|
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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.)
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Praesidium 9.2
(Spring 2009)
CONTENTS
The
Power of Then
Steve
Kogan
The
self-styled gurus of a pop-cultural Zen, so abundant and prolific two or three
decades ago, are enjoying a revived influence as their aging disciples inherit
positions of power. Professor Kogan
measures how far such dull awakening is from the real thing, using Kipling’s Kim
as a yardstick.
From Arcadia to Empire: The Aeneid’s Elusive Allegory
John
R. Harris
Rome’s
greatest poet is too often caricatured, even in university Classics departments,
as a propagandist flunkey. The truth
is that Vergil’s flawed, perhaps failed attempt to project a vision of
progress without belying the reality of human fallibility poses a lasting
challenge to progressive thinking. Part
One of two.
The
Absurd Reich Or, On the Politics
of Demonic Nothingness
Gary Inbinder
Reprinted
from May of 2005, this paper has grown more relevant than ever as a new
administration pursues the agenda outlined earlier by Robert Reich.
Faith, Reason, Charity, and
Liberalism: A Response
John R. Harris
The charitable
impulse historically embedded in liberalism is wandering off target, to be
sure—but reason is not the culprit.
Technophobes
Roil Nation, Rile Lawmakers
Staff
The latest in our series
of mock “news flashes”, this scoop was created by a professor to calm his
students’ surly objections that their iPods and laptops are too much
criticized—but nobody laughed!
Parallel Failures
(poetry)
Alan
McGinnis
Has science become the new poetry?
Then some universes will never be reached.
Memento Mori
(short story)
Ivor
Davies
Among
various surefire but little-explored ways to earn tenure from a reluctant review
board, announcing one’s imminent death is perhaps the least violent.
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
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75701
Or use the PayPal option at our "Make
a Donation" link
*****
A
Few Words from the Editor
Probably no one associated with The Center for Literate Values (i.e., no
one who reads and writes at an advanced level) shares the confidence of our
ruling class that nations can spend their way to prosperity, that printing paper
is an adequate strategy for removing debt, or that the public sector tends to
show a higher degree of efficiency than the private sector.
These, then, are dismal times for our readers and contributors.
I have observed that disagreement is not uncommon among our faithful in
the matter of foreign policy, and the recent national elections were said to
have been impacted in no small measure by our military entanglements abroad; but
it turns out that our aging, ailing nation is to find little respite, even here.
Entanglements are to be reshuffled, not reduced.
The arts were created for just such gloomy historical moments.
Into the imagination, one may effect an escape which defies the moral
opprobrium of escapism, since true art—great art—actually draws one into
closer proximity with the immutable facts of human nature.
When those facts are fragmented, distorted, or suppressed in a political
setting, honest people grow frustrated. They—we—simply
cannot endure steady exposure, day after day, to the folderol about an utter end
to war or poverty or disease or unhappiness or insulting words which our
utopia-purveying oligarchs market to a childish throng.
We know how these fairy tales will end—how they have always ended:
literature allows us to cut to the chase, finding a closure within a few dozen
or hundred pages which a generation of text-messagers may need half a century of
living (if God grants them so much) to figure out.
We understand; and, understanding, we recover a degree of equanimity.
For to desire a world without fools and their folderol, let us admit,
would also be to yearn for Never Never Land.
In this particular issue, authors and subjects already consigned to the
progressive’s long train of cattle cars for insufficiently ignoring human
facts seemed to coalesce unbidden. Rudyard
Kipling and the Roman poet Vergil have both been belittled as propagandist hacks
by forces within the academy for a good (or a bad, really) four decades now. Through
a serendipitous kind of coincidence which has often smiled upon my editorial
endeavors, Steve Kogan and I just happened to feel drawn to Kim
and the Aeneid as ’08 wore
unhealthily into ’09. At about the
same time, Gary Inbinder kindly consented to my republishing his protest against
the secular idolatry of progressivism; and poet Alan McGinnis was inspired over
these weeks to mourn the absorption of metaphor into science.
Thus I very nearly ended up with a “special issue” about the
corrosion of beauty and vision by demagoguery and the slick sell.
Yet rather than favor a mystical explanation of this convergence, I cling
to the notion that something about 2009 makes such a choice of subject quite
natural.
One day soon—perhaps before this year is out (for the end of any year
is beginning to seem soon to me)—I hope to write on the importance of stasis
to human fulfillment. I say this not
simply because we are likely to get our fill of “change” before the next
snow, but because it is a truth far too little respected by both sides of the
aisle. That a maturing person should
go back to a farm cottage or a neighborhood village once in a while and find the
same old trees—or find the same old rooftops framed by mysteriously larger
trees—has been a universal experience until our time; and it has been a
healthy one, as well, and its deletion from the past half-century has left our
humanity the poorer. Men and women
should be able to measure the progress of their lives against that which does
not progress, but abides. The author
of the Critique of Judgment probably
would have said that the Old Courthouse which we first saw holding
Grandfather’s hand and will last see holding our grandchild’s is a
representation of metaphysical permanence, a sublime image of unchanging
standards against which a lifetime’s striving to satisfy those standards may
be poignantly viewed (much as the struggle of a mountaineer appears to those
miles away who see the whole mountain). A
society which has undermined such moments of homecoming—which plows under its
trees every decade and immerses its granite courthouses in windowless marble
“bureaus”—is dangerously likely, by implication, to nurture no sense of
abiding value, of reality beyond the here-and-now.
In its quest of “change” and “progress”, it increasingly looks
with indifference upon the ambush of babies exiting the womb and the fusion of
humans with robots. Obviously, this
society would have no regard for beauty or literature, which insist upon a
frame, a set of references, a telos—a
sense of things—rather than forever postponing the moment of justification.
Thank God, then, for literature—true
literature! I have buried over
half a dozen homes in the life which my change-worshiping culture has forced
upon me, though most of them still haunt me in my dreams.
Through all these meaningless migrations, however, I have always
transported a wealth of books. I
thank Steve Kogan for reminding me of Kim,
one of the first novels I ever read (assigned when novels were still taught
before high school, and just before Kipling was airbrushed from the canon).
I shall be returning to its pages very soon. ~J. H.
back to Contents
***************************
The
Power of Then
Steve Kogan
And when the sun has begun
to sink behind the rim of the hills, I sit quietly in the evening waiting for
the moon so I may have my shadow for company, or light a lamp and discuss right
and wrong with my silhouette.
Matsuo
Basho, The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling
Over the past few months, I have grown curious once more about the
mass-marketing of Zen and those joyful claims from the 1950s and 60s about
“living in the moment,” an impossible life-ideal that easily slipped into
living for the moment and, for the highly motivated, often ended in
living from moment to moment, as was the case with any number of
burned-out eccentrics I met in those years, when drugs and Buddhism seemed made
for each other. I myself had
consumed quantities of both and liked them, but I didn’t like the combination,
and I particularly disliked Allen Ginsberg’s agenda for living, although I was
struck by the opening section of Howl, because I had seen some of my own
most gifted friends “destroyed by madness... looking for an angry fix” (this
was at Columbia, where Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg had gone years before).
Among all the writers in their circle, I made one exception, and that was
for Kerouac. By 1957, I had several
reasons for wanting to travel west, but it was On
the Road that spurred me to take the first of many cross-country trips, both
as a student and two-year dropout from teaching, and I am still partial to some
of Kerouac’s recorded readings from his works and the Orientalism of “Alone
on a Mountaintop,” a travel sketch and philosophical reminiscence that recalls
certain motifs in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting and Basho’s The
Hut of the Phantom Dwelling, a meditation on the poet’s stay among the
hills near Lake Biwa, which captivated many of my later students, as did
Kerouac’s chapter from Lonesome Traveler. A
veteran in one of my classes, just back from Saudia Arabia after the first Gulf
War, told me that he never wanted to see another sunset until “Alone on a
Mountaintop” inspired him to look again. Another
student, a conservatively dressed business major (whom any run-of-the-mill
hipster would have labeled a “square”), came up to me after class one day,
told me that he had grown up in Kerouac’s home town of Lowell, Massachusetts,
and had read all his books, whereupon he opened his attaché case and gave me a
copy of the town’s commemorative Guide
to Jack Kerouac’s Lowell, complete with descriptive passages of local
sites from his works and accompanying photographs. None
of the other authors I assigned from that 1950s New York-San Francisco group
meant anything to my students, either in Advanced Composition or American
Literature II.
Curiously enough, for all his earlier celebrity status and Ginsberg’s
promotion of his work, not one of the many people who came in and out of my life
in the late 1960s ever talked about Kerouac that I can remember, although copies
of Buddhist tracts, popular “Zen” commentaries of the day, and Herman
Hesse’s Siddhartha were strewn about
everywhere I went, from the Bay area in California to Manhattan’s Lower East
Side and southern Vermont. When
I returned to teaching, I assigned Hesse’s novel one semester, mostly for old
time's sake, but it never really took hold of me, and after a few classes it
began to leave me cold.
One of my great awakenings from the fog of the “cultural revolution”
occurred when I read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
and saw just how thin and programmatic Siddhartha
was compared to the vibrant scenes of India in Kipling’s tale. It
was all there—the British army, the Great Game in the north between England
and the continental powers, the exotic traffic along the Grand Trunk Road, the
Buddhist’s Wheel of Life, an old lama from the Such-Zen monastery on a holy
quest—the entire canvas of India as Kipling knew it in his time, yet I had
never seen a single mention of the novel anywhere that I had knocked about. And
what could that keen-eyed and passionate writer, whom the left decades ago
branded an “imperialist,” have taught those offbeat groups in which I moved,
with their first stirrings of New Age orthodoxy through one cultish belief or
another, including their “counter-culture” propaganda of Zen? Not
even Gary Snyder, for all his Buddhist studies in Japan and outdoor life in the
Pacific Northwest, could write, as Kipling and Basho did, without betraying a
self-conscious desire to sound authentic and in tune with his surroundings.
Of all the “beat” writers of his time, Kerouac was the only one I
remember whose Orientalism had no trace of posturing in it and who wrote with a
genuine weakness for the American scene, especially the landscapes and
cityscapes of his childhood generation. I
still feel drawn to Kerouac’s travels through the last remains of
Depression-era America in the 1940s and early ’50s, with its freight yards,
battered side streets, and dusty towns along Route 66, the old migrants’
highway of The Grapes of Wrath, and I
still value his ear for Whitman’s prose in Specimen
Days and the long, all-embracing lines in Song
of Myself, with their pronounced love of country that Ginsberg never heard. It
was Kerouac, more than any other writer in my youth, who helped me to recognize
the deeper levels of this same sensibility when years later I read John Dos
Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. (1936) and was further surprised when I read Orient
Express (1927) and heard a familiar sound from On
the Road in Dos Passos’ travel sketches of the middle east: “There’s
no opium so sweet as the unguarded sunny sleep on the deck of a boat when it’s
after lunch in summer and you don’t know when you are going to arrive nor what
port you will land at, when you’ve forgotten east and west and your name and
your address and how much money you have in your pocket.”
All this and more came back to me last September in an unexpected way
after I saw several performances of an autobiographical monologue directed by my
wife and written by an acting student of hers in LA, Jim Loucks, whose father, a
Baptist preacher in south Georgia, was the main subject of Jim’s scenes from
his rural southern past. Talk about
an earlier America. Everything about
the work was a recreation not only of Jim’s childhood but also of his
parents’ youth, and it even touched upon the long-gone dead. At
the center of Jim’s memories was his father’s church and a cemetery that
began just behind the preacher-family’s house and ended at a hog pen further
back. It was not the pen, however,
but three points in the graveyard that marked its special character, for Jim’s
father, whose two great passions, as his wife never tired of complaining, were
“God and golf,” had turned that pastoral burial ground into a three-holed
golf course where he could practice his swings, until one day he achieved the
Zen-like perfection of a hole-in-one bounced off the church roof and gravestones
dating back to the Civil War. Hence
the title of Jim’s monologue, Cemetery
Golf.
I saw the work in its latest incarnation this summer at Beyond Baroque, a
small theater near the Pacific in Venice, California. The god of ironic
associations must have had a hand in my moment of recall, which was amplified by
Barack Obama’s remark in San Francisco about small-town Americans clinging to
their guns and religion (or golf clubs and religion in the case of Reverend
Loucks). Soon after returning to New
York, I happened to be reading “Obama, Oprah, and the Guru’ in the online
conservative journal American Thinker
when my Venice evening leapt to mind, the exact moment occurring when I came to
the passage on “Oprah’s guru Eckhart Tolle” and his book The
Power of Now. It was this
hucksterish-sounding title that triggered my memory of Jim’s show and the
after-theater conversation that I had with a one-time professor of film, who
drifted from Cemetery Golf to carrying
on about his teaching days among “Georgia rednecks” and from there to the
church of higher thoughts in LA that he attends, with a brief mention of Timothy
Leary and Richard Alpert’s Be Here Now.
I had never heard of Tolle or his book, but I had read the original Now
in the old days and years later tried out several passages on some of my Borough
of Manhattan Community College students, one of whom wrote a journal entry that
sums up for me the lively, articulate, and unselfconscious writing of my best
BoMac subway-college students from that time. The
author of that entry, a divorced thirty year-old postal worker living in a small
walkup apartment, had the distinctly Jewish-East European and non-Now name of
Jerry Yutkowitz, and his directness still makes me smile when I think of all the
verbiage that Alpert's book inspired:
What
is this assignment about? Is it Zen?
Is it living in the moment? Individuality?
Are all these things the same
anyway? I’m sitting here at my
desk, which is a hollow wooden door supported by old green army file cabinets
facing a brick wall. I’m nervously
munching on raisins, turning pages of this Be Here Now book, dazzled and
stupefied by the crystal clear knowledge or the incredible bullshit coming from
its pages.
Living
in a cramped apartment, working at a menial job, going back to school, coping
with an ex-wife who was giving him grief about seeing his child, Jerry was
living proof that one could be alive in the moment without being stoned,
“self-actualized,” and in tip-top shape to receive the higher consciousness.
As for me, I always thought that
Leary and Alpert were frauds, although I never got to the bottom of my feelings
about Better Buddhism through LSD until that evening conversation about Cemetery
Golf, when, living for one perfect instant in the Now, I said, without any
thought or hesitation, “I would rather be living in the Then.”
I had struck the mother lode. There
I was, at one with the moment and turning its force against the peddlers of Zen,
who want us to believe that Now is only what they say it is. Naturally,
they claim the opposite and say that Now is everything, and then they complete
the ruse by making everything subservient to their version of the Now. This
is the way with all self-sealing ideologies. The
ancient gnostics, who created the template, preached that holy wisdom lies
beyond Creation, with the sole exception of their own illuminated minds. The
Koran insists that Allah is both the immediate and final cause of everything,
postmodernists that nothing exists apart from words (“il
n’y a rien hors du texte”), Marx that no form of society, politics, or
spirituality has any existence outside ‘the mode of production of material
life,” and Tolle likewise lays down the dictum that nothing can ‘happen or
be outside the Now.” The past is
not the past but only “a former Now,’ the future is not the future but only
“an imagined Now,” and all the ills of the world nothing more than symptoms
of “resistance to the Now.” In
the perfect circle of Tolle’s tautologies, ‘there are no problems in the
Now.” And just to make sure that
this self-enclosed gibberish remains insulated from critique (for where else can
problems exist except in the present?), we have the first and last rule of Now:
“The essence of what I am saying,” writes Tolle, “cannot be understood by
the mind.” In the words of Alpert
/ Ram Dass, “The major obstacle at every stage of the path of enlightenment is
our own thoughts.” The elimination
of this “major obstacle” is the express aim of these salesmen of Now, for,
as it is written in the Gospel of Tolle, “The good news is that you can
free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation.”
It is one thing to say with Pascal that the heart has its reasons which
thought cannot know, but it is quite another to impugn thinking itself, a
strategy that is tailor-made to protect the notions that these gurus want us to
believe, the thoughts that lie beyond all thought. In
Be Here Now, this quackery is enhanced by a fourteen-page mishmash of
“books to hang out with” and other hip selections, which include everything
from eastern and western scripture to Madame Blavatsky, Dante to Timothy Leary,
and William Blake to Dame Rudhyar (The
Planetarization of Consciousness). Herman
Hesse weighs in with three novels, but Kim
is nowhere to be found. It is not
just that the author’s name alone would be a political liability (Kipling as
“apologist” for British rule in India), but that the lessons of the novel
itself would be too tough to swallow; for Kim is a street-wise boy of the first
order and could never be seduced by Alpert’s egoless parent (“You’re
offering a child here and now-ness”), and Kipling’s Tibetan holy man is a
free thinker, as he is referred to several times, and his skepticism would
likewise have no place in Alpert”s flummery (“My teacher Hari Dass Baba is
Essence”). As for his own
religious beliefs, the lama has faith only in the Buddha, the perfect justice of
the Wheel of Life, and his own journey with the help of Kim, to whom he insists
only that “the Search is sure.” What
is most sure for Leary, Alpert,
and Tolle, on the other hand, is the ever-expanding market for popular Zen,
where they excel in the art of selling freedom from thought to gullible minds.
This is the crux of the lama’s difference even from the gurus of his
time, for Teshoo Lama makes no special claims for his beliefs or the beliefs of
any sect. As we learn in the second
scene of the novel, he is guided by the Buddha’s doctrine that “it is all
illusion,” and, although he welcomes the chance to teach the Buddhist
world-picture to one and all along his way, no one’s salvation matters to him
except his own and later Kim’s. What
is more telling yet about his search is that he does not wish to be free of his
mind or personality, only of his sins, a word that has no place in the semantic
tyranny that has cornered the enlightenment market since the 1960s.
Let the buyer beware. On the
one hand, we are called upon to Be Here Now, which is a direct command for each
of us to be fully alive in the moment; yet we are also told that we have to pay
attention to each other, for “we are all on the journey towards enlightenment
and at each stage must share what has been discovered with those who will
listen.” Unless we are all living
in the same Now, however, the two directives cancel each other out, for we
cannot live in the moment if we have to be concerned with everyone else’s Now,
as well. Moreover, it is patently
false, as the world goes, that “we are all on the journey towards
enlightenment”; and if, for argument’s sake, it were true, who would not
be willing to listen? Worse yet,
if we did as Alpert says we “must” and shared our discoveries “at each
stage” on the way to Now, there would be no room left to live in it, for we
would all become consumed with talking and listening, and the world would turn
into a spiritualized version of Show and Tell. There
remains one last question, which brings us back to Alpert’s title and takes us
to the heart of this farce. With no
ifs, ands, or buts, he proclaims that we must “Be Here Now,” yet where else
could anyone be while reading the book? The
answer completes the circle of this self-enclosed journey into mindlessness,
for, according to Alpert and his clones, you aren’t anywhere worth being
unless you accept their definition of the Here and Now. And
what it means, most of all, is that you cannot become enlightened as long as you
think that you are you.
The mantra of Zen for the masses goes like this: if you are frightened,
unhappy, repressed, or unfulfilled, it is because you persist in the delusion
that you have a self that feels this way, even worse, that you believe you have
a self at all, when what you really have is a fixation on a mental construct
that you think is you. In the
politics of Now, you are a victim of the western “assumption of
self-presence,” the belief that all things have an identity, which locks us
into an oppressive word system and cuts us off from the infinitely changing flow
of everything. To which a Jerry
Yutkowitz might reply, “But isn’t this just another bunch of words?” Indeed
it is, and at length. A Japanese
haiku creates a world in under twenty syllables, and even the prose-poetic
sections of Lao Tzu’s The Way of Life
are short enough to have been written in a single visionary flash, while our
mass-marketers of life in the moment don’t know when to stop talking,
especially about silence, despite the teachings of the east. And
why should they when they have an unlimited audience for their brand of
illusions? It’s not just that
“the simple believe everything,”
as Proverbs has it, but that the masses are especially vulnerable when
demagogues lace their fantasies with the necessary scapegoats du jour: Jews, Christians, capitalists, meat-eaters, Dead White
European Males, men themselves, living or dead, or one’s own anxiety-ridden
self. Hence the wisdom of P. T.
Barnum’s “every crowd has a silver lining.” The
old masters of the Tao would have looked right through the peddlers of Zen, the
last people on earth who could possibly understand what the Way of Life meant to
them: no words, no theories, no pretence at “crystal clear knowledge” that
is nothing more than “incredible bullshit.”
As Chuang Tzu wrote, “Where is there a man who has forgotten words so I
can have a word with him?”
That is the kind of Now that lasts for centuries, while today’s is
filled with words without end, like the wall of books that I once saw at the
delivery entrance to Barnes & Noble’s flagship store on Fifth and 18th
in New York. One could grow old trying to count the volumes of dead words since
the advent of the “counter culture” in the 1960s (counter to
culture is what Leary and the others really meant). The
last time I looked, works on psychic self-help, postmodern theory, and
spiritualisms of one kind or another took up whole sections at that same Barnes
& Noble store, while one or two volumes still suffice for the Bible, Homer,
Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, the plays and poems of Shakespeare, and the essays of
Montaigne. For sheer conciseness,
depth, and beauty of expression, Then has it over Now in spades. All
you have to do is have one true insight into Hamlet
and the power of Then will be with you in a flash, while today we have nothing
more than one instant Was after another, in which the present is only as good as
the last hour before a politician’s promises or the latest scandals and
disasters are gone and forgotten, the last minute before your five-year-old
laptop suddenly crashes and becomes permanently obsolete, the last flicker
between one image and the next on MTV or a high-speed computer game, and the
split second between the end of a class and the moment when a student reaches
for his cell phone, so that Now becomes one vast prison-house of disconnected
moments, in which the past is reduced to, “That’s so yesterday,” and the
future becomes, “Later for that.”
In an age when the world seems to be closing in on us in a frenzy of
change, Tolle’s pronouncement that “there are no problems in the Now”
sounds especially perverse, and it would be erroneous even in the best of times,
for, as Robert Frost observes in “Carpe Diem,”
The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing—
Too present to imagine.
Life
is difficult enough amid this welter of sensations and events, but it becomes
all the more bewildering when the past slides out from under one’s feet and
the present is up for grabs, which is why demagogues thrive in an atmosphere of
disorientation and crisis. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a
constant struggle” is not only true in itself but perhaps the most
self-revealing line that George Orwell ever wrote, for it speaks to his own
efforts to anatomize the most destructive fraud of his time, with its
unrelenting campaigns on behalf of the Soviet regime, which used every trick of
language to promote a profoundly evil fantasy of world reform.
In The Communist Manifesto,
where this fantasy was born, Karl Marx declares with all the tough talk at his
command that religious, philosophical, and otherwise ideological critiques of
communism “are not deserving of serious examination,” but what mass-produced
Zen offers is soft dogmatism for soft minds.
“Be here now” means that you aren’t but you should be. Note
the unspoken imperative that yours is not to question why. When
his first guru tells Alpert in so many words to shut up, he treats it as
religious instruction and stores it in his memory as the key to his
enlightenment:
“Did
I ever tell you about the time that Tim and I… ”
And
he’d say, “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.”
Silence.
And
I’d say, “How long do you think we’re going to be on this trip?”
And
he’d say, “Don’t think about the future. Just be here now.”
