Board of Directors: John R. Harris, Ph.D. Executive Director Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. Secretary Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D. York College-CUNY Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D. Azusa Pacific University Kelly Ann Hampton Michael H. Lythgoe Lt. Col. USAF (Retd.) CONTENTS A Few Words from the Editor This issue continues two essays which overran the confines of Winter 8.1--but also quite a bit of the short and barbed. A Kinship Forgotten, A Rebellion Overlooked: Evangelical Influences on English Romanticism (Part II) Sean Trainor In the second part of his essay, Mr. Trainor argues that the Romantic poet Coleridge was virtually alone in his generation of English intellectuals to notice the empirical assumptions underlying both scientific rationalism and evangelicalism. The Tyranny of Numbers John Matthew Fox Mr. Fox finds in eating disorders merely the most dramatic form of a pathology afflicting our entire culture: the obsessive mission to reduce reality to weights and measures. Freedom Grows on Trees: A Eudemonist Economics (Part II) John R. Harris The second part of this essay builds upon Part One’s praise of the Southern Agrarian economists to suggest how we might find more happiness in modern suburbia by growing more of our food and controlling more of our lives.  iBrain: The Future of Mind Power Rosalinda Nava Tongue-in-cheek or prophetic?  This unveiling of the “iBrain” really does little more than introduce the Cochlear implant to the iPod. College Professors Seek to Rediscover, Redefine, and Revivify Goals of Higher Education Thomas F. Bertonneau Most definitely tongue-in-cheek: a “scoop” from the avant-garde brain-storms of Academe gone a-conferencing. “OLD KING COLE”: article abstract  David Z. Crookes … And still more high jinks: the abstract of a scholarly article that might as well be written in hieroglyphs. A Stone Map Requiem on the Frontier of Day  (poems) Michael Lythgoe Lines on paper do not define the life cycles of communities any more than a coffin can store away the life of an individual. Epimenidean Vignettes (short stories) Peter Singleton Perhaps the conte philosophique—short as a fable, explicitly allegorical, a complex message lurking beneath its disingenuous surface—is less a lost art than one never found.  These vignettes seem to create their own tradition.   To make a donation, address your check or money order to The Center for Literate Values or to John Harris (NOT to Praesidium) and post to:    Praesidium    c/o John Harris, Editor    2707 Patriot Drive    Tyler TX, 75701 *****

A Few Words from the Editor

     I had anticipated the Spring edition’s being little more than a continuance of the Winter’s.  Both Mr. Trainor’s essay and my own had proved much too long for the covers of Praesidium 8.1.  I know that Mr. Trainor would have preferred to see his work appear intact—as, indeed, would I mine.  Some day soon, perhaps The Center can offer longer essays, or series of essays, as e-books available for “download” from its website.  (What a mouthful of barbarisms!  But one must drink the tasteless brew of this neurotically self-renewing brave new world, or go thirsty.)  In the meantime, I must beg our readers to browse through the Winter edition if they find themselves confused by 8.2’s points of departure.  I personally consider Sean’s paper to be of very special insight, having myself just attempted (with some success) to link several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors to the empiricism of Bacon and Hobbes in a literary survey course.  (Bunyan’s emphasis of Bible-reading contrasts powerfully with Langland’s of natural law; and Rasselas’s Imlac describes the poet’s craft in chapter X as if a white coat and microscope were as ancillary to the Muse as quill and ink.)

     As winter mellowed into spring, however, something far less expected than thunderstorms and pollen forcefully announced its presence: new submissions, most of them short, several ironic in intent.  Their brevity made them eligible for what would otherwise have been an inn with no room.  As for their satiric inspiration, I am inclined to believe that it has more than one source.  Educated people of good will tend to crack subtle jokes among themselves when hard pressed by Yahoos rather than to grab a club (or that other weapon particularly favored by Yahoos).  It is impolite to go looking for trouble, and unfair to hold tree-dwellers to the standard of erect bipeds… yet one has to vent a little frustration, or else explode, when one’s long-cherished neighborhood is zoned only for apehouses.  Besides, things in academe have reached such a state that reality and farce are almost indistinguishable.  The “intelligent intellectual” suffering through these desperate times really has little more to do in pursuit of gentle mockery than to record the Ivory Tower’s own echoes.  I would be willing to wager that readers unwarned by my opening comments here will require a hundred words or so from the barbed pens of Bertonneau and Crookes to realize that a seriously intended document from our smoking culture’s Maginot Line is not before them.  The satirist in such cases, then, is simply being honest and allowing fact to declare folly.

     A further case in point: Rosalinda Nava’s introducing us to the “iBrain”—not yet commercially available, but sure to attract a devoted following in the not-too-distant future.  I had originally read Ms. Nava’s piece as yet another satire, then understood that only its first paragraphs, perhaps, were aimed in this direction.  (In our e-mail exchanges, Linda showed a commendable interest in factual accuracy and high probability.)  Our entire culture, one may say, has grown as nutty as its nutty professors.  In our pursuit of convenient amusement, we may well be prepared to start equipping ourselves internally with gadgetry.  The step would flow logically from the progressive fight against thinking which we have chronicled and analyzed faithfully over the years in the pages of Praesidium; for since the contemporary human is most often forced to think when in quest of amusement, but since thought itself is hard, supplemental appendages assuming the burdens of calculation are and will continue to be in great demand.  Functional stupidity is tomorrow’s goldmine.

     At this point, I will note what may not be quite obvious and well deserves stress: that we feature two pieces this quarter by young persons who have either just finished an undergraduate degree (Trainor) or are still working toward it (Nava).  It appears that “the next generation” so deplored by those of us who remember the well-bound, well-edited book has not wholly given up thinking, after all, hard though it is.  People eventually sicken of ease, and bright people sooner than others: there is much ground for hope in that observation.

     John Matthew Fox’s piece was also a pleasant surprise.  I rather disagree with his prescription that we let ourselves slip into “a Dionysian exuberance” as a means of exorcising the number’s power over our slightest movements; it seems to me, rather, that an overdose of such exuberance during the decades of my lifetime has sent our culture into a neuralgic retreat to numbers.  (I think of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, that ultra-rational Cartesian who was a stabilizing antidote to a chaotic era.)  Yet Mr. Fox has done us a great service just to remind us that our tin-pot determinism—our statistics, our genomes, our demographics, our formulas and focus groups and “idols” and “icons”—are not the hobbies of a healthy mind in its leisure.  They are genies and rabbit’s feet and tea leaves that, one and all, dispense with the moral need to form a plan and stick to it.  That we should have boxes and boxes of such things in our cultural closet must raise a warning.

     Finally, I thank Lt. Col. Lythgoe and Peter Singleton for providing creative ballast as they have for many years now.  In a sense, Praesidium is all about the vital importance of the creative spirit, even though few of our works are strictly creative.  We cannot see what extends beyond this life, after all: we can only imagine. 

 ~J. H. 

back to Contents

***************************  

 

A Kinship Forgotten, A Rebellion Overlooked: Evangelical Influences on English Romanticism (Part Two)

Sean Trainor

 

’Tis this that draws the fire up to the moon,

The mover this, in hearts of mortal things,

This that binds up the earth and makes it one.

Dante, Il Paradiso, Canto I: 115-117

 

Stop, Christian Passer-by!—Stop, child of God

And read with gentle breast.  Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he, —

O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;

That he who many a year with toil of breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death!

Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

He ask’d, and hoped, through Christ.  Do thou the same!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Epitaph

 

IV. Evangelicalism’s Kinship with Early English Romanticism

     The quotation above raises an important point concerning the evangelicals’ kinship with the Lake Poets .  The general emphasis on “feeling” and “experience” generated by evangelicalism had its counterpart in poetry—both religious and non-religious—of individual experience, sentiment, and engagement with nature (both personal and external: Coleridge’s “one Life within us and abroad”).[1] While it is difficult to draw any direct connections between the sonneteer William Lisle Bowles, one of the Lake Poets’ most important early influences, and the evangelicals, it is clear, nevertheless, that both the content and style of his poetry share more with the simple, personal, and heartfelt expression of evangelical experience than with the ornate and impersonal poetry of the Augustans and their late-century followers.[2]  See, for an example of this sentimental, experiential poetry, Bowles’s “On a Beautiful Landscape,” from his influential Fourteen Sonnets of 1789, published nine years before Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads:

            BEAUTIFUL landscape! I could look on thee

            For hours, unmindful of the storm and strife,

            And mingled murmurs of tumultuous life.

            Here, all is still as fair, the stream, the tree,

            The wood, the sunshine on the bank: no tear,

            No thought of Time’s swift wing, or closing night,

            That comes to steal away the long sweet light –

            No sighs of sad humanity here.

            Here is no tint of mortal change; the day, –

            Beneath whose light the dog and peasant-boy

            Gambol, with look, and almost bark, of joy, –

            Still seems, though centuries have past, to stay.

            Then gaze again, that shadowed scenes may teach

            Lessons of peace and love, beyond all speech.[3]

Bowles’s poem contains numerous parallels with Wesleyan and romantic style and thought.  Most obviously, it emphasizes sense and experience (albeit of a contemplative sort).  The poem is written in the first person (Wesley and the Lake Poets ’ characteristic perspective), and reflects not only upon nature’s beauty, but upon those thoughts and feelings it provokes in the viewer.  Throughout, and especially in the swift transition from the viewer’s objective description of “the stream, the tree, / The wood, the sunshine on the bank” to his subjective assertion that “No thought of Time’s swift wing... / ... comes to steal away the long sweet light” [emphasis added], the poem conveys a sense of subject and object merging in the act of observation.  His style, like that of Locke, Wesley, and later the Lake Poets , is one of simplicity; and yet a certain sermonizing, didactic quality characterizes the poem’s closing couplet.[4]  While the couplet’s didactic thrust—looking forward to the famous lines of Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned, “Come forth into the light of things, / Let nature be your teacher”—may have its intellectual roots in natural theology and its understanding of the created world’s order as expounding moral principles, the poem’s overall tone of inwardness and sentiment nevertheless bears a strong resemblance to evangelicalism’s emphasis on a “warming” of the heart.[5] Even Bowles’s poetic concern with the “peasant-boy” parallels both Wesley’s concern for England ’s dispossessed and the farmers and peasants who populate many of the Lake Poets ’ early poems.

     It is difficult to prove that Bowles was directly influenced by the evangelicals.  The paragraph above, however, strongly suggests an intellectual kinship between Bowles’s experiential poetry of sentiment and the evangelical’s religious empiricism.  While it is true that many of Bowles’s themes could have been drawn from other sources—his stylistic simplicity, for example, from Locke, his emphasis on nature from the natural theologians, and his positive valuation of individuality and human worth from the Enlightenment and political radicals—the simplest explanation of his poetry’s characteristic shape remains an awareness of and kinship with the evangelicals.  As noted above, a spiritual understanding of Locke’s Essay, popularized by Wesley’s own writings and his widely-read abridgement of Peter Browne’s Procedure, was “in the air”.  When Bowles published Fourteen Sonnets in 1789, only two years before Wesley’s death, the old Methodist was near the height of his influence.  Given, then, the extent and nature of Wesley’s influence, an evangelical origin of certain of Bowles’s themes seems likely.  His relationship with the evangelicals, however, need not have been exclusive.  In terms of this essay’s argument, it is more important to demonstrate that Bowles’s poetry was in the Lockean mainstream of British thought—that is was akin to, if not largely derived from, evangelical thought.

     Similar problems arise in trying to directly link the romantics and the evangelicals.  There is some minor evidence that the romantics directly encountered and admired evangelical writings.  In a letter of 1795, Coleridge expressed his admiration for Methodist spiritual autobiography to his friend Thomas Poole and outlines his plan to “write his own autobiography according to the Methodists’ model of heady self-consciousness tempered by the claim of disciplined humility.”[6]  Besides Coleridge’s comments on Methodist autobiography, however, there is very little to suggest that the romantics had any important encounters with evangelical thought.  Their most important influences clearly lay elsewhere.  In 1795, for example, Coleridge delivered a series of lectures to a largely Unitarian audience and throughout the 1790s, Coleridge maintained an extensive correspondence with the prominent Unitarian minister John Prior Estlin.[7]  His extensive reading included travel literature, the works of contemporary radicals and obscure metaphysicians, and Bowles’s Fourteen Sonnets.[8]  Most tellingly, in 1796, Coleridge named his first-born son David Hartley Coleridge.  Wordsworth, like Southey, whose influences were briefly summarized in the introduction, was also influenced by the poetry of sentiment and Europe ’s more radical thinkers.  He too was an admirer of Bowles, and his political radicalism culminated in two visits to revolutionary France in the early 1790s.[9]  Neither was Wordsworth altogether without evangelical connections.  Living near Coleridge in the English southwest in the mid-1790s, Wordsworth developed a friendship with Humphry Davy, a young Methodist who would go on to be one of the most important chemists of his age.[10]  These evangelical associations, however, are relatively insignificant in comparison with the direct influence of other, non-evangelical thinkers and writers.

     Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence of romantic kinship with evangelicalism and overwhelming evidence of romantic kinship with the larger Lockean currents of eighteenth-century English thought.  Supporting the latter point is the romantics’ early reading and their particular interest in natural religion and theology.  Early influences included Hartley, the empirical scientist and Unitarian Joseph Priestley, and the French philosophes, whose political theory was largely grounded in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and whose rational empiricism had its roots in the work of both Locke and Descartes.[11]  As Brantley notes, moreover, nearly every major eighteenth-century English nonconformist and the proponents of natural theology (centrally important to the discussion of early romanticism) built upon ideas found in Locke’s writings.  “Since the Essay,” writes Brantley, “formed an element of the atmosphere in which Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, John Ray, and Richard Bentley brought about a marriage of science and theology, it should come as no surprise that Socinians [Unitarians], Arians [believer in a created Son, subordinate to the Father], and Deists regarded Locke as a believer in the God of natural religion.”[12]  Finally, the Lake Poets ’ admiration and emulation of Bowles, demonstrated above to have been working within the mainstream of English empiricism, advances the case for their intellectual kinship with Locke.

     As for their kinship with evangelicalism, Brantley’s case is compelling.  He quotes for example, Charles Lamb’s characterization of Wordsworth’s Excursion as “natural Methodism”.[13]  Brantley’s elaboration is helpful.  “The word methodism suggests the religious quality of [Wordsworth’s] thoroughgoing reliance...  on experience as a basis for knowing the true and the good.”  Brantley’s words call to mind another famous stanza from Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned:

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.[14]  

Wordsworth’s notion that the experience of nature brings with it a moral understanding parallels not only the natural theologians’ assertion that the order of nature propounds moral principles but Wesley’s assertion that the spiritual perception of the senses is a form of immediate revelation.[15]

     The Lake Poets ’ emphasis on individuality and experience is widely noted: e.g., Claude Welch wrote that romanticism was characterized by “the near worship at times of originality and genius”.

Of course, romanticism did not discover the individual for the first time. Not only [evangelicalism] but also strains of rationalist thought were close in the background.  Yet where the dominating quest of the Enlightenment had been for the universal beyond the individual, or for the participation of the individual in the universal, romanticism self-consciously and enthusiastically turned in the other direction.[16]

This particular emphasis manifested itself not only in the first-person, testimonial narrative style so characteristic of romantic poetry (and evangelical autobiography), but in romanticism’s new “sense of the nature of the self”.

Following Rousseau, romanticism exalted the immediacy of feeling—in the self, for humanity, and for the world.  The fundamental relation of man to the world is not through the dignified structure of reason, with its objectifying categories, but in the direct relation of the whole man in his inner heart and in “sensuous impulse” to the vitality and flux of life.[17]

“The whole man in his inner heart”, however, was largely understood by the early romantics as the emotions or the human spirit acting upon the information of the senses.  Despite the American transcendentalists’ later emphasis on “intuition”, the Lake Poets largely regarded the physical senses and an empirically understood “spiritual sense” as the sources of their divine inspiration.  The Lake Poets ’ moments of spiritual exaltation are nearly always induced: that is, brought about by some sensual experience.  In Frost at Midnight, for example, Coleridge, writing to his infant son Hartley, asserts that “thou, my babe”

...  shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.[18]

It is not, after all, a trans­-sensual understanding on the part of the whole being that perceives God’s didactic “eternal language”.  Rather, it is the “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” that “teach” of God.  In fact, there is rarely a sense in the romantics’ early work that man is endowed with an innate understanding.  The passages from The Tables Turned and Frost at Midnight both suggest that man must be taught, that neither the inclination towards natural observation nor an understanding of God’s “eternal language” are naturally endowed.

     Welch’s discussion of “objectifying categories”, moreover, introduces another parallel between Lockean-Wesleyan empiricism and the romantics’ poetic philosophy: the tendency to collapse the distinction between subject and object.  This tendency is particularly apparent in Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey and his use of the same words to describe both the objectively perceived and the subjectively felt.  See, for example, the following lines:

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs ...  (ln. 5)

With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues...  (ln. 128)

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.  (ln. 8)

While with an eye made quiet by the power...  (ln. 47)

And the round ocean and the living air...  (ln. 98)

In body, and become a living soul...  (ln. 46)

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns...  (ln. 97)

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place...  (ln. 141)

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought...  (lns. 100-101)

And even the motion of our human blood...  (ln. 44) [Italics

added][19]

Colin Clarke, in his Romantic Paradox, takes particular notice of this phenomenon.

If cliffs and thoughts are both “lofty”; if the sky and the human eye are alike “quiet”; the soul and the air both “living”; if both river and human observer wander; if the light of setting suns is a “dwelling”, and the memory a “dwelling-place”; if the spirit or presence is “a motion” and “our human blood” also felt as “motion”, etc. etc., then it becomes difficult for the reader to sustain without radical qualification a normal, common-sense distinction between the living and the lifeless.[20]

In short, Wordsworth, in an attempt to unify man and nature and realize Coleridge’s “one Life within us and abroad”, almost completely abandons the distinction between subject and object.  This eschewal of distinction is discussed in greater detail and nuance elsewhere by Coleridge:

The groundwork, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference between...  that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole...  and that which presents itself when...  we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, think to thought, death to life.[21]

While Wordsworth seems to indicate that objectivity is impossible, Coleridge instead posits the notion of perceptive modes, of both distinction and coalescence as ways of perceiving.  Going further, he suggests that not only is objectivity a purely mental phenomenon—i.e., a way in which an individual thinks about himself and the world—but that the objectifying mode of perception is to be rejected.  By comparing the objectifying mode to death and the unifying, subjectifying mode to life, he makes his opinion of both clear.

     Even taken collectively, however, these parallels do not add up to proof.  With the exception of Coleridge’s admiration for Methodist spiritual autobiography and Wordsworth’s friendship with Humphry Davy, there is little to suggest a direct connection between the evangelicals and the romantics.  Their ideas and the themes of their poetry, while almost certainly akin to many of the evangelicals’, cannot be definitely shown to have been directly or exclusively derived from Wesley and others.  Nevertheless, given the general extent of the evangelicals’ influence, it seems unlikely that the Lake Poets were either unaware of or completely uninfluenced by their ideas.  Instead, it would seem that the romantics, building upon their professed influences—Hartley, Priestley, and other Unitarians and natural theologians—integrated other, more distinctly spiritual and sentimental elements of the Lockean empirical atmosphere of eighteenth century thought.  While not self-consciously Wesleyan or evangelical, the Lake Poets nevertheless made use of ideas shared by Wesley and the evangelicals.  

V.  Romantic Religion of Conservative Maturity: Coleridge’s Growth in Christianity, and Aids to Reflection’s Theology

     The Lake Poets gradually came to acknowledge their intellectual kinship with the evangelicals.  As noted in the introduction, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge all renewed their relationship with the Church of England in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.  Their writing and thought became more overtly Christian and began to suggest a growing sympathy for Methodism and Anglican evangelicalism.  A younger generation of radicals, who had found early inspiration in the Lake Poets’ seminal work, roundly rebuked their elders for their political and religious apostasy.  William Hazlitt, among the most vocal of the younger generation, penned numerous attacks on Wordsworth and Coleridge.  His criticism reached a fever pitch in the late 1810s and early 1820s.  Writing a “pre-emptive” review of Coleridge’s yet-to-be-published Lay Sermon, Hazlitt predicted the work would be “‘an endless Preface to an imaginary work”, full of religious obscurantism and political apostasy advocating “despotism, superstition and oppression”.’[22]  The mounting criticism, however, neither altered the course of the Lake Poets’ religious development nor diminished their exploration of evangelical kinship.  In 1820, as noted earlier, Southey published his Life of John Wesley, and thirteen years later he published the Life and Works of William Cowper.

