tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68333100182408498512023-11-15T22:15:43.277-08:00Book Burning ServiceThe old Pentecostal churches I grew up in were wild rides, and had book burning services all the time. Well, I'm not Pentecostal anymore, but I sure enjoy burning through books, metaphorically anyway, to separate the dross from the gold. This is a chronicle of my biblio-incinerations.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-40219981265214558592017-01-30T22:03:00.002-08:002017-01-30T22:22:05.061-08:00Review of Introducing Heidegger<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://archive-media.nyafuu.org/wg/image/1438/25/1438258955185.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://archive-media.nyafuu.org/wg/image/1438/25/1438258955185.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I liked the cartoony style of the book which kept it
semi-interesting, but I ended up deciding Heidegger is hardly worth the
effort. I'm sure he helped move some
thought along in his time by loosening terms and experimenting with
idea-games, but I'm not convinced he did much more to earn his place as one of
the fathers of existentialism. I'll be honest and say that his Nazi sympathies
and lack of post-war remorse was the final straw for me, but he also struck me
as a academic playboy vying for first-chair in the philosophy department. The very fact that "Being And Time"
was practically unfinished and rushed into publication so he could fill the
vacancy left by the former chair of his department, Husserl, tells me just
about all I need to know about him. No wonder he makes very little sense...he
didn't have to! Is this an Emperor-with-no-clothes kind of thing? </div>
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It wasn't all a waste, I suppose. I like the idea of
'Da-sein' (human beings defined as 'there-being'--better translated as
'being-there') as a deconstruction and broadening of the idea of what it means
to be human--that humanity is a more complex first-principle than what
religions, sciences, and philosophies have reduced it too. The idea of Da-sein
as being in-the-world is a reminder that Da-sein can't be separated from it's
environment, and that it is always Da-sein itself that is considering itself as
separate object while not being truly capable of separating itself as idea or
object from the environmental fabric with which it is partly identified. The
world and even time itself is 'bent' by Da-sein (a foreshadowing of Einstein's
rather unoriginal idea) and can therefore only be understand as part of the
holistic picture with no beginning/end. </div>
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Heidegger expanded on Husserl’s Time-Consciousness which
expanded on Bergson’s work. "Husserl believed that time ‘appeared’ in
consciousness in much the same way that a musical melody is known. The melody
is knowable only through the simultaneous operation of three acts of
consciousness:</div>
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<br />
<ol>
<li>Retention: notes which are no longer sounding have to be retained in memory</li>
<li>Attention: a ‘primal impression’ of each note, as it sounds, must be gained</li>
<li>Protention: the auditor must ‘listen ahead’ and construct expectations of what
might or might not follow.</li>
</ol>
</div>
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Time must be viewed in the same way. Not linear, but
simultaneous consciousness of all principles at once."</div>
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There ya go. The rest was gobbleygook. Well, not really,
but it did feel like a spiral into meaningless theology (which I admit I can no
longer stomach in the least), politics, academic pedantry, wishful thinking,
and ice cream I want ice cream. Plus, he was a friggin Nazi. So...</div>
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Well, it was nice to met you Heideggar, but I'd like my
sanity back now. As one redditor said about a completely unrelated subject (and
I have no idea why I remember this): "Ride free into the scintillating
frog sunset, you mad bastard." </div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Credit for frog sunset quote:<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="reddit-embed" data-embed-created="2017-01-31T06:09:25.539Z" data-embed-live="false" data-embed-media="www.redditmedia.com" data-embed-parent="false" data-embed-uuid="aa3feeff-138c-4c3f-92b1-eefc96b39826">
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5qth0v/til_aldous_huxley_author_of_brave_new_world_took/dd1ykko/">Comment</a> from discussion <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5qth0v/til_aldous_huxley_author_of_brave_new_world_took/">TIL Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, took LSD on his deathbed and died tripping.</a>.</div>
<script async="" src="https://www.redditstatic.com/comment-embed.js"></script>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-37605652211915853532017-01-15T19:32:00.000-08:002017-01-15T20:59:19.249-08:00Review of On the Road by Kerouac<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png/220px-Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png/220px-Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png" width="143" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
I know Jack Kerouac regarded himself as a ‘dumbsaint of the
mind,’ but this work felt more dumb than saint. Yes, yes…I’m sure he’s a
genius. But what an extraordinary waste of time and talent this book represents…and
I’m talking about the time/talent it takes to <i>read </i>it, not to mention write it!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Okay, that was fun. But in all sincerity, where did this
young dumbsaint go wrong? As a writer he seems enamored with wastrels and
good-for-nothings. I found myself wanting to sing him the old protestant
Christian Hymn, “Come home!” If there’s anyone who needs a solid come-to-Jesus
moment, it’s young, will-less Sal Paradise and his permanently fork-in-the-road
friend, Dean Moriarty. </div>
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How the bloody hell could anyone like this book? Seriously.
If you’re reading this review and you actually liked the book, I would love to
know why. Leave a comment. And then slap yourself. I suppose the virtue of the work could have
been the way it gave the establishment the finger, or the way it celebrated middle class opportunity and rebellion, or the way it demonstrated the knee-jerk and reckless
ingenuity of vagabonds bred by good ole ‘Merica. To be honest, those are
interesting subjects to me; but Kerouac’s style is too rambling, repetitive,
mundane, and even at points thrilling for all the wrong reasons. I could find
no redeeming value in any of it. The characters were all pieces of shit in the
strictest, dictionary sense of the terms. I’ve gone back to the book several
times since reading it, wanting—nay…aching!— to find some glimmer of value. Nothing.
Maybe it was just a tad too long? Maybe I’m too immature to appreciate the
nuanced high-culture from which Jack scrutinized and baptized low-culture?
Maybe the feeling of reader-futility was Jack’s exact point? Maybe. Or maybe the
book is for dumbsaints. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
If you haven’t read it, or even if you have, grant me the honor
of summarizing. Sal is a spoiled brat, a supreme example of delayed adulthood,
who is always looking for a rush and can’t sit still long enough to get some
steady work and stop bumming money off his aunt who keeps sending him money
because she’s always afraid he’s going to die as a result of his dumb-as-saint
choices. This mindless dolt chases around Dean Moriarty, the only person
stupider than himself, and literally follows off every cliff Dean jumps off.
Dean is that ‘friend’ which every parent in every home ever has warned their
kids about in that phrase, “if they jumped off a cliff, would you?” Yup. Little
boy Sal would. I swear that the <i>Darwin
Award</i>—conferred on every imbecile who ever killed themselves and thus mercifully
removed their genes from the human gene pool—was created just for idiots like
Sal and Dean. If one of those boys came after my 13-year-old daughter—after
all, they chased pre-teens in the book—I wouldn’t blink to grind their
cognitive functions to a halt with an aluminum baseball bat. In self-defense of
course. </div>
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The only way the ending could have been better would have
been if both of the protagonists were publically flogged while being forced to declare,
“We are pieces of shit that don’t deserve our privilege of going around
stealing, bumming, drinking, drugging, lusting, humping,
nearly-child-molesting, women-beating, and pretending to appreciate the life we
disgustingly squander as if it’s just another cheap beer!” Yes indeed, that
would be a good ending and might nearly redeem the story. I don’t ask for much.
Unless the option of them killing themselves was on the table. In which case, I’ll
take that.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I really do wish Jack would have been wise enough to use
this as some kind of moral fable instead of a play-by-play of his blended experience
and fantasy. It was written in a spirit of levity no doubt, but I could hardly
stomach the cyclical, spiraling ignorance and unconscious sensualism that
seemed the real heart of the story. The literary style displayed all the
panache and flourish of a staggering drunk. The theme was so self-destructive,
but with accents to try and make it somehow romantic and hilarious. Maybe if
the character splurged like that for a day. That might be funny. But for years
upon years of adulthood? </div>
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Question. What kind of country doesn’t let people like that
starve to death? Letting such prodigals eat better than pigs is a crime.
Sarcasm aside, there are people who do live and die like these characters. And
it’s much less handsome. How is this funny? I mean really funny? Not as in the
“they’re stupid” kind of funny, but as in the “this is cool” kind of funny? I
consider myself fairly progressive, but let’s not celebrate stupidity as
artistry. Stupid people are not artists; they are the art of artists. </div>
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For the love of God, don’t feed the dumbsaints.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-89481162044071900272016-07-20T08:01:00.001-07:002016-07-20T11:45:43.710-07:00Film Review: Swiss Army Man<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/06/07/14/swiss-army-man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/06/07/14/swiss-army-man.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Summary: A tale for only the lowest- and highest-brow
intellects, Swiss Army Man sticks its dirty finger on the peeled flesh of raw
human friendship and introduces us to ourselves in all of our fetid charm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">This is a movie with a prodigious amount of farting. And,
yes, I thought most of the farting was funny. And yes, I also thought the idea
of a corpse being ridden as a jet ski was downright hilarious, especially when
Hank pulls down the corpse’s drawers to allow its bare butt to go full-throttle.
Yes, that really happened, and yes, I laughed so hard that a stray French fry remains
lodged in my sinuses to this very day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">In case you haven’t seen the movie, here is a quick,
spoiler-free synopsis: Hank is stranded on an island contemplating suicide when
he sees a male corpse wash up on shore which turns out to be weirdly half-alive
though nearly immobile, and the two develop a friendship as the duo—Hank and
Manny—try to find their way out of the jungle by utilizing Manny’s rigor
mortised limbs as wood choppers and methane-producing, versatile bum as a
jet-ski and fire-starter; leaving plenty of time for Hank to teach Manny about
life, opportunity, love, farting, courage, and fear until Hank finally ends up
exploring his own internal landscape—‘unlearning what he has learned’—and
recognizing his true self as he comes to terms with the reality and/or delusion
(I’m not spoiling it!) of his experiences with Manny which appear to go
back-and-forth between psychosis-lucidity-psychosis-lucidity until Hank
ultimately releases his inhibitions, expresses his desires, and accepts and
affirms himself despite the confusion and possible rejection of his society. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Deep breath. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">This movie was a bromance of the highest order with
full-on hugging, dancing, rugged survival, avowals of life-long loyalty, drinking
of torrential spit from each other’s mouth, and a random underwater kiss that
ignited the butt-farting (again) and saved their very lives. Farting. Vindicated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The question many might ask themselves upon finishing the
movie is best phrased by one of the character’s exclamation upon an encounter
with this strange scenario, “What the fuck?” We in the theater all nodded our
heads in agreement with this sincere and apropos question. There was no overt
answer to the question in the movie, but I believe that there is a strong point
to the movie though it degenerated quite willingly into complete and utter
nonsense at times. But despite this decoy, it returned to its motifs with a
more solid punch for every twist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">This story of a man and his corpse explores two themes:
1) bro friendship, and 2) self identity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: large;">1) Bro Friendship<o:p></o:p></span></h2>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Manny: “If my best friend hides his farts from me then
what else is he hiding from me, and why does that make me feel so alone?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Many men aren’t comfortable with their feelings for their
homies. Back in the day, Arabs consummated deals by placing their hands
curiously close to the other party’s ball-sack. Socrates and his ilk had no
problem proclaiming love for their brethren by wrestling naked. Aristotle went so
far as to say that a friend is “a second self.” Christianity’s Apostle Paul—St.
Homophobe himself—declared that men should “greet each other with a holy kiss”
(with the understanding of course that “the tongue should lie dormant in such
blessed mouthing lest his Lordship Caesar should learn of it and want to ‘get
up on it’” (I Thessalonians 19 something). Walt Whitman made male bonding even
more socially acceptable by cloaking it in his reverence for Lincoln and a Grizzly
Adams persona by which he became widely considered as a man’s man with “ne’er a
proclivity towards ass-washing.” That brings us right up to the era of buddy
films like Good Will Hunting and Lord Of the Rings. The rest is history and
mostly legal: guys can like guys, and guys can <i>really </i>like guys.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">So it’s all cool, bro-love, right? Well, not yet
apparently. People of the modern age are in general still struggling to
understand their complex natures, not to mention complicating that search for
identity with the multiplied problems of fathomless dimensions of societal relationships
with other fucked-up people. If it takes a lifetime or more to “know thy
fucked-up self” as Socrates put it, it will take many more lifetimes to “know
thyself in the context of other fucked-up selves.” But we don’t have much time,
and life gets thick, quick. Guys aren’t always sure about how to connect best
with other people, not to mention other people with penises. Watch Fight Club. And
for the record, girls aren’t sure about these things either. Watch Bridesmaids.
And everything in-between. There, I don’t think that oversimplifies things at
all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Manny: “Girls must be so nice to let guys do all these
things to them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">When we say ‘bro’ most people probably refer to males,
but the word ‘bro’ is a reference to a type of friend-relationship that is like
family and ideally unselfish. Bros are bros to bros who don’t need them because
they have a gaping hole to fill (just in case you didn’t catch that….no pun
intended). Bros need bros to just be bros and nothing else. Bros are there when
the going gets tough, and bitches be bitchin, and bastards be bastarding.
Sometimes a guy (gender neutral) just needs another guy (gender neutral) to be
a friend and not require them for ulterior motives or sexual intimacy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">In a nut-sack, that’s what the whole bro thing means. We
all want to have at least one pure friendship with loyalty and love that’s not about—what
Manny referred to as—“boobs, vaginas, butts.” Or penises for that matter
(“Manny, I think your penis is guiding us home!”). Or any of the other parts of
the body that human erotica transmogrifies into something to lick or ejaculate on.
Bromance is about keeping things completely Platonic so that both parties are
bringing something to the table, and leaving each other alone at the end of the
day. It’s not sexual, or parental, or dependant, or enabling, or parasitic, or
domineering. It is true, secure friendship of separate selves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Manny: “I'm scared because I fear if I die I might really
miss you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Hank: “Oh you're the worst.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, this film is NOT about farting. Merely. I mean, it’s
definitely about farting, but it’s not JUST about farting. There’s more. Lot’s
more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<h2>
<span style="font-size: large;">2) Self Identity<o:p></o:p></span></h2>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Manny: “Oh God I'm disgusting. My body is disgusting.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Homo Sapiens are gross. And not even in the immoral sense
always, but just in the ‘plain nasty’ sense. Movies, meta or method as they
often are, still cannot quite approach the metallic taste of reality. Our
Victorian puritanistic toilet paper and pretended virginal innocence to our
rank crevices and odors are much more absurd than anything in this movie, and our
false-piety is a complete denial of our physical grotesqueness, office gossip, barstool
confessions, church hypocrisy, and political selfishness. Oh, we are mostly
fine being oblivious to ourselves. Joseph Campbell— that great mind that
unified myths and stories from around the world and condensed them down into recognizable,
recurring themes—believed that even our most horrific stories seldom wish to
plunge into the inhumanity of our existence. “Generally we refuse to admit
within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing,
self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very
nature of the organic cell.” We’re gross.
And because we are disgusting, and because we don’t like smelling our
own excrement, we mold our excrement into devils, ghosts, zombies, hitlers,
trumps, step-parents, cool kids, and Teletubbies. According to Campbell, the
ogres in our stories are “reflections of the unsolved enigmas of our own
humanity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">But is critical and necessary that we come to terms, to
some extent, with our humanity and inhumanity. We must, at some point, explore
our dark places if we are ever to find our way. The poet W. S. Merwin wrote
that all light gathering leaves are the direct result of roots saturated with
darkness, and that humans must grow by “touching the darkness of their whole
story from which their leaves open.” The coexistence of beauty and ugliness,
good and evil, love and hate, life and death has fascinated people throughout
history. Why? Because we can’t seem to escape our fears and filth which dwell
side-by-side with our most wholesome traits and cherished hopes. This is so
damn hard to admit to ourselves. So we shroud our self-confession in story
which helps to soften the blow by a forced, though unconscious, dissociation. Cognitive
dissonance and dissociation can be a healthy defense against the bombardment of
pessimism and nihilism, but it must be transcended frequently for the sake of a
unified self and an honest look at our situation which affords an opportunity
to change things for the better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That’s why farts. Cuz us.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">There may be a Nietzschean flare to this whole caper. Friedrich
Nietzsche’s character, <i>Zarathustra</i>,
sympathetically carried around a friend’s corpse for a while in <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> until he came to
the conclusion that he was finished with “corpses, herds, and believers” in
favor of companion-creators. Jesus himself told his followers to “let the dead
bury the dead” as a way of embracing a life free from the dead-weight of
people-problems (what a dick). Moving on from the corpses—dead-ends and
fruitless appendages— of our lives is certainly a recurring archetype in many
cultural narratives. But the larger arc of this story would indicate that the
‘adventures of Hank and Manny’ is a simple story of friendship, even if a tad
apparitional at moments. Their world’s rules often seem to change from one
scene to another, but the writers are under no obligation to be consistent. “A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (Emerson). Come at me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Manny: “I have a lot of questions about all the things
you just said.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is, on the surface and near the bottom, a story about a
bro being allowed to love a bro. Hank’s neuroses prevent him from enjoying
masturbation, being able to accept his mother’s death, expressing his feelings
of affection, and farting in front of people. He doesn’t know himself or accept
himself. But his stiff friend changes all that. You can watch the film to
discover if Manny is real or just another Wilson (from “<i>Castaway”</i>), but the scenes are clearly illustrative of how friends
accept each other, mirror back to each other traits that only a friend can
disclose, provide a safe place for the risk of exposure, become each other’s
compass when lost, wipe each other’s tears, drink each other’s spit, and accept
each other—farts and all. Well, most of that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">We are a lot of things to each other including resource,
support and reflection. We are each other’s Swiss Army Men and women. We bring
each other to life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">“My name’s Manny and this is my best friend Hank. I used
to be dead and he brought me back to life.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-83554784535590703622016-06-21T13:26:00.001-07:002016-06-21T13:27:16.746-07:00Review of Ada Limon's "Bright Dead Things"<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I first read Limon’s poem <i>How To Triumph Like a Girl</i> in a magazine called The Sun—a weird
little creative writing periodical that was sent to my home probably by
accident, and in which I connected with very little until I stumbled upon
Limon’s masterpiece. If you haven’t read it, you need to. The poem, not <i>The Sun</i>. God, not <i>The Sun</i>.
The poem had an emphasis on woman-power, but as a man I felt equally inspired
and in awe of human strength and self-belief. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I read a lot of poetry, but this little beauty stopped my
world's rotation for a few minutes. So simple and profound. I nibbled on it for
days like a sustaining trail mix in a hostile jungle. Poetry as condensed, creative, and courageous
words are important to those of us who feel like we don’t have enough genius or
time to catch all the ideas and feelings that run like water through
unconscious fingers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wait a minute. That was genius. I want to thank my family,
my editor, the Academy, and any one of the gods of the top ten religions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, I bought the book. Many of the poems in this book delivered
the same seismic wallop as “<i>How To
Triumph...</i>” Limon is great at appreciating life while complaining about the
sucky stuff in a way that doesn’t completely coagulate into mere bitchiness.
It’s crude enough to be authentic, but even when it gets a little weird (<i>e.g.</i>, squatting to pee in the poem “<i>Service</i>”), it feels like it was about
time for someone to piss on the rules. (Pardon the phun…I did mention I’m a
certified genius, write?)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I loved Limon’s criticism of the evasiveness and
self-loathing of many constricting forms of religious belief. Life is
inscrutable but beautiful, and life lived with open-eyed hopefulness<i>—“the sweet continuance of birth and flight
in a place so utterly reckless…How masterful and mad is hope”</i>—is infinitely
preferable to adopting a traditional faith by which one can pretend to “<i>fix their problems with prayer and property</i>.”
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The benefits of her humanistic/naturalistic/agnostic life
include:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large; text-indent: 0.5in;">“…[a] new way of living with the
world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“…nesting my head in the blood of
my body…I relied on a Miracle Fish, once…that was before I knew it was by my
body’s water that moved it, that the massive ocean inside me was what made fish
swim.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The <i>coup de grace</i>
to fundamentalist religion arrives in a description about a time in her life
when she tried believing in prayer as tradition suggests, but she couldn’t make
it work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“There was a sign and it said, <i>This earth is blessed. Do not play in it.</i>
But I swear I will play on this blessed earth until I die.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Sounds like a good idea. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The play part. Not the die part.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-68113825320895771892016-01-13T20:09:00.000-08:002016-01-14T10:22:36.728-08:00Review of Humans of New York<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is not a coffee table book. It looks like one, but it’s
not. It is a masterfully simple summary of modern human experience and the current
evolutionary status of homo sapiens in photos and short stories. It is not a
coffee table book in that it ought to be taken seriously and read in earnest by
all serious readers. But I guess in one sense it IS a coffee table book in that
it ought to be, and can easily be, read by anyone no matter how much they
normally read. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I have to admit, I was surprised at how gorgeous-ugly-provocative
it all turned out to be. Searching might even be a good word for how it works
on the reader. You can’t read it all through in one setting—or maybe you can,
but shouldn’t. You have to put it down to digest, and keep coming back. Otherwise,
you miss it. I was moved to tears several times. It’s not that the entire thing
is profound. Rather, it was a perfect blend of the trivial and mundane,
hysterical and hilarious, trite and bizarre, insane and beautiful, horrific and
courageous, and sickening and inspiring qualities that make up the still-undefined
and open-ended question of what it means to be human. I was actually surprised
at how finely tuned its poetry and portraiture was. I don’t know how Stanton
does it so well. I imagine that it’s not as easy as it looks. I doubt that even
10% of his interviews or portraits made it to print. It couldn’t have. Every
line seemed surgically cut and pasted with tweezers, needles, and magnifying
glass to give the impression of effortless storytelling and to get the letting-life-tell-its-own-tale
look so precisely. I found myself reading out-loud to my family, sending people
texts of some of the pictures and stories, and planning to use it for group
discussions. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Stanton doesn’t force the stories to paint the loveliest
picture of life at any cost. His humans come across as hopeless, depressed,
evil, and oozing with tar and darkness. But they also come across as
courageous, loving, pure, hopeful beings of light. There’s something in the
book to sicken even the most optimistic; but other things to fill even the most
nihilistic with joy. The unresolved dilemma of human meaning might be one of
the most unsettling features of the work. Reading it, we’re not sure if
humanity is a good thing or a bad thing. This is where Stanton is genius. He offers
no solutions. He lets it play out. All the loveliness and horror do their own
work in each reader. No doubt he believes that the light will prevail against
the dark, but the conflict is real and at times very disheartening. I still can’t
shake the memory of the guy who said that he had to get used to spending life alone
because he was obese, relating that his first few therapy sessions were filled
only with crying. Or the principal who made each of her students stand up in
school while she told them one by one they mattered. Or the boy who said that
he’ll always remember the day when no one showed up to his 10<sup>th</sup>
Birthday party. Or the old woman who cheerfully noted that today there were
ducks instead of pigeons eating the bread she threw.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The book runs through the dizzying spectrum of human
emotions in all their colors and shades; and we’re left feeling a rich, deep,
wounded, but purposeful sort of acknowledgement of the value and vicissitudes
of life. It’s as if Stanton is documenting our joys and pains and saying from
his individual but validating presence and work, “I see you, and your
experience if valid.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Or something like that. Or maybe his message is something
more like, “You’re not alone.” I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s <i>Question</i>:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">A voice said, Look me in the stars</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And tell me truly, men of earth,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">If all the soul-and-body scars</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Were not too much to pay for birth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Somehow Stanton’s work leaves us with an impression that
the scars aren’t too much to pay for birth. Not by a long shot.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-9532699846326023072015-12-13T21:47:00.000-08:002015-12-13T21:48:22.326-08:00Review of Catch-22<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">My advice to anyone who wants to glimpse the brilliance
of Heller in half the time and twice the concentration: read Vonnegut.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The irreverent and critical style of Heller is amazing in
some ways, especially considering the uptight milieu in which it gained
ascendance, and at times it was quite hilarious and illuminating, but
unfortunately too much of it amounts to 500
pages of low-hanging puns and cheap shots to slog through to unearth the gems.