This
is the kind of deep training in expanded consciousness that Alpert thinks he is
receiving from Bhagwan Dass, (or, more properly, “Bhagwan Dass”), “a 23
year old guy from Laguna Beach” on a “temple pilgrimage” through India,
whose charismatic appeal for Alpert lies in his “long blonde hair and a long
blonde beard,” his “holy clothes—a dhoti,” his lessons on “some
mantras and working with beads,” and the blank slate of his essential vacancy,
on which Alpert can project whatever guru fantasies he desires. Through
the accompanying photograph of Baghwan and his terse messages from the Here and
Now, Alpert urges us to do the same. Interestingly
enough, the two are traveling on the same exotic journey to the Himalayas as Kim
and Teshoo Lama; but that is where the resemblance ends, for Kipling’s novel
is filled with vibrant human interchange, while Bhagwan insists that he and
Alpert remain practically incommunicado from each other:
He’d say, “You eat this,” or, “Now you sleep here.” And
all the rest of the time we sang holy songs. That
was all there was to do.
Or he would teach me Asanas—Hatha Yoga postures.
But there was no conversation. I
didn’t know anything about his life. He
didn’t know anything about my life…. And
yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being…. He
had been in India for five years, and he was so high that everybody just
welcomed him, feeling “he’s obviously one of us.”
There
is a kind of sophomoric silliness to Alpert’s excitement over the important
people in his life that sometimes sounds like the voice of Alicia Silverstone in
Clueless, with its perfect intonations
of Valley Speak among the teenagers of Beverly Hills High: “The more time I
spent with Tim, the more I realized he had an absolutely extraordinary
intellect. He really knew a lot.”
Whatever else they may have known, what Leary and Alpert understood about
Buddhism would have barely filled a thimble compared to the knowledge and wisdom
of Kipling’s lama. The first time
we meet him, he is about to enter a museum of Indian arts and industry, “the
Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum,” where the curator
(modeled on Kipling’s father) takes him on a guided tour, has an extended
conversation with him, scholar to scholar, as they pass among the exhibits of
sacred art, and later exchanges gifts with him.
In addition to the lama’s depth of
knowledge, inquisitiveness, dignity, and poise, the curator is intrigued by the
actual path of his journey, which follows Buddha’s own life from birth to
death among “the Holy Places which His foot had trod.” This
is no mere pilgrimage to venerate the sacred sites, however, but a quest to
discover the Buddha’s legendary “River of the Arrow,” which the lama began
after years of dissatisfaction over the decline of Buddhist spirituality, about
which Leary, Alpert, and all the other proselytizers of the Now have not a word
to say:
The lama lowered his voice.
“And I come here alone. For
five-seven-eighteen-forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well
followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and
idolatry….
“So it comes with all faiths.”
“Thinkest thou? The books
of my lamassery I read, and they were dried pith; and the later ritual with
which we of the Reformed Law have cumbered ourselves—that, too, had no worth
to these old eyes. Even the
followers of the Excellent One are at feud on feud with one another. It
is all illusion.”
Unlike
Alpert and his Laguna Beach guru, the lama has no special interest in temples,
rituals, or yogic practices (his great meditation comes only at the end), and
people from all walks of life are drawn to him not because “he’s obviously
one of us” but for the exact opposite reason, because he is unlike anyone that
they have ever met.
The young street urchin Kim, who seems to know everyone in Lahore and is
irrepressibly curious about everyone’s business, follows the lama into the
museum and lays himself down on the floor just outside the curator’s cubicle,
“his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door,” where he overhears
the lama’s story and is immediately filled with a sense of wonder about the
man. What Kim experiences with the
quickness of a perceptive and impressionable child, the curator grasps with the
eye of an art historian and avid connoisseur:
The curator would have detained him; they are few in the world who still
have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures which are, as it
were, halfwritten and half drawn. But
the lama strode out, head high in air, and pausing an instant before the great
statue of a Bodhisat in meditation, brushed through the turnstiles.
Kim followed like a shadow. What
he had overheard excited him wildly. This man was entirely new to all his
experience...
For
all their talk about “higher consciousness,” I cannot recall a single
expressive thought or image in any of the Orientalized guides to enlightenment I
ever read, only endless passages of highly charged, all-purpose abstractions, to
the point where an intellectual and emotional nullity like Eckhart Tolle can
depersonalize that most personal of all the world’s sacred figures and insist
that his readers treat “Christ” as a unisex “presence” as well:
If
“Christ” were to return tomorrow in some externalized form, what could he or
she possibly say to you other than this: “I am the Truth. I
am divine presence. I am eternal
life. I am within you. I
am here. I am Now.”
Never personalize Christ. Don’t make Christ into a form identity.
So
much for Christ’s “form identity” in the Gospels and in Christian art for
over fifteen hundred years, and so much as well for the entire sweep of sacred
Asian art from India and Tibet to China and Japan, for, according to Tolle,
“Avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters... are not special as
persons.”
Kipling gives the lie to this chilling pronouncement when he draws our
eye to the paintings and scultpures at the Lahore Museum, as the lama, with
“the curator behind him, went through the collection with the reverence of a
devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman”:
Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story,
holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here
were incidents in the legend of the cousin Devadatta. Here
was the wicked woman who accused the Master of impurity, all confounded; here
was the teaching in the Deer-Park; the miracle that stunned the
fire-worshippers; here was the Bodhisat in royal state as a prince; the
miraculous birth; the death at Kusinagara, where the weak disciple fainted;
while there were almost countless repetitions of the meditation under the Bodhi
tree; and the adoration of the alms-bowl was everywhere. In
a few minutes the curator saw that his guest was no mere bead-telling mendicant,
but a scholar of parts.
Kipling’s
prose is vivid and moving because he has the capacity to see and feel the human
drama of these sacred scenes. Like
the curator’s attraction to the lama’s own distinctive qualities, the
emotional depth of the passage also prepares us for the exquisite relationship
that is about to begin between the boy and the aged lama, “such a man as Kim,
who thought he knew all castes, had never seen.”
In stark contrast to Kipling’s Teshoo Lama, Tolle’s “enlightened
masters” lack all character and physiognomy, as Alpert’s guru worship is
organized around a series of inflated clichés (“He is just like a crystal,”
“He is a perfect mirror,” “A teacher points the way. A
guru is the Way,” etc.). Such
demagoguery of the spirit is both intellectually embarrassing and pernicious. In
The Power of Now, which is a chaotic
mixture of ersatz Buddhism (“Give Up the Relationship with Yourself”) and
radical feminist rhetoric (”Why Women Are Closer to Enlightenment”), we read
that “the energy frequency of the mind appears to be essentially male”
(manipulative, grasping, and aggressive) and that the highest form of this
“energy frequency” belongs to the fear-arousing “traditional God” of the
Old Testament, who “is a patriarchal, controlling authority figure, an often
angry man.”
Tolle’s drivel plays its part in propelling the underlying chaos of the
book, in which he denies the humanity of Christ and Buddha and passes a
simplistic and offensive judgment on the Torah yet claims in his introduction
that he does not wish to undercut the followers of any religion but only to
reveal “the essence of all religions.” Tolle
inadvertently reveals the demagoguery and outright lie of this vacuous claim
when he writes that he has “endeavored to use terminology that is as neutral
as possible to reach a wide range of people.” On
the final page of the book, we discover that Tolle, in fact, does not care
whether God is vengeful or compassionate, since the Gospel principle of
forgiveness, which he refers to merely as “a term that has been in use for two
thousand years,” can only become “true forgiveness” if you give up “your
sense of self from the past” by “accessing the power of the Now,” at which
point “the whole concept of forgiveness then becomes unnecessary.”
The end result of Tolle’s dismissive sophistry is that scriptural
teachings are either manipulated or thrown out the window (so much for
non-“male” thinking), and people’s heads become filled with childish
notions about spirituality, human nature, and the condition of the modern world,
as in Tolle’s, “Resistance to the Now... forms the basis of our dehumanized
industrial civilization.” This
exploitation of the Now as a ready-made answer for everything has its
counterpart in Alpert’s psychedelic gospel and draws upon the same language of
New Age Orientalism as we find in Be Here
Now, minus Alpert’s drug therapy, detailed yogic lessons, and
bibliography, which makes The Power of Now
the perfect adaptation of Alpert’s book for the I. Q. of the new millenium.
Where Alpert / Ram Dass proposed ashrams
for the “counter culture,” Buddhism Lite is for everyone (“Enter the Now
from wherever you are”).
The lessons of Kim have nothing in common with these escapist fantasies. It
never occurs to Alpert and Tolle, for example, that “the power of Now” can
be used in the service of force and fraud, yet it is little Kim who practices
both to perfection, once when he devises a plot to have two assassins captured,
another when he disguises the identity of a spy in a train compartment without
anyone being the wiser, and the third when he outwits a French and Russian spy,
all in a flash of inspiration and the luck of the moment, whose successful
resolution comes about “simply, beautifully, and inevitably.”
As for Teshoo Lama, his humility and ethical rigor would never permit him
to preach the narcissism of Alpert’s, “You are the guru,” or Tolle’s,
“The reality of your divine presence”; and he would positively shun the
rhetoric of these New Age faqirs, whose spiritualized snake-oil about “the energy body,”
“loss of Now,” and “the realized being” operates in the same perverse
way as political propaganda and leads not to higher thought but in the precise
opposite direction, which Orwell described for all time as “a reduced state of
consciousness” that is “favorable to political conformity.” Hence
the deadening of thought and perception as the strategic aim of all “the
smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for our souls.”
One aspect of this strategy
is the cynical manipulation of images, chiefly of the Leader or some equally
exalted figure, and in the most simplistic terms possible. Like
the ever-watchful gaze of Big Brother’s poster-portraits in 1984
and the mass-produced portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin that blanketed
parades and administrative offices throughout Soviet Russia,
Alpert’s full page photo-portrait of his Laguna Beach guru is meant to induce
the same response in everyone who looks at it, in this case the impression of
the generic hippie as an other-worldly youth and budding saint. With
his mouth pursed behind his beard and moustache (the enigmatic silence of the
master), Bhagwan rivets our attention to his eyes, which bore into ours from the
slightly elevated angle of his head. For
one who does not come under its intended spell, the general effect, complete
with long hair, beaded necklace, and naked torso, is of insufferable
pretentiousness that is also frighteningly vacant as he stares at us with a kind
of all-seeing disdain. Marariji,
another of Alpert’s holy men, looks much wilder by comparison in his
photograph but with those same tunneling eyes.
In Dan Yack, a novel that takes
us from St. Petersburg to Patagonia, Blaise Cendrars remarks, “The simple
impression of being disoriented, in an alien land, is sufficient to knock you
off balance.” If we add to that
observation a drug-addled mind like Alpert’s, we can appreciate how a
disaffected Harvard professor of psychology, wandering through India and the
foothills of the Himalayas, could surrender all sense of self and reason to a
“23 year old guy” after he tells him, “You know, I feel crumby, my hips
are hurting,” and a moment later feels that his SoCal guru has exploded his
whole phony life (“He sort of wiped out my whole game. That
was it—that was my whole trip—emotions and past experiences, and future
plans”), all because of Bhagwan’s unrelating and empty-headed response to
his complaint: “Emotions are like waves. Watch
them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”
It is Mahariji, however, who gives Alpert the full treatment by telling
him where he was the night before they met, what he was thinking of (his
mother), and when and how she died, after which Alpert’s mind burns “out its
circuitry” in trying to comprehend what happened. He
then collapses into uncontrollable weeping, suddenly feels “like I was home. Like
the journey was over,” and several days later “realized that he knew
everything that was going on in my head, all the time.” Alpert
claims that he wasn’t under the influence of psychedelics when Marariji read
his mind, although he writes that he was carrying a bottle of LSD when he and
Bhagwan visited Mahariji and that he gave him several pills, which would have
knocked out any ordinary person but, according to Alpert, had no visible effect
on him. On the following page, the
mystery of this offhand miracle is presumably cleared up when Alpert tells us
that Mahariji is living in a state of Samadhi,
or “oneness of mind; undistracted union of subject and object.”
The most telling point for me about these stories of all-seeing gurus is
that Alpert, a trained psychologist and, among other things, a former therapist
with Harvard’s Health Service, was “turned on... to pot” by his first
patient when he was “still quite a heavy drinker” and then graduated to
Psylocybin and later LSD; yet he does not even suggest the possibility that he
could have been experiencing distorted perceptions through any long-term effects
of alcoholism and the ingestion of powerful drugs. Although
he is incapable of making the connection, his failure to consider Baghwan’s or
Mahariji’s effect on him in light of his own history is bound up with his
admitted failure to believe in the very techniques of analytical psychology that
he was both teaching and practicing; and we in turn are left to believe that it
was all over with his “game plan” after Bhagwan taught him that “emotions
are like waves” and that his mind blew its circuits in trying to understand
how Mahariji could have read it like an open book.
Alpert’s stories belong to a genre that might have found its way into
Robert Ripley’s Believe it or Not (“In 1967, the guru Mahariji read a Harvard
professor’s mind in less than five minutes!”), whereas Tolle confronts us
with the dumbing down of hokum itself: “Even a stone has rudimentary
consciousness; otherwise it would not be, and its atoms and molecules would
disperse.”
Whatever these celebrity guides have to say, there is always something
shoddy, ignorant, or unprincipled at work. Early
in their travels, to cite one choice example, Alpert’s Laguna Beach guru is
busy “giving away all my money,” then insists that they drive off in a Land
Rover that an initiate in Alpert’s “psychedelic sessions” had left in
someone else’s care; and when they finally reach their holy man in the
foothills of the Himalayas, Mahariji’s first remark is, “You have a picture
of me?” followed by, “You came in a big car?” and, “You give it to
me?” Once again, Bhagwan leaps at
the chance to give away someone else’s property; and, although Alpert’s
first reaction is “No—now wait a minute—you can’t give away David’s
car like that,” the day after Mahariji sees everything “going on in my
head,” Alpert is ready to give him “anything” he wants. “If
he wanted the Land Rover, he could have it.”
As for Teshoo Lama, he asks for nothing but gratefully receives offerings
of food and lodging from the faithful, and what he offers in return is a ready
ear, common-sense advice, and the lessons of his “brush-pen Buddhist pictures
which are, as it were, half written and half drawn.” During
the last stage of their journey, the lama brings Kim to his temporary temple
cell at Benares and ushers him into the secrets of his craft. There
is a fairytale feeling of magic in the air as the lama assumes “the
cross-legged attitude of the Bodhisat emerging from meditation” and, in an
echo of Shakespeare’s Prospero, solemnly says to him, “I will show thee my
art”:
He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow Chinese
paper, the brushes, and slab of India ink. In
cleanest, severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes,
whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger, and Lust),
and whose compartments are all the heavens and hells, and all the chances of
human life. Men say that the
Bodhisat Himself first drew it with grains of rice upon dust, to teach His
disciples the cause of things. Many
ages have crystallized it into a most wonderful convention crowded with hundreds
of little figures whose every line carries a meaning. Few
can translate the picture-parable; there are not twenty in all the world who can
draw it surely without a copy; of those who can both draw and expound are but
three.
It
is a piece of knowledge, one of the
highest in the old cultures of Tibet, China, and Japan, that allows him to paint
the Wheel of Life in all its glorious details, even when he is on the move, and
to “expound [it] cycle by cycle” along the way:
Here
sat the Gods on high—and they were dreams of dreams. Here
was our Heaven and the world of the demi-Gods—horsemen fighting among the
hills. Here were the agonies done
upon the beasts, souls ascending or descending the ladder and therefore not to
be interfered with. Here were the
Hells, hot and cold, and the abodes of tormented ghosts.
In
one of the most brilliant passages in the novel, when the lama directs Kim’s
attention to “the Human World, busy and profitless, that is just above the
Hells,” the boy’s mind is “distracted” from the lesson by the living
truth of the lama’s words, for right there
by
the roadside trundled the very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading,
marrying, and quarrelling—all warmly alive. Often
the lama made the living pictures the matter of his text, bidding Kim –too
ready—note how the flesh takes a thousand thousand shapes, desirable or
detestable as men reckon, but in truth of no account either way; and how the
stupid Spirit... is bound to follow the body through all the Heavens and all the
Hells, and strictly round again.
It
is as though the lama’s painting and “the living pictures” of the road had
grown out of one another,
and it is all described in a single vivid paragraph that is more intimate and
more compelling than anything that Alpert has to say about Buddhist spirituality
and altogether beyond the humbug of Tolle’s “essence of all religions.”
As for the deeper relationship between guru and disciple, in Kim
it is the teacher who seeks enlightenment and the student who is the key to his
salvation. This process begins
almost from the moment that they meet, but it does not effectively get under way
until they are forced to separate, and it is the lama’s embrace of this
rupture that will take him from suffering to redemption. As
the lama later tells Kim, “It was made plain to me in a hundred dreams... that
without thee I should never find my River,” yet, earlier in the novel, when
the two come upon an English encampment, are taken for questioning, and Kim is
turned over to the chaplain of the regiment, the lama gives him up as a
sacrifice to his love for the boy and his faith in the justice of the Wheel. This
faith will be tested by the very terms of their separation, for the one person
that Teshoo Lama needs to fulfill his quest turns out to be the son of a
deceased English soldier, Kimball O’Hara, of that same regiment to which their
path has led them, and it is Kim who has drawn them to the camp. What
is more remarkable yet is that these circumstances will play a decisive role in
Kipling’s own portrayal of the Wheel.
There will be many comings and goings between teacher and disciple as the
story unfolds, but for the present each is forced to return to his separate
world: the lama to his solitary quest and the boy to his English roots. Without
knowing the meaning of its contents, Kim has been carrying a little “leather
amulet-case” around his neck that contains three papers: his father’s signed
scrawl, “Please take care of the boy,” his “clearance certificate” from
the army, and the boy’s birth certificate—which O’Hara (who by then had
become addicted to opium) insisted that Kim should never lose. Unlike
Alpert’s drug-addled visions, O’Hara’s are filled with love for his own
flesh and blood, and they are based on a true understanding of what his
documents mean, for “those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium
hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On
no account was Kim to part with them.”
This sole command from father to son has a special urgency, for Kim’s
mother “died of cholera in Ferozepore” when Kim was three-years old,
whereupon O’Hara turned to drink and “drifted away, till he came across the
woman who took opium and learned the taste from her.” In
dramatizing the conjunction between O’Hara’s downward slide and the
orphaning of Kim, Kipling does not say precisely when it happened, only that
O’Hara was speaking to a child and that he died sometime later “as poor
whites die in India.”
In addition to the documents, what helps to save Kim from a similar end
is his curiosity and quick-wittedness, his ability to live as a native child of
the streets, and an oral gift from his father that is in some ways more
significant than the papers, for it is the direct cause of his capture and all
that flows from that event. Kipling
describes it as an enigmatic and magical prophecy, according to which “nine
hundred first-class devils, whose god was a Red Bull on a green field, would
attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O’Hara—poor O’Hara that was
gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line.”
It is that Red Bull, the
regiment’s emblem, “on a background of Irish green” and sewn onto “an
ordinary camp marking-flag,” which stops Kim in his tracks at the encampment
and for the lama also “touches my Search.” When
they are brought before the Anglican priest and the Roman Catholic chaplain of
the regiment, the lama gazes “into space and emptiness” and renounces his
attachment to the boy by the dictates of his search:
“And
I am a follower of the Way,” he said bitterly. “The
sin is mine and the punishment is mine. I
made believe to myself—for now I see it was but make-belief—that thou was
sent to me to aid in the Search. So
my heart went out to thee for thy charity and thy courtesy and the wisdom of thy
little years. But those who follow
the Way must permit not the fire of any desire or attachment, for that is all
illusion…. I see now that the sign
of the Red Bull was a sign for me as well as for thee. All
Desire is red—and evil. I will do
penance and find my River alone.”
Unlike
the commercializers of the “self-actualized” life, the lama keeps strict
account of his personal failings and, free thinker that he is, loves true
learning wherever he finds it and has no need to impugn the west in order to
prop up the teachings of the east.
These qualities of the lama’s character are revealed at the museum in
Lahore, and they now determine the direction of Kim’s development; for it is
Teshoo Lama’s intellectual rigor, together with his care for the boy, that
allows him to decide on the instant to support his education in an English
school. Before he departs, he asks
Father Victor’s advice and is told that “the best schooling a boy can
receive in India, is, of course, St. Xavier’s in Partibus at Lucknow.” Several
days later, he astonishes the chaplain with a letter written by a wayside scribe
“for Venerable Teshoo Lama the priest of
Such-zen looking for a River, address care of Tirthankers’ Temple, Benares,”
in which the lama hopes that his “present
step” will be “approved for
Almighty God’s sake. Education is
greatest blessing if of best sorts. Otherwise
no earthly use,” to which
Father Victor, a man of no mean intelligence and common sense himself, exclaims,
“Faith, the old man’s hit the bull’s-eye that time!” Reading
on, he is bowled over to hear that the lama will forward “three hundred rupees a year to one expensive education St. Xavier,
Lucknow”; and, four days later, his wonderment reaches its crest when he
receives another letter from the temple “enclosing a native banker’s note of
hand” for the first year’s payment and cries out, “How the Divil—yes,
he’s the man I mean—can a street-beggar raise money to educate white
boys?”
Father Victor soon receives an answer of sorts from Colonel Creighton,
who arrives to take charge of the boy. He
is the spymaster in charge of the Indian Survey, the British counterpart to the
lama in Kim’s education, and one of several men and women who will figure
prominently in the plot. After the
chaplain shows him the bank note, tells Kim’s story as far as he knows it, and
asks, “Did ye ever hear the like?” Creighton only deepens the mystery when
he says to Father Victor, “At any rate, the old man has sent the money. Gobind
Sahai’s notes of hand are good from here to China.” There
is a Now of finance too, which Kipling highlights by never explaining how “the
old man” secured the note nor how he would have gained immediate access to a
man of wealth and ready reputation (perhaps the Abbot of Such-Zen has his own
prestige that is “good from here to China”); and when Creighton adds, “The
more one knows about natives the less can one say what they will or won’t
do,” Father Victor replies that it is not so much the money that baffles him
as “this mixture of Red Bulls and Rivers of Healing... it’s the mixture of
things that’s beyond me.” Given the many social barriers between whites and
“natives,” a close friendship between a child born into an Anglo-Irish
regiment and a Tibetan lama would be perplexing enough, but it is compounded by
their separate and unusual tales, each one summed up in a symbol that has a hold
on their imagination. The chaplain
cannot know it, but he has hit upon a karmic mystery that has already begun to
take shape through this “mixture of things,” which Kipling will unfold with
uncommon clarity and precision.
This conjunction of mysterious destinies and precision of expression is
inherent in the very fabric of the novel, and Kipling makes it possible by
endowing his principle figures with superior knowledge and character, so that
they are able to thread their way to their goals in a sure-footed progression of
steps amid a bewildering variety of people, secret plots, and random events. Throughout
the novel, for example, there are many references to detailed observations and
coded messages being passed across “the Hind” and to Creighton as the man
who keeps it all together in the Great Game in the north. In
their own way, the boy and the old man share Creighton’s mastery of worldly
affairs, since both have a wide range of contacts and a sharp and extensive
knowledge of the land: Kim knows all the byways of Lahore and many people,
places, and customs beyond its walls; and the lama seems to find his way to men
in authority with ease and quickly gains the trust of everyone he meets along a
journey that extends from the Himalayas to the plains of India.
