Endnote: In Medias Res
Art and War
Why Dante?
Faces
Notes On Noise
Horn Lore
The Woman from Beijing
Tribes
The Black and White Blues: “No Man Am I” & “I Am
What I Am.”
On Edge
Snakemate
Spirit-Life
Words For the Silences
A Pen in A Hand
The Writing Life
Late Thoughts at the Mayo Clinic ER
Late Night Leopard Thoughts
Dancing Around Black Holes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Late Night Thoughts about Life, Learning and Literature
Copyright © 2023 Emilio DeGrazia
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2023 Rocket Science Press
ISBN-979-8-9875338-7-1
Again, to Monica for her patient kindness as lover, wife, mother, housemate, critic, citizen
Endnote: In Medias Res
Milton begins Paradise Lost in hell, in medias res, “in the middle of things.” My life story was already well on its way when I was born on that cold as hell night of February 16, 1941. How was I to know then that in a few months bombs would fall on Pearl Harbor, or that World War I had set the stage for Hitler’s rise and the horrors of World War II? Those events postdated while pre-existing in me. Much was happening in and to me, not only in my nine womb months but in the years, even centuries, before I first saw the light coming from the bulb above my mother’s bed on that 11 p.m. night, my birth day. Now, decades later, as my story gets more interestingly intense, I’m still in medias res, with little promise that any rising action will bring a wholly satisfying climax with it. I’ve always had a hard time doing without some new exciting thing that’s already happened to me, especially when
profound desire to know keeps nagging me to guess how things will turn out. But how can my life story have a happy ending, when it’s certain to suddenly stop or cripple me with some awful traffic accident or disease? What’s most troubling is that I’ll never know how the larger story that preordained me concludes the one with wars, pandemics, pollution, Artificial Intelligence, real intelligence, music and nature’s beauty in it.
For my son Dante’s 18 th birthday, as he goes to college to study music and art
What follows are a father’s comments, so they come from an older time, and from someone making no claim to be an expert about art. So my advice gives me pause. I’m an amateur, a lover of certain kinds of art. My faith is that some good may come from the art I deeply love, in its making and uses, and in the loving of it as cultural influences
John Ruskin, the Victorian empire’s most eminent art authority, gives me, a proud citizen of the state of Minnesota in the U.S.A., some bitter food for thought. “All pure and noble arts of peace,” he said, “are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among an agricultural people if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art, but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.”
These are fighting words, and Ruskin didn’t hold his fire, especially since he delivered them in 1865 at a commencement ceremony for cadets about to see the world as products of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England. His insistence that the “arts of peace” are “founded on war” seems odd coming from a man who was outspoken in defense of the underclass, those most likely to be the victims of war. If the cadets at the commencement ceremony were certain that Ruskin was not eager to rush them off to war, they also were left to wonder about what potential for art was latent in them as warriors. Were they, like William Blake’s tiger, “burning bright/In the forests of the night”? Would they, and the “deadly terrors” they were trained to inflict, “dare frame [a] fearful symmetry?” Did
their ability to destroy and create come from the same energies?
If Ruskin’s comments about the relationship between art and war were stroked with a broad brush that leaves abstractions in its wake, my own responses here seem like some examples I’ve seen of so-called minimalist art that inspired in me bouts of distance gazing in which only a few broad forms are visible. Every writer faces the blank page with a teeming and dizzied mind. What escapes the pen are a few threads that only hint at the ongoing unraveling of the mind’s tangled thoughts, beliefs, impressions and prejudices. I’m not sure I understand or like minimalist art, but I start here with a few minimal scrawls. Then I dare to add more scrawls, some of them very broad, until I run out of periods.
Travel helps open the eyes, and sometimes it opens the mind to troubling questions about both art (I mean music too) and war. When I first visited Europe as a student (in 1967) London was my first big city eye-opener. What I saw and heard left me in awe the elegant Parliament buildings, the organ concert in Westminster Abbey, the National Gallery, British Museum, Windsor Palace, etc. etc. etc. My awe deepened when I saw Paris next Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, the Sainte Chapelle, etc. etc. etc. By the time I found myself on the streets of Florence and Rome I was almost numbed by the array of churches and cathedrals, museums and villas, paintings and statues, grand houses and palaces.
I returned “home” to Detroit in late August of that same year. My city, one that in my boyhood had landmarks, a symphony orchestra, and museums resembling those I’d just experienced in Europe, looked like a war zone. The city lay in ruins. And still does.
I’ve been to Europe four times now, in part to feast my eyes on the art. Much of Europe is, as Hemingway said of Paris, “a moveable feast.”
It was during my third trip to Rome (in 1994) that I finally got a sense of what Ruskin was trying to tell the cadets. On that trip my legs again were about as numb as my sense of awe, perhaps because my mind was weighed down by a few dense books I’d been reading. Taken together those books gave me a deeper, and not wholly lofty, view of European history.
What struck me as I stood (small) in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica was (again) its sheer magnificence. It is a stunning achievement of human engineering and art, accomplished without modern machines the result of many careful hands working for almost two hundred years to realize a grand and ambitious vision. In heavenly places on earth like St. Peter’s and other grand cathedrals believers feel their faith surge, and even unbelievers feel the uplifting gravity of massive well-carved stones.
But as I stood there in that grand artwork my awe eventually came down to earth’s common sense. A question began nagging me: Why did so many people go to so much trouble?
The grand, and official, answer immediately came to mind: For the glory of God. Yes, of course. Sincerity of belief deserves being honored for its honesty and intensity, if not for belief’s content and purposes. But why worship in this grand, expensive, and perhaps inefficient way? Why not find God and spirituality instead in a simple flower, or in a beggar woman’s brown eyes? Why not put the emphasis, energy, genius, and money toward addressing down to earth needs––spiritual and material instead?
What would Ruskin say? That if art is the result of human passions unleashed by war’s excess, and if the winners of wars are profiteers, then art patrons are the beneficiaries and custodians of war’s excess. In Old Europe art patrons were kings, aristocrats, bishops, and wealthy merchants. In today’s more democratic times patrons are corporations, the wealthy, and more ordinary “consumers” of art. Art serves
their individual personality needs, or the purposes which they define for it.
I wonder a lot about art’s purposes.
Ruskin suggests that poor people have no time or resources for the making of enduring art because they are busy doing basic life-sustaining work. If art requires leisure and money, these arrive wholesale as a consequence of conquest, often of poor people trying to get through the day by doing their life-sustaining chores. The spoils of war that ancient conquering armies paraded past cheering crowds featured not only the women, girls and boys they enslaved; it included the spoils of war, stolen stuff made from silver, gold, and brass, and, less visibly, the leisure and wealth necessary for the making of more art. Slaves did much of the work on many of the monuments we adore.
I see some progress when it comes to victory parades. Today the enslavement of women, girls and boys is not usually put on parade. And what happens in sweatshops is not, technically speaking, slavery.
Don’t get me wrong: The food for thought Ruskin provides is hard to swallow whole. His comments, like mine here, are only abstractly meaningful, like some art. I love what I believe is (good) art, and I’m as capable as anyone of liking bad and ordinary art. I’m also a beneficiary of several wars, a prosperous child of World War II and several other wars since. My prosperity is linked to the death of thousands of soldiers and civilians. So in my good time I feel privileged to spend a few hours scribbling poems rather than digging potatoes out of dirt. But I can’t stand on any street in London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, St. Paul or Minneapolis without wondering about the sources of the wealth that paid for the great art roosting in these wonderful places, and what provided me the leisure for scribbling poems. Now and then I pause to ask why I write poems. After reading Ruskin the word “empire” keeps creeping into
my mind, and with it the image of a child, dark-skinned, bigeyed, and starving.
I prefer not to be personally responsible for every darkskinned and big-eyed child starving somewhere in the world, and my poems don’t feed starving children. Nor should an artist’s sons or daughters plunge into wholesale guilt over their failures to address everything wrong with the world. It’s easy to find someone else to blame. Only dimly and distantly do we see ourselves as individually responsible, especially in the absence of a sense of collective responsibility.
And only dimly and often distantly is war obviously connected to the production of individual works of art. But hard questions still nag, with tangles too gnarled and fine to unravel into uniformed lines standing at attention in short essay form.
