-04:00

At one point Ms. Neti-Neti herself apparently got confused or distracted, and opened the wrong door, and in the wedge of light before she could push the heavy door closed again I caught a glimpse of a long room filled with IRS examiners in long rows and columns of strange-looking tables or desks, each of which (desks) had a raised array of trays or baskets clamped to its top, with flexible-necked desk lamps clamped at angles to these fanned-out trays, so that each of the IRS examiners worked in a small circle of light at what appeared to be the bottom of a one-sided hole. [These were Tingle tables, an Examinations convention with which I became all too familiar – although no one I ever talked to knew the origin of “Tingle”, as whether it was eponymous, or sardonic or what.]

Row after row, stretching to a kind of vanishing point near the room’s rear wall, in which there was incised another door. The most striking thing about it was the quiet. There were at least 150 men and/or women in that room, all intently occupied and busy, and yet the room was so silent that you could hear an imperfection in the door’s hinge as Ms. Neti-Neti pushed it closed against the force of its pneumatic strut. This silence I remember best of all, because it was both sensuous and incongruous: For obvious reasons, we tend to associate total quiet with emptiness, not with large groups of people. The whole thing lasted only a moment… [but] I reverberated from the sight of all those intent, totally silent examiners for quite a while.

Here is probably an apt place for some exposition on my background re: silence and concentrated desk work. In hindsight, I know that there was something about the silent, motionless intensity with which everyone in that opened door’s instant was studying the tax-related documents before them that frightened and disturbed me. The scene was such that you just knew that if you were to open the door for another brief instant ten, twenty, or forty minutes later, it would look and sound just the same. I had never seen anything like it. Or rather I had, in a way, for of course television and books often portray concentrated study or deskwork just this way, at least by implication. As in e.g. “Irving knuckled down and spent the entire morning plowing through the paperwork on his desk’; ‘Only when she had finished the report did the executive glance at her watch and see that it was nearly midnight. She had been completely absorbed in her task, and was only now aware that she had worked through supper, and was famished. Gracious, wherever did the time go? She though to herself.’ Or even just as in ‘He spent the day reading.’

In real life, of course, concentrated deskwork doesn’t go this way. I had spent massive amounts of time in libraries; I knew quite well how deskwork really was. Especially if the task at hand was dry or repetitive, or dense, or if it involved reading something that had no direct relevance to your own life and priorities, or was work that you were doing only because you had to –like for a grade, or part of as freelance assignment for pay from some lout who was off skiing.

The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts , brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men's room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c. This is because sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended lengthy of time is, as a practical matter, impossible.

If you said, ‘I spent the whole night in the library, working on some client’s sociology paper,’ you really meant that you’d spent between two or three hours working on it and the rest of the time fidgeting and sharpening and organizing pencils and doing skin- checks in the men’s room mirror and wandering around the stacks opening volumes at random and reading about, say, Durkheim’s theories of suicide

There was none of this diffraction in the split-second view of the room, though. One sensed that these were people who did not fidget, who did not read a page of, say, dull taxpayer explanation about the deduction of some item and then realize that they’d actually been thinking about the apple in their lunchbag and whether or not to maybe eat the apple right here and now until they realized that their eyes had passed over all the words (or, given the venue here, perhaps columns of figures) on the page without actually having read them at all – with read here meaning internalized, comprehended, or whatever we mean by really reading vs. simply having one’s eyes pass over symbols in a certain order. Seeing this was kind of traumatic.

I’d always felt frustrated and embarrassed about how much reading and writing time I actually wasted, about how much I sort of blinked in and out while trying to absorb or convey large amounts of information. To put it bluntly, I had felt ashamed about how easily I got bored when trying to concentrate.

As a child, I think I’d understood the word concentrate literally and viewed my problems with sustained concentration as evidence that I was an unusually dilute or disorganized form of human being [46], and had laid much of the blame for this on my family, who tended to need a lot of loud noise and distraction going on at all times and undertook almost every kind of activity with every available radio, stereo, and television set on, such that I’d taken to wearing special high-filter customized earplugs at home from the age of fourteen on.

It took me all the way up to the age of finally getting away from Philo and entering a highly selective college to understand that the problem with stillness and concentration was more or less universal and not some unique shortcoming that was going to prevent me from every really rising above my preterite background and achieving something. Seeing the enormous lengths that those elite, well-educated undergrads from all over the nation went to to avoid, delay, or mitigate concentrated work was an eye-opening experience for me. In fact, the school’s social structure was set up to prize and esteem students who could pass their classes and assemble a good transcript without ever working hard. People who skated by, doing the absolute minimum required for institutional/parental approval, were regarded as cool, while people who actually applied themselves to their assignments and to the work of their own education and achievement were relegated to the status of ‘grinds’ or ‘tool’, the lowest caste in the college’s merciless social hierarchy [47].