It is a vast and ancient world whose fate is now bound up with the life
of a late-nineteenth-century empire, both of which are summed up in the figure
of Kim. On his “Asiatic side,” as Creighton calls it, Kim “spoke the
vernacular by preference,” “was burned black as any native,”
knew
the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch;
was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haround al
Raschid dreamed of; and... lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights...
At
the same time, he is the son of Kimball O’Hara, a former “colour-sergeant of
the Mavericks, an Irish regiment,” while his mother had been an English
“nursemaid in a colonel’s family.” This
brief reference to her station underscores the role of the British army in the
lives of Kim’s parents as well as in his own, for as the unnamed colonel gave
his mother employment while his father was stationed with the regiment, Colonel
Creighton will oversee his youthful occupation as a spy in the Game.
Like the orders of being in the lama’s art, with their cycles upon
cycles of existence, there is a recurring harmony at work in Kipling’s
east-west motifs, which is epitomized in two expressions of the miraculous: the
lama’s River of the Arrow and the three papers that Kim carries in his leather
amulet, which his father told him he must never lose,
for
they belonged to a great piece of magic—such magic as men practised over
yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue and white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic
House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It
would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn would be exalted
between pillars —monstrous pillars—of beauty and strength. The
Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest regiment in the
world, would attend to Kim, little Kim that should have been better off than his
father.5
At
the heart of these correspondences, O’Hara’s prophecy that “it would...
all come right some day” parallels the lama’s faith in the justice of the
Wheel, and it is simultaneously fulfilled in Kim’s last successful operation
for Colonel Creighton and the perfect peace that comes to him through Teshoo
Lama’s completion of his search.
The wheel of the novel encloses these analogies and even includes a
subtle correspondence between drugs and enlightenment; for O’Hara’s words to
Kim, spoken at the height of his “glorious opium hours,” appear on the
second page, and the lama’s spirit, “exalted in contemplation,” soars into
“the Great Soul” near the very end of the work. Moreover,
at its highest point, the lama’s vision, like O’Hara’s, concerns the
welfare of Kim; and both occur in the midst of suffering, O’Hara’s through
poverty, addiction, and the death of his wife, and the lama’s through great
hardships, together with Kim’s, on their journey from India to the Himalayas
(the lama returning to the hills where his search began, and the boy in pursuit
of a French and Russian spy).
Their last resting place is at the home of the Sahiba whom they met early
in their travels on the Grand Trunk Road. She
is as cheerful and garrulous as ever, but the lama stops her short: “Do not
jest,” he tells her. “That time
is done. We are here upon great
matters. A sickness of soul took me
in the Hills, and him a sickness of the body.” It
is as though they were one person suffering on either side of the divide between
body and soul, yet nothing is cut and dried in Kim;
and, like the Buddhist’s circular symbol of yin-yang opposition, in which a
black dot appears against a white background and a white dot against a black,
each shares something of the other’s illness: the old man from a blow to the
head by the Russian, and Kim through renewed doubts about who he really is:
“‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And
what is Kim?’ His soul repeated it
again and again.”
As the Sahiba nurses Kim while he lies ill with “mountain-sickness,”
the lama wanders into the fields and sits down under a tree to meditate, in
ritual imitation of the Buddha under the Bodhi-tree of his enlightenment. Without
moving a muscle, he begins a two-day fast and meditation and on the third sees a
brook that he believes to be his River of the Arrow, which he told Kim several
times would appear of itself one day beneath his feet. Still
in his trance of meditation, he steps into the water, tumbles in, and is about
to drown in the midst of his mystic vision when he hears a voice call out to
remind him of the boy, and he allows himself to be rescued from death:
“Also
I saw the stupid body of Teshoo Lama lying down, and the hakim from Dacca kneeled beside, shouting in its ear. Then
my Soul was all alone, and I saw nothing, for I was all things, having reached
the Great Soul. And I meditated a
thousand thousand years, passionless, well aware of the Causes of all Things. Then
a voice cried: ‘What shall come to the boy if thou art dead?’ and I was
shaken back and forth in myself with pity for thee; and I said, ‘I will return
to my chela, lest he miss the Way.’ Upon
this my Soul, which is the Soul of Teshoo Lama, withdrew itself from the Great
Soul with strivings and yearnings and retchings and agonies not to be told. At
that hour my Soul was hampered by some evil or other whereof I was not wholly
cleansed, and it lay upon my arms and coiled round my waist; but I put it aside,
and I cast forth as an eagle in my flight for the very place of the River. I
pushed aside world upon world for thy sake... and behold I was again in the body
of Teshoo Lama, but free from sin, and the hakim from Dacca bore up my head in the waters of the River.”
Like
Kim’s magnificent exploits in thwarting a plot against English interests in
the north, the lama’s vision is action-packed and no less a conquest over
himself than Kim’s over the European spies. Nor
are these isolated acts, for both represent the final recurrence in a pattern of
similar events. Kim has already
achieved a number of successful missions, each one rising in complexity along
the wheel of his life; and the lama redeems his own by letting go of his vision
for the sake of the boy, as he once gave up the boy for the sake of his search.
As the lama’s spirit soars into the higher realms, we are reminded one
last time of his speaking “brush-pen Buddhist pictures”: “Here sat the
Gods on high—and they were dreams of dreams.” This
was the first lesson from his works that the lama taught the boy, and it teaches
us as well about Kipling’s continuation of the Prospero theme in relation to
the lama’s craft; for Shakespeare’s magician likewise creates a sacred
dream-work when he summons the goddesses Iris, Ceres, and Juno to enact a
wedding masque for Ferdinand and his daughter Miranda. Within
limits, the parallel is precise, since both visions express love for the young:
Prospero for his daughter and her betrothed, and the lama for Kim; while the
“Gods on high,” who are “dreams of dreams,” are echoed in what the lama
would call “the Human World” of Prospero’s
,“We are such stuff / As dreams
are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”
There is still another aspect of the lama’s watery trance that weaves
together eastern and western literature and lifts it beyond the clichés of
westernized Zen, for Kipling, in one quick stroke, has linked the lama’s
imitation of the Buddha to the actions of a Buddhist Don Quixote in a moment
that is “simply, beautifully, and inevitably” both sublime and ridiculous. Had
R. H. Blyth described Teshoo Lama rather than Don Quixote as “Zen
incarnate,”
he would have hit his mark, for in that one act of tumbling into his fabled
“River” that is nothing more than a brook, the lama not only takes a
pratfall as Quixote does whenever he translates a common reality into a scene
from medieval romance but also frees himself from his last imperfection through
love of the boy, that same Kim who was distracted from his teachings when he saw
“the very Wheel itself” by the side of a road, with its scenes of humanity
“warmly alive.” All this
surpasses Blyth’s “Zen in literature” and is further yet from
Siddhartha’s relentless wordiness and Govinda’s ersatz Buddhist vision by
the side of a river
in the concluding section of Hesse’s novel. As
for Alpert, Leary, and Tolle, they disappear in the dust of their meaningless
words as soon as the lama begins to speak of his search and exchanges gifts with
the curator of the “Wonder House” at Lahore.
Postscript
During
the last weekend of January, 1984, which fell by a double coincidence on the
thirty-fourth anniversary of Orwell’s death, I flew to London to see an
exhibit of Venetian painting at the Royal Academy. Early
the following morning, I took an express train north to see the cathedral at
Durham, which appeared from afar on the heights of the cliff above the River
Weir as the train rounded a bend and slowly pulled into the station. The
early morning sun had dissipated the freezing fog through which the train had
passed the length of the journey, although the cathedral still shimmered in a
sparkling haze like a late Turner or Monet. As
I stepped out of the car and looked around, a station hand who was sweeping the
platform came up to me and asked if I had come to see the cathedral. When
I answered yes, he remarked that the very building of it was a wonder. “They
did it all without modern machinery, and it’s stood there for centuries and
hasn't budged an inch. My council
house is only three years old and the front steps are already moving out of
line.” At the entrance to the
cathedral was a sign that read, “We would like visitors to know that people
have been worshipping here every Sunday for the past nine hundred years.”
Notes
Leary
died during a “former Now” on May 31, 1996.
The
Biblical equivalent of “there’s a sucker born every
minute,” once attributed to P. T. Barnum and subsequently traced to one of
his competitors, who was referring to the spectators of a hoax perpetrated
against him by “the master of
humbugs” himself.
3
In “The Pleasures of
Imperialism,” the tenth essay in Culture
and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said declares that Kipling has placed the
lama “firmly... within the protective orbit of British Rule in India. This
is symbolized in Chapter 1, when the elderly British museum curator gives the
Abbot his spectacles, thus adding to the man’s spiritual prestige and
authority, consolidating the justness and legitimacy of Britain’s benevolent
sway.” It is Said, however, not
Kipling, who makes the lama subservient to “British Rule in India,” since
he omits the lama’s gift to the curator, an “open iron-work pencase…. It
was a piece of ancient design, Chinese, of an iron that is not smelted these
days; and the collector’s heart in the curator’s bosom had gone out to it
from the first.” The scene in
fact depicts a heartfelt exchange between scholars of two very different
cultures, men who are sensitive, moreover, to certain weaknesses in each
other, the curator to the lama’s old eyes and scratched spectacles (when he
looks through them, he recognizes that their “power was almost exactly that
of his own pair”), and the lama to the curator’s “collector’s
heart.” The nature of the
lama’s journey also means nothing to Said, who refers to it merely as “the
quaint sincerity of his search.” About
the lama’s vision at the end, he says that “some of this is mumbo jumbo,
of course” (so much for his sympathies with the suppressed spirituality of
colonial India), and he also claims that “Kipling is less interested in
religion for its own sake... than in local color, scrupulous attention to
exotic detail, and the all-enclosing realities of the Great Game.” This
too is a piece of intellectual dishonesty and is flatly contradicted by the
closing words of the novel, which Kipling gives to Teshoo Lama:
“
... So thus the Search is ended. For
the merit I have acquired, the River of the Arrow is here. It
broke forth at our feet, as I have said. I
have found it. Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold
of Freedom to free thee from all sin—as I am free, and sinless. Just
is the Wheel! Certain is our
deliverance. Come!”
He
crossed his hand on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won Salvation for
himself and his beloved.
It
would take an essay twice as long as Said’s to separate the facts of the
novel and even his own few worthwhile points from the chicanery of his
polished lies.
To which one could add the ubiquitous
photographs of imams and suicide bombers in jihadist states and communities
and the disturbing suggestions of a Leader cult in the posters and photo
portraits of President Obama that have been flooding the public arena since
the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign. Apropos
Soviet propaganda and subversion, the politics of guru worship held particular
interest for the KGB; for, according to Yuri Bezmenov, a former agent who was
involved in this episode of its history, the regime was bent on exploiting the
pacifism of the celebrity guru craze as part of its strategy to demoralize the
west. See “Yuri Bezmenov on KGB
interest in Yoga”: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Srw3Ysda1XY&NR=1.
The harmony between the lama’s
iconography and “the living pictures” of the Wheel reflects an aesthetic
principle for Kipling that appears in another work of this period: Letters of Travel, 1892-1914, in which he first describes a scene on
a tropical freighter as though it were work of art and then passes judgment on
studio painting in his time:
A
blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a stanchion spreads his wings against
the sun in an ecstasy of terror. Half-a-dozen
red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from their ripening-places,
and are lying between the feet of the fighters. One
pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear…. The
faithful sunlight that puts everything into place, gives… [the officer’s]
whiskers and the hair on the back of his tanned wrist just the colour of the
copper pot, the bear’s fur and the trampled pines. For
the rest, there is the blue sea beyond the awnings.... Now,
disregarding these things and others—wonders and miracles all—men are
content to sit in studios and, by light that is not light, to fake subjects
from pots and pans and rags and bricks that are called “pieces of colour.”
Their collection of rubbish costs in the end quite as much as a ticket, a
first-class one, to new worlds where the “props” are given away with the
sunshine.
Kipling is a master of suggestion and
often reveals a wealth of unspoken observations in a single line. Note,
for example, the emotional range that O’Hara’s words encompass, from the
heights of fairytale imagery (“Nine hundred first-class devils, whose god
was a Red Bull on a green field”) to the grim reality of “poor O’Hara
that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line.” Although
Kipling never says it outright, we are meant to understand that O’Hara has
an instinctive understanding of a child’s imagination, and his care for the
boy shines through even in the midst of his self-pity and addiction; for he
couches his command in the only way that it could find a permanent home in the
heart of a child, which is not through reasons and explanations but by the
language of enchantment. Moreover,
this language, as O’Hara’s uses it, is grounded in reality, since his
prophecy that that “it would... all come out right some day” is based on
the actual content of his papers, and even this outcome is tempered by the
realistic observation that his documents can only work their “magic” if
those “nine hundred first-class devils... had not forgotten O’Hara.”
In Zen
in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942).
Dr.
Steve Kogan is a native of Brooklyn and was educated largely at Columbia
University. He has taught for over
three decades at The Borough of Manhattan Community College.
back to Contents
***************************
From
Arcadia to Empire:
The Aeneid’s
Elusive
Allegory
(Part
One)
John
R. Harris
I.
Scholars vs. Poets (Intellectualism vs. Vision)
Vergil’s Aeneid was one of my first—and remains one of my
enduring—literary loves. That is
an odd admission in an epoch when the Classics are very rarely studied at all,
when the Greek is usually prized over the Roman wherever Classics programs
survive, and when the favorite Roman authors of professional Classicists are
almost invariably lyric poets like Catullus or eloquent wags like Ovid.
In my early days as a Classics major, I can recall a fellow student’s
disparaging the last line of Aeneas’s exhortation before a desperate charge
into Troy’s flaming streets: Una salus
victis nullam sperare salutem (“The only safety for the vanquished lies in
hoping for no safety”). This
golden-haired child of the bourgeoisie-hating bourgeoisie was pleased to brand
the verse jingoistic propaganda worthy of a John Wayne movie.
That might as well have been the day’s reigning assessment of the
entire epic, with Vietnam still weighing heavily on our national consciousness:
the Aeneid was the product of a
militaristic empire’s well-bankrolled efforts to brainwash the masses.
Yet the line in question (and, indeed, the whole epic) suffers brutal
mischaracterization if reduced to such terms.
In Aen. 2.354, Aeneas is elevating despair, not king or fatherland or
tradition. If anything, he is within
touching distance of the sublime spiritual conundrum, “Those who would gain
their life must lose it.” The
utter selflessness of expecting no tomorrow—of casting loose all moorings to
peace and home and family—is no doubt an occasionally useful form of ecstasy
for an emperor to inspire in his soldiers… but there is no question of any
emperor, literal or figurative, behind the scenes of Troy’s fall.
Aeneas’s battlecry might be paraphrased, “We are betrayed and
unmanned by wanting to preserve precious fragments of our doomed world.
Too late for that! This life
is at an end… or if it’s not, and if some cultural fragments may yet be
saved, only releasing all regard for life and culture will perhaps win them a
new dawn.”
This turns out, then, to be a highly complex utterance, involving not
only a dispassionate distance from one’s own life and the generalized beauty
of a living order and purpose, but even implying the virtue
of not loving too much, of not forming insurmountable attachments.
I have often marveled at the resonance between such Vergilian passages
and Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Hold nothing of this world as immutable.
Be thorough in action, even apparently self-annihilating action.
Know that the soul’s peace resides elsewhere.
This all sounds to me far more like the Epicurean’s ataraxia—the
“undisturbedness” echoed by most post-Socratic ethicists—than like the
marching orders of a Nazi strike force.
Yet to my generation of “scholars”, a passing resemblance was
sufficient ground for a death warrant. The
one course offered in Vergil during all the years of my graduate work addressed
the Eclogues (or Bucolica)—a
not uninformative study, but a mere prolegomenon, if even that, for one of
Western literature’s greatest works. Exponentially
more common were courses regaling the student with all the abundant high-jinks
and “naughty bits” to be found throughout the lyric and elegiac poets.
An objective observer might well be forgiven for concluding that young
people confused about their sexuality or passively aggressive in shamed
resistance to their native socio-economic privileges had discovered in such fare
a covert vengeance on middle class values, if not a validation of their own
increasingly anomic habits.
As a matter of fact, I have never sat through a single minute of formal
course work focused on the Aeneid, in
Latin or in translation, at any level of my educational experience.
I introduced myself to the epic when, as an undergraduate English major,
I decided to dust off my high-school Latin (a program discontinued when I was in
ninth grade) by purchasing Clyde Pharr’s edition of Books 1-6, generously
featuring relevant vocabulary and footnotes on the bottom half of every page of
Vergilian text. Something must have
captivated me instantly about the bard, since I ended up dedicating my
master’s thesis and a large part of my doctoral dissertation to his
masterpiece… but I cannot swear that it was his concept of heroism or the lacrimae rerum so characteristic of his style. It
may, at that inaugural stage, simply have been his “grandiloquence”: the
distinctly Vergilian habit, that is, of repeating the same event or observation
immediately from a slightly different angle or with slightly shifted emphasis.
Conticuere omnes intentique ora
tenebant… “They all grew silent and, intent, they stilled their
mouths.” My master’s thesis
actually catalogued hundreds of such passages.
In short, I do not feel beholden to the academy for placing this great
work within my grasp. I will go
farther: I will say that I have read very few books or articles which
significantly elucidated the Aeneid’s
literary qualities to me. I recall
admiring the work of Adam Parry, a younger scion of the brilliant but
short-lived Parry clan; and I will rely heavily in this essay upon W. R.
Johnson’s Darkness Visible, which
incited me to pursue a certain line of inquiry even if it did not utterly win me
to a specific thesis (and I doubt that Johnson would admit to the book’s
having had a specific thesis). In
looking back over Johnson’s profound little volume, in fact, I find that he
begins his concluding chapter in terms very like those with which I opened this
essay. His estimate of the
classicist machine clearly tends toward a suspicion that poetic effects are
likely to be mauled therein:
Great
writers are never the products of the times they live in, though they often seem
so because they reflect—indirectly but brilliantly—the events, the common
attitudes, hopes, and fears of their contemporaries.
But they do not merely react to events or passions of “doctrines of the
times” as purely popular writers do; they also react against events and
contemporary attitudes and use these critical reactions to shape something
permanent and true out of the ephemeral. All
these true truisms mean here is that the term “the Augustan Age” identifies
a propaganda device that was very successful [in teaching Vergil beside other
Roman authors] and is now a handy but somewhat deceptive category for people who
are engaged in writing or lecturing about the poetry or the art or the political
events or social patterns that existed within a certain span of time.
Professor Johnson’s sensitivity is the exception that proves the rule,
however. His book was greeted by a
storm of indignation on the far shore of the Atlantic, where Vergil’s epic has
long been taught (under the magnetism of the British empire) as a paean of those
who sacrifice self-interest to the commonweal.
The Old Guard, or so-called Oxford School (Johnson’s “European
School”), numbering in its phalanx such worthies as C. S. Lewis, Sir Maurice
Bowra, and Brooks Otis, insists that history and culture are on its side.
Vergil cannot have intended his epic as a rejection of militarism—even
a subtle one—because anti-militarism was something that the Yanks had thought
up in the sixties and were now trying to import retroactively into Augustan
Rome. Implicit in this case (and it
is precisely the sort of case one hears in Classics departments on most topics)
is the assumption that authors are incapable of thinking independently of their
cultural scaffolding, however imaginative may be their artistic genius or
fertile the depth of their personal experience.
The culture surrounding Vergil embraced an “anything for the
fatherland’s glory” kind of ethic; there is every reason to think that
literate members of that culture received Vergil’s public readings of his
work-in-progress as an endorsement of such jingoism.
Therefore, this was Vergil’s intent.
It cannot be true that a later age with a different perspective may
perceive subtle facets lost to Vergil’s contemporaries: it can only be true
that later ages read their own dominant preoccupation into a past which did not
share it.
Not that I have ever been a card-carrying follower of the so-called
Harvard School (also viewed by Johnson with reservations)—for the argument on
this side does indeed seem to me overstated in places, which may account for
much of the other side’s bristling. I
cannot read the Aeneid as a deliberate and consistent indictment of imperial
aggression. In what follows, I shall
applaud Johnson’s astute identification of certain baleful images in the epic
which come to have, through cumulative impact, a distinctly symbolic power.
Something is surely wrong in this universe, and fighting not only fails
to put it right, but must be closely equated
with it. Yet not
fighting also seldom offers a credible solution—perhaps never, where major
contests are involved. Evil, I must
say, often seems a necessary choice in the Aeneid:
or the sorting out of evils, I should say, in an effort to choose the least evil
of them is a Vergilian fact of life. Karl
Galinsky has maintained, for instance, that Aeneas’s slaying of Turnus in the
incomplete work’s final scene would not only be acceptable to Roman tastes,
but obligatory to the Roman sense of duty.
(An Alsatian, Galinsky favored the European perspective in these matters;
and he must certainly have offered some excellent classes in the Aeneid
while at Austin—my bad luck was to be out-of-step with the curricular cycle,
apparently.) What must be granted to
the Harvard scholars, however, is that the slaughter of the Rutulian prince
remains an evil, acceptable or obligatory though it be.
More than that, the fact that such
behavior may be acceptable or obligatory in human affairs implies a deeply
pessimistic message about human life and culture.
I believe that Vergil has discovered nothing less than the
“fallenness” of mankind—quite a remarkable find for an offspring of the
civilization whose great luminary, Socrates, insisted that no one knowingly does
wrong.
What evidence have I in support of this assertion?
Is there reason to suppose that Vergil knew Hebrew or had the Pentateuch
translated for him? I have no such
evidence whatever, any more than I have amassed clues that a wandering scholar
told him of the Bhagavad-Gita.
Any claim of this kind would be extravagant to the point of silliness.
Yet what vexes me about the Classics establishment is that appeals to
essential human nature are considered equally extravagant.
One cannot allege that the basic moral insight, “Thorough, persistent
right action is impossible.” lies waiting to be unearthed by any intelligent,
introspective person. There must be
a source, a historical primum
mobile. The position is absurd.
It overlooks that no truly, fully historical first cause would be
coherent in matters of morality, since 1) behaviors would be dependent on an
historical event, not anchored in human thought, and hence lacking in genuine
moral compulsion; and 2) that the “prophet” of the new regime would have to
draw his ideas from some preceding influence—or else his dynamic effect could
only be explained by inspiration
(i.e., access to a transcending spiritual communion), which would thrust us out
of historicity and into a territory beyond the scholar’s reach.
Classicists today are in fact as “anti-essentialist” as English
professors. As a group, they will
not countenance the notion that “human nature” extends beyond biology.
(Hence the fascination with the Dionysiac and the yawning sufferance of
the Apollonian: “that old bore”, a full professor of international repute
once referred to the Stoic Seneca in one of my graduate classes.)
Of course, why would we call any work “classic” unless it possessed
qualities which endured above the ebb and flow of epochal circumstance?
