Review of Chief Modern Poets Of Britain And America

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.

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).

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.

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.

Pardon him,

…for it is he  

Devours death, mocks mutability,

Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.

Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget  

How for so many bedlam hours his saw  

Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,  

And the slam of his hammer all the day beset

The people’s ears…

Forgive the hero, you who would have died  

Gladly with all you knew…

(From Still, Citizen Sparrow by Richard Wilbur)

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 Stevens).

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.

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.

No old word was ever spoken.

Every word is newly minted from the mouth.

Reshaped,

Reworked,

Rethought,

Refought.

No old word was ever spoken.

New spite for old stings.

Spit to polish tradition’s rings.

Sounded-Soul’s returning pings.

New-knit versions of people and things.

No old word was ever spoken.

Don’t believe the lie

That a dead dictionary is a clue to you.

No lexicon has the slightest idea what the hell you mean.

The British Library,

Library of Congress,

Russian State Library,

National Diet Library,

Toronto Public Library,

National Library of China,

Bibliotheca Alexandrina,

And the Harvard University Library

All wait breathlessly for your most casual, verbal slip

To add to their paper tombs.

iPads and Google central would short circuit, would blow their brains

On trying to compute the long eternity of work

That went into coming up with your premier use of

‘The’ and ‘and’.

No old word was ever spoken.

You, sir, madam, are not a redundancy.

You are not a hiccup.

You are not a glitch.

You are not something to be looked up in Wikipedia.

One should blush with abject shame for ever accepting

That you are just another thing that happened,

That your words are best understood in light of anything but your own prototypal self,

That your birth is just another smudge on a certificate,

Chicken-scratch in histories and family trees,

A date, or time, or place.

No old word was ever spoken.

I caught myself writing this with a sneer on my face,

An apology and confession for ever having allowed

The thought to enter my skull

That any word has been heard before.

When I think I hear an old word,

I suppose I’m just tired,

And want to be through with it all;

Through with new words

And the daily recrudescence of life and movement and sound;

Through with stimulations and meanings that complicate my own desire

To be through with it all,

And just hear, for once,

An old, dead word.

If you think you hear an old word,

Listen for your prayer that is catching, sifting,

And translating all the new words into a simple plea of

“Dear God, make it stop.”

Still, even after you’re dead and deaf like you wanted,

No old word will ever be spoken.

Review of L. Ron. Hubbard's Dianetics: The Original Thesis

I read this book in conjunction with interviews I am conducting for Awakenings: Felt Benefit In Personal Values (www.awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings). In addition to reading Original Thesis, 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.

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 scientific—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.

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 wants, 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.

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 Dianetics seems to have done a lot of good for many, and has been reported to have transformed individuals and communities for the better (http://www.scientology.org/how-we-help/volunteer-ministers.html). 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.

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 long way 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.

Dianetics [Dia—“through”, nous—“soul”]: The Original Thesis 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.

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) to remember trauma in the womb 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.

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 homo sapiens) who were intellectually impaired and lost in the non-Hubbardian darkness.

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]”).

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.

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, The Way To Happiness 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.

I realize I am attempting to sum up a religion, and it must be remembered that I only read Dianetics: The Original Thesis containing Hubbard’s tiny germ of original thought which I understand was greatly revised, expanded, complicated, tangled, transmogrified, and ruptured into Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health. 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.

And also (this is probably as good a time as any to say this) the film The Master, which intentionally parallels the life of L. Ron Hubbard, is brilliant. R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh, and Hubbard too.

Review of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

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.

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^th century. Great for her and for all women. Seriously.

She is brilliant. She’s a clever writer. She’s courageous. And that’s probably what fools people.

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 from, but in spite of?

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 Objectivism, 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.  

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!

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 The Fountainhead, “Roark is a noble soul par excellence. The man as man should be…and who triumphs completely.”

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?”

Of course, this somehow snowballs into a reckless selfishness and unwillingness to seek win-win situations in any form. He wants things his way, 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.

Rand would later write about Roark, “The story [The Fountainhead] 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.

The reason I want to establish this is because (Attention: Spoiler Alert Straight Ahead!) 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!

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.” 50 Shades anyone? The next day doesn’t find Roark remorseful. At all.

“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.”

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.

 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.

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 necessarily 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.

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 part 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.

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 being yourself means. It doesn’t have to mean being by yourself. 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.

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 any kind, at any time, is a betrayal of self, and that is when Roark-the-whiner 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.

Rand attempts to romanticize selfishness, but she ends up caricaturing it. There’s a healthy kind of self-confidence, and this includes self-love 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 only 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.

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.

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. 

I could only stomach a little over 200 pages of The Fountainhead. Perhaps I’ll try again later with Anthem or We the Living. As for her philosophy of Objectivism, I have zero interest in a system which assumes it can uproot knowledge from human desire and an existential outlook.

Review of All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

“…he knew that the life there was unimaginable to him.” 

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. 

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. 

“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.”

 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. 

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.

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.

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.

Review of The Ethics Of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialism was, for a sweet minute, the new way to think about self and the world in the 20^th 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:

1.       An affirmation and value of one’s own self as the center of the universe

2.       Confidence in one’s own powers to shape the world

3.       A confidence in the importance and necessity of others and their happiness

4.       A call to action and responsibility within the context of a limited understanding

5.       A framework to understand the world in a more practical way which exposes and utilizes the subject-object tension consistently evident in our experience.

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.

Beauvoir and Sartre

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 Being And Nothingness Sartre laid out that humanity is a lack in that every existing person has a consciousness which has, in effect, stepped away from the world of things (thus a lack) 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 more without becoming all, 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.

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.

Ambiguity and an open future

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.”

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.

Flights from freedom

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.

1. The Child

Literal and figurative children simply wish to remain in a stage of innocence and insignificance.

“[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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

2. The Sub-Man

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.

3. The Serious Man

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.

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, where no oxen are, the stables are clean.

4. The Nihilist

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 attempts 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.

5. The Adventurer

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 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.

“[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.”

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 potentially 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.”

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.

6. The Passionate

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.

“[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.”

Consequences of flight freedom

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, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 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^th century, not to mention the Nazi occupation.

Ethics of ambiguity

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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

 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.

Conclusion

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 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 only justified, if the fight is against a person, for a person, and for others’ ultimate welfare. “The tyranny practiced against an invalid can be justified only by his getting better.”

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.”

Now THAT’S a woman.

Review Of Ruth Graham's article "Against YA"

This is my review of Ruth Graham's article Against YA atSlate.com.

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 NPR list), 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.

In other words, adults should be wanting more.

“…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."

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.

She does, however, make some great points, like her eye-rolling take on a feature of Fault In Our Stars:

“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.”

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.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world where all the adults were camped out in mine.”

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.

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.

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?

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:

“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.””

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.

  

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.

Review of The Miraculous Journey Of Edward Tulane

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.

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:

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.

The end.

The point? Any story without love has a bad ending.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.