Sale of the Century

The challenge of historicism post Hegel is not diagnosing ghosts for the metaphors by which they organized their lives or elaborating upon the tropes that kept them from seeing the plain truth before them, nor is it in diagnosing the dead's schizophrenia and condemning their certitude that phantoms were real. Explaining to one another that they were all infected and limned by the absurd "seven races of man" and exploring the narrative of such a belief is not frightening. No. What the anxiety of historicism is the awareness it commands of us that we ourselves are hooded by a metaphor we speak so often that we no longer hear it and the dire likelihood that many things we know to be obviously true, even clear states of physical being, are just as much phantasms as the "murderer's brow ridge."

Once we learn about Hegel's idea of history as an ineffable force, we're confronted with a paradox and a panic. The paradox is that, if history is determining and no person is ever free of history, then how was or is anyone ever able to come to the realization that history is a determining force? It would have to be the historical moment of Hegel that made it necessary and fitting for Hegelianism to occur, because there is no room for "genius" to be effective. The panic is that the student of history as much as the subjects of historical narratives is being controlled by the historical moment.

In the 1970's American intellectuals devised the notion of "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts." Around the same time, Michel Foucault wrote about the "episteme." Both are related, if not genealogically descended, from Hegelian historical determinism. In both cases, every generation or epoch of humanity organizes not merely what it knows, but what it can know along specific framing metaphors. It may be "father/family" that acts as a prefiguring metaphor in an age -- showing up in everything from discourse about the king/nation to church/flock to landlord/tenant to market regulations -- or it may be "inviolability of the body." Regardless, the who world of speakers and thinker is captured before it even emerges by a pattern of perception, processing and speaking. Political and economic power flows through these figures, but human knowledge itself moves only when "revolutions" occur in these frames.

We can reaffirm this anxiety, if we ever start to calm down or feel hopeful, by resorting to Marxism or remembering the painful lessons of Wittgenstein. According to the former, super-structure is only ever a reflection of base conditions. Marx never quite got around to writing a book about art, but the Marxists have hardly been able to shut up. Let's just say that what exists in language is not anything so coarse as Immanuel Goldstein's NewSpeak from 1984, nor is knowledge and artistic expression controlled by the capitalist directly, but what we can know and say and ask is at least engaged in a project of social and economic control. It gets that way coincidentally, and not because someone at Goldman-Sachs declares it, but ideas that spread do so because they are going through expensive media that is funded by investors, and "successful" persons are emulated, so individual, class-conscious, and free expression is at long odds.

Wittgenstein simply casts a doubt on the status of interrogation. He does not make knowledge less likely, but he points out so clearly that our words control our thoughts that he makes any honest person a skeptic about even asking questions.

No one wants to hear that he or she is a fool, and no one prospers by talking about the emperor's nakedness. However, I'm about to suggest that something "obvious" is actually artificial and mercantile.

I have dealt with being a religious intellectual for a long time. As I have gotten older, I have recognized that the dormitory conversation about "is too!" "is not!" in regard to God never grows up, because every year a new group comes into the dorm room. Therefore, I try not to get involved with naive arguments on the subject. People who argue their passions instead of their reason are impossible to reason with, so, since my religion forbids my slapping them, I really don't have much to say.

However, I was drawn on the subject too recently. I get annoyed by the "Stupid people are religious" line. I can have 20+ years of college education, and the other person can have a high school degree, but that person is much "smarter" and "knows" more because he (or she) does not believe in God. After all, he is following the course of Reason and Science. Only people who don't know anything believe in a "magic sky father."

What I said there caused enormous hurt. I said, "You bought your atheism from the store, and it was on sale, cheap." I pointed out that all of his argument was a script written for him and a discourse of power, that he had swallowed a cultural narrative that had been invented. He had not discovered it, had not bravely achieved courageous individualism against the repressive hoards, and he had not surmounted some vast intellectual height. He had gone along with a cliche.

That is what I'd like to discuss, perhaps in my next, since this is already long and has big words. Atheism is an invented concept. It is a cultural moment that has a history and functions in history. Like most of the poisonous metaphors that limit perception, it tells a lie about itself. Like most of the successful cultural adhesions of the last century, it serves capital.

Miss Elainey

To clarify what is below, the point is really simple. I refer to McLuhan a lot, but that's because he asks us to ignore the novelty of a piece of technology and to focus instead on what it does. What it does, he says, is inevitably a replacement for something already being done, an extension of one of the human senses or capabilities, the recall of a forgotten technology, and the reversal of its initial extension and replacement. I grok that two of these are hard to buy.

Just focus on the first thing: every piece of technology replaces something already underway. Humans come to a piece of technology with the same brain they've always had. What's more, technologies create their own social norms. Remember CB radio, good buddy? Hashtag memory. The individual technology creates a fetish in both the "neutral" anthropological sense and the more potent Marxist sense. McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride talks about how a new technology presents anesthesia ("New!" "Labor saving miracle" "Lose Weight without Trying!") and seduction by borrowing from art. He had in mind the yearly parade of automobiles and dishwashers. Imagine if he had seen the explosion of articles praising the "revolutionary design" and "aesthetic" of the Apple iFad.

If we can ignore the borrowed clothes of technology and suspend the anesthetic claims, we can ask, "What does this do by other means?" In other words, if you want design, go to 90th and Park Ave. in New York. The labor saving claim is true, but it's a compensation for changing the way we do things, the way we organize labor, and the expectations we have. Allowing it to be more than that is to be seduced.

From Shorpy

With me so far?

Ok, the fetish of a piece of technology grows more and more essential as that technology is social. Therefore, a single user piece of technology such as the hoe will hardly have any fetish to it. There won't be "a right way to hoe," and there most especially won't be a "right way to get ready to hoe." On the other hand, driving a buggy or a car has an enormous fetish: adjust the music, fasten the seat belt, adjust the seat, set rules for "calling shotgun," and then going out to engage in heavily codified driving behavior.

A great deal of money and advertising effort has gone into making YouTube ubiquitous. Many dollar bills are betting that the future consists of every citizen of the planet watching and computing on a telephone. The new Windows 8.1 looks like a Kindergarten cut-out board book with its big icons (perfect for a phone screen) and reduction of text to a series of enigmatic gestures of hostility (e.g. "The Store").

"Video," as understood by persons born after 1995, is a free audio/visual experience found "on the web." It is anti-artistic, in that it is a product intended for consumption and repetition, but not consideration. Video requires response -- an up or down thumb or a forwarding to a friend -- but, if you understand the dichotomy of pornography and art, it is on the pornographic side. (Briefly: pornography is taken, devoured, and used up by its viewer, and it is good to the degree that it is useful in producing an effect. The pornographic is consumed in the viewing and therefore cannot teach lessons or provoke thought, because those are inimical to the pure sensationalism of pornography. The artistic refuses to be understood. It cannot be contained by the viewer and elicits mood rather than provokes it.) Video is flash paper.

If a teacher uses a video presentation or a video presence in a remote class, then the medium's fetish works against the purpose of the class. The medium (video) eliminates a set of uses and imposes a set of interpretive mandates.

All online teaching runs head-on into the fetish and unintended reiterations of the technologies we use. What I call "the big text box" runs into a problem, too. Again, forget the claims of saving labor for the time being and bracket any questions of "ease of use" or "design," because those are all claims astride or beside the critical questions of, "What is this, outside of the classroom" and "What is the fetish already in place?"

The Professor gets a big window. In the left pane is a list of the names with online/off status indicators, and below that is a dialog box for the students to "speak." The professor's right pane splits into one box for slides and another for web pages or documents brought up on the fly. The professor then types:

The Licensing Act of 1736 indirectly led to the success

of the English novel and the creation of Shakespeare as

"the greatest playwright in English." After Walpole's Commons

passed the Licensing Act, London audiences distrusted

any plays that did get to the stage, because such plays

felt like propaganda. Furthermore, playwrights couldn't

get plays passed by the censors. However, they could make

some money by publishing their play ideas as novels.That's

just what Henry Fielding did.

