I used to think of myself as a forest person. I grew up in the woods of upstate New York, and one of my first memories of sheer joy was taking off shoes and socks and wading in the the stream behind the garages and down the steep bank. The stream, a distant cousin to the stronger Agawamik Creek further north, flowed lazily along the north end of our property and it was full of crawfish and tadpoles and water skippers and picked up speed as it narrowed. It was cool and wet and in places you had to look hard through foliage to see it. That's how I saw the world then, as something where things were hidden by nature and to find them you had to look hard.
I started thinking more like what Bill Holms called a prairie person when I studied poetry with him in graduate school in Minnesota. Things were still hidden in that view, but because they were closer to the earth, often right underfoot. You didn't have to look hard, you just had to notice them. Now I live on the edge of a Great Lake, which is like a moist prairie in what things aren't hidden but you do need to notice them. I often start my barefoot walking starting with the grassy hill about a half mile from my home that runs down to the beach and then northward for a mile or two, before disappearing under a pier and the weight of local businesses.
I've written of the jolt of recognition I experienced when I realized that, in doing this, I've come to live out the dream I had for myself 30-odd years ago. I've lived in several river towns--in the east and midwest it's almost impossible not to. Lakeside living was never something I had experienced before moving here, and in the winter especially I cherish it. In the forest, nothing ever seems dead in the winter; on the prairie, everything seemed dead when covered with two feet of snow, ice, and bitter wind; here on the Lake, there is a sound of life all winter long, even when the ice shelf covers a mile and a half from the beach, the regular pulse of water coming in and going out, helping me to breathe through the winter.
What brings all this thinking on is having read Terry Tempest Williams' An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field. I hadn't read a book by nature essayists in a long while, and since I picked that up I've gone back to Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild, an old essay collection from Anteus someone sent me decades ago, Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America, Bill's The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota, books about not only wandering around in the woods but stopping to look closely at what you're walking among and on. I expect I'll even go back to Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the one that began it all for me. I have a first edition I picked up somewhere on whim 40 years ago that is so water- and sun-logged, its sleeve long since shredded memory, whatever value there might be to it rests in what the cost to recycling the paper might be.
I've lately been reading a book about adolescence, A Tribe Apart by Patricia Hersch, which is, I'll be the first to admit, rather dated in its information, having been published in 1998. But precisely because of that I'm left to wonder if the following information, presented about the early teens of the mid-90s, who are parents now, is a good descriptor for what has led to Trump's election.
In 1992, a USA Weekend survey of over 236,000 young people revealed that 25 to 40 percent of teens see nothing wrong with cheating on exams, stealing from employers, or keeping money that isn't theirs. A 1989 Girl Scouts survey of 5,000 kids found 65 percent would cheat on an important test. A survey by the Josephine Institute of Ethics in 1992 similarly revealed that 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating...The biggest reason, according to 65 percent of the students, was that it was more important to get good grades than to be honest..."People are under lots of pressure. The attitude is that everybody does it, people don't look upon cheating as bad, none of your friends look at you as bad because you cheated." Everybody knows it is the wrong thing to do, "but I am not convinced that it is unfair when you are in a class you are never going to need again in your whole life but...the difference between a C and an A will make a difference in what college you get into.
Paradoxically, there is an ethic of cheating. This is how most students explain it...: It is easy and it is not always straight-out cheating. It is the little sneaky stuff like asking somebody from the period before what is on the test, or being absent so you know what is on it the next day. "Real cheating is having the answers in front of you while you are taking the test, looking at someone's paper."
The truth, and everybody knows it, is that to get into college an A or B is always better than something lower, and students' lives are so full of pressure and activity, especially for the smartest and most ambitious, that something has to give. "Even though we are told it will hurt us in the long run, that is a bunch of baloney...Maybe you are hurting other people and that may be unfair, but you are not hurting yourself. Why not take the easy way out if you can go home and be with friends for three hours or work in a subject that really matters to you...[?]" The bottom line is that "grades are more important because they get you someplace--getting good grades, not being ethical."
This may be the crux of the matter. In the Girl Scouts of America survey, it was found that by a huge margin the youth problems of the headlines--peer pressure, drugs, alcohol, sex, gangs--were not the "crisis issues" for kids. Their concerns were "the social expectations of the adult world which all have to do with pressure..." In times when society lacks clear ethical guidelines, when parents neither spend the time to educate about time-honored values...and personal responsibility nor necessarily model consistent value`s in their own lives, kids are responding to the one message they hear loud and strong from the adult world: Succeed. Do well. Do whatever you need to do...
Kids have grown up with a regular diet of people like Leona Helmsley, who ripped off the government; Mayor Marion Barry, who was reelected after being in prison for cocaine possession; Michael Milken and his junk bonds; Ivan Boesky and insider trading; Pete Rose and gambling. The list seems endless: Watergate, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Lorena and John Bobbitt, Whitewater. Stories of killings for sneakers, parents who abandon their children, drive-by shootings. The students see inconsistent punishments or no consequences at all...
Somehow people keep on expecting kids to have a certain belief system or a commitment to certain kinds of values that are not evidenced with any regularity in their environment. Values do not spring fully formed out of nowhere. And cheating, among all the things people are doing that are not right, turns out to be fairly benign.
Get ahead any way you need to. Cheating isn't the worst thing you can do, and you have to do it because everyone else is and it's the only reasonable response to everything they expect of you. If you aren't caught, you won't be punished, and if you are caught, well, people will understand. There's a sliding scale of unethical behavior and you can always justify it by contrasting it with what someone else does or could do. Act like we tell you, not how we act. Most importantly, other people do a whole lot worse, and they're the real reason things are bad.
Is there a better description for what history will come to call Trumpism?
It would be easy, I've come to realize, and I admit it might be better for my mental health, to take the tack I followed most of the time during previous republican presidential administrations: That is, to curl into myself like a fern and focus primarily on my own development, occasionally glancing up to wrinkle my nose at the nasty smell coming from DC or even saying "That's wrong" aloud. But I am too involved now with humanity, with its take and give, its weight and physicality, and with people who, under the policies Trump espoused during his campaign, will be hurt to sit home reading up on economics and etymology. I love the individuals of America more than I used to think, and when I hear them cry I can't ignore them.
That's my friend Rich's voice on the soundtrack of this video. He died earlier this week, a 37 year old victim of heart attack. The story of the monk and the strawberry, while it has a lot of history behind it, particularly for Buddhists, also has tremendous import for me. Decades ago, while still taking myself seriously as a bhikku in training, I determined I'd live my life by its lessons. It held at least equal resonance for Rich.
This is a video he produced for an arts project at the seminary we attended together and I'd seen it twice, once as he prepared it and again in a class on Zen we took. He is--was, I have to remind myself--an odd person even among the denizens of my congregations. He had, even by my standards, an interesting life: born (and, I think, baptized) a Mormon, converter to Unitarian Universalism, converter to fundamental Christianity, converter to Buddhism, graduate of Liberty University. Volunteer in the military, veteran of the Bosnian Conflict and the First Iraq War. Chaplain in training. World traveler. Learner of Japanese. His first marriage ended very badly and bitterly and it was in chewing over the bitterness and learning to accept the hot taste of it that we bonded. His second marriage to a Japanese woman five years his senior he met at a Buddhism conference.ended with his death. They were married a month.
