Visually stimulating, Marshall McLuhan’s study The Medium is the Massage is, in a word, cool. When I purchased this little cool book back in April, I was working on a research paper dealing with the “electronic church” and how televising religious phenomenon undermines the meaning and the message of that phenomenon which I titled “The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer,” which I thought was clever.[1] It seemed like a book that would be popular among indy kids because of its cult status and coolness as well as for people like me who hate television, though McLuhan doesn’t seem to think TV is all that bad of thing. In this regard, I am more attune with Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death and, of course, DFW’s essay “E Unibus Pluram” but I do find this book to be informative and stimulating. It works in this way, by being stimulating and informative, the book which incorporates the work of graphic designer Quinton Fiore into the body of the text mimics the medium it is critiquing, critiquing in a more favorable way than I should like, probably. That is also sort of why I didn’t like it, I am sure, since I don’t think a book must resemble television to be relevant or popular, not to say that was really the intention of McLuhan, which it wasn’t, but I think its intention was to overwhelm us, if I am not mistaken, in the way that television overwhelms us. But as a product of a television culture, I don’t think anything can overwhelm us sensually. This is most likely the product of always living in a television culture as opposed to McLuhan’s “Age of Anxiety” where our mental faculties, at present that is, are much better equipped to sift the constant bombardment of images—it is all we know. The “mind control”[2] like images are well within our ability to handle.
In regards to the name of the book, the “Massage” here is not a typo on my part; it was actually a mistake on the part of the typesetter who originally made the mistake of setting the e in “message” to an a thus “massage.” When showed the mistake, McLuhan was reportedly thrilled with the typo since the book deals with the effect media has on all our sensory perceptions.[3] As McLuhan says “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”[4]
One of the main themes McLuhan explores in the text is the idea of a global community with the world becoming a smaller, more media dependent place as technology evolves and becomes more accessible to the world at large. He pretty much considers this a good thing, something I for the most part disagree with since this is somewhat presumptuous of us to assume everyone in the world want this—I mean this type of invasion was one of the reasons the media savvy Al Qaeda cited among others for the 9/11 attacks.[5] Such is the nature of community that determine and develop who we are. Children, for example, are no longer raised by only their parents, nor are they solely the products of their immediate surroundings, as McLuhan illustrates, technology means that “all the world’s a sage.”[6] He adds “electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism… Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ You can’t go home again.”[7] This comes in 1967, a full two and half decades before the internet totally obliterated the need for the two as we can now carry our information and community with us in high-speed-global-networking with technology allowing us instant access to all the world’s entertainment at any time and at any place, whenever we choose, 24/7/365, from “womb-to-tomb.” [8]
One of the areas McLuhan’s media theory is most genius and spot-on is with the idea that “all media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”[9] According to this theory, the wheel is an extension of the foot, just as the book is to the eye, clothing to the skin, electric circuitry is to the central nervous system and so on. I do agree with this assessment, however, this has the potentially scary implications that McLuhan seems to think more positive than I could ever admit writing “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense [perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.”[10] The reason he sees these as being good things, and superior to gaining knowledge through “book learning,” is because they compel, according to him, people to interact with the medium and with others. Books, on the other hand, he believes are opposed to social interaction since they are read typically alone by solitary individuals and thus isolate and alienate the individual. I tend to agree that being a reader does alienate from others who are more of the television watching variety and I do believe that this is the product of new technology that has made our literature far less relevant, but I think this is a very negative development and instead of producing a more intelligent/connected community, in this case global, in its vastness in its bombardment of fragmented/contextless information, it destroys the real sense of community people once shared with their family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers because in this world of internet and television and cell phone and email dominance, the individual is left even more alone and silent only knowing a machine while fooling themselves into thinking they are actually part of a real community.
So when McLuhan, whose book I really like and agree with in terms of how we are shaped by our media though I am critical of some of his interpretation of their effects on modern society, makes statements like “[mass culture is] a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore”[11] and “information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously” and “as soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information “ and “our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition”[12] to illustrate that they are preferable to the old way of reading outright, I have to say he misses an important characteristic of mass culture and fails to see the significance of life that was known more fully and intimately before the whole technological revolution that is a product far newer than we can imagine with mass media having always been a part of our lives. In his view, people are unhappy because they are trying to use “outdated mental and psychological responses”[13] in order to experience and make since of the world which is complete horseshit. What would he have us do than, give up on such concepts as family and instead let our televisions, or worse yet, the internet, raise a child so things like love and understanding don’t get in the way of development in this postmodern, media addicted hyper-reality.
