I used to live in Normaltown. In fact, I lived on Normal Avenue, in a house that dated from the 19th century and was owned by a woman whose avarice was the only quality that exceeded her vanity. She bilked me out of about a thousand dollars in rent, in the end, and I endured much there. Normaltown meant having half the floor devoted to a woman who got her 12 year old son only when his father was in prison, so I kept hoping that he would go straight. This child loved to roll a skateboard across the wooden porch in front to make my dog bark, and he would pound on my front window, when he thought I wasn't home, to torture my dog. It meant a cranky man upstairs who could only have downward thrusting sex with his old lady.
We should not dwell too often among the normal, for they are a nasty group, as I learned. They were, however, peppered with generations that sported faces of normality past. There was a grandmother nearby who was called Goody. Her grandchildren were famous, and she was sweet -- adopting neighborhood strays. I cannot imagine her having to confront the blind, indifferent killer of AIDS when it struck down one of her beloveds, and I do not wish to.
The letter carrier violated the Sabbath?
My colleagues there, in Athens, were pretty normal, too. They were a collation rather than collection of hipsters and haircuts that could be cowed fairly easily, but they drove down knowledge as if it were a secret lover or a conquest. Honestly, I had a feeling that at any moment one of them would give another a swirlie. Nevertheless, they had wit enough, betimes, especially in service to cruelty. They were, as I say, collated, as they were each indexed, marked at the corners and arrayed orthogonally. Each had feet planted against the root of the middle class, and the attitudes and angles each particular one assumed from that base simply made a fuzzy orange.
Beside a cliff made of kudzu, or an ocean wave of kudzu stopped for a moment while you're looking, only to crash over house, road, car, and stream as soon as you look away, inflicts a sort of reality on the landscape. REM's first album had come out, and people around the country were wondering what the vines on the back of "Murmur" were. Whatever the intention of the band or art director on the album, the effect I got of the design was that there was a suffocation in the South. All during that time, I agreed with the theme. It was a very Harry Crews point of view -- this idea that something essential, or essentially wicked, was being starved of breath beneath what was quaintly termed southern culture. It was fashionable to wonder what southern culture would be in a few years, too, since we were already hip to the K-Marting of our land and the malls of the city. I regard such talk as blather now.
What I was feeling, anyway, was intimidation. The bigness of the inexorable is always present. It is never easy to shake, either. If the kudzu doesn't shake your confidence, then the river might. The small thing that, unattended, takes on its own way and dwarfs all your work is real in a way that eternal law is real.
I was also feeling the smallness of Normaltown. The expectation that of course you would scam your renters, if you could was normal. I knew it then, and the years have simply increased the font. In the Bronx, the buffet steakhouses had plaques up with lists of rules about how far away people had to stand from one another, how many pockets could be on their coats, etc., all because a buffet was of course a thing to scam. The phone company has online bill paying, of course so that they could close all their regional offices and make the mailed-in bills due at offices as far from the customer as possible so as to increase late fees. They made the online bill pay instructions small and hard to follow of course to trip up older customers because it's normal to maximize "profits" in late fees.
What's WRONG with me, if I don't learn to rip off every company I can? I should sign up for the free six months and then change to the next company after that. It's normal.
I am not better than the normal. In fact, their cars are not broken and dangerous. They do not worry about surviving until tomorrow for the paycheck as much as I do. I may be too smart to have an adjustable rate mortgage, but I also have no mortgage at all. My decade of not having to worry about every day's totals has never come, and it never will, because I do not have the normal preoccupation every day of finding a way to screw up and over. It is not normal to wake up and hear grinding from a disappeared ball joint.
I do not like Normaltown and its mania. When we were short of money recently, I sold my 24k gold class ring. I needed $100, and so I asked for it. The pawn broker agreed in a flash. Gold fixed at $1,800 an ounce. How weird was I being? Well, to even blame myself for not having gotten the maximum is to admit that I was seeking a profit, that I was buying and selling and that the trafficking in misery and memory is legitimate. I do not. I do not accept that normal.
I wish, before I had moved away, that I had planted kudzu in the backyard.
