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A Few Words from the Editor
In my capacity of small publisher (very small), I keep
receiving e-mails, brochures, and newsletters assuring me that the
industry has never been more vibrant. Of course, this is true in a way.
Not only are hundreds of thousands of people publishing in quantity on the
Internet whose work would not have seen the light of day by conventional
means: the paper, print, and paste grind is also churning out titles
faster than Books in Print can list them all. To those who value
such superficial measurements, the proposition that literacy is in full
decline deserves a hearty laugh in the face.
The sound of that laugh would be the shrill, giddy,
untuned warble of a fool. The decline of freedom is often signaled by
outbreaks of extreme license; genuine religious faith tends to waste away
beneath deceptive bursts of cultic hysteria. They say a dying man
sometimes enjoys a surge of vigor right before his final plunge. Metaphors
and analogies aside, the proliferation of printed matter which we see
today is precisely what any serious student of culture would expect during
the last days of literacy. It isn’t volume that counts: it’s quality.
For about a millennium, northwestern Europe saw a production of
manuscripts in monastic scriptoria whose tally far surpassed the copies of
the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses put into circulation around
ancient Rome. Yet medieval "literate" Europe failed to nurture
Vergils and Ovids in record numbers. In fact, its audiences were at least
as fond of native oral traditions committed to writing for ready
performance on demand as they were of antiquity’s high-literate masters.
What scribal labor was not devoted simply to copying sacred texts and
important official documents was as apt to be lavished upon the Táin
Bó Cúalnge or the Chanson de Roland as upon the Thebaid—or
maybe, for that matter, upon a folksy rendition of the Thebaid
wherein monsters, witches, and the Wut of battle fury would play a
more prominent part. In some very significant sense, was this not an
extension of the oral age rather than an inauguration of the literate age?
By that reasoning, you may respond, the literate age
may be expected to linger well into the twenty-fifth century, comfortably
integrated with screens and keyboards. But you should then be missing the
point: to wit, that true, full literacy isolates the individual with his
thoughts, and is hence always resisted by human indolence. Speaking is
easier than writing, and button-pressing is easier than writing. The last
is indeed a sterile imitation of the first in its sad lack of genuine
sociability, yet an imitation thereof it surely is. The screened images
chatter away like warm bodies, and the clicked mouse shoots out responses
almost as casually as the loose tongue. As orality dominated the cultural
landscape for centuries wherein scribal literacy scratched and squinted,
so electronic transmission of prefabricated images and clichés has within
two generations suborned literacy to be its lowly handmaid. Our fellow
citizens now read in order to study TV Guide or stock prices or Web
directions to the great Nike online shoe sale. Even now, after just a
decade or so, many such instrumental lective chores have been replaced by
visual cues which light up when touched by a manual arrow. Reading fills
in the gaps where graphics remain ambiguous.
As for those tens of thousands of titles unleashed upon
the public annually, do not be deceived. Most are financial disasters. Of
these many, all too few fail in a noble endeavor to stir deep thought.
Like the best-sellers they emulate, the majority are ancillary to the new
crypto-oral culture of the screen. They peddle gossip about the rich and
famous; they spin visually lurid tales of epic slaughter whose degree of
psychological sophistication recalls a fifth-grade writing assignment of
thirty years ago; they pass along secrets about how to stuff a pepper,
fill a pie, and dice a salad that would have been whispered by grandmother
to granddaughter in the days when families still existed. And yes, such
documents will probably linger for a great many decades to come. How would
archaic Rome’s leadership have curbed mass hysteria without a book of
Sibylline prophecies which practically no one could read?
So read our issue and weep! Or better yet, read it and
enjoy, with that special, vanishing enjoyment of frequent pauses to review
an argument, to ponder an image—to go deeper. Tom Bertonneau’s essay
was the material cause of my decision to gather a special issue on this
subject; but, of course, the plight of literacy has vaguely concerned the
pages of every Praesidium ever published. Our creative work may
offer something of a relief to the considering of so many grim realities.
Quite without design, however, I happen to have emerged with a delightful
poem by Ralph Carlson about Internet courtship and a unique short story by
Fiona MacAlister about telemarketing. Coincidence? To some degree… but I
hasten to add that the artists among us can hardly be impervious to the
transformation of our psychic world. Indeed, I suspect they know better
than the rest of us what a rough ride awaits Western civilization.
The Irish proverb illustrated fetchingly on our cover,
by the way, is well suited to pre- and post-universalist tribalism, is it
not? Brace yourselves for more "survivalist" ethics.
~JH
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Thinking is Hard:
How a Damaged Literacy Hinders
Students from
Coming to Grips With Ideas
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Writing is a grand symbol of the Far, meaning not
only extension-distance, but also, and above all, duration and future
and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only in the
present, but through script one speaks to men, whom one has never seen,
who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard
centuries after he has passed away… Nothing is more characteristic of
a Culture than its inward relation to writing. (Oswald Spengler, Decline
of the West, Volume II [1923])
Tom
Bertonneau has contributed regularly to Praesidium since its
inaugural days, and is known in many of what few honest corners of the
academy remain as an invincible exponent of sound pedagogy and common
sense. He currently teaches English at SUNY Oswego.
I
It is not merely Oswald Spengler, but many another
among more recent thinkers, who has divined the indissoluble bond between
high culture or civilization and an historical alteration in consciousness
brought about by the written word, most particularly by alphabetic
writing.
Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato (1963),
describes the consequences of alphabetic literacy as a veritable
intellectual revolution, which, in the period between the eighth and the
fourth centuries B.C., transformed the tribal, the reactionary, the
superstitious into the philosophically inquisitive, the skeptical, and the
empirical—and so established the foundations for all subsequent
systematically conceptual endeavors. From the orally based customs of
their tenth and ninth century B.C. Dark Age, the Greeks of the Archaic
Period had inherited a paideia, or educational regimen, based on
memorization of fixed, rhythmically structured patterns, designed to be
spoken and heard. The human subject fostered by such a paideia is
by no means autonomous or rational in a modern sense but depends, rather,
on rote learning in rigid imitation of another who personally incarnates
the authority of the community. This regime of strictly mimetic education
will leave room neither for skepticism nor for analysis. Assuming that such things were possible
in an oral society (they appear not to be), they would be antithetic to
its fundamental organizing principle of dogmatic conformism. If writing,
as Spengler says, is "a grand symbol of the Far" that has
to do with "distance", then its antitype —what Walter J. Ong
Jr. has dubbed orality—is an index of and has to do with
closeness, and especially with the somatic and personal nearness of other
people and of the concrete features of the immediate lifeworld. Havelock
notes that "at some time towards the end of the fifth century before
Christ, it became possible for a few Greeks to talk about their ‘souls’
as though they had selves or personalities which were autonomous and not
fragments of the atmosphere nor of a cosmic life force, but what we might
call entities or real substances" (197). The salient marker of this
development was a shift in the valor of the term psyche, which
indeed had previously signified something like a mute "life
force":
In brief, instead of signifying a man’s ghost or
wraith, or a man’s breath or his life blood, a thing devoid of sense
and self-consciousness, it came to mean "the ghost that
thinks," that is capable both of moral decision and of scientific
cognition, and is the seat of moral responsibility, something infinitely
precious, an essence unique in the whole realm of nature. (197)
… [Around this time] the Greek pronouns, both
personal and reflexive, also begin to find themselves in new syntactical
contexts, used for example as objects of verbs of cognition, or placed
in antithesis to the "body" or "corpse" in which the
"ego" was thought of as residing. We confront here a change in
the Greek language and in the syntax of linguistic usage [that] is part
of a larger intellectual revolution, which affected the whole range of
the Greek cultural experience. (198)
Havelock elsewhere describes the same metamorphosis in
slightly different terms: "Another and more correct way of stating
the effect of the revolution… would be to say that it now becomes
possible to identify the ‘subject’ in relation to that ‘object’
which the ‘subject’ knows" (201). One might further modify the
formula to state that the species of literacy innovated by the Greeks
(alphabetic literacy together with prose) is the foundation of all objective
cognition. Descartes’s radical dichotomy of the res cogitans (the
thoughts we have) as against the res extensa (the things about
which we have thoughts) is thus already implicit in the
"syntax", as Havelock styles it, of Socrates and Plato. Where
the Archaic paideia trades in the figures-in-action and emotional
states of oral epic, on which it was based, and is participatory (mimetic)
in an almost gymnastic manner, the new prosaic philosophia, or the
literate education, emphasizes concepts, definitions, syllogisms—in
other words, it distances itself from persons and the lifeworld by asking
the subject to suppress his emotional reaction to a topic in favor of
detached assessment according to set criteria. It also creates topics that
are "not necessarily agents, that is, persons" but, rather,
"entities" (The Muse Learns to Write 101). The attitude
appears as early as Heraclitus (fifth century B.C.), when he asserts that
"of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be
uncomprehending… for although all things happen according to the Logos
men are like people of no experience" (qtd. in Kirk, Raven, and
Schofield 187); and later when he urges that "listening not to me
but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one" (187
[emphasis added]).
Appealing to his external criterion, the Logos,
Heraclitus at the same time complains that the many of his day have not
yet come to terms with it; they do not examine the thing in itself
according to its intrinsic character—the thing per
se (κατα φυσιν)—
but by implication only under the received, and by no means guaranteed,
opinion. The "not to me" is extraordinarily important, as it
brackets the ego in an unprecedented way. It suspends, rather more
accurately, the plural egos of contending, relativistic dispute, in which
no subject succeeds in separating affect from proposition. The enduring
battle in the sequence of the Platonic dialogues between the Socratic
passion for truth and the sophistic dedication to mere opinion stems from
the same scheme, which is why Havelock makes Plato’s oeuvre the armature
of his discussion.
Ong’s rehearsal of these same events and facts
demands attention on its own. In his indispensable Orality and Literacy
(1983), he describes how pre-literate communities "conceptualize and
verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the
human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more
immediate, familiar interaction of human beings" (42). By contrast,
"words are alone in a text" (101), where "they lack their
full phonetic qualities" (101) and so tend toward impartiality and
abstraction. The spoken word, confined to "situational, operational
frames of reference" (49), lacks literacy’s "consciously
contrived [and] articulable rules" (82), which, precisely because
they are "completely artificial" (81), force the subject to
reduce the otherwise seamless flow of events into its analytical
constituent elements. Just this suspension of the lifeworld, and of its
confrontation of personalities and subjective orientation, however, is
what exposes the mind "as never before not only to the external
objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self
against whom the world is set" (105). In a discussion of print, Ong
notes:
By removing words from the world of sound where they
had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating
them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual
space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to
think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more
and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print
encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort
of inert mental space. (131-132).
While the image of "inert mental space" might
irritate the vestigial Romantic in us all, we should remember that Ong
intends the phrase positively, for only when one can represent himself
neutrally can he submit himself to rigorous assessment and correction;
prior to that he can only conform. The transition from orality to literacy
therefore has not merely an intellectual implication in the restricted
sense, but a moral one as well. Furthermore, while the assertion that
"print encouraged the mind to think" in a new way about its own
contents might appear as a concession to contemporary relativism (there is
oral thinking and literate thinking and one is as good as the other), the
opposite is in fact the case: for only when the contents of observation
can be stored and evaluated as if apart from the observer does an
empirically verifiable objective knowledge at last appear. The
epistemological advance thus underpins the ethical one; and the ethical
one in turn reinforces the epistemological one. Havelock shows, in The
Greek Concept of Justice (1978), how the sense of what is right in,
say, The Iliad, remains subjective and ego-driven. Without a
concept of objective moral reference, might tends to make right, as the
old saying cynically insists. In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, which
benefit from later developments in a literacy still quite incipient when The
Iliad was written, we can by contrast already see the result of the
mental distancing spurred by writing: the whole point of Protagoras
or Gorgias is to define, as carefully as possible, ethical ideas
(virtue or justice) and to separate them from the rancor and selfishness
of personal claims.
Literacy—as Spengler or Havelock or Ong sees it —is
a momentous and yet tenuous achievement largely of the West. Vast areas of
the globe have been but little altered by the phenomenon of the
alphabetization of consciousness, or they have changed only superficially
without yielding a tenacious orality in their basic adjustment to life.
There is no particular reason to suppose, for example, that the regions of
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan visited by cognitive science researcher
Alexander Luria in the 1920s and 30s would show any greater influence of
literacy today than they did seven or eight decades ago when he studied
their peoples. But we should not imagine that literacy is guaranteed where
it has historically taken root, that it is permanent or inalterable on its
"home ground". It is assuredly not. Ong’s somewhat troubling
coinage of "secondary orality" addresses the vulnerability of
high literacy to erosion and subversion. The term refers particularly to
the reappearance in literate cultures of essentially oral types of
communication, such as radio and television; these technologies bypass and
increasingly replace the written word as the medium of public discourse.
Ong claims that: "secondary orality" is "essentially a more
deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of
writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation
of the equipment and for its use as well" (136). This might be the
case for the first generation of radio and television audiences, but as
broadcasting permeates a society—as it has American society for more
than half a century—the subtlety and objectivity of literate discourse
retreats before a resurgence of ego assertion, opinion, gesture, and
image; the near displaces what Spengler calls the Far. The
advertisement-driven, visual style of "internet" communications
(with cartoon-like sound effects and flashing rebuses) no doubt also veers
away from literacy, as such, and reinforces habits, which are essentially
oral.
Complaints about the politics of the
"sound-bite" indicate the character and direction of the overall
development; so do steadily dropping verbal SAT scores and the "dumbing
down", as it is denominated, of the schools and of the culture
generally. In her essay on "The Question of our Speech: the Return to
Aural Culture" (1989), Cynthia Ozick urges that while "pragmatic
reading cannot die," literate culture "is already close to
moribund" (Washburn and Thornton 86). She notes the primacy of a
visual-oral style (television, movies, commercial music) and spells out
its default: "The job of sitting in a theater or in a movie house or
at home in front of a television set is not so reciprocally complex as the
wheels-within-wheels job of reading almost anything (including the
comics)" (86). Reading books entails "an act of imaginative
conversion" (86). The moral and the intellectual are again connected.
I quote from Ozick’s rather Spenglerian assessment of the current
situation:
In the new aural culture there is no prevalent
belles-lettres curriculum to stimulate novel imaginative intent… what
there is, is replication—not a reverberation or an echo, but a copy.
The Back to Basics movement in education, which on the surface looks as
if it is calling for revivification of a belles-lettres syllabus, is not
so much reactionary as lost in literalism, or trompe l’oeil:
another example of the replication impulse of the new aural culture…
Above all, a book is the riverbank for the river of
language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk—a
free fall, a loose splash, a spill. And that is what an aural society,
following a time of complex literacy, finally admits to: spill and more
spill. (87)
The "new aural culture" that Ozick describes
resembles Ong’s "orality" or Havelock’s
"acoustic-mimetic culture" part by part, with the exception that
it is less competent because less purposeful than either. The salient
common feature is the lack of a literature to serve as intellectual model
and orientation. Archaic Greek culture had not yet invented literature;
twenty-first century "aural culture" has given it up.
II
The written and oral contributions of the students in
my college composition and literature courses substantiate Ozick’s
thesis, which is my own as well: three or four decades of affective—often
outright anti-literate—education in the public schools have created
cohort after cohort of high school graduates whose intellectual capacities
remain largely undeveloped and are perhaps no longer amenable to
development by the time that they reach eighteen and show up in the state
colleges. I shall only state here for the first time what I shall repeat
as my exposition unfolds: while the students suffer intellectually from
the effects of this default in their education, they themselves are not
responsible for it. When I note the intransigency of their untutored
mental habits, it is not for the sake of charging them with their own
shortcomings; it is, rather, to show the manner in which bad schools and
thoughtless schooling have cheated them out of a birthright.
Student "orality" betrays itself in a number
of guises: a childish prose, full of technical defects, depending heavily
on the transcription of oral formulas based on the first and second
persons, as though what one writes were merely a graphic version of what
one says; a reliance on paratactic utterances pointing to a concomitant
unfamiliarity with hypotactic procedures; a nearly perfect lack of
analysis, either grammatical or logical; only the dimmest notion of
causality; a lack of even the narrowest repertory of allusions and
references, such as to an historical chronology or to scientific or
belletristic knowledge; a crude rhetoric of ego-assertion and resentment;
a subjectivity that exploits a ready-made vocabulary of simplistic
relativism, often expressing itself in a sweepingly judgmental
condemnation of judgments; and a penchant for emotional posturing and what
might be called affective argument (except that it is not really
argument). Contemporary student writing is, as Ong might put it, close
to the human lifeworld, agonistic, egotistical, aggregative, and
formulaic.
Consider the responses of first-year composition
students, on the first day of the semester, to the following dictum by
Heraclitus, chosen for its self-contained rationale: "All men should
speak clearly and logically, and thus share a rational discourse and have
a body of thought in common, just as the people of a city should be under
the same laws" (Davenport’s translation, Fragment 81). The dictum
is a modal, counterfactual one describing the necessary (ideal) state for
transparent civic discourse in a community, its point being underscored by
a simile in reference to law. The dictum’s level of abstraction is high
and its grammatical structure of moderate complexity; in its simile,
however, it makes an effort to analyze and clarify itself, and this should
be a help to readers of modest accomplishment. Yet freshmen typically
misread it, often failing to grasp it as a counterfactual plea for greater
deliberation and clarity in the forum while mistaking it for an erroneous
report on the empirical situation. Here is an example:
It is hard to get people in a city [to agree?] that
they should all follow the same set of laws, mostly due to people that
won’t follow them. In comparison "all men should speak clearly
and logically, and thus share a rational discourse and have a body of
thought in common is in principle alone not going to happen. Also, we,
as humans, express ourselves in different ways. We may seem to all
follow the same set of standards on speaking clearly and logically but
there are some different ways to do this that sometimes we outwit
ourselves
The paragraph shows a number of interesting features,
which it will be profitable to detail. Let me start where the writer does,
with his assertion about the alleged difficulty of getting people to abide
by "the same set of laws". The sentence is not true, but it is
not true in a particular way: of course, most people do obey the law or
follow the rules; the writer finds this generalization unsettling because,
empirically speaking, not everyone is law abiding or rule following—hence
his tautology that not everyone toes the line because not everyone toes
the line. Generalization is a form of abstraction. We generalize, as the
theoreticians tell us, by first gaining some distance from the empirical
situation, what Ong would call the sensorium. The writer’s
discomfort with the generalization appears to come from, or to be bound up
with, his unwillingness to reconcile the exceptions with the rules. His
inability to assert a perfectly valid generalization is thus the reverse
of his incomprehension of the modal counterfactual grammar in the sentence
to which he responds. Heraclitus has uttered a formula for ideal
communications in a society; he has not described the empirical situation,
which no doubt differs quite radically from the ideal (in his day, as in
our own). It might well be the case, as the writer says, that Heraclitus’
best possible outcome "is… not going to happen," but modal
counterfactuals are not predictions; they are speculations—hypotheses,
as it were—which deal the probable consequences of projected causes. As
before, the writer does not understand the tense of Heraclitus’ verbs,
and once again he confuses the factual with the counterfactual. Note the
only partially assimilated phrases of the second sentence, the "in
comparison" and the "in principle". These come from written
discourse, but the writer is unsure of their function and seems to employ
them for effect only, in the naïve faith that they will add something to
his iteration. The next sentence reverts to a widespread topos of
contemporary classroom propaganda—the jejune notion that everyone is so
different from everyone else that set criteria for measurement do not
apply. The plausible aim for the writer in asserting that "we, as
humans, express ourselves in different ways" would be to defend
people in general, and most especially to guard himself, from the
application of such criteria. There are "different ways", the
writer claims, of following "the same set of standards". Here,
too, the function appears to be prophylactic. The final sentence, the one
that supplies this armory of defensive anticipation, trails off into a
semi-coherent phrase that seems to contradict what has gone before: it
suggests that there is indeed something inherently confusing in expressive
anarchy, hence the notion that in insisting on private modes of argument
"we outwit ourselves".
Even when respondents appear to agree with Heraclitus,
it is often without fully understanding the formula’s import, as in the
case of the student who writes: "Not only should we stand for what we
believe in but also stand together and disgard [sic] what we don’t
believe in." This sentence confuses the requirement for rules to
which all submit with conformist solidarity as a desideratum; its images
of assembling en masse and collectively expelling "what we don’t
believe in" originate in communal action and suggest an ego still
heavily indebted to peer pressure. In his description of Greek orality
prior to the dissemination of alphabetic literacy, Havelock stresses the
mimetic character of its education: "Tradition… is taught by
action, not by idea or principle", and learning occurs largely
through the sharing of "common feelings" in a "collective
association" (The Muse Learns to Write 77). To explain what he
thinks Heraclitus means, the writer imagines such an occasion, with a
crowd of people standing together. His disgard is an
interesting conflation of disregard and discard and is
facilitated, so to speak, by a lack of visual acquaintance with the two
terms.
A second student trades Heraclitus’ theme of clear
and logical speech for his own theme of "equality" and offers
this gloss: "Equality is some[thing] that can be stressed in this
quote… All people should respect each other and everyone should be
treated the same." Another student agrees: "In the quote by
Heraclitus of Ephesus, it states how all men should be equal." The
same student adds this: "There is no reason why people should not be
treated equally. I believe that no one should be labeled as better than
someone else, and should be treated the same… I believe that equality
and respect should be brought upon everyone." This demand for
"respect" for everyone fits well with the defensive claim that
universal criteria pose a threat of some kind to the individual because,
after all, "we… express ourselves in different ways." Yet
another student opines how "in my opinion, the quote by Heraclitus of
Ephesus is discussing how everybody should be treated equally." Of
course, Heraclitus says nothing at all about "equality."
Why then do the respondents insist in such a convergent
way that he does? It begins with what must be the opacity, to them, of the
text; when the terms defy translation one seeks out some other, familiar
term as if one term were freely exchangeable with another. The
theme of "equality" is currently widespread and is one of the
few Latinate abstractions to which students can readily attach a brief
gloss. Everyone in the contemporary scholastic and academic milieu talks
endlessly about equality. It follows that Heraclitus, too, must have been
talking about it, even if his asseveration makes no mention of it. The
appeal to equal shares in "respect" for everyone belongs to the
same vein of free-floating egalitarian discourse.
A related but resolutely programmatic response to
Heraclitus is this one, the vocabulary of which suggests a rather thorough
assimilation of the reigning sectarian ideology:
The same uniformity, or logic, of thought when shared
by all men does not breed diversity. Diversity is necessary for
expression and leads to more avenues of advancement in the arts and in
culture. A shared and clearly expressed language fosters both
enforcement and creation of laws as well as allowing for an exchange of
ideas. A shared language is vital for a city while undiverse logic and
argument lead to stagnation.
In comparison with some, this response shows a modicum
of grammar and syntax; yet the competency is a reflection, it seems to me,
of the writer’s reliance on stock formulas of a rudimentary sort close
to oral slogans—the sort of pronouncements that freshmen now routinely
hear during summer orientation. Like the obligatory events in an epic
sequence, everything turns on a preexisting collective knowledge of what
actions and emotions go with the topos of "diversity". As
do many respondents, this one reacts with indignity to the misperception,
by no means unique to him, that Heraclitus is calling for a lock-step type
of non-thinking—"uniformity… of thought… does not breed
diversity"—to condense the affront to its essential form. The next
sentence is de rigueur: "Diversity… leads to advancement in
the arts and in culture." This unites "diversity" with a
version of progress ("advancement") in the standard yoking. Note
how the next sentence, which displays a bit of real and perhaps
independent analysis, has an entirely non sequitur relation to the
previous one; for it is quite true, as Heraclitus implies, that it is only
the sharing of concepts and rules that "fosters", in the
student’s surprisingly apt diction, "the exchange of ideas."
The terms "enforcement" and "creation", however, are
not in their proper order; a law cannot be enforced until it is
first created. I am tempted to characterize the concluding sentence
of the response as schizophrenic, since its first half states the
analytically undeniable case, while the second half reverts arbitrarily to
the cliché. It is not clinically schizophrenic, of course; it is merely
contradictory in a confusing and irresolvable way. The weight of the
writer’s moral opprobrium expresses itself through the awkward coinage,
"undiverse", which is close to a manifestation of Newspeak.
Other respondents echo the politically correct indignation without
employing the prêt-à-porter vocabulary. For example: "if we
all had similar thoughts, there could be no creativity in the world"
and "we could be a society of mindless drones with no
individuality"; or: "if this was how things were [run,] then
where would you ever get individuality"; or: "not everyone
should vote or go for something if they don’t like the outcome";
or: "if this were true, we would still be living in caves." The
students persistently and widely identify the call to speak clearly and
logically with the demand to think alike. The paradox is that in making
this error, the students demonstrate that they cogitate in a manner
remarkably similar—and quite predictable, as well.
Luria’s meditations in The Meaning of Mind
(1979) can help us to summarize the mental operations revealed in the
student responses to Heraclitus. "New experiences and new
ideas," Luria writes, "change the way people use language so
that words become the principal agent of abstraction and
generalization" (73). Prior to this development, which stems from
exposure to literacy, language remains oriented to the "concrete
situation" (72), and exhibits a rather tenacious antipathy to
"abstractions or generalizations about categorical relations"
(72). Even the notion of a human being is an abstraction.
Poignantly, the respondents to Heraclitus in my class exercise rarely
refer to human beings or humanity; they are obsessed, on the
other hand, by what they call individuality. This
"individuality", as in the phrases quoted at the end of the
previous paragraph, does not seem to be an abstract—an ethical or
philosophical—category. On the contrary, it seems to mean people whom
I know, my friends, me, the cohabitants of my lifeworld; indeed, those
who share my tastes and typical behaviors. The aggressive speculation
in Heraclitus’ words, which creates a categorical imperative ("all
men should…"), must strike the students as incompatible with, even
a threat to, their concrete and affective sense of themselves and their
acquaintances. That their usage of individuality is not abstract,
but situational in Luria’s sense, is indicated by its unresolved tension
with the ideas of equality and equal respect. Logically,
individuals will differ; the degree of their difference will correlate
with the development of their individuality. Superb singers will not be
"equal" with bad ones; the best basketball players will earn
more than "equal respect" in comparison to those who do not make
the team. But these are precisely the "logical schemas" (75), in
Luria’s term, which the students do not have available, so that the
question of resolving them does not arise.