The upshot, though, was that up until entering college, where everyone often lived and did homework together in plain mutual view, I’d had no opportunity to realize that fidgeting, distraction, and frequent contrived breaks were more or less universal traits. In high school, for example, homework is literally that – it’s done at home, in private, with earplugs and KEEP OUT signs and a chair jammed up underneath the knob. Same with reading, working on journal entries, tabulating one’s accounts from a paper route, &c. You’re with your peers only in social or recreational settings, including classes, which at my own public high school were academic jokes. In Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it – which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still here in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac…

[47]…It was either Acquistipace or Ed Shackleford, whose ex-wife taught high school, who observed that what was then starting to be codified as ‘test anxiety’ may well really have been an anxiety about timed tests, meaning exams or standardized tests, where there is no way to do the endless fidgeting and self-distraction that is part of 99.9 percent of real people’s concentrated deskwork. I cannot honestly say whose observation it was; it was part of a larger discussion among younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. For the sake of convenience, let’s assume it was Shackleford. His observation was the real object of crippling anxiety in ‘test anxiety’ might well be a fear of the tests’ associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread – and it’s this dread, not so much as the test itself, that people feel anxious about.

A Matter of Difficult and Dangerous Belief by Michael Montaigne (1533-1592)

2011-04-22T12:54:00.003-04:00

I follow Saint Augustine’s opinion, that a man were better to bend towards doubt, than incline toward certainty, in matters of trial and dangerous belief.

Some years are now past that I traveled through the country of a Prince who, in favor of me, and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace, in his own presence, and in a particular place, to let me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind; and amongst the others there was an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity; and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession.

I saw both the proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some other insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I inquired and talked with her a long time, with the greatest attention I could, yet I am not easily carried away by preoccupation. In the end, and in my conscience, I should rather have appointed Helleborum [a cure], than Hemlock [a punishment]. Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa. ‘ The matter seemed liker to minds captivate than guilty.’

That privilege it hath pleased God to give some of our testimonies, ought not to be vilified, or slightly communicated but mine ears are filled with a thousand such tales. Three saw her such a day in the East; three saw her the next day in the West, at such an hour, and in such a place, and this and thus attired, verily in such a case I could not believe myself. How much more natural and more likely do I find it, that two men should lie than one, in twelve hours, pass with the winds, from East to West? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capering mind be transported from his place or that one of us should by a strange spirit be carried on a broom through the tunnel of a chimney?

Touching the oppositions and arguments against my opinions that honest men made unto me, both there, and often elsewhere, I have found none that tie me yet, admit that mine is not always a more likely solution than their conclusions. True it is that proofs and reasons grounded upon fact and experience I untie not for indeed they have no end but I often cut them, as Alexander did his knot although when all is said and done it is an over-valuing of one’s conjecture to by them cause a man to be burned alive.

I am neither a Judge, nor a counselor unto kings, very far from any such worthiness, but rather a man of the common stamp and both by my deeds and sayings, born and vowed to the obedience of public reason. He that should register my humors to the prejudice of the simplest law, or opinion, of custom of this village, would greatly wrong himself, and injure me as much. For in what I say, I gape for no other certainty, but such as was then my thought. A tumultuous and wavering thought. It is by way of discourse only that I speak at all and nothing by way of advise. Nec me pudet, ut istos, fateri nescire, quod nesciam. ‘Nor am I shamed, as they are to confess I know not that which I do not know.’

Many abuses are engendered into the World; or to speak more boldly, all the abuses in the World are engendered upon this, that we are taught to fear to make profession of our ignorance, and are bound to accept and follow all that we cannot refute, We speak of things by precepts and resolutions but I am drawn to hate likely things when men go about to set them down as infallible. I love, on the other hand, those words and phrases which mollify and moderate the temerity of our propositions" "It may be', 'Peradventutre', 'In some sort', 'Some', 'It is said', "I think' and such like and I have been a teacher I would have put this manner of answering in their mouths, inquiring and not resolving: 'What means it?', 'I understand it not', 'It may well be' that they should have rather kept the form of learners until three score years of age than present themselves Doctors at ten, as many do. There is some kind of ignorance strong and generous that for honor and courage is not beholding to knowledge: an ignorance which to conceive rightly there is required no less learning than to conceive true learning.