This idea, less naive than insane and twisted, also carries over into other areas of our lives such as our work and especially our education. To McLuhan, “today’s television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute ‘adult’ news… and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.”[14] Here, again, one has to wonder what he would have us do about it, accommodate the child who he says is “growing up absurd” by integrating our educational system with technology, which is what has happened, and you have a media savvy little kid who can give you a lot of facts but you sacrifice theory and breadth in doing so. Of the television generation—i.e. those who are more or less raised by the set—he does say they are “a grim bunch”[15] but not for the reasons that one might expect. In this rare instance when he is somewhat critical of television but this is more of the crap being produced on it than of the medium itself, a development I found surprising considering the book is about media effects and such saying that “commercials” are the best reflection of understanding the medium since in them “there simply is no time for the narrative form, borrowed from earlier print technology.”[16] With that, he seems to be saying that we should embrace the fact that the medium and stuff we watch on TV is necessarily short and viewer friendly. However, he does make mention the medium in a somewhat critical way at least (and for as far as I can recall only) once when he talks about what is on the old tube, which he sort of defends saying “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda. Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” Thus in this assessment, the television medium has the potential to be a negative that reinforces itself self-referentially in that when used to process and distill information, it enforces its cultural authority simply by its own design, a design that I argue inhibits us from true dialogue. However, in a hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner type argument, he tells us defends television content wise by writing “You must talk to the media, not to the programmer. To talk to the programmer is like complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing”[17] Despite the terrible and somewhat misleading analogy, he does have a point, yet he undermines it with the fact that most of what he has to say about the medium of television is overwhelmingly optimistic and even goes so far as to defend it against critics who miss the significance of the medium itself.
The defense, which I completely agree with in terms of theory but again disagree in terms of the way we see the results that are more or less the same in both of our assessments, illustrates his deep understanding of the television medium and also how he believes in it. Responding to a 1965 cartoon from The New Yorker with the caption “When you consider television’s awesome power to educate, aren’t you thankful that it doesn’t,” it states the following:
The main cause for disappointment in and for criticism of television is the failure on the part of its critics to view it as a totally new technology which demands different sensory responses. These critics insist on regarding television as merely a degraded form of print technology… Critics of television have failed to realize that the motion pictures they are lionizing… would prove unacceptable as mass audience films if the audience had not been preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.
With this, assuming as it does that we actually prefer this medium because we conditioned to it, it is clear he is much more optimistic and far less critical of the medium than I am as a born, nay, conditioned cynic, which is true of most technology, I would imagine.
88 My own upbringing and subsequent adult life resulting from that upbringing, has virtually lacked all forms of mass culture, thus I am more adept than most at assessing and critiquing that culture, according to McLuhan, so maybe I have something here. He writes that “whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are.”[18] This may account for our differences in the way we perceive media effects—I am rather far from away from being “well-adjusted” and pride myself on being an individual immune to trends of fashion or thought or whatever—as I do have a decent ability to see things “as they really are,” or so I am told. Maybe I could be sort of like the Tocqueville of mass media or something; but that is a world I choose not to visit—or spend very much time in anyway. I don’t think I will ever conform to it because it is something I cannot imagine really finding pleasure in, thus to suddenly spend time watching and learning from a culture that I am thoroughly uninterested in would be paradoxical and lose for me the status of amateur. Don’t get me wrong, I do watch the occasional program and spend a lot of time thinking about them, Lost would be the best example here, but I never get my news from the box, preferring print media to all others with NPR a distant second and relegated to time commuting to and from work in my car—but even that is only when there are no good songs on the alternative station and ESPN radio is talking about I sport I don’t care about like baseball. And I never connect with or through that culture—about the only thing I can talk about and sustain a decent conversation in is in the world of books, which are clearly very important to me. But as uninterested as I am in television culture, I am interested a thousand times more so in media theory, which some find dissonant, however, all of the great media theorists in my mind are those that McLuhan would call “antisocial” in that they go against the popular grain and choose to live outside the box that dominates American discourse. Such greats, to me at least are the likes of DFW and Jonathan Franzen (neither of whom are media theorists per se but deal with television culture as a whole) and Francis Wheen and Neil Postman, and none of them share McLuhan’s optimism. In fact, those writers are as or even more critical of the culture than I am.
With all of that said, I think McLuhan is a genius and I think this work is genius even though I tend to disagree with some of the outcomes he sees from the visual medium so a part of our lives. Plus I find the concept thoroughly interesting and engaging—the collage type images and words mingled in book form—and think it well worth anyone’s time reading. Some of the most memorable images from the book, which I will close by discussing, are one that depicts a sculpture of a giant woman with people around it to give its size some perspective and an image of women sewing onto a quilt the phrase “Keep into circulation the rumor that God is alive.” The first image, depicting a woman 82-feet-long and 20-feet-high that is titled “The Biggest and Best Woman in the World”, is interesting because it shows that you can walk around inside her, entering through the vagina like sperm. The concept and picture, of which all I can say is it is cool and interesting, are intriguing and make you think about the strangeness of modern art. The second image, which references Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead” is meant to be ironic I think. I am not sure what these women who are quilting the piece are motivated by or intending to convey—I suspect that they are suggesting people still have a need for church even though technology has made God unnecessary or killed Him/Her or whatever. Regardless, it is very apparent that the “the groundrule of [our] universe,” namely God, “upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved”[19] and this quilt is meant as a representation of that fact. And it is for this reason and for making connection impossible that I find our media so toxic. Because even if religion is a fiction, I believe it is a necessary one for most of us, and keeping that in circulation can actually be a good thing so long as it is not tied in with the status quo, which means reinforcing that infernal piece of furniture.
