353. Paris Review, Readers' Digest, God.

After struggling to find a less brutal characterization I have to say that the Paris Review has just published a Readers' Digest article.  The distilled Readers' Digest article.  "I [Did a Far-Out Thing] and Found God."  That is what the intelligentsia made fun of in the fifties and that is what "Letter from Williamsburg" (Summer Issue, 2016) amounts to.

Kristin Dombek and her boyfriend find a woman willing to go to their apartment and have three-way sex with them.  After the first of these experiences Kristin finds "a peace immanent and tangible as a body, some kind of giant embrace in the air, and it was most definitely not coming from my mind."  

After the third encounter she sees the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, "The one who watched, the one who did, the one who felt.  The one with power, the one who suffered, the bliss." 

 In the end she presents herself in what looks to me like a state of  bliss.  "There was a world outside the world I’d known.  I have never been so relieved in all my life.  And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray."

In the Readers' Digest piece you got both the thrill, often transgressive, of the thrust into the exotic, and the comfort, at the end, of your provincial (US: Mid-American) minister: God is everywhere and will reveal himself where you least expect him.  When you got on to more sophisticated periodicals you realized how facile this was, how shaped by editors for an unsophisticated audience.  When you got to great religious literature— Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Donne, Herbert — you learned how hard-earned such visions were.

You, reader of this blog, knowing that the author started as an unsophisticated member of a Mid-American church and became, by trade, a sophisticated reader of cosmopolitan articles, might predict his pulse as he reads Dombek's piece.  Sure enough, excitement at the thrust into the exotic.  He's a patsy, as of old, for the Readers' Digest editors. 

If you think that's not predictable you need to know that he's the kind of Mid-American who, when he first encountered toplessness in the Bois de Bologne, couldn't keep his eyes on the path.  No surprise now that he can't keep them on the page.

But exotic transgressions draw him back as they always do, and as cynical editors know they will do.  He feels the old thrill.  But then, "Wait a minute.  This is the Paris Review!"  I need an explanation.  Is there a higher Review?

I can't see behind the curtain of my age, and my age's age.  I can't see what the Paris Review editors see.  I see only what's in front of the curtain, and that looks like Readers' Digest superficiality. 

In the shadows, yes, I see something I might understand — instability so great it hallucinates stability (God) anyplace, a need for goodness so strong it steals words for their established goodness (as, "love" for a moment's physical warmth), a quest in which the mundane is never worth a look.  Or, less sympathetically, I see self-indulgence pushing for some justificatory vision at the end of an indulgence.

And I feel pity because the writer has so far to go.  Romantics generally have a long way to go but this one....I can't measure it.  I get an idea, though, when I picture the man in Frances Cornford's poem, bent over his love's "slight essential words" with "attentive courtesy" before they, like a man with his prized guitar, "begin to play."  Or Lear picturing daily prison life with Cordelia, the two of them chattering about "who's in and who's out" at court (see Post 349).  Will this  couple's threesomes ever arrive at chatter, vital chatter?  The first of their partners has two sentences, the second four.

Chatter apparently is limited to "those capable of monogamy."  (Oh, a glimpse, a pang.  Words to go back to, smart analyst.)  Is she the unfortunate outsider looking in?  Or has she simply not tested her capability, not pushed it past the laundry-stacking boredom?  She seems to know from the start that God will never appear to the housewife loading the dishwasher.  Nor to anybody in her church.

But back to that look over at monogamy, which I took to be a longing look.  That's not Readers' Digest.  Is this what the editors saw?  A feel for pain in the odd, an honest report from the cultural frontier — detailed, well-written, necessarily intimate but rare and courageous?

Taking it that way has many attractions.  It allows me to feel less a brute, and more welcome behind the curtain.  I'm the open-minded, adult academic whose oath of objectivity keeps him calm (what he hopes will be called cool) and his eyes on the page and the path.  Ah yes, threesomes.  It's an acquired insouciance, but it admits you to the company.