In a week my seminary will hold a memorial for his memory. We are very good at memorials, fitting for people whose primary purpose, no matter what we tell ourselves, is to comfort the dying and the surviving. I am trying not to mourn Rich's death but merely, as I think he would express it, to accept it. He was a good man who got on my nerves at times--he talked too much at times, pressed his presence on people at times, made too much of his Buddhism at times, refused to observe his own faults at times--but do we know anyone (besides ourselves) who don't get on our nerves at times? That, as much as dying, is a part of life.
The story of the monk and his strawberry doesn't mention anyone acknowledging the monk's death. But like the rest of us monks need a community; a monk may live a solitary life but one isn't a monk by oneself. That's what distinguishes her from a hermit. Someone notices the monk's absence. Someone has a moment of silence or a brief word for his life and death. Someone recollects the monk's life. This reflection may be the sweet part of someone's life, the strawberry plucked, not by the monk but by the monk's survivors, enjoyed in contemplation.
If I could play the guitar or sing I would play this for Rich. But as I can't do either I'll go to the original.
Sit back.
Relax. This is a long one and we’re
foregoing our practice of community dialogue after this. This isn’t a sermon, by the way, but
something I’m terming an “entertainment.”
So don’t worry about thinking too heavily about it. A
stereotype is a sort of mental shorthand for how to think about someone when
you meet him or her for the first time.
You base your impression of someone on the experiences you’ve had with
similar people or on the actions you’ve seen someone similar take. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just the way
we think when we’re faced for the first time with somebody new or a unique
situation. Thus, there is often a
measure of truth to a stereotype if only in the sense that one person I’ve seen
behaved in this manner when faced with this situation. And so long as we leave it there, as an example
of a single experience, it remains true.
There are, however, times when whole peoples behave the
same over and over again, with little change.
Then the stereotype becomes something more, something like a
truism. Thus, the truism I have often
heard repeated in my Unitarian Universalism class and many of us have heard in
religious and spiritual discussions: UUs
are guided by the head more than by the heart.
Today, we will operate as if that truism is not
true. But we aren’t going to be led by
our hearts. Actually, where much of the
following will lead us is about two feet below our head.
Among our Catholic brothers and sisters today is the
feast day of St Cunigunde, the patron saint of Luxumbourg. A descendant of Charlemagne, she marriedHenry II, then King of Germany and Italy—separate countries even then, it was
possible to rule several at one time, at least in a titular way—and eventually
the last Ottonian Holy Roman Emperor.
Supposedly, Cunigunde and Henry had what was called a “white marriage,”
an unconsummated marriage, a union without union, what many today who have
children have called “marriage.” She is
said to have died on this day in 1040, making today the 973 anniversary of her
death. It’s said they wed for
companionship and by mutual consent did not have sex, although there is no
evidence either was a virgin, and I suspect that when one is Emperor such
niceties as an official wife who does not want to sleep with you makes a good
cover for whatever else you might want to get up to. Be that as it may, apparently both Henry and
Cunigunde died childless.
Cunigunde
was quite politically active during her marriage to Henry, serving as advisor
and confidant while he was King and Emperor.
After his sudden death, she and her brother ruled the Empire together as
co-regents until the ascension of Conrad II several months later. She had apparently always wanted to be a
nun—the dreams of girls I guess were very different then—and after Conrad’s succession
she retired to a Benedictine monastery in Hesse and took vows. She remained there until her death. She was canonized in 1200 by Pope Innocent
III in reaction to multiple miracles ascribed to her.
There
were three. The first is that, having
been accused by enemies of the Emperor of having lovers, she walked across “hot
irons” to prove it was not so, doing so without the appearance of even a
blister. How the one proves the other is
not explained. The second relates that both Cunigunde and her
maid, having fallen asleep and allowing a candle to set fire to the linens,
woke from the heat, and saved by the saint’s quick thinking: she made the sign of the cross, which put out
the blaze. If you have been following
news about the sequestration talks you know congressional Republicans have
suggested that fire departments consider doing something similar in the face of
municipal cuts.
Lastly,
there is this:
A final legend tells of one of Cunigunde's
nieces, Judith, the abbess ofKaufungen Abbey. A frivolous young
woman, Judith preferred feasting and carousing with the young sisters to the
Sabbath rituals. Cunigunde remonstrated with her, to little effect. Finally the
saint became so vexed with her niece that she slapped her across the face; the marks
remained on her face for the rest of her life, serving as a warning to those of
the community who would not take their vows or observances seriously.
This sounds suspiciously like a snap, or a “yo
mama” joke: “Yo mama so greasy when someone
slaps her they leave skid marks.” Given
that “feasting and carousing” are the issues that the saint took with her
niece’s behavior, perhaps celebrating her day with a feast is not what would
make her happiest. Perhaps all-day
scouring of the flesh would be better appreciated.
Now it’s not known, by which I mean he never
said, whether the saint’s name provided the model for Voltaire’s near-virginal
character Cunegonde from his masterpiece Candide—there are multiple famouswomen named Cunigunde, some, like Cunigunde above spelled with a “c,” most of
them spelled with a “k”—and one of the other St Kunigundes (there are three) was
beatified by Pope Clement XI 45 years before Candide was published making her
at least as likely. But this Cunigunde
is a near-enough fit for our purposes.
It is a certainty all of you have heard of
Voltaire’s novel, Candide. It is
possible some of you have even read it.
It’s very short, 130 pages of brief, almost terse paragraphs, many of
which are recapitulations of what has happened previously. Each chapter is about 2 or 3 pages long. It took me roughly 3 hours to reread the
whole novel, although admittedly, I’ve taught it in the past and know its plot
pretty well, so I was able to go quickly over many parts.
In the event, however, you don’t have the 3 or 4
hours to give to it, let me summarize its action for you. We are introduced to our four primary
characters, Candide (whose Latin, candidus,
means “white” in the sense of simple or unadorned), Cunegonde, and her brother
the young Baron, and Dr Pangloss (or “All-Tongue”), who live a nearly perfect
life in a castle in Westphalia in northeast Germany. Pangloss is the tutor to the three young
students whose primary philosophy is that they live in the best of all possible
worlds. It is after watching Pangloss
having a sexual romp with the chambermaid Paquette that Cunegonde imagines
having such an interlude with her young, illegitimate cousin Candide, and when
she takes advantage of the opportunity her father discovers them and throws
Candide bodily from the castle.
This turns out to be a good thing although we
don’t know it for a while. Candide is
quickly conscripted into the Bulgarian army where he witnesses a battle,
trembling like a philosopher, and hid himself as well as he could during the
heroic butchery.
He escapes in the chaos and in Holland discovers
“a beggar all covered with scabs, his eyes diseased, the end of his nose eaten
away, his mouth distorted, his teeth black, choking in his throat, tormented
with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at each effort.” It is his old tutor Pangloss who tells him of
the deaths of Cunegonde and her family at the hands of the Bulgarian army. His own condition has come about from
contracting syphilis from Paquette (whose name means “parcel,” specifically of
firewood or kindling). The syphilis, he
explains, is “a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had
not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source
of life, frequently hinders even generation, and which is evidently opposed to
the great end of nature, we should [not] have...chocolate...”
