J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 book Foe deals with a story most of most of us are familiar enough with to pick up the names and the subtle critique of Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century island tale Robinson Crusoe. However, to fully appreciate the novel, you are going to have to put some work in by hunkering down and reread/read the book that Coetzee retells from a contemporary point of view giving voice, as Coetzee does time and again, to those who lack the ability to speak. You can make due by reading a RC summary if you are tired of island life from watching way too much Lost, as I am, but in my own case I can just tell that my depth here lacks because I don’t really want to read RC for the third time in seven years. To be fair though, I did read it just last year so it wasn’t too far removed but I get that as a contemporary writer he wants us to return to the classics and see how they are biased and how our own times and places are still very much screwed up because the whole thing—i.e. the combination of racism, sexism, oppression, silence, etc—is a systemic flaw in Western controlled societies. But I got lazy and time is money to be spent wisely, at least where books are concerned, and I have pay my dues and seen that dog-and-pony-show before, so I don’t feel too bad about skipping out on revisiting RC on his little desert island somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.
So here is the basic outline of what I can remember that is important to understanding the currently discussed book: a young cleric goes against his father’s demands and leaves what would have been a practical future undertaking a career in law to take up life on the high seas; he deeply and heartlessly (which goes beyond simply buying and selling humans but I won’t get into) in the course of one of his journeys; he winds up getting shipwrecked and as the sole survivor of the mishap, must make due on an island by his lonesome, spending his time reading and meditating on the good book as he has now found Jesus and all that and he begins keeping a diary and learns how to survive on an island where nothing is provided for him and he must do everything with his own two hands. Years later, he finds footprints on the beach and thinks they were left by Satan, RC is starting to lose it, and by this time he has started calling himself “the king” of the island so as the crabs and barnacles growing on his dingy (he is alone there after all) knows who rules this patch of land; after he comes to what you might think of as some lucidity, he thinks about how insane the idea of Lucifer walking around his island would be armed with the power of Christ as he is and all, thus coming to the logical conclusion that if it is not evil personified, it must be cannibals; despite what reason tells us at this point, RC’s island is overrun with cannibals and one day he discovers the aftermath of a cannibal Thanksgiving day feast. Watching the cannibals from a distance, he sees them slaughter some unfortunate soul while another awaits his turn; instead of offering himself up on a platter, I know, I know, that bombs, he breaks free and the cannibals give chance since dinner is on the loose; since the delicious runner runs straight at RC, he steps out of the woodworks to save the guy from rotisserie heaven, for the cannibals that is, by killing one of them and incapacitating the other whom supper steps up to the plate and kills holding an understandable grudge against the guy for wanting to eat him and all. This then leads the nearly consumed young man such gratitude that he gives up his freedom for RC as a type of ronin and, of course, RC accepts thereby giving him a new diminutive name, “Friday,” to commemorate the day that he willing gave up his freedom. Eventually this duo picks up another companion, this one a conquistador, and somewhere in their busy days filled with indiscriminate cannibal genocide, they get rescued and RC lives a long and productive life as a merchant in London —you know, the typical island/adventure stuff we are all familiar with.
In a nutshell, what Coetzee does to the RC story, outlined above, is he takes what amounts to an episode of ABC’s Lost and turns it into Castaway, that is, he takes a action filled tale that is too good to be true and makes it believable thus boring. But that is not the point of the novel, what Coetzee does with this tale is give an alternate account of someone who herself has a story, protagonist Susan Barton, and also the story of the real Friday, as Foe imagines him, a black, tongueless man who may or may not also lack genitalia. The real story lies with them in Coetzee reinvention of the classic tale, RC is just some boring asshole when you come right down to it. He is thus secondary, never appearing outright, only lurking in the shadows as a ghost from Barton’s past. In fact, he doesn’t even exist in the confines of the novel, the only glimpses we get of his adventures is from the letters Barton writes to Foe in her attempt to get the writer to capture the tale of her disheveled island love.
Barton’s tale, as it turns out, isn’t all that interesting either, the novel’s main focus is on her life away from the island, which in the first section comes in the form of letters written to Foe about RC and then progressing into her time there. In the second portion, the reader sees her voice mature, now fully telling her own tale while experiences the hardships of returning to life away from the island and her attempts to reintegrate back into society with Friday following behind as though he was her shadow. With life proving difficult for both woman and shadow as well as Foe, Barton travels to the writer’s abandoned home—he is on the lamb hiding from the strong arm of the law—and squats there buying food with money they earn from selling Foe’s stuff. The notes I took from this section consist of things like “where does she get off” and “she must have a set of brass balls” and “SB lives off of whatever man is unfortunate enough to wind up in her path devouring everything” and “she is not a woman, she is a parasite.” All this is mixed in with spider imagery and allusions mostly made by SB regarding all of these mean she bleeds dry, but never once does she realize she is in fact a black widow, the most deadly and poisonous spider of them all.
Coetzee, whose work I generally love, does have a few things working against him in not only this short novel but pretty much all of his work. In this I won’t even go into the bizarre sexual stuff that takes place in all of books that I have read to date, but I will look at four other points that are drawn from Coetzee’s body of work. The first thing I will mention is the fact that of the four novels by the South African writer (other three being The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Disgrace) not a one of them offers us any redemption and the protagonists are left in the same place they were in when the novel began, having either learned nothing or unable to deal with the lessons they have learned, only they are now worse off in that same lot they are never going to escape—like the characters in Achebe’s work as well. The second thing that you notice is his novels are unbelievably bleak/dark look into the world and society that one must resolve is fucked and not going to get any better. If anything, it is going to get worse and you aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. The die have been cast, the hand you get dealt is the only one you get, trying to change them out or worse yet trying to change the rules of the game is a futile endeavor. You are still all in, riding high, whatever, and if you don’t make the most of your crummy hand, you are going to lose it all. This seems to be somewhat of a staple with African fiction in general and isn’t exclusive to the genre but the thing about Coetzee’s existential little books is that his are darker and more depraved and cynical even than the accounts I have read by former child soldiers and victimized refugees in North African camps. The last thing I will mention here is something is actually something from another one of his novels but extends to pretty much all of his work one would have to think. In Michael K, Coetzee’s narrator in a small passage taken as a diary entry from the life of a doctor treating MK in a refugee camp writes about a fictional conversation he has with the starving MK who was bent on getting out of dodge in bad way and has made his way out of confinement choosing instead what appears to be inevitable starvation. At that time we learn that he said to his patient that “Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory - speaking at the highest level - of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.” Such an assessment was bad. It was wrong for reason I shall discuss momentarily but for now know that this was supposed to be ironic and in its irony show us that his work is not to taken allegorically no matter how badly we want to read it that way.
Coetzee work, as stated previously, is genius, but it is so because of and not despite the three things mentioned above he is often criticized for. The first article, that Coetzee seems against redeeming his protagonists or their plight, works because it is tragic in the same way that life is tragic. In the end, we all die and life rarely gets better toward the end. Plus, his novels aren’t supposed to be about redemption but about how the institutions we are a part of are full of inequalities and those aren’t ever going to change because there are checks and balances against them. To go against the grain in such systems would be suicide, depending on the severity of the protest/institution. Nothing will ever really change because our plight is always one of struggle, it's the way things have always been, the best we can do is minimize that struggle and our suffering by focusing on the little things. Coetzee’s solution than is to create order in the micro by doing what must do to survive and bring a few along with you. When things are as bad as they can get, we have no choice but to settle down and spend our time in the garden, as Friday does, or write our little letters and/or books, as Defoe, Barton, and Coetzee do. The second article then, that his work is too bleak, is thus a pointless assessment because it illuminates what we as individuals can do to increase our own wellbeing and the lessen the psychic burden of life. The third article mentioned above completely destroys any allegorical reading of Coetzee’s work. He doesn’t want us to make the same mistake as the doctor made in looking at his characters through our own set of lenses. To do so is to attribute our own Western ideals and misconceptions on the characters that are in and outside the text. This is a clear critique of the post-structuralist stance on text in that the reader’s perception when approaching a work are unprepared to make correct judgments regarding the text. Thus, his characters cannot or should not be separated from the text. That passage from LTMK was given as an example of the way we tend to look at peoples we try to help but in the end they don’t want it because it is yet another form of oppression. The organism cannot survive without learning on its own
Foe is yet another example of Coetzee’s virtuoso and exploration of his many themes, most notably the effects of Western imperialism on native culture. His analysis of authorship and authority are, as always, on point and forces the question on the ownership of history. Always giving voice to the marginalized, even Friday who has no voice, Foe’s conversation with Barton illustrates this most poignantly toward the end of the novel reading “‘his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.’ No, Susan answers: ‘Friday's desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom, who has been a slave all his life? That is the true question. Should I liberate him into a world of wolves and expect to be commended for it? . . . Even in his native Africa . . . would he know freedom?”’ This tale, like most of Coetzee’s work, is well worth your time and will make you question everything from language, history, authority, and Western empiricism and how it is still very much alive and well.