There is a slide up there saying, "*John Gay's  Polly *Henry Fielding **Haymarket Theatre **Pasquin *Repertoire theaters with Shakespeare *Puppets!" However, to the shock of the true believer in online classes, student Chad interrupts with "When was Shakespeare born?" Addison takes advantage of a pause while the professor waits for students to catch up to type, "The syllabus didn't say that the first test was going to be part of our final grade. I don't think it's far."

What's happening is that the fetish of the Big Text Box is the online forum or the web comment thread. It's different from "watching a video," but it has a primitive social structure that repeats itself with depressing regularity. The rules lawyer, the "but you haven't done your job because you haven't convinced me that Jane Austen wasn't a lesbian" writer, the "you have to be nice to me; it's in the rules" special sunbeam, and, of course, the troll (the individual who goes to a place he (or she, I suppose) most hates to try to 'tell them off' or just make 'them' unhappy) -- each is standard issue in comments threads. 

In an online class, students have every reason to avoid "web comment" behavior, but they have every reason to avoid classroom disruption in in-person classes, too. For students feeling frustrated or afraid, or for students who are just plain unhappy, "exposing this BS for what it is" seems worthwhile. When an online class uses the BTB, students know the personae they must adopt.

An Hoff Othat

Illinois Republican Bobby Schilling was formerly in the House of Representatives, and he wants his old job back. For one thing, he needs the money. He's only making $100,000.00 a year, and he made $174,000.00 while in Congress. He can't manage on his current salary: 

". . .the folks that are living paycheck-to-paycheck, which is most Americans, including myself, is that, you know, this [an imaginary tax to fund the ACA] is not something that you want to be putting out when you've got a kid that wants to play sports or you want to take a trip for vacation. Instead, you've got to funnel your money over to Obamacare, which is something you might never have to use."

Let us bask in the glow of the 5 watt light bulb glowing before his lenses

So, health insurance is terrible, because it might mean not taking a trip for vacation -- which is a decision we paycheck-to-paycheck people often grapple with -- just where we want to go for our vacations, whether we should fly or drive, and whether we should try the Virgin Islands this year or stick to Martha's Vineyard. Why, health insurance could even cost as much as. . . as a kid playing soccer. Well! In that case, the choice is easy: little Maradona needs spikes. (It's possible that Bob there could be thinking of a daughter and an actually expensive sport, like gymnastics or tennis, but we've got to remember that he's living paycheck to paycheck, so he has to be thinking of an inexpensive sport.)

I want to point out something in Bob's favor, here. I believe him when he says he's broke. This is because of my lesser known law ("Geogre's Law" is on the Internets, but I've got more than one of 'em): Debt rises to income. Also, all people live on $18,000 a year.

Bob has no money. Bob makes a lot of money. Bob probably has nice stuff, including a nice car payment and a nice mortgage payment to make. Given his party affiliation, he probably has a tuition payment or two to make as well. He no doubt has dues and greens fees that he has to pay. He spends more per mile with his vehicle than I do, for example, because he would have a "nice" car, which means a heavy car, which means fewer miles to gallon. If he makes more money, he will likely get a private plane. No matter what, until he runs out of desires, the debts will chase his income, leaving him with a set amount with which to buy food, drinks, golfing magazines, pay-per-view sports, and Toblerones in hotels. That figure used to be $15,000, but I'm sure that it is now at least $18,000.

There! Two posts in one. Some pretty pictures, though.

The Valley of the Uncan

This pun is available for adaptation, by the way ("The ICANNy Valley," e.g.).

The time is drawing near when I will be asked to consider technology and instruction again. I have never stopped thinking about it, of course, but once upon a time I was payed to be aware of the issues, even if no one actually wanted to hear what I had to say. (I blame myself. I probably didn't say it very clearly.) Now, though, I'm going to be caught between the cruising speed icebergs of capital and capitalized tech purchases and will need to explain why education, instruction, and the latest purchase aren't always aligned.

I got a new laptop, and for once, I'm current in software. I'm indistinguishable from consumer class, and it only took thirty years to get there. This means that there is a video camera built into the lid of the laptop, and both the NSA and Microsoft can turn it on at any time without my knowledge. Fortunately, there is a high tech defense against this. For a fee, I can relate the specs to you on the wireless network enabled BLACKTAAPE (TM) (Pat pending). By getting the properly designed, wholly chemical free and Y2K compliant BLACKTAAPE, you can place this device in front of the lens of the camera and be certain that no one is seeing anything you don't want to show.

Anyway, even if you don't keep up with college education, you know that the trend is for online classes. This trend is driven by consumer impulses and a flood of G.I. benefits, an exponential growth of for-profit colleges, and, most of all, colleges and universities seeking ways of gaining revenues by reducing labor costs and facilities expenditures. Sometimes, schools try to own the online classes teachers create, claiming that the professors surrendered their intellectual property and copyrights by using college/university computers. Even when that's not the case, the colleges frequently pay less for online classes and demand more.

In general, they are exceptionally unpopular among faculty. (Yes, commenter: you love them. That's great. I don't hate them. I'm talking about the general feeling.) Faculty generally figure out that exploitation is in the offing.

I

I want to talk about one small subsection of the phenomenon, though, and that's the technology of the online classroom.

Assume a class size of 15. Assume the class will involve laying out background information and process instruction. In fact, let's go ahead and stipulate a mid-point class, like "Survey of British Literature 2: 1750 - 1945." To teach a class like that, there will be

• Historical background, genre background, biographical background, thematic background for major authors; construction of either a thematic narrative or an historical narrative to unite the material selected into an arc that will allow the students to frame the things they read.
• Discussion with students of individual works to encourage close reading and strengthen student close reading skills; class investigations of longer works so that the students get to pioneer the exploration and discover when a reading has and lacks support.
• Explanation of "how to write on literature." A survey class is structured as a first step in a major, so one needs to teach students how to write about literature with an awareness of critical perspectives; students need to know how to read criticism without being adversarial or slavish.

Now, ignore for a moment what technology you must use. What technology would you choose to use for these tasks -- provided that "in seat class time" is not allowed?

No very good teacher is ever one-way about teaching. Giving background is close to one-way information flow, as the information in the background goes in one direction. However, the delivery, in person, is two-way. In a physical classroom, lecturers watch students, listen to whispers and groans, make personal asides to punctuate the depth of the information, slow down when students get behind, etc. However, this, and only this, can be replaced with a set of web pages or a video. Students can "watch a You Tube" of the professor and get an 80% experience, perhaps.

The third thing -- "how to write the paper" and "how to take the test" -- seems as if it is just as susceptible to one-way, static replication, but it is not. Even in highly selective schools, where students have relatively uniform backgrounds, a class of fifteen students will have ten different misapprehensions about how to approach writing about literature. This is inevitable, because the task is at the heart of the college major. In other words, students will be uniformly heterogeneous because they're not college majors. A single talk or web page on "how to write a literature paper" that addresses the misapprehensions of students will either be a work of inexplicable genius or unreproducible luck.

It's the second bullet point that's the hell.

Should I be on video, with fifteen small thumbnails of the students, to "meet" with my class? Is that better than a large chat window?

There is an irony here, because video contact is worse at reproducing the classroom than a flat text window. It is worse for my students, and much worse for me, to have video and video to recreate the in-person classroom than to have no pictorial representation at all in favor of text windows.

Think about what happens when you speak to a conference room. Think about what the people around the table are doing. The non-verbal communication is much greater than the verbal communication, and people will inaudibly negotiate a mood and behavior. This is why one class can be "mean" and another "sweet" -- with the same material presented by the same teacher, the students themselves will negotiate a mood among themselves without even knowing it, and this collective voice will hold until disturbed. This social harmonizing prevents the most egregious behaviors. (It also intimidates some students and prevents their asking for help.)