     Coleridge praised the work highly and later in life commended the Methodists in conversation with others.  He admired their singing and their being “in the main opposed to an anti-Christian rationalism”.  He also asserted that they had provided “a new influx of living waters” and represented “an agency permitted by God in the restoration of our Church”.[23]  Finally, as quoted in Table Talk, a collection of quotations from Coleridge’s private conversations, edited by his nephew and son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge, the aging poet avowed as his conviction that

the Christian faith is what Wesley...  described….  It is either the identity of the reason and the will (the proper spiritual part of man), in the full energy of each, consequent on a divine rekindling, or it is not at all.  Faith is as real as life; as actual as force; as effectual as volition.  It is the physics of the moral being.[24]

     Coleridge’s high praise of evangelicalism, however, must be read in historical context and with certain qualifications.  First, praise must not be confused with affiliation or action.  Had Coleridge truly held that “the Christian faith is what Wesley...  described,” he surely would have converted to Methodism.  Second, Coleridge’s statement in Table Talk was made in the context of a discussion about the nature of faith in God.[25]  The word “faith” in Coleridge’s “Christian faith”, therefore, cannot be read as synonymous with the word “religion”.  His words were intended not as a blanket statement of approval of Wesley’s theology, but in affirmation of a single, technical theological point: that faith is a gift of Divine grace, given to those whose mind and will are united in a search for faith.  Finally, Coleridge’s praise was relative rather than absolute.  He admired the evangelicals’ recovery of many traditional doctrines—the Trinity, Original Sin, justification by faith, and others—from the meddling hands of Anglican rationalist theologians and the proponents of an “anti-Christian rationalism”.  Moreover, he admired the intensity of their religiosity in comparison with the spiritual apathy of the early nineteenth-century Church of England.  He believed, in short, that Wesley’s fervent, empirical Christianity was better than what effectively amounted to no real Christianity at all.  He did not, however, approve of the entirety of Wesley’s message.

     Instead, he spent much of the early nineteenth century engaging in a religious dialogue with the empirical, philosophical core of evangelicalism.  The theology he ultimately developed not only went far beyond Wesley’s but, in its assertion of empiricism’s epistemological insufficiency and its attempt to place religious knowledge on firmer ground, Coleridge’s theology was an implicit critique of Methodism’s philosophical theology.

     Coleridge’s turn away from empiricism seems to have been triggered by a series of personal crises over the course of the first two decades of the nineteenth century.  Dejection: An Ode, written around 1806 after a series of personal disappointments involving his unrequited love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, marks his first major attack on empiricism.[26]  Coleridge’s unshakeable depression, a misery that not even his beloved walks in nature could dispel, seems to have first suggested that “in our life alone does nature live.”  Coleridge’s loss of faith in the senses’ reliability may have also been driven by his worsening opium addiction.  The extent to which laudanum altered his senses and withdrawal worsened his mood may have led him to question the extent to which any objective reality corresponded to his subjective feeling.  Not surprisingly, Coleridge’s sense of empiricism’s limits was accompanied (perhaps partly inspired) by his growing interest in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  Coleridge seems to have been especially impressed by Kant’s distinction between noumena (that which actually exists) and phenomena (that information which the mind receives from the senses).  Much of his later thought can be construed as an attempt to articulate how noumena are knowable.

     During this same period, Coleridge came to be convinced of his own inherent sinfulness.  His illness, his deepening drug dependency, and his disappointments with Sara Hutchinson also seem to have played a central role in this transformation.  Writing after a series of rejections by both Hutchinson and Wordsworth, Coleridge described his feelings of religious need as follows:

...  tho’ driven up and down for seven dreadful Days by restless Pain, like a Leopard in a Den, yet the anguish & remorse of Mind was worse than the pain of the whole Body.  –O I have had a new world opened to me, in the infinity of my own Spirit!. . . ”[27]

     “O how I have prayed even to loud agony only to be able to pray!  O how I have felt the impossibility of any real good will not born anew from the Word and the Spirit!...  O I have seen, I have felt that the worst offences are those against our own souls!  That our souls are infinite in depth, and therefore our sins are infinite, and redeemable only by an infinitely higher infinity; that of the Love of God in Christ Jesus.  I have called my soul infinite, but O infinite in the depth of darkness, and infinite craving, and infinite capacity of pain and weakness...   Should I recover I will—no—no may God grant me power to struggle to become not another but a better man.[28]

     Coleridge’s new-found understanding of Original Sin and its personal implications seem to have been accompanied by a particular disgust with Paley’s theology of evidences.  “Evidence of Christianity!” Coleridge exclaimed.  “I am weary of the word.  Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence.”[29]  Man, he argued, was not to be brought to faith by evidences.  He was not to be rationally convinced of God’s existence.  He was to be convinced of his inherent sinfulness, of his need for salvation.  That, in itself, was enough to awaken a belief in Christianity.

     Coleridge’s growing concern with empiricism’s solipsistic tendencies seems also to have aroused a certain distrust of Methodism’s emphasis on the receiver, rather than the giver, of grace.  His marginal comment in the works of Archbishop Leighton, returning again to the comment cited in the introduction, suggests a belief that evangelicalism had so far emphasized the subjective, inner workings of grace that it teetered dangerously close to neglecting the perceived object: God and His gift of grace through the Son and Holy Spirit.

the main and most noticeable different between Leighton and the modern Methodists is to be found in the uniform Selfishness of the latter Not do you wish to love God?  Do you love your neighbour?  Do you think O how near and lovely must Christ be or but are you certain, that Christ has saved you, that he died for you—you—you—you yourself on to the end of the Chapter—this is Wesley’s Doctrine.[30]

Christianity, he indicates, must be grounded in a theocentric rather than a homocentric understanding of the world.

     It was in light of these issues that Coleridge’s theology began to take shape, a theology that would ultimately challenge the intellectual foundations of both rationalism and evangelicalism.  In its final form, as articulated in Aids to Reflection, Coleridge’s theology, underpinned by a Platonic-idealist philosophy, seems to have had at its core a notion of the entire man, of a sensing body with an indwelling, Divinely-endowed light of reason.  The Coleridgean man begins with Sense, proceeds to a this-worldly organization of the senses’ information through the faculty of Understanding, and ultimately, through the indwelling power of an irradiative Reason, arrives at the infinite—at a participation in a transcendent unity, the knowledge of a God whose Name is Being: “I AM WHO I AM.”[31]

     Coleridge’s three-tiered conception of man’s intellectual being is a central element of his theology. Intellectual life, according to Coleridge, begins with the senses, but the senses do nothing more than communicate a disorganized mass of information to the mind.  The information, in itself, is of relatively little value.  It does not, after all, convey to the mind anything essential about the object of perception.[32]  Coleridge made his position on the value of sensory information clear when, in 1818, lecturing on the history of philosophy, he asserted as the lectures’ central thesis that “the Aristotelian and the Platonic approaches represented a permanent polarity in the human intellect.”[33]  With professed intellectual influences including the Cambridge Platonists, the ancient neoplatonic philosophers (including Plotinus, whom he read as a teenager), and Plato himself, Coleridge clearly considered himself in the latter camp.[34]  Of Plato (and consequently of himself), Coleridge stated that, “with Pythagoras before him, [he] had conceived that the phenomenon or outward appearance, all that we call thing or matter, is but as it were a language by which the invisible (that which is not the object of our senses) communicates its existence to our finite beings.”[35]  This seems an apt description of Coleridge’s own position on the value of sensory information.  The appearance of matter is in relation to matter what words are to thought: no more than a secondary means of communicating something more real.  The information of the senses only becomes representative of something real—that is, experience—when organized by the second tier of man’s intellectual being: the Understanding, or “faculty of the finite”.

     In his notes to the Opus Maximum, a planned statement of his complete philosophical and theological position, Coleridge described the second faculty in the following terms.  It is that

which reducing the confused impressions of sense to its own essential forms, to quantity, quality, relation, & inclusively to the forms of action reaction, cause & effect, &c &c, thus raises the materials furnished by the sense and sensations into objects of reflection i.e. renders them capable of being reflection on, & thus makes experience possible.  Without this faculty the man’s representative power would be a delirium, a mere chaos & scudding-cloudage of shapes, and it is therefore more appropriately called the understanding or sub-stantiative faculty.  Our elder metaphysicians down to Hobbes inclusively named it <in its logical existence> likewise discourse, discursus discursion, from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but running as it were from this to that to abstract, generize, classify &c…. [36]

To summarize, Coleridge’s Understanding is that faculty which discovers and comprehends the connections between the “confused impressions of the senses”, which translates the senses’ information into ideas—or, more specifically, back into those ideas from which they proceeded.  Here, in the Understanding, the sources of phenomena are once more found in the ideational state from which they issued.

     The understanding’s systematization, however, while making life, thought, and experience possible, nevertheless obscures the essential unity of the “confused impressions of the senses”.  It organizes a unity into a multiplicity.  The Reason, or the third-tier of intellectual life, is required to restore the understanding’s multiplicity to its essential unity.  This Reason, however, is not the reason of the rationalists.  The rationalists’ reason is Coleridge’s Understanding which, within its proper limits, makes life in the world possible, but which cannot be used to judge, analyze, or attempt to apprehend the infinite “without grievous error”.[37]  When applied to the infinite, the Understanding becomes that which, to paraphrase Wordsworth, murders by dissection—it becomes, in short, the “vaunted Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy...  of death”.[38]  Coleridge’s Reason, instead, is akin to the conscience, to faith, to reflection, and to the will.  It is “the irradiative power of the understanding, and the representative of the infinite”, the means whereby the objects of the Understanding are seen in light of their ultimate Divine unity.[39]  It is the faculty which allows man to see his experience in reality as, to quote Douglas Hedley, “modes and attributes of the one infinite substance”, to perceive all reality as the subjective “explication of the absolute ‘I AM.’”[40]

     The conscience, then, is a lower operation of the Reason, a light in which ostensibly private decisions are intuited to be borne upon by an abiding and universal ethical code.  Conscience, writes Coleridge, “unconditionally commands us to attribute Reality and actual Existence to those Ideas, and those only without which the conscience itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas of the soul, of free will, of immortality, and of God.”[41]  It commands, in short, that man move beyond the unimportant things of this world and search out the higher things of God and eternity.  This search is the essence of Reason’s higher operations.  The Reason’s higher operations, however, require an act of Will, and a willed act of Faith.  Nevertheless, in Reason’s highest sense, Reason, Will, and Faith all essentially become one.  As Claude Welch writes, at its highest level, “Reason and Faith become one, where Reason is fidelity.  Reason itself requires an act of will, a venturing forth, a throwing of oneself into the act of apprehension of spiritual truth.  Just as faith must give a reasoned account of itself, so a reason that had no fidelity in it is unfaithful to Reason.”[42]  As the quote above suggests, a certain degree of linguistic bafflement almost invariably attends any attempt at explaining Reason’s highest function.  This bafflement, however, is ultimately part of the explanation: the height of Reason is the point at which the discrete ideas represented by the words Faith, Will, Reason, Reflection, and Grace cease to be distinct.  It is the point at which the willing hand of man and the graceful hand of God blur and coalesce, at which the Understanding’s ideas fade into the infinite unity of the Divine Name. It is, to quote Coleridge, “unity in multeity; multeity in unity”.

     Coleridge, then, in response to Paley on the one hand and the evangelicals on the other, denied that religious knowledge could be received through or rationally understood by the senses alone.  Instead, he asserted that it is only achieved by moving beyond the senses and the subjective, by making use of the inner, irradiative power of Reason to perceive God’s wholeness.  The knowledge of God, for Coleridge, transcends the subjectivity of sense, of feeling and experience.  To assert that God’s grace can be sensed or rationally understood is to require that God mediate Himself through an incompleteness, through a feeling or a logic that neither addresses the whole of man or communicate the wholeness of God.  Proceeding from the material senses to the mind and soul, Coleridge’s knowledge of an all-encompassing God encompasses all of man.  The knowledge of God is not personal for Coleridge.  It is trans-personal.  It is a knowledge grounded in the reality of both the inner man and his experience of the outer world.  It is insulated from solipsism by Coleridge’s assertion that to know of God is to know of the Being in which all being is grounded; it begins with God’s existence and ends in man’s knowing.  To quote Coleridge himself:

There is something in the human mind which makes it know...  that in all finite Quantity, there is an Infinite, in all measures of Time an Eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, the true and abiding reality of the former; and that, as we truly are, only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess (i.e. enjoy) our Being or any other real Good, but by living in the sense of his holy presence.[43]  

VI.  Aids to Reflection’s Reception

     Published in 1825, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection had at its core the epistemology described in the section above.  It was an epistemology that placed the foundations of knowledge largely in the mind’s internal activity and a Divinely-endowed Reason.  In doing so, it challenged both rationalism and evangelicalism.  Remarkably, however, the challenge to evangelicalism went unnoticed by most in the English reading public.  The following section will examine the reception of Aids to Reflection and attempt to explain why Coleridge’s critique of evangelicalism failed to attract attention.

     The mood of Aids to Reflection’s initial reception was quite similar to that which continues to characterize its reception: it was a mood of bafflement.[44]  Even at his most sublime, Coleridge is never an easy read.  Problems of understanding, however, ran much deeper than Coleridge’s grammatical complexity and his excessive use of obscure vocabulary and neologisms.  Basic matters, such as his relationship with reality, confused his readers.  The novelist and historian Thomas Carlyle, contradicting Coleridge’s assertion that his theology was grounded in the “true and abiding reality” of God’s Being, wrote that Aids to Reflection propounded a system of “strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras, —which now roam the Earth in a very lamentable manner!”[45]  In a similar vein, Arthur Hugh Clough noted that he kept “wavering between admiration of [Coleridge’s] exceedingly great perceptive and analytical power and other wonderful points and [an] inclination to turn away from a man who has so great a lack of all reality and actuality.”[46]

     Both comments above suggest a certain insularity in English philosophical thinking.  While much of his theology was novel, the Platonic idealism at the core of Aids to Reflection was grounded in an ancient philosophical tradition.  The fact that two bright young Englishmen would reject Coleridge’s theology as a system of “strange Centaurs” and “spectral Puseyisms” lacking in “all reality and actuality” indicates the extent to which early nineteenth century England had rejected Platonic notions of the reality of ideas.  While Carlyle and Clough recognize idealism for what it is—an alternative epistemological foundation—they simply reject it out of hand.  They apparently felt no need to engage it seriously or formulate an original refutation.  It was, in their eyes, obviously nonsense.

     The anti-idealist bent of English thought is further born out by the fact that between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the publication of Aids to Reflection in 1825, no major English philosopher or theologian espoused an epistemological system that differed greatly from the empirical norm established in the work of Locke.  George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid, William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, and the Deists all operated within a broadly understood empirical framework.[47]

     This philosophical insularity, directly or indirectly, underlies the three most important reasons for the English public’s failure to recognize the critique of evangelical epistemology implicit in Aids to Reflection.  First, this insularity is related to the English public’s general misunderstanding of the interrelationship between its various schools of thought.  By narrowly construing epistemology, excluding idealism altogether, it tended to magnify the differences between what were essentially kindred schools of thought.

     This statement is not intended to totally diminish the difference, for example, between Thomas Reid’s “common sense” assertion that epistemology must begin with the reality of the “external world as a perceptual given”, on the one hand, and Berkeley and Hume’s claim, on the other, that the “immediate objects of perception are our ideas” and “one is obliged to establish by argument that there is an external world.”[48]  At the core of both, however, is the basic notion that sense perception is of central importance, that, whether or not external reality is a “perceptual given” or man is innately endowed with the “‘original’ principles by which sensations and remembrances are interpreted,” the knowledge upon which we act, however reliable, comes from the senses’ information.[49]  In short, Reid, Berkeley, and Hume were all operating within the broad currents of Lockean empiricism. 

     Just as the English could find a stark contrast between Reid and Berkeley and Hume, so they tended to draw a sharp distinction between empiricism and evangelicalism.  Empiricism, after all, provided the foundation of the natural sciences and religious movements that sought to reject elements of Christian doctrine and denude Christianity of the evangelicals’ enthusiasm.  How, then, could empiricism be related to evangelicalism?

     This sense of epistemological disjunction between scientific rationalism and evangelicalism was not only prevalent in the early nineteenth century.  It persists into the modern day.  Claude Welch’s characterization of evangelicalism as “no system of thought”, but rather a “system of feeling”, supports this notion of a perceived disjunction.  Clayton Roberts and his co-authors, moreover, describe evangelicalism as “functional”, typified by “moral seriousness” rather than “abstruse theology”.[50]  Understood as either unintellectual or purely practical, evangelicalism could be conceived by few Britons sharing an empirical core with rationalism.

     This sense of intellectual disjunction between evangelicalism and rationalism seems to have obscured many readers’ full understanding of the purpose of Aids to Reflection.  Several noted the text’s importance in retrieving young men from the brink of rational irreligion.  “Young men,” writes John Beer, “who were becoming conscious of the difficulty of holding Christian beliefs within the emerging” rational and irreligious “intellectual climate found in a work such as Aids to Reflection accents that they could understand.”  It provided them with “a note of assurance in difficult times.”[51]  One such young man was John Sterling.  He wrote the following to a former tutor and fellow clergyman in 1836: “To Coleridge I owe education.  He taught me to believe that an empirical philosophy is none, that Faith is the highest Reason, that all criticism, whether of literature, laws or manners is blind, without the power of discerning the organic unity of the object.”[52]  To another friend, he wrote:  

I scarcely hold fast by anything but Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge and I have nothing serious to say to any one but to read the ‘Aids to Reflection in the formation of a Manly character’—a book the more necessary now to us all because except in England I do not see that there is a chance of any men being produced anywhere.[53]

These two statements, taken together, suggest a great deal about why Coleridge’s public failed to recognize the critique of evangelical epistemology implicit in Aids to Reflection.  His first statement, for example, explicitly mentions epistemology.  This suggests an awareness, albeit limited, of the epistemological implications of Aids to Reflection.  His second statement, moreover, seems to suggest that Aids to Reflection’s epistemology bears directly on the question of rationalism.  Only in conservative England, where rationalism’s hold was weaker than on the continent, did Sterling foresee “a chance of any men being produced”.  Given, then, that Sterling mentions both epistemology and the importance of Coleridge’s theology in the struggle against empiricism and rationalism, it is surprising that he does not mention the threat it posed to evangelical epistemology.

     It is even more surprising when Sterling’s statement on epistemology is placed in the larger context of his life and the history of the Church of England.  By 1836, Sterling had been a minister for two years, and he was writing to another minister at a time when evangelicals were near the height of their influence in the Church of England.  Evangelicals held close to twenty bishoprics, one in eight Anglican clergymen considered himself evangelical, and by 1848, an evangelical would be the Archbishop of Canterbury.[54]  It seems unlikely, then, that the subject would have simply slipped Sterling’s mind.  Nevertheless, a sense of Coleridge’s threat to evangelicalism is noticeably absent in Sterling’s letters.  While he fully understood the challenge Aids to Reflection presented to empiricism and rationalism, he seems to have viewed evangelicalism as something apart from, perhaps even antithetical to, the former.  The insularity of English philosophical discourse apparently prevented Sterling from seeing evangelicalism’s kinship with the broader Lockean-empirical tradition.

     The public’s failure to recognize Coleridge’s critique of evangelicalism might also be explained by the way in which evangelicalism understood itself.  While Wesley and others had been tremendous intellects, it seems that the philosophical emphasis of early evangelicalism had been lost by the early nineteenth century.  As noted above, evangelicalism, especially as experienced by the masses of Englishmen and women, was characterized by “apostolic simplicity” and “active faith”.  It was a “functional”, morally serious religious expression and reform movement.  While much of this essay has been devoted to debunking the myth of evangelicalism’s intellectual emptiness, a distinction must be made between Wesley’s learned understanding of evangelical religion and that of its less intellectually gifted practitioners.  At its intellectual core, evangelicalism was a philosophically and theologically rigorous movement; as practiced, however, it was primarily a movement of this-worldly reform.[55]  It should come as little surprise, then, that while evangelicals took serious issue with Aids to Reflection, it was not with Coleridge’s epistemology.