See also:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7D61239F931A15751C0A961948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE3DB1331F932A25751C0A961948260&sec=&spon=&scp=2&sq=foe%20coetzee&st=cse
http://readingforwriters.blogspot.com/2008/06/foe-by-jm-coetzee.html
http://californiawriter.blogspot.com/2007/11/jm-coetzees-novel-foe.html
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/rajasir/foe-jmcoetzeenobel-prize-winner-literature
Friday, October 10, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Yesterday's Crossword was One Worth Saving (Wink, Wink)
I love a good crossword puzzle. I get this from my parents, their one intellectual activity aside from discussing politics and listening to NPR. The New York Times, of course, is my hands down favorite but it is rare that I get to work those because I typically read the it online and don’t have a credit card or the money to purchase the crossword portion of that paper. So when I get to do the Times’ puzzle, usually days my female companion brings the paper home from her work, it is a nice little treat for me. Yesterday’s puzzle (10/6/2008) by Patrick Blindauer was one of these little indulgences and it was one of the cooler puzzles I have ever completed and has also excited crossword aficianados.
When I first opened the paper up to the puzzle, I thought about how weird it was that instead of a perfect square, which is what I have always seen, the box was rectangular in shape, wider than it was long. I pointed this out to female companion even, noting on how bizarre this was. I also noticed that some of the answers had circles within the boxes that highlighted some of the letters in a given answer. I didn’t pay much attention to where these were placed and didn’t spend much time considering what they might mean. Assuming they had something to do with a jumble or something, it didn’t dawn on me for sometime that the Times doesn’t have a jumble despite the fact that a minute before when I told female companion that “I always forget where in the Times the crossword is,” and she tried to help by saying “it’s always next to the funnies,” I commented that it doesn’t have comic strips like most other papers, “just the crossword.” But I didn’t really dwell on it as this led her to make a few remarks on the highbrow paper she called “snooty” asking what kind of paper “doesn’t carry the funnies.”[*] So it wasn’t until I was finished that I noticed the significance of both the rectangle and the circles within it, which were pretty ingenious and original innovations in the art of creating a crossword puzzle, an art form that you don’t see much variation in that I would imagine gets pretty tedious.
The first clue of the puzzle, 1-Across, was “Blood type, briefly,” a clue with several possible answers. When I work a puzzle, I fill in the answers with pen, in which case, I don’t write in answers with multiple answers until I get more clues as to what that answer might be and so I move down the list to the next clue. If I don’t know the answer to that clue I move on to the first one I can, I do this for the entire puzzle. Once I have made my first swipe at it, the thing is a patchy bunch of words that I then go back over to see what else I can fill in I didn’t know the first time and then see if I can start to make sense of the really long ones and ones that are dependent on other answers or clues—pretty standard strategy we are talking about here.
The first clue I got that had circle in it ended up being 64-Across: Ryan of “Love Storey” the answer of which was O-N-E-A-L, O’Neal. Still thinking the only significance of the circles was for some jumble or something, I didn’t pay any mind to the fact that the letters circled were O-N-E. After finishing my first pass, I went back to 1-Across, the answer now, it was clear, had to be O-N-E-G since 1-Down: Choose (to) was O-P-T and 4-Down: Lowly soldier was G-R-U-N-T. If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that the three letters circled in this word were the same three circled in the other, O-N-E. But I wasn’t. You can probably already see where this is going but at that point I did not have a clue.
Mixed in with the bunch of regular clues, there were also the ones that were dependent on other clues like 8-Across: Source of all the tender words in this puzzle, 26-Across: 8-Across issuer, 35-Across: Motto of 26-Across found on the 8-Across, 53-Across: Symbol of 26-Across found on the 8-Across, and again 58-Across: Symbol of 26-Across found on the 8-Across the answers of which are 8: D-O-L-L-A-R, 26: T-H-E-U-N-I-T-E-D-S-T-A-T-E-S-O-F-A-M-E-R-I-C-A, 35: I-N-G-O-D-W-E-T-R-U-S-T, 53: G-R-E-A-T-S-E-A-L, and 58: B-A-L-D-E-A-G-L-E, all having to do with currency. It was after figuring the puzzle out in its entirety that I noticed the significance of the shape and the circles. In the four corners of the puzzle there were the letters O-N-E. ONE. One! It was the back of a dollar bill! Upon closer inspection, the puzzle was even more genius in that all of those previously stated answers lined up to their corresponding positions on a fed note. The end result looking something like this:
O N E O N E
T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A
I N G O D W E T R U S T
G R E A T S E A L B A L D E A G L E
When I first opened the paper up to the puzzle, I thought about how weird it was that instead of a perfect square, which is what I have always seen, the box was rectangular in shape, wider than it was long. I pointed this out to female companion even, noting on how bizarre this was. I also noticed that some of the answers had circles within the boxes that highlighted some of the letters in a given answer. I didn’t pay much attention to where these were placed and didn’t spend much time considering what they might mean. Assuming they had something to do with a jumble or something, it didn’t dawn on me for sometime that the Times doesn’t have a jumble despite the fact that a minute before when I told female companion that “I always forget where in the Times the crossword is,” and she tried to help by saying “it’s always next to the funnies,” I commented that it doesn’t have comic strips like most other papers, “just the crossword.” But I didn’t really dwell on it as this led her to make a few remarks on the highbrow paper she called “snooty” asking what kind of paper “doesn’t carry the funnies.”[*] So it wasn’t until I was finished that I noticed the significance of both the rectangle and the circles within it, which were pretty ingenious and original innovations in the art of creating a crossword puzzle, an art form that you don’t see much variation in that I would imagine gets pretty tedious.
The first clue of the puzzle, 1-Across, was “Blood type, briefly,” a clue with several possible answers. When I work a puzzle, I fill in the answers with pen, in which case, I don’t write in answers with multiple answers until I get more clues as to what that answer might be and so I move down the list to the next clue. If I don’t know the answer to that clue I move on to the first one I can, I do this for the entire puzzle. Once I have made my first swipe at it, the thing is a patchy bunch of words that I then go back over to see what else I can fill in I didn’t know the first time and then see if I can start to make sense of the really long ones and ones that are dependent on other answers or clues—pretty standard strategy we are talking about here.
The first clue I got that had circle in it ended up being 64-Across: Ryan of “Love Storey” the answer of which was O-N-E-A-L, O’Neal. Still thinking the only significance of the circles was for some jumble or something, I didn’t pay any mind to the fact that the letters circled were O-N-E. After finishing my first pass, I went back to 1-Across, the answer now, it was clear, had to be O-N-E-G since 1-Down: Choose (to) was O-P-T and 4-Down: Lowly soldier was G-R-U-N-T. If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that the three letters circled in this word were the same three circled in the other, O-N-E. But I wasn’t. You can probably already see where this is going but at that point I did not have a clue.
Mixed in with the bunch of regular clues, there were also the ones that were dependent on other clues like 8-Across: Source of all the tender words in this puzzle, 26-Across: 8-Across issuer, 35-Across: Motto of 26-Across found on the 8-Across, 53-Across: Symbol of 26-Across found on the 8-Across, and again 58-Across: Symbol of 26-Across found on the 8-Across the answers of which are 8: D-O-L-L-A-R, 26: T-H-E-U-N-I-T-E-D-S-T-A-T-E-S-O-F-A-M-E-R-I-C-A, 35: I-N-G-O-D-W-E-T-R-U-S-T, 53: G-R-E-A-T-S-E-A-L, and 58: B-A-L-D-E-A-G-L-E, all having to do with currency. It was after figuring the puzzle out in its entirety that I noticed the significance of the shape and the circles. In the four corners of the puzzle there were the letters O-N-E. ONE. One! It was the back of a dollar bill! Upon closer inspection, the puzzle was even more genius in that all of those previously stated answers lined up to their corresponding positions on a fed note. The end result looking something like this:
O N E O N E
T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A
I N G O D W E T R U S T
G R E A T S E A L B A L D E A G L E
O N E O N E
Very sophisticated, very cool, Blindauer’s crossword puzzle was pretty slick.
[*] Keep in mind that in rural Arkansas; Birmingham, Alabama; and Winston Salem, North Carolina, the paper of choose is not any that come from up north and until recently, when Starbucks started carrying it, the Times was pretty hard to come by. I myself didn’t get my news from that source until high school when someone told me I would really find their movie and book reviews most helpful, which I did/do for the most part, but I didn’t really like reading online at that point† so I still got most my dailies from The Indianapolis Star or The Chicago Herald, the most widely and third most widely read papers in Indianapolis, my hometown, with the second being USA Today that, like the Star, was too conservative for my tastes, but unlike the local publication, there was no local stuff to read about. Even then, the Times was probably a close fourth to the Herald and that was before everyone had the internet it being in the late 1990s, luckily (or possibly unluckily) though, my family had always been one to get the cool new technological advancement with a reasonable price tag‡ and so too were both of my high schools so I haven’t been internet free (excluding my year at Tilton School) since 1996 and I have had it at my disposal ever since. Then, in college, living with a kid from New York for a couple years, who was so notorious for his antics and being an asshole and being dirty, one of many of my friends who were and to be completely honest I was too,
though to me he was the most generous, loyal, and hilarious people I have ever met, with an incredibly New Yorkish name, Benjamin Abraham Golden, only read the Times. All other news was shit. So I too ended up reading it more and more. Since my college days in Ohio, moving all over the East Coast/Midwest from Indianapolis/Bloomington to New Hampshire just outside Boston back to IN and now to NC, I tend to read the Times for my daily news because it is the most available paper that I don’t consider shit and is one of the few consistent things in my life after so much change over the years. So the point of all this is to say that people in the South are not big into Northern publications, the causes for this are probably deep seeded and as old as the colonies, but neither were the people in the Midwest until recently and forget about people in New England, The Boston Globes’ crossword puzzle had its answers in that day’s same daily issue if that is any indicator.
