Intelligent Design...

As a literary critic and (hopeful) creator, I find myself taking exception not simply to the idea of Intelligent Design in the anti-Darwinian sense, but in a creative sense, as enumerated in Roger Shattuck's Candor and Perversion:

Few of us can resist the wish to put the pieces of the world together, and we give lasting recognition to some, like Jesus, Muhammad, and Gandhi, who convinced many others that they could makes sense of it all. There is nothing original about saying that the widely held belief among artists and writers in a universal unity represents a survival of religion in secularized form. Few of them would reject any connection at all to spiritual experience... R.P. Warren says what most artists, let alone ordinary citizens, would agree with: "I am a man of religious temperament in the modern world who hasn't got any religion." But in fact he does. He practices religion in a diluted form, which we accept as artistic and literary, a poetic faith without worship or ethics. It is difficult to say how long analogy alone will sustain and satisfy us. (49)

I take exception not to Shattuck's (accurate) observation that many people believe "in a universal unity," whether they call it god or a human spirit, but, rather, to 1) the suggestion that an artist/writer expressing anything other than complete nihilism must be religious, and, 2) the implication that "analogy alone" will be incapable of "sustain[ing] and satisfy[ing] us."

First, when Warren says he "hasn't got any religion," he is most likely correct. To say that he "practices religion in a diluted form" is offensive - both to the act of artistic creation (which is not "diluted" in any way) and to the idea that one may be creative without investing in some sort of "religion." Creativity and imagination do not require the existence of religion, deity, or a larger metaphysical plane in order to exist. And to imply that an artist (under which category I include "writer") needs something beyond him or herself in order to produce something of beauty and value is offensive to the artist.

Is creation truly nothing more than "religion in a secularized form"? A positive answer is understandable; after all, for centuries nearly all art was religious in nature. However, does that necessitate that art is religious? Does it mean that simply because an artist works with a religious medium, mythos, or image, that he or she must believe in its supernatural elements? Certainly, no one would suggest that simply because an artist painted a picture of a minotaur that he or she believes the minotaur is real.

And this leads, finally, to my counter-question. Why cannot "analogy alone... sustain and satisfy us"? We think, reason, and dream in analogies. We relate to one another in terms of metaphor and simile, we recognize our emotions in images and words that are not the things we think of upon viewing them. Why may not an "analogy" satisfy our creative, our emotional, or rational minds? After all, if I am right, then the greatest religions in the world have made a millennia-long practice of sustaining and satisfying with nothing more than "analogy alone."

So why do we constantly attempt to mitigate our own talents and creations? Why do we, as a species, constantly attribute our art, our skills, our talents, to the intervention or blessing of a deity? Quite simply, because of fear. Because our society recognizes a kind of selfless ecstasy in the act of imaginative creation, and is afraid to attribute that kind of raw and unmitigated power to a mere human being. Because if we acknowledge that we are capable of Creation, then we become gods. And if we are gods, then we must accept not only the power, but the responsibility that accompanies it. And if we accept that responsibility, then we must acknowledge that, as the gods of ourselves and our world, we have been terrible gods indeed.

The Meaning of Life

Every few months, I - and, I suspect, many others - wonder what, precisely, it is that I'm making out of my life. What it is that I really want to do. Do I want to spend the rest of my life devoted to the largely insular world of academia? Not particularly. Devoted to my students? That I could do.

It brings back, again and again, the recognition that I do what I do because of the students. Not because of the texts, not because of Shakespeare, but because of the students. Because it allows me to teach them how to think critically, not about the texts, but about the world. About what they are told - even by me. I simply use literature as the medium.

But my secret heart - well, perhaps not so secret - wants desperately to create that medium. To create something that will do by itself what I struggle to teach. To change not the world, but minds. Because, ultimately, it is the changing of minds that will change the world.

And the thing to which I come back, every time, is the idea that there is no binary. There can be no binary in a world made of color and light and sound and touch. And that those who live with binaries ultimately condemn themselves to exactly that which they hate and fear.