If there is a hint of truth in what Ruskin said about the arts “that no great art ever yet rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers” I cannot easily dismiss the conclusion that the prosperity of the arts we enjoy might be directly proportional to a people’s inclination to wage wars. That the U.S. has been almost continuously at war since (and before) the Revolutionary War rightly or wrongly, by proxy or directly, in hot or cold confrontations is clearly outlined in history books most people prefer not to read. Since 1846 the U.S. military has “intervened,” for example, 79 times in Latin America alone, and for most of the last half-century we as U.S. citizens have enjoyed the aura of peace at home even while we have been actively at war abroad. If war is a major part of American enterprise and if art is one of its byproducts, on what grounds can the expenditure of public money for arts development be defended? And why should peace-lovers value the arts?
These questions are especially troubling when we consider how war art has been used to legitimize and empower princes, dictators, nations and businesses that find wars
useful. When we think of “Europe” an artificial construct comes to mind: We think of the great capitals London, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Rome, etc. etc. etc. and of their fine and noble art. We speak of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, with the glory and grandeur of their art providing us some reason to look past the abuses these empires visited on conquered people. Seldom do bean pickers, goat herders and woodcutters come to mind, except in folk and fairy tales, and seldom as victims of the so-called winners of wars. Except for a sculpture by Michaelangelo I’m aware of no European monument representing slaves, who did most of the hard labor of empire-building, as laborers, and as anonymous artists and artisans.
Self-interested individual artists routinely serve the selfinterests of war’s sponsors. Statues and portraits of war heroes are favorite subjects of art, as are landscapes of war scenes, rousing marches, and inspirational novels for young adults that exalt “heroic” virtues. Now we also get a manly fill of violent big screen movies, some of which resemble horrific video games, and these we consume as a staple of our cultural fast-food cuisine. When I step back from such displays I begin wondering if even war art deemed “grand” and “fine” provides war a vulgar beauty, and compelling power, it doesn’t deserve. Can it do anything more, usually, than glorify and caricature war’s horrific realities? Is any art about war truly “realistic?” Can it ever be? Does such art not only distract but also delude us?
It seems easy and appropriate to appreciate “grand” and “fine” art for its “own sake” whatever that means perhaps merely for the sake of the careful craft that goes into it. But do we transfer this appreciation for craft to the purposes for which such art is used? Does the careful artwork of a grand palace chime with the dirty work done by a brutal dictator who once paid workers to construct it, or some corporate bandit who now lives in it? Do fine sculptures and stained-glass windows do justice to priests who looked the other way as so-called witches burned and
as Jews were herded into concentration camps? How lovely were the fine-tuned choruses singing halleluiah as preachers kept their silences while ex-slaves were being lynched? The actions art empowers cast shadows on its lovely forms. How chastely white are the columns holding up the house of presidents who permit torture? And how delicate are the sensibilities of billionaires who make obscene profits from sweatshop labor in order, among other things, to fill their mansions with Picassos and Monets?
As I stood that third time in St. Peter’s the sense of art’s overwhelming power to both lift and delude my spirits descended on me. The question I couldn’t avoid was simply this: Did St. Peter’s as a work of art do more than saints, theology, good deeds and articles of faith to legitimize the authority and define the mission of the Church? Would the Church have been different, and differently Christian, if Michaelangelo, Raphael and a host of other wonderful artists had not enhanced the Church’s aura of authority with their great art? Did their conscientious work put a lovely mask over a lot of corruption, and did their art make “holy” wars more possible, and unholier?
I’m not singling out the Catholic Church. What the Church provides its believers in the way of spirituality is incalculable, and some of its devotees have worked faithfully to reduce poverty and misery. Its indulgence of high taste for the arts chimes with its hierarchical structure, giving it a commanding view of the artless and of its iconoclastic Puritan rivals whose artistic tastes trend toward the simple and plain, often the dreary. But as a political and economic institution that has relied on artistic high taste to enhance its authority, the Church is an easy target. And the questions we direct its way about art’s influence on the minds of people are also applicable to any institution living under the influence of a king, prince, president, millionaire, or committee chair.
There’s no cynic in me asking these questions. I have high, probably unrealistic, hopes for art. So there is a nag in me who keeps wondering about what “good” art is and what it is good for. That nag first asks, What is art? Is it any manmade thing, or is it defined by the desire to express a vision in some sense authentic and original? Are all such visions created equal? Do they have the same inherent value, or do some have qualities that, in some sense, are connected to a sense of beauty, and, presumably, with beauty’s power to do some good in the world? If so, wherein lies art’s beauty and virtue? How are they best expressed?
That nag also tells me there’s a difference between “art” and “craft” that craft refers to skill while art expresses a vision and the values inherent in that vision. The nag supposes that the best art marries expert craft with worthwhile vision, and that the best artists brood over the misuse of worthwhile vision the re-purposing of art, artists, and their reputations.
And the citizen inside the art nag asks if the state, especially a so-called Big Government state like Minnesota, has any business being involved with the arts.
To claim that art has nothing to do with our troubles is to minimize its influence, or to attribute to it a life of its own most of us don’t understand and are unwilling or unable to explain. To claim that it has no behavioral or moral impact on daily life and decision-making neutralizes and dehumanizes its presence. Such claims transport art to some airy sphere where only a few the artsy types “get it.” Art, whether it be a museum piece or simple logo for a new company, is usually selected by a few experts for reasons seldom made clear, sometimes not even to themselves. The experts have their uses for the art they select, and the public is seldom consulted about whether these uses serve the public good.
When we decide not to make sense of art it’s sometimes because both art and artists make us seem stupid when we try to find words. Our language about art revolves around a solipsist set of synonyms: What we “like” we equate with what we call “good.” A standard of preference is identified with a standard of value. If we like something let’s say, for example, a zombie movie is it the same as saying it meets the standard for good movies, and that good movies are no better than the zombie movie we like? In many instances meaningful discussion about this issue goes in circles, and in many cases discussion is socially unacceptable. In the pursuit of this kind of art happiness all opinions about art’s value are created equal.
It is generally assumed that art is good when it is “creative,” but what it creates is often difficult to express in clear terms. When artists and art “consumers” say, “It means whatever you think or want it to mean?” they seldom give a penny for our thoughts as they wait for us to say what they want to hear. For art to mean no more than what consumers want it to mean allows artists to surrender responsibility for defining the uses to which their art may be given once it leaves their hands. Surrendering ownership of a work does not neutralize its moral or social impact, but it frees its new owners to make what they want of it. If art becomes just another commodity like Beanie Babies or Barbie Dolls subject to the whims of its owners or the marketplace, it compromises its ability to define itself by the qualities generated by its purposes, content and structures, and by those inherent in the vision it projects.
But if art is one of the “high virtues and faculties of man” (and women, Ruskin fails to mention), it is also difficult to see outside the context of what Ruskin sees as its primal parent, war. He is unequivocal about war’s art-making ability. “You must have war to produce art,” he tells his cadets. War destroys properties, lives, and other art while creating the profits, and inspirations, that make new art possible. Ruskin’s linkage of what’s “pure and noble” about
war with “expressions of the highest state of the human condition,” however, suggests that not all art is “pure and noble.” No one who is sane would assert that war represents what is “highest” about the human condition, and most would agree that war, even when its cause is “just,” is what is lowest about human enterprise. If we accept that art comes from war, we are not relieved of the responsibility to distinguish between art that expresses “the highest state of the human condition” and art that fosters more war.
In a culture based on the abuses war propagates the term “art” is easily, even promiscuously, abused. It means whatever someone wants it to mean and do. So it’s not surprising that many books have been written celebrating the “art of war,” all of them streamlining warfare into ways of crafting techniques and technologies having their own set of qualities, purposes, and outcomes. This “art,” like war’s glorious monuments, are created to celebrate war’s partisan destructiveness. It is also easy to confuse powerful new military technologies with “art.” Death and destruction, often on a massive scale, are the intent and outcome of these technologies.
It seems sensible to distinguish the technologies of death from the arts of life. *
It’s arguable that art has a natural enemy, nature herself. If “nature” is in some sense the opposite of “art” that is, if what we make with our minds, hands and machines requires us to use natural resources, and thereby even destroy, the spaces, plants, animals, and resources provided us by nature then art may be said to be nature’s enemy. Do we delude ourselves when we claim that the making of art is a wholly “creative” act, especially when we bulldoze a field alive with trees, weeds, and grasses to build a new museum on it?
As the natural environment gets “developed” a term seldom seen as a synonym for “debased” we find more
and more of the natural world routinely abused and exhausted. It has become obvious now to all but the most persistent blind believers that we live in a special state of emergency calling on us to distinguish between art that destroys nature from that which allows us to make a truce with it.