When interviewing his subjects, Luria noted "a
mistrust of initial premises" (79) when he tried to lead them through
logical or abstract discussions. Ong writes about the "agonistically
toned" character of oral societies (Orality and Literacy 43).
"Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena
where human beings struggle with one another," but by contrast "orality
situates knowledge within a context of struggle" (42-43). All of the
student utterances previously quoted show traits of oral antagonism and of
non-literate situational, as opposed to abstract or categorical, thinking.
Of course, all of the responses originate with people who are, in some
degree, literate. One occasionally even finds among them vocabulary and
syntax that verges on the sophisticated. But we should remember Ozick’s
observation that pragmatic literacy should not be misidentified with the
literacy of cognitively competent and richly educated individuals.
The adolescents who show up at college in today’s
freshman classes are not illiterates, but they are also not readers or
thinkers; they resemble the middle tier among Luria’s Central Asian
subjects: "Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of
kindergarteners [who] as a rule had no formal schooling and almost no
training in literacy" and "active… collective farm workers and
young people who had taken short courses" (61). The acculturation of
modern American young people is primarily oral-acoustic, with the imagery
of motion pictures and television added on. The tendency in elementary and
secondary schools has been to concede to this situation and to lower the
standards for reading, writing and literary studies all along the line in
the K-12 curriculum. Sandra Stotsky has noted, in Losing our Language
(1999), how the literary offerings in widely used textbooks have changed
since the early twentieth century. Of the contents of a third and fourth
grade reader from 1900, Stotsky says that its "vocabulary and
sentence constructions… would be an extraordinary challenge to students
in the sixth grade today" (18), who have been brought up on reading
programs "that may actually be decelerating children’s rate of
language learning as they move through the grades" (15). Of an essay
by Joseph Addison offered in a McGuffy Eclectic Reader, Stotsky
says that, "it required much more of the reader than well-developed
reading vocabulary" (19). The Eclectic Reader’s selections
from Addison, Poe, and others "require—and reward—considerable
reflective thought" (19).
III
Heraclitus on the advisability of clear and logical
language is one sentence—of some grammatical subtlety, it is true, but
by no means opaque or intractable for someone who has been exposed
meaningfully to the Lincoln-Douglas debates or who, in the sixth or
seventh grade, has lived up to the demands of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne
or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. My advanced composition
students (freshmen who have tested out of the "developmental"
writing course) recently experienced considerable difficulty with the
following passage on the character of scientific research in a
collectivist context from Simone Weil’s "Sketch of Contemporary
Social Life" (1934), which I had assigned them to read:
New results are always, in fact, the work of specific
individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any
result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past
discoveries that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.
Consequently, new discoveries, as they go on accumulating, take on the
appearance of enigmas, after the style of too thick a glass, which
ceases to be transparent. A fortiori practical life takes on a
more and more collective character, and the individual as such a more
and more insignificant place in it.… As for the general body of social
life, it depends on so many factors, each of which is impenetrably
obscure and which are tangled up in inextricable relations to one
another, that it would never even occur to anyone to try to understand
its mechanism. (Simone Weil Reader 29).
Their bafflement stemmed from a number of proximate
causes—from having almost no discernible sense of the activity of
scientific research, from not knowing what the phrase a fortiori
means and so ceasing to read beyond the point in the passage where it
appears, and from not knowing the import of the adjective
"collective." Yet the scheme of Weil’s statement is neither
complex nor elusive: in a welter of activity where one researcher cannot
possibly know of the endeavors of all other researchers, the results of
experimentation quickly escape from the discoverer, who remains powerless
to influence further developments or practical applications. One student,
on being asked about the meaning of Weil’s words, said hesitantly that
"life is full of mystery." I wanted to know whether that was
good or bad. "It’s good," she said; "people need mystery
in their lives." I asked where the idea of a "mystery"
appears in the passage. She had associated the term, as it happened, with
Weil’s enigma, which however belongs to the metaphor of
diminished clarity, as of "too thick glass", and does not boast
a positive valence in the context. Later on in the passage, Weil develops
the "thick glass" metaphor under the figure of impenetrable
obscurity. The young woman gave no sign of registering any of this.
Another student reacted this way: "People should mind their own
business and not go poking around." He added that Weil seemed to him
"a grumpy sort of person who likes to complain." Yet another
student said, "Most of the people I know are happy."
As do the brief compositions on Heraclitus (which come
from the same group of eighteen students), these oral ripostes to Weil
reveal a restriction to the immediate situation or lifeworld. If my
friends and I are happy, why should we worry whether "blind
collectives" (whatever they are) cancel or otherwise disturb our
individual aspirations? The students do not reject a particular bit of
social analysis (Weil’s) in preference for another on the basis of a
real assessment; they simply do not enter into critical interpretation of
overarching social phenomena. Nor is it exactly a refusal; it is more like
some kind of incapacity. They fall back on bits of folklore, like the
sententious advice that "people need mystery in their lives," or
the admonition not to go poking around. These sententiae are
the functional equivalents of the declaration that "diversity…
leads to advancement in the arts and culture." They mean little but
serve rather as reassurances of the affective status quo. A notion,
on the other hand, like the one stating that "a complex set of
interrelations" now mediates all knowledge, is as it were too complex
and too interrelated with other notions in the same passage for the
students to come to grips with it. Does this odd combination of bafflement
and hostility with complacency represent, as Stotsky and others argue, a
decline in cognitive achievement from past decades? Or have first-year
college students always operated linguistically and intellectually at this
wanting level? Jeanne S. Chall, in "Should We Worry", summarizes
a number of studies that strongly indicate a real decline in freshman
literacy. For example:
A comparison of the reading achievement of University
of Michigan freshmen 50 years apart—in the 1930s and 1980s—on a test
originally given to the 1930 freshmen, found the 1980s freshmen tested
lower on both the vocabulary and reading comprehension subtests than had
the 1930s freshmen. The 1980s freshmen tested particularly low on the
vocabulary subtest.
Another possible indication that reading achievement
has been declining is the great increase in remedial reading courses at
colleges—both at two- and four-year colleges. This may well be a
reflection of the increase in first generation college students. But it
might also be that they are not, as a group, as proficient in reading and
writing as those of similar background who attended college in previous
years (Research in the Teaching of English, October 1996, 267).
Stotsky would probably correlate the comparatively poor
performance of the Michigan students in the 1980s with a shift away from
phonics and from intensive-quality reading in K-12 in the 1960s; as things
in K-12 have gotten no better since then—according to Stotsky they have
gotten progressively worse—we would expect a comparable decline over the
twenty year period from 1980 to the present. The starting ability of the
writers in my current (Spring 2002) freshmen composition class is evidence
for a continuation of the decline noted by Chall; so are the reading and
writing skills of the sophomores and juniors in my "Western Heritage
I" course, essentially a survey of ancient and early medieval
literature in translation.
The class has an enrollment of twenty-five students. On
a mid-term examination given in the second week of March, or about half
way through the semester, essay writers made the following basic-language
errors (among many others):
PROPER NOUNS: "Euricles" for Euripides;
"Ithica" for Ithaca; "Lauis"
and "Laus" for Laius; "Media" for Medea;
"Odesseus" for Odysseus; "Odysseu’s"
for Odysseus’; "Telemachius" for Telemachus.
OTHER TERMS: "a extremely strong theme" for an
extremely strong theme; "apon" for upon; "atuziurs"
for something indecipherable; "can not" for cannot;
"chauvanistic" for chauvinistic; "dionystic"
for Dionysiac; "disgussion" for discussion;
"enstill" for instill; "epidmy"
for epitome; "focus" for focused; "occuring"
for occurring; "persued" for pursued; "resues"
for rescues; "sence" for scenes; "tail"
for tale; "tryes" for tries.
These simple errors tell us a good deal about the
intellectual habits of the students. The misspelling of proper names is
particularly interesting given that "Euripides" and "Medea",
for example, appear boldly on the front cover of the Dover edition that I
ordered for the course. When the ears and the eyes work together, matching
repeatedly what they hear and see, then unfamiliar but easy spellings are
swiftly mastered; when the ears do the work and fail to coordinate what
they hear with what the eyes see, the default produces orthographic
oddities like "Euricles" and "Media". In the second
case, the partial homophony of the proper name "Medea" (where
the accent, however, lies on the second syllable) with the plural noun
"media" results in the substitution of the latter for the
former, because it is known and "Medea" is not. Someone
habituated to the optics of careful reading would not make such a mistake,
especially given that "Medea" is a mere five characters. The
erroneous "disgussion" resembles another item of confused
diction that we encountered earlier: the quasi-portmanteau coinage "disgard",
which conflates disregard and discard, while putting g
for c in the vowel-consonant pattern of the latter. The explanation
is the same—a lack of visual familiarity with the word. "Enstill",
too, probably results from hearing the word but not seeing it. "Dionystic"
and "epidmy" require some background for their implication to
become clear. I make full use of classroom technology in my teaching; I
create detailed outlines of my lectures on transparencies and project them
the screen while I speak. This serves exactly the purpose of making novel
terms as plain as possible, right down to their spelling. In this manner,
during the sessions about tragedy, students had the opportunity to learn
the term D-I-O-N-Y-S-I-A-C along with its Nietzschean pair,
"Apollonian"; in a session on Homer’s Odyssey, I
made reference to Apollodorus’ E-P-I-T-O-M-E of the journey back to
Ithaca (for which two students wrote "Ithica"). In "Dionystic"
and "epidmy", then, we once again encounter the supremacy of the
ear over the eye. The aural/oral aspect of the word overwhelms the graphic
representation of it, so we get a quasi-phonetic transcription of what
"Dionysiac" and "epitome" merely sound like to
the student, who then ignores the template that is set before his eyes.
"Focus" for focused is a related
error, one that indicates a class of misspellings that appear to be
occurring more frequently than ever before in student writing. Many
students seem never to have consciously encountered written
representations of the past participle and are therefore unfamiliar with
it (they show no sign of ever having been exposed to systematic grammar);
and because they do not have a visual sense of the terminal –ed
that marks the inflection, they do not hear it when it is spoken. I have
also encountered, among other instances of the same phenomenon,
"discuss" for discussed, "force" for forced,
and "prejudice" for prejudiced. Now "sence" for
scenes also indicates a flawed visual familiarity with the word,
the written pattern of which the writer has insufficiently noted; the
writer knows that both s and c are involved, but not how the
pattern juxtaposes them. "Tail" for tale shows
unfamiliarity with the latter form and assumes an orthographic identity in
the homophonic convergence of the two semantically quite different nouns.
A really inexplicable item is "atuziurs", which refers to
something in one of the reading assignments covered by the examination.
The closest thing to it phonologically, perhaps, is suitors, as in
Homer’s Odyssey, about whom I lectured at length; but the item’s
context—a sentence from an essay reading, "order was kept by the
atuziurs who had great respect for the gods and one another"—would
seem to eliminate Messieurs Antinoüs, Eurymachus, Amphinomus, et alia,
from consideration.
The apparent triviality of these gaffs might lead one
to dismiss them as mere sloppiness. This is not so: they belong in a
larger pattern with the oral traits in the responses to Heraclitus and
with the inability to render transparent the passage in Weil’s essay.
The representative contemporary college freshman—the one who is likely
to show up in a typical state college —operates mentally in a realm with
some resemblance to Ong’s "secondary orality", but without the
literate formation that Ong supposes for the phenomenon.
What Luria writes about his Uzbek subjects describes
students fairly well:
These people made excellent judgments about facts of
direct concern to them, and they could draw all the implied conclusions
according to the rules of logic revealing much worldly intelligence.
However, as soon as they had to change to a system of theoretical
thinking, three factors substantially limited their capability. The
first was a mistrust of initial premises that did not arise out of
personal experience [which] made it impossible for them to use such
premises as a point of departure. Second, they failed to accept such
premises as universal [but] rather treated them as a particular
statement reflecting a particular phenomenon. Third, as a result of
these two factors [they perceived syllogisms as sets of] isolated,
particular propositions with no unified logic. (79)
In the terms that I am using in the present essay,
contemporary college students have a hard time coming to grips with ideas.
Just how difficult will be further illustrated by their responses to the
examination question that asked them to comment on the theme of order
in three out of the six works that they had read (or were supposed to have
read) prior to the halfway point of the semester. Of course, there is much
dereliction in fulfilling the reading requirement, but wherever a student
has commented on a text, I assume him actually to have read, or to have
tried to read, it. The works were The Odyssey by Homer, Oedipus
Rex by Sophocles, Medea by Euripides, The Symposium by
Plato, and The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes. They also
had exposure to some characteristic pronouncements of the Pre-Socratic
philosophers, with the emphasis on Heraclitus. They read The Odyssey
in Palmer’s Victorian translation, quite elegant in its prose and
several degrees de-archaized; they also read The Voyage of Argo in
prose, in E. V. Rieu’s translation, likewise fluent and modern.
I conduct the course systematically, as I have earlier
hinted, doing a good deal of story summary in my lectures, supplying a
visible outline of major points, and approaching from two or three angles
any feature of the text or incident in the tale that strikes me as
important. I articulate lectures around a number of themes that unify the
reading and among these the theme of order is foremost. In Homer,
for example, I carefully set out the details of the laws of hospitality
and explain their centrality in the social pattern of the saga; I guide
students through the patterns that inform relations between mortals and
immortals and that dictate right behavior or else, by their disruption,
indicate its default. In the case of Oedipus Rex and Medea,
I pointed out not only the assumptions about order and disorder internal
to the action but also the Aristotelian unities of form imposed on the
action from without by the poets. When dealing with Plato, I analyzed the
speeches in their sequence and spoke about the interior, spiritual order
embodied by Socrates and so casually despised and violated by Alcibiades—who
therefore strongly resembles Homer’s suitors. I place every work in its
historical context and have brought maps and chronologies and other
graphic and artistic material into appropriate convenience with the works
under discussion. I regularly ask students to think, and to talk, about
patterns that appear in more than one work. Odyssey and The
Voyage of Argo are quests; so, in its way, is Symposium,
although there the search is not a topographical, but a spiritual, one.
Apollonius gives us the beginning of Medea’s marriage with Jason,
Euripides its end. In other words, precisely on the assumption that they
will have difficulties, I do my utmost to establish clarity in what is,
for them, opaque because utterly unfamiliar. Given these clues, the
students might have been expected to have an easy time with the essay,
which did not require them to make an argument but merely to
"comment". How did they do and what do their responses reveal?
IV
The struggle simply "to comment" is often
moving. Writing about The Odyssey, a student whom I shall call
"Warfield" produces the following paragraph, which ranks among
the most coherent in the batch:
In Homer’s epic Odyssey, the theme of order is
clearly identified throughout the tail. The description of Ithaca during
the first four books illustrates that of chaos. Penelope is being
persued by suitors who take advantage of Odysseu’s values such as his
herd and the kingdom in general, especially the significance of justice
and order. Telemachus attempts to gain some order by calling an assembly
together to discuss what should be done about the unruly suitors.
Another example of how order is key to a virtuous society is when
Odysseus visits the Isle of Cyclopes. The inhabitants on the island have
no solid community, camaraderie, laws, or customs. After Odysseus blinds
Prometheus, Prometheus yells for help, yet none of the other Cyclopes
come to his aid. Had some kind of order been present, Odysseus might
have been caught and Prometheus helped. One may see that when order is
present in a society, such as when Odysseus returns home and kills the
suitors, that society may prosper.
The writer has read the material and recollects some
significant detail from his reading; not surprisingly, he best remembers
what in his reading coincides with pronouncements made by me during
lecture about and discussion of the poem. "Order" is an
abstraction, however, and Warfield does not quite sort it out. Like a
number of other respondents, he takes the phrase the theme of order
as a unit, failing to separate out the final element as the independent
general term. Nevertheless, he is able to work with both order and its
antithesis, and his implied scheme of order and chaos does
indicate the internalization of a rudimentary dichotomy, something few
other students demonstrate. Warfield recognizes in the tumult in Odysseus’
household, vividly described by Homer in Books I through IV in a set of
concrete images and stock actions, the principle of disorder and thus, by
definitional contrast, of order. The taking advantage that he
correctly ascribes to the suitors is, moreover, a type of ethical
disorder, so that we may justly say that Warfield is not, as many of his
classmates are, thoroughly bound to concrete and operational definitions.
To see order in Telemachus’ calling of the assembly is also admirably
non-concrete. In the discussion of "values", on the other hand,
the analysis breaks down: not only is the sentence cluttered with terms
whose interrelation is unclear, but the idea of "values", which
is essentially abstract, collapses back into its concrete meaning of
property or chattel; thus the suitors "take advantage" of the
absent king’s "herd" and of "his kingdom in
general". That the suitors have eaten Odysseus’ swine, that they
have drunk his vintage, is clear to Warfield; that they have violated
reciprocity, an idea one or two levels up on the ladder of
abstraction, is not. The discussion acquires a bit of
sophistication again when Warfield adduces the lawlessness and lack of
social organization of the Cyclopes as an example of disorder. This is not
an original discovery, however, but a report based on one of my lectures.
Warfield misidentifies Odysseus’ Cyclopean nemesis as
"Prometheus". The correct name, of course, is Polyphemus.
Another exam-taker who cannot break through to genuine
abstraction is "Katherine." "In the Odyssey," she
writes, "the theme of order was destroyed because the king was not
there... The city was in chaos until the king came back. Because Odysseus
was gone for so long the rule of hospitality somewhat diminished & the
respect for others was also lost." Katherine treats "the theme
of order" as a palpable thing, which like a vase or a
mechanism can be physically destroyed, and yet the passive voice omits to
specify who perpetrated the destruction. Katherine has only the most vague
idea of cause and effect in Homer’s story. Events happen, sort
of, but without agency. Thus: "the rule of hospitality somewhat
diminished" and this has something to do with the absence of
Odysseus.
A more representative sample than Warfield’s is
"Xenophon’s": "I feel The Odyssey portrays
has a theme of revenge. Telemachius wants his father back and the
revenge on the suitors that have made him and mothers life in the palace
hell." Note that the instruction asks for comment on the theme of order.
Xenophon implies the opposite of order, possibly, in the "hell"
of "life" under the bullying regime of the suitors; but what is
striking is the way in which Xenophon ignores the instruction to address
"the theme of order" and launches into his own commentary on
"a theme of revenge." This evasion of the topic bears a relation
to the tactic by means of which some of the composition students addressed
Heraclitus. They substituted ready banalities about "equality"
and "diversity" for his recommendation about clarity in speech.
The evidence of hesitation in the two scratched out verbs
("portrays" and "has") divulges, I would guess, some
worry about how the substitution might be made, and whether it is
effective or not. The nebulosity of the cognitive process underlying the
words finds its sign in the first-person report with which the response
begins, the affective "I feel", which should be taken absolutely
at face value, and which controls the remainder of the iteration. Ong,
following Havelock, remarks how Homer’s poems show their own nearness to
the long-standing oral tradition that they immediately succeed by their
reliance on "characters [and] persons", as he says, "whose
deeds are monumental" (71) and with whose outsized struggles the
listener can identify emotionally. Xenophon’s "hell", to cite
it once more, points to this type of emotional participation in a detail
of Homer’s story. I have heard students use the phrase "he is
making my life hell" about their co-dwellers in the dormitories and
about teachers or administrators or supervisors who, in their perception,
harass them in the context of campus life. We might plausibly speculate
then, that Xenophon has remembered this particular detail of The
Odyssey because it exaggerates, in its figures, features of his
personal (direct or indirect) experience. Under this hypothesis, the
"I feel" is redoubled in its honesty and its accuracy—but
Xenophon is reduced to something other than a reader-writer in any beyond
the functional or pragmatic sense.
Students consistently confuse the lecture with the
reading. Homer does not tell of Odysseus’ attempt to feign madness when
Agamemnon came to recruit him for the Trojan campaign; I recited the
episode in my introductory remarks on Homer and his poem. "Gwen"
is not sure where the lecture ends and the poem begins. She writes that:
Well in the Odyssey the theme of order was when
Odysseus left for the Trojan war in Troy for ten years and then went
through different obstacles to get back and the world was basically
destroyed because of the fault of Helen going off with Paris. But
anyways Odysseus tryes to get back to Ithica for the love of his life
which is his wife Penelope he finds his suitors betraying him so to put
back order, he kills his suitors for betraying him and gets back his
wife, son, and country back.
Ong remarks on the "aggregative" (38)
character of oral language, its tendency to string things together in no
particular strategic sequence, and on its copiousness and repetitiousness.
Whereas, in the written language, the possibility of "backlooping"
always exists, yet in spoken language, "there is nothing to backloop
into outside of the mind, for the oral utterance had vanished as soon as
it is uttered" (38). Luria has noted that the syntagmatic structures
of oral language tend to be paratactic: "The simplest form of
parataxis is simple joining of individual sentences by means of the
conjunction ‘and’" (Language and Cognition 130). The first
of Gwen’s sentences illustrates both points. Her initial
"well" is the functional equivalent of a conjunction; Gwen takes
up the topic in medias res, as if she were in on-going conversation
with someone, without grappling with the need to make her written
presentation self-sufficient. Like Warfield and Katherine, she treats the
phrase "the theme of order" as an indissoluble unit; she uses it
grammatically, and must therefore imagine it, as a thing or, rather
more generously, as a concatenation, which inchoately and evanescently
happens ("the theme of order was when…"). On the
positive side, Gwen’s aggregative iteration does bring together elements
of the Homeric narrative that really are causally related to one another,
but it cannot reveal the causality. The causal chain would entail that
Paris eloped with Helen, that Agamemnon convened his barons to make war,
that the siege at Troy lasted ten years, and that Odysseus spent an
additional ten years trying to sail home, impeded on his way by the wrath
of Poseidon. The initial "but" of the second sentence is another
conjunction. The oral "anyways" tells us that Gwen, in writing
her comments, has paused to think what she might put next, and as in a
conversation she has vocalized (or, maybe, graphed) the interstice.
Nor is she clear about who, exactly, the suitors are or on whom they press
their suit; she writes of "his suitors" as though they had been
pressing their cause to Odysseus rather than to Penelope. She does not
quite grasp why Odysseus must resort to violence, either, positing that
the suitors have betrayed him. The real point is that they have
consistently violated every law and custom governing the peace of the
Homeric world.
Another writer, "Jackson", cannot
universalize the premise that order is necessary for a society, any
society. For Jackson, order is peculiarly a desideratum in Homer but
remains confined there without transferability: "The ancient Greek
world is very different than the one we live in today. In those times the
theme of order was very important to their way of life." Ozick says
that real reading pivots on "imaginative conversion." Taking
Xenophon and Jackson together, we see that, in a few instances,
contemporary late-adolescents can experience momentary emotional
identification with fictional characters; what they do rarely and with
great reluctance is to universalize the concepts compactly present in
those fleeting episodes of identification. No "imaginative
conversion" or "reflective thinking", to borrow terms from
Ozick and Stotsky, occurs. The Greeks needed order but we apparently do
not: or rather the question of whether the requirements of ancient people
might have some contact with those of modern people does not emerge.
Tragedy turns on outsized figures and enormities.
Students notice these in Oedipus Rex. "Tillinghast"
delivers one of the most coherent responses:
In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles disorder begins with the
death of King Lauis. Oedipus does not believe what the oracle tells his
wife Jocasta when he finally realizes Lauis was killed at a 3 way
crossroad he comes to the conclusion he was the murderer, and has
married his own mother. With the city in shock Jocasta finds of this
news and hangs herself. The city of Thebes has already lost its king,
and now a queen. In the end Oedipus is sent into exile, blind from
stabbing his own eyes out.
Tillinghast has successfully traced the origin of the
crisis in Thebes to the murder of Laius, king in the city before the
arrival of Oedipus. He falls short, even so, and despite at least two
lectures devoted to the phenomenon, of grasping the relation in the drama
between civic order and personal restraint. The deep-seated cause
of the Theban plight lies in the aggressiveness of both Laius and Oedipus,
neither of whom, when they meet at the fateful trivium, can set
pride aside to make way for the other. Tillinghast’s longish,
unpunctuated run-on sentence once again brings to mind the tendency of
oral language to string items together as though pure sequence sufficed to
give an account of why and how something has fallen out in a particular
way.
The one I dub "Strether" similarly tries to
put an analytical cause in proper relation to its effect,
yet with something less than success: "When [Oedipus] realizes what
he has done, total chaos breaks out and Jacosta (his wife) kills herself,
while Oedipus gouges his eyes, blinding himself. So in this work order
turns into disorder." In fact, "chaos" already reigns as
the tragedy begins, as Oedipus’ speech makes evident and as the speech
of the Elder affirms. Strether, identifying properly with the protagonist,
nevertheless cannot get beyond the incestuous-parricidal horror to the
problem of the Theban people, which is that the city is in a state
resembling the worst of a plague and a civil war. Strether indeed believes
that "there is mostly order throughout the poem until Oedipus starts
questioning whether or not he killed his own father." What Strether
calls "chaos" finds its relief in the discovery of
Oedipus as Laius’ murderer and in the solidarity inspired by the horror
over his grotesque transgressions; the city is saved only as Oedipus is
destroyed.
The respondent named "Indiana" also reduces
the enormity to something simplistic and banal: "Oedipus must find
Laus’ murderer, so he can restore order and society can flourish once
again." This, too, as in the cases of Xenophon and Jackson, betokens
an imaginative default. Indiana’s expectation probably derives from the
self-contained television and motion picture stories that have seen to his
acculturation: at the end of thirty or one hundred and twenty minutes, all
disruptions of the consumer dispensation must have been addressed and the
placidity of the right clothes and the pretty girlfriend and the nifty
sports car restored. Gwen, whom we have encountered through her comments
on Homer, says of Oedipus that "he is so ashamed that he tells Creon
to banish him, this caused chaos & shame for Oedipus &
disorder." Calamity, for Gwen, means personal calamity, so
that the starting mark for "chaos", which is affiliated with
"shame", is Creon’s banishment of Oedipus; the status or the
fate of those who surround Oedipus does not enter into her assessment of
the story, nor do the events that happen before and issue in Creon’s
mercy of expulsion. What accounts for these failures of analysis?