See also:
http://lost-tv.tribe.net/m/thread/173fd275-6e25-40a3-ab56-dcf53109ca43
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html
http://masc1100.blogspot.com/2005/09/medium-is-massage-notes.html
[1] The title derives from the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming” which is one of my favorite poems. In this second line of the poem, Yeats uses the falconer and falcon as metaphors for man (or woman) and technological advancement respectively. Man’s inability to call forth the product of its own imagination to control its message is the point of using this as a title. So it is clever.
[2] It kind of reminded me of the “Reorientation Film” that poor bastard Carl had to watch in ABC’s Lost which moved by at breakneck speeds and flashed words and images on the screen. I am like 99% sure that the show’s director had this book in mind when creating the montage. In fact, Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly claims to have been given “secret documents” that suggest McLuhan’s work had even more influence on the show than with this one instance giving a version of the DHARMA Initiative’s mission statement, a mission statement I have never seen, that goes into specific detail about the effect of this work on the good old DI which can be found here. Plus there is a reference to mathematician Michael Faraday, the name of the guy that Lost’s Daniel Faraday gets his name from.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
[4] Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1967), p. 26.
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
[6] McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, p. 14.
[7] Ibid.. p. 16.
[8] Ibid.. p. 12.
[9] Ibid.. p. 26.
[10] Ibid.. p. 41.
[11] Ibid.. p. 61.
[12] Ibid.. p. 63.
[13] Ibid.. p. 63.
[14] Ibid.. p. 18.
[15] Ibid.. p. 126.
[16] Ibid.. p. 126.
[17] Ibid.. p. 142.
[18] Ibid.. p. 88.
[19] Ibid , p. 146.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
An Amendment to “Black Friday”
On a day that I posted about how in the service industry “there is no such a thing as being human,” I witnessed one of the most tender, least bull shitty acts human understanding I have seen in some time, and I must say, it actually moved me. The act, described below, was performed by a girl around 18-yearsold who is somewhat self-conscious and insecure and seemed to desperately want to make an impression on her new co-workers—which is understandable—but these things have nothing to do with why she did what she did or the act itself. While I don’t know what to make of it, in an act of full disclosure considering what I wrote yesterday in my piece Black Friday, here it is.
Sometime during the dinner rush around 7:30 or so, with every table occupied and on a 25-minute wait and the big screen playing the UNC-Notre Dame contest in a town where everyone either loves UNC or goes to Wake and people are intent and focused on food and football, a kid with severe mental disabilities starts shouting very loudly some general football terms that are audible even from the recesses of the kitchen. And people getting uncomfortable in a really bad way—I have people asking for their checks and holding their temples looking down at their crotch and whispering about the kid and the scene he is making—and this isn’t really good for anyone. Servers begin whining, people are staring, I here someone say “why don’t they just leave.”
But just as people are about to stampede for the door, a hostess who started a week ago to the day, came over to the clearly frightened severely mentally disabled boy and his ancient companion (who I assume was his grandfather[*]) and squeezed her way into a one person booth, taking up very little of the kid’s space but still setting with him and just talking and listening to his pleas of “score!” and “touchdown!” Maybe part of it was the fact that he had a very pretty young girl sitting next to him actually giving him her undivided attention that calmed him down, I know it works for me when I am freaking out and my unbelievable female companion shows me that I am worthy of such lavish and unwarranted attention. But as with the case with my female companion, there was something else that transcended simple circumspection. It is shown in words and tone and body language that all say it is ok and you are a person and you are human and you are worthy without having to actually say it.
So as she sat there talking to the unlikely pair, she provided comfort for everyone around her. Obviously for the kid, but also for the grandpa in listening to their story, which she barely mentioned afterwards to the inquiring minds, and then the paying customers who were annoyed with the outbursts and the servers who were having to damage-control their tables and on down the line of employees and customers all with a single act of kindness. It visually illustrated the fact that we all are connected and that can be a good thing. When it was over and the two were gone, I told her something along the lines of “nice job” but it was insufficient sounding like some work related issue which it was not, not really. It went beyond that and I hope she realizes this and retains this quality.
After I had some time to reflect on this event, this lone instance of actual, really deep caring, I started to think that maybe this actually shows how most of us are broken by such places. In this line of thinking, I figured it would take someone who has only been working at it for only a week to do something like this. Later, a newer server who has worked at other branches of the company who is one of the most negative people I work with and bitches a lot and calls people “redneck” or “ghetto” depending on race and is pissed off about something virtually every night though he is a nice enough guy for the most part and has been doing this far longer than I have and is also “educated” apparently had some sort of talking to with the hostess because it was late and she was forced to set people in his section around the bar (though she tried to sit at least two of these tables in my section but the TVs aren’t over there and who wouldn’t rather sit in a table around the bar anyway) and it didn’t look like these folks really gave a shit about when we close (20 and then 15-minutes from when they moseyed on in) and were only drinking water (often times a sign of how cheap the table is comes from the drink order which tells you a lot about the way they are going to tip you[†]) and never even acted like they wanted to be there and have you prepare their drinks and dinners for them.