Candide returns with his teacher to the home of
the Anabaptist James who has taken him in and helps to rehabilitate him. The 3 of them set sail for Lisbon on
business, but there is a storm as they make the city and the Anabaptist and
everyone else is drowned. The event is
the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in which nearly 40,000 people were
killed. The Inquisition rules in Lisbon
and after the earthquake Candide and Pangloss are taken prisoner, Candide to be
whipped while Pangloss is sentenced to be burned, as “it had been decided…that
the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great economy, is an
infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.” Pangloss is hanged instead because it rains
that day, and the sniveling, wretched Candide is rescued by an old woman who
secrets him to an abandoned house, bandages his wounds, and feeds him.
After several days she leads him to another house
and presents him to a veiled woman “brilliant with jewels.” The veiled woman is Cunegonde. Candide says, “You live?...Then you have not
been ravished? Then they did not rip
open your belly as Dr Pangloss informed me?”
“’Yes, they did,’ said the beautiful Cunegonde;
“but those two accidents are not always fatal.’”
Her family killed before her, Cunegonde had been
raped by a 6 foot tall Bulgarian soldier who was himself skewered by his
captain on finding him in flagrante. The captain takes her in, and she becomes his
concubine. But after 3 months he tires
of her and sells her to Don Issachar, a jeweler who trades in Holland. In turn, she has been spotted by the Grand
Inquisitor of Lisbon who lusts for her.
He arranges with Issachar (whose name, meaning “man for hire” in Hebrew,
is the same as the son of Jacob and Leah) to share Cunegonde between them,
Issachar the Jew visiting her Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, and the Grand
Inquisitor on the other days. She had
witnessed Candide’s punishment and Panglass’ hanging and sent the old woman to
help him.
While they are embracing Issachar and then the
Grand Inquisitor enters the house, and Candide runs each through with his
sword, explaining to Cunegonde, “When one is a lover, jealous and whipped by
the Inquisition, one stops at nothing.”
The old woman shoos them onto conveniently waiting horses and the trio
ride to Andalusia. Unfortunately, they
are robbed of Cunegonde’s jewels and money.
They sell one of their horses—the old woman, who has only one buttock,
rides with Cunegunde—and continue to Cadiz, where Candide is recognized as a
soldier and given command of a ship.
Aboard ship, they entertain themselves with
stories. Cunegonde and Candide, finding
the old woman’s claim she has experienced greater loss than they amusing,
listen to her story. She is, it turns
out, the daughter of Pope Urban X. On
her wedding day her husband is poisoned by his mistress. “But this,” she says, “is only a
bagatelle.” The young woman and her mother
embark by ship to Gaeta but are swooped down upon by pirates who intend to sell
the ship’s company into slavery in Morocco.
Her virginity is taken by the pirate captain, and when they reach
Morocco the pirates are themselves raided by a rival faction, who rip apart the
women and kill all the men. She is left
on a heap of dead bodies, but found by a eunuch who was once her mother’s
chapel musician.
The eunuch makes plans with the young woman to
return to Italy but instead of course sells her to an official in Algiers. There is a plague in Algiers. “You have seen earthquakes,” she says to her
companions, “but pray…have you ever had the plague?” The official and the eunuch both contract it
and die. She is sold off to a merchant
who takes her to Tunis and begins a procession of sales of her until she ends
up owned by an Aga whose city is besieged by Russians. The warriors are starving, and after eating
their own eunuchs look at the women with hungry eyes. Their imam, however, exhorts them in a sermon
to “Only cut off a buttock of each lady…and you’ll fare extremely well. If you must go to it again, there will be
another buttock.” The deed is done but
the Russians overrun them anyway and she is taken by them back to Moscow. After her latest owner is executed, the young
woman, now growing old, makes her way across Russia until she reached Lisbon,
where she became a servant of Don Issachar. “I waxed old in misery and disgrace,
having only one half of my buttocks, but always remembering I was a Pope’s
daughter.” They agree she is more
miserable.
Candide and Cunegunde intend to marry in Buenos
Aires, their destination, but when they arrive the Governor is smitten with
Cunegunde, sends Candide elsewhere, and proposes to her on the spot. The old woman counsels her to accept, and meanwhile
another ship enters the harbor, this one containing officers of the Inquisition
seeking the murderer of the Grand Inquisitor.
When she hears this information, the old woman convinces Cunegunde to
remain in Buenos Aires, where she’ll be safe, and tells Candide “Fly…or in an
hour you will be burnt.”
He does.
And we now take a moment in our summary to pass over the details of the
next 10 chapters. My reasoning is
this: they have nothing to do with
Cunegunde who is the subject of this discussion. But I will tell you that Candide during this
time is befriended by his servant Cacambo; discovers in Paraguay that the
Jesuit commander of military forces is Cunegonde’s brother, the young baron,
who was not quite dead yet; kills said young baron when he attacks Candide for wanting
to marry his sister; makes his way to fabled El Dorado whose king sends him on
his way with great quantities of their “pebbles,” which are gold and emeralds
and rubies, as well as 100 red sheep; finds his way to Surinam where he
dispatches Cacambo back to Buenos Aires to ransom Cunegonde and meet him in
Venice; is robbed of much of his fortune and finally makes his way to France
with a companion, the pessimistic scholar Martin.
A moment here to pause within the pause and tell
you something about Martin. Another
truism about Unitarian Universalists is that we often take into our fold famous
people, like Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, who displayed Unitarian
principles but never actually said they were Unitarians. One such person is Voltaire, who never, by
the way, said “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your
right to say it.” His biographer said it
of him. If only, we say, Voltaire had
known about Unitarianism he would have been a Unitarian.
But Voltaire, the “brain on sticks” as a
contemporary called him, did know about Unitarianism. The word had been around at least 100 years
by then. And Martin is accused of being
a Unitarian, or at least one type of Unitarian.
His accusers call him a Socinian which was a type of proto-Unitarianism
that rejected the Trinity, original sin, the Fall of Man, and atonement. They were also pacifists which is why of all
of them Martin never harms anyone. For
his part, Martin explains he is a Manichean since “I cannot help thinking that
God has abandoned [this world] to some malignant being.”
In Paris, Candide and Martin discover Paquette
who had left the Westphalian castle immediately after Candide. Retaining her beauty despite having syphilis,
she has become a prostitute whose primary lover is a Friar. Voltaire gives her what is perhaps the most
impassioned defense of women written by a man at this time, two animated pages
ending “if you could only imagine what it is to be obliged to caress
indifferently an old merchant, a lawyer, a monk, a gondolier, an abbe, to be
exposed to insults and abuse; to be often reduced to borrowing a petticoat,
only to have it raised by a disagreeable man; to be robbed of what one has
earned from another; to be subject to the extortions of the officers of
justice; and to have in prospect only a frightful old age, a hospital, and a
dunghill.”