And why would the classicist tolerate the laurels of light and reason
traditionally bestowed upon his field by gullible outsiders if he accepted only
sex, hunger, and the will to power as motives not founded in cultural
conditioning? He accepts the laurels
because they are offered, and because they are laurels.
Why refuse free adulation? But
the cognitive dissonance stirred up by constant hypocrisy (adulation turns out
to be not quite free, since essential
human nature turns out to include a conscience) at least gravitates against
teaching the most “classic” of works. Exit
the Aeneid.
Perhaps by now my introduction has sufficiently justified my decision to
write as an experienced reader, a trained linguist, a published novelist, and an
adult human being rather than as a “scholar” (using the word in a very
narrow sense). That is, I shall cite
minimally from other studies of the Aeneid,
because I have found few of them to be useful in tracing the work’s
overarching tendencies. Such studies
too often cannot see the forest for the trees.
Immersed in details about Vergil’s circle of poet-colleagues and
patrons, about his shadowy past, about the prevailing tastes and beliefs of his
day, etc., etc., they seem to have immunized themselves against reading
the text. And while the New
Criticism has been anything but new for a long time now, no amount of
historicizing can impugn its most basic insight: that a literary text is a work
of art, an object, and hence the alpha and omega of any artistic experience
which involves it. We can ultimately
best understand Vergil by reading Vergil: by remarking what images he favors,
analyzing their context, comparing the circumstances of recurrence… yes, and
also by noting what emotions most move his characters, how these characters act
when moved, what consequences result from their actions, and how consistent a
moral portrait the overall mass of action and reaction ends up producing.
That we who so evaluate motive and moral consistency may be twenty-first
century Americans does not disqualify us from a membership in humanity.
Were we incapable of understanding the loss of a child, a lover, or a
friend as an ancient Roman would have done, then the rationale for studying the
past’s literature as literature would
have evaporated—and the rank and file of our ailing culture are perhaps not
far from that point of insular nullity. But
this would be far from a concession of cultural relativism—an admission that
one age can never understand another. On
the contrary, it would be a confession that our own age had fallen out of a
bimillennial line of civilized continuity into barbarism.
If we wish to muster ourselves back into that noble line, where mere
gestures can express complex feelings and life itself may be risked to fulfill a
created expectation, then reading literary classics is one obvious restorative
measure. As for those
“classicists”, be they graduate students or tenured professors, who rate our
dietary, tonsorial, and connubial habits as more important determinants of our
value system than a brush with death through starvation or disease or combat, I
really don’t think such people capable of assessing either another culture’s
view of life or, indeed, their own
culture’s. Great literature, at
last, is about life. A scholar who
has done nothing but read, scribble, and pedantically spar throughout his mortal
existence is in no position to do anything with a text but correct its spelling.
II.
Imagery: Life as Ongoing War
The early Greek philosopher Anaxagoras held that all things began in
cosmic spirit, but that terrestrial life took its specific origin from water,
heat, and earth. If a poet’s
creative genius be held to determine the first seed and ultimate destination of
his intricate fictions, then we may divine something of that alpha and omega in
the specific terrestrial images to which he recurs.
Such often-evoked objects may not so much be symbols as mere mood-setters
(especially if we require that the symbol’s directions of reference be plainly
intended by their author). In
Vergil’s case, I think we may indeed discern something elemental pulsing with
spiritual alarm through a narrow cluster of favorite images.
Johnson captured two of these in the title of his book: fire and shadows.
That pair already introduces an irony, of course, as Johnson knew (and as
Milton knew before him). Fire
spreads light, which is a universal expression for the expelling of ignorance or
“darkness”—yet it is precisely in the presence of bright light that we are
most keenly aware of the shadows thrown contrastively where illumination cannot
reach. Johnson is entirely correct,
it seems to me, when he stresses that blazes of glory are routinely attended by
tragedy and even atrocity in Vergil’s authorial hands.
To these images I would add those of blood and madness.
A wound or a lurid stain is conceptually far more distinct, to be sure,
than whatever picture words like insanus,
vesanus, and furiens may evoke. Nevertheless,
the four images taken together often appear to be interchangeable in the Aeneid.
Fire is always potentially rage and lunacy, darkness always poised to
burst into flames—and from an eruption of any or all three of these may pour
blood in frightful abundance.
Books 2 and 4 show the highest concentrations of these images, though
they are sown more or less evenly throughout the epic.
That in itself is suggestive: the climactic plundering and torching of
Troy and Dido’s tragic dissolution into madness mirror one the other in
Vergil’s mind. Not all of the
second book’s most compelling clusters of imagery, furthermore, directly
relate to fighting: in fact, we are seldom witnessing raw battle-fury (what the
Germans call Wüt) at such moments.
Writes Vergil of the Trojan Horse’s introduction into the citadel, for
instance:
… quater ipso in limine portae
substitit
atque utero sonitum quater arma dedere;
instamus
tamen immemores caecique furore
et
monstrum infelix sacrata sistimus arce.
2. 242-245
Four
times on the gate’s very threshold it stuck, and four times the arms in its
belly made a clatter; yet we pressed on thoughtlessly, blinded by zeal, and
settled the baleful wonder within the sacred stronghold.
Of
the fourfold complex of images, blood and fire are here somewhat implied in the
arms’ clatter: for we all know what points and blades do, and the clang of
these objects hints that they are bright with polish, not muted in dirt and
rust. Darkness leaks into the scene
both from the Horse’s great belly and from the Trojans’ blindness, which
state of mind is said to be stirred by a mad zeal (furor).
Rage, of course, might just as well be associated with fire, as it is
less than 100 verses farther along:
arma
amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis
sed
glomerare manum bello et concurrere in arcem
cum
sociis ardent animi; furor iraque mentem
praecipitat,
pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.
2. 314-317
Insane,
I arm myself. Not that there is much
sense in arms—but my spirits burn to be immersed in battle and to hurl myself
with my comrades into the citadel. Mad
frenzy and rage drive me on. The
beauty of dying in the fray is irresistible.
If
arms may again be assumed to imply both fire and blood (and fiery images are
seconded by Aeneas’s burning spirits), then only darkness is missing from this
passage—though the odd verb glomerare
suggests burial at the bottom of a gory dog-pile.
To be sure, we have here drawn closer to the rage of actual combat.
The prospect of fighting to the end, however, plainly appeals to Aeneas
as a kind of suicide, not as a likely means of defending his city.
Psychic derangement holds the upper hand in these pictures.
The feminine influence is stirred into this toxic mix without any
apparent incongruity when we are told that Aeneas’s rampaging comrade Coroebus
had recently arrived in Troy insano Cassandrae incensus amore (343: “inflamed by an insane love
of Cassandra”). One hardly stops
to wonder if our narrator thinks love itself insane, if Coroebus loves too much,
if the raving Cassandra is simply a bad choice of amorous interest… or if all
strong emotion has turned to liability on this fatal night.
The last supposition may be the best, inasmuch as Coroebus indeed commits
a kind of suicide upon witnessing the rape of his betrothed at the altar of
Minerva. Non
tulit hanc speciem furiata mente Coroebus / et sese medium iniecit periturus in
agmen (407-408: “Coroebus, his mind crazed, could not bear this sight, but
hurled himself, ready to die, into the midst of the battleline”).
The Trojan contingent under Aeneas, by this point, has been compared
through simile to ravening wolves in a dark mist (350-353), and soon after draws
comparison to a bright, venomous snake, its neck swollen with rage (379-381).
In other words, these desperate men have degenerated from a properly
human state to an animal mindlessness.
Indeed, the transformation is somewhat physical in that one of their rash
ploys is to assume the armor of slain Greeks—a shift which eventually draws
volleys of friendly fire down upon them.
The snake simile is reprised when the dreadful Pyrrhus penetrates the
inner sanctum of Priam’s palace, triumphantly poised to slaughter Troy’s
king (471-475). There is nothing
particularly martial about what follows. On
the contrary, for grotesquerie and downright sadism, it rivals those very
peculiar carvings of the Trojan War which Aeneas views when first entering
Carthage (1. 464-493: everything from throat-slitting by night to desecration of
corpses to necrophilia is here, but not a single scene of equal hand-to-hand
combat). Pyrrhus first baits the old
man by eviscerating the boy Polites at the altar where the royal couple has
taken refuge. When Priam feebly
flings a spear in furious indignation, the brute dispatches him, too.
Aeneas, having watched these horrors from afar, describes them
appropriately. Pyrrhus is furens,
like a wild torrent (498-499); the expired Priam desecrates the altar’s flames
with his blood; the legendary fifty thalami
of the palace topple in another image of suffocation and burial.
Blood, fire, madness, and darkness… and not one brush stroke of it
hinting that ainsi va la guerre—that
war must necessarily break a few eggs to make an omelet.
War is perhaps the purest distillation of the madness Vergil paints in
Book 2: but remains a mere species of madness, not a worthy endeavor from which
madness may incidentally detract. Neither
Coroebus nor Pyrrhus—nor even the suicidal Aeneas, with his battlecry of pulchrum mori—is primarily attending to the business of breaking
through the opponent’s phalanx.
To be sure, we should look for such a picture on a canvas properly suited
to its representation: the scenes of pitched battle in Books 7, 11, and 12.
Images of insane rapine are somewhat less concentrated here—but only
somewhat. Just as the Carthaginian
frieze viewed by Aeneas and Acates offers not a single panel where equally
matched heroes fight toe to toe, so the vibrant portrait of the Italian war in
the later books is flushed with shades of brutal excess, tragic misjudgment, and
supernatural frenzy. The Queen of
the Gods, Juno, inaugurates this conflict as she did the storm which pitched the
Trojan refugees on African shores in Book 1.
At both points, her fuming, implacable indignation at past slights is
linearly rationalized and rhetorically magnified with an obsessive precision
that could well allegorize Envy in a morality play.
The perverted intensity of these passages (1. 35-49 and 7. 293-322) is
indeed undervalued for its Miltonian genius at representing a warped soul
through speech. As we shall see, the
relationship between Juno—whatever Vergil means to symbolize in her—and
murderous rage must hold a vital clue to understanding the author’s view on
the origins of human strife.
In Book 1, Juno had enlisted the aid of Aeolus, ancient god of the winds,
by dangling before him the prospect of alliance with the most comely nymph of
her attendants. The distinctly
feminine instigation of obstacles to Jupiter’s grand plan is again underscored
in Book 7—underscored four times, in fact.
First of all, Juno summons the dire Allecto from Hades, instructing her
to inspire a belligerent rage in the Italians parallel to that chaotic violence
unleashed earlier by the old god of the winds.
Allecto dutifully betakes herself to a mortal female who will become a
constant and finally self-destructive firebrand in the cause of havoc, the
Latian queen Amata: here is the second association of femininity with mad
passion. The dread Fury fits the
queen with a poisoned, serpentine necklace spun more or less metaphorically from
dark concealment, insanity, fire, and the implicit wounds of venom (7. 349-356).
Amata immediately stirs up the local womenfolk in a feigned bacchanal (simulato
numine Bacchi, 385), an image which plainly echoes that of the Bacchante to
whom the degenerating Dido was compared in Book 4; and the meltdown of civil
order begins, the frenzied queen leading a wild procession of torches in the
dark mountains (frondosis montibus,
387).
The third invocation of a female figure finds Allecto assuming the guise
of the ancient Calybe, a priestess of Juno
(415-419), to incite the valiant warrior Turnus as he lies sleeping.
This masquerade fails to have the desired effect: Turnus scoffs at the
wizened hag, telling her (apparently more awake than asleep) that a man’s work
should be left to men. Allecto grows
enraged. Her mask melts away (exarsit in iras, 445), hissing snakes rise from her hair, and she
declares, “In my hand I carry war and death” (bella manu letumque fero, 455).
Turnus fully wakens in a trembling sweat and calls madly for his arms: saevit
amor ferri et scelerati insania belli (461: “a craving for iron rages in
him—the insanity of wicked warfare”).
As this fatal kettle is brought to a boil, young Ascanius (here called
Iulus), Aeneas’s son, innocently wanders into the Italian woods to go
a-hunting. Excited hunting dogs
(literally maddened: rabidae, 493)
unfortunately rouse a stag that is the special pet of the local ruler’s
daughter, Silvia. The boy draws his
bow and fires: Vergil describes him as eximiae
laudis succensus amore—“ enflamed by a longing for high praise”
((496), leaving us to puzzle over what this childish desire to please possesses
of corrosive adult passion. The
arrow, of course, does not miss its mark. Bleeding
profusely and groaning like a human suppliant (501-502), the stag returns with
the last of its vital energy to Silvia, whose grieving reaches the ears of every
neighboring farmer. In the hands of
all, wrath turns tools of honest labor into deadly weapons (telum
ira facit, 508)… and the idyllic peace of this pleasant backwater is
permanently ruptured as men in both of the coalescing battlelines fall slain.
Fully satisfied that she has ignited “spirits with the love of insane
Mars” (animos insani Martis amore,
550), Allecto returns to the recesses of hell through a dismal vale hidden in
dense foliage (561-567). Amata’s
wild troupe of Bacchantes meanwhile converge upon the pacific but ineffectual
Latinus, pressing him to declare war on the Teucrians by flinging open the
temple of Janus. He refuses in
gestures of futility oddly resonant with Pontius Pilate’s hand-washing (abstinuit
tactu pater aversusque refugit / foeda ministeria, et caecis se condidit umbris,
618-619: “the old man held his hands aloof and, having turned away, fled from
these loathsome duties and hid himself in inner shadows”).
Yet Juno supernaturally steps up to fulfill the rite, driving the doors
open with her own hand.
To reiterate the lesson of all that we have just observed: for Vergil, it
is war that erupts from passion, not excessive passion which erupts now and then
during the manly business of war. That
the feminine is implicated in dangerous spiritual surges throughout Book 7 as
Aeneas’s fragile truce with Latinus dissolves can only underscore how alien to
the Vergilian vision is any view of warfare as naturally virile; or to phrase
the thought more accurately, the feminine inspiration of warfare in Vergil
stresses that men naturally—if paradoxically—tend to compromise their
manhood as they go about the “business of men”.
For men are least men when they cannot control themselves: the Socratic
tradition had taught the ancient world as much for four centuries by this point.
Passion is literally pain (from the verb pati), the anguish of an impulse resisted by the rational mind yet
burdensome to the unappeased nerves. From
passion grows strife—and from strife follows the madness of bloody
destruction. These associations are
as inescapable in the Aeneid’s text
as they are grudging of hope for long-lasting human happiness.
III.
Femininity, Passion, and Tragedy
If we now follow this thread of the feminine—which we have found
surprisingly but brightly twined about Vergil’s other images of war—back to
the epic’s beginning, we indeed discover that the female influence has played
midwife to strife from the start. The
Trojan fleet is very nearly sunk in a terrific storm during our introduction to
Aeneas. The vengeful, ever-seething
Juno has staged the whole thing by luring Aeolus to help her in the fashion
described above. Had not Neptune
intervened in a timely manner and chastened the unruly waves, the glorious
mission to found Rome would have been ignominiously drowned; for Jupiter, though
having conceived a high destiny for Aeneas, is seldom sufficiently attentive to
ward off Juno’s efforts at sabotage from those whom he has set into very risky
motion.
A very similar sequence will appear in a few hundred lines when Aeneas
relates the final hours of Troy to Dido in Book 2.
Specifically, he describes the end of Laocoon.
This worthy man had stood alone against the foolhardy proposal (fomented
by the vile spy and liar Sinon) to bring the great wooden horse within the
citadel’s walls. For his exemplary
caution and civic-mindedness, Laocoon is soon after attacked by a supernatural
horror while sacrificing to Neptune (ductus
Neptuno sorte sacerdos, 2. 201) along Troy’s windy shores: a two-headed
serpent, sent by Minerva. Upon
launching an utterly futile defense of his two young sons and his lineage’s
future, Laocoon himself is torn to shreds. Sic
semper optimis, one is tempted to say of this epic where bad things so often
happen to good people!
Vergil’s Roman Athena, the goddess Minerva, appears rarely in these
verses, but we may note that she is a double of Juno in many ways: both were
slighted in the Judgment of Paris, both therefore became implacable enemies of
Troy, and both—in Vergil’s eyes—channel
their hatred
cleverly into
opportunities for
vengeance
unnoticed
by more powerful male gods who might have resisted.
We do not know if Laocoon’s immortal patron chose not to save him: the
incident, after all, is being recounted by another mortal who can only guess at
divine will. What remains certain is
the disturbing fact that this morally superior man was indeed cruelly punished
for his virtue by a ravening force of female (read “passionate”) provenance
as the more stable male force of order did nothing—seems, indeed, to have
known of nothing amiss in the cosmos. If
Neptune saves the Aeneades in Book 1 while Jupiter is lost in Olympian dreams,
the Old Man of the Sea is himself similarly vacant and anemic in Book 2.
The agonizing
end of the Trojan priest Laocoon is commemorated in a sculpture (probably a
Roman copy of a Greek original) recovered from a storeroom in the Vatican about
five hundred years ago.
Schiller also dedicates several pages of his Vom
Pathetischen und Erhabenen to this brave man’s futile struggle against a
two-headed sea serpent devouring his sons in cruel ambush.
The philosopher most certainly had Vergil prominently in his thoughts;
and the unknown Roman sculptor, even if he borrowed some of his inspiration from
the Eastern Mediterranean, may have been stirred to do so by the Aeneid‘s
second book.
Though this catastrophe is narrated by Aeneas to Queen Dido, and though
Aeneas himself often has scarcely an inkling of the gods’ intentions, to say
that the goddess Minerva sends the serpent while Neptune looks on would not
depart from the castaway hero’s own recollection of the event.
The pattern repeats itself at every critical juncture of the epic: a
female divinity, seething with rage or vengefulness or jealousy, overrides the
authority of a presiding male divinity to turn the cosmos inside-out.
Indeed, no later than the epic’s first verses after its invocation, we
see Juno plotting to annihilate the Trojan fleet, reciting in crazed soliloquy
her grievances against the tribe in a lather of implacable indignation.
Juno enlists the aid of Aeolus, ancient god of the winds, by dangling
before him the prospect of alliance with the most comely nymph of her
attendants. A symbolically female
force of passion having destabilized a symbolically male force of order, the
world quite literally slides into chaos around the Trojan fleet, which is only
saved by the timely rise of Neptune from the waves.
Like Jupiter’s many rehabilitations of the imperial destiny awaiting
Aeneas, this one comes almost too late and leaves the audience convinced that
the rational male influence tends to doze in moments of smooth sailing.
When I teach the Aeneid to
undergraduates, I always hasten to add at this point that Vergil’s symbolism,
if sexist, is not so in any facile way. Passion
is a formidable power in the epic, not a weak-spirited cringing from hard labor
or intense concentration. Over the
short haul, it often appears to dominate the universe, rather as Euripides’s
Medea dominates Kreon’s plodding legalism and Jason’s slippery sophistry.
Furthermore, both male and female characters may often be said to display
an orderly male side and a passionate female side in the epic.
Aeneas employs words like amens and
insanus to describe to Dido the
street-fighting in which he and others engaged during Troy’s final night, a
sequence where flames and darkness are also invoked as much in metaphor of the
combatants’ spiritual state as in portrayal of the setting.
An indirect association, therefore, of fighting with the female through
Dionysiac frenzy may be divined throughout this section.
Indeed, the hero claims that a tristis
Erinys drove him to take arms and rush into the streets (2. 337)—very like
saying, “A female devil made me do it.”
His comrade Coroebus suicidally hurls himself into the Greek ranks, as
noted above, upon beholding the rape of Cassandra, his betrothed.
Then we have the other side of the coin.
No Vergilian female is more poised, sober, and deliberate than the
magnificent Camilla. The poet
introduces her as a warrior who disdains the womanly pursuits of spinning and
weaving (bellatrix, non illa colo
calathisve Minervae / femineas adsueta manus, 7. 805-806) but suited,
instead, to harsh battles (806-807) and races with the wind (806).
Yet this explicitly undomesticated female is by no means without charm.
All the country lads (omnis tectis
agrisque effusa iuventus, 812) admire her as she leads her rustic contingent
to war. For some reason, Vergil also
includes their mothers among the breathless bystanders (813), as if Camilla were
the ideal prospect for a daughter-in-law. Her
femininity at this point is not nullified, but supple and in check—the more
powerful, perhaps, for that reason (since explosions of female passion tend to
ignite “manly” fury). Indeed,
she is much the cooler head in Book 11, where the leadership of the Italian
troops is divided between her and Turnus. The
male valiant impetuously charges off to arrange an ill-advised, vengefully
conceived ambush for his rival Aeneas. Camilla
stays behind to defend Latium, which she does with lethal effectiveness…
until, that is, her attention is fatally riveted by bright plunder.
Vergil tells us that she incautiously follows the richly adorned Chloreus—a
priest (the ultimate irony) of that same Cybele who feminized her male
votaries—“burning with a womanly desire of booty and spoils” (totumque
incauta per agmen / femineo praedae et spoliarum ardebat amore, 11.
781-782). This single lapse into a
faint surge of passion suffices to seal her doom.
The devious sharpshooter Arruns looses an arrow that finds its mark, and
the virgin warrior expires bleeding from her breast in the arms of inconsolable
attendants—very much as we saw Dido perish in Book 4.
Indeed, the star-crossed Dido begins her poetic life looking quite like
the tragic Camilla. The young queen
is compared in simile to the virgin huntress Diana—the most boyish of the
goddesses, perhaps—when she assumes her throne in Book 1 (498-504).
At this early point in the epic, Dido assumes a rightful place among the Aeneid‘s
august male rulers of simple, uncorrupt states created comfortably in the
“uncivilized”, almost Edenic west (cf. Acestes and Evander).
Her city’s walls are rising in orderly and energetic fashion.
Her people, occupied with their labors, give no hint of dissension.
She receives suppliants on her throne with an easy majesty and a generous
mansuetude which bear no sign of calculation.
Only after being maddened by passion for Aeneas does she become Book
4’s wounded deer:
uritur
infelix Dido totaque per vagatur
urbe
furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,
quam
procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit
pastor
agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum
nescius:
illa fuga silvas saltusque
peragrat
Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.
2. 68-73
The
unhappy Dido is on fire. Raging, she
wanders throughout the whole city, like a deer among Crete’s wild heights whom
a shepherd, trying to chase off with weapons, pierces in an improbable shot.
He turns his back on the arrow without knowing of its success as his
victim blindly flees through Mount Dicte’s forests and valleys, the lethal
dart clinging to her flank.
Note that this effusion of feminine passion has immediately evoked the
fourfold imagery of fire, darkness, blood, and madness which so often
characterizes Vergil’s combat scenes. Dido
is on fire. The preceding two lines
(66-67) emphasize the deeply hidden quality of the embers: the flame eats her
marrow (est mollis flamma medullas)
and a silent wound lives within her breast (tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus).
Of course, the simile makes the wound far more explicit while also
extroverting the inner shadows in steep mountain vales.
The single word furens specifies that the pitiable queen has lost her mind; but the
simile again, by likening her to an irrational beast, underscores that her
reason has forsaken her.
As the tragedy of Book 4 unfolds, we indeed find Dido’s anguished
femininity so regularly fused with images reserved for mortal combat in Book 2
that we might claim to be watching the fall of Troy all over again in metaphor.