When fifteen students are fifteen picture-in-pictures, they are fifteen individuals -- fifteen television sets. They don't negotiate with one another, and each is engaged in the social behavior of "watching video."

You may think "video connection is allowing me to connect to my students," but each student has a history of viewing "video" on a laptop or desktop computer. There are conventions for YouTube and the others that overwrites the actual use made of the video link.  "Watching video" is a fundamentally solitary behavior that is subject to the egoism of consumerism. "Watching video" comes with a "like" or "dislike" button, has a comments field, and invites "snark" or forwarding to Facebook. These conventions are everywhere except the online class, so the students, at best, experience contradictory signals from the media. More likely, each of the fifteen students conceives of herself as a solo entity and the professor as disembodied, if not a commodity, and the commodity experience (i.e. monetized routine found in advertising and placed in journalism) of "watching video" acts as interference against the perception of the professor as a teacher.

The instructor for his or her part, will see fifteen separate, distracting behaviors across the screen. There will not be the corporate behavior one gets in person.

On the other hand, if students engage a large text box, the experience pre-dating the activity is "writing a text" or "reading." This is an individual experience as well, but it is what McLuhan called a "cool medium." The cool medium of reading/writing allows or forces analytical thinking. While the video presentation should replicate "conversation," the technology by which it is arriving has already etched out a set of expectation that instead dominate the intended effect.

Thus, it seems, just as it becomes more possible to have a video link with a class, it is less and less useful -- more and more counterproductive, in fact -- to do so, because the ubiquity of YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, and the rest automatically carry methods of interpretation in the very act of appearing by video.

"9/11 Changed Everything," indeed.

To begin to write for the third time on this subject, I would need to go to the ends of the subject. As with each previous time, the real occasion for writing is obscure, as it should be, if there is going to be any use to it. Way back in 2001 and 2002, the fools who had to have something to say as they closed their thirty minute tours of news would quote governmental press releases and talking points fallen from Dick Cheney's desk and say, "It's no exaggeration to say that 9/11 has changed everything." I didn't believe them. I vaguely remember a floating head on a screen waxing poetic and summoning all the atmospheric Murrow he could (but only managing Brokaw) and saying that we would be telling our children about the event that defined their world. It was Pearl Harbor. . . or not quite that, but it was like it.

The news readers going basso profundis was inconceivable comedy to me. Even looking back, the most I can come up with by way of how I felt is a paraphrase of Lincoln, who said that, if the United States were ever to die, it would be by suicide, not conquest. 

Then again Lincoln embarrassingly underestimated the thanatopsic urge. So did I.

Oh, historians of the time in question have said that Cofer Black and the Spook Patrol began giving W. Bush daily briefings with unfiltered intelligence -- that is, with no analysts involved, no hierarchies of threats, no assessments of feasibility or reliability, just every single hateful and violent threat made by the whole world -- and this every morning before the Ovaltine. It scared Bush senseless, and he said "Yes" to every request. This is how the USA PATRIOT ACT went from controversial to routine -- even boring. The same scary people with scary reports kept working on their haunted house routine, because Obama began saying his job was, "Keeping Americans safe" in 2009. The man who campaigned on civil liberties began devouring them at a pace that his predecessor would not have imagined.

Assassinations? Secret detentions? Suspension of habeas corpus? Phone taps on a national scale (i.e. a small nation of people, not every person in this nation)? "Why object, if you have nothing to hide" uttered as a legitimation, when it had last appeared in satire or dystopian cliche? All of this has come to be a portion of the invisible architecture of American reality -- a base condition for living for most citizens. W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" is unteachable now, both because its commentary has been bunted in front of home plate and, more, because its world of a state with an indexed population of statistics is now so far beneath the N.S.A.'s capabilities and the ostensible goals of "total informational awareness" as to seem boring.

September the eleventh thrust a cup of hemlock into national hands. Our leaders presented as a chalice, and all drank. 

I do not mean, though, that losing "the American way" or civil liberties was the death of America. Instead, I mean that, frighteningly, the vapid people were right: we changed everything on the day, soul first.

In 2011, the little people who live inside of the television asked, "What have we learned from 9/11?" We learned nothing, of course. We learned nothing because there was nothing to learn from a billionaire attacking centers of international capitalism. We learned nothing because 9/11 handed its victims suffering rather than pain, and suffering neither teaches nor presents norms. Most of all, though, we learned nothing because to learn we must first recognize our world and ourselves.

September the eleventh was suffering for those of us in New York City. I feel confident that it was for those in the affected wing of the Pentagon and for the families of the lost in Pennsylvania as well. No one can learn from suffering, only  from pain, but suffering is less focused. Rarely is suffering for a particular reason, or even for a passion. Even more rarely is suffering for a passion or reason that carries with it a moral value or heuristic principle. Instead, people may grow while suffering, but they grow by having empathy or understanding (of humanity, of self, of family) increase. 

Most of us would rather attend a seminar.

Among our problems with 9/11 is just simple recognition. "We" don't do much introspection of the moral sort. For a nation of self-help patrons and "Face the Press in Review This Week" organizers, we love to look at the individual self and the weekly events, but not much from a decade or a community.

 Why there is a new government,

and why the parties are disenfranchised

The Republican Party has variations on "self" in its definitions. It's the party of "self-reliance," of "individual liberty," of "personal responsibility," and it performs a fan dance with libertarianism. (Well, it used to. Since 2012, it has been more of a peep show, where the primaries are all access libertarian and the general elections put on a flag G-string.) The Democratic Party is the party of good governance, of community building, of ensuring welfare and commonweal. Most of its definitions feature "community" and "common" in them.

September the eleventh made both parties aliens to the United States. Unlike the United Kingdom and numerous European nations, the U.S. has no "government" distinct from its politicians. We do have a civil service, but it is weak and without an identity of its own. It is certainly not operating contrary to the political system. There could be no American "Yes, Minister" the way there was an American "House of Cards," because our civil servants have less and less job security and are beholden to political appointees who face the spoils system. Thus, most talk of "the government" Americans do has been faulty from nearly the day of Andrew Jackson. It has certainly been faulty since the 1980's. However, since 2001, we have begun to grow a government, complete with self-protection and ideology separate from the political EVEN AS the traditional civil service has been put under more political control than ever before.

This government of 9/11 begins and ends with a fiat: It is the job of government to keep the citizens safe from "evildoers"/ "those who wish us harm" (the difference is one of dialect, not language). You heard Bush say that his job was keeping Americans safe countless times. You may have even heard Cheney and others lie and claim that Bush was a good president because there were no terrorist attacks on Americans during his presidency. If you have been listening, you have also heard President Obama define his job this way, and probably as often as his predecessor. 

 

The problem is that, well, keeping citizens safe from harm is simply not one of the duties of the presidency. The president of the United States is the head of the executive branch. He is the chief cop and the chief enforcer of laws. In war, she is the coordinator of the armed forces ("commander in chief"). There is no warrior king, priest king ("decider"), or even "CEO president" function to the job. Armed forces keep us safe from foreign powers, and police keep us safe from those on our soil if they have broken a criminal law. Secret services stop agents of enemy and foreign powers. Quick: what part of the government is the Secret Service a portion of?

We all want to be safe, of course. However, we also all want to be asked how we are kept safe, if we are a democracy. A critical difference between democracy and fascism is that we do not believe that a Great Man (or woman) might, with will or strength, achieve what the people, with consent, do every day. A critical difference between democracy and the Soviet is that we do not believe that the Party or state leadership can, with critical efficiencies or expert policy, achieve what we do in our stumbling consensual manner.

Never mind my idealism, though. The parties are aliens to the government of the United States because this government dedicated to keeping Americans safe has a new question to ask. It is no longer concerned with the individual's happiness or the group's welfare, as both are irrelevant. Instead, it asks, over and over again, "Who are you? What is the identity of the citizen?"

