15 posts from November 2009

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

 

—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835

 

Existentialism comes to Valhalla. The Bothersome Man, a rather bizarre Norwegian movie, has its disturbing moments. It is difficult to decide if those moments take place when the main character, Andreas, cuts his finger off or gets himself run over by a train a few times, or if those moments are in the vast spaces between those somewhat gruesome moments when seemingly NOTHING of interest happens that Andreas might lodge in his mind as a worthwhile memory.

Andreas, we surmise, kills himself in the opening scene; I suspect because he finds everything in life completely vapid and banal. Everything seems absolutely and totally material to him and so he throws himself in front of an oncoming train, only to wake up in a world one level further down in an existentialist’s Dante’s inferno where everything is one degree MORE banal, vapid, and meaningless. Refusing to be satisfied with a world that has no pain but no meaning (and no smell and no passion), Andreas eventually discovers a crack in a basement wall through which he discovers the slightest hint – the slightest smell of beauty. A woman singing. A child laughing. When he jackhammers through, he discovers, yet ever so briefly, a world, like the one he came from in the life before this. Not entirely meaningful but one level less vapid than the one he has wound up in. It is a world where you can at least taste the food. A world like ours.

Alas, “the angels” in this world he has been deposited in will not tolerate this breaking down of walls. They come and haul him off, seal up the wall, and stuff Andreas in a bus that dumps him off in a world one level lower in the hell of meaninglessness. No one can understand why Andreas cannot simply be happy with meaninglessness and order. This new world he has been sent to, we surmise from the howling of the wind as the final scene draws to a close, is one level chillier and less interesting than the last. In short, to kill yourself is not a sin. It is something people “just do” from time to time. But to try and find meaning? That cannot be tolerated. People who do that are taken away and deposited in worlds where that hope becomes even more impossible to achieve.

  "...how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!... There can be no peace without hope."  - Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague

Question for Comment: What do you think you will "wake up to" when you die?

I just watched FRONTLINE'S Breaking the Bank. I am not sure what to say that has not already been said really. Really. It is like watching Rome burn. Why talk about it? I think I will just share some lines from Juvenal's Satires, descriptions of life in Rome in the days before its fall.

"Why tell how my heart burns dry with rage when I see the people hustled by a mob of retainers attending on one who has defrauded and debauched his ward, or on another who has been condemned by a futile verdict—for what matters infamy if the cash be kept? The exiled Marius carouses from the eighth hour of the day and revels in the wrath of Heaven, while you, poor Province, win your cause and weep!

. . . Would you not like to fill up a whole note-book at the street crossings when you see a forger borne along upon the necks of six porters, and exposed to view on this side and on that in his almost naked litter, and reminding you of the lounging Maecenas one who by help of a scrap of paper and a moistened seal has converted himself into a fine and wealthy gentleman?

. . . For when was Vice more rampant? When did the maw of Avarice gape wider? When was gambling so reckless? Men come not now with purses to the hazard of the gaming table, but with a treasure-chest beside them. What battles will you there see waged with a cashier for armour-bearer! Is it a simple form of madness to lose a hundred thousand sesterces, and not have a shirt to give to a shivering slave? Which of our grandfathers built such numbers of villas, or dined by himself off seven courses?

"What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie . . . No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff . . . A man's word is believed in exact proportion to the amount of cash which he keeps in his strong-box."

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat1eng.html

Question for Comment: What do you think is the root cause of the present financial crisis?
 

A few days ago, I dropped in at a blood drive and donated some blood. The man who took it was Serbian. He told me a small part of his story but not all. And I wondered what kind of story lies behind the decision to take one's family and move to another country altogether?

The movie, The Trap is not a pleasant look at the difficult lives of post Milosevic Serbia. It is not a pleasant movie. It is about a moral and ethical dilemma that no one should ever have to face.  Set in a context where criminals have money and good people don't, where some people can buy picture frames with the money that could save other people's children's lives, the Trap explores the complexities of moral decision making in a society that is fundamentally immoral. And I think in many ways, it shows how difficult it is for Serbians to find their way to doing right after having, for so long, allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing things that they now know were wrong.