The answer is bound up with the paratactic character of
the utterances. As Luria notes, parataxis works well for storytelling, for
stringing images in a sequence, but for the setting forth of
"relationships", as when one analyzes or explains a story, it is
insufficient:
Whereas communication of events can be expressed
concretely (i.e., the contents can be reflected in a series of images),
the communication of relationships cannot be expressed in this way,
because the communication of relationships involves units of complex
codes of language that serve as a means for abstract logical thinking.
In the communication of relationships, the mere
juxtaposition of individual elements of a message (parataxis) is no
longer adequate. Other, more complex types of grammatical structure are
needed, which [allow] one to develop an entire hierarchy of mutually
subordinate components customarily called hypotaxis. These
structures allow the governance of some groups of words by others. This
means that complex types of speech communication differ from the simple
type both in form and content. (130)
One cannot account for the relation, in Homer, between
the laws of hospitality—which epic poetry represents in action but never
explains—and the maintenance of peace merely by retelling the story.
Because one must shift between orders of abstraction, one requires a
grammar of subordination. The laws themselves, because they are not a
discrete entity in the Homer’s verses, must first all be inferred from
the imagery. I did that in lecture, which is why a sense of it appears in
most of the student essays. In writing about order in The Odyssey,
then, "Vendela" produces the following string of sentences:
"In the Odyssey, by Homer, Odysseus has been away from his home for
many years. Due to this the suitors have violated the laws of hospitality.
Disorder came about because of Odysseus’s absence. When Odysseus returns
order is restored when he slaughters the suitors for their violation of
the laws." Vendela’s first sentence deals with Odysseus’ absence,
her fourth with his return. The second sentence attempts to derive
causality ("due to…"), but confuses the occasion with the
cause: the suitors lack restraint, as do all those in the story on whom
disaster, of their own making, falls; they are thus the authors of their
own demise. The third sentence repeats the second with a slight variation
of the terms. "Milburn" also attempts analysis using the
"due to…" construction: "The Odyssey is plagued
with chaos due to the suitors and it is Oddysseus’ mission to return
home and restore order to his family which is in turmoil." Milburn
confuses Homer’s poem, however, with what it depicts; he mistakes the
turmoil in Ithaka, moreover, for turmoil in Odysseus’ family,
who are threatened but maintain decorum (continue to provide the model of
order) under threat. The static character of the passive mode ("order
is restored" and Homer’s poem "is plagued with chaos")
suggests what the students have not succeeding in overcoming in these
utterances—the parataxis of emotionally toned images in a string.
Plato’s Symposium, because it tells only the
most minimal of stories and otherwise deals in fairly high-order
abstractions, poses a real test for the limits of student understanding.
What "order" do students find in the speeches of the famous
drinking party? We have met Milburn before:
The Symposium also has a hero, Socrates.
However, he is a moral hero, respected for his self control and ability
to know his own limits. The other men he is with decide to have a
disgussion but not let it get out of hand. The conversation does turn
into a symposium, though, leaving everyone drunk and senseless. The
order remains with Socrates who in the morning rises before everyone
else, cleanses himself, and leaves. He is looked at as being the better
man for maintaining the sense and dignity that others do not.
Most of this, in its topsy-turvy way, reflects the
lecture. What one tells the students about The Symposium makes more
of an impression on them, however small it is, than what they read of it.
This is just what we would expect from people who are more oral/aural in
their mental orientation than literate. This is the limitation with which
the best students, who are often also the most frustrated, struggle. The
phrase "moral hero", for example, comes from lecture, as does
the ascription to Socrates of "self control" and knowledge of
his own limits. There is confusion about the definition of a symposium,
a word denoting a convivial gathering for serious discussion lubricated by
moderate drinking. What really happens in the dialogue is that the
drinking party degenerates into a competitive binge. To Milburn’s
credit, only three other students out of twenty-five taking the exam chose
to look for order in Plato. We must acknowledge his intellectual
courage, but we must also see the restrictions within which he operates.
The most interesting sentence is the final one, where Milburn wants to
make a generalization about Socrates, but cannot: instead he lapses into a
deficient passive construction leaving out the prepositional tag that
would tell us who makes the assessment. Milburn cannot produce a simple
third-person predication about Socrates; rather, he imagines a group who
makes the assessment, which he then reports. This is what his phrase,
"is looked at", implies. He remembers a few details of the
dialogue, such as Socrates’ cleansing himself on the morning after the
famous occasion. In Plato’s text, Socrates’ dignity is indeed
connected with his embodiment of spiritual order. Milburn leaves
the two words unlinked; one of them languishes in the penultimate, and the
other in the ultimate, sentence.
Xenophon, like Milburn, achieves predication only
through the roundabout of imagining other people who see something:
"Love [the theme of the dialogue] was seen in various ways
different [sic] and discussed with the aspect during the drinking
party" (emphasis added). "Aspect" is one of the
semi-abstract nouns favored by undergraduates; none can define it. Like
Milburn, Xenophon omits the prepositional tag, leaving the passive
construction in grammatical abeyance.
Given the homoerotic atmosphere of the dinner in honor
of Agathon’s victory in the dramatic competition, we may be forgiven for
winking at Katherine’s declaration: "The discussion of love brought
a rise out of some of the men." In a minimally hypotactic sentence
referring to Socrates, whom she misidentifies as "Sophocles"—"it
seemed no one wanted to disagree with him, which would probably ruin the
theme of order"—Katherine hints at the beginnings of a tenuous
analysis yet pushes it no further. To what does Katherine refer? True
enough, the characters in the dialogue would rather not argue
("disagree") with Socrates, but this by no means indicates their
agreement with him. On the contrary, with the exception of
Aristophanes, Socrates’ speech about love repudiates those of all the
other speakers; their behavior indicates that his lesson has not moved
them. How much farther in grasping the difficult concepts might Katherine
have gone had she been put under stronger discipline earlier in her
education? It is a shame for her; it is a real human loss that
neither she nor we will likely ever know.
The fourth respondent to Plato is "Linley,"
who reports as follows:
In the Symposium order seems to be intact and less
chaotic than in the other books. The theme of the Symposium was the
meaning or a depiction of love. Order was kept by the atuziurs [?] who
had a great respect for the gods and one another. The Symposium seemed
different in violence than the other books because there wasn’t any.
But they all had something in common. They all expressed love and
heartache.
Linley misses entirely the self-serving character of
the speeches by Phaedrus and Pausanias (who argue that teachers are
perfectly justified in sleeping with their students—that it’s an honor
for the students); she notes not the drunken party-crashing of Alcibiades,
which is violent without making a metaphor of the notion. I have already
remarked the opacity of "atuziurs". The last two sentences
instantiate a typical gesture of student prose—the lapse into
sentimental cliché.
V
I have myself tried throughout to be resolutely
unsentimental. According to Ozick, the culture of "mass
literacy" endured "in its narrow period from 1830 to 1930"
(Washburn and Thornton 83); during this century, "the almost
universal habit of reading for recreation or excitement conferred the
greatest complexity on the greatest number… The world of the VCR is
closer to pre-literate society of traveling mummers than it is to that of
the young F. Scott Fitzgerald’s readership in 1920" (83). Ozick’s
references are not to Havelock or Ong, but they might well be: "Where
once the Odyssey was read in the schools, in a jeweled and mandarin
translation, Holden Caulfield takes his stand" (82). Caulfield, Ozick
writes, "is winning and truthful, but he is not demanding" (82).
By "the schools", she does not mean college. Ozick’s analysis
converges with Stotsky’s when she tells what demanding reading did when
it still held a place in the public school curriculum. The century-old
classroom readers that Ozick has before her as she writes are full of rich
selections, whose vocabulary and syntax are of a high order:
What did these demanding sentences do in and for
society? First, they demanded to be studied. Second, they demanded
sharpness and cadence in writing. They promoted, in short, literacy—and
not merely literacy, but a vigorous and manifold recognition of literature
as a force. They promoted an educated class. Not a hereditarily
educated class, but one that had been introduced to the initiating and
shaping texts early in life, almost like the hereditarily educated class
itself. (Ozick 83).
Stotsky says the same thing, exactly, about the
selections in the Eclectic Reader. I put the question whether such
ascriptions as "sharpness" or "cadence" could possibly
apply to a sentence such as Linley’s, "The Symposium seemed
different in violence than the other books because there wasn’t
any"; or Fortheringay’s, "The suitors were made to move in b/c
they should have went to Penelope’s oldest surviving relative asking him
for Penelope’s hand in marriage." If Linley or Fortheringay
represented an exception rather than the rule, then we might be reconciled
to the occasional dullness of student writing. In the sample on which I
draw in this essay, and in others that I have collected for similar
purposes, Linley and Fortheringay are, sadly, typical. Let me repeat here,
however, what I have already stated once in my text and have repeated in a
footnote: I do not blame students. Although they themselves would
almost certainly not understand it were I to offer them the explanation, I
in fact commiserate with them—or is it for them? "For
them", because I take their expression as an index of their thinking;
and muddled thinking, the incapacity before the most rudimentary of
concepts and relations, is all at once chaos and misery. Nor are students,
to say it again, the primary authors of their condition. Stotsky not only
records the reduction in intellectual and artistic value of what K-12
students are nowadays asked to read; she also quotes a specimen of
contemporary English education theory from English Leadership
Quarterly, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of
English, spelling out (so to speak) how teachers will instruct students in
K-12 how to write:
Writers should be encouraged to make intentional
errors in standard form and usage. Attacking the demand for Standard
English is the only way to end the oppression of linguistic minorities
and learning writers. We believe this frontal assault is necessary for
two reasons: (1) it affords experienced writers, who can choose or not
choose to write Standard English, a chance to publicly demonstrate
against its tyranny [sic] and (2) if enough writers do it
regularly our cultures [sic] view of what is standard and
acceptable may widen just enough to include a more diverse surface
representation of language, creating a more equitable distribution not
only of power in language and literacy but also, ultimately, of the
power in economics and politics that language and literacy allow. (qtd.
in Stotsky 212)
I draw a line directly from the semi-literate passage
above (and from the arrogant derailment of education that it represents)
to the wretched reading and writing performance of my composition and
Western Heritage students. Stotsky adds that "only thirteen of the
twenty-eight documents that [she] examined in a review of standards for
the English language arts expect students to demonstrate competence in
using Standard English orally and in writing" (213).
With some effort, one can reconstruct the mental world
of contemporary first-year college students on the basis of their prose
and with reference to their behavior and to what they say. We can make our
own "imaginative conversion", experimentally casting off our own
intellectual achievements, and in so doing understand how tragically
short-changed students are by their passage through the K-12 curriculum.
In the first place, they are massively social creatures—"other-directed",
I believe, is the phrase; yet at the same time they show remarkably little
self-awareness in an ethical sense. Linguistically and cognitively they
live in the continuing seamless buzz of conversation that fills their
lives: this shows up in their writing, which amounts to a transcription of
what they would say to someone in a verbal exchange over a topic, and in
their reliance on, if it is not outright confinement within, the I-You
axis of conversation. Virtually everything that they utter, when asked to
do so in writing, comes filtered through the first-person pronoun, with
the result that they rarely predicate anything about objects per se
but rather report on them indirectly by making them an occasion for
divulgences of personal sentiment of one kind or another. There is, as in
Havelock’s formula, no separation of the knower from the known.
"Like" and "dislike" are the two most powerful
categories. The range of objects denoted by what one doesn’t like is
largely coincident with the range of objects that are unfamiliar, and the
range is large. The range of objects denoted positively by what one likes
is limited and has a commercial flavor. Students are extremely sensitive
and vulnerable to the market and to fads. At the same time, they are
convinced that they are highly individual ("unique" is their
word for it) in their tastes and hobbies. This, of course, is exactly what
the market that caters to them wants them to believe.
Students find reducing large patterns to their elements
difficult; it is extremely hard for them to see existing phenomena as effects
that analysis and research can derive from a cause. Things merely are.
The world is one for them, seamless and contiguous in all its
segments. Wholes of any kind rarely resolve into their constituent parts,
from the student perspective. For example, while displaying a drawing by
the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher, I asked my composition students,
what are the main parts of the scene? "It’s a town," they
said. They struggled to see that Escher’s town sat amid climbing
terraces surrounded by steep mountains and that it contained prominent and
distinct architectural structures, such as a bell tower and a
multi-storied house, arranged around a piazza. By "the
whole", I also mean the situation: for the "I" who
apprehends a thing under some emotional color is not separated out from
the thing; nor is the emotional color, either from the thing or the
perceiver. These restrictions in how students are able to view the world
stem in part from their being young; but youth cannot be the sole, or even
the primary, reason for their comparatively impoverished intellectual
range. Younger people in other circumstances have been much more strongly
focused than they on the world, more perceptive of what they are seeing.
Rather, indeed, than call them childish (as tempting as
the adjective is), it is truer to see them as closely resembling the adult
persons whom Luria studied in Uzbekistan. "Their mental processes
[are] closely connected with their practical activity and their life [is]
characterized by the predominance of concrete practical forms of
activity" (Language and Cognition 207). The words that
students use, to quote Ong on Luria’s subjects, "acquire their
meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat" (Orality
and Literacy 47), and they are not aware of "semantic
discrepancies" (46) or of formal definitions apart from the obvious assumed
or ostensive meanings of words in usage. I have earlier made notation
of their struggles with abstract vocabulary, mentioning that they rarely
talk or write about human nature and express bafflement when they
encounter written discussion of it. All of this is linked to their lack of
interior formation by the model of the written text. In the flux of
practical activity and fleeting I-You exchanges, no backlooping
occurs. Backlooping is required for the formation of high-order concepts and
for ethical self-assessment, in which one must treat oneself as an object
for analysis. Although the words text and textualize have
been appropriated for both silly and corrosive purposes by
deconstructionists and other "postmodern" types, it would not be
implausible (it is really only Havelock’s theory) to say that rigorous,
systematic self-correction requires a permanent, accessible archive of one’s
words and deeds over a considerable period of time. One must textualize
oneself. Such self-assessments find an additional aid in books,
especially in poetry and fiction of a sophisticated species, which offer
models against which one can compare oneself. Detecting semantic
discrepancies in a text is akin to detecting moral slips in the record of
one’s conduct. To imagine the student mentality, then, one must imagine
an inner world without these assimilated structures.
What impinges on student consciousness? Of what are
students chiefly aware? We can glean some idea from their first-person
prose—the kind that they always produce when left to their own devices.
For the men, two realms of the sensorium loom large (their identity will
surprise no one): organized sport and commercial music, especially the
"grunge" and "heavy metal" styles of rock and roll.
The references to sport usually show an element of braggadocio:
"Tough is not throwing an elbow at someone, being a bully or even
fighting. Never complaining, diving on the floor for loose balls, beating
everyone up the court, taking charge of someone twice your size, now that’s
tough." The writer tells how "during my freshman year in high
school I was the same as the rest of society"; but he later became
"tough". These insights might be true; what I wish to emphasize
in them is their confinement within a young adolescent worldview
articulated entirely around the sportive "verbomotor" sensorium.
On music, one encounters passages such as this one:
The 1980’s were a decade of hair bands and
glam-rock that relied heavily on obscenely loud guitar solos, and lyrics
regarding love and living a rock and roll lifestyle. Bands like
Whitesnake, Poison, Winger, and Skid Row gave the era an almost
predictable feel of leading men indulging in women while sporting
leather pants and incredibly long hair. But in the early 1990’s 3
bands emerged from Seattle that would change the face of the music
industry and shape all musical generations to come. Nirvana led the way
with Pearl Jam and Soundgarden following closely behind with what was
later to be dubbed the "grunge rock revolution".
The models lie in Rolling Stone, CD booklets,
and most importantly in the banter of a Music Television "rockumentary":
from these sources come the jargon of "glam-rock",
"obscenely loud guitars solos", and "incredibly long
hair", and the hyperbole of "changing the face of the music
industry" in a "grunge rock revolution". We are back in the
oral world, as described by Ong, of outsized figures and agonistic side
taking. Our writer is heavily for "grunge rock" and
heavily against "glam-rock". The phrase "Nirvana led
the way" reminds me of the Soviet marching song, "Gaidar leads
the Way", sung about one of the Revolutionary heroes. Ong remarked in
1981 that "one of the many indications of a high, if subsiding oral
residue in the culture of the Soviet Union is (or was a few years ago,
when I last encountered it) the insistence on speaking there always of ‘the
Glorious Revolution of October 26’—the epithetic formula [being an]
obligatory stabilization" (38-39), just as in Homer. That the
cynosure of public discourse in the USA is MTV rather than the Komsomol
accounts for the replacement of Gaidar by Kurt Cobain.
Women students work within the same parochial
intellectual circle as the men but have different references: they report
about "love" and related matters in Hallmark card banalities. On
the positive side, they seem largely untouched by feminism, although the
effusions about diversity quoted in Section II have women authors. Given
students’ wide-open receptivity to commercialized group thinking and
their inability to form independent analysis, it is worth quoting Havelock
again on the literate mind and psychic autonomy: "at some time
towards the end of the fifth century before Christ," Havelock reminds
us, "it became possible for a few Greeks to talk about their ‘souls’
as though they had selves or personalities which were autonomous and not
fragments of the atmosphere nor of a cosmic life force, but what we might
call entities or real substances." Most of my students have not
decisively experienced at the ontogenetic level what Attic civilization
experienced at the phylogenetic level "towards the end of the fifth
century before Christ."
A final important component in the lifeworld of
students is pain, of a psychic sort, which they refer to as
"boredom". They experience this pain when they come up against
their limits, which they are reluctant to test or surpass. The passage
from Weil’s essay struck a number of students as "boring", and
they said so, after blinking at it without result for some minutes. The
paradox of their situation is that the very thing that they resist—a
conjoint reading and writing, with its alteration of the oral state
of mind—is the thing that might salvage them from their ennui.
They resist it because no one has insisted to them that they should
assimilate it. In effect, vast libraries have been snatched away from
them, a whole codified itinerary of humanity. These are gone for them just
as if they had vanished in the smoke of incendiary vandalism and looting.
My experience of teaching teachers through Central Michigan University’s
master’s degree in humanities program in the 1990s suggests to me that,
in fact, many instructors of today’s secondary students are hardly more
literate than the students whom they instruct. Writing, as Spengler puts
it (with none of the reluctance that holds back Ong), "is an entirely
new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relation of man’s
waking-consciousness, in that it liberates from the tyranny of the
present" (The Decline, Vol. II 149). Writing, asserts
Spengler, "is one of the first distinguishing remarks of the historical
endowment" (150). Yet Spengler is assuredly wrong, he has it
backward, when he says that "the peasantry is without history and
therefore without writing" (152).
My students are basketball players and
"grunge-rock" enthusiasts, and not much beyond those things,
because they have no real writing, no real reading, and no real literacy.
We live in the aftermath of a cultural calamity—the disappearance of
mass literacy, as lamented by Ozick. It is actually much worse than a
natural extinction, because, as Stotsky shows, it was a disappearance by
design, and it is also a continued absence by design. At some
point, it will no longer be possible to live on the residue of past
accomplishments, and we will begin to experience the sorrows of our
condition.
WORKS CITED
Bertonneau, Thomas F. "Epistemological
Correct-ness in English 101." Academic Questions 10:1
(Winter 1996-97): 67-78.
---. "We All Have Our Own Brains: The Price
Students Pay For Cutting Edge Instruction." The Montana Professor 11:2
(Spring 2001): 1-9.
---. "Orality, Literacy, and the Tradition." The
Montana Professor 10:2 (Spring 2000): 3-7.
Chall, Jeanne S. "American Reading Achieve-ment:
Should We Worry?" Research in the Teaching of English 30:3
(October 1996): 303-311.
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational
Berkeley: U of California P, 1951.
Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write:
Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New
Haven and London: Yale, 1986.
---. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap Press
(of Harvard UP), 1963.
Kirk, G.S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The
Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Luria, Alexander. Language and Cognition. Ed. J. V. Wertsch.
Washington DC: V. H. Vinston and Sons, 1981.
---. The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of
Soviet Psychology. Ed. M. Cole and S. Cole. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP,
1979.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Ozick, Cynthia. "The Question of Our Speech: The
Return to Aural Culture." In Washburn and Thornton, Dumbing Down:
Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture. New York: Norton,
1997.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I,
Form and Actuality. Trans. C. F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.
---. The Decline of the West, Vol. II, Perspectives
of World History. Trans. C. F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.
Stotsky, Sandra. Losing our Language: How
Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s
Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Weil, Simone. Simone Weil Reader. Ed. G.
Panichas Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1977.
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***************************************
The Dusty, Dog-Eared Book:
Space Well Wasted
by
Peter T. Singleton
Peter
Singleton’s Return to Chivalry: How Contemporary Men Can Recover the
Dignity of Living for a Higher Purpose, was published last year by
Arcturus Press.
Arguments for the existence of a vast degeneracy, I
suspect, are often left unmade because they are too true. If a whole
culture is losing its ability to concatenate reasons and to use a rich
variety of words with precision, then where are the intellectual castaways
to be found who will build this case; and, assuming that a few may be
found (the spring tide of barbarism always leaves a philosopher or two in
a skiff here and there, shepherding his victuals), who will listen?
Certainly there’s no money in publishing or broadcasting complex tales
with unhappy endings for giddy masquers who cannot so much as estimate
their grocery bill.
If I dare, therefore, to defend in these few words the
old-fashioned book, proofread and printed and bound, I do so with no
illusions. I know well, to begin with, that others much brighter than I
have entertained such thoughts as I shall express, and that none of us
sees these thoughts purveyed far and wide simply because, taken all
together, we who understand remain too few to attract a capital
investment. I realize, too, that the abandonment of books and literacy is
unlikely to be arrested in the least by anything that so few may do. My
tone will no doubt seem wistful for these reasons, if not nostalgic. So be
it. Nostalgia as a genre is not without its pleasures: our age, in its
very debasement, is beginning to rediscover (or invent) the charm of the
past, if only through the debased means of poorly scripted movies.
Personally, I prefer to think of my endeavor as a brief exercise in
speaking out, in saying my say. The inferiority of printed, bound books to
computer disks (the wretchedly denominated "e-book") is being so
widely alleged that it now lays an illegitimate claim to self-evidence. In
fact (according to my view of the facts), e-books are miserable
substitutes for those bulky tomes which once collected dust on the study’s
shelves.
Let me count the ways. It has been proposed to me by
some very energetic young people whom I do not suspect of illiteracy that
laptops are cozy. You can read from them in bed without dedicating a hand
to propping them open. You can read from them over breakfast without
worrying about coffee spills or having to anchor down their sides with
marmalade jars. I may say at once that I remain skeptical of the resistance to coffee. If my elementary physics still
serves me, water and electricity don’t mix. I’m not sure what one does
with two free hands in bed while reading, or what one might be reading
which would require two free hands: I am sure only that I don’t wish to
pursue the matter here. As for certain tautly bound books having a
tendency to upset the cream and sugar when pinned dubiously open before
one’s plate, this is indeed one of the great unsolved problems of
literate culture—and laptop computers are growing far too light to be of
any help. I recently retrieved a rusted fragment of coupling from a
railroad track (at the instigation of my son). A little steel wool should
render this quaint relic of the Industrial Age invaluable for my purposes.
Speaking of water and electricity, consider the dark
and stormy night so affected of bibliophiles for curling up in a favorite
chair before the centrally heated study’s dormant gas logs. Would you
wish to be cradling a laptop (and doing God knows what with your two
hands) as lightning cracked just beyond your window? If holding a cell
phone to one’s ear during an electrical storm is inadvisable in these
circumstances, can cuddling a laptop be much less so? My information is
that the e-book requires rather more than a couple of flashlight batteries
to operate. This superior voltage surely makes for risky business. I
prefer to shudder deliciously around my dusty old tome, keeping both hands
well in view, as the thunderbolt rives the lordly oak.
And a word now on behalf of dusty old tomes. As far as
dust goes, a shelf of books is vastly easier to dust than a desk
encumbered with hardware projecting two dozen wires and cords into
unreachable places from all possible angles. Spiders are undoubtedly in
love with the latter arrangement, and seem to send their own nunciative
kind of web-mail to others of their tribe whenever they find it.
Furthermore, there is clearly a magnetically attractive relation between
electrical currents and dust (though here my elementary physics carries me
few steps down the path). Television and computer monitors must surely
rank among the dustiest things on earth. If you wiped one of them clean
yesterday, it will have collected another thick film by tomorrow. A dusty
screen, of course, is extremely hard to read. Books, in contrast, are
divested of five years’ worth of negligence with one brisk blow, and
perhaps the ensuing brush of a pinky. Inside, they are usually as
immaculate as on the occasion when they were first opened (though the
paper of European publishers is less likely to weather decades
un-yellowed; what unpromising genus of trees, I wonder, have our cramped
cousins been reduced to harvesting?). Bookcases sometimes come hinged with
protective doors. At worst, the book shelf’s neat, tight platoons
minimize surface exposure to dust and are eminently dustable. The argument
ex pulvere, therefore, I find littered with flies.
But what about space? We are constantly treated to
extravagant assurances that e-books will reduce libraries to the size of
closets, just as we have so often heard that other electronic technology
will shrink reality’s coordinates in time. The perceptive observer will
have noticed that shrinkage is always an unquestionable
improvement. Faster and smaller… less time, less space… time saved,
space saved… and for what, then, are we saving all this time and space,
I am forever doomed to wonder? We can scarcely store either commodity. An
hour saved today is not an hour you can pull from your hand like a trump
card when the Grim Reaper knocks, and space trimmed from one room of a
house or one sector of a township confers no benefit except as space added
elsewhere. I will admit that smaller libraries might mean bigger parks. I
will even admit that a closet with half a million titles would in most
ways better serve erudite patrons than an expensively air-conditioned
children’s summer holding tank whose fifty thousand titles must be
supplemented by the snail express called Interlibrary Loan. Libraries may
well have become too many things to too many people. Vagrants can even
splash about in their basins with little fear of prosecution, and the
pillage-and-pilfer rate among paperbacks and children’s books is so high
that serious adult acquisitions are virtually elbowed out of the budget.