     An evangelical review in the British Critic, for example, attacked Coleridge’s undermining of Christian simplicity.  “We want sound practical piety,” wrote the reviewer, “content to form itself upon the model of the faith once delivered to the Saints, and looking for no other guide.  In the Christian philosophy there is nothing esoteric; there is not one language for the learned, and another for the vulgar.”[56]  While the review begins with praise for “the various light thrown by [Coleridge’s] writings upon the excellence and the beauty of the Christian scheme” and doctrinal tradition, it proceeds to rail against his theological formulations’ complexity and the text’s reflective, contemplative quality.[57]  The most threatening aspect of Aids to Reflection was not its epistemology.  This was of little concern to the majority of evangelicals.  The nature of knowing put neither pastors in parishes nor children in Sunday Schools.  It addressed neither public drunkenness nor the slave trade.  Rather, they railed against a text that threatened to remove religion’s emphasis from the concerns of this world to the abstruse and useless depths of the philosophical mind.  Characterized by a distinctly practical outlook, most evangelicals were neither aware of nor concerned with the empirical epistemology that underlay their movement.

     This emphasis on morality and doctrine extended beyond the evangelical fold.  The mainstream Anglican poet and critic Matthew Arnold shared certain concerns with the British Critic’s evangelical reviewer, although he was less interested in an active faith than his evangelical counterpart and fully approved of Coleridge’s religious philosophizing.  Arnold’s interest in morality and doctrine is apparent in his essay on Joubert.  After lambasting Coleridge’s morals—the theologian’s religious reflection, he asserted, was “not a moral effort, for he had no morals”—he continues to praise his promotion of traditional Christian doctrines.  “The great Coleridgean position,” Arnold asserted, was that “Christianity rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that, apart from all questions of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason.”  He concluded by suggesting that Aids to Reflection was “henceforth the key to the whole defence of Christianity”.[58]

     Arnold’s praise of Coleridge’s work echoes the evangelicals’ concern with morality and the integrity of the Christian doctrinal tradition.  His approval of Aids to Reflection, however, had more to do with a sense that Christianity’s survival required that the doctrinal tradition remain intact than with a thoroughgoing appreciation of Coleridge’s epistemology.  For Arnold, Aids to Reflection’s significance lay not in its epistemology, but in its reintegration of doctrine and philosophy.  This philosophical reintegration was inevitably borne upon by Coleridge’s epistemology, but it is of no small significance that Arnold fails to mention Aids to Reflection’s attack on empiricism.  The full significance of Coleridge’s attack seems to have escaped Arnold’s notice.

     Arnold’s response to Aids to Reflection not only sheds light on moderate Anglicans’ approach to Coleridgean theology; it also provides a link between the particular philosophical insularity of the practical-minded evangelicals and the epistemological disinclination prevalent among the broader non-evangelical English intellectual public.  As noted in the introduction, Englishmen and women of the early nineteenth century were not altogether unfamiliar with epistemological discourse.  In the eighteenth century, Thomas Reid and Samuel Johnson vied with Berkeley and Hume for the legacy of Locke’s empiricism.  Evangelical leaders discussed the experienced knowledge of grace, and early in nineteenth century the Lake Poets expounded on the knowledge of nature’s sublimity.

     By the 1820s, however, epistemological inquiry had gone into a state of hibernation.  Reid and Johnson’s philosophy of “common sense” had become “something like an orthodox or establishment philosophical position”.[59]  Bentham employed Hume’s brand of empiricism with few modifications; his movement was “not concerned primarily with epistemology”.[60]  Non-evangelical Anglican theology remained preoccupied with an empirical theology of evidences, evangelical thought maintained its focus on experienced grace, and neither ventured far beyond their shared Lockean heritage.[61]  In short, English intellectuals seem to have arrived at something of a broad epistemological consensus.  While they retained a faint awareness of alternative epistemological options, they seem to have been generally content with their common empiricism.  In any event, English empiricism had not been seriously challenged for more than a century.  When a critique finally came, they failed to recognize its full implications and dismissed it with the arrogance and superficiality of a people long unchallenged in their beliefs.

     While dismissive of Coleridge’s idealism, Carlyle and Clough, as noted above, seem to have been aware of what it represented.  They understood, to a certain extent, that Coleridge’s theology presented a challenge to the epistemological assumptions of the broad English intellectual tradition.  Carlyle’s use of the word “chimera” and Clough’s discussion of “reality and actuality” describe epistemological concerns and, in a unsophisticated sense, represent a rudimentary argument against Coleridge’s idealism.  In the main, however, their arguments against Coleridge seem to depend on a self-evident conventional wisdom—on a prevailing sense that to ascribe transcendent reality to ideas was to engage in the most backward of epistemological thinking.

     This hasty dismissal was not unique to the writings of Carlyle or Clough.  Crabb Robinson regarded Aids to Reflection as philosophically interesting but religiously tedious.  “On first reading these Aids,” wrote Robinson in his diary, “I remarked that his, Coleridge’s philosophy was his own, his religion that of the vulgar.”  Upon completing the work, Robinson summarized it as “a book which excited feelings that will probably never ripen and doubts that will remain unsolved.”[62]  He too noted the work’s philosophical novelty, but failed to seriously engage it.  Coleridge’s idealism was an interesting brain-teaser, but it hardly merited a serious refutation.

     In the end, therefore, the English public simply lacked the inclination and the language to fully recognize, engage, or refute Coleridge’s epistemology.  Many of Coleridge’s readers recognized the novelty of his epistemology and the extent to which it challenged prevailing assumptions about the nature of knowing.  While they may not have grasped that empiricism underlay nearly every English school of thought, they understood that Coleridge’s epistemology differed greatly from their own.  Their protests, however, amounted to little more than hasty, intuited dismissals.  Rationalists, evangelicals, natural theologians, and romantics had so thoroughly and unquestioningly integrated Locke’s empirical epistemology into their work that most of Coleridge’s readers utterly lacked the background or philosophical vocabulary to grasp and discuss the new footing upon which he had set religious knowledge.

     The reading public failed to recognize Coleridge’s implicit critique of evangelical epistemology because they understood neither his idealist epistemology nor the common empiricism that bound together the broad spectrum of English thought.  They lacked a clear image of both Coleridge’s critique and that which he was critiquing.  Like the people of most ages, they understood their intellectual life in terms of false dichotomies.  They labored petty differences while ignoring essential ones.  They recognized what Coleridge’s theology represented—a challenge to their way of knowing—but for the most part they could do little more than dismiss it as absurd.

     There were, of course, those exceptions who recognized and fully understood the work’s unique contribution to English thought.  John Henry Newman, for example, greatly admired Coleridge’s notion of the Reason as irradiative light and often quoted the passage that closes the previous section.[63]  The American Congregationalist minister and editor of Aids to Reflection, James Marsh, also displayed a unique understanding of Coleridge’s message.  Marsh was perhaps the first person to explicitly note the anti-Lockean character of Coleridge’s work.  In his “Introduction” to Aids to Reflection, he “dwelt particularly on its virtues as providing a proper metaphysical grounding for Christian religion.  Unitarians and modern Calvinists, for all their differences, shared a common allegiance to the philosophy of Locke and his successors which Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding, properly understood, should lead them to question.”[64]  Marsh hoped Aids to Reflection would be the first step towards a post-Lockean intellectual age.

۞

     By the middle of the nineteenth century, England’s philosophical insularity gave way to a larger spectrum of epistemological options.  By 1840, John Stuart Mill could write, in his famous essays on Jeremy Bentham and Coleridge that

there is hardly to be found in England an individual of any importance in the world of the mind, who...  did not first learn to think from one of these two…. [E]very Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean; [he] hold[s] views of human affairs which can only be proved true on the principles either of Bentham or of Coleridge.[65]

While empirical epistemology continued to play an important role in English intellectual life, Coleridge’s philosophy of knowledge increased in public importance as England discovered German Idealism over the course of the latter nineteenth century.  Ultimately, Coleridge’s hold on the Victorian consciousness was greater than that of any other romantic poet.  

VII .  Conclusion: The Resonance of Ancient Songs

     With few exceptions, Coleridge’s critique of evangelical epistemology continues to go unnoticed.  The implications of this cognitive failure are important.  They shed light on the societies that continue to receive Coleridge’s theology.  Of far greater importance, however, are the implications of English romanticism’s kinship with evangelicalism.  This process of silent integration reveals much about the language of the Western mind.

     Our ideational language is a rich one.  Even in an age, as Jonathan Chaves calls it, of “neologism run amuck”—an age of historical parochialism, as Bertrand Russell writes, in which “new catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors, even when they differed little from our own”—even in such an age as our own, the language of our minds continues to resonate with the sounds of times forgotten.[66]  This is hardly an original observation.  In his essay, “The Metaphysical Poets” of 1921, T.S. Eliot noted that

poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.  Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon the refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.  The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.[67]

Despite the characteristically elitist overtones of Eliot’s statement, the heart of his message is the same as this section’s: that the language of the mind is one of great complexity, variety, and richness.  It resonates with thousands of years of images and ideas.

     In a relatively simple statement, the modern American or European speaker is likely to invoke images from the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible, use words that have a rich etymology rooted in the deep Indo-European past, employ terminology derived from the likes of Freud and Marx, and all in the process of describing a romantic quarrel or the psychological motivations of a television character.  Daily, we use this language—this infinite, fountainous language of the human past—and yet the fullness of its meaning escapes us.  We do not understand the language we speak.  We cannot comprehend the infinity of even a single breath.

     It is not surprising, then, that even the Lake Poets, for a time, failed to recognize the extent to which their poetry was akin to evangelicalism.  Evangelical thought was, so to speak, but one of many musical strands that together formed the symphony of romanticism.  Later they would recognize this kinship, and with it, the vast complexity and variety of their mental language itself.  In terms that have guided this essay’s conceptualization of intellectual history, Coleridge compared the transmission of ideas to a movement in music.  Musing on the subject of intellectual continuity in his lectures of 1818, Coleridge suggested the following:

If we listen to a symphony of Cimarosa, the present strain still seems not only to recall, but almost to renew, some past movement, and yet present the same!  Each present movement bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems sometimes trying to overtake something that is to come….  The events and characters of one age, like the strains in music, recall those of another.[68]

     Our ideas, our images, and our language link us to ages we will never know and persons we will never meet.  We think and speak in spider-webs, the ends of which reach to the fringes of human experience.  Our words are points of infinite depth.  We speak in the fullness of time.

 

Sean Trainor holds a B.A. in History & Religion from The George Washington University.  The present essay (see previous issue for Part One) is substantially the text of his Honors’ thesis for that institution, which was judged to be the year’s best.  Mr. Trainor has studied with Praesidium contributor Jonathan Chaves.

back to Contents

***************************

 

The Tyranny of Numbers

John Matthew Fox

 

     Anorexics and bulimics are excellent at rudimentary mathematics. They practice adding and subtracting sums all day long, whenever eating or contemplating eating.  To their eyes, a buffet line is an abacus, and the goal is to maneuver through by selecting the foods that will add up the fewest number of beads.  The anorexic must add calories and fat, then subtract the calories burned during the hour-and-a-half gym workout; the bulimic fastidiously counts calories while restricting, then after purging discounts the food excreted with the help of laxatives or vomited with the help of fingers.  Every day is an equation to be solved.  Every day the ceiling number of caloric intake hangs overhead like Damocles’ sword; and when the welter of adding and subtracting subsides, an underbidding of that number signals the hair’s sufficiency for the time being.

     To accomplish all these equations, the eating-disordered first perform an act of transubstantiation.  In their presence, every morsel transforms to a numeral.  The fork bites into the steamed white rice and comes away with a chunk poised on the edge of the tines; before it’s raised to the mouth, it fades into a blocky 15.  A spoon plunges into a plain baked potato, and when it surfaces in a cloud of steam, the number 20 appears, moist and hot.  Their faith matches that of the priest, confident that the Eucharist is not food.

     Not only does everything entering their body have to be transformed into numbers, but also everything leaving.  Numbers go in and numbers pass out, and the difference between the two equals their body.  Among the eating-disordered, exercise on machines is preferable to running in a neighborhood or swimming in a pool, because then their expenditure is not in incalculable terms, but certified to the n^th degree on the digital display of a cardiovascular machine.  Every watt of energy expended must be assigned a number, or else the sum of their body grows hazy.

     Vomit and defecation also change into numbers.  Bulimics gauge their vomit or their feces.  If they don’t discharge enough, an additional finger or pill will help expunge the recalcitrant numbers.  Laxatives are the henchmen of the number world; they hunker down and muscle out the stray number of a cookie eaten at a Christmas party binge or the slice of cake eaten in a moment of frailty.  Wrapping the chunks and fluids in a number is the only way to guard against the disgusting nature of daily vomiting or diarrhea.  The number protects: mathematics keeps the disorderliness of bodies at bay.

     Not only external items but also their own bodies turn into numbers for the eating-disordered. They cannot see their bodies in a mirror.  A 5’4” girl will weigh ninety pounds and complain about her fat jiggling when she walks—what she sees is not her thighs, breasts, arms, but a loose integer dangling beside her thigh.  The scale superimposes numbers over her silhouette, which shields her from sensory data.  The visuals of the situation—the appearance—mean nothing next to the totalitarian power of mathematics.  The length of the dial swing or the composition of the red bars legislates self-image for the day.  The eating-disordered walk about imagining themselves as a stack of numbers, and the identity of those numbers determines whether they contract like a corset or bulge like a barrel.

     Without the scale to translate bodies into numbers, the epic mathematical struggle would fizzle.  The scale is the deity of the eating-disordered, it is the patron saint, it is the icon.  The scale bridges the world of the physical and the divine, bringing the numerical to mankind like Prometheus bringing fire down from the gods.  The scale also resembles the Old Testament avatar of God, a deity both loved and feared: they cannot function without its sagacity, but fear every approach to its throne.

     Psychologists ask eating-disorder patients to discipline themselves by refraining from weighing themselves for a week or two, and the tension grows unbearable because their image fades like a departing ghost.  They clutch upon the most recent number; but when their conception of self becomes so faint that they have no idea what they look like, the desire to find their numbered identity overwhelms them and they return to their lover and enemy, the scale.  Clinics that specialize in treating disorders, both in-patient and out-patient programs, ask them to step on the scale backwards, so the technician can read the number but they cannot.  The given reason is so that they may not try to alter their behavior in response to weight gain (squirreling away food, refusing to eat, secretly exercising), but the underlying reason is so that they may begin to develop a self-image independent of a number.

     This substitution of body image for numbers is scarily reminiscent of detainment facilities: the tattooed numbers of the Nazi concentration camps, the sewn numerals on prison garb.  The similarity of using a number for identity is not an accident—those using a scale to assign themselves a numbered identity long for the security of a confined and controlled situation like an internment camp or prison.  They want to embrace the rigorous schedule and rigid confines of a stable institution, and to avoid dealing with the linguistic complexities that a name confers.  Jean Valjean offers such a slippery identity compared to the certitude of 24601.

     What is shocking about these acrobatic feats of mathematics is not their abnormality, but their correspondence to our society at large.  Eating disorders are a solar flare on the sunscape of our culture—they seem abnormal because they depart from the mean, but they rise from like kind.  The epidemic of eating disorders reveals the broader cultural mistake of mathematizing the body and food, an activity so ingrained within the popular psyche that despite its ubiquity (or because of it), it is invisible.

     It is considered normal to live in a land where every item of food has a rectangular bunker of numbers affixed to it, numbers that pretend to represent the essence of that food: 30 grams fat, 18 saturated fats, 140 calories, 10 grams sodium.  Every package also has a bar code, a coded numbered identity.  Beyond the packaging itself, a grocery store is a mob of numbers flashing a deal for $4.99 or a 2-for-1 special.  Most people even cook by way of numbers, assiduously following the instructions for 2 ½ cups or 4 teaspoons.  But many individuals don’t reach the recipe stage of food—they eat flash-food from fast food joints or microwave-ready boxed food, both of which promise culinary pleasures on the basis of math: quarter-pound hamburger for $2.99, now with 2 patties, 30% more fries.  As food metamorphoses into a numeral, it loses all relationship to essence or quality; and although a number cannot satisfy in the same manner as food can, we readily accept this change because numbers give us a security that our palates cannot.  If food does not have a number, many are stumped.  How can one cook a recipe without numbers?  And how can one know what to buy?  When people masquerade as “healthy consumers” by constantly checking the caloric and fat numbers on their food, they are actually revealing their deep ambivalence and bewilderment about culinary affairs.  A number confirms their choice.  It’s the mechanized chef, able to govern their gastronomic concerns with rigid precision.  Of course this is the right package of stir-fry vegetables—it has only 50 grams of sodium and 15 grams of saturated fats.  More importantly, by checking the nutritional numbers, shopper-cooks are revealing a complete lack of trust in any specific historical tradition of food—a tradition such as Italian or French—and throwing their faith upon the mythology of food created by food corporations, a myth that provides a new and utterly malleable way of seeing food.

     Ultimately, when food becomes only numbers, the eaters become only consumers, and forget the history of the food.  Numbers are abstract, rising from the immaterial, and have no relationship with other people, times, or places, while food has a concrete history: it was planted by someone, in a specific place, and cultivated using particular techniques; it was subject to weather conditions and its sale was determined by economic factors; it was processed in a plant and trucked to the store.  If food is only a number, it loses all this history and becomes something that appears (abracadabra!) on the grocery store shelf, where the consumer places it in a basket without considering the pesticides used, the long-term sustainability of the land, the economic viability of the farmer, or the price fluctuations caused by hurricanes in the southeast.  The consumer loses all connection to the land, to the people that provide his food, and to the edible materials he consumes, which not only prevents him from raising a cry against irresponsible farming techniques used by myopic capitalists, but ultimately alienates him from the composition of his own body.

     It is a short step from the tyranny of mathematics over our food to the tyranny of mathematics over our bodies.  More than even biology or psychology, numbers dictate how we live in our bodies.  An alarm clock counts the sheep of our sleep, and we rarely sleep without noting the bedtime and rising-time, which transforms our rest into a stop-watched affair.  If there is something wrong with us, we ingest a pill—a 90 or 120 milligram dose of a drug which we take every 4 hours or 6 hours—which offers ironclad assurance of our future health.  Numbers saturate our exercise: we lifted 70 pounds 10 reps in 3 sets, we cycled 54 minutes at 27 mph. burning 574 calories.  Our shampoos and soaps and contact solutions and toothbrushes and razors all bear numerals: their length (2”), weight (80 grams), volume (40 fluid ounces), their level (Stage 3), their PH level (2.2); we apply them to our body after judging which number represents or typifies us, believing—ever so naively—in the ability of our mass-producing consumerist market to invent products not only matching who we are in our bodies, but also helping to define our bodies for us.

     We minutely assign numbers to our bodies to make ourselves valuable.  We monitor the scale with rapt attention, believing our weight equals our sum.  Doctors tell us that we are 140/80 blood pressure, 2000 cc’s lung capacity, 70 resting heart rate.  Our appendages are numbered—the average length of a man’s penis when erect is 6.1 inches and average girth 3.6 inches—men feel a need to measure up, and feel disenfranchised when they are outside the mathematical mean.  A woman should fit into a 2 or 4 dress size, have breasts of C (2 ½” to 3 ½”) or D (3 ½” to 4 ½”), and not be shorter than 5’ but not taller than 6’. We do not have these numbers, our body is these numbers.  Numbers have surpassed their role as a system of measurement and ascended to ontological status: these numbers are our being.