Afterwards, she was pretty upset and said that she is now “thinking about leaving.” Here is a young female who did an unbelievably kind thing that greatly benefited the restaurant in a way that pretty much went unacknowledged by anyone but me because everyone in there was so self-absorbed. I mean, this was a place where two weeks ago a severely mentally disabled employee (who is so handicapped he is actually appears happy) was coming out of the back when he not only slipped and fell on the hard tile but after landing awkwardly, he like sort of slid, sort of bounced, and racked himself on a pole of the platform where the guys in the back wash dishes. It was incredible as far as falls go. It was the worst one I had ever personally seen in that it was a double edged sword of wounded pride with the initial fall and then the skid into pole resulting in genital anguish. It was also, I hate to say, slapstick comedy. When it happened I couldn’t believe he had actually went down the way that he did, the odds had to be astronomical, and I was frozen for a second, everyone was. But, being right there only a couple of feet away dropping off dirty plates, I went over and helped the poor guy up. Once on his feet, he simultaneously grabbed his elbow with his uninjured arm and his crotch with the arm being held. That is when some people began laughing. It made me sick to my stomach but I can’t say that I blame them. Maybe in the future she will be one of those that laugh and say things like “he really shouldn’t be here” but today she is not. She is human. It is the staying human that I pray she keeps and pray that we all keep.
[*] Something that a lot of times will happen in cases like this is the severely mentally disabled will go unwanted by their biological parents and instead of institutionalizing this person, a family member will take the person in and care for them. My grandpa did this with a second cousin or something who was maybe ten years older than my dad who remembers my grandpa telling him to stick up for him and not let anyone give the guy any shit. So my grandpa and my dad took on a lot of the responsibility with this guy whose story was a very sad one indeed—he was dropped as an infant not once but twice by nurses and went unloved and uncared for by his own parents who wanted nothing to do with the burden of caring for a child with special needs (though it was a different time then, I suspect things like this still happen as they did back 40-years ago). When this guy died in 2003, my grandpa and my dad were the only attendees of his funeral, marking the sad end to a excruciatingly sad life. The point is, I suspect this was a situation similar with a relative stepping in to raise a child with special needs.
[†] For example, it has happened on occasion that a family will come in and when you prepare to ask about maybe bringing them a Samuel Adams Oktoberfest, which really are delicious btw, they cut you off mid-sentence and act offended like you are one of the many salesmen in their lives trying to dictate your purchasing/spending, which technically you are, or like you are stupid for not like knowing that they would never drink ever or at a restaurant that overcharges or in front of children or late on a Saturday night or while operating a motor vehicle or whatever. These people do not tip well. You are extremely lucky to get 10% out of them. The most telltale sign thoughthat your tip is going to be lousy, in my experience, is when the adults in this situation order “water with lemon” and then order the drink for the kids however diminutive such an action appears to everyone involved and makes a point of stating that their offspring would like whatever beverage of their choosing “in a kids cup” as in “he’ll have a kid’s coke” which is free and they typically know is free and involves extra work for you because they are tiny and have lids that make refilling and knowing when to refill a pain because they want to make sure you don’t charge them the buck fifty for a regular sized glass, which I never do anyway, and is yet another way of telling you you are too stupid to see this person is a child and thus gets a free beverage all before the adult themselves try and order a ½ order of ribs or steak off the kids menu to save a couple of duckets because it is the same quality of food at a slightly cheaper price and the whole thing just makes you want to quit and tell them they need to get with the fucking program here and acknowledge what they already know in that servers get paid like shit for an hourly wage and depend on your gratuity to make rent and we are working hard to get a paid just like you are and so on and so forth.
Sometime during the dinner rush around 7:30 or so, with every table occupied and on a 25-minute wait and the big screen playing the UNC-Notre Dame contest in a town where everyone either loves UNC or goes to Wake and people are intent and focused on food and football, a kid with severe mental disabilities starts shouting very loudly some general football terms that are audible even from the recesses of the kitchen. And people getting uncomfortable in a really bad way—I have people asking for their checks and holding their temples looking down at their crotch and whispering about the kid and the scene he is making—and this isn’t really good for anyone. Servers begin whining, people are staring, I here someone say “why don’t they just leave.”
But just as people are about to stampede for the door, a hostess who started a week ago to the day, came over to the clearly frightened severely mentally disabled boy and his ancient companion (who I assume was his grandfather[*]) and squeezed her way into a one person booth, taking up very little of the kid’s space but still setting with him and just talking and listening to his pleas of “score!” and “touchdown!” Maybe part of it was the fact that he had a very pretty young girl sitting next to him actually giving him her undivided attention that calmed him down, I know it works for me when I am freaking out and my unbelievable female companion shows me that I am worthy of such lavish and unwarranted attention. But as with the case with my female companion, there was something else that transcended simple circumspection. It is shown in words and tone and body language that all say it is ok and you are a person and you are human and you are worthy without having to actually say it.
So as she sat there talking to the unlikely pair, she provided comfort for everyone around her. Obviously for the kid, but also for the grandpa in listening to their story, which she barely mentioned afterwards to the inquiring minds, and then the paying customers who were annoyed with the outbursts and the servers who were having to damage-control their tables and on down the line of employees and customers all with a single act of kindness. It visually illustrated the fact that we all are connected and that can be a good thing. When it was over and the two were gone, I told her something along the lines of “nice job” but it was insufficient sounding like some work related issue which it was not, not really. It went beyond that and I hope she realizes this and retains this quality.