The libraries I hold in nostalgic retrospective here,
however, are not of the public variety. The public library is only about a
century old. Before the positivist ascent of the common man upon the wings
of bourgeois progress, even the most permissively accessible libraries
were affiliated with religious institutions (as "reading rooms")
or colleges (all of which were private, and hence also of religious
provenance). Far more often still, of course, libraries were entirely
personal. People were bequeathed sets by their friends and relatives, they
added volumes according to their taste, and they frequently loaned books—or
gave the run of the whole collection—to their intimates. It would be
worse than banal to say that such libraries reflected the personality of
their owners: it would be somewhat inaccurate. Such a collection, rather,
would reflect the taste of an entire family, in a sense which that
much-battered word no longer conveys. For as often as families themselves
reflect their socio-economic milieu, in the days of "high
literacy" they also frequently fought back against their milieu. They
might well have concealed an "eccentric" vein. Old Man Smith was
always citing Thucydides: his son Raphael wandered into Herodotus and
ended up (in that decadent fashion to which the young are ever prone)
reading Pindar. The Joneses down the road had a suspiciously French turn
of mind, and the youngest son, after his European excursion, was rumored
to have brought back certain Catholic tendencies. The Browns devoured
works of science; the Whites, in contrast, immersed themselves in
inspirational texts.
Sometimes little wars arose, not just within
neighborhoods, but within families, on the basis of reading matter. A
close parallel in contemporary society might appear to exist with the
home-schooling movement, where entire curricula are composed (or rejected)
on the basis of a few central ideas. The crucial difference, I fear, is
that too many home-schoolers regard books as an essential threat to their
ideas—ideas whose roots, alas, have not strayed through a rich tradition
of reading, reflecting, and discussing. The books in these cases are not a
point of origin, but an afterthought, a concession to legal strictures.
Hence we have, not amusing feuds between the Smiths and the Joneses
("But Henrietta, you can’t let him marry her—don’t you
know her father is a free-thinker?"), but full-scale Waterloos
concerning iron-clad ethical and epistemological prejudices. "Culture
wars", we call them. While the well-read household of yesteryear was
indeed the paradigm for home-schooling, it was significantly pre- rather
than post-bureaucratic. Tutelage under those steep gables was not styled
"home-schooling" or anything of the sort simply because the term
would have been redundant. Schooling was what happened as you grew up in a
good home. To leave the home and the family for another, more formal kind
of school often occurred at more or less the college stage. By that time,
you had become a Smith or a Jones intellectually just as you were born
with blue or brown eyes. It was the books: they had gotten into your
blood.
I need hardly say that the space-saving CD library can
produce nothing remotely akin to this phenomenon. What always seems to
escape notice is the true role of space in the distinction. Let us
take for granted that Jack Hammersmith, direct descendant of a Boston
parson or a Virginia statesman, has substantially the same library on disk
as his illustrious great-great-grandfather possessed. It’s an absurd
proposition, but let us grant it for the moment. Young Jack’s collection
is on display to no one who doesn’t wish to open closets and cabinets
and squint at lettering within plastic cases. Even then, the inquisitive
guest could not flip indiscriminately and idly to page 257 of The
Betrothed or Varieties of Religious Experience and begin
reading. As I understand them, CD-players have no
"indiscriminate" option. They advance only from one band to the
next, and at their fastest they still require more of that precious time
(and energy) for such a maneuver than would be involved in allowing a book
to flop open. Of course, a CD-Rom in your computer could be randomly
scanned by toying with the mouse if Jack’s volumes are actually meant to
be read on screen rather than heard from the recliner, and Jack
would no doubt have his lifeline to the globe booted up and purring
twenty-four hours a day. Still… can you imagine the conversation?
"I say, Jack, I just happened to slip Schopenhauer into your D-drive
while you were relieving yourself… and look at what he says here in Part
Three!"
Come on, now! Disks are made to save room, and the room
is dedicated to something "more valuable" than ancient reading
matter. In many dens and studies, that inflated presence would be bestowed
upon an "entertainment center" or a television whose screen
rivals a movie theater’s. But a person who so valorizes our
thought-starved film productions that he devotes entire walls of his house’s
largest rooms to their broadcast is hardly likely to be a reader of
Manzoni or James or Schopenhauer—or of any author who satisfies
thought-hungry minds. This raises the further point that e-books
replicating Parson Hammersmith’s personal library simply do not, will
not, and in a sense cannot exist. Such books were written for literate
people, to put it bluntly. They were often produced in very small runs and
at very low cost, an enterprise which was made possible by the practice of
selling subscriptions as we do now for magazines. (That is, an author
would have to compile a list of several hundred willing buyers before the
publisher would proceed.) Despite all we hear about the incomparably
thrifty costs of burning a CD, typing out a text remains labor-intensive.
How many antiquarians are likely to undertake that labor without the
promise of a paying public? We may presume that they already possess a
print copy of the classic if they contemplate digitalizing it; do we
suppose, then, that they would spend weeks keying the text into the
computer just for the joy of reading it from a laptop?
The connection is inescapable: space is indexed to
value. When space is viewed as "wasted" upon books, books are
held in low esteem. Indeed, what e-books are successfully published
inevitably cater to the new tastes (or the declining taste) of a
computer-savvy audience, which may be briefly characterized as restless,
thrill-seeking, and impatient with reality. To return to young Jack more
soberly, we all know that most of his library will consist of games and
business-ware. At best, he may own a few disks which lead us through the
digs at Chaco Canyon or zap us along the spiraling corridors of our
galaxy. The subjugation to visual dazzle is implicit in e-books: it is
responsible for the continued failure of pure literature as a commodity on
disk. No formerly page-bound industry has so profited from the Internet as
pornography—which, I needn’t say, is not about reading. I
foresee the day when Jack’s books will have "photo files"
attached to highlighted words. (Click on Vanessa and see what
Manning saw as the bath towel dropped to the floor.) Extravagantly graphic
and absurdly staged books about star wars, dino-humanoids, and Armageddon
are already popular, though usually in movie form at the same time as or before
they hit the mall’s shelves and stalls. Why Jack should invest in any of
these when he might simply acquire the movie-CD is a mystery to me. I
suspect that there is no demand for such tomes except as bound
paper, in which form they can be endlessly hauled out in waiting room and
under hair drier to re-evoke the film. Committing them to disk would be
like creating an airtight cabinet to preserve each year’s first item of
junk mail.
The mere notion of placing such matter on semi-public
display would have sent Jack’s great-great-grandfather into cardiac
arrest. (How many of us have consigned to drawer or box a trashy little
novel which we couldn’t quite throw away?) Of course, no e-book is ever
on semi-public display. It is a match in a matchbox. Exponents of e-life
will contend that the viability of the closet as a great warehouse for
thought merely allows our true nature to "come out of the
closet". Old Parson Hammersmith was a hypocrite. He advertised his
lofty interests and refined tastes to all who gained admittance to his
study; yet the secrets of his heart, if posted on the Web, would be
filtered to the point of annihilation by any child-friendly
"shield". Now (so the argument goes) we are not so pompous, nor
remotely embarrassed by our quirks and kinks. We can be ourselves in the
new privacy of ultra-compressed space. Personally, I find this aversion to
hypocrisy insufferably hypocritical. Yes, we can well afford to be
"honest" about our perverted "fantasies" when a) all
of our thoughts have been reduced to plastic wafers, and b) we simply
"consume" the wafers, in any case, whose very composers simply
responded to general patterns of consumption. On a Web of infinite
strands, any set of coordinates is ever harder to locate, and no loop or
arc looks convincingly original. In our renunciation of the paper library’s
observable soul, our inner life paradoxically becomes the property of our
broadcast media more every day.
Why the common assumption, by the way, that vast
personal libraries are mere ostentation? They are often so now, perhaps. I
have known more than one chair of a college English department whose
office walls were decked entirely with old texts from graduate school and
rather newer texts (purchased at the school’s expense) from courses
taught. The same person may well have virtually nothing literary at home:
a magazine or two (maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly),
a rather pasty set of Harvard Classics inherited from the wife’s father
and posed along the built-in book shelf beside the mantel-piece…
otherwise, computer equipment and an eye-popping collection of movies
pirated off the cable. In truth, such a person’s puny gestures toward
erudition scarcely seem to qualify as ostentation. They resemble, instead,
the costly "camp" of ancient gum-ball machines, antique
wall-phones, split-rail fence sections at the curbside, and the rest—more
so every year, it seems, as our new "honesty" about the
obsolescence of books feeds a new, hi-tech kind of condescension to all
such large-boned fossils.
In contrast, the literato of centuries past was
putting his interests and convictions on the line when he put his books on
shelves. He fully expected, even welcomed, a stimulating conversation as
soon as a visitor noticed David Hume on his reading table. This is hardly
ostentation, which is a kind of fraud based on appearances of a
deliberately exaggerated brilliance. An ignorant man trapped among the
many learned authors in his possession would have no place to hide, and
his vanity would most certainly stand unmasked in the course of a month
unless all his visitors were as foppish and null as he.
For the sheer space sacrificed to a good print
library thrusts it into any visiting eye: the hundreds of volumes weigh
upon the room and insist upon being noticed. That much is quite true.
Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius insist upon the upper shelves,
Fielding and Richardson and Thackery insist beside the window. Even when
quite alone in this room, perhaps pacing back and forth with crisis at his
shoulder, the friend of books feels himself in the company of great minds.
Perhaps he runs his eye across the bulky spines, seeking counsel from
Spinoza or Kant; and perhaps he finds it, or perhaps he merely discovers
the poise and perspective of recollecting how many great minds have
confronted how many crises in the history of civilization. That
"mere" discovery is itself no small gift. If he should also
happen to pull down a favorite volume, or perhaps an unfamiliar one, and
open it distractedly, whatever his gaze falls upon can scarcely help but
be more edifying than any television station that a satellite dish may
offer.
Is it from this "waste of space", then, that
we need to deliver ourselves and our families? I confess that I always
seek out a room heavy with the wasted space of many books when I need to
compose a thoughtful letter or paper, or when I simply need to think a
problem through very carefully. The silence of book-lined walls, where a
sneeze or the chink of tea cup against saucer is quickly muffled,
concentrates my ideas far better than a walk in the park, where rustling
breezes and birdsong and the playing of children inspire a diffuse
rambling rather than a rigorous progress to a strong conclusion. Even as I
sit before a screen (somewhat traitorously) composing these words—and
who knows how effectively, compared to what I might have done with pen and
paper?—I have become aware of my frequent glances away from the insipid
Microsoft square with its rulers and Help Menus to the only bookcase
visible from my chair. There sits the Decameron, Epictetus, All
Quiet on the Western Front… here, at the click of a mouse, awaits
the great wide world of slogans, come-ons, and an infinity of strident
trash.
I’ll take a book, thank you—printed and bound,
perhaps dog-eared, always and inevitably nuanced by its time in some
manner of which its publishers were wholly unaware. What sense of mission,
I wonder, charged the offices of Arnoldo Mondadori in Milan of 1960, when
that house bound hardbacks as squarely as little soldiers? Why are Taschenbüche
of the German house Reclam so incredibly minute, as if made by and for
Black Forest elves? Book-of-the-Month gave my Selected Kipling a
gaudy cover busy with melodramatic poses which I can well imagine
belonging to the early years of cinematic Techno-color and the television
soap opera. How appropriate is such decor to its subject—were the
mid-nineteenth-century Victorian and the mid-twentieth-century American
publics moved by a kindred spirit? In an age when literary theory is
forever reminding us that all art is driven by cultural circumstance, what
fascinating time-capsules are these instances of literary packaging! I
need not like them or agree with their implications. They will not allow
me to forget, however, that my author passed through others’ hands
before reaching mine. They bring me to reflect upon the energetic,
petulant, feuding family of Western culture as it seeks (or has sought)
its place among the immeasurable family of mankind.
The e-book gives me quick, unreferenced access to a
specific thrill or two which might have much to do with me if I were
nothing but a thrill-seeking bundle of nerves. The print book, even when
its specific contents disappoint me, draws me back to a cultural past and
outward to a global community—where, it turns out, I seem to see myself
in a much more revealing and (ironically) independent light. Pondering my
volume’s bulk, I belong and do not belong in its vision: I am of this
author and not of this author. Part of my place in his or her tradition is
my right, and indeed my duty, to judge that tradition.
To the e-marketer, I am a set of jaws waiting to be fed. To the book
with covers, I am a visitor at the door, and we have much to talk about.
back to top
***************************************
Post-Literacy, Biblicism, and the Death of Christianity:
Big Party in the Wading Pool
by
John R. Harris
Les vertues se perdent dans l’intérêt
comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer.
La Rochefoucauld1
One really must admire that Internet’s flare for
bringing out the worst in people. Nowhere else is the oppressive truth so
palpable that few human beings have much to say worth hearing, and that
those who say most have perhaps the least. I have often been urged by
marketing advisors, promotional specialists, and other wizards of
insincerity to secure admittance to discussion groups, also known as
e-groups. Here (the argument goes) I would write warmly and fluidly on my
favorite subjects, winning over e-friends and creating a stock of good
repute for myself in the e-community. Then, like a mole who has performed
diligently in his assumed capacity for years, I would suddenly begin
distilling allusions to my publishing endeavor, transforming my
"friends" into buyers and contributors.
I hasten to say, with pride, that I am spectacularly
bad at the game. I tend to let everyone know at once just who I am and
with what mission my e-gurus have released me into the universe of
"groups". At the same time, I tend to nudge aside that mission,
for the opportunity of corresponding with various parties sincerely
concerned about great literature or good schools or (as in the occasion of
this essay) true faith excites me more than the evasive specter of a few
bucks. Yet disillusionment soon cures me of this rare thrill. Entry after
entry on the message board will read, "I’ve been assigned this Poe
story for lit class, it’s so cool!" or, "Does anyone know if
the Marquee de Sade [sic] liked cats?" Most participants do not even
pretend to be pregnant with insight: they are the least pompous beings who
have ever been disembodied. They run to the keyboard (or do they carry it
everywhere they go—the ever-encroaching laptop?) with comments
which a Maine farmer or an Arizona rancher would impart du bout des
lèvres to no one in particular: "No rain tomorrow… summer’ll
get that tree." They bring to the public forum no sense of going
public, no shame of offering nothing to justify the waste of time and
space. Or is it that they have lost all sense of privacy—that they don’t
give a damn if we see them using the syntax and diction they would spray
upon a seatbelt stuck in the car door? As usual, the immediate practical
consequence of intimacy is disgust. People who spend not the slightest
effort dressing up anything soon convince you that clothes are a civilized
necessity.
It’s bad enough to see one’s most revered classic
authors given a patronizing pat on the back by some cerebrally dormant
sophomore for whom "cool" is just half a step from
"hot". What happens, though, when one takes the most direct
entrance into the most basic questions of existence? Even though the great
writers and philosophers should be just this entrance, we all know that
they have been bricked up from both sides. Students get to know them very
late in academic life—at the tail end of their core courses, occupying
in severe abridgement some corner of a Norton anthology—while professors
will discuss them only among other professors initiated into the mysteries
of jargon and critical trend. The last good literary discussion I recall
having was with an African about the novelists of his region.
Unfortunately, even in Africa, there will soon be few people left who are
a) capable of reading novels and b) did not grow up in front of a screen.
So I return to the basic subjects at their most basic
level: God—his reality or illusion, his essential nature. Life and
death. What we should do, what we mustn’t do, what we can do. In pursuit
of an exchange upon such weighty matters (and—who knows?—perhaps a
connection advantageous to my professional enterprise), I began to sort
through "Yahoo e-groups" once again this spring. I can never
escape being a little stupefied at the cultural bankruptcy indicated by
Yahoo’s broader categorizations. All things literary are hidden away in
"Books", which itself trails the subheadings "Movies"
and "TV" under "Entertainment & Arts". Similarly,
major debates whose fault lines run through the desiccated foundation of
our moribund culture have been thickly layered over by "Cultures
[sic] & Community", subheading "Issues" (right beside
"Cooking"). Here one finds "Genetic Engineering" and
"Death Penalty" sharing a list with "Confederate Flag"
and "Road Rage". The contempt of hierarchy is not merely
skin-deep, either. Keyword phrases like "academic nihilism" and
"campus propaganda" might as well be typed in transliterated
Greek: they register no "hits" where the two words are actually
side-by-side, leaving one to feel that one has ingenuously violated the
savvy chatter of e-land. I would scarcely be surprised someday to see a
little gray box adorned with exclamation points pop up: "Third
hitless search! Further access denied! Please exit this program!"
But "Religion & Belief", at any rate,
enjoys its own primary category, and Christianity is listed prominently
beneath it alongside Islam, Buddhism, and "Paganism". The groups
number in the tens of thousands, besides. One cannot help but be sanguine
about the possibility of a mature discussion.
One filters out the eudemonist entries with the most
cursory reading, and quite without the dubious help of electronic sieves
and screens. Even a brain on auto-pilot can quickly spot the signs:
"make friends", "feel the love", "hi!",
misspellings like "prase" and "charish". These are
young people (though not as young, alas, as their orthography makes them
appear) who want desperately to be happy. They mean no harm; and they may,
indeed, be groping after the fresh air of facile optimism through a miasma
of adult-inflicted harms (sexual abuse, broken homes, lifelong
psychological neglect) as suffocating as the atmosphere of Dickens’s
London. No, they have nothing much to say—but leave them to their
triviality. A convalescing patient needs quiet torpor before he is whole
enough to confront vigorous exercise. For the answer to why so many tender
shoots are so etiolated, let us proceed soberly to the more mature
offerings.
Mature, indeed! I have now used that word twice to
describe the level of exchange where hard facts can be stared in the face:
the fact that babies sometimes contract incurable diseases, the fact that
innocent people sometimes spend years in jail, the fact that large
organizations—even ecclesiastical ones—sometimes reprimand or dismiss
employees who tell too much truth too openly.2 No mature faith
can maintain in the teeth of such evidence that God does not allow
believers to suffer. Try seeking out maturity, however, with more keyword
phrases which seem sure to lead to its doorstep, and you enter the Net’s
insane Hall of Mirrors, where the origin of words is irretrievably remote
and where countless inept associations have effected the most grotesque
caricatures. We are already aware that "mature" in post-sixties
America (i.e., since every vestige of censorship was lifted from
film-making and since offbeat television channels began to proliferate)
commonly means "characterized by an adolescent obsession with
sex". No need to waste time running a search on that word in
any combination. What about "moral reason", though? It turns out
that the invocation of reason dredges up groups of deviants who regard
every conceivable inhibition upon any pleasure whatever to be irrational!
Apparently, to outrage decorum is in itself a mark of lofty genius, of
thinking outside bourgeois boundaries. There are e-groups serving
Christian sado-masochists, Christian fetishists, Christian pedophiles…
all of these, so they claim, are somehow engaged in the practice of moral
reason. Never mind: try another search. "Intelligent faith"?
After a mere two or three twists, one ends up in the electronic labyrinth’s
most cryptic cul-de-sacs. The furrow-browed Faustian "reasoners"
who share their favorite porn are indeed an almost wholesome lot beside
the various neoteric Round Tables whose paladins believe implicitly in
dragons and magic (or Magick, as they style their fantasy of northern
European blood-sport). Is it "intelligent" or "faith",
then, which feeds this rancid strain of mold? All I know is that any
attempt to marry the concept of purposeful reflection with that of active
faith is a passport, not to yesteryear’s Christian mainstream (the
discipline of reason, the exempla of tradition, the counsel of holy
writ), but to today’s fringe.
To hunt for "maturity" from a negative
direction casts an even darker pall over one’s screen-time. Phrases like
"moral chaos" and "cultural meltdown" have the same
effect upon the open Internet as blood has upon sharks or a lamb’s
bleating upon a tiger. One raises cheers where one had expected to draw
long, knowing sighs. Images which should haunt us to this day, which
should continue to haunt our children’s children—the Nazi swastika,
the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Charles Manson’s blood-scrawled
"helter skelter"—have become what are now called
"cultural icons". They are the stuff of t-shirts and Web pages.
"Total meltdown, man!" At this point, "hi!" and
"make friends" are beginning to look good—and are beginning,
even, to look less intellectually crippled. If the Net brings out the
worst in people, it also enjoys the doubtful virtue of always possessing a
lower trough than the one whose clammy oblivion you have just plumbed in
disbelief.
So we come, at last, to the mainstream as it exists
here, in electronic currents—in a space without dimension whose
occupants appropriate outlandish pseudonyms. The gullible adolescents and
the ring-eyed sociopaths could be brought into perspective, no doubt, as
two shores of the major current. A case could be made that the children
have always been with us, liberally flashing their winsome smiles and
passing out flowers in furtherance of "a nice day"; they seem to
me not always to have been so abundant or so purged of self-consciousness—but
it is, and always was, natural enough that the naïve should suppose their
rosy horizons a triumph of will power. Likewise, the lurid dusk of
strained sanity has always limned our world. Every era has surely harbored
a certain small percentage of exhibitionists, pyromaniacs, antinomians,
and warped planks left out in the rain at a very early age (though, again,
the abundance and assertiveness of these bravos among us now strikes me as
alarming and symptomatic). Even if the Net could be held responsible for
multiplying both silliness and depravity, it cannot be charged with having
invented either one.
But the mainstream is another thing. By definition, it
characterizes eras, cultures, systems, and faiths. As a subscriber to
"intelligent faith", besides (and by that I mean simply an
oft-applied conviction that intense thought leads us toward rather than
away from God), I believe in a "mainstream of mainstreams". That
is, cultural oddities having been factored out and historical juggernauts
having been given time to annihilate themselves, I believe that people of
all times and places tend to converge upon a few basic realizations—or
perhaps to fight against them tragically, which is really the same thing.
The "things realized", furthermore, are overwhelmingly of a
moral nature. Beauty has its own kind of perdurability, to be sure; but
the most insistent classic is but a murmur beside the moral imperative to
stay one’s hand from harming innocents or to keep one’s solemn word.
Is this the mainstream, then, into which Internet
discussion groups carry one? Having easily navigated past the happy
frivolity of finger-deep rivulets and, more laboriously, rafted clear of
deathly whirlpools, does one find oneself delivered into something like
the common sense of a maturely mature humanity?
I actually joined several groups this spring on the
assumption that, indeed, the human condition’s inescapable force field—the
limits of life, of possible knowledge, of possible meaning—must overtake
a large portion of these wayfarers, even though my keyworded hails had
drawn no automatic response from their published self-descriptions. What I
soon discovered, therefore, left me aghast. E-groups—and now I mean mainstream
e-groups—do not discuss matters of faith, or matters mundane inviting
the insights of faith, with any notable regard for reason or Western
tradition. They have no sense of philosophical rigor and integrity nor any
of the generations of thoughtful people who have gone before them. None
whatever—absolutely none. They have precisely one approach to every
question: they throw Bible verses at it. Participants who refuse to heave
more verses into the fray are disqualified from the exchange, often very
overtly and with an imperious manner well within the boundaries of
boorishness. I recall one "discussion" where a party dared to
suggest that the lessons of the Garden of Eden were less about gender than
about human nature. This author was trying to argue, in other words, that
our gender is irrelevant to sin, whose roots are spiritual rather than
glandular. Punishment was quick and decisive. Under a pelting of biblical
citations—single lines (the same two or three, mostly) wrenched from
context and tagged with the declaration that their few translated words
were self-evident in intent—the unhappy moralist retired. The victors
monopolized the message board throughout the next week with scripturally
inflected war-whoops.
This, I repeat, soon emerged as the pattern in the vast
majority of "responsible" e-groups. I am not in a position to
maintain that there are categorically no Yahoo e-groups devoted to
reflective discussion of ethical issues, Christian morality, or faith and
works. I may surely hazard the remark, however, based on my experience,
that these are not readily turned up by keyword searches; and I may surely
extend that point, as well, to observe that the mainstream Christian by
the Internet’s tabulation primarily worships the Bible rather than
the God who became incarnate in Christ. After all, every search on the Net
is an opinion survey. The results irresistibly advance the thesis that the
Christian presence on the Web is not properly Christian at all, but
"biblicist" or "bibliolatrous" (in James Barr’s apt
coinage). This body of faithful judges heretical any questioning (let
alone denying) of the Bible’s utter, literal inerrancy in all matters—not
just moral matters, but matters historical, geographical, geological,
meteorological, anthropological, political, and nutritional—all
matters. "Heresy" is the precise diction favored at such
prickly moments. I have seen it used of several authors excluded from the
inner e-circles at issue. It was aimed explicitly at me on one occasion,
and more implicitly at another venue which refused to publish my comments
(and which warned up front that rudeness, vulgarity, and
"heresy" would not be tolerated).
In this essay, I wish to push the point still further
in a somewhat daring thesis: that the Internet has fueled the malignant
growth of bibliolatry. Precisely because the Net bestows the freedom of
invincible laterality, it also and inevitably leads to the most tyrannical
kind of hierarchy. I mean, of course, the tyranny of mass whimsy.
Uninformed by any particular knowledge of the past or submission to reason
or even obedience to a common etiquette, chatters and surfers exchange
jokes, insults, imprecations, and propositions far and wide. The
electronic forum simply monitors and then prioritizes these by frequency
of repetition. A lot of people are buying Graia’s fish: a lot more want
to hear Viterbo’s dirty ditties about Julia. Meanwhile, Pompilius is
trying to read his treatise on fortune to Laertius… but they can hardly
hear themselves think over all the shouting, spewing, guffawing, and
finagling.
So it is with "biblical" e-groups: their
poverty of thought, rich only in citations of a text whose complex history
most of their members scarcely imagine, is the ignorant voice of an
ignorant mass. The Net has amplified this voice until no other is audible.