     What is most unfortunate about this neo-numerology is that the numbering of the body is the first step to dehumanization.  Every body can be assigned numbers, and every body can be labeled by means and medians.  But to sacrifice any body on the altar of the god of math is to assert its interchangeability with the herd: 1=1=1.  Individuals become lost in the crowd, and it is always crowds that become the subject of gassings and bombings.  Numbering of the body means one can ship bodies in cattle cars to facilities designed to strip all individuality down to a race, and all that matters is how many bodies each car holds.  It leads to justification of an atomic weapon that will kill between 3,000 and 4,000, but not over or under that figure; or it means one may imprison X number of people for Y number of years, because the undertaking is simply an equation, a matter of jiggling the two factors, and not of injustice against a father or a cousin.  Casualty summations do not differentiate between the babies slaughtered or women gutted, the twelve-year-olds who had rifles shoved into their hands or the men who weren’t affiliated with politics; there is only… 118 dead.  When a number falls off the earth, we subtract one number from the sum of humanity and recalculate our population, but when a wife or brother or cousin dies, we weep with the bereaved.  A dead person—a brown-skinned woman with a broad smile and a levitating walk—does not merely add to the casualties of a civil war, but leaves a heritage of sorrow to her loved ones.

     It is also unfortunate that this numbering can only measure the physical universe.  Numbering of the body insists that a body is just a body, without any intrinsic value beyond the flap of skin and pulsing organs.  A number can calculate the efficiency of a fist-shaped muscle thrusting blood in and out of arteries and ventricles, but it cannot measure the gumption of the heart.   A number can count the wavelengths of mental activity, but these are not equivalent to our minds.   A number can sum up the whole of our corporeal bodies, but misses such metaphysical nuggets as the soul crouching behind the mucus of our membranes.  Instead of penetrating the body, numbers always skim along the epidermis, assessing every inch and ounce of the physical while glossing over the metaphysical.

     Western culture is held captive under the low ceiling of integers, and everyone has fallen sick.  Some are less visibly sick than others, but a cultural malady does not skip persons: it only infects to a greater or lesser degree.  This fellowship of disease should lead us not only to identify with the eating-disordered, but cry with them, for we struggle under the same thumb of oppression. Indeed, recognizing the close relationship between how the eating-disordered see food and our culture sees food might initiate a movement of change.

     We begin the process of change not by seizing control, but by letting go.  To relax first requires a de-masking of the areas of our lives controlled by the banality of numbers.  Any attempt to break the habit of math will result in the siren call to measure with numbers how well we are succeeding, and this must be resisted.  Yet this process of letting go does not aim to eradicate math, only to reduce the inroads that math has made into parts of our lives where it lowers the quality of life rather than raises it.  Math has a place—a provincial one, not a totalitarian one.  The process of letting go must begin with celebration, a celebration of food and the body, a Dionysian exuberance that dances and eats, eats and dances, and does not remember the plus and minus signs of the god that haunts our every numbered step.

 

John Matthew Fox teaches at various universities in the Los Angeles area, as well as writing book reviews for publications such as Rain Taxi and California Literary Review.  His website BookFox (www.thejohnfox.com) covers the short story world, including interviews, literary news, and upcoming collections.

back to Contents

***************************

 

Freedom Grows on Trees: A Eudemonist Economics (Part Two)

John R. Harris

 

Πόσων έγω χρείαν оύκ έχω

“How many things there are of which I have no need!”

 

    Socrates beholding the agora’s

         merchandise (Diogenes Laertius 2.25)

(continued from the previous issue; numbering of sections and footnotes resumes from where Part One ended)

 

IV.  A Series of Hypothetical Contrasts

     Heretofore, I have argued that a genuine concern for happiness has been all but exiled from contemporary discussions of economics.  I have been especially critical of soi-disant conservative theories in this regard, precisely because I believe that the secret to human happiness, considered as an empirical phenomenon indexed to a certain material state, must contain substantial elements of conserving.  Coherence with the past, a fairly secure anticipation of the future, a perceived harmony between one’s personal values and those of one’s neighbors… surely these are circumstances attendant upon the satisfaction in life expressed by sane, responsible adults of any era.  Today’s liberal, in my view, has therefore disqualified himself from addressing the great question at issue.  Since contemporary liberalism is so heavily invested in change, as if people were mere morsels in a stew whose proportion and seasoning could be adjusted until the perfect recipe finally produces just the right savor, I have looked in the other direction for answers.

     They have not been forthcoming.  Indeed, the neo-conservative of today shows little interest in conserving anything of the cultural or the spiritual—or even, perhaps, of the social.  Here, too, change reigns supreme, usually in the holy name of free trade.  Institutions must make way when they stand in the path of financial gain.  Even religion and family are typically defended with reference to statistics that correlate church-going and marriage to income and longevity.  Such reasoning certainly implies that Bible-reading would have to go if, for instance, a new survey suggested memorization of the Beatitudes to accompany a reduced ability to scale the corporate ladder.  In the same way, Main Street ’s boutiques have lately been boarded over or paved under because shoes and soccer balls can be made more cheaply in India than in Omaha .

     Both to recapitulate and to clarify further, I should like to proceed from this point by positing a series of images.  I shall ask the reader to picture typical people living in various cultures.  The method is no doubt unscientific in numerous ways; but then, happiness is neither a bank account nor a ration of grog and beef.  It is something, rather, that those of us who study belles letters and past civilizations should be less shy about identifying, for our qualitative sensors should be more apt in this investigation than the clinician’s weights and measures.  All the same, I hope that I shall not offend grievously against objectivity.  The portraits that I advance are highly generalized, but not at all distorted as generalizations.

     Imagine, first of all, human society in its simplest state: that of the hunter-gatherer who lives in semi-temporary camps of two or three dozen people, migrating within a fairly fixed range as nuts, tubers, fruits, and game within easy walk of a given site are depleted.  This manner of living, to be sure, is “simple” only in regard of its minimal technology.  In other ways, it can be quite sophisticated.  Popular representations of it often err in both directions: we are invited either to see Adam and Eve delighting in Eden or a clan of “cavemen” eking out a brutish existence.  A few objective remarks will serve our purpose here.  Of primary importance is the fact that hunting-and-gathering is not arduous toil.  The men who track down prey do not race antelope or wrestle bears: they are infinitely more likely to snare small animals and to address larger ones with poisoned darts, patiently shadowing them for hours, perhaps, until the dose takes full effect.  The women who dig roots and grope after berries do not spend hour upon hour doubled over or balanced on their toes: they have no quota of bags to fill, no specified number of fields to harvest.  Though life depends upon the success of such food-gathering expeditions, we seek almost in vain for any instance of a malnourished people straining under great burdens or against massive obstacles with every fiber of their frail bodies.  To call their life a leisurely one would not, in a sense, be inaccurate.  The chores of gathering, especially, can be combined with socializing.  (Hunting demands less noise and rewards spreading out.)  In a long-standing culture where knowledge of healthy and unhealthy plants, safe and unsafe approaches to predators, secure and unreliable shelters, etc., has accumulated over the centuries, the hunter-gatherer existence may well be viewed as robust, free, peaceful, and even mentally challenging—in short, as a regimen not incompatible with happiness.

     I would stress that the medical technology upon which we found our era’s superiority to all others with such overweening confidence would not have been sorely missed in hunter-gatherer communities during a typical month, or maybe even a typical year.  Granted that broken bones poorly set would permanently reduce an individual’s contribution, and probably his or her lifespan: yet what I have written above should suggest that activities involving a high risk of fracture or internal injury must have been rare.  Members of such societies tend to know how to budget efforts and avoid dangers.16  That having been granted, our “superiority” dwindles to an acquired skill at making up deficiencies in our diet and daily exercise artificially and an advanced technology of fighting infections with injected antibodies.  Here again, our pride is somewhat presumptuous.  Concerning diet and exercise, the hunter-gatherer could no doubt teach our best clinicians a thing or two.  As for infections, we are especially prone to them despite our keen awareness of hygiene because we constantly expose ourselves to strangers in our footloose, densely populated lifestyle.  The tribesman-counterpart of our frequent-flyer executive passed most of his days among the same thirty people and their progeny.  His vulnerability would become apparent only if some representative of our world were to intrude upon his, importing a host of new bacteria and viruses along with the best of intentions.

     Yet there’s no denying that such a life, at its less fortunate moments, could be very hard indeed.  Years of irregular climate brought about such moments.  If the usual foods could not be harvested within the tribe’s usual range—or not in sufficient amount to sustain the group—then starvation might virtually annihilate the small society.  Severe weather conditions might also render habitations inadequate: grass huts might blow away, and wigwams of hide might not keep extreme cold at bay.  Settlements were an answer to such afflictions.  A permanent home, of course, could be more soundly made; and the limits which it would impose upon one’s wide-ranging habits would introduce no problem if the production of food stuffs could be intensified artificially within a small area.  Grains, nuts, and perhaps some tubers could also be stored in anticipation of a lean year.  The more mobile hunter-gatherer would not have been able to transport any such depository from campsite to campsite.  Furthermore, as agricultural technique emerged in response to long-term risks, hunting would be similarly transformed into the herding of domesticated antelope and swine.  Human society began to sink deep roots.

     For Rousseau and his heirs, this was not a happy development.  Among other things, it was the birth of private property.  Communitarians always keenly feel the loss of the share-and-share-alike ethos without conceding (apparently without noticing) the tragic fragility attached to that habit of existence—its constant exposure to aberrations in the natural cycle, to incursions of stronger tribes, and so forth.  They are more aware of the setbacks which the wandering lifestyle imposes upon nascent individualism: such a “liability” simply leaves them unmoved.  Perhaps associating the hunter-gatherer existence with a perpetuation of childhood joys, they cannot see the more independent human being’s evolving sense of self and other, with all of its many moral and spiritual implications, as a significant advance.  To them, the farmer bartering potatoes for cheese is but one step removed (and in this supposition, they are right enough) from an entrepreneur charging prices for goods in his inventory.  If a hoarder was ever detected in the days of wandering tribes, he must have been stiffly reprimanded by a council of elders.  Now he tallies up his sheep as his neighbor’s herd dies of thirst, foreseeing an opportunity to corner the market in wool and mutton.

     Let us be fair: there is a modicum of truth in such nostalgia over the child’s lost innocence.  When people graduate to greater autonomy—when, in a word, they become adults—we find certain ones rising to the occasion and certain ones degenerating.  That religion itself should shift from a placatory reverence for natural forces at this evolutionary phase to embrace a budding sense of conscience, responsibility, and soul is clearly no accident.  Contemplating the child’s initiation into such potentially fatal complexities is not without sadness, yet this sadness belongs to a fuller life, a higher reality.  Far sadder still would be the child-of-forty-years, a stunted plant which will never bear fruit.  If one accepts that human beings achieve their most human level when they achieve a measure of self-awareness, then the farmer’s life must be rated happier than the wanderer’s.  No doubt, it is a very different kind of happiness, less spontaneous and less trusting, and so perhaps less intense.  But it is also a subsequent happiness, and that which does not graduate to its next natural stage is less successful even though it could be said to have found a kind of eternal youth.  Death itself is eternal youth: the unplanted seed never dies because it has never decayed to yield new life… but it has also never lived.

     Such mysticism may seem ill-suited to the agriculturalist’s life (though I think those of this persuasion must neither have read Hesiod nor have studied varieties of monasticism).  A popular misconception holds that farmers are “rubes”, “rednecks”, and “hayseeds” who toil like mules and are just literate enough to sign their “x” on a deed.  The truth is that, like hunting and gathering, farming is usually more pleasurable than the unremittant drudgery of the factory or the chain-gang.  The farmer labors mightily for stretches of time during the day and over certain seasons during the year.  Yet he does not race a clock, being generally endowed with the luxury of taking breaks as desired; and he knows long months, as Hesiod writes, when there is little more to do than linger near a stove and repair tools.

Those mid-winter months, foul days fit to rip an ox’s hide off his back—

Watch out for them, and the frosts which make of the ground

A hard bed as North Wind howls outside,

That visitor from Thrace ’s wild-horse mountains across the wide sea

Huffing and thrashing until the forests groan.17

If the rural dweller does not profit from such enforced rest by reading, he is nevertheless turned in upon himself with an intensity largely unknown to the urban laborer.  Indeed, we easily forget how many deep thinkers of the past were living close to the land in their periods of greatest literary activity (Cicero, Virgil, Sallust… Jefferson, Madison, Thoreau) and how many urban scribblers were somewhat constrained by their fear of censorship or dependency upon volatile patronage (Horace, Statius, Suetonius… Descartes, Pascal, Fénelon).  The farm is not the cradle of literacy: that distinction belongs to the city, with its need of accurate record-keeping amid the flux of materials and the crush of the crowd; but the farm turns out to excel at sustaining the best literate habits of thought—self-examination, freedom of inquiry, and assessment of ideas against observed results.  The eccentric Tycho Brahe erected massive star-gazing equipment on his estate, and the eccentric Michel de Montaigne penned essays from a sequestered turret in rustic retirement.  The courtly masters of Renaissance Italian epic, Arioso and Tasso, wore themselves out with clerical work for ungenerous patrons, in contrast; while the genius of Edgar Allan Poe took leave of this world in a Baltimore gutter.

     I am perhaps selecting my examples with prejudice so as to demonstrate, at the very least, that agriculture is not inconsistent with cultivation of the spirit.  I submit, at any rate, that we should not assume hives of urban intellectuals such as universities, symphony orchestras, art galleries, and research laboratories to be the ultimate destination of the humane life.  More of that anon.  Let us develop the simpler end of the contrast first: the hunter-gatherer and the unskilled urban laborer.  I understand, of course, that the thousands of human cogs supplied to vast assembly lines in the nineteenth century’s second half came from farms, not from savannas.  With regard to its practical form, however, the day-laborer’s existence clearly paralleled the bushman’s more than the cultivator’s.  Whatever skills the blue-collar worker brought from the farm were not generally in demand: he was hired, rather, to swing a mallet or an axe.18  He lived from day to day, bringing home just enough to keep his family alive; and after a month or a year of working in one locality, he would be roaming the streets looking for new employment.  He might quite literally transport meager belongings and family from one tent city to another as the railroads progressed; or he might transfer his residence from one hovel to another as a job loading barges was replaced by a job digging tunnels.  His way of life, if not explicitly migratory, had the shallowest of roots, and of superfluity stockpiled for leaner years he could show not a bite or a dime.

     To imagine this urban gypsy’s enjoying a single advantage over his nomadic progenitors on the open plain is a formidable challenge.  His housing was usually more secure than a hut of reeds or sods—but it was poorly ventilated, prone to catch fire, and hard to heat or cool with the moist earth sealed far below under concrete and tar.  His illnesses sometimes were treatable with drugs that were sometimes affordable—but he was more apt to take sick on a diet of diminished fruits and vegetables and in constant close proximity to hundreds or thousands of other urban dwellers.  His clothes were probably not as adequate as the wanderer’s hides and skins.  His children often went barefoot on filthy brick streets, while the nomad’s brood plodded a softer earth not steadily washed with horse manure and emptied chamber pots.  The air breathed by the former was poisoned by coal dust and the sulfurous exhalations of nearby factories, seldom warmed by sunlight visiting between high-rise tenements and sooty veils; for the latter, air and sun were free and abundant, a daily charity from the heavens.

     Quite frankly, I should suppose the life of the nineteenth-century urban laborer to have been more distant from happiness than any previous existence not lived directly under the thumb of an insane, bloodthirsty despot.  Even as he died, the ailing wanderer could at least lie his bones down and watch the stars come out (perhaps made safe from large predators by kinsmen who had lofted him high into a tree).  The dying laborer had a squalid cot, four cold brick walls, and a tiny window opening upon more gray facades to cheer his last moments.  Whatever family hovered near him was probably terrified or dazed before the prospect of an uncertain future; his more extended relations had usually been left far behind in the old country or scattered throughout the New World by the four winds.

     In passing, I cannot resist remarking one of the many absurdities awash in current discussions of labor, lifestyle, and happiness.  The temporary laborer admitted from Latin America (or illegally shuttled across our southern border) indeed resembles the typical nineteenth-century immigrant from Ireland or Eastern Europe, as we are often reminded, in the following ways: he is unskilled except in agricultural techniques for which there is no demand, his English is imperfect or non-existent, he is scarcely literate even in his native tongue, he has left his extended family and the external supports of his belief system far behind, and he has enjoyed little exposure to state-of-the art conveniences like microwaves and CD-players (or even, perhaps, to televisions and air-conditioned automobiles).  We are invited to believe that this person is “bettering” his lot by plunging into our blue-collar work force—invited, especially, by those of liberal political inclinations who believe devoutly in the forward progress of human society.  Yet to define progress as the acquisition of microwaves and CD-players sounds very like the overture to a defense mounted by right-wing advocates for bourgeois capitalism.  If my observations above about comparative happiness are not hopelessly flawed, then we might just as well expect that the undocumented roofer, gardener, or meat-packer will end up more miserable than he was at his point of origin.  To the extent that this is not so, the explanation, I think, must surely be that political corruption and oppression back in his homeland did not permit him to farm a small plot of land in peace; and in that case, his problem becomes an officialdom swollen to intolerable heights of arrogance—not a deficiency of affluence.  Our own political commentators may justify the human deluge over our border with flippant quips about the discomforts of bathing in a stream or living without Internet.  We should strive, however, to imagine pair of scales wherein one dish is occupied by an overweight contractor munching chips before a wide-screen TV on his day off, the other dish by a slender campesino leaning on his shovel to admire his irrigated chili peppers as chickens cluck in the background….  Which of these two scenes possesses more human value?  If there is something missing from both of them, which is likely to be more receptive to a greater degree of thoughtfulness or reverend mystery?  That the Left should vote for the former is a shocking surprise.  That elements of the so-called Religious Right may end up choosing the latter hints at what a very foolish marriage these naïfs made in plighting their troth to the consumerist cult of ever newer gadgetry.

     Of course, both liberal and self-styled conservative would probably claim that the real comparison should be drawn between the farm and the middle-class lifestyle of skilled employment.  No one wants to roof houses for thirty years.  Just as Irish and Polish immigrants graduated from swinging a pick in mines or a sledge along the railroads to running small shops or doing fine brick work, so the objective of the Mexican fruit-picker is to open a restaurant and eventually send his children to college.  Even though today’s blue-collar laborer already enjoys immensely better conditions than his counterpart one hundred years ago, his real happiness awaits him in the future—in circumstances which he himself may not live to see fulfilled, but whose approach will suffice to delight his heart as he glimpses a new world opening before his sons and daughters.  The liberal finds in this visionary happiness the vindication of progress which is the soul of his or her philosophy, while the neo-conservative finds in the vast upward thrusting of economic and social ambitions a self-renewing energy to drive the mechanism of consumption.  If their motives do not exactly converge in this picture of rising material affluence (and I would suggest that they do, far more than the liberal likes to believe), then they nonetheless share the same behavioral outcomes for society.  We witness the convergence, in fact, more clearly every day in these times as we watch our nation’s political landscape endure major upheaval.

     And here, precisely, is the most critical juncture of this essay’s quest after economic happiness.  Is the farmer’s happiness a match for the burgher’s?  Let us at once remove corrupt police, oppressive taxation, and other such factors from the equation on the farmer’s side: we are not envisioning an ill-starred Mexican peasant, but a successful planter who feeds his family with a bit left to spare.  Likewise, let us imagine that our roofer now owns a small business, with a fleet of pick-up trucks bearing his name in constant cruise about town.  Who would question that the latter is the “better off” of the two?  He has invested his substantial profits in stocks and bonds, he has moved into his “dream home”, his children will attend not just any college but rather one of their choice… he has achieved an estimable degree of control over his life.

     Or has he?  I wish to examine that assumption very closely, for I find it dubious under the surface at several points.  In the first place, we can scarcely suppose that any human being feels a mission in life to shingle houses.  Let us harbor no romantic illusions about our man’s success: he started out in the business because it produced a paycheck, and his persistence and hard work have merely produced bigger paychecks.  One supposes that hammering on shingles all the livelong day offers few spiritual rewards, and one readily imagines that those who do the hammering may even loathe their work at times.  But the shingler is a shingler: he cannot switch his skills to painting murals or designing bridges.  He is stuck—more or less for life—in a trade which happened to make money for him, and money is all he will ever really have to show for “success” in that trade.  Is that such a bad thing?  Can he not use his money to take guitar lessons or travel the old country or collect sports memorabilia?  The liberal/neo-conservative vision asks us to accept that our man will have enough energy left over during his brief vacations and his silver years to supplement a life of indifferent, perhaps repellent drudgery with spiritual awakening.

