Today, we watched The Colbert Report, the episode where Edwards comes out and does the “edWords” of the day. Putting aside the frequent comments on Jetskis, Edwards rather crudely paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr., stating that he would like to see the day when his children could wake up in a world where economic equality was more than just a fantasy.
It’s a nice thought. But one that – I’m afraid – is an impossibility.
This is not to say that I believe poverty is a necessity. I don’t. I cheered as loud as anybody when feudalism fell. I even think that it is possible to functionally eradicate poverty, at least within the Western World. But I do not think that economic equality is feasible in any way.
We’ve reached the point in the historical timeline when the Cold War has become history. When college students were no longer alive at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and rapidly approaching the time when they won’t have been alive for the fall of the USSR. I remember both. My parents remember Vietnam, my grandparents World War II.
Equality in any sense is a utopian pipe dream. It’s a nice dream, yes. But only a dream. Like Willy Loman’s “well-known.”
I believe that, inherently, people are equal. No skin color or gender or genetics or ethnicity or sexual preference is inherently better or worse than any other. People are equal.
Society is not. Class, status, education, employment. All these are divisive and discordant. They rank us by our grades, by our height, our weight, our standardized test performance, our salaries. They look at the industries in which we choose to work – entertainment, education, business, service, public service – and at the communities in which we live – urban, suburban, rural – as barometers of our worth as people. They rank us by the degrees written upon pieces of paper and upon the university or college seal that adorns the top.
We are divided by religion. Each religious organization, sect, and denomination privileging one another differently. It is the same with regionalism and nationality.
We tout the value of equality and then conspire against ourselves by applying false labels and hierarchies, undermining our own proclamations with hypocrisy.
Communism is a nice theory. But in practice, people are not designed, not engineered, not bred to quietly acquiesce to our own diminishment. And that, ultimately, is what pure equality would do. Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984. There can be no true equality without the complete annihilation of everything that makes us truly human.
We are not all equal. We never will be. But let us define our inequalities by things other than skin color or national origin or gender or sexual preference. Define our inequalities not as “good” and “better,” or “bad” and “worse,” but by “this” and “that.” Let us define our inequalities as what we do and what we believe in, rather than our genetics or the happenstance of our birth. Let us choose how we wish to differ, and respect the fact that we are not equals, nor should we be. I am smarter than many people. But there are many people more skilled than I am in many ways. Stronger or faster or more dexterous or more graceful or more mathematically minded or musically talented. We are both greater and lesser than one another. This is not equality. It is diversity.
Let us be content with our inequality, let us celebrate our inequality, and accept that, ultimately, we are as high above others as others are above us.
"Words fly up, my thoughts remain below."
black and white, Angels and demons.
We aren't two sides of the same coin.
We're the gold into which those sides are imprinted."
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
History of Violence
Our society, as I have mentioned before, is preoccupied with violence. With watching it, with committing it, and - yes - with censuring it. We go to movies slathered with more gore than eloquence, we watch murder and war on the news, we save Darfur (as well we should), and we enter into the cybernetic domain of exploded pixels on our computers, Xboxes, and PS-whatevers. And then we click our tongues at the violence of today's children.
Please, don't think that I'm censuring violence in the media and in video games. I'm not. But I am recognizing the hypocrisy inherent in a society that both glorifies and vilifies violence. A society that cannot teach itself about appropriate and inappropriate violence. A society that likes to pretend it isn't violent, when it really is.
I've talked before about the productive and sacrificial nature of violence. I've cited Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, but that's not going to stop me from doing it again. He writes,
Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. (2)
We are a nation at war. No one doubts, no one questions this. But for what purpose? To what end? For freedom? Justice? The American Way? The sheer plethora of abstract concepts that have led our nation to war are staggering. The "War on Terror." I understand what that means, but I cannot help but conjure up images of fully armed marines rushing into a child's bedroom at night to make war on the monster that turns out to be nothing more than a clothes-rack when the lights are turned on. How many of our boogeymen are just as real?
Girard's point is that violence deferred will find an outlet. When you can't find the object of your hatred, then you take it out on someone else. Who hasn't? Bad day at work, you come home and yell at your husband, your wife, your kids, the dog... Minor violence, yes. But violence nonetheless.
So what happens when a country seeks its enemy and doesn't find it? Violence deferred. Whole nations have gone to war and reduced one another to rubble over a lost traitor, a lost object, a lost ideal. Because whatever it was that was lost is gone, and we seek to replace it with something else, a surrogate, a scapegoat, "chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand."
It is not a nice thing to contemplate the truth of human nature. When we are enraged at something we cannot reach, something we cannot find, something we know we cannot defeat, we lash out at something "vulnerable and close at hand." Our neighbors. Pets. Children. We make them - in our minds - the surrogate cause of our violence. We substitute them for whatever it is that has provoked us.
But violence, as Girard says, begets violence. And when the sacrifice is an unworthy substitute - when it does not, as we intend, diffuse the violence directed at it because it is not a close enough analog to the original source - it becomes a further source of violence. A vicious cycle.
This is not to say that we should go about killing our bosses or destroying the computer out of sheer frustration. We should find outlets. But positive ones. Ones whose role is to be surrogate - a movie, a video game, a literal punching bag at the gym.
But that is not my point here. My point is that we make war in the name of peace, commit violence in the name of ending it, but we do not commit our violence upon the right victims. We choose abstract concepts that are by nature untouchable because they are not tangible. One cannot kill a concept. We set ourselves up for sacrificial failure because we choose to make our target something that cannot be reified.
And then we try to kill it. Collateral damage. Civilian casualties. Genocide.
There is no uplifting message at the end of all this. No platitude to warm the heart and make us believe it will all be okay. It won't. It can't. We have begun to walk a path that leads only to death, and until we realize what it is we are fighting against, we will only find further violence.
Please, don't think that I'm censuring violence in the media and in video games. I'm not. But I am recognizing the hypocrisy inherent in a society that both glorifies and vilifies violence. A society that cannot teach itself about appropriate and inappropriate violence. A society that likes to pretend it isn't violent, when it really is.
I've talked before about the productive and sacrificial nature of violence. I've cited Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, but that's not going to stop me from doing it again. He writes,
Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. (2)
We are a nation at war. No one doubts, no one questions this. But for what purpose? To what end? For freedom? Justice? The American Way? The sheer plethora of abstract concepts that have led our nation to war are staggering. The "War on Terror." I understand what that means, but I cannot help but conjure up images of fully armed marines rushing into a child's bedroom at night to make war on the monster that turns out to be nothing more than a clothes-rack when the lights are turned on. How many of our boogeymen are just as real?
Girard's point is that violence deferred will find an outlet. When you can't find the object of your hatred, then you take it out on someone else. Who hasn't? Bad day at work, you come home and yell at your husband, your wife, your kids, the dog... Minor violence, yes. But violence nonetheless.
So what happens when a country seeks its enemy and doesn't find it? Violence deferred. Whole nations have gone to war and reduced one another to rubble over a lost traitor, a lost object, a lost ideal. Because whatever it was that was lost is gone, and we seek to replace it with something else, a surrogate, a scapegoat, "chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand."
It is not a nice thing to contemplate the truth of human nature. When we are enraged at something we cannot reach, something we cannot find, something we know we cannot defeat, we lash out at something "vulnerable and close at hand." Our neighbors. Pets. Children. We make them - in our minds - the surrogate cause of our violence. We substitute them for whatever it is that has provoked us.
But violence, as Girard says, begets violence. And when the sacrifice is an unworthy substitute - when it does not, as we intend, diffuse the violence directed at it because it is not a close enough analog to the original source - it becomes a further source of violence. A vicious cycle.
This is not to say that we should go about killing our bosses or destroying the computer out of sheer frustration. We should find outlets. But positive ones. Ones whose role is to be surrogate - a movie, a video game, a literal punching bag at the gym.
But that is not my point here. My point is that we make war in the name of peace, commit violence in the name of ending it, but we do not commit our violence upon the right victims. We choose abstract concepts that are by nature untouchable because they are not tangible. One cannot kill a concept. We set ourselves up for sacrificial failure because we choose to make our target something that cannot be reified.
And then we try to kill it. Collateral damage. Civilian casualties. Genocide.
There is no uplifting message at the end of all this. No platitude to warm the heart and make us believe it will all be okay. It won't. It can't. We have begun to walk a path that leads only to death, and until we realize what it is we are fighting against, we will only find further violence.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
How Inversion Wrote my Dissertation
As I work through the impossible process of producing a book-length (and hopefully book-worthy) academic work, I find that much of what I have to say all boils down to the same basic point and the same basic elements.
On the one hand, this is A Good Thing. This means that my organizing thesis isn't insane. It means that I am on to Something. It also means that each of my plays ends up proving the same thing in ways that are only very subtly different. Trying to wrap my head around how to articulate why, for instance, Richard II isn't exactly like 3 Henry VI is fascinating. In the "oh, look, bone poking through my skin" kind of way.
You'll forgive me for being paranoid and not posting it here. Suffice it to say, it involves dying and Jesus. Of course, so do many things in our Christian-centered nation. But that's another bone to chew.
The main point here is that I've discovered that inversion and opposition are a very useful way to make the same point. Now, you wouldn't think that saying the opposite of what I just said would in fact prove it all over again, but that's just how screwed up academics are sometimes. For example, "Bob is a tree, and therefore we can cut him down," is astonishingly the same thing as "We cut down Jimmy, and therefore he is a tree."
Now before the philosophers and logicians out there all have heart attacks, I realize that this appears to fail. But in the dissertation, it doesn't. There are magical categories in the world for which the above formulation actually follows.
Unfortunately, sometimes they appear in the real world, too. And they get used even when they fail. Miserably. (Choose to apply that modifier to whatever you wish.)
For instance, in supporting the government and being a terrorist. It may be true that if you are a terrorist, you do not support the government. No objections from me. However, if you do not support the government, there is no law in logic or even in creation that says you are automatically a terrorist. Not even in Shakespeare. Hell, especially not in Shakespeare. But that's another rant.
The world, as I am often fond of saying, is not a set of dichotomies. We are not all either one thing or another. In the most platitudinous of phrases: the world is not black and white.
Come on, people. Shakespeare got it. Even Beaumont and Fletcher got it, and I'm convinced they got the shorter end of the smart-stick. Even - and this is the big one - even Elizabeth I got it, and let me tell you, she was not a merciful lady. That woman was brutal, but very politically savvy.
She said (supposedly), "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She chopped off the head of the Earl of Essex when he rebelled... even though he was one of her favorites. But she didn't order the execution, imprisonment, or even the censure of the players who put on Richard II, performed on the eve of the rebellion and commissioned by Essex.
And why not?
Because she understood the difference between terrorism and political commentary. Amazing. In 1601. Four-hundred and seven years ago. She didn't even send any of the actors to Guantanamo... er... the Tower.
Was Elizabethan England a veritable paradise? No. Not in the least. Between the plague rats and the smell, I much prefer the twenty-first century, thank you. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the ghosts of our own history. They were not idiots, our social and political predecessors. They were not barbarians, at least not any more so than we are today.
Sure, they enjoyed violent entertainment... but then, so do we. They unjustly imprisoned traitors... but so do we. They censured dissidents... but so do we. Did they like a little more poetry with their gore? Sure. But they didn't have CGI.
On the one hand, this is A Good Thing. This means that my organizing thesis isn't insane. It means that I am on to Something. It also means that each of my plays ends up proving the same thing in ways that are only very subtly different. Trying to wrap my head around how to articulate why, for instance, Richard II isn't exactly like 3 Henry VI is fascinating. In the "oh, look, bone poking through my skin" kind of way.
You'll forgive me for being paranoid and not posting it here. Suffice it to say, it involves dying and Jesus. Of course, so do many things in our Christian-centered nation. But that's another bone to chew.
The main point here is that I've discovered that inversion and opposition are a very useful way to make the same point. Now, you wouldn't think that saying the opposite of what I just said would in fact prove it all over again, but that's just how screwed up academics are sometimes. For example, "Bob is a tree, and therefore we can cut him down," is astonishingly the same thing as "We cut down Jimmy, and therefore he is a tree."
Now before the philosophers and logicians out there all have heart attacks, I realize that this appears to fail. But in the dissertation, it doesn't. There are magical categories in the world for which the above formulation actually follows.
Unfortunately, sometimes they appear in the real world, too. And they get used even when they fail. Miserably. (Choose to apply that modifier to whatever you wish.)
For instance, in supporting the government and being a terrorist. It may be true that if you are a terrorist, you do not support the government. No objections from me. However, if you do not support the government, there is no law in logic or even in creation that says you are automatically a terrorist. Not even in Shakespeare. Hell, especially not in Shakespeare. But that's another rant.
The world, as I am often fond of saying, is not a set of dichotomies. We are not all either one thing or another. In the most platitudinous of phrases: the world is not black and white.
Come on, people. Shakespeare got it. Even Beaumont and Fletcher got it, and I'm convinced they got the shorter end of the smart-stick. Even - and this is the big one - even Elizabeth I got it, and let me tell you, she was not a merciful lady. That woman was brutal, but very politically savvy.
She said (supposedly), "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She chopped off the head of the Earl of Essex when he rebelled... even though he was one of her favorites. But she didn't order the execution, imprisonment, or even the censure of the players who put on Richard II, performed on the eve of the rebellion and commissioned by Essex.
And why not?
Because she understood the difference between terrorism and political commentary. Amazing. In 1601. Four-hundred and seven years ago. She didn't even send any of the actors to Guantanamo... er... the Tower.
Was Elizabethan England a veritable paradise? No. Not in the least. Between the plague rats and the smell, I much prefer the twenty-first century, thank you. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the ghosts of our own history. They were not idiots, our social and political predecessors. They were not barbarians, at least not any more so than we are today.
Sure, they enjoyed violent entertainment... but then, so do we. They unjustly imprisoned traitors... but so do we. They censured dissidents... but so do we. Did they like a little more poetry with their gore? Sure. But they didn't have CGI.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Why Celebrity?