One critical question there are others facing the present generation and its stressed planet is strictly aesthetic: If art is one of the spoils of war and a despoiler of nature, can it also be conceived as an act of resistance that makes war and the destruction of nature less certain? Can art, child of war, be war’s spoil sport? And can art ally itself to nature in ways at once useful, beautiful, and recreative?
Ruskin’s comments about art’s incestuous relationship to war and the inherent antipathy between art and nature should make Minnesota’s citizens proud of the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment that had broad public support when it was approved by the state government in 2008. The Amendment’s arts and culture clause was embedded in environmental protection aims: “To protect, enhance and restore our wetlands, prairies, forest, fish, game and wildlife habitat; to preserve our arts and cultural heritage; to support our parks and trails; and to protect, enhance, and restore our lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater.” To fulfill these ambitious ends the State of Minnesota, damned as a Big Government State by some, increased its sales tax on spenders by 3/8 of one percent.
In contrast, the U.S. government, the most generous sponsor of wars, penny pinches the arts. For the year 2014 the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act called for $638,000,000,000 billion dollars in “defense” spending, with another $85,600,000,000 for “winding down” the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the $154.46 million allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency that supports arts activities in all 50 states, looks miniscule in comparison to the roughly one billion dollars spent
annually to fund military musicians. The numbers suggest that the U.S. government is willing to admit the existence of the arts as a national pastime, and that music by and for soldiers and their supporters is the most important national arts activity.
Most troubling is art that does the work of war by inspiring irrational fears. The huge U.S. defense budget suggests that people in the U.S. have a lot to fear. To justify such huge expenditures on war we should first ask if the fears are imagined or real. We might also ask if the fears have external foreign and “enemy” sources, or if they are in part generated by a steady consumption of American art.
A steady stream of thriller novels and big-budget terroraction movies comes to mind.
When domestic art generates fear it may be an enemy’s most powerful weapon, making it easier for nations to wage war on each other and the arts that resist enemy influences. Art suffers collateral damage in any war, but ideological and religious wars zero in on an enemy’s artwork. Iconoclasm is a regular feature of religious wars, with a culture’s symbolic art often reduced to elemental forms such as rubble, silver and gold. When art loses its face value as the expression of individual and cultural visions, and when it undergoes diasporas outside the societies in which it was created, its anonymity becomes useful to those willing to undermined its purposes. When precious objets d’art are destroyed they become worthless, and when melted down they live on simply as hard, and abstract, currency. While the prices of fine art often become absurdly bloated they are also subject to the ironies of terrible times that may reduce their value far below the price of a cabbage, a glassful of clean water, or one fresh apricot.
But art’s forbidding power to preserve itself is suggested by many historical survivor examples. It is common for warring nations to destroy enemy temples with impunity, but exceptional art is sometimes spared. During World War II
what was it that prevented generals from issuing orders to bomb the cathedral at Cologne, or from excluding Kyoto, Japan, as a possible A-bomb target? These sites were not spared so they could become spoils of war, for it was the conquerors who were carried away with them. Nor were they spared because they represented sacred creeds. During both world wars dutiful Christian soldiers devastated many Christian holy shrines in Europe and beyond, and they certainly had no special interest in preserving the Shinto religion worshipped in the temples of Kyoto they did not destroy. The artwork of these holy places had a power that made them exceptions to war’s destructive ways, and this power was more important to the survival of these sites than were the creeds they stood for that failed to keep the peace. It is also doubtful that they were saved by those who make a religion of art for art’s sake. Clearly, the structures of those shrines spared by American bombs had a spiritual power that touched something deep in our very humanity. The magnificent expression of that depth took an elegant, convincing, and successful stand against war. What would John Ruskin say, notably about the Minnesota Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment money earmarked “to preserve our arts and cultural heritage” and natural resources? That Minnesotans are convinced the private sector will not generate enough war arts without state support?
Or that they want to give peace, and nature, a chance.
So while war’s excesses make art possible, what kind of art does war generate that opposes war? If wars eat their own children, what are the features of “the pure and noble arts of peace” that break away from war fathers? Ruskin acknowledges that some art does when he says that war gives birth to “All the pure and noble arts of peace.”
What can the best art do? What inheres in its very nature that fosters life?
The question gets giddy as we turn it different ways, and it develops a distant look of abstraction as we try to define basic standards that apply it to multiple art forms. Our varied responses to individual works of art resist definition but invite further discussion. This resistance is one of art’s best strengths. The aura of uncertainty call it mystery in its best examples surrounding certain art sets it apart from the clarities offered by caricature, stereotype and business as usual propaganda necessary to the demonizing of enemies. Such mystery challenges us to re-articulate our emotional and mental responses to real experiences. Art’s mystery creates new life by reawakening us to life’s variety, complexity, dissonance, fluidity, and forms. It attracts us to these variables by way of an invariable, the constant at their core, a form of beauty James Joyce associates with the word “radiance.” The heart intuitively tunes this constant in, though it often lacks words for it.
War art moves away from this ideal, not toward simplicity but toward the sameness that generates revulsion, disorder and violence. The appropriate critical response to it Joyce appropriately calls “loathing.” Some pieces of music and art spontaneously cause us to turn away from them; loathing manifests itself both as actual disgust and as lifeless apathy. If Ruskin drew attention to the military aspects of the art of ancient Egypt and Greece, and praised the art of Gothic chivalry sponsored by “the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy” as work that allowed “a passionate delight in war itself, for its own sake [to be] born again” he was as terrified as he was charmed by it. In recent centuries one of state-sponsored art’s favorite subjects are the uniform and the super-symmetry of battalions marching in tidy rows in honor of the violent chaos of war. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, her celebration of a brutal Nazi regime, is one of war’s award-winning twentieth century masterworks.
Though in his speech to the cadets Ruskin asserted that, “whenever the faculties of men are at their fullest, they must
express themselves by art,” good art’s lust for beauty’s original faces and forms is war’s enemy. Certainly we are all born with creative impulses that males, not able to give biological birth, express via art. If some psychiatrists blame outbreaks of war on repression of libidinous energies, sublimation of these energies is a way of enlisting beauty into rebellions against oppression. The cadets Ruskin addressed at the Royal Military Academy, like painters, sculptors and musicians, have the urge to break the chains that bind emotional, sexual, economic, moralistic, political. Good art, like war, wants out, and will out, like graffiti splashed on public monuments as individual expressions of resistance to the powers monuments represent. A nation’s well-being perhaps may be measured by the quality of the graffiti its nameless artists produce.
But graffiti art also serves war when performed by those who find making a point as easy as shooting a gun. Art calculated to make a point, especially when as narrow as artless minds, shrinks to a slogan useful to propaganda pushers. In good art there are never merely “points,” and never just black or white, or bad guys and good, however these melodramatic opposites present themselves. There are instead shades and shapes seen in no rainbow or on no skin surface, shadows of meaning lurking in conspiring metaphors, sharps and flats singing minor melodies as the brass section rages on in C-major. The innuendoes, inflections, and reflections of such art gather to attempt the impossible: Visions of the world’s realities on the move, morphing as they distinguish themselves from the stereotype and banal.
What good do good artists do as a class? Their eccentric genies together escape from magic lanterns to change and trouble us. In war-oriented societies (such as ours) in which war is a well-heeled and respected norm, artists keep testing and extending the parameters of the possible. The pleasure good art provides, its radiance, is difficult to forbid or wall out. It quietly gets into the goosebumps under our skins.
While art that serves war dulls the senses and mind, and often is calculated to distract people from war’s presence and realities by “entertaining” them, art that makes peace engages people by holding or transfixing them, putting them on alert. A given aspect of art genius is its ability, like metaphors, to “bring things together,” and these linkages are most originally of things not normally associated. So the oddness we find in much art, its dissonance and originality, is a way of establishing the metaphoric, and organic, unity of individuals, societies and nature. As such, art extends itself to outsiders the eccentric, the ill and disabled, the rebellious, the unseemly and tunes communities into their presence. As outsiders are more clearly seen it becomes more difficult to make enemies of them.
Given war’s origins in centers of power and its monopolization of the arts by the wealthy and powerful, the decentralization of art makes it friendly to democracies. Ordinary people need and love the arts, and love doing art. To imagine that art belongs in and emanates from the boondocks is an unconventional view, and popular art raises issues not unlike those raised by “pure and noble” aristocratic art with its addiction to expensive, often absurdly extravagant, tastes. New and young artists not steeped in aristocratic arts will make mistakes; they will confuse arts with crafts and entertainment, and noise with music, for example. But an arts culture is a crucible, and when what’s hot in the pot is well-stirred something good is likely to come of it. This something may be very good for those artists or not who could use some stirring themselves.