With it, though, comes the academic's alertness to superficiality.  And reluctance to say, "I know," until he knows.  There's so much here I don't know.  You're young, says Dombek of herself, and you're trying to be good, and you're wrestling with God (who tells you what good is), and you get tired.  "So you give up."  So.  Therefore.  Everybody behind the curtain understands that.  Every reader of the Paris Review apparently understands it, the inevitability, the helplessness, without editorial intervention or gate-keeping,

But I can't say I understand it.  The problem is compulsion.  When is it resistible and when not?  When are you obliged to resist it whatever your knowledge of its resistibility?

There is no doubt about what you do in two of the great books in my Great Books Course, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.  In them the formula ("algorithm" now), which happened to be the formula of my and most other Mid-American ministers, was "reason over the passions."  Compulsion to a passion was never irresistible.  In both Paradise and Ohio your reason, feeling a passion, was supposed to suck it up and assert control.  That's what Adam was supposed to do and that's what I was supposed to do.

Dombek glances at Adam when she finds "a new kind of knowledge" in "just watching."

We [she and her live-in] had come to think that this might be some part of why God forbade eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: eat it and you can no longer believe that your happiness comes from him or me, God or me, him this or her that, or me this or me that.

Dombek tries, but I really need assistance here.  The couple had "come to think."  How?  I'm lost.  Thinking happens.  What a contrast with Milton, who (through the angel Raphael) patiently explains how happiness comes to a fallen creature: little by little, day by day, using his reason not just to suppress the passions but to get the most out of them.  The one hope of regaining the jouissance that came so easily before the Fall.  Raphael sees it as "light after light well used," the light of sensible daily care, familiar care, not the light of mystical vision.

If that's not understandable I can go back and note that what Adam (in Milton's eyes) lost most damagingly was his ability to respond.  That's a loss of Paradise whatever the external decline.  Getting it back takes work.  In a relationship it means listening to your opposite "with attentive courtesy," working your way back to the essential chatter — in which lies your, nay man's, nobility. 

That's clear.  To oppose it I need a comparable clarity.  Because I don't get it from Dombek I need help.  From somebody on the inside.  Until I get it all I'll see is what's in front of the curtain, the Readers' Digest.

349. Chatter, Vital Chatter

Rebecca Mead, of the New Yorker, right about so many things, is wrong about the importance of chatter in a relationship.  She thinks it's fluff, weightless.  Talk about "school districts or visits to the in-laws or the follies of the Bush Administration" (8-11-03) couldn't possibly be what Milton was referring to when he made "a meet and happy conversation" the "chiefest and noblest end of marriage."

I didn't realize just how wrong she was until the other day I ran into this poem, "The Guitarist Tunes Up," by Frances Cornford.

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

Not as a lordly conqueror who could

Command both wire and wood,

But as a man with a loved woman might

Inquiring with delight

What slight essential things she had to say

Before they started, he and she, to play.

That one word "essential," after "slight."  Essential to their love, to the ecstasy they will play their way into, essential to their relationship.  There it is, the whole refutation of Mead, a refuting the way poets refute, a brain-shaking combination, with a power no academic's argument, whatever it's length, will ever reach. 

I would have heard "talk about the follies of the Bush administration" as fluff when I was a high-theorizing graduate student.  That was before I really listened to King Lear.   Stripped of the big kingship things, standing with Cordelia as she asks to confront the sisters who will imprison them, he stops her:

No, no, no, no!  Come let's away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage....

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too —

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out —

And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies, and we'll wear out,

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

There's day-to-day life together!  The essential in the slight.  In this passage what invitations there are to superimpose the other — Lear bending over Cordelia with "attentive courtesy," his pleasure in their kind of play, their "singing i' th' cage" coming through as well-tuned guitar music.   In Cornford what invitations to expansion.  See, as Mead does, the connection with Milton, and realize that marital back-and-forth is exactly what Milton was talking about, and you can see the lovers' play going on, with children, into larger play, with more variations, more personalities, more to play with.  A well-tuned family.