† Still prefer holding an actual paper but I have accepted reading things online as just something I have to get used to which is actually ok since I am trying to save paper anyway.
‡ Things my family got when I was growing up that were cutting edge at the time but under say $500 and when they got them were as follows: Atari/VCR- circa around 1982 as I was too young to remember, Nintendo with Powerpad- 1988, Compact Disc Player- 1991 (my dad loves grunge), CD Burner- 1997, Digital Video Recorder- 1998, DVD Player- 1999, Tivo- 1999. I don’t really even remember why I was putting this in here, though I think it had something to do with how my parents sure do have a lot of technological gadgets for people so closely connected who are deeply environmentally conscious, simple-living, and anti-capitalists. So yeah.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Original and Translated Freestyle Battle
I usually the last person to see stuff like this so this video has probably been around for a year and thus not new to anyone, but if you haven’t seen it, oh my lord are you in for something amazing. At the dinner party my female companion and I hosted last Wednesday, a dinner guest showed us this video which made my mouth and eyes hurt I laughed for so hard and long. I haven’t laughed like that in years. The one on the left is the original battle (untranslated) which, if you watch them in the order I have posted them, it will make the translated version even more hilarious/ridiculous I am told.
Friday, October 3, 2008
New Seeds of Devotion
Personally, I do not watch television, nor do I regularly surf the web, so I end up having a lot of time to read and think about what I read—yet it is never enough. With the schedule I keep, which feels insane, there is rarely a moment when I do not feel the existential dread of constantly being in a hurry. Always on the offensive, in a state of perpetual motion, forever moving from one place to the next or anxious of the awareness of knowing the next place I have to go—all while I try to just breathe. This is more or less what is like for everyone in this postmodern era, at one time or another, literally traveling at breakneck speeds day after day. No one is foreign to this I am sure.
Such times don’t have to be aggravating though because these moments that usually feed our contempt for the world we live in too can prove meaningful. They can even become moments of serious spiritual attainment that confirm something sacred at the basic level of experience unifying all things. Or so Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation contend.
These short spiritual achievements, easy to read yet inspiring, presents the reader with a practical guide in how to center one’s life around God’s Presence. In this feverishly hectic world it difficult to find a place that is not overrun with constant noise and perpetual motion. Thomas Kelly and Thomas Merton, on the other hand, implore us to find this space so that we may obtain the lasting fulfillment of conversing with our Creator in a time in which God was thought dead—a death caused not by Science but by technology and the onslaught of information. Yet Kelly, does this gently, at least when compared to Merton who offers a brand of tough love that cares enough to be cruel when needed.
Merton’s writing is mostly negative in that he spends most of his energy telling the reader what the contemplative life is not and what we should not do, following or followed by a concise declaration of its opposite in positive terms. For instance, one of Merton’s most famous lines on the topic, “not a heaven of separate individuals, each one viewing his own private intuition of God; it is a sea of Love,”[1] works in precisely this way. This sophisticated technique both diagnosis and then cures the problem at hand. Not all instances of this device play out this quickly, some unfold the course of the book.[2] Both this style and Kelly’s more positive, grandfatherly approach—It is a light within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon our faces[3] (ah, that’s the money melon)—have their merits and compliment the other in a harmonic way because what they reveal is ultimate the same message—that it is belief that counts and it is necessary to validate existence. They affirm that in an age of disbelief such as ours, the most
The ritual, undogmatic, unspecific, does not need to be intellectualized to be useful in shaping meaning into one’s life because we already possess it. Kelly tells us that “by inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us,”[4] implying it is what we are meant to do and should come relatively through its very nature. In fact, such abstract thought is part of the problem: it is wholly other to from the loneliness of self-satisfying drive; it cannot be expressed by words alone; it must be experienced to even relate to description. Of this type of over intellectualizing, Merton writes “the whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate…the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth… for the work of rescuing the inner man from automatism belongs first to the Holy Spirit.[5] In other words, to really devote one’s self to the contemplative life, one must actually accept the Holy Spirit as it is instead of trying to make it fit in a way that we choose by intellectualizing it’s nature thereby justifying a degradation of that Spirit. Again Merton tells us “this experience is beyond the reach of verbalization and of rationalization”[6] so to try to experience it by intellect alone is as futile as Ulysses’ efforts to reach the shores of Purgatory by way of boat, a metaphor that Dante uses to warn us that mere intellect will not guide us to the Divine: Using his famous resourcefulness, here equated with intelligence, to “pursue virtue and know the world,”[7] he “rejoiced, but soon it turned to grief,”[8] as the fated journey ended up costing him and his men their lives. Readers of Merton and Kelly’s texts are therefore supposed to open them from ground-zero of their spiritual journey, first learning the basic way to Nothingness, void of self-consciousness, cynicism, of knowing anything in order to dismantle the thought process and hold up to cynical speculation and basically just works.
They doesn’t throw Jesus’ name around all that much—I don’t even recall Kelly mentioning Him. Penance doesn’t seem to matter a great deal either. What is of vital importance though is connecting with the Divine voice in a way that is accessible to all who are listening. Shaped by Kelly’s Quaker faith and Merton’s Trappist monasticism along with Romantic ideals, they attest that there is something else out there that transcends the rat-race, helter-skelter, existentially loathsome modern existence where the only apparent significance one seems to have is economic. Merton corrects us, saying contemplative experience is not “something you can buy,” rather, “it has to be a gift.”[9] And Kelly comforts, “is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself.”[10] In this eternity pressing upon our hearts, one can detect a Wordsworthian message suggesting that focusing on the Heaven and Hell to come after we cease to be is to not only miss the point but to totally have the wrong way of looking at the world and the precious and fragile gift of life. Heaven and Hell are not just here with us, they are actually in us; thus, when we go through life unaware of our own little personal skull-sized prisons and paradises inside our brains or hearts or wherever, religion actually becomes nothing more than the bars to another cell instead of freedom it promises.
To go through life unaware and unmindful of the basic reality of our nature that lies deep within is akin to going through life as though having “had and lost some infinite thing.” In truth, this is exactly what happens when one resorts to their default way of thinking which is how people tend to live for most of their conscious existences. We are so culturally used to thinking like this that Merton calls it a “cliché.” In the following passage, Merton explains that late-date-Americans, in essence, do not think for themselves, instead giving in to the conditioned, negative type of thinking:
immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn't care, he doesn't hear, he doesn't think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés.[11]
As individuals, we, as Americans, are beginning to realize that there is some “cosmic-unconscious” that is making it more and more difficult to attain true satisfaction in default mode and those of us not already dead inside are searching for a better way. But through God’s presence, “we are reduced, as it were, to nothing, for He is all,” and “self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it,”[12] thus our primal needs to connect with something larger are relieved. In this sense, this feeling means fulfillment, contentment, and an end to a deep seeded disappointment that is becoming more common as the culture’s spiritual decline increases toward oblivion.
Lacking existential fulfillment, we lack something that is fundamental to our very being. Deprived of wholeness due to missing one-to-one connection in both a spiritual and an interpersonal sense, an endless cycle of alienation occurs as substitutes instituted in place of the missing piece. The stand-in, lacking substance, always proves inadequate in squelching a hunger hardwired into the human condition, which Merton echoes when he writes:
common life can either make one more…or less of a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates a him from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides him off and separates him from other men and from his true self… / The complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom…It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility.[13]
Disappointment permeates in the secular-disconnected world of material plentitude as the surrogate continues to operate. Replacements—e.g. other deserted people, material goods, entertainment, drugs, etc.—appear as comfort foods to the abandoned soul. Such feelings originate, according to Kelly, because “We are not integrated. We are distraught…And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”[14] The need to fill the void ends up turning solitary beings into worshippers unaware that their chosen idol has been eating them alive. However, the substitute itself is not something that is loved in the way flocks love their protector but the consequence of electing nothing over themselves to truly love. Merton says as such when he writes “keep me from the sins that eat a man's flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured”[15] Long before taking their last breathes, the substitute becomes their agent of self-annihilation for the desperate indefinable desire. The thing coveted—whatever that may be—robbing the individual of its will, is something that is freely embraced as the new deity.