An interesting question, in this day and age. What causes us to valorize, to deify particular people within our culture? Why these people? Particularly - if one considers the Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan type - why these people? What is it about them that attracts our attention, draws our collective eye, makes us want to worship not only them, but the proverbial ground they walk on?
I often find myself mostly exempt from this tendency. Mostly. I do have authors whose blogs I read or whose books I check up on. I have musicians whose work I enjoy and listen to with frequency. There are academic speakers I would happily listen to or discuss issues with. But for the most part... I must confess I just don't get it.
I understand the principle. It's one that I deal with on a fairly regular basis, if only in a histo-literary context. But that's how I often relate to the world these days.
In Shakespeare's time, people believed that physical proximity to the monarch somehow let something kingly "rub off" on you. It why "gentleman of the privy chamber" was actually a desired title. You got to be the honored man who got to wipe the kingly ass. How fortunate for you. It's also why we know so much about kingly stools. Not the kind with legs, either. David Starkey - who has several very interesting books on Henry VIII and Elizabeth - wrote an article entitled "Representation Though Intimacy" that details the way in which physical contact and proximity to the king (here, Henry VIII) endowed an individual with an element of the sacred supposedly possessed by the king:
the vehicle [the body] was itself a symbol, with two distinct sets of meanings: one sacred, the other profane... The literalism is transparent: the king’s hands had been annointed at his coronation and hence were holy; they then rubbed off their benediction onto the metal. Thus, though there is no formal contemporary evidence on the point, there can be little doubt that in the intimate physical contact of body service the royal charisma was felt to rub off onto the servant, who thereby became himself endowed with part of the royal virtue. (Starkey 208)
Is that really what celebrity is all about? Do we have the sense (however subconscious) that some of their "greatness," their "sacredness" will rub off on us? Will somehow make us better or more interesting or more something?
I get being impressed by great artists/writers/musicians/actors/etc. I get that. What I don't get is the fanatic desire to touch them. Or to touch something they've touched. (To say nothing about getting body parts signed.)
For centuries, people went to kings because they could cure the "king's evil" (aka Scrofula). People made pilgrimages to holy sites, carried relics or bottles of holy water from a particular church, and visited the graves of saints. All because of this fascination with touching the ding an sich. The thing itself.
Touch is one of those things, those tactile, visceral, human things. Basic human contact. It's vital to not only our emotional health, but - some say - our very survival. Certainly, if you can't tell whether you're about to put your hand in a fire, you've got survival issues, but that's not what I mean. We get starved for touch, for contact. After a long day, we come home to our loved ones and hug them, kiss them, touch them. We use our bodies as a way to reassure ourselves that we're not alone, but also to convince ourselves that we're real.
Is that the importance behind - excuse the expression - touching Victoria Kahn? To determine that genius, that greatness, is, in fact, real?
If I can put my hand on it, then that must mean it's not a figment of my imagination. And if it's real, then I can share it. Even if only some tiny part of it. It can be mine, too. If it's real. If I can touch it.
Our eyes can deceive us, our ears can lie to us, our noses be fooled by oils and perfumes. But our hands... We can't yet convince them that something is real when it's not. So touching celebrity is nothing more or less than that basic human affirmation of reality. It's here. It's real.
I'm real.
I often find myself mostly exempt from this tendency. Mostly. I do have authors whose blogs I read or whose books I check up on. I have musicians whose work I enjoy and listen to with frequency. There are academic speakers I would happily listen to or discuss issues with. But for the most part... I must confess I just don't get it.
I understand the principle. It's one that I deal with on a fairly regular basis, if only in a histo-literary context. But that's how I often relate to the world these days.
In Shakespeare's time, people believed that physical proximity to the monarch somehow let something kingly "rub off" on you. It why "gentleman of the privy chamber" was actually a desired title. You got to be the honored man who got to wipe the kingly ass. How fortunate for you. It's also why we know so much about kingly stools. Not the kind with legs, either. David Starkey - who has several very interesting books on Henry VIII and Elizabeth - wrote an article entitled "Representation Though Intimacy" that details the way in which physical contact and proximity to the king (here, Henry VIII) endowed an individual with an element of the sacred supposedly possessed by the king:
the vehicle [the body] was itself a symbol, with two distinct sets of meanings: one sacred, the other profane... The literalism is transparent: the king’s hands had been annointed at his coronation and hence were holy; they then rubbed off their benediction onto the metal. Thus, though there is no formal contemporary evidence on the point, there can be little doubt that in the intimate physical contact of body service the royal charisma was felt to rub off onto the servant, who thereby became himself endowed with part of the royal virtue. (Starkey 208)
Is that really what celebrity is all about? Do we have the sense (however subconscious) that some of their "greatness," their "sacredness" will rub off on us? Will somehow make us better or more interesting or more something?
I get being impressed by great artists/writers/musicians/actors/etc. I get that. What I don't get is the fanatic desire to touch them. Or to touch something they've touched. (To say nothing about getting body parts signed.)
For centuries, people went to kings because they could cure the "king's evil" (aka Scrofula). People made pilgrimages to holy sites, carried relics or bottles of holy water from a particular church, and visited the graves of saints. All because of this fascination with touching the ding an sich. The thing itself.
Touch is one of those things, those tactile, visceral, human things. Basic human contact. It's vital to not only our emotional health, but - some say - our very survival. Certainly, if you can't tell whether you're about to put your hand in a fire, you've got survival issues, but that's not what I mean. We get starved for touch, for contact. After a long day, we come home to our loved ones and hug them, kiss them, touch them. We use our bodies as a way to reassure ourselves that we're not alone, but also to convince ourselves that we're real.
Is that the importance behind - excuse the expression - touching Victoria Kahn? To determine that genius, that greatness, is, in fact, real?
If I can put my hand on it, then that must mean it's not a figment of my imagination. And if it's real, then I can share it. Even if only some tiny part of it. It can be mine, too. If it's real. If I can touch it.
Our eyes can deceive us, our ears can lie to us, our noses be fooled by oils and perfumes. But our hands... We can't yet convince them that something is real when it's not. So touching celebrity is nothing more or less than that basic human affirmation of reality. It's here. It's real.
I'm real.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Sacrificial Violence
Violence is something with which today's society is eminently familiar. Something that has become so much a part of our everyday lives, that we no longer cringe to see it on the news. That we go to movies that valorize the violent hero. That we dismiss it as "terrorism" or "patriotism" without bothering to realize that they are often one and the same.
And yet, when we look back over the centuries, we condemn cultures who embrace their violence. The Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Spartans... any society who understood the human impulse toward violence, we label as "barbaric."
As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, violent sacrifice is simply an alternative outlet for natural human violent tendencies. He also notes that violence is inextricably intertwined with sanctity: "Violence and the sacred are inseparable" (19), and, further, "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred" (31).
The "secret soul."
Violence, then, is the core, the essence, the fundamental root of all that we have determined to be sacred. It is the lifeblood - and the deathblood - of our society. The foundational stone for every belief system and governmental institution we have managed to construct in our time as self-aware entities on this planet. For all our claims of modernity, all that we term "civilized" is just as anchored in violence as the human sacrifice flayed on the altar of the sun-god. And all of them are designed to curb the very thing they emblematize.
The procedures that keep men's violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. As we have seen, the various forms of prevention go hand in hand with religious practices. The curative procedures are also imbued with religious concepts - both the rudimentary sacrificial rites and the more advanced judicial forms. Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men's efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence. It is that enigmatic quality that pervades the judicial system when that system replaces sacrifice. This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.
We are a nation, a civilization, a world, of sacrifice. Whether we view it as barbarity, symbolism, or justice, sacrifice pervades every level of our conscious and subconscious.
For example. The dominant religion in our country symbolically sacrifices human flesh and then passes it around for its worshipers to eat. Sometimes every day. They wear images of human torture - for that's what a cross was for, folks - around their necks. They worship at the nailed and bleeding feet of a man nailed to a piece of wood and left to drown in his own blood. Disgusting when you think about it that way, yes? But it's symbolic. It isn't real.
Our justice system is designed to use violence to mitigate violence. Death penalty, people. And if not that, then imprisonment, which Foucault will tell you is its own kind of violence. It doesn't much matter (for the sake of my argument, anyway) if the violence is corporeal or psychological. It's still using violence to curb violence. To - Girard argues - stifle the cyclic perpetuation of vengeance with sanctioned violence. Whatever. It's still violence.
Do I even need to say anything about our entertainment? I didn't think so.
This is not to say - at all - that I'm against violence. I'm against beating the crap out of your neighbor for no good reason, but I'm not against the symbolic, and even occasional literal, violence in which our lives are steeped. No, I don't worship a dead man on a cross. But I find the idea of lauding self-sacrifice and respecting the kind of will it takes to die in a horrible, painful way worth attention. Perhaps not to the degree it is given... but, then, what irritates me about that is that the people who hold it in the highest regard don't seem to understand precisely what it is they are doing. If they acknowledged their veneration of violence, great. But they don't. They claim for it "peace" and "mercy" and "love," all the while behaving like boorish and ignorant yahoos.
But that's a rant for another day. Or two. Or twelve.
I think violence - particularly the kind we see in video games - is good for us. Gets the blood and the juices flowing. Reminds us that we are, fundamentally, animals. Higher animals, certainly, but still animals. Predators.
We are what we are. We are violent beings. Rather than pretend that we are not, we should do as our ancestors did. No, not rip people's beating hearts out of their chests and offer them up to the parrot-god of the moon. Though that does sound like fun...
Sacrifice. Sacrifice to ourselves and for ourselves.
So go ahead. Pick up the mouse and keyboard, the controller, the wiimote. Shoot the electronic and pixelated zombies, the splicers, the vampires and ghouls and ghosties and three-legged beasties. Sacrifice the ball. Sacrifice the pain as you push yourself another mile, another foot. Commit violence, but make it constructive. Make it count. Make it sacrificial.
And yet, when we look back over the centuries, we condemn cultures who embrace their violence. The Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Spartans... any society who understood the human impulse toward violence, we label as "barbaric."
As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, violent sacrifice is simply an alternative outlet for natural human violent tendencies. He also notes that violence is inextricably intertwined with sanctity: "Violence and the sacred are inseparable" (19), and, further, "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred" (31).
The "secret soul."
Violence, then, is the core, the essence, the fundamental root of all that we have determined to be sacred. It is the lifeblood - and the deathblood - of our society. The foundational stone for every belief system and governmental institution we have managed to construct in our time as self-aware entities on this planet. For all our claims of modernity, all that we term "civilized" is just as anchored in violence as the human sacrifice flayed on the altar of the sun-god. And all of them are designed to curb the very thing they emblematize.
The procedures that keep men's violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. As we have seen, the various forms of prevention go hand in hand with religious practices. The curative procedures are also imbued with religious concepts - both the rudimentary sacrificial rites and the more advanced judicial forms. Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men's efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence. It is that enigmatic quality that pervades the judicial system when that system replaces sacrifice. This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.
We are a nation, a civilization, a world, of sacrifice. Whether we view it as barbarity, symbolism, or justice, sacrifice pervades every level of our conscious and subconscious.
For example. The dominant religion in our country symbolically sacrifices human flesh and then passes it around for its worshipers to eat. Sometimes every day. They wear images of human torture - for that's what a cross was for, folks - around their necks. They worship at the nailed and bleeding feet of a man nailed to a piece of wood and left to drown in his own blood. Disgusting when you think about it that way, yes? But it's symbolic. It isn't real.
Our justice system is designed to use violence to mitigate violence. Death penalty, people. And if not that, then imprisonment, which Foucault will tell you is its own kind of violence. It doesn't much matter (for the sake of my argument, anyway) if the violence is corporeal or psychological. It's still using violence to curb violence. To - Girard argues - stifle the cyclic perpetuation of vengeance with sanctioned violence. Whatever. It's still violence.
Do I even need to say anything about our entertainment? I didn't think so.
This is not to say - at all - that I'm against violence. I'm against beating the crap out of your neighbor for no good reason, but I'm not against the symbolic, and even occasional literal, violence in which our lives are steeped. No, I don't worship a dead man on a cross. But I find the idea of lauding self-sacrifice and respecting the kind of will it takes to die in a horrible, painful way worth attention. Perhaps not to the degree it is given... but, then, what irritates me about that is that the people who hold it in the highest regard don't seem to understand precisely what it is they are doing. If they acknowledged their veneration of violence, great. But they don't. They claim for it "peace" and "mercy" and "love," all the while behaving like boorish and ignorant yahoos.
But that's a rant for another day. Or two. Or twelve.
I think violence - particularly the kind we see in video games - is good for us. Gets the blood and the juices flowing. Reminds us that we are, fundamentally, animals. Higher animals, certainly, but still animals. Predators.
We are what we are. We are violent beings. Rather than pretend that we are not, we should do as our ancestors did. No, not rip people's beating hearts out of their chests and offer them up to the parrot-god of the moon. Though that does sound like fun...
Sacrifice. Sacrifice to ourselves and for ourselves.
So go ahead. Pick up the mouse and keyboard, the controller, the wiimote. Shoot the electronic and pixelated zombies, the splicers, the vampires and ghouls and ghosties and three-legged beasties. Sacrifice the ball. Sacrifice the pain as you push yourself another mile, another foot. Commit violence, but make it constructive. Make it count. Make it sacrificial.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Conclusions of the Godless
Having finished Dawkins' The God Delusion yesterday, I have some further thoughts on the book and its general premise.
Dawkins proves himself to be a remarkably enlightened individual who has an incredible level of frustration with the current state of international psyches. He just doesn't understand how so many people could be confronted with the same universe as the one in which he finds himself and not come to the same conclusions he does.
I sympathize.
I do understand how someone might wish to believe in god or in the supernatural. I even understand how they can believe in it. I've seen enough strange and unexplainable things in my life to have my own moments of doubt, though I must confess that I consider the supernatural to simply be things-we-can't-explain-yet-but-someday-will. Even if that means finding a scientific explanation for hauntings, etc. that includes the dead. Great. Fine by me.