"When I was little, I imagined that life was a film that you could rewind and start again where you wanted" Mladen tells his wife after explaining that the only way he could come up with the money to pay for his son's surgury was to commit a murder. For Mladen, there is no path to redemptions besides confession of what he has done and explanation of why he thought, in the moment, it was justified. When he pleads that he killed a man to save a boy, we are left to wonder if he is asserting his guilt or innocence.

The Trap is a profoundly depressing movie in almost all respects. At its core is a plaguing question that no one likes to ask but everyone answers. Are some lives more valuable than others? Mladen and his wife move towards the climax like the protagonists of Greek tragedies. We are left to wonder, "How do people with such good intentions get so screwed and so messed up?

As an aside, the movie reminded me of Robert Frost's poem, Home Burial. A poem in which a husband and wife grow increasingly distant as a result of the way they deal with their grief differently.

Question for Comment: Do you think there is something fundamentally immoral about social systems that do not provide healthcare to all children, regardless of their income?

“You have listened long enough.  Demonstrate your note.” Seamus Heaney, Station Island

My hat is off to Tal Birdsey and the students who made him worth listening to. As a student and teacher of Vermont History and as a person who has tried to visualize different ways of organizing young people into learning communities practically my entire adult life, watching someone throw themselves off a cliff like this was an immense pleasure. I couldn’t help but think of Emerson’s words in Self-Reliance when he writes:

“Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

The beautiful thing about this book and the thing that makes it unlike most books on education is that it has a voice. Tal Birdsey is not a curriculum but a personality. He does not say “teach like me and you will succeed” but “teach like you and you will succeed.” Reading some of these chapters is like listening to a Socratic dialog in which Socrates himself captures the sound of Socrates teaching.

Everything lasting in education begins with intention and succeeds through personality and this book testifies to that. Birdsey quotes the sculptor in Chiam Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev “Asher, anyone can draw.  Art is when it is connected to the scream inside you.’” The Northbranch school is “designed” - if you can use that word - to give young people a place to hear and express that scream, and to shape it in the cleft of the rock of community that safety creates.

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

“These kids . . . were at the chasm between childhood and adulthood.  At  that threshold I should be able to hold them for a moment and give them something of themselves to take before they went.”

“We most likely had assembled the least credentialed middle school faculty in America.  It is a miracle that anyone at all trust us with his or her children.”

“Compiling nice deeds done was not part of the state of Vermont school standards.  In fact, nothing we did the first weeks would fit in a school district’s curriculum rubric.  I understood the state’s standards but didn't care much about them.  I cared about understanding my students and learning who they were and how to make them feel they were making something new and important.  I cared about what they yearned to know and understand.”

 “Certainly, conventional intellectual knowledge was important.  How else would they grow up and be able  to enter the world to do rewarding and meaningful work?  Mastery of facts, logic, and reason, and facility in linear and critical thinking were essential.  But I was talking about fluency in the language of the heart, which emerged from willingness to speak from deeply felt experience.  Yes, I wanted them to be able to say things well.  Even more, I want them to have something valuable to say.”

“I was realizing that school was a place where such meandering dialogue could happen, where we could create something like a Greek symposium, where the discussion was given time and honor.  Our work was that constant interplay of question and answer, speaking and listening, searching and finding.”

“I had a teaching postulate: a good teacher will ask at least 100 questions a day, 18,000 per school year, half of which might be philosophical, theoretical, ambiguous, or otherwise mystical in nature.”

“My dream of what I wanted them to learn to not come back to me regurgitated a test or other conventional achievements.  It was creation out of nothing, creation out of them, meaning wrested from the simplest, most complex materials: books, a box of pencils, two tables, and 12 kids and their teachers looking for something great inside each other.”

The other day, my own son said to me that he wished more classes were like math classes. Where something was taught and then students got to engage in constructing something. In short, he was wishing that more teachers believed that young people had something valuable inside them that needed a school to help mine as opposed to the belief that all that was valuable was outside the student standing in need of an injection of that value. “My students love it when their words or actions had influence,” says Tal. “We are mystics.  All of us. We have the inner light in the eye of the heart. They're great souls.  We are the sweet cold water.  Our minds and hearts are whirling dervishes.  But we have to listen.”