This is not a new point. I do not claim it is. However, it is one that needs revisitation. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people who do not recognize the hypocrisy inherent in themselves, in their religion, and in the ideologies they purport. I hope, someday, to see a majority of rational, thoughtful people who are able to place their faith in their own logic rather than in something external to themselves. Whether they want to call that part of themselves god or reason is unimportant, but until we as a species stop attributing right and wrong based on illogical and hallucinatory fairy tales, we will not be able to work as a cohesive species.

Nothing More Than Feelings

I've noticed an alarming trend of late in student writings, and, it appears, in our educational system: the permissiveness and even encouragement of treating our "feelings" as though they were valid sources of fact and argument. This is, "I feel," complete crap. As an academic, I view it as a degradation of the art of interpretation.

It is part - or is at least an off-shoot of - the increasing validity of reader-response. Which is itself the bastard child of New Criticism. Both of which, "I feel," should be dragged out back and shot.

We, especially here in the United States of America, want our feelings to be given credence and importance that they do not deserve. This is, of course, not to say that feelings aren't important. They are. In social relationships. Not in my classroom, thank you very much.

I am not one of those teachers who belittles her students. I am respectful of them and I expect them to be the same of one another and of me. I do not try to hurt their feelings and I go out of my way to make sure that any and all criticism I offer them is constructive. But what they "feel" about Shakespeare has no place in their papers.

I'm glad Shakespeare makes them feel something. I'm glad that Eliot was right about the objective correlative. But I don't care. And not only do I not care, I actively do not want to know how they feel about Hamlet and Gertrude or Romeo and Juliet. What I want to know is what they have discovered within the text. And since the entire purpose of education is to encourage thought, I don't think I have unrealistic expectations.

The problem is that they are being encouraged in high school to tell me what they feel. To tell me that they agree with Machiavelli, or that they think Machiavelli is going to Hell. I. Don't. Care. Go right ahead and think it, but it does not belong in any serious treatment of the text. This isn't about what you "feel." Life does not care what you "feel." I don't care. The text doesn't care if it hurt your feelings or if you disagree with it.

The entire purpose of critical thinking, of interpretation, of analysis, is to find things that are intrinsic to the text. If you can link that to its contemporary history, great. If you want to link it to other historical, literary, philosophical, etc. circumstances, great. But don't tell me "I agree with Machiavelli that rulers need to be deceptive." Unless you, sir or madam student, are a political authority, historian, or literary giant, your opinion doesn't count. Show me that Machiavelli is jaded and bitter over the corruption of political office. Show me that he contradicts himself. Show me how idiots in office took him seriously without realizing that they're proving the very things he satirizes. But don't tell me you "agree" or - god forbid - that you don't think rulers can be deceptive anymore because of the internet. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a-whole-nother kettle of fish.

What really drives me crazy - in case you couldn't tell - is our society's penchant for wanting to make everyone's "feelings" important. I don't want to have to pussy-foot around an issue simply because it might "hurt someone's feelings" to have it addressed. I want to be able to say "it drives me crazy when everyone assumes I'm a lesbian" without worrying about offending lesbians. I mean no offense to lesbians. But I'm not one. It's just like saying "it drives me crazy when everyone assumes I'm a man." I'm just not, no matter what the guy who told me I look like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie thinks.

Have your feelings, kids, but recognize that you'll be a whole heck of a lot better off if you learn that feelings aren't worth a damn (except, as I said, in social relationships). Because, boys and girls, no matter how much you "feel" that Hamlet shouldn't die or Romeo and Juliet was written to you personally, it just isn't true. Feelings can lie to us. They're unreliable, variable, and very often quite stupid. Yes, they can also be wonderful, life-changing, fabulous things. But they belong between you and your family, your friends, your lover. They do not, I repeat, do not belong in the world of facts and critical thought. Maybe I am, as a dear friend so often insists, "dead inside." But, please, relegate your feelings to their proper place and let your brain get a little more exercise.