Some of his one-liners make his works worthwhile though, and while reading I
stay reasonably convinced that he knows what he’s doing and I just need to
lighten up. Even so, it is convoluted and laborious for the most part, and I
found myself wanting it all to be over after the first hundred pages. I would
be embarrassed to say how many days this went on for me, and how many books I
started and finished before I put this one to rest. I only hope some of the
quotable quotations I put in my back pocket get used in this lifetime, because
it is my only justification for the book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">All in all, there just too much great literature that’s
current and probably more impactful for someone to waste too much time on this.
Hate saying it, but it’s probably past its prime and ready to take its rightful
place as one of the ‘classics’ that everyone knows about, but nobody reads. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Some of the best lines from the book:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that
weren’t even funnier. (17)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">He had decided to live forever, or die in the attempt.
(29)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">‘You mean there's a catch?'</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">'Sure there's a catch,' Doc Daneeka replied. 'Catch-22.
Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.'</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which
specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were
real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could
be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no
longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly
more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If
he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was
sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of
this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed. (46)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Like Olympic metals and tennis trophies, all [military
awards] signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone
more capably than everyone else. (72)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Clevenger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his
philosophy. (104)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital
and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. They couldn’t ; dominate Death
inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her
manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like
a lady…People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room, or expired
without comment in an oxygen tent. (166)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">“I’m cold, Snowden had whimpered. I’m cold.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him.
“There, there.” (166)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating
away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him
alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe. (172)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">He could start screaming inside a hospital and people
would at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital they would
throw him in prison if he ever started screaming about all the things he felt
everyone ought to start screaming about, or they would put him in the hospital.
(172)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Each day he faced was another dangerous mission against
mortality. (175)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into
combat in full-dress uniform so they’ll make a good impression on the enemy
when they’re shot down. (219)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">You put so much stock in winning wars…The real trick lies
in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. (245)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">There was no way of really knowing anything, he knew, not
even that there was no way of really knowing anything. (The chaplain, 266)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Did it indeed seem probable…that the answers to the
riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the
mechanics of rainfall? (285)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">He wished that he could be young and cheerful, too. And
it wasn’t their fault that they were courageous, confident, and carefree. He
would just have to be patient with them until one or two were killed and the
rest wounded, and then they would all turn out okay. (regarding Yossarian’s
hardened, military cynicism beside the buoyant, courageous young recruits, 349)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">He felt awkward because she was going to murder him.
(394)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">When you added them all up [the good people with the bad]
and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with
Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculpture somewhere. (413)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed
down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy
floor. It was easy to read the message in the entrails. Man was matter, that
was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and
he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit
gone, man is garbage. (440)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">When I look up [for ideals] , I see people cashing in. I
don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent
impulse and every human tragedy. (445)</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-74905257071246542932015-08-17T22:04:00.000-07:002015-08-17T22:04:11.682-07:00Review of Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl and Her Search For God<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In a sentence: A strong African woman casts off the
restraints of a slave’s religion, challenges whitey’s gods, and pushes through
to a way of life that is more natural, productive, and happy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It doesn’t take long for nearly every intelligent author in
the course of their career to weigh in on the one topic most try to avoid until
they have had at least a small amount of success under their belt. The question
of religion and of God are nearly inevitable in an author’s career, and I enjoy
the challenge of searching/waiting for works which reveal authors’ best kept
biases and most petty/profound insights. Sometimes I am devastated by the
inanity and childishness of the reveal, and other times I am deeply moved and
persuaded that there is more to the author than her works generally exhibit.
Either way it’s entertaining.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So I was excited to stumble upon a work of George Bernard
Shaw that performed quite well on this front. Mr. Shaw has thrown his hat in
the ring of authors who have spoken out quite bluntly about God and religion,
and he pulled no punches. Not only did Shaw tangle with millennia of Christian
tradition—a.k.a. ‘God’—in the epilogue of the book, but he also slammed his
atheist brothers and sisters for presuming to banish transcendent ‘meaning’
groped for in a mythos, and castigated agnostics for not committing either way
and thinking to sidestep the question altogether (“mere agnosticism leads
nowhere”). This much was made explicit only in the essay at the end of the book
about the failure of modern Christianity, severed as it is from its original
context and embellished and contorted in order to fit two millennia of evolving
sensibilities and changing environments. But the beginning and middle of the
book didn’t make the final comments any easier for the faithful to swallow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Shaw’s heroine, called ‘the Black Girl’ throughout, is a
smart, strong, African woman with as healthy a glow to her spirit as to her
earth-strong skin and body. She was, in Shaw’s words, “a fine creature, whose
satin skin and shining muscles made the white missionary folk seem like ashen
ghosts by contrast.” And with this social commentary on the rooted superiority
of African blood, body, and brain compared to the ‘ashen’ feebleness of their
western ‘saviors’, the author sets up a contest between his protagonist the Champion
of religion—namely, God. The Black Girl had been converted to Christianity by a
sad, single missionary woman who had found no satisfaction in her life, and the
Black Girl decides to go travelling through her jungle to see if she could find
the real God of the Bible that the missionary had depicted. She strides off
into the jungle, her knobkerrie in hand (a sort of club with a knob-tip used in
hunting and battle), naked and shameless as the earth who mothered her.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Throughout the story she meets with different versions of
the God of the Bible, each representing a successive stage of god-progression
from blood-thirsty Lord of Hosts, to the God of Job and Micah, to the ascetic
and passive Jesus who speaks of a kind of love that consumes individuals for
the sake of the collective and frees no one. She debates with each of these gods,
and ultimately moves on in search of a more perfect deity that offers more
answers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is when the Black
Girl discusses God with a few enlightened westerners, and is told by one of the
more honest ones that it were best that the Africans—who were “stronger,
cleaner, and more intelligent”—not be taught to believe in the “simple truth
that the universe has occurred through Natural Selection, and that God is a
fable.” Why would this behoove the Westerners to teach? In the words of one
pale-thing, “It would throw them back on the doctrine of the survival of the
fittest…and it is not clear that we are the fittest to survive in competition
with them...I should really prefer to teach them to believe in a god who would
give us a chance against them if they started a crusade against European
atheism.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And there Shaw has put it about as succinctly and potently
as he could. The Black Girl has felt the bottom of Christendom, and is ready to
break out of the religious labyrinth that had been designed for the Third World
by Western imperialists (though I don’t believe that the suppression of Third
World freedom by Western religious controls is necessarily a conscious thing in
all cases, but I wonder if white faithful folk would change their tune if they
weren’t the saviors, and felt more in need of the saving). The Black Girl finds
no theology which could deliver to her the perfected essence of the imperfect,
traditional, Christian God with its heterogeneous limbs, faces, and purposes.
The God she seeks doesn’t exist, and she ends up marrying a good Irishman who
believes that “God can search for me if he wants me” (not bad terms to be on
with God, if God is good that is). She later becomes a mother, reflects on the
futility of wasting her life making assumptions about God and chasing mirages,
and in the distraction of living her life and taking care of her family and
children, completely loses interest in the search for a God whose absence didn’t
ultimately affect her much. Later, after she had raised her children, she
considers again taking up the search. But “by that time her strengthened mind
had taken her far beyond the stage at which there is any fun in smashing idols
with knobkerries.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A brilliant little ending for a brilliant little book about
the triumph of humanity over a few of its stubborn and isolated beliefs. It’s
not that Shaw had no appreciation for Christianity—“at worst the Bible gives a
child a better start in life than the gutter”—but he urged his fellow Sapiens
to put behind them the cruder elements of a faith that must be outgrown, and
make progress in the search for what William James called, “the More, and our
union with it.” He knew the danger of a closed mind, and when one or more
people are not willing to move forward and question tradition, things like
Christian religion and the Bible become a little more than an impediment to growth—“[if]
we cannot get rid of the Bible, it will get rid of us.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Now all I need is to find me a knobkerrie and crack some
ignorant skulls with it. And…I have learned nothing.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-21753450994712771332015-06-25T21:12:00.000-07:002015-06-25T21:13:02.081-07:00Review of Erik and Joan Erikson's "The Life Cycle Completed--Extended Version"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.fotoblur.com/imgs/0/0/0/2/5/1/3/341338.jpg?v=0" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.fotoblur.com/imgs/0/0/0/2/5/1/3/341338.jpg?v=0" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Erik Erikson can drive a person mad with his florid language
and abstractions, and his antediluvian sexual stages are nearly nails in his
coffin (lo-rest-his-so), but the man and his wife were a force of nature. He
never finished his bachelor’s degree, but he knew what it meant to be human.
Who does that? The sense kept washing over me that he was jumping ahead of
empirical data and taking hold of a reality-in-itself that transcended his case
studies. I can’t help thinking that, even when he was wrong, he was right. I
personally think he’s bigger than psychology, perhaps fitting more the
philosopher-sociologist type with his wide-sweeping anthropologic and
reality-unifying theories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">His 8 stages are brilliant, but I think they are basically
restatements of the pulse of human ‘becomings.’ The stages represent an opportunity
for each person to ‘become more’ or ‘become less’ in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">• Trust
(becoming more) vs. Mistrust (becoming less)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">• Autonomy
(more) vs. Shame (less)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">• Initiative
(more) vs. Guilt (less)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">You get the picture. Apparently Joan did too when she wrote,
“I am persuaded that only by doing and making do we become.” Each stage either
sees a person desiring to become larger with more involvement in the universe
by confirming and building on the freedom and success from an earlier stage, or
the person desires to withdraw and cover their wounds, to avoid becoming an
inflated target and insulate themselves against the hostile environment that is
slowly (or quickly) eroding their ego and sense of capability. As an aside, I
was explaining this to my 8-year old daughter, and when I asked her what she
thought would happen if an infant doesn’t trust its world and begins to
withdraw, she answered, “They won’t learn!” This is true, and perfectly
describes the stunted growth of a psyche that fears the world and its presence
in it. Sartre and the existentialists would have had a few things to say about
this, as their definitions of an inauthentic and dysfunctional human being
relate closely to those who are attempting to escape from their essential
freedom and suffering in the world (without success). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I have to give a shout out to Joan Erikson (sup Joanie
babe!!) for being willing to go back and modify the 8th stage based upon her
first-hand account of it which neither she nor Erik could have augured from
their 40-year-old-or-so perspectives when they wrote Life Cycle Completed. Like
a boss—at 93 years old—she scrawled out a new definition to ‘wisdom’ and
‘integrity’, representing them not merely as virtues—wispy, spiritual
attributes of the distanced-from-life—but as qualities of someone who is
‘in-touch’ with life and it’s meanings in a very intimate and mystical way. She
kicked ass for old people the world over, and made her voice heard above the
melee of the young, proud, and heedless. Joanie babe, if you weren’t dead and
rotted, I’d kiss your un-rotted face for your bravery and un-rottedness!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Quotes From the Book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Epigenesis—step by step growth and gradual differentiation
of parts. In embryology as well as psychology, each organ or trait has its time
of origin—a factor as important as the locus of the origin. If the eye, said
Stockard, does not arise at the appointed time, “it will never be able to
express itself fully, since the moment for the rapid outgrowth of some other
part will have arrived.” If the organ misses its time of ascendance, it is not
only doomed as an entity, it endangers at the same time the whole hierarchy of
organs. The result of normal development, however, is proper relationship of
size and function among all body organs. (summary with quote)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A sense of defeat [in early childhood]…can lead to deep
shame and a compulsive doubt whether one will ever be able to feel that one
willed what one did—or did what one willed. (37)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">[Ritualization is a way of saying] ‘this is how we do
things’…[and has] adaptive value...in the social process...that must do for
human adaptation what the instinctive fit into a section of nature will do for
an animal species. (42)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">[Parents are the first to] help evoke and to strengthen in
the infant the sense of a primal other—the I’s counterpart. (44)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The mutual recognition between mother and infant may e a
model of some of the most exalted encounters throughout life. (45)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I submit that this first and dimmest affirmation of the
described polarity of the ‘I’ and ‘Other’ is basic to a human being’s ritual
and esthetic needs for a pervasive quality which we call the numinous: the aura
of a hallowed presence. The numinous assures us, ever again, of separateness
transcended and yet also of distinctiveness confirmed, and thus of the very
basis of a sense of ‘I’. (45)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with
experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and
planning. (51)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">[Adults, too, play] with past experience and anticipated
tasks, beginning with that activity in the autosphere called thinking. (51)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hope connotes the most basic quality of “I”-ness, without
which life could not begin or meaningfully end. (62)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In old age a retrospective mythologizing…can amount to a
pseudointegration as a defense against lurking despair. (65)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">An immense power of verification [in mature adulthood]
pervades this meeting of bodies [sex] and temperaments after the hazardously
long human preadulthood. (70)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It seems that the stage of generativity, as long as a threatening
sense of stagnation is kept at bay, is pervasively characterized by a supremely
sanctioned disregard of death…Youth and old age, then, are the times that dream
of rebirth, while adulthood is too busy taking care of actual births and is
rewarded for it with a unique sense of boisterous and timeless historical
reality—a sense which can seem somewhat unreal to the young and to the old, for
it denies the shadow of nonbeing. (80)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The problem is such that so basic a sense of centrality [of
the ego] depends for its renewal from stage to stage on an increasing number of
others: some of them close enough to be individually acknowledged as an ‘other’
in some important segment of life, but for the most part a vague number of
interrelated others who seek to confirm their sense of reality by sharing… (89)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am persuaded that only by doing and making do we become.
(Joan Erikson, 127)</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-13732978050441520232015-04-25T21:38:00.000-07:002015-04-25T21:39:50.065-07:00Review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/files/2012/05/kuhn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/files/2012/05/kuhn.jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Nothing I’ve read to date on the the subject of diversity in
human perspective comes near to being as eye-opening as this work has been for
me. It is probably still one of the brightest lights on the subject, and
continues to cause waves in our time as it did in the 60’s when it was severely
controversial. It danced on the graves and sacred places of logical positivism
(the idea that we can approach absolute reality by pure reason), <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>surpassed post-positivist epistemologies like Karl Popper’s theory
of falsification which posited that human ideas only change when we find
something wrong with them, and caused bedlam among those who opposed
Nietzschean relativism and postmodernism in general. In fact, this work and its
ideas are still wreaking havoc among those who attempt to brace the door
against the tsunami of an already entrenched postmodernism. The judgment for
those who don’t adapt and/or capitulate to a more virile paradigm is severe in
any system, but in Kuhn’s it is phrased as an inevitable path towards
isolation, imitation, and parasitism. Even if late-adopters finally acquiesce
to the novelty of a new paradigm, it may be too late to ‘go native’ with it. An
unwilling imitator “may use the new [paradigm] nonetheless, but he will do so
as a foreigner in a foreign environment, an alternative available to him only
because there are natives already there. His work is parasitic on theirs, for
he lacks the constellation of mental sets which future members of the community
will acquire through education.” Of course, I’m thinking of latest wave of
materialistic scientists, who I love and revere for their genius in their own
fields, but who refuse to acknowledge the debt they owe to great thinkers like
Wittgenstein and Sartre whom they imitate but don’t thank. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Regardless of who is who in season 5 of “Paradigm Wars”, the
work concerned with in this review—<i>The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions</i>—explicates the reality of paradigm competition,
paradigm incommensurability, and the process of paradigm succession. As I said,
no one comes close to Kuhn in explaining why different people commit to
different ideas, and why they seldom change without life-altering circumstances
or crises, and sometimes, not even then. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This may be nicely illustrated by a conversation I had with
my daughter recently. We were driving along, talking about the belief system I
was raised with, and I was explaining how my worldview changed drastically. I
felt strangely honored when she said, “Dad, I’m proud of you.” I asked why. She
said, “Because you made it out of a religion. Most people grow old with what
they believe, and sometimes never make it out.” Wow. Now, to be honest—and my
wife made me admit this—I most certainly planted that idea in her head since
this wasn’t an isolated conversation; but for her to put those words together
for that moment tells me she understands what powerful things worldviews and
paradigms are! The chance of coming to terms with the power of paradigms makes
this book is so important for people who can understand it, and for those who
can help translate the message to the many who will never read it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Paradigms</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">To begin, Kuhn begins by defining what a paradigm is, and
how it works. A paradigm is a word rescued by Kuhn from the Greek word <i>paradeigma</i> meaning ‘pattern’ or ‘example’.
The contemporary use of the word along with the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ owes the
shirt off its back to Kuhn. In Kuhn’s usage, a paradigm is essentially a
communal worldview that saves people the task of reinventing the ideological
wheel. Paradigms are full of rules, definitions, expectations, values,
feelings, and views of the world that are heavily inculcated and therefore
deeply ingrained in the mind of each member. Paradigm-imprinting is often
unconscious, with implicit thinking patters which are ultimately accepted by
the member as ‘the way the world is.’ Kuhn brought to the world’s attention how
even academic textbooks are assiduously designed to give the impression that
they are unbiased and have arrived at a final convergence of all past paths of
knowledge and discovery. But even textbooks are subject to paradigmatic bias.
Kuhn points out that there is no cumulative ‘one right way’ to think about the
world (a point which he revisits later), but rather there are many different
simultaneous paradigms that compete with each other and offer different
benefits to members of their community. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Normal Science</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Are paradigms, then, merely symptoms of human bias and
communal narrow-mindedness? Yes and no. Paradigms offer what Kuhn dubs ‘normal
science’—the foundation and compliment for all ‘revolutionary science’ which
ushers in new, contending paradigms—and it is this normal science which assists
paradigms in functioning unimpaired by every stray doubt or question that
plagues the human mind. Within an accepted paradigm an individual can rest on
certain principles that they believe are true, and science can begin to test
those principles in all their nuances and further articulate the theories
present in the paradigm without fear of being rushed or waylaid at every
corner. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The restrictions [of normal science’s range of research],
born from confidence in a paradigm, turn out to be essential to the development
of science. By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric
problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in
a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable…[and solve] problems
that its members could scarcely have imagined and would never have undertaken
without commitment to the paradigm.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Kuhn cites three things that normal science provides which would
be untenable in revolutionary science:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">1) Theory fact-finding that is undisturbed, unimpeded, and
supported by consensus and advanced technology.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">2) Theory fact-matching that is a concentrated and
sophisticated form of puzzle-solving within a given paradigm. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">3) Theory articulation of the paradigm that provides refined
language, rules, tools, and minor revision of paradigmatic theories to keep the
paradigm afloat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Normal science is not designed to produce paradigmatic
changes, novelties, or facts that aren’t ultimately assimilable into the
paradigm. All findings of normal science are either forced into categories to
support a paradigm, or they are dismissed as the errors or as limits of the
scientist. The reason for this is that the puzzle-solving urge of scientists,
and human beings in general, is irresistible and provides rewards in the form
of solution-gratification and recognition. This puzzle-solving urge is enough
in itself to busy most people for most of their lives, because in it answers
are predictable and achievable. This is in direct contrast to the work of
revolutionary science in which problems are reconstituted with no ready
formulas for attaining solutions or even a guarantee that a solution will be
attainable or recognizable in one’s lifetime. In some sense, normal science is
much more productive in research and articulation, but it folds in on itself
and stymies the process of actual discovery that so many mistake to be its
central purpose. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time
prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted
belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is
almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of
a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if
only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one
before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have
devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort.
On most occasions any particular field of specialization offers nothing else to
do, a fact that makes it no less fascinating to the proper sort of addict.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Augmenting the apparent triviality of puzzle-solving that
normal science is obsessed with, basic educational models are designed to
condition students to learn ideas by plugging theorems and formulas into applied
science—learning by rote and practice—which further solidifies the
puzzle-solving mentality. This distances the eventual specialist from any
contact with problems or values not originally defined by their community’s
paradigm, which definitions are often accepted at face value and remain largely
unquestioned. “Though many scientists
talk easily and well about the particular individual hypotheses that underlie a
concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at
characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems
and methods.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is a frightening notion that so-called ‘detached’
scientists aren’t so detached after-all—even the tools and rules used to
approach problems are only after all a ‘strong network of commitments’—but we
have to remember that this is in accordance with the very nature of humanity
which is, <i>ipso facto</i>, anything but
detached to its desires and goals. We are irremediably invested in goals and
aims, many of which we aren’t even completely aware of, and yet what little
awareness of our prejudice we can develop will help us to switch our
allegiances in as intelligent ways as we can manage when it comes time. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Discovery</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Kuhn, points out again and again that the discovery of new
facts which inform new paradigms is not a simple process of accumulating
knowledge. Discovery is not merely something that happens when people
experience something new. Indeed, discovery happens far later than a first new
experience. With new experiences, people are only conscious of a phenomenon
which defies established categories as ‘something that has gone wrong’, or an
anomaly. Kuhn gives the example of the discovery X-rays. In a normal
investigation of cathode rays by the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, a piece
of lab equipment seemed to arbitrarily glow on the other side of the room.
Further investigation of the phenomena, and many experiments later, Rontgen was
able to isolate, duplicate, and describe the effect which was caused by X-rays.
This discovery was piecemeal, and could not be properly called a ‘discovery’ at
those early stages when Rontgen had no idea what had caused the anomaly. With
enough research, anomaly gives way to novelty—or repeated anomaly—and novelty
gives way to expectation, completing the process of discovery. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The point here is extremely significant: there is no
authentic discovery in normal science, because there is no room for anomaly or
novelty! “Discoveries [which are] predicted in advance are parts of normal
science and result in no <i>new</i> sort of
fact [no authentic discovery]… Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact
or theory and, when successful, finds none.” Normal science supports, puzzle-solves,
and articulates theories within a paradigm, but it doesn’t go off hunting for
new paradigms; therefore data that doesn’t fit into an existing paradigm is
anomalous until it is either mashed into the paradigm, or it becomes a crisis
to usher in a competing paradigm in which to assimilate. Therefore, paradigms—ways
of thinking about the world that are bolstered by normal science—are designed
to resist discovery! Welcome to the glories of the human brain. This is
right-brain, left-brain wars if I’ve ever seen them! Read Ramachandran’s <i>Phantoms In the Brain</i> for a neurological
explanation of why and how the brain creates fiction (confabulates) to compose
a consistent picture of reality. You can’t make this stuff up! Wait. Yes. Yes
you can.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But the pitfalls of paradigms are worth the trouble. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“In the development of any science, the first received
paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the
observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners.
Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of
elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and
a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their
usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand,
to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable
resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On
the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention
of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a
precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other
way.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">What Kuhn is pointing out here is that we would not be aware
of the need for <i>new</i> constructs if we
didn’t have <i>some</i> construct in place,
however limited or inadequate, to start sorting through the profusion of data
that is present to our senses. How would we know that something has gone wrong,
or that we need a new or more accurate metric if we had no standard by which to
measure and notice something is awry in the first place? Paradigms are grids of
the cosmos which allow scientists to concentrate on specific sections to study
at close-range without being bothered about the rest of the universe. By doing
this, novelty and anomaly take on real texture and appear in stark contrast
against a background of a very well-studied context. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily
emerges only for the man who, knowing <i>with
precision</i> what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has
gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the
paradigm.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Paradigms, then, are temporary structures—rigid, limited,
and ultimately abortive—but without them, humanity could not advance
ideologically or scientifically. Every successive generation leaves the old
ones behind, but also creates new ones which will, in their turn, be left
behind some day. It is the circle of paradigm-life: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The mobs of birth</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Avoid our stale perfections,
seeking out</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Their own, waiting until we go</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">To picnic in the ruins that we
leave. –Wallace Stevens</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Crises and Competition</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The specific way in which old paradigms gives way to new
paradigms is fascinating. Even in the case of complete discoveries—from
anomaly, to novelty, to expectation—new data is merely contorted to fit old
categories unless a competing paradigm is offered which reframes all data, old
and new, to form a new map of the world. Crisis is the harbinger of change. Without
crises, no new idea would ever take root because there would be no perceived
need for it, and therefore no motivation to do all the hard work required to
establish it. Humanity has a strong tradition of staying in bed until the
sheets are soiled. For all people, including scientists, “retooling is an
extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it,” i.e., ‘if it
ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ And when one considers how deeply paradigms are
woven into the fabric of society and scientific methodology, one can understand
why ‘retooling’—or completely reimagining the wheel—is so costly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But crises do finally come in their dark robes and scythes
for every paradigm’s soul, in one of many ways. The first symptom of a crisis
is often a general sense of inefficiency in areas that once demonstrated the
paradigm’s superiority. Here scientific paradigms show their consanguinity with
political paradigms in exhibiting breakdown when they have “ceased adequately
to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created.”