Part Rumi. Part Socrates. Part George Fox. Part Jung. Part Calvin and Hobbes. His insistence on the necessity of chaos reminded me of M. Scott Peck’s work on community building (The Different Drum) where Peck talks about the futility of constructing communion from pseudo-communities of predictable safety. This is a different kind of safety. A safety that, like the Psalms, allows people to curse God, doubt human goodness, brag, and wonder. A place where it is safe to be entirely human. “The school had to be safe enough for my students locate that self,” says Tal Birdsey,

“to loose what was snarling and alive inside .  Then the school could become a true reflection of their minds as they discovered it, as though for the first time in the history of the world. The class had to be safe for anything, including disharmony.  Harmony in a classroom could be utterly numbing -- dissonance and dissent, atonality and cacophony were, to my mind, the greater provocateur for learning.”

Tal speaks of the greatest compliment that any teacher could hope to receive from a student. “Sometimes I have thought that the school is like the only place where the lilies are considered at all, she said.”

This is not a school that originated in the mind of someone wanting to know what minimum had to be reached to achieve a State License. One gets the feeling that Tal Birdsey was not the sort to ask a teacher how long a paper had to be. The proper question for anything we set out to do in life is, as he puts it, “How great does it have to be?”

I have often thought of my courses not as History courses but as “critical thinking courses that use History as a medium.” I suspect that Tal Birdsey sees them as “feeling” courses that use … everything from Coltrane to pasta noodles as a medium.  

 “We think by feeling.  What is there to know??” Theodore Rothke

Question for comment: Have you ever had a teacher that actually cared more about YOU than the curriculum?

I am so glad that I do not have Andrew Krepinevich’s job. Trained at West Point and 21 years in the military, he spends his life imagining future military conflicts and advocating that we spend lots of money preparing to fight them. If he is not on the payroll of the military-industrial complex, he ought to be. His book 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21rst Century takes  a look at seven different conflict stories, treating each “deadly scenario” as though it we already history and telling their story as matter-of-factly as possible.

In the “Collapse of Pakistan” Islamic militants take over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. In “War Comes to America” terrorists begin detonating nuclear (with former Soviet nuclear arsenal origins) in American cities. In “Pandemic” infectious diseases in Mexico create an invasionary wave of refugees over the border.  In “Armageddon: The Assault on Israel” increased weapons sophistication in the Arab-Israeli conflict, funded by a militant Iran escalates into a region wide war that profoundly interrupts the price of oil. In “China’s Assassin’s Mace” economic destabilization in China caused by demographic instabilities combined with military conflict over Taiwan leads to an intractable war over American bases and Sea Lanes along the Pacific Rim. In “Just-Not-On-Time: The War on the Global Economy” again, terrorist attacks on the Malacca Straits and Iranian militancy in the Strait of Hormuz leads to massive disturbances in energy and commercial supply lines. Finally, in “Who Lost Iraq” Krepinevich explores the widening impact of sectarian instability in an Iraq, left to its own devices.

The author’s conclusion amounts to an appeal for more defense spending, more investment of mind and attention to the affairs of future wars, and more preparation for wars of different kinds. “Are you scared yet?

Needless to say, it would be beyond my pay grade to assert that he does not know what he is talking about. He clearly is an informed man. And I can  not even criticize him for a lack of imagination. That he has in abundance. It is the direction that his imagination takes. His solutions to imagined conflict involve military deterrence rather than imagined ways to pre-empt the collision of alternate visions for the global future. Throughout almost every one of his scenarios is an assumption that Islamic militancy, in its various forms, will be a force of significant threat into the foreseeable future. In several of his scenarios, it is the idea of a global Islamic State that serves as the rationale behind the majority of threats.

In none of the scenarios is America the aggressor. And none of them involves an aggressive act by one of our key allies (Japan, Israel, Britain, etc.) Krepinevich has no solutions for drying up the swamps of despair and poverty in which oppositional attacks arise. His job is to prepare for the attacks themselves. Not once does he counter the forces of chaos and conflict visible in the present world with the many and numerous initiatives (like those that I take part in) that bring people off different cultures together. It is as though he does not see the massive exchange of communication and comrade-building activity that is going on in the world side by side with military tactical advances and evolving weaponry. His perspective on the future of this planet assumes that we will always live in adversarial relationships.