I would not be so hardy to speak, if was your duty to believe me: and so I answered a great man who blamed the sharpness and contention of my exhortations. When I see you bent and prepared on one side, with all the endeavor I can, I will propose the contrary to you, to resolve and enlighten your judgment but not to subdue and bind the same. God hath your hearts in his hands, and he will furnish you with a choice. I am not so malapert as to desire that my opinions alone to give sway to a matter of such important. My fortune has not raised them to so powerful and deep conclusions.

Truly, I have not only a great number of complexions, and an infinite many of opinions from which, had I a son of my own, I would dissuade him, willingly make him to distaste them. What? If the truest are not ever the most commodious for man, he being of so strange and untamed composition: whether it be to the purpose or from the purpose, it is no great matter.

"Of the Lame and Crippled", Florio's Montaigne, Third Book, Chapter 11. edited and abridged.

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You’ve got your two kinds of people now, when you get down to it. On the one hand you’ve got your rebel mentality whose whole bag or groove or what have you is going against power, rebelling. Your spit-in-the-wind type who feels powerful going against power and the Establishment and what have you. Then, type two, you’ve got the other type, which is the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly.

So imagine you are a type two. There’s more than they think. The age of the rebel is over. It’s the eighties now. If You’re a Type Two, We Want You- that should be their slogan. Check out the blowing wind, man. Join up with the side that always gets paid. We shit you not. The side of the law and the force of the law, the side of the tide and gravity and that one law where everything always gradually gets a little hotter until the sun up and blows. Because you got your two unavoidables in life, just like they say. Unavoidability – now that’s power, man. Either be a mortician or join the Service, if you want to line yourself up with real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further. You can trust me on that, my man. (page 105)

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Our house was outside the city, off one of the blacktop roads. We had us a big dog that my daddy would keep on a chain in the front yard. A big part German shepherd. I hated that chain but we didn’t have a fence, we were right off the road there. That dog hated that chain. But he had dignity. What he’d do, he’d never go out to the length of that chain. He’d never even go out to where that chain got tight. Even if a mailman pulled up, or a salesman. Out of dignity, this dog pretended like he chose this one area to stay in that just happened to be inside the length of the chain. He just up and made it not relevant. Maybe he wasn’t pretending – maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world. He had a power to him. All his life on that chain. I loved that damned dog.”(page 117)

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Sugar in cake has several different functions. One, for instance, is the absorb moisture from the butter, or perhaps shortening, and release it slowly over time, keeping the cake moist. Using less sugar than the recipe calls for produces what is known as a dry cake. Don’t do that. (page 105)

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

The Novel by Richard Rorty

2011-04-18T12:27:00.002-04:00

Given the immense influence the novel has come to have in recent times, it is hard for us the remember that such writers as Milton and Spinoza, Dr. Johnson and Hume, Burke and Kant, were familiar with only a few, rather primitive, examples of this genre. The burgeoning of the novel in the 19th and 20th centuries has altered the the map of the Western intellectual world and it has done so in ways that the philosophers and literary critics of the 17th and 18th century could never have foreseen.

The emergence of the novel has contributed to a growing conviction among intellectuals that when we think about the effects of our actions on other human beings we can simply ignore a lot of questions that our ancestors traditionally thought relevant. These include Euthyphro’s question about whether our actions are pleasing to the gods, Plato’s question about whether they are dictated by a clear vision of the Good, and Kant’s question about whether their maxims can be universalized. Instead, a decision about what to do should be determined by as rich and full a knowledge of other people as possible – in particular-, knowledge of their own descriptions of their actions and of themselves. Our actions can be justified only when we are able to see how these actions look from the points of view of those affected by them.

Most novels tell us how other erring mortals think of themselves, how people quite unlike ourselves contrive to put the actions that appall us in a good light, how they give meaning to their miserable or tragic or banal lives. The problem of how to live our own lives then becomes a problem of how to balance our needs against theirs, and their self-descriptions against ours. To have a more educated, developed and sophisticated moral outlook is to be able to grasp more of these needs, and to understand more of these self-descriptions.

I have said previously that religion, in its unphilosophized form, resembles the novel in that it attempts to put us in relations to persons which are not mediated by questions of truth. The relation between a pious but uneducated Athenian of the 5th century and one of the Olympian deities, like that between an illiterate Christian and Christ, is an attempt to find redemption by getting in touch with a special, very powerful, immortal, sort of person. As Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy, that sort of search for redemption becomes tinted with questions of truth only when Socrates, “with his belief in the explicabality of the nature of things,” suggests that “the mechanism of making concepts, judgments and inferences is to be prized above all other human activities.” The search becomes philosophical only after people like Socrates and Euripides have taken a skeptical stance towards the gods, a stance that Homer, and perhaps Aeschyles, would have been incapable of adopting.