On the Interpretation of...

We, as a species, often find ourselves in the position of interpreters. It is our nature to interpret - not simply on the most basic level of language, but on so many various sublevels. We read one another - body language, tone, expression, eyes. We interpret these extralinguistic cues on a daily basis - and we believe them, often more readily than we believe the language that accompanies them.

We are accomplished liars, but we are also accomplished interpreters. Often, we seek answers in places other than in language in our day-to-day interactions, reading things other than words.

And we reproduce these signs and symbols, both the linguistic and the extralinguistic, in art. Certainly, literature is the art of language. There is nothing more linguistically pure than literature (drama excepted - it gets its own category). It is composed entirely of words. Words that lie. Words that speak truth. Words that do both at once. Words that delve into the essence of human nature, rife with ambiguity and impossible layers. But these words so often invoke the other aspects of interpretation - descriptions of bodies, of voices, of colors, of all the sources of sensory input upon which we rely. All put into words. Limited. Exploded. Infinite.

No wonder we, as readers, are always interpreters. Even if unconsciously, we must interpret words on a page. Is this serious? Sarcastic? Sad? But, as interpreters, we also skew that which we choose to interpret. Stephen Leo Carr and Peggy A. Knapp write that as we interpret, "We make the text over, rewriting it in our own image so that it seems to anticipate and validate that image" (838).*

For so many, the act of interpretive reading - and all reading is interpretive, whether consciously done or not - is the act of assigning one's own value systems, one's own ideology, to the text. It is an act of penetration, of violation, that attempts to conform characters and themes to the familiar and, often, the agreeable. We grow disturbed by a text when we cannot force it to agree with our views. We choose to dislike it, labeling it as "bad," despite its probable virtues. This is a crime of which teachers are most often accused.

It is something we do not only to books, but to movies, to music, and to people. When a person does not conform to our desires for them, we dislike them.

I do not suppose that there is anything wrong with this. I dislike many things, and many people. But my dislike should not make them inherently "bad." While there are things that are inherently "bad" - murderers and Harlequin romances spring to mind - there are more that we simply dislike for their unwillingness to conform to our "image."

But, as has so often been said, variety is the spice of life. We would not like it - no matter how much we think we would - if everything in the world conformed to our "image." We might like it if everything were "good," we would still desire difference - or, in the Derridian sense, differance. We like conflict. We like the clashing of ideologies. What we do not like is their ultimate destruction.

So pause. Take a moment, the next time you dislike something, to determine whether it really is "bad," or whether it is simply an "image" in which you do not wish to see your own reflection.


*Carr, Stephen Leo and Peggy A. Knapp. "Seeing through Macbeth." Publications of the Modern Language Association 96.5 (1981): 837-847.

My Country, 'Tis of Thee

It's approaching the anniversary of our nation's declaration of independence, the one day out of the year that the entire population (more or less) feels obliged to wear red, white, and blue; to wave flags; to run about stuffing their faces with both food and drink while saying "God bless America." The time of year when those of us in the tourist industry in colonial cities gear up for the influx of patriotic visitors seeking something extra-special and extra-American. Good, clean, wholesome family fun.

The time of year when the site at which I work digs out a Union Jack and prepares to badmouth the historic Patriots. We tell the other side of the story. Which, I might note, is both interesting and horrid.

As children, we learn about "no taxation without representation," about the protests against British imperial rule, about the Liberty Tree and Paul Revere's famous Midnight Ride (except we don't learn about William Dawes or poor Samuel Prescott). We don't learn just how horrifying being tarred and feathered is (think second and third degree burns over your whole body); how the Patriots lied and stole their way to independence; about the lootings and burnings of Tory houses; about the murders and executions of Tory Loyalists; or about the massive financial and psychological hardships endured by those who believed themselves doing nothing more than being loyal to their King.

That's my job. I - and my staff - tell the other side of the story.