What I - and Dawkins - do not understand is the type of mentality that allows a person to believe something even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Creationism, for instance. Like Dawkins, I tend to cringe at the phrase "intelligent design," though I do understand the thought that maybe god got the whole ball rolling. But then, like the proverbial ball, it rolled along its evolutionary way.
I'm sorry, but the earth is NOT 6000 years old. It just isn't. It's millions of years old, and that - as Dawkins points out - is just so much cooler than if it were a mere 6000. But this wasn't meant to be a post on creationism versus evolution.
It's a post on religion itself. I tend to harbor what may be an irrational animosity toward organized religion. It all started - as I said in an earlier post - with a pink button. Funny how so small a thing can be a life-changing, mind-altering thing. The proverbial straw.
But once my eyes were open to the idiocy going on around me - at the tender age of six, mind you, things began to make more sense. Grow more infuriating, too. All of the things a child must do in Catholic school seemed more and more ridiculous the older I got, and the very notion of god slipped away into the shadows as I began to realize that the people around me were more interested in themselves than in the god in which they professed to believe. It wasn't simply that they were children. It was that the god - the "little god" - in which they had faith would damn me for any number of insignificant things.
God, in my rapidly expanding world, was a thing of rules. A thing of limitations and condemnations. A thing that tried to stifle my voice, my creativity, my self. And I decided - very early - that I was having none of it. God was, insofar as I could tell, an excuse for people to tell me what to do. Dawkins agrees:
Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.' Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.' (221)
The elimination of reason would be the elimination of one of the fundamental things that makes us human and sentient. I suppose it would disprove evolution - if we abandon reason, then we all devolve into monkeys. We're already slinging metaphorical feces at one another; why not make it real feces? It can't possibly smell any more of bullsh*t than the Creationist Museum.
Did you know, for instance, that dinosaurs didn't come with name tags? And did you know that the T-rex ate fruit because in Eden there was no death and therefore he couldn't have eaten animals? Well, then. I guess T-rex got to the Tree first and the reason dinosaurs got wiped out is because of a stupid animal with too-short front arms that got hungry and made itself as god. *BLAM!* Enter falling sky-bits. Good-bye T-rex. Adam and Eve were really the second expulsion. (Please note that the Creationists' assertions end with the last question mark. If you couldn't tell that, it may be a sign of just how stupid their logic *cough* really is.)
Finally, though, my biggest complaint about religion is another mentioned by Dawkins. The fact that people do things in the name of religion that are otherwise entirely unsanctionable. The Crusades, for instance. Under what other auspices could an entire continent send droves of children off to die? Again, to quote Dawkins:
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.' (283)
I'm sure we can all run through a laundry-list of atrocities committed in the name of one god or another. The wars, the deaths, the destruction. Only patriotism can convince people as wholeheartedly to commit themselves to death and slaughter... but at least patriotism has a tangible result. The safety of a nation makes infinitely more sense than... than what?
What do we get from killing for religion? Sent to a magical land which has what? Puffy clouds and wings? What if you're afraid of heights? Virgins? Not for long. A table of mead and women and war? I hope they've got cures for hangovers and syphillis. Any conception of the afterlife that we've managed to concoct (with the exception of the reincarnationists, who actually make some sense) is based on a flawed, human understanding of the universe. The things we get are the very same things we're warned away from during our lives as being sinful (with the exception of the very nice Norse - drunken sex and battle are good things in both worlds).
What is most pathetic - in all senses of the word - about religious devotion is the idea that a person can willfully discard the wonders of the world in favor of imagined wonders of equal or less splendor. I can think of no greater tragedy for the human mind than to be consoled by a weak shadow of this world, to look forward to the promise of something so much the inferior of the universe around them that they cannot see what it is they have.
And if there is a god - particularly a benevolent one - how can it possibly find value in a race of creatures whose motives are all directed at selfish self-promotion? I will be good so that I get to heaven. How is that goodness? It's self-serving and vile. Be good because you wish to be good. Be good because you believe it is good. Don't be good just to get a pat on the head from a great invisible power that could squish you like a bug.
If there is a god, then I hope that it judges us not by our religion or our devotion, but by the quality and content of our characters. It does not need us to believe in it in order to exist. And if it demands worship and devotion, well, then I'm going to blaspheme and say that I agree with Milton's Satan: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven." But I tend to find myself agreeing most with Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Dawkins proves himself to be a remarkably enlightened individual who has an incredible level of frustration with the current state of international psyches. He just doesn't understand how so many people could be confronted with the same universe as the one in which he finds himself and not come to the same conclusions he does.
I sympathize.
I do understand how someone might wish to believe in god or in the supernatural. I even understand how they can believe in it. I've seen enough strange and unexplainable things in my life to have my own moments of doubt, though I must confess that I consider the supernatural to simply be things-we-can't-explain-yet-but-someday-will. Even if that means finding a scientific explanation for hauntings, etc. that includes the dead. Great. Fine by me.
What I - and Dawkins - do not understand is the type of mentality that allows a person to believe something even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Creationism, for instance. Like Dawkins, I tend to cringe at the phrase "intelligent design," though I do understand the thought that maybe god got the whole ball rolling. But then, like the proverbial ball, it rolled along its evolutionary way.
I'm sorry, but the earth is NOT 6000 years old. It just isn't. It's millions of years old, and that - as Dawkins points out - is just so much cooler than if it were a mere 6000. But this wasn't meant to be a post on creationism versus evolution.
It's a post on religion itself. I tend to harbor what may be an irrational animosity toward organized religion. It all started - as I said in an earlier post - with a pink button. Funny how so small a thing can be a life-changing, mind-altering thing. The proverbial straw.
But once my eyes were open to the idiocy going on around me - at the tender age of six, mind you, things began to make more sense. Grow more infuriating, too. All of the things a child must do in Catholic school seemed more and more ridiculous the older I got, and the very notion of god slipped away into the shadows as I began to realize that the people around me were more interested in themselves than in the god in which they professed to believe. It wasn't simply that they were children. It was that the god - the "little god" - in which they had faith would damn me for any number of insignificant things.
God, in my rapidly expanding world, was a thing of rules. A thing of limitations and condemnations. A thing that tried to stifle my voice, my creativity, my self. And I decided - very early - that I was having none of it. God was, insofar as I could tell, an excuse for people to tell me what to do. Dawkins agrees:
Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.' Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.' (221)
The elimination of reason would be the elimination of one of the fundamental things that makes us human and sentient. I suppose it would disprove evolution - if we abandon reason, then we all devolve into monkeys. We're already slinging metaphorical feces at one another; why not make it real feces? It can't possibly smell any more of bullsh*t than the Creationist Museum.
Did you know, for instance, that dinosaurs didn't come with name tags? And did you know that the T-rex ate fruit because in Eden there was no death and therefore he couldn't have eaten animals? Well, then. I guess T-rex got to the Tree first and the reason dinosaurs got wiped out is because of a stupid animal with too-short front arms that got hungry and made itself as god. *BLAM!* Enter falling sky-bits. Good-bye T-rex. Adam and Eve were really the second expulsion. (Please note that the Creationists' assertions end with the last question mark. If you couldn't tell that, it may be a sign of just how stupid their logic *cough* really is.)
Finally, though, my biggest complaint about religion is another mentioned by Dawkins. The fact that people do things in the name of religion that are otherwise entirely unsanctionable. The Crusades, for instance. Under what other auspices could an entire continent send droves of children off to die? Again, to quote Dawkins:
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.' (283)
I'm sure we can all run through a laundry-list of atrocities committed in the name of one god or another. The wars, the deaths, the destruction. Only patriotism can convince people as wholeheartedly to commit themselves to death and slaughter... but at least patriotism has a tangible result. The safety of a nation makes infinitely more sense than... than what?
What do we get from killing for religion? Sent to a magical land which has what? Puffy clouds and wings? What if you're afraid of heights? Virgins? Not for long. A table of mead and women and war? I hope they've got cures for hangovers and syphillis. Any conception of the afterlife that we've managed to concoct (with the exception of the reincarnationists, who actually make some sense) is based on a flawed, human understanding of the universe. The things we get are the very same things we're warned away from during our lives as being sinful (with the exception of the very nice Norse - drunken sex and battle are good things in both worlds).
What is most pathetic - in all senses of the word - about religious devotion is the idea that a person can willfully discard the wonders of the world in favor of imagined wonders of equal or less splendor. I can think of no greater tragedy for the human mind than to be consoled by a weak shadow of this world, to look forward to the promise of something so much the inferior of the universe around them that they cannot see what it is they have.
And if there is a god - particularly a benevolent one - how can it possibly find value in a race of creatures whose motives are all directed at selfish self-promotion? I will be good so that I get to heaven. How is that goodness? It's self-serving and vile. Be good because you wish to be good. Be good because you believe it is good. Don't be good just to get a pat on the head from a great invisible power that could squish you like a bug.
If there is a god, then I hope that it judges us not by our religion or our devotion, but by the quality and content of our characters. It does not need us to believe in it in order to exist. And if it demands worship and devotion, well, then I'm going to blaspheme and say that I agree with Milton's Satan: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven." But I tend to find myself agreeing most with Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Thursday, March 20, 2008
This is not an American Pipe Dream
I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. At first glance, it is a play that seems to have little to do with the rise and fall of kings and kingdoms, with the rampant violence that typically graces the pages I study.
But then I got to thinking.
It's been a long time since I read the play. But I remember, vividly, the experience of reading it, if not the play itself.
I remember the way it looked in my head, dusty and drab and dry. Curtains made of wallpaper fabric with yellow fade-marks from too much sun and grease. A wooden floor that hadn't seen wax for years. Doilies made by someone's grandmother once upon a time. An olive-green stove that had made birthday cakes and Christmas cookies, spaghetti from a jar, Betty Crocker cake mix, Jello, and pot roast with little pearl onions and carrots.
I think of Willy Loman as the king of a failing kingdom, surrounded by successful neighbors, with subjects who recognized in his rule faded glory and wished they could still respect the king in his tattered robes. His sons are filled with regret, but they know their father - like King Lear - is no longer fit to rule his house. They are the Cerrex and Porrex to Loman's Gorboduc, Edgar and a legitimate Edmund whose success should be measured in something other than what it is, following their blinded Gloucester-father as he stumbles his way toward the edge of a cliff.
All this leads me to wonder whether or not the American Dream is all that different from any country's dream, from Shakespeare's "Wherefore base?" and the countless tales of upward social mobility all across early modern Europe. After all, Aristotle defined Comedy as the rise in status or fortunes of one who began low.
Tragedy, however, was the fall of one from a height of status or fortune. The decline of the high school football hero to the fat, middle-aged and miserable man who sits morosely in his foam-and-steel cubicle and stares at the blank grey fabric where a window should be.
All this comes back to a point I have made - one that Shakespeare made many-a-time - that our lives are played out as on a stage. We have our exits and our entrances, and we, in our time, will play many parts.
Learn from Willy Loman. Decide, now, that yours will be a Comedy. Decide that, whatever your fortunes may be, you will make yourself rise, if not in wealth or status, then in contentment. Make content your crown, and crown your life in content before you play your final age in mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
But then I got to thinking.
It's been a long time since I read the play. But I remember, vividly, the experience of reading it, if not the play itself.
I remember the way it looked in my head, dusty and drab and dry. Curtains made of wallpaper fabric with yellow fade-marks from too much sun and grease. A wooden floor that hadn't seen wax for years. Doilies made by someone's grandmother once upon a time. An olive-green stove that had made birthday cakes and Christmas cookies, spaghetti from a jar, Betty Crocker cake mix, Jello, and pot roast with little pearl onions and carrots.
I think of Willy Loman as the king of a failing kingdom, surrounded by successful neighbors, with subjects who recognized in his rule faded glory and wished they could still respect the king in his tattered robes. His sons are filled with regret, but they know their father - like King Lear - is no longer fit to rule his house. They are the Cerrex and Porrex to Loman's Gorboduc, Edgar and a legitimate Edmund whose success should be measured in something other than what it is, following their blinded Gloucester-father as he stumbles his way toward the edge of a cliff.
All this leads me to wonder whether or not the American Dream is all that different from any country's dream, from Shakespeare's "Wherefore base?" and the countless tales of upward social mobility all across early modern Europe. After all, Aristotle defined Comedy as the rise in status or fortunes of one who began low.
Tragedy, however, was the fall of one from a height of status or fortune. The decline of the high school football hero to the fat, middle-aged and miserable man who sits morosely in his foam-and-steel cubicle and stares at the blank grey fabric where a window should be.
All this comes back to a point I have made - one that Shakespeare made many-a-time - that our lives are played out as on a stage. We have our exits and our entrances, and we, in our time, will play many parts.
Learn from Willy Loman. Decide, now, that yours will be a Comedy. Decide that, whatever your fortunes may be, you will make yourself rise, if not in wealth or status, then in contentment. Make content your crown, and crown your life in content before you play your final age in mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Searching for an Author
As an (aspiring) author - though I suppose, technically, I am a published author, just not in the genre in which I would like to be published - I often think of myself in terms of words. Not language, in general, but words. I see myself sometimes as a me-shaped bottle filled with ink, all swirling and dark and filled with the loops and whorls of letters. I can envision my skin covered with words, tiny insect-like creatures that cover me from head to toe in little tattoo-feet.
In re-reading Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for class on Wednesday, I came across this fascinating and brilliant passage:
Father: But don’t you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
It struck me, then, that what the Father describes is, in essence, the Human Condition. We are all, in some ways, searching for an Author.
In the case of Pirandello's play, the Author for which the Characters search is the Logos, the Word, god. And I think Pirandello is right. We are, all of us, searching for that Author, that Logos, that god.
Regular readers will know, of course, that I am not religious. In any way. I am not looking for god in the traditional or non-traditional sense of the word. But I am looking for Words. Always. It is a perpetual search for the right language to express exactly what haunts my inner castle, the spell that will seal or release my sanctum sanctorum.