"If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." -- Augustine, Confessions IX
I used to love Henri Bergson's philosophy. It was wacky in the way that only French and 18th century British philosophy can be, because it simply ignored the prior centuries and conversations and asserted a thing and then followed the implications. If the maestro is correct about time being a perception rather than a physical reality, then you're off and running, or at least trotting, beside him as he works out the myriad consequences.
I do not know if anyone ever exactly said why his philosophy was a door stop, why it shuttered the building and silenced the rest, but it did. There were few followers, because there was little to follow. It wasn't like Nietzsche, where the system sort of ends in a great, guttural growl, but once time is only perception, pretty much everything else gets idiosyncratic. You have to think about it a while, but you'll see that you can't reason on any subject, really, without time being something that we agree upon.
Even as Einstein would say that the physics property called time was relative, the human quality called time could never be more flexible than local. Oh, you -- you can say that time is a fiction, but I bet your computer clock is set. Like language and the myth of "slippage" that the deconstructionists wittered on about, it's true that absolute time is false and that we are all locked into a contract. Our time is nothing greater, in the end, than a network of contracts to go and do things, and between those actions we say time exists. The universe knows not "8:00 AM."
Our "8:00 AM" only means something between it comes between "7:00 AM" and "9:00 AM," not because there is any magic in the number or the time. Our "butterfly" only has meaning because of the contexts embedded in the signifier, not the magic of the sound. Yeah, yeah. The world is so, like, enslaving, man.
(I'd like to see the deconstructionist free herself from the paradigm of the clock.)
Time is not a fiction, if it's a shared delusion. If we share it, then it's not imaginary, because we've never been able to enforce universal fantasies. However, it's also not a reality, if none of us can talk about it rationally or even know how we keep speaking of it. It's this ongoing activity, but we can throw it into a pool, hurl it into futurity, and slice it into segments, and all without a definition or apprehension.
Do you feel time passing? I know. . . reading this would make anyone aware of time passing.
Anyway, the cruel lights of the sky, the poorly disguised commands of the economic machine, and the way the earth stumbles like a disoriented dancer through three hundred plus spins to get back to where it began all sound out a loud chomp of regularity and regulation. Things are regular, and we think they are timing.
Our souls wait for the Lord as surely as the watchman waits for the light of dawn. In that waiting, there is no time. Do you know why, all through the Psalms, the singer talks about waiting for the dawn in anxiety, why Jesus told two parables about people setting watch for the night? I doubt the least aware shepherd doubted the sunrise or was confused about the seasons, but waiting is a quality of time.
In the eternal, there is no beginning or ending, for "eternity" means timelessness, and without time such terms have no sense to them. We wait for the Lord just like the watchman waits for dawn. In the period of endless extension (waiting, dark), the solution goes by its own schedule (dawn, God). At the moment of coming, it is no more waiting. Time kicks in.
Time is not a fiction. It is a narrative.
We take our strands of life, our yarns, and the card spins us together. We accept the narrative of work, the narrative of season, the narrative of paying bills, and even the narrative of death, but time isn't responsible for any of these things. Time is the result of them. Here, we can lose our memory, or just lose our control over memory, and we can lose the power to imagine, but that is not time. Time is when we comply, put stickers on the planner, adjust our gait to the dance floor, and have a thing to tell or be told.
There are tribes and groups that live without a future tense. There are some with low number counts (how many? hrair!), but they still have a sense of time because they tell stories and have history. My sparkle-brained puppy cannot tell anything, and she has no time: she carries in her skull memories and a blurry pocket of "now" that might be fairly long, but not time.
I have written before about how, once we announce that we are offended and that we must be appeased, we have achieved the ultimate power, because the power to take offense exists independently of anyone giving offense. When our goal is harmony, instead of peace, then the most offended and most displeased person has power over the whole of the group.
Consider the United States Senate today. Its paralysis over the "notification to filibuster" is not only troubling because it says that the least happy have power to stop all things without having any necessary reasons or programs. The Republicans have not actually had any ideas for reforming health care. Their idea has been, pretty much, to stop malpractice law suits. That, needless to say, has nothing to do with health insurance. However, they feel perfectly justified in stopping all efforts at extending insurance, even efforts that they had once sponsored, under threat of filibuster, because they are not in charge.