The presence of the arts in the center of public life also favors social stability. The artless are also the alienated, and the alienated more easily become enemies. As more and more immigrants arrive to work in rural areas, and as the poor and dispossessed abandon rural areas for big city life, the degree of their alienation depends on the art they encounter, or its absence.
We should not underestimate good art’s transformative power. When art’s vision and beauty are ingenious and when a work is expressed with consummate skill, it creates moments that transcend the differences that divide, and it binds performers and audience into a sense of community aglow with the art work’s radiance. War’s inclination to divide and conquer dissolves in the separate peace created by this radiance. Under its spell we forget that the artist was a jerk, the performer was an arrogant opportunist, the work was sponsored by profiteers, and the audience was loaded with pretenders. The heart and mind bask in the radiance, as differences dissolve and disappear into it.
Given the state of the world it is unlikely that art will overwhelm war and redeem nature soon. If war makes art that in turn makes more war then it is clear that the fate of societies and nature is descending into a destructive spiral. When art violates nature without honoring or at least making a truce with it, art does the work of war. If the arts and artists of peace are to survive, they will have to establish their own presence based on a holy alliance with nature, and look to nature to discover the organic principles of growth unifying their work. This holy alliance ties art and artists to nature’s munificence as a source of material and spiritual sustenance. As we approach a moment in human history when the end of nature seems a possibility, artists may do well to conceive of themselves as master gardeners, with their art providing food for thought derived from rivers, lakes, soil, forests, marshes, fens, and airs these natural resources give us for our own good. Art that stages survival of the fittest melodramas dominates current popular arts scenes, with the concertos that speak to nature’s graciousness, its edges contained by rounds, are played on the periphery. If art is necessarily different from nature in kind, it need not be by degrees. When the boundaries between the two are semi-permeable, both, like Aeolian harps diversely framed, may live by the rule of doing as little
harm to each other as possible. In such work respect and love for nature and art are reciprocally renewed.
So, my son, I send you off to college knowing that dedicated artists face difficult odds as they try to make room for their work on a planet becoming more contentious and crowded. You will have to confront the artist’s temptation to want “out” to exist on the periphery of society and to let others define your work as having marginal, or merely decorative, value. There is no way out. For all the years of your life your nation has been actively at war. You therefore are a child of war, and your art, charged by the destructiveness of war that cries out for new creations, is also one of war’s offspring. To respond to these cries your art will not be merely marginal or decorative. It will have to give peace a chance. Nor will its value be easy to assess. Few judge art’s value by doing a cost analysis of its healing impact on the inner life of individuals, or by assessing how it saves taxpayers money by providing alternatives to their absurdly expensive addiction to wars. If war’s accountants feel no shame about calculating the projected costs of future wars, you as artist perhaps should enlist accountants to assess how much destruction your art prevents and how many lives and medical costs your art saves the state. It’s one thing to address enemies with violence. It’s another to use the arts to make friends of enemies.
College departments of accounting might want to explore the new job and research opportunities these original arts assessment alternatives could create.
You, my son, have not always been easy to have around, especially during your middle teenage years. And good artists are not always easy to have around, especially if they challenge themselves and others to explore both what’s deeply inward and most essentially real outside themselves. For this reason we should expect them to disobey their fathers, especially if these fathers were children of a nation
almost perpetually at war. Good art is often edgy, and good artists are often on edge, because that’s where the horizons are.
So I’m sure that you, my son, will think you know it all, as I do here on this page. I expect you to look upon my work and say, “It is good.” All of it. My behavior will irritate you because I am your dad and I love repeating “It is good” after everything I say to you as you move away to improve on me.
I know one thing for sure. Your contrariness will make you undesirable as a spoil of war, and therefore you will give war lords one less person for war to spoil.
So go, Son, do your art. You have vitally important work to make of your play. See, feel, taste, smell, hear and think it too, all at once, and add generous servings of learning to it. Above all live it all your life, in its radiance.
Irather insisted on the name: Dante. I was the only male in the family, and he turned out to be a boy. I liked the sound of the name, toothy and hard, though it violated my cardinal rule that writing, when performed properly by the rhythm method, should never end unaccented. I rationalized the rule away as I sounded the name in my mind’s echo chambers: Dante was a name with two, not one, accented syllables. There was strength in that.
There were other motives for insisting on the name. My Dante would bear the same name as the original, the Italian outcast who wrote The Divine Comedy, perhaps the world’s most influential poetic narrative. Though the name is as common as white bread in some eastern American cities, my Dante would have a name seldom heard in Minnesota. This would distinguish him from generic Minnesota Toms, Bills, and Bobs, while reviving the image of the grand Tuscan poet. His name would also entitle me. My son would be directly linked to my Italian-ness more intensely than to the Irish/German bleach in his mother’s blood. He would be his father’s, rather than his mother’s, son.
(I turned out to be badly mistaken about that.)
But I wanted him to bear the name of the man who wrote a classic work, thinking he would take things from there and make himself a classic too.
I waited until I was 75 years old to finish reading The Divine Comedy. My Dante, born (naturally) on Father’s Day, was not quite 21 at the time. I’d read the first two-thirds of the masterpiece The Inferno and The Purgatorio under the influence of many commentaries reminding me of how vital to our civilization The Divine Comedy has been. I could see proofs of that how, for example, the nine-tiered Inferno scheme might have shaped laws that reflect a proper relationship to the consequences and enormity of sins. Capable of bouts of lust, I reserved for myself the right to
see myself as fundamentally less unkind than the coldblooded snakes who start wars to make a good killing for themselves. Dante sees lust, even when as heartfelt as mine, as different in kind than crimes against humanity conjured and calculated by scheming brains. His Inferno has given law a basis in reason, and lawyers some good arguing points.
The Purgatorio is as tidily layered as Hell, but many of its distinctions were lost on me as I worked my way out of it. The Purgatorio must be deemed great, I kept telling myself, because life is a purgatory of sorts, a hard journey full of imperfect souls maybe worse than mine trying to find their way to clarity and purity at the end of the last canto, or wail. Dante, the genius writer, tried to make sense of our hard journeys in general, and Dante, my son, would have to have to find his way on the road too.
Because my passage through the Purgatorio was so arduous, and so often interrupted by real life, it took me years to get to the Paradiso. One reason is that The Divine Comedy, in any translation I’ve tried so far, is, frankly, a hellish read. I believe wholly that its beauty exists in some poetic sphere, like some lovely Beatrice teasing us with glimpses of herself. I tried a few passages in the original Italian, but the Italian dialect I learned as a child, lovely in its own way, is no match for the rather incomprehensible fourteenth century Tuscan dialect Dante fashioned into his terza rima schemes. And Dante’s version of Italian does not find English a comfortable substitute, especially when forced to rhyme. There are many rough spots the mind must travel over, on twisted syntactical grounds, even as the traduittore e trattatore the translators are traitors to us and the original.
And then there are the weighty notes some as worthy as entire chapters that explain who is who, when, where, why and what is really going on. The mind, gliding over a terza rima, inevitably crashes into a heady footnote. The going is never smooth, easy or clear-minded on its way to Paradise.
For that reason I postponed my fulfillment of the Comedy. But lurking in my laziness was a grand scheme: I would save the Paradiso for my very oldest age, getting there at last in my boring death-bed throes. It would be as close as I’d ever get to literally getting a view of heaven. So for many years my Paradiso sat on the bookshelf next to my bed, looking down on me. To conclude my journey in its pages seemed like a good way of assuring that life, like great literature, required a certain proper closure.
But that unopened Paradiso also gave me pauses. What if I died in a car crash, rather than drooling in bed while reading another heavenly footnote? Already I’d come to understand how clueless I am about the mysteries of life laughing as they stare me down. How much more clueless would my understanding of Dante be if I waited longer for my brain to deteriorate? Would the sinkhole footnotes also clog my brain drains? Before that happened should I get on with it?
The thought came and went over the course of several years, hanging over my head like an unlit bulb. If I suddenly read the Paradiso, achieved my closure, was it a sign that I was finished too? The thought first came to me while I was alone, doing 70 in my rusty Taurus, on a freeway. Immediately I slowed down.