Pirandello's Father Character offers the suggestion of impossibility. Of the interiority which Edward Said (in Orientalism) we all bring with us to every cultural, social, or literary encounter. We cannot help but bring our ideologies into play whatever we do, see, hear, or read. I acknowledge this. I embrace it.
I am proud of my ideology. I am proud of the things I choose to reject and of the things I have chosen to bear. I know that my upbringing has colored my world with a particular palette of paints, that my view on the universe in which I find myself awash is mine and mine alone, and thereby flawed. But it is mine.
I am a possessive creature. I like the things that are mine. My world. My words. I think we all like the things that are ours. It is why, as children, our papers, our homework, our art, was proudly given to mommy to put on the refrigerator. It is why we claim what is ours and fight for it. It is why we like to put our own spin on things.
I know this. I accept it. I revel in it. I acknowledge that it is mine, and it is flawed. I acknowledge that my world is not that in which others live, even if a part of them is mine, as a part of me is theirs.
And a part of this is searching for that impossible Author. The Logos. The Word.
The difference, I think, between me and most people is that I choose to find that Author in myself. I am a creator of worlds, a manipulator of universes, a source of salvation and damnation.
And Pirandello realizes this. He is his own Author. He creates himself. Writes his way into and out of corners. But his Father (his god-voice, Author-voice) condemns him for it:
Father: Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist. For each one of us has his own reality to be respected before God, even when it is harmful to one's very self.
For Pirandello, then, this world in which the self is the Author, one is condemned. The Author-less Characters in the play are condemned to live and relive the tragedy of their "lives" precisely because there is no pen to script out their existence. No Author. No god. For Pirandello, a godless existence is one in which the self-Author is condemned to make mistakes. To fall into error.
I concur. I make mistakes. I stumble. I fall. I am the ultimate in post-lapserianism. I have long been a proponent of imperfection. It is the bite in the apple that - the myth tells us - gave us the wisdom of gods. And for this, we are damned? Is not this wisdom in and of itself the greatest blessing we ever could have been granted?
I have never understood - and my virulent reaction against Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge is testament to this - why knowledge is so very bad. Why there are things that I should not - or must not - know. There are horrifying things that exist in our universe. Terrible things. But that does not mean they should be forbidden - at least in theory. We should know the theories, the means, the methods. There are things we should probably not do, but knowledge makes us greater, better, no matter the severity of the information it contains.
And words... Words are the vehicles of this knowledge. The means and method of its transmission. They have become the safeguards of history. They are the elements that compose our collective memory, and, as such, our wisdom.
This is why the pen is mightier than the sword. Why language is the sword of my mouth. And with it, I will destroy thee. Create thee. Love thee.
In re-reading Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for class on Wednesday, I came across this fascinating and brilliant passage:
Father: But don’t you see that the whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
It struck me, then, that what the Father describes is, in essence, the Human Condition. We are all, in some ways, searching for an Author.
In the case of Pirandello's play, the Author for which the Characters search is the Logos, the Word, god. And I think Pirandello is right. We are, all of us, searching for that Author, that Logos, that god.
Regular readers will know, of course, that I am not religious. In any way. I am not looking for god in the traditional or non-traditional sense of the word. But I am looking for Words. Always. It is a perpetual search for the right language to express exactly what haunts my inner castle, the spell that will seal or release my sanctum sanctorum.
Pirandello's Father Character offers the suggestion of impossibility. Of the interiority which Edward Said (in Orientalism) we all bring with us to every cultural, social, or literary encounter. We cannot help but bring our ideologies into play whatever we do, see, hear, or read. I acknowledge this. I embrace it.
I am proud of my ideology. I am proud of the things I choose to reject and of the things I have chosen to bear. I know that my upbringing has colored my world with a particular palette of paints, that my view on the universe in which I find myself awash is mine and mine alone, and thereby flawed. But it is mine.
I am a possessive creature. I like the things that are mine. My world. My words. I think we all like the things that are ours. It is why, as children, our papers, our homework, our art, was proudly given to mommy to put on the refrigerator. It is why we claim what is ours and fight for it. It is why we like to put our own spin on things.
I know this. I accept it. I revel in it. I acknowledge that it is mine, and it is flawed. I acknowledge that my world is not that in which others live, even if a part of them is mine, as a part of me is theirs.
And a part of this is searching for that impossible Author. The Logos. The Word.
The difference, I think, between me and most people is that I choose to find that Author in myself. I am a creator of worlds, a manipulator of universes, a source of salvation and damnation.
And Pirandello realizes this. He is his own Author. He creates himself. Writes his way into and out of corners. But his Father (his god-voice, Author-voice) condemns him for it:
Father: Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist. For each one of us has his own reality to be respected before God, even when it is harmful to one's very self.
For Pirandello, then, this world in which the self is the Author, one is condemned. The Author-less Characters in the play are condemned to live and relive the tragedy of their "lives" precisely because there is no pen to script out their existence. No Author. No god. For Pirandello, a godless existence is one in which the self-Author is condemned to make mistakes. To fall into error.
I concur. I make mistakes. I stumble. I fall. I am the ultimate in post-lapserianism. I have long been a proponent of imperfection. It is the bite in the apple that - the myth tells us - gave us the wisdom of gods. And for this, we are damned? Is not this wisdom in and of itself the greatest blessing we ever could have been granted?
I have never understood - and my virulent reaction against Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge is testament to this - why knowledge is so very bad. Why there are things that I should not - or must not - know. There are horrifying things that exist in our universe. Terrible things. But that does not mean they should be forbidden - at least in theory. We should know the theories, the means, the methods. There are things we should probably not do, but knowledge makes us greater, better, no matter the severity of the information it contains.
And words... Words are the vehicles of this knowledge. The means and method of its transmission. They have become the safeguards of history. They are the elements that compose our collective memory, and, as such, our wisdom.
This is why the pen is mightier than the sword. Why language is the sword of my mouth. And with it, I will destroy thee. Create thee. Love thee.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Thou shalt have no gods
In this day and age of televangelists, the rising power of the Religious Right, and the encroaching theocracy of our government, I find the attitudes of people like Richard Dawkins refreshing. Frustrated, angry, and exasperated, but refreshing nevertheless. Dawkins' recent book - The God Delusion - has recently made its way into my pile of things-to-read, and I find most of what he has to say edifying.
Dawkins focuses - at least thus far - primarily on science and its increasingly persistent conflict with religion. He quotes Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way'. (Dawkins 32-33)
I have to say, I love that - "My god is a little god." It so encapsulates everything that is wrong with the Religious Right and everything that is right with faiths like Buddhism.
The right first: the idea of a "little god," a personal god, who exists within and for the person, the idea of the internal "little god" within each of us who possesses the possibilities of divinity and enlightenment - this idea is wonderful. It smacks of joy and self-promotion and gentleness and oneness with the self and the world.
The wrong: this, I find, manifests in the term I have used - the Religious Right. The branch of society that is both politically Right (conservative) and convinced of its Right-ness (righteousness). It is self-congratulatory. It believes that its "little god" is one that it knows, thoroughly and completely, a "little god" that serves those who follow it like a slavish monkey. A "little god" who has nothing better to do than rain fire and brimstone down on the [insert ethnic/social/religious minority/gender here]. A "little god" whose omnipotence and omniscience is entirely wasted on the dregs of humanity who are both self-serving and narrow-minded.
(Let me be clear for one moment in saying that I do not think all conservatives or religious people are a part of the Religious Right. That epithet I reserve for the very worst of the worst.)
What is wrong, I would like to know, with appreciating the beauty and grandeur that is our universe? Why must we compartmentalize it? Force it into our little creationist box and insist that it is only 6,000 years old and that it was made by invisible hands in 6 days? Why can't it be millions of years old? Isn't that much more impressive?
But we must rely upon The Truth.
Fine. I'm all for truth. But my truth and yours, Religious Right, are two very different things.
But, oh, yes, your Truth is sacred and I mustn't touch it. I'll defile it.
Bullsh*t. Dawkins has a quote for this, too:
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. (Dawkins 42)
Yup. And if I dare to violate that bubble of sanctity, then I am a heretic, a heathen, a monster. I become a violator of the sacred, a profaner of the great All that is religion. I am an ignoramus who needs must be saved.
Let it be. Or, to borrow a familiar term, Amen. I know. Sacrilege.
I do believe that religious belief should be respected. But I also believe that my lack thereof is also deserving of respect. As is my choice to wear cotton or leather or a purple polyester shirt. Or my decision to be vegetarian. Or to study Shakespeare. Yet those things are not nearly so offensive to most people as my atheism. How dare I not believe in god!
The anger that comes through - and which I recognize even as I type it - is also prevalent in Dawkins' book, and I can see how he's ruffled a good many feathers. For instance, an amazon search of "God Delusion" brings up Dawkins' book, one that seems similar, and eight books that attack atheism (7 of those 8 are direct responses to Dawkins - I'm jealous of the fact that the man has managed to make so much of an impact). And that's just the first page. But while perhaps a published author should refrain from too much vitriol, I completely understand. Having been raised Catholic, I understand the frustration of a man struggling to make sense of what seems to him to be entirely delusional.
I remember being sent to the corner for insisting that god was not something I could draw (I was 6, and I still believed in god). I remember being told I was going to hell for any number of things, most of which I can't even recall. I remember the insistence that I was a "bad Catholic" because I didn't give a hoot about the Apostles' Creed, about First Holy Communion, or about First Reconciliation (Confession. I lied to the priest.).
I blame my mother. No. I thank my mother. Not because she raised me to be atheist. My mother is a Catholic. Sort of. At any rate, she's a practicing Christian. But she had a button. It was big and pink and glittery and it read "Trust in God. She will provide." I asked why it said "She" (I think I was four or five). My mother explained to me that because god wasn't human, it was silly of us to think of god as either male or female. I thought that was a pretty good point. My first grade religion teacher did not.
And that was the beginning. I learned to distrust everything I learned in school (Catholic school). I learned to question everything they told me. And I learned that such questioning wasn't fondly looked upon. In high school Morality class, my Catholic hero was Martin Luther.
Dawkins, in his book, uses a scale, 1-7, with 1 standing for absolute belief in a god or gods and 7 an absolute belief that there aren't any. Dawkins says he's a 6. I'd probably fall at a 5.5.
I like the idea of deity. Not of the Judeo-Christian god (whom, as Dawkins points out, is really rather self-contradictory, vindictive, and downright sadistic), but of some kind of otherness, a divinity or quasi-divinity that sets us in motion, gives us some kind of as-yet-indeterminable largeness. Whatever it is that draws us toward one another, cements friends, lovers, families together. Maybe it is chemistry. But it's not yet one that we can even begin to understand.
Do I think there is a god or gods out there, controlling our lives? No. And I don't like the thought at all. I want to be the one in charge of my destiny. No three hags with strings for me, thank you very much. My thread, my scissors. Back off, Fate-ladies. I want to take responsibility for my own successes... but also for my own failures. I made myself. You didn't make me. No god made me.
I am the only god - terribly flawed and awesomely human as I am - I need. I am that I am.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
Dawkins focuses - at least thus far - primarily on science and its increasingly persistent conflict with religion. He quotes Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way'. (Dawkins 32-33)
I have to say, I love that - "My god is a little god." It so encapsulates everything that is wrong with the Religious Right and everything that is right with faiths like Buddhism.
The right first: the idea of a "little god," a personal god, who exists within and for the person, the idea of the internal "little god" within each of us who possesses the possibilities of divinity and enlightenment - this idea is wonderful. It smacks of joy and self-promotion and gentleness and oneness with the self and the world.
The wrong: this, I find, manifests in the term I have used - the Religious Right. The branch of society that is both politically Right (conservative) and convinced of its Right-ness (righteousness). It is self-congratulatory. It believes that its "little god" is one that it knows, thoroughly and completely, a "little god" that serves those who follow it like a slavish monkey. A "little god" who has nothing better to do than rain fire and brimstone down on the [insert ethnic/social/religious minority/gender here]. A "little god" whose omnipotence and omniscience is entirely wasted on the dregs of humanity who are both self-serving and narrow-minded.
(Let me be clear for one moment in saying that I do not think all conservatives or religious people are a part of the Religious Right. That epithet I reserve for the very worst of the worst.)
What is wrong, I would like to know, with appreciating the beauty and grandeur that is our universe? Why must we compartmentalize it? Force it into our little creationist box and insist that it is only 6,000 years old and that it was made by invisible hands in 6 days? Why can't it be millions of years old? Isn't that much more impressive?
But we must rely upon The Truth.
Fine. I'm all for truth. But my truth and yours, Religious Right, are two very different things.
But, oh, yes, your Truth is sacred and I mustn't touch it. I'll defile it.
Bullsh*t. Dawkins has a quote for this, too:
A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other. (Dawkins 42)
Yup. And if I dare to violate that bubble of sanctity, then I am a heretic, a heathen, a monster. I become a violator of the sacred, a profaner of the great All that is religion. I am an ignoramus who needs must be saved.
Let it be. Or, to borrow a familiar term, Amen. I know. Sacrilege.
I do believe that religious belief should be respected. But I also believe that my lack thereof is also deserving of respect. As is my choice to wear cotton or leather or a purple polyester shirt. Or my decision to be vegetarian. Or to study Shakespeare. Yet those things are not nearly so offensive to most people as my atheism. How dare I not believe in god!
The anger that comes through - and which I recognize even as I type it - is also prevalent in Dawkins' book, and I can see how he's ruffled a good many feathers. For instance, an amazon search of "God Delusion" brings up Dawkins' book, one that seems similar, and eight books that attack atheism (7 of those 8 are direct responses to Dawkins - I'm jealous of the fact that the man has managed to make so much of an impact). And that's just the first page. But while perhaps a published author should refrain from too much vitriol, I completely understand. Having been raised Catholic, I understand the frustration of a man struggling to make sense of what seems to him to be entirely delusional.