After I had some time to reflect on this event, this lone instance of actual, really deep caring, I started to think that maybe this actually shows how most of us are broken by such places. In this line of thinking, I figured it would take someone who has only been working at it for only a week to do something like this. Later, a newer server who has worked at other branches of the company who is one of the most negative people I work with and bitches a lot and calls people “redneck” or “ghetto” depending on race and is pissed off about something virtually every night though he is a nice enough guy for the most part and has been doing this far longer than I have and is also “educated” apparently had some sort of talking to with the hostess because it was late and she was forced to set people in his section around the bar (though she tried to sit at least two of these tables in my section but the TVs aren’t over there and who wouldn’t rather sit in a table around the bar anyway) and it didn’t look like these folks really gave a shit about when we close (20 and then 15-minutes from when they moseyed on in) and were only drinking water (often times a sign of how cheap the table is comes from the drink order which tells you a lot about the way they are going to tip you[†]) and never even acted like they wanted to be there and have you prepare their drinks and dinners for them.
Afterwards, she was pretty upset and said that she is now “thinking about leaving.” Here is a young female who did an unbelievably kind thing that greatly benefited the restaurant in a way that pretty much went unacknowledged by anyone but me because everyone in there was so self-absorbed. I mean, this was a place where two weeks ago a severely mentally disabled employee (who is so handicapped he is actually appears happy) was coming out of the back when he not only slipped and fell on the hard tile but after landing awkwardly, he like sort of slid, sort of bounced, and racked himself on a pole of the platform where the guys in the back wash dishes. It was incredible as far as falls go. It was the worst one I had ever personally seen in that it was a double edged sword of wounded pride with the initial fall and then the skid into pole resulting in genital anguish. It was also, I hate to say, slapstick comedy. When it happened I couldn’t believe he had actually went down the way that he did, the odds had to be astronomical, and I was frozen for a second, everyone was. But, being right there only a couple of feet away dropping off dirty plates, I went over and helped the poor guy up. Once on his feet, he simultaneously grabbed his elbow with his uninjured arm and his crotch with the arm being held. That is when some people began laughing. It made me sick to my stomach but I can’t say that I blame them. Maybe in the future she will be one of those that laugh and say things like “he really shouldn’t be here” but today she is not. She is human. It is the staying human that I pray she keeps and pray that we all keep.
[*] Something that a lot of times will happen in cases like this is the severely mentally disabled will go unwanted by their biological parents and instead of institutionalizing this person, a family member will take the person in and care for them. My grandpa did this with a second cousin or something who was maybe ten years older than my dad who remembers my grandpa telling him to stick up for him and not let anyone give the guy any shit. So my grandpa and my dad took on a lot of the responsibility with this guy whose story was a very sad one indeed—he was dropped as an infant not once but twice by nurses and went unloved and uncared for by his own parents who wanted nothing to do with the burden of caring for a child with special needs (though it was a different time then, I suspect things like this still happen as they did back 40-years ago). When this guy died in 2003, my grandpa and my dad were the only attendees of his funeral, marking the sad end to a excruciatingly sad life. The point is, I suspect this was a situation similar with a relative stepping in to raise a child with special needs.
[†] For example, it has happened on occasion that a family will come in and when you prepare to ask about maybe bringing them a Samuel Adams Oktoberfest, which really are delicious btw, they cut you off mid-sentence and act offended like you are one of the many salesmen in their lives trying to dictate your purchasing/spending, which technically you are, or like you are stupid for not like knowing that they would never drink ever or at a restaurant that overcharges or in front of children or late on a Saturday night or while operating a motor vehicle or whatever. These people do not tip well. You are extremely lucky to get 10% out of them. The most telltale sign thoughthat your tip is going to be lousy, in my experience, is when the adults in this situation order “water with lemon” and then order the drink for the kids however diminutive such an action appears to everyone involved and makes a point of stating that their offspring would like whatever beverage of their choosing “in a kids cup” as in “he’ll have a kid’s coke” which is free and they typically know is free and involves extra work for you because they are tiny and have lids that make refilling and knowing when to refill a pain because they want to make sure you don’t charge them the buck fifty for a regular sized glass, which I never do anyway, and is yet another way of telling you you are too stupid to see this person is a child and thus gets a free beverage all before the adult themselves try and order a ½ order of ribs or steak off the kids menu to save a couple of duckets because it is the same quality of food at a slightly cheaper price and the whole thing just makes you want to quit and tell them they need to get with the fucking program here and acknowledge what they already know in that servers get paid like shit for an hourly wage and depend on your gratuity to make rent and we are working hard to get a paid just like you are and so on and so forth.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Black Friday
The economy is something I cannot begin to understand. I read reports, ask knowledgeable friends questions, listen to debates, but most of all, I get my feel for the economy by how much money I have left over (or rather how much more I owe) after the necessary expenses are taken care of. According to this system, the only system I can pretend to comprehend, after the bare essentials and one bi-monthly luxury item, my first since May came this past Wednesday so now that is becoming more of a biannual thing it would appear, I can afford to spend about $90 a month. I am someone who has reached a 5-digit salary only once in my life (and even then I literally just broke it) yet I have amassed a 6-digit almost entirely from my absurdly expensive education. While outstanding, my education has made me, I am estimating, about $15,000 in its totality. That is $12,500 for teaching and $2,500 for various writing jobs. That number, as depressing as it is, is about the same as the jobs I have had that require no education or even frown upon it. For example, the summers or 1999 through 2001, when I worked as a lifeguard, I made about $2,500 each year. The summers I was in college I made even less at J.C. Penney’s and landscaping, which was more accurately described as getting high and smashing things with a shovel, that goes for both of those jobs. In those summers I made around $1,500 and then did not work one of those years instead taking summer school. Out of college, post-academia, I did some internet database updating for some company, worked with my mom for a while, had a few sales jobs which I was terrible at and technically lost money, spent two weeks in advertising, and did a brief stint with FedEx. In sum with those odd jobs, I made something like $3,000. Now working in the service industry, don’t get me started on how badly I hate this job, I have probably made about $3,500 in the last three months.