Define for yourself the goal of N.S.A. and other agencies dedicated to defeating foreign agents in an era when "agent" no longer means what it once did. Whereas once an agent was a person not only acting in the interests of a foreign entity but acting at the behest of that foreign entity, an agent now does not need the alien entity's knowledge, much less involvement. This is because the agent is no longer of a foreign power, but a foreign ideology. Furthermore, that ideology is not named. It isn't "the Communist Party": it's "terror" or "wishing us harm."

Even though we in the United States do not have an official religion or official ideology, we have a shifting net of enemy ideologies that are largely identified solely by the willingness of anyone propounding them to, coincidentally or consequentially, advocate violence against the U.S. military, U.S. citizens, U.S. territory, or U.S. assets. Think back to 1978 for a moment and remember the anti-nuclear protests held throughout Europe. It was a weapon that made plain the fact that some of Europe would be a battlefield in a coming war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and the people living on that battlefield were less than pleased. Some of them were infiltrated by Soviet agitators. Some of them were violent. Most of them were neither. Were that today, would N.S.A. label "Belgian" or "Social Democrat" as enemy ideologies? Under the philosophy that demands that all believers in a religion or religious sect are "enemy" today, it might. This is a consequence of 9/11 and defining the goal of government as "protecting Americans." Once that becomes the goal, violence is the only qualification for enemy status.

 

Imagine that you are floating in the ocean. Now, so long as you float, you will be rescued. However, a line is tied to you and attached to everyone you know. For reasons unclear to you, some of these people cannot swim and have weights attached to them, while others are just struggling swimmers like yourself. Even the people you are tied to who are swimming are themselves tied to all the people they know, and some of them are sinking. It is fairly likely, depending upon how many people you know, that you will be dragged down.

As far as the security government is concerned, a person is not a person. A person is a set of associations -- a deferred identity calculated by its connective power. Each association is either dangerous or not. If an association is not dangerous, it carries no weight. If it is dangerous, it weights the person. Furthermore, the attachment's weight is determined by its own attachments. Are you an enemy of America? Well, a friend of yours who has a friend in the Peace Corps who made friends with a group of people in Yemen has sunk you. You do not know this, of course, because you do not know your friend's friends. Your friend, in fact, does not know his friends are today called "terrorist" by someone. They, indeed, do not know that they are "terrorists," necessarily. Even if they have shouted, "Death to America," they could have repented of the view. It would not matter. It does not matter because the government's role is to "keep Americans safe," not to produce an accurate risk assessment.

 

Once we take the one, small step, from "provide for the common welfare" to "keep Americans safe," safety trumps all political activities and all operations of the state. The citizens cease to have civic value and transform into menace or neutrality, and only menace or neutral. The two political parties, therefore, become entirely beside the point. Individual liberty or community building are meaningless questions to a government dedicated to detecting threats and sifting its own population into only two piles.

I could offer up homespun analogies on the philosophy of safety. I could ask you to compare a nation to a household and to think of the effects of parents who seek to keep their children safe at all costs with not a thought to the children's happiness, prosperity, or education. However, those analogies foster reductive thinking, because nations are not families, or businesses, or enough like anything except themselves to be profitably compared except to each other. In fact, nations are capable of a phenomenon that is almost without parallel in any other organism: they can grow alienated from themselves. Nations can, under the worst possible circumstances, begin to operate one way while believing another; they can begin to concentrate power in one spot while announcing it in another. The most famous, and therefore guarded against, condition of national alienation is the phenomenon of bureaucracy. When the civilization is not rule by the demos (democracy) or representative (res publica/republic) or divine person, or by select family, or by the wealthy, but, instead, by bureaus, then an unthinking, vegetable mind governs indifferently to all concerns and makes all political exchanges inefficient.

We are not in a bureaucracy. We have something else. Dana Priest's report on “Secret America,” where she began to see just how large the expenditure and secrecy is in Classified work, certainly testifies to a potential bureaucracy of safety, but, forgetting the inefficiencies of duplication and lack of oversight, we have an alienation where no one votes for safety as a national priority. Neither chamber of Congress, no election, and no presidential order reorganizes society onto safety first. All the same, it is there, and it determines the activities of all other facets of the nation.

 

One way that we can tell that our nation is alienated is the staggering bathos of the safety measures. When, two weeks after September eleventh, military with sub-machine guns were stationed in Penn Station in New York City, it did not make travelers feel safer. Coming in from Madison Avenue and having one's eye first fall on a soldier with a slung machine gun did not set a commuter's mind at ease. The harlequin pantomime that has replaced airline boarding – shoes off, hands up, standing in a booth – does not give safety, either. Crucially, both “left” and “right” react the same way to these measures. The left rejects the loss of civil liberties, and the right fears “the government” and calls for a right to have personal firearms to protect itself. These measures launched in the name of security represent no one's political idea, no one's civil goal, and deliver no one's social good, but there they are. The most conservative president in history and the current president alike have presided over measures seemingly no one has endorsed.

What began as an urge to reverse every expansion of civil liberties of the 1970's with the USA PATRIOT ACT turned into something else. It has turned into something with the power to generate itself, something that moves by a vegetative mind, with a motive (to make America safe) that is paramilitary and unconstitutional. The government that is arising now, what people call “the security state” (a misnomer, as this is not the state; it is beneath the state and beside the state), sets out an end goal that cannot be achieved without the elimination of free will.

What Changes

Brought to you in GLORIOUS

The utterly inexplicable Stand by Me opens with gang #2 mesmerized and propelled into action by the question, "Hey! Want to see a dead body?" Gang #1 has claimed the corpse, they discover after their Odyssey. I would like to reiterate, here and now, my initial reaction to the movie, since no amount of pay could have moved me to read the book: Who the hell would want to go see a corpse?

Oh, sure, might as well ask, "Who the Hell would read a Stephen King novel," since the questions are equivalent. After all, what is the question except a promise that, some pages ahead, King is going to describe a corpse? In that regard, he is providing pornography for virgins. If he gets it right, the readers who know he did will not get any reward except a trip to a place in memory that cannot bring any joy, and, if he gets it wrong, his readers by and large will be none the wiser. He is not, generally speaking, describing a corpse as much as he is describing what pathology photos look like or what a corpse feels like to an objectifying gaze. Thus, the virgin gets the joy of self-fulfillment or self-abhorrence, but no real experience has changed hands.

The little blighters of the story are supposed to Change and Learn, and the experience Refines the character from the dross, revealing, like Buonarroti's marble chips, the prisoner within. The thing is, King missed everything. I know, or suspect (I cannot really speak to the man's state of mind, only the narrative), because of what has changed in me.

You see, we think of the dead and living, and we fear thinking of dying, but Death. . . death the thing, the moment, the extinguishing, is something we cannot think of. For centuries, poetry has spoken of the pale rider, the midnight visitor, the hungry stranger, the guttering wind, and we have mistaken these as parables. They are not. They are as literal as our minds can accept of death itself.

At the time of her death, my mother and I had nothing unsaid. We were sympathetic to an enviable degree. There were still times, of course, when she would refuse to say and I could not intuit, but our feelings were open, and I had no apologies to give or accept. This does not, of course, take even an atom off of the scales (on my eyes or that I eye) whereby guilt is measured. It was my job to keep her alive, to swat away medical mistakes, to hear all the doctors and translate into English, to call in the family when deathly ill turned to moribund but then to be wrong. I knew that I couldn't win, but I also knew that losing, as I had to, was going to be bad -- very bad. When, therefore, my mother's death did not cripple me, I knew that this was just a sign that what was coming was going to be a wave spawned from a deeper shock -- slower to arrive and higher when it arrived. 