We now rejoin our summary. Candide and Martin are rejoined by Cacambo,
now slave to another master. He leads
them to Constantinople where he has found Cunegunde. She “washes dishes on the banks of the Propontis,
in the service of a prince, who has very few dishes to wash…” She has become a slave herself; but what is
worse: she is ugly.
“Handsome or ugly,” Candide replies, “I am a man
of honor, and it is my duty to love her still.”
On the final leg of their journey, Candide,
Martin and Cacambo board a galley which takes them up the Propontis. The galley is staffed by slaves, two of whom
row very badly. These two slaves are, of
course, the young baron and Dr Pangloss.
Yes, the young baron survived Candide having run
his sword to the hilt in his chest. He
was taken prisoner by Spaniards but released to return to Rome where he became
chaplain to the French ambassador. Unfortunately,
he took a bath with a Muslim, which is illegal in Constantinople, and sentenced
to the galleys.
Pangloss, on the other hand, was hanged
badly. His body was sold to a surgeon
who resurrected him. He ended up hired
to a merchant who took him to Constantinople.
There he enters a mosque where he picks up a bouquet of flowers dropped
by a young Muslim woman and returns them by stuffing them into her cleavage and
then arranging her breasts around them.
That’s how he ended up on the galley.
They arrive at their destination and are welcomed
by Cunegonde and the old woman hanging towels out to dry. Cacambo was correct: Cunegunde has indeed grown ugly. She is brown, “with blood-shot eyes, withered
neck, wrinkled cheeks, and rough red arms…”
Candide is repulsed but steps forward to embrace her out of good
manners.
Ransoming both the old woman and Cunegunde, the
group determines to persevere. “At the
bottom of his heart Candide had no wish to marry Cunegunde,” but there really
is nothing for it since, as he points out, he is a man of his word. Similarly Pangloss, as he is a philosopher
and can’t change his mind, has retained his optimistic view that everything is
for the best despite having syphilis and being killed. Once the recalcitrant
young baron, who remember has been killed twice, insisting to his future
brother-in-law, “You may kill me again but you will not marry my sister!”, is
kidnapped and smuggled back to Rome, Candide
marries Cunegunde and with Pangloss, Martin, Cacambo, Paquette and her
Friar, now a Muslim, and the old woman, settles into an estate where they are
equally miserable and bored.
The group makes the acquaintance of a Muslim
farmer whose “labor preserves us from the three great evils—weariness, vice,
and want.” They take his example and, as
Martin puts it, “Let us work…without disputing; it is the only way to render
life tolerable.” Or as Candide puts it
in the famous last words of the novel, “All that is very well…but let us
cultivate our garden.”
Well. What
are we to make of all this? Sex, death,
murder, gore, resurrection, pirates, the Inquisition, Muslims, South Americans,
burning alive, hanging, venereal disease, cannibalism, El Dorado, women with
monkeys as lovers (I left that part out), popes, chocolate, wine, philosophy,
disputation, all served up in a magilla of the human condition. Candide is famously a picaresque, a novel of
fanciful characters in which impossible things happen and fantastic characters
appear and a great lesson about life is learned. What is the great lesson? I’m unsure, perhaps that it’s better to be
alive than to be dead. Perhaps that work
sustains life better than thought, an odd lesson for a philosophical novel.
But all that is, as the old woman says, a
bagatelle. Consider: Cunegonde is unaware that she’s become ugly
as no one has ever told her. There’s
surely a great lesson somewhere in there.
Martin’s mantra is “That is the way men treat each other,” and there’s a
great lesson somewhere in there, too. Candide,
while repulsed by her, nonetheless marries her and settles into something like contentment,
and surely there’s a great lesson somewhere there. It might be, as the original Cunigunde’s
union, a “white marriage,” but there’s no suggestion that Candide and Cunegonde
do not make good on their intent to make the beast with two backs, although
perhaps not as lustily as they’d expected to.
It has been years, after all, and they’ve been very, very busy.
What is certain is that this is the great
lesson I’ve taken from the novel: that if
we have anything like a responsibility to life it is to leave the world in a
little better shape than we found it. Whether it is by gardening or adding laughter
to the music of the spheres or feeding the birds or the homeless, it should
lead inevitably to the culmination, in Judy Chicago’s words, that “everywhere
will be called Eden once again.”
The other morning the manager at the bookstore where I'm working 10 hours each week asked if I'd ever seen "So It Goes," a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I hadn't, and because I had my Kindle with me, we watched it there in the store. That led to a discussion of the Vonnegut novels we'd read--it turned out she'd stopped reading them earlier than I did, and I stopped at Galapagos--but she's rereading the earlier ones and is now in the midst of Slaughterhouse Five, whose movie trailer I showed her.
Anyhow, this wasn't really a memory about Vonnegut so much as about the first Vonnegut novel I ever read--which was Breakfast of Champions--and isn't really about that so much as about where I got it. Back in the 70s department stores used to sell all kinds of paperback books, from men's espionage to women's love stories (of course--this is where Harlequin Romance made most of its sales) to tracts about current politics to, and this is what I'm really surprised at, literary fiction and essays. It might be argued that I oughtn't be surprised that Barkers would sell a paperback of Breakfast of Champions--after all, it was a recent bestseller then--but what about Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, the essay collection I bought and read immediately after (and where I first heard about Biafra)? At that time and in that place, the only stores were department stores, and they sold what people wanted to buy, and how did they know what I wanted to buy was a collection of self-referential Vonnegut essays?
I've no clue where this quote came from--I've done a cursory background search and, aside from this quote, there seems no information on Alexandra K. Trenfor otherwise--but that doesn't diminish from the truth of what she, or someone who attributes it to her, said.
Similarly, I'm rereading Parker Palmer'sHealing the Heart of Democracy, and came across the following wisdom: "No educational task is more important than helping students reflect on realities larger than their own egos." This was always, although I never articulated it the way Palmer has, the impetus behind my teaching and I hope that came through to most of my students. I'm learning to translate this now to everyday life; that's harder and less often rewarded, I've found, but no less rewarding.
where this book really comes to life is in its descriptions of books--the manuscripts and early editions and incunabula (what a wonderful word!) and fakes and the tracking down of old titles and their provenance. which only makes sense. the goldstones are bibliomanes and at their best writing about other bibliomanics. their thumbnail of what the book business was like in the 17th century is pretty indicative too of modern rare book selling. I've read two of their previous books--used & rare and slightly chipped--both of which were focused on the oddities of bookcollecting and those were wonderful. they try something a little different here--tracing a single author, the spanish author michael servetus, from his influences to the influences he had on others and the fate of his books, which were supposed to be destroyed but as we discover thrillingly nearly at the end of the book, "[john] calvin [who had ordered the burning at the stake of servetus along with all his manuscripts and copies of his books] after ordering every copy...hunted down and destroyed, after threatening anyone who harbored a copy with the same fate as that of its author, could not bring himself to destroy his own copy [of servetus' most heretical work]." this is a satisfying coda to an author's life and death.