Most of the time, people think it's really interesting. Sometimes, you see them grow a little bit horrified at the thought of what their beloved Patriots (particularly the smuggling pirate John Hancock) were up to. You see them realizing that the British citizens forced out of the colonies were suffering, too.

An hour or a day later, of course, these lessons and memories fade, but for a little while, at least, they recognize that there are always two sides to every story. There are always victims, even - especially - in the greatest of victories. That nothing new can be born without bloodshed.

I have no problem with patriotism. What I have a problem with is blind patriotism. With beliefs that disallow the questioning of the dominant ideological paradigm simply because it is dominant. With the automatic vilification of the Other Side. Love your country, but don't hate all others. Don't create a cookie-cutter image of the "American" and antagonize everything that doesn't fit into it.

Our country was born out of diversity, forged in the heat of a war of rebellion, and tempered by blood and gunpowder. We as a nation came about precisely because we were able to reject the strictures we found suffocating. Our founding fathers did not make this nation so that it might stifle itself under dictates of what we must think or speak or feel.

Love your country. But love it as a parent - firmly, sternly, and with the knowledge that when it needs correction, it is better to correct than to allow it to become uncontrollable. Love it as an audience - applaud its good performances, but when it fails, boo it from the stage. Love it as a child - recognize that it has brought us this far, but that we cannot forever remain under its strict control; respect it, but recognize that change, that evolution, is necessary to life; remember that it has loved and nurtured us, but know that it has come to need our care.

The Book of Martyrs

I've recently been reading about the Jesuit missions to England in the 16th and early 17th centuries, specifically, as they relate to the Gunpowder Plot. I find it interesting how the majority of the authors I've picked up seem so sympathetic toward the Jesuits, and critical of the Elizabethan/Jacobean governments.

Is it that we, as a society, tend to automatically vilify the dominant regime? To root, as it were, for the underdog? The Jesuits lost in England - not only did they not succeed in converting the nation back to Catholicism, they failed to assassinate Elizabeth and to blow up James (though to be fair, most of them weren't out to blow up anything). Underdogs. But... not really. The Catholic Church isn't much of an underdog. And yet it occupies a strangely liminal position between supremacy and oppression.

That particular role, it seems, centers around the concept of the martyr.

Martyrs are attractive. The notion of self-sacrifice for a cause, the willingness to give up even one's life in the pursuit of a noble idealism, is lauded, praised, and sanctified by our national and religious cultures. "So-and-so died for his/her beliefs/country" is the highest of praise.

I wonder. If our biological ancestors had been into self-sacrifice, our species very likely wouldn't exist (with the notable exceptions of dying to save one's young or the rest of one's pack).

In The Lion's Court, Derek Wilson suggests that “Martyrs are seldom made by events. There has to be something deep within a man’s soul to prepare him for, or impel him towards, the ultimate sacrifice... To welcome death in a righteous cause was the surest way to avoid the everlasting torments prepared for the worldly. There is always an element of selfishness about the martyr’s preoccupation with his own eternal well-being” (377-378). I find his point about selfishness to be particularly interesting.

As did the Jesuits. And - as I learned at a session at Kalamazoo this year - the missionaries to the Muslim East in medieval times. The latter were much disposed to going to the Middle East with the specific intention of getting killed. Sure-fire one-way ticket to heaven. How do we know this? Because as long as the missionaries in question didn't preach close to a mosque (in the instances recounted in the paper), they'd be left more or less alone. They chose to do so anyway. They were disemboweled, decapitated, etc. No surprise to anyone. The Papacy elected to stop canonizing them - and to discourage the praise of said individuals - to keep more people from going out and dying. Same deal in England with the Jesuit missions; they actively encouraged people NOT to go unless they felt that the priests in question were capable of deception and espionage.

But that never seems to stop people. People want to become martyrs. And why?

I have to say that here is one of those points at which my atheism leads to my incredulity. Perhaps if I believed in another, spiritual life, a reward, a heaven, martyrdom would make more sense. As it is, I just don't get it. Martyrdom seems such a waste. Why give your life for something when you could devote the time and energy of that life TO it?