Nevertheless, I girded my intellectual loins and resolved to go prematurely into the Paradiso. My son’s name was Dante. How could I pass from this world ignorant of the heaven his famous ancestor so artfully and conscientiously sculpted for the world to believe in and see?
On a sleepless night I took the book from the shelf and opened it. I owed it to the kid. I owed it to myself to decide if I had done the right thing in giving him Dante’s name. I might not rest in peace while reading it, but I’d take my chances on getting through the text alive.
What I never explained to my son, even years after I had resolved to give him Dante’s name, is that there was much
in The Divine Comedy that struck me as peevish and wrongminded. The footnotes made me dully aware of how profoundly its grand scheme is riddled with personal piques, how as political exile from his beloved Florence Dante got even with his enemies by condemning them to the appropriate circles of his Hell. Nor was he shy about imposing partisan judgments on rather parochial historical events. He names names as he sends individuals to heaven or hell, reserving for himself the humble privilege of getting a glimpse of God while gazing at Beatrice’s divine face and form. His Divine Comedy concludes with a happy ending for himself.
Then too we have to wonder about his agonized handling of justice and love. If Hell, with its lurid torments, is a necessary third of his architecture of the universe, how can horrors inflicted on humans there be justified with the Christian notions of forgiveness and love? His Inferno provides a feast of horrors for prurient minds, and justifications for inflicting horrors on both terrorists and weakling passionate selves. While the allegorical level of the Comedy internalizes the narrative’s conflicts spiritualizes the pleasures and pains of existence his story’s literal level, its explicit tortures and glimpses of bliss, fire the reader’s imagination. In this Divine Comedy hell, purgatory, and heaven become more literally “real” as “places” than as “spiritual states.” The Church, and most members of all those Protestant churches that tried to reform the Roman one, have given Dante’s “places” realistic standing in their theologized imaginary worlds, and grounding for the troubling complexities this imagined grand scheme imposes on spirituality.
Dante clearly struggled with the problem. How literally was he to take the world imposed on him by the traditions and art surrounding him, and how far would he dare to transform the Medieval view into an imaginative construct that spiritualized the world, flesh and devil? The question agonizes him as he tries to address the proper relationships
between sin, crime, punishment, justice and salvation, and it surfaces repeatedly as he tries to accommodate himself to the dictum that all those born before, and therefore ignorant, of Christ are doomed to eternal darkness.
His invention of Limbo gives his mind an escape route away from the intellectual pit represented by the Hell he designs for the whole world to more clearly see. Divine love based so fundamentally on the vivid revenge schemes he devises is a hard sell, however spiritualized. In his Inferno Dante does not turn the other cheek. Its tortures are gory and contemporary, inspirations to the likes of Heinrich Kramer and his associate Jacob Sprenger, whose pathological vindictiveness resulted in the publication, in 1487, of Malleus Malificarum, a work that became the church’s guidebook for the wholesale torture and murder of thousands of “witches” and “heretics” in ways reminiscent of Dante’s hell. The line connecting Dante to the Malleus and to Hitler and waterboarding is direct and bold.
The lurid literalism inspired by Dante’s hell is mainly what perversely survives of his Great Work of Art. His great name is mainly synonymous with his Inferno. We are left to speculate about how deeply he influenced Hollywood.
In considering Dante’s Divine Comedy as a work of art, I wonder if he would have better served human history by being less great. Dante’s mythologizing of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven provided a grand stereotype of enduring influence. Not only did it firm up into a coherent picture the diverse loose cannon thoughts popular in his late medieval times, but it provided the narrative structure by which millions would visualize their lives for centuries to come.
T.S. Eliot, whose own stature as poet would prevent him from being accused of being guilty of the sort of sweeping generalization and bifurcation found on freshman themes, was not shy about telling us how seriously we should take our Divine Comedy today: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” Presumably
Eliot had Royalist Roman Catholics in mind as devotees of Dantean schemes, but maybe not Presbyterians, the Amish and Unitarians too, leaving Shakespeare to everyone else, including the many who never have read one of his plays.
So one thing is clear: Dante’s Divine Comedy has had an enormous impact on how millions see the world, how they think about sin, law and order, justice, women and God. And this vision is at root medieval, and seriously flawed.
So why insist on naming my son Dante? Kids, especially, agonize about their names, and names also haunt the adult years. My good friend Dolph, born in 1940 of solid German American stock, never calls himself Adolph.
My objection to Dante began simmering as I made my way into the deeper levels of the Inferno. As I mused on the logic of his classification scheme of sin and punishment, and on its bottomless cruelty, I was allured by his creative audacity. The poet William Blake must have had Dante and Milton, the Protestant Dante in mind when he declared, “I must create my own myth, or be enslaved by someone else’s.” As brainchild of his medieval world, with its religious obsessions, cruelties, superstitions, beauties, kindnesses, filth and quests for purity and logic, Dante called on his imagination to set the universe in order. His imagination responded by providing him a narrative structure synonymous with the great cathedrals that represented the grandest art of his times. Within the triune architecture of his great poem its three large divisions defined by multiples of three, each of them built on the strength of the three-lined terza rima stanzas he found himself on a journey of creation, moving purposefully forward to reason his way through the absurdities and injustices he saw around him toward a sense of coherence, just order, and conviction of truth. Luring him on to these goals was the Eternal Woman, at once the real, and inaccessible (and no doubt sweaty) Beatrice Portinari, but also Beatrice the Blessed, personification of beauty’s grace.
He is wholly devoted to her, reaching toward an idealized vision he can glimpse and a body he will never touch, this inspiration providing at once a sense of heaven and earth.
But what moved Dante most deeply to lift his pen? We get several hints of it, mainly in the Paradiso. There Dante articulates his driving passion his sense that there is not only structure but harmony in the scheme of things. There his blessed rage for order, his knightly quest, moves him to his highest sense of creativity, a work of art faithful to a belief that the universe’s deepest reality is musically beautiful.
What more can we expect of any Dante, even the one who provided many rooms in his Divine Comedy for the tragic cruelties and injustices he abhorred. If he created a narrative others found useful to exploit, in constructing it he made a way of life for himself, centrally purgatorial. In a modern world rife with unimaginably worse cruelties and injustices, my new Dante goes forth with his dad’s (not at all heavenly) blessing. May you, son, construct your own narrative, and cathedral or small country church, and may one Beatrice, or several, be your inspiration and guide as you tune your voice and instruments to the music of the spheres.
There are moments when my father’s face, twisting itself into a smile or smirk or surrender, is mine. As I watch him I feel I am watching myself but not, as some would think, merely imagining how much I resemble him. No, in those moments I am him, not a chip off the old block but the same carved surface on the identical block.
To think this way is, of course, insane, or the function of an alien, perhaps Hindu, metaphysics I’ve never wholly understood. But feeling, subject only to its illogical positivism, has its own promiscuous way of confirming the reality of things.
In what sense am I present in my father’s face? I don’t need to look closely to see that his lines are mine that his eyes retreat when he disapproves, or that his lips curl into a smile, or that his beliefs, often unlike mine, harden behind his brows. Together we go way back, my face in his and his in his father’s and mine in my grandfather’s face in a regression that allows me to see that I indeed am some ancient Adam’s child. It’s as if the genetic plasma from which I was begot could not entirely tear itself away from a field of force that keeps pulling me back so that now and then I find myself there again, in my father’s face.
I remember the folk advice my father offered when I brought home the first girl I seriously intended to marry: “Before you decide,” he said, “look closely at the mother.”
So when a tempting lovely face passes by I have it more than one way: What does her mother look like, I ask, and what would the young lovely look like if she were her own mother?
If there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, imagine the four and twenty baked in a pie. With
mathematical certainty we potentially have at least 312 views of those poor fowls. For too long I’ve had the habit of staring at sidewalks even when I’m on the laziest stroll, so I occasionally revisit the Wallace Stevens poem to bring myself to my senses again. The poem has a way of unscrewing my eyes from those deep sockets buried in The Self. With renewed eyes a blackbird becomes more than just a black bird standing in a tree that is just a big green thing standing in the way.
I see, for example, that blackbirds are variably black, especially when sunlight displays the rainbows shimmering on their wings. Now I want to see blackbirds up close, every which way. I wonder about their faces, especially the four and twenty in that pie. Do birds have faces by which they can tell each other apart, express longing, calm, desire, anger, fear and despair? How dull is our intelligence, that it reduces a bird’s face to beak and eyes?