but the book doesn't entirely satisfy. the goldstones are on solid ground when, say, tracking down provenance (their section "the trail" detailing the assumed trajectory surviving copies of servetus' last work took in order to end up in various national and private libraries), but less so when trying to explain philosophic concepts or theological arguments. and their views of calvin and the holy roman emperors, all of which are the villains to servetus' scholarly hero, are tellingly simplistic: they operate primarily out of a basis for attaining and holding onto power, as if their beliefs and theologies are beholden to that and not the other way around. the reason john calvin remains a potent religious force to this day is because of his genius for combining scripture and human needs in the service to providing the religious discipline most people acknowledge they need. he remains influential because his strict dogma answers a god-sized hole in people, not despite it.
aside from this and a few other caveats--among them one that has nothing to do with the goldstones but my kindle version of the book often substitutes symbols for numbers when it's obvious there's meant to be a date noted (so it looks like the authors are cursing someone) and sometimes nonsensical numbers appear (for instance, in describing the devastation of the 30 years war, this appears: "no statistic is more chilling than this: there were 11 million people living in germany in 1618...;by 1648...only 13 million were left." what?)--the book is serviceable in delineating a seldom-known precursor to unitarianism as well as providing a sketchbook explanation of what unitarianism is and its expansion from the council of nicea to 19th century america.
Nelson [Humboldt] spent the summer after graduation back [home], painting houses and fantasizing hopefully about the next few years of his life. Gallaher had painted an idyllic picture of his own grad school days, living in a Quonset hut in East Lansing, Michigan, writing his master's thesis on a card table at one end of the room while his wife and kids watched Your Show of Shows at the other. As a going-away present, he had given Nelson a handsome slip-covered edition of Aristotle. This would give him a head start on his literary theory seminar, Gallagher said, and Nelson spent the summer reading it cover to cover, his hands smelling of turpentine.
But on his first day as a graduate student, at the very first meeting of Introduction to Literary Theory, his instructor--a gaunt and entirely hairless man in severe wire rims, a jacket of herringbone tweed, and a white roll-neck sweater--lifted a paperback edition of Aristotle with two fingers and set it on fire with a silvery Zippo. He dropped it in a wastebasket without a word and watched it burn, and when Nelson got up and opened a window to let out the smoke, he spun with a sharp, jerking motion and barked at Nelson to sit down.
"Don't touch that, you!" the professor said, in a vaguely Gallic accent; and then, to everyone, "I want you all to smell that. I want it to penetrate to the back of your nostrils. By the end of the term I want that smell to come to you even in your sleep, to be as familiar to you as the stink of your own pale, oozing bodies."
This struck Nelson as a little extreme on a September morning in Indiana.
"For some of you," the professor went on, "I will be an intellectual terroriste, striking brutally"--and here he lunged at a young woman in the front row, who cringed and clutched her notebook to her bosom--"ruthlessly and without warning at the foundation of every you hold dear. But for those of you with the rigor and the intellectual humility to submit to my will, I will be your guerilla chieftain, teaching you, disciplining you, driving you with a terrible love to do things you did not think possible. Some of you will not survive." He fixed Nelson with a fearsome glare, his merciless eyes huge behind his lenses. "But some of you I will lead out of the hills and down into the burning metropole."
He lifted the wastebasket. Aristotle was still smoldering.
"This is just the first step," he said. "We will have to destroy literary theory in order to save it."
Thus Nelson discovered that no one was doing close reading anymore. The professor called himself Jean-Claude Evangeline. Even his colleagues were uncertain of his provenance, although they hadn't examined his vita any further than the College de France, which was good enough for them. His one published volume, Les Mortifications, a book as dense and impenetrable as the man himself, was dedicated equally mysteriously to "Ma belle guerriere!" His English was flawlessly idiomatic, but was he French? Flemish? Quebecois? Those of his colleagues who envied his cultural cachet and his hypnotic hold over graduate students mimicked his accent behind his back and compared him to Pepe LePew.
...Nelson himself felt as though he had passed through the looking glass. An innocent and self-evident remark in Evangeline's class about Conrad's jumbled chronologies raised snorts of derision from his classmates. A severe young woman from the Indian subcontinent addressed Nelson without looking at him, telling him painfully, in a posh imperial accent, that Conrad's racisim was the starting point for any discussion of his work.
"Read Edward Said," she added, in a curt postcolonial sotto voce.
Evangeline himself cut Nelson not un millimetre of slack. In his first paper, Nelson manfully tackled Nietzsche, the earliest theorist Professor Evangeline was willing to sanction, and the professor handed the paper back with a failing grade and only one comment; on the first page he'd circled the word "literature" in blood-red felt tip and written in the margin: "When I see this word, I reach for my revolver."
Thus, Nelson's first lesson in graduate school was to keep his mouth shut.
this is from an interesting comic horror novel I've started reading about an academic whose reattached finger begins to assert his will on everyone around him, a sort of postmodernest revision of faustus or of what faustus would have liked to accomplish. hynes also wrote the collection publish and perish back in the 90s, and I really enjoyed those stories. as with many young literary men--or in this case, middleaged literary men--this story may have autobiographical detail, particularly the above, but I reproduce it not because it reflects my own grad experience--far from it--but because I heard similar stories from many classmates and remember the bloodshot and baggy-lidded eyes of other students, so that I often wondered at my own abilities to avoid such enforced workaholism. for me, grad school and then teaching was mostly fun, and the few times it became insufferable were distinctly because of my own tendencies for procrastinating (which of course I am loathe to give up).
It’s often been said, or more exactly complained, about contemporary peoples that we worship money. At least a part of that is true. But if there’s a more certain thing most individuals worship it’s time.
Time, of course, is money. We watch the clock, keeping track of lost time. We take offense when someone wastes our time or if he or she fails to value our time. Most human records of achievement focus on the amount of time it takes to do something. We tell someone hurrying to take his time. We ask for time to figure things out, if we have time to spare. Retirement is when we’ll have all the time in the world. We make pledges to one another to the end of time, or at least until time runs out.
Emile Durkheim describes this common, secular sense of time
The individual lives in time, and…has a certain sense of temporal orientation. He is situated at a determined point in space, and …all sensations [he feels] have something special about them. He has a feeling of resemblances: similar representations are brought together and the new representation formed by their union has a sort of generic character. We also have the sensation of a certain regularity in the order of the succession of phenomena…(480-1)
In other words, the experience of time, while it takes on a characteristic individuality, relies on a common experience outside the individual for its grounding.