Question for Comment: Do you think the lion will ever lie down with the lamb and swords be beat into plowshares?

 

I cannot believe I used an hour of my BIRTHDAY to watch the rest of this movie. But I did. It is funny how the Rubiks Cubeedness of it challenges me even if its essential morbidity depressed me. Maybe on some subconscious level I have a greater desire to be interested than happy? Grin. WARNING. I RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE TO NO ONE. If you feel the need to depress yourself, just go read Ecclesiastes and pretend that its your only sane way of looking at life.

To start with, in understanding this movie, you really have to be a bit familiar with the whole philosophy (and I use the term with caution here) of Post-Modernism and Existentialism. Camus, Sartre, etc. argue that life has no meaning … no universal meaning other than the meaning we create for ourselves and pretend to have. You just sort of have to imagine some sort of storyline in the universe that gives your life meaning and then play along as if that story is true. That sort of thing.

In short, life is just a play and you can come up with whatever storyline you want. Title your life whatever you want to title it (Hoffman’s character, Caden, does this several times throughout the movie. He keeps saying that he NOW knows how to direct the play he is directing and changing his mind about the titles.) Sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don’t but that is the whole post-modernist point really. Nothing REALLY makes sense so feel free to give yourself a life philosophy that does or doesn’t. No matter. Caden thinks of calling his play Simulacrum – a word meaning “something that is only a pretending to be real” – a “fake” – a “fraud” – a facsimile. There is a whole history of the word "Simulacrum" in Philosophy that is being referred to here.

Seriously, Part of this is stepping into insanity (as Frederich Nietzsche did when he began believing the world WAS meaningless).

One key point of the movie is this: Ultimately, everyone is going to fall apart and die and be nothing. Caden opens the movie directing the play Death of a Salesman, a play about the meaninglessness of this guy’s life (Willie Loman). Only he uses YOUNG actors. As if to convey that young or old, your life is still in a trajectory of death, dying, and decay.

A few quotes from Death of a Salesman may help:

“I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.
Linda, referring to her husband Willie Loman, Act 1

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.
Willy Loman, Act 2

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.
Willy Loman, Act 2

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

Biff: Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!
Willie: I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!
Act 2

"I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life." Act 1, Part 2

"Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!" Act 2, Part 7

Anyway, Death of a Salesman is pretty depressing too. Synechdoche, New York is just saying that what is true of an old man dyeing is true of everyone. Indeed, the title, Synecdoche, is a word that means this very thing. It is a word for something small that describes the whole. Like when you say you have hired a few extra “hands” for a project you are working on. The word “hands” stands in for the entire people you have hired. Kaufman, the director, is saying that we are all just playing out parts in a big play within a play that doesn't matter. Our lives as individuals don’t matter just like the entire story of civilization does not matter. The stage gets blown up. the City gets blown up. The main characters all die. On the BIG level and the small, same thing. And this is toyed with in comparing HIS art (The HUGE play) with his wife’s (The microscopic paintings). What is true of the meaningless person is true of the meaningless universe. Both the paintings and the play say "We are dieing."

But even when we are young we pretend we are not dieing. For example, early in the movie, Caden’s alarm clock goes off and we hear that it is September first. A moment later at the kitchen table, the TV reports that it is Halloween. Seconds after that, a  radio tells us that it is November second. His disease goes from symptom to “its over” in a matter of minutes.

In the movie, a woman buys a house while it is burning down and it continues to bur down every time a scene is set in that house over the course of many years. I think the whole point of the burning house is in this. Right from the very beginning, you know the house is burning down. But you just pretend that it is not and buy the place. This is the quintessential way of looking at the universe as a Post Modernist nihilist. We are ALL dying but we all pretend that we are not. Our universe will someday die too and yet we pretend that it is not. We (as individuals, as a culture, as a world) are all “hurling towards death” as Caden says. This is the message that Caden gives to the people trying out for his “play” – that they are ALL dying and all pretending that they are not.