Mona Lisa, also a black bird of sorts, comes to mind, along with at least four and twenty hundred million other women behind veils. And here I am, with only 311 views currently available to me.
In his book Theory of Film the astute Hungarian critic Bela Balazs lamented that books (like his) “gradually rendered illegible the faces of men.” He had high hopes that film, the new exciting technology of his time, would give people “new faces” by renewing interest in visual culture. “What appears on the face and in facial expression,” Balazs wrote, “is a spiritual experience which is rendered immediately visible without the intermediary of words.”
I try to conjure what the expression on Balazs’ face might be whenever I see a couple of thirty-foot Hollywood heads filling the screen with the spiritual experience of a Hollywood kiss. The facial landscapes are lovely and large indeed, the woman’s as smooth and sun-tanned as desert sands, the hero’s rugged enough to remind us that he’s hard
underneath. I wonder too: Who’s holding the camera, and how far away from the lips? Who’s got a grip on the key grip? Is the woman in charge of sound playing solitaire somewhere on the set? Who’s running the lights, and how many more takes will it take to get the kiss take right?
Faces matter in film. They’re maybe the main bottom line factor. In the small privacy I enjoy in cinema’s dark factory of dreams, I want to connect to a face. one I can hate or love, call mine for the long fantasy moments I gaze at the screen. And films give us faces worth gazing at, many we’ve never seen before, some telling us their wonderful stories, often silently. We even have two films, Bergman’s “Face to Face” and Cassavetes “Faces,” both worthy of making a prophet of Belazs.
But the machinery of film is also a complex screen, a form of make-up poured on by a host of players paid to get in on the face’s act. Actors are not hired because of their ability to have spiritual experiences. What matters most is whether a face will do its part to sell a film, and how well an actor can turn the semblance of genuine emotion on as soon as the cameras roll. Behind the face are the make-up crew, script, focal length, filter, director’s instructions, etc. Except in documentary moments it is naïve to believe that a face on screen is not as calculated as one painted in oils on a canvas. There’s perhaps more to be said on behalf of the authenticity of the painted face. For hundreds of years painters, especially of portraits, made long and slow careers of representing faces by way of nuanced brushstrokes calculated to unmask salient marks of character; and still photography also had the power to give us pause, fix our studied gaze on an image long enough for it to stir imagination from its sleep. But while the machinery of movies stands invisibly to one side making an artifice of the face we see on screen, film directors eager to sustain their moving pictures within the content curves of five second shots cut faces away, so we see them as we more naturally
see strangers in real life on the move, mainly away from us. A face in a movie rarely gives us sufficient pause to consider, reflect, read its textures as texts in the same way we conjure intimate narratives lurking in the lips and eyes of a Mona Lisa who sits silent and still, reading us, perhaps at a table across the room in a coffee shop. *
Our language undermines our efforts to put proper faces on faces. When I’m told to “face facts” I’m expected to reduce experience to static cartoon with bold outlines that obscure the backsides and nuances of complex realities. “Face it,” we are told whenever someone wants to whisk us away from what’s hidden away, the ambiguities lurking in dim histories mainly dark. Facts faced harden into belief behind brows suddenly determined to put a good face on things, especially on those most common convictions rooted in superstitions that require us to ignore the obvious. Thus does Jesus Christ, in all his versions, continue to walk on water in so many lands, and thus do tyrants, democratic and otherwise, get away with getting us to think they’re working for Justice, Freedom, and Peace. And thus does much of Western Civilization’s monumental art, secular and religious, serve as a façade for its nations’ horrific incivilities.
*
The made-up face turns heads. Rouge, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick the stuff of billion-dollar alchemies rooted in ancient village practices from Ur to the outback of Australia. Here, in the civilized West, women faithfully observe their makeup rituals. Since the boring is bad business and busyness is change, makeup landscapes are works in progress endlessly reshaped. Carefully, at times lovingly and artfully, faces are retouched, as if self-love an experiment, quest, and discipline played out on the canvas of the face is at stake. Each face put on is an advertisement for an assumed self in which there lurks scorn, playfulness, longing, anger, hunger or desire. On busy sidewalks the id is a streetwalker
showing off her masks, especially proud to sally into church to display herself while vulnerability and innocence, confined indoors, keep watch.
If a woman’s face in New York is a colorful mask, her veil in Saudi Arabia is a dark curtain that is at once window and closet door. In these closets women’s eyes, barred from advertising their minds, enjoy the freedom conferred on imprisoned privacy. Desire, disapproval, the sneer of cold command have no place on the veil, but all is permitted in the small space behind. There the veiled woman has a room of her own, dark as her eyes. From there she can spy on public traffic from the safety of her miserable indoor haunt. In her world the super-ego lives a blank public life while the resentful id stays indoors, playing its dramas as shadows on the walls of her cave.
My friend Richard’s teenage daughter once photocopied her face. It’s an awkward picture the girl placing her head down on the photocopier flatbed, then closing the lid gently over herself as she twists her hand toward the “Print” button to start up this new form of vanity press. Though she doubtless had no fear of burying herself alive this way, her self-publication had eerie results, particularly since the machine only expressed itself in black and white. When the sheet finally came out of the machine the poor girl, quite beside herself, gave a small shriek before she balled herself up and threw herself away in the wastebasket. Naturally she has lovely colors in her face, but the machine didn’t have eyes for them. What she saw was neither X-ray, hologram, nor line drawing. Rather it made a ghost of her.
The shaved head, unadorned, conjures my worst chemotherapy fears. Skin isn’t thick enough, even when elaborately adorned, to shield me from the bone-white nudity of a skull. A brow may wrinkle and flesh sag from
cheeks in peculiar ways, but these variations don’t detract us from a skull’s basic theme. A face on a shaved skull is a Halloween mask pulled tight enough to show the meltdown of flesh and line. Except for the eyes, two bloated feelers alone in their small caves, pallor dominates, its yellow hue fading to gray as we conjure the brain crammed into its casing of bone. Within that casing the mind devolves into brain mass heaped like a ball of intestines, the same mass that has evolved into the inscrutable sensing device feeling its way through the eyes.
If we dare to crack the skull like the two halves of a walnut shell, our eyes would be taken by the two eyes mired in brain mass and bulging with wonder at the weirdness of life. Imagine hundreds and millions of us walking around skullless. Perhaps we like to save face because it keeps us from conjuring the skull. Too basic, and as blank as the terrifying whiteness of Melville’s whale, the skull democratizes death.
We sense a sameness in the faces of children with Down’s Syndrome, the distinct roundeur, bulging sad eyes, full cheeks and parted lips dulling to uniformity the rich swirl of emotions, impressions, pleasures and pains that define this gentle brand of humanity. It’s hard not to believe that nature has a prejudice to replicate identities, with close replications proof of success. Cloning comes to mind.
And cloning especially gives me the creeps. In a mirror I see another me. Imagine two dozen more of the same me walking around how this would trouble my lovely wife Monica and diminish this Jack into an even duller boy. See all twenty-four of me as we gather in the same room and peer in the same mirror, our heads bobbing around without wondering if we’re about to be baked in a pie.
Give me faces and variations on faces, pained or not with all the colors under the sun. And give me hair on heads, even a woman sporting a beard.
My mutt Samantha, or “Sam,” is an elderly mutt who insists on taking me on her walk every night, preferring to snooze the bright afternoons away. She’s hairy and smart enough to stay out of the noonday sun, but nights have a special allure for her, as if in the darkness she can savor what’s otherwise tasteless in the purifying light of day. Every tug on the leash pulls me off the beaten track toward some debris or tuft of grass into which she can bury her nose and drink odors deeply in. What she sees in these odors I can’t fathom. I’m convinced her eyes are really in her nose.
A dog’s face unless it’s one of those pug varieties evolved from head-on collisions with Mack trucks seems specially engineered to feature the snout. From terriers and collies to beagles and black labs the dog face seems mainly nose, the cold wet nub on the end serving as subtle sensorvalve to the snout’s vast chamber and its swirl of fragrances threading their way from there into the brain. Except when its ears are erect with alarm requiring a long intense view, a dog seems content to lead a chthonic life that makes vision an afterthought. For a dog the nose leads the way, the eyes serving as background brokers, lacking final enforcement authority, between nose and brain.
No wonder then that when dogs get a certain whiff of things they lose their minds and go entirely blind. When they’re seriously keeping their nose to the ground their sniffers have erections strong enough to tear any hand away from any leash.