The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism and its descendents Christianity and Islam, however, share a concept of time outside this regular or ordinary, secular understanding of time. The Greek term for this “breakthrough of the eternal into history” (Tillich 534), is kairos. Kairos, Paul Tillich writes, “means time, the right time, the qualitative time in contrast to chronos, clock time, quantitative time…[Kairos] is a biblical idea attached in particular to the…messages of John the Baptist and Jesus and to Paul’s interpretation of history” (534). The nearest Hebrew equivalent to kairos would seem to be zeman “season” as it’s used in Ecclesiastes 3:1 (Blueletterbible.com). Monford Harris claims that
Jewish existence has always been characterized by a sense of time and history…its celebrations have always been historically oriented…This historical consciousness must have been deeply rooted in the life situation of the Israelites. It did not come about by intellectual fiat or by contemplating alternatives to the archaic mentality. (2-3)
This concept of zeman or of holy time is connected via explicit means to Sabbath, the covenantal time of the Jews (and hence to Christians and Muslims) during which rest is the means for contemplating and celebrating God. “Sabbath has been celebrated for the most part in Exile because much of Jewish experience has been spent in Exile” (9). While its roots are ancient, zeman is not simply an anachronism in the modern world. In her book focusing on a contemporary New York Hasidic family, Lis Harris quotes one of the daughters as living “from one Shabbos to the next…I look forward to it all week. We almost always have three or four guests…In the last month we’ve had people show up from England, Iran, and South Africa; the door is never closed. It’s totally unlike what I was used to growing up…I didn’t really understand what the Sabbath was about; no one ever talked about it” (55). Later, Harris clarifies, “If [Jews] live in a kind of perpetual Biblical present, in which the events of their everyday lives are constantly being linked to their spiritual past, their rebbes have traditionally been the guides who have interpreted the interconnectedness of the two” (76).
Tillich credits the Pauline writer with the shift from zeman to kairos:
[The] appearance of Jesus as the Christ…happened in one special moment of history when everything was ready for it to happen…Paul speaks of the kairos in describing the feeling that the time was ripe, mature, or prepared…There are things that happen when the right time, the kairos, has not yet come. Kairos is the time which indicates that something has happened which makes an action possible or impossible. We all experience moments in our lives when we feel that now is the right time to do something, now we are mature enough, now we can make the decision. This is the kairos. It was in this sense that Paul and the early church spoke of…the right time for the coming of the Christ. (1)
This concept of kairos is so fundamental to what would become Christianity that Hoyt Hickman titles his subsection about it “Time is Important,” and emphasizes, “Christianity takes time seriously” (16). Hickman continues,
Christianity talks not of salvation in general but…accomplished by specific actions of God at definite times and places…of climactic events and a finale…In the fullness of time, God invades our history, assumes our flesh, heals, teaches, and eats with sinners…Christian worship uses time as one of its basic structures. Our present time becomes the occasion of encounter with God’s acts in time past and future. Salvation…is a reality based on temporal events through which God comes to us. (16)
This experience of God coming to us is also Sabbath. But Giorgio Agamben points out an inherent paradox to the Pauline kairos. “Paul decomposes the messianic event in two times: resurrection and parousia, the second coming of Jesus at the end of time. That’s why theologians define the Pauline conception of redemption as an already and a not yet: the messianic event has already happened, salvation is already accomplished, and yet, in order to be really achieved, it needs a supplementary time” (6). In explaining one solution to this paradox Agamben refers to Franz Kafka’s assurance that, “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last”, and quotes Walter Benjamin that “every instant can be the little door through which the messiah enters” (7).
In reminding us that “In our new cosmic story, time is irreversible, genuine novelty results through the interplay of chance and law, and the future is open” (105), Sallie McFague in presenting a dynamic universe still in flux reminds us of the Muslim, and specifically Sufi, term waqt “the present moment,” which “reflects…time not as a linear sequence of units of a measured duration, but as an existential, vertical moment…characterized by a strong emotional response to an inner experience” (Sviri 18). Sara Sviri illustrates waqt through a Rumi poem.
At the time when in the company of that selected group I began to meditate, Stepping out of myself, The soul got rid of all time that turns youth into age. All change arises out of time: He who gets rid of time gets rid of change. Oh, my heart, for a while be out of time, get rid of change. Oh, my heart, for a while be out of time to be free from “how” and “why.” Time does not know the nature of Timelessness, Because only wonder can lead to it.
Sviri explains: “For the mystic…Life’s goal becomes simply this: to return to the very beginning…to return to the dawn of the existence, to return to the Source of Being, to return home” (127, emphasis in original).
Huseyin Algul explains that during waqt, what he calls their “blessed days and night,” “Muslims…evaluate their actions in their social life, and they have the chance to renew or change their behavior. From time to time, human beings undergo a process of change; in such a situation, it is important to ensure that the direction…is toward what is positive, beneficial, or appropriate. In this way, the blessed days and nights open a door toward positive change, enabling one to overcome life’s obstacles more easily and to gain easier access to the road to success” (4). These blessed days and nights are, in effect, Sabbaths spread across the panoply of the Islamic calendar.
Perhaps reflective of McFague’s dynamic universe still in process, the Islamic year is based entirely on lunar observations, sometimes locally observable, sometimes globally, so that a year, and hence time itself, often mistaken as static, fluctuates. On a Muslim’s Sabbath, “Worship includes the environment and everyday life, as well as other forms of worship, like prayer, fasting, paying alms, pilgrimage, and sacrifice; worship makes a whole…At the same time, each [Sabbath] is an opportunity to take stock of one’s relationships with one’s children and relatives” (4-5).
It is in this reflection and potential improvement that the concepts of zeman, kairos, and waqt come together as a way of explaining the Abrahamic emphasis for allowing the open door of covenantal time to make its impact on the individual. Through the physical inactivity of Sabbath God’s presence can be felt and there is the opportunity to be at peace with that which is on the other side of the open door.
WORKS CITED · Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. “The Time that is Left.” Epoche. Volume 7, Issue 1. · Algul, Huseyin. 2005. The Blessed Days and Nights of the Islamic Year. Jane L. Kandur, translator. Somerset, New Jersey; The Light, Inc. · Blue Letter Bible. 2012. “The Preacher Solomon - Ecclesiastes 3 - (NIV - New International Version).” Blue Letter Bible. 8 Mar 2012. Bible.cfm?b=Ecc&c=3&t=NIV > · Durkheim, Emile. 1968. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Joseph Ward Swain, translator. New York; Free Press. · Hickman, Hoyt, Don Saliers, Laurence Stookey, and James White. 1992. The New Handbook of the Christian Year: Based on the Revised Common Lectionary. Nashville; Abingdon Press. · Harris, Lis. 1985. Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family. New York; Summit Books. · Harris, Monford. 1992. Exodus and Exile: The Structure of the Jewish Holidays. Minneapolis; Fortress Press. · McFague, Sallie. 1993. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis; Fortress Press. · Sviri, Sara. 1997. The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path. Inverness, California; The Golden Sufi Center. · Tillich, Paul. 1968. A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism. Carl Braaten, editor. New York; Simon and Schuster.
this is a mashup I made both for a teaching presentation for my xian education class and for next monday's CPE worship service. by that time we'll have reached the midpoint in our experience (which ends mid-january). what I wanted to get across was the sense that this is tough but it's an effort we, and our future congregants, will be the better for.
last week my wife commented on a recent essay, "I think this is the worst essay I've ever written in my seminary career," and a friend noted, "technically, you've got to have a worst essay anyway so you might as well get it out of the way." he's absolutely right about that and this little story is intended to introduce the following, which I think is my worst essay of my seminary career, researched and written over about 24 hours after realizing sunday morning that it was due.