Beyond an intuition that something is awry, there are other more obvious
signals. “The proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try
anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and
to debate over fundamentals, all these are symptoms of a transition from normal
to extraordinary research [which research works to inaugurate a new paradigm].”
What’s further, taste and aesthetic preference can cause people to look up and
out. Sometimes the subjective impression that an existing paradigm has become somehow
become clunky and unattractively complicated might signal the need for another
paradigm that is nice, neat, and simple.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">When a crisis is acknowledged in a community, new paradigms
are proposed by brave souls who aim to create a system that better incorporates
and explains new and old information. This paradigm-rush sees a proliferation
of multiple, un-tested versions of traditional paradigms, rules, and all-new
iterations altogether, introduced which might
initially seem to complicate things, but actually help to free people from the
fear that the rigors of an old paradigm is their only option. “All crises begin
with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for
normal research.” And the bearers of these gospels of change? Young people with
fresh eyes. This works partly because new eyes see clearly the problems that
communities become inured to over time, but it also works because new people
have not sunk resources, time, and energy so deeply into the old paradigm, nor
have they staked a political reputation on defending and reinforcing the old
views. And although introducing a new paradigm is difficult and meets with much
opposition, it is often still worth the risk because the sense of loss isn’t as
poignant if things don’t work out. Loss aversion, a very real behavioral
phenomenon which refers to the tendency of people to strongly prefer avoiding
losses than acquiring gains, may be a large part of the underlying tenacity of
old paradigms, especially when afflicted by crises and faced by alternative
paradigms. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Incommensurability of Paradigms</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">History has illustrated again and again that the introduction
of a new paradigm doesn’t bring world peace. The problem is that all new
paradigms are only accepted by those who recognize failures within old
paradigms. If a failure is not recognized by those who adhere to a paradigm,
then it will continue to be bolstered and perpetuated until its adherents have
moved on, or are dead. And as long as communities hold together within a
paradigm, failures of a view will be compensated for and speciously ‘solved’ by
the puzzle-solvers and articulators who find benefit in solidarity itself. It
quickly becomes obvious that paradigms are ways of life, and not solely ways to
<i>think</i> about life. It is here we see
how closely scientific paradigms resemble paradigms within other human studies
and endeavors.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Like the choice between competing political institutions,
that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible
modes of community life.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A paradigm ultimately reveals itself to be glued together by
personal taste and interest, and not merely by claims to ‘truer truths’. This
is why Kuhn states that all groups argue in circularities when coming to the
defense of why they chose their paradigms. Proofs don’t convince, because
proofs are <i>a posteriori</i> explanations
of what works and what doesn’t. The best a proof can do is demonstrate <i>that</i> a paradigm works, or provide “a
clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who adopt the
new view of nature,” and may not win much merit for logical explanations which
every paradigm ultimately develops. Mostly those who find that a paradigm
community works or is compelling on some level are those who ‘step inside the
circle’ and ‘go native’ with a paradigm. They are those who understand the
values, terms, and rules, and who value similar goals and processes. Within
every paradigm are defined problems, and proposed solutions, but what happens
when people differ with each other about what the real problems are and what a
solution would look like? Problems and solutions are essentially human in
nature. Nature in itself has no problems or solutions. Problems and solutions
depend on the significance human beings place on them, and there never has been
nor ever will never be problems or solutions that nature defines for us. And if
paradigms, as Kuhn maintains, function to define and solve problems, then it is
evident that world views are strictly human constructions and depend as much on
our frame of mind as anything empirical and external to us. Normal science,
therefore, is about human interest, and not mere detached observation and
reportage.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This most personal value and interest that gives a paradigm
its existence and imbues it with significance is what makes paradigms
ultimately incommensurable with each other. They fundamentally aim at different
goals, define success and failure in different ways, and structure their
communities to follow specific rules to achieve specific goals. Especially
important is how language is customized and everyday terms are defined by a
community’s nuanced goals, rules, understandings and expectations. Paradigms
are different worlds! This is why Kuhn says that members of different
scientific schools “will inevitably talk through each other when debating the
relative merits of their respective paradigms.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And because every paradigm necessarily involves incomplete
and therefore partially inaccurate explanations of the universe, the
incommensurability only increases. “Since no paradigm ever solves all the
problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems
unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it
more significant to have solved?” I can’t imagine a question more important or
more divisive than that one, and yet hardly a person recognizes that this exact
question is even at stake.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Kuhn believed that people of different paradigms essentially
inhabit different worlds. Often people’s views of the world are so completely
at odds with each other that it’s hard not to believe that they are viewing the
same thing at all. It is as if a gestalt switch has been flipped, and where
before one saw ducks, now they see rabbits; or where before the one “saw the
exterior of the box from above,” they now see “the interior of the box from
below.” For example, in very simple, literal terms, a contour map may at first
look to a student like mere lines on a paper, but to a cartographer, it’s a picture
of terrain. Kuhn uses the history of incommensurable views in Copernicus’ time
to further illustrate gestalt. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Consider, for another example, the men who called
Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either
just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed
position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly,
Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole
new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that
necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion’. Without those
changes the concept of a moving earth was mad.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">New information and different frameworks ‘create’ different vision
to view different worlds. “What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at
and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to
see.” This goes so far as to affect not only the ideological framework for
data, but the supposedly straightforward data itself. Even “the operations and
measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not ‘the given’
of experience but rather ‘the collected with difficulty’,” which means that
facts don’t fall into anyone’s laps, they are sought after and only recognized
when they are squeezed into the mold of a prefabricated pattern or idea. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The force of polarization in paradigms naturally increases
and reinforces the incommensurability of paradigms, almost irrevocably. Is it
any wonder it seems nearly impossible for some people to change their mind on
any given subject? The secret about facts is that no fact stands alone. Each is
inextricably woven into a vast web of meanings, implications, underpinnings, and
cover-ups; and the knots cannot be untied without leaving the whole in tatters.
This is why the webs of paradigms are simply abandoned when they fail to work,
and quickly replaced by a paradigm that promises better solutions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Conversion</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So how can people change their minds and switch paradigms if
their self-reinforcing psychology and genetic protocol to propagate one’s own
ideas at the expense of reality keeps confirming the paradigms that they
accepted at an early age? What happens when a paradigm is taking water, and it’s
time to bail? Well, it’s either adaptation or extinction, and most would rather
die before their dreams do. Scientists of the ilk of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin
and many others never witnessed a conversion of the masses to their ideology
immediately, and countless others were murdered before later generations
pardoned them, sainted them, and adopted their discoveries. Quantum theorist Max
Planck summed up this tragic truth best in his <i>Scientific Autobiography</i>,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Cynics would dismiss the whole mess as a modality of one of
the useless extremes of either relativism or bigotry, but a closer look reveals
the value of the hard-to-kill nature of human paradigms. Commitment to
paradigms, along with the obstinate delusions about their absolute nature, is
exactly what makes normal science—puzzle-solving—possible! Without this resolve
to stick to the paradigm, no work would ever get done, and the meticulous
scrutiny and recording of experimental findings—brute data—that makes the
scientific process what it is would be abandoned at the first sign of
discrepancy. Imagine a world of fickle, bohemian, flip-flop scientists! Pun
most definitely intended! </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Science help us. Science help us all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But for those who do recognize crises in a paradigm and are
still young and supple enough to convert to a new paradigm that can solve the
old crises, ‘there is a mansion prepared for them, so that where the Solution
is, there they may be also.’ But we have to keep in mind that a more accurate
and helpful paradigm may introduce new problems, and may not solve enough
problems satisfactorily, at least immediately, for all people. In fact, some historical
revolutions with proposed solutions initially “created many more problems than
they solved…Copernicus’ theory was not more accurate than Ptolemy’s and did not
lead directly to any improvement in the calendar.” It is often true that a person
who wakes from a worldview must do so “in defiance of the evidence provided by
the problem-solving” all around her, and this is done by “faith” in a new way
that as of yet hasn’t been established. She then become the pioneer that
everyone else watches to see how she fairs, and to witness how her new paradigm
serves her. If things go well, they may have a new winner.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Textbook Paradigms and Invisible Revolutions</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">As a very practical example of the failure to understand
competing paradigms, Kuhn strings up textbooks. The best of our science—for all
of the scientific community’s claims of detachment, objectivity, and systematic
process—is just as subject to paradigmatic provincialism and confirmation bias
as any other human pursuit. Kuhn deals very candidly and directly with the fact
that school textbooks—which stand as a tool purely intended to convey
information and not feelings—are just as prone to prejudice and manipulation of
the facts as any other human instrument.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional,
science textbooks…refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that
can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the
texts’ paradigm problems…[this] depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and
probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession,
the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details
of other sorts.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Kuhn spends a lot of time with the textbook problem because
it is largely overlooked by many, and perhaps least acknowledged by scientists
and the academy. The result is that scholars and laymen alike are wrongly
persuaded that humanity’s knowledge of the world is steadily increasing, as
opposed to the more likely scenario that science, like everything else, is a
constant flux of paradigms slugging it out to the death in a battle royal where
the strong, not necessarily the ‘more right’, survive. Essentially, these
historical, textbook “misconstructions render [scientific] revolutions
invisible” by pretending each revolutionary idea was finally saluted and crowned
king upon its arrival by its epoch, rather than viciously attacked for being
antithetical to the established. Kuhn argues that this isn’t honest, effective,
or healthy. Science and history ought to give a more forthright account of
itself, lest, in the words of William James, it “lose[s] truth by this
pretension to possess it already wholly.” Not only that, but the creative and
pioneering spirit of discoverers are substituted with an idea of gentle
inevitability which downplay the role of courage and imagination which subverts
and contends with the powers of paradigm. “Until the very last stages in the
education of the scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the
creative scientific literature that made them possible…it is a narrow and rigid
education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But again, the reason for this is that textbooks teach by
inculcation, by setting up problems and solutions which students learn formulas
to apply, facts to remember, and patterns to recognize. In this way, an
existing paradigm is passed on, and a gestalt is reinforced which causes
members of the same group to see the same picture. These are the ‘examplars’
that Kuhn refers to, the faux problems that condition students to recognize and
reproduce paradigms, and it is completely natural and universal. “One of the
techniques by which members of a group…learn to see the same things when
confronted with the same stimuli is by being shown examples of situations that
their predecessors in the group have already learned to see as like each other
and as different from other sorts of situations.” If it weren’t for crises, or,
I would add, boredom, which catalyzes a revolution, perhaps nothing would break
the cycle of a paradigm’s reiterations and redundancies. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large;">Summary and Conclusions</span></h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So what did Kuhn really contribute to science and
philosophy? Kuhn successfully contended with and soared above other popular
ideas in his day about how to verify the accuracy of a theory or idea. Karl
Popper’s “falsification” epistemology was still in vogue, and Kuhn’s
competitive paradigms made it clear that an idea need not be perfect, or
perfectly validated, for it to work. It was a much simpler test of accuracy than
had ever been devised before, but it wasn’t without its consequences. If a
paradigm wasn’t ‘right’ because it won in the contest, what’s to say an
incorrect paradigm couldn’t pull out in front of the rest and be wrongly
celebrated for its veracity simply because it received the largest number of
votes? Kuhn saw where this was going, and beat it to the punch: Science and
history has no goal, no higher truth towards which it is progressing. He admits
that this is not a conventional view, and it can be very disturbing within many
paradigms (especially in his day). Yet William James, among others, said as
much in his <i>Varieties of Religious
Experience</i>, “Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which
it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the
scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself.” Kuhn points
out that this was the essential findings of Darwin, “The <i>Origin of Species</i> recognized no goal set either by God or nature” (Kuhn).
But the idea that the evolution of paradigms is moving away from “primitive
beginnings,” revealing a pattern of an “increasingly detailed and refined
understanding of nature,” and not necessarily <i>towards</i> anything doesn’t have to be disappointing. It’s all in the
way you look at it (go figure). “If we can learn to substitute
evolution-from-what-we-do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a
number of vexing problems may vanish in the process.” In other words, one could
say that we are progressing towards knowing more of what we <i>want</i> to know, and as tautological as it
sounds, it certainly doesn’t interrupt our rhythms of getting everything we
possibly can out of science and intellectual endeavors. If it works, who cares
if it doesn’t work the way we thought it should, or it doesn’t reveal what we
thought it would reveal? We find it meaningful and productive, and in the end,
that may be enough.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But this work goes beyond science by elucidating the ways in
which human beings think in art, politics, sociology, philosophy, and
religion. As a matter of fact, although
Kuhn states in the Postscript that paradigms in science often operate in some
‘strikingly different’ ways than in fields like art and literature, he admits
that he derived the concept of paradigm successions from other fields for the
reason that he believed the sciences operated in many similar ways, if in
different degrees. This is enough for any thoughtful reader to apply the
concept of competing paradigms to all areas of human cognition and action,
since it is impossible for humans to work and think—to live!—outside of
paradigm or outside a community of other minds. This is precisely what The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions is all about, and it is how the Postscript
of the second ends. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the
common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall
need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It was Kuhn’s way of saying that no idea exists outside of human
community—that paradigms ARE human community— and it was his hope that future
generations would use this to better understand themselves and each other.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-33645467471252628312015-02-02T20:37:00.001-08:002015-02-02T20:38:40.934-08:00Review of In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the World by Virginia Hamilton<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs40/i/2009/010/6/9/Gaea_by_AnnPars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs40/i/2009/010/6/9/Gaea_by_AnnPars.jpg" height="320" width="215" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I read this book of creation stories and cosmogonies from
around the world out-loud to my 8-year-old daughter to try and balance out the
Christian stories that she is deluged by in American culture. Many children
have no idea that predominant western religions did not develop in a vacuum,
but are threads in a tapestry of world mythology and religion that is as varied
as it is valued by so many different people in different times and climates. We
really enjoyed the stories, although some of them were as strange on first read
as the stories of the Bible and western myths must feel to children from other
cultures. Going through all the stories was actually an excellent experiment in
exchanged perspective, and the disorientation caused by the change lasted long
enough for us to go back to our own stories and sense afresh the “vagueness,
monstrosity, and incoherent variety” (H.G. Wells) of the western gods. I
thought it was especially beneficial to have the Bible story of Eden placed at
the end of the book as a way to say, “And now, doesn’t this story seem to have
much more in common with the stories of antiquity and early thought than you
had realized?” Brilliant. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In addition to being understandable by old and young alike,
the stories were very well spaced temporally and geographically, and mixed
together an excellently artful and balanced pastiche of creative human
narrative. At the end of each story, updated with modern language but loaded
still with rich and incomprehensible imagery, there was a nice little paragraph
about the story and its cultural setting and significance that helped explain
elements of tale would have passed us by. My daughter and I read this together at
bedtime every night, and we made it more fun by taking an atlas and a globe and
looking up the country of origin for each story. It was very educational, and we
learned more about mythology, religion, history, anthropology, geography,
globes and atlases (cartography) than we ever imagined we would. It even
inspired an idea in me to help other families guide their kids along a similar
tour of origin stories from around the world, and I have already taken it to the
interfaith group in our city which has granted me a hearing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am reminded of the words of George MacDonald who believed
in the value of understanding the worlds that exist in other people’s minds, “If
you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much
better.” I want my children to understand their world, and the people that make
up their world. I want them to develop a profound appreciation for the survival
and bravery of other peoples, and the indestructible spirit and hope that have
caused other cultures to endure. I want them to believe in the power of the
creative instinct that lies deep within us, to learn to harness the power of imagination
to solve problems and simulate alternatives, and to understand the significance
of narrative identity in human minds which weaves together the happenings of
our lives into a cohesive whole which gives us a sense of direction. We miss so
much when we close ourselves off from the rest of universe and the complex beings
who inhabit it. I recommend this book, and books like it, to everyone who has
grown accustomed to the same stories, with the same morals, preaching the same
fear of the unknown. Sapere aude!</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-59459797847764197402015-01-16T10:36:00.000-08:002015-01-16T10:38:58.038-08:00Review of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/185/5/5/flowers_for_algernon_by_sariels_hope-d3l0ald.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/185/5/5/flowers_for_algernon_by_sariels_hope-d3l0ald.jpg" height="320" width="205" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Can intelligence solve all human problems? Is more knowledge
the answer to human suffering? Sadly, most people would answer yes to both, and
that’s partly what this story responds to. Leftovers of the Enlightenment still
permeate society at all levels, and are preponderant in our public educational
process. Voices in the scientific community are more vociferous than ever in
hailing the supremacy of intelligence and objective knowledge in achieving a
meaningful life. And yet, not a single datum has saved anyone yet, or brought
one bit of good into the world. Information about the empirical world has been
here since the beginning of time, sitting on its fat ass. But information <i>in the right hands</i> can revolutionize
human existence. The difference isn’t the information. Information is
everywhere…we ARE information, life is information! We inhabit it. But the
proper use of information to gain very specific ends is a different thing
altogether. The meaning is in chosen ends, in the passion and will to achieve
those ends, and not solely in the instruments utilized. Our significance is
found in wanting good things, and working towards good things. When people
don’t want good things, they don’t use knowledge and information for good ends,
and they ultimately hurt themselves and others. This ‘bad living’ isn’t always
necessarily unintelligent—unless you characterize abortive ends, ineffective
methods, and harmful relationships with others, yourself and the world as
unintelligent…which I sometimes use as a definition depending on the
context—rather this is a bad use of information and intelligence in that it is
ultimately abortive and contradictory. Our goal as human beings is to be as
happy as possible, and to increase our happiness in the context of community;
but when tools like information and procedures are used for anything other than
the happiness of the individual and the community, then it is not the fault of
mathematical intelligence or empirical knowledge, but it is a symptom of
destructive and individualistic intentions that appropriate the instrument of
reason to sabotage an individual’s happiness or the happiness of the community
with which an individual is interdependent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In our post-information age—what some have deemed the
‘inventive age’ for the desire to put all of our information to some new
use—the most common criticism of ineffective people is that they are ignorant,
uneducated, or just ‘stupid’. Even astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson sees some
meaning in including other types of cognizance and human functioning to broaden
our notion of intelligence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to
empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals
on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy.
Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading,
writing, arithmetic, empathy.'”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Here is a story that demonstrates the absolute failure and
futility of mere intelligence in both the protagonist and in those around him
that parade themselves as knowledgeable. The narrative captures the arc of one
person as he rapidly travels from mental disability, ascends to the heights of
genius, but plummets back to mental disability again. The story is really about
what is gained along the way, what is lost, and what is essentially a wash.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Charlie starts off wishing to be intelligent, and others
around him wanting that for him too. He is warned, however, that “the more
intelligent you are, the more problems you’ll have”, but the meaning was lost
upon him as it is most who don’t understand that the instrument of knowledge
and genius, like any other instrument, only amplifies the intentions of the
user. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Charlie’s awakening did not come without its delights. His
intelligence brings with it the possibility of romance, friendship, power, and
mastery. He grows very curious about life in general, and more specifically,
about his past, “like a man who’s been half asleep all his life, trying to find
out what he was like before he woke up.” He is now fully conscious of things
that escaped his notice before, and his memories are much more clear. As his
intelligence continues to soar far above the average person, he realizes that his
prior ignorance may protected him on more than one occasion, and insulated him
from the full gravity of how lowly he was estimated in others’ opinions. At
times he had been treated like an inanimate object. His discoveries hurt him
now, but he much preferred his freedom and awakening, with its concomitant
pain, to his life of groping in the dark. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The loss of friendship was probably the harshest reality
check for Charlie, especially the estrangement that occurred because he now
surpassed his acquaintances in comprehension and capability. Watching people
withdraw hurt him. He quickly saw
through the shams of people he thought were intellectual giants—afraid that the
rest of the world will find out they’re full of bull*hit. Everyone began to fear and resent Charlie,
because his “growth diminished them.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Charlie quickly learned that his genius wasn’t alone. The
former innocent, illiterate Charlie had never left. He discovered with bleak
clarity that “nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had
covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was
there—watching and waiting.” The veneer didn’t run as deep as he had hoped, nor
does it for anyone one of us. Here the author takes a moment to pontificate on
the destitution of reason without affection:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by
human affection isn’t worth a damn…don’t misunderstand me…Intelligence is one
of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives
out the search for love…Intelligence without the ability to give and receive
affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even
psychosis…the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end,
to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The authorities are passed over one by one as they manifest
themselves as flawed humans who are searching and desperate like the rest of
us. Charlie starts looking for answers in himself, not trusting to purebred
truths passed down inviolate through the ages immune to the contaminating egos
of people trying to survive. He learns that he can not entirely capitulate to
external authorities. As the poet Al Shapiro wrote, <i>Sentio Ergo </i>Sum—we must feel our way. We must trust ourselves.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Charlie’s descent back into the mental vortex of cognitive
disability is fascinating and tragic. It makes us appreciate our grasp—however feeble
it is—of information that can be accumulated and constructed into ideas which
help us interpret the world. Without some hold of discrete facts and memories,
there is no sense of a past or future, and this yields a very hazy sense of
identity. Watching the margins of Charlie’s world shrink into a limited, purely
temporal consciousness with only shadows of further horizons was almost
claustrophobic for me. As Simone DeBeauvoir has pointed out, in order for us to
be fulfilled our concept of human freedom “requires that it emerge into an open
future” (<i>Ethics Of Ambiguity</i>). I’m sure there are times when we all live
moment to moment, our minds centered on evanescent experiences of our world—and
this can be a good thing, as mindful, meditative ideologies like Taoism and Zen
Buddhism have demonstrated—but imagine the depths of experience that would be
lost if each day was an eternity to itself<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> without
consideration of the past or the future. A balance, however tenuous, of
temporal living with chronological thinking is the goal; not slipping into the error
of believing we can evade the ennui or terrors of existence by “escaping from
the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing
oneself in the pure moment” (DeBeauvoir).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Although something tells me that this book that once began
as a short story should have stayed a short story (just a extremely biased,
personal opinion founded only on my sense of boredom around the middle of the
book), still the story is a fantastic idea: take a mentally disabled adult,
perform an operation that rectifies his brain-break, and watch the slow dawn of
his genius rise to its meridian, before it sinks back down to its former
disability. Win-effing-win. I’m sure it made great strides in promoting
awareness and compassion for those who are mentally delayed or disabled, making
it clear that they are people of worth no matter their IQ. And it’s mockery of
so-called geniuses “devoting their lives to studying more and more about less
and less—filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of
the <i>grunt</i>” deserves uproarious
guffaws at the colossal waste of a life spent navel-gazing and not loving fellow
human beings. Where my Dickens at? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“But you were always a good man
of business, Jacob,'' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">``Business!'' cried the Ghost,
wringing its hands again. ``Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my
business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.