Its speed-of-light exchanges are exquisitely designed to solicit the
bandying of biblical verses back and forth like volleyed tennis balls.
Long, subtle arguments, thrice proofread and edited even after weeks or
months of preparation, don’t belong here. They are a relic of the
literate universe. E-argumentation, rather, is guerilla warfare: snipe,
hit and run, slit throats from behind. It all leaves one ringing and
smarting, desirous of firing back a shot or two in kind yet chagrined that
the words tingling between fingertips and keyboard are the shallow,
childish sort which occupy the tongue’s tip, as well. The very
"study guides" of many denominations which are printed, bound,
and distributed by the thousand (there is one before me at this moment)
have acquired a "Q&A" or "FAQ" format from the
ubiquitous Web page. That is, biblical commentators now routinely reject
sustained argument and amass, instead, a battery of statistically common
but logically unrelated questions which they address in
first-come-first-served order, often with little more than a Bible verse.
For in religious discussions, scriptural citation is
the quick kill par excellence. Televangelists had already
discovered as much thirty years ago, when they renounced Bishop Sheen’s
sober, civil reasoning to "electrify" audiences with one-liners.
On the Net, scriptural one-upmanship’s stiff-wristed thrust through the
throat is very nearly the exclusive means of forensic triumph in
"Christian" exchanges. "You didn’t cite a single
scriptural passage. What about Philippians? What about Galatians? What
about Second Corinthians?" These are lone verses, most often, pulled
from modern English translations without any regard for their immediate
context in the document and with little awareness of historical/cultural
circumstance.3 They are sentences (at least in English: not
always in Greek) in which a certain word appears (at least in English: not
always in Greek) which has been listed in a concordance. That is, they are
the result in clipped, massed congeries of a keyword search done
with paper and ink. Long before the Internet (or even print) was ever
dreamt of, rhetors already knew the utility of rapid iteratio for
inciting a crowd. Rabble-rousers of old, however, had to allow that the habit
of listening might readmit the better argument.
Yet while I grant that the Internet did not create The
Myth of the Quotable and Inerrant Text (nor even televangelism), I am
convinced that biblical citation itself has fundamentally changed in the
electronic age. Take Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron—which,
despite its immersion in medieval Catholicism, extols Bible-reading over
seeking priestly counsel more than once. Marguerite’s manner of
scriptural study is a truly devotional exercise, often solitary and never,
when communal, attended by shouting down of one’s adversary. The
emphasis was one finding the way through a moral quandary, not on grabbing
one verse and running off with it in struck-it-rich exultation. By the
late Renaissance, of course, such intense Bible study was fairly common
among Protestants (as well as certain marginal groups of Catholics like
the Jansenists). Significantly, these same sects and denominations were
often fractured from within by more charismatic believers who found the
prevailing studious habits "uninspired". That is, those
worrisome few who equated hysteria with holy rapture were almost always opponents
of Bible-study. The Quakers, for instance, originated in a European
Pietist tradition which very much aspired to a spare, minimalist,
"scriptural" manner of living, and which sought to secure itself
in that manner by quietly reading and meditating upon holy writ. By the
early nineteenth century, however, congregations in the frontier states
viewed Bible-reading as ostentatious and insincere.4
Surely it is significant that the electronic phenomenon
has here reversed the tempo of "reading", turning it into a
search-and-seize operation. Between preemptive applications of The Word,
we seldom find lingering moral benefits on message boards and in
discussion groups. That is, when no one is trumping the flux of commentary
with a scriptural verse, participants may write in with the most
digressive and ill-focused babble, not always stopping short of vindictive
gossip. Wasn’t this entirely predictable? So truculent and arbitrary are
recurrences to scripture that, the verse du jour having been
descanted, nothing remains to talk about—not, that is, with regard to
the verse, which must rest as venerated and unscrutinized as the Arc of
the Covenant. The faithful therefore fall to chattering in mindless
fashion about what (to any shrewd analyst) might seem the least
appropriate subjects. The chirping continues until one of the group
protests the absence of biblical verses. Then the cycle begins again—having
consumed, however, not two or three generations, but two or three days. I
offer the ensuing plaintive ramble in evidence, which I gleaned from a
"Christian writers" site:
I have found that reading the Bible is like unlocking
a great mystery that is hidden to many, and only opened by few. As the
Holy Spirit reveals things to me, I like to share them in discussion
groups at church like Sunday School. Today I said that I was having
trouble to [sic] with dying to self, and living to serve God. The Sunday
school teacher told me that what I was going through was too legalistic,
that we could argue about it all day and not come to any conclusion. To
me though, its [sic] quite simple, and one of the basic lessons we learn
as Christians… Dying to self: taking up our cross: and going after
Jesus with our whole heart [sic].
I should of [sic] known that this was not a subject
open in Sunday School. After all, they’re not used to talking about
the Bible. Sunday after Sunday for the past two years it’s been
nothing but a gossip session about the problems we face every day. And
seldom did I EVER hear anything Biblical in that class. Rarely did they
ever open their Bibles, let alone open the class with a prayer. I got
fed up a month ago and went out and bought a Bible Study for that class
and gave it to the teacher.
I shall not waste space pummeling the painful solecisms
of this algarade. We all know that our young writers cannot write. Worthy
of emphasis, though, is the fusion of a whimsical mysticism with a
determined biblicism. This author has so lost the literate habit of keen
self-analysis that she cannot in any way picture how her own (obviously
considerable) yearnings and frustrations may have influenced her reading
of scripture. When she reads the Bible, she brings nothing to it: the flow
of insight comes utterly, mystically from the other direction. She is
fully persuaded, besides, that her very intimate consolation and rapture
await others in precisely the same measure who may agree to read with her.
Her encounter, as far as she is concerned, has absolutely nothing
subjective about it. One can pass a very gloomy hour pondering whether
this young woman’s inevitable failure to reach and sustain perfect
beatitude, with or without a support-group of other Bible-browsers, will
wreak lasting damage upon her fragile soul.
Many such e-groups, of course, would insist that they
are conducting patently ethical business, not vetting slogans and forging
sound bites. They want a better world—that is, a world where people
behave better. Nevertheless, something about their means to this objective
is profoundly, alarmingly anti-ethical; or lest I stumble upon the
ambiguities of the word "ethical" (which, in its literal sense,
merely signifies the habitual), I see something here which is wrong, bad,
and surely displeasing to the God of goodness. For does not goodness
require choice, and choice require deliberation, and deliberation require
a collecting of all relevant facts and a sensitive assessing of them
against general principles? How could anyone be pleasing to God who has no
zeal for goodness, and how could willful ignorance of details in any
situation be called zealous? How could blind acceptance of how another has
applied principle to circumstance be deemed a devotion to principle—are
we afraid, then, that our principles will shatter into pieces if we notice
that certain predicaments bring two or three of them to strain upon each
other? And in view of the complexity involved in serving God thus
faithfully, why would one not prominently display words like
"ethical" or "moral" or "goodness" in one’s
Internet invitation to discuss God and humankind? Why would the very name
of one’s group—of a single lonely group, out of thousands—not be
"God All Good" or "Deeds of Mercy" or "Moral
Duty"?
The result of electronic haste upon genuine spirituality has
been devastating, and may well prove catastrophic. To be a Christian is
primarily to believe in a supernatural power which is supremely and
eternally good. That power may be other things, as well. Specifically, it
may be materially preemptive in some way or ways, ranging from
meteorological effects to spontaneous influence upon tires or roof tiles
or ballistic nylon in proximity to the protected persons of the elect. Yet
this god, before he is a rainmaker or body-guard or engineer, is a Father:
he is God, benign, loving, and merciful. To the extent that this "omnibenevolence"
may enter into conflict with other divine attributes, it trumps them. If
an all-good creator and sustainer could not have arranged murderous events
in any comprehensible fashion, he did not arrange them in any
comprehensible fashion. If this means that he is not in full control to
our manner of understanding, then he is not in full control to our manner
of understanding. And when such an event is ascribed to his will by a
document included (perhaps after long oral transmission, and certainly
after frequent translation) in the solid citizen’s Revised Standard
Bible, then… then the Bible gets it wrong.5 The Christian God
may well cause things in ways that no human being can understand; but when
a human being clearly understands ethnic annihilation or the joy of
flexing muscle as a cause of events—when such is God’s biblically
stated motive—then the Christian shakes his head and declares with
conviction, "No."6 Christians cannot know why God
does everything, but they well ought to know that he never does anything
for certain reasons.
This is "mere Christianity": it is mandatory.
One cannot not believe that God is supremely good and still be a
Christian. Now, I do not say that all those who insist upon the strict,
literal inerrancy of the Bible in all matters are not true Christians,
though many of them would say as much of me for daring to raise the
possibility of scriptural misstatement. Rather, I contend that most
inerrantists are not true inerrantists, having never thought through the
position in all that it implies. But let me forestall a host of vexed
questions and probable quibbles about matters chronological, historical,
and empirical. Let us allow for the moment, even, that there’s something
we must be missing when God is said to exhort Israel’s kings to
wholesale slaughter of civilian populations. Let us take a body of moral
teaching as irreproachably sound as any which has ever passed through
human hands or before human eye: the Sermon on the Mount, for instance.
Here is authority made manifest! Who could resist such words? Yes, but
therein lies the very undoing of the inerrantist position. That pang of
conviction, that spring of "enthusiasm" (literally, "being
in the god")—these are movements of the human heart, not dance
steps learned from a diagram. Words of moral persuasion are true when they
sound true, when they vanquish our own considerable capacity to
serve our selfish interest and to represent our motives in flattering
fraud. We do not know their truth from the authority of the book wherein
they appear; we know the book’s authority, instead, from the fact that
such words appear within it.
The inerrantist is precluded from believing this. He is
forced by his intractable system to locate authority within the
document, not within the heart which reads or hears the document. God
spoke, the prophet repeated, the scribe wrote, and we obey. Were we to
maintain that God continues speaking—and to us personally, through our
heart and mind and conscience—then we would short-circuit the chain of
command. The God of goodness might speak things to us which are not even
in the book, or he might say with greater clarity to us things which seem
somewhat garbled in the book. Then we would all be so many little prophets
walking about and claiming each to have his own truth. What a horrid
carnival of relativism would result!
But relativism is already weaving quite comfortable
nests where idolaters of the written word willfully craft tortured
interpretations into "literal" declarations. And it is
relativism à l’enchère, surcharged with the highly
dangerous assurance that it is not relative to the reader’s will.
La Rochefoucauld’s cynical warning, cited in epigraph at this essay’s
beginning, is a necessary corrective to our most zealous moments. We dare
not take a moral crisis lightly, yet we dare not take our response to it
too seriously. No arrogance is less pious or more lethal than the
self-willed obstinacy of someone who insists that God has full possession
of his will.
I cannot overemphasize that I am not presently
challenging the Bible’s reliability as a moral assessment of God’s
purposes, or even as a historical or scientific record. Though I believe
one must in conscience and in reason do so at times, I have suspended that
degree of rigor here merely to make a point about authority.7
Were the Bible impeccable in honoring God’s perfect goodness and in
stating historical chronology and detail, to accept all of its contents
without question purely because they belong to the Bible would
contradict the essence of the Christian faith. On what basis might this
book, this collection of books drawing upon disparate cultural stages
(from nomadic to urban, from oral to literate, from Eastern to Greek),
deserve such abject acceptance? Because it comes from God? But that
argument is transparently circular: we must worship God because the Bible
tells us to, and we must do what the Bible tells us because it is God’s
word. Or are we fearful of eternal punishment, perhaps, or awed by
biblical miracles adduced as evidence? But a moral system cannot be
constructed out of fear—not fear of physical reprisal, at any rate. To
be sure, the genuine fear of God is a dread of being called to a strict
accounting for our half-hearted acts and tainted motives; but such fear
bears the signs of inner conviction—of moral understanding and
active conscience—all over it. As for awe, one plays Russian roulette
with one’s soul in granting supreme authority to special effects. Modern
science, too, can virtually bring people back from the dead or make rivers
run backward. Should we, then, surrender our moral will to the scientist’s
reality? Much of Christendom had done precisely that by the end of the
nineteenth century, and we are still reaping the bitter harvest therefrom—apparently
without having learned our lesson.
For there is nowhere, ultimately, for the voice of God
to draw its authority except from without or from within. If from without,
whether from revered texts or perceived menaces and miracles, then our
faith rests upon our senses, and therefore upon material phenomena, and
therefore upon things perishable, misapprehensible, and unworthy of faith.
If from within, then we must take constant care, undoubtedly, to sort the
true voices from the innumerable whispers, wheedles, and whines of
egotism. Hence the special role of humility in the Christian faith.
But some will say that my rationalizing exposes an
unregenerate heart—that I would recognize, if I were "saved",
how the voice mystically commands obedience from without and thereby
transforms the individual within. At the risk of persisting in the
unpardonable sin of rational coherence, I must remark two grave errors in
this view. The first is moral: it is the full repeal licensed in the newly
recruited Christian soldier of that precious humility just mentioned. Now
invaded utterly by God’s will, he has no moral lapses, thinks no selfish
thoughts.8 I have already stressed that no position could be
more repugnant to the true practice of Christianity.9 As for
the second error, it is the simple logical embarrassment of circular
reasoning again. If God does not speak to us within the limits of our
human understanding, then he can only impose his will from without in a
fashion doomed to appear arbitrary. If acceptance of this arbitrary force
somehow reveals to us, however, that it is rooted in our nature, then it
was never really arbitrary to start with, and the thunder and fireworks
were indeed distractions rather than revelations. There is no third
alternative.
When the bibliolater removes the very possibility of
moral enlightenment from the mechanism of God’s love, he repudiates the
Christian faith and does the work of darkness. This, if I may sadly resume
my main strand, is clearly just what awaits us as a culture:
"e-faith". Allegiance to a protocol: sub-allegiance to a
community within the protocol, to a group within the community, to a topic
within the group. Bible Worship > Make Friends > Youth Groups >
Bowling for Jesus. Laterality applied to the nth degree—or, at
least, to that degree where available hours of the non-negotiable
twenty-four are pleasantly consumed. The refinement of human relationships
and intellectual commitments once supplied by reading, reflecting,
qualifying, compromising—in a word, by thought—has now been
supplanted by an etiquette of sidestepping which brings one eventually to
whatever inner circles are desired. Definition of sloppy terms
sidestepped, mitigation of crude generalities sidestepped, contradiction
by hard experience sidestepped, dissension among rough fellow-travelers
sidestepped. Result: your very own e-sculpted prayer group! But do these
circles really consist of friends and spiritual brothers? Do their
celebrants enjoy sufficient common ground to deserve such a distinction
merely after having made the same four or five choices off a menu? The
bibliolater is incapable of protesting the shallowness of it all (unless,
of course, he is a defector at heart). Keywords are the foundation of his
universe. He points and clicks: his duty is to follow prompts, not to
analyze options for what may be missing among them. Even if he has never
owned a computer, he has created a robotically linear faith which the
computer-generation recognizes at first glance as
"user-friendly". All reflection has been anticipated:
"other" has been nudged off all menus with the addition of a few
more links.
The most graphic illustration of e-faith’s rigor
mortis must surely be the proliferation of fellatious sex among girls
wishing to preserve their virginity. The role of biblicist evangelism in
winning young people away from the carnivorous vortex of the sexual
revolution is to be praised—or would be, if the battle were really won.
Unfortunately, this effort has only wrested adolescents from the watery
clutches of Charybdis to deliver them into the talons of Scylla; for being
biblicist, it refuses to define carnality or to explain the essential
sinfulness of carnal living. It simply cites scripture. I do not say that
sin is difficult to explain, and that the Bible-worshiper makes a hash of
it.10 I say—for this point deserves heavy emphasis—that the
bibliolater disdains any style of counter-argument which is not
mired in his peculiarly out-of-context scriptural nuggets. Reason is
positively to be shunned. All that the newly recruited footsoldier of True
Love Waits has in her arsenal is three or four scriptural verses rather
vaguely addressing lust (for St. Paul, in his good taste, always shied
away from dissecting lust) and the camaraderie of other platoons flanking
her, leading her, and following her. Which of these supports is more
likely to influence her behavior significantly? Hardly scripture. She has
been carefully drilled in the evils of analyzing scriptural passages. The
very attempt would perhaps be a far greater evil than mindlessly violating
any particular passage: it would be the unpardonable sin against the Holy
Spirit. Instead, she will look to her sisters. Where they march, she
marches. If they supply fellatio to their boyfriends (after all,
Jesus is love—how’s that for literal reading?), then she, too, falls
on her knees. A kind of self-degradation so patent and so outrageous to
any healthy moral acumen that St. Paul must have waved it with disgust
into the legions of "impurities" and "bestialities"
has turned invisible on the Bible’s pages for these letter-addicted
legionnaires, and… vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni.
Click "Bible". Click "Love". Click
"Virginity". Click "Local Organizations". Click
"Sign On". Congratulations: your submission has been received!
It is no doubt possible to be too hard on the
electronic sources of this zealous hostility toward analysis. If Western
culture will turn incurious tomorrow, it was also incurious yesterday. In
the United States, "Bible-thumping" is inevitably associated
with Appalachia, where illiterate or proto-literate populations of poor
farmers once blended their faith with heavy doses of hoary superstition
and hard-nosed proverbial wisdom.11 At the same time, however,
to equate the chapter-and-verse hailstorms which rage in e-Christian
chatrooms with the hillbilly’s downtrodden hard-headedness is grossly
unfair to the hillbilly. There is good reason for this careworn, sun-baked
churl to cling to the past and the familiar. The newfangled has always
parted him from his pennies, and the snake oil he has received in exchange
grows no magic beanstalk leading to Jack’s pot of gold. In contrast, the
post-Christian Bible-believer, while he may play up a connection with
rustic simplicity, is wholly unconvincing in this role. He is quite as
heavily represented among prosperous Mid-westerners in burgeoning urban
areas as among poor Southerners inhabiting miserable mill villages. His
house has Internet hook-up, his children prefer Web-surfing to TV, and his
daily life is meticulously scheduled with church outings and soccer
practice rather than inscrutably ravaged by flood and drouth. He could
well afford a little time to meditate: he freely chooses to search out
"family-friendly" Hollywoodiana. He could well afford to stock a
personal library: he freely chooses to invest in DVD’s. He could well
afford to buy new tires for his aging Buick: he freely chooses to spring
for a minivan with all the trimmings. Nothing about this habit of
existence indicates the slightest interest in keeping tradition alive.
More often than not, this man or woman is indeed materially
invested in post-literacy. He owns stock in it. He most certainly
consumes "cultural progress", if not e-culture, and he very
likely sells it in some way or measure. My comment above regarding the
purchase of lavishly accoutered minivans was not a pompous crypto-Marxist
sneer of the sort so common in academic writing. It is based on blunt
observation. The concurrent embracing of "car culture" and of
biblical fundamentalism may be remarked in any part of the United States
that I have ever inhabited (and, as an ex-professor with no talent for
politics, I have moved around quite a bit). Many such congregations will
announce of a Sunday that auto forays have been arranged over the coming
week to the mall, to the lake, to the amusement park. I have yet to hear
of one organizing a hiking or biking or walking club. Generous
contributions from car dealerships are routine: at this instant, I could
name two owners of such dealerships in my neck of the woods who are
aldermen. A merely cursory reconnoitre of the church’s parking lot when
services are in session will reveal some interesting disparities between
one of these congregations and (for instance) the local Catholic church.
Even the young single members seem to have secured a loan for some
respectable wheels. Fifteen-year-old models are nowhere in evidence here.
My point is this. If ever a modern habit of living were
antithetical to the Bible’s paradigm—not morally so much as
culturally, where biblicists insist that the paradigm be applied—"auto-mania"
is that habit. The automobile disrupts families, neighbor-hoods, and
communities. Its relation to the post-World War II skyrocketing in teen
pregnancy, though little studied, cannot be seriously disputed. Its
implication in zoning laws which undermined urban solidarity has been just
as overlooked, yet is equally transparent. Its participation in the
business culture of long commutes and sudden transfers is more discussed,
and has clearly shattered extended family structures beyond repair.
Nevertheless, faced with a technology which has nourished illegitimacy,
abortion, incivility, fragmentation of social units, toxification of the
air supply, and a murderous frivolity especially notable among
adolescents, the biblicist can find no contradiction herein with any of
his beloved single-verse formulas. There were no cars in antiquity. Hence
the noxious presence of the car in our own existence is wholly
unarbitrated by anything to be found in The Book. On the contrary, The
Book says that God wants prosperity for "his people" (who are,
of course, the Bible-idolaters—for who could be more deserving of the
letter’s promises than one who adores the letter?). In the modern world,
the only way to prosper (and we all know what "prosper" means,
don’t we?) is to ride the wave of technological progress: to sell cars,
to connect cables, to hawk the Internet. God’s people, therefore—always
following the strict letter of the law—are fully intended to
immerse themselves in trends which raze the literate Western heritage left
and right, and may God’s blessing be upon them!
Despite a theatrical hugging of the Bible before every
possible audience, post-Christian biblicists are not only not
particularly atavistic: they are not even notably conservative. Here lies
the crux of the matter. At the heart of our Western tradition lies our
Christian faith, and at the heart of our Christian faith rests immovably
the all-goodness of God. Goodness is not defined by drawing lines in the
sand and declaring, "Cross or be damned!" The boundaries must
cut profoundly through our souls, even though, in every human soul, there
lives an almost-as-profound inclination to defy the boundaries. When the
letters and print and translations and adaptations of The Book are
deprived of this inner elucidation, they become the mute prisoners of
whimsy which Socrates foresaw in writing.12
Of course, Socrates’s teaching anticipated Jesus’s—and
neither could have awakened thousands of hearts, no doubt, had writing
itself not already begun to rouse oral tradition from its deep tribal
slumber. As usual in human affairs, there are enough ironies here to keep
one musing all day long. Our culture’s early beacons of inner life could
not but grieve that loss of traditional innocence which would leave some
snared in their own egotism and folly even as it freed others to approach
the true God. As the Hebraic tradition longed after Eden, so the classical
tradition longed after Arcadia. Yet at last, one must grow up to grow
toward God. One must grow into the second childhood—the child-like moral
idealism—of refusing to dwell comfortably in the dark cracks between
"appearances". The bibliolater has not relinquished his first
childhood: he clings, childishly, to his first responses as if the very
simplicity of declaring them objective could make them so. In this
letter-idolater’s pharisaically petulant attachment to "what it
says", we see the prophet’s strange pity for the hordes he has just
enlightened turned inside-out; for here sits the supreme irony of one who
murders literate inquiry and its highest virtue, self-deprecating
humility, all for a self-professed love of holy writ.13
Make no mistake, then. Literacy’s single most
precious gift is squandered in the banishment of moral authority (and
hence the very possibility of morality) from an internal source. Duty no
longer says, "I must step forward, though I be killed";
conscience no longer says, "I must step back, though the crowd turn
on me"; inspiration no longer says, "In those words
speaks the voice of God." The Book now represents the group, the
clique, the ethnos: and, not very deep down but so loud as to make all
else inaudible, the only inner utterance laments, "What will they say
if I don’t go along?"14
To be sure, written words may energize duty,
conscience, and inspiration. Parts of the Bible teem with such words. So
do parts of Shakespeare, parts of Dante, and even parts of Vergil. To
maintain that these most critical moments of individual humanity, however—of
the soul’s wrestling match with itself—are objectively in the words,
which in turn pull duty and conscience and inspiration about like
marionettes on a string… this, I urge, is fatally obtuse. It is the
Janus twin (if you haven’t yet had enough of irony) to postmodern theory’s
charge that words have no meaning. For if all the meaning is
in the word and none in the reader’s heart, the reader can only
make up meanings as he reads: he can possess no key to the bolted door. By
no accident, the inevitable outcome of post-structuralism was PC fascism,
the intractable idolatry of certain words, certain codes, which is
commonly known as ideology. The strict Bible-worshiper is an idolater of
the code for the very same reason. Indeed, he will visibly, publicly agree
with his leftist utopian counterpart on this point alone: that the
valorization of inner life—of deep reflection, of rational seeking after
universals—is absolutely to be despised and categorically to be
rejected.
So the Right Wing biblicist and the Left Wing
relativist alike end up in the starless midnight of Pyrrho, from which
both emerge with a triumphantly unexplained and inexplicable program of
action. No wonder they loathe each other—they are competing for
precisely the same patch of turf! What those of us who remain
unrepentantly thoughtful, though, must understand about this paradox is
its foundation in post-literacy—not illiteracy or pre-literacy, but in
the moribund phase wherein thought itself is thoughtlessly blamed for the
Fall, for the Bomb, for Mortality. Traditional audiences are not
especially resistant to novelty, insight, or moral appeal. They are taken
aback at such moments, but not stirred to violence.15 Our
present malaise involves an outright hostility to inner revelation. You
may protest that literate-scientific culture was most eloquent in
advocating the early stages of its suicide. Post-structuralist theorists
were often stunningly well-read within their narrow areas of interest, and
were much given, besides, to the late-literate vices of sophistry and facetiae.
This is all quite true—but it is also now painfully after-the-fact.
At present, we are well into the metastatic stage.
Today’s advocates of stoning classicism, the Enlightenment, and quiet
meditation generally are not suicidal. They are already solidly on
the outside of the culture which some of them appallingly claim to be
protecting. They do not read literature, and they do not comprehend
science. Their internal depth has been successfully back-filled by
semantic bulldozing and linear link-hopping.16
Our choices for "therapeutic invasion", then,
are two: shut down the e-system through whose arteries the malignancy
spreads apace, or inject large doses of literacy into victims from whose
eyes and ears wires are practically trailing. Now, to suppose that
millions of young Internet addicts, alerted to an absence of depth in
their lives by literary scholars and moral philosophers, will create a run
on used copies of Conrad, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen is to traffic in the
inanities of the educational system’s career bureaucrats (not that many
of these latter would ever think to recommend Conrad, Tolstoy, or Jane
Austen). Our nation shows few signs of disaffection with its electronic
thought-suppressants; and until it wearies of swimming endless laps around
the wading pool, it will naturally have no time for reading. The second
option, that is, suffers the misfortune of depending on the first. Without
a general turning away from the screen, there can be no general turning
toward the printed page.