I remember being sent to the corner for insisting that god was not something I could draw (I was 6, and I still believed in god). I remember being told I was going to hell for any number of things, most of which I can't even recall. I remember the insistence that I was a "bad Catholic" because I didn't give a hoot about the Apostles' Creed, about First Holy Communion, or about First Reconciliation (Confession. I lied to the priest.).
I blame my mother. No. I thank my mother. Not because she raised me to be atheist. My mother is a Catholic. Sort of. At any rate, she's a practicing Christian. But she had a button. It was big and pink and glittery and it read "Trust in God. She will provide." I asked why it said "She" (I think I was four or five). My mother explained to me that because god wasn't human, it was silly of us to think of god as either male or female. I thought that was a pretty good point. My first grade religion teacher did not.
And that was the beginning. I learned to distrust everything I learned in school (Catholic school). I learned to question everything they told me. And I learned that such questioning wasn't fondly looked upon. In high school Morality class, my Catholic hero was Martin Luther.
Dawkins, in his book, uses a scale, 1-7, with 1 standing for absolute belief in a god or gods and 7 an absolute belief that there aren't any. Dawkins says he's a 6. I'd probably fall at a 5.5.
I like the idea of deity. Not of the Judeo-Christian god (whom, as Dawkins points out, is really rather self-contradictory, vindictive, and downright sadistic), but of some kind of otherness, a divinity or quasi-divinity that sets us in motion, gives us some kind of as-yet-indeterminable largeness. Whatever it is that draws us toward one another, cements friends, lovers, families together. Maybe it is chemistry. But it's not yet one that we can even begin to understand.
Do I think there is a god or gods out there, controlling our lives? No. And I don't like the thought at all. I want to be the one in charge of my destiny. No three hags with strings for me, thank you very much. My thread, my scissors. Back off, Fate-ladies. I want to take responsibility for my own successes... but also for my own failures. I made myself. You didn't make me. No god made me.
I am the only god - terribly flawed and awesomely human as I am - I need. I am that I am.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Strange fruit
I must say that one of the things that encapsulates the theatrical experience for me is the very simple act of carrying strange objects around with me, knowing what they're for, and knowing - as I do so - that nobody else has a clue why I'm carrying that with me as I walk through the hall, down the street, or on the subway.
In the past, that has been canoe paddles, a medical bag, swords, a staff of office, large yellow pantaloons, a life-sized portrait without a face, and a decapitated head. This year, it's a large box containing a bundt-pan sized ring of green jello and a half-collapsed skull named Gloriana. Most people don't know her name is Gloriana, of course, but it's one of those things that you just feel compelled to refer to by name. What is even more amusing about Gloriana is that her jaw is held on with Gorilla and Krazy glue and she is older than most of the cast (her date of manufacture is 1985). And she's wearing lipstick.
Kudos to anyone who can tell me why she's wearing it.
It may seem strange that carrying odd things about is what encapsulates theater for me. But I'm not an actor, I'm a technician, and the theater is all about strange objects. It's about things that you've cobbled impossibly together to resemble something else entirely. About putting string and wire and paint together and making an obelisk, a monument to human intellect and imagination. About closing your eyes, stepping back, and flipping the switch and finding out whether your little creation glows brightly or sets the theater on fire.
Characters are like that, too. These funny, mish-mashes of the writers who've scripted them, the directors who interpret them, and the actors who breathe life into their hollow forms. They're these funny things that appear one way in your mind, but then take on this uncontrollable energy once you let them loose within a body. Each time, they are different. Each time, the glue and strings that compose their flesh are unique.
There is no absolute Hamlet. Hamlet must change as time passes, as the seasons turn, as kings rise and fall, as new countries are made and new worlds discovered. Yes, there is a timelessness to Hamlet. To any character or play. But it is not that Hamlet, as performed in 1600, has endured. It is that Hamlet has adapted. And I do not mean in the Ethan Hawke sense. I mean in the sense that we find something within the hollow essence that is Hamlet that is relevant, that is real. What is real now in Hamlet may be - but most likely is not - the same thing that was real when his words were first scripted. But he has endured.
This endurance is not unique to drama. Far from it. Novels, poems, songs, paintings. All endure. All adapt. But theater is different. It must be. It is a medium not of words or paint, but of bodies and voices. Yes, there are words. Often, there is paint. There are lights and clothes and makeup and music. But the bodies. The voices. These are the true medium of the theater, and no one person has control over it all. Not even in a one-man or one-woman show. Because the theater requires the audience. It needs - like we need air and food and water - the people who come, who stand or sit and listen and watch. The theater is not simply what is put into it by the designers and directors and actors. It is what the audience takes, and what it gives back.
That is its true beauty. The strangest fruit of all, that ripens as you watch, that blooms and fruits and seeds itself within the minds of those gathered to witness a singular event that can never and will never happen again. The crowd of transient participants who have the privilege, the honor, of witnessing a birth, a life, and a death all in the two-hours traffic of the stage.
In the past, that has been canoe paddles, a medical bag, swords, a staff of office, large yellow pantaloons, a life-sized portrait without a face, and a decapitated head. This year, it's a large box containing a bundt-pan sized ring of green jello and a half-collapsed skull named Gloriana. Most people don't know her name is Gloriana, of course, but it's one of those things that you just feel compelled to refer to by name. What is even more amusing about Gloriana is that her jaw is held on with Gorilla and Krazy glue and she is older than most of the cast (her date of manufacture is 1985). And she's wearing lipstick.
Kudos to anyone who can tell me why she's wearing it.
It may seem strange that carrying odd things about is what encapsulates theater for me. But I'm not an actor, I'm a technician, and the theater is all about strange objects. It's about things that you've cobbled impossibly together to resemble something else entirely. About putting string and wire and paint together and making an obelisk, a monument to human intellect and imagination. About closing your eyes, stepping back, and flipping the switch and finding out whether your little creation glows brightly or sets the theater on fire.
Characters are like that, too. These funny, mish-mashes of the writers who've scripted them, the directors who interpret them, and the actors who breathe life into their hollow forms. They're these funny things that appear one way in your mind, but then take on this uncontrollable energy once you let them loose within a body. Each time, they are different. Each time, the glue and strings that compose their flesh are unique.
There is no absolute Hamlet. Hamlet must change as time passes, as the seasons turn, as kings rise and fall, as new countries are made and new worlds discovered. Yes, there is a timelessness to Hamlet. To any character or play. But it is not that Hamlet, as performed in 1600, has endured. It is that Hamlet has adapted. And I do not mean in the Ethan Hawke sense. I mean in the sense that we find something within the hollow essence that is Hamlet that is relevant, that is real. What is real now in Hamlet may be - but most likely is not - the same thing that was real when his words were first scripted. But he has endured.
This endurance is not unique to drama. Far from it. Novels, poems, songs, paintings. All endure. All adapt. But theater is different. It must be. It is a medium not of words or paint, but of bodies and voices. Yes, there are words. Often, there is paint. There are lights and clothes and makeup and music. But the bodies. The voices. These are the true medium of the theater, and no one person has control over it all. Not even in a one-man or one-woman show. Because the theater requires the audience. It needs - like we need air and food and water - the people who come, who stand or sit and listen and watch. The theater is not simply what is put into it by the designers and directors and actors. It is what the audience takes, and what it gives back.
That is its true beauty. The strangest fruit of all, that ripens as you watch, that blooms and fruits and seeds itself within the minds of those gathered to witness a singular event that can never and will never happen again. The crowd of transient participants who have the privilege, the honor, of witnessing a birth, a life, and a death all in the two-hours traffic of the stage.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Memory
Watching "Adam" from this season of Torchwood made me think about the quality, the nature, of memory. Of how our identities and our selves are constructed not only of flesh and bone and blood, but of the scraps and threads of thought and recall that construct what we think of who we are.
What are the things we tend to remember? The really happy moments, the tragic ones, the traumatic ones. But we also sometimes remember pieces of our everyday lives: leftovers from breakfasts, lunches, and dinners eaten with the people we see or saw on a nearly constant basis; the tatters of an old favorite blanket or shirt or dress; the scruff of a beloved stuffed toy or pet.
I remember a moment of childhood spent in my mother's rose garden behind a grey house, tier upon tier of mulched flowerbeds, a green kiddie pool, and a red wooden fence.
I remember illness, the acrid smell of a hospital, the stiff cotton of the green speckled gown, the pain of the IV in my arm, the comforting familiar presence of a large purple unicorn lying above my head on my pillow. The taste of bad canned corn pushed around in an unbreakable bowl while watching the same cartoon movie over and over. Darkness. The strange, half-real blue of nighttime and rage. Hating what they did, what they wanted, what was wrong with me.
I remember endless summer days, swimming in the pool. Playing with the dog. The new cat - the one that hated me - climbing a tree. The salamanders I rescued bloated with chlorinated water. They were blue-black with yellow spots. Their skin was slick and rubbery, their feet like tiny wet pads.
I remember the county fair. The smells of beer and sawdust. Popcorn. Animals. The roar of people and of stock cars.
I remember the smell of crabapple trees in spring. The sneezing.
The sound of water trickling. The scent of Easter lilies and candles and incense. The cool crinkle of a new white dress.
I remember the pink linen dress with white and purple ribbons my mother made me. I remember wearing it whenever I could.
I remember many things. What I do not remember is the feeling of despair. I know I felt it, once. I know I thought the world - my world - was at an end. I know I blamed myself and everyone around me.
I do not remember this. I know it happened. I remember the clothes I wore, the food I often ate, the car I drove. I remember things I did. I do not remember the despair.
What does this mean? No idea. What do I take from it?
I am not that person. I have little to link myself to her but the knowledge that we have shared memories of the same little girl. The girl who loved dogs and cats and trees and flowers and water. The little girl who didn't understand just how sick she was. The little girl who never let herself be told "you can't."
So who are we? We are what we decide to allow ourselves to be. I don't mean our jobs. I don't mean what other people think of us. Those things don't make us what we are. They contribute to our thoughts, our memories, certainly, but they don't form us. It is how we respond, what we learn, and how we choose to recall our memories that reveals what we have become.
Our memories are the texts, the poems, the plays of our lives. They are the language and the scenes that make up the formation of our characters. They are informed by what we have written into them, but also by the way we read them.
We are the books of ourselves. The stories of our own lives. The verses and rhythms and meters that beat out the timbre of each year, each day, each hour. We are romances. Adventures. Fantasies. Mysteries. Endless pages waiting to be written and read. To be lived.
What are the things we tend to remember? The really happy moments, the tragic ones, the traumatic ones. But we also sometimes remember pieces of our everyday lives: leftovers from breakfasts, lunches, and dinners eaten with the people we see or saw on a nearly constant basis; the tatters of an old favorite blanket or shirt or dress; the scruff of a beloved stuffed toy or pet.
I remember a moment of childhood spent in my mother's rose garden behind a grey house, tier upon tier of mulched flowerbeds, a green kiddie pool, and a red wooden fence.
I remember illness, the acrid smell of a hospital, the stiff cotton of the green speckled gown, the pain of the IV in my arm, the comforting familiar presence of a large purple unicorn lying above my head on my pillow. The taste of bad canned corn pushed around in an unbreakable bowl while watching the same cartoon movie over and over. Darkness. The strange, half-real blue of nighttime and rage. Hating what they did, what they wanted, what was wrong with me.
I remember endless summer days, swimming in the pool. Playing with the dog. The new cat - the one that hated me - climbing a tree. The salamanders I rescued bloated with chlorinated water. They were blue-black with yellow spots. Their skin was slick and rubbery, their feet like tiny wet pads.
I remember the county fair. The smells of beer and sawdust. Popcorn. Animals. The roar of people and of stock cars.
I remember the smell of crabapple trees in spring. The sneezing.
The sound of water trickling. The scent of Easter lilies and candles and incense. The cool crinkle of a new white dress.
I remember the pink linen dress with white and purple ribbons my mother made me. I remember wearing it whenever I could.
I remember many things. What I do not remember is the feeling of despair. I know I felt it, once. I know I thought the world - my world - was at an end. I know I blamed myself and everyone around me.
I do not remember this. I know it happened. I remember the clothes I wore, the food I often ate, the car I drove. I remember things I did. I do not remember the despair.
What does this mean? No idea. What do I take from it?
I am not that person. I have little to link myself to her but the knowledge that we have shared memories of the same little girl. The girl who loved dogs and cats and trees and flowers and water. The little girl who didn't understand just how sick she was. The little girl who never let herself be told "you can't."
So who are we? We are what we decide to allow ourselves to be. I don't mean our jobs. I don't mean what other people think of us. Those things don't make us what we are. They contribute to our thoughts, our memories, certainly, but they don't form us. It is how we respond, what we learn, and how we choose to recall our memories that reveals what we have become.
Our memories are the texts, the poems, the plays of our lives. They are the language and the scenes that make up the formation of our characters. They are informed by what we have written into them, but also by the way we read them.
We are the books of ourselves. The stories of our own lives. The verses and rhythms and meters that beat out the timbre of each year, each day, each hour. We are romances. Adventures. Fantasies. Mysteries. Endless pages waiting to be written and read. To be lived.
Monday, February 25, 2008
PPSD
Pre-Production Stress Disorder:
The result of Murphy's Law as applied to theater.
Everything that can possibly go wrong, is.
But rather than allow this unfortunate condition to cause me to become homicidal, I've decided to wax philosophical for a while.
Why do we, as human beings, elect to subject ourselves to situations we know will cause us inordinate amounts of stress? Theater, after all, is nothing but pure drama. In the most profoundly negative sense of the term.
We do it, quite simply, for one of two reasons.
1. We need stress - tension, adrenaline, what-have-you - to feel alive.
2. To prove to ourselves or to others that we have the balls necessary to claw our way through whatever unholy hell life has thrown our way.
I fall under the second. Whatever life - or the theater - manages to throw at me, I will not fall. I will triumph. It may be bloody, messy, dirty, involve tears and sweat and every other bodily fluid known to man, but I will. not. fail.