The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of
my business!''</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">If you can’t understand that, then Keyes’ message may not
reach you.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-51127213648791037222015-01-05T20:10:00.000-08:002015-01-05T20:11:07.408-08:00Review of The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QwCbVG%2BYL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QwCbVG%2BYL._SL500_AA300_.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I always loved the film The Iron Giant (which is a distant
adaptation of the story written by Ted Hughes), so when I started reading Ted
Hughes poems, which I also love, and learned that he had written The Iron Man
which was later renamed The Iron Giant, I knew I had to read it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s a great story. My 8 year old read it in one sitting,
and she said it was really fun and imaginative. I agree. The storyline is a bit
more eccentric and discursive than the film adaptation, but I expected that
from a poet. I wouldn’t have wanted to read it if it was the same as the film
anyway. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The allegory implicit in the story was fairly evident, the
iron man being the threat of machinery and industrialism to agrarian culture,
and the space-bat-angel-dragon-thingamabob was something like the personification
of war and humanity’s self-destruction, though I think some would make it
represent more specifically the threat of a nuclear holocaust. When asked why
it came to earth to consume it, it replied, “It just came over me, listening to
the battling shouts and the war cries of the earth—I got excited, I wanted to
join in.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The creature is defeated by the self-sacrificial cleverness
of the Iron Giant that has now become a friend to men and women. In its defeat,
the creature is condemned to use its powers of song to sing the enchanting ‘music
of the spheres’ over the earth as it flies around it at night. It is a
beautiful image of hate turned to love, destruction to beauty, and death to
life. Humanity has used a machine in an unprecedented way to intellectually and
gracefully preserve itself and ensure the welfare of its members. The monster
of war and destruction is enslaved, and its more native voice is unleashed to raise
peace in place of conflict and hate. Its voice was “like millions of voices
singing together”, resonant of the unified song of people living in harmony.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Iron Giant too is now fully synchronized and peacefully
integrated with human beings. It becomes a tool that places demands on the
world, requiring responsible handling and feeding, but it is now a servant and
no longer a master, “humm[ing] in harmony to the singing of his tremendous
slave in heaven.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“And the space-bat-angel’s singing had the most unexpected
effect. Suddenly the world became wonderfully peaceful. The singing got inside
everybody and made them as peaceful as starry spae, and blissfully above all
their earlier little squabbles. The strange, soft, eerie space-music began to
alter all the people of the world. They stopped making weapons. The countries
began to think how they could live pleasantly alongside each other, rather than
how to get rid of each other. All they wanted to do was to have peace to enjoy
this strange, wild, blissful music from the giant singer in space.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I think we could all use a space-bat-angel-dragon in our
world now. Or maybe not. Maybe just the singing?</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-72449335254559978202015-01-04T20:29:00.001-08:002015-01-04T20:29:07.676-08:00Review of Poems of Wallace Stevens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://moreintelligentlife.com/sites/default/files/legacy/stevens4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://moreintelligentlife.com/sites/default/files/legacy/stevens4.jpg" height="217" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Another wonderful, mostly opaque, poet. But I thoroughly
enjoyed what I could understand. Stevens has a very strong philosophical bent,
and his overtly humanistic stance celebrates in such bold and beautiful
language the gift that every moment of life is with or without an eternal
assurance. He wrote in his book Opus Posthumous, “After one has abandoned a
belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s
redemption." Many people with religious sensibilities may wonder how one
can appreciate life at all, or have any hope or peace, after the idea of God’s
existence is no longer a plausible credence. This is a fair question, because
it is really a question of how another person thinks and feels, which we should
all be curious about. Poetry is the perfect medium with which to answer, and
Stevens is a great poet for it. His poem <i>Sunday
Morning </i>is a great start. The subject is a woman who chooses to skip a
Sunday morning church service:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">…Why should she give her bounty to the dead?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">What is divinity if it can come</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Only in silent shadows and in dreams?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Shall she not find in comforts of the sun…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">…Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">…There is not any haunt of prophecy,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Nor any old chimera of the grave,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">…that has endured</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">As April’s green endures… (excerpts from <i>Sunday Morning</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Surely, to some, this might be as unsatisfying an answer as
the response given by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson to an inquirer who
asked about his belief regarding an afterlife: “I would request that my body in
death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it
gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I
have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.” That won’t communicate
well to some who don’t have the same emotional responses, backgrounds moods,
understandings, and associations that Neil has invested in such a sentiment.
So, one gets a poet to translate. A good poet—with their skills of
language-bending, image-amplification, and feeling-conduction—communicates
emotional content beyond mere factuality in a way that can send frequencies of
information and sensation across worlds and epochs to reach a person otherwise
isolated from another’s view and feeling, and who may not share similar
constitutions or lifestyles. <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">There is an undercurrent of heavy-sighed romanticism in many
of the poems, which to me comes across as far too maudlin and melodramatic; but
the way he wrestles with philosophical ideas like the tension between
appearance and reality, and description versus impression, piqued my interest
the most. He looks a matter in the eyeballs, and calls back to the rest of us
convention-lubbers what we might see if we were brave enough to look directly
at death, suffering, boredom, danger, beauty, and existence as it is. I truly
wish I could understand more of Stevens’ poems than I did. Sometimes a line
would emerge like a piece of clear sky from out a hole in a complex and clouded
poem, and a message would be delivered. There are secrets there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">My favorite poems, and great ones for newbs to start with,
are:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Sunday Morning (“Death is the mother of beauty.”)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Gubbinal</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Evening Without Angels</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">A Postcard From the Volcano</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Poems of Our Climate</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Dutch Graves In Bucks County</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Anecdote of the Jar</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-59164171777768184442014-12-31T11:38:00.000-08:002014-12-31T11:38:18.129-08:00Review Of George MacDonald's Thomas Wingfold Curate<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/George_MacDonald_1860s.jpg/225px-George_MacDonald_1860s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/George_MacDonald_1860s.jpg/225px-George_MacDonald_1860s.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">As much as I love him as an author, I feel I am outgrowing
much of George Mac’s theology. I’m much more familiar with up-to-date scholarship
about comparative cosmogonies, religions, and mythology than I’ve ever been, and
that makes some of MacDonald’s theology—very progressive in its own time for its
overtones of universalism, inclusivity, and equality—feel outdated to me. It’s
my fault for thinking of his theology as current in the first place; but I came
from a very fundamentalist Christian background, and it took me a while. I am
profoundly grateful to have discovered MacDonald as a source of liberation from
my dogmatic heritage (thank you C.S. Lewis and John Eldridge for introducing
us), yet I find myself increasingly distanced particularly from his Christian
metaphysics, and this distance seems to increase each time I go back to read
one of his works.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">On the other hand, the unparalleled sweep of his
imagination, his poetic grasp of beauty and existential significance, his love
of nature, his authenticity, and his supreme literary intelligence far outshine
the facets of his <i>fin de siècle</i> religious
framework that are dated. I just keep getting the feeling that I haven’t yet
plumbed the depths of all this guy has to offer beyond his Christianity. To be
sure, there are so many gorgeous concepts and phrasing side-by-side with
religious platitude, but his charm and range of vision blast through the
time-worn ideas. Although he would probably claim that his profundity is
borrowed from the deeper truths of Christianity, it seems to me that he is
borrowing from something much older which Christianity itself borrows from, and
perhaps from something further back within his own self that recognized some corollaries
within an established religion.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And I have to admire his honesty and attempt at integrating
even his darkest doubts regarding the existence of God and the meaning of life
into his faith. The protagonist of this book, Thomas Wingold, is a pastor who
begins to question his own beliefs regarding the existence of God and the
teachings of his sacred book. The entire work depicts a struggle between
secular humanism, religious fundamentalism, and an honest faith. Wingfold, of
course, represents an honest faith, and even though (spoiler alert!!) he ends
up being predictably confirmed in the same faith he started questioning, still
it is a purer, kinder, more honest sort of faith that cares for the lonely and
outcast. Seems more right than wrong.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I truly believe that the polarized personalities of the work
that represent the views of humanism (George Bascombe and Helen Lindgard),
religious fundamentalism (Helen’s mother, oftentimes her brother, Leopold, and
Wingfold’s own congregation), and an honest, inclusive Christianity (Wingfold
and Polwarth) highlight MacDonald’s raging internal debate regarding the
validity of each position, especially the contest between humanism and
Christianity . It’s clear that MacDonald was not portraying his brain-child
humanist in the most positive light—George Bascombe is conceited, selfish, and
prejudiced against the weak and ignorant—but even so, he puts some pretty damn
good munitions in the mouth of George against which to scrimmage. Perhaps if
MacDonald didn’t work so hard to vilify him—probably an attempt to quell that
voice in his own head—he could have been pretty close to creating understanding
between people of faith and non-faith. But he was definitely playing a side,
and gives some of the best apologias for the Christian faith—not bandying mere
fact-based propaganda—that I have ever heard. It is philosophical jujitsu at
its best with an understanding that the key to throwing an opponent isn’t
necessarily data-bashing (“Evidence! All of it that was to be had was but such
as one man received, another man refused…”), but rather using the weight of common
human experiences, desires, and fears to compel, being diligent not to “weaken
by <i>presentation</i> the force of a truth
which, in <i>discovery,</i> would have its
full effect.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Though obviously predisposed, as are so many faithful
believers, to think that all nonbelievers must be either deluded or dishonest, MacDonald
was still extremely sympathetic to a sincere person whose heart seemed open to
others; and he empathizes to a degree with the some of the points made by a
more genuine secular humanism, namely, the lack of absolute certainty or
assurance in matters of faith. Wingfold himself, though reinforced in his faith
by the end of the story, is still a far way from absolute, untroubled
certainty. But against losing hope in the face of uncertainty, he affirms his self-election:
“What mighty matter is it if, thus
utterly befooled of Nature, we should also a little fool ourselves, by
believing in a lovely hope that looks like a promise, and seems as if it ought
to be true?” This sentiment reincarnates throughout the story, but the essence
is the same: the best one can do is hope, and trust that the very best of what one
believes is true. If there is a God, he or she will take care of the rest.
This, I think, seems fair and even laudable, and would be a great common ground
for people of different perspectives to meet if they could get past the need to
declare absolute certainty over absolute hope or determination.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I was surprised, however, at my own disappointment with a
tenor of poutiness on the part of MacDonald that I never noticed before in his
writings. It seemed most pronounced when he mentioned the hypothetical absence
of God in the universe. “Wingfold felt that if there was no God, his soul was
but a thing of rags and patches out in the masterless, pitiless storm and hail
of a chaotic universe.” World’s smallest violin ova’ heah. It was all very much
in the spirit of William Wordsworth when he wrote:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“One adequate support for the calamities of life exist—one
only—an assured belief that the procession of our fate, however sad or
disturbed, is ordered by a being of infinite benevolence and power, whose
everlasting purposes embrace all accidents, converting them to good” (from <i>The Excursion</i>).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">MacDonald complained through his protagonists about life not
being worth living if there were no God to control every little contingency, in
which case all good experienced or hoped for were a complete illusion. It was
as if he reasoned, “If I can’t have life all my way, with a god of my own
perfect ideal, then I would rather not have life or god at all!” This whining
reverberates throughout this book, although I can’t say I don’t sympathize in
some ways. Nietzsche’s ‘does-a-mother-get-paid-for-her-love?’
rebuff against those whose virtue consists in a desire to receive a reward for
their love and goodness might well apply here:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“At you, ye virtuous ones, laughed my beauty to-day. And
thus came its voice unto me: ‘They want—to be paid besides!’... Ye want to be
paid besides, ye virtuous ones! Ye want reward for virtue, and heaven for
earth, and eternity for your to-day?...Ye love your virtue as a mother loveth
her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love?”
(from <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But, again, a universe without a traditional concept of God,
immortality, and reward is a very hard thing for some who’ve been conditioned
to think of happiness with strings of very concrete, eternal guarantees. I won’t
begrudge a man or woman their prerogative to construct a system of metaphysics
or mysticism. It’s very…human. Happiness ‘with strings’ is what we all want; it’s
what we all work towards in one way or another; but when a string breaks, we
can either cry over spilled milk, or we can try to enjoy what we have while
searching for new strings. Simone DeBeauvoir, the French philosopher, said that
losing a god through disbelief hurts too much to come to terms with easily.
“After having lived under the eyes of the gods, having been given the promise
of divinity, one does not readily accept becoming simply a man with all his
anxiety and doubt” (<i>Ethics Of Ambiguity)</i>.
This, she said, goes hand in hand with
the difficulty people have in “living without a guarantee.” Still, even without
a sharply defined guarantee, we are yet alive for this moment, and to waste our
only moment with the people we love is tantamount to wasting eternity. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the end, Wingfold is content to “cast in my lot with the
servants of the Crucified”, despite his parishioners’ disapprobation concerning
his “lack of absolute assurance.” He lives what feels most real and hopeful to
him, and that, at the very least, sounds authentic for many Christians and
non-Christians alike. That is something a lot of us can get behind. Regardless
of MacDonald’s conscious message, the grandeur of his style and grasp of the
significance of human existence which lives on hope—on a chance—makes his works
thoroughly enjoyable reads.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-9762053348615770212014-12-28T22:24:00.000-08:002014-12-28T22:24:46.440-08:00Review of Raymond Smullyan's The Tao Is Silent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">About a year ago I read the experimental philosophy of “The
Mind’s I” and enjoyed it so much that I decided to follow up with some of its
selected authors, and Raymond Smullyan was a first stop. To be honest, at the
start of <i>The Tao Is Silent</i>, I wasn’t
sure if Smullyan was a joke or not. No doubt, as a mathematician he’s clearly a
genius, but the tenor of the book seemed so blithe that I didn’t know how
seriously he expected his readers to take him. I’m still not entirely sure he
doesn’t think Taoism is completely hilarious as a philosophy of non-philosophy and
an absurd parody of religion. The book is full of existential riddles,
punchlines, and paradoxes that stretch the mind and loosen our grip on our
stubborn biases about what life is, who we are, who god is, and what the ‘answers’
to our problems are. After getting used to his style, I realized that Smullyan
is smiling straight through the confused questioning of humanity, and asking
his readers to breathe for moment, and think in a purer air before working
towards answers. At the end of the book, I was pretty sure he was legit as a
thinker and philosopher, even though I never successfully determined which
parts were sarcastic and which were completely sober. As far as the latter,
probably none were entirely so.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">His treatment of Taoism is less like a lesson than a game.
Smullyan unasks more questions than he answers, but I think that is EXACTLY his
point, and the point of Taoism. It is a perfect demonstration of the unraveling
of tangled logic. In the style of Alice In Wonderland, he helps us see what
fools we become when dogmatism creeps into ethics, religion, philosophy, politics,
education, etc. He uses Taoism to illustrate
that we know more than we think [sic], and that the good is often much nearer
to us than social reform theories might lead us to believe. He wants us to
believe that we do what we do because it’s who we are and we can’t help it.
Except when we can. Yeah, it gets tricky, but Smullyan is not interested in
resolving contradictions for anyone. He loves it this way, and he makes me
think that he loves it this way because he loves life, and life is this way. Matter
of fact, he seems completely satisfied with apparent contradictions, believing
that there may or may not be an explanation after all. “I wish to accept all
religions, even though they contradict each other...pick the finest veins, and
synthesize them as well as I can.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I thought at first that he was an absolute pacifist, and possibly
an absurdist, but I think he’s simply interested in breaking down illogic and dispelling
presumption before proposing a solution. He quotes George Berkeley’s criticism
of philosophers, “They first raise a dust, and then complain they cannot see.”
Of course, Smullyan would be the one to play games and antagonize others in the
dust storm before helping to clear people’s view, yet even that may be a very
strategic move in motivating people to sit still long enough for their
confusions to settle so he can help. It’s no jest to say that this is one of
the most playful books from a very serious thinker that I have read in a long
time, and it almost threw me completely, as it may others. One could very
nearly miss the real gold here.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Smullyan is an optimist. It is evident he believes that
people will be more effective if they are happy in life, and they will be more
happy if they believe in themselves and do what comes natural (and that paradoxically
includes what often appears to be ‘going against nature’). It is very Buddhist
in that it attempts to go beyond mere right thinking and right action, to
reestablishing right view. “When the wrong man does the right thing, it usually
turns out wrong.” Taoism, he says, may not always change the practical
lifestyle of some, but they may now live “with less fear and anxiety.” There is
no coercion in Taoism. “The whole idea of Taoistic politics is that the
sage-ruler influences the people to <i>voluntarily
</i>do that which is good for them.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Again, the real gem here is the permission to release our
death-grip on sanity and logic, and to simply live with the confidence that the
mechanism of our body and the world is rolling in the right direction somehow. This
confidence in ourselves, and a simple acceptance of and joy in existence, is
what Smullyan thinks will right most wrongs—wrongs which accumulate into the
only real ‘evil’: suffering. He willingly accepts that this is a form of
mysticism, stating that “metaphysics is the necessary ripening process of the
human race to prepare it for mysticism.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And what mysticism doesn’t cover, a buoyant absurdity does. “Someone
asked a Zen-Master, ‘What is the ultimate nature of reality?’ The Master
replied, ‘Ask the post over there.’ The man responded: ‘Master, I don’t
understand!’ The master said, ‘Neither do I.’”</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> My favorite chapters,
and well worth an isolated read by curious people, are: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Is God a Taoist?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">An imaginary Zen story.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Evening Cool.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-7535144480284440032014-12-08T20:54:00.001-08:002014-12-08T21:10:36.162-08:00Review of Varieties of Religious Experience by William James<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://kenanmalik.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/religion-praying.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://kenanmalik.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/religion-praying.jpg" height="320" width="259" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">William James—father of American psychology, author of
stream-of-consciousness, popularizer of the subconscious— was an absolute beast
to take on religion the way he did, considering that religious fundamentalism
was in thick ferment, social Darwinism still womb-wet and hungry, and global
ignorance still blocking the sun. The task of outlining and appraising
religious belief and practice is a prodigious task in any age— mindboggling in
its scope and potential offenses. I’m sure we all grow weary of people who
flippantly blame religion for world problems and societal ills, and no doubt
there is a growing number of experts, and people in general, who think that the
world can and should be purged of religious belief altogether, and that we’d
all be more happy and healthy for it. The staggering lack of understanding
aside which these assumptions betray of what religious belief is and is
not—reducing religious belief to an antiquated and now useless, eradicable
behavior that has had its day in the sun and is positively harmful for modern
people— religious belief is not so easily peeled from our humanity. A study of
religion and the origins and effects of religious belief reveals that the
fundamental nature of religious sentiment connects in at the level of raw human
desire, subsuming all intellectual pursuit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So William James steers us and all religion-deniers
straight. Here’s a guy, at the turn of the 20th century, who was light years
ahead of thinkers, theologians, and philosophers even in the 21st
century—probably due to a combination of genius AND honesty and courage. He was
a Harvard’s resident physician-philosopher-psychologist par excellence,
lecturing with the latest information in psychology and the psychology of
religion; but he was also towered over his peers in his bravery to explore an
area crawling with so much social taboo, challenges of obscurity in definition
and origin, and risks of fanning false hopes or snuffing those which weakly
flickered in the gale force winds of dehumanizing science. At some point in my
reading of this work, my skepticism of his 19th century limits curtailed
significantly. It quickly became clear that James was a cerebral giant, and
seems to have truly grasped the essential nature of religion as a universal and
irreducible trait of humanity that recurs in every age, culture and individual;
as ineradicable as hope; as unquenchable as love and desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Defining Religion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">James commences by attempting to define religion. This is no
easy task because colloquial uses change even from person to person, not to
mention culture to culture. But James narrows his task by insisting that the
real pith of religion is the personal religious experience, not qualified or
classified by institutionalized dogma or communal requisites. In other words,
James decided that the pure ore of religion is acutely individual and
first-hand, and must be studied anecdotally and not merely statistically or
systemically as described by religious histories of the masses or
tradition—which James’ calls “second-hand religious life”—because they have
been censored and sanctioned by governing bodies of one sort or another intent
on filtering raw perspective and reproducing very limited and constrained
viewpoints and experiences for the purposes of control. These “original
experiences” he focuses on exclusively in this work, and summarily ignores all
dogma. With that clean chop of the cleaver, his work is focused and unbothered
by zealous fundamentalism which amounts to sheer scare tactics in the first
place. He ultimately classifies these original experiences, for the purposes of
his study, as mystical and ecstatic because they belong to the unique
experience of each individual, are unassailable by mere reason alone, and they
produce revelations and assurances that are unattainable any other way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Having set the parameters for his subject, James offered
three tests for the value of a religious experience(s):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Immediate luminousness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Philosophical reasonableness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Moral helpfulness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">All are predicated upon the subjective experience of the
individual, though number two may seem to imply otherwise. James’ point here is
that a religious experience or viewpoint offers a believer illumination,
ordered thought, and moral resources which appeared unavailable before the
religious encounter. The value of these experiences are primarily weighed
subjectively, and corroboration by outside observers are a subsidiary concern.
James wards off detractors by saying, “If the mystical truth that comes to a
man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the
majority to order him to live in another way?...it absolutely escapes our
jurisdiction.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Regarding moral helpfulness, James quotes a Dr. Maudsley to
affirm that it is “the way in which it works on the whole” that defines whether
a belief is helpful or not. By demanding that his readers “judge a religious
life by its results exclusively”, he has again preemptively narrowed his field
of study to not merely vet the universality or cogency of a conviction itself,
but to concentrate on the effects convictions and illuminations have on the
lives of those who hold them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">As an aside, the felt benefit of religious belief is the
emphasis of my research in Awakenings: Felt Benefit In Personal Values
(http://awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings). James’ focus on the end results
of religious belief underscores the misguided tendency so many have to
witch-hunt and mock those who have ‘strange’ beliefs, instead of working to
understand if those beliefs increase the wellbeing of believers and those
around them despite the beliefs’ plausibility or normality. “If the mystical
truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what
mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way?...it
absolutely escapes our jurisdiction.” The western mindset insists that everyone
be reasonable above all things, without a thought as to whether or not a
person’s logic, however flawed in others’ opinion, can enable them to enjoy
life and love adequately. The existence of hope belies our devotion to facts,
efficiency and all impersonal science. Science is just another tool that helps
us realize our hopes, and cold data will never substitute for the heat of human
desire. In other words, like it or not, science will always be at the behest of
our hopes—translated into illuminations, stories, systems, dogmas, and even the
gods and no-gods of our religions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Mysticism and Religion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James believed that the “root and center” of religion is a
mystical state of consciousness. These mystical states are primarily
responsible for the deep convictions of the religious because through them
subjects feel as though they have experienced something more real, more
personal, and more hopeful than what their mundane existence has disclosed thus
far. One study James cited involved an individual who summarized their
conviction of truth gained in an ecstatic moment: “…the memory [of this mystical
experience] persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might
be a dream, but not that.” Myriad examples of profound assurance such as this
exist both within and beyond James’ work (see Eban Alexander’s descriptions of
near-death-experiences and their corollary persuasions in “Proof Of Heaven,” or
Christopher Bache’s psychedelic-induced impressions in “Dark Night, Early
Dawn”), and they confirm that mystical states of consciousness deeply shock a
person’s sense of reality, sometimes to the point of a complete denial of
quotidian sensory data in favor of impressions received during non-ordinary
states of consciousness. At those times, the inner vision becomes more real
than physical sight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James’ restrictive use of the word ‘religion’ excludes mere
morality and institutional conformity which he felt were offshoots of original
religious experience. James believed that, as far as our ideas of reality go,
“Instinct leads, intelligence follows.” That means at the bottom of our
persuasions and rationalizations regarding reality, there’s lies an abstract
and fluctuating sense of the way things are and the way things ought to be.