One can understand why 95% of our literature, and maybe 99% of our movies, appeal to our interest in the exotic ­— what's outside our daily experience.  Getting excited  about what's inside, the introtic, say, is so difficult.  You really have to crank up your imagination.  All while resisting the exotic's force of attraction.

Are you in doubt about that force?  Look at what Roget gives as synonyms for "exotic": alluring, colorful, fascinating, enticing, unfamiliar, romantic, glamorous.  Even better look at the antonyms:  boring, uninteresting, standard, usual, dull, common, familiar, normal, regular, ordinary.  Think what it must take to overcome that!

Exotic things are essential to those whose imaginations are not yet strong enough to penetrate the fluff, to get to what's in play, the love, and yes the conflict, the competition.  Managed and played with.  The love.

The disproportionate lure of the outside to youth is understandable.  There, and possibly really there, is the New York stage, or an ambassadorship, or a Nobel prize, or the Great American Novel.  You have to live a while, and not get a Nobel, to know what Lear is talking about.  Also now there are new chemicals for our sensors, new kinks in the sex chain, all there for the exciting exploration our affluence allows, all alluring, fascinating, unfamiliar, and enticing, none standard, normal, regular, ordinary, or dull.

It's not a competition, though, where we can go all-out either way.  I favor the inside game but I have to back the youth who might, just might, playing outside, write the Great American Novel.  On the other hand there's what Lear opens up for us: the chance to become God's spies into the mystery of things.  That can't be boring, uninteresting, standard, or dull.  Not if you're spying on human beings. 

There's a problem with our word "exploration."  It nearly always means to us "movement into the outside, the unfamiliar."  It seldom means "digging deeper into the inside, the familiar."  What the lover is doing when he inquires into the slight essential things the loved woman has to say.  What parents in the well-tuned family do, and the children learn to do.  Attending to the slight things that reveal a spouse's character, or a child's capacities.  There's no other word for that than "exploration," and no other suggestion it can make than "exciting."  Any dullness has to be in the observer.

Is that the inside game's highest promise, the nobility, a chance to see into the mystery of things?  A blaze of light, Truth on a mountaintop?  I don't want to deny any possibility that might give the inside game an advantage over the outside game, but I can't claim it. 

I can, though, give advice on a bet.  If the winner is going to be the one on top at the end put your money on the inside players.  Shakespeare has given me a vision.  I see Lear and Cordelia, inside those prison walls, gabbing away, wearing out "packs and sects of great ones." I see our two, Cornford's two, bouncing their ball back and forth, wearing out packs and sects of romantic questers.  On and on.  When those on the outside are worn out those imaginative ones on the inside will still be fresh.

226. When Error Philosophers Become Kings

 

Call somebody a philosopher and sure enough you'll get the question, "But how will he do as a ruler?"  Too many minds have been seeded by Plato's pronouncement: "There will be no end to the troubles of the state or indeed of humanity until philosophers become kings or until those we now call kings really and truly become philosophers."  So how do I think my error philosopher (pictured in Post 224) will behave as a king, or ruler?

The error philosopher's first concern, remember, was to avoid gross mistakes, rather than attain fine truths.  And that concern, to avoid rather than attain, would no doubt be carried into government.  In the financial crisis of 2008, for example, he would ask, not "What can we do to rise shining out of this recession?" but "What can we do to avoid falling into a Great Depression?"  Both George Bush and Barack Obama could, I think, be called Avoidance Rulers in that year, and I think most of us now approve — as we disapprove of Herbert Hoover for the mistake that in 1931 tipped recession into World Depression: raising tariffs.

In foreign policy the Cold War gave us perhaps our clearest distinction, since the grossest mistake was so terrible: falling into a nuclear war.  There was no goal so fine that it would be worth suffering that, though there was a goal that came close: containing communism.  So close.  For some it was almost a tie.  What a problem! And there it stood for forty years: to patrol the line against communism without blundering over it into world destruction.