Aeneas once more flees the city, with Jupiter insisting that he go forth
on a higher mission and while female deities create havoc at his back.
Towers do not literally topple, but they cease to rise as the reins of
state slip from the queen’s trembling hands (non
coeptae adsurgunt turres, 86). The
skirmishers in the streets are Dido’s warring hopes, and the slain and
bleeding corpses are her despair. Madly
(demens, 78), she craves to hear the
account of Troy’s last hours again from Aeneas’s lips.
In the night’s thick shadows, as the stars counsel sleep (81), she
strays through her empty palace, unable to keep to her bed.
The climactic “wedding” scene arranged by Venus and Juno shares some
of the same disastrous indications as attend Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam.
Aeneas and Dido have both “armed” themselves for a day of hunting,
which—according to divine plan (female divine
plan)—ends chaotically in a thunderstorm.
The entourage of both leaders flees helter-skelter (tecta metu petiere; ruunt de montibus amnes, 164: “they seek cover
in terror; rivers course from the mountains”).
Dido and her guest find shelter in a cave which, in a parody of marriage
rites, becomes a kind of altar. Flashes
of lightning serve as celebratory torches, and ululating mountain nymphs are
bridesmaids ((167-168). This day,
Vergil tells us in a rare moment of editorial doom-saying (yet very like the
pronouncement with which Aeneas concludes the death of Priam: haec
finis Priami fatorum, 2. 554 ff.), was the beginning of the end: ille
dies primus leti primusque malorum / causa fuit (169-170)—“this day was
the first of ruin, first as a cause of misfortunes.”
Of the many other passages which might be cited from Book 4 to
demonstrate how mad passion, bloody destruction, and femininity coalesce in
Vergil’s poetic imagination, two must not be left without highlighting: the
“Bacchante” simile and the queen’s suicide.
The disturbing simile creates a bookend with Book 1’s likening the
widowed queen, independent and in the full bloom of youthful competence, to the
virgin huntress Diana. Now, as Dame
Rumor drives her distraught with word of Aeneas’s imminent departure (impia Fama furenti…, 298 ff.), the tortured queen rages unthinking
and inflamed through the city: saevit
inops animi totamque incensa per urbem / bacchatur” (300-301).
The verb ending the clause just cited leads into an explicit comparison
of Dido with a Thyias, or votary of
Bacchus, as she celebrates his triennial rite of ritual delirium on Mount
Cithaeron (302-303). To this passage
might be appended another about 150 lines later, wherein the raving young woman
sees a cruel Aeneas in her dreams (agit ipse furentem / in somnis ferus Aeneas, 465-466) leaving her
all alone. A simile ensues comparing
these nightmares to the horrid visions endured by Pentheus demens just prior to his murder at a Dionysiac rite and a crazed
Orestes beset by a mother armed with fire and serpents (469-473).
Together, these scenes stress that Dido’s fury has reached fatal
proportions—that it can no more be characterized in clichéd fashion as
passionate love than Vergil’s warriors can be said to spill into bloodlust
only when they become rather too heated up.
Instead—and in both cases, love and war—we see psychic upheaval
resulting in annihilation of the human victim; and the victim, in both cases, is
he or she who suffers the passion far more than any recipient of fiery words or
homicidal blows.
Dido’s death, it need hardly be said, is very close to an act of war.
She impales herself with Aeneas’s sword, having surrounded herself with
his armor in a deceptive mockery of a purification rite, just as her
“marriage” had mocked traditional connubial rites.
(How many altars and sacrifices, from Laocoon’s to Priam’s to
Cassandra’s to Dido’s, are grotesquely inverted in this epic where one’s
“target god” often turns out to be either impervious or hostile!)
Vergil emphasizes a profusion of blood: the queen’s attendants witness
“a sword frothing with gore and hands smeared with blood” (664-665).
The news is said to spread like—once again—a running Bacchante (bacchatur, 666), and the palace resonates with womanly ululation (femineo
ululatu, 667). Vergil proposes a
simile of raging flames (flammaeque
furentes, 670) igniting the entire city to describe how quickly chaos seizes
hold of Carthage. He does not round
the comparison out by reminding us of Troy’s last hours… but he might well
have. The emotions and the results
are essentially the same.
IV.
Arcadia: Pastoral Island Where Boys Evade Women
If the female has a significant association with the Dionysiac in
Vergil’s epic—and, specifically, with the mad, destructive passion of
warfare—then we would expect to find venues relatively free of female
influence (if there are any such) equally free of carnage and tragedy.
As improbable as the terms of this proposition seem, the Aeneid
actually offers several such prospects.
Let us recall the younger Vergil’s Eclogues.
Though patterned after the highly stylized Bucolica
of the Hellenistic Greek poet Theocritus, Vergil’s pieces never admit a
female into the ranks of those shepherds whose quaint words are set down.
(The Theocritean landscape indeed tends to hum mostly with male voices:
this is likely part of what drew the Roman poet to it.)
Women are naturally featured in the tales and laments shared by our
uncouth rustics sprawled under scraggly trees—they represent the source,
invariably, of whatever frustrated ambition or anguishing hopelessness is known
to the denizens of the pastoral world. Yet
their disturbing gravity remains sufficiently remote that male emotions are not
warped from their placid loops into reckless collisions.
Wherever something of Arcadia survives in the Aeneid
(and it never survives for very long, to be sure, on the earth’s surface), a
similar tranquility appears to enjoy a fragile reign.
Dido’s Carthage itself, as has already been suggested, is paradoxically
such a place; for the queen, her volatile femininity neutralized momentarily by
Vergil’s Diana simile, is originally as competent and serene as Camilla (who
hails from the Arcadian hinterland, even as Dido has fled into it).
There is surely an echo, furthermore, of pristine Arcadia in Troy’s
royal sanctuary, where Priam and his family ever so briefly find refuge as the
city burns around them.
Aedibus
in mediis nudoque sub aetheris axe
ingens
ara fuit iuxtaque veterrima laurus
incumbens
arae atque umbra complexa penatis.
512-514
In
the great building’s mid-section, under the open sky, was a vast altar, and
nearby an ancient laurel tree overspreading it and embracing the sacred idols in
shadow.
Of course, the protection
offered by this glimpse of uncorrupt nature is more illusory than
substantial—and so for all images of the pastoral in the epic; for kings and
heroes are not, after all, simple shepherds, and have not the luxury of the
safety afforded by inconsequence. Vergil
may well have been reflecting upon this lonely laurel when he compared Troy’s
collapse a hundred lines later to a lofty ash tree in the mountains cut down
with feverish zeal (certatim) by those
timeless rivals of the shepherd, farmers (626-631).
Another simile cast in the same mold is struck in Book 4 to describe
Aeneas’s steadfast resistance to Dido’s entreaties (441-446).
Here the mighty oak stands fast against the north wind’s assault… but
the result is scarcely less unhappy. The
tree can provide no shelter, but only retain its own position as chaos erodes
the world around it. Perhaps
suggestively, its roots reach to Tartarus (446), a pit whose portals are all
shunned by innocent shepherds.
Turning from the innuendo of simile to the explicitly orchestrated
landfalls of Aeneas’s westward-trekking itinerary, we find a veritable index
of pastoral worlds in various phases of decay.
To the extent that each island or port has been touched by
“civilized” aggression—and this touch more often than not has a feminine
quality—it has lost its utopian sheen. Apollo’s
sacred isle of Delos is a gratissima telus
(3. 73) where the weary refugees are awarded temporary protection in an
utterly peaceful harbor (placidissma portu,
3. 78). The old king and priest,
Anius, receives the travelers warmly and offers them prophetic guidance.
No god, of course, could be less Dionysiac than Apollo.
Yet here the Aeneades cannot stay—their holy mission has disqualified
them for the life of pastoral ease. They
mistake Crete for their destination: Crete, stepping stone to Egypt and cradle
of Greek culture’s oldest civilization. Wasted
by long human habitation (rather like Troy in ruins), the island proves a desert
to them. A famine and corrective
omens drive them onward. In the
uninviting Strophades, similarly tainted by previous human contact, they find
the Harpies, than whom no female representation could be more odious.
As they pass Ithaca and its environs, the looming presence of their Greek
foe chases them back out to the main. In
the region of Leucae, however, they cast anchor and linger unmolested, again
honoring Apollo (whose sacred precincts these are) and engaging in the playful
athletic contests which will also grace their sojourn in Sicily (and which
Aeneas will observe in the Elysian Fields). The
games along the shoreline (celebramus
litora ludis, 3. 280), complete with wrestling matches for which bodies have
been stripped and oiled ((281-282), imply a boyhood innocence—and emphasize,
at the same time, the absence of women from the scene.
By contrast, the journey’s next stop, in Epirus, is haunted by
Andromache’s overpoweringly tragic figure—a kind of prelude to Dido’s
spiritual collapse, who listens to this narrative little suspecting that she has
just foreseen the approximate outlines of her own fate.
Book 3 concludes with the once pastoral image of Polyphemus (still young,
keen-sighted, and stunningly ignorant of his ghastly ugliness in Theocritus 11)
now transformed into a nightmare (monstrum
horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum, 658).
The Aeneades have left behind them a dismal wake of ruined gardens,
though none as yet ruined by their own efforts.
That has changed by Book 5, as the smoke of Dido’s makeshift pyre
stains the horizon quite literally to the stern of Aeneas’s flagship (1-7).
Yet the hero cannot divine what the conflagration means.
He is off, instead, to one more idyllic setting: Sicily, where his remote
kinsman King Acestes extends another warm welcome.
Here the travelers stage a second round of athletic events (after those
in Delos) to celebrate properly the funeral of old Anchises… but the epic’s
tension is beginning to intensify, and images of boyish joy and womanish
delirium no longer manage to occupy separate shores.
Some scholars have alleged that this episode was indeed intended to
conclude Book 3’s narrative, at the end of which Anchises dies and where
genuine funeral games would have been more appropriate.
That Vergil may have found Aeneas’s recitation to Dido growing entirely
too long is quite possible—yet the infusion of mania into the new book’s
conclusion also signals the looming confrontation between Arcadia and empire
which will consume the epic’s second half.
The games themselves come off cleanly enough.
Even when competitors commit rash blunders in the heat of striving or
foolishly boast before they have won the prize, little blood flows and no ill
will appears to linger. During the
nautical race, the pilot Menoetes is tossed overboard for steering too
cautiously, incurring no more pain therefrom than a deep drink of seawater and
the light scourge of the crowd’s laughter (5. 181-182).
The ship of Sergestus makes the opposite miscalculation, managing to hang
itself upon a shoal during a tight turn, and limps to the finish line derided
and without a prize (inrisam sine honore ratem, 272).
Still further folly is manifest when the arrogant Dares claims victory by
default in the boxing match since—so he says—no one will venture to take his
challenge. After the wizened
Entellus succeeds in landing a terrific blow, Aeneas halts the fight, prevailing
upon the young braggart to renounce his lofty dementia
and accept the will of the gods (465-467). To
all appearances, the vain youth, though missing a few teeth, is content to
yield. The day’s festive spirit
not only resists flagging, but gains momentum
for the archery contest (which concludes in the epic’s only meteoric
omen—a shaft spontaneously catching fire in flight—having no direct
reference to future movements). The
afternoon is golden, uncompromised by hurt feelings if not by aching bones.
Boys will be boys: Arcadia is not without rough-housing, only without
abiding malignity.
This particular Arcadia has so far been without women, as well.
In fact, Roman women seem not to have been permitted at public funerals
in most circumstances. Instead, the
matrons of the group are stewing away to one side, “mourning the lost Anchises,”
writes Vergil, “and collectively gazing upon the deep sea through their
tears” (amissum Anchisen flebant,
cunctaeque profundum / pontum aspectabant flentes, 614-615).
Juno does not miss the opportunity to stir trouble from this unwholesome
brooding. Her messenger Iris,
disguised as the ancient Beroe, wife of the respected Doryclus, delivers a
desperate speech, the gist of which is that the exiled tribe’s wandering will
never end. After Iris/Beroe seizes
and hurls a torch, an old nurse of Priam’s children pronounces the act
ominous… and the whole group is off and running to the moored ships with any
portable fire available. Altars are
even plundered sacrilegiously for firebrands (pars
spoliant aras, 661). The men,
alerted to the peril by columns of smoke, manage to save most of the fleet.
The upshot, however, is that almost all females will have to be left in
Sicily due to loss of transport. This
resolution may appear to symbolize the imperial vangaurd’s liberation from its
manic part. Yet in light of what
follows on the Italian mainland, we should more likely see it as a pollution of
boyish good nature, so much on display during the book’s first half, with the
lethal fury needed to wage war. When
men are sequestered from women in the Aeneid,
their own manic “female” part only erupts the more vigorously, given enough
time.
At precisely one point is this not true: the Elysian Fields of the
Underworld—and the exception here may indeed be dubious.
At first flush, Elysium certainly seems like a pastoral paradise.
Largior
hic campos aether et lumine vestit
purpureo,
solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.
Pars
in gramineis exercent membra palaestris,
contendunt
ludo et fulva luctantur harena;
pars
pedibus paludunt choreas et carmina dicunt.
Nec
non Threicius longa cum veste sacerdos
obloquitur
numeris septem discrimina vocum,
iamque
eadem digitis, iam pectine pulsat eburno.
6. 640-647
Here
a more abundant atmosphere hung over the fields with a purple haze.
The inhabitants enjoyed their own sun, their own stars.
Some of them stretched their limbs in rustic wrestling matches or staged
a playful competition tussling in the sand.
Some kept time with their feet while chanting festive verses.
That most illustrious Thracian, Orpheus, was there in his long robe,
singing metrical responses in seven voices, strumming a lyre now with his
fingers, now with an ivory pick.
From
end to end of Elysium, no female spirit arises before Aeneas’s inquisitive
eyes. We need not suppose the
exclusion premeditated and invidious: after all, the names of distinguished
females are not expunged from the roll-call of future worthies which Anchises
recites for his son (e.g., Ilia and Berecyntia)—and the Sibyl, naturally,
whose prophetic gifts are displayed in fits of frightful raving, remains in
attendance. Yet the immediate
panorama of these blessed plains suggests only the bliss of boys at play or of
philosophers in quiet converse. Soft
light we have aplenty, but supernaturally softened in a caressing haze, quite
without a hint of burn or blaze; and darkness has similarly yielded to gentle
shade. Freed of fear, desire,
ambition—freed of women and passion—very nearly (and progressively) freed of
all recollection—these stately figures pose an antithesis to those Aeneas
observed in the Carthaginian frieze, every one portrayed in excruciating,
sometimes macabre anguish.
Yet lest we suppose that here lies some sort of virtuous consummation, an
eternal respite for those who did their duty in life, Vergil perversely
introduces the theme of reincarnation. The
unborn heroes whom Aeneas glimpses in queue are not merely souls awaiting a
body: they are souls having lived countless times already (no doubt in toil) now
at the frail peak of ataraxia.
An oblivious purgation of passion-roiled striving from their minds has
bestowed upon them as much serenity as they will ever know.
They are about to step right back into the abyss, yet apparently have no
inkling of their impending plunge’s depth.
The irony can scarcely be intended: the moment is clearly meant to be
exhilarating, even climactic in some ways. Neither
Anchises nor Orpheus nor any of the happy vale’s other denizens expresses any
regret about having to re-enter the fray one day, nor any bitterness that, as
another Italian poet would write centuries later, the holiday’s best hour is
the evening of the preceding work day. Nevertheless,
so it is. Elysium’s freedom from
the female/passion complex of corrosive forces turns out to be just another way
of saying that it is a dreamland.
I shall deal with the Aeneid’s
second half more thoroughly in this journal’s next issue.
Enough to say here that the Italy where Aeneas lands is much like a
projection of Elysium at the receiving end of the heroic queue: the dream’s
terrain, that is, in the harsher light of true day.
Old Evander, in particular, a widower with but one son to brighten his
last years, is nonetheless fully content with life when Aeneas—at divine
instigation—seeks him out as an ally. The
kingdom of Alba Longa is humble but virtuous, after the exquisite Arcadian
fashion. Its citizens are engaged in
a yearly ritual honoring Hercules as a strange ship beats upriver to make
landfall. Evander recalls with
pleasure having once met Aeneas’s father, and offers the hero and his crew a
place at their festival. The
arrangements resemble what we would today call a picnic far more than a
complicated rite bristling with arcane symbolism.
Dapes iubet et sublata reponi / pocula gramineoque viros locat ipse
sedili: “he [Evander] orders the feast to proceed, the cups restored to
their places, and he himself sees to his guests’ grassy seating” (8.
175-176).
The subsequent long narrative about how Hercules once upon a time slew
Cacus, a man-eating scourge of the locality, is of course peppered with rage and
mortal combat: the giant actually breathes fire and inhabits a cave, so flame,
smoke, and shadow punctuate the climax. Yet
the mythic superman kills his adversary bloodlessly, as if the setting’s
Edenic influence had somehow purged even this ghastly tale of grotesque
savagery. Neither in the tale nor
about the precincts of Evander’s rustic palace, furthermore, flits so much as
a female shadow. Evander informs
Aeneas that the wooded landscape was thickly populated by indigenous Fauni Nymphaeque (314) during the blessed reign of Saturn, and also
confides something of his personal history of anguish and wandering, the
pronouncements of his divine mother Carmenta at last having guided him to safe
haven. The female is numinously
present in these remote forests, therefore—but in a generative manner, giving
birth and nourishment to a transplanted, innocuous culture.
Evander might indeed have been Aeneas if a preemptive destiny had
commanded him to build an empire upon these foundations where brush grows and
cattle graze (cf. 347-348 and 360-361). Introducing
his guest into a lowly palace, the old man invites Aeneas to remember that
Hercules, too, once passed this way: “Dare to scorn wealth, imitate the god,
and view not our thrift harshly” (364-365).
Such ideas are among the noblest of the classical world, resonating as
they do with independence, free will, and a contempt of vain acquisition.
Vergil was not alone in being enamored of them.
They are also implicitly inconsistent with the idea of empire, however,
which requires that one surrender one’s will to a vision of conquest, power,
and affluence. By the time war’s
madness has sent its many cracks through Alba Longa’s pastoral landscape,
Evander is a broken man, vowing to follow his son’s spirit to the Underworld
as soon as possible (11. 181). From
a pastoral Elysium where purified souls wait to occupy the bodies of heroes, we
have come to a pastoral backwater where the activity of heroes has left a kind
old man longing for the Underworld. The
circle is closed, without any apparent possibility of release, its prospect
capable of driving any thoughtful person to despair.
The rest of this green new world to the west, Hesperia, is already
prowled by female Furies intent upon sabotage and vexed by queens and princesses
of unquenchable ambition or of tormenting beauty.
Perhaps the only way out is to force one’s way forward… but perhaps
to use force is but to work one’s way deeper in.
V.
What It All Means (First Attempt)
In my years of trying to sort out the Vergilian vision of the cosmos, I
eventually settled upon the image of an Arcadian island gnawed constantly by
waves of wrath, fear, greed, envy, and the rest.
These noxious surges are stirred not by a mighty Poseidon (who, during
his only direct appearance in the epic, calms rather than rouses the seas), but
by female deities ranging from that insatiable harridan Juno to the nightmarish
Allecto to the personified busy-body Fama. To
the male deities (I blithely assumed) is consigned the island’s unstable
peace—unstable largely because these gods, almost comatosely lulled by the
idyll they have founded or the idyll they are planning, fail to foresee the next
tsunami. They dine with old men
(widowers every one) who partake of their vision sufficiently to organize rustic
games and simple, pious rites enacted in shady vales.
I had in fact employed a visual representation—a kind of
“sketch”—of the pastoral drama just described in teaching my undergraduate
courses for several years before growing dissatisfied with it.
The picture I posed my students seemed to unravel a lot of feverishly
interlaced mortal and immortal activity, especially, in a simplistic way that
students reading translated excerpts could appreciate.
The graphic looked something like this:
S
U R R O U N D I N G S E A
O F P A S S I O N S
GREED
VENGEANCE
LUST
Greek plunder of Troy,
Juno’s hatred of Trojans,
Coroebus’s fatal attraction
Polydorus’s
murder, Cam-
Dido’s cursing of Trojans,
to Cassandra, Dido’s love,
illa’s fatal inattention
Aeneas’s slaughter of Turnus
Amata’s obsession?
A
R C A D I A
N I S L A N D
( E
D E N )
Pastoral Island of Eclogues and Georgics
sufficiency, not luxury
peace and brotherhood
simple rules followed by all
Presiding
Male Rulers/Gods
Acestes (Sicily)
Evander (Alba Longa)
Anius
(Delos) Anchises
(Elysium)
Jupiter Neptune
|
ENVY
PANIC
VAINGLORY
Juno’s of Venus,
Dido the Bacchante,
Neoptolemus’s brutality,
Iarbas’s of Aeneas,
Trojan women in Sicily, Iarbas’s impiety,
Turnus’s of Aeneas
riot after Silvia’s deer slain
Turnus’s belligerence
F E M A L E S P I R I T
S I N C I T I N G
U N R E S T
Juno Fama
Iris Celaeno
Allecto Juturna
There is little of the creative here, really, let alone of the shocking.
The model is fully Socratic, after all, with the soul’s reigning
element—reason—presiding over the more bestial elements susceptible to
impulse. To be sure, reason’s
reign is deeply trouble in Vergil, and perhaps hopelessly compromised.
That the Roman poet did not share Socrates’s confidence in the eventual
triumph of enlightenment may scarcely be said, however, to fly in the face of
the classical disposition. No less
an Athenian oracle than Euripides anticipated Vergil’s reservations.
Worthy of special note in the light of my foregoing discussion is the
distinct tendency of Euripidean women (most famously Medea and Phaedra, not to
mention the Bacchae) to represent the irrational in an invincible and
destructive manner. They may quite
likely have influenced Vergil’s Muse.
We know, too, that Vergil was very much an Arcadian—a votary of the
pastoral life. The Eclogues and Georgics,
upon which his poetic reputation was securely founded before he was commissioned
to undertake an epic, are by no means rigid imitations of Theocritus and Hesiod.
They seem, rather, a paean to the simple existence which one might well
expect of a man who had come through Rome’s ruinous civil war with little more
than his life. If Vergil was a
follower of Epicurus, into the bargain, as many scholars have argued, then he
would have embraced the formal creed of retiring from the crush of sordid,
raucous special interests and cultivating his own garden.
Let us recall that the highest good to Epicurus was not pleasure (that
dubious distinction belonged first to Aristippus), but freedom from pain.
If the spirits inhabiting Vergil’s Elysian Fields enjoy any sort of
pleasure at all (and they are obviously offered up by the poet as definitively
happy), it is the sort found in quiet conversation and childishly innocent
competition, not in the least akin to the sensual thrill of hedonism.
Johnson captures all the essentials of Vergil’s pastoral ideal in
summarizing the Epicurean’s outlook:
For
the Epicurean temperament, the social order, which is a kind of perversion of
friendship, can do little good but can do and invite endless harm.
Since the Epicurean ideal is freedom from ignorance for the individual,
the body politic only serves to nourish what it feeds upon—fear of
catastrophe, dependence upon changing circumstances—in short, painful,
destructive illusions about things as they are and men’s proper good.