Considering alone the haziness of memory and the inconsistent glue of logic, I
can completely agree that the myth of crystal-clear reality is a sham, and can
even become a defense against the ultimate and unknowable. “Our impulsive
belief is…always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately
verbalized philosophy is but its slow translation into formulas.” In other
words, our “inarticulate feelings of reality,” as James calls them, are the
best we have! Here James has home court advantage in the realm of the
psychology of religion. Again and again he reminds the reader that if religion
or theology were really dependent on reason and not feeling, then the universal
appeal of reason would probably do a better job of convincing people of the
truth of a particular religious belief over another. “Feeling is the deeper
source of religion…philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products,
like translations of a text into another tongue.” Religion, then, is founded on
feeling; but James is fair in pointing out that religion isn’t the only thing
founded on feeling. So is…well…everything else. But religion is closer to the
source of “immediate experiences” and feeling, and makes its home there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Being a man of extraordinary reason and charging intellect,
James was, and still is, a rare species in that, being brilliant, he yet
understood the limits of his reason (aaaaand…everyone else’s). Reason arranges
and classifies information gathered by the senses, but it does not supersede
the senses or other faculties that it partners with, including the emotions and
imagination. “Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret
them; but they do not produce them…perception [is] always something that
glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes
too late…” This is not to say that blind will or raw emotional processing is
all that is necessary for human functioning, or that the intellect is a
completely ancillary and discrete process. Intellection is a generally
considered to be a more refined filtering and categorization of data, but it is
in some degree present in all the holistic operations of a person. In no way is
the intellect a process detached from the will or emotions that commission the
body’s scavenging for intel. “The intellect is not independent of what it
ascertains.” All this to say, reason is not the crackerjack of mental
functioning, though it may be a sophistication that evolved more recently; nor
are the religious out of their minds for living closer to their spinal cords. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Religious Temperament: Once-Born and Twice-Born<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James differentiated between two types of the religious
temperament: the once-born, and the twice-born. The Once-Born person is born
into life and immediately takes to it, is happy with life’s potential, and
finds it to be meaningful and fulfilling as it is. The Once-Born has warm
fuzzies about the world, and might say, like Margaret Fuller of old, "I
accept the universe"—hearing which, Thomas Carlyle is reported to have
commented, "Gad, she'd better!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Twice-Born person, on the contrary, is born into life a
‘sick soul’—sick with pessimism—needing to be symbolically born into life a
second time (“born again”) via a religious conversion or some other altering
crisis before they can find the world to offer a meaningful experience for them
with potential for joy and fulfillment. The label of twice-born is no
epithet—distinguished thinkers and writers throughout the ages have suffered as
‘ sick souls’ with severe depression and often torturous despair, yet with the
courage to face life and affirm it even in the midst of misery. These
tremendous sufferers I knew to exist, but I took it for granted how many people
before the 20th century, both anonymous and renown, have suffered and bore with
existence as if it was a sore test of endurance and one’s sanity merely to live
and think. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Consider a quotation from the 18th century genius Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe—whom so many in his day idolized, and many who currently
know of him still do—in which he likened his life to Sisyphus and the futile
and meaningless rolling of a rock up a hill again and again without end: “I
will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom I has been
nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75
years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual
rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Especially in such cases, and for such people, religion
becomes a booster vaccine loaded with adrenaline to help ease the agony and
panic of being. “Here is the real core of the problem [which religion answers
to]: Help! Help!.. [and] deliverance must come in as strong a form as the
complaint.” It is a sad reality that, for many, the heart of life is pain; and
fear is, as Jack London put it, “coiled around the roots of our being.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> James was brave to
fully admit the horror of life as it manifests to some, and to recognize that
humanity must have something to cope. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all
drawn from the material of daily fact… [and] every individual existence goes
out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” Well tell me some good news doc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“…there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that
did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body
struggling in despair of some fated living victim.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">That’s not what I had in mind Billy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at
life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Egads, man! Make like Marley and speak some friggin comfort
to me! Okay, so, I get it. Religion is a potent and equally grotesque response
to the severe cruelty and horror of the world which we seldom allow ourselves
to consider or confront. So, at least religion is a good fallback.
Right?...right? James, where you at? Come at me Bro!!!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the
absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to
higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as
to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil,
dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I think I’m going to be sick. But I get what he’s saying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Religious Phenomena:
Saintliness and Asceticism<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James addresses many forms of religious expression and
phenomena, and spends a lot of time on the qualities and value of the paragons
of religious life—saints whose traits range from blind optimism to
asceticism—and the lifestyles that provide different solutions for boredom,
danger, and pain. It becomes quickly clear that James labored over the meaning
of suffering in the world, and was profoundly intrigued with what potential
answers religion seemed to produce, consciously or otherwise. “Our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal
ingredient of the world’s order”, although, it seems to me the ancients weren’t
so satisfied as all that, and clearly believed in its ultimate eradication in
one doctrine or another. Even so, James takes very seriously the different ways
in which people deal with pain and boredom, and he’s sees deep significance in
the ‘yes’ and ‘no’s’ of the saintly towards being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Some men and women can live on smiles and the word ‘yes’
forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed…some
‘no! no!’ must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character
and texture and power.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps some austerities and deprivations are often required
to produce a contrast which surfaces beauty and love. Without this contrast,
some would feel that life comes too cheaply, or that materialism drowns out the
spiritual. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“…some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of
tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter
souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and
inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest…In short, lives based on
having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being… Naked came I
into the world…My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot save me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Well, you have to respect that. I’m not much for cutting,
but I imagine a person can find some justification for variations of
self-denial. And that’s what began to shock me about this book: so many
religious experiences and ideas—no matter how different from mine, or how
harmful they are purported to be—have a very specific reason for being, and
many rationales and lifestyles foreign to me (read: “us”) may have enabled the
survival and prosperity of entire civilizations. The sooner people like Richard
Dawkins can acknowledge this and stop overreacting against faith and even
fetish, the sooner he will be acknowledged and taken more seriously by
traditional thinkers who feel attacked by his belligerence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The New War: Poverty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Religion definitely seemed to emerge in James’ mind as a
ward against materialism—one of the more positively salutary effects of
religion as far as he was concerned—and it accomplished this by becoming chummy
with poverty. Poverty is the war against fat and insulating materialism. He
actually develops this brilliantly. Let’s watch the author at work in his
natural environment as he builds his case:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in
war, and for war’s uses they are incommensurably good.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the
moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally
as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war
has proved itself to be incompatible.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the
educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization
suffers.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Poverty indeed is the strenuous life. Among us English-speaking
peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.
We have grown literally afraid to be poor.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And there you have it, the voluntary poverty and self-denial
that religion offers is the new war that we all apparently want! Of course,
this brand of poverty-appeal is for very specific temperaments that desire the
stress of combat of some kind; but hey, Henry David Thoreau would have been
proud of this poverty-mongering, having said himself, “None can be an impartial
or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should
call voluntary poverty.” Bro, meet bro.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">As for the loss of comfort, this goes back to James’
explanation that not everyone wants comfort. This is, again, an example of
different ways in which people are fulfilled by embracing different measures of
the pain-pleasure tension. The various balances people strike between
simplicity and complexity in ideology play a part as well. For some, the desire
for beauty outweighs the risk of poverty, discomfort, and chaos, and may even
be enriched by difficulty. “Although some persons aim most at intellectual
purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative
qualification.” So many reasons to be poor!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Conversion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">In his chapters covering conversions, James explored the
changes and confirmations that occur in a person’s life that lock them into an
idea or a way of living. He cleverly dissected the psychology of conversion,
and identified several contributing factors:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A desire for a unified self<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Regular successions of selves in a desire for unification<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Catalysts for new successions<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Desire or excitement for the new<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Absolute exhaustion with the old<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He builds slowly from an understanding of the complex nature
of the need for a unified sense of self—despite heterogeneous qualities that
make up every self—to the common vacillations that occur unconsciously between
multiplied states and identities coexisting, converging, and conflicting within
each person. Conversion becomes, in James’ estimation, a “succession of self”
which is quite frequent though often unconscious. Some successions-of-selves
are given more notice by the psyche than others, and some are valued more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“As life goes on, there is a constant change of our
interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more
central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of
consciousness...all we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and
cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive
within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">These changes and conversions are typical for all people,
but the contrast can be sharper in sudden conversions due to various factors
such as:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Pronounced emotional sensibility<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Tendency to automatisms (neurotic behavior/obsessions)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Suggestibility <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James would say that conversion is actually a very normal
adolescent phenomenon, indicating a “passage from the child’s small universe to
the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.” Conversions later in
life may signify internal volatilities such as a changing perspectives,
changing needs, and new skills that have reached critical mass and require new
challenges; or external fluctuations as simple as a change in environment, or a
crisis. Herman Hesse stated that the myth of a unified self contributes to the
myth that conversions are rare and isolated events. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It appears to be an inborn need of all men to regard the
self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is
shattered, it always mends again…In reality, however, every ego, so far from
being a unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated
heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and
potentialities” (from Steppenwolf).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">More recently, author Gail Sheehy, in her book Passages:
Predictable Crises of Adult Life, marks many common later-in-life transitions
that would qualify as Jamesian ‘conversions’ because they are successions of
selves induced by transitions of states, consciousnesses, and crises, very much
like the adolescent changes that James spoke of. By acknowledging and educating
others on the reality of adult passages that often go unrecognized—due to pop
opinion and urban legends about the adult ego being cemented and irrefragably
one, and the taboo of the unnaturalness of adult crisis (consider the label of
‘mid-life crisis’ that is considered more a failure than a normal
passage)—Sheehy broke down the misunderstanding that conversions, successions
of selves, and passages are abnormal or unhealthy. My point here is that
Jamesian conversions are not exclusive to the domain of religion, but are
consistent with psychological transitions experience by all healthy people,
religious or not. Understood in this light, it is a shame that so many view
conversions as phenomena associated with neurosis and delusion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Subconscious <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">By slow degrees James approached the topic of the
subconscious, which was an extremely new idea and in its infancy of proving its
mettle as a legitimate point study in psychology. The subconscious was
introduced to the world of psychology in 1886—James wrote his work in 1902, a
mere 16 years with the new science— and the application of this concept in the
field of the psychology of religion was an experiment that we now know yielded
incredibly persuasive results, helping to solidify its tenure. James was
wicked-smart in administering the findings of the subconscious—which he called
“memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the
primary consciousness altogether”—to illuminate the monster-gods that religion
had produced in many instances, and thereby ushered the world into a new era of
empowerment and independence. Once he worked up to its theme in Varieties, it
was all downhill, opening up the deeper recesses of religious influences to be
scrutinized and subsequently demythologized. They never knew what hit them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Doctrines<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Much to my surprise and delight, James ultimately took his
subject all the way to the limits of ‘decency’ and actually attempted to
appraise the value of a few specific beliefs, most notably the idea of an
infinite God and doctrinal orthodoxies such as ecclesiastic rule and Scriptural
inerrancy. He used, of course, the
meritocratic metric of results—of the amount of good these beliefs seemed to
accomplish in the life of their adherents—and not the metric of how reasonable
a creed or belief appeared to others. The deities a person keeps around play
some kind of role, however poorly, in protecting and reinforcing something that
they think they need. The commands of a sovereign god would hardly be noticed,
much less revered, if they were antithetical to the needs of the devotee. “The gods we stand by are the gods we need
and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on
ourselves and on one another.” Some of his conclusions regarding specific
beliefs were intriguing—an infinite god is a monstrosity, and orthodoxy is a
scare tactic—but his willingness to weigh particular faith tenets was brazen
and timely. Love this guy’s stones.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And because he spent a lot of time critiquing cherished
beliefs, he spent some time developing an apologia for his right to do so, lest
he be accused of a form of iconoclasm which he himself denounced. Even his
claim that human reason is prone to error resolved into a barricade, knowing
that he would be criticized by dogmatists for what appeared to be a
relativistic standpoint. Times haven’t changed much, and fundamentalist
Christians are still fighting with the same outmoded arguments against ‘higher
criticism.’ James would counter naysayers by declaring that his honesty about the
limits of reason and science only made him more believable. The burden of proof
remained incumbent on those who claimed to apprehend absolutes with a finite
mind. James was unassailable when he said he feared to “lose truth by this
pretension to possess it already wholly.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">How Belief Works<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The psychology of belief enters into chapter 18 with
beautifully simple yet elegant summaries of belief and thought in religion. The
idea of belief being ‘thought at rest’ is poetic, and maybe a bit
revolutionary. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the
attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject
has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely
begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action…to develop a thought’s meaning
we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">That statement goes far to establish parameters for thought
and belief. Giving thought the sanction and time to do its business, without
rushing it to crystallize into any form for a span of time, helps it get its
job done right. When thought has finished its recon of a given subject and
available data, then settling on a decision—a commitment to believe which is an
act of the will—would be in order because, as James noted, settled decisions
guide future action. Thought, then, is the scout, and belief is the general
giving out orders. Understanding thought as belief at rest keeps thought and
belief from being confused, and in doing so gives thinkers and believers the
right to operate differently—thinkers in gathering and analyzing, believers in
creating rules for action—and both will feel the freedom and necessity to cross
over into alternate operations routinely. A believer must not always be a believer
only, nor a thinker a thinker, but each must in turn explore and decide for
human cognition to have the greatest advantage. It grieves me how little this
is understood or employed by those who call themselves thinkers and believers.
A thinker who believes nothing fails to act and live; a believer who no longer
thinks critically or independently can no longer change direction but barrels
down a path that they no longer choose. Both seem infatuated with an early
death.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">What I didn’t like<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">For all of William James’ genius, there were still a few
things that proved him a man of his times. I’m not one to excuse the past for
being the past, so I’ll mention what I found to be disagreeable to me
personally, since I—let the minutes reflect—am the one reading it. As Nietzsche
once said, “It is my sympathy with the past that I see it abandoned.” So,
please humor me, and allow me the gratification of taking William James to task
for being—how shall I say—a stiff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">To start with, the author’s Insistence, towards the beginning of the book, that a
religious outlook must always be a solemn and serious look at life overshoots
just a tad. This, along with his praise of the ascetic trait in the section
titled “saints”, extols too highly the austere demeanor, even if it is well-suited
for some. I have to cry foul at this rhapsodic appraisal of the benefit of
solemnity. “[Religion] favors gravity, not pertness; it says ‘hush’ to all vain
chatter and wit.” In a way, I understand. He is trying to communicate that the
thrust of religion is that “all is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the
appearances may suggest”; but I and many others believe that wit , cynicism,
humor—even black comedy and gallows-humor— are staples of human personality and
hope, especially in extreme conditions. I know James didn’t have the pleasure
of meeting Mel Brooks, but from the sound of it, he may not have been thrilled
with Brook’s jab, “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” Why
could James not acknowledge that a cathartic cynicism inherent in dark humor
was replete through all religious texts in the form of laughter, irony,
sarcasm, tales of suffering and retribution, caustic apologia, polemical
retort, poetry, hyperbole, and in the will to pass on outlandish stories which
essentially evoke pleasure in paradox. I see no need to pitch religion against
the more sophisticated forms of intellectually satisfying humor (can you tell
how I get my kicks?). Even the line that James borrowed from Renan to epitomize
and condemn cynical authors, using their own words, is brilliant and defeating
to the intention of his use, “Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it
seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us”
(Renan). We’ve all heard it before, but you can laugh, or you can cry. I always
thought the response to that aphorism was obvious, but I guess some would
rather cry. Go figure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Some of James’ defenses of religion and asceticism sounds
reaching, and throughout the book tautologies abound. “We can count upon the
saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other
person.” Huh? I know a lot of ‘saints’, and they aren’t all the lend-a-hand
types. Many are aloof, disrespectful, and oftentimes downright adversarial
towards anyone who is unlike them. I’m not saying that a sweeping justification
of unbelievers or a condemnation of so-called saints is in order, but neither
do I feel that an unqualified endorsement of believers solves any real
problems. Might actually create a few. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I also found James’ defense of choosing examples of extreme
religious passion to form the basis of his studies of the religious temperament
to be bizarre and not as helpful as he would have us believe. “The essence of
religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be
that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a
quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious
experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.” It appears he
wanted to have clearly defined boundaries for his research and reportage, but
unfortunately when it comes to religious experience, the varieties are legion;
and allowing the categories to be too sharply focused, when in reality the
issue is much more broad, cuts out a lot of relevant material that the greater
portion of humanity finds relatable.
Don’t get me wrong, I have often used the phrase “the extremes help
define the moderate,” but I think the absolute exclusion of the mean skews
results, as extreme examples can often jump categories and detract from
generalized applications. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein knew this well,
saying that in the realm ideas and language we must be careful not to attempt
to sharpen a mental picture or a word when a vague idea is more faithful to the
reality we experience. “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct
picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we
need?...Imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture ‘corresponding’ to a
blurred one” (from Philosophical Investigations). The real problem James ran
into was trying to go back and justify his critique of religious experience
based on exaggerated examples of neurotic, highly sensitive personalities that
actually only constitute a very small percentage of those who consider
themselves to have religious sensibilities. Besides that, he neatly severs all
those from his study who self-style themselves as religious by virtue of
second-hand belief and doctrinal fidelity (not having had a mystical experience
themselves, but desiring one), and this faithfulness is a very real facet of
religious experience as most people understand it, and which I happen to think
is a very useful and valid division of religious categorization. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Who knows, maybe the only available data for such a study
was primarily reportage from extraordinary cases of mystical transport in
neurotic and ultra sensitive people. Or maybe James simply wished his topic to
remain proscribed, thereby reducing the perceived influence of religion by
narrowing it in definition. But when he makes statements that suggest he
believes religion is a boon to mankind, and that it is here to stay, I wonder
if he has forgotten his narrow criteria for eccentric religious experience.
Later in the book he even swallows up the confines of his definition by
referring to the universality of religious reality, “By being religious we
establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at
which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private
destiny, after all…The love of life, at any and every level of development, is
the religious impulse.” He blows his category even wider by the statement, “The
‘more’ as we call it, and the meaning of our union with it, form the nucleus of
our inquiry.” Who doesn’t want to be united with the ‘more’? In these
sentiments his rubric begins to slip and he thinks, correctly in my opinion, of
religion for the masses and not for the peculiar few. But I’ll cut him some
slack. After all, he’s dead, and I’m not. So…there’s that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Conclusion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> James concludes quite
rightly that there are a multitude of ways to view and live life, and of these
ways there are different combinations and alternations of ideas, methods,
wants, and needs of different people in different places at different times.
How could there possibly be only one right way to think or act for so many
different contingencies? Our ideas and practices should be as diverse as the
sundry ways we each experience reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"> “What, in the end,
are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated
systems of ideas that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common
sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?...And why,
after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many
interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation
by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as
mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by
analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each
time come out right?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">James deftly illustrates the validity of various ways of
believing and living by asking his readers to consider alone the way people
experience pain differently. “Does it not appear as if one who lived more
habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of
religion from one who habitually lived on the other?” Intolerance of religion
betrays a basic failure to understand the global variety of human temperament
and value expressions directly related to all the diverse factors that make us
unique. Again, it would be a huge step towards understanding each other if we
could at least acknowledge that there
are some people, maybe much more than we are comfortable in admitting, who
can’t find the same simple pleasure in existence as everyone else. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">We have to get it into our skulls that we all need to
believe and express ourselves differently to manage our very unique lives. In
this central theme of the work, we hit the payload. DON’T MISS THIS!! Here,
James brings us to the crux of his interest in mystic states that he believes
are the quintessence of the authentic, because personal, religious experience:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Some years ago I myself made some observations on this
aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One
conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth
has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness,
rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness,
whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie
potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So there it is. James was religious himself, not in terms of
believing specific things about God or a Holy Book, but in so far as he had an
experience with nitrous oxide that had touched him profoundly, and helped him
see something new which had given him an unshakable confidence. What is this
new thing he realized through laughing gas?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The keynote of it [nitrous illuminations] is invariably a
reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose [paradoxes] and
conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Doesn’t sound so bad. So this is what James thinks people
are chasing, and what, I believe, he was chasing and seeking to validate in
this work. But really, generalizes the lesson in a way anyone can take
something home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“No account of the universe in its totality can be final
which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded…At any rate,
they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Now that is fantastic. Why would we shut each other out—each
person being a window to other worlds, feelings, hopes, dreams, loves—when we
could be seeing everything new through each other? Why would I only limit
myself to one way of viewing the world, one defined and unchangeable self to
experience it, one mode of expressing the joy, struggle, and courage of my
existence? It makes perfect sense that we should all experience the universe in
as many different ways as we are each different, and report back to each other
in words and images that are faithful to the extraordinary and unspeakable ways
it feels to BE ME. Why would we limit that???…unless we are afraid. Fear is as
valid an experience and view as any other, but it is just ONE! How sad when
fear is the only view we allow. In shutting out discomfort and even the
possibility of danger to our egos, we risk shutting out hope, love, and beauty.
I don’t want to shut any window that might bring a word or a vision from beyond
the walls of my skin. It appears James didn’t want that either. The Other is a
chance for salvation from a very limited life and perspective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is
enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to
live on a chance.”</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-15175411591978804972014-10-13T21:51:00.001-07:002014-10-13T21:58:22.587-07:00Review of Chief Modern Poets Of Britain And America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://elliebloo.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/poetry2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://elliebloo.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/poetry2.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Someone recently asked me to tell them why I like poetry.
Here is what I said. First, poems are not rhymes. Most people don’t know that.
It took me a long time to understand. Poems can be rhythmic and musical, but
they don’t have to be. At the end of that curve in my explanation is a sheer
drop to an understanding about what poetry can become: it can become anything.
Poetry is language loosed. It is the playground of language. It is everything
that language can be, and everything it can never be. Poetry is language
shattered, to be either recreated, or trampled in a “protest of life against
reason.” Poetry can be highly dense and groping language that turns every
object into a thought or a feeling—which is probably more faithful to human
reality than detached descriptions. And, oh, the stinging freshness, the
electric pulse wakes something in the
mind that went asleep. It can run along pretty placidly at times, then suddenly
it shakes you. Then it ends as quickly as it began. The message is transmitted,
and poem is over. It has said what it needed to say, and has left. No prosaic
fortifications that leaves your reality untouched; or endless footnotes to keep
you from reading and believing your own life above all. It’s the puzzle. The
passion. The pure concentrate of questions and answers in varied blends. The
deepest humanity can dive, with the most she can bring up in each hand. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">If that is confusing, I usually knock on a skull with the
reminder about songs: lyrics to songs are poetry. This usually does the trick,
because even the most barbaric of unimaginative poetry-bashers can understand
that lyrics from the likes of The Beatles or Sara Bareilles are moving (wide
spectrum I know, but if you don’t get the point then you should just turn the
volume up on your Katy Perry), even when read without music (though, no doubt,
music is intentionally paired with lyrics in song to draw out flavor). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I loved taking a year to go through this book which
contained thousands of English poems spanning back several hundred years. I was
able to get a taste for who my favorite poets might be, and I took many hiatuses
in order to read a complete book of poems by specific poets to get in deep before
I moved on. Anyone who loves literature and poetry really needs to go through
an anthology that gives you a taste of the different kinds of poetry, if for no
other reason than to see how it has morphed and advanced over the centuries.
There are so many new ways people have expressed creative thought, it is
mind-blowing! And I’ll admit, I was completely lost on about a third of the
poems included in this massive volume due to the experimentation and avant-garde
flair of modern poets. I have strong feelings about obscurantism in poetry when
it is published for the masses (i.e., it’s frustrating because it can be
pedantic and high-browed), but because of the sheer mountains of the output of
poets throughout the ages that appear unintelligible to the general reader,
I’ve concluded that there is an essential drive in human nature to push the
boundaries of what we know, and attempt to communicate the incommunicable, if
even to those few whose understanding is fine-tuned enough to hear the more
nuanced and delicate tones of meaning from the poets. Most of us are used to
language that takes eons to evolve, word by word; but I imagine that some are
dissecting and advancing language, on a personal level anyway, at a far more
advanced rate, and those left behind are left to grumble about the poets’ obscurities.