I tread water furiously as she died. I fairly ran from the deathbed. I told myself a true lie -- that I was giving up my place to her sister and to the rest of the family. I had nothing to say to her, nothing to hear, for we had spoken often of our love, and my own prickliness was something she was finally understanding. (I confess: she still could not tell my "exasperated" and "sad" faces from "angry" faces. When your own Mama thinks you're pissed off all the time, the problem might be in the face. (Then again, I've never been too in love with this one. (A very short line of ex-girlfriends can endorse the sentiment, by the way.)))

In truth, more was happening. (I cannot, by Goggle, find the true source of the definition of a swan as "Grace and calm above; furious paddling below." I was told it by an absent friend.) I was trying to avoid the evidence. If my mother was going to die, I didn't want to see it. I simply didn't need to, I thought. Let it be a fact, as abstract as my own death. Let it be a case of here and then gone. Let me drive in to the funeral and comment on the coffin. That's the modern thing, after all.

As I'm sure you know, I was there at the death. I arrived fifteen minutes after the actual death, but it's not long enough that the stranger was not still in the air. The skin's color changes in a flash, and the full relaxation of the face into a droop did not suggest rest, to me. My mother's life force was five times that of anyone else I've known. It was furious, and she barely had any flesh. Without animation, the corpse was and is a negative affirmed. It wasn't loss: it was lostness.

Prior to my mother's death, I had put two dogs to sleep in my arms, and the swooping in of death in those circumstances was frighteningly sad. This is similar, because now there is a body that bears only a resemblance to a being whom you love passionately and fully, but this is worse, because the body fights. Even as the hospice personnel were making it "easy," there was nothing easy at all. If I were to have an angelus that said, "All was well at all that time," it would not change the effect on me, because what struck deeply was the core of the core -- life itself versus ceasing. 

Prior to this grief, I would sing odes to death (mine only) daily. I considered it rather normal. After all, I knew that I was praising rest, not death, really, and, when I last came near to genuineness, I had shuffled away from suicide as being an insufficient improvement over living. Nevertheless, I had, and still actually have, little relish for the days. I have a mighty slate board in my mind of wins and losses, and the latter have been etched, while the former keep getting erased or forgotten. Every month, my poverty runs me against abject failure as an adult, and without feeling qualified as an adult, asserting my skills as anything else are unlikely.

That has stopped now. Now, I think that I want to live. I don't have a good reason for it. I won't even say, "I'll quit when the stupid people do." After all, they replace themselves, and more. I can only say that we should know Death. We should know the unreasoning enemy who bears us no malice. Death is behovely. We are the ones who fight it with more than just our will.

Tolstoy wondered what value any of his work had, in the face of death. The Death of Ivan Ilych is one explanation, but it's not Tolstoy's own. No, that story is not about meaning, but about meaningfulness during life. It is about one very, very narrow question: "What are you living for?" The contemporary Kierkegaard would say,

"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not." -- The Sickness Unto Death

Despair is any state wherein the infinite (soul) and finite (mind and body) and the barrier between them (self) are unaware of their own heterogeneity. (It works out much more simply and profoundly than it seems, but you can do that on your own.) Tolstoy was right, though, that we will never get out of despair if we never see death.

I am miserable (sum quod eris) (non posse non peccare) ("I am a man -- reason enough to be miserable" (Menander's Epitrepontes, I think, because it isn't Dyskolos), but to even feel that requires the flame. I have changed from my experience with dying, but not heroically. I am grieving, and not myself. Instead, I am, I think, far, far sadder than I was, because I have seen the inescapability of the flesh, the way that the rock refuses to let go of its figure, and I have heard the groans that must accompany the liberation.

 

Pain and Suffering (the usual)

"Probitas laudatur et alget."--Juvenal Satires I 74

Virtue is praised, and it starves.

I've been in a dark, dark place for a while. Last Wednesday, before I found out that I had $88 to last until September 30th, I was faced with a choice: do I tell my first year students about 9/11 or not? If I do, then I'll have to go there. If I do not, then they may have no idea that their entire world was created out of an act of instinct rather than thought. As I have before, I chose to go. My thinking is that I may be the only person who lived through the two months that were "9/11" in New York City that these people will ever meet, and, if I do not tell them, they will never know.

I began, therefore, with the day. I have written about it before -- how the sky was more perfectly china plate blue than any sky I have ever seen in any place, how the temperature was the sort of chill that teases at one's senses like a lover, enticing and exhilarating at the same time, how the air was so clear that it was possible to see all the way from 90th street to the end of the island, how sparkles appeared on the painted steel lines, how sky scrapers popped one by one across the edge of the window frame on the #6 train. It was a day when even I wanted to play hookey, and I was a) new on the job, b) never skip. (I've taught with high fevers, with tubes running into my bile duct, and once while hungover.) I told them how a full house in the WTC would have meant up to 40,000 dead, so God (or random meterology) saved a lot of lives, because a whole ton of folks went in late.

I told them how, at 10:30, I went on my religious pilgrimage to the bodega for a bowtie donut and a cup of coffee. "You guys will learn that I am very religious," I said, "about lunch." I told them that I gazed down the vast hill and saw a snuffed candle and didn't know what I was seeing. I told them how we knew that we had orphans in front of us, that we were teaching children who had no parents, but we had to be cheerful and normal. Teachers whose own children worked in the towers had to show no signs of concern.

Then I told them about the young woman. I said that she was very attractive, and they seemed puzzled, so I had to add, "I'm a heterosexual man. I'm going to notice. You may think I'm old, but I'm not dead." I told them that she confirmed that people had jumped from the towers. She was filthy, and on 9/11 I silently upbraided her for it in my mind. I now know that it was the 120 mph dust cloud that made her dirty. She had said to me and another stranger, "I was in Liberty Plaza. I was where the bodies landed." I mentioned to the students that, all her life, she would have to deal with seeing people alive, falling, and then, in a fraction of a second, dead.

"What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships,
but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief,
discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!"--Sterne

The people who saw 9/11 on their televisions received a different thing. They felt pain. We humans have only had movies and television a very, very short while, and we neither evolved nor were made with these technologies. If you see or hear a person get injured, you immediately wish to respond. This is human. Despite those people who say that we are all indifferent to one another and out to line our own pockets (shouldn't someone who says that be placed on a malarial island somewhere?), the fact is that we're pretty social. The sound of babies crying is used as a torture. We can't watch or hear another person get hurt without wanting to react to it, to make things better.

Out in America, and perhaps the world, people saw the planes hit the towers, heard the firemen calling for help, saw the towers fall, and then saw it all again and again and again. However, they could do nothing . . . nothing at all, to help. There was no "donate money here" button on the screen.

Television presenters are accustomed to narratives, to stories, and they told 9/11 through a narrative structure. Before the afternoon had come, they were saying who did it and going on to "Why do they hate us?" By the next day, the television news had a complete arc: "They hate us because of our freedom, and they struck us to take our freedom, and now the sleeping giant will get them for what they did."

When you feel pain and cannot respond, pain leads to frustration, and frustration leads to anger. People lined up to enlist in the armed forces. They were angry. W. Bush played on that anger. He might even have genuinely felt it for all I know. The fact is that watching a huge amount of pain delivered and being unable to anything to, about, or for the situation is going to make anyone angry. This is extremely potent stuff for the amygdala of anyone.

In New York City, however, we did not see it. Even the people who were at Liberty Plaza could not have seen it without incredibly bad luck. Had they seen one impact, they'd not have seen the other. Had they seen both, they'd not be standing there to see the collapses. Had they seen the collapses, they'd not have seen the ash and debris cloud. Instead, everyone heard the part that directly affected the individual. The people in New York City knew less about what was going on than the least attentive viewer in Hawaii.

Whatever we saw, heard, or felt, we responded. We had no choice but to respond. If we wished to, we could go down to the pile and volunteer, too. Many civilians volunteered on the first and second day. Even people in the outer boroughs, though, had to respond to the attack, because all had to get food. No trucks were allowed across the river. We had to get transportation. We had to find out if the people we knew were lost or had lost people.