The big difference, however, between religious worship and novel-reading is that immortals are the object of adoration or self-abnegating love or fearful obedience, rather than people in whose shoes we are trying to put ourselves. As soon as we begin to want to understand the gods, or to make Christianity or Buddhism reasonable, religion begins to fade away and be replaced by philosophy. That is why Martin Luther described such attempts at reasonableness as diabolical temptations and why Kierkegaard described them as occasions of sin. But novels rarely offer us god-like heroes and heroines, to whom our reaction resembles that of religious believer towards deities ( though some, of course, do – Superman comic books and the fantasies of Ayn Rand, for example.)

Obviously, the novel is not the only literary genre which helps us achieve a more developed and sophisticated moral outlook. Homer’s epics, Herodotus’s travelogues, Thucydides’s history, Theophrastus’s characterology, and Plutarch’s biographies did this sort of work in the ancient world, supplemented by such primitive fictions as those of Petronius and Apuleius. In our own time, ethnography, historiography, and journalism continue to broaden our sense of the possibilities open to human lives. But the novel is the genre which gives us most help in grasping the variety of human life and the contingency of our own moral vocabulary.

Novels are the principle means which help us imagine what it is like to be a cradle Catholic losing his faith, a redneck fundamentalist taking Jesus into her heart, a victim of Pinochet coping with the disappearance of her children, a kamikaze pilot of the Second World War living with the fact of Japan’s defeat, a bomber pilot who dropped fire-bombs on Tokyo coping with the moral price of America’s victory, or an idealistic politician coping with the pressures that multinational corporations bring to bear on the political process.

Novel-reading often increases tolerance for the strange, and initially repellent, sorts of people. But the motto of the novel is not “to understand all is the forgive all.” Rather, it is “Before you decide that an action was unforgivable, make sure that you know how it looked to the agent.” You may well conclude that it was indeed unforgivable, but the knowledge of why it was done may help you avoid committing actions that you yourself will later find unforgivable. That is why reading a great many novels is the process by which young intellectuals of our time hope to become wise. This hope is the same that drove young intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries to read a great many religious and philosophical treatises.

Philosophers and theologians today who are dubious about the idea that novels are important for education think one can answer moral questions by saying, for example, “all children of God Matter” or “all rational agents matter” or “all those affected by our actions matter.” But questions always arise about whether infidels count as the children of God, or the densely ignorant or stupid as rational agents, or whether we are justified in being paternalistic towards those who do not grasp their own best interest. An increasing sense of the vacuity of general formula for deciding hard cases leads us away from philosophy and towards literary forms that tell us more about that these recalcitrant sort of people look like to themselves.

I can sum up much of what I have been saying as follows: people read religious scriptures and philosophical treatises to escape from ignorance of how non-humans things are, but they read novels to escape from egotism. “Egotism”, in the sense in which I am using the term, does not mean “selfishness”, it means something more like “self-satisfaction”. It is a willingness to assume that one already has all the knowledge necessary for deliberation, all the understanding of the consequences of a contemplated action that could be needed, It is the idea that one is now fully informed, and thus in the best possible position to make the correct choices.

Egotists who are inclined to philosophize hope to short-circuit the need to find out what is on the mind of other people. They would like to go straight to the way things are ( to the will of God, or moral law, or the nature of human beings) without passing through other people’s self-descriptions. Religion and philosophy have often served as shields for fanaticism and intolerance because they suggest that this sort of short-circuiting has actually been accomplished. Novel-readers, by contrast, are seeking redemption from insensitivity rather than from impiety or irrationality. They may not know or care whether there is a way things really are, but they worry about whether they, are sufficiently aware of the needs of others. Viewed from this angle, the hegemony of the novel can be viewed as an attempt to carry through Christ’s suggestion that love is the only law.

The person who hopes to render more confident moral judgments as the result of the study of religious or philosophical treatises is usually hoping to find a principle that will permit of application to concrete cases, for an algorithmm that will resolve moral dilemmas. But the person who hopes for greater sensitivity just wants to develop the know-how that will let him make the best of what is always likely to be a pretty bad job – a situation in which people are likely to get hurt, no matter what decision is taken…

”Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises”, 2001, by permission of the Estate of Richard Rorty.[The Rorty Reader]

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

2011-04-17T10:02:00.002-04:00

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture’s wire beyond which one horse smells at the other’s behind, the lead horse’s tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never touches tail. Read these.