Shakespeare, he is good.

There is a reason we still, after 400 years, read Shakespeare. And it's not because he's a dead, white male. He is, but that isn't why we read him. The man had a gift. I hesitate to say "genius," if only because that is a word charged with so much angst and excuse, but Shakespeare, he is good.

Some of Shakespeare, of course, is not good. Some of it is downright terrible (and yes, I still think the terrible bits are Shakespeare, too, despite what certain *ahem* editors out there tend to argue). But that does not change the fact that the man was an intellectual giant.

What I perhaps love the most about Shakespeare is the fact that he became what he became simply because he was so damn good at what he did. Not because he was highly trained (he wasn't) or educated (he wasn't that either) or born into the right family (nope, still not).1 He was just plain and simple good at what he did. It didn't matter that his spelling was terrible or that he made up new words (we like that about him). He wrote what he saw, and when he saw, he understood. He recognized the patterns and the passions in the world and put them into a language that translates into performance as well as writing. He saw the intrinsically human, the universally recognized, the basest and greatest drives we possess, and he translated them into something that survived for centuries.

All this is, of course, instigated by my dissertation, about which I will not write. But suffice it to say that today I found yet another pattern, a perfect circularity, a flawless symmetry that made me recognize that what so many critics view as a "flaw" is, in fact, no such thing. It is deliberate and elegant. And it works. It reaches out off the stage and grabs us by the ruff and shakes us, it makes us feel something we should not feel, forces us to recognize in the most pathetic of figures the beautiful contradiction that is the human condition. It causes in us the same epiphany we have just witnessed - and the most glorious part is that we are not told what to think. We are shown. The scene is played out before us and it is up to us to recognize what we have seen, to bear witness to the passing of a man who has only just learned how to become great. To mourn his death, but to revel in it, because it is only through this single scene that he could become what he has just become. And it is great, and it is terrible.

And it is what makes us question whether we, too, can be both saint and sinner. Whether we, like this figure before us, have the capacity to be at once so mighty and so fallen. We are, it tells us, flawed. But we are also great.



1.[This is supposing, of course, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the playwright rather than the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Elizabeth I or Christopher Marlowe or whatever-other-monkey-they've-come-up-with-this-week. Not to say that some of those figures don't have a case... Oxford in particular is an intriguing suggestion, though I do have to note that both Elizabeth and Marlowe died before Shakespeare stopped writing. And don't give me crap about "they found it later," because those later plays were referring to contemporary historical events.]

Revisiting History

I've been reading a good deal of history lately - and along with it, some historical fiction. Sets the brain cells a-churning.

The most recent book to have filtered its way through my brain is C.J. Sansom's Dissolution, purchased on a whim at Kalamazoo. It's set in Tudor England under Henry VIII just following the death of Jane Seymour (that's after the Reformation and after the execution of Anne Boleyn for those of you who don't keep tabs on 1500s England). The subject, rather unsurprisingly, is the dissolution of a monastery - more specifically, the dissolution of a monastery following a series of gruesome (of course) murders which must be solved by the main character.

When I started it, I hated it. I thought the writing was flat and uninteresting. But, since I was on a plane, I made myself keep going. Turns out it was one of those books that gets you hooked and then you can't put it down. And it was well-researched, as I'm discovering in reading Derek Wilson's In the Lion's Court, which is about the reign of Henry VIII.

But that's not the point. The point is that we have - as a friend and I talked about a couple weeks ago - this fascination with the early modern period in England. Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth, to be specific.

Sure, there are reasons. Henry's six wives, the Henrician Reformation, the Golden Age of England... But, as my friend pointed out, we don't seem to be nearly as interested in one of the most ground-breaking and soul-shattering instances in English history: the public execution of Charles I.

Why is that? What do we find so utterly fascinating about Henry and his two daughters that we don't find in Charles? There was depravity, disillusionment, and corruption in the Caroline court. Religious upheaval, even a civil war. But we're drawn to the Tudor dynasty like flies to honey. And believe me, the Stuarts have their fair share of scandal and strangeness. But we aren't interested in them.