So there is no chemotherapy or surgery indicated for
this Stage 2 progression, only surrender to ever-increasing malfunction
and pain… is that the prognosis? Actually, in this instance, it may also
be the cure. Pain is a great motivator: people sometimes seem incapable of
action without it. In the days of high literacy, a bright person typically
needed relatively little pain to inaugurate a productive chain of
reflections. A single chagrin d’amour, perhaps, or a single rude
encounter with social inequality might suffice. People felt more deeply
then, for they had more time to feel as well as the habit of quietly,
doggedly teasing out their soul’s secrets. Today a lover requires
multiple hook-ups and break-ups, with their attendant baggage of
alcohol-fueled parties, illegal anti-depressants, nagging social diseases,
physical abuse, stalking, unwanted pregnancy, and the rest to figure out
that the road to happiness doesn’t lead through such jungles and
deserts. An aspiring young professional sacrifices two decades to
specialized degrees and licenses, conferences, and colloquia, training
films and tutorials, interviews and introductions, probational stints and
menial assignments before realizing that the system is rigged to advance
only children of certain parents or graduates of certain schools. Our
culture peddles dreams. We are raised now to believe that each obstacle
may be sidestepped even as a deftly wielded mouse circumnavigates a
website’s broken links. We are a long time learning that there is no way
through certain cliff faces, and an even longer time getting over it. Our
initial response is to hire an attorney.
How long, then, does a desensitized e-citizen have to
absorb pain before he begins to measure his short span on earth and his
own responsibility in affecting the few precious days of others? How many
friends will die a-partying, how many relatives will be blown out of the
sky, before he grasps that this sort of stuff isn’t just filler for
action movies and video games?17 E-man will be a long time
figuring it all out. He will pray many e-prayers to his fanciful deity—the
one who never lets friends and neighbors perish in cars or airplanes
without a cosmically urgent reason—before he begins to suspect his
spiritual nullity. Then, his electronically calloused hide showing raw
nerves in places at long last, he will begin to understand. He will be
ready to read Conrad, Tolstoy, and Jane Austen—and to seek God.
In the meantime… bring on the select verses whose
tendentiously translated and culturally misappropriated promises never
lie, bring on the ubiquitous background of amplified Soft Rock to which
overfed bodies ritually sway through their day, bring on the speed and
ease of air-conditioned lethal weapons and supersonic death traps, bring
on instant access to imaginative substitutes—e-images of everything from
sex to murder to the Taj Mahal (with filters available to personalize the
menu).
What a monumental waste of time… what a long, hard
way to grow up.
NOTES
1 "Virtues gradually
vanish in self-interest as rivers gradually vanish into the sea."
2 Not only are the realities of political
"pecking order" and sycophancy among the most soul-withering
discoveries which young people make upon entering adulthood—they are
also sometimes very poorly identified in the Epistles. Surely no sane
human being over the age of thirty would award the same moral authority
and "truth value" to St. Paul’s confidence in government (cf.
Romans 13) as he would to the Beatitudes. Paul could not more patently be
expressing an opinion, and that opinion could not be more transparently
arguable. I stress this in passing because what follows is intricately
concerned with the matter of biblical inerrancy. St. Peter reveals a
similar naiveté, perhaps, when he proposes (like Blake’s tender
chimney-sweep) that no one will harm us if we do good (1 Peter 3.13); yet
the assertion is advanced as a rhetorical question, then re-framed in a
slightly less confident afterthought. What, then, is the literal, inerrant
pronouncement behind this utterance’s intelligent vacillation?
3 James G. Barr, in The Bible in the Modern
World (Philadelphia: Trinity P International, 1990), aptly notes the
irregularities in the "strict interpretationist’s" handling of
history. "The point of conflict between fundamentalists and others is
not over literality but over inerrancy. The typical
fundamentalist insistence is not that the Bible must be interpreted
literally but that it must be so interpreted as not to admit that it
contains error. In order to avoid imputing error to the Bible,
fundamentalists twist and turn back and forward between literal and
non-literal (symbolic, metaphorical, transferred) exegesis" (168). Of
course, such "method" is entirely disingenuous, especially since
it so often scorns other methods as devious.
4 Cf. Thomas D. Hamm, The
Transformation of American Quakerism (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 1992), 30.
5 Cf. 1 Samuel 15.3, where God is said to have
commanded Saul to put to the sword all of the Amalekites, "both man
and woman, infant and suckling." Others of His servants to conduct
similar campaigns of ethnic cleansing (cf. Joshua 11, and next footnote).
More vexed, perhaps, is God’s reported command that Abraham immolate his
young son Isaac. Since divine intervention arrests this atrocity, one may
argue that God wished to discover if Abraham primarily worshiped his power
or his goodness (and received a disappointing answer, of course).
Yet from the days of Kierkegaard, anti-rational hysteria has chosen to
interpret the incident in the opposite fashion, lauding Abraham for his
willingness to desecrate the most solemn moral obligations of the human
heart because he hears a voice in thin air—in external thin air.
The defense attorney of Andrea Yates should no doubt be chided for having
overlooked such a promising strategy. If she had belonged to a commune and
the group had stoned her children to death for misbehavior, Deuteronomy
21.18-21 would fully have sanctioned the deed.
6 C.S. Lewis once wrote to
a friend that he would choose God’s goodness before scriptural inerrancy
wherever the two were in conflict. The passage is cited by Joe Edward
Barnhart in The Southern Baptist Holy War (Austin: Texas Monthly P,
1986), 177. Lewis, of course, is a darling of Bible Bookstores, whose
patrons evidently make of him what they will rather than what he declares
himself to be. After citing this foremost Christian apologist of the
twentieth century, Professor Barnhart immediately appends his own worthy
reflection on the biblical account of Joshua’s ethnic purges: "If
the wholesale slaughter of an entire people,
including children, can be justified in the name of God, then anything can
be justified. Joshua’s exploits are situation ethics gone berserk."
7 I devote two chapters to
"the question of authority" in A Body Without Breath: How
Right and Left Have Both Stifled Moral Reason Within the Christian Faith
(Tyler, TX: Arcturus, 2002). The biblicist concentration of all authority
in the Bible as a written revelation, complete and inerrant, is addressed
therein at length.
8 Louis B. Smedes reproduces the following
hybristic sentiments from Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics in his
own Mere Morality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 9: "The
command of God as it is given for us at each moment… wills us precisely
the one thing and nothing else, and measures and judges us precisely by
whether we do or do not do with the same precision the one thing that he
so precisely wills." Though Smedes mollifies the tone in his
comments, he remains in basic agreement.
9 Cf. this eloquently
simple passage in Earl H. Brill, The Christian Moral Vision (New
York: Seabury, 1979): "It may be right and just… for me to kill an
enemy in wartime. But in doing so, I cannot afford the luxury of believing
that my action has no evil in it. The death of a fellow human can never be
other than evil, no matter how necessary it might have been. If we lose
sight of the evil involved in our own right choices, we will develop a
callous attitude that will make love more restrictive rather than more
universal in its application" (37). One could write such words as
these two decades ago under the aegis of the General Convention of the
Episcopal Church. They expressed at that time what I would call the
"mainstream" Christian view.
10 In fact, a thumbnail version of the argument
against surrender to carnal passion is easy to find in the classical
tradition. Since actions can be neither good nor bad if they are not
chosen, the good person must seek to maximize the scope of his or her
choice. Since impulse and passion are by definition unchosen forces which
assert the dominance of species over individual, they are inveterate
enemies of free will. (The intellectual vacuity of campus clichés like
"sexual expression" is, of course, perfect.) Therefore, all
surrender to pure impulse is inherently wrong. Impulse can only be
redeemed when the will has already approved its inclination along rational
and moral lines—as, for instance, when concupiscence is elevated to love
by the will’s affirming a profound and permanent commitment.
11 For a fascinating summary of superstitions
about the Bible as a physical object—where and how to lay it down, how
to exorcise with it, etc.—in the traditional American backwoods
community, see Kevin J. Hayes, Folklore and Book Culture
(Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1997), 28-35.
12 "Every
word, once it has been written down, is rolled around in all directions by
careful listeners and those who hear without profit alike. It does not
know how to address itself to whom it ought and to ignore the others"
(Phaedrus 275e).
13 In his introduction to Literacy in
Traditional Societies (ed. John Rankin Goody and Ian Watt [Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1968], 1-26), Jack Goody comments upon proto-literacy’s
highly conservative, even reactionary qualities. Like Havelock and Ong, he
observes that "literate religions tend to be more `salvationist';
they place greater emphasis on individual paths to righteousness"
(3); yet he is perhaps more sensitive than other scholars to the
pharisaical paradox of a literate élite's attempting to block off these
same paths once they have become entrusted to the mysteries of manuscript.
"Under these conditions book-learning takes on an inflexibility that
is the antithesis of the spirit of enquiry which literacy has elsewhere
fostered" (14). Apparently, the recrudescence of books into objects
revered because of their arcane distance from daily life is also a feature
of post-literate existence.
14 The ubiquitous "What Would Jesus
Do?" line of trinkets reflects little more than this longing after a
clique, a tribe in whose badges and tokens one may adorn oneself. Taken at
a less frivolous level, it would become intolerably schizophrenic. On the
one hand, the simple question (often ciphered by the four letters, "WWJD")
is already a repudiation of verse-brandishing bibliolatry, for it clearly
recommends such complex deliberative exercises as comparison and contrast.
On the other hand, Jesus Christ is ultimately not a model either for the
moral philosopher or for the strict bibliolater, since the former knows
that people are far too imperfect ever to resemble Jesus, and the latter
(in his enthusiasm for the Bible as a whole) sees Jesus’s moral teaching
as insignificant beside his fulfillment of the prophesied scapegoat
sacrifice. Awash in a near-chaos where church authorities shout Bible
verses at them from one bank and infidel peers sneer mockery at them from
the other, our post-literate children primarily want someone to stand at
the head of their fragile column. Their bracelets are perhaps a tribute to
their natural admiration for goodness—but most certainly an indictment,
as well, of adult betrayal.
15 Despite the cliché of the missionary ending
up in the cannibal’s pot, most proponents of the Western literate gospel
of individualism (each soul’s immeasurable value to the one god of
goodness, each person’s obligation to remain pure and to treat others as
ends in themselves) has historically played rather well when auditioned in
oral-traditional quarters. Of course, elements of tradition are often
fused seamlessly with the new faith (a tendency dubbed homeostasis
by Jack Goody), and the results have often
vexed the intruders. Friction rarely erupts into violence, however, unless
traditions are treated with open contempt. The more common kind of
peaceful reception is charmingly illustrated in Book Four of T.E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, when Lawrence gives the Bedouin their
first taste of epic parody. "The Howeitat sat silent as death,
twisting their full bodies inside their sweat-stiffened shirts for joy,
and staring hungrily at Auda; for they all recognized the original, and
parody was a new art to them and to him" (278 in the Anchor Books
edition for Doubleday [New York and London], 1991). After an initial
stupefaction, the group bursts in laughter.
16 During this year’s
Fourth of July fireworks celebrations, which were unusually extravagant
due to the sense of la patrie en danger, major networks naturally
broadcast shows in Washington, DC, and New York City. I am not a yearly
consumer of such productions, so I was quite bewildered to find that both
"shows" were complete audio-visual productions, with blaring
music every bit as explosive as the cherry bombs. Almost as astonishing
was the degree to which the crowds appeared to lend themselves to the
musical suggestion, swaying and singing en masse. I made a point of
studying similar (though, of course, much smaller) celebrations as they
were reported on the local news. More stentorian music: it has clearly
become part of such scenes now. That people no longer want to enjoy a
certain privacy as they contemplate a sublime spectacle raises grave
questions about the "freedom" which they will all praise—in
almost identical formulas—at any wandering reporter’s cue. It has
occurred to me, besides, that the more "fundamentalist"
church-goers of these crowds must already have been very familiar with the
association of sublime moment and cranked-up amplifiers from their weekly
order of worship.
17 That a great many onlookers at first
assimilated the attack upon the World Trade Towers as a scene from a movie
was evident from several on-camera interviews at the time. Witnesses of
our all-too-frequent public massacres (e.g., at the Wedgwood Baptist
Church and at Columbine High School) are also on record as saying—in a
clearly reflexive chain of associations—that they first supposed some
kind of movie to be in the filming before their eyes.
back to top
**************************************
Three Sketches
of Post-Social Society
by
Fiona MacAlister
New to these pages, Ms. MacAlister
teaches junior college, raises her children, and meditates literarily upon
the spiritual bankruptcy of what life in our "free" society has
become from her lofty perch in the Denver area.
Slipped Cables
"Hello. Hello? Oh, hell—"
"Hello, this is a telemarketer. If you’re like
me, you really hate telemarketers, especially when they call at this hour.
So why don’t I just shut up and hang up?"
"Is… that it?"
"Unless you really want to hear about the rip-off
that I’m peddling at the moment for people who are too cheap to put an
ad in the Sunday paper. Why do you think they hire us, anyway? Because we
basically get paid on commission. No sale, no pay. With an ad, they’d be
stuck for the cost whether or not it generated any revenue."
"So… why do you do it?"
"You mean why do I debase myself by harassing
people in their homes at dinner time to chatter about a piece of garbage
that they don’t need and can’t afford? Why don’t I do something
respectable, something where I can have a modicum of self-respect?"
"No, I… well, yes. Why don’t you do something else… where
you can have some… where you can have a sense of fulfillment?"
"Fulfillment? Ah, bella donna—che non
la dispiacqua la mia spavalderia, ma sento della sua voce suavissima che
sia una donna bellissima… you have a nice voice. A beautiful voice.
A person like you… when I’m moved, especially over the phone, I
disguise my thoughts in Italian. It’s hard for me, very hard—it’s
always been very hard—to tell people things in English like that I love
the sound of their voice, that they’re very gentle and that I appreciate…
well, that, you see, is the extent of my education’s usefulness.
I studied Renaissance Italian literature for four years. I was going to do
doctoral work, but… what’s the point? Universities don’t teach
Italian any more. Just get a teacher’s certificate, maybe—but what’s
the point? High schools don’t teach Italian any more. Did they ever? So
what could I do? Work for the CIA as a translator? What’s the point—we’re
not at war with Italy! Work for some federal relief agency, go into the
ghettos to help Italian mama mia’s figure out how to get their
welfare checks? What’s the point? The Italians all learned English a
long time ago, the fools! They could have had everyone eating out of their
hand by now, they could have had ballots printed in Italian, they could
have had Italian newscasts and Italian baseball piped in—they could have
produced lots and lots of jobs for people like me, and there would be
Italian departments on every campus and Italian bilingual education at
every high school. But no, they had to learn English! I’m sorry, I’m…
I’m just being boring."
"No… no."
"But, so what am I supposed to do? Go back to
school and study accounting? I’m no good with figures. Play ball? I’m
not an athlete, I’m a clumsy near-sighted punk. Ah, computers! Bill
Gates! Go on the Internet and sell people virus screens for the viruses I
invent and release, one after another, each one with a screen just waiting
for it—you didn’t know they do that? Or maybe I could market e-lists
for guaranteed customers or guaranteed soulmates pulled randomly from
worldpages-dot-com—a thousand on the basic list, ten thousand on the
platinum—as soon as they give me their credit card numbers. Is that what
I should do? To avoid being a bum, I mean? Or, worse, a
telemarketer?"
"No. No."
"I had a little money stashed away, which I
promptly blew trying to set up an Internet business, funnily enough. An honest
Internet business, one that tracked down old books for people. I paid
for a book-hunting program, I paid for Web hosting, I paid for a software
package to design the site, I paid a consultant to pick the best keywords
and put me on top of the rankings, I paid a specialist to submit my site
to the search engines, I paid another specialist to design a banner ad, I
paid for an e-mail list of potential customers… when it was all over
with, I’d paid everyone and his Aunt Claire, and there went my little
nest egg. But that was okay. I was all fixed up. I was going to get it all
back and then some. In my zeal to make an honest living over the Internet,
though, I had forgotten one thing—and, what do you know, none of my paid
consultants ever thought to tell me about it before taking my money. You
know what I forgot? Would you like to know what I forgot?"
"No… I mean, yes."
"I forgot that people don’t read any more! There
I was, at the car show selling buggy whips. The Internet does that real
well, you know. It separates fools like me from their money. And fast.
Well, so maybe I should just give up my intellectual pretensions and
humble myself. Maybe I should get down on my knees and sell shoes. But
they don’t sell shoes that way any more. The Internet sells shoes. My
father’s father sold shoes. In fact, he made shoes and sold them. That
was back in the days of the Mom-and-Pop stores. You know what’s happened
to all the Mom-and-Pop stores? Well, between the death tax and the
property tax and OSHA inspections and lawsuits for not having a crippled
bathroom… sometimes I get angry at my dad, God rest his soul, for not
seeing it all coming. But then, he did see it all coming. He said,
‘Son, you gotta go to college.’ What was he supposed to say? Son, flip
hamburgers at McDonald’s? Son, become a truck driver? Son, buy a bunch
of cheap housing on credit and charge your tenants extortionate rates? But
whatever you do, son, don’t do anything where you can use your brain and
still respect yourself, because you’ll starve! Would you tell your son
something like that?"
"No… no, I don’t think so."
"Like the Bible says, would a man give his son a
snake to eat? The Bible! Wait’ll I tell you this! I went to this local
seminar thing—it was a series of breakfasts being given by the biggest
church in town, and the minister was telling us all about how we could
pick ourselves up off the deck and make it. That was after the employment
agency had told me I was overqualified to wait tables and stuff envelopes
and shelve books. I could have done all that when I was in grad school,
but now that I’m closing in on forty, I’m overqualified. Well, so I go
to these job seminars—and I respect the man for doing them, but… well,
here’s this parishioner of his that I’m put in touch with who sells
these blanket-spreads."
"Blanket-spreads?"
"THE Blanket-Spread. The One and Only. Patented.
You want me to read the thing off the little card? I shouldn’t do this
to you—not if you’re in the middle of your supper. It’ll make you
sick to your stomach."
"I… I can take it."
"Well, here goes. ‘The one-and-only
Blanket-Spread is not available in stores. It’s yours only through this
special offer. The Blanket-Spread is both blanket and bedspread. It comes
in assorted colors and patterns. No more having to make your bed when you’re
late for work, no more having to unmake your bed when you’re ready to
plunge into sleepy-land….’ I’m not making this up. ‘But that’s
not all. Blanket-Spread’s patented design is ready to give you a
massage!’ It’s spelled ‘message’, but I’m sure they mean ‘massage’.
‘Just click the palm-sized control to low, medium, or high. Instantly
Blanket-Spread sends soothing vibrations all over your body. It’s the
most delectable experience you’ve ever had! You will feel like you’re
riding on clouds of glory! Lie under Blanket-Spread on cold winter nights,
lie on top of it during the summer. Massage your back, your neck, your
muscle groups. Ball up the Blanket-Spread to concentrate the effect on any
part of your body. It won’t wrinkle or crease, and it’s easily
washable. No intruding coils or wires.’ I think they mean ‘protruding’,
but who am I to question the Master? Oh, the Master! This is the good
part! Except… I just… I can’t do this to you. You might think I’m
just making this up, and it’s too embarrassing…"
"Aw, come on!"
"Well, on the Blanket-Spread’s box in three
places, and on its instructions, and on the actual Blanket-Spread itself,
both top and bottom, there’s this logo. Hmm."
"Yeah?"
"The logo shows a fish hook made into a cross up
at the top. You know, a Christian cross?"
"Yeah."
"And wrapped around this logo, like the emblem on
a medieval coat of arms, there’s this… it says… oh, man!"
"Come on, now!"
"It says, ‘The Master baits His hook in many
ways."
"Hmm."
"Don’t you get it?"
"I… I…"
"The Master Baits? All that stuff about
balling up the Blanket-Spread and—"
"Oh, no!"
"Oh, yes! And this guy is a big wheel in the
church! He was a major sponsor of the seminars!"
"But… do you think he… maybe he just didn’t…
people can be pretty thick sometimes, you know. You wouldn’t believe the
ads people send into us…"
"Oh, he knew! I went to him once and hummed and
hawed around it. He knew right away, and he wasn’t happy with me. He
almost fired me on the spot. And, of course, nothing changed after
that. He knew exactly what he was doing—he knows exactly what he’s
doing. The next time I go in to see him, I’m going to take the patented
Blanket-Spread and tie it around his neck! I’d rather starve to death
than… you know what this reminds me of? I keep thinking of when I was in
grad school, living in some rat-run apartment complex. I’d have to walk
through street after street of panhandlers and pickpockets just to get to
school—the low-income hippies, you know, the new crop of drug addicts.
Sometimes you’d see some guy in a long coat, and he’d flash you, and
he’d have all these pictures pinned inside his coat. That’s what I do,
over the phone. That’s what I do for this guy. I thrust myself into
people’s dining rooms at the hour of rest and flash them with the B-S’s
luscious promise of sex on demand. That’s what I do to pay the bills.
That’s why I got out of the store and went to college. That’s why I
studied Renaissance literature. That’s what I am. I’m a piece of
garbage who sells garbage."
"Look… look, now..."
"No, I know what I’ve become, and I’m going to
go bait his hook with his patented B-S tomorrow! Talking to you has
given me just about enough guts to do it. I’ll probably end up in jail,
but at least for once in my life—"
"No! Look…"
"I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to me to
talk to someone like you. I think it’s the most important thing that’s
happened to me in years. I just… I don’t know how to thank you for…
for giving me back a little of my self-respect."
"Look, please! You don’t want to do anything… I mean, you’re
talking crazy now."
"Maybe I am crazy."
"No, you’re not. Look. Send me the damn
Blanket-Spread."
"Oh, no…"
"Yes, I mean it! I could always use another
blanket… or a bedspread. If you can pass it off as either one... well, I’m
one of those people who never has time to make up the bed."
"No."
"What?"
"No. I won’t do it. I don’t need your money—I
don’t need another sale. I’m already the leading seller this
month."
"You…"
"The leading seller, that’s right. Me."
"You mean… you have this conversation with
everyone?"
"No, of course not! But the opening part about,
‘I’m a telemarketer, and you don’t want to talk to me’—I have
people wanting to order before they even know what I’m selling."
"Well, then!"
"Well, then? Then I’m the best panhandler on the
block, that’s what I am!"
"But… you said yourself, you have to make a
living."
"Why? Is it so important to stay alive? Why? So I
can sell more of the Master’s bait?"
"I… but…"
"No, I won’t let you do it. You’ve been…
this has been too important to me. You mean too much to me. I’m not
letting the Master soil the one good thing that’s happened in my
life for… for years. I… I’d better let you get back to your
supper."
"No, wait. You live in this area, don’t you? I
mean, you’d have to, you couldn’t be dialing long distance and stay in
business. Why don’t we… how about a cup of coffee one morning? Or
maybe lunch? Are you still there? Hello?"
"I can’t. No."
"Oh."
"I can’t because… because this has meant so
much to me. I’d rather remember this evening just as it happened, and
not ruin it by… you wouldn’t go for me, I can tell you right now.
Besides, if you did it would be because I’m a loser. I can’t do that
to you. Why are you even alone, a person as wonderful as you? You don’t
make a habit of collecting losers, do you? You should do something about
that. You deserve more. A lot more."
"Oh, come on, come on. Please don’t—"
"Vi amo… te amo."
"What? What did you say? Hello?"
Missed Calls
She was the first thing he noticed—really noticed—after
slipping past the door’s frosted glass, mincing his way through the
polite flails around the coat rack, and navigating the sweet-and-sour
gauntlet of strong spirits and smoke along the bar. She would have been
noticeable even without her glorious hair let down, even had she not been
sitting all alone at a booth; but with the same instinct as carried his
own footsteps to the farthest reach of the bar, his gaze ran over the dim
room’s edges and corners… and there she was. She, on the other hand,
might never have noticed him, or only long enough to stare down his stare.
But he yielded so quickly, hanging his head as if caught with a hand in
the cash register, that he became a curiosity.
If she noticed how hastily he dropped upon a corner
stool and slumped into the mass of shoulders, she might have been less
vaguely interested. She might have suspected that one of the men who had
once done her wrong had recognized her before she had him. And maybe she
would have wondered when that number had grown so large that she could no
longer remember faces.
He did not remain well hidden, however—and most men
who want to know how to remain hidden.
It happened somewhere halfway into his second Rusty
Nail. He wasn’t drinking fast. In fact, it was the other who had been
growing louder and louder. The game was in the seventh inning now, and the
other man had demanded that it be turned up. He and his buddies, who had
been faintly milling up and down the bar for the last half-hour, settled
in before the screen, which just chanced to be at the bar’s far end. (Or
maybe it wasn’t chance: maybe the electronic depressant had been
expertly judged most appropriate for the bar’s inner sanctum, where
people expected less horseplay and more tranquillity.) And it chanced that
this game mattered just enough to the other man for him to watch three
successive pitches. When the third, low and away, was called a strike,
even heads near the door, near the coat rack, spun around to see who had
been knifed.
"Hey, don’t spill your drink," grumbled the
bartender adroitly when the other man had to gasp for air. (He had
measured the opening perfectly, and he knew better than to wave the
"we have ladies in here" red flag.)
"What’s to spill, it’s empty! Fill it up. Did
you see that—did you see that?"
"Too close to take," said Rusty Nail, in a
much milder grumble but with more red in meaning.
"What did you say?"
"He had two strikes, it was too close to
take."
"Nobody throws a strike on 0-and-2."
"He does. Why waste it when they expect you
to waste it? When it’s that close, you gotta foul it off."
"… my ass. What are you, some kind of… ex-represen-ative
of the umpires’ union? What are you laughing at?"
"You oughta try it."
"Try what?"
"Umpiring. Try it sometime. It’s not as easy as
you think."