I believe this desire to ‘be’ and ‘say’ burdens the more advanced and keenly
sensitive minds which are very alone in their engagement with truths that would
crush the mind and spirit of the average person. Maybe there is a reason it
must be incomprehensible and confounding to the light reader—one who isn’t
invested in the investigation and consequent agony of the poet who has touched
truth that could strike a man dead with its earth-shattering import. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I, for one, and thankful to have the fruit of genius right
in front of me, to catch what I can and grow how I can through pressure of
hard-thought and excelled maturation; rather than not knowing what is out there
and not caring because I feel threatened by what flies over my head. If it’s
easy, it’s old. Hear that. I’m reminded of one of the last poems I read by
Richard Wilbur in which a ‘hero’ (in the present case, a poet of course) is not
appreciated by his peers for pioneering a higher plane of thought and
existence. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Pardon him,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">…for it is he </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Devours death, mocks mutability,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">How for so many bedlam hours his saw </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And the slam of his hammer all the day beset</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The people’s ears…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<u><span style="font-size: large;">Forgive the hero, you who would have died <o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><u>Gladly with all you knew</u>…</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">(From <i>Still, Citizen
Sparrow</i> by Richard Wilbur)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Very simply put, I feel so much comfort reading the thoughts
of others who are brave, and honest, and creative. It feels like I’m not alone.
NOT that I’m all of those things all the time, but it makes me remember it’s
okay to try to be more brave. There are people there already, people who have
tried new things and spoke new words and sailed into uncharted territories and
tried to tell their stories in broken words. Even with the more obscure poems,
it can be such a good feeling to pick up on something brand-new, even if
receiving only a glimmer of meaning, and feel something change inside merely
for having read it. The joy of revelation that I have gathered from so many of
these poems has stayed with me for days, sometimes weeks…simply for reading a beautiful
and courageous thought. I deeply enjoy the “heavenly fellowship of men who
perish” (Wallace Stev<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>ens). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">A few of my favorites in random order: Walt Whitman, Robert
Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, Richard Wilbur, T.S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers,
Karl Shapiro, Emily Dickenson, Wallace Stephens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl
Sandburg, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Being the
poet that I am, I offer one of my latest poems, dedicated to the poets who have
taught me to live with the boldness of a revelation, as an epiphany on earth; who
convinced me of the worth of every word spoke, and that each word is original as
the life that spoke it. No old word was ever spoken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word was ever spoken. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Every word is newly minted from the mouth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Reshaped,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Reworked,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Rethought,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Refought. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word was ever spoken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">New spite for old stings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Spit to polish tradition’s rings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Sounded-Soul’s returning pings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">New-knit versions of people and things.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word was ever spoken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Don’t believe the lie</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That a dead dictionary is a clue to you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No lexicon has the slightest idea what the hell you mean.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The British Library, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Library of Congress,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Russian State Library,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">National Diet Library,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Toronto Public Library,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">National Library of China, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bibliotheca Alexandrina, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And the Harvard University Library</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">All wait breathlessly for your most casual, verbal slip</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">To add to their paper tombs. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">iPads and Google central would short circuit, would blow their
brains</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">On trying to compute the long eternity of work</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That went into coming up with your premier use of </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">‘The’ and ‘and’. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word was ever spoken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">You, sir, madam, are not a redundancy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">You are not a hiccup.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">You are not a glitch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">You are not something to be looked up in Wikipedia.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">One should blush with abject shame for ever accepting </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That you are just another thing that happened,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That your words are best understood in light of anything
but your own prototypal self,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That your birth is just another smudge on a certificate,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Chicken-scratch in histories and family trees,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">A date, or time, or place.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word was ever spoken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">I caught myself writing this with a sneer on my face,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">An apology and confession for ever having allowed </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">The thought to enter my skull</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">That any word has been heard before.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">When I think I hear an old word,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">I suppose I’m just tired,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And want to be through with it all;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Through with new words</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And the daily recrudescence of life and movement and
sound;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Through with stimulations and meanings that complicate my
own desire</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">To be through with it all,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And just hear, for once,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">An old, dead word. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">If you think you hear an old word,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Listen for your prayer that is catching, sifting, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">And translating all the new words into a simple plea of</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Dear God, make it stop.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">Still, even after you’re dead and deaf like you wanted,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;">No old word will ever be spoken.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-69015998443277826122014-09-15T13:31:00.004-07:002014-09-15T13:31:58.230-07:00Review of L. Ron. Hubbard's Dianetics: The Original Thesis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://f.edgesuite.net/data/www.scientology.org/files/profile-LRH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://f.edgesuite.net/data/www.scientology.org/files/profile-LRH.jpg" height="320" width="235" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
I read this book in conjunction with interviews I am
conducting for <i>Awakenings: Felt Benefit
In Personal Values</i> (<a href="http://www.awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings">www.awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings</a>).
In addition to reading <i>Original Thesis, </i>I
have met with staff at a Scientology church, have undergone an Oxford Capacity
Assessment (“Free Personality Test”) at their site, and I look forward to
interviewing a few Scientologists for my research soon. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First, let me establish something. There is no denying that Hubbard
was a genius. I know he’s derided by many who don’t take his religion or
methodology seriously, and vilified by those who consider his ideas a grave
threat against humankind or a specific belief system, but that doesn’t discount
the fact that his prodigious literary output and complex ideology are
tremendously orchestrated and deeply ramified into a very well thought-out system.
I have no doubt he was an extremely informed person, and he wrote intelligently
and assiduously in order for people to take him seriously as a religious Czar.
He desperately wanted people to think of his work as scientific, though it
mostly strikes one as innovative, and I believe that it was his innovation that
brought him his enormous success. He clearly created more than he relayed, and
if his Scientology is <i>scientific</i>—in
the sense of being verified by other leading scientists or presenting
hypotheses that are testable for definite verification—then science is in some
serious trouble. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But as it stands, I think Hubbard did the right thing in
declaring his Scientology—a label probably intended to evoke respect for
dispassionate research and reportage, which it is not—a ‘religion.’ Religions
require faith, and Scientology most certainly requires a LOT of faith, but
religion does something very specific that science doesn’t do: it speaks to
what a person <i>wants</i>, and provides a
sense of direction and meaning for one’s life that is based on an emotional
connection with the content of that faith. Science more closely deals with
impersonal data, calculation, and ‘detached’ intellection; religion more
closely deals with passion, instinct, and volition. I personally think that
both science and religion are pursuits of every human being in varying degrees,
though many systems of behavior or thought often represent more one function
than the other; therefore both are legit. So, Scientology as a religion is not
a bad thing in all cases, although the idea of a ‘new religion’ is humorous in
most people’s mind as an absurdity or an anachronism. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t really speak to the type of person Hubbard was
because I haven’t done enough research—even though he might strike one as a
slime-ball in his interviews, and I haven’t interacted enough with his
metaphysics which account for the origin and destination of life, though I
generally distrust its extremes; but I do think the practical results of his <i>Dianetics</i> seems to have done a lot of
good for many, and has been reported to have transformed individuals and
communities for the better (<a href="http://www.scientology.org/how-we-help/volunteer-ministers.html">http://www.scientology.org/how-we-help/volunteer-ministers.html</a>).
For all its oddities and possible snares for authority-seeking types of
individuals, its results are still impressive, considering alone the massive
amount of followers it has attained over the years. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hubbard cooked up something novel, expansive, and fully
planned to last. It’s clearly a knock-off of psychoanalysis with a few new
tricks and a religion’s-worth of cleverly minted and repurposed terms, but it
looks like something different on the surface, and for those who don’t know yet
what they believe in, it certainly offers something substantial. You’ll sooner
reach the bottom of most world religions combined, with regard to their central
texts, than you will the total, staggering volume of Hubbard’s works alone
which include written and audio recordings on a wide range of topics including
literacy, mental health, personality assessment, metaphysics, business
administration, and addiction. Reading through his works would truly amount to
a lifetime reading plan for most people, which introduces a fairly serious risk
to the naïve in commencing the perpetual chain of obligatory reading material
which is sure to end in an extremely provincial understanding of the world
through the exclusivity of reading habits that is required to commit to finish Hubbard’s
nearly interminable opus. In other words, if someone starts down that road and
later decides it’s not the right path, they may find it’s a <i>long way</i> back; so I imagine most would
rather just keep their head down and keep reading, whether it still seems cogent
or not—it’s better than starting over.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Dianetics </i>[Dia—“through”,
nous—“soul”]<i>: The Original Thesis</i>
begins with the primary axioms on which Hubbard founded his practices. The
first axiom, which is the primary drive of humanity, is: “Survive!” This he
calls the “Dynamic” which is divided into multiple expressions, or “dynamics”,
which include self, one’s life-partner and family, one’s social groups, the extended
community/nation/world; and in later books he further includes non-human
categories of animal, the physical world, the spiritual world, and finally,
infinity. Hubbard teaches that for each person these drives to survive and
expand the support network for one’s survival derail when attempting to
navigate traumatic experiences which create an unhealthy dependence on the
‘reactive mind’, and so the original Dynamic must be reinstated by a rigorous
and guided process of placing the more highly evolved and sophisticated analytical
mind back in charge through a psycho-therapeutic operation called auditing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Auditing is the cooperative effort of an auditor and a
participant to go back (‘return’) to birth (‘the basic’) and prenatal memories
to neutralize the harmful and unconscious reactions to negative memories (‘engrams’)
in the ‘reactive mind’. These engrams are memories of dangers which continue to
influence an individual, but which no longer represent real threats. The
primary goal of auditing is to prompt the ‘pre-clear’ (the participant who
cannot access clear analytical reasoning) <i>to
remember trauma in the womb</i> and to bring them to desensitize themselves to
those experiences through overexposure. “What,” might you ask, “could be a
prenatal memory that is traumatic?” Well, that would be the attempted abortions
that nearly every baby boomer has experienced, according to Hubbard. To be
fair, he does state that there may be other postpartum trauma that impairs an
adult and causes ‘dramatizations’ or outbursts which hamstring their functions,
health, and happiness in later life; but he is very adamant on the point that
the primary engrams to be disarmed are those caused by prenatal abortion
attempts and birth itself. The auditing process is an intense and closely
guided therapy session of reactivating those fetal memories in order to
neutralize them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He defends the possibility of being able to consciously
return to fetal memories by reasoning that the human brain is recording events
and storing experiential data at all stages of its development, even during its
unconscious moments. It seems logical that everything sensed by the brain is at
least partially recorded in life, but the few objections I have to his ideology
would be, 1) a baby’s brain is still developing and continues to do so into
adulthood along with its sensory, mnemonic, and interpretive functioning which
serves and constructs a sense of what we call ‘consciousness’ and can’t be
expected to construct meaning and record data to fit into discrete categories
that can be sequentially accessed later for clear interpretation by an
individual or an auditor, 2) a baby’s brain is as selective about what it
records and how it records as is the adult’s, so it seems nonsense to suppose
it indiscriminately records everything that happens to it in anything but
shorthand or extremely fragmented hieroglyphics suitable to early stage of
growth, 3) if conscious returns to unconscious impressions were always possible,
it would imply that all sensory recordings on the physical plane during an
adult’s sleep could be later reconstructed just as easily, like air currents or
sounds during REM cycles, and 4) if conscious returns to birth and pre-birth
could be reached, why wouldn’t reaching them be an experience far more common
than it seems to be now? If Hubbard is right, then everyone who existed before 1950
should be categorized as a pre-clear, which is roughly a billion-billion people
(give or take a few billion Neolithic <i>homo
sapiens</i>) who were intellectually impaired and lost in the non-Hubbardian
darkness. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do tend to give some credence to what I consider to be
scientifically conducted experiments and peer-reviewed research in recreating
alleged birth trauma and helping individuals to cope through exposure to what
is believed to be perinatal memory of sorts (see the work of Stanislav Grof and
Christopher Bache). Probably this amounts to more of a sympathy and admiration
for the courage to both develop beta therapeutic techniques which might be
helpful to people, and to stand with their new ideas against the tsunami of
scientific evidence that might seem at times to fly in their face. However,
though the concepts of Dianetics intrigue me, I think it is at bottom mostly
neologistic craftiness and shifty formalism. But still, I don’t think
Scientology is all bad, or better yet, I don’t believe it is all bad for all
people. It is my belief that Hubbard to some extent probably had the good of
others in mind. Reading over his principles and methods I get the feeling he
may have been working miracles among the disturbed, and who knows, his most
faithful adherents may have been the breeding grounds for psychopathy, and I
don’t mean that in a hateful way. Even his subtle reminders throughout his
works that those who have been ‘cleared’ of mental ‘aberration’ would no longer
be obsessively introverted (“introversion is not natural nor is it necessary to
the creation of anything”) might be a signal that his focus was on the compulsive
type whom he probably even had to ward off from an over-interest in even his
own ideas (“so long as he is interested in his own reactive mind [one of the
fundamental principles of Dianetics and auditing], he has engrams [corrupted
thought]”). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All decriers of what is widely considered eccentric
religious belief like Scientology have to ask themselves if they are sincerely ready
to know what the world would be like without religion. If all religions of the
world were turned upside-down and shaken, what neuroses/psychoses would fall
back into general society without the guardrails and/or systematic suppression of
superstition, shaming dogma, unquestioned authority, and congregational
pressure to conform? Speaking for myself, I’d be afraid of what would shake
out. Especially out of the Scientology domain. And yet, I truly hope that those
who are ready to become “prey to a freedom that is no longer chained-up” would
find the courage they need to break out. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So, it seems to me that there is some value in Dianetics as
a self-help tool. Even coming to terms with shock of the ‘exile’ of existence
in general—through the emotional bath of a phantasmagoric and semi-hypnotic,
free-associative exploration of the themes of pain, birth, thought, memory,
dreams, and primal reflexes through the contrived rigors of auditing—appears to
be beneficial to some degree, and quite possibly the whole success of Dianetics
hangs on this the catharsis and relational support of auditing. Considering for
a moment the sole impact of the first axiom of Dianetics which lays out one’s
primal and primary function of “Survive!”, Dianetics initially appears valid;
and moving a few steps further it continues to ring true in explanations about
how the survival of self grows more ‘dynamic’, healthy, and happy when it
includes the welfare and survival of others and one’s environment. This
survival of self and others is the basic message of Scientologists’
oft-distributed book, <i>The Way To
Happiness</i> by Hubbard, which is an extremely simplistic, bordering-on-banal,
code of ethics that monotonously pecks into one’s head the message: “Your
survival and wellbeing must include the survival and wellbeing of others or
you’re not going to thrive.” Who can argue that these seem positive and
sensible messages for our world? Of course, good ideas often are the Trojan
Horses for incubating bad ideas, but that’s sort-of-but-maybe-not-really beside
the point.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I realize I am attempting to sum up a religion, and it must
be remembered that I only read <i>Dianetics:
The Original Thesis</i> containing Hubbard’s tiny germ of original thought which
I understand was greatly revised, expanded, complicated, tangled,
transmogrified, and ruptured into <i>Dianetics:
The Modern Science Of Mental Health</i>. Well anyway, for what it’s worth, Dianetics
at its rudimentary core, distinct from its later expressions and Scientology
framework, gets my vote to stay around as long as it can. Until it ruins some
poor bastard. In which case, thumbs down.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And also (this is probably as good a time as any to say
this) the film <i>The Master</i>, which
intentionally parallels the life of L. Ron Hubbard<i>,</i> is brilliant. R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh, and Hubbard too.<o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-78087109710146704022014-08-19T17:47:00.000-07:002014-08-19T18:26:42.005-07:00Review of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/7a/82/3019b220dca05cf35a9b3010.L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/7a/82/3019b220dca05cf35a9b3010.L.jpg" height="320" width="188" /></a></div>
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I broke my own rule for this book. Usually, I give a book
and its author more of a chance. After all, I’ve heard so much good about Ayn
Rand, and the one-liners people pass around are amazing. </div>
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My conclusion after reading 218 pages of a 694-page
book—which I took great pains in deliberating on whether or not I should abort,
restarting several times but only making it a few paragraphs before concluding
it’s all the same—is that it is no longer worth my time. I get it, Ayn Rand is
clever, but I don’t think she’s as profound as people might like to make her
out to be. And I’m sure she took huge strides in helping women to be taken
seriously in the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century. Great for her and for all women.
Seriously.</div>
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She is brilliant. She’s a clever writer. She’s courageous.
And that’s probably what fools people. </div>
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The question I was asking when reading her work is: Is this
work of Ayn Rand still relevant, or is it a relic of another time? Is it a
leftover? In other words, was there anything Rand put out that transcended her
era, or is it dated for the most part, a period piece that we learn not <i>from,</i> but <i>in spite of</i>? </div>
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It seems to me, after reading a little of this work, and
reading a little bit about her, and hearing people talk about her, that some of
her ideas at least, including her pseudo-philosophy of <i>Objectivism</i>, are relics. Curiosities, though superlative in literary
design, but not exactly fresh anymore. I have to say it that way because it
seems that she is still being treated by some people as impeccable. </div>
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Yes, 218 pages in, I couldn’t take it anymore. My extreme
annoyance is probably due to the fact I liked a lot of what I read initially,
but it all ended up failing so hard and pathetically. It’s like watching the
city mayor turn into the local drunk. You just hate to see it happen. After the
first 100 pages I was left feeling like a sucker after each scene, seriously
embarrassed that I had fallen for her. Everyone seems to have read her stuff at
some point, and loved her… but then high school ended. Angsty teenagers thought
it was cool, and some still do in their 40’s and 50’s, but it’s kitsch baby.
Kitsch!</div>
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It’s clear that the protagonist of the story, Howard Roark,
is Ayn Rand’s hero, and, I would add, her alter-ego. She wrote of Roark in the
character-details she sketched out prior to <i>The
Fountainhead</i>, “Roark is a noble soul par excellence. The man as man should
be…and who triumphs completely.” </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meet Howard Roark, a cold, detached, misunderstood person. He’s
a bit of a loner, and by that I mean that he would probably find no difficulty
in going through life, cradle-to grave, without having touched another human
being. As long as he’s vindicated and proved ‘right’—ironically a form of
validation from the pedestrians he claims to care so little about—he will live
on bread and water. Dreamy. His ideals are epitomized in his comment to the
garbage-eater, Keating, “…most people take most things because that’s what’s
given them, and they have no opinion whatever…Do you wish to be guided by what
they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?” </div>
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Of course, this somehow snowballs into a reckless
selfishness and unwillingness to seek win-win situations in any form. He wants
things <i>his way</i>, or he pouts. “I would
have to think on a nice clean job. I don’t want to think. Not their way. It
will have to be their way, no matter where I go. I want a job where I won’t
have to think.” First world problem. Keating was right when he leveled a charge
straight at the face of Roark, “Why don’t you start working, like everyone
else?” Not sure even Ayn Rand knew how to answer for Roark.</div>
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Rand would later write about Roark, “The story [<i>The Fountainhead</i>] is the story of Howard
Roark’s triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets
it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man’s spirit, a hymn glorifying a man’s
‘I.’” I think that is enough to establish that whatever Roark says or does in
the book is the materialization of the highest ideals of Rand for what she
calls ‘Man’—which word, I believe, is employed as a metonymy for humanity and
therefore encompasses both genders. Even without reading Rand’s very specific
intentions for her main character, it is quickly evident that Roark is Rand’s very
direct mouthpiece. </div>
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The reason I want to establish this is because (<u>Attention:
Spoiler Alert Straight Ahead</u>!) near the end of Part 2, Chapter 2, Roark
rapes Dominique. And Rand isn’t sorry about it. Quite the opposite actually. It
happened like this: Dominique was obviously dropping hints for Roark but also
playing ‘hard to get’ without any clear language or indication that she wanted
to be had; Roark began playing ‘even more hard to get’, seeming to be able to
read her thoughts and know that she wants him; Dominique was in her room alone
one night, and Roark slipped into her room, uninvited, through the terrace
windows and proceeded to have his way with Dominique; Dominique fought against
Roark, but didn’t scream even though she knew she could; and finally, he left
without a word, feeling triumphant, and woke the next morning with pride. Yeah,
not sure I would call that a “noble soul par excellence”, but, to each her own!</div>
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Those couple pages are probably enough for anyone to see
deep into who Rand really is as a person and a writer. It’s the way Rand
treated the moment as profound that creeps me out. Check out Rand’s summary,
“He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made
her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have
remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master
taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had
wanted.” <i>50 Shades </i>anyone? The next
day doesn’t find Roark remorseful. At all. </div>
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“Roark awakened in the morning and thought that last night
had been like a point reached…they had been united in an understanding beyond
violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of the action; had she meant less to
him, he would not have taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would
not have fought so desperately. The unrepeatable exultation was in knowing that
they both understood this.”</div>
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So, basically, we’re supposed to suspend disbelief—which I’m
not uncomfortable with for the most part—and be open to the idea that both
characters are quasi-human in that they are somehow telepathically reading each
other’s intentions, and, best-case-scenario, making assumptions about the
mutuality of this act; and we are supposed to believe, on those grounds, that
this wasn’t rape. Now, I can certainly suspend my disbelief for a few seconds
to consider that this telepathy or mutual certitude might be possible in Rand’s
fictional world in which she is trying to make a point. Why not. That’s not my
problem. The problem is that she is trying to romanticize the idea of the
forcing of one’s self onto another for the good of the other, without being
clearly invited. For instance, all flirtation aside, we all know how this would
be interpreted if Roark happened to be ugly.</div>
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I suppose we can all
accept that love and sex can involve both parties enjoying the
possessing/ possessed roles, and some controlled and mutual aggression could
take place which might seem rough to a detached observer. Sure, why not. But
these people did not know each other, and were making colossal assumptions
about the willingness of the other to be forced into intercourse. Let me ask: what
if Rand was wrong, and Dominique did not want this? That would qualify as rape,
correct? So, when Dominique looks at her bruises in the mirror and relishes
them, that doesn’t absolve Roark of his presumption, does it? Ludicrous.</div>
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As I’ve understood Rand’s construction of Roark, I can only
deduce that Roark represents human egoism, but an extreme form of it. It was
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who said “the true ego grows in inverse proportion
to egoism.” The highest form of egoism, then, would be a brand of ‘selfishness’
that does not calculate self as if all being and matter outside of one’s body
(and who would define its boundaries?) is exclusive and in not in some way
tributaries and even extensions of self. Jean Paul Sartre’s idea of self is one
that is dependent on others for it development, and this is why he advanced the
idea of ‘intersubjectivity’ which is tantamount to a web of consciousness that
produces the idea of self and fosters it in an irreducible network of other
selves. True egoism, then, does not conceive of self in a vacuum, but understands
its absolute dependence and interconnection with all matter and being in the
universe. I understand the concept of survival of an ego which often must vanquish
some external hostility, even other negative egos, but that complimentary to
the idea that survival very often involves the intentional preservation of
external forces which in turn preserves and expands self. This is the very
simple concept of interdependence, and how an illuminated mind like Rand’s
would miss this is very puzzling to me. Imagine a bee saying to the hive, ‘I
don’t need you’; or a plant saying to its environment, ‘I can become more on my
own’. Nonsense. Donne was right when he said, ‘Every man’s death diminishes
me.” Again, I understand self-preservation and self-expansion that is often to
the detriment of others who are oppositional to one’s betterment and
fulfillment, and recognize it as an observable and often pleasant feature of
the world. But absolute self-preservation that precludes a sense of interdependence—and
sometimes even utter dependence on others—because one fears that the presence
of others <i>necessarily </i>reduces one in
the universe instead of expanding them…this is complete nonsense. Yes, there is
this center of consciousness that I like to think of as united self (even if it
unravels all the time) that I am responsible for above all else, but there is
also a wider view of self that constantly threatens my understanding of a
united center, and reveals my consciousness and body as partakers in the flux
of matter that surrounds, penetrates, and combines with myself so that I can no
longer simply say that I am me, you are you, and the world is the world. </div>
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As an aside, some may ask, how am I me, but not me? Take a
child, for instance. A child is quite literally a de facto <i>part</i> of me who has separated from me, and begun to live as me
outside of me. So, who do I concern myself with now? Am I only concerned about
the current center of my perceived consciousness, or do I involve the ‘me
outside of me’ which also includes everything that gives into me and takes away
from me? This ‘me outside of me’ can explain an over-concern of parents for
children, and it is a start to understand how something external to me can
begin to every bit as serviceable and important to me as my own body. </div>
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We’re all adults here, right? We all do realize, don’t we,
that without the small compromises of community—the social contract, if you
will— we would be cooking dinner over our own shit and hiding in holes to avoid
being gang-raped by gorillas, right? If society is truly, at bottom, a
“mitigation of ownership”, then why do we whine when we have to sacrifice a
small pleasure for a greater one? Roark is the paragon of the type of free man
who just doesn’t get what <i>being yourself</i>
means. It doesn’t have to mean being <i>by
yourself.</i> I truly can respect the hero that is committed to an ideal, but I
immediately lose respect for a person who can’t discriminate between worthy
goals and unworthy ones. Healthy
self-love doesn’t mean you get everything your way or you’ll threaten to starve
yourself to death—which, by the way, Roark was fundamentally doing. He wanted
to build skyscrapers without a lick of the investor’s opinion, even to the
point of rejecting millions of dollars simply for not making minor changes to
satisfy the taste of his client. Of course, the huge contradiction here is that
Roark couldn’t help make these exact compromises while anonymously creating
plans for his friend Keating. Huh? When he couldn’t get a job because he refused
to make anything that included a shred of classic or Renaissance stylization
that he didn’t approve of, he lost his business and starting working minimum
wage as a construction worker. As if there aren’t compromises in labor. He went
bat-shit when people suggested to him what they’d like to see in the final
design, and to stick-it-to-the-man, he started drilling in a mine. Genius. </div>
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Now, that’s NOT to say that I don’t think there are some
compromises an ego should NOT cave-in to. If one’s sense of self-worth and
personal freedom is seriously becoming degraded and denatured by the continual
surrender to another’s demands, then there comes a time for each individual
when no more compromises can be made in order to preserve one’s value of self
and life. I understand that completely, and I believe there is some line even I
might not cross, however petty it may seem to another, so as not to give away
another iota of my ideals and my power to choose, merely to satisfy the whims
of others. Fine. And if someone wants to maintain that Roark was protecting
himself from being adulterated and diluted by the goals of others that
contested his own goals, I suppose I could back away and say it was possible.