Is it charisma? The figure of the magnificent, leontine Henry VIII, strutting about in his ruff and puffy sleeves; "Bloody" Mary who executed more people in five years than Elizabeth in forty-five, wearing severe black, subject to cancer and false pregnancy; and Elizabeth, Gloriana, the greatest ruler (supposedly) to ever sit on the throne of England. We can't let go of our fascination with them. TV, movies (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Tudors, Blackadder II), and books (again, The Other Boleyn Girl, Firedrake's Eye, Unicorn's Blood, Six Wives, the list goes on). And that doesn't even mention Shakespeare in Love.

I say - though I'm a bit biased - that it's propaganda. Portraits (Elizabeth had dozens), pamphlets, pageants, progresses, plays, poems (there are an awful lot of Ps there)... all dedicated to the Tudors. Designed and very often censured or sanctioned by them. And this is what has passed to posterity. The images they wanted us to remember. Yes, we also recognize that Henry was something of a nasty bastard, cutting of two of his wives' heads, divorcing one, annulling another. But he was good at what he did. It all comes down to publicity.

And from this, we learn that the power of media is ancient. It isn't that FoxNews has just figured out the influence they have over us (okay, maybe they just figured it out), it's that we the audience has suddenly recognized what the early moderns knew very well: we are subject to the things given to us. To subvert the system, we must recognize it as as system. And once we understand the mechanisms directed toward us, the tools and tricks of the trade, then we can learn to read between the lines... and to write between them.

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Chaucer... the list goes on. They all knew how to write between the lines. To contain in something seemingly innocent or propagantist the message that you don't always have to believe what you're told. Sometimes, you should. But simply knowing that the choice is yours to accept or condemn...

It causes a revolution.

The reason we look at Tudor England? Because without the Tudors, I'll bet you anything Charles I would have kept his head.

La Vita Academia

Writing from a Medieval and Renaissance Conference, at which I am surrounded by not just hundreds, but thousands of academics and scholars from all over the globe, I can’t really help but be prompted to think a bit about what it means to be an academic.

My musings began on the flight over. During the second leg of the trip, two men were seated in the row behind me, a older and a younger, seemingly strangers, discussing the younger man’s life and career. He was in aviation administration somehow – this was not of particular interest to me – and was on a trip to visit his girlfriend, who is still in school. When the older gentleman asked what she did, the younger replied “She’s a women’s studies major. But don’t worry, she’s not one of those man-hating types,” to which the other replied, “What the hell do you do with that?” the disdain evident in his tone.

Part of me wanted to turn around and smack them both., but things like laws and federal aviation behavior requirements kept me facing forward and seething invisibly in my seat. While I give the boyfriend kudos for calmly explaining that the girlfriend wants to go into politics, “because that stuff is useful, I guess,” I couldn’t quite give him enough to make me not want to scream. First of all, the caveat – “But don’t worry, she’s not one of those man-hating types” – was both bigoted and entirely unnecessary (she’s dating one, after all). Second of all, he should have enough respect both for her and her choice of career not to be apologetic about her major.

I don’t really blame the other man for wanting to know what career she will enter with the degree (after all, people ask me that all the time, and I’m getting a degree in something nice and non-threatening), but the tone irritated me no end. It was one of those oh-how-cute-the-little-lady-is-getting-an-education tones. The kind that is usually possessed by persons who are under the impression that women belong in the home, making dinner for their menfolk and raising the kids.

And then at the conference I was taught by a female professor how to “shake hands like a man,” because “this is a man’s world, honey, and you got to fight to stay in it.”

I can’t decide which is worse. The chauvinism inherent in the “uneducated masses,” or the self-perpetuating deprecation practiced by women in the profession. We wear masculine-style suits (particularly to job interviews, where, I learned, skirts are a no-no) and blocky clothing designed to hide our figures – so we won’t be distracting. We put on ball-busting attitudes that will, ostensibly, allow us to get ahead. But these are the very things that cause the illusion that we aren’t as good as our male counterparts to be perpetuated.