Also, 9/11 never stopped for us. It played all night, each morning, all day, every day. The ash floated down for days. The smoke blew for over a month.

New Yorkers had an a) unrelenting, b) unexplainable, c) irreducible, d) meaningless and constant suffering. Pain makes you act. If a person has pain and cannot remedy it, the person feels anger. Suffering is otherwise. Suffering will not listen to anyone saying, "They hate us because of our freedoms." Aside from that statement being irrational, the statement is entirely non-ameliorative. No one and no thing is made better by understanding that someone hates us for freedom. If the fires burn today and will tomorrow, it does not matter. Furthermore, there is no "make them pay for this." Not only did "the evil men who did this" already "pay" for what they did (they were in the pile), but the fire would burn tomorrow just the same, whether some Afghanistani village were blown up or not.

Suffering is knowing that the air is harmful and that it will be that way for a month. It is seeing ash-covered bicycles being discovered long after the event. It is men with submachine guns suddenly showing up in the subway station to "reassure" us! Suffering teaches no lessons. Suffering has no meaning. Suffering is not sent or received.

Job is the greatest book about suffering ever written. Job does not learn anything, precisely. However, Job grows as a soul in the course of his suffering. You and I are not Job. At the apogee of his growth, Job is able to say, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." He is not happy with the giving or the taking, but rather saying that the power is God's and that God remains good irrespective of which act is involved or how it affects us. He is not, I think, saying what Leibnitz says -- that what is painful or bad to a human is good in the grand scheme of things -- but rather that however giving or taking treats the happiness of a person is incapable of lessening God's glory and goodness.

To arrive at a conclusion like that and not be a quietist or defeatist, to keep insisting that he will not confess a false sin, nor lose faith, Job's soul is truly great. There is no lesson, though. Had Job not reached that wisdom, the suffering would have been the same, and coming to the understanding doesn't make the boils drop off.

If you are punched in the arm, you will want to match aggression for aggression, but if you suffer, you won't think that more suffering will help. I think about a bomb or missile that blows up a building and kills four or five innocents but also kills the most lethal terrorist. The village will neither know nor care about the military value of killing this aggressor, but it will know suffering, as it has to have funerals, tend to orphaned children, live with seeing that flash of light and the flicker between life and death. It will have to repair a building, constantly aware that here was where this or that man died. This is why it was hard for those of us who went through 9/11 to agree with the Bush administration's need to go "get" the bad guys.

On the other hand, for those who felt the pain and frustration and, honestly, impotence, of seeing that much pain without redress, a vast act of aggression was on the cards. The nation's instinct was pushing, and that allowed for politicians with dark ambitions and black hearts to get passed unthinkable laws and to reverse America's position on human rights without a discussion, much less a vote, even less a judicial review.

The Crude Matter

"The Curious Joy of the Flame" Copyright & stuff to me

Each place shows hard times in its own way. Only the poor neighborhoods demonstrate the change of fortunes immediately, and eastern Baltimore went from doors to plywood masks over the wounded facades of row houses in 2002-4 as the Inner Harbor prosperity turned out to be another Baltimore County extension. Wealthy places show that hard times have come by admitting low end shopping into their world rather than by diminishing the opulence. The middle does as the middle does -- it slowly slides back and forth between fewer and more loan offices, gold buyers, gold bugs, recycling centers, and Fiat dealers.

Rural America is not very much like suburban America. It has grown like it in speech and in many sexual mores and outlooks, but the society of the small town is generally quite different from the lack of a society found in a suburb or the duress society of an urban core. Land and ownership of major businesses keep the top stratum of a rural town where it is. I could tell hard times had come when the drive from home to work was suddenly a drive through a clear cutting camp.

The SUV's don't disappear, nor the Lexis cars. The trees do, though, as rural towns are land based, and people will believe that the trees on their land can give emergency money during a disaster. In 2010, I saw an entire region sell trees. The perspective of the world got much shorter all of a sudden. I'm no fan of this thinking, but I'm no fan of the pine tree -- which is the most common citizen taken from the soil (Roy Barnes ran for governor of Georgia last time saying that Georgia was the "Saudi Arabia of pine trees"). My opposition, though, is not simply aesthetic.

In North Carolina, the botanical garden is pretty cool. They have all the pwetty flowers, but the real botanical garden is along a series of trails that go miles through the woods and rise in elevation by a couple of hundred feet. Along the way, there are plaques marking out the zones the trail is emulating and illustrating the plants of the state present there. That's how a state botanical garden ought to do it, I think. It was there that I was walking and came to a mature tree fallen over a creek, and it had a plaque.

The botanical garden explained that this mature tree fell over because of run-off. 1. People put in parking lots and roads that do not absorb rain water. 2. The rain water hits local streams in vaster amounts and at greater speeds. 3. This stream, way back in the woods, is fed by those streams running behind subdivisions of houses. 4. The water is running fast and digs out the dirt underneath the tree. 5. A tree that had been growing comfortably for 120 years falls over.

1999, outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina

My employer faced a briefcase nuke of debt. When it had needed a grant, it had gotten a loan, and the interest on that loan had consumed all of its proceeds and then some. It sold a vast lot of land that fronted the highway in 2011, and its trees of value were gone quickly, then the rest were burned before bulldozers went to work on the soil.

These last few months, I've been grimmer and less operatic in my morbidity. This is because all of the talk of lingering shadows has been closer.

My mother's condition is puzzling. She will not initiate any actions. She will sit or lie and stare, with a mind fully active. She is not vacant, and any conversation with her reveals how vivacious she is, but she won't stand up, won't walk, won't move around anywhere. As for whether or not she is confused, that is a question of which six hour period you speak to her in. One segment is good, and another is bad, and another is acceptable but trending good or bad. This means, for me, that I have to be extraordinarily involved in ways that I had and do and will dread.

Yesterday, a colleague of mine died of liver cancer.

Also, as I was coming home and praying that my car's wheels stayed on, I passed a horrible wreck, where a tan sedan had its top smashed in and torn off sideways. A large -- very large -- tree from the lot the employer had sold was down across the roadway, too. I prayed for the ambulance workers that they have skill and success, and I prayed for those involved, that their lives might be spared.

Two college freshmen had been in that tan car, and the tree had fallen on them as they were going 40 mph or thereabouts. They were both killed at the scene.

Death mocks the young. It turns the sententious old men's voices to cruelty. Those who had said, Think of your future, and Plan for your life after college, are moved from the wise to the vicious, and those who said, Listen to the voice, for you have been called here must choke. The death of young men is vinegar and ash. They die in the high tide of life, when passions are stronger than reason or body, when the heart's truths can't be contained.

The middle aged death is the explosion of worlds. My colleague's wife becomes a widow, which is no thing to marry. The children, below ten years, have to hear echoes of God's purpose and not understand that death is not a judgment, not an evil, not a sentence carried out on this person or that. They have to know that love is undimmed and undiminished by death, and that death can quiet the body, but it cannot remove a father, truly. All changes, and bills mount, and the future looks to have been written in black on black, night in night, because of the jeering interruption of death, which said "No" to plans.

Death to the old is no better, for it sounds the bell. As one friend goes or another, or as one acquaintance or another goes, the generation and all the world a person has known announces that it is passed and that you, you too, belong in that quiet. The constant funerals become death's repeated tattoo: "Isn't it time for you, too?" Then one sits waiting -- fully alert and hoping for a catastrophic blow that will spare the dribbled out life of the thousand indignities.

I am taking a break from talking about suicide and gloom, myself. Instead, let's look over at those fields. The reason the trees are worth keeping is the vast roots. They make a city underneath the surface. They are interlaced fingers of roots clasping hands. When death comes to them, it comes, but it should not be because we took the soil from beneath the roots. It should not be because rain, the life giver, has cut through our breast.