An Epicurean can manage, without deluding himself, to find and safeguard
the garden that is his because, very strictly speaking, it does not matter in
what city his garden my be; he is, by definition, a fierce and proud émigré.
Concludes Johnson, “Why should an Epicurean attempt to write not merely
a foundation epic, but the Foundation
Epic?”
For this philosophic profile of thrift, independence, and introversion,
one must admit, looks rather odd on the résumé of an
epic-writer—particularly one who is to sing the glories, not merely of an
individual or of a certain war, but of an evolving empire.
Greek philosophy in general was a poor fit with the Roman ethic of public
sacrifice. Stoicism had to make a
major adjustment in moving west, its Greek founders having shown little interest
in extending the realm of duty beyond a deeply introverted kind of will power.
The younger Scipio was a Stoic of this new, more westerly stamp—and he
perished backing the wrong side (or the right one, if you are an idealist rather
than a pragmatist) in that same ruinous civil war which Vergil narrowly
survived, doing his public duty unto the bitter end.
In the section of Cicero’s Republic
called Scipio’s Dream, old Africanus stresses to his grandson that the gods
are pleased by nothing so much as active service to a virtuous state, even when
such good servants are not appreciated in their lifetimes by the populace (Res Publica 6. 13).
Perhaps we find something analogous to this passage in Vergil’s dozing
male Olympians. They see the big
picture, the grand scheme, and it so anesthetizes them to petty squabbling that
they are apt to be rudely awakened when a squabble boils up into an eruption.
The paradox of such right-mindedness could indeed be said to run very
deep, the inviolable serenity of a grand vision encircling the many bursts of
extreme vigor required to enact that vision’s particular programs.
It is at precisely such moments that I recall the Bhagavad-Gita
(not to mention various more modern projects to build visionary states at
sword- or gunpoint).
So the friction between Vergil the Arcadian and Vergil the epic bard may
have been genuinely intense—sufficiently so that he might have left
instructions for the Aeneid to be
burned after his death, as Suetonius claims.
Yet such friction, at the same time, might have been fairly common among
thoughtful Romans. Aeneas himself
could be viewed as the paradigm of the empire’s conflicted footsoldier: called
hither by his natural love of peace to settle wherever the waves wash him and
harvest his garden, called thither by his duty to an artificial but benign state
to resist nature and aggressively spread civilization’s laws.
I doubt that all of Vergil’s fellow Romans were too dense to appreciate
the realism of this anguish, or that Augustus himself was too despotic to accept
a portrait of honest torment more happily than one of standard propagandistic
folderol. Aeneas does
soldier on, after all. Commentators
have cannily noticed that he doesn’t speak to his son Ascanius in the epic’s
second half, and that he generally grows two-dimensional in grim resolve as his
mission nears completion; but perhaps this is to say no more than that he has at
last squared destiny’s burden on his broad shoulders.
It is a fact (though an unremarked one, as far as I know) that Aeneas’s
battle fury, contrary to Book 2’s precedent, is never described as amens
or insanus during the Italian campaign, though the words furor
and furens continue to crop up.
What I have just said does not contradict the conventional European
reading of the Aeneid, as championed
by the likes of C. S. Lewis, Brooks Otis, and my erstwhile professor, Karl
Galinsky. This school has been far
less inclined than I to concede the epic’s spiritual friction, in the first
place; but its members would probably be satisfied that I had reached the right
conclusion at last. Vergil was not a
subversive. Naturally, his epic
teaches that service is demanding. Where
would be the virtue in an easy task? To
suppose that Vergil would have represented the foundational struggles of the
Roman Empire, however, as toxic to the hero’s soul would be simply
outrageous—the excess of a bunch of Yanks who could not live down their own
recent failure in Vietnam; for, though the Europeans did not designate Adam
Parry, Michael Putnam, and others of the Harvard School in such blunt terms,
their assessment was that the Americans had responded too naively to the new
reader-response criticism.
Yet we are left with Laocoon and Evander—men of exemplary piety who
wish only to preserve their tribe, and who must witness the extermination of
their line by divine rage as divine justice lifts not a finger; and also with
the frieze of the Trojan War adorning Carthage’s entrance—scenes selected
deliberately for their depravity which go far beyond an inglorious “war is
hell” grimness. This is all too
much. The standard European reading
of such misery continues to be, apparently, “that Laocoon’s real offence is
that… he has stood in the way of history and destiny.
Omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs: the ways of God are not
our ways….”
In a post-Homeric, post-Socratic world, however, where man is commonly
accepted to have a little god within him (in the formulation of Epictetus—and
of Christ), God’s ways are our ways insofar as the human conscience may tap into the
inspiration of supreme goodness. Whatever
Vergil’s metaphysical beliefs, his heroic creations plainly expect not only
that the gods will favor the obedient but that they
will the good of the faithful. Certainly
there is never a suggestion that Aeneas suspects a conflict between divine will
and the good of his people: quite the contrary.
Vergil cannot merely be saying that life is hard, therefore, and that
real men face and deal with the hardship. Life
in the Aeneid is more than hard,
especially for virtuous people: it is a moral outrage, an exploitative lie,
generated or at least connived at by the high powers which claim a right to
dutiful service. If Laocoon’s and
Evander’s plight is indeed Aeneas’s in microcosm, then the frieze is perhaps
Vergil’s. Commissioned to create a
work of art about the brave deeds of heroes in time of war, he awes his audience
with his technical skill. Horses
seem literally to snort and neigh, swords to rasp and clang, widows and orphans
to shriek and wail. In their
enthusiasm, the work’s consumers very likely fail to notice what is, after
all, less than conspicuous by its absence: real heroism.
Miguel de Unamuno once wrote, echoing his beloved Don Quixote, “Sí,
para vivir muriendo nació todo género de heroísmo”: “Yes, every
variety of heroism is born of dying as one lives.”
We are back to Aeneas’s declaration that the only hope for the
vanquished is to have no hope at all. But
Aeneas does hope, and in a way which Don Quixote uprightly resists.
He piously believes in the coming of a terrestrial paradise, while the
would-be knight-errant understands that he can only wander while on earth.
In his vain hopes, the demigod is perhaps more insane than The Knight of
the Sorrowful Figure—who at least knows who he is and who he may be, if he
will. Aeneas appears to know
neither; for he would be the apotheosis of duty which sits athwart his high
destiny, yet the pursuit of that impossible instar
mires him in a being created from one moral tumble after another.
Much as I would like to argue that Aeneas triumphs internally over
passion as he triumphs externally over destiny’s obstacles (for this would
render the Aeneid wonderfully
coherent), the formulation doesn’t work. If
we see less emotion in the Aeneas of the work’s second half, it is because we
view his character less intimately there, as if destiny had now sealed all
possible portals for spiritual development once the new war had spilt new blood.
To argue thus can grow tendentious, yes: easier just to read the epic as
most Romans must have done—to face the fact, in other words, that it was
commissioned propaganda. And the
haunting clusters of imagery, the ambiguity of the main character’s acts, the
increasing opacity of his motives, the radical contradictions running rampant
among the Olympian gods… the author’s deathbed instructions that the work be
destroyed… is all of this, too, then, merely an argumentative quibble, since
the rank and file would have paid it little notice?
In the second part of this essay, I intend to reconsider my diagram of
the troubled pastoral island. I
intend, particularly, to reject the position which I therein awarded to the male
deities presiding over the cosmos. For
a second look at the evidence, I believe, must lead us to conclude that the
epic’s most fundamental conflict lies not in the passionate rages of female
spirits, nor even in the frustrated faith of virtuous mortals serving feckless
gods: it is in those male deities themselves, rather—in Jupiter, especially,
who insists upon his grand vision yet will not supply the attention and support
necessary for its execution. The
inspiration for virtuous striving turns out not to justify the devoted service
which it receives without question.
Notes
John Harris is president
and founder of The Center for Literate Values.
He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University
of Texas at Austin, and is now employed as a visiting lecturer by the Tyler
branch of that system.
back to Contents
***************************
The
Absurd Reich
Or,
On the Politics of Demonic Nothingness
Gary
Inbinder
This
article first appeared in the May 2005 issue of Touchstone:
A Journal of Mere
Christianity. www.touchstonemag.com
Democrats “gotta have faith,” argues former Treasury Secretary Robert
Reich, and what’s more, they gotta have an “irrational faith” that we can
work together to “create a more just nation and a more just world.”
Writing in Slate magazine’s analysis of our November 2004
election—a forum that tried to figure out why the Democrats lost again—he
admits that such a faith is “entirely irrational” because there is little
empirical evidence to justify it. It
certainly is not the fides caritate formata (faith formed in love) of
Scripture. If there is any
“love” in the formation of Reich’s faith, it is the “love” of humanity
in the abstract that lies at the core of Enlightenment humanism.
He does not advise Democrats to become more religious, because
“religion is a personal matter.” He
does not want Democrats moving toward Republican positions on “matters of
personal morality,” such as opposing homosexual marriage and abortion. Democrats
can argue for “fewer abortions” through the wider dissemination of
contraceptives to young people, more family planning, and better social
services, as long as individual choice is protected.
Reich apparently believes that man lives by bread and circuses alone,
that is, by the satisfaction of his material needs and animal desires, and that
any spiritual needs may be satisfied by maintaining an “irrational faith” in
our ability to use national or transnational organizations to see to it that
those material goods are distributed more equitably. As
for faith in God, he declared in The American Prospect that “the great
conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism.” Terrorism
he called “a tactic, not a belief.”
The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists;
between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe
that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority;
between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that
human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who
believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is
revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism
will disrupt and destroy lives. But
terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.
We can gather a few things from these passages: first, according to Mr.
Reich, it appears that giving “priority to life in this world” does not
extend to the lives of the unborn; second, “those who believe in science,
reason, and logic” must paradoxically have an “irrational faith” in the
human capacity for establishing utopian “social justice”; third, traditional
Christians and Jews, who repose their faith in something that transcends the
human, are the enemies of “modern civilization,” indistinguishable in their
beliefs from Islamo-Fascist terrorists.
Reich’s
Mere Humans
While musing on Reich’s irrational rationalism, I recalled the
philosopher Eric Voegelin’s remark that Christianity has made clear
“that man in his mere humanity, without the fides caritate formata, is
demonic nothingness.” The
“demonic nothingness” of “mere humanity” has wormed its way into both
our politics and the existentialism of pop culture.
It is nowhere better expressed than in the popular song, “Is That All
There Is?” In the song, the
narrator relates the existential detachment and disillusionment he felt with the
loss of possessions and pleasures. He
describes the loss of comfort, security, and possessions by fire; disappointment
in a popular entertainment billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth”; the loss
of first love; and finally, the inevitable loss of life itself—responding to
each with the question, “Is that all there is?”
The narrator seems to agree with Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the
works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of
spirit.” Therefore, the question,
“Is that all there is?” ends with the final response: “If that’s all
there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing—Let’s break out the booze and
have a ball—If that’s all there is.”
Of course, there is another materialist response to this existential
dilemma. That is a modern political
response of pseudo-morality in action, first criticized by Edmund Burke in his Reflections
on the Revolution in France, and the response advocated by existentialists
like Sartre and Heidegger: to “seize the day” by aligning one’s alienated
self with the great “progressive” movements of the time. Sartre
chose Stalinist Communism, and Heidegger, albeit briefly, Hitler’s National
Socialism.
Burke, writing during the French Terror, described the existential horror
of twentieth-century Europe. Man, he
wrote, “is by his constitution a religious animal... atheism
is against, not only our reason, but our instincts [and thus] it cannot prevail
long.” The anti-religious mania
fostered by the French Revolution would leave whole nations in a spiritual void
that would inevitably be filled by “some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading
superstition.”
When Reich writes of his “irrational faith,” he seems to agree with
Burke that “atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts.” Nevertheless,
Reich has already answered our existential question by presuming that material
comforts and animal pleasures are “all there is,” and therefore he thinks
the “moral” thing to do is to urge the Democratic party to embrace enough of
socialism to provide material goods through re-distribution of wealth and
increased social services, while simultaneously preserving enough of capitalism
to maintain a sound economic tax base for his welfare state.
Further, he seems to want to preserve the individual’s “right” to
“break out the booze and have a ball” within an ever-expanding zone of
privacy, unfettered by Judeo-Christian morality and with little concern for the
corrosive effects such radical individualism might have on civil society.
Dragged
Down Democrats
Be that as it may, in his adherence to an “irrational faith” in the
establishment of “social justice” by material and political means alone,
Reich risks dragging his party down into Burke’s “void,” because he has
closed himself, and his politics, to the higher part of our human nature and
consciousness.
He has closed them to the “Divine Ground of Being” that is
recognized, in their common sense and common human experience, by the majority
of those whose votes the Democrats seek. Further,
he appears to be out of touch with basic political reality, because most
Americans remain religious and therefore will not easily be persuaded to trade
their faith in God for the “irrational faith” of his secular humanism.
In Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, the
historian Paul Johnson remarked upon the stubborn persistence of religion, and
the human religious instinct, long after the Western intellectual elite had
proclaimed God’s death. According
to him, “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious
belief to disappear.”
Millions in the twentieth century, most particularly in Western Europe,
abandoned their religion and filled the void with the “pernicious and
degrading superstition(s)”of National Socialism, Communism, humanist
utopianism, eugenics and health politics, the ideologies of sexual liberation,
racial and environmental politics, and so forth. But
for millions more, the overwhelming majority of the human race, religion remains
an important part of their lives. “What
looked antiquated, even risible, in the 1990s,” Johnson noted, “was not
religious belief but the confident prediction of its demise once provided by
Feurbach and Marx, Durkheim and Frazer, Lenin, Wells, Shaw, Gide, Sartre and
many others.”
To that list of notable secular humanists of the past, I would add
Robert Reich and his “irrational faith” in mere humanity’s capacity for
“social justice” and “progress.” Promoting
the naturalistic worldview that is the foundation of Reich’s “irrational
faith” while rejecting the Judeo-Christian foundation of the civil society
that made our constitutional democratic republic possible is to practice the
Politics of Demonic Nothingness. If
the Democrats continue to do so, they may well continue to be losers in
politics—and losers in more than politics.
Reich’s article can be
found in Slate magazine’s analysis of the 2004 election (www.slate.msn.com/id/2109190). Voegelin’s
remark appears in his “What Is Political Reality?”
Gary
Inbinder is a California attorney who specializes in
health-care law. He holds a B.A. in
English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a J.D. from the
University of La Verne (California). His
articles have appeared in Humanitas, Quodlibet, and Praesidium.
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Faith,
Reason, Charity, and Liberalism: A Response
John
R. Harris
In the second book of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, Lucilius Balbus
visits the Stoic topoi for validating belief in God (or the gods; by this
time, ancient philosophers use the singular and plural almost interchangeably). Upon
lately re-reading this text for perhaps the sixth or seventh time in my life, I
reflected that most of the arguments were deeply beholden to aesthetics.
That is, because the universe displays an intricate order when we study
it carefully—or even when we gaze upon it casually—it cannot be the product
of haphazard collisions (as the Epicurean system maintains which Balbus
derides). Modernity has dealt
harshly with defenses of this kind. To
a Darwinian, chaos is indeed unlikely to create successful intricacy—which is
precisely, if perversely, why the intricacy that we observe in our physical
environment has succeeded: i.e., it chanced to trump chaos, surviving initially
by blundering into a strategy, then surviving at an even higher rate when
further chance ramifications managed to stumble farther out of the labyrinth.
The tracks of sustained survival thus left behind have a purposive look
retrospectively: they lead right out of the labyrinth.
The evidence of missteps has mostly eroded under the winds of time, no
wayward path having been followed for eons.
To a Kantian, contrastively, chaos is not a possible human perception.
Even amid the most disorienting sandstorm, a human being would eventually
identify the wind’s direction, the land’s rises and falls, moments of
greater and lesser bluster, a lighter quarter of the sky where the sun must be
hiding. The universe appears orderly
because it must to the perceiving, thinking mind.
The best proof that God exists therefore rests not in the orderliness of
things per se—which cannot be reliably known—but in the irresistible
disposition to impose order upon things which we creatures carry into our waking
life and, a fortiori, into our imaginative existence.
A Darwinian might rebut a Kantian by remarking that our lively human mind
has evolved to build our monumental success.
I have never actually heard this rebuttal made, but it is the obvious
counter-position for the materialist to assume.
Many of us, laymen and specialists alike, cannot grasp how even several
million years would suffice to construct human reason in the hit-and-miss
fashion described by the Darwinian mechanism… but say it were so.
There remain facets of our natural disposition which not only serve our
material survival in no clear way, but overtly mobilize against our selfish
interest. The suppression of
selfishness, in fact, underlies every human moral code which has ever proved
temporally durable and capable of bridging cultural gaps—nor is the mysterious
calling to serve the universal good rather than selfish inclination a mere
instinct designed to promote the hive’s interests over the drone’s.
If this were so, we would cut adrift bothersome individuals who needed
help when the safety and prosperity of the mass was at stake… yet civilized
peoples do no such thing, and the “fool” who risks his life for the lonely
castaway is admired as a hero even when his folly is deplored.
One of my favorite passages in twentieth-century literature comes near
the end of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Pilote de Guerre, a work
intended to draw the United States into the war against Fascism but which,
toward the end, also condemns the ethic of the hive (la morale de la termitière)
all too visible in the Russian experiment with communism.
Saint-Ex writes of the lost miner whom dozens or hundreds of saved miners
will risk their lives to retrieve from the rubble.
This is as it should be, he believes… and so do I, and so do we all in
our honest moments.
I continue, then, to believe in reason—for our moral intuitions must be
an integral part of a mysteriously endowed reason, since they cannot be deduced
logically from our material struggle to survive.
I will not cross swords in this tight space with the proposition that
faith is opposed to reason (a skirmish I have waged on many earlier occasions)
other than to suggest that a magnetism toward the good which attracts every
human breast seems to me infinitely more worthy of the words “inspiration”
and “revelation” than a set of laws and narratives—usually
much-transcribed and then much-translated—cast in the idiom of cultures not
yet familiar with nails and mortar. To
polarize faith and reason is to leave the faithless in possession of reason’s
fertile plain, by default. If we
believe at all—believe, I mean, with anything like true sincerity—it is not
because some inculcated regard for authority or acquired anxiety over the
unknown has left us neurotically eager to surrender, but because we cannot, in
full clarity of mind and heart, accept that a child is fully vaporized when his
body perishes or that our yielding a place to a frail brother is a mistake.
Reason insists that such essential emotions should find an ultimate
coherence.
I am convinced that political liberalism indeed often begins in a sense
of duty to the overlooked and the undervalued. The
charitable impulse is indisputable in certain liberal formulations, and many
liberal crusades of the nineteenth century were carried forward by churchmen.
The curiosity seems to me less that liberals should lapse into religious
language, therefore, than that they should have discarded the true faith in
whose context that language would make sense.
The discarding appears to occur with almost cyclical regularity, for at
least two reasons. The first is
that, having immersed oneself in supplying the material needs of the destitute,
one is always at risk of exaggerating the importance of the material.
When you have cured aborigines of tapeworm or straightened their teeth
for two decades, all you can think of when they float to the surface of a
conversation is X number of tapeworms to extract or Y sets of teeth to
straighten. The means to a more
fulfilled human existence (for who can examine his soul with 103˚ of
fever?) become the end of existence.
The second force which is forever seducing charitable people away from
the faith necessary to elevate humanity to a worthiness of charity is the very
practice of the self-styled religious. Christianity’s
worst enemies, I am afraid, are among those who call themselves Christians.
I have begun reading the late Oriana Fallaci’s long novel Insciallah.
In its early pages, as she describes the brutal reprisals exacted by
Beirut’s Christians for the assassination of President Gemayel (the book being
set in stark realities witnessed by the author as a foreign correspondent),
those who gang-rape and butcher young women after quartering their babies before
their eyes are said to be “proud of their faith in Jesus Christ”.
You and I might roll our eyes, sigh deeply, and say, “Yes, this is
called hypocrisy—and no one is immune to it.”
But hypocrisy on such a colossal scale leaves a deep impression.
Christians should be the very last to commit such atrocities: one would
assume that ordinary people drawn randomly from anywhere in the world would
shrink from these acts in horror. To
find a Christian doing such a thing because he is a Christian is likely
to turn liberal intellectuals like Fallaci away from faith for a lifetime (and
her own initiation into such displays of “piety” began with her father’s
being tortured by Fascist thugs who claimed to be defending the Church.)
If I might put it this way… an immersion in providing the material
needs of the impoverished may rivet one’s attention upon the material, but a
conviction that these needs are ancillary rather than primary may also lead one
to respond callously to them. This
world doesn’t really matter—except that, while we live in it, it matters
immensely as the proving ground of our commitment to the other world.
We must never become so confident in bookish teaching or “revelation”
that we consider our conscience irrelevant.
When those of little or no belief hear that salvation is a matter of
praying and eating in just this manner and not that one, they may rightly
protest that such lunacy is as old as warpaint.
Frankly, I find the ever-repeated liberal charge that Christianity is
mere tribalism a very dull assessment of current events.
Liberals like Robert Reich are all too similar to today’s Bible Belt
bourgeoisie. They try to make the
rank and file worthy of sacrifice by screening photos of plebeian birthday
parties or by camcording homespun marriages and reunions (Barbara Walters and
Anne Curry supplying a “voice-over” as they build to a tornado- or
kidnap-tragedy in what might otherwise be the First Baptist Church’s website).
One must indeed wonder, “Is this all there is?”
The more the sprawling American proletariat is larded with high-def TVs
and cheaper gas, the more dumbed-down its utterances grow (“I couldn’t
believe it was happening to me,” drones the tornado’s victim, “it was like
watching a movie”) and the more bloated on Big Macs its collective gut
becomes. People are not easy to love
for themselves. At least Walters
& Co. catch them when their tears threaten to break some kind of barrier.
The neo-Christian believer in secular utopia, meanwhile, eagerly turns
out to rebuild his neighbor’s fallen house, exhorting him to view the tornado
as a bad dream—to try out his new recliner and anesthetize himself before
ESPN. We good church-goers dole out
turkeys for Thanksgiving and toys for Christmas as if material acquisition were
our message—as if the poor were sick with poverty and could be cured with
doses (modest doses) of our lucre.
In a way, perhaps the great decision faced by the twenty-first century is
whether or not we will learn how to be “rich in poverty”.
Christendom, in particular, will be called upon to identify which
progressive vectors are freeing the body of its inherited torments the better to
cultivate the soul, and which are simply escorting us through unexplored realms
of newfangled glister the better to churn out sales.
We should cure the sick and feed the hungry—but we should neither
surround ourselves with pelf nor stir an artificial craving for bright
playthings in our fellow creatures. At
the moment, we are collectively making a miserable job of this vital triage.
If people of faith would themselves ponder what faith requires of them,
the absurd misstatements of the faithless would draw down a spontaneous ridicule
that would soon teach the virtues of silence.
Robert Reich’s partisans (if I may assume an advantage over Mr.