I am not going to add all this up, it is too depressing, but I bet they are even keel. Plus if you count the year I was technically unemployed, a year I spent working for a bookie and gambling, I guess my main source of income that year would be picking NFL winners, filling out March Madness tournament brackets, and getting unbelievably lucky in basically blind draws with the sport of kings (horse racing), I would be better off, financially speaking, if I didn’t even go to school. Because starting in 1999, my schooling has cost me[1] an intimidating six-digit-number that overwhelms me just thinking about. And I have yet to even dent it. Two years at Park Tudor at $12,000 a year, plus four years at Kenyon totaling among the nation’s highest (#2 when I went there which is boasted as though it were something to be really proud of)[2] [3] with a whopping $38,000 price tag (that I consider well worth every penny [it at least in the time I was a student there] and upon my deathbed will probably consider the four happiest years of my life), though no one, save for Colin and Joe F. who are very well off but compared to some of the families there are practically beggars, and in full disclosure, I paid less and than half of that number, and then Wake Forest, in a program I am not even going to finish, I took out over $20,000 in student loans. I am actually starving here, I have lost over 50 pounds in the last year, where am I gonna get that kind of money?
I probably won’t. There are friends of mine here in a similar predicament as mine but are more responsible and these people actually know something about economics. They are basically saying the crisis will probably help us out because with all of this student debt that is going unpaid yet must be paid, the gov. will likely devise a new plan/strategy to deal with it. Our prosperity literally depends on it. Or so they say. Maybe that is one of the reasons the crisis doesn’t seem to scare me all that much, I am a survivor, I live simply and will continue to do so. Even if someone were to say, “Yo, AB! You the bomb! Here is a MacArthur fellowship for your bitchin ass! Have at it,” I would probably give most of money away and with what is left over start some sort of literary journal. I don’t own any big ticket items. The most expensive things I own, my car (which I inherited from my grandpa when he died, worth around $6,000 dollars though I take shit care of it and currently rock a donut as one of my tires) and my watch (my parents’ gift for graduating college which is an unbelievably beautiful and tasteful Swiss made Tissot worth about $600)[4] are things that were given to me and not things I would have spent money on myself to own. Its all just stuff and I pride myself on having virtually nothing.
So the point of this little musing, I guess, is to say that I see people freaking out all the time about this damn “Depression” and it doesn’t really scare me. The big-wigs macking it hard will still mack it hard and the poor are still gonna be desperately poor. Can’t people see that the system is incredibly fucked and one-sided and always going to end with inequality and oppression?
This “Black Friday” stuff I heard all over the radio today—from NPR to local rock-block to ESPN—has got people obsessing. My female companion talks about how scared she is about what all this is going to do to her credit score. Sometimes she gets pretty freaked out about it, especially when she starts inquiring about my debt and my credit, which I know nothing about other than it just has to be terrible.
Yesterday, before I heard any of this business, I went to the bank in order to cash my pay checks from work and found a line that practically went out the door. Wha? It turned out people were freaking out about this whole crisis and running to the bank to pull out their savings—ah la It's a Wonderful Life—or so I believe though it was late in the afternoon on a Friday so who knows. The line, dominated by old people, which makes me suspect that the line did in fact result from the quote unquote “Black Friday” thing, was so decrepit that at multiple times when the teller would call out “may I help you” the hard of hearing senior citizens would stand there staring strait ahead until someone with a better hearing aid finally tapped them and pointed them in the direction they needed to go.
When my turn finally came, I lucked out and came to the same woman I dealt with the last time I was in this particular branch. The first time I had went in there, this woman, young, somewhat attractive, huge rack, tried to set me up with a checking account with them. I went through the motions but I had recently been turned down with another bank because I joined an account with my mom in my name that she had overdrawn. Lacking $400, neither I nor my mom can pay it off, thus I am to remain bankless, at least for the time being. But I was going through this then because the woman said she would waive the check cashing fees on all my checks and maybe it would like go through or something as she said. Then, in late July or sometime around there, she was flirty and accommodating and said that whenever I got a valid ID, don’t ask, I could come in there and she would waive the fees, anytime.
So yesterday, hoping to make good on that proposition, I went to her and reminded her of this exchange. The look she gave me was not the flirty, playful look I witnessed back in July but one of annoyance seeing me now as something of a burden, or so I interpreted. “I personally said that?” she kept demanding to know, also asking a rhetorical “Why would I say that?” that seemed to imply I was either lying or had greatly misunderstood our conversation. She then informed me that the checks would cost $6 each to cash, although that bank did not charge some businesses to cash their checks there. This is what happened to be the case with my employer and this bank. It certainly did clear things up for me then, what I assumed was this attractive and flirty young woman doing something nice for me person-to-person was in fact just doing her job, caring out a function that was as part of her routine as bringing a to-go side of dressing is to mine.