Harmony and unison are not identical, and peace and harmony are not the same thing. Having all sides agree is not only not necessary, it is not beneficial. Having all sides cooperate is desirable, but they never will until they understand that they must honor an overriding rule that is above their individual good.
It's like pluralism. Pluralism is not relativism. Pluralism and inclusiveness is not the same thing as indiscriminate inclusion. Pluralism is a positive ideology, and it has within itself a principle of exclusion. "We allow in all groups, so long as they accept the idea of including all groups that are themselves open to inclusion" is the philosophy of pluralism. Democracy is not merely "the people vote," but rather "the people always vote to determine their government." Therefore, a democracy cannot vote to get rid of the democracy, and any vote to abolish the democracy is not democratic.
I feel like I have to point these things out, because too few people seem to know them. I feel that I need to state them rather than finesse them out philosophically because they are both axiomatic and elementary. One could take the time to work through examples and reason quietly over days and weeks to make the propositions likely, but these are, in fact, a priori within the concepts themselves. My only stretching is extending to the idea of consensual behavior. It isn't axiomatic or elementary, but I have come to believe that it is likewise inescapable that consensus means agreement when all sides understand that they cannot have their way. I.e. consensual politics, consensual corporations, consensual kindergartens, consensual communes, and consensual online editing communities are all possible only when each person gives up striving for her or his pure vision. "Consensual" is therefore an antonym to "pure" or "revolutionary" or "orthodox." The orthodox, pure, and revolutionary exist only with the application of unequal power.
I needed to do that quickly, and with none of my verbal playground stunts, because I want to talk about the auto de fe, the auto da fe, and how stupid people get when they're stressed out.
A number of conservative organizations are embracing purity tests, oaths, and other declarations these days. It has long been a feature of the conservative impulse, incidentally, as the very idea of 'return to glory days' means that one has the mindset that there is a largely invisible but inherent threat in the present, and 'return America/England/Australia/Canada/Sweden to its glory days' means that one believes that the present citizenry may be contaminated with beliefs that destroy the greater good. When this is combined with religious principles, the desire for a declaration is oddly unchanged. Many organizations associated with the Southern Baptist Church are now moving toward oaths, and this is merely the latest step in a curious evolution for a church that was once known as "the Independents" and criticized for having no unity at all. However, the way the oaths come in and the way they are organized is quite like the conservative "purity test." Instead of "creeping socialism" or division over Ronald Reagan, the presumption is that Satan is working inside those who will not sign or swear, as inward doubt is a mark of an absence of perseverance of the saints and grace (I suppose). Additionally, the institutions in question (mainly colleges) believe that they are "mission" oriented and therefore must convert, and conversions can only be performed by those who are "called" to be missionaries.
We need not dwell very long on the effectiveness of these instruments. It is self-evident that they do not work. They are like a net designed to keep the very large and the very small, while the middle sized get away. They succeed in keeping only the feckless and the fools, while the conscientious and convicted flee, and this is true whether they are applied in religion, in politics, or in culture.
What I think is worth talking about is why they do not work, and yet why people keep reaching for them, year after year, making the same historical mistakes, the same psychological mistakes, and the same cultural disgraces.
Does anyone here remember the hubbub of the flag pin in the presidential elections last year? It was all about wearing a pin showing the U.S. flag. Only patriots wore them, and anyone who didn't wear one was no patriot. Before that, there was a furore about the "Pledge of Allegiance." Back in the late 80's and early 90's, politicians vied with one another to say it loudest. They also made sure to sing the national anthem, or bits of it. It prompted me to think that the ministers of Lilliput, who had to dance on a high wire to get elected, were chosen on a more rational basis than conservative politicians in the U.S., because the public was more entertained by a high wire walker than these old white men trying to sing or look grave without looking dead.