when forced to endure infuriating hassles that require stress inducing urgency within irritating, inconsiderate hordes of people tearing thru the streets in an insane rush to get God only knows while the person in this hypothetical situation must stomach something that has just got to be more important because they think “this is happening to me!” Other people have no place in such think since the individual’s needs and desires are of the utmost importance with impacting consequences that have substance. As such reasoning has it: “My objectives are of greater meaning with higher stakes as mine are the only ones that I understand. Other people’s thoughts must be communicated to me in some way while mine are already here so are more authentic and real; thus my need is more valid, more pressing.” This makes it “easy to identify the sin with the sinner when he is someone other than our own self. In ourselves, it is the other way around; we see the sin, but we have great difficulty in shouldering responsibility for it…[We] tend to interpret our immoral act as an involuntary mistake, or as the malice of a spirit in us that is other than ourself.[16] Again, to this individual, every person who sits at a traffic light or impedes in any form is “in the way.” Tied up with selfish thought, people end up becoming very bitter very quickly since the world does seem to be out to get them. Never does concern that they are in fact the ones obstructing the someone else’s path ever come into their reasoning. Kelly describes this sentiment noting that “there is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days… But there is also removable suffering.”[17]
Demands placed upon people who think this way tend to suspect that these competing and tedious day-to-day necessities are in some way personal, as though the cosmos were taking out some karmic vendetta against them or perhaps the inconveniences were Divinely Inspired. It is to think selfishly, which Merton venemently berates saying Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates…Self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us… is the ultimate development of a pride so great… that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God.”[18] This naturally results from selfish thoughts due to the fact that everything in their immediate perception of reality, they literally find all sensory evidence to place them at the absolute center of the universe. Thinking about things in this way is culturally so heinous that one can’t even admit to it. But nonetheless, we continue to carry on in this way because it is very easy to let ourselves get carried away in our own little imaginary worlds. I know I do when I am not aware of how truly egotistically and inconsiderate my accepted beliefs really, truly are. The ideas that enter into my semiconscious—i.e. fully awake but lacking attention—mind may corroborate beliefs I have that I am the absolute most interesting and entertaining and wise and profound and inspiring person who has every lived. This is even provable and logical when one really thinks about this phenomenon assuming one can think long enough and hard enough in a way that is so culturally repulsive that to acknowledge it is to feel somehow immoral and unjustly exposed as depraved. The worst of it though is that to think in this way is also to think about it and confront this dimension of ourselves that is as undeniable as it is excruciatingly upsetting. This means that we actively end up denying “God the initiator, God the aggressor, God the seeker, God the stirrer into life, God the ground of our obedience, God the giver of the power to become children of God.”[19]
These situations of hopeless inability in the face of societal demands are always, for me anyway, accompanied by existential dread that deals with the necessity to perform a role in said society that lacks any sense of purpose and is void where at a level where well-adjusted people operate and behave as though there is nothing amiss. All the while there is the stressful, incessant, pitiless noise slowly disabling the capacity to function without some degree of rage. Thus, we are thinking but not contemplating when we think about things in a way that is harmful or negative or oppressive to anyone or anything, including ourselves; we are illustrating the exact type of thinking we are not supposed to be undertaking. However, Kelly promises us “there is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, with a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”[20] But unless the interior voice is turned off, self-conscious thinking, not contemplation, results; instead of the intended self-discovery, one remains closed and hidden, or in Merton’s words, these people will “never succeed in being themselves.”[21]
Their message is really pretty simple when one thinks about it—a cliché even. For instance, Merton writes:
The way to contemplation is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so, for a contemplative, there is supreme value in the ordinary everyday routine of work, poverty, hardship and monotony that characterize the lives of all the poor, uninteresting and forgotten people in the world.[22]
But like most statements of profound wonder, the simplicity of it is what ends up paradoxically making it so profound in the first place. This is often the reason we tend to overlook truths that are so significant. Having been there all along, they become banal and people lose sight of their importance with so many other things demanding our attention. The deepest realities in life are always the ones most difficult to hear.
Once one obtains the ability to actually listen, many a door to happiness and contentment will open up and liberate the soul from its confinement. All one has to do is use their inner ear. When this takes place, life becomes simplified and the noise pollution becomes bearable. With obedience to the voice’s call comes a peace making one appear poised and calm. In Merton’s words:
There is only one true flight from the world…the flight from disunity and separation, to unity… the ‘world’… [Christ said] His disciples were in but not of it? The world is the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell…But if you try to escape from this world by leaving the city and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you into solitude, and yet you can be entirely out of the world while remaining in the midst of it, if you let God set you free from your own selfishness and if you live for love alone.[23]
The outward reflects the inward in such a case as the mind becomes tranquil having turned off the incessant inner monologue that is by sheer ontology 99% selfish thought because in some way, almost every thing that pops into one’s mind is implicit or explicitly about one’s self. In learning to truly listen, individuals naturally become less self-centered as they consciously attempt to dispel the regular modes of thinking in favor of infinitely deeper ones.
Deciding the thing to put absolute faith in becomes even more important since both manifestations of our inner longing, positive and negative, find residence within the individual. Choose wisely, the object of affection liberates the soul and releases it into the next life; choose poorly, the object kills the host amounting to a victim of a bloodless utilitarianism good is equated with literal “cash-value” in that it is nothing more than satisfying demand. For Merton, the only alternative is contemplation which he calls the “highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive…a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source.”[24] There is no way around the fact that people are, utterly and only, the thing that gets chosen to love that one would die without. But when people choose correctly, they paradoxically experience “this total Instruction proceeds in two opposing directions at once. We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions – contemptus mundi. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world – amor mundi.”[25]
But, living without knowing any inner voice other than our own is a recipe for disaster since our species is notoriously horrible at determining what is actually good, and considering America’s addiction to pleasure, the likeliness of choosing something beyond immediate self-gratification is remote. Therefore, Kelly is correct in asserting that “An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the last vestige of earthly security is gone. It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but/ we haven't believed it.”[26] Such denial has lead to an unhealthy relationship with the mind and thought in hyper-self-consciousness obsessing about one’s self and about continuing to do it. That much despair in a life with few exterior threats to existence takes residence in the head comes as little surprise with constant commentary going on all the time. More disturbing, although no more staggering, is the fact that the majority of suicides occur by firearm shots to the head, identifying satisfaction in this case with desiring not wanting to suffer being a self at all.[27] The illusion of self-erasure, in any form, provides not escape but leads to a state of oblivion—i.e. more despair. This ultimately results, according to Merton, because the individual “tried to be like something else, which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.”[28] “Therefore,” he adds, “ the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” Because he sees God as granting us free will, we are “free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear one mask and then another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own face.” But choosing such an existence will guartee a life filled with isolation and unhappiness and “if we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that true eludes us when we finally come to need it!” One must choose to listen to that inner call since “the secret of my full identity is hidden in Him…But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is in secret I can learn from no one else but Him. There is no way of attaining to the secret without faith. Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and happiness depends; to discover myself in discovering God.”
One of the major hindrances keeping us out of touch with our inner, spiritual selves, I contend and believe Merton and Kelly would concur is our cultural addiction to entertainment. As stated previously, when the spirit goes untapped and one is shut off from a Higher Power which allows that person to function in society without going completely insane, it is a major problem indeed. The main factor in not achieving this for the majority of Westerners is a direct result of constant being distracted so as never to develop a spiritual connection or a true understanding of self. In living such an inundated life, Merton says “Mere living in the midst of other men does not guarantee that we live in communion with them, or even in communication with them. Who has less to the communicate than the mass-man? Very often it is the solitary who has the most to say; not that he uses many words, but what he says is new, substantial, unique. It is his own. Even though he says very little, he has something to communicate, something personal which he is able to share with others. He has something real to give, because he himself is real.”[29] The problem with entertainment then, as opposed to contemplation, is not gaining encyclopedic knowledge for such information communicates the least.
If that were the case, the advantage would clearly way in a viewer’s favor since television fires constant information open its audience while it takes time to read a book and absorb its hidden meaning—that is to say what it affirms/encourages as well as diagnoses/critiques within ourselves—while there is too much to take in through a fast-paced medium. The really important kind of knowledge is based on a deeper understanding that mere facts could never convey—some degree of experience must be involved. It is through such experiences that one develops the true ability to empathize since undergoing this transformation “plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of attachment. And He hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together carry it in infinitely tender love.”[30] 20 Yet, spending time in deep thought is taxing after a while but the difficulty of it grants access to much of its pleasure because it is demanding; television, conversely, adheres to a strict pleasure-seeking-agenda and is therefore immensely more unimposing.
Further more, the only stipulation before internet made spontaneous transmission a reality was the fact that one had to be in front of a TV at a certain time to watch a certain show. Now, via internet downloads, viewers now control 100% of what they watch at any given time in coddled environments that are increasingly cage-like. That is the real point of spiritual refinement, to step out of one’s cage and find that there are no more bars holding him/her in another prison but a way out of the skull-sized cell that we all must escape for true liberation. Once this is experienced, “one emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real.[31] Because there is nothing more important than to really live and know you are alive; this is a well-being that is unattainable through commerce. In fact, it is proof that life really does mean something.
[1] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 65
[2] The first two chapters, “What is Contemplation?” and “What Contemplation is Not”, are telling by their names alone, displaying themes that appear throughout the book.
[3] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 3.
[4] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 43.
[5] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 108.
[6] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 6.
[7]Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. H. Sisson, (Oxford: University Press, 1998), Inferno XXVI. 120.
[8] Dante, Inferno XXVI: 136
[9] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 185.
[10]Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 3.
[11] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 55.
[12] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 31.
[13] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 55-6.
[14] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 92.
[15] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 44.
[16] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 112-3.
[17] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 42.
[18] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 180.
[19] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 26.
[20] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 9.
[21] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 98.
[22] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 250.
[23] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 78-9.
[24] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 1.
[25] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 19.
[26] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, pp. 41-2.
[27] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/ss/ss5002.pdf
[28] The following series of quotes are taken from pages 35-36 of Merton’s text.
[29] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 54.
[30] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 20.
[31] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 31.