In this way of seeing the world, it doesn’t matter if we play one part or another really. We can be whoever we want to and shift from one character to another as we wish as Caden and his characters do. They barely know who they are after a while they switch so often. Ultimately, nothing matters and just when we think we have figured out the meaning of life, we die. As Caden does in the end.

And the movie keeps inserting tragedies, - Horrible unexplainable tragedies that make no “sense”. People die. People get cancer. People get diseases. People betray people. They commit suicide, etc. etc. etc. But then they don’t die or they come back. Who cares?  You might ask, is there ANYTHING redemptive about this view of the world? Well, all the director offers you is the hope that you will find someone to hold you in the middle of it. While your life comes apart and nothing makes sense and no one cares, and everyone falls apart and the world blows up, and everyone dies and nothing matters, all you can hope for is company, intimacy, and maybe sex. A shoulder to put your head on attached to a face that will smile at you and comfort you and care even though you don’t deserve it.This is so important to Caden that he will be anything anyone who will love him asks him to be. He will say he has done things he has not done. He will take any part he has to play if it provides him some hope that someone will love him and hold him (be it his wife or daughter or a complete stranger).

It is funny that they call this point of view “Post-Modernism because you can read all about it in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a book written to explain what the world looks like without the lens of faith. “”Vanity of vanities,” says the preacher, “all is vanity. Chasing after the wind”.

I suppose he is simply making the argument that you should just give up trying to find meaning in life and just do what you need to do to meet your basic needs. It is pretty bleak.

Ultimately, a person would be much better served using the two hours to tell someone in their family that they loved them. ;-)

Cranford by Elizabeth Glaskell is not a movie for men who enjoy watching the Superbowl I am afraid. There are no swordfights. Based on Glaskell’s 1851 novel of the same name, its principle focus is the internal daily lives of the women in an English village soon to receive its first taste of modernity as the train companies plan to connect it to the world.

In short, it is about Victorian society before it changes, as it is about to change, changing, and after it changes. I suppose you could say that it is about our own times as well in that regard. In one scene of the movie, one of the characters reads a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson as she bemoans the loss of a true love that she might have had as a young woman. A love she lost by being overly concerned with the influence of her sister. The poem is entitled Locksley Hall  and is fairly lengthy but I thought I might quote some of it here.

It is a poem about a young soldier who is traveling with his unit past his childhood home, Locksley Hall. He pauses, like Robert Frost pauses by the dark woods on a snowy evening in Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening to spend a moment in reflection upon the fond memories of his youth – memories of nature, of the ocean, of the night skies, and memories of his dreams for the future.  

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—

But within these memories lies a trap that has been set for him. He begins to think of Spring . . . and then soon, of a youthful love he bbore for his cousin, Amy.

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

He remembers how he found her and how she responded to his affection.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.
And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.
And she turn'd--her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs--
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes--

Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong";
Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long."

I suppose we can all remember some point in time when the heaven of our happiness opened up upon us to find that the one we fancied, fancied us. He speaks of the joyful memories that ensued.

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,
And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fullness of the Spring.
Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips.

Everything beautiful. Everything as it should be. Everything unspoiled. And then this poem turns on a dime, from the glow of nostalgic bliss to the fiery bitterness of his broken heart. Alas, with a ferocity of one of England’s greatest Romantics, Tennyson storms against the social conventions that shipwrecked his life.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
Is it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

She marries another. Its an old story. Its been told before. It will be told again. Can he wish her happiness with this man that he thinks such ill thoughts of? He pictures her in all her perfections having to daily dose herself with his imperfections.

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.
What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine.
Go to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.
He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand--
Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!
Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,
Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.

He personally thinks she would be better off dead than with him. And he rages against the forces of society that have conspired against them. (Remember that for all we know, she could be much happier with her husband than she would have been with her former hearthrob but this is the broken hearted lover’s poem. Not hers.)  

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool!

He hates the conventions of Victorian Society that give the power of breaking up what he believes love and nature joined together. This is the heart of the Romantic Movement’s dissent from the societies they lived in. They railed against social structures that defied nature and ignored the emotional self.