Well, the thing about all such pledges is that they allow the certain to seek out a set of magical words, a set of words that, if spoken by the unbeliever, will cause the cursed tongue to burst into flames. They therefore represent a wish rather than a tool. They testify to the desire of the affected group, not the social coherence of it. A group can be entirely uniform in belief, completely loyal, entirely certain, and yet it can reach for the formula of the loyalty oath, the pledge, the confession of principles that all "real members" must sign or say or sing or dance (really, in some societies it's a dance). In each case, the invocation of the magic is a demonstration that the group feels like it is impure, is fearful that it is infiltrated, is nervous that its ideas or ideology haven't strength enough to survive a test (whether the test is foreign trade, education, free speech, open assembly, or discussion varies group to group and place to place).
When the Republican Party goes after a Purity Pledge, swearing to pure Ronald Reagan, they not only grant Reagan the apotheosis that Christian fundamentalists within the party really ought to object to, but they also seem to say that they are afraid that these principles are not capable of surviving in their party without such oaths. Particularly, the device is aimed at "accountability." A politician who "passes" the purity test (with its connotations of sexual inexperience being simply another troubling aspect, given that this is a party most dogged by closeted politicians and hidden pedophiles currently) can then be "held to account" when he or she casts a vote that presumably violates the pledge or test later. What's implied is that the pure principle cannot survive the jarring of practicality or negotiation. What is actually stated is that the demand is for inflexibility and "pure" or nothing.
It is this latter principle that ends up slashing the throats of those who devise such tests. The institutions, whether they're church affiliated colleges or businesses or political parties, that institute oaths and pledges for purity are stipulating a "not them" as the definition of "a good one of us." This is, first of all, an identity built on opposition, which is guaranteed to be absurd or tragic. Secondly, though, it means that the person who devises the oath is subject to the same examination by the next test giver. "Are you Baptist enough, friend," the test giver asks the test maker. "I see that you ask them to swear that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, but you do not make everyone swear that it is the inerrant literal Word of God." In turn, that reformer is challenged, later, by another who can say, "I love the oath that you have devised, but you did not have the statement of principle say anything about how we all affirm the sanctity of unborn life, and we certainly don't want any baby killers around!"
Once an instrument of purity, or Puritainism, is in place, "purity" goes on indefinitely. Our friends the Menonites are pure. To them, the most fundamentalist protestant churches are hopelessly corrupted by man. Each element of a defining principle can become exaggerated to become an identity, and then a test question, and all in an effort to sort out the good from the bad on the assumption that the bad cannot speak lies and the good will never hesitate to swear.
"Auto de fe" is the original of what we now know as the "auto da fe." Originally, it was an act of faith. If you were sorry for your sins, you would show it in an act of faith. No one would tell you to, and no one would tell you how. The confessor would simply watch to see if you did something that showed that your faith was back so that he could be sure that you weren't paying lip service to the oaths. You see, the old church folk actually knew that people could be forsworn, that bad people had no problem swearing that they were good, that people without conscience would gladly swear to whatever was convenient. The auot de fe was not a test imposed by anyone, but rather a sign manifested by the will of the person.
Well, we all know what happened. Once the institutionalized fears came in, once the Roman Catholic Church became convinced that its ideas might not stand up in free interchange, they adopted tests of faith. Then came hunts for heretics. Then came increasingly elaborate tests to prove that a person was or was not serving Satan or Martin Luther. Then come the Inquisitors. After a person was tortured, that person would sign or say a grand confession in public, and this was the auto da fe. What had been a sign from the person became a testing outcome for assessment.
It's sad, amazingly sad, to see tests come in like this -- tests of the soul, of the heart, of the mind. It's sad, deeply sad, to see Christian schools, particularly protestant ones, adopting, increasingly, oaths, as if unbelievers will not sign or that they will somehow demonstrate their non-belief. It tells us that the groups at the helm are afraid that their faith is not strong, that their ideas cannot survive free exchange, that they believe that prosecution is better than construction. What's more, it tells us that they are, in their fear, willing to forgo looking at a person's expression of faith in favor of demanding a formulaic satisfaction of a ritual.
If the Republicans want to be a party again, they need to have dissent, debate, and discussion, and not purity. If protestant churches want to triumph, they need to have faith -- faith in the power of Christ, power in the Word that conquered the world -- faith in life's diversity and the glory of God who creates not in one type, one model, or one mold, but in endless variety.