During my research, I found a review by one D. Findlay on Amazon which you can read here that was pretty hilarious and spot on. Had this not been for a class where professors tend to be pretty sensitive about the texts they assign, I would have been more critical of Merton's negativity. But such were the facts and I can't deny the reality of that situation.
Such times don’t have to be aggravating though because these moments that usually feed our contempt for the world we live in too can prove meaningful. They can even become moments of serious spiritual attainment that confirm something sacred at the basic level of experience unifying all things. Or so Thomas Kelly’s A Testament of Devotion and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation contend.
These short spiritual achievements, easy to read yet inspiring, presents the reader with a practical guide in how to center one’s life around God’s Presence. In this feverishly hectic world it difficult to find a place that is not overrun with constant noise and perpetual motion. Thomas Kelly and Thomas Merton, on the other hand, implore us to find this space so that we may obtain the lasting fulfillment of conversing with our Creator in a time in which God was thought dead—a death caused not by Science but by technology and the onslaught of information. Yet Kelly, does this gently, at least when compared to Merton who offers a brand of tough love that cares enough to be cruel when needed.
Merton’s writing is mostly negative in that he spends most of his energy telling the reader what the contemplative life is not and what we should not do, following or followed by a concise declaration of its opposite in positive terms. For instance, one of Merton’s most famous lines on the topic, “not a heaven of separate individuals, each one viewing his own private intuition of God; it is a sea of Love,”[1] works in precisely this way. This sophisticated technique both diagnosis and then cures the problem at hand. Not all instances of this device play out this quickly, some unfold the course of the book.[2] Both this style and Kelly’s more positive, grandfatherly approach—It is a light within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon our faces[3] (ah, that’s the money melon)—have their merits and compliment the other in a harmonic way because what they reveal is ultimate the same message—that it is belief that counts and it is necessary to validate existence. They affirm that in an age of disbelief such as ours, the most
The ritual, undogmatic, unspecific, does not need to be intellectualized to be useful in shaping meaning into one’s life because we already possess it. Kelly tells us that “by inner persuasions He draws us to a few very definite tasks, our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizing His burdens in us,”[4] implying it is what we are meant to do and should come relatively through its very nature. In fact, such abstract thought is part of the problem: it is wholly other to from the loneliness of self-satisfying drive; it cannot be expressed by words alone; it must be experienced to even relate to description. Of this type of over intellectualizing, Merton writes “the whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate…the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth… for the work of rescuing the inner man from automatism belongs first to the Holy Spirit.[5] In other words, to really devote one’s self to the contemplative life, one must actually accept the Holy Spirit as it is instead of trying to make it fit in a way that we choose by intellectualizing it’s nature thereby justifying a degradation of that Spirit. Again Merton tells us “this experience is beyond the reach of verbalization and of rationalization”[6] so to try to experience it by intellect alone is as futile as Ulysses’ efforts to reach the shores of Purgatory by way of boat, a metaphor that Dante uses to warn us that mere intellect will not guide us to the Divine: Using his famous resourcefulness, here equated with intelligence, to “pursue virtue and know the world,”[7] he “rejoiced, but soon it turned to grief,”[8] as the fated journey ended up costing him and his men their lives. Readers of Merton and Kelly’s texts are therefore supposed to open them from ground-zero of their spiritual journey, first learning the basic way to Nothingness, void of self-consciousness, cynicism, of knowing anything in order to dismantle the thought process and hold up to cynical speculation and basically just works.
They doesn’t throw Jesus’ name around all that much—I don’t even recall Kelly mentioning Him. Penance doesn’t seem to matter a great deal either. What is of vital importance though is connecting with the Divine voice in a way that is accessible to all who are listening. Shaped by Kelly’s Quaker faith and Merton’s Trappist monasticism along with Romantic ideals, they attest that there is something else out there that transcends the rat-race, helter-skelter, existentially loathsome modern existence where the only apparent significance one seems to have is economic. Merton corrects us, saying contemplative experience is not “something you can buy,” rather, “it has to be a gift.”[9] And Kelly comforts, “is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself.”[10] In this eternity pressing upon our hearts, one can detect a Wordsworthian message suggesting that focusing on the Heaven and Hell to come after we cease to be is to not only miss the point but to totally have the wrong way of looking at the world and the precious and fragile gift of life. Heaven and Hell are not just here with us, they are actually in us; thus, when we go through life unaware of our own little personal skull-sized prisons and paradises inside our brains or hearts or wherever, religion actually becomes nothing more than the bars to another cell instead of freedom it promises.
To go through life unaware and unmindful of the basic reality of our nature that lies deep within is akin to going through life as though having “had and lost some infinite thing.” In truth, this is exactly what happens when one resorts to their default way of thinking which is how people tend to live for most of their conscious existences. We are so culturally used to thinking like this that Merton calls it a “cliché.” In the following passage, Merton explains that late-date-Americans, in essence, do not think for themselves, instead giving in to the conditioned, negative type of thinking:
immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn't care, he doesn't hear, he doesn't think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés.[11]
As individuals, we, as Americans, are beginning to realize that there is some “cosmic-unconscious” that is making it more and more difficult to attain true satisfaction in default mode and those of us not already dead inside are searching for a better way. But through God’s presence, “we are reduced, as it were, to nothing, for He is all,” and “self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it,”[12] thus our primal needs to connect with something larger are relieved. In this sense, this feeling means fulfillment, contentment, and an end to a deep seeded disappointment that is becoming more common as the culture’s spiritual decline increases toward oblivion.
Lacking existential fulfillment, we lack something that is fundamental to our very being. Deprived of wholeness due to missing one-to-one connection in both a spiritual and an interpersonal sense, an endless cycle of alienation occurs as substitutes instituted in place of the missing piece. The stand-in, lacking substance, always proves inadequate in squelching a hunger hardwired into the human condition, which Merton echoes when he writes:
common life can either make one more…or less of a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates a him from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides him off and separates him from other men and from his true self… / The complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom…It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility.[13]
Disappointment permeates in the secular-disconnected world of material plentitude as the surrogate continues to operate. Replacements—e.g. other deserted people, material goods, entertainment, drugs, etc.—appear as comfort foods to the abandoned soul. Such feelings originate, according to Kelly, because “We are not integrated. We are distraught…And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”[14] The need to fill the void ends up turning solitary beings into worshippers unaware that their chosen idol has been eating them alive. However, the substitute itself is not something that is loved in the way flocks love their protector but the consequence of electing nothing over themselves to truly love. Merton says as such when he writes “keep me from the sins that eat a man's flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured”[15] Long before taking their last breathes, the substitute becomes their agent of self-annihilation for the desperate indefinable desire. The thing coveted—whatever that may be—robbing the individual of its will, is something that is freely embraced as the new deity.
when forced to endure infuriating hassles that require stress inducing urgency within irritating, inconsiderate hordes of people tearing thru the streets in an insane rush to get God only knows while the person in this hypothetical situation must stomach something that has just got to be more important because they think “this is happening to me!” Other people have no place in such think since the individual’s needs and desires are of the utmost importance with impacting consequences that have substance. As such reasoning has it: “My objectives are of greater meaning with higher stakes as mine are the only ones that I understand. Other people’s thoughts must be communicated to me in some way while mine are already here so are more authentic and real; thus my need is more valid, more pressing.” This makes it “easy to identify the sin with the sinner when he is someone other than our own self. In ourselves, it is the other way around; we see the sin, but we have great difficulty in shouldering responsibility for it…[We] tend to interpret our immoral act as an involuntary mistake, or as the malice of a spirit in us that is other than ourself.[16] Again, to this individual, every person who sits at a traffic light or impedes in any form is “in the way.” Tied up with selfish thought, people end up becoming very bitter very quickly since the world does seem to be out to get them. Never does concern that they are in fact the ones obstructing the someone else’s path ever come into their reasoning. Kelly describes this sentiment noting that “there is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days… But there is also removable suffering.”[17]
Demands placed upon people who think this way tend to suspect that these competing and tedious day-to-day necessities are in some way personal, as though the cosmos were taking out some karmic vendetta against them or perhaps the inconveniences were Divinely Inspired. It is to think selfishly, which Merton venemently berates saying Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates…Self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us… is the ultimate development of a pride so great… that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God.”[18] This naturally results from selfish thoughts due to the fact that everything in their immediate perception of reality, they literally find all sensory evidence to place them at the absolute center of the universe. Thinking about things in this way is culturally so heinous that one can’t even admit to it. But nonetheless, we continue to carry on in this way because it is very easy to let ourselves get carried away in our own little imaginary worlds. I know I do when I am not aware of how truly egotistically and inconsiderate my accepted beliefs really, truly are. The ideas that enter into my semiconscious—i.e. fully awake but lacking attention—mind may corroborate beliefs I have that I am the absolute most interesting and entertaining and wise and profound and inspiring person who has every lived. This is even provable and logical when one really thinks about this phenomenon assuming one can think long enough and hard enough in a way that is so culturally repulsive that to acknowledge it is to feel somehow immoral and unjustly exposed as depraved. The worst of it though is that to think in this way is also to think about it and confront this dimension of ourselves that is as undeniable as it is excruciatingly upsetting. This means that we actively end up denying “God the initiator, God the aggressor, God the seeker, God the stirrer into life, God the ground of our obedience, God the giver of the power to become children of God.”[19]
These situations of hopeless inability in the face of societal demands are always, for me anyway, accompanied by existential dread that deals with the necessity to perform a role in said society that lacks any sense of purpose and is void where at a level where well-adjusted people operate and behave as though there is nothing amiss. All the while there is the stressful, incessant, pitiless noise slowly disabling the capacity to function without some degree of rage. Thus, we are thinking but not contemplating when we think about things in a way that is harmful or negative or oppressive to anyone or anything, including ourselves; we are illustrating the exact type of thinking we are not supposed to be undertaking. However, Kelly promises us “there is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, with a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”[20] But unless the interior voice is turned off, self-conscious thinking, not contemplation, results; instead of the intended self-discovery, one remains closed and hidden, or in Merton’s words, these people will “never succeed in being themselves.”[21]
Their message is really pretty simple when one thinks about it—a cliché even. For instance, Merton writes:
The way to contemplation is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so, for a contemplative, there is supreme value in the ordinary everyday routine of work, poverty, hardship and monotony that characterize the lives of all the poor, uninteresting and forgotten people in the world.[22]
But like most statements of profound wonder, the simplicity of it is what ends up paradoxically making it so profound in the first place. This is often the reason we tend to overlook truths that are so significant. Having been there all along, they become banal and people lose sight of their importance with so many other things demanding our attention. The deepest realities in life are always the ones most difficult to hear.