Well--'t is well that I should bluster!--Hadst thou less unworthy proved--
Would to God--for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

“You messed up!” he wants to yell at her. “You messed up!” You caved in to some sort of pressure instead of following your heart and now look at me! I am a mess!” In the next lines, he tries to figure out how to contain the painfulness of his grief. Alas, if he pulls out the pain, he pulls out his heart. He speculates whether it is possible to isolate and quarantine memories of her betrayal so that he is left only with his memories of her affection. Can he somehow pretend that she was not one and the same but two people? One that loved him. One that left him?   

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?
I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root.
Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?
I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.
Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?

And here we come upon another turning point. One that I suppose all unrequited lovers have to navigate. Can they continue to love that which has chosen not to love them in return? Can they keep a memory of affection and seal off the memory of rejection? Tennyson determines that he –for one – cannot. She must be regarded as one person and that one person is the woman who left and therefore could never have loved him in the first place. Her later self annihilates the former.

No--she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore.
Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

I suspect that a line like that last one is what makes a poet like Tennyson great. It says it all. The pain of lost love is in this. That the mind WANTS to remember happy times and thus will it always take one to the memories of a person who crushed them later. And here, I suppose is where his angry vengeful spirit overflows with spiteful bitterness. She wishes upon her the misery of a lifelong regret.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.
Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,
To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.
Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years,
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;
And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.

I can just here the Toby Keith Singing that song “How Do You Like Me Now”

His moment of vengefulness is then interrupted by the thought that in the midst of her loneliness, she will most likely have children to comfort her and console her.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.
'T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.
Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest.
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.

“Damn!” HE says … “the love of children will console you and you will thereby forget me.” And even that seems unfair. Everything is unfair so long as he gets his love and he does not.  

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.
Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.

He next pictures her doing to her daughters what she allowed her parents to do to her, denying love its rightful place with “petty maxims” of Victorian repressiveness.

 

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.
"They were dangerous guides the feelings--she herself was not exempt--
Truly, she herself had suffer'd"--Perish in thy self-contempt!

He hopes that she will come eventually to deny and repress everything beautiful and everything alive. And here he reaches another turning point in dealing with his grief. He determines that he will pursue a life of action and adventure. He knows he has no money. All the golden gates are barred to him and he has no golden key with which to unlock them. There are no women whose gates are not “clogged with suitors” And thus he plans to head to the Orient as a soldier, to take advantage of the fact that there are wars to be fought abroad where he will perhaps die in battle or perhaps make his fortune and find himself a wife among the natives. His broken heart will not bode well for the people of India one is tempted to surmise.

Overlive it--lower yet--be happy! wherefore should I care?
I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.
What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow.
I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?

[A good deal of the poem passed over here]

Out of his vision of British empire and the march of civilization, his unit’s bugler calls him out of his meditations.

“Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.
Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain--
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:
Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine”

Tenyson’s soldier’s poisoned hearts bears the mark of a newfound mysogeny. From the hurt of one woman’s rejection is grown a crop of disdain for women in general. He considers the possibilities of removing himself to some far off tropical paradise where, beyond the bonds of Victorian conventions altogether, he will take himself “some savage woman” where “the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space”.

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;
Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd,--
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.

Or to burst all links of habit--there to wander far away,
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.
Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;
Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree--
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.
There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space;
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;
Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books--

He fantasizes finding a place where HE makes the rules and where children are not “civilized” by book learning, morality, and Victorian social conventions.

[part of the poem passed over here]

In the last stanza, he bids his farewell to Locksley Hall and all it represents, heading for the boats that will take him to some place in the British empire. He seems to have turned his vital emotional energy and converted it from grief to anger and from anger to imperialism.

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.
Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

Elizabeth Glaskell was married to a Unitarian minister it appears and for all intents and purposes, she was happy with her life as a mother and as a writer, but you can see that in her writing she treats the characters of Cranford as “endearing” and “charming” but in need of change. Her women all seem to be on a trajectory of softening, evolving. They fear the changes that the railroad will bring to Cranford and perhaps for good reason. But they each come to understand that change must come.

On this, the Romantics are right. When we are out of sync with nature. When our rules negate our realities, we perish in some way. It all goes back to Jesus’ parable of the wine and wineskins. Life – the heart – they cannot be contained in the confines of convention.