When money is involved it is hard to stay human and when money is tight it is harder still. On nights when I am in no mood to ask my tables what they want to stuff themselves with, as tonight I am sure will prove to be which I am already dreading, when a table of seven, one less than the number of people required to get an automatic 18% tacked on to the bill, spends $150 on food and drinks which constantly need refilling and leaves a $10 tip if I am lucky or a $1 tip on $80 and then say something like “you are an excellent server” and ask me “is that alright?” my job requires me to say “oh yes, thank you very much” instead of the obvious “no everything is not alright, you just gave me a shitty tip and I am working my ass off here” I certainly don’t feel like myself. On these nights, at that job, at any service job, there is no such a thing as being human. There is only the customer is always right and you have to live by it. To hell with you.
[1] My parents, barely making ends meet themselves, have not contributed a penny to my education unlike most people at the three wonderful and expensive schools I attended. Most of my peers were of families in the top 5% of yearly income, at worst, whereas my parents are more like at or below the national median making a combined $40,000ish annually. I tried to use the U.S. Census Bureau as my source here, then some other reputable agencies, but without any economic knowledge or skill, except buying things that are cheap, I couldn’t make heads or tales out of it. But hey, Wikipedia makes it easy, there I get the information I seek with minimal trouble, get class and money involved and information just disappears especially in an economic crisis. So anyway, here is my God damned source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Household_income_in_the_US. Thus I have borrowed and worked, but mostly borrowed, seeing this education thing as an investment that right now is not paying out in dollars like I was told it would. But to be fair its not like I really motivated by moneys, I have never had and don’t really know what I am missing. Nor do I really care to know.
[2] http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/21/education-university-globalization-biz-cx_bw_lh_0121colleges.html
[3] http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2008/03/24/story11.html
[4] Mom and Dad saved up for a year and half to buy me something special for I am the first one in my family to finish college—a family that is so large and reeks with so much Irish Catholic descent that to go through the names of aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and so on and so forth would be incredibly involved. So anyway, this is an item I love and I don’t really love stuff. I am in constant panic that I own such a beautiful thing and I am always thinking I will or have lost and I get complimented on about once a month, the most recent one being from a co-worker whose name is Jordan who I think is the type of chick it is probably good to have on your side and reminds you of every cheerleader you ever met, I am sure you get the idea, who said while I was pouring tea out of a bucket into a dispenser “Oh my God, you have a really, really nice watch…It is seriously beautiful,” which, you know, doesn’t suck to hear, but nonetheless, I love it but I could never justify spending that much on myself.
See Also:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2008/10/if-ever-there-w.html
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/882789?UserKey=
I am not going to add all this up, it is too depressing, but I bet they are even keel. Plus if you count the year I was technically unemployed, a year I spent working for a bookie and gambling, I guess my main source of income that year would be picking NFL winners, filling out March Madness tournament brackets, and getting unbelievably lucky in basically blind draws with the sport of kings (horse racing), I would be better off, financially speaking, if I didn’t even go to school. Because starting in 1999, my schooling has cost me[1] an intimidating six-digit-number that overwhelms me just thinking about. And I have yet to even dent it. Two years at Park Tudor at $12,000 a year, plus four years at Kenyon totaling among the nation’s highest (#2 when I went there which is boasted as though it were something to be really proud of)[2] [3] with a whopping $38,000 price tag (that I consider well worth every penny [it at least in the time I was a student there] and upon my deathbed will probably consider the four happiest years of my life), though no one, save for Colin and Joe F. who are very well off but compared to some of the families there are practically beggars, and in full disclosure, I paid less and than half of that number, and then Wake Forest, in a program I am not even going to finish, I took out over $20,000 in student loans. I am actually starving here, I have lost over 50 pounds in the last year, where am I gonna get that kind of money?
I probably won’t. There are friends of mine here in a similar predicament as mine but are more responsible and these people actually know something about economics. They are basically saying the crisis will probably help us out because with all of this student debt that is going unpaid yet must be paid, the gov. will likely devise a new plan/strategy to deal with it. Our prosperity literally depends on it. Or so they say. Maybe that is one of the reasons the crisis doesn’t seem to scare me all that much, I am a survivor, I live simply and will continue to do so. Even if someone were to say, “Yo, AB! You the bomb! Here is a MacArthur fellowship for your bitchin ass! Have at it,” I would probably give most of money away and with what is left over start some sort of literary journal. I don’t own any big ticket items. The most expensive things I own, my car (which I inherited from my grandpa when he died, worth around $6,000 dollars though I take shit care of it and currently rock a donut as one of my tires) and my watch (my parents’ gift for graduating college which is an unbelievably beautiful and tasteful Swiss made Tissot worth about $600)[4] are things that were given to me and not things I would have spent money on myself to own. Its all just stuff and I pride myself on having virtually nothing.