Once one obtains the ability to actually listen, many a door to happiness and contentment will open up and liberate the soul from its confinement. All one has to do is use their inner ear. When this takes place, life becomes simplified and the noise pollution becomes bearable. With obedience to the voice’s call comes a peace making one appear poised and calm. In Merton’s words:
There is only one true flight from the world…the flight from disunity and separation, to unity… the ‘world’… [Christ said] His disciples were in but not of it? The world is the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell…But if you try to escape from this world by leaving the city and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you into solitude, and yet you can be entirely out of the world while remaining in the midst of it, if you let God set you free from your own selfishness and if you live for love alone.[23]
The outward reflects the inward in such a case as the mind becomes tranquil having turned off the incessant inner monologue that is by sheer ontology 99% selfish thought because in some way, almost every thing that pops into one’s mind is implicit or explicitly about one’s self. In learning to truly listen, individuals naturally become less self-centered as they consciously attempt to dispel the regular modes of thinking in favor of infinitely deeper ones.
Deciding the thing to put absolute faith in becomes even more important since both manifestations of our inner longing, positive and negative, find residence within the individual. Choose wisely, the object of affection liberates the soul and releases it into the next life; choose poorly, the object kills the host amounting to a victim of a bloodless utilitarianism good is equated with literal “cash-value” in that it is nothing more than satisfying demand. For Merton, the only alternative is contemplation which he calls the “highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive…a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source.”[24] There is no way around the fact that people are, utterly and only, the thing that gets chosen to love that one would die without. But when people choose correctly, they paradoxically experience “this total Instruction proceeds in two opposing directions at once. We are torn loose from earthly attachments and ambitions – contemptus mundi. And we are quickened to a divine but painful concern for the world – amor mundi.”[25]
But, living without knowing any inner voice other than our own is a recipe for disaster since our species is notoriously horrible at determining what is actually good, and considering America’s addiction to pleasure, the likeliness of choosing something beyond immediate self-gratification is remote. Therefore, Kelly is correct in asserting that “An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the last vestige of earthly security is gone. It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but/ we haven't believed it.”[26] Such denial has lead to an unhealthy relationship with the mind and thought in hyper-self-consciousness obsessing about one’s self and about continuing to do it. That much despair in a life with few exterior threats to existence takes residence in the head comes as little surprise with constant commentary going on all the time. More disturbing, although no more staggering, is the fact that the majority of suicides occur by firearm shots to the head, identifying satisfaction in this case with desiring not wanting to suffer being a self at all.[27] The illusion of self-erasure, in any form, provides not escape but leads to a state of oblivion—i.e. more despair. This ultimately results, according to Merton, because the individual “tried to be like something else, which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.”[28] “Therefore,” he adds, “ the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” Because he sees God as granting us free will, we are “free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear one mask and then another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own face.” But choosing such an existence will guartee a life filled with isolation and unhappiness and “if we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that true eludes us when we finally come to need it!” One must choose to listen to that inner call since “the secret of my full identity is hidden in Him…But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is in secret I can learn from no one else but Him. There is no way of attaining to the secret without faith. Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and happiness depends; to discover myself in discovering God.”
One of the major hindrances keeping us out of touch with our inner, spiritual selves, I contend and believe Merton and Kelly would concur is our cultural addiction to entertainment. As stated previously, when the spirit goes untapped and one is shut off from a Higher Power which allows that person to function in society without going completely insane, it is a major problem indeed. The main factor in not achieving this for the majority of Westerners is a direct result of constant being distracted so as never to develop a spiritual connection or a true understanding of self. In living such an inundated life, Merton says “Mere living in the midst of other men does not guarantee that we live in communion with them, or even in communication with them. Who has less to the communicate than the mass-man? Very often it is the solitary who has the most to say; not that he uses many words, but what he says is new, substantial, unique. It is his own. Even though he says very little, he has something to communicate, something personal which he is able to share with others. He has something real to give, because he himself is real.”[29] The problem with entertainment then, as opposed to contemplation, is not gaining encyclopedic knowledge for such information communicates the least.
If that were the case, the advantage would clearly way in a viewer’s favor since television fires constant information open its audience while it takes time to read a book and absorb its hidden meaning—that is to say what it affirms/encourages as well as diagnoses/critiques within ourselves—while there is too much to take in through a fast-paced medium. The really important kind of knowledge is based on a deeper understanding that mere facts could never convey—some degree of experience must be involved. It is through such experiences that one develops the true ability to empathize since undergoing this transformation “plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of attachment. And He hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together carry it in infinitely tender love.”[30] 20 Yet, spending time in deep thought is taxing after a while but the difficulty of it grants access to much of its pleasure because it is demanding; television, conversely, adheres to a strict pleasure-seeking-agenda and is therefore immensely more unimposing.
Further more, the only stipulation before internet made spontaneous transmission a reality was the fact that one had to be in front of a TV at a certain time to watch a certain show. Now, via internet downloads, viewers now control 100% of what they watch at any given time in coddled environments that are increasingly cage-like. That is the real point of spiritual refinement, to step out of one’s cage and find that there are no more bars holding him/her in another prison but a way out of the skull-sized cell that we all must escape for true liberation. Once this is experienced, “one emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real.[31] Because there is nothing more important than to really live and know you are alive; this is a well-being that is unattainable through commerce. In fact, it is proof that life really does mean something.
[1] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 65
[2] The first two chapters, “What is Contemplation?” and “What Contemplation is Not”, are telling by their names alone, displaying themes that appear throughout the book.
[3] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 3.
[4] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 43.
[5] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 108.
[6] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 6.
[7]Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. H. Sisson, (Oxford: University Press, 1998), Inferno XXVI. 120.
[8] Dante, Inferno XXVI: 136
[9] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 185.
[10]Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 3.
[11] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 55.
[12] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 31.
[13] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 55-6.
[14] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 92.
[15] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 44.
[16] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 112-3.
[17] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 42.
[18] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 180.
[19] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 26.
[20] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 9.
[21] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 98.
[22] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 250.
[23] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 78-9.
[24] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 1.
[25] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 19.
[26] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, pp. 41-2.
[27] http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/ss/ss5002.pdf
[28] The following series of quotes are taken from pages 35-36 of Merton’s text.
[29] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 54.
[30] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 20.
[31] Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, p. 31.
During my research, I found a review by one D. Findlay on Amazon which you can read here that was pretty hilarious and spot on. Had this not been for a class where professors tend to be pretty sensitive about the texts they assign, I would have been more critical of Merton's negativity. But such were the facts and I can't deny the reality of that situation.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Dan Brown Shadow
Matthew Pearl, whose debut novel The Dante Club, seen in many an airport travel station book section, surprised me as an enjoyable and creative read. When writing a book of historical fiction like this one, it is hard to stay clear of comparison to Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code which is, let’s say, umm, misleading and not taken seriously at all as a source of history or as a work of literature. Pearl’s first novel found it’s self lumped in with the genre that Brown is famous for, he even has a Brown sound byte on the cover, seemingly to get people to draw this association. This has to do with audience and marketing assuming, correctly for the most part, that people who read The Davinci Code would also like this other book with the same initials (TDC) while academics would write it off as crap if they took notice of it at all.
Its plot was sort of ludicrous; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a team of Harvard poets/scholars go about solving a case of a serial killer who uses the Inferno as his inspiration in doing the deeds. It wasn’t a serious work of art, no, but it was clever enough to keep me reading and as far as it went into perhaps the greatest work of literature of all time, The Divine Comedy (another TDC title), it wasn’t at least wrong. There are even some analyses I found insightful with regards to Dante’s work.
Pearl’s follow up, The Poe Shadow, which attempted a similar endeavor involving a fictional amateur sleuth trying to solve the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe, however, is pre-Poe-sterous. The reader is supposed to care about Poe and his demise as Quinton Clark, the hapless narrator who cares way too much about his literary hero, but in the end we aren’t Poe obsessed and take on the role of Peter, his adopted brother—don’t ask—recommending that he get his life together and give up on this fruitless endeavor.