"Oh, really? Hey, guys, ex-umpire on board. Tell
us about the time you did the All-Star Game."
"I did a few Little League games, okay?"
"Ooooh, Little League!"
"The point being, a fast-moving object that you
have to call one way or the other in an instant—that’s not easy to do.
Whether at the All-Star Game or in Little League."
The situation deteriorated from there. The other man
had his next drink down before the inning was over. At every close call,
he appealed loudly to his neighbor (even though his buddies showed no
interest in the game-within-a-game: one of them even walked off). Rusty
Nail never looked up from nursing his second order until the raillery
finally went one sneer too far.
"Don’t say another word to me," he
announced. "Not one more word."
The other man smacked down his glass and sauntered
around two remaining buddies, running his tongue over his swollen lips.
"Sure you don’t want some help with that call?
Maybe an appeal to the third-base umpire."
"That was one more word. Now you’re out of here.
Shut up and walk away."
The other man swung his right so loosely that Rusty
Nail intercepted it with ease in his left palm. More impressive was the
pain he wrung from the man’s face simply by squeezing on his wrist.
"Break it up now, boys," grumbled the
bartender in his characteristic register.
His wrist released, the other man melted back into the
crowd toward the doorway, scowling over his shoulder, muttering taunts
which emerged only as slurred "s’s", both his stares and his
defiances rather effectively interrupted by the figures of various buddies
which discreetly congealed around him.
This incident left him entirely alone at his end of the
bar.
"Next one’s on me," murmured the bartender
in something miraculously less than a grumble.
"Ah… thanks. Buy yourself one at closing
time."
"Sure thing."
He failed fully to disguise his amazement when she
suddenly appeared in the vacated space at his side. Again, his initial
reflex was to mute his interest, as if he had accidentally peeked into
someone’s bedroom window. But the last of his fleeting glance must have
caught the first of her nervous smile, for his second look held no
apologies.
"I like the way you handled that."
"You do? Why?"
"I dunno. He had it coming, didn’t he? Take it
from me, he started sounding off as soon as he got here. It wasn’t the
booze."
"And when was that?"
"What?"
"That he got here?"
Her moist teeth feigned biting her lower lip, and she
played at stirring her glass of rounded ice cubes. "A little after I
did. Are you asking how long I’ve been here?"
"There I go again, opening my mouth too wide!"
"A little, maybe. But I guess that can be viewed
as… kind of flattering. Like you were sizing me up, maybe."
"You like being sized up?"
"Hardly! But it’s a necessary evil. I mean, it’s
a step beyond being completely ignored."
He laughed—spontaneously, convincingly, even a bit
over his far shoulder, as if to stifle the effect. "What would you
know about being completely ignored! You’re not going to persuade me you
were ever overlooked in any roomful of people, so don’t try."
"All right, I won’t." Her murmur was almost inaudible, but
its very faintness supplied the blush which the dim light concealed.
"So… you think you shouldn’t have said anything to him, is that
what you meant? When you said, ‘There I go again,’ it sounded like you
thought you should have just said nothing when that guy started in on
you."
"There was no need to say anything. Maybe later…
but I never should have said anything about the third strike. No need for
that."
"There’s no need for… for anybody to
say anything in a bar. But what do people come in here for?"
"To drink."
"Jeez, is that kind of a bar this is? I
hadn’t realized how low I’d sunk!"
"Well, okay, they come here for two things: to be
alone and to find somebody else."
"So how do you find somebody else if you don’t
talk?"
"I guess you don’t. But I guess I must have come
in for the other thing."
"Oh." At last she noticed that her glass was
empty. She straightened up. "It’s getting late—I could have
gotten served faster at the table."
"Look, I didn’t mean that the way it came out.
Don’t run off. Hey, keeper, can we have another here, whatever the lady
was drinking? What were you drinking?"
He deftly dug into his left breast pocket with his free
hand—his left hand, which coiled easily for the difficult maneuver and
emerged with a bill. Though his right was merely toying with a glass, she
noticed that it never left the bar. Yet he volunteered a few more words to
sell the polite illusion that he was flustered.
"I… you gotta take it easy on me, I still haven’t
recovered from my first fight."
"Maybe I do come here to… you know, meet
people," she yielded. "I usually don’t come alone, though—I
usually bring my office mate."
"A woman?"
"Yeah, that’s right."
"So the guys won’t hit on you… only they do,
anyway, don’t they?"
"Like clockwork—and that’s not what I
meant by meeting people."
"Yeah, I know. But they draw their own
conclusions. If your office mate is good-looking, too, they just figure
that you’re team-hunting."
"Team-hunting?" she smiled, perhaps covering
her pleasure at the "too".
"Yeah. Or if she’s not, they figure that she’s
clinging to you in hopes of getting fixed up."
"God, this male vanity you guys have!" she
laughed. " Everything we do has to be a snare to get you
somehow!"
"I was talking about what other guys must
think."
"I know, I know. Sad thing is, you’re probably
right—I mean, the egotistical male version was probably the right one. I
should have known better, but Janet took me completely by surprise. I
guess I did get her fixed up. Really fixed up. At least it wasn’t
at this bar. I’ll never go back to that place again."
"Something went wrong, I take it."
"Something always goes wrong."
"She blames you for it?"
"I wish! She doesn’t blame me for anything—she
doesn’t even see that anything’s gone wrong."
"I see. No judgment."
"Nope. And I thought I had bad
judgment!"
"So here you are, basically wanting to be alone
after… after that miserable experience."
"After a lot of miserable experiences. Janet was
just my… you know."
"Your way to keep some of the creeps at bay."
"I was using her, wasn’t I?"
"She was using you, too."
"Apparently. And now I come elbowing up to you for
my refill. Not very subtle, am I? Kind of blows my credibility. Only…
only, I really did want to be alone. I just wanted to talk a little,
maybe."
"It’s the same thing, you know—the two things
I said, wanting to be alone and wanting to meet someone. It’s because
you’re afraid to be alone all alone that you come to a place like
this."
"So we can all be alone together!"
"Yeah. So we can all be alone together."
***
They passed the night in his apartment. It hadn’t been
planned that way (at least, both of them seemed to accept that nothing
about it was scripted, though everything turned out to fit a script). She
had simply talked too long. By the time she had noticed how empty the bar
had become, the streets were no longer particularly safe… and he, of
course, had volunteered to walk her to her car. The two crowded blocks
which she had been forced to measure earlier in the evening from her
parking space were now so much vacant curb and silent sidewalk. When she
had stood paralyzed before her streamlined door, key in hand, the
thunderbolt which had found her among the tall buildings, blanching her
face even beyond the pallor of streetlights, had every appearance of being
instantaneous. He was right beside her, and she had actually leaned on his
half-extended arm—but not to finesse a kiss.
"Are you going to be
sick?"
"No… no, I don’t think so."
And there, at about three in the morning, with a drunk or
junkie calling someone’s name from his nightmare among the trash cans,
she had been forced to tell him about the restraining order. What if her
"ex" were waiting for her now, in the shadows beside her garage?
She was braver earlier in the evening these days (she said), but as lights
turned off and streets grew quiet, she entered another world. Now it was
too late to wait for some couple before she approached the elevator. It
was too late even to set the gun out beside her lamp table—not too late,
but… but she was too tired to get it all ready.
"There’s a lot to get ready. I have to do every bit of it before
I can relax enough to go to sleep. I sound crazy, don’t I?"
"No."
"Maybe I am. But I’m too tired tonight to be crazy. I might as
well park at some big shopping center and let the seat back and… and
grab some z’s."
So they had ended up at his place, which was only another few blocks.
They had begun making love as soon as he had bolted the door behind them.
It had been the most prosaic, the most reflexive of movements, that
sliding home of the deadbolt; yet the metallic pop had seemed to surprise
them both, or perhaps (like the proverbial turning key on the prisoner’s
cell) to make them face the inevitable. Their eyes had met in a kind of
weary fear or a kind of child-like resignation, wide eyes rising through a
flow-tide of slumber, and their fingers had touched over the doorknob.
They had kissed and groped as if in a dream, waltzing in progressive
undress toward his bed while (in their dream, or in a sedated memory) a
lone saxophone played the blues in some ancient Bogart film, their only
haste to outstrip sleep—the sleep of physical and spiritual exhaustion.
And their climax was so perfectly timed with the moment when they passed
away, away from each other and themselves into a dreamless black plunge
through outer darkness, that they awoke on the other’s shoulder, dull
and sticky and unrested and half-covered, long after the curtains were
silvered with murky daylight.
They would be late for work. Or she would be late, she announced (and
then paused as if coaxing the same admission from him: it never came). She
said something about wishing it was Saturday, but she spoke without
conviction. (Saturdays posed so many ambiguities, offered so many deathly
kisses: at least on a weekday, a quick departure was objectively
necessary. On Saturday mornings, what might have seemed un-quick could
turn out to be the same old throw-away.) He waved her into the bathroom
while he deftly arranged a twosome of clean, shiny things on the kitchen
table. When he cracked the door to ask toast or cereal, coffee or tea,
orange juice… he had the laconic efficiency of a trained waiter.
The vapor which followed her half-clad figure from the bathroom had an
indifferent scent, except for what it dissolved from her body and her
dress (which he had hung from a ceiling vent so as to submit it to a
"poor man’s steam-cleaning": he claimed not to own an iron).
There had been no woman’s shampoo, no feminine soap or fragrance or
moisturizer, in the medicine cabinet or in any tiled niche. He bade her
take the hair-drier with her (a lackluster unisex hair-drier) while he
showered, and he promised to give the dress another strong application of
steam. (It was the second whisper of a joke he had uttered that morning,
both about cleaning her dress: was he, then, in a good mood?) She first
hastened to the phone, however—towel-bound hair and all—to call the
office, even though the answering service would still pick up for another
twenty minutes. She spoke loudly about car trouble, and about having to
spend the night in a hotel (not that the overnight operator would know if
she were to wear the same dress all year).
"That’ll settle some of the gossip about me wearing yesterday’s
dress," she laughed at the yet cracked bathroom door, just to make
sure that he understood the ploy (or just to make sure, perhaps, that he
understood how rarely she used such ploys: for it was a card which could
only be played once in a blue moon).
An inarticulate but sympathetic sound came from the crack, which then
disappeared. (He must have turned the knob to keep the mechanism from
clicking.) A moment later, the shower began to sigh again. She plugged the
drier in next to the can-opener and bowed beneath a new uproar which
shouted out all thumps and rumbles from the bathroom. Yet her eyes dwelt,
brightly mesmerized, upon something of his presence, perhaps, in the
impeccable place settings at the table. The tines and folds and right
angles might have spelled a message for one who knew the code. So formal
an invitation to break bread might just be far more flattering than a
spontaneous invitation to risk creating life. But it might be, just as
well, the most subtle of solid barriers. Would pot-luck from the
refrigerator not have been more promising—stools touching at the counter
(as they had ended up touching last night at the bar) while the two of
them divided a pitcher of juice and ate from the same cup of yogurt?
But was promise more desirable than it was intimidating? Who needed
another promise? How many cozy breakfasts with leg twined around leg could
one endure before coziness itself became a pack of lies?
Suddenly she switched off the drier, though her hair was still dark
with moisture and compelled her to chase through it with the towel. The
gentle rush of the shower had stopped, and she eyed the bathroom door
warily and she continued toweling and faded into the living room. There
her arms fell slack, and she gazed about as if seeking something in
particular. At a muffled rap from beyond several walls now (a brush
falling on a tiled floor, perhaps), she made a feint back toward the
kitchen and held her breath. When no further sound came from the bathroom’s
quarter, she slid quickly away in the opposite direction, the towel
trailing forgotten from her shoulders. There was a kind of second bedroom
off the living room, apparently. The door was open, and she peeked in.
Desk, computer, file cabinets, books… a few framed diplomas or
certificates jammed between the rows of books as if to keep them upended….
"I work in here."
She actually gave a frightened squeal. The towel slipped to the carpet
before she could grab it.
"I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up…"
"No, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t be snooping. I didn’t mean to…"
"Don’t be ridiculous." He had retrieved the towel just
before her fingers could close on it, his cheek brushing her damp hair.
Now he stood offering it to her as her hands fluttered about too busily to
take it.
"It’s just that… well, I don’t really know anything about
you. I seem to have done all the talking last night, and… and I want
to know something about you. I want to know everything. I mean, I want to
know everything you want to tell me."
Finally her hands could settle upon the towel. Yet she made no effort
to lift it from him, and their crimped fingers grazed through the warm
terrycloth.
"There’s nothing much to tell. Most of my work is freelance, or
temporary. Pretty dull stuff… but it’s over pretty soon, and I move on
to the next dull stuff."
"No benefits, huh?" she smiled breathlessly. "No health
insurance? What if you got really sick?" She laughed nervously.
"I’m not trying to sell you a policy. But… you should take care
of yourself!"
"Cling to life, huh?"
"What? Yeah. Yes, of course."
He stared at the window for so long that he seemed to watch the morning
migrate through another shade of silver. "So that’s what you mean
by a benefit?"
It was not spoken as a joke. She began to panic, and fled into blunt
honesty.
"I was looking for photographs—on the counters, on the walls—you
don’t have any photographs, Rick! And that thing you said last night at
the bar… to that big jerk, you know… about Little League, about
umpiring Little League…."
His face was melting before her eyes as he continued to stare toward
the curtained window, the only interruption on the bare walls. His strong
chin which had at once attracted her wrinkled impossibly. Even his ears
quivered, and they strained at his forehead and the roots of his hair.
Only his eyes remained fixed in the meltdown; and, in the effort of doing
so, they bored through his flesh like torches. They could not more
haggardly have watched the new day descend into the high-rises if the sun
had looped from its path and turned blood red.
She wrung the towel in her hands until she could feel water oozing
between her fingers. Then she flung it far away and hid his face between
her breasts, perhaps as much to spare herself its sight as to offer
comfort. A long animal groan accompanied a blast of heat which seared her
straight through her maladjusted bra. The sob that followed almost toppled
them over together, sending his hair abruptly against her chin, into her
open mouth. She turned aside like a swimmer gasping for air, raked her
tongue over her teeth, and then settled around him (one eye wincing in his
wet hair, one hand shielding his ear from the world). Each new start of a
sob she quickly smothered in her hold as she herself gaped in
concentration, scarcely daring to breathe, registering every tremor of the
cataclysm in her struggle to wrestle it into a rhythm.
She said not a word, and he said not a word. A rhythm surfaced,
submerged, and rose back up to her lure. Their silence triumphed over the
sobs, which finally vanished into regular breathing—a breathing whose
regularity, in turn, became his and hers rather than one’s or the other’s.
Somehow it grew increasingly clear that the longer this silence lasted,
the closer their lives would become. And as long minutes saw sunlight
begin to work its way across the carpet and up to a shelf where the towel
had lodged, neither of them made the slightest effort to change anything.
Trim Included
At first the house-hunting was almost enjoyable. How
could it have been otherwise? They had saved for so long, waited for so
long upon interest rates, suspiciously screened their job evaluations for
hidden signals. Now every indicator was pointing upward. The two-bedroom
apartment, besides, no longer offered arguable advantages as it had when
they were running back and forth to Larissa’s crib and cradle. Now she
had collected a roomful of playthings, and they… they themselves were
not getting any younger. If Larissa was to have a playmate as she grew
through childhood, they should not postpone the attempt. They had had to
try for a full year (much to their surprise) just to bring her into the
world, and now they were three years closer to nature’s dry well.
So the act of house-hunting, all by itself, was a valve
which released mounting pressures and a ceremony which crowned mounting
successes. Even when the day’s quarry turned out to be a miserable
disappointment, it felt good to go a-hunting. She would usually go first,
since her schedule was more flexible. Sometimes she would take Larissa,
but more often she would leave her at day care. (It didn’t seem fair to
expose a stranger’s home, tidied up and temporarily abandoned, to a
curious two-year-old.) That way, too, she could linger over the dining
room, the master bathroom, the closets, the garden, and talk it all out
with Ann Callender. She quickly began to like Ann, or (more importantly)
to trust her. There was no hard sell with Ann, no warbles of lavish
praise. Ann sized up properties as critically as if she were shopping for
herself. The chats they had beside her Lincoln in the driveway after
turning the premises upside-down often took on a delicious note of
conspiracy. The decision about whether or not to bother Kenneth and
arrange a second appointment imperceptibly became a final decision on the
house’s merits, out of which a dutiful invitation to Kenneth very rarely
emerged.
It wasn’t that the houses were all hopelessly flawed,
or that the flawless ones were all hopelessly overpriced. Perhaps that
eventually summarized the overall experience in a formal sort of way—but
fatal flaws and high prices were not what she discovered getting to her
after five months. It was the lives. Lives like hers and Kenneth’s, like
their life together—only all of these lives were broken or unraveling.
At best, when she asked Ann why this or that attractive house was up for
sale (and Ann always knew, for her curiosity was insatiable and her
snoopiness irrepressible), she was told about a transfer or a "move
up". These responses should have made her thank her lucky stars.
"The company will buy the house from them and cut its losses on a
quick resale," Ann would say, or, "They can’t close in Willow
Glen till they’ve got this one off their back." Three or four
chances like that came drifting by. Kenneth was actually pressing her on
one, less because the tiny back yard didn’t much bother him than because
it was such a sweet deal.
How long, though, would they be able to live with the
roar of traffic a stone’s throw away? Were they choosing a dream home,
or just taking another step up the ladder? How many steps did the ladder
have? How many moving vans could her grandmother’s antique hutch
survive? And what if the ladder really didn’t have a last step? What if
everyone finally just slipped off, or got acrophobic at some point and had
to spend the rest of their days fighting back nausea? How many of these
people who were taking a better job in Chicago or moving up across town
were scaling closer to divorce—and how far had she and Kenneth been
drawn toward the same fatal flame?
Divorce. She had always secretly sworn to herself that
she would never, never divorce. Especially now that Larissa had arrived,
she would have murdered Kenneth and faced prison before signing papers to
let him walk away. Her parents had divorced relatively late, while she was
in high school, and she had never forgiven either of them. The house, she
began to realize, was supposed to be part of the cure, and maybe even part
of the revenge. A place so nice that it would forestall Larissa’s
growing attachment to "Mimi’s" swank suburban demi-mansion and
silence Dad’s wisecracks about Kenneth’s career… so nice that it
would comfort her, too, for the modest luxury which she had
renounced as soon as she was old enough to escape to college.
And now she was discovering that divorce was as subtly
embedded in the properties she most loved as the sprinkler system in the
carpet-smooth lawn or the sheathes of wiring between the studs. The climax
came on a beautiful late-autumn morning. She had just found it on her
lunch break: the house of her dreams. It was set comfortably back from the
curbside and "nestled" (as the real estate booklet had promised)
among mature oak trees, whose leaves were now mostly red and gold. The
shallow litter of blushing foliage on the slightly neglected lawn made the
impression more nostalgic than ever. The garage was tastefully secreted
well to the rear of a magnificent wrap-around porch, whose light-gray
railing modestly accented the blondly olive vinyl and the sandy brick
veneer. The two unpretentious dormers in the steep roofline were not a
ruse, but filtered real sunlight over window-seats into real bedrooms.
This final detail she appreciated only after having taken the inside tour:
she had already fallen in love before she crossed the threshold.
Ann had remained almost speechless throughout the
showing. She would be hanging back a little more than usual, perhaps
mumbling, "Did you see this closet?" or, "The window trim
stays… I’m sure that told me that." No doubt, she must have
sensed that her client had instantly started to fall under a spell. Their
eyes never met until they had rendezvoused back in front of the shimmering
Lincoln. She was trembling too much to speak: it was Ann who had smiled
behind the shades clipped on her glasses and said, "Let’s knock off
a couple of thousand and write it up."
Then the silver minivan had wheeled in like a hawk out
of the oaks, borne on wings so silent that its sleek alighting on the
driveway sent a startled shudder through her. A young woman popped out and
hailed Ann. Her brooding oranged lips tragically reconciled the strawberry
blond of her cropped hair with the sleek sag of her impenetrable
sunglasses. What a smile! The lips were able to curl amply around it, even
to lavish an impish imbalance upon it, without entirely erasing their sad
question mark at the corners. The cutest of soccer moms… even her Docker
shorts had plenty of room to hold their crease along her thighs.
"Oh, that’s okay," Ann had waved back,
finally understanding a message sent more in gestures than words. "We’re
done—"
But the woman had interrupted, suddenly chattering away
in an attack of apologies. "I was going to drive around again, but my
youngest—he was just starting to eat when we got the call! Bless his
heart, he’s starting to cry he’s so hungry! If I could just grab some
crackers and applesauce—"
"No, no, it’s okay, really," Ann had
insisted. "Lindy, aren’t we through here?"
"Oh, yes, we’re…"
And then the woman, who had so far clung to the van’s
open door as if she feared falling into the russet leaves washing about
the driveway, seemed to fling herself into the abyss. Her long, thin
fingers interlaced in a prayer. (Lindy noticed that they were bare except
for a wedding ring.)
"Please don’t let me chase you off! Please take
another look—I mean, if you want to! Please just take your time, because…
it’s really such a beautiful house, you know. Did you see the closet in
the master bathroom? The dining room chandelier stays, you know. We just
fell in love with it when we were… and the kids just love the back yard!
And the fireplace at Christmas! Did she tell you the sky fort stays? Do
you have kids?"
She had somehow come within reaching distance of Lindy,
though she had never appeared to move more than her hands. She seemed
horrified at the discovery, and backed off as if she had trespassed across
some sacrosanct boundary.
"We’ve been so happy here! These were the
happiest days of our lives… the kids and mine. I’m sorry about the
leaves. I tried to get out yesterday and… but Philip is teething, and
Jason isn’t really old enough to be out front all alone. That’s his
little rake! He wants to help mommy, but… it, it’s a very safe
neighborhood, you know! I didn’t mean that it wasn’t, I didn’t mean
anything like that. It’s just… you never know when kids are going to
wander off, you know. Do you have kids?"
Lindy had gaped. She had found wet lines starting to
glisten in the wine-sweet autumn sun, running from the sunglasses to those
lips, now convulsed and constantly betraying each awkward emotion on their
pliant, splendid surface. She had reached out as if to comfort the woman,
to hug her—at least to stop her. And stop her she had. The sunglasses
had clattered to the driveway as the woman turned away with her face in
her hands. That sob became the ghost in the house of her dreams, and in
all her later dreams of houses.
***
So Kenneth had assumed the onerous duties of the hunt
after that. She had at first told him that the re-design of the courthouse
was forcing everyone at her office to put in overtime. He had needed
little more convincing—probably not even as much as was contained in
that lie; for he had registered his opinion more than once lately that
things were dragging with Ann, and had once suggested that they find
another realtor. Her secret, however, turned out not to survive
twenty-four hours of shifted responsibilities. For, having made a few
adjustments to his schedule that next day, Kenneth came home and announced
that he wanted to pick up where she had left off: the house with the
wrap-around porch.
"Looks awfully good on paper," he declared
with a flatness which, she knew, always coated over his excitement.
"You weren’t very specific about what you didn’t like, Lindy. I
think maybe you were just tired after Larissa’s measles."
Her cards came flying down on the table between them,
almost faster than he could read them. And, after all, maybe he was right.
Maybe she was just stressed out. She was vaguely aware that her final
posture, face buried in hands, was a sister of that hysteria to which she
had reduced the bright, cute, stylish young woman left high and dry (as
Ann had footnoted) by a rotter husband.
"I just can’t live in that house!" she had
cried out in pain.
"But," pursued Kenneth, almost inaudibly,
half-peeking between her fingertips, "the nicest thing you could do
for her would be to—"
"To buy the place where she had the best years of
her life, where her children were born and had their first Christmases and
birthdays! Please, Kenneth, not the ‘tough love’ speech!"
"But it’s true."
"And someone will! But not me… not us."
As her hands lowered, she vaguely extended one to him
across the table. He didn’t see it: he had turned his gaze out the
dining room/den/living room window, whose panorama was filled by a cement
balcony/sliding door/gray eave just like theirs. Her eyes followed his.
"I’d sooner buy up the mortgage and rent the
house to her for whatever she could afford," she mumbled.
"Well," Kenneth sighed without malice,
"we can’t do that."
At least from then on, Kenneth made no more derogatory
remarks about Ann. In fact, he soon developed an appreciation for her
tight-lipped, arm’s-length manner—the same skepticism as had won Lindy’s
trust. He would often meet her at a property during lunch break (eating
behind the wheel as he navigated empty suburbs) or just after work
(turning up the radio to keep himself alert in the rush-hour traffic). Ann
would be punctual and punctilious. No homeowners would be malingering on
porch or driveway, and the updated computer print-out would be lodged in
her multi-listing guide. She never spoke of Lindy except to ask after her
health. A tacit understanding seemed to evolve quickly between them that
Lindy was under great stress, that she had been taking too much upon
herself and shouldn’t be needlessly bothered now. Kenneth liked Ann for
that, since—somehow—he divined that Ann didn’t really believe it,
any more than he did. But what was the alternative? To confess that they,
all three of them, were lewdly sticking their noses through people’s
bedroom windows? You just couldn’t admit some things and function: you
had to lie to survive, sometimes. In Ann, Kenneth recognized the reticence
of the hunter who knows full well that the quarry sometimes screams like a
human baby before dying—who knows, but who will never tell.
Only once had Ann ever alluded to the incident of the
house with the wrap-around porch. A homeowner had not yet decamped when
they arrived on the scene, and Ann insisted that Kenneth wait in his
pick-up until the coast was clear. Finishing he granola bar while
pretending to read the paper, he had vaguely heard her lecturing at the
grandiose brass-plated front door, "If you want this house sold, you’ll
have to follow the rules." As if aware, too late, that she had staged
a bit of a show for him, she murmured to begin their tour, "I wasn’t
going to let that happen again!" Afterward, the incident of
the wrap-around-porch house must have loomed large before both of them;
for they silently did their rounds, plodding down hallways and opening
closets, like jaded security guards. Kenneth was gazing distantly from the
front stoup (far beyond the bland and barren lawn, and even beyond the
roofline of the house across the street) as Ann locked up. The first words
out of her mouth were, "The house on Mayfield is still for
sale," pronounced just airily enough to reach the level of his
daydream.