It's a holdover, I think, from being the kid that everybody picked on. There are other psychological options to that, of course. To become intolerably shy. To become so socially awkward people stop picking on you because they want more to avoid you. To attempt to force yourself to blend in, becoming miserably unhappy because you have no idea who you are or what you want. Or - my personal choice - to send a big finger in the general direction of the universe.
I've gotten better over the years. This mysterious thing called "maturity" has made me far less inclined to lash out unpredictably at everyone and everything in order to keep them from attacking first. But I haven't lost that streak that just wants to pile on the punishment until it gives in to the awesome power that is my pure tenacity. I believe it's called "stubbornness."
Well, that's what the theater is about, for me. About being the only member of the technical crew. About being director, designer, prop mistress, costumer... until I can't really think straight. Now don't get me wrong, I could do this to myself with only one or two hats, instead of the six that I seem to be wearing at present. And I'd probably do a better job. But I do a bang-up-enough job at all six that, since I don't have anyone else to wear those hats, I can manage it.
But I don't go into theater for the applause - they don't applaud the person in the booth in the dark - or for the accolades. I go into it because it's something that I can do despite all conceivable odds. And I think many technicians do the same. We all have horror stories. And we love them. They are our bear-slaying stories, our tales of manhood, our first kills. And every time we find ourselves in another impossible situation, we swear we'll never do it again.
And then, when a few days or weeks or months have passed, we forget the tremors, the screaming, the tears and blood. And then we start thinking about jumping back in. About the rush of watching our little creation unfold on a stage beneath the pretty lights, dancing about in a sparkling costume that only we know is held together with glue and tape and string that we're fervently praying will hold long enough.
But we also know that if it doesn't, the string and glue and tape alone will be a triumph. Because there is magic in the string, magic that maintains the illusion of other-worldliness even when the tape falls off and the sequins trail across the stage. There is magic just in believing that this place, this two-hours' traffic of our stage, is, for a fleeting time, real.
The result of Murphy's Law as applied to theater.
Everything that can possibly go wrong, is.
But rather than allow this unfortunate condition to cause me to become homicidal, I've decided to wax philosophical for a while.
Why do we, as human beings, elect to subject ourselves to situations we know will cause us inordinate amounts of stress? Theater, after all, is nothing but pure drama. In the most profoundly negative sense of the term.
We do it, quite simply, for one of two reasons.
1. We need stress - tension, adrenaline, what-have-you - to feel alive.
2. To prove to ourselves or to others that we have the balls necessary to claw our way through whatever unholy hell life has thrown our way.
I fall under the second. Whatever life - or the theater - manages to throw at me, I will not fall. I will triumph. It may be bloody, messy, dirty, involve tears and sweat and every other bodily fluid known to man, but I will. not. fail.
It's a holdover, I think, from being the kid that everybody picked on. There are other psychological options to that, of course. To become intolerably shy. To become so socially awkward people stop picking on you because they want more to avoid you. To attempt to force yourself to blend in, becoming miserably unhappy because you have no idea who you are or what you want. Or - my personal choice - to send a big finger in the general direction of the universe.
I've gotten better over the years. This mysterious thing called "maturity" has made me far less inclined to lash out unpredictably at everyone and everything in order to keep them from attacking first. But I haven't lost that streak that just wants to pile on the punishment until it gives in to the awesome power that is my pure tenacity. I believe it's called "stubbornness."
Well, that's what the theater is about, for me. About being the only member of the technical crew. About being director, designer, prop mistress, costumer... until I can't really think straight. Now don't get me wrong, I could do this to myself with only one or two hats, instead of the six that I seem to be wearing at present. And I'd probably do a better job. But I do a bang-up-enough job at all six that, since I don't have anyone else to wear those hats, I can manage it.
But I don't go into theater for the applause - they don't applaud the person in the booth in the dark - or for the accolades. I go into it because it's something that I can do despite all conceivable odds. And I think many technicians do the same. We all have horror stories. And we love them. They are our bear-slaying stories, our tales of manhood, our first kills. And every time we find ourselves in another impossible situation, we swear we'll never do it again.
And then, when a few days or weeks or months have passed, we forget the tremors, the screaming, the tears and blood. And then we start thinking about jumping back in. About the rush of watching our little creation unfold on a stage beneath the pretty lights, dancing about in a sparkling costume that only we know is held together with glue and tape and string that we're fervently praying will hold long enough.
But we also know that if it doesn't, the string and glue and tape alone will be a triumph. Because there is magic in the string, magic that maintains the illusion of other-worldliness even when the tape falls off and the sequins trail across the stage. There is magic just in believing that this place, this two-hours' traffic of our stage, is, for a fleeting time, real.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Sex Sells
Not my usual subject for ranting, I know, but this post over at Pixiepalace got me thinking. The venerable Rosepixie was a friend of mine from long ago and a land far away, though we've been only intermittently in touch for the last couple of years.
Her post deals with issues of marketing to female gamers, specifically, the over-sexualization of female characters and avatars in the gaming industry. Her complaint is, specifically, that the women on the promotional art (and sometimes on the boxes) is degrading, irrational, and oftentimes impossible.
I’m always on the lookout for gaming art with images of women that make me want to play the game or, even better, play that particular female character. I was a kid in the era when Ms. Pac-Man and Princess Peach were about the only female characters that were terribly prominent in the video game world. This led me to believe for a long time that video games weren’t really for me. I didn’t really want to be a princess in a pink frilly dress who constantly needed rescuing (What is up with that anyway? Somebody needs to buy Peach some books on how to be self-reliant!). Anyway, we’re beyond that now. These days, women are everywhere in the world of video games. Unfortunately, they still have a ways to go when it comes to being attractive as avatar images for women.
One commenter noted that women are not the target audience of these designs (there are images on Rosepixie's blog), and therefore, because more men than women buy games, it is the men to whom the designs are marketed. Rosepixie counters with the logical if-you-don't-market-to-them-they-won't-buy-it answer, and I think she's right. But I also think that by assuming a specific marketing audience, the marketers are perpetuating certain, very negative, stereotypes.
First of all, your "average" guy isn't going to go for the image of a woman in armor, no matter how scanty that armor may be. Not only does it very often look funny, but it would be a pain in the royal patootie to get off... which, let's be honest, is what most guys are after.
Second, these images of seemingly idiotic women in even more idiotic armor reinforces the idea that women just don't belong on the battlefield. And if they're wearing THAT, I'm going to have to be forced to agree. At least make the men equally stupid and in equally bizarre clothing so that everybody's got an equal change of being skewered.
Third, most gamers are more than happy to make the acquaintance of a female gamer. Especially if she knows what she's doing... unlike the ever-so-charming artistic depictions of her. Competence, like confidence, is very sexy.
I do acknowledge that a girl in full armor probably doesn't sell... oh, wait. Samus. A girl in full armor. Selling. (This would be Metroid, for those not in the know.) Admittedly, it's not really humanly feasible armor, but it is at least armor.
Anyway, my point being that if sexy sells, fine. But then be sexy to the men, too. Show that sexy does not always mean stupid. It doesn't always mean I'm-about-to-die-of-exposure. It doesn't always mean I'm-helpless. Show both genders in equally revealing/tight clothing that is actually wearable and in circumstances in which said clothing won't get them immediately killed.
Is that really so much to ask?
Her post deals with issues of marketing to female gamers, specifically, the over-sexualization of female characters and avatars in the gaming industry. Her complaint is, specifically, that the women on the promotional art (and sometimes on the boxes) is degrading, irrational, and oftentimes impossible.
I’m always on the lookout for gaming art with images of women that make me want to play the game or, even better, play that particular female character. I was a kid in the era when Ms. Pac-Man and Princess Peach were about the only female characters that were terribly prominent in the video game world. This led me to believe for a long time that video games weren’t really for me. I didn’t really want to be a princess in a pink frilly dress who constantly needed rescuing (What is up with that anyway? Somebody needs to buy Peach some books on how to be self-reliant!). Anyway, we’re beyond that now. These days, women are everywhere in the world of video games. Unfortunately, they still have a ways to go when it comes to being attractive as avatar images for women.
One commenter noted that women are not the target audience of these designs (there are images on Rosepixie's blog), and therefore, because more men than women buy games, it is the men to whom the designs are marketed. Rosepixie counters with the logical if-you-don't-market-to-them-they-won't-buy-it answer, and I think she's right. But I also think that by assuming a specific marketing audience, the marketers are perpetuating certain, very negative, stereotypes.
First of all, your "average" guy isn't going to go for the image of a woman in armor, no matter how scanty that armor may be. Not only does it very often look funny, but it would be a pain in the royal patootie to get off... which, let's be honest, is what most guys are after.
Second, these images of seemingly idiotic women in even more idiotic armor reinforces the idea that women just don't belong on the battlefield. And if they're wearing THAT, I'm going to have to be forced to agree. At least make the men equally stupid and in equally bizarre clothing so that everybody's got an equal change of being skewered.
Third, most gamers are more than happy to make the acquaintance of a female gamer. Especially if she knows what she's doing... unlike the ever-so-charming artistic depictions of her. Competence, like confidence, is very sexy.
I do acknowledge that a girl in full armor probably doesn't sell... oh, wait. Samus. A girl in full armor. Selling. (This would be Metroid, for those not in the know.) Admittedly, it's not really humanly feasible armor, but it is at least armor.
Anyway, my point being that if sexy sells, fine. But then be sexy to the men, too. Show that sexy does not always mean stupid. It doesn't always mean I'm-about-to-die-of-exposure. It doesn't always mean I'm-helpless. Show both genders in equally revealing/tight clothing that is actually wearable and in circumstances in which said clothing won't get them immediately killed.
Is that really so much to ask?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Monarchy of the United States
Sometimes it occurs to me just how much like our political ancestors we really are. For instance, for all that we purport to be a democratic state, there are shocking political similarities between our current government and the early modern English absolute monarchy. There are many reasons why I find this profoundly disturbing.
Yes, we could find ourselves with a glorious monarch *ahem* president whose golden reign - er... term - will last for many harmonious years.
But.
(A good word, that.)
But. Absolute monarchs are no walk in the park. Even if it is St. James'.
Glen Burgess - in Politics of the Ancient Constitution - describes the dual prerogative of the Stuart monarchy beginning in 1603, lasting until 1649, when Charles lost his head. Literally.
Okay, you may ask, that's all very well and good, but what does it have to do with King George II (you know who I mean)?
The idea of absolute prerogative grants, ostensibly, the power to the monarch to issue commands, statutes, and dictates above and beyond the purview of the common law. While common law in seventeenth-century England was drastically different from American law today (for one thing, it wasn't written down), I think the notion is still applicable. Our ruler - a.k.a. President - is able to, in particular circumstances, issue directives above and beyond the law. Fine. Makes sense. But there's a problem, and it's the same problem we saw with Charles I, the same problem foregrounded in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II.
Nobody told the king.
When absolute prerogative functions to allow the monarch to functionally create a precedent for something outside common law, it's lovely. When a monarch - or President or Prime Minister or whatever - uses absolute prerogative to overrule or alter common law, then we have a problem. When, hypothetically, the sovereign authority decides to ignore the Bill of Rights. Or confiscate property from a law-abiding citizen.
This "carelessness," boys and girls, is what the very astute early moderns call "tyranny." It's what happens when our rulers and leaders forget that they - like the rest of us - are human and subject to the same laws (like gravity) as the rest of us. When they assume that the power they've been granted by vote or blood makes them better than the ordinary woman or man. Why do they forget? Because not only do we let them, we encourage them to forget. We encourage them to think themselves better than we are because we want them to be. We want our leaders to be great heroes, demi-gods whose blood is somehow purer, greater, more than ours. And that is a very natural, very dangerous thing. It leads to corruption, to the abuse of power and prerogative, and - as we are reminded by our good friend Shakespeare - to tyranny.
And what happens to tyrants? Well. Look up 1649. Look up Richard II or Edward II. I can tell you it isn't nice.
We in the U.S.A. happen to be lucky enough to have this thing called "term limits." We have an out that doesn't involve fire pokers. And a good thing, too. We also have a very nice First Amendment that lets me write this with little to no fear of having my head chopped off because I can't recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin. I'm not saying we're living in an unenlightened age. I'm simply saying that perhaps we aren't quite as enlightened as we think we are.
Or, maybe, that Shakespeare and company weren't living in an age of barbarism.
But perhaps we're all barbarians. Perhaps we will remain so as long as we enjoy bloodsport and American Gladiators. Perhaps enlightenment - in the truest, Buddhic sense - will elude most of us permanently. Perhaps an alien race will come upon our little blue and green planet, shudder in disgust, and blow us all to smithereens.
Or perhaps we'll go on as we always have, living our little lives with passion and confusion, both loving and hating every breath with all the vitality our unimportant souls can muster.
I don't think that would be so bad, do you?
Yes, we could find ourselves with a glorious monarch *ahem* president whose golden reign - er... term - will last for many harmonious years.
But.
(A good word, that.)
But. Absolute monarchs are no walk in the park. Even if it is St. James'.
Glen Burgess - in Politics of the Ancient Constitution - describes the dual prerogative of the Stuart monarchy beginning in 1603, lasting until 1649, when Charles lost his head. Literally.
Between the competing sides in the imposition debate there was substantial theoretical agreement. Everyone agreed that the common law protected property, within England at least, and that the king could not infringe upon property rights without his subjects’ consent. Most agreed also that the king had both an ordinary and an extraordinary (or absolute) prerogative, the latter properly used not to contravene the common law (through which the king exercised his ordinary prerogative) but to supplement it. It provided a basis for royal action in areas where the common law had no force, whether geographical (possibly the high seas) or institutional (possibly the church). The dispute was not primarily theoretical at all, but more about whether impositions were in fact properly a matter for the absolute prerogative and thus of no concern to the common law.1
Okay, you may ask, that's all very well and good, but what does it have to do with King George II (you know who I mean)?