With DFW’s tragic end earlier this month, I have to admit it is tempting to fixate on the writer whose words bring you joy like no other and you live in anticipation of getting to read new ones. But when the author dies, you are left with the body of work that they left and that is all you are ever going to get. Thus you end up obsessing on what is there and, as Pearl’s novel illustrates, what is not.
The book claims to provide definitive answers to the questions about what happened to Poe in his final days with recently uncovered evidence “never before published,” but the evidence Pearl provides through his mouthpiece Clark is rather dubious and therefore not definitive. If you are looking for a nice, easy, fun read in this mystery, you are surely to come away with less than this book claims to answer. Go with something by Paul Auster if existential mysteries are your bag and Don DeLillo, Mark Costello, or Phillip Roth if you are more interested in alternate versions/accounts of history.
Its plot was sort of ludicrous; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a team of Harvard poets/scholars go about solving a case of a serial killer who uses the Inferno as his inspiration in doing the deeds. It wasn’t a serious work of art, no, but it was clever enough to keep me reading and as far as it went into perhaps the greatest work of literature of all time, The Divine Comedy (another TDC title), it wasn’t at least wrong. There are even some analyses I found insightful with regards to Dante’s work.
Pearl’s follow up, The Poe Shadow, which attempted a similar endeavor involving a fictional amateur sleuth trying to solve the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe, however, is pre-Poe-sterous. The reader is supposed to care about Poe and his demise as Quinton Clark, the hapless narrator who cares way too much about his literary hero, but in the end we aren’t Poe obsessed and take on the role of Peter, his adopted brother—don’t ask—recommending that he get his life together and give up on this fruitless endeavor.
With DFW’s tragic end earlier this month, I have to admit it is tempting to fixate on the writer whose words bring you joy like no other and you live in anticipation of getting to read new ones. But when the author dies, you are left with the body of work that they left and that is all you are ever going to get. Thus you end up obsessing on what is there and, as Pearl’s novel illustrates, what is not.
The book claims to provide definitive answers to the questions about what happened to Poe in his final days with recently uncovered evidence “never before published,” but the evidence Pearl provides through his mouthpiece Clark is rather dubious and therefore not definitive. If you are looking for a nice, easy, fun read in this mystery, you are surely to come away with less than this book claims to answer. Go with something by Paul Auster if existential mysteries are your bag and Don DeLillo, Mark Costello, or Phillip Roth if you are more interested in alternate versions/accounts of history.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Grieving teams learn hard lessons after tragedy
Here is the piece:
Last Friday’s match up that pitted the now 1-4 Glenn Bobcats against the 2-3 R.J. Reynolds Demons would to most observers appear like a game hardly worth notice in its mediocrity. However, in this unexpected setting, there was a supreme truth to be learned with life-or-death significance void of self-interest or cynicism. It was a parable of hope.
One month ago, Reynolds linebacker Matt Gfeller died in a horrible anomaly and in his honor they have worn no.57 decals and patches. They’re also a reminder that adolescent myths of invincibility and immortality to committed pursuits get shattered when reality proves fragile and temporal and directed by forces beyond control. Yet they must play on, as their teammate cannot.
Talking about how his team has held up, Reynolds coach Mike Propst vented “anything we do, win or lose, on or off the field, you know… whatever,” considering how unimportant a loss becomes when compelled to think about bigger issues.
However, in the midst of an excruciating situation, players have learned a deep truth novelist David Foster Wallace, who woefully died last week, said in his commencement address at Kenyon College, “involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
“Sports have a way of healing things,” Propst said. He added that their opponents have done some “wonderful things” to make the burden easier to bare, but Glenn “did some extra things they didn’t have to do and that’s just been special.”
One such thing came soon after the horror when Glenn coach Dickie Cline, who not so long ago had a player pass, interrupted practice to talk about issues more serious than sports—assuming one thinks that possible—when he declared the obvious but overlooked truth that life is cruelly and unbelievably short.
“We do not know when it is going to be taken,” he said. “That is why you need to live your life to the fullest and to make sure your right with the-Man-Upstairs. Because you never know when its your turn.” This televised message for players to take responsibility and own up to their true interior selves was also an act of mercy since it took just a little attention off of the traumatized Reynolds community.
Though Cline would never say it, his team faces similar yet far less consequential dismay with their recent slump. But confident in his team’s “men of character,” there is hope that “something positive will ignite this team.”
When tragedy strikes the self-contained world of football, it paradoxically makes everyone more cognizant of the world off field since it refuses to indulge the fantasy of a seamless break between realities. There, things like personal character and communal disposition become extremely important to success. To deal with a player removed from not only his role on the team but from all aspects of life is a transcendentally profound and sad experience—teams have come apart when a player changes clubs or gets sidelined for a few weeks. Yet, as Cline’s words also pointed toward, through the tragedy there comes the more important awareness that life actually means something beyond self-interest.
Reynolds won the game 34-0.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
My Limited and Biased Top 50
I will say that list is more like the 50 books that had the most profound and lasting effect on my rather than a favorites list per se. The common denominator here with these books is that I read each and everyone of them at a time that I felt they were needed. Some of these books have become less and less significant as a piece of my world but nevertheless are still in some ways near and dear if only for nostalgia. Some of these books listed had an embarrassing amount of sway when I was younger and now I sort of wonder how. But my memory for things is ridiculous so even if I would wish to forget the fact that some of the books that really got me passionate about reading I can barely get through a few pages of now—every Stephen King book on this list would be an example of that—which comes with more mature tastes in literature as well as life experience. Another few oddities that I am sure have to do more with who I was when I read them as opposed to who I am now are books that I have read multiple times and either surprised me at how I hadn’t liked it so much the first go around but rocked my worldview with another inspection but the reverse has also been true a couple of times. An example of the latter that is still very fresh in my mind since I finally got around to rereading it after tracing it back to more or less the instant I decided I wanted to major in English and write for a living instead of doing something I would have hated. This book is that of Fahrenheit 451 which just about caused my head to explode as a sophomore in high school but when I read it again after living ten years and a couple of months, in which time I changed schools from the crappy public school that made us read it, to the dream-come-true-those-kids-are-so-lucky-to-go-there private school across town (praise the Lord I had an outstanding jump shot and an ability to de-cleat kids with extreme prejudice); went to a good college I never would have thought about going to had I not an absurd affinity for books; taught at a high school where I pushed postmodern literature on my kids to get them to care about books as I do, some of whom at least tell me that my strategies worked; went to grad school at another good school and read and read and now I write professionally (among other things). But last week when I read Bradbury again, I found his work to be pretty juvenile. So it goes I guess, but I think that was the start of my interest in “serious fiction” so it has a higher spot than I would at first want to place it because I try to take a book’s impact on my person as a whole from childhood until another one come along to drastically alter the way I see the world. Some of my selections aren’t even real books either, some are poems and plays and oral histories record much later. Others, like the Bible for instance, I have left off because I am not sure as to the extent it has over my being because it is interwoven into the American fabric—for good or bad I am not going to judge—and to include it is sort of a cop out eliciting basically a “no duh” when someone responds to my questions directed at knowing them better. That said, here it goes.
1. The Divine Comedy
2. Infinite Jest
3. Paradise Lost
4. The Canterbury Tales
5. Fahrenheit 451
6. King Lear
7. The Stranger
8. Macbeth
9. Hamlet
10. The Everlasting Gospel
11. Consider the Lobster
12. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
13. Lord of the Flies
14. The Life and Times of Michael K
15. The Aeneid
16. The Brothers Karamazov
17. Beowulf
18. Death Be Not Proud
19. The Corrections
20. A Clockwork Orange
21. As I Lay Dying
22. Brave New World
23. A Confederacy of Dunces
24. Bhagavad-Gita
25. To the Lighthouse
26. Waiting for the Barbarians
27. How To Be Alone
28. Timbuktu
29. The Catcher in the Rye
30. White Noise
31. The Magician’s Nephew
32. The Book of Illusions
33. The Medium is the Massage
34. Mr. Vertigo
35. Crying of Lot 49
36. The Iliad
37. The Hobbit
38. Ulysses
39. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again
40. You Shall Know Our Velocity!
41. Catch-22
42. Slaughterhouse-Five
43. Doctor Faustus
44. Things Fall Apart
45. A Farewell to Arms
46. Billy Budd
47. An Enemy of the People
48. The Grapes of Wrath
49. Darkness at Noon
50. The Green Mile
1. The Divine Comedy
2. Infinite Jest
3. Paradise Lost
4. The Canterbury Tales
5. Fahrenheit 451
6. King Lear
7. The Stranger
8. Macbeth
9. Hamlet
10. The Everlasting Gospel
11. Consider the Lobster
12. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
13. Lord of the Flies
14. The Life and Times of Michael K
15. The Aeneid
16. The Brothers Karamazov
17. Beowulf
18. Death Be Not Proud
19. The Corrections
20. A Clockwork Orange
21. As I Lay Dying
22. Brave New World
23. A Confederacy of Dunces
24. Bhagavad-Gita
25. To the Lighthouse
26. Waiting for the Barbarians
27. How To Be Alone
28. Timbuktu
29. The Catcher in the Rye
30. White Noise
31. The Magician’s Nephew
32. The Book of Illusions
33. The Medium is the Massage
34. Mr. Vertigo
35. Crying of Lot 49
36. The Iliad
37. The Hobbit
38. Ulysses
39. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again
40. You Shall Know Our Velocity!
41. Catch-22
42. Slaughterhouse-Five
43. Doctor Faustus
44. Things Fall Apart
45. A Farewell to Arms
46. Billy Budd
47. An Enemy of the People
48. The Grapes of Wrath
49. Darkness at Noon
50. The Green Mile
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Dead At 46: David Foster Wallace Hanged Himself and It Will Never Make Sense
DFW, who is my favorite writer of all time and the inspiration for the name of this blog (from his novel Infinite Jest) and the first contemporary writer who has a substantial amount of work out there that I have read in its entirety, who I witnessed give the commencement address to end all commencement addresses—Kenyon College Class of 2005—which I turn to whenever I think about how working in the service industry makes me want to stick my head in a microwave or think about how much I hated grad school or anything really that I just can’t deal with in a rational way, who I talk about everyday to my girl friend’s annoyance, has just taken himself off the map. It sucks and I am as sad as anyone can be over the death of someone I don’t actually know.