I’m not exactly the most girly female in the world. But if I want to be girly, then, dammit, let me. Let me earn your respect regardless of whether I act tomboy or butch or fem or frills-and-ponies. I shouldn’t have to – nor should anyone have to – pretend to be something I’m not just to earn the respect I should deserve simply because I’m competent at what I do.

It’s one of the things I generally like about this particular conference. I’m a little out of my time-period, but I enjoy this place because it accepts everybody based on their competence and intelligence, not on what they wear or how “acceptable” they appear. I’ve seen academics here wearing kilts, dresses, period garb, t-shirts and jeans, sundresses, suits, clerical habits, sweats, and – in once case – the weirdest ensemble I’ve ever seen on ANYONE. There’s no pressure to appear or behave in a certain way. Just the expectation that you accord the other people the respect they deserve as people and as scholars. It’s refreshing.

That said, academics are a very strange breed. They live and exist in a world entirely different from the one in which “normal” people operate. They are people to and for whom the historical world is present – as real as the tangible world outside their windows. They’re people who speak a different language and worship different deities than everyone else, people who understand their existence in relation to a past – or even a fiction (as in my case) – they never saw. They worship it like a god, nurture it like a child, and caress it like a lover.

I can think of worse ways to spend our lives.

Death and Life

In the spirit of several recent events - and a plethora of student papers - I'm addressing death. The death of people, the death of things, the death of relationships. (No, this has nothing to do with my own personal life.)

Phoebe S. Spinrad writes in The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage,
The human mind is afraid of Nothing.
It is at the moment of death that Everything and Nothing meet, and throughout the history of humankind, art has struggled to make them both less frightening by transmuting them into Something, a something that can be borne. (ix)

Spinrad's observation is as applicable to literal death as it is to the figurative deaths that fill our lives. When we experience loss - whether to death, to divorce, to a move - we struggle to find larger meaning or intention. We fear the absence of meaning, of purpose, of design in our lives. We want all our losses to mean something else, something other than - as Spinrad says - Nothing.

Meaning is one of the many reasons people choose to believe in religion. We want to know that our lives have a purpose. That our deaths, our tragedies, will give rise to something larger than ourselves. And sometimes, it does.

Sometimes it is a sign that we have made the wrong choice - of mate, of behavior, of job, of living place. Sometimes it means nothing more than a bad coincidence. But we don't appreciate coincidences. We don't want to think that randomness can cause us hurt and pain. We want our suffering to have greater import than just the randomized stimulation of nerves or emotions.

But we also tend to avoid confronting the possibility of this loss. We don't want to hear when a spouse is cheating, when our behavior could make us sick or injured, when we have been the cause of either our own injury or the neglect that has led to it. We don't want to know when we are at fault.

Nor do we want to know when our own prosperity, our own happiness, has come at the expense of another's pain. And yet it is something in which we participate daily. Often through ignorance, often through deliberate disavowal of our own capabilities. We are a society and a culture that enjoys shadenfreude, that takes pleasure - even humor - in the suffering (physical or psychological) of others.

It is the hypocrisy that I find despicable. The refusal to acknowledge our own animalistic nature, to reconcile ourselves as fierce and ferocious beings with our innate desire for compassion. For we are, ultimately, both compassionate and cruel. We enjoy pain, but we also enjoy its mitigation. We are healers as much as - if not more than - harmers. Ultimately, the kind of pain in which we take pleasure is the kind that passes, the kind that teaches, that makes us stronger.

We are vicious, but we are also gracious. We understand the gains to be discovered in suffering, the advantages to being the stronger, the victor. But we are also infinitely kind, infinitely considerate, infinitely compassionate. We are creatures of contradiction, and creatures whose contradictory natures make our flaws our saving graces. And in this, we find the Something for which we risk the greatest Nothing of all.

Dreams of Equality

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.