Change, repeated the social worker.  The way of ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds.  You will live, Risa.  Only in a different form.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Tonight I offer but a brief comment on the book of the day recommended by my son. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind  is a dystopian look at the future of the pro-choice/pro-life conflict in which a war ensues (as the Civil War once erupted over differing moral positions) and was ended by a compromise of half rights. In Unwind, fetuses come to term. Mothers of unwanted children are allowed by law to “stork” them – that is, to leave their unwanted children  on doorsteps and those recipients are required by law to keep them.

Even more thought provoking are new laws that allow teenagers between the ages of 13 andf 18 to be “unwound” – that is, dismembered into organs and tissue and donated to others in need of them. The law agrees to regard such people as still living as they go on to live their lives in the context of other bodies.

The book begins by introducing us to three of the main characters who have just discovered that they are to be unwound. They each find themselves in the same predicament by different means. One is simply unwanted by his parents. One is from an orphanage that is experiencing government cutbacks, and one is being tithed by his very religious family. The plot of the book includes periodic conversations between members of “normal” society and those who are scheduled to be “unwound” (they are never regarded as being killed) that reflect in many ways contemporary debates over abortion. Indeed, the whole novel is a parable intended to give teenagers the opportunity to reconsider their views on abortion in a context where it is camouflaged into something else, just different enough to be plausibly different and just just similar enough to be understood.

Some of those being sent to be unwound find themselves wondering what exactly the implications for a soul are when its body is “unwound”. They wonder what an appropriate response is to a society that regards their demise as a perfectly legal procedure.

Naturally, the great difference that one could draw between a thirteen year old slated to be “unwound” and a fetus has to do with consciousness and sensibility. These characters sense their plight. They seek to escape. They chose lives as fugitives. They resent not being consulted in the matter of their own existence. They feel anger. They feel betrayal. They question the morality of what is being done. They take philosophical positions on the nature of the soul and its relationship to the body. They love one another. They exhibit all the traits of what we have come to regard as “humanity”.

In a sense the author has asked us to ask ourselves “What if the unborn could think?” Some will object to the question. Others will find this a book worth reading as a means of stimulating a discussion about the relationship between law and morality.

I can only assure you, it will make you think. The scene where one of the characters goes through the process of being unwound is something not easily to be forgotten.

Every once in a while you meet someone who has had a unique life experience. This man has served as a chaplain in the Huntsville, Texas prison where, over the course of his career, he served as confidant and spiritual adviser to 95 death row inmates. After each execution, he went home and recorded his thoughts on tape as a means of processing the feelings that such involvement entailed for him psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. At the Death House Door documents the ethical dilemmas and struggles that someone with a compassionate intention goes through in "helping" someone to go "process" their own execution. As far as the warden is concerned, his job is to see to it that the prisoner arrives at his own execution willing to cooperate. As far as God is concerned, his job is to see to it that this human being is as prepared as he or she can be to meet his or her maker. As far as the inmate is concerned, his job is to address the fears and sorrows of the impending moment. And to do that, it almost seems as though a certain ability to form attachment that will not last through the night is needed. That has to be a difficult line to walk.

The documentary eventually leads to a lean in opposition to the death penalty but it does not assault the viewer from the beginning with that perspective. The director has done a good job presenting the issue in a morally complex fashion. One comes to the anti-death penalty conclusion slowly and only as the documentary's main subject does. The documentary does not pretend that many of the people executed under this man's watchful care were "nice" people. But it neither assumes that none were innocent. Sadly, humans are fallible and the mechanisms they use to protect themselves are no less so. Lethal injection, like a machine gun or a cruise missile serves as a tool in the hands of people who are as capable of errors of judgment as the rest of us. Should tool that can injure the innocent be banned from use on the guilty because we are imperfect discerners of the two? 

Definitely a movie to put on my list of discussion starters for Ethics class.

HERE are the last words and testaments of 444 Texas prisoners executed for murder since 1982 in case you are interested.

I had an idea tonight for another course that might be fun to prep for, if not teach someday. It would be a course on “Prodigy Literature.” It seems like the genre of child prodigy stories is growing much faster, as measured by numbers of titles on the shelves, than books about average children or less than average. My own son loves to read Orson Scott Card and the Ender series, Eoin Colfer’s Artimis Fowl series, Harry Potter, and a number of other books and series about young boys with unique gifts. Tonight, I finished one suggested to me by my son that I somewhat enjoyed Ookay. IT has its drawbacks and I cannot say that I recommend it).