The Joy of the Loveless

"I decided that if the

shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of

the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,

and I concentrated my attention with careful

subtlety to this end." -- T. S. Eliot, "Hysteria," 1920

Your life, like most lives, is a tale of inappropriate loves that swerved one way or the other in the chaos of time by the impact of mismatched forces. Appropriate love, all the sober gray heads would agree, is of a living object better and bettering than the self; this definition may be behind our stumbles, but, like the naked mole rats we resemble, we feel our way by warmth on our pelts, blindly going "Warmer, warmer... colder, colder," falling this side or that of apathy's zero state.

And you thought Art History wasn't a good major!

 I was at the circus yesterday -- Mal-Wart, I mean -- and my absurd remnant of desire had me looking at women, girls, crones, and mothers, and then each would go from retina to a filter that may not be the same as other men's. I did not go to sexual attraction, but fitness of soul. A carriage, a posture of head, a relaxed face, would say that she was angry or worried or innocent, serious or vain. After that coarse speculation came nothing, really, but a reflected impulse, whereby I thought on time or life. Some women, more girls, did not inhabit their bodies, and others did not master them. Some were younger than their years, but more were older or matched.

I saw several who were in the last of their teens, but their world was older. They had become mothers or already learned to fear a ringing phone, and so their minds were not where their flesh was. Another was about twenty-five, but her eyes never held anything they touched, and her feet never reached the ground when she walked, and I realized, "She thinks seventeen." (There is not a word missing in that sentence.)

There may be more stages, more fixed points than the ones I know about, but it seems to me that there are ages we actually are. The "want to grow old" age is a mind that cannot have a number on it, because it is an age that, by its primary desire, tells itself that it is dependent, controlled, and inexperienced. Then, though, there is seventeen. Some thirteen year olds -- tough kid boys with older brothers who initiate them into beer and drugs early, girls who 'blossom' early and are stunned by the shockwave -- think seventeen, but it's usually the thinking of the triumph over puberty. It is having won against one's own body, feeling its contours as reliable and being relieved, at long last, of daily name calling, back stabbing, and fighting with same sex peers.

Some people are mistakenly under the impression that thinking seventeen is happiness. Ask someone who is seventeen, though. The next year is twenty-three. The graduating college person, the full of information person, the self-confident competent person who announces independence for the first time and competency for the first time and isn't awed by it -- this is the person who has the beer party, who goes to that strange restaurant with her friends, who organizes a potluck on her own. This is the person who writes the famously dense novel filled with every idea he or she ever had. (The genre of the novel of twenty-three could fill two graduate seminars.)

Then there's thinking thirty. Most of us past thirty think thirty. The thrills are gone. It's not neat to get mail in the mailbox. Parties are boring. Dating is dreaded. More money thought than creative thought goes on, and there is worry. One is at full power, but only to find that the world really has only a very, very small spot on the dance floor for each of us to move in.

I have just discovered that there is thinking fifty, too. This is the regretful and the "Oh, no" thinking, as well as the thinking of diminishment. It remains until the last thought -- being the person who is weak, and that, like the first, has no number associated with it. The first mind is one we flee as quickly as we are able, and the last is one we adopt only after we have no other choice.

The women I looked at fell into ages -- ages of mind. I also looked at their kindness, because to me that may be most needed. When I came back to the house, after that trip to the circus, I saw a man my age moving some heavy thing in a ditch. His wife was standing behind him with her arms crossed under her bra, her cropped hair a blond contrast to her red face. He placed the thing somewhere and looked eagerly under his arm behind him, and then bent back down. This is all I saw, but I was going 20 mph, so I saw that much. I also saw that she was a woman of a stunning figure at twenty, a heart of frustration lurking beneath it, and a mind of ways things must be done. (I have no praise for the man, but her stance was a cliche.)

Als das kind kind war
We think and are, at first, in love. Some people mistake this for joy. They are allowed to do so, because it can seem that way later, but it is, instead, trust. When one has no trust left, the thinking "when I grow up" seems idyllic, because it was a time of loving parents and teachers and police and aunts and uncles and the family dog. Even as it meant no self control, no power, it meant love. It was a false love, because it was a temporary one. All those things could be stronger, smarter, and wiser than the child, but not better -- as gummy eyed poets have said, and as Jesus made clear (it does occur to me, now, that, although Jesus in other places says that we must become children again and that the prophecy is fulfilled that the wise are made simple, the simple wise, the particular circumstance of this saying was of sick children and children suffering and having faith). After the completely thoughtless phases of grabbing whatever is wanted are gone, the aspiring young who think about their future are fine.

The next mind we inhabit is the one of self-aware division, where we fall victim to love's mating and lust's warfare, and we know it. I doubt there is a person who has gone through the mind and not been aware of some falseness to the driver. As for falling in love, I could point you at Shakespeare or other Elizabethans who have such precise words for it. ("This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid; /Regent of love-rhymes,  lord of folded arms,/ The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,/ Liege of all loiterers and malcontents." Marriage, the goal of earthly love, "’T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.") Most of the Restoration wits saw love as a disease and lust as its fever, and they had elaborate metaphors for it -- what else but a disease could make a person behave in such a way, and what else but a fever could animate a person to such a degree?

Passing, or not passing, that, we join, or we join around the mind of twenty-three. I now advise teenagers to marry, and to do it quickly, because the false love of seventeen is negated by the false love of twenty-three. At seventeen's mind, it is union. The other person is better than you and has all the parts you lack, and two-in-one will solve the failure of isolation's deficits. Palm to palm and chest to chest, face to face, we have union -- a wonder enough to keep us forever and yet transient enough, mutable enough, to make us aware that it may be a shadow. She isn't better, and he isn't. She makes you a better person . . . somewhat, and he makes you stronger. . . when he isn't ruining everything. Union is so rarely complete, synchronized, and without tugging on the rope that we have a valid love, a good love, but still a misdirection.

Marry, children! Marry soon, or don't, because when you begin to live in the mind of twenty-three, you will fall in love with someone else. Around the age of nineteen, you will meet the most fascinating, compliant, coy, and agreeably cryptic and great person, ever: You.

From nineteen until thirty, you are the most interesting person you know. Why are you like ___? Why don't people like you more? Why aren't you wealthier? Why do you procrastinate? All these questions and more will come to you in time, and you'll answer them and others -- several times over. This is not a quality of the affluent only, either. The first flush of reflection, which occurs the moment the hormones take their claws off the gas pedal, leads to more.

The thirty mind can hit at twenty. It's just when you no longer think of yourself as a glorious subject, and instead think of yourself as a persecuted subject. The thirty year old mind is responsible, dutiful, over-stretched, under-appreciated, and busy. No one knows the beauty and sophistication of the great Self that the twenty-three year old was, and no one will see how wrong he is. Instead, whatever answers to the Big Mysteries of Me the person came up with, those stick, because now we are busy.

Imagine a man who marries at twenty-three -- a normal enough time. He might go into the wonder of self for a short time. That wonder lust wanderlust takes a person to blame first, then persecution, and then understanding, followed by repetition on a more accurate level. First up for most people is "Mom and Dad made me this way." That's the usual answer, but it doesn't usually last. However, if that man has his first child and is running his business the next year, he goes right from seventeen/nineteen to thirty, frozen at the introspective point until the next grand turn.

The love of the self's intricacies, its labyrinth of history and the pachinko game of the future, can better the self or worsen the self and probably does. However, it is not love of an object. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said, but the examined life is not lived at all. The love affair of nineteen to twenty-three is necessary refining, but it's a false love. It precedes another false love: the battering of the body and will against other men and women and against capital to secure against time some light -- a profit, a trust, land, a home, generations, traditions. I don't think I need to argue with anyone very hard that this effort is rarely successful on its own terms and never a proper love. Love of children is great, but it isn't the spur.