     The farmer, on the other hand, lives every day of his life shoulder-to-shoulder with certain basic truths of life.  He follows birth, growth, and decline; he studies what his dependents need from the process to secure their own survival; and he exchanges hard labor, not for another’s vain displays, but for personal necessity.  To rephrase the last of these insights, he understands the spiritual value of work—the purifying quality of honest labor applied to honest ends about which Wendell Berry wrote so lyrically.  If the exchange rate of sweat for inner peace is not exactly a “basic fact of life”, it is closer to the foundation than the investment banker and the stockbroker care to admit.  I shall argue that its absence from our present habit of life is indeed the fatal flaw in our system.

     For such peace, in terms of historical breadth, is very soon lost after the move to the city: life in town is about making a wage, not about bringing in a harvest.  Growing food can never be ignoble unless one finds life itself ignoble; and in that case, one chooses to starve and shuffle off this mortal coil.  Nothing in the city, however, directly produces food.  At most, food is processed or distributed here—food from the country.  Already, even among butchers and grocers, chores are performed directly for pay, which may or may not be spent upon sufficient and healthy sustenance; and the work, being often heavy and repetitive (lifting, cutting, sorting—over and over and over), is less bestializing than mechanizing: i.e., it reduces man, not to a dumb beast straining in the traces, but to a mindless appendage taking its cues from conveyor belts and automatic doors.  Such service cannot be a setting for human happiness, I maintain.  Yet so contagious are its dismal effects that they tend to reach out into the country like tentacles, poisoning even the farmer’s domestic economy.  Farmers begin to grow, not what their family needs, but what city-dwellers want.  When enough city-dwellers want country-grown products badly enough, they pay top dollar, and the richer farmers buy up the holdings of the poorer ones.  Since the poorest usually have the misfortune to be tenants, as in Mexico —or as in Ireland during the Potato Famine or in England during the Enclosure period—the humble cultivator profits not a whit from having soil at his fingertips.  He may not even survive: he may starve, as perhaps two million did in Ireland .  In that tragic venue, one scholar writes,

… food would be transported out of the district where a poor harvest had occurred.  Usually it would go to a town or city, for the city-dwellers also needed sustenance.  The country people would sell their food to pay their rent and to buy food later at an elevated price.  The district’s residents, therefore, would see lorries or barges carrying their food away, even though they themselves were in dire need.  It is scarcely surprising that there were often attacks mounted on these lorries and barges.19

Tenant farmers in western Ireland dropped like sheep at the slaughter during about half a decade, not because their potatoes were blighted, but because everything they grew besides potatoes was carted away to generate profit in the city.  Similar circumstances, less homicidal but just as unnatural, exist in northern Mexico today.

     I digress from my argument precisely to stress that the servile farmer, in constant need of government subsidies and tax breaks just to survive, is indeed unnatural—a reflexive creation, as it were, of our rural population’s mass-exodus to the high-tech city’s artificial environment.  I return now to the main point: that the true farmer holds his fate in his hands quite literally.  He can grow his own food, and he can repair or extend his own house.  He is the model of nuclear independence.  The burgher must proffer money for food and shelter—and I shall mean not just the green-grocer or the meat-packer, but also the publisher, the lawyer, the advertiser, and the professor.  Such people are commonly viewed as having reached the pinnacle of civilized life.  There is a strain upon their existence, however, which remains latent in the best of times, yet which must sooner or later, as one generation succeeds another, assert itself: they all provide services to the public, and public taste must eventually prove a tyrant.  Richard Weaver, enamored as he virtuously was with the self-sacrifice of medieval chivalry, viewed its lapse as cracking the door open for the marketer:

… the disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism.  There is a cause-and-effect relation here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the market place, and there is no surer way for him to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.20

     Weaver’s noble naiveté is itself on display, I suspect, in this pedigree.  More likely, it is the growth of commercialism which strangles the heroic ideal, for the burgher need not start out venal and cynical.  Many have been known, indeed, to perish in high principle rather than adjust to the “demands of the market”.  The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the glorious triumph of the middle class—and the pillorying of a few hold-out free spirits who did not bend a knee to mass taste.  Baudelaire was successfully prosecuted for obscenity because (among other reasons) his poem “Delphine et Hippolyte” dared to address the subject of lesbian love.  Were he a resident poet on the English faculty of a state-funded university today, the same poem would earn him summary dismissal because its treatment of the subject is censorious!  If a poet must thus adjust his credo, professionals with a Yellow Pages listing must be rigidly faithful to the whim of the day.  A lawyer who refused cases on moral grounds (who chased from his door, say, a husband wishing to reduce his child-support or a retailer plotting to exploit a contract’s fine print) would soon be unable to pay his office’s rent.  A landlord who refused to raise rent above the prevailing mean would soon find his property being defaced by disrespectful tenants, though a few deserving poor would also bless his name.  Everyone who sells a service incurs at least the potential risk of having to play the prostitute.  Our freedom to say what we believe in the city is severely circumscribed by the necessity of eating and finding shelter; for if we choose to play the prophet instead of the prostitute, who will pay for our supper?21

     One may credibly maintain that the Renaissance poet or artist enjoyed more such freedom than we do, in fact.  He had only to win over one well-healed patron: we must win over the masses—we must find a “market”.  Liberal intellectuals want the government to stand in for Lorenzo de Medici, assuring creative free-spirits of a regular honorarium.  Yet where do the representatives of popular government derive their tastes, if not from the people?  The bare truth is not only that most people lack taste, but that the general taste must inevitably grow worse if commercial capitalism has free rein.  Upon what do people spend money, once they have accounted for the necessities (and recall that we are now scrutinizing the successful bourgeois)?  They opt for convenience.  Our technology excels at spewing out new conveniences with a volcanic kind of energy, so these affluent expenditures are self-accelerating: the more cellular telephones are bought, the more investment will be drawn into developing cell phones that render previous versions obsolete.  The public’s taste makes a decisive shift toward embracing the new per se—and worship of trend has always been a defining factor in poor taste, since its focus is on ostentatious display rather than on engagement of intellectual faculties.

     To be sure, such acquisitive “feeding frenzies” generate new jobs.  More trends, and the acceleration of existing trends, translates into more demand, which means more producers and more hucksters.  More and more workers will be able to receive pay doing frivolous, even degrading acts in order to buy food; and, if the degradation grows too palpable, perhaps they will have enough money left over to buy enough frivolity themselves that they will not be left alone in a quiet room at week’s end contemplating the utter futility of their existence.

     I am back on the humble worker’s gritty doorstep again, a destination which has a hidden magnetism.  We are observing an epochal economic shift, in fact, wherein the white-collar executive is watching his shirt change color.  As machines do more and more of our complex labor, human workers are finding that more and more job openings are for the “human machine” once again—the low-level, repetitive task which once characterized sweatshops, which machines faintly lifted from our shoulders for a while, but which now may be done more cheaply by two hungry hands than by sophisticated equipment.  The engineer and the accountant are unemployed, their work “outsourced” to countries whose newly educated are “happy” just to get off the assembly line; and our manual laborers are seeing either a similar exit of their jobs to hungrier shores or a furtive awarding of those jobs to foreign nationals imported under the law’s radar.  Perhaps the best chance today at a high-paying domestic position is the software company whose creations will at last render even work-for-room-and-board engineers and accountants redundant.  (Employees of tax services already do little more than “key” numbers where “prompted” on a screen.)  Of course, the day when computer programs create new computer programs cannot be far away.

     On that day, we shall witness the sickly birth of the world’s first fully “service” economy, The Age of the Servant.  Some, perhaps many, will be waiting tables and emptying garbage cans.  A modestly more prosperous group will be driving trucks and pointing the drills and nozzles of heavy equipment in the right direction—but this, too, will be essentially a custodial duty.  The more prosperous still—the one group which will yet enjoy a long shot at striking it rich—will be peddling various stimulants chemical and electronic, legally and illegally, online and in the street.  Stimulants, sleeping pills, fantasy games, the alternative realities we call “movies”… and let us not forget pornography, the prostitute’s passport to a relatively healthy prosperity… such are the growth industries of the future.  People will participate in them because they have to eat—and eating means food, and food means pay, and pay means awakening and exacerbating every latent whim in a mass public whose ashes may yet be fanned into a flame.

     But what if we grew our own food?

 

V.  The Suburban Farmer

     I will at once reassure the reader that I have not taken leave of my senses and do not propose the evacuation of our cities to repopulate the countryside.  The farming of the past must remain in the past, for all but a few determined eccentrics like Wendell Berry.  Whenever we hatch a plan for improving the future (and here I speak of a “return to happiness”, not the much more suspect “progress”), we must not ask of our neighbors what we ourselves would or could not do; or, if we happen to be Wendell Berry, we must ask rather less of them, understanding that some spirits are but faintly willing and some flesh very weak indeed.

     Taking full account of human inertia, then—of our instinctive resistance to change when its vector does not carry us toward greater convenience (what is progress to us but a shift toward less work and pain?)—I can envision several entirely feasible means of bringing agriculture to our residential suburbs.  Technology would assist us in many of these efforts; some are mere common sense, however, with minimal “upgrading”, the equivalent of cultivating a backyard garden a little more seriously.  Bear in mind that the motive for my proposals is terrestrial happiness: I seek to expound nothing less than how a contemporary human being might best supply his or her basic material needs without loss of self-respect, subservience to a vile regimen of collective intemperance, and the moral exhaustion attendant upon living only for surfaces.

 

•     Conventional Methods:  Let us start with the family garden.  Tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, and other staples of a healthy diet can be grown in some variety just about everywhere, and with relatively little effort.  (I find that, other than regular watering, most of my ministrations only torment my plants.)  Major problems can develop, however.  Some residences may have precious little real estate to spare for a garden, especially closer to downtown areas.  Families with young children and pets will also find their produce under constant attack.  Then, too, the weather is undependable in some regions; and natural competitors for the fruits of one’s labor, like birds, moles, and squirrels, can also be immensely annoying.  I am led, therefore, to propose my first major adaptation.

 

•     The Greenhouse Roof:  Most residences reflect a major investment in attic insulation.  We are warned by experts that the cool air we churn out artificially inside our domestic domain during the summer and the warm air during the winter literally travels through the ceiling, incurring the social and political costs of higher energy demands as well as personal costs to our checkbook.  Now that glass can be manufactured which resists hail at least as well as wood shingles do, why do we waste these 2,000 square feet or so of solar energy—why do we actually expend energy to repel energy?  If our residence’s roof were a greenhouse, our living quarters could be just as well insulated throughout the year.  (I am less confident, frankly, that this would be so in summertime down South: but greenhouses can be ventilated, and leafy plants absorb a good bit of heat.)  The greenhouse would be impervious to birds, baseballs, and burrowing pests.  Its contents could grow year-round.  It would be a very pleasant retreat for adults after a hard day—both more sedative and less wasteful than, say, a sprawl in a hot-tub.  Its light chores would occupy children who are currently burning their eyes out on PlayStation as they cultivate nothing but a criminal ignorance of how the natural world works.  Hardier plants—roots and tubers, for instance—could still be grown in the back yard, but the more delicate species would find safe haven up in the roof.

 

•     Nut Trees for Protein:  Unfortunately, trees that bear nuts take a long time to grow—but landscapers and surface-sensitive, manicure-minded “yuppies” have waged an unreasonable war against this crucial variety of plant for decades now during which many a pecan orchard might have risen loftily.  If one can endure the nuisance of having “rubbish” fall all over the lawn at certain times of year, then the nut is manna from heaven.  It is that rarest of finds, a plant-produced source of protein.  Nuts also survive in storage a very long while, unlike more familiar protein-intense foods.  Most of us consume them in holiday deserts, or perhaps lightly as condiments on certain dishes; but they have lately been found to have numerous health benefits quite in addition to their deposits of protein, even as conventional protein-powerhouses like cheese and red meat have acquired a spotted reputation.

 

•     Livestock for Milk:  Nevertheless, milk and cheese remain the time-honored means of surviving handily and healthily for poor folks.  Slaughtering animals for their meat has always been a dubious proposition: the harvest of steaks may be rich, but their source is gone for good once the axe falls.  (Studies have indicated that the Hindu prohibition against killing cattle has probably allowed a great many families to survive on milk that would have starved on steak over the centuries.)  The milk cow (or goat, for that matter) consumes a repository of the sun’s energy not accessible to us mammals—grass—and turns it into easily ingested protein, renewable throughout the animal’s lifetime.  The milk cow is the mythical glass that never drains.

     With none of my proposals have I encountered such weak-kneed, wide-eyed, pusillanimous incredulity as I have in arguing for a neighborhood milk cow.  Our urbanized nation seems to believe collectively that udders squeezed by our own hands would produce a noisome liquid excrement sure to poison all who might consume it, and that the animal itself would bury lawn and driveway under its “chips” until flies were breeding on our necks and acrid stench inducing swoons in our womenfolk.  A clear plastic jug at the grocery store, sealed and stamped by richly remunerated federal and state officials, is required to exorcise the malodorous demons issuing from the cow’s bowels like Greeks from the Trojan Horse.  The word “squeamish” hardly begins to capture the extent of a rather contemptible naiveté frequent even among those who style themselves environmentalists.

     Of course, cows do expel fecal material.  It makes excellent fertilizer: gardeners routinely pay several dollars a bag for it.  The animal’s stall would certainly have to be cleaned regularly and the “harvest” spread and watered into the ground.  The flies and vermin drawn to such an operation, however, are no more formidable when the “pet” has hooves than when it has paws—and Americans often lodge the litter boxes of their precious cats in the kitchen!  The unsavory chores involved in maintaining a clean premises would do our spoiled children a world of good; while the process of sterilizing the gathered milk, though usually redundant in cases where a single animal is being housed, could be accomplished expeditiously with simple technology, and would likewise teach valuable “hands-on” lessons of the sort that our mammoth education system seems so hard put to supply.  That Third World nations are notoriously inept at taking hygienic precautions with their livestock and poultry (viz. the impending threat of Avian Influenza) is a cautionary tale, to be sure; but to assume that our government is providing for our welfare in such matters better than we ourselves could do is not only a disappointing response in a free society—it is inaccurate in specific cases, and likely to become ever more so as our public resources grow more strained.

     I might add that cows and goats, in cropping the ample lawns to which Middle American suburbia is so partial, would spare us the misery of lawnmowers and grass-blowers—“conveniences” which not only guzzle gas unconscionably, but also pollute at a far higher rate per gallon than any vehicle on the road.  I do not know of any study of the probable toxic emissions inhaled by the wretches condemned to lives of pushing this gadgetry around day after day, all year long.  Apparently, we are so eager not to deprive them of their labor that we cannot be bothered to entertain the notion of their health’s being irreversibly damaged.

     I envision a cow being grazed up and down every residential block.  The milk provided would probably suffice for as many as a dozen families—or perhaps two cows could be stabled.  When I consider how many billions of dollars we invest in pets annually, I cannot imagine that a slight shift to more functional varieties of animal wandering about inside our picket fences would call for much of a sacrifice.

 

•     Piscine Protein: Another protein source occurs to me, but I confess that the subject soon carries me out of my depth.  Victorian novelist Standish O’Grady wrote a thrilling novella titled Between Sea and Land wherein a young man becomes trapped in a network of dark caves and can sustain life only by virtue of the fish that a family of seals shares with him.  Eventually, the castaway feels himself declining and knows that he must work harder to escape: the diet of fish does not sufficiently restore his energy.  Whether there is a nutritional basis to this fictional peripety, I do not know.  Fish may offer rather less protein than red meat does—but it is healthier in other respects, and I am not suggesting baked carp as an exclusive source of protein, in any case.

     My ignorance is more profound in matters logistical.  Having never raised fish, I do not know if they could be brought to maturity in a domestic aquarium quickly enough a give them a steady place on the menu.  Certainly we all find an aquarium a very relaxing prospect, however.  To pipe in a little oxygen and feed the tank’s scaly occupants with scraps would not pose much expense.  I assume that the piscina would be an indoor set-up, since an open pool outdoors would draw insects and vermin and also create a hazard for small children.  Even a modest residence could easily afford the cubic footage needed to graze a prospering school of fish, I should think; and the problems involving cost-effective population density, vulnerability of the fish to small changes in the tank’s temperature, the product’s appeal to human palates, and so forth could probably be resolved by selecting carefully among various breeds.

 

      I insist that these strategies for feeding one’s household, and others like them which have not occurred to me but must be evident to practiced gardeners, do not demand of us a major alteration of our lifestyle.  On the contrary, they demand that we resist the highly artificial lifestyle which has been thrust upon us by narrow economic interests.  Nothing could be more natural than plucking a snack off a tree, and nothing is more embedded in the history of human experimentation than coaxing fruits from the earth in slightly engineered circumstances.  The hesitation in which our misgivings torpidly hold is very like the mesmerism in which the automobile keeps us courting our own ruin.  Consider the evidence.  For centuries, human settlements have mingled residential functions with commercial functions.  People ate meals behind their shop and slept above it, as they indeed continue to do in whatever towns around the globe have not been turned inside-out by highways.  To all appearances, this is the natural way for humans to socialize at a higher level where private property exists and commodities are exchanged.22  In our own nation, the compartmentalized city, wherein one must navigate traffic to transport children to school, reach a place of employ, or make even the simplest purchases, is scarcely half a century old.  Yet we already find the image of corner grocery stores and neighborhood repair shops so outlandish as to be fatally stigmatized.  The picture makes too much sense—it is too childishly easy!  If it were not fraught with hidden difficulties and dangers, we would already be modeling it in our daily lives.  Besides, it is also archaic (for even we Americans are not such ignoramuses as to be wholly unaware that we indeed used to live this way).  Answers for complex problems never involve turning the clock back: the very idea blasphemes against the sacred cult of Progress.

     Yet the multi-functional neighborhood and the agriculture-intensive residence would solve many of our major social and economic (not to mention spiritual) problems in the same manner—and one must confess that it is a pretty obvious manner, and also more than a little beholden to past lessons.

 

•     Traffic would be reduced.  Growing food would give at least one of the two adults heading a household a good reason to stay home.  Clearly, the greater number of people remaining in their residences throughout the day would represent more potential customers for the café or the bookstore across the street.  As life in the suburbs became diverse, residents with the option of staying or leaving each morning would choose to stay: their home street would now seem an enjoyable place.  Expenditures of fuel would perhaps be halved (much to the dismay of those whose joy depends upon our national oil dependency), less tax money would be spent on paying traffic cops and maintaining roads, hospitals would be less strained, insurance rates would drop, and the one American in about five or six thousand who dies every year in car wrecks would have to find another ferry across the River Styx.

 

•     Crime would plummet.  With residents staying in their neighborhoods, fewer homes would be abandoned all day long to pose tempting targets for burglars.  A man would never be wandering the streets out of work if he owned property, for he would always have the work—the noble work—of tending his crops and livestock.  (I shall say more anon about my casting the urban exile here as a man.)  Young people, who tend to commit crimes incidentally as they cruise streets far from any adult capable of putting a name to their faces, would have chores to do.  Chores done, they would also have recreational locations to walk to a few blocks away.  Perhaps most important, the ethos of hypocrisy, of self-praising venality, which eats deep into our nation’s soul—which inspires the bromide that delivering pizzas from a buggy with an illuminated sausage on its roof is the proper path to success—would be undermined; for young men want most of all not to be lackeys, and a planter stands on his own two feet without bowing or scraping.  It would be impossible to calculate how much criminal behavior in our time—specifically, how much gang-related drug-dealing—originates in a refusal among young males to “step and fetch it” for a few bucks a week… but the figure must be a sizable one.  Is agriculture really a solution—or is it, perhaps, a potential magnifier of the problem?  I have utterly no doubt that some readers will instantly have formed in their minds the thought, “These greenhouse roofs will be mere hothouses for marijuana!”  My answer is that Americans will stop wanting to anesthetize themselves when their lives stop becoming so painfully absurd and petty that a frontal view of them is intolerable.