Inbinder which a lapse of four years has allowed me) may soon teach us the
virtues of poverty, in any case. They
will do so with lofty sanctimony as they wrap themselves, their families, and
their adherents in a mantle of power which may cover generations, in high
medieval fashion. That, too, is one
way—the most painful way—to explode Mr. Reich’s brand of faith: i.e., to
surrender our lives to mere human beings on a messianic mission and watch how
egotism rots the new temple. Nobody
knows the virtue of patience more thoroughly than the poor.
Veronese, Calvary (c. 1570)
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***************************
Technophobes
Roil Nation, Rile Lawmakers
Staff
Neo-Luddites pose a serious threat to the advance of our civilization:
such is the conclusion reached by numerous scholarly observers of the current
scene like Eleanor Twaddle-Fitch, Dieter Dunsdorfer Professor of Technology and
Popular Culture at Orion University. “I
see it in my undergraduates every semester, and with escalating frequency,”
laments Twaddle-Fitch. “The fear:
the dread of returning home to their little burgs and backwater suburbs.
Parents confiscate their laptops, sometimes literally slamming them to
the floor. Neighbors who see them
with a cell phone to their ear are apt to hurl obscenities at them—o r
something worse. One of my students
said that a rock narrowly missed her head last summer as she was inputting data
into her iPhone in order to gauge the proper speed and distance of her daily
jog.” Twaddle-Fitch hopes to see
Orion pony up with the dollars necessary to launch a summer program allowing
at-risk students to pass their vacations within the university’s friendly
confines, acquiring marketable computer skills at the same time.
That other academics have actually protested the excessive and
irresponsible growth of technology in areas such as video gaming and television
programming is further cause for alarm. “If
society’s best and brightest are seen as condoning this vigilante
anti-progressivism,” opines Herbert Menendez, District Coordinator of the
National Council for the Promotion of Technology (NACPOT), “then the door to respectability is open for countless pitchfork-wielding rednecks to press
their case home.” Menendez fears
that a misidentification of the Green Movement with Luddite causes may be
responsible for leading some of the nation’s educated class astray.
“These refugees from the sixties who now occupy tenured positions on
our campuses should look at who they’re hanging out with,” he continued in a
phone interview, visibly warming to the subject.
“If you’re making common cause with a guy who goes to Monster Truck
events every Friday night, then you can’t very well be on the side of the
planet, can you?”
The venerable Sven Birkerts would have to be numbered
among those who have foolishly backed the wrong horse.
Writes Birkerts in a seminal technophobe essay, “This is my fear: that
if the screen becomes the dominant mode of communication, and if the effective
use of that mode requires a banishing of whatever is not plain or direct, then
we may condition ourselves into a kind of low-definition consciousness.”
Sound innocent? Such urbane
reservations are but the tip of an obstructionist iceberg looming ever nearer to
our culture’s unsuspecting prow. “How
can one worry over whether high school graduates of tomorrow will jump giddily
from point to point like channel-surfers,” protests Chandra Kanchandrasandra,
“when refusal to adapt to change is definitively dull-witted?”
This pert young trustee of the Multination Education Supplementation
Foundation stresses that the human being is unique in all of nature for her
ability to adapt. “Where do these
bibliophiles think the book came from?” Kanchandrasandra laughs out loud.
“Every one of our great advances has been artificial.
The day when we cease to embrace change will be the day when we begin
descending the same slope that brought the dinosaurs to extinction.”
Then there is the raw evidence of the streets.
Neo-Luddites are growing overtly aggressive in large numbers. Last year
the annual convention of Americans for the Immediate Elimination of Electronic
Entertainment (AIEEE) met in Buffalo to discuss ballot initiatives aiming at an
eventual amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The organization’s president, Malcolm A. Ulander, described the
envisioned amendment in blunt, brutal terms as “a blow for common humanity.
No one would be allowed to put a child in front of a screen before the
age of eight. IPods would require an
annual license conditional upon receipt of a doctor’s consent form.
Cell phones found in vehicles during a routine search would be punished
with the same severity as concealed weapons.
Taxpayers whose hard-earned money had been used to equip local school
districts with computers would be entitled to refunds and to class-action
lawsuits in the event that damage to their children was irreversible.”
Hardware distributors are already beginning to feel the heat from such
groups. Rudolf Schmeikel, manager of
a Radio Shack store in Plain Deal, Missouri, is afraid to leave his home for
work. “A dead cat was in my
mailbox last week,” confessed Schmeikel in an interview during which he
insisted on disguising his voice. “A
mouse had been crammed into its mouth... I mean, you know, a real mouse, an old
model with a cord, not the laser. Malcolm
Ulander’s thugs do this kind of stuff all over the city.
We call it getting MAU-MAUed.”
Radical technophobes have even used the Internet,
paradoxically, to disseminate dysinformation.
The braindamage.org site, which makes extravagant claims about the
hazards of all electronic technology placed within five feet of the user, has
been traced to the Citizens for an Unwired Tomorrow (CUT).
When confronted with their strategy’s gross hypocrisy, CUT henchman
Liam O’Fogarty shot back, “I’d set me own grandmother itself atop a
spring-release bomb if it’d advance the cause.
To dine with the divil, you need a long spoon.”
Meanwhile, ordinary citizens look on in growing disbelief as their
neighbors seek to wall out the future. “I
don’t even recognize my country any more,” choked a young woman who wished
to remain apocryphal. “When I try
to text while driving, people give me dirty looks.
Last month I ended up in a ditch when someone ran me off the road—I
couldn’t get their tag number, but I know it was one of those freaks… you
know, the CUTCO people.” Representative
Mickey “Hondo” Buckholtz of Florida’s Eighth District, who notes that his
pet alligator was poisoned last year right after the installation of a new
satellite dish, speculates that aliens may in fact be behind this reign of
terror. A dismantling of our
technological defenses will leave us completely exposed to alien conquest,
worries Buckholtz. His wife Neena,
who claims actually to have been abducted by aliens, disagrees with Hondo’s
anxiety but shares his frustration. “The
aliens are friendly people,” she explains.
“They just want what we all want—a better-paying job and some quality
leisure time. But if we keep
sabotaging all our new technology, how are we ever going to get on the same page
with them?”
The new Obama Administration’s science-friendly attitude has ignited
hope that, at long last, Luddite extremists will be forced into silence.
Senator Jaspar Hammer of Arkansas, the former Christian-Rock star whose
message of tolerance has reached hundreds, if not hundreds more, wants to see a
statement appended to all applications for government employment which would
renounce technophobe bigotry categorically, and whose signing by the applicant
would be mandatory. “As more and
more employment is shifted to the public sector,” beams Hammer, pumping his
fist, “these Ludd-Duds will have to sign on, or else starve!
We’re past the point where we can allow people to stand in the way of
progress.”
(N.B.:
The above reportage is a spoof. It
did, however, succeed in awing two classes of college freshmen, almost none of
whom could detect its humorous intent. Q.E.D.)
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***************************
Parallel
Failures
Alan
McGinnis
Parallel universe or
warp-speed transit to
alternate galaxy or
time-machine dial set
backward/forward or
alien touchdown taking
captives…
n’importe
oú hors du monde.
They killed the poets.
You would otherwise wield
many
subjunctives and
conditionals
prophecy auspice omen
contrary-to-fact clauses
in your daily search for
daylight
“If may… then
might…” “were it…
it would…”
How many light years
in a metaphor?
If I write
(should may might
write—for why
write it now,
post-poetry?)
“Blonde sun, chill
spring tide—
March tide,
birth-season’s watery march—
blue flaking over azalea
shoals
where precocious children
smell philosophy
as their mates chase and
play,
I swam downward, backward,
trapped her under white
dogwood coral, a
movement too gold-blonde
for sun and
not flower enough for
fish,
touched her as I never had
when we were
children (I precocious,
she
playing) and asked but
could not say
(under water thick with
years)
why, why, why, why… and
she
would have seen once in
her lifetime,
my lifetime… me.
Seen me,
had this been time of
life,
Had life been death and
this real time.”
If I say, were I to say,
what
might just split such and
such an
image superimposed on
another
like two atoms under a
particle beam
and fuse, shock wave
settling, a
metaphor… would I not
have traversed
more cosmo-plasma than
you, Mr. Einstein?
For you cannot transport
me back.
Were you to worm-hole me
back to
childhood, I should be a
child, and she
a blonde child, and my
words
awaiting me a man to be
found
too late.
So I should gain
Nothing thereby, though I
shuttle from primal soup
to red shift bled out.
For I need
her then to see me now.
I need
her now to see my now is
then,
was then, will be now.
I need
all over again, but
without the loss
of a single blonde hair,
and a vast gain
of words, words, words.
I need
flowering chances to
speak. I need
the courage to speak of
one having lived.
But you killed the poets,
in a way.
You absorbed them
in neutron stars and split
chronons and
other seductive
chalk-scribbled poetry.
I can travel twice the
rate of light
and double half back if I
can split & patch
the words just right, the
things
which are not themselves
till you make them
half not themselves.
Or I could
before your
number-serenades seduced us. Now
we look Out There again,
like blunt Cro-Magnons
who look for men in the
stars, who
expect to see a god
walking, to
track him from the deep,
fresh prints,
and to ask him for her
in so many words.
Should she flinch, they
will lace
their sinewed fingers
through her sun-spun hair.
I cannot reach my there
from your here.
You do not understand, Mr.
Einstime, Mr. Weisenstein.
You are too dull.
Your numbers
will not make words, and
make only words
that will not pry open and
compress
the universe.
Which is what I need.
What’s an equation in
the subjunctive?
Where can I find myself
young and wise?
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Memento
Mori
Ivor
Davies
All of us imagine saying words, sometimes for months or years, which we
would never ever allow to leak out of our mouths in an unguarded instant.
The intimate familiarity of the phrase, born of innumerable daydreamt
rehearsals, is usually no lubricant at all to the outside world: passage from
fantasy to reality remains unthinkable. Were
it otherwise, the institution of marriage would vanish, Tourette Syndrome would
be diagnosed more often than the common cold, and listening to a politician
would risk becoming informative.
It was with a paralyzing shock, therefore, that Molchak heard himself say
to a class of two dozen freshmen one fine morning (a composition class, where
discussions of racism, abortion, and gay marriage had already incited one
sobbing breakdown and one shouting match over the long weeks) the following
absurd words, which he had only ever imagined before over a Scotch-on-the-rocks
on a lonely Saturday evening:
“I’m dying.”
Moments earlier, there had been an accidental silence as he was trying to
air the ideas in the Kubler-Ross essay on death.
In the back of his mind, he had been trying to determine—as he did so
often, and could now do rather well—whether the discussion’s relative
flaccidity suggested an indifference to the subject more than a virgin innocence
of exposure to the assignment. The
latter was always the proper explanation in at least 25% of cases on any given
day… but even the three or four students who always bloviated away regardless
of the topic (and of their exposure to relevant printed matter) had sat cheek in
hand. Not even texting or prodding
their neighbors to peek at a laptopped image from FaceBook… just brooding,
like castaways in an open boat with no supplies.
He had sensed the response’s unique oddity.
Here was a subject—death—that you really didn’t need to read about
in order to find stimulus or provocation. Everybody
died. Or did these
ringed-and-tattooed culture warriors suppose, with their smooth cheeks and
smooth brows, that they would never reach his age, let alone their forties and
fifties? As they dwelt in the
Internet’s eternal Now, did they suppose that they would remain eighteen
forever?
He stared hard into his rostrum, trying to recover the sound of his own
voice. Perhaps he had not really
said it. Having thought it so often
in his empty apartment—“I’m dying”—while lounging on the sofa where he
often slept the night away, perhaps the part of his brain entrusted with this
playful recitation had simply flitted across the silence for a little exercise.
But a glance up at the first row of students convinced him that the voice
in his ears had arrived there from his mouth.
Emily, who always sat front-and-center, seemed to have opened her eyes
almost as wide as the thick lenses before them.
Cody, the baseball stud (whose coach exacted perfect attendance of the
team), had surrendered the worldly-wise cock of his head, the visor of his
eternal cap having leveled off perfectly. Deandrion
actually appeared interested, as if never having entertained the notion that
white people, too, sometimes die out of season.
There was still time to… not to take it back, but to reshape it.
To vaporize the horror with a few more words.
Of course, we’re all dying. You’re
dying, too. Yet as irresponsibly
and unforgivably as those three syllables had slipped from his teeth, Molchak
found that they had immediately captured a majesty which intimidated him from
refinement. After all, who was to
say that he was not dying—dying in
some sense far more imminent than the universal one?
He could be dead by this evening, perhaps shredded in a car wreck or shot
by a deranged student… though that sense, indeed, was also universal, nor did
it qualify for the imperfective aspect in dying.
Perhaps he had cancer and didn’t know it.
More than anything, though, he sincerely felt that he was dying
inside—something in him, if not exactly the body which held the something.
He had been feeling this way, very palpably, for a long time now.
The Sibylline letters, “I’m dying,” had seemed to coalesce drily at
the glassy bottom of every Scotch or beer he drained.
Even when he would go jogging an ambitious mile (for he had all but
renounced booze after a scene with his father last Christmas—the
college-professor son back at the humble homestead, caught in a trough between
past and future), he would feel, curiously, that the salutary burst of physical
activity was only using up his soul. More
than anything, he could not gainsay or finesse his horrible announcement because
he found it, upon consideration, to be deeply true.
Melissa, the Buxom Blonde Christian, was about to ask him why—why was
he dying? Of what?
Was there anything he could do—anything she
could do? It was coming… he
could see it bubbling up from those two magnificent breasts.
“Read the assignment next time, huh?” he smiled gently at his rostrum
with a wave of the hand. “Now get
out of here. Go soak up some
springtime rays.”
Needlessly arranging his notes and gradebook, he listened to the silent
scuff and rustle of exiting bodies in fascination.
Fascinating, that people could find absolutely nothing to say at such
moments… fascinating, that he had moved them to so human a state—now they
were just “people”, like the rest of the world—when they had been so full
of contempt for over-twenties during the racism discussion a week ago.
Ever bourgeois, just beneath the surface.
And still more fascinating, that he was allowing them to exit and spread
the word, the horrible word, like a tide going out with toxic waste in its
rustling hems. What on earth was he
thinking?
A heavy vapor of perfume. He
looked up from his briefcase.
“I’ll pray for you!” whispered Melissa excitedly, her steady gaze
shouting a heavenly blue.
He realized just then that he had foreseen her every word, even though he
had been blind-sided by his own. And
he heard more words from another favorite fantasy—but this time kept safely
under decorum’s lid: I’ll pray with
you if you’ll sleep with me! Had
that played some part in The Announcement—his fantasy of killing a mattress
under Melissa, an introverted, boring bachelor’s fantasy?
Had some particle of his motive been to create this instant?
Molchak couldn’t fight off a smile, so he gave it the best alibi he
could. “I… I’d like that.
Thank you.”
*
One thing was for sure, he mused during the following free period in his
office: when word did get out, his position would be no worse around campus than
it already was. His chance at tenure
was already shot to hell, and he had already decided not to re-apply next year:
going through all this a second time really would drive him to his grave.
His publications were satisfactory but not spectacular—none of his
ideas was politically “edgy” enough to find favor with the most celebrated
journals. His institutional service
consisted of grinding out hours on mean-nothing committees to which he was
assigned precisely because he was the lowest grimace on the totem pole—well,
that and the fact that he was temperamentally incapable of mounting a loud,
righteous protest. The students
evaluated his teaching at the very bottom of the “average” range (he did not
“arouse” or “stimulate” them, wrote Aldredi predictably in annual
reviews, unconsciously equating college instruction to a species of
pornography).
He was lackluster. He
was neither very bad at anything nor very good.
To the question, “Why fire him?” the obvious answer would always be,
“Why not?” Tenure was supposed
to be special, like admission into heaven: if many were not denied, what would
be the virtue of the accepted? His
lot—the lot of that horde of the lackluster which he represented (and he could
easily have checked off his brethren on any class roster after two weeks of
meetings)—was to ennoble the few by remaining among the many.
He made interviewers more aware of the dynamism and energy they sought by
mulling over questions, refusing to effervesce on cue, and generally displaying
the conductivity of cold mud. He
made women more aware of an exciting date or a possible mate by talking about
Dostoevsky, not laughing when there was nothing to laugh at, and generally
defining the polarity of perfect tedium. If
only he could rent his services out through some kind of agency… “A night on
the town with Molchak: discover all that you are not
looking for”… “Submit your employer to Molchak: teach him to
appreciate you.”
The final pronouncement on tenure was supposed to have reached him long
before Spring Break, but he had not even been able to summon enough nerve to ask
the verdict of Aldredi. To his own
gloomy sense that the outcome could be presupposed was added a certain noxious
condescension from his chair—an impatient but gentle recognition which he had
never known before—in the mail room, the hall, the faculty lounge; this
evasion, as if Aldredi dreaded being forced to pronounce the death sentence in
so many words and was mildly grateful every time Molchak spared him, sealed the
deal. A few more weeks, and then no
job. Nor any prospects for another
job—not this kind of job, the kind
he had kidded himself for years of graduate school would give him all the
fulfillment that driving a UPS truck hadn’t.
Under the circumstances, he concluded (deleting all his
new e-mails in a sudden rush of nihilistic freedom), he was glad that they would
all soon know of his impending death. Let
them know. Let them stew in it.
Let them take it home to supper, bubbling in their gut like a dirty
little bacterium, as they delayed writing unpleasant letters and sidestepped him
to arrange interviews for his position. Let
them fully realize that they were cutting off a man—a real man, not just a
stat knocking around at the bottom of the “average” pool—to meet his death
without friends or resources. Let
them cram all that in their social-progressive pipe of compassion, bring the
pipe to a nice red glow, and then stick the whole thing up their…
A sheepish knock at his not-quite-closed door.
He cried the “come in” without even pausing to consider what look a
dying man should be wearing on his face.
What were their names, now… the buddies of the second row?
Jessica (bean-pole tall, stringy hair, wire-framed glasses) and Dolores
(Latin-svelte, melting faun-dark eyes, a bit of an overbite—not
unbecoming)…. Fairly regular
attendance, both of them… Jessica had once approached a B on a paper…
Dolores wrote with sincere fervor, but only in the “I… me… you… we”
chatter of a conversation before the Coke machine.
Now, coke was one thing he had never tried—or scarcely even weed.
He had been a rarity in grad school that way.
If they would only give professors drug tests, like A-Rod and Roger
Clemens, he would suddenly be catapulted to stardom in the vast gap created by
mass-suspensions….
“I wanted to turn in my second essay,” Jessica finally
murmured, fingering a pair of sheets thinner than their staple.
“You said that I could turn it in late, without penalty.
You remember… I told you that my grandmother d—… that she, that she
passed….”
The bridge crumpled under passed,
which came out sounding very like pissed as
the girl dropped her chin onto her sternum and stiff-armed the paper in his
direction, bidding to hide behind it, apparently.
Dolores picked up the slack.
“I… I have mine, too!” she warbled; anyone would have thought that
she was giving him a going-away present. What
a beautiful smile budded from her mild overbite!
“I mean… not my second essay, but the one due on Friday.
I won’t be there. We have a
cross-country meet. I showed you the
note from my coach… remember?”
Molchak wondered what it would have been like to inhabit an
Hispanic/Catholic pelt and have some tawny, voluble, doe-eyed thing bearing one
yearly babies and serving one evening cervesas.
He couldn’t tell how the typical Hispanic male would hold any advantage
over him, as a catch. His skin
wasn’t mottled, his teeth were straight, he was no shorter than average (if no
taller), and he hadn’t ever drunk enough beer to build a paunch.
He could see why the Melissas of the world were saving their treasures
for something in the Donald Trump line, but he retained just enough Catholicity
himself to feel indignant at their bargaining powers.
A Dolores would not have been half bad….
“I could have her send you an e-mail, if you don’t remember…”
“No, no, no,” he sighed with a wave of the hand (a gesture which he
suspected of being his signature move). “I
remember. Off to go running.
Hard on the knees, isn’t it?”
“Only if you step in a hole!” Dolores laughed.
Yes, a surround-sound of laughter like that would have been some
compensation for the loss of Melissa’s… amplitude of other surrounding
qualities. There was more than one
way to pray. There was oh,
God! and fall on your knees in rapture… and then there was listening to
the sparrows in the sunlight at your window.
“It’s… it’s not very good. But
I tried to make it more like what you said you wanted.
I’m going to get a B from you if it’s the last thing I do!
I mean, the last thing before… before the semester ends.”
“Well, the semester will probably end before I do, if that’s what’s eliciting this rash of submissions.”
“No! I… we just…”
“We just thought… it seemed like a good time to…”
“Yes, a good time. The
present is always a good time. You
never know.”
And as he tidily aligned the two papers with a couple of taps on his
desk, Molchak had the satisfaction of glimpsing Dolores’s lower lip, thrust
prettily out by her slightly too salient teeth, begin to tremble.
*
The news spread the way the weather warmed.
You never actually perceived the shift, yet it was unmistakable as the
days wore on. Students in all his
classes—not just the section of composition where he had made The
Announcement—began to follow his rambling with riveted attention, as if
expecting him to fall dead in mid-sentence.
(What if he had—what would be the advantage of immediate awareness?
A lightning call to 911? A
rush to lift his short-circuiting brain off the hard floor?
[Melissa first, please.] A
chance to tell a ripping yarn in detail later on—maybe to capture his death,
like Saddam Hussein’s, on a cell phone and post it on the Net?)
His languid jokes were laughed at, his non-sequiturs overlooked.
Reading assignments were not completed any more thoroughly nor writing
assignments performed any more thoughtfully; but attendance, oddly enough,
swelled and stabilized, and discussions grew… for lack of a better word…
respectful.
The same… respect… seemed
to infect the faculty. In the
mailroom and the lounge as in classes, a tacit kind of stricture appeared to
forbid any direct questioning. (That
was the one thing he had feared originally—questions on the order of, “What
are you suffering from? How long did
they give you? Have you seen a
specialist?”) Molchak often
puzzled over the phenomenon. Did his
colleagues suppose that he would break down—that the last thing he wanted was
to be reminded of the grim hand poised above him?
Did they assume that the diagnosis might imply certain indiscretions,
like visiting gay bars or sharing the blood of an inferior race?
The secretaries, in particular, treated him like a nine-year-old leukemia
patient, feigning maternal smiles and hovering over him with maternal concern;
but even faculty members who had never spoken to him turned almost chatty.
The German sociologist deemed a higher order of being since a five-minute
spiel about transsexuals aired on Larry
King once inquired of him if he found the weather to his liking.
Weston Aldredi still wouldn’t give him the time of day regarding the
tenure decision (the foregone conclusion that never needed deciding)… but even
these evasions had now assumed a new character.
No more was Aldredi the benign maitre-d’ saddled with the unsavory task
of informing an out-of-towner that his attire was inadequate for admission into
the club. Now the out-of-towner had
been shot on the club’s doorstep and was bleeding out: Jeeves’s unpleasant
duty had been preempted by mortality, and he could only hold the unfortunate in
his arms as he cried for help. Molchak
enjoyed the turned-tables effect very much, indeed.
For once, he was in control.
The supercilious frauds in the club could only peek timidly through the
drapes at the death’s head on the sidewalk and wet their perfectly creased
pants.