Being fifty in mind means a panic, sure. It means knowing that the clock is running down, really. It's not the knowing, though: it's the inescapable, daily pain. Unlike an injury, age picks surprising joints and muscles to fire. So, we look back. We look ahead. We evaluate. The thirty age mind gets disgraced, often when the children are old enough to not need a custodial parent. The seventeen year old mind gets shouted at, often when the marriage mate is doing the same. The nineteen year old seems more attractive than even the seventeen year old: it's time to once again discover the self, to find out where things went wrong, to tap into potential, to talk to people of the opposite sex who are engaged in those quests.

Most of us are sane. We just wish, think, and grunt. We don't go nuts. Furthermore, that foolishness washes off, eventually, but we're left with the self, and then memory as its grist.

As for love affairs, I have no advice. I was rejected by eHarmony. But that love? Well, the soul is big enough to fold and open, and I can't see any love but one as sovereign.

Advent

Let us make it clear: this is not about the Christmas spirit, or about the solstice, or about a Fox News personality's paranoid frisson. This is, first and foremost, about time. “Time and tide,” we say, when the words are synonyms in Old English. When it's “Eastertide” or “Christmastide,” the “tide” means “season” and “time.” This, then, is about Advent tide, and why that isn't Christmas.

I will acknowledge right off that I am peculiar. I am an anti-rationalist (which has nothing to do with irrationality, by the way) and a Christian humanist, and so I'm attracted to mysticism. I follow a long parade of better minds in this regard. From Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein, philosophers who have dealt with the insane limitations of enquiry have come to the conclusion that IF there is a Something Grander, reason won't go there.

However, liking mysticism is rather like being an inhabitant of Greenland. Someone lives there, you know, but they'd have a devil of a time getting you to visit.

Like Anglo-Saxon, Greek had more than one word for time. “Chronos” is the word used for time in general, and it's the customary word. However, the New Testament famously (ok, famously in the circles of people who read Greek) uses the other word, “kairos.” Even if you reject the tradition of Christian writing on the New Testament, the word “kairos” carried with it a sense of “right time” or “particular moment.” Therefore, a translator might say, “And at one particular time she was to be delivered,” but that can also mean, “She was due” or “When it was correct” (Luke 2:6).

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (or vice versa) have an essay in The Dyer's Hand about /kairos/, and I read it when I was young and impressionable. I didn't like it. I hated it. Consequently, it has informed my outlook ever since. Auden ties the breakthrough between supernatural reality and quotidian reality to separate cycles of time, whereby our natural, plodding time will assemble itself through myriad acts of free will and necessity into these few shocks of transcendent history, when God's history and our history converge in the “fullness of time.” (It turns out that I am a liar or a doddering fool, as I have searched electronic versions of The Dyer's Hand and found nothing, but I have found “For the Time Being” by the author. I have also discovered that Kierkegaard had quite a bit to say about “fullness of time.”)

Precision is impossible with these concepts because of how fluid they were. W. B. Yeats wanted to find history circling itself in “gyres,” where there would be moments of contact between the coils of the unwound spring. These contact points would be transcendent, as a single grand narrative played out over and over again. The French Symbolists, especially as they suffered revival by T. S. Eliot, saw a second world's signification lying beneath the scattered and broken objects of the war-ravaged landscape. While they silently held onto a priesthood of art by having the Poet be the one who could see the hidden, they also overtly secularized transcendence. It was supernatural, anti-rational, profound in the literal sense, and timeless.

By The Four Quartets, Eliot's mysticism was more classically Christian. He had, instead of a counter-narrative in life, the counter-narrative of humanity and, even below that, a rhyming, pulsing sense of spirit in time. I think Eliot would not have liked Kierkegaard, or anything that denied essence, but the two visions fit well.

The reason I am rambling through all of this is to show that this feeling, “like a splinter in your mind,” is hoary and persistent. Some of our more sensitive and thoughtful people have also found in it not a grand illusion, but a grand truth. For myself, I have to go back to the real before I can find anything super-real.

Metaphors of Life

How do we speak of life and time? We speak of the “circle of life” and the “river of time.” Sometimes we use a metaphor of a train, a journey, or growth for life, and the interconnected events of nature are sometimes phrased as a balance. The Magna Mater is kind of rare these days, but sometimes Mother Nature shows up, if only in advertisements for personal hygiene products.

The circle of life is both value neutral and nullified. It is purposeless, perpetual, and indifferent. We can only break it by caring or evading it. Further, it is a metaphor of biology and science, as it focuses upon eating and reproducing as the meaning of living. Since every time we speak the language, our language speaks us, this metaphor betrays our desires or infects them.

The “river” of time has been around for thousands of years. While Heraklitus might himself have meant to propose a stoical and mystical end, the metaphor is quietistic. It is fatal, as it suggests the particulate nature of the speaker, the hopelessness of understanding, much less commenting upon, the current, and the inevitability of events.

I was out in the managed wilderness yesterday, and I closed my eyes and listened. To listen, there must be sound instead of noise, and being far from a highway allowed me to hear things as they were without our intentionality splattered across them.

Digression for pastoralism

I apologize for being a self-indulgent jerk (it's ok: I forgive me), but this is what occurred to me while I was out there.

Most of all, the birds and the wind sound. The wind does not sigh, at least not here, not often. It swells a chorale, the chords shifting gracefully like curtains sweeping across the land, and the tree limbs and leaves, those freed corpses rolling about as tides of memnto mori until they bed in graves about the path, sing and shake rhythm and counter melody beside. And when the wind falls silent, it is only thinking of the next long syllable to play on the world. The lake's surface knows in its body what we cannot hear in our ears: there is always a breeze, for what else is the current?

The birds play tree specific notes. Sp! Sp! Is all the straw-blended sparrows say, until one says, Food. As each peeps and sings, the songs clash, but that mixture and burble is the hillside in winter. Besides, the loudest call, and most common, comes from the one who respects no season: the red tail hawk who is always complaining to no one in particular about the one that got away. When it is silent, it is only because it has no complaint.

The respiration of nature

Nature's order is each of the things we have said of it, but it is something more basic, too, something we carry in ourselves. It is wax and wane, ebb and surge. The natural world respirates, and respiration carries within it the cycle and the motion, for we never have the same breath twice.

When we humans set out order, we plan, and we will. We intend, and we let either a goal or a past event (history) set forth our intention, but the natural world accommodates by allowing any individual item to be whatever it is and still set the growth/release model.

Tide

The Anglo-Saxon tide is a period of time, a season, and an area of time when things are right. Like /kairos/, it is fullness, fitness, appropriateness. It can also be “area of time surrounding on a calendar,” but that is only true in a very limited sense. This is Christmas tide.

The Advent, for Christians, is not a time for simple meanings. The signal events in the Christian story are the ones most difficult, most ambivalent, calling for joy and grief simultaneously, for awareness of birth and death. I heard a young man pray in thanks for Christmas, because “Fathagod” it was “the time when you took all that sin on yourself.” For that young man and his dualist theology, he could only think of Advent as the birth of the crucifixion. The life of Jesus was hardly there at all.

The birth's meaning is far greater than his understanding, I think. As Auden and the others were saying, this is a moment, for Christians, when the three times intersect, when the natural order and the narrative order and the divine shatter. The moment of incarnation is parallel, proleptic, and also unique. Mary's response to Gabriel in the annunciation mirrors Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, and the taking up of her flesh mirrors the words of institution at the last supper. (In other words, the flesh is important, in all its suffering.) At the same time, it is when the first sin, when Eve and Adam wanted to know what evil was and got their wish, is given the complex answer in the new humanity. All of that is involved, and so every sign repeats, leaps forward, calls to something from before, and evokes in such a way that any effort at pinning it down to “Happy baby” or “Whew, the cross is coming” or “He will ascend” is missing everything for trying at something.

No one knows when Jesus was born, not even the year. The traditional mass and feast for Jesus was set for December 25^th in the west. For many Sundays prior, traditional lectionaries have readings to prepare for the feast, as this is not a question of Christmas, but of the Advent, nor of a day nor time, but of a tide.