There we have no trouble identifying our Avoidance Statesman: he's the one being so careful to step on the safe side.  The Attainment Statesman will be careful too but he'll have a harder time keeping his balance.  He's got too many forces impelling him ("Drive on, American, drive on!  Fulfill your high destiny!") and too many people pushing on him ("What are you going to be, soft?  A wuss?").  Feel sorry for the poor Avoidance Statesman.  He's got all that testosterone against him, with all that idealism it can dress itself in.

Another word for idealism here is romanticism, typified in Robert Browning's famous lines "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what's a heaven for?"  The Avoidance Ruler and his Statesman are anti-romantics.  Anti-romantics (sometimes called classicists), if they were to write a counter-poem, would write, "A man's reach should coincide with his grasp, and that's how you mount to heaven."  A few years ago they'd have put their view, or found it, in Greek, to show how deeply rooted it was in ancient wisdom, the old warnings about over-reaching.  Hubris, you know.  But no Greek at election time.  You look a little wussy.

In politics and foreign affairs a close-observing classicist (the most common kind) would see that the romantic idealist's banner-word, "freedom," now means (or has been revealed by our experience in the Middle East to include) "freedom of warlords to go at each other."  So: "Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship for that?  Extremism in defense of that is no vice?  moderation no virtue?" Oh that young idealist, John F. Kennedy.  Ah that old romantic, Barry Goldwater.  John McCain, would you step forward?

You can feel sorry for the Attainment Statesman too, though.  He's got all those people trying to put more hair on his chest.  Look at him at election time, a manly enough fellow already, being badgered to open his shirt.  Even so, as we observed, he's got to be careful too, and think, and choose the least dangerous steps, and risk looking like a wuss, even on the way to the greatest attainment.

Nuance, that's what's needed in arguments for war or peace, especially now, when cases are so complicated and words jump around so.  Hawks are as capable of it as doves, as we know when think tanks flow out against each other.  But there's this about hawks: when they're in danger of losing an election they know they can tap another tank, the no-think tank, with a spigot doves can barely reach.   Need backing for Marines into Da Nang? bombs on Haiphong?  Out it comes, onto bumper stickers: "Victory over Communism, not Coexistence."  Think of all the work doves would have to do, all the explaining, before they could get that kind of sock into a sticker.

Sure, doves have their spigots.  There is such a thing as liberal reflex, and it's widely exploitable.  But the doves' spigots are nothing like this one.  This one opens directly, with nearly frictionless ease, into the pool of under-educated voters, the great pool that collects under every democracy.  Though a constant in the minds of political scientists, its occupants are known by different names at different times.  What I call the "under-educated" was once, in America, the "Know-Nothing" and is now, more commonly, the "low-information" voter.  Not too long ago he could be called the "dumbhead" voter.  In any case, he's in a pool most easily tapped by hawks.

"Fine.  Your Avoidance Ruler will be above that.  He'll be above — meaning indifferent to — a lot of things that could lead his country into trouble.  But he'll also be indifferent to a lot of things that could lead the world, including his country, into disaster.  Hitler militarizes the Rhineland.  What will he be doing?  Passively waiting for the Great Mistake.  What will he be saying?  'Calm down, you (dumb?) hotheads, calm down.'"

You're missing something.  The Avoidance Ruler is a philosopher, remember.  Thinks.  Sorts out and traces cause and effect.  Visualizes consequence-chains.  Does a cost-benefit.  And what he can't do he has a staff of experts do.  But what he does best, and must do all by himself, is prioritize threats.  So he can concentrate on the big ones and wave away the little ones, no matter how hot his citizens get over them.

I know that sounds presumptuous, but ranking blunders is his thing.  He (or she) is an error philosopher.  So I think, with his philosophy, and his (or his helpers') ability to work out the cause-effect chain, that when Hitler went into the Rhineland, he'd have said, "This is big.  It would be a mistake not to act.  And act big."   You can't call an Avoidance Ruler a passive ruler.