Seeing-eye dogs, therefore, are misnamed. They lead us mainly by the nose, usually intelligently away from trouble. Politicians should all have at least one. Maybe the main difference between dogs and people is that when the blind of any political or religious breed lead the blind, we all fall into the ditch.
In the democratic republic of faces the eyes carry the day. I vote with my eyes, either for or against what comes my
way. In general I prefer to stand and watch, letting the eyes pick and choose a few faces and forms to stand out in the crowd. It’s my first mostly unconscious impulse to scope out a scene and find the finest faces and forms. During my people-watching I am almost aware that eye contact invades my privacy too, disrupts the polling process, and may spoil all the fun.
Consider, for example, someone who catches me in the act of gazing, then repays me with a glare. A glare is an aggressive act, foreshadowing hostile gestures and words; it warns me to keep my eyes and nose out of someone else’s space. As a tribal gesture it reminds me that I am an outsider with no rights to membership or intimacy. If glaring eyes had bullets in them we’d all be dead.
A glare coming from a beautiful face is confusing and dangerous. All beauty, terrible and terrifying or not, inexorably allures me. My people-watching, the indiscriminate grazing my eyeballing performs when I’m in a crowd, is arrested when it encounters a lovely face. Then I sneak myself away to a better position to observe, hide so I can disguise and sustain my gaze.
My prejudice for the striking, alarming, weird or unfamiliar quickly dissipates under the spell of a lovely face, as if my predilection to select experience, sort it out, maybe gain something from or make sense of it, is driven by a primal instinct that favors the beautifully well-formed. This instinct, perhaps encrypted in some non-relativistic strand of DNA that deceptively resolves itself into the solipsism, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” also deceives me into concluding that it can’t be helped: Natural Selection, its invisible hand doing the ruthless work biological necessity, favors an aristocracy of the beautiful in the interest of species survival. Ugly ducklings, and the mass of ordinary faces incapable of turning heads their way, perhaps take little aid and comfort from the way Natural Selection might be making a sub-species of them.
Am I a pawn of Natural Selection, or guilty of unnatural acts. I want to ask my Italian biologist friend if my yen for the beautiful face is indeed the sneaky work of Natural Selection’s invisible hand. Do we have genes coaxing us to behave as if beauty is ruthlessly power-hungry?
Made you look, Made you look, Made you buy A penny book.
Ordinary or “ugly” faces can only hope Evolution fails. It begins to fail every time I nod toward the ordinarily invisible plain Janes and Joes, and search there for the scriptures that enable me to read, and therefore rewrite, the codes in my mind, those limiting me to the beauty inscribed in my slavish eye.
But when the most tempting ones happen by, the faces that qualify for the covers of glamour magazines, my insect eyes poise themselves on the ends of long feelers that begin nosing the air. Wherever I am café, crowd, and church my antennae are up and about sniffing for a glimpse of the loveliest face in the place, the loveliest ones too often resembling the standard versions featured in Hollywood pictures and TV ads. When my feelers find her, or her closest approximation, they pull back, still erect and especially sensitive to any glance coming my way before circumstances beyond my control require me to tuck my tail between my legs and move on.
These faces have an inexorable allure, put me under arrest or make me run for cover, just to get a better look. My prejudice for what’s odd or striking is trumped by the spell of the standardly beautiful, as if my predilection to select experience, sort it out and thereby make sense of it, is driven by a primal instinct that favors the conventionally wellformed.
This quest for the stereotype is standard operating procedure for me even during blizzards and rain too thick to justify keeping the sunglasses on. It helps to stop and think: The problem with glamour girl faces is that they are beautiful. Their beauty haunts me as much as it curses them into the problem of living up to their own standard of beauty all their lives. This problem perhaps requires them to squander years in front of mirrors that tempt them to let their beauty do all their work and thinking for them. We wonder how they will survive middle age, let alone help the human species survive. But we can’t blame them for turning our fool heads. They perhaps can’t help it in the same way I can’t help myself.
I watch other red-blooded males in a crowd, young and old going about their business as usual, and note that only a few have antennae as persistent as mine. Or, perhaps, the majority are more subtle and sly than I. In a stadium they seem taken by the ballgame; I scan the faces in the crowd, looking for her face. I have a genuinely lovely wife, but still for me the loveliest stranger in the crowd is the only game in town.
It’s odd, by the way, how faces in a packed sports stadium dwarf the bodies they represent. Row after row of faces squat Humpty-Dumpty-like on their seats, the bulk of their bodies pedestals as invisible as their motives for paying good money to spend a few hours cheering out their brains.
I’m in training right now to pay better attention to the nine out of ten faces (of either sex) that come and go. These faces, glimpsed in the same way scanning devices pass over the bar codes of canned fruit at the checkout counter of the supermarket, I normally identify only long enough to dismiss as too plain, or unremarkable, or strange, or ugly. In the plain light of day I am blind to most faces in front of my nose.
I need to change my ways. *
It takes self-discipline and courage to dwell on a face. A dwelling is a specific place where we take a good space of time to live comfortably and decently. But try gazing long and hard at a face. A gaze caught in the act becomes a leer, and a leer invades privacy.
The harder problem is that most faces, unlike a book whose pages we can leaf through in a leisurely way, are in motion, challenging us to speedread them on their way. For the study of faces portraits and photos at least stand still, usually long enough for us to turn our attention to the way artists have applied the makeup of brushstrokes, color, light, lenses and other technical gimmickry to prejudice our view. But faces in real life don’t sit still even in chairs. The seats in an auditorium, schoolroom or church offer us hindsight at best, the backs of heads, and in the living rooms, barrooms, and coffeehouses where people mill about the faces are as fluid as streams of consciousness.
What can we really know about any static thing studied in isolation, divorced from contexts that include us as observers and objectified as an invariable operating outside its histories, and ours? The face is no butterfly or insect pinned down on black velvet felt.
So my science of faces is simply poetic. What matters is that in the blur of experience I find a tell-tale detail to seize upon as a significant sign. Then I must learn to arrest myself in the act of dismissing the ordinary face, and in that moment stir up the concentrated curiosity normally visible in the eyes of well-fed small children perpetually reinventing their worlds. I need to train my gaze on the smile twisted by a cross-eyed curl of the lips, the tilt of the jawbone high and away saying hit me again if you dare, the birthmark afloat on the peach surface of a cheek, the spackled brown island just under the left eye, the yellow shine of the fully felt smile, the mole on the nostril, and, of course, mainly the eyes, the eyes,
what they say to us truthfully, deceptively, silently. These are the facts of life of the real faces that come and go speaking of the Beatles and Michaelangelo, as they prepare faces to meet the faces that they meet.
The ancient philosopher Philo of Alexandria advised, “Be kind to everyone you meet, for everyone is fighting a great battle.” We know where to look. The face falls like bead curtains over the heart, veils it behind goggles and shades, fits over it like a tight rubber Halloween mask, the one that hurts when we peel it off. Faces, therefore, impose a heroic requirement on my poetic discipline, an extraordinary challenge to my very humanity. Can I take that mask from somebody else’s face, peel it down over mine, and see through its eyes?
In the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian creation myth, the gods destroy the world because humans make too much noise. They kill everyone so they can recreate a better world.
My father, eloquent when on a roll, let silences speak for him in his last years. He said nothing when the TV was on, or at the table when we force-fed opinions to each other without swallowing our words. When he died in 2005 he and my mother had endured almost a full century of Progress. They were born and raised in an Italian village where sounds were mainly a-technological the rooster’s wake-up call, the donkey’s braying, the child’s laughter or cries, the woman’s complaint or song, rain on roofs, wind in trees. The century’s new technologies trains, radios, cars, planes, TVs, bombs, computers swept over them like a tsunami, leaving behind their wreckage of unintended consequences and atrocities. My mom and dad easily would have agreed with Faulkner’s Dilsey: “I seed the best and the worst.”
The best and the worst created a lot of noise.
It’s hard not to ask: Is there a language of everyday sounds, a way to determine if they’re not merely tolerable but intelligible, perhaps good for us? Do sounds wordlessly make meaning and evoke responses? We know what a cat means when it purrs and a dog growls. So do the cat and the dog. The sounds they make are not noise. These sounds have resonances, frequency patterns, colorations and tone. Are other sounds and their “meanings” lost to us because we lack translation skills, and because distractions deafen us? If “meaning” is inherent in types of sounds that somehow make sense, and if noise is the cacophony inherent in non-communication, how do we find our way in a world when noise seems the way of the world?