A CONTEMPORARY PSALM 46
Context: I’m a product of the punk movement. My spiritual awakening came, not in a church or through a Bible reading or even in sitting zen, but in dancing alone on a southern summer evening to a scratchy tape of X’s Los Angeles album roaring out of a dusty boombox hotwired to the radio of the car I was living in. In that moment I saw myself as a part of everything and everyone, perhaps not in harmony with it all but in intimate relationship with it nonetheless. Much of my ministry focuses on the marginalized—the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill—for whom some religion and scripture has a lot to offer if it’s relevant and presented on their terms. I look at my experience a few years ago, in CH 161, upon learning that it was possible to interpret the Exodus from the perspective of the wanderer who has come off the road, as a breakthrough I needed and am excited by.
My current ministry is divided between being a teacher and interning as a minister, and a lot of the people I work with in both cases are kids in their late teens. For them scripture is dry, it carries the weight of official interpretation, and is heavily judgmental, especially as against them and the people they know. For years I‘ve taken it as my responsibility, when I work with scripture from any faith tradition, to find as near a contemporary approximation of that original scripture as possible (allowing for a little tweaking when necessary). It’s rare, in my Unitarian Universalist context, for me to be called on to explicate a psalm, but I can envision using Psalm 46 and its contemporary corollary to reinforce a congregant’s feelings of safety and well-being.
Exegesis: Coming near the beginning of Book II of the Psalms, the so-called “Elohist Psalter” (“so named because it uses the generic name for God [Elohim] which has been systematically substituted throughout these Psalms for the proper name, Yahweh” [Caresko 287]), 46 is an example of what Kathleen Farmer (150), echoing Peter Craige (who credits it to Leo Krinetzki [:342]), calls a Psalm of Confidence: such psalms “present the community of faith with the bases from which succeeding generations of worshippers learn to recognize and to trust in the present involvement of God in their lives…[They] invite readers to recall their own previous experience of God’s steadfast love in their lives” (150).
Unlike a lament or a psalm of praise, 46 opens with a bold statement: “God is our refuge and our strength” (:1). Singing such a statement places both the listener and the singer in a state of assurance in the authority of the assertion. This is reinforced by the repetition of the lyrics “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge” in :7 and :11. As Patrick Miller rather inelegantly puts it, “The whole point of the psalm is wrapped up in [this] line” (:42). Farmer cites scholars who posit that the term “’alamot is a technical term referring to women’s voices and that the heading [to the psalm] indicates that the psalm should be sung by women. If so, then women in the community of faith that preserved this psalm are being encouraged to claim [‘God is with us’ {Farmer’s emphasis}. Thus,] when the psalms are sung by women’s voices, when women claim the traditions as their own, then the…’God of Jacob’ becomes the refuge and strength of women” (:146).
The psalmist reinforces the statement both with a greater assertion and concrete imagery. “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult” (:2-3). This serves to locate in the psalm what Walter Brueggemann calls the social construction of reality: “The world mediated by the Psalter, amidst the tensions of Torah conditionality and Jerusalem unconditionality, is a world always at risk but on which the community gathered around the Psalter bets its entire destiny” (:288).
Miller points out that the psalm “envisages the possible chaotic breakdown of the natural world (vv. 1-3) and the nations (vv.4-7)—all of which is caught up in the several references to ‘earth’…One of the ways [the psalmist emphasizes God’s refuge] is in the three uses of the verb mut, meaning ‘to shake, totter’…In the first case it refers to the mountains shaking (mut) in the heart of the sea; in the third case it refers to the nations and kingdoms tottering (mut). But in between those two…the poet uses the same verb with a negative to say that the city wherein God is present shall not shake or totter [:5a]” (:42).
“God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved…The kingdoms are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts” (:5-6). While the world around them quakes and trembles, the people of God’s community take comfort in the steadiness that comes of trusting in God. Brueggemann further points out that this psalm is also a “Song of Zion”—emphasized by Craige as a certainty by “implied association” with references to “city of God” and “holy habitation” (:342)—in which the “temple is celebrated as the place of YHWH’s residence and therefore is the guarantee of the safety of the city and of all who reside there…In the Jerusalem temple, YHWH is celebrated as Creator and King [whose rule] is constituted in justice, righteousness, equity, and mercy…YHWH’s city is the place of the Davidic King, YHWH’s regent…” (:285-6). This “Jerusalem focus,” Brueggemann later asserts, illuminates the relationship of the temple to the Psalms’ theme of orientation-disorientation-new orientation (:288-90).
The final section of the psalm returns us to more traditional hymn territory: “Come, behold the works of the Lord…” (:8a), a call of praise, is again reinforced by the concrete references to “desolations” (:8b), to wars ceasing, bows breaking, spears shattered and shields burned. This martial imagery is juxtaposed with the more bucolic images of the second section: “a river whose streams make glad…” (4), “when the morning dawns” (:5b), and “the earth melts” (:6b, this last a translation of muwg “faint” and translated in Psalm 65:10 as “softening”). Zion, the city of God, is a beneficent, peaceful place for rest in contrast to the desolation and war of the outside world. To be a citizen of Zion is to “Be still, and know that I am God!” As verses 1-3 are orientation, and verses 4-7 are disorientation, this section is Brueggemann’s new orientation which “celebrate the new world that is given in YHWH’s powerful generosity. In such psalms…YHWH is credited with a radical novum in the life of the world that is not derived from antecedents but is a fresh ‘miracle’ of YHWH” (:290).
A more modern poet like Reed can neither bring himself to believe fully in a beneficent God nor to assert that all one needs is acceptance of God. However, in his song “Busload of Faith,” Reed, probably unconsciously, echoes the Psalmist’s iteration that what’s needed in the midst of devastation is exactly that faith. Although Reed wouldn’t identify it as a faith in God, or only in God—and in fact in lines 6 and 19-22 he discounts traditional religion itself—he might identify it as something God-related, something innate in people that is at least as powerful as “cruelty, crudity of thought and sound” (:29-30). It’s faith in this Unnamed Element—call his song the same as Craige does Psalm 46, a Psalm of Confidence—that Reed has. Despite the concrete images of betrayal and violence in lines 9-14 and, heart-breakingly, in lines 17 and 18, and despite his avowal that “You can depend on the worst always happening,” it is this faith that allows us to “get by.” This is a song meant to comfort. It’s a cold comfort but, like a song of confidence in which one takes confidence by the desolation God brings “on the earth,” but cold comfort is comfort nonetheless. Sometimes getting by is as good as it gets.