The idea of absolute prerogative grants, ostensibly, the power to the monarch to issue commands, statutes, and dictates above and beyond the purview of the common law. While common law in seventeenth-century England was drastically different from American law today (for one thing, it wasn't written down), I think the notion is still applicable. Our ruler - a.k.a. President - is able to, in particular circumstances, issue directives above and beyond the law. Fine. Makes sense. But there's a problem, and it's the same problem we saw with Charles I, the same problem foregrounded in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II.
Nobody told the king.
When absolute prerogative functions to allow the monarch to functionally create a precedent for something outside common law, it's lovely. When a monarch - or President or Prime Minister or whatever - uses absolute prerogative to overrule or alter common law, then we have a problem. When, hypothetically, the sovereign authority decides to ignore the Bill of Rights. Or confiscate property from a law-abiding citizen.
The intellectual elaboration that it underwent in the early-seventeenth century was made possible by the tools provides by civil law jurisprudence; but the elaboration was not at first fundamentally inconsistent with accepted common-law thinking. That inconsistency would not arise until the king’s power outside the law came to be used (it was more a matter of use than of theory) as a power over the law. This was a feature of – as Oscar Wilde might have said – the general carelessness that lost Charles I three kingdoms (and a head).2
This "carelessness," boys and girls, is what the very astute early moderns call "tyranny." It's what happens when our rulers and leaders forget that they - like the rest of us - are human and subject to the same laws (like gravity) as the rest of us. When they assume that the power they've been granted by vote or blood makes them better than the ordinary woman or man. Why do they forget? Because not only do we let them, we encourage them to forget. We encourage them to think themselves better than we are because we want them to be. We want our leaders to be great heroes, demi-gods whose blood is somehow purer, greater, more than ours. And that is a very natural, very dangerous thing. It leads to corruption, to the abuse of power and prerogative, and - as we are reminded by our good friend Shakespeare - to tyranny.
And what happens to tyrants? Well. Look up 1649. Look up Richard II or Edward II. I can tell you it isn't nice.
We in the U.S.A. happen to be lucky enough to have this thing called "term limits." We have an out that doesn't involve fire pokers. And a good thing, too. We also have a very nice First Amendment that lets me write this with little to no fear of having my head chopped off because I can't recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin. I'm not saying we're living in an unenlightened age. I'm simply saying that perhaps we aren't quite as enlightened as we think we are.
Or, maybe, that Shakespeare and company weren't living in an age of barbarism.
But perhaps we're all barbarians. Perhaps we will remain so as long as we enjoy bloodsport and American Gladiators. Perhaps enlightenment - in the truest, Buddhic sense - will elude most of us permanently. Perhaps an alien race will come upon our little blue and green planet, shudder in disgust, and blow us all to smithereens.
Or perhaps we'll go on as we always have, living our little lives with passion and confusion, both loving and hating every breath with all the vitality our unimportant souls can muster.
I don't think that would be so bad, do you?
Monday, February 11, 2008
Today's Revelation
Brought to you by Neil Gaiman.
"writing is, like death, a lonely business."
This encapsulates so much of what writing is about, at least for me. "A lonely business." There is something about that which is very, very true. You can share your aches and pains, complain about the blockages and the cramps, but, ultimately, it is something you do alone. A lot like aging. Like dying.
And writing is its own form of rebellion against death. It is our window, however transient and translucent, into immortality. Our way, as writers, of leaving a mark in indelible ink on the parchment of the world. For some of us, we do this consciously. We know, as we set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, that we are attempting to write our own legacies. Some of us do it for other reasons. To find out who we really are. To explore the possibilities and impossibilities of our world. To tell the stories and say the things that so desperately need to be said. But, underneath it all, we know that this is our trust to the people and places we will one day leave behind. Our bequeathal to a future that might otherwise never know we exist.
I see no shame in that. Shakespeare did it, after all. Keats. Shelley. Marlowe. Jonson. Wilde. Yeats. Eliot. Pound. Writers have written their way into the eternal, inscribed their names and beliefs on pages and stones for us to find. It is what we do. Because, like death, writing "is a lonely business."
I remember, years ago, working on my undergraduate thesis and coming across the myth of Thoth. Thoth - the Egyptian ibis-headed god of writing - was charged with finding a way to remember things. He invented writing and presented it to Ra. Ra was both pleased and angered. Thoth had done as he was bidden, but he had also contradicted those orders. With writing, what was could be remembered so long as it could be read. But so long as it could be read, there was no need to remember it.
Does writing mean we no longer need to remember things? Post-its, memos, and little check-mark notes in our PDAs certainly seem to indicate that memory has gone the way of the Dodo. We have things that do our remembering for us. But so long as we have those things, read those writings, we have the capacity to remember so much more than if we had to rely on the feeble weakness of our fleshly minds.
Do I wish I could hear a play and recall it, almost verbatim, a few hours later? You bet. But do I regret ever having the urge to read or write? Never. Words, whether engraved within the cellular matrix of my mind or written out - even on something as simple as a post-it - are the inky blood that keeps my psyche - my soul, if you will - alive. They allow us not simply to remember, but to grow. To take what our mothers and fathers have taught us and to change, to become something wonderful and rich and strange. Like death. A lonely business.
"writing is, like death, a lonely business."
This encapsulates so much of what writing is about, at least for me. "A lonely business." There is something about that which is very, very true. You can share your aches and pains, complain about the blockages and the cramps, but, ultimately, it is something you do alone. A lot like aging. Like dying.
And writing is its own form of rebellion against death. It is our window, however transient and translucent, into immortality. Our way, as writers, of leaving a mark in indelible ink on the parchment of the world. For some of us, we do this consciously. We know, as we set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, that we are attempting to write our own legacies. Some of us do it for other reasons. To find out who we really are. To explore the possibilities and impossibilities of our world. To tell the stories and say the things that so desperately need to be said. But, underneath it all, we know that this is our trust to the people and places we will one day leave behind. Our bequeathal to a future that might otherwise never know we exist.
I see no shame in that. Shakespeare did it, after all. Keats. Shelley. Marlowe. Jonson. Wilde. Yeats. Eliot. Pound. Writers have written their way into the eternal, inscribed their names and beliefs on pages and stones for us to find. It is what we do. Because, like death, writing "is a lonely business."
I remember, years ago, working on my undergraduate thesis and coming across the myth of Thoth. Thoth - the Egyptian ibis-headed god of writing - was charged with finding a way to remember things. He invented writing and presented it to Ra. Ra was both pleased and angered. Thoth had done as he was bidden, but he had also contradicted those orders. With writing, what was could be remembered so long as it could be read. But so long as it could be read, there was no need to remember it.
Does writing mean we no longer need to remember things? Post-its, memos, and little check-mark notes in our PDAs certainly seem to indicate that memory has gone the way of the Dodo. We have things that do our remembering for us. But so long as we have those things, read those writings, we have the capacity to remember so much more than if we had to rely on the feeble weakness of our fleshly minds.
Do I wish I could hear a play and recall it, almost verbatim, a few hours later? You bet. But do I regret ever having the urge to read or write? Never. Words, whether engraved within the cellular matrix of my mind or written out - even on something as simple as a post-it - are the inky blood that keeps my psyche - my soul, if you will - alive. They allow us not simply to remember, but to grow. To take what our mothers and fathers have taught us and to change, to become something wonderful and rich and strange. Like death. A lonely business.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Ashes, ashes we all fall down
While it’s been a long time since I actually believed in any sort of god or savior beyond my own psyche, I never fail to grow contemplative around Ash Wednesday. As a holiday – a holy-day in the truest sense of the word – Ash Wednesday always fascinated me. It was eerie, beautiful, dark. The creature hidden in the closet that nobody talked about but, when you open the door on that one day of the year, stepped out with a strange and feline grace, her dark fur glossy and dusty and oh-so-elegant in its secretive and forbidden finery.
It reminds me, in the way that things can only remind a creature of book and word, of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” And not simply because of the title.
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Ash Wednesday is a time of silence. A time where congregations of people who are uncertain and unsure – both of who they are and why they pause in their lives, in the very midst of their days, to sit and daub themselves with ash – gather to simply breathe in one another’s company, to draw into themselves the air and the word. The Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
We are the people. We are the suffering, the crucified, the dying. We. The ashes smeared on our foreheads are our own. They are the reminder – the words we hear every year, at every funeral, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – of where we have been and what we will become. They are our signal to mourn the losses of our lives, the little and the large, to allow ourselves one hour out of our day to lament and languish, to smear ourselves with the paint of grief and wallow in the strange patters we find our fingers drawing on our skin.
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
We force ourselves to believe in hope. We force ourselves to believe that there is something more, something beyond… but we rarely manage to answer beyond what? We do not hope to turn, we do not hope, we do not hope to turn again…
We have turned before, O my people, we have turned and will turn. Our lives are composed of the turning of the stair, of the twisting and winding of the hourglass, the turning and turning over, the timeless moment before the grains tumble the other direction, carrying us back and forward all at once.
the time of tension between dying and birth
Our lives are… turnings. Windings. Stairs. Our lives are the moments that exist between birth and death, and we hope for a turning that leads us back, from death to birth. And there is no shame in that hope. No folly. There is shame only in no hope. Shame in refusing to hope for another turn, to hope for another day, another hour. There is folly only in placing our dreams beyond our own hands. Dreams are meant to be shared. Meant to be formed and reformed, turned and returned, drawn and written and revised. Reenvisioned.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
In my Ash Wednesday, I sit alone, naked, in a warm garden filled with flowers curling from the ground like smoke, their leaves and stems and petals the sepia tone of old photographs, the fading black-brown wash of ink. In my Ash Wednesday, the ashes are a thick paste-like paint, kept in pots that rest their little clay bottoms and feet on stone and grass. And all the color of ink and ash. They are warm. The ashes glide onto my skin like silk, stain it like henna set for days, draw out the patters of my lives and hopes – oh, yes, I have had many lives, many hopes – and trace the promises of my dreams. And I have dreams.
Dreams in which Angels sing demons to sleep, in which wings are formed of feathers made of words, in which my skin gleams with sweat and sings in a language I cannot yet understand, but one I hope someday I will learn.
In my Ash Wednesday, there are hands that are not my own, and they draw new patters, trace new words, new dreams, new hopes, onto the canvas that is my skin. They are gentle hands, warm hands, hands with patches of rough that tingle and tickle what they touch. I know whose hands they are.
In my Ash Wednesday, there is no division between life and loss, no division between hope and despair, no division – Suffer me not to be separated – but all is a revel in the glory of our lives, our dreams.
In my Ash Wednesday, there is fire. Heat. Passion. There is screaming. There is laughter. They are the same. In my Ash Wednesday, there is promise.
And let my cry come unto Thee.
In my Ash Wednesday, a phoenix is born.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
The Blood is the Life
Now the Christian church was founded on blood, strengthened by blood, and augmented by blood; yet nowadays they carry on Christ’s cause by the sword just as if He who defends His own by His own means had perished. And although war is so cruel a business that is befits beasts and not men, so frantic that poets feign it is sent with evil purpose by the Furies, so pestilential that is brings with it a general blight upon morals, so iniquitous that it is usually conducted by the worst bandits, so impious that it has no accord with Christ, yet our popes, neglecting all their other concerns, make it their own task.1
Blood defends the faith, establishes the borders of nations, and strengthens – or so we say – the bonds of nation and brotherhood. We use blood as a demarcation of rites of passage: blood-brothers, the blood of the first battle, the first kill, the blood of menstruation, the blood of birth, the final blood of death. The blood – as so many of fiction’s vampires seem so fond of saying – is the life. But it is also the death. It is the fluid that marks the passage from this life into the next – or into whatever it is that awaits us, be it another life or simply the long silence at the end of our fitful lives.
Blood can be beautiful. It flushes our cheeks in moments of passion or anger or embarrassment. It warms our skin, fuels our bodies, and makes us alive. Bright red blood is, in fact, a very pretty color. It draws our attention, inspires our curiosity and our poetry.
Blood can also be ugly. It stands for loss, death, and pain. It congeals and dries into a coppery, muddy color unlike anything else. Dried blood screams its identity. It stains and doesn’t come out. It crusts and flakes and nevertheless retains that strangely sweet-salty-coppery scent that makes our mouths water and turns our stomachs. It makes us – like Lady Macbeth – want to wash our hands.
Blood incites panic. It howls in our heads that primal scream of bad thing! We want to stop its flow, stifle the brightness, the liquidity, of that precious, disgusting fluid. Blood makes us faint, makes us scream, makes us vomit. Blood is a sign that something is very wrong. Ask any parent or teacher – blood is bad.
And in today’s world, blood is a carrier of disease – “blood-borne pathogens” are the new hidden threat. HIV. AIDS. Hepatitis. The silent and invisible monsters that hide inside our blood.
And yet, so much has been built on blood. The Church, as Erasmus notes above, the nation (pick one), what we so desperately cling to as “freedom.” Built on blood. Mortared with a paste of blood and dirt and crushed bones and hopes. “Founded on blood, strengthened by blood, and augmented by blood.”
And still, our politicians, our armies, our supposed saviors, “neglecting all their other concerns, make it their own task.”
In the thousands of years of civilization on this planet, we haven’t figured out a way to solve our differences, to build our cities and our societies, without blood. We mouth the words that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” murmur platitudes that say “give peace a chance,” and click our tongues in censure at the violence in other places, but we do not acknowledge – do not want to acknowledge – that we are creatures of life and death, creatures of healing and violence, creatures of blood.
I do not say that I support war. I do not say that I am in favor of violent means as an end to conflict. I do neither. But neither to I deny the violent impulses I have – I don’t follow them, but I also don’t deny them. Our society is one in which violence is a source of entertainment. It makes us feel good, provides our catharsis. We revel in shadenfreude. We want to watch pain. We want to see blood. We’re just happier when that blood isn’t real, when the shiny red drops are corn syrup and food coloring, starch and dye. When they wash out or wipe away. But they, for all their falseness, are still drops of blood. Symbolic, yes, but blood, nonetheless.