So the point of this little musing, I guess, is to say that I see people freaking out all the time about this damn “Depression” and it doesn’t really scare me. The big-wigs macking it hard will still mack it hard and the poor are still gonna be desperately poor. Can’t people see that the system is incredibly fucked and one-sided and always going to end with inequality and oppression?
This “Black Friday” stuff I heard all over the radio today—from NPR to local rock-block to ESPN—has got people obsessing. My female companion talks about how scared she is about what all this is going to do to her credit score. Sometimes she gets pretty freaked out about it, especially when she starts inquiring about my debt and my credit, which I know nothing about other than it just has to be terrible.
Yesterday, before I heard any of this business, I went to the bank in order to cash my pay checks from work and found a line that practically went out the door. Wha? It turned out people were freaking out about this whole crisis and running to the bank to pull out their savings—ah la It's a Wonderful Life—or so I believe though it was late in the afternoon on a Friday so who knows. The line, dominated by old people, which makes me suspect that the line did in fact result from the quote unquote “Black Friday” thing, was so decrepit that at multiple times when the teller would call out “may I help you” the hard of hearing senior citizens would stand there staring strait ahead until someone with a better hearing aid finally tapped them and pointed them in the direction they needed to go.
When my turn finally came, I lucked out and came to the same woman I dealt with the last time I was in this particular branch. The first time I had went in there, this woman, young, somewhat attractive, huge rack, tried to set me up with a checking account with them. I went through the motions but I had recently been turned down with another bank because I joined an account with my mom in my name that she had overdrawn. Lacking $400, neither I nor my mom can pay it off, thus I am to remain bankless, at least for the time being. But I was going through this then because the woman said she would waive the check cashing fees on all my checks and maybe it would like go through or something as she said. Then, in late July or sometime around there, she was flirty and accommodating and said that whenever I got a valid ID, don’t ask, I could come in there and she would waive the fees, anytime.
So yesterday, hoping to make good on that proposition, I went to her and reminded her of this exchange. The look she gave me was not the flirty, playful look I witnessed back in July but one of annoyance seeing me now as something of a burden, or so I interpreted. “I personally said that?” she kept demanding to know, also asking a rhetorical “Why would I say that?” that seemed to imply I was either lying or had greatly misunderstood our conversation. She then informed me that the checks would cost $6 each to cash, although that bank did not charge some businesses to cash their checks there. This is what happened to be the case with my employer and this bank. It certainly did clear things up for me then, what I assumed was this attractive and flirty young woman doing something nice for me person-to-person was in fact just doing her job, caring out a function that was as part of her routine as bringing a to-go side of dressing is to mine.
When money is involved it is hard to stay human and when money is tight it is harder still. On nights when I am in no mood to ask my tables what they want to stuff themselves with, as tonight I am sure will prove to be which I am already dreading, when a table of seven, one less than the number of people required to get an automatic 18% tacked on to the bill, spends $150 on food and drinks which constantly need refilling and leaves a $10 tip if I am lucky or a $1 tip on $80 and then say something like “you are an excellent server” and ask me “is that alright?” my job requires me to say “oh yes, thank you very much” instead of the obvious “no everything is not alright, you just gave me a shitty tip and I am working my ass off here” I certainly don’t feel like myself. On these nights, at that job, at any service job, there is no such a thing as being human. There is only the customer is always right and you have to live by it. To hell with you.
[1] My parents, barely making ends meet themselves, have not contributed a penny to my education unlike most people at the three wonderful and expensive schools I attended. Most of my peers were of families in the top 5% of yearly income, at worst, whereas my parents are more like at or below the national median making a combined $40,000ish annually. I tried to use the U.S. Census Bureau as my source here, then some other reputable agencies, but without any economic knowledge or skill, except buying things that are cheap, I couldn’t make heads or tales out of it. But hey, Wikipedia makes it easy, there I get the information I seek with minimal trouble, get class and money involved and information just disappears especially in an economic crisis. So anyway, here is my God damned source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Household_income_in_the_US. Thus I have borrowed and worked, but mostly borrowed, seeing this education thing as an investment that right now is not paying out in dollars like I was told it would. But to be fair its not like I really motivated by moneys, I have never had and don’t really know what I am missing. Nor do I really care to know.
[2] http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/21/education-university-globalization-biz-cx_bw_lh_0121colleges.html
[3] http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2008/03/24/story11.html
[4] Mom and Dad saved up for a year and half to buy me something special for I am the first one in my family to finish college—a family that is so large and reeks with so much Irish Catholic descent that to go through the names of aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and so on and so forth would be incredibly involved. So anyway, this is an item I love and I don’t really love stuff. I am in constant panic that I own such a beautiful thing and I am always thinking I will or have lost and I get complimented on about once a month, the most recent one being from a co-worker whose name is Jordan who I think is the type of chick it is probably good to have on your side and reminds you of every cheerleader you ever met, I am sure you get the idea, who said while I was pouring tea out of a bucket into a dispenser “Oh my God, you have a really, really nice watch…It is seriously beautiful,” which, you know, doesn’t suck to hear, but nonetheless, I love it but I could never justify spending that much on myself.
See Also:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2008/10/if-ever-there-w.html
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/882789?UserKey=
Friday, October 10, 2008
Coetzee on Robinson Crusoe's Foe Pas
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
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
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.
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