 

•     Public health will vastly improve.  Besides a fall-off in annual traffic fatalities, the resuscitated neighborhood where residents actually buy and sell products and services and grow their own food will obviously elicit more pedestrian circulation and favor a better average diet.  Among the plain facts in support of my proposals is the nutritional and hygienic superiority of food straight off the vine to food canned for months or else picked green and shipped (all too often) in contaminated containers.  Frankly, fresh fruit and vegetables also taste better.  Children are more likely to eat them.  By default, food of the “fast” and “junk” variety, with its whopping doses of sugar and trans-fatty acids, will occupy a reduced portion of the daily diet.  Adults will also live under less stress day to day.  Relieved of fighting heavy traffic, secure in the knowledge that an abusive boss cannot suddenly cut them off from all sustenance, and attached to the pacifying rhythms of the natural cycle, they will be less prone to cardiac disease, insomnia, and perhaps some kinds of cancer.  They will enjoy life more: that, remember, was our point of departure.

 

•     Our young people, who have arrived at an extremely worrisome state, will perhaps be reclaimed for humanity’s higher endeavors.  I shall not write the essay-in-itself which poises to spring from this assertion.  Readers may draw their own conclusions, or rate mine on their own scale.  I simply observe that a child raised to be intimately familiar with true necessity, natural cycle, a disdain for gaudy frivolity, and a high regard for thrift is much more apt to govern his actions soberly as an adult than a child rigged with an iPod, a cell phone, a GPS , a laptop, and whatever other gear for whose possession a seductively pandering “culture” primes him with yearning.  I will add, quite editorially and without claim to objectivity, that those who discern something distinctly Christian in the workings of our present system seem to me a far greater mystery than the god of goodness.

 

     It should be added that the agriculture-intensive residence, quite apart from policies about traffic flow, would be an inestimable boon to struggling Third World nations.  Apologists for unbridled capitalism and free trade typically point to images of squalid huts in Southeast Asia , quite without indoor plumbing and overrun by chickens and pigs, as examples of the living standard from which we must rescue the planet.  They seem to suppose that the toxic yellow clouds which satellite photos reveal to have settled permanently over “progressive” population centers like Hong Kong are a small price to pay for a carpeted apartment with a toilet and air-conditioning.  Yet the truth is that small farmers, whether in Vietnam or Chihuahua or Nigeria , suffer primarily because of abusive tenantry systems and because of ignorance about hygiene and helpful technology.  There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Such populations would eat better, have a more secure future, enjoy more autonomy, and feed fewer of the problems that threaten entire regions and continents—they would be, in short, happier—if they could just stay put and be introduced to a few advantageous techniques.  The progressives who masquerade as conservatives, however, would prefer to transform them into heavy consumers of oil, junk food, and electronic entertainment; for massive infusions of uncritical, disoriented, easily seduced customers are the cannon fodder of bull markets.

     I conclude this vision of the independent urban farmer with a modest Philippic, whose tone will seem more political than it should.  Except perhaps in an attic-turned-greenhouse, crops cannot be raised without land—and even the glass attic perches on a piece of real estate.  The citizen must not be charged for the right to live and grow food on his own property.  Otherwise, we might as well break his hoe and spade and send him back to the pizza parlor.  Specifically, government has no moral right to levy a property tax if the assertions of the Declaration of Independence are yet held as valid.  Individual citizens own their land.   They do not lease it from state or federal (let alone local) authorities, or hold it upon royal sufferance of same.  For the traditional citizen—whose virtues I should like us to recover—land is both home and food.  We do not rent the food which we feed to our children: we do not tuck them into bed at night calmly resigned to the thought that a SWAT team may show up at the witching hour and eject us all from our borrowed residence.  Yet when I informally surveyed a group of about fifty college freshmen recently, almost all of them agreed with the statement, “Property ultimately belongs to the government: private ownership is a privilege which may be revoked in times of crisis.”  Most of the young people in my geographical area, furthermore, would style themselves conservative.  In their enthusiasm to give centralized government a carte blanche to pursue malefactors, they seem quite willing to relinquish their “inalienable rights” upon a bureaucrat’s whim.

     If the property tax is not declared unconstitutional, one may easily foresee the day when a man who owns his residence free and clear and raises on his suburban plot much of the food his family needs will nevertheless have to sell up because he cannot pay his annual fine.  The situation, I submit, is intolerable.  The tyrant’s reasoning seems to be that property-owners tend to have families, and that property taxes go largely to the funding of schools: ergo, let the former pay the latter.  Yet surely the state as a collective has a profound interest both in allowing families to survive financially and in striving to educate all children adequately.  Where collectivism is justified, our rulers mete out individual levies; where the individual’s intimate household duties are concerned, they assert the preemptive interest of the vast social unit.  If local government is convinced that parents should bear upon their backs the majority of a titanic public school budget, then it should withdraw from the schooling business entirely and allow parents to fund schools of their own choice out of their own pockets.  That failing, such revenues must be raised as sales taxes, paid by all.23

     Richard Weaver denominated ownership of private property “the last metaphysical right”, emphasizing that the land over which one has sweated and bled to build a house and grow food is something very like one’s body, and perhaps even more like one’s soul.

Private right defending noble preference is what we wish to make possible by insisting that not all shall be dependents of the state.  Thoreau, finding his freedom at Walden Pond , could speak boldly against government without suffering economic excommunication.24

The political Left, which is so fond of lionizing whistle-blowers and free spirits, should be able to recognize the value of feeding oneself from one’s land even after strings have been pulled to dismiss one from a sensitive, influential position.  Since the New Right seems unmoved by such issues, perhaps a nostalgic liberalism should step into the gap.  It was classical liberalism, after all, which cried foul when Irish landlords elevated the rent on any tenant who improved his shanty with hard labor and initiative.  One such enterprising peasant on the Aran Islands found a plank which had washed ashore and hauled it home to make a door of it.  The bailiff sniffed out the affair, and the poor wretch was sentenced to one hundred days of hauling stones to create Lord Charley’s precious enclosures.25  A third of a year… approximately the same sentence served by the average American taxpayer annually in order to fund the services which he is deemed too stupid to provide for himself—and, of course, to salary the lords who administer said services. 

 

VI.  Work and Gender: The Unhappy Man

     When I talk to people about the issues discussed in this treatise, I detect little disagreement with the assertion that we are a spendthrift society, that the cost of necessities is outpacing the average wage, that consumerism is turning our culture increasingly coarse, and that the urban sprawl created by our oil-based habit of life is distasteful and oppressive.  The one claim about which I am most likely to be challenged is the most critical to my case: that large numbers of people are sincerely, profoundly unhappy doing the labors essential in a high-tech service economy.  I have compared these labors to prostitution.  Everything will eventually become marketing, I warned, and the market’s target will eventually be only Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man”, whose needs are visceral rather than spiritual and whose responses are reflexive rather than reflective.  The seller “shows some thigh”, spills more perfume, circles seductively and purrs—even the computer programmer is equipping a given site to do more of this sort of thing with greater effectiveness.  And the programmer, I have also opined, must at last devise programs that program: the destiny of market-driven technology is to erase human beings entirely from all productive ranks of the labor force—to reassign them from the ratio to the libido.  Then we have only Pandars and their Cressids.

     Yet women, especially, often reject my formulation.  Perhaps this is because they have been denied general admittance to the salaried workforce for so long that they are still enjoying the freedom it offers relative to the narrow duties of wife and mother.  I doubt it, however.  Few female college students who cross my path grew up in a household where the mother did not have a paying job.  I suspect that the rift between male and female perceptions starts at a much deeper point.  It seems to me that women are more social, less keenly aware of the wall that separates Self and Other.  They are more receptive to persuasion and compromise, less apt to view a concession as cowardly or traitorous.  A fine little book in whose publication I once collaborated attributed the fork in this ethical road to childbirth, women having been raised in the knowledge that they might one day carry life in them, men having been raised to know that their body could never possibly nourish another’s.  Call this Freud stood on his ear if you will: it is an assessment with much to recommend it.  The author summarizes:

As a result of this detached perspective, men tend to see things more abstractly than women and to be more suspicious than women of mixed motives and combined purposes.  They tend to think in Platonic ideals, and to act in Stoical defiance of compromise.26  

Howard Schwartz has approached the same issue from a more straightforwardly psychoanalytic direction.  He believes (if I follow his complex argument) that young men today are insecure in their manhood because they grow up seeing their mothers occupying the father’s traditional role of provider and head of the household.27  Though these two views may appear opposed, both concur that 1) men and women evaluate their experience differently, 2) the woman’s values are typically less trenchant than the man’s, and 3) the woman is playing a more active role today in supporting the household.  For the former advocate, I should quickly add, sees women as filling more jobs and at a higher level precisely because so much work now consists of recruiting a clientele rather than lifting barrels.

     I suspect that we have here the origin of a dissonance in our society whose painful strains we have not yet begun to distangle from the many other sources of cacophony around us.  That is, we have not noticed that men, particularly, are unhappy.  They will often ascribe the professional bottleneck which they feel closing in around them as the devilry of women: women unwilling to stay home and tend to their family, women without a family robbing a “family man” of his livelihood, women preoccupied with promotion by hook or by crook not concerning themselves about the product’s quality, etc.  Such resentment, I now believe, arises fundamentally from two consecutive conditions: 1) jobs in our service-dominated economy increasingly involve persuasion and compromise, and 2) women are simply better at such jobs.  Even without the epochal entry of the New Woman into the workforce, I think men would have found themselves confronted more and more with jobs that grated on their nature.  If it is indeed true that the space between magnanimous concession and pusillanimous surrender is much more slender for a man, then most men are probably less suited to placating angry customers, winning over prospective clients, creating broadly pleasant settings, and so forth.  Furthermore, men who excel at such work despite their aversion to it probably grow far more cynical—more jaundiced by daily survival’s sordid league with hypocrisy—than their female counterparts; for the female would be less likely to perceive her accommodations as doing violence to high principle.  She would emerge relatively happy, because she would not carry home with her the heavy burden of having been two-faced.

     Stunningly, I find that historical overviews of gender roles in the workplace never seem to take much account of how seldom sociability was required of the man when he was the exclusive breadwinner.  The hunter was a silent loner compared to his chattering womenfolk, left behind to dig roots and pick berries; the farmer had only his horse and his ox to talk to most of the day while his wife called after the children and borrowed sugar from a neighbor down the road.  The stevedore, the bricklayer, the carpenter—all went about their tasks with a kind of introversion.  Had they paused too long to chat, they would probably have been reprimanded or dismissed.  Yet as townships of the same era (say, the sixteenth century) were beginning to burgeon with small shops, women were already prominent.  The baker’s wife served the public while the baker tended the oven, and the wine merchant’s wife filled glasses while her mate rolled another barrel up from the cellar.

     Only since about World War II—just as the advanced technology of cars and televisions and telephones was transforming Western culture in so many other ways—have men found the more reticent occupations known to them for centuries drying up and blowing away.  The image of the “hard-selling” male huckster, barking out prices of used cars or wheeling and dealing with brokers over two phones, is a potent one in the popular mind.  Yet the fact remains that this figure is more myth than reality, as if males were reassuring themselves through his cartoon-like antics that they, too, had a role in the brave new world.  How on earth does a grown man truly become excited to the point of shouting about the prices of automobiles?  He must be either obsessively greedy (and greed, like fear, is an unmanly passion) or else playing out a game—a literal role, complete with script.  As a schoolboy will play the fool for laughs, so the grown man will leap and howl like an ape in the knowledge that he is not his part, and in the devout hope that his audience will understand the “joke”.  My own suspicion is that most men would be thoroughly embarrassed if they supposed other men to be taking their “act” at face value.  The car salesman, like the charismatic preacher and the Dionysiac sports announcer, relies upon his fellow males to appreciate the exigencies of his role—to understand the genre—if he values his manhood.

     If men could stay home and labor with their hands to produce food for their children, how many would prefer to hustle around the car lot for commissions all day?  Certainly I have elicited from far more men than women in my questioning of college freshmen an affirmative that self-employment is a significant personal objective.  Indeed, women frequently register an aversion to “flying solo”: they seem to prize the interaction of an intricate office hierarchy, or at least to dread the loneliness of being thrown upon their own devices.  The ideal situation, then, appears to be that the woman of the house should sally forth to trade words behind a desk while the man of the house is milking the cow and digging spuds.  We are warned by some that this reverses the traditional paradigm—but I have stressed that such “traditions” have increasingly contradicted their more reverend versions.  “Man as provider” is an icon positing a competitive,  almost adversarial relation to the environment.  The bourgeois rendition of this drama into dollars and cents immediately raised questions about the clerk’s or shopkeeper’s virility, as I have just explained; but at least the womenfolk back home continued to enjoy numerous social outlets.  An unstable balance seems finally to have been upset in our time.  Having considered why the man lost his poise, let us examine what happened to the woman at the same time.

     By 1950, children no longer stayed home for their schooling; cars emptied out neighborhoods every morning; radio and television kept indoors most of those few residents who had not abandoned the suburbs for the day; air-conditioning made the den cooler than the porch even in summertime; and growing corporations transferred their employees from city to city, disrupting ties with old friends and extended family.  On top of all that, women now did less work at home than ever, their washing and cleaning chores greatly alleviated by machines… but the social vacuum into which these very sociable beings were forced, I contend, was the deciding factor.  Women wanted to work—but they wanted to work in company.

     Would the man be content to bring food quite literally to the table if his wife were bringing far more paychecks to the bank account?  Basing my response, once again, only on a great many informal interviews and personal observations, I should say that men worry less about their earnings than about what women may think of those earnings.  That is, men tend to feel that women look down upon them for drawing humble salaries—and in this, alas, their fears are far from groundless.28  The vulgar relegation of all our labors to a money standard is in many ways a consequence of the American male’s trying to please the New Woman while competing with her.  (There can be little question that the coarsening of our popular culture has overlapped the influx of females into the workforce.)  The woman seems to read a large salary as proof that a person can successfully negotiate society’s many roadblocks and hurdles—a quality which she much admires.  Frustrated by this standard, men are more apt than women to respond to it by pulling out all moral stops, for they cannot grasp how a facility with social challenges would be the game’s ultimate end rather than money.  After all, money buys food—it provides—while flattering various interests is vile sycophancy.  As Thomas More’s outspoken Raphael Hythloday puts it in the first book of Utopia, “A man of courage is more likely to steal than to cringe.”29  Well, then, if it’s paychecks the woman wants… by God, the man is going to bring her the biggest checks she ever saw!

     That money causes divorces has become a cliché.  Yet I believe it would be more accurate to say that a basic misunderstanding between the sexes about the nature of work is what fractures marriages.  I am convinced that few women would complain when seeing their husbands haul basket-loads of succulent vegetables in from the garden, and few men when seeing their wives go off to a day of high-intensity “relationships”.  Men would be doing their work, and women theirs.  The children of our urban farmer, I hasten to add, would be surrounded by grandparents, extended family, and trustworthy neighbors, as they were for centuries before we started changing residences every three years.  Aging relatives themselves would be more likely to spend their last days among those who care about them rather than in an antiseptic cell, for at least one household adult would usually be nearby.  How can we suppose that things could never be this way again when they were precisely this way for yesterdays time out of mind?

     Yet the single most visible benefit of self-sufficient food-growing remains political.  Happy people must be free people—free, that is, in the Burkean sense of having enough autonomy to sustain their life’s enriching web of associations.30  The Stoic would say that everyone always has autonomy—that one can always decide to starve rather than labor as a slave, or to be executed rather than adore a tyrant.  Stoics, however, tend not to be family men: whatever web holds them is thin, simple, and easily rent.  For those of us who want to keep our mates and our children relatively healthy and secure, we must be free to give them what they need and also to speak out against folly, vice, and corruption or to refuse service to arrogant boars and unprincipled schemers.  We must have the freedom to say “no” without saddling our loved ones with dire consequences.

     Western culture has probably reached a more critical juncture than it has known since Christendom and a millennium of literate culture took refuge from Goths, Vikings, and Muslim holy-warriors on a few rocky, windswept islands.  Within a decade or so, we shall learn (those of us who know what we are watching) whether an oligarchy will assign our work, our tastes, our candidates, and our amusements to us for the ensuing century—or whether, instead, we shall willingly embrace the “poverty” attendant upon a self-sufficiency in all that matters.  The emerging oligarchic elite already has us crinkling our noses at the word “isolationist”.  The truth is, however, that the independent citizen of a democratic republic is and chooses to be isolated in the formation of his value judgments.  He makes up his own mind, and then he proceeds to seek or to form a community of fellow believers.  In his inviolable residence, surrounded by cultivated patches that sustain him, the independent grower needn’t fret unduly about China ’s calling in our debt, about the Middle East ’s refusing to sell us more oil, about an immigrant population’s rejecting English in the public forum, about the central government’s shrugging off its Social Security promises.  He will be impossible to finesse into Hobson’s Choice when his “leaders” announce with feigned regret that it’s either the Devil or the Deep Blue Sea .  He and his independent neighbors will understand the true meaning of “neighborhood”.  They will comprehend that no one need ever eat with the Devil who cannot be lured to Hell’s table.  For this citizen will always be able to stock his own table, with no thanks to anyone but God and his own two hands.

     No wonder the oligarchs dread him!

 John Harris is the founder and president of The Center for Literate Values.  His doctorate in Comparative Literature was completed at The University of Texas at Austin , from which institution he has also earned degrees in English and the Classics.  He taught throughout the southeastern United States in a variety of settings and disciplines for two decades before giving The Center most of his attention. 

back to Contents

***************************

iBrain: The Future of Mind Power

Rosalinda Nava

 

     The guitar, the car radio, the walkman, and the CD player are all ways that people have developed to keep music close.  The Apple iPod is very well known among the more recent developments.  It stores music digitally, so no disks are scratched and no cassettes wear out.  My iPod Nano doesn’t measure half the size of my CD player.  The latest variety of iPod is no bigger than the screen of my iPod.  How much more convenient can it get?  I suppose people might go so far as simply to implant a device into their minds that would allow remote access to music stored on a personal computer somewhere:  maximum portability with minimal effort.  I’d call that very convenient.

     This iBrain would be the ultimate hands-free device.  One could sift through and listen to music by the power of thought alone.  There would be no buttons or dials to mess with.  Just deliberately think the key word and iBrain is put into active mode and ready for use.  There would be no uploading music to the iBrain.  It would have music translated into a series of electrical shock patterns by a device hooked up to the “home” source that would transmit information to the iBrain necessary to “relay the message” (i.e. stimulate parts of the brain to understand that it is hearing music).  This marvel would be streaming media directly into the brain.  Listen to music anywhere, any time.  The iBrain would be discreet and not bother bystanders because only the user could hear the music, no matter what volume said user might understand it to be—and with no damage to the ears, at that.  As long as synapses in the brain were firing, iBrain would have power.  No one with an iBrain would have to waste time and money dealing with batteries like everyone still using CD players, nor would iBrain-users have to worry about charging up like those with iPods.  Yes, the iBrain would be the ultimate hands-free device.

     Of course, there are the obvious issues with the iBrain.  Despite the fact there is nothing physically impeding the ears, the auditory senses would understand that the user is listening to something and that most likely would draw an unsafe measure of awareness away from the user’s surroundings.  There would also be the issue of age appropriateness.  Would the adolescent mind be considered not yet developed enough for such an intrusion?  There might have to be policies on whether or not mental stability played a role in who qualified to have an iBrain, as well. 

     Then the obligatory and notorious technological problems are to be considered.  What if the device malfunctioned?  If something went wrong with the streaming capabilities, someone might literally be walking around with a song stuck in his head.  Would there be some kind of reset button?  It would be hard to reset something that has no “off switch”, since to cut power to the iBrain would mean no brain activity, which (I’m sure everyone will still agree) is necessary to a healthy living existence.  If the iBrain’s ability to draw power from the firing synapses were to somehow get cut, would the device just be a foreign object in a place it shouldn’t be?  How would the body react to that? 

     For that matter, we’d have to wonder if the human body would accept a foreign object so close in, to begin with.  There are those of us, after all, who can’t even get piercings because the body rejects foreign objects and tries to fight, which usually results in an infection of some sort.  No one would want an infection in the brain.  No procedure is fool-proof, either.  Professionals in many fields botch a job at some point or other.  For this device to be as widespread as manufacturers would likely be planning on, a market in commercial brain surgery would have to open up.  The odds of everything going splendidly in such an operation are not likely to be higher than those for conventional brain surgery.  Considering that the iBrain would most probably go into the temporal lobe, there would surely be a risk of damaging or even destroying the powers of speech and/or hearing.  What if it zaps the wrong part of the brain?  The parts of the brain are by no means isolated from each other.  Just because the iBrain might be programmed only to stimulate those parts of the brain that are necessary for its function, who’s to say that something might not go awry and an electric zap might not hit a vital spot?  The iBrain could be a potentially fatal attempt at convenient entertainment.   