I don’t watch TV. I don’t care about celebrity culture. And I don’t shed tears for anyone outside of my most nearest and dearest. But Don Gately got my eyes flowing at a time when the end of my then current relationship to a girl I had loved since high school never did. I saw a lot of Gately in myself as a once “near great” football player who is “massive” who found work with a bookie and is an alcoholic with an affinity for Demerol. Plus I read the book while teaching at a boarding school outside of Boston, a job that I hated, yet found comfort in this work of splendid fiction.
It is no wander that IJ has been called “the grunge American novel.” Kurt Cobain and to a lesser extent Layne Staley (though the music of Alice in Chains had a more profound effect on me, I had mourned for Staley long before they found him dead) were the only other quote unquote celebrities that moved me in anyway, one was also a suicide, and I find that my heart ache this time around is even more awful. Cobain and Staley pointed out how shitty the world is and while listening to their music, I felt momentary release and continue to. With DFW though, I find ways to connect with other people and to see the world as a less hostile place, which Nirvana/Alice in Chains/Mad Season definitively did not do.
When I first heard about the death of my literary hero, it was from the person who probably knows me better than anyone else, my girl friend whom I live with and love and who understands that this is the one person in the world outside of my close and very small circle whose death would have a devastating effect on me. I was in the can at my shitty, shitty job, risking dismissal for having my phone out and in use, hitting send on my missed call from “The PGOAT”, which I typed in on the night we met, and on this night, when she began to talk, I was afraid that Darth Maul, the black cat we are cabbaging from our neighbors, had been run over by a car. No, thank God, but in the long run it was something much worse. Sara, the girl friend, has made me promise, before and again on this evening, that I would not do that to her—hang or in anyway de-map myself—and I won’t. I wouldn’t do that to her or to my parents because of what I have learned from the man who himself could not swallow his own medicine. I believe love involves empathy and connection and now I have allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to do that—to love and experience empathy—which I interpret all of the thousands of DFW pages to really, at their core, convey.
But what to do when the one person whose words you turn to when you just don’t feel like going on, in your darkest hours when you barely feel human, when you are nothing more than some abstract conception of grief or doubt or negativity, whose words always bring you back from whatever despair you find yourself consumed by, has killed himself. Was he consumed by this idea that he was a fraud like his character in “Good Old Neon”? Did he feel “weak and afraid” or maybe “stupid, afraid, always on the verge of being found out”? Did he buy into the line of thinking that he explicitly warned us was so soul sucking and deadly on that lovely May morning in 2005? Perhaps he had that “constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing,” Some probably question whether he felt washed up and/or like a sell out considering that Brief Interviews is being made into a feature film and rumors circulate that Infinite Jest may be as well and lets not forget the photo of him in GQ last year. None of these questions really matter though and we are never going to get answers unless a 200 page suicide note begins to circulate (which it very well might), his fiction and essays will continue to make me a much better and happier person and will never be more than a couple of feet away lest I forget “what it is to be a fucking human being.” His death is an extraordinarily sad thing.
Below are some of the better pieces I have read that talk about his death. I am still in shock.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
A Pit Bull in Lipstick is the Same as a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing; Isn't it?
Gov. Palin, as it turns out, is a pit-bull. Not only did she herself allude to this, but often times I will employ this term for a person who at first seems passive and reserved to only surprise you with ferociousness when push comes to shove. My mother for example, standing at all of 5’2, has been called a pit bull before. Even though I agree with her—Palin that is—politics only about 1% of the time, I have to give her credit for her apparent outrage.
And she sunk her teeth deep into the media and the Democratic campaign last night both of whom supposedly crossed the line in speaking about her home life, despite the fact that it seems the Republicans involved went on the offensive to break the story, and her qualifications as a running mate. As far as her qualifications go, I don’t think that is an area where Obama really wants to tread considering much of the questioning of his own qualifications is just now starting to die down. Plus there is the fact that she is a Governor which neither McCain nor Obama can boast as true of themselves and that is usually regarded as one of the stipulations to becoming a viable Presidential Candidate.
As for the other charge, I contend that going on the offensive with the breaking news on Monday was a clever way of provoking controversy and thereby taking everything that gets said about and saying it is biased and sexist. This is sort of what conservatives charge liberals with doing, kind of like crying wolf or intimidation in their offended states—i.e. you are just looking for something to make the issue about race or gender or class or what-have-you when it really has little to do with those things in the first place.
That said, the focus of The New York Times today was not on the creepy right wing stuff that Palin said but rather the “melodrama” that always seems to garner so much attention and focus. As Obama pointed out, I “did not hear a single word about the economy… Not once did they mention the hardships that people are going through.” The poor, as usual, go uncared for and in their economic plan, which consists of it would seem tax cuts!, the divide between rich and poor would only be greater.
Then, of course, there is God’s creation to look at that we are given dominion over. Too often that call for care is interpreted as making Mother Nature bow to the nature of man, which is complete futile, and ends with destruction. The energy crisis we are in, Palin says, has a quasi-solution just off Alaska’s shores in untapped natural oil reserves. What a plan.
The Doomsday Clock is down to five minutes till midnight and the crowd in Minnesota chanted “Drill Now, Drill Now, Drill Now!”! She says they are also going to “lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources,” one can only assume in that order, leaving little time for “moving forward” as we still focus on nonrenewable resources (with the except of nuclear energy of course).
But no one hears about any of this stuff except for just in passing. It doesn’t sell papers to talk about stuff like this. It isn’t sexy and no one cares. So all we get is talk about what order McCain hugged Palin’s family in.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Family Politics
After yesterday’s announcement that Vice Presidential Candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unwed daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, much attention has been placed back on the ever-present campaign issues of family values and abortion.
This is, of course, something that happens to people all the time and is rarely even news worthy; however, with the GOP’s supposed core of support coming from conservative Protestants, which Gov. Palin herself claims to be a part of, some questions with religious implications have begun to surface (as they almost always do at this time in an election year). Some Republican constituents are asking whether McCain made the right decision when choosing his running mate, favoring Senator Joseph Lieberman or former Gov. Tom Ridge, both of whom favor abortion rights, but this runs anathema to those Christian groups who are pro-life. There is also the question of whether she will be able to handle the demands of being a VP considering that Gov. Palin herself has recently had a child who will require special attention and now has a daughter, still a child herself, who will soon bring another life into their home.
What The Times is seeing this as, in a way, in the article “In Political Realm, ‘Family Problem’ Emerges as Test and Distraction,” which was one of about four on the family centered issue, seems to be an opportunity for the VP nominee to walk the conservative pro-life walk which I am sure the GOP is all very aware. This puts the young Bristol in quite the predicament considering that one of her options was never really an option politically. But that is neither here nor there since she is well past the time for aborting the fetus. What she has now become is a symbol for the conservative party, she is someone who is commended for doing the “right thing” by “deciding to marry and have the baby.”
While the candidates are saying that the private lives of these people are “off-limits”, there will likely be much political spin on both sides trying to pull the old religious ethical conundrums down around Gov. Palin and her “family problem.” This is not “the traditional image of a first family,” as the article is quick to point out. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who always has to make his two cents count, claims in the article that “the media is already trying to spin this as evidence that Govenor Palin is a hypocrite.” Going on that “all it really means is that she and her family are human.”
Be that as it may, this too is political spin that is using the religious convictions many have for a right to live for political ends. One has to wander if McCain’s choice for a running mate may have been based on the knowledge of Palin’s daughter, which does give her even more political significance than she already had.
What does it say about the media, this supposed liberal media outlet specifically, that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy gets painted in a light of courageous action instead of a possible political move by the GOP to have a family that walks the walk, so to speak? Can you imagine what people like Dobson would be saying if it were Obama’s daughter who were pregnant with the Dem. Nominee not only on the left of the Evangelical Right but also a candidate who is black? Wouldn’t that be devastating for the party? Why is her family even a part of the debate? She was willing to put all of this in the national media come to think of it. Gone are the days when Truman threatened reports for featuring the first daughter’s singing abilities. Even Clinton would have flipped a shit if Chelsea was under the public eye like this. Of course, this could just be my cynicism talking.
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