APPENDIX “Busload of Faith” Lou Reed
You can’t depend on your family You can’t depend on your friends You can’t depend on a beginning You can’t depend on an end You can’t depend on intelligence 5 You can’t depend on God You can only depend on one thing You need a busload of faith to get by
You can depend on the worst always happening You can depend on a murderer’s drive 10 You can bet that if he rapes somebody There’ll be no trouble having a child And you can bet that if she aborts it Pro-lifers will attack her with rage You can depend on the worst always happening 15 You need a busload of faith to get by
You can’t depend on the goodly-hearted The goodly-hearted made lampshades and soap You can’t depend on the Sacrament No Father, no Holy Ghost 20 You can’t depend on any churches Unless there’s real estate that you want to buy You can’t depend on a lot of things You need a busload of faith to get by
You can’t depend on no miracle 25 You can’t depend on the air You can’t depend on a wise man You can’t find them because they’re not there You can depend on cruelty Crudity of thought and sound 30 You can depend on the worst always happening You need a busload of faith to get by
WORKS CITED • Brueggemann, Walter. (2003.) An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY. • Ceresko, Anthony. (2005.) Introduction to the Old Testament: A Liberation Perspective. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. • Coogan, Michael, editor. (2007.) New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV). Oxford University Press. • Craige, Peter. (2004.) World Biblical Commentary, Volume 19: Psalms 1-50. Nelson Reference and Electronic. • Farmer, Kathleen. (1998.) “Psalms” in Women’s Bible Commentary. Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe, editors. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, KY. • Miller, Patrick. (1986.) Interpreting the Psalms. Fortress Press, Philadelphia. • Reed, Lou. (2000.) Pass Thru Fire: The Collected Lyrics. Hyperion, New York.
"[poet and computer afficienado brian] christian goes on to make the subtler, poetic point that human talk is not just an exchange of axioms, or even of emotionally coded abbreviations, but an activity of compressed communication and the nimbleness with which we compress it--between our knowledge that in everything we say we have to leave out a lot of information for economy's sake and our ability to make that economy itself eloquent and informative. kid-speak...is an ideal instance of compression in balance with concision. what sounds to the outsider limited and repetitive is to the knowing listener as nuanced as henry james. when one eleven-year-girl says to another eleven-year-old girl, 'so then, like, the teacher got all, like, all of you, I guess, are, like, going to have to do a, like, I don't know, a makeup test. so! like, yeah,' she means: 'the teacher, becoming heated'--that's why she 'got, like,' rather than 'said, like'--'announced, in effect, that many of us (I suppose, at a first approximation, all) will, at some point in, as it were, the near future, have to take what actually amounts to, when all is said and done, a secondary makeup test. I have indignant feelings about this--as who among us would not?--but I recognize their essential futility.' all of this is completely clear to the knowing listener, but it's been impossible, so far, to teach a machine to, you know, like, really, like, get it."
--from "get smart: how will we know when machines are more intelligent than we are?" by adam gopnik in the april 4, 2011, issue of the new yorker
"the problem with scholarly publishing is that the business model it has adopted generates so much income that it has to be protected against the danger posed by scholarship being shared freely. the only way the business model can survive is for information to be scarce, an expensive commodity available only to those who can afford it."
--from "liberating knowledge: a librarian's manifesto for change" by barbara fister in the number 26, fall 2010 issue of thought & action
I'm not entirely certain I buy fister's target for blame: researchers themselves who have "outsourced the evaluation of faculty value to publishers" and who "instead of learning how to contribute to knowledge for the greater good, [coach] graduate students...in how to play the game and compete successfully"--as if academic publishers hadn't priced themselves out of the market generations ago and as if search and tenure review committees weren't openly hostile to publication in any form that isn't bookended by covers. (and now I suspect I have a better idea of where the hostility of so many of my colleagues to research from wikipedia comes from.)
but I can't take issue with her conclusion: "the library is conceptually the commons of the university. in recent years, it has been enclosed and exploited by corporations, and individual scholars have been schooled to be grateful to those corporations for claiming the copyright over their work in exchange for career advancement. but we don't have to do it this way."
finster's solution, modeled on liberation theology (!), is an inspired bit she calls liberation bibliography. it is as follows:
liberation bibliography arises out of outrage at the injustice of the current system. it's not about saving money, it's about the empowering nature of knowledge and the belief that it shouldn't be a luxury good for the few.
liberation bibliography must emerge out of a sense of solidarity with communities struggling for liberation. it's not just a matter of a few academics and librarians tinkering under the hood of the scholarly communication system to improve conditions for scholars; it's about action for the public good.
liberation bibliography recognizes that the world is not separated into the scholarly and the ordinary. if knowledge matters, it must matter beyond the boundaries of our campuses...
liberation bibliography recornizes that we are implicated in systems that personally benefit us, even when we recognize those systems to be unjust. whenever we publish in a journal that will resell our work for a profit and withhold it from those who can't pay, we have put our self-interest before social justice.
liberation bibliography takes seriously the slogan...that the truth shall set us free--and that means freedom should extend to all of us, not just to a select class of employed academics and currently enrolled tuition-paying students.
liberation bibliography recognizes that the liberal learning we promote must be beneficial to all people. as a consequence, our libraries should not serve our institutions' immediate needs but rather their higher ideals. toward that end, libraries and scholars need to remind our institutions of those ideals which still form the material for countless mission statements and taglines but are ignored in daily institutional practice. and...we must act on them.
I was thinking earlier this week about the short time I claimed to be a philosophy student--this was in between the years I was a secondary education student and a dance student--and was wondering whatever had happened to price charlson, one of my professors at suny new paltz. I looked him up, but he seems to have vanished. google notes a lot of his publications, the most recent of which is 1980, a few years before I studied with him.
after that his existence seems to simply peter out. he's not listed as either a professor or an emeritus on the current suny-new paltz philosophy department's website, and there are no other listings for him, whether he's teaching at another school--doubtful, since I think he's upwards of his late 80s by now--or his death. there is a letter to his alma mater's magazine posted in 2007, but on further examination it was originally published in 1964. it's as if he has become an unperson.
I don't think that should happen to anybody. and in the event anyone else googles his name to find him, I'd like there to be some reflection of him available. to that event I've been recalling as much as I can of charlson.
he was a short, squat man with a perpetual slump who looked like he should have shuffled but took deliberate steps like he was always walking across ice floes;
he seemed to be always drunk, and he might have been because every time I got near him he smelled like alcohol; but for all I know he was diabetic and his blood sugar was perpetually low. I did see him most evenings for at least a little while at bacchus in new paltz, where he comandered a table near the front windows and sat by himself for hours, even during the most raucous nights when it seemed like everyone in town was there, sipping a glass of red wine. people would mill around his seat, as if silently demanding by their presence that he give up his table. I'm not aware that he ever did. he left each evening at around 9 or 10:00 and wouldn't budge before then;
the rumor had it that he took in young men new to the college and rented a room to them in his large house for less than most places, in exchange for sexual favors. I never heard that from anyone who claimed to have been one of those young men;
I studied with him in 4 classes and the one I remember best was about existentialism. it was a small seminar of 4 of us and we read the first two-thirds of heidegger's being and time. on the first day of class he walked in and switched off the lights, saying, "by all rights we should study this book at 5:00 on a cold morning when there's no heat and in dim light." he made a point of switching off the lights each time we held class no matter how cloudy it was (and I think that class was in fall so there were lots of rainy, cloudy days).
the last time I saw him was in the early 90s on the street in new paltz. he was dressed the way he had always been--dark suit and tie, brown oxfords, dark overcoat--and carrying his briefcase that swung almost jauntily in contrast to the way he walked. I didn't see where he might have gone to but since it was late afternoon I suspect it was to bacchus to start his night.
(the photo of course is not of price charlson--I can't find any--but is of jean-paul sartre who, except for the wayward eye and a twist of dark hair across his brow, charlson resembled.)