     At an entirely different level of concern, what if someone figured out how to use iBrain technology to hack into people’s heads?  As I type these words, some scientist somewhere in the world is driving a living remote-controlled rat through a maze.  Someone else has a quadriplegic hooked up to a machine to watch him control a mouse on a screen with nothing more than his will power, the same way anyone else might move his foot left or right.  The ability to control the human mind may seem merely a favorite terror in the pages of science fiction; more and more, however, science fiction is anticipating the next technological revolution.  Studies are happening around the world whose end is to decode the human brain.  For the sake of science? 

     For some, these studies are an innocent way to understand the way the mind works.  Yet people never can leave information on “pure” display once it has been unearthed.  Having become known, it must be put to use.  The question will always be, as it is here:  to what use?  It’s easy enough to laugh now at the thought of a government conspiracy in which the general populace would one day be controlled through the use of such technology as the iBrain, cleverly disguised as a toy for the entertainment of the masses.  But is it so outlandish?  When most of the science fiction involving mind control devices was written, the idea that we could reasonably stick a foreign object into somebody’s brain without doing considerable damage was ridiculous.  It has now happened (in the case, for instance, of certain implants designed to assist the deaf).  We would be very naïve to assume that there wouldn’t be a figure out there who would want to control and track (because what good is control of a tool when the tool cannot be located?) the minds of a population.  Possibilities such as this would not go unexplored.

     With the development of the iBrain, a heightened sense of paranoia might also begin to infiltrate the contentment of a society well off enough to create dangerous toys for pleasure (a scenario also often evoked by science fiction).  If history has taught us anything, it is that a rise of fear and  unrest in the people of a society does not bode well for the future of that society.  If the ideas that revolve around the iBrain are not so absurd, what else becomes not so absurd?  Maybe, in a mindset reminiscent of The Matrix, we might learn to draw power from living beings.  That is what the iBrain does, after all.  What projects might it inspire?

     On the individual level, outlook and expectations would certainly be affected.  It is far from absurd to imagine a child growing up in the understanding that gratification should be instantaneous with the desire.  (Have children not already reached this point?)  People would soon lose their appreciation of any technology that requires more than thought-power to operate.  There would be more “internal focus”, less willingness to be involved with anyone else.  Although teachers and parents all claim that headphones are a way to tune out the world and remain anti-social within a group, headphones may at least be shared.  They do not promote the trend of isolation as a device like iBrain would, for one cannot share the internal functions of the brain.  As those who suffer from depression well know, one of the hardest feelings to digest is loneliness.  If being isolated from everyone in so many senses of the word isn’t lonely, then the word has no meaning.

     With this in mind, we can reasonably predict that as people become more distant from one another mentally and emotionally, the number of those who suffer from depression—and from other illnesses that depression is shown to influence—will rise.  Accompanying this increase will be another in antisocial behavior, naturally.  As if people aren’t stressed enough!  When stress sets in, so does the yearning to escape from causes of stress—a yearning that may grow well nigh universal.

     Very rarely does anyone look at a source of obvious pleasure and tag it as a cause of stress.  People review their responsibilities and complain, “These bills make my head hurt,” or, “Work was so tiring.”  How convenient if someone else would do it all!  Babies are forced to rely on others for all needs—are indeed born expecting someone to address those needs.  None of us would have cried as an infant if we hadn’t expected something to come of it.  For most of us, something did come of it.  We were fed, changed, kept warm and loved.  Our worlds were comfortably controlled.  We were content to have our decisions made for us, to have everything done for us.  The development of technologies that are frequently drawing less and less supervision suggests that we’re still looking for that natural expectation to be met.  In the case of devices like iBrain, perhaps the temptation we should eye most fearfully is not that which lures power-hungry leaders to seek more control, but that which lures us into envying the robot’s dependent existence.

 

Works Consulted

Horgan, John.  “The Myth of Mind Control:  Will Anyone Ever Decode the Human Brain?”  DISCOVER Magazine 29 Oct.  2004.  6 Sept. 2007 <http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/cover>.

“Mind Control.”  Produced by ScienCentral, Inc. DISCOVER Magazine.  13 Sept. 2007 <discovermagazine.com/brightcove>

ScienCentral, Inc.  “Mind Control.”  ScienCentralNEWS 24 Sept. 2002 .  13 Sept. 2007 <www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3? language=english&type=&article_id=218391807>

 

  Rosalinda (Linda) Nava, a native of Austin , Texas , currently attends The University of Texas at Tyler as an undergraduate devoted to writing.  Despite our era’s academy- and culture-wide indifference to literate expression, she hopes to find an appropriate major soon. 

back to Contents

***************************

     College Professors Seek to Rediscover. Redefine, and Revivify Goals of Higher Education

 

     Whatexactly is higher education and what syllabus or plan should students follow in order to arrive at the state of being intellectually informed and technically competent after four years of undergraduate matriculation?  Most parents, sending their eighteen-year-olds away to the freshman experience, assume that the supervising experts of our colleges and universities fully understand the conditions, requirements, and goals of higher education, which the layman supposes are clear and obvious to all.  It turns out that these cheery convictions might not represent the actual case.  How has such a startling revelation come about?  For four weeks during the summer of 2007, over two hundred American college professors from all disciplines have lived, eaten, and worked together under a sizeable federal stipendium on the campus of Ataraxia Polytechnic, a private “Contract College” used by the Texas-Oklahoma Twin-States Higher Education Consortium to “outsource” instructional services that cannot be profitably undertaken by individual, community-based institutions in the economically depressed oil-producing regions of the Panhandle.  The purpose of the month-long “retreat” is no less than, in the words of the project’s organizers, “figuring out what no one has figured out in the two thousand and five hundred years during which higher education in the modern sense or something like it has existed.”

      But if a thing has existed—as the statement implies higher education to have existed—more or less recognizably for more than two thousand years, doesn’t the fact that we recognize it and that it has endured in a familiar outline for so long imply that a definition or at least description of it exists?

      “Absolutely not,” says Harden Klotz, who currently holds the Johnny Depp Endowed Chair for Metrosexual Studies at the Garden State Institute for Applied Graphic Arts and Food Sciences in East Orange , New Jersey .  “These types of widely accepted intuitive conclusions, as held by ordinary people in an everyday context, are precisely what cloud the air in discussions of higher education policy.  The main thing in deciding how to structure a curriculum is to be a unique individual by questioning authority, just like it says on the MoveOn.org bumper stickers that we all have on our Volvos.  That’s questioning authority in an innovative, culturally sensitive, multi-nuanced, and cross-disciplinary way, it goes without saying.  I always feel sorry for eight-hour-a-day right-wing types or so-called concerned parents who storm into the dean’s office and demand what they naïvely refer to as explanations for seemingly arbitrary course-requirements or clear thinking about the relevance of progressive curricula to economic survival in the real world.  Or should I say, the alleged real world?  Maybe those guys should cut down on their Big Tobacco smoking habits if they can’t pay the tab for their kids to study with highly trained professionals like me.  Out here on the cutting edge of post-modern research—which Ataraxia is, I can tell you—we can see plainly that oppressive pretences about knowledge, rigor, discipline, and an orderly and well-established curriculum have, over the centuries, prevented the emergence of transgressive discourses and hindered the consolidation of the absolutely unshakeable, tax-funded departments and programs that inalterably enshrine and permanentize social change.”

      Klotz, last year’s recipient of the Reggie Bannister Award for Most Immaculately Groomed Professorial Pony Tail (Humanities Division), cited his own special area as a case in point: “Five years ago, Metrosexual Studies didn’t yet exist—its development had been thwarted for hundreds of years by reactionary, bigoted attitudes towards androgyny, pan-erotic sensitivity, underarm and scrotal-sack hair-removal, and mall-shopping as an acceptable activity for adult males—not to mention cheap suits from J. C. Penney’s and bad haircuts from so-called barber shops.  A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities changed all that, as has the public prominence of Democratic Party presidential hopeful John Edwards.  In consideration of how much the senator has done in spreading acceptance of metrosexuality, our organization is now considering the establishment of a yearly John Edwards Prize for Most Innovative Product Use by a Public Person—or maybe two such prizes, one for product use above the neck and one for below.  Because of our increased profile and the eagerness of foundations to lend support, we now not only have our own quarterly journal, Exfoliations, but Abercrombie and Fitch have agreed to underwrite our annual conference—provided that all presenters submit to be photographed in their bikini-underwear for the new A & B catalogue.”

     Pelvina Sporkler, the Critical Thinking team-leader at the Ataraxia retreat, hails from Cracklins College , a small liberal arts institution (formerly a ladies academy) located in Sasquatch Creek , Arkansas , where she serves as Administrative Special Coordinator for the Implementation of Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum.  That term, “critical thinking”, is one that participants in the retreat use frequently, often while drinking Chablis coolers during the daily cocktail hour and listening to NPR.  Porkler explains how “critical thinking” has gradually superseded the sad old garden variety of thinking, without any adjectival prefix, in the academy.  “For thousands of years the oppressed masses of the Patriarchy did almost everything without adjectival prefixes.  In the field of education, for example, children were forced to study stupidly un-prefixed language rather than nattily prefixed Whole Language, qualifier-free math rather than qualified New Math, and a rhetorically unadorned reading-and-writing rather than the lexically more satisfying Socially Progressive Reading-and-Writing.  The same prefix-less limitations held sway over basic mental operations.  Ferocious, socially regressive thought-dictators like Plato and Aristotle claimed that harsh, limiting concepts such as logic, clarity, and a basis in evidence should restrict our investigations into the world and hinder the formulation of our general statements.  The oppressors of those days also made people do things standing up rather than sitting down, which is today’s enlightened preference.  Frankly, progressive experts nowadays believe that the criterion of linear thinking, another word for logic, merely reflects the fact that men can sign their name in the snow without using a pen or pencil, whereas women have to squat.  It’s so unfair…

      “This means that lots of things that people want to be true and that should be true and that would undoubtedly make the world a flowering utopia if they were true—and typically this involves social rearrangements fervently desired by women and other marginalized people, like the elimination of urinals and mandatory coed restrooms—don’t have a fair chance in open discussion because the gatekeepers and power mongers of culture meanly declare them to be, you know, illogical or lacking evidence.  What they’re really saying is, the people who justly want these things to be true and who need them to be true can’t write a syllogism in the snow without a pen or a pencil, which of course Plato and Aristotle probably spent most of their time doing back in ancient Greece .  At least I think so.  Research has shown, however, that ignoring evidence, avoiding logic and clarity wherever these stand in the way of a progressive conclusion—and, of course, squatting—are heartily conducive to the brave, new, heavily prefixed world of the progressive, multicultural, gender-equalized, and adjective-rich agenda.  I ignored my father’s non-progressive advice not to buy a used Volvo over the Internet, and look how adjective-rich I am.”

     Sporkler continued: “While favoring prefixes, critical thinking naturally remains implacably opposed to dangling modifiers—or to anything else that dangles.  It’s hard to see how we’ll ever have Squat-Friendly Rules of Argumentation—to give one instance—until we get rid of the rules of argumentation, so embarrassingly deficient in any audacious qualifying prefix, or until we banish all those offensive danglers.  Boy, do they make me feel uncomfortable.  And we’re never going to do away with the oppressive scandal of rights (you know how humiliating those are) until we’ve established Squatters’ Rights, which is one of our primary goals in the critical thinking movement.  I’d say that’s the basic definition of critical thinking: it combines an emphasis on squatting with an abhorrence for dangling and it upgrades them both by putting a fancy-sounding prefix, like post, in front of everything.”  Frequently used examples of “post-non-prefixed” vocabulary, according to Sporkler, would be, “post-modernism”, “post-phallogocentrism”, and “Post Toasties”.

      Many innovations that bode the way for a courageous future of American higher education have found enthusiastic advocates during the “Four Weeks of Ataraxia”.  Take “ethno-mathematician” Laszlo Vëgly-Noumerant, chair of the Multi-Cultural Quantitative Sciences Program at César Chavez Community Welfare College in Oxnard, California.  Vëgly-Noumerant qualified for his master of industrial arts degree from Land Grant Correspondence Academy, East Sandusky, Ohio by reading about the counting system of the stone-age Kah-Ching Tribe of the Lesser Sunda Archipelago in a public library.  He hopes to apply that counting system to arithmetic pedagogy in the sophomore year, as a kind of new New Math to “cleanse” college-students of “the vestiges of Patriarchal reckoning”.

      “It’s really amazing,” says Vëgly-Noumerant, “the Kah-Ching have only three numbers—one, few, and many—which they nevertheless use to compass all the tallying demands connected with the practical chores of everyday life.  Compared with the decimal counting system using Arabic numerals with a zero, it’s a definite improvement in the direction of notational economy.  The decimal system means memorizing ten symbols, almost as many as in the alphabet, and then there’re all those operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  If you say that American colleges and universities eat up billions of dollars annually of taxpayer money, what does that really mean to the average person?  Nothing.  It could even be intimidating.  So you might as well say it’s many dollars, or even just a few, as far as construction workers are concerned.  Replacing the Western decimal system with the Kah-Ching trigital system could have important implications for college administrators.  Suppose some pesky state representative asks the dean, ‘of the three thousand entering freshmen from four years ago, what is the precise number that have earned a degree this year?’  The dean could answer with perfect honesty, while consulting the rosters, ‘Hmm, let me see… there’s one, there’s a few… why, there’s many.  Honest to God, Mr. Representative, many seem to have graduated and only a few didn’t!’  Trigital counting could help in grading quizzes, too.”

     At one point, Vëgly-Noumerant considered lobbying for a base-five counting system once in use among the warrior-caste of the West Gobi Plateau, which he had also read about in the same public library.  “This was an organic counting system drawn from the fact that the male body (but not, of course, the metrosexual male body) has five prominent appendages, not including the head.  But after consulting with my colleague here at Ataraxia, Professor Sporkler, I remembered that the West Gobi system belongs to what modern anthropology calls Anti-Squatism, something offensive, in a grossly dangling way, to the progressive outlook.  I decided I wouldn’t want any of that, what with a supernumerary fifth token John-Thomasing around and upsetting the esthetics of the otherwise evenly balanced cardinal series.  So I threw in with the Lesser Sunda style of enumeration.  I’ve already received a six-figure grant—oops, make that a many-figure grant—from the National Endowment for the Sciences.  I’ll be saying Kah-Ching all the way to the bank!”

      Peace Studies is yet another hot topic at Ataraxia this year, one already strongly reflected in undergraduate curricula across the country.  In fact, a nasty incident marring the retreat halfway through its four weeks thrust into prominence the Peace Studies team-leader, Senior Professor of Conflict-Avoidance Counseling, Jihada Alhazred-Cthulhu, of the breakaway New Miskatonic Women’s-Studies Madrassa-University of Arkham, Massachusetts.  The incident, involving a mop-and-bucket, a suicide bomb-belt, and the bad luck of an Ataraxia Polytechnic janitorial staff-member in misunderstanding a nuanced non-gender-specific remark uttered privately by Alhazred-Cthulhu to Pelvina Sporkler (or so observers claimed), spoiled the Other-Gendered / Handi-Capable Grand Shuffle-Board Tournament and Multi-Cultural Karaoke Contest, long planned and eagerly anticipated.  The Ataraxia organizers had scheduled this event to celebrate the fortuitous same-day coincidence during the retreat of the Toltec Huitztliputchtli Festival, in which the high priests used to put to death captured shamans of oppressive enemy-tribes, and the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Bat-Mitzvah of the late feminist Congressperson Bella Abzug.  According to Professor Vëgly-Noumerant, this particular calendar-convergence happens “only once every many years or so.”

     Asked why she had worn a suicide bomb-belt under her ruby-sequined black-silk chador from Vivienne Westwood, complemented by a stunning dark red faux-leather handbag from Karl Lagerfeld, Alhazred-Cthulhu spoke of her “solidarity with the Palestinian people”, “the plight of the fresh-water dolphin”, and “the backlash of dangling participles emanating from Fox News and The O’Reilly Factor”.  She reminded a badly shaken crowd that “in really effective conflict-avoidance you’ve sometimes got to go beyond dialectic exchange by indulging in a little explosive monologue, which we call venting.”

      The incident occurred during a brief power-failure, common during summer months in the Panhandle when air-conditioning needs draw heavily on the power-grid.  Some participants suspected that a janitor, working near a fuse-box, had caused a short circuit.   Alhazred-Cthulhu allegedly said to Sporkler, concerning the lights, “we need a gaffer.”  The janitor, a recent South African immigrant of Zulu ancestry, overheard Ms. Alhazred-Cthulhu to have uttered the Swahili word kaffir, used by Dutch-speaking Afrikaners during the era of Apartheid as a racial slur against blacks.  In a tense conversation with the offended party, Alhazred-Cthulhu agreed that gaffer is an obnoxious word that ought to be stricken from the language.  She somewhat reluctantly apologized to the janitor, who is only just learning English, for, in her own words, “having held inexcusably niggardly watchfulness over my potentially hurtful rhetoric.”  It was at this point that the mop came into play, fully soaked from the bucket, which fortunately dampened the black-powder fuse of the suicide bomb-belt, thereby minimizing collateral mayhem during the ensuing altercation, although it ruined the Vivienne Westwood chador.

     Organizers of the Ataraxia retreat said that the federally funded conference lived up to their expectations and vindicated their rationale.  “The only thing we know about higher education is that nobody really knows anything about it, and that means that parents and taxpayers have no real cause when they complain about skyrocketing costs for four years of courses that nobody in his right mind would even try to understand.”

 

(Thomas F. Bertonneau, Oswego, New York, filed this story.)

back to Contents

***************************

 

“OLD KING COLE”: article abstract

David Z. Crookes

 

     Postcolonial race-gender-class theorists like Mjinga who reconjugate the subaltern-paradigm in terms of classical Prester-Johnism believe that although albocentric paternalism is Cole’s keyest given, the anachronistic scopophilia which is embeddedly phenomenic in any gendered-gaze reading of a paleocolonial “hisness” contrapuntally devalorizes the monarchical masterism inscribed in its metrically tyrannized text.  Irradicated in (and synergetically liminalized by) the metrocolonial project, the orientationist reliquary called “literature” is still intolerably vinculated by antiquated palimpsest-edicts, with the result that hyperprivileged parasocietal proaesthetics like Mercator’s racist projection and deracinative heterosexist compradorism, which were weakened by the postcolonial academy, are periodically revalorized.  Any metahierarchical deembedment of Mjinga’s “old” regalism chromatizes the race-gender-class postcolonial counter-discourse by cartographically emphasizing its anglocentric keyness.  While the pocahontasized Cole is “merry”, he barbarianizes his “soul” by exploitatively subvalorizing his own postcolonial people-group, for it is clear that the heterocratic givenness of his environment tangentializes on a conveniently pretasked “was”.  Cole’s alteritous metaracism deossianizes the hypoculturally paracolonial praxis of his in-denial hegemony, derridizing the postcolonial embeddedness of unkey conspecifics and hypervalorizing their metacolonial systemic nexus-links with the givenly eurocentric “enlightenment” project (Newark 2001).

     My race-gender-class explication of “Old King Cole” postcolonializes Akimbo’s keyly unventriloquized xanthochroism within Mjeledi’s paraculture of haggardized protocolonialism by epistemically reconfiguring the hybridic narrative-fissure between the hypercolonial semioticism of the “pipe” and the oligocentric essentialism of the “bowl”.  It goes without saying that the obviously female and clearly fettered “fiddlers” valorify the transculturation that Mjinga critiques by characterizing all models of postcolonial “threeness” (which we metathetically mimic) as scriptocentric rhizomes of subcolonial joplinism (which we noologically auscultate).  Having been peripheralized, and subjected to “the rule of thumb”, the three female slave-musicians cry out for postcolonial deminstrelization, retroducing Cole’s crusoeist parahegemony even as they attempt to fanonize the lexicon of autocolonial surveillance-behaviours.  Mbuzi’s keyer subechelon of heterocolonial bricoleurism must be interrogated metaculturally for the ultraimperialist heuristics that it dereifies and the hyperembedded deontics that it postcolonially otherizes (Schiffer 1993).  Readers who discern what the king has really “called for” will acknowledge that the closet-Manichaean Cole’s “merriness” is nothing more than an expression of unicolonial heterochauvinism, and they will also applaud the utter rectitude of laissez-faire misandry, which Mwalimu defines as the energizing principle of all postcolonial theory.