"The house with the wrap-around porch."
"Yes. You haven’t seen it, have you?"
"Actually, I have. I drove by there Friday
afternoon. Alone."
"And what did you think?"
Kenneth sighed heavily, turned entirely around, and
stared at Ann straight through her tinted lenses. "It doesn’t
matter what I think."
Ann’s head bowed, and he heard the ghost of a hiss.
Was it an obscenity? He watched Ann’s mouth labor after speakable words.
"I’ve never in my career… I’ve been doing
this twenty-five years, and I’ve never seen anyone go to pieces like
that Duval woman. God, how could any woman—but especially a smart woman,
Kenneth, an educated woman—let any man get away with doing all that to
her?"
Kenneth remained a little shocked at this indignation,
which he mulled over in his truck’s cab all the way back to work. That
was one way, no doubt, to deal with the cry like a baby’s scream,
especially when you hunted for a living: blame it on the quarry. Stupid
animal, why did you twitch at the last second? What were you even doing in
a clearing as open as this?
In the weeks that followed, Kenneth cruised down
Mayfield Lane (whose trees were now long divested of their last leaves)
one more time on his own. He had expected to see the sign gone, had
anticipated the final blow to the gut. Only when he saw the gaudy
blue-and-red rectangle, bigger and bolder than ever in the unshaded,
sun-swept yard, did he realize that his little jaunt was all about the
closure of finding it taken down. Still for sale: instead of a blow to the
gut, a slap in the face. He felt his face genuinely flush hot to the ears.
The property bore no trace of having housed another Christmas for the
toddlers. There were no toys on the lawn, no wreath lingering from the
holidays, no vehicle in the driveway. The place was probably vacant. He
would have it out with Lindy tonight and get past all this silliness.
Instead, he discovered three or four major reasons why
he didn’t like the house as he steered his way back into city traffic.
The cruel full light of dead winter had been revealing. Needed a new roof,
new gutters. Probably water damage… probably why it wouldn’t sell. He
said nothing that night.
His own great test as a hunter came two months later.
It was an unseasonably warm late-winter morning. The air was as crisp and
invigorating as a frosty drink. He felt optimistic as he left half an hour
early for lunch. (He had renounced all after-work viewings as well as all
viewings on rainy days: the circumstances were too prejudicial.) Ann had
come to know his likes and dislikes so exactly that she wouldn’t have
bothered him over a non-starter. (She had even said, "This is a
little more your style than Lindy’s," and amazed him by explaining—much
to his own enlightenment—just where his tastes veered from his wife’s.
Amazing, too, was Ann’s unvoiced perception that Lindy would fall in
line if he were satisfied: that the fight for Lindy had become, not
against dark hardwood paneling or steep staircases, but against the very
horror of occupying the decayed nautilus’s shell.)
Kenneth was already working down a mental list as he
pulled up. Not sitting at curbside: check. Not overgrown with scraggly
shrubs: check. Straight, sharp roofline with no sags: check. He and Ann
scarcely exchanged greetings. She must have sensed that this could be the
big one, for he noticed that she held back more than usual and respected
the silence of his introspective tabulations. Foyer not immediately
tripping over stairs or spilling into den: check. Built-in bookcases:
check. Plenty of window light in breakfast nook: check.
It was an immaculate house, too. It seemed scarcely to
have been lived in. Though there were three bedrooms (and a possible
fourth), only one closet had any clothes: men’s clothes all, a couple of
nice suits, tie rack, black wing-tipped shoes. On the other hand, the
dresser in this one bedroom was littered with framed photos (as the
mantelpiece had been in the den). Kenneth grew curious. He studied the
smiling or grimacing faces and quickly sketched out the development of a
young family. Wedding shots (couldn’t be a divorce—this guy had
his wedding photos front-and-center), little girl taking first steps,
little girl held by much older girl (her aunt?), little boy in baseball
uniform… dad playing catch with boy, mom pushing girl in swing, dad
taking mom and kids’ picture at ski resort (had to be dad: mom took his
picture with the girl in the same snow outfit)…. A history in portraits
spanning six years, perhaps eight.
"I’ll bet you get to be something of a homicide
detective on this job," he mused aloud, knowing that Ann had watched
him pause at the dresser.
"It’s a separation," she said gravely.
"The divorce is pending."
"Ah?" He stiffened, and could find no more to
say. That was not at all the kind of homicide he had in mind. The absence
of women’s clothes and kids’ playthings had puzzled him, but… but
why had he resisted to obvious conclusion? Because the children looked so
young and healthy in the pictures, and their parents so devoted? Because
the house was so bright and unworn?
He did the rounds of the house a second time, being far
more leisurely. Yes, he liked it, and yes, he wished to examine the door
frames and the caulking around the sinks before deciding if he really liked
it. But something in him was also alert to more clues about the marriage’s
murder. The children’s things had not been moved out lock, stock, and
barrel, after all. He sneaked a peek into one of two huge cardboard boxes
and found it filled with yellow and red plastic trucks and ducks and play
stations. He caught a glimpse of a half-closed dresser drawer and noticed
a pile of tiny white sox. The evacuation of mother and children was
recent, and remained incomplete. The elaborate tree house in the back yard
(together with the storage shed beside it arrayed in state-of-the-art
gardening equipment) hardly suggested a father who stayed on the road or a
husband who lounged from bed to sofa. As he wandered back toward the
house, he avoided the French doors of the den (leaving a vigilant Ann to
shut them) and entered, instead, through the breezeway from the garage. He
sensed that he had left Ann scurrying after him like an orderly after a
brigadier general, but he didn’t care. Suddenly, he was consumed by a
desire to revisit this room off the breezeway. It held the key to
everything.
"What a… what an incredible room," he gaped
upon hearing Ann’s panting at his shoulders. "This… this was his
office."
"It could be a fourth bedroom, too," he heard
Ann murmur.
Yet he took no notice of her. Rather, his arms
outspreading to measure some invisible scene, he approached an interior
wall.
"Look! Here’s his college diploma. His B.A. in…
accounting. My God, it’s dated only five years ago! They got married
when they were in college—in their junior year, maybe. Maybe they were
high school sweethearts!"
He wheeled upon Ann triumphantly, so astonished at his
own deduction that he apparently took her open-mouthed bewilderment for a
sympathetic wonder. Immediately he turned away again.
"And over here—look, her knitting things! Her
craft magazines in this basket. She’s got an artistic side, and she
wouldn’t just give that up. She left in a hurry, taking all the bare
essentials for herself and the kids, but she left one of the most
important parts of herself right here, in this room. The same room where
he had his office. They used to work in here, together, he doing his
accounts, she doing her knitting and quilting. Especially when the kids
were toddlers—just put ’em down in the carpet to crawl around with
rattles. They didn’t even have a TV in here."
"Maybe she took it," said Ann almost
inaudibly.
"No, no!" Kenneth turned sharply on her.
"Look around. There’s no place for one on any of the existing
furniture, and the carpet isn’t marked by anything heavy that’s been
moved."
Shortly after that, they were done. Kenneth drifted
back down the driveway, his lips parted as if he were recalling the words
to an old song. Ann eyed him without blinking, then locked up and followed
his footsteps at about the same uncertain pace. Eventually she caught up,
for he had stopped.
"Well," she volunteered from his elbow,
"what do you think?"
Kenneth studied ciphers in thin air for another second
or two, then nodded slowly, firmly. His mind was made up.
"I think they really, really need to get back
together."
***
That night, Larissa safely asleep, they stared at their
reflections in the living room/den/dining room window. The night was pitch
black, and the cheap chandelier’s five bulbs blazed down with little coy
obstruction on the closed, shuffled realty books between them. Yet neither
had risen to pull the drapes.
"What if we buy a lot and build?" said Lindy.
"What if we get together a wagon train?" said
Kenneth.
back to top
*********************************
If It Keeps Them Quiet,
Is It True?
Over the last decade or so, educated people have
finally begun to show alarm over the fallout of the sixties and seventies.
Bright women are writing books about the miseries of waiting until
thirty-eight to marry and attempt healthy childbirth. Perceptive
sociologists are noticing (and, more importantly, daring to declare) the
connection between sexual liberation, broken families, and catastrophic
effects like youthful suicide or violent adolescent crime. Some of us may
want to say, "What took you so long?"… but better late than
never.
Except that "late" is going to have to be "later"
if we expect of these new analyses a high degree of moral subtlety. In
many cases, the tail is wagging the dog. That is, long-term results are
tallied up and used as arguments for why a rival agenda would have been
healthier or might yet lead back to health. All that matters is getting
the "desired outcome". But material outcomes are not necessarily
proof of a position’s virtue—or only to a complete materialist. Good
people can die young (Menander claimed that they routinely do), while bad
people can so successfully monitor their calories, sodium, and cholesterol
that they hang around for a century to torture the rest of us. Doctors
have recently warned us in their pragmatic fashion that we should sleep
eight hours a day, as if none of us was waiting for anything but their
announcement to reset the alarm. The body is healthier with more sleep,
so... so what’s stopping us all? Insomnia aside, allowance is never made
for the possibility that the ultimate purpose of human life isn’t simply
to live long and well. What if there are things in pursuit of which
fifteen-hour work days are sometimes morally compelling?
Lest we be misunderstood, a medical doctor is not expected to answer
such questions, and most good ones would instantly disqualify themselves
from the final calculation. But isn’t that calculation supposed to be
the business a fortiori of scholars in the Humanities? Why, then,
are so many of these latter still so unwilling to speak out on
"values" matters? Why, rather, do they either ignore moral
issues in favor of the physically healthy antidote (where goodness equals
good health) or else defer judgment to the healthiest groups on the scene?
If the group most likely to survive an outbreak of the plague practiced
burning convicted criminals at the stake to assuage the Plague God, would
its order of worship, then, be a prescription for moral recovery?
Judith Reisman has paid her dues. With a moral will which no one could
impeach, she transformed herself from a doting mother and occasional
performer on the old Captain Kangaroo show to an academic of solid
credentials and, specifically, a whistle-blower on the infamous Albert
Kinsey. Her Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences (Arlington:
Inst. for Media Ed. 1998) is generously supplied with revealing
photographs of the Kinsey mob and the slick propaganda which it fed the
media. Reisman proves not only that Kinsey cooked the books to validate
extravagant conclusions flattering his personal kinks; she also indicts
such criminal horrors as "Kinsey’s scientific collaboration with
pedophiles" (176). Anyone curious about the extremes to which an
ivory-tower revolutionary will go to make the world over in his image
should read this book.
Yet to our praise, we must append a caution. Reisman
assumes throughout her book that Kinsey caused the sexual
revolution. A contributing factor he certainly was—but only inasmuch as
he provided a generation with the illusory objectivity it needed to
justify publicly how it would no doubt have lived, in any case. If right
conduct were simply a result of right "input", then people would
be robots, and "right" would be relative to the decree of the
prevailing authority: the very view of morality which Reisman’s critics
purvey. Perhaps her most deterministic moment is the following passage:
The SAR [Sexual Attitude Restructuring] has served as
a critical tool to shape views of human sexuality. This New Biology
media {sic}, an orgy of public and variant sexual couplings on film and
video, is regularly utilized in academia to restructure educated sexual
attitudes into Kinseyan sexuality. To understand how this works, it is
useful to momentarily study the mechanics of the SAR in desensitization
and disinhibition of the human brain to allow the shift in pedagogical
attitude and teaching. The SAR literally scars the viewer’s brain as
it short circuits his and her [sic] conscience. (174-75)
Besides showing that Reisman’s publisher should have
engaged the services of an English major (preferably well over the age of
forty), this passage reduces us to thanking our lucky stars that we have
not been subjected to SAR: otherwise, we, too, should be slavering sex-aholics.
But if the only thing keeping us sober is the alternate brainwashing of
bourgeois decorum, then Kinsey was right, and morality is just a question
of who’s piping what into your headphones.
Enter Gertrude Himmelfarb, grande dame of
historical studies as a discipline and apologist extraordinaire for
the much-maligned Victorians. Like Reisman, Himmelfarb has taken enough
slaps from academe’s Gestapo to qualify for canonization —though, for
that matter, both are Jewish. Indeed, one must wonder if a deep respect
for external codifications of The Law may have rendered these two
insightful and courageous scholars strangely insensitive to the highly
intimate roots of morality. In her latest book, One Nation, Two
Cultures (New York: Knopf, 2001), Himmelfarb argues the superiority of
bourgeois conditioning on the basis of social health. The post-Kinseyan
world has seen more broken families, more mental disease, more violent
crime, more depression and suicide, more abortion and reproductive
dysfunction, etc. Pockets of society which have resisted the sexual
revolution, however, scoot along at a comfortable low ebb across these
graphs of misery. Ergo, keeping The Law (in any rigorous fashion, whether
Jewish or Baptist or Catholic) is better than being free of it. Ergo… is
there another ergo? Not as far as Himmelfarb is concerned. At this point,
she stamps her QED.
Of course, it is precisely those religious groups most
rigidly committed to strictures which would reject such reasoning. For
them, the resting point must not be social stability, but a belief in their
specific faith. In evading this crucial matter, Himmelfarb has
clumsily (if not cynically) contradicted the universal verities whose
champion she fancies herself to be. She has answered the question,
"Is it socially salutary?", not the question, "Is it
true?" A condemned soul herded into a box car for the death camp
would no doubt be less likely to die of heart attack along the way if he
thought himself bound for a comfortable penal colony. Should we envy him
his peace of mind?
The most legalistic versions of faith are themselves
often painfully inept at grounding truth. They tend to waffle back in the
direction of Himmelfarb’s healthy social unit (leaving her, perhaps, in
the winning position of having snipped an otiose loop from the chain). Yet
Himmelfarb is careful not to highlight the incoherence of her devout
social hygienists. (The egregious incompetence of most Christians to rule
upon the Bible’s textual accuracy receives one small footnote [95].)
Though she acknowledges that "as morality has been defined downward
for public figures, so it has been for the public as well" (121), she
considers legalistic religion a remedy to this complaint rather than one
of its causes. This is a grievous oversight. How many of our sexual and
social rebels are reacting against a stringency which was never put
before them in moral terms? How many young people, bright but ignorant and
undisciplined, would have "said no" to the antinomian showboats
which cruise college English and History departments if an adult had once
appealed to their reason and their honor rather than beating their head
with a heavy, lightly read book?
Moral philosophy is this puzzle’s missing piece. Don’t
look for it on the PC campus: good philosophy programs died in the
eighties. But don’t look for it, either, in a New Awakening which is as
exciting to thirsty minds as a double dose of Sominex.
back to top
**************************************
Dr. Palaver,
Word Therapist
De omnibus pauca, de nullo omnia.
Dear Doctor,
I was amused (and also annoyed) to read the following sentences in a
story about hurricanes which was attributed to the AP Wire Service:
"Allison’s first iteration in 1989 drenched Houston"; and,
"Only notorious storm names are relegated to history." Is this
the proper way to use "iteration" and "relegate"? I’ve
pondered the dictionary definitions, as usual, without finding much
enlightenment. At the very least, I would say that this article is
straining the envelope—and all within the space of a paragraph!
Open Umbrella
Dear Connoisseur of Parades,
Whether or not you are right to anticipate showers (and who are we
to begrudge such anxiety?), your suspicions of this demotic Demosthenes
are well founded. The Latin noun iter simply means
"journey" or "route of travel", so a first appearance
might be called a first iteration (as opposed to a reiteration)
without too much dissonance. The Romans, in fact, used the phrase iter
facere ("to make way") to describe progress on a journey.
All the same, the noun iteratio—without the re prefix—is
used by classical orators of deliberate and artful repetition. That is,
when a Roman spoke of "waying" instead of "way", he
understood that the trail had already been blazed.
As for "relegate", the problem here seems to
be more in the overall metaphor. To relegate is literally to constrain
with rules. An employee submitted to disciplinary measures might be
relegated to half-pay or to a period of probation. One may presume that
these storms are "bad boys" in the metaphor since they are
called "notorious". Be thankful that your reporter does not
subscribe to the journalistic equation of "notoriety" with
"fame"! To my ear, the word "history" is what creates
the clank in the tropological machine. Are bad storms punished,
then, by consignment to the Meteorological Hall of Fame? Isn’t the idea
of "retiring" the name to commemorate a stunning catastrophe
rather than to exorcise its return? Like so many failed metaphors, this
one reverses its polarities at a very awkward moment. Perhaps your
aspirant Whitman of the Wires doesn’t understand notoriety, after all.
And, really… is a news story the proper place to trot
out tortured metaphors and resurrect long-forgotten words? All of us
around here are certainly in favor of a strong vocabulary, and to possess
such a vocabulary is to use it fully and fearlessly. Yet part of such
confident and knowledgeable usage is setting. Cicero and Demosthenes would
never have used their highest style to relate a rather silly incident
meant to cajole the audience. This misguided youth, however (for his
trespasses indict his inexperience), not only abuses words; he is using
the wrong caliber of word for the circumstances. In attempting the
tongue-in-cheek, one finds that a little polysyllabification goes a long
way in an article about the weather
Dear Doctor,
I have noticed in one or two of Praesidium’s essays that the
word "suit" (as in "follow suit") was spelled with an
"e" at the end. Now, we all make typo’s once in a while… but
there appears to be a method in this madness of yours. May I ask what it
is?
Not Suited to Following
Dear Free Thinker,
With regard to our methodical nature and our madness, you are surely
twice correct. There seems little point to fighting out this particular
battle: it’s like insisting upon the "t" which should be at
the end of "relict". Like Hotspur’s starling trained to cackle
"Mortimer" in the king’s ear, however, we simply relish (in
our mad way) irritating people with orthographical reminders. In this
case, the French word suite, which actually means a
"following", is clearly the source of the term used in
card-playing. There is a progression from the two-card to the ace in
spades, in hearts… and so on. That this French borrowing should be
mutilated in order to achieve conformity with other English
"suits" is not a proposition of transparent merit. The
"suit" which some Western males still wear on formal occasions
is of course "suited" to those occasions: it is fitting,
appropriate, decorous, and decent. It is, in short, the embodiment of what
the English verb suit intends to convey. To be sure, our verb is
also derived from the French suivre: to be fitting is to follow set
standards. Nevertheless, the noun so familiar to haberdashers is patterned
after the English cast of the French word with an immediacy that the noun
so familiar to gamblers is not; or, to say it from the other direction,
the array of cards hearkens directly back to French in a way that the
penstripes and lapels do not.
How odd, that one should have to assert such independence in looking
after decorum!
back to top
**********************************
Three Poems: R.S. Carlson
Ralph Carlson, Professor of English at Azusa Pacific
University, teaches writing, undertakes frequent missionary jaunts to
Southeast Asia, and contributes regularly to Praesidium. Like Lt.
Col. Lythgoe (whose poems follow), he is a member of our Board of
Directors.
Clearing Her Room
Now that she is gone, we rummage through
brown bags of cards, old and new.
She would leave the house at ten-fifteen
and take Bus 22 to Fifth and Main.
Who would notice? Sales clerks would see
nothing but "a little old lady",
wrinkled, grey-haired, all too slow
to count her change, close her purse, and go
away so better customers could buy
more items more quickly.
Why
did she keep her circuit every week day,
buying greeting cards, and on the way,
stopping at a careworn coffee shop
for a sweet roll and a single cup
of coffee with half a spoon of sugar? Hot,
sweet, and black was how she liked it, not
bothered with milk or cream or half-and-half.
She used to take cream she skimmed herself
back on the farm, but then she knew for sure
it was fresh and poured from clean stone ware.
These days, in the city, who cared
if the cream sat on the table till it curdled?
How many people smirked along her route
at her bulky wraps—scarf, beret, and coat
better meant for deep winter snow
she used to watch fall years ago,
years away from here, where she bought
so many greeting cards that she forgot
to which old friends she really meant to send
a reminder of their continued bond,
the "Happy Birthday" or "Just Thinking of You"
with a flower-embroidered handkerchief, too,
as old friends had done in those decades
now rained into snapshots in shades
of grey or sepia tones.
Now we scan
the names of those who wrote her. If we can
track relationships, we may find
family or some surviving friend
to write to, reporting her one last trek
wondering who, if any, will write us back.
E-magine Dot!
Jack dot Doe
and Jill dot Too
e-met among a chat-dot-crew.
They e-mailed cards
till they both knew
each other’s e-ddress by rote, and few
were the days
before the hours
of e-mail turned to grand e-flowers.
Next, Jack’s e-bucks
graced Jill’s front door
with dot-com chocolates and more.
Then Jack’s e-praise
of Jill’s e-charms
led to e-calling her into his arms.
Jill e-answered
that it sounded I-keen
but she was still just thirteen.
Jack e-plied
her youth was fine.
Their I-contact would be divine!
Jack dug deep
into his pocket
and gifted Jill an air e-ticket.
Jack sent a limo
so Jill could tell
their whole weekend would just be swell.
Then came the knock
on the motel door.
Jack was ready for his e-score.
He couldn’t believe
that Jill’s sweet love
had come from FBI-dot-gov!
Shredding
In the years I wrote these checks
and reconciled these statements
only spies and crooked politicians
worried about shredding documents.
But by now, drug addicts with a few solvents
and somebody’s signature on paper
can play wonderland for tens of thousands a week
with what they can pull out of the trash intact—
as long as they keep a step ahead
of insurance investigators and cops.
So I feed three to five old checks at a time
into the shredder, wary of clumps
that choke and overheat
this light-duty plastic confetti-maker.
The thrashing blades consume
our past lives in small rectangles—
this for a school photographer,
that for the school trip,
this for the young one’s driver’s license,
that for the speeding ticket,
this for the monthly mortgage,
that for the weekly milk and bread.
Week by month, the promises of the past
pass through my hands.
Names change and names stay the same
month after month, year after year
Bank bought bank. Supermarket ate supermarket.
Always the business plans proclaimed
economy, efficiency, better service at better prices
for us, the consumers,
and the costs crept higher
as the competition decreased.
Church names shifted on the charitable contributions
As race or class or ego outshouted love.
Envelope after envelope
empties through my hands.
I decide to keep a few checks
as tokens in family history—
to remember the bridesmaids’ dresses,
the school trips overseas,
the last bills to doctor, hospital,
mortuary and crematory,
the plaints of "I’m fine on my own—
just give me the loan!"
The desk drawer now has room for current truths:
The garbage can has five more sacks of confetti
all thrashed out to confute any counterfeiters,
but the hours have taught more than these hands
that, deposit by debit, even a heart
may be drawn by the numbers.
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Three Poems: Michael H. Lythgoe
Rondeau for Black & White Photos
Their eyes find mine—four bituminous burns.
The Jerusalem stone is white. Sun turns
The bright stone brighter; holy land—we learn—
Is hard, hard to film; black & white places:
The Wailing Wall prays, eyes darken lit faces.
Picture Jerusalem—stone walls, two children—
One eating bread—sitting as in a cavern mouth,
Emerging from shadows: two lit faces.
Their eyes touch my mind.
White laundry on a line—behind, light turns
Stones white-on-white; blinding perspective learns,
Sees mystics’ black diamond eyes—mysterious
Portals, coal dust shade, anthracite spaces,
Tank traps; Golan Heights, shimmering light, burns.
Their eyes touch mine.
Black Snake in Cherry Tree
The season receives new words like new seeds,
As a serpent emerges from a hollow tree.
This is the season for ploughs and planting.
Take time to atone for an apple’s misdeeds.
The Saharan season floods—a wash-out—
Unpredictable is spring’s renewal;
The winter’s discontent is breaking camp.
Immigrant clouds clash in thunderous shouts.
We believe in April’s sepulcher, lost
Paradise, fertile air, heavy oak pollen.
Blue grass is fresh; Kentucky foals frolic.
New nests give wing to fleeing frost.
The Midas-touched shrub ignites the margins.
Patio is awash with cherry rain.
The cherry tree muscles dogwood—shedding
Pinks like a snake losing last season’s skin.
Cinco de Mayo lilac’s scent is free,
Celebrating Our Lady’s sky of blues,
Treading on the serpent tempting Eden.
Yet, a black snake suns in the cherry tree.
Forbidden fruit is the taste of the day;
Banished from a garden, we are like weeds,
So we leave remembering Lucifer—
Languorous in the shade—winning the day.
The tattered remnants stain; fallen blossoms
Are like fallen angels losing their wings,
Wind-blown, burned by heat-lightning, grounded.
Cancer cells spread like crazy weeds: Lessons
To learn of hot flashes and earthy speeds.
Our bodies burn with nuclear wild fires.
This season holds a burning in the bones.
Radioactive seeds will kill the weeds.
But once we have fallen in our garden,
Our task is to live among the dying.
Azaleas lose their colors; the fallen
Angels are the tainted leaves of Eden.
As the seasons move the body decays.
The fruit in the orchard ripens and falls.
Autumn turns brown, dooms summer’s goldenrods.
A split trunk parts, reaching for sunny days,
Stretches a cherry limb from wounded bole;
The rough bark on aging cherry tree
Feels the coils slide out of the hollow dark.
The snake suns out on a limb, stalks a soul.
Whistles Along Kettle Run
Kettle Run overflows its banks.
Keep in mind the dry times this fall,
The dead end of summer’s drought: minks
And fox attacked the farmyard fowl--
Creeping under a hidden moon;
Their prey heard only the crickets;
Geese failed to guard or warn black swan
Carted off, buried in woods without a trace.
In hard times, the mangy survive
By stealing in to strike sweet wings.
Three bitten quail buried, alive
Duck stashed in snow: a treasure cache.
We reap the ruin of our crop;
The ravaged covey of cooped quail,
All two hundred hearts—in fright—stop.
The fox flurry, the assault, is quelled.
This ritual wash, this seasonal patter sluices away
stains of shocked-still bobwhites.
Ghosts whistle along Kettle Run. Bird-seller
Replenishes his brood—targets—for shooters.
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Praesidium Archive
The Center for
Literate Values
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