"Got you.  And I think you're letting me call George W. Bush an active Avoidance Ruler.  He went right after terrorists.  It would have been a big mistake, a Rhineland-ignoring mistake, not to."

Oh please, let's not get back into George Bush.  I'm tired of talking about him.  I know, I know, he was an Avoidance Ruler.  I've granted that.  But he wasn't a philosopher.  He didn't come close.  Low standards of evidence, haphazard justification, loose cost-benefit, weak imagination.  I don't think he finished 101.  But I don't think I need to say any more about him.  Ari Shavit, in Wednesday's NYT Op-Ed (11-21-13), has pretty well said all that needs to be said.

71. "Bleeding heart"

 

For centuries a bleeding heart was a good thing — Christ's sacred heart bleeding for humanity, Mary's immaculate heart bleeding for her son, human hearts (in the "imitation of Christ") bleeding for their fellows. Catholic painters gave it to you — the actual heart, there, blood streaming — and Protestant authors reminded you of it. Some of Dickens' most sympathetic characters were found in Bleeding Heart Yard. A bleeding heart meant compassion.

Now a "bleeding heart" means "liberal sap." Are you downtrodden? Are you being called imprudent? Is your favorite species in danger? Here's an organ that will bleed for you.

The opposite of a bleeding heart would be a callused heart. "Callused heart" is not used as a comeback in the put-down contest but if it were I suppose liberals would apply it to Ron Paul, who just objected (Fox News, 8/30/11) to FEMA's enlarged part in aid to disaster victims.

Care has to be taken in identifying either kind of heart, though. The callused heart must be distinguished from the tough heart, which can be loving, and the bleeding heart must be distinguished from the compassionate heart, which is … different how? There's a problem. A compassionate heart bleeds, doesn't it?

Yes, but not publicly. The difference is in the display. The person the conservatives identify is saying, "Look at me. Am I not a good Christian? Am I not sensitive to suffering?" It's more than compassion. "Bleeding heart" distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart displayer.

And "callused heart" (in the Bible the "hardened heart") distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart dismisser. The dismissal comes across in the way victims are spoken of. “The bleeding heart will say, well, we have to take care of them,” said Ron Paul of the flood victims. He's betrayed by his indifferent tone. And also, I should say, by his word-choice. Callused hearts often give themselves away by their use of "bleeding heart."

Which isn't to say that heart-display is good or bad. That's very much in dispute, especially since T. E. Hulme complained about it in the Romantic poets. "I object," he said, "to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other." I think he must have had Shelley in mind. "Wail, for the world's wrong."

Shelley. Would you like to see, or be reminded of, some real sappiness? Follow him through "The Indian Serenade." A dream of his lady wakes him up and a "spirit in his feet," he says, leads him to her chamber window where he's so overcome by love that he passes out.

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast —

Oh! Press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

It doesn't help to say that Shelley was writing for a public which at that time admired sensitive male responses. So much the worse for the public and poets who cater to it.

And so much the worse for our definition of "bleeding heart." We've added cynicism to it. When Shelley, at the end of a very serious poem, "Ode to the West Wind," says, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed," we see a play to the public. We take him less seriously.

Are Christian hearts more prone to bleeding than others? You'd expect them to be, considering where sin is located for Christians: not in the deed, not in the consequence, but in the motive. Wish to kill your brother and you have killed him. "Whosoever looketh after a woman to lust hath committed adultery in his heart." Locate sin in the heart and you're going to have a lot of looking into it. And oh what temptation to display what you have found, or would like people to think you have found.

Some have wondered whether Christian democracies are more prone to well-intentioned blunders than other nations.   I'd say yes, you'd expect them to be. Their voters will worry more about wanting good ends, having their hearts in the right place, than good means, having their armies in the right place.