He and I may argue about this tomorrow but I can’t find it in my heart to put it in the category of great literature but I did learn some things about him and about myself in reading it.

An Abundance of Katherines is about a young high school graduate with an IQ up around 200. Assume that is a good deal higher than my own. Grin. What I like about the book is that it traces the difficulty that intelligence creates in the social lives of young people afflicted with it. Colin, the main character in the book has just been dumped by his 19^th girlfriend, each of whom, we learn in the course of the story, was named “Katherine.” Like any 18 year old who has just been dumped, he is in pain. But I suspect that the pain is worse because a person like this cannot stop thinking about the sources of it. When your brain just naturally connects anything to a subject you are interested in, it becomes impossible to think about anything without quickly coming to think about the most important things.

We are introduced to Colin reading his yearbook.

“For the next 14 hours without pausing to eat or drink or throw up again, Colin read and reread his yearbook, which he had received just four days before.  Aside from the usual yearbook nonsense, it contained 72 signatures.  12 were just  signatures, 56 cited his intelligence, 25 said they wished they had known him better, 11 said it was fun to have him in English class, seven included the words “pupillary sphincter,” and a stunning 17 ended, “Stay Cool!”  Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than  a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangledesh  -- could stay rich.  Presumably, those 17 people were kidding.  He mulled this over -- and considered how  25 of his classmates, some of whom he'd been attending school with  for 12 years, could possibly have wanted to “know him better.”  As if they hadn't had a chance.”

These are just signatures in a yearbook. But notice how they can be analyzed and broken down into statistical conclusions. Everything has meaning in this sort of a mind. Everything can be connected to other things. Or as Colin says in his Eureka! Moment, “Love is graphable.” Here is Colin’s best friend, Hassan describing it.

“’How does he do it?  Does he just memorize everything?’  Lindsey was saying.

“No. Its not like that. It's like, if you or  me sat down and read a book about, say, the president, and we read that William Howard Taft was the fattest President and that one time he got stuck in a bathtub, that might click in our brains as interesting, and we would remember it, right?”  Lindsey laughed.  “You and I will read a book and find like three interesting things that we remember.  But Colin finds everything intriguing.  He reads a book about presidents and he remembers most of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as interesting.  Honestly, I've seen them do it with the phone book.  “He'll be like, oh there are 24 listings for Tischler. How fascinating.”

Colin, who is standing outside the door has to agree. But he tells us why he found the number of Tischlers in the phone book fascinating and … when he explains it, it makes sense. He also understands why it is that this ability to find anything interesting simply by associating that thing with other sets of interesting datasets is what makes it difficult for him to tell a story. “Authors never included the whole story;” he says,  “they just got to the point.  Colin thought the truth should matter as much as the point, and he figured that was why he couldn't tell good stories.”

When trying to explain why one of his former Katherines had dumped him, he explains,

“I was both too smart and too dumb for her.”

I suspect this is so because a smart person can connect many many things in their minds but they often cannot seem to connect the ones that are crucial to their social functioning. Perhaps they see so much, they miss too much? And when people who love them for connecting so many things, dump them for not connecting the right many things, the feeling of being dumped takes even longer to heal because everything they come across brings them back to it.

“You can love someone so much, he thought.  But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

Smart kids are no different than normal kids. They feel the need to be with someone that they can think out loud with. “That's who you really like.” Colin observes, “The people you can think out loud in front of.” But who wants to spend time with someone who can think out loud about the number of Tischlers in the phone book? Precious few.  And this is why Colin notes that books make better dates than people.

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”

I will close with Colin’s explanation of the difference between prodigies and geniuses.

“Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered.  Prodigies learn; geniuses do.  The vast majority of Child prodigies don't become adult geniuses.  Colin was almost certain that he was among that unfortunate majority.”

Alas, if I were ever a prodigy, I could find myself easily in a sentence like this.

Question for comment: Do you think that intelligent people are likely to be more lonely in life than most?