But Rand seems to imply that any little concession of <i>any kind</i>, <i>at any time</i>, is
a betrayal of self, and that is when <i>Roark-the-whiner
</i>is born into the world. But where would he draw the line in separating from
the pack? Will he not in some point in his life make compromises to a boss
because he doesn’t want to punch in at 8:00 am, saying that he values his sleep
which preserves his alertness? Will he not concede to his child because taking
him to school reduces his own time to read and more fully stimulate his
intellectual life? Will he not concede in conversation because adapting his
language to the style and understanding of his auditor dilutes his meanings and
intentions? Will he not defer to inoculations because a sore arm after a needle
pokes it minimizes his time in the gym pumping iron for a day? If a tiger
crossed his path, would he not step aside because doing so diminishes his sense
of freedom and self-worth? Is a meteoric death so much more brilliant than a
steadily growing flame that bends with the wind? Confused? I think Rand is too.</div>
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Rand attempts to romanticize selfishness, but she ends up
caricaturing it. There’s a healthy kind of self-confidence, and this includes <i>self-love</i> which is often misunderstood
and grossly undervalued. An egoism that realizes that one is never fully one’s
self without other selves is a good kind of egoism. But I reserve the word
‘selfish’—with its typical connotation of isolationism and imagined, absolute
autonomy—for people who <i>only</i> love
self and fail to realize the impact of community and interdependence on things like,
well, one’s self-awareness (which is completely owed to societal interaction
and differentiation) and survival (starting with the womb and breast of
origin). To truly be his own man and live life the way he wanted—alone—Howard
Roark, for all his lofty ideas about independence, would literally starve to
death, or become an ignorant, weak, and outright dependent creature whose
ultimate aim would be to cake on enough mud each morning to deter a mosquito’s
proboscis. </div>
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I do get what Rand is trying to say. There is a lot of
self-loathing that passes for being civil-minded and socially successful. The
low-life of the story, as Rand conceived of him, is Keating who is a
crowd-pleaser extraordinaire, and she wrote of him, “He looked at the faces, at
the eyes; he saw himself born in them, he saw himself being granted the gift of
life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and
his body was only its reflection.” Great stuff, and point taken. But Roark is
the polar opposite, a vampire-like being who lacks any reflection in the eyes
of others, and Rand loves his undead social persona exactly like that. </div>
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It’s apparent, if you know her biography, that Rand needed
to withdraw into herself to survive the perils of the Russion Revolution and
the confiscation of her family’s business and livelihood; and I believe many
people would do well to search inside themselves for a strength originating
inside them and a light that will lead them out of the darkness of public
ignorance. Community would be nothing without these ‘solvent’ natures who owe
nothing, and are owed nothing. But the ‘first-me’ mentality so easily slips
into a completely unbalanced view of one’s part in society and the natural
order, and the tendency to view others as drains, instead of potential
tributaries that extend my sense of self, is all-to-real a possibility. It’s a
slippery slope from lordly to lonely. </div>
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I could only stomach a little over 200 pages of <i>The Fountainhead</i>. Perhaps I’ll try again
later with <i>Anthem</i> or <i>We the Living</i>. As for her philosophy of <i>Objectivism</i>, I have zero interest in a
system which assumes it can uproot knowledge from human desire and an
existential outlook. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-1567180013542741652014-07-30T12:55:00.000-07:002014-07-30T12:55:33.143-07:00Review of All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBvl6zNYneYllGs7IKy-BWY5emmP71reqg0ynwLyh5dGSAZCE3n1F_2CJ38WO6dwo2W9cQIfgX339g8z7s6vMa9AatcakZCU6sNESH0tsUXcyG_ZPdXyrlxaEYR30QKXK5erjZUxXaauY/s1600/cormac--mccarthy%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBvl6zNYneYllGs7IKy-BWY5emmP71reqg0ynwLyh5dGSAZCE3n1F_2CJ38WO6dwo2W9cQIfgX339g8z7s6vMa9AatcakZCU6sNESH0tsUXcyG_ZPdXyrlxaEYR30QKXK5erjZUxXaauY/s1600/cormac--mccarthy%5B1%5D.jpg" height="320" width="251" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">“…he knew that the life there was unimaginable to him.” </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">These words by McCarthy epitomize what I believe this author does so well: he helps you imagine a life that was unimaginable to you before. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">McCarthy sees you. Oh yes he does. He watches, and he waits. He brings a bucket with him and sits in the corner and sh*ts in the bucket if he needs to so that he doesn’t have to leave so he can watch. And then he sees it. That thought that crosses your mind, but is so soon buried again. But he saw the shadow cross your face. He grabs that fear, walks away with it, whispering sweet nothings to revive it and keep it throbbing just long enough to get it under his pen. He writes it into places of the world you think you know about, but you really don’t, and most of the time would rather not. Some of that life is as romantic and adventurous as you had hoped, maybe more-so, and other parts are exactly what you feared were true and tried to insulate yourself against. He reminds you that there really is such a thing as torture, despair, betrayal, agonizing deaths—especially of the young and innocent—and, in some cases, lives that end with a sense of meaninglessness once and for all. Don’t get me wrong, none of this is able to unravel the beauty and heroism present in his narratives, but one gets the feeling that he is not at all interested in a final reconciliation of horror and beauty, two irreducible ends of a tension that strains McCarthy's world. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that…in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"> He believes in the best and the worst, and helps you to believe in them too, probably because he’s not sure that either could exist without the other. He’s brave and tells incredible stories, and I get the sense that he loves life and people to his core. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">That being said, while All the Pretty Horses was a fairly exciting book, it didn’t quite take me over the top. I feel like I have a better grasp about the kind of life a wondering cowboy would have experienced crossing into Mexican territory in the mid-twentieth century, and I was fairly engaged throughout the entire read, but I’m not sure it moved me enough to read any more of the “Border Trilogy.” Don’t get me wrong, I think McCarthy is an incredible writer, but I suppose from my standpoint the plot had more depth than the characters. Also, I probably value a strong message above all else, and I don’t feel it delivered any new or reinforced way to think about life for me personally, which, again is how I rate a book, based on what it does for me. The persona of John Grady, the protagonist, was a bit too grandiose and cavalier to be honest. He was a cowboy’s cowboy and was absolutely perfect—too perfect actually—at taming horses, wooing women, dissembling a gun and using very specific parts to cauterize bullet wounds, and killing kids in prison knife-fights. He was more John Wayne than John Wayne. I’m not sure even McCarthy is aware of the level of his idealism, probably thinking himself a pretty realistic guy by writing things like, “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure, death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” Seems true enough, but these words were spoken through the cold-blooded aunt who represented more the pessimist, which contrasted with John Grady’s determined optimism and, in my opinion, the naiveté of McCarthy’s preferred hero. He was a character which, in the end, seemed to distant from the sorrows of the world which McCarthy seems so interested in convincing his readers of.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Although I certainly don’t hold the satisfying and resolving components against this story, I feel that the arc just did what it was expected to do, and not much else. There were some great one-liners of course, as is typical with McCarthy, but it is a book I’ll probably never go back to. And I suppose I am also frustrated that he had so much Spanish in the dialogue so that any reader without basic Spanish would have no clue what exactly was said. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would love that sort of thing, and it may very well have been brilliant of McCarthy to include something for his polyglot devotees; but I don’t know Spanish, so I’m one of the one’s who didn’t appreciate it so much.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Overall, the book was a decent read, and while it was not completely to my taste, I can understand why some McCarthy admirers rave about his stuff. I think he is an extremely talented writer. There. Can I be done without being sniped by a fanboy? Don’t hurt me.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-17769193438476616872014-07-10T21:03:00.002-07:002014-07-10T21:03:45.597-07:00Review of The Ethics Of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CARTIER-BRESSON_1945_Simone_de_Beauvoir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CARTIER-BRESSON_1945_Simone_de_Beauvoir.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<h1>
Existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Existentialism was, for a sweet minute, the new way to think
about self and the world in the 20<sup>th</sup> century; but few—so very
precious few—understood anything about it. Christians were probably the primary
reason it bombed among traditionalists, but its novel language, complex ideas,
and deep avowal of the value of personal choice were strong determinants of its
unrecognized benefits. So what is it exactly that Existentialism offers? Simone
de Beauvoir does a wonderful job drawing out the practical significance of
existentialist ideas, such as:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->An affirmation and value of one’s own self as
the center of the universe</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Confidence in one’s own powers to shape the
world</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->3.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->A confidence in the importance and necessity of
others and their happiness</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->4.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->A call to action and responsibility within the
context of a limited understanding</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->5.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->A framework to understand the world in a more
practical way which exposes and utilizes the subject-object tension consistently
evident in our experience.</div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She offered answers for postmodernism and
post-traditionalism and post-“what the heck do I do now that I realize I have
to decide for myself?”-ism. Besides
defining a new method for ethics, she also took on crass communists and gross
capitalists and staunchly defended a philosophy of authentic, vulnerable,
courageous living against a petrified, simplistic code of morals that for
centuries has enabled instant action but not an understanding of the nature or
goals of one’s existence. It will always be difficult to defend a new idea
against deeply ingrained and widely accepted customs, but then again, there’s
air conditioning. Old ways of thinking, no matter how convenient, are like
Missouri summer weather, while the ethics of existentialist ambiguity is like
air conditioning. Who wants to live in Misery without air conditioning? You
sir? Be my guest, but I’m thinking air conditioning will ultimately win the
day.</div>
<h1>
Beauvoir and Sartre</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This book is especially for anyone wondering what the blank
they should do with the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Many
summarize Sartre’s philosophy by his words, “Man is a useless passion”, and
though some women may agree (ha!), I think mostly his words are being wrenched
out of context. In <i>Being And Nothingness</i>
Sartre laid out that humanity is a <i>lack</i>
in that every existing person has a consciousness which has, in effect, stepped
away from the world of things (thus a <i>lack</i>)
to be able to comprehend the world of things. In other words, the
subject-object relationship is fundamental and absolute, for if all were object
there would be no consciousness of objects at all. And because this
subject-object disparity is the foundation of consciousness, there is no going
back. The subject strives to expand in the universe, to “disclose its being” and
define its dimensions. Its goal is to continue to become <i>more</i> without becoming <i>all</i>,
because in becoming all it would be object (in that there would be no object
besides itself), and it would cease to exist, theoretically, as conscious
subject. Beauvoir sums it up nicely, “If I were really everything there would
be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to
possess, and I myself would be nothing.” In other words, we strive to remain
conscious as a limited, transcendent being-away-from-objects, but we also
strive to assimilate things we are becoming conscious of. This is the paradox
and “useless passion” that Sartre spoke so frankly about, but I would think the
words “endless passion” would better characterize the tension. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beauvoir, Sartre’s compatriot in country and mind, takes up
existentialism where Sartre left off, and tackles how one should live with these
new ideas. She believes with Sartre that our existence is concerned with
disclosing and expanding our being, but she is chiefly concerned with how to do
so healthily and happily for the best results. In the wake of WWII and
communist turmoil, France, and the rest of the world, someone needed to point
the way with a new species of ethics that wouldn’t land us all in the awful
mess and global suffering the world at that time found itself in.</div>
<h1>
Ambiguity and an open future</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So Beauvoir did what Sartre was never able, or interested
enough, to do. She recognized with him that the ethical character of
existentialism was ambiguity—no external right or wrongs that absolved
individuals from their essential responsibility to decide for themselves and
all the risk that entails, and that this ambiguity would become a perceived
stumbling block for the uninitiated; but she also believed that something might
be done to help people embrace their freedom and love their life, and she hoped
to provide ideological support to assist people in making more rewarding
decisions in the game of life. “The characteristic feature of all ethics is to
consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the
means of winning.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She begins by laying out what human beings want: freedom
over and above the world of objects, disclosing one’s being in that world, and a
future open with possibilities to continue to expand and define one’s presence
in that world. “My freedom must not seek to trap being, but to disclose it. The
disclosure is the transition from [unconscious] being to [conscious]
existence.” The autonomy of the human being must always float above the
objective world, never equating itself with a thing or finding itself on a
crash course collision with objectification and the ‘stillness’ of absolute and
unconscious being. This is why “freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal;
neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal.” The idea of
an open future and a continually retreating, but partly-realizable goal, is
what everyone wants in balance, and oppression occurs when one is prevented by
another from feeling fulfilled in balanced and meaningful pursuit.</div>
<h1>
Flights from freedom</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To highlight the different ways in which imbalances are struck
in the subject/object tension from person to person, Beauvoir provides a
brilliant list of six different types of personas who try to evade their
freedom—their separation from the world of objects—and thus begin to limit the
freedom of others.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. The Child</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Literal and figurative children simply wish to remain in a
stage of innocence and <i>insignificance</i>.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“[The child is] in a state of security by virtue of his very
insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that
nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts
engage nothing, not even himself.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But this is an illusion. The child has, from his very birth,
been active in creating his world, albeit without a clearly formulated concept
of his having been doing so. Every child changes the shape of his world with
every act, with every cry, with every laugh. His choices warp the world, twist
it this way and that, bring that thing closer and move that other thing
further, influence places and positions and people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“The child set up this character and this [his current]
universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant
of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Many who are frightened at the thought of having to take
responsibility for their world or admit that they create, and have always
created, their own experience, attempt to remain a blameless child in any way
they can by denying responsibility, becoming dependent on others, and refusing
to acknowledge the full power and horror (“anguish”) of becoming the “prey of a
freedom that is no longer chained up by anything.” Anyone who has ever had to
drive a car, pay mortgage, manage employees, or have children of their own can
appreciate the struggle of first realizing the full consequences of power which
can be both creative and destructive. One can understand how some people
regressively pretend to be an insignificant child who can’t do anything great, nor
cause great harm; but of course this is a flight from the reality that even as
a child a human being is choosing for herself, even when she is choosing to
submit to another’s authority.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. The Sub-Man</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Sub-Man is one who, like the child, attempts to avoid
the significance and responsibilities of his existence, but instead of
attempting to regress to a relinquishment of power to others, the Sub-Man
attempts to passively ignore his situation and failure-to-launch. “This apathy
manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks
and tensions which it implies. The Sub-Man rejects this ‘passion’ which is his
human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being
which always misses its goal, but [this passive way of life] is the very
existence which he rejects.” There is no escape, there is only denial and a
failure to thrive, and the Sub-Man in his fear and refusal to spend his life on
something worthwhile, spends it nonetheless on his evasions. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. The Serious Man</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Serious Man, like the Sub-Man, takes the external, objective
world more seriously than he does himself. A spontaneous freedom is an unwieldy
and unpredictable thing, and he wants a stable, predictable, unmoving world
which poses no threats to him. “He [tries to keep] himself from existing
because he is not capable of existing without a guarantee...[but] he will
always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden
into a thing is belied by the very movement of life.” He resents being the
subjective viewer, the controller of an objective experience which he still
can’t completely master, and in his denial of his freedom, he attempts to kill
his uniqueness by regarding himself as just another object. He wants to be an
effect, a corollary, a pre-determined and fated thing like all other fated
things. Unlike the Sub-Man, he works hard so that, one fine day, he no longer
needs create or take responsibility for his actions. It is a race to escape
one’s self. He thinks he has established that nothing is responsible for itself
if it is conditioned, so he longs to become a thing among things, which, if he
is not free, really takes off the pressure to perform as if he were free.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For many, the serious mindset is most prominently manifested
in religious notions about being a God-slave so as to escape human
responsibility. Reasoning goes thus: God made human beings, he gave humanity a
chance to be free-but-miserable instead of enslaved-but-happy, humanity
offended God and brought upon itself God’s wrath for acting freely, God offered
forgiveness for humanity’s freedom back, and now humanity must suffer with
their own freedom, or relinquish that freedom and live happily in bondage to
God for all eternity. That, for the serious person, is at least a guarantee of
happiness. So why would someone give up a slave’s happiness for the anguish of
freedom? Beauvoir hit it square when she writes, “After having lived under the
eyes of the gods, having been given the promise of divinity, one does not
readily accept becoming simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt.” Of course
Beauvoir doesn’t believe freedom leads only to misery, but there is no denying
that there is some anguish involved in being your own person. It’s that old
proverb, <i>where no oxen are, the stables
are clean.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. The Nihilist</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The Nihilist is just one step beyond the Serious Man. He
is the Serious Man become conscious and, as the poet Ted Hughes so well put it,
“Unwinding the world like a ball of wool, found the last end tied round his own
finger”, and he laments his ownership. He is the Serious Man disillusioned. He
realizes that he can’t become an object, a history, a determination. He’s not
an episode in someone else’s memoir. He despairs when he realizes he must
always be the self-determining author of his own life. So, he <i>attempts</i> to lose faith in the whole
system. “Conscious of being unable to be anything, man then decides to be
nothing.” Now begins his war against his own projects and the projects of
others. Here Beauvoir really gets the ball rolling down a path towards what she
will later clarify as the category of ‘evil’, citing political tyrants as
examples of peaking Nihilists. This Nihilist is the apex of the types of flight
from life which seek to lose themselves in the objective world and thereby
annihilate their subjectivity. </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
5. The Adventurer</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
After the Nihilist, Beauvoir backs up to start a new
track in the types of flights from freedom. She describes a more moderate
flight from existence in the form of an attempt to become swallowed up in
subjectivity versus losing oneself in the objective world. The Adventurer is
someone who takes life for what it is, in the moment, in her personal moments
more specifically, and makes the most of them as if the moment is all that is. Adventurers
are those who, as Beauvoir stated at the beginning of the book, “enclose
themselves in the pure moment” and “become pure inwardness<i> </i>to escape the sensible world.” If it weren’t for the fact that
they are escaping their intrinsic human need and responsibility to develop more
distant, meaningful goals, then there might be some virtue in their self-affirmation
and sportsmanlike engagement in their projects. But the problem comes in an escapism
which cares nothing for what appears outside of their self and their narrow
range of solipsistic values. Life is a big game—play it while it lasts, aim no
higher, and regret nothing.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“[The Adventurer] seeks a pretext in [things] for a
gratuitous display of activity…Hoping for no justification, he will
nevertheless take delight in living…he likes action for its own sake...[but]
though engaged in his undertaking, he is at the same time detached from the
goal.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The detachment from a further goal leaves him with a
short-range concern for life, which is ultimately delusive because he fails to
acknowledge that his consciousness is dependent on his inter-being/inter-consciousness
with others. This devaluing of life around him makes him immediately a threat,
a <i>potentially</i> dangerous person,
especially if someone gets in the way of his fun. “He carries the seed of [a
tyrant] within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to
support the game of his existence.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beauvoir’s bottom line for her views in general really
surfaces in her discussion about the Adventurer. “No man can save himself
alone…[the Adventurer] will enclose himself in a false independence which will
indeed be servitude.” That is probably the nearest to a pivot for the entire
work, and is probably the thrust of her ethics and extended philosophy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
6. The Passionate</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Passionate person is a more obsessive form of the Adventurer.
He makes a goal out of his goal-lessness and solipcism. He is more conscious
and relentless in his obsession to sacrifice himself to his activities which
are ultimately self-evasive. The Adventurer and the Passionate person both
realize they cannot become an object and know they will never find validation
in becoming a controlled thing, but in rushing madly to sacrifice or spend
their lives to zero, they are attempting to burn out the objective world and
along with it their freedom and separateness in the consuming fire of passion, numbing
busyness, and maniacal risk which leads to finality. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 12.0pt;">
“[For the Passionate person]
nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce
him to modify his choices…The cause of the passionate man’s torment is his
distance from the object; but he must accept it instead of trying to eliminate
it.”</div>
<h1>
Consequences of flight freedom</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The problem with all of these various ways to escape oneself
and one’s responsibility is that they become not only destructive to self, but
destructive to others. In other words, the Sub-man and the Passionate person
both threaten me because they have assigned me a value of being just another
object in their world in which they are not invested. The failure to see others
as critical components of one’s own consciousness leads to a reduction of others’
worth in a subordinate role. This idea of interdependence of the frameworks for
consciousness is what Sartre referred to as “intersubjectivity” in his work, <i>Existentialism Is a Humanism</i>, and it
underpins all of Beauvoir’s philosophy of the human concern for one another. The
existentialists fought hard to make people see that we are all woven into a tapestry
of consciousness which comes into being together and cannot function rightly
without each other. “The freedom of one man almost always concerns that of
other individuals… his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of
others.” In the repeated emphasis of human solidarity one can clearly
understand how French existentialism was birthed in crisis amid the political
and communistic oppression of the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century, not to mention
the Nazi occupation.</div>
<h1>
Ethics of ambiguity</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, now that we know how NOT to act, how DO we act?