Polytheism by Richard Rorty

2011-03-31T12:22:00.006-04:00

There is a famous passage near the end of The Varieties of Religious Experience at which William James says

If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may find all worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.

In The Gay Science Nietzsche argues that morality – in the wide sense of the need for acceptance of binding laws and customs- entails “hostility against the impulse to have an ideal of one’s own.” But, he says, the pre-Socratic Greeks provided an outlet for individuality by permitting human beings “ to behold, in some distant overworld, a plurality of norms: one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him.” In this way, he says, “the luxury of individuals was first permitted; it was here that one first honored the rights of individuals.” For in pre-Socratic polytheism “the free-spiriting and many-spiriting of man attained its first preliminary form- the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes.”

Here is a definition of ”polytheism” that covers both Nietzsche and James. You are a polytheist if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs. Isaiah Berlin’s well-known doctrine of incommensurable values is, in my sense, a polytheistic manifesto. To be a polytheist in this sense you do not have to believe that there are nonhuman persons with the power to intervene in human affairs. All you need to do is abandon the idea that we should try to find a way of making everything hang together, which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell all of them the same thing.

Once ones sees no way of ranking human needs other than by playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters. Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction you need – all the philosophical advice you are ever going to get about your responsibilities to other human beings. For human perfection becomes a private concern, and our responsibilities to others becomes a matter of permitting them as much space to pursue these private concerns – to worship their own gods, so to speak, as is compatible with granting an equal amount of space to all.

The privatization of perfection permits James and Nietzsche to agree with Mill and Mathew Arnold that poetry should take over that religion has played in the formation of human lives. They also agree that nobody should take over the function of the clergy. For poets are to secularized polytheism what the priests of a universal church are to monotheism. Once you become polytheistic, you will turn away not only from priests but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists – from anyone who purports to tell you how things really are, anyone who invokes the distinction between the true world and the apparent world that Nietzsche ridiculed in Twilight of the Idols. Both monotheism and the kind of metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world is really like are replaced with democratic politics. A free consensus about how much space for private perfection we can allow each other takes the place of the quest for “objective” values, the quest for a ranking of human needs that does not depend upon such a consensus.

So far I have been playing on the similarities between Nietzsche, and the American pragmatists. Now I want to turn to the two most obvious differences between them: their attitudes toward democracy and their attitude toward religion. Nietzsche thought democracy was “Christianity for the people” Christianity deprived of the nobility of spirit which Christ himself, and perhaps a few of the more strenuous saints, had been capable. Dewey thought of democracy as Christianity cleansed of the hierarchic, exclusionists elements. Nietzsche thought those who believed in a traditional monotheistic God were foolish weaklings. Dewey thought of them as so spell-bound by the work of one poet as to be unable to appreciate the work of other poets. Dewey thought that the sort of “aggressive atheism” on which Nietzsche prided himself is unnecessarily intolerant. It has, he said, “something in common with traditional supernaturalism.”

I want first to argue that Nietzsche’s contempt for democracy was an adventitious extra, inessential to his overall philosophical outlook. Then I shall get down to my main task in this paper – defending Dewey’s tolerance for religious belief against those who think that pragmatism and religion do not mix…

After Dewey realized that his mother had made him unnecessarily miserable by burdening him with a belief in original sin, he simply stopped thinking that, in James words, “there is something wrong about us as naturally stand.” He no longer believed that we could be “saved from the wrongness by making the proper connection with higher powers.” He thought that all that was wrong with us was that the Christian ideal of fraternity had not yet been achieved –society had not yet become pervasively democratic. That was not a problem to be solved by making proper connection with higher powers, but a problem of men to be solved by men.

When Christianity is treated as a social gospel, it acquires the advantage which Nietzsche attributed to polytheism: it makes the most important human achievement “creating for ourselves our own new eyes,” and thereby “honors the rights of individuals.” As Dewey put it, “Government, business, art, religion, all social institutions have a purpose…to set free the capacities of human individuals…The test of their value is the extent to which they educate every individual into the full stature of his possibility.”

For John Dewey, the principle symbol of what he called “the union of the ideal and the actual” was the United States of America treated as Whitman treated it: as symbol of openness to the possibility of as yet undreamt of, ever more diverse, forms of human happiness. Much of what Dewey wrote consists of endless reiteration of Whitman’s caution that “America…counts, as I reckon, for her justification and success, (for who, as yet, dare claim success?) almost entirely on the future…For our New World I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come.”

Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism, pp. 21-36 in Morris Dickstein (ed.)The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, 1998, Duke University Press