 

 

David Z Crookes is British, and lives in Belfast, where he was born in 1952.  He holds degrees in Hebrew, Latin, German, and music.  After leaving university, he gained a professional qualification in musical instrument-making, and a diploma for a thesis on sports administration.  His publications in scholarly journals include articles on Chinese, English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish literature.  His translation from German of Michael Praetorius’s De Organographia I-II was published by Oxford University Press as a hardback in 1986 and as a paperback in 1991.  Crookes has made replicas of many ancient, medieval and Renaissance instruments.  At various times he has run instrument-making courses in the United Kingdom and in Sweden.  He has also written and arranged a good deal of music.  As director of his own early music consort, and player of several instruments, he has broadcast on the BBC both nationally and on the World Service.

     Aside from work and study, Crookes is a frequent preacher in local churches.  At different times in his life he has enjoyed going to the ballet, riding horses, collecting bronzes, coins, paintings, rugs, and stamps, making paper, and building crude furniture. 

back to Contents

***************************

 

A Stone Map

Michael Lythgoe

 

Some borders are like stone walls,

Others are porous as the Rio Grande,

Or fluid as the coast where Morocco

Meets Ceuta; there swimmers smuggle

Goods & daily drown.

 

Along the Rio Orinoco, I met

The Venezuelan Army Captain

In charge of the border outpost;

We joined his troops in the mess hall,

     Ate a stew of mystery meat

     & jungle roots; I held

An Anaconda for pictures. The Captain,

Uncomfortable in English, offered

A toast to friendships among

Officers. Privately, we handled

Our words like unfamiliar gear.

 

I received a memento: Venezuela—

     A map carved in stone—

Disputed boundary marked—Essequibo

Region, where Venezuelans patrol.

Jagged spear tip mounted on the map

To represent the Gran Sabana mountain,

Flecked with pyrite; fools gold. Farewells.

     In gratitude, I sent a Civil War

Book of pictures, battle-maps of Manassas.

The economy later smoked out a president.

     The new leader wears a red beret,

Befriends Fidel. Workers tighten oil spigots.

But border with Guyana-Brazil—Essequibo—

Remains peaceful solid as the stone map.

 

The lost orphan of the Holy Land & Balkans—

Peace—struggles with a “road map.” Opponents

Steal geography. African diamonds bleed. Wars

Chop limbs, bury mines, rub out lines in Darfur—

Between Sudan & Chad the desert landscape

Seeks vengeance; rebels cross disputed frontiers,

Redraw maps, carve ethnic & religious lines

In sand, ravage refugees. Maps seldom rest in stone.

Cartography cuts to the bone.

 

            Requiem On The Frontier Of Day

Michael Lythgoe

The work of mourning…

Bugles dead achievement….   –Geoffrey Hill

 

The body is an earthenware lamp.

The lamp’s flame has gone out.

The flesh turns again to clay

As dirt is tossed on the pine box.

 

To everything there is a season…

A time to die; a time to plant….

She left a yard of mangoes & avocados;

She moved to crepe myrtles & magnolias.

 

Cries in the night, loss, lamentations,

Anger, grief, love & grief returns again in

Waves on Key Biscayne, tides, ritual, wind

Stirring white caps, Old Testament & New.

 

She was a woman of needles & threads,

Helpful seamstress to neighbors, laboring

For daughter, learning late in her winter

Years of ancient Chinese tiles, creating

 

Gift bags for mah jongg players, new friends,

To hold their racks for bamboo & dragon tiles

& winds. She was born American in the Canal Zone

Where two oceans met in locks as cargo ships

 

& liners rose & fell. She was a mother in San Juan,

Moved to Miami to raise her daughter, touching

Greeks, Cubans & Jews, loving changing lives.

Hear the Spanish prayers; hear the Hebrew.

 

She is remembered by The Book of Wisdom,

Verses said from the Old Testament & New.

Her daughter bade farewell at Karla’s;

Farewell—with cafecitos Cubanos, sweet—

 

To Coral Way. No pallbearer, but Cuban waiters

In Black Tuxedos. No arroz con pollo, but tostones

With gray rice & black beans: Christians & Moors.

She died just after dawn, peaceful in her sleep.

 

After sending farewell signals across the miles

Back to Miami. At Olga’s bier—graveside—near an

Aerodrome, the sun rose in flames translucent

Pinks became a bright host, a wafer’s whiteness.

 

The daughter returned to her home, her rooms,

After the burial, to see a cardinal in flames outside

Her window—spiritual wings—a visitation. There is

A time for war & a time for peace. Her pain is no more.

 

Nor swelling; grief is deeper than her surgical wounds.

Pain in her flesh is no more. Love sustains the mourners

As we hear her soul sing, ascending on feathered wings.

Daughter flies higher than clouds, over Miami, over

 

Intense traffic, Hispanic streets to where heaven seems

Just over the horizon where ocean blues meet polar ice

& white caps blend in blue-greens old & new.

We pray the words of the Old Testament & the New.

 

O the cardinal flies red & hummingbirds miss her.

O the flesh grows old, cold as stone,

& dirt is our earth under stardust.

Her flesh is our flesh settling into our earth.

 

A Greek woman—unknown to her daughter—saw her

Obituary & phoned from Coral Gables. For years

She searched for Olga who once had helped her.

In Olga’s honor a votive candle burns in St. Sophia’s.

 

 

Michael H. Lythgoe (Lt. Col. USAF, Retired) is a frequent contributor to Praesidium and a member of The Center’s board.  His chapbook of poems, Brass, was published in 2006 by the Poetry Society of South Carolina .  Among many other endeavors for the arts, Mr. Lythgoe has interviewed dozens of the nation’s most celebrated poets and published these interviews in various outlets.

back to Contents

***************************

 

Epimenidean Vignettes

Peter Singleton

 

     Diogenes Laertius mentions the Cretan Epimenides as one of antiquity’s Seven Wise Men.  Conservative estimates of his lifespan converge upon a figure of about 150 years.  About a third of this time was supposedly consumed in a single somnolent trance—for Epimenides was the Rip van Winkle of the ancient world.  Legend has it that, in compensation, he needed very little sleep throughout the rest of his days.

     I have borrowed the name of this largely fictional figure in stitching together a few fables because I grow more and more impressed by age as I myself acquire it in greater abundance.  I should not think it very easy to pull the wool over a 150-year-old pair of eyes about much of anything having to do with human nature.  Though I have scarcely lived longer than the sage’s miraculous sleep, I already feel that I have discovered several secrets of the human heart which are scarcely to be endured by a mere mortal.

 

The Last Word

     A writer was meditating upon a difficult passage when he felt a hand close upon his vitals—felt it reach right through his shoulder blades and lace its icy fingers around his spine, his heart, and his lungs.  Though he had only read about this mute, irresistible emissary in metaphorically stale poems and preachy morality plays, he knew at once that he was dealing with Death.

     “Come, now!” he tried to cajole the power.  “Don’t be so tiresome as they make you out.  Give me… give me only another day more.  Or make it half a day… a couple of hours.  Just a couple—I couldn’t possibly finish in less.  Upon this passage depends the sense of my whole book, and I’m having enough trouble getting it right without being unduly rushed.  Say just an hour, then.  Out of an entire lifetime, what favor is a mere hour?  My other books, you see… I could never quite get it right in them, either.  This was to be the book that finally set it all straight.  This is my keystone, and the present passage… it’s my keystone’s center of gravity.”

     But even as he unfolded these delicate and appealing arguments in a single gasp, he sensed himself being lifted a great distance from his chair—where, exactly, he could not say, because the chill about his chest made his neck stiffen and forced his gaze straight into the ceiling (which had become a blurry blue-gray sky).  All that he could register was the vertigo of a condemned prisoner under whose feet the trap has suddenly sprung, and who falls and falls upon too generous a noose until down seems up.  The liquid in his bowels evaporated through his throat, as it were, though there was no discernible sign of such dissolution, either before his eyes or within as genuine pain.  Indeed, the fulfilled experience turned out to be strangely pleasant, for his earthly weight did not re-descend upon him as he felt his feet come to rest upon something stable.

     But now a new discomfort assaulted him: a wind burdened with millions and millions of sand grains, apparently—a terrific dust storm.

     “These are all the words ever written or said by men before your time,” announced a voice at his back, “and all that you yourself and those of your time ever said or wrote, and all that will ever have been written or said after your time.  Each grain is a word, and all the grains are the accumulated words of all human history.”

     The writer had buried his face in his elbow, for his discomfort was fast becoming very real and near to suffocation.

     “Please!” he cried.  “I can neither breathe nor see!  I cannot possibly endure this punishment for all eternity—please have mercy!”

     “Be at peace,” soothed the voice, “and lower your arm.  The storm is already past.”

 

Command Decision

     A general was in a difficult, though far from hopeless, position.  Pursued by a numerous but brash and artless enemy, he had every confidence in being able to draw the disordered troops some few miles at his heels into a trap.  Having reached the border of a swift-running river, he hastily called a council of war and advised his subordinates of his intention to take 500 crack troops, work back around up the gorge of a tributary stream, and catch the enemy force in a pincer movement.  He had only to determine which of his captains to leave in charge of the main body—a concern not openly voiced as he let the small group dispute tactics.

     “If the flanking maneuver takes too long,” protested one burly commander, “our main body will be trapped against the river.  We will either drown in the heavy current or be slaughtered from the fore.”

     “I have seen the natives of this region construct pontoon bridges of animal skins,” volunteered a younger man.  “We could empty our wine and rapidly construct a crossing.”

     “Not rapidly enough,” scoffed another.  “Besides, the river runs too fast, and the horses would balk upon such wobbly footing.  I’ve seen it happen.  No, the best course is to work farther up-river to where the shores are nearer.”

     “And also higher,” said yet another.  “Then our men will fall instead of splash to their death.  Besides, a withdrawal up-river would thwart the general’s flanking maneuver.”

     “Which, with respect, it were best to rethink,” said still another.  “There must be better places to undertake such an operation.  If the enemy’s line is careless and ragged now, how much more so will they be farther south, where the river widens but slows down and grows shallow.  We need to slip out of this death-trap while there’s still time… with respect.”

     “And open up the door for our men to run away rather than stand their ground?” smiled the council’s final member.  “Besides, daylight is growing scarce, and we haven’t the supplies nor the leisure to feed our troops for fighting another day—the enemy has far more of both.”

     “Then you would do nothing?” sneered the previous speaker.  “You would sit here and wait?”

     “Wait and fight, yes,” said the humble captain.  “Perhaps something else would occur to me… but those are the main things.”

     “So they are,” proclaimed the general.  “Obey this soldier, for I make him my adjutant.  If he does nothing at all, it will be better done than all your somethings.”

 

Natural Law

     The lion had grown old, and the animals all about him who had once cringed in fear whenever he lifted his shaggy head became bold.  A huge gathering with an evil air about it converged upon him one morning—a gathering in which every animal of the forest and the plain was represented.

     “Look at him!” called a voice from among the buffalo.  “He can hardly rise upon his legs, and his teeth are falling out.  If we were to stampede in his direction, we would leave his old hide and fractured bones behind us ground into the dust.”

     “Do it,” growled the leopard.  “I recall the day he crushed my father’s spine in his jaws.  Today he could neither catch a hare nor devour her if she were handed to him.  Let us put an end to this tyranny that has continued far too many years!”

     “A fine spokesman!” mused the lion from between his great paws, his eyes narrowing, his voice commanding silence even in its frailty.  “How many sons of the forest have you assassinated—and never as fairly as I killed your sire.”

     “That’s true, that’s true,” nodded the apes.  “The leopards have slaughtered more of our children than we have fingers and toes.”

     “And yet you multiply still,” sneered the leopard.  “I must feed my young, who are not so numerous as yours.  And I have seen you, from my high-set shadows, gnawing on carrion, or even eating mice.”

     “The whole world eats us,” said a small voice from somewhere underfoot.  “We receive mercy from no one, though we also harm no one.”

     “No one except all of us who graze,” objected a buck.  “One year you so fattened yourselves upon sweet seeds and roots that the herd had to wander deep into lion country—and even then, most of our young who were not eaten starved.”

     “As if your starving offspring were a more pitiable sight than ours!” piped a gazelle.  “It is not one year out of many that your grinding jaws force us into the forest for food, but every year, year in and year out.”

     “A retreat you so devastate with your prying muzzles,” peeped a thrush, “that we have scarcely either material to make our nests or peace to lay our eggs.”

     “Very tasty eggs, they are!” smiled the lizard.  “I only wish your cousin, the hoopoe, would behave less cruelly with that bill of his.”

     “If the water and the air had voice to complain,” sighed the lion, “they, too, would have sad tales of unjust capture and devouring.  You see that it is the way of all things.  Finish me, then—he who has the courage for it.  Only beware of him who comes after me.  For he will fall like a bolt of lightning upon you all, as I did in my prime.”

 

Self-Defense

     A sanguinary tyrant had ruled for years before the nagging cares of constant suspicion brought him to his grave.  The oppressed people of his state were not slow to storm his palace and apprehend his chief henchmen.  Some of these were slain outright by the crazed mob, but the worst of them was preserved for a hasty trial.  Accuser after accuser filed before the judges to indict his arbitrary slaughters over the years.  Most episodes had a repellently staged quality, as if the victims had been lured to their death like mindless insects into a trap merely for the deceased king’s amusement.  Conspirators had been tricked into executing each other one by one, a son had been seduced into betraying his father, a brother had butchered his sleeping brother in a fatal error engineered with the help of night’s shadows, and two cabinet ministers had drunk publicly from a poisoned cup lest their having doctored it be proved by their reluctance.

     So infuriated did the judges grow after hearing these accounts that they could scarcely be persuaded to allow the plaintiff a few words in his own behalf; and indeed, their curiosity over what he might possibly say after a day of such damning testimony was clearly all that had won their indulgence.

     Much to their surprise, the wretch did not attempt any denial.  He confessed freely to everything.  “And you would have done it, too,” he cried with an arresting note of certainty in his quavering voice.  “Every one of you!  Like me, you are ordinary men, not heroes.  The madman would have his subjects dying daily around him, and those of us who served him could not refuse his whim—or even mitigate it—without offering ourselves up to the block.  We hated him every bit as much as the rest of you.  Our lives were a perpetual misery of fear.  But what could we do?  The pitiable victims you have named would all have died, in any case, whether snared by me or by some other.  It was my idea, in fact, to render their deaths amusing through the element of surprise—for the king’s taste inclined more to torture and anguishing cruelty.  In my hands, their doom came suddenly, with but little wait between the discovery of a sword above their heads and the sword’s descent.  You should thank me, if anything, for securing them a relatively painless end.”

     At this, the mute stupor which had seized the judges dissolved into enraged shouts.  The accused quickly shifted his argument to a different footing.

     “Because if you really believe that what I did was unpardonable, it can only be because you also believe that I had a choice.  It can only be that you think I might have eased away from the tyrant’s mad slaughters and kept my own life.  And the best way to show that would be to let me live.  Prove to me that mercy is possible, or at least forgetfulness!  For if an august body like this one can deal out death to all who cross its will, what hope would I have had against a crazed despot?  Prove to me that I was wrong! By killing me you will prove the contrary.  You will warn posterity to behave just as I did.  You will say to the world that it had better not resist the brutality of whoever tyrannizes at the moment—whether a king or a people’s assembly.”

     The judges would have none of it: their shouts were merely punctuated now with derisive cat-calls.  The verdict was a universal thumbs-down.  As the condemned man was hustled harshly away to execution, a guard overheard him to mumble, “Right all along!  I stole thousands of days for myself and robbed not an hour from anyone who might otherwise have lived.  What idiots!”

 

Under Attack

     Epimenides was once asked by a disciple, “What should I do to get ahead in the world?”

     “In truth and knowledge, or in the world?”

     “Why… both, I suppose.  Is there a different way in the two cases?”

     “Opposite ways, one may fairly say.  Do you wish to know how to advance in understanding of nature’s cycles and man’s solemn duties, or do you wish to achieve a higher rank and a greater salary?”

     “The latter, Epimenides.  I shall perhaps do the former once I retire from public life as a wealthy and successful…”

     “Yes, yes.  As I supposed.  Then I shall tell you exactly how to succeed.  Strive for mediocrity.  Do not lift your head above the great plain of the masses around you, neither sink far below their level where you may be downtrodden.”

     “But Epimenides… excuse me. But what you say seems just the reverse of what must surely be true.  That is, surely the way to achieve fame and prosperity is to excel.”

     “A disastrous miscalculation, made by many.  Consider the following situation.  Say that a kingdom is under attack from a formidable foe.  The king is faced with the chore of selecting the best general to lead his army against the enemy.  Whom should he choose?”

     “Why… the best general, of course.”

     “Certainly not.  No true king would make such an error.  Sending the best general would result in one of two equally ruinous conditions.  The general might be defeated, in which case another general might just as well have been sent in his place—for it doesn’t take a great general to lose a war.  Or else the general might prevail; and in that case, he would pass from being already great to being a very formidable rival to the king.  It doesn’t take an alien enemy to make a king uneasy—those he grows on his own soil are quite sufficient.”

     “So the king’s choice…”

     “Would logically fall upon a mediocre general.  This leader would neither be outstandingly brilliant nor outstandingly inept.  If the critical battle were to be won by any reasonable means, he could be depended on not to stand in the way of victory.  Yet being mediocre, he would suggest to discontented factions back home no likely figurehead for an uprising, and his self-love would be entirely satisfied by whatever little honors the king might choose to heap upon him.”

     “Yet I perceive a flaw in your formula, Epimenides.  If the blandest of choices were also the best, how could this dull general—or how could any particular cast made from his well-worn mold—hope to be specially remarked for his unremarkableness?  Your advice seems to me to be little more than to return to my house and await a rain of gold coins from the sky.”

     “Patience, my friend, patience!  It turns out that few men can actually endure a protracted test of ordinariness.  Invariably, many will lose heart and fall away, while others will grow contumacious and rear their dull heads higher than the moment warrants.  In less time than you think, I assure you, you will remain among the elite few of the truly ordinary ordinaries.”

 

  A Life Lesson

     A Cretan disciple of Epimenides was having difficulties with his beloved only son, who was neither any longer a boy nor yet a man.  The youth would obey only reluctantly and show little respect when doing so, convinced that his elders were dull, timid, money-grubbing fools whose zest for life had dried up.

     It happened that one day along the docks of Gnossos (for the man owned half a dozen seafaring craft), the sky darkened as the wind drove waves ashore in sizzling sheets.  The youth was laboring at his father’s side to try to secure the yet-unshipped cargo of a certain vessel.  The lad straightened up from hefting a bulky load and found his worried gaze attracted to a quarter of the horizon where an eerie brightness filtered through the clouds.  The waves also fell unnaturally quiet at about this moment.  Shortly thereafter, the incredibly lean needle of a waterspout could be seen in sinuous ascent from the harbor’s mouth all the way to vaults of heaven.

     Terrified, the young man ran to his father and grabbed his shoulder.  The man reared back from his work and admired the storm’s stunning masterpiece as if studying the magnificent columns of a marble temple.  As he did so, he draped an arm around his trembling son.

     “What a grand sight!” he smiled.  “You may never see another such as long as you live.”

     “But we may not outlive the sight of this one,” quaked the boy in a brave attempt at wit.

     “But if we live, we will live the better for it,” answered the man confidently.  “And if it spin our souls right out of our bodies, then who can say that we will not truly begin to live, and a life with no end in sight?”

     After that day, the young man’s treatment of his father changed entirely for the better.

 

Dr. Peter Singleton enjoys semi-retirement in the North Texas area, where he teaches and writes in various venues.  He has been a frequent contributor to Praesidium from the journal’s early days.