Essentially Beauvoir heads towards a “greatest good for the greatest number” form
of rationale, and it stands up pretty well. She offers well thought-out and
cogent responses to humanitarian quandaries like using force against others,
sacrificing a few that more may live, sacrificing many so that one with a more
hopeful future can live, and using means in the light of ends while making sure
that the ends are present in-part with the means.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
However, while it seems that Beauvoir is presenting a
hard-and-fast ethic—being concerned for others—the whole point of human
existence is realizing our fundamental freedom from external influence that
would condition or determine human beings’ actions or choices, and it is this
which introduces ambiguity as the freedom from the restraint of rules,
traditions, dogma or imperatives of any kind. There is no external authority to
be blamed or praised for an individual’s unique and unqualified personal choice,
not even the authority of thinkers like Beauvoir. My choice is my own, and no
one else’s. It is mine alone, and will always be so. Therefore, the other can
only suggest tools that I can use to help me achieve more success with my
actions, and even then, I have to assess those tools and experiment with them
at my own risk. I am liable only for myself to myself. This is why Beauvoir
proposes personally utilized ‘methods’ and not universal absolutes, even when
it comes to things like human oppression and murder. “Ethics does not furnish
recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Probably the most uncomfortable part of existentialism, and
of this work in particular, is the deflating assertion that we must accept
risks in ethics as in the rest of life without having complete information, being
always in a state of partial doubt; and this, says the author, is the most
fundamental trait of human existence. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or
will, always starts up in the darkness…we must [at bottom] maneuver in a state
of doubt… Man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, [and] he must
want beyond what he knows.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For many, this will
not sound consoling, but for those who have already begun to recognize that
this is indeed our situation, it is freeing to be able to admit it, and maybe
to start loving it for what it is. For one like myself who has come to the
realization that they may not have been one hundred percent certain of anything
at any point in their life, it comes as an affirmation to know that all the
good that could ever be achieved can only be achieved, and has only ever been
achieved, by courage and love with all of their concomitant dangers. That feels
pretty good to know.</div>
<h1>
Conclusion</h1>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If ethics are not absolutes but only proposed methods, what
about the people who may not adopt the methods which I believe ultimately
benefit humankind, and instead employ methods which produce only devastation?
This, my dear, is what war is for. “There are cases where a man positively
wants evil, that is, the enslavement of other men, and he must then be fought.”
I assume Beauvoir believes that her method-of-proposing-helpful-methods must be
somewhat effective in producing authentic living and honest thinking which
naturally engender a human concern for one another; but it’s easy to see that
she isn’t opposed to a very physical approach to attitude adjustments when all
else fails. And this would still fit within her philosophy of being concerned
for others, even those fought against, because another’s unwarranted <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>violence against their own self or another person “is an
attempt of the individual against his own freedom”; and so violence against
violence can be justified, and <i>only</i>
justified, if the fight is against a person, <i>for</i> a person, and for others’ ultimate welfare. “The tyranny
practiced against an invalid can be justified only by his getting better.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some may ask, “How dare you? How dare you, Simone de
Beauvoir, though your name is like a honeyed song rolling off the tongue? If
you are so concerned with the Other, what right have you to hurt another human
being?” She would answer (and she did), “… love authorizes severities which are
not granted to indifference.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now THAT’S a woman.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-58323258951692446462014-06-09T10:40:00.000-07:002014-06-09T10:49:22.440-07:00Review Of Ruth Graham's article "Against YA"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcJIagAXSnxlvQLB97k2CFHOtFd25krye3sA0s60uPO9CK2-jG6A8x1aAGEagGzGe3-pRcHj58rg2VLZnxLJqlgN9OSAIgYjrc7tTsnYnrboIiSSDTgpIuBb6JGXje_X1ncPzoT5D1LL0/s1600/Readers-007%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcJIagAXSnxlvQLB97k2CFHOtFd25krye3sA0s60uPO9CK2-jG6A8x1aAGEagGzGe3-pRcHj58rg2VLZnxLJqlgN9OSAIgYjrc7tTsnYnrboIiSSDTgpIuBb6JGXje_X1ncPzoT5D1LL0/s1600/Readers-007%5B1%5D.jpg" height="192" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is my review of <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html" target="_blank">Ruth Graham's article <i>Against YA</i> atSlate.com</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
YA stands for Young Adult fiction. Titles like The Call Of
The Wild, The Hobbit, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Outsiders, Anne Of Green
Gables, Flowers For Algernon, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Harry Potter,
Twilight, The Book Thief, Hunger Games, and Fault In Our Stars could all fall
under this genre (see the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/08/07/157795366/your-favorites-100-best-ever-teen-novels" target="_blank">NPR list</a>), but I think Ruth Graham is specifically
targeting YA in the last couple decades starting approximately with Harry
Potter. So, why is Graham up in arms about YA? Because it’s written for
teenagers, with simplistic plot and character development, rudimentary ethics,
and falsely tidy resolutions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In other words, adults should be wanting more.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“…mature readers…find satisfaction of a more intricate kind
in stories that confound and discomfit, and in reading about people with whom
they can’t empathize at all. A few months ago I read the very literary novel
Submergence, which ends with a death so shattering it’s been rattling around in
my head ever since. But it also offers so much more: Weird facts, astonishing
sentences, deeply unfamiliar (to me) characters, and big ideas about time and
space and science and love."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The qualities of good stories that she mentions are what we
all should want out of a truly challenging and growth-stimulating book, but it
would be hard to regard these traits as exclusive to the books Graham is
specifically advocating for (which are what exactly?) and not present in some
degree of concentration in some YA. And that’s the problem I have with her
article: it’s too categorical and dogmatic.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She does, however, make some great points, like her
eye-rolling take on a feature of Fault In Our Stars:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“This is, after all, a book that features a devastatingly
handsome teen boy who says things like “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in
the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things” to
his girlfriend, whom he then tenderly deflowers on a European vacation he
arranged.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yeah. That’s kind of dumb. It’s not that she’s criticizing
the juvenile nature of juvenile literature, but she’s mostly concerned about
adults who want to continue to mentally and emotionally exist as a child and
not raise the bar on their expectation of the world and their behavior in it.
Besides that, she says it may not be fair to kids to spoil their fun by having
adults over-indulge in their world—which is sort of a neutral, experimental
ground between innocence and responsibility—at the cost of annoyance with, and
loss of confidence in, adults.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world where all the
adults were camped out in mine.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bam. Here’s the crux: adults have a hard time being adults,
just like teenagers have a hard time being teenagers. But what would we as
adults think of teenagers who wanted to keep solely reading Dr. Seuss? Sure,
it’s good that they’re reading, but are they learning? Let’s be honest, we want kids to learn to
read at least some material that helps them come to grips with their changing
situations, and challenges them to think, grow, and become more complex,
capable beings. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia—which is, in essence, an
appreciation of the formative events and warm relationships in a person’s
life—but when it amounts to an obsession with the past, or an obsession with
someone else’s experience and stories, it begins to run the risk of a denial of
one’s own life. Escapism on a small scale can be healthy as it gives us a
chance to dream a new situation and plan our acts accordingly, but a constant
avoidance of present problems becomes a type of brain-candy that makes one feel
that everything is okay when it isn’t, and can be positively harmful.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Graham is probably going to catch some flak for sentences
like, “I’ve…gotten purer plot-based highs recently from books by Charles
Dickens and Edith Wharton…” I know what she’s saying, and I agree, since I love
Charles Dickens, but that might be viewed as a form of escapism and nostalgia
itself, since, much like YA, it deals with some problems specific to its own
age. Graham might opine, “But much of it is still relevant in principle even if
some parts suffer from outdated style, language, and ideas!” True, as does YA
fiction.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, while I agree with much of what Graham writes, I also
believe a certain caution might be in order to not leap to an absolute
condemnation of YA. There’s a lot of good there. And who am I to say that
adults who have not learned to delay instant gratification, or who aren’t as
ideologically oriented as I am, shouldn’t spend more time on teen literature,
even if it seems a backward step for other adults. I would rather a person be
honest and read at the level they are at, albeit, with options and
encouragement (which I think Graham is advocating for) for growth and
advancement when they are ready. Telling adults they’re ready for more, and all
adults actually being ready for more, are two different things. There are a lot
of adults who haven’t really developed intellectually or emotionally beyond the
teen years, so should we really be censuring all adults for reading YA? Or
should we be encouraging adults to continually try challenging material and
helping them learn how to get more out of what they’re reading?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think the latter. And I think, for the most part, that is
what Ruth Graham is interested in, even if it sounds like she slips into a
pontifical, elitist attitude from time to time in her article to create a
scandalous—and therefore sellable--read. I applaud her for recognizing the need
for adults to ‘grow up’, and for sounding the call to a greater thought life. I
especially love her more positive approach to provoking adults:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“There’s a special reward in that feeling of stretching
yourself beyond the YA mark, akin to the excitement of graduating out of the
kiddie pool and the rest of the padded trappings of childhood: It’s the thrill
of growing up…But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Shailene Woodley, the
22-year-old star of this weekend’s big YA-based film. “Last year, when I made
Fault, I could still empathize with adolescence,” she told New York magazine
this week, explaining why she is finished making teenage movies. “But I’m not a
young adult anymore—I’m a woman.””<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ruth Graham is concerned about people not challenging
themselves to grow, and, frankly, I am too; but for those who are reading
challenging material—material appropriate to their personal stage of growth and
supportive in their personal progress—then there is no need to only read one
genre or one age level. I’d say read it all and enjoy it all, from Green Eggs
And Ham to Hamlet. Imagine a world where adults no longer appreciated The
Giving Tree because it was for kids! We don’t want to slip into a denial of
those foundational principles on which we build our complex ideologies—that’s
nonsense. As long as you’re challenging yourself, reading for fun is healthy
and beneficial.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p> </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
My conclusion? The title of Graham’s article, Against YA, is,
much like some Young Adult fiction, a bit over-the-top, like I’m sure she meant
it to be.<span style="background: white; color: #281b21; font-family: "sl-ApresRegular","serif"; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-3595848647351354272014-06-04T14:00:00.001-07:002014-06-04T20:33:59.212-07:00Review of The Miraculous Journey Of Edward Tulane<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/9e/1e/91/9e1e911797749b32bfe9ff8ced842b50.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/9e/1e/91/9e1e911797749b32bfe9ff8ced842b50.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">This is a story for brats. I mean that in the best way. It’s
a story about a child’s doll learning about love…the hard way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Near the beginning of the story, Grandma Pellegrina tells
one of the most fabulous “you’ll-poke-your-eye-out” sort of cautionary tales
that I’ve ever heard. I committed it to memory for all the little brats,
besides my own, I’ll meet with in my lifetime. Here it is in brief:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">There once was a princess. She was selfish and didn’t love
anyone besides herself. A prince visited and gave her a ring to show his
affection for her. But in a petulant fit she swallowed the ring and ran away
into the forest. She grew hungry and came upon a small hut. She didn’t know it
was a witches hut. The princess knocked, and the witch told her to go away. The
princess persisted, and the witch turned her into a wild boar. The princess ran
away, was caught by the royal hunters, and brought into the royal kitchen. The
royal chef butchered the boar, and served it up, but not before she found a
ring in the stomach. She put it on her finger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The end.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The point? Any story without love has a bad ending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I’m keeping that one in my back pocket. Now, granted, this
could be construed as a story about a princess who was pressured into marrying
someone she didn’t love and was establishing her independence and sense of
self-worth by running away. But the grandma telling the story said that she
didn’t love anyone, and so I assume that she was intended to be understood as
cold-hearted and not merely taking a stand for women’s suffrage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, the story of Edward Tulane growing to love and
desire companionship is intended as the antithesis to the stupid princess
story, and I think it does a fine job of it. I read it to my 7 year old
daughter, and we had a lot of fun with it. Lots of moral lessons. And it didn’t
hold back either, as it dealt with issues like poverty, death, old age, abuse,
addiction, and bullying. Good talking points. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Edward’s ‘journeys’—he never actually moves or talks, only
thinks, because he is a doll after all—takes him all over, from the top of a
scarecrow’s perch, to the bottom of the ocean. I loved his constant yearning to
see the stars, as if the stars were what reminded him that he is always home,
and always a part of something beautiful and enduring, even when he feels
buried in a garbage landfill…which he was. By separating Edward from all his
comforts, and later by removing him in tremendously heartbreaking ways from
those he actually grew to love, the author helped the reader begin to grasp the
transitory nature of life and relationship. The message, glaring and potent,
was that you can’t hold on to people forever, though you need to as long as you
can; and you have to begin to trust in yourself and life/God/nature that you
will find love again. In other words, the author’s message seemed to be that
true love is not in the ‘something’ that is loved, but is in the very act of
loving, and this is found in the heart of a lover, no matter who is around, and
no matter the circumstance. More than affection for one person, love was
broadened into love for people you haven’t met yet, love for the changing
scenery of our experiences, love for the beauty that always surfaces from the
ugliness. True love that anchors a soul is love for life in its entirety with
all its chances for joy, beauty, and relationships. I would also add that this
includes a love for one’s own self, often last to be loved, but which holds the
key for loving all things outside of self.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, obviously, my daughter may not have gotten all of that
out of the book, at least not consciously anyway; but she did learn that if
she’s a brat she might spend a night in a landfill. Wait. No. She learned that
without love, the story of life does not end well; but WITH love, life, with
all of its adventures, is a beautiful story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Next up, Pinocchio—a story about a blockhead who gets his
feet burned off after he kicks his dad in the nose. And stuff like that.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-6201584908063350332014-06-04T10:39:00.000-07:002014-06-04T14:27:46.457-07:00Review of Robinson Jeffers' poetry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://sites.oxy.edu/special-collections/jeffers/WestonScaled300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://sites.oxy.edu/special-collections/jeffers/WestonScaled300.jpg" height="320" width="224" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Robinson Jeffers thinks of life like a kid who can’t play
basketball, and now wants to ban the sport. He’s a man constantly dreaming of
death, but in a twist of irony, he didn’t kill himself or completely stop
eating. I guess death isn’t so fun when you can’t dream about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jeffers’ Freudian “Death Drive” must have been in overdrive.
Even Schopenhauer would have talked Jeffers back from the ledge. Jeffers poetry
suffers from a breathtakingly mellifluous denial of the human situation. While
Jeffers does not recognize any moral depravity in animal or vegetable, and
sometimes even excusing all humans from immorality—not ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but
beings who “mean well”—he is quick to want to sweep all being and matter to the
big trash bin of oblivion. He has apparently had enough, and he’s decided the
rest of us has had enough too. I think it’s a good thing the ‘fire project’
button for the universe wasn’t within arms-reach of him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Though he was reportedly interested in Nietzsche’s writings,
the mood of his poems are a far cry from the life-affirming, life-surpassing
things that Nietzsche’s works were. Nietzsche himself would probably have
considered Jeffers a downer…which Nietzsche most definitely was NOT. Nietzsche
condemned whiny, world-weary souls (religious or otherwise) who looked too far
backwards or forwards, and begged for the punishment of life to be over. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one
leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any
longer: that created all God’s and backworlds” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Nietzsche had no time for people who just wanted quiet lives
and quiet deaths, and he didn’t believe the point of existence was to avoid
struggle; rather, he conceived of life as a realm where joy can be so rich and
profound that it “thirsts for woe.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“O man! Take heed!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">What saith deep midnight's voice indeed?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I slept my sleep—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">From deepest dream I've woke and plead:—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The world is deep,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And deeper than the day could read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Deep is its woe—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Joy—deeper still than grief can be:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Woe saith: Hence! Go!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But joys all want eternity—<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Want deep profound eternity!" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Even in the tradition of the 20th century existentialists, a
nihilist like Jeffers—for that’s what he appears to be—would fall into the
category of a denial of freedom and a flight from self and existence. It’s
basically self-rejection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“All in a simple innocence I strove<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">To give myself away to any power…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I failed, I could not give away my soul.” (The Truce And The
Peace)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">He’s what Simone de Beauvoir, the French activist and
philosopher, would have described as a “sub-man” who has an increasingly
destructive bent against one’s own existence that stems from the deep anguish
brought on by the responsibility to live and create new values. Not sure if he
would agree, but he also didn’t have to READ HIS OWN BOOKS LIKE I DO! Okay….I
just totally sub-manned it. Sorry. Ahem. I’m back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Let’s face it, Jeffers wanted to die. He had clearly
euphemized death into some kind of euphoric peace, which I don’t understand
since peace is a state of mind and being, and not a state of mindlessness and
beinglessness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“[Death] said, Come home, here is an end, a goal<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Victory you know requires<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Force to sustain victory, the burden is never lightened, but
final defeat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Buys peace. (Woodrow Wilson)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, peace in the womb and peace in the grave is what you
always wanted? Making sure I understand here: it’s what you always wanted as
long as you were able to want, which you are only capable of in this life, so
you’re basically using your life to bitch about life? So, just die then! What’s
with all the poetry? Why write about hating to be alive to write? Unless...life
really is worth it in some way, and whining just helps people blow off steam. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I’m a big believer with the other existentialist thinkers that
nothingness proceeds (comes after!) being and “plays on the surface of being.”
Even the very idea of ‘nothing’ is only a maneuver of consciousness to separate
out oneself from matter and think of self as ‘not that’. In the words of Jean
Paul Sartre, “Human reality secretes a nothingness which isolates itself…and
this is called freedom.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Imagine, if you will, the process of a consciousness. A
person is born, and their consciousness, or self, begins to distinguish itself
from its environment. Then it begins to account for ‘space between’ as a metric
for that distinction. For some people, this consciousness, this subjectivity,
that is now independent of the objective world may begin to feel so alone and
isolated that it wishes everything back ‘into the box’. It begins to wish even
for an identity that is the empty space itself between, before, and after self
and world, and neither subject or object! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were
prologue and epilogue merely<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is
called life? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I fancy that silence is the thing, this noise a found word
for it.” (The Treasure)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">However, HOWEVER, besides sounding like complete
nonsense—which, I admit, the best of any of our ideas sound like sometimes—it
is an expression of pain and loneliness; and I suppose that THAT always is
valid, no matter how it is expressed. It’s sad that some people feel that way
so much of the time, but pity from others, or worse—self-pity—will only make
things worse. Get out of there Jeffers! She’s gonna blow!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">But one thing gives me hope: Jeffers didn’t commit suicide.
He kept writing and speaking and living. He must have liked life more than he
admitted. Maybe his words were, as author Paul Tillich liked to put it, “a courageous
expression of decay” which tacitly affirmed self even while seeming to disavow
his life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, maybe I’ve been a little hard on him. Maybe I heard too
much about him protesting the U.S.’s involvement in WWII. Maybe, just maybe, he
still loved life, even if he allegedly loved death a little bit more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“And I and my people, we are willing to love the four-score
years <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is
for harbor.” (Night)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And, to be honest, there were some pretty awesomely awesome
lines in his collected poetry that left me stunned with their beauty. Even some
of the lines which I hated for the philosophy, I loved for the gorgeous way
they were expressed, and the way I was challenged to look outside my normal
perspective and feel with others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">And, if I’m being honest and not just biting his head off
for fun—which I do to the delight of some of my more blood-thirsty readers—even
some of his odes-to-death were beautiful in that they helped me not fear death
so much. I happen to think that a limited will-to-death may be an authentic
coping mechanism of over-exposure and reinterpretation of the thing we fear
most—death—and may even be healthy to a certain extent. As another example of
what I liked, I lift up the poem “Mediation On Saviors” in which he is critical
of what people look for in their heroes, “This people has not outgrown
blood-sacrifice, one must writhe on the high cross to catch at their memories.”
Good stuff there, no doubt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">All said, I do think Jeffers fell face forward into his
morning bowl of death-soup and drowned his will to live, but he left a few
helpful things behind. And for that, I’m thankful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Best poems:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Truce And The Peace<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Shine Perishing Republic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Treasure<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Woodrow Wilson<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Old Man’s Dream After He Died</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6833310018240849851.post-24399137911278838802014-05-28T14:28:00.000-07:002014-05-28T14:28:54.403-07:00Review of The Dog Stars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Peter Heller is a great writer, plain and simple.
Storyteller and poet, he really digs in to the emotional landscape of his
characters. He knows what motivates them, and helps the reader to experience
them from the inside. Almost to an overwhelming degree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">For those who don’t know Peter Heller, he writes very
stream-of-consciousness, which quickly spirals into stream-of-dialogue,
stream-of-grammar, and
stream-of-whatever-the-Heller-feels-like-writing-at-the-time. His style does
take some getting used to, but over all I like it. Those who have achieved
mastery of the English language, and truly understand it, have a right and a
duty to smash it too pulp and build something new from the ruin. Language is
always being reinvented unconsciously, so why shouldn’t the masters reinvent it
consciously? This is what poetic license has always represented in my
mind—playing with language—and I love when prose is proven a malleable thing,
like any other human creation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are obvious comparisons being made between this book
and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and I have to admit that I was wondering if
reading this would feel redundant, but there were enough differences to make me
happy I read it. The primary difference, other than a more dynamic flexibility
in literary style and emotional exuberance, is the way the world looks through
Hig’s eyes. He’s much more optimistic, he still struggles morally (McCarthy’s
character’s—the father’s—orientation to the world is pretty-much mineralized
into deeply-set convictions and instinctual reflexes by environmental
hopelessness), he is looking for new love, he still has conversations with
himself (the internal dialogue of McCarthy’s man is minimal and all but
smothered by anguish), and he is still able to connect with nature (though, to
be fair, the nuclear holocaust of McCarthy’s world—versus the flu epidemic and
global warming of Heller’s planet—leaves a lot less flowers to stop and smell). </span><span style="font-size: large;">This doesn’t mean that I liked Heller’s character better,
but I was happy for a change from McCarthy’s protagonist’s motives which
stemmed mostly from animalistic survival and procreative instinct which
included his son’s welfare. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">HOWEVER, while I like most of what I read from
Heller, I was absolutely turned off by Heller’s sex scenes. I’ll admit that I
generally don’t relish hearing other people—especially guys—talk about their
latest sexual capers, but Heller’s description of Hig’s sexual encounters and
his poetic descriptions of hard-ons, oral sex, and orgasms seemed to be an
interesting—not really—infusion of erotic romance and voluptuous aesthetics
into an otherwise rugged, elementally tempering narrative. Not to say that
there shouldn’t have been a development or flowering of the finer
sensibilities—intellectual, emotional, and sexual—because I do believe that was
part of the redeeming value of Heller’s more aesthetic and emotive style, but
the writer’s insistence on fully exposing the more euphoric organ-play of two
of his characters seemed a bit too tender and over-exposed. I’m sure we all have
our spectrum of how much we want to hear about each other’s most intimate
moments, but I’m of the opinion that, in this case, the more graphic opening of
the carnal delicacies, in a setting as vicious, hostile, and unforgiving as this story, feels uncalculated and gratuitous. Or maybe it felt mostly like
poor timing. (This coming from a guy –me—who has read 50 Shades and recognizes
that erotica has a place in all world literature, even in the Bible). I
wouldn’t have minded an outline or an allusion to the encounters, but full-on
play-by-plays of giggling, licking, fingering, ejaculating…. c’mon! It’s like
someone recounting their night of crazy sex in sensuous detail over donuts and
coffee. We get it, you’re a horn-dog! Is it too much to ask NOT to have vicarious
story-sex right now?!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Moving on. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Hig’s inner conflict is between surviving, and loving. His
dubious friend, Bangley, represents an iron-clad fortress into which no one
walks without being first invited. He shoots first then asks questions. Hig
wonders about the consequences of this kind of life. “”Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating
your own death…[but] Follow Bangley’s belief to its end, and you get a ringing
solitude…the cold stars.” He waffles between the extremes of defense and vulnerability,
and this really makes the story because it forces readers to look inside
themselves at a similar struggle between love and vulnerability. The real
complication comes when Hig still has to live and make decisions, regardless of
whether or not he has come to a firm decision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Well, anyway Hig, whether you are a good man or a bad man,
or just a pretty good man in a fucked up world, you are going to have to land
the Beast first. Put her down in a rolling rocky county with one road that is
no longer a road.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Don’t we all, Hig, don’t we all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Best line from the book: “We should have all paid more
attention to the Left Side [of the Bible] I am thinking now. The Wrong Side,
the Side Where Shit Goes Really, Really Wrong.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15168606756561269949noreply@blogger.com0