He was half-surprised to find himself solicitously invited to the
semester’s end departmental soirée… and half not.
(Against the terror of inviting the death’s head would have been
weighed the inhumanity of ignoring a colleague in his final days—and the fact
that the colleague had already been slated for professional execution would only
lump a heavy dose of guilt into the “humanity” side of the scale.)
Molchak in fact had little inclination to kill off an evening at
Aldredi’s manse, listening to the tenure-track people attempt awkward thrusts
of one-upmanship while the fully tenured people reminisced about the sixties or
grew so tipsy that they started romancing each others’ mates.
After all, he didn’t have a lot of time left… to live, to die, to
find a job, or whatever. Yet when he
expressed some of these reservations as diplomatically as possible to Ellen in
the office next door, she vaguely threatened to bring the party to his
apartment. Perhaps supposing that he
was unable to drive (sudden blackouts? seizures?),
she insisted on showing up with her significantly “other” other—a
disturbingly attractive female muscle-builder who taught Fitness and always wore
sleeveness tops—to transport him to the affair.
“So what exactly is the matter with you?” asked the Body-Builder out
of the blue, his door scarcely closed. Molchak,
from the back seat, could see Ellen try to swallow her throat in the rear-view
mirror.
“It’s… congenital.”
“Ah. Been misbehaving,
hmm?”
“No. I mean that it’s…
you know. Inherited.
As old as the human race. The
mechanism of evolution works very slowly sometimes in weeding out the inferior.
I will be one more of my kind, at least, that doesn’t reproduce.
So you might say that I am serving the cause of progress.”
It was far, far more than he had ever said on the subject before (having
never before been questioned)—and certainly more, as well, than he had ever
planned out in the event of a question. He
was amazed at the ease with which the words flowed forth.
To his ear, it all had a ring of complete truth—and to his mind, it all
enjoyed a strange justification.
“You look pretty healthy, all the same,” muttered Muscles from the
front passenger seat, turning over an exquisite bare shoulder whose golden hairs
caught the low sun like a fruit in the bowl of some still-life painting.
Ellen was starting to fidget visibly.
“So do you,” smiled Molchak at the shoulder.
“What? What do you mean by
that?”
“I mean you look pretty healthy. You
know… like that girl on… I’ve forgotten the name.
I take in a lot of trash TV, lying on the couch evening after evening.
Sometimes I go to sleep and then wake up to something that I can’t
identify.”
“Poor dear,” he read off of Ellen’s lips in the rear-view mirror.
“The Biggest Loser… that’s
what it’s called. There are women,
you know….” Did he really want
to keep trotting up this path—hadn’t he already ridden into enough briars
for one decade by giving his tongue free bridle?
On the other hand, he was as
good as dead. “Some women, when
they work out until they almost look like men… they seem more attractive to me
than they would have if they’d stayed as they were.
There’s just a hint of the brute in they way their brow or their lip is
turned, as if the wince of lifting heavy weights had gotten permanently
impressed on their face. But
it’s… somehow, it’s really a turn-on.
Not beautiful, but… seductive. Maybe
Ariosto’s Bradamante looked like that. I
like to think that she did.”
The Body-Builder had twisted increasingly back toward him until her lower
lip caught the same sunlight as her shoulder.
Its fleshy, glossy surface described a kind of V whose mid-section was
cut in two by a dramatic dark cleft. Very
kissable. Its owner would ask him in
whispers later that evening, as she cornered him in Aldredi’s deserted kitchen
and crumpled her fourth beer can in a tight fist, if he had been insulting her
or coming on to her.
But the only words spoken for the rest of the drive were Ellen’s.
“Why, Galen!” she cooed delightedly.
“To think that you’ve been here all these years, and I had no idea
that… that you were a person of such discriminating taste!”
The showdown in the kitchen in fact occurred relatively early during that
evening’s parade of bizarre events, not all of which he could reconstruct
confidently in proper order. The
Body-Builder had started hitting the beer pretty hard right off, however,
perhaps because she was the only non-academic in the house (Aldredi’s two
children having departed for their court-ordered weekend with a bipolar but
medicated mother) and hence left with little to say.
Since Molchak also always suffered through periods of long silence at
such gatherings and often sought out empty rooms to cover his awkwardness, maybe
the Amazon was drawn to him as much by a similar awkwardness as by the influence
of John Barleycorn. Yet her mouth
was decidedly wetter than in the car, as he studied it from Ground Zero.
Somehow he managed to squeeze a refrigerator door between them and then
execute a barrel roll that would have excited the Red Baron’s envy.
He wanted no trouble with Ellen, with whom he was often on something like
friendly terms. Then, too, his new
role of Walking Dead Man didn’t allow for feeling out any waists for degree of
physical fitness.
Either after his escape or, possibly, just before—or before, during,
and after—two tenureless understudies lengthily hatched a tedious prank on two
or three others of their rank which involved the Internet.
The most gullible tiro had apparently gone online upstairs, using one of
the departed children’s computers, while a girl genius deeply mired in acne
giggled downstairs over a laptop (which, Molchak was forced to conclude, she had
brought with her to the party). After
a few minutes, the mark and his sidekicks were screaming down the stairwell,
“We’ve done it! We’ve got her!
Jason has Zora Neale Hurston’s niece in a chat!”
Another recent hire, looking more like a sorority sister than a Ph.D.,
pretended to relay further excited shouts as the chat progressed, actually
guffawing over a sofa as Pimples hammered out the Hurston niece’s spontaneous
reflections on race, gender, and a better world.
The last of these priceless observations appeared to include charges that
the person at the chat’s other end was a bigot, a sexist, a fool, and a twit.
The upstairs gang descended for more beer with every bit as much weakness
in their knees and pallor in their cheeks as three interns would have displayed
who had accidentally given President Obama digitalis instead of aspirin.
Molchak had registered this low-grade burlesque—a kind of Jackass
for Ph.D.s—as he drifted in search of rooms unoccupied by Muscles.
At some stage, he had blundered upon Lucas and Fernandez leaning each
into the other’s face over a pool table, wagging a fist, and shouting.
“I was closer to meaningful revolution than you
ever were—I was forty years ago, and I am now!
“You were never for
change—you were always a little
bourgeois!”
“How dare you? Because I
don’t want to put the worker out of work?”
“Bah! If you let the worker
make his own decisions in a degenerate state, he’ll graze his days away like a
cow at Wal-Mart!”
“That’s because you don’t know the worker!
You never did!”
“I don’t know the worker… I?
Which of us went to Cuba while it was still dangerous to go?”
“Dangerous to whom—danger from whom?
I know you’re not talking about—”
“I’m talking about our government, you idiot!
My mentor Heilig was audited just for writing an open letter to
Castro!”
“Oh, how chic! So you
braved auditing! My father worked on
an assembly line… but you sneaked
over to Cuba from Madrid after your conference was over.”
“What your father did is irrelevant to the greater issue—you can never entertain a generality, can you?”
“No, not when the specifics you’re sweeping off the table are people
like my father!”
“Such a good little bourgeois son!
But didn’t your mother teach you that to make an omelet, you have to
break some eggs? When will you ever
understand?”
“But you don’t make an
omelet with egg shells!”
“What in the hell does that mean? Anyway,
egg shells are high in protein. Maybe
the common people… maybe they need to eat crickets for a while to survive!
Maybe this is what you don’t see!”
“So is that your plan for change? Destroy
all our industrial jobs and have the people eat crickets?”
“You’ve never even eaten a cricket, have you!
I’m not surprised. With
that tire around your belt…”
“That fly trap of yours is open so much, you must have insects flying
in all the time! You should charge
rent!”
And so on, and always in that style. Molchak
had heard twice as much before he could compose himself sufficiently to feel for
the doorway; and at that point, he wondered if he should perhaps stay to avert a
tragedy. The hand of Lucas which was
not a fist had fitted itself tightly to a billiard ball, while Fernandez’s
free appendage had blindly happened upon a pool cue.
“Stop it!” screamed Ellen.
(Molchak did not know if she had been standing the whole time in rapt
silence, much as he, or if the ruckus had only just drawn her in.)
“Listen to yourselves! It’s
no wonder the world is in the shape it’s in!
You men—you can’t even come together and have a few glasses of wine
without wanting to kill each other! Just
like a couple of drunken sailors! You
should… you should be thankful just to be alive!”
And, incredibly, she burst into a sob.
He turned to her as the source—suddenly—of greater surprise, only to
find her scurrying away from him to the room’s far corner.
Reflexively, he turned back to the combatants… and discovered them,
almost as improbably, gaping at him rather than at their watery denunciator.
Yet once his eyes met theirs, they stared into the green felt of the pool
table like boys whose Christmas presents have been taken away in punishment.
Fernandez finally relinquished the cue stick and (without looking up, his
hand apparently endowed with special sensors) recovered a beer bottle that left
behind a moist ring on the table’s varnished mahogany rim.
In fact, there seemed to have been rather a lot of elbow-bending,
particularly for a department as tame as this one.
At some point in the evening—certainly before the incident in the
billiard room—Molchak had begun to suspect that he
had something to do with the Bacchic madness afoot.
Try as he might to float to the edge of every social eddy (and very
little trying was required), he had poisoned the whole stream merely by being
present: a grinning skull bobbing speechlessly in the current, looking on
through empty sockets. To the young
ones, he must have signified not only mortality in the broadest sense, but also
the more imminent professional demise that poised over their thickly haired
heads (for he imagined it common knowledge by now—all the way down to the
janitor—that he would be denied tenure). The
grave abruptly opened—so they thought—at his feet would simply be a metaphor
for the oblivion awaiting at least half of them in five or six years.
And they must have accepted his presence as that of a white lamb too dull
or disoriented to bleat before the altar, and garlanded his fleecy neck, and
danced themselves silly around the scapegoat offering that might mystically
clear a free passage for them: better
he than they!
As for the older ones… he was farther from being able to
frame a picture of what they must think, for he remained decades away from them
while only years away from the ingénues. Probably
more of the real thing in their case—the real death.
Death. Like Lucas and
Fernandez (and Aldredi), they must have reflected that the very high mound of
paper honors they had managed to heap up and climb throughout their adult life
was still just fuming excrement, ready to decay into the earth at the first
steady downpour. Or maybe all the
incessant hot air about social progress really did have enough electricity in it
to stir a lightning bolt—maybe the ignoble prospect of giving the axe to one
already bowed beneath a much sharper, surer axe had forced their vile hypocrisy
over their lifted chins and into their faraway-focused eyes.
They appeared to grow more testy, more surly, even as the younger set
grew more frivolous, more childish. Or
perhaps it was just the booze, after all. (Mercifully,
nobody had pressed him to imbibe once he had refused a couple of drinks: the
word had obviously buzzed round that he was under doctor’s orders.)
The sliding doors onto the patio stood invitingly ajar all evening,
though the occasional June bug angrily staggered in like a tipster who has
forgotten the way home. Molchak had
fled into the cool night air more than once, perhaps evading Muscles, perhaps
hoping she would follow him to a spot where they would not be observed.
(He honestly posed himself these alternatives several times, painfully
understanding that they were a form of the question, “Are all your sexual
fantasies the refuge of a coward?”) Surely
it was his last exit which brought him into the proximity of Leyda Reinsdorf and
one of the young guns’ husbands, for this was the encounter which decided him
upon leaving. They never actually
saw him, and he himself heard much more than he saw.
The scarcely mistakable sound of a lash falling (for though one seldom
sees whippings, what else sounds like a whip?) followed immediately by a
half-swallowed grunt of pain (which must have enhanced the image of a scourge)
greeted him with the cool zephyr. As
he gaped into the back yard’s trees and slid himself into shadows away from
the porch light, his widening eyes slowly brought up Leyda’s squat but not
unshapely silhouette and very bushy coiffure.
The thrashing ended almost as soon as he had taken his position; but the
exchange that ensued (as a belt buckle and zipper continued to clue his visual
imagination with sounds) left little in doubt.
“I still don’t get it.”
“You didn’t like that?”
“It hurt!”
“God, you pansy! It’s
supposed to hurt! Pain is the
whetstone of pleasure—that’s the whole point.”
“Maybe if there were more pleasure to follow…”
“No, not here. Maybe not
anywhere. That wasn’t part of the
deal. You just told me that you
didn’t understand—”
“And you were going to show me. Well,
show it all!”
“You’re a creep! I
don’t know how Slayde could have paired up with someone like you!”
“Ah, come on! I just
meant…”
“No, you either get it, or you don’t.
If you didn’t feel the beginnings of pleasure in that, then… then the
experiment failed. As you said, you
just don’t get it.”
“I want to try to get it.”
“Maybe you’re too drunk.”
“I’m not drunk! But
wouldn’t that help?”
“No, it would actually dull your senses.
S-and-M all about extending your sensory frontiers—turning up your
brain’s dials and knobs to the max, for both pleasure and pain, so that one
becomes the other—so that you live life to the fullest.”
“I love it when you talk like that!”
“One day we’ll be old, really old, like our pathetic host, or…”
“Or dead, really dead, like that… what’s his name again?”
“He was dead before he started dying.
That’s what I mean. You
can’t live your life like that. You
have to grab every cup you can reach and drain it to the lees.”
“To the lees, yes! Let’s
go rustle up a pot of coffee, and drain it to the lees, and try again!”
“Let’s?
As in we?”
“Okay, me.
I promise I’ll sober up. I
have something better than caffeine.”
“I’m not coming out here again unless you bring Slayde, too.
Especially after what you said.”
“You saw her—she’s busy with her computer.
But they’re finished with all that crap upstairs, and we…”
The rest trailed off into a whisper, though Molchak heard the word
“bathroom” emerge as the couple passed him for the sliding doors.
In a subconscious attack of decorum, one of them actually pulled the
sliding panel shut. Its thud echoed
his resolution: he made his way toward the yard’s gate.
An invisible hound in the next yard almost scared him out of his shoes
with its wolfish barks.
*
He knew the way from here to his apartment complex well enough; but he
was pleasantly taken aback, all the same, by the pedestrian appearance of
landmarks—an ornate iron grill in the Spanish style, a small park with a
slide, an odd intersection where five streets met—which that great fool, the
Mind, had somehow supposed accessible only by car (in its infinite
susceptibility to conditioning). Six
years he had lived in this burg, and twice that many times he had made the
transit to Aldredi’s pretentious subdivision… yet always behind the wheel.
Now, on foot and by streetlight, he found this nondescript sprawl (where
he had never really wanted to spend his life, but where he had inscrutably
leaked out his soul’s last drop of blood to dwell as long as possible)
strangely, pitiably unmasked. He was
struck especially by its emptiness. Though
Friday night had freed all wage-slaves temporarily from their chains, none of
the liberated appeared to celebrate within these brick-and-shingle temples on
whose account they had indentured themselves.
They had to flee the homes which were their refuge from work’s misery
in order—properly and truly—to ventilate their hatred of work.
Birds slept in their nests among the thick boxwood hedges, retired senior
citizens plied a satellite to find an episode of Gunsmoke…
but the lifeblood of the community had gone in search of booze, sex, and
near-death, vicarious or otherwise. At
a certain moment, passing entirely out of the streetlight where a tall pine
threw a long shadow, he identified two distant sirens at opposite ends of the
compass, racing at break-neck speed, no doubt.
He wondered where Melissa went on Fridays like this, with her Magic
Christianity and her scented, magnificent bust?
A prayer meeting? A movie
with other girls? A double-date to
the bowling alley? A tryst with a
dark beau who spirited her to a place where nobody could see and nobody would
talk? Might that place be the
apartment next to his?
What about Dolores? Probably
more likely to stay in a group all evening—more likely to be a virgin, if less
likely to wear an wristband announcing her wait for marriage.
Catholic girls were the bunch he knew best of all.
But even she would be somewhere—anywhere but at home.
Even her balloon-waisted, bubbly mamacita
would be somewhere, maybe at bingo or running a mission to the old folks’
home… maybe something charitable like that.
But the charity was more apparent than real (not that Mamacita would ever see it that way), because it got her out of her
own home. It spared her that grim
moment of staring everything she had worked for in the face and thinking (for
she couldn’t say it—no one could say it), “Is this all there is?”
An engine like the chest of a saber-toothed tiger growled moodily to a
halt at the stop sign he had left twenty yards behind him.
Then a set of tires squealed, and the tiger roared just at his back,
making to pounce upon his neck. Something
whisked passed his ear. In the same
instant, it seemed, the iron post of a chain-link fence at his elbow spat ice
over his pants, and the tiger carried the laughter of its riders quickly off
into the gloom (though a red pair of rear-view eyes continued to slant at him
through the dark). Molchak had not
flinched. He would have thought for
sure that a coward like him would flinch, yet he had to make himself break his
regular stride, pause, and look back over a shoulder.
Ice, nothing… the shards of an amber beer bottle lay scattered up and
down the concrete curb, scintillant where drops of liquid still pooled in their
curvature.
He could be dead right now. But
might he be alive right now?
*
The next Monday morning, just after the class wherein he had made The
Announcement, Molchak found Aldredi camped out before his office door.
Instantly he knew that This Was It: The Announcement.
After all, the bad news couldn’t be postponed indefinitely, even for a
dead man. Finals were looming.
The semester had grown so old that conducting interviews had almost grown
impossible, from a standpoint of professional decency.
Curiously, he felt no knot in the stomach, no pounding of the heart.
He felt… nothing. A strange
pleasure. The pleasure of nothing.
“First let me apologize for that… for our little end-of-the-term
bash,” panted Aldredi, settling heavily into the guest chair from which
students would numbly hear about sentence fragments and other atrocities
eliciting red marks up and down their papers.
“That got out of hand, at some point.
I really have no idea what happened.
I had stocked up on Chablis, and one or two others seem to have brought
some beer… ah! And Lucas behaved
rather badly, I heard. How did you
get home, by the way? Ellen was
frantically looking all over for you. We
thought maybe you’d fallen asleep in one of the upstairs beds.
Wilbury had dozed off in my daughter’s room, you know.
Hmm.”
“I caught a lift home with… with Lorrie.
Isn’t that her name?”
“Ah. She left very early, I
believe.”
“Yes. Well, I did, too.
Obviously. I’m afraid I
suddenly became very tired…”
“Of course, of course. Well…
well, then. Maybe you didn’t see
the worst of it!”
“No. No, I saw nothing
that… I enjoyed myself, in fact. Thanks
for inviting me.”
“But you’re always invited. As
a member of the department, I mean. And…
and as a friend, too. Whenever you
want to pop over. Mi casa, su casa.”
“That’s very kind.”
“Not at all, not at all.”
Aldredi was no longer panting as if he had run an urgent message across
campus, but his breathing’s labor persisted.
He couldn’t have sighed more heavily if he had occupied center-stage
and wanted to mime “distress” for an auditorium’s balcony.
“This tenure business… what a damned messy business!
I want you to know, I’ve been working my tail off on it.
We’ve had such a complicated semester….
There was the accreditation renewal process, and the dean’s position to
fill, and the curricular overhaul… and then Ballinger Hall burned down in that
lightning strike! The gods seem to
have meant for us to struggle this term! But
you’re home free now, Galen. You
should receive a formal offer of tenure by the end of the week.”
Molchak was stunned. He sat
heavily back in his chair, as if… as if what?
Was it like hearing that a best friend had died, or hearing that a best
friend presumed dead had been found? What
was it, besides more nothing—a deeper nothing?
What was the emotion at the bottom of this bottomless abyss?
“I am sorry—truly
sorry—that we kept you waiting so long! It
was unconscionable. Strictly
speaking, the delay broke a number of guidelines—and to think that we’ve
just conducted a self-study for the accreditation review!
But all’s well that ends well, eh?
I’m so glad to be able to bring you good news at last!”
“I… thank you, Wes.” Still
no feeling in the net. From the
abyss came only a string of words, like the hawser of a long-sunken ship bearded
in kelp. “I won’t be coming
back, though. I should have told you
sooner.”
Aldredi sat in thunderstruck, open-mouthed silence.
As his own words dripped before him, freshly dredged up from another
world, Molchak thought to tear away a bit of kelp and pass his companion some of
the cable.
“I must have supposed you knew why.
I guess I thought you knew.”
Almost slumping over the desk impulsively, Aldredi seemed to reach for
his young subordinate’s wrist (but came up with a stapler, instead).
His rounded mouth opened wider and wider, yet could now only produce
something like a whisper.
“I… I’m so sorry, Galen! God,
I’m so sorry! We’re all… just
devastated! I was afraid… frankly,
I was afraid that those bastards had denied your application just to save a few
bucks on insurance. It’s the sort
of thing they do now. Because they did
deny it, you know—I’ll tell you the whole honest truth.
Yes, they denied it at first! And
when I found that out… I was so furious, I threatened to resign myself if they
didn’t reconsider! I brought them
new evidence, which didn’t hurt. Your
latest teaching evaluations were through the roof—I’ve never seen such high
ratings! What a turn-around!
They could hardly say that you hadn’t at last shown an improvement!
That deprived them of their last leg to stand on.
So now they have to… do you understand?
They have to provide for
whatever medical expenses… whatever expenses may go along with… they have
to! I’ve made them do the right
thing!”
“I’ll be in your debt as long as I live,” said Molchak very simply.
“But to tell you the truth, you’ve wasted your gallant effort.
There’s nothing that can be
done.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?
No meds… nothing?”
“No, nothing.”
“But that’s… that’s just awful!
What will you do? Naturally,
you don’t want to spend your… your time… your remaining time grading
freshman essays. I can see that now.
I suppose you want to… to go some places.
See the world! If there’s
anything I can do to help out… if you need a little extra money…”
Molchak fought and fought against the instant recollection of a
black-and-white sixties serial he had often dozed through on a re-run channel…
“only one year to live. Or maybe
two.” Aldredi was writing the
pilot script for Run for Your Life and
didn’t even know it. In his
revolutionary indignation at the evil engineering of benefits packages by
heartless institutions, he was grinding out the kind of bourgeois pabulum that
had kept Middle America dazed before Woodstock unlocked the kennel.
“Yes, I might see some of the world,” Molchak finally managed with
continued simplicity. “But I’ve
got some savings, plenty of savings. I
truly appreciate the offer, but…”
“You will stay in touch,
won’t you?”
He took the few minutes that remained before his next class to take a
little air on the open porch just beyond the Coke machine.
Fortunately, there were no student-loiterers (or, more likely, those who
would have appeared reconsidered when they saw the Walking Dead Man in a pensive
mood). It was no great sacrifice he
had made, probably: Aldredi would have been the first to want more explanations
once he had failed to die on schedule and threatened to sport his tenure for
years… though, as to that, nothing short of a lawsuit was likely to have upset
him on his new pedestal. And how
likely would a lawsuit have been, with all the negative publicity?
How could medical records (even non-existent records) be subpoenaed on
the grounds that a tenure decision had been reversed because of them, when such
a decision would itself have broken all the rules?
All the rules….
And still nothing in the nature of an emotion would float to the surface.
The pleasure of nothing. To
live dying, he decided, was the greatest pleasure a man could ever know.
Ivor Davies has composed for this
journal a score of stories dedicated to stripping away the glamour from Academe.
His last contribution was “Next Door Burned Ucalegon,” in the Summer
2008 issue.
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