I say that blood does us more good when it stays inside our bodies than when it is let out. But I also say that it has a place in our lives. Every woman who menstruates, who has given birth, knows what I mean. Everyone who has skinned a knee, cut a finger, scraped an elbow, knows what I mean. Everyone who has lived rather than died because someone else gave a pint of blood knows what I mean. Everyone who has waited to hear the yes or no of a blood-borne pathogen test knows what I mean. Blood is a part of us, a part of our society, a part of who and what we are.
I am a creature of blood. So are we all.
1 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 100-101.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
What is "rational," anyway?
In his article, "Rational Control, or, life without virtue" (from The New Criterion, September issue, 2006), Harvey C. Mansfield suggests something with which I want to simultaneously agree and for which I'd like to beat him with a wet noodle.
God is the foundation of the irrational order. Modern liberation is liberation from God as the source of irrational custom. (41)
Mansfield defines "rational control" as things, rules, and/or people who control the actions of others for a "rational" purpose, here identified with things like "life" or "the greater good." Things like mandatory seatbelts, airbags, auto-flush toilets, and those automatic sinks that never seem to work right. These things make our lives better, or would if they worked properly instead of getting stuck in their dispensers and car doors, going off for no good reason, flushing and wetting one's behind, and refusing to turn on or off no matter how much hand waving is involved. The idea behind them is, ultimately, altruistic. Designed to prolong and better (or at least sanitize) our lives.
The "irrational order," then, is that which goes against "rational control."
Don't get me wrong. I'm an atheist. While I personally do not have any faith in a higher being/power/flying spaghetti monster/invisible sky wizard, I also recognize that belief in a deity or deities gives great comfort, solace, and even joy to other people. I'm all for that - as long as they keep it to themselves.
But how is placing our human inclination to have faith in something in the handlessness of brainless technology any more or less "rational" than placing it in the possible handlessness of an unseen divinity? Given the track-record of auto-flush toilets, I personally don't feel any more inclined to allow the auto-plumbing of the world to have "control" over my "rational" impulses, thank you very much. Particularly since the faucets repeatedly confound my perfectly "rational" desire to wash my hands after using the equally "rational" (and often equally malfunctioning) auto-flush toilet.
How is the auto-flush toilet a better "replacement god" than god?
At least nobody asks god to flush for them. They're perfectly willing to do it for themselves.
But, Mansfield says, we are unable to exercise that kind of "rational control" over ourselves.
To liberate us from subjection, modernity must show that men can control themselves. (41)
Great. I'm with you Mr. Mansfield. But I do have one teensy little problem... Auto-flush toilets do not let me control myself. They don't even let me control my own fecal matter. The auto-flush is most certainly not an instance of human control. It represents our desire to give up control to some sort of porcelain god that will happily whisk away all unpleasantness from our spanking-clean bottoms. And this is most emphatically not a case of giving up liberty for progress - it's a case of transferred reliance. From god to technology. From ourselves to unreliable auto-plumbing. It's a case of the age-old human problem of "not-my-problem."
But Mansfield is aware that progress can come at the cost of our liberty. I wish - oh, how I wish - he weren't.
It appears that the two aspects of modernity are liberty and progress, and that the two are linked. Liberty means liberation from unreason, which is progress; progress means expanding the scope of liberty. Is there no difficulty here? Yes, there is, and not a small one. There is no liberty to be irrational or to be satisfied with less liberty. For example, women today are equal to men, or closer to equal than they used to be. Men, however, are less free to be their old sexist selves. No doubt this is all for the good, but men are still less free in a sense. Moreover, having abandoned the "traditional stereotypes," we have set in place new, non-sexist stereotypes. These are to be taught to children by parents, to parents by the mainstream media. (41)
I think I was just catapulted back to 1950. No, wait. To 1789 and the writing of the Bill of Rights. Not only do I find it extraordinarily insulting that Mr. Mansfield considers his freedom "to be [his] old sexist [self]" to have been curtailed by feminism, but the very idea that sexism - or racism, homophobia, etc. - is a freedom... For Pete's sake. Okay, fine. Freedom of speech says that you can feel free to be vocally sexist if you want. Fine. But it also says that I don't have to take that crap from you if I don't want. Just because I get to retaliate doesn't mean you are any less free to say what you think. It just means you might have to weigh some consequences before you open your big, fat, bigoted mouth.
Now I will concede Mr. Mansfield's point - modernity has led us down many paths on which improvements in medicine, government, and social expectations have also led to restrictions in our "liberty." But pick a less offensive example, please. In all fairness, perhaps that is Mr. Mansfield's point. He doesn't feel "free" to use offensive examples, so he does it anyway, just to push some buttons. But I think that in so doing, he does himself and his ideas a great disservice.
In this age of Patriot Acts and phone taps, there needs to be some recognition that just because we've allowed our language and ourselves to be "rationally controlled" doesn't make us any more "rational." It makes us, in my humble opinion, a good deal less "rational." I acknowledge that political correctness may seem like a restriction, but I will also say that does not stop us from saying what we want to say. It simply asks that we consider our speech.
And what I say - what I have always and will always say - is that if what you have to say is important enough, you should say it anyway. Speak up, speak out, political correctness be damned. To requote the oft-and-over-quoted Voltaire, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Just remember, the auto-flush toilet has a button that lets you exercise your independence, to defy "rational control" and flush whenever you want.
God is the foundation of the irrational order. Modern liberation is liberation from God as the source of irrational custom. (41)
Mansfield defines "rational control" as things, rules, and/or people who control the actions of others for a "rational" purpose, here identified with things like "life" or "the greater good." Things like mandatory seatbelts, airbags, auto-flush toilets, and those automatic sinks that never seem to work right. These things make our lives better, or would if they worked properly instead of getting stuck in their dispensers and car doors, going off for no good reason, flushing and wetting one's behind, and refusing to turn on or off no matter how much hand waving is involved. The idea behind them is, ultimately, altruistic. Designed to prolong and better (or at least sanitize) our lives.
The "irrational order," then, is that which goes against "rational control."
Don't get me wrong. I'm an atheist. While I personally do not have any faith in a higher being/power/flying spaghetti monster/invisible sky wizard, I also recognize that belief in a deity or deities gives great comfort, solace, and even joy to other people. I'm all for that - as long as they keep it to themselves.
But how is placing our human inclination to have faith in something in the handlessness of brainless technology any more or less "rational" than placing it in the possible handlessness of an unseen divinity? Given the track-record of auto-flush toilets, I personally don't feel any more inclined to allow the auto-plumbing of the world to have "control" over my "rational" impulses, thank you very much. Particularly since the faucets repeatedly confound my perfectly "rational" desire to wash my hands after using the equally "rational" (and often equally malfunctioning) auto-flush toilet.
How is the auto-flush toilet a better "replacement god" than god?
At least nobody asks god to flush for them. They're perfectly willing to do it for themselves.
But, Mansfield says, we are unable to exercise that kind of "rational control" over ourselves.
To liberate us from subjection, modernity must show that men can control themselves. (41)
Great. I'm with you Mr. Mansfield. But I do have one teensy little problem... Auto-flush toilets do not let me control myself. They don't even let me control my own fecal matter. The auto-flush is most certainly not an instance of human control. It represents our desire to give up control to some sort of porcelain god that will happily whisk away all unpleasantness from our spanking-clean bottoms. And this is most emphatically not a case of giving up liberty for progress - it's a case of transferred reliance. From god to technology. From ourselves to unreliable auto-plumbing. It's a case of the age-old human problem of "not-my-problem."
But Mansfield is aware that progress can come at the cost of our liberty. I wish - oh, how I wish - he weren't.
It appears that the two aspects of modernity are liberty and progress, and that the two are linked. Liberty means liberation from unreason, which is progress; progress means expanding the scope of liberty. Is there no difficulty here? Yes, there is, and not a small one. There is no liberty to be irrational or to be satisfied with less liberty. For example, women today are equal to men, or closer to equal than they used to be. Men, however, are less free to be their old sexist selves. No doubt this is all for the good, but men are still less free in a sense. Moreover, having abandoned the "traditional stereotypes," we have set in place new, non-sexist stereotypes. These are to be taught to children by parents, to parents by the mainstream media. (41)
I think I was just catapulted back to 1950. No, wait. To 1789 and the writing of the Bill of Rights. Not only do I find it extraordinarily insulting that Mr. Mansfield considers his freedom "to be [his] old sexist [self]" to have been curtailed by feminism, but the very idea that sexism - or racism, homophobia, etc. - is a freedom... For Pete's sake. Okay, fine. Freedom of speech says that you can feel free to be vocally sexist if you want. Fine. But it also says that I don't have to take that crap from you if I don't want. Just because I get to retaliate doesn't mean you are any less free to say what you think. It just means you might have to weigh some consequences before you open your big, fat, bigoted mouth.
Now I will concede Mr. Mansfield's point - modernity has led us down many paths on which improvements in medicine, government, and social expectations have also led to restrictions in our "liberty." But pick a less offensive example, please. In all fairness, perhaps that is Mr. Mansfield's point. He doesn't feel "free" to use offensive examples, so he does it anyway, just to push some buttons. But I think that in so doing, he does himself and his ideas a great disservice.
In this age of Patriot Acts and phone taps, there needs to be some recognition that just because we've allowed our language and ourselves to be "rationally controlled" doesn't make us any more "rational." It makes us, in my humble opinion, a good deal less "rational." I acknowledge that political correctness may seem like a restriction, but I will also say that does not stop us from saying what we want to say. It simply asks that we consider our speech.
And what I say - what I have always and will always say - is that if what you have to say is important enough, you should say it anyway. Speak up, speak out, political correctness be damned. To requote the oft-and-over-quoted Voltaire, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
Just remember, the auto-flush toilet has a button that lets you exercise your independence, to defy "rational control" and flush whenever you want.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The poor player
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth 5.5.24-28)
This particular passage, so often quoted (and, like any Shakespeare, misquoted) is the subject of today's rant. Specifically, the following elucidation by Harold Fisch:
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth 5.5.24-28)
This particular passage, so often quoted (and, like any Shakespeare, misquoted) is the subject of today's rant. Specifically, the following elucidation by Harold Fisch:
The problem arises when one comes to evaluate the total function and meaning of this metaphor. Does it suggest simply, in reference to Macbeth, the ‘automation of the stage-actor’ as Mr. Kantak remarks – the hollowness of an illusory existence which has lost all its meaning? The comparison of the world to a theatre and of the people in it to actors had certainly served to ‘stress the empty, ephemeral nature of life on earth’ and certainly this represents the main direction of Macbeth’s thinking in the fifth act.1
But does the trope of the theatrum mundi, as here Fisch (after Kantak) implies, really suggest that life is “empty, ephemeral” and “hollow”? Or is the implication that what is rich is performance itself? That the color and quality of life is contained entirely within the realm of the theatrical? Let us examine, for a moment, this inversion. If Macbeth, for example, has just recognized that performance is the core of existence, that richness, power, and monarchical glory are all contained within the ability to perform them well, then his nihilistic attitude is not that life is empty, but that his life, in specific, has been empty. I suggest that the argument should not be that life is “empty,” but that Macbeth has failed to perform it. It is his failure, and not the intrinsic quality of life, that indicates the “hollowness” of which Fisch speaks. In essence, then, the message of the theatrum mundi is not that we are “mere” anything, but that the whole of creation is available to us through the power of performance.
Is not the actor image essentially ambivalent? For whilst it implies on the one hand that life is a play of phantoms, a meaningless repeated cycle, in another sense surely it implies that life has the gripping significance of a dramatic plot, that it has design, intention, purpose. It may serve to introduce something not less, but more meaningful than the neutrality of a non-dramatic order of existence. The world of nature is without pattern; but the world of drama is full of pattern – a mighty maze but not without a plan.2
"Not without a plan"... Dear god, intelligent design is infiltrating my damn literary criticism. Okay, Mr. Fisch, so drama is better than nature because it has "a plan"? You have, sir, come up with what may be the driest, most boring reason that life is like theater and vice versa. Your theater, Mr. Fisch, makes me want to go to sleep. Or, better, cry out of sheer, desperate boredom. No wonder Macbeth gave up and his wife offed herself. While life is hollow and empty, at least it is... "dramatic plot." Good god, man! Better yet, it's okay that our lives are mere theater because we get something "more" when we're dead. The applause from god. Oh, goodie. I can't wait. Ugh.
My issue with Fisch and Kantak - and Macbeth - is principally this: what is so bloody wrong with the theater that you are so damn against it? Why is it so bad to be a "poor player"? What's wrong with "strutting and fretting"? That's all most of us spend our time doing! Strutting and fretting. I'm all about strutting and fretting, thank you very much Mr. Harold Fisch. Lay on Macduff! On with strutting and fretting!
Okay, so that's a little melodramatic. But still. This is Shakespeare's way of saying "life is what we make of it," and, Mr. Macbeth, you sucked at it. You fretted more than strutted and you killed a few people that made you crazy... but you didn't ever just say "To hell with you and your prophecies you stupid hags, I'm going to be a real King!" Nope. Not once. You whined at your wife, who told you to act like a real man, and you whined at your friend (whom you killed), and you whined at the witches to "make it all better" for you. But did you ever just try to rule the damn country you killed Duncan for? No. Much better to blame everybody else for your problems, Mr. Macbeth. Because then you don't have to pretend that you failed because you are a terrible "player."
So, my dear Mssrs. Fisch and Kantak and Macbeth, I say Shakespeare was a bloody smart guy - smarter than you guys anyway, and certainly smarter than me - and when he says that "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" through the mouth of a complete whiny failure...
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that what he means is not that life is empty, but that it is oh, so rich. So impossibly, beautifully full of possibilities, of costumes, jewels, and roles, of hats and gowns and robes that we can don and cast aside, glittering and shiny things, swords and pens and shimmering silks and rattling bones, bits and bobs and all manner of fantastic and wonderful things that can let us be anything we want, if we only take a deep breath, push aside the stage door, and step out into the wide world - that great Globe - and play.
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