It’s easy to agree that one person’s music is another person’s noise, while jabbering on about why our football team won or lost. We know that loud-wired heavy rock can literally deafen us, and we should wonder why Mozart was popular in Nazi Germany. Do certain sounds tell us it’s wrong to scream “Fire!” in a concert hall, while others tell us to set the world on fire, perhaps with bombs? Do we dare ask perhaps study which sounds serve these two types of “freedom” best? Are all sounds even those we call music no more than socially accepted noise?
It’s hard to say yes to that. *
If I’m exposed to long silences I’d maybe welcome a stroll on a loud boulevard. Or like those with troubled hearts and minds, I may seek silence instead, even when silence echoes loneliness and conjures long-lost presences. And when noise surrounds and complicates silences, it may confound what is deeply felt or thought. To slip into silence is not necessarily to escape from noise. *
I’ll venture here to define noise as a chaos of sense impressions, its fragments incoherently swirling about, its volume and intensity able to dominate consciousness. In this chaotic swirl fragments are divorced from any semblance of pattern, clarity or music. The coherence we associate with art, self-control, and good government are lacking in noise. And as the chaos of noise intensifies, it overwhelms, leaving anarchy and absurdity in its wake. *
Noise can get me fired up. When it’s loud enough it seizes me, or puts me on high alert, or mesmerizes me as I surrender to its presence. Clarity and coherence can be made delirious by noise. This surrender has its perks, one of them the feeling of being carried away, transported, no longer responsible able to respond or willing to respond.
It’s well known that when inebriation results from noise, barroom sales increase.
Normal lethargy, linked to purposelessness, confusion, inactivity, and melancholy, often surrenders to noise. When my lethargy, rather than my sense of purpose or art, is the primary available fallback position, the stimulation and allure offered by noise are hard to resist. And when noise’s excitement becomes normalized, a higher dose may be required. Then noise addiction easily results.
A problem. Noise is hot and big-time, its numbers staggering, and noise sells. The noise occasioned by sounds has a visual anarchic ally ads.
Researchers tell us that the typical American is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads daily. These come mainly via TV and smartphones, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and the roughly 350,000 billboards commuters are exposed to nationwide on the move. We notice or rather momentarily pause on fewer than 100 ads per day. The others are “noise,” much of it complicated by its motions swiftly coming and going away from us into some la-la land.
Entertainment industrialists have an ample supply of raw youth eager to satisfy market demands for noise, and entertainers and artists, their identities routinely conflated, face the same challenge: How can they be more sensational? In the good old Sixties days when the fragrances of freshly mown (unsmoked) grass hovered in concert over the vibes of rock bands performing above fields of dreams, loudness began gaining currency, amplitude, repute and normalcy. Amplifiers sometimes hooked up to nuclear power plants routinely became the instruments of choice, broadcasting lyrics often only heard and understood when recited simply as words.
There’s excitement in it concerts, texting, internet surfing and gambling, video games like highs from a rollercoaster ride or bungee-jump from a high cliff, with each ride requiring a wilder one. The rides stimulate and escalate, as the forces in control political, corporate, and innocent (“consumers)” weave us more tightly into their networks and clouds. Hollywood producers of thriller movies know this process well. They stimulate and escalate, then abandon us to our solitudes, our senses dulled in anticipation of new pleasures based on greater intensities. Addiction follows unnaturally enough, with anxiety, depression and alienation common hangovers. Many who have experienced actual war, notably veterans on motorcycles, seem to have a feel for this kind of noise.
Another problem: De gustibus non est disputandum. The question hard to ask, especially in good company, is what “noise” and “music” “say” to us. I’m not likely to trouble peers if I insist that Mozart’s sounds provide the pleasures derived from structured harmony, melody, and rhythm, or that as “music” it’s able to provide heartfelt gravity and levity. Nazis made good use of it, perhaps to balance and disguise the noise in their brains. But if I turn the Mozart volume high enough it too will bomb. It’s fashionable to agree that the difference between Mozart and heavy metal rock is entirely a matter of individual taste. De gustibus non est disputandum. Matters of taste pasta sauces and red wines, for example, or maybe Mozart and Jimmy Hendrix can turn discussion into spitting contests. If I’m invited to attach “pleasure” to both music and noise, then try to distinguish them from each other, am I a party-pooper if I actually tell people that what their music represents is pain? If no arguing about taste is a universal command, then what I “like” smoking, for example, and heroine highs and what I deem “good” fruits and vegetables have equal value as the stuff entering my life. In this democratic
view all conclusions derived from observation, research, and reason are, like nonsense, fragments swirling incoherently. And talk about the life of the imagination, heart and mind, and these words here, are nothing but noise.
If so, why go on from here?
I’ve often wondered what sounds are made by galaxies and other space objects. Is noise the common denominator of the universe, with music humanity’s response to cosmic disharmonies? Old philosophers have claimed to be attuned to “the music of the spheres.” Pythagoras, the first mathematical physicist, likened the orderliness of his calculations to music, and Kepler had this connection in mind when he developed his scheme for the planetary harmonies Newton and later classical physicists found useful as inspirations for their own discoveries. Plato, his ideal forms, lurked in the background of these classical scientists hoping to prove that the “music of the spheres” was not merely a poetic trope but a metaphysical fact governing not just the physical but moral and aesthetic forces in the universe.
But from physics I now learn that sound is a projection of light waves emitted by a physical object such as a car horn or owl. With the universe so full of stars, planets and invisible particles, it must emit dins no human ear could endure. Should we bless our stars for making us deaf to them, or bless the music we make in spite of heavenly noise?
I often make noise from music in order to find relief from noise. When the sounds of daily life street traffic, screaming kids, machines at work, loud talk in restaurants become so obviously present I want to be someplace else, I often turn music on, and the volume up. What typically happens is that I stop hearing music except as background
sounds that augment, rather than negate or improve, the larger noise environment.
As background music it loses its musical flavors and forms and morphs into white noise, a well-hidden ghost of itself able to cast a shroud over what I hear, think and feel. *
“White noise” has its own ways. It may insinuate itself as a barely audible hum, its fragments losing their edges as they dissolve in its stew. It also may wear sheeps’ clothing, its hum having the musical quality of a low note that grounds and smooths sharp-edged noise fragments. As such it may seem “natural,” a deafening cousin of silence. When it achieves the power we call “loud” it loses its prestige and allure. Then we better understand how it grates on nerves. *
The evidence pointing to noise damage is clear: Loud noises cause hearing loss and further impair those suffering from Alzheimer’s.
But the jury is still out on subtler forms of noise. Several Luddites, and some studies with doubts attached to them, claim that cell phones may cause brain cancer. But a larger question looms: If cell phone radiation is a secretive form of noise, and if this radiation perhaps has adverse health effects, does noise, in its more obvious and wholesale forms, damage the health of societies?
Maybe birds have their way of speaking to this issue. In a Scientific American Mind (June/July 2007) study it was learned that, “As is the case with humans, songbirds are dependent on what they hear to develop normal vocalization. If songbirds are subjected to loud noises, if they become deaf or if the feedback from their ‘teacher’ [another songbird] is interrupted, they never learn to sing properly.”
Maybe plants also have their quiet ways of expressing their sound preferences. Plants seem to share my musical tastes. In a controlled greenhouse experiment, researcher Dorothy Retallack found that, “plants physically leaned 15 to 20
degrees toward a radio playing classical and jazz music, while they scramble to get away from rock music and actually become sick. Marigolds ‘listening’ to rock music died within two weeks, whereas those in the classical music room six feet away were flowering.”
At Annamalai University in India, T.C. Singh, head of the botany department, found that exposure to Indian music increases rice harvests by 25-60% and peanut and tobacco production by nearly 50%. Other experiments on several plants have “proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that harmonic sound waves affect the growth, flowering, fruiting and seed yields of plants.”
There are skeptics, but other small studies yield similar results. In one study plants preferred classical to no music, and no music to rock, and in another that did not include classical music, pop came in first, rock second, none third, and rap dead last.
Organic growth seems prejudiced against sounds it deems unhealthy.
The mind, led by the nose and other senses, wonders as it wanders in search of where to dwell. Good mind doctors, Amit Sood and David T. Jones (in Explore, May/June 2013), tell us that studies show “Human attention is constantly presented with large volumes of data,” and that “wandering decreases happiness and may interfere with learning.” Much of this “data” wanders, in search of me and my attention spans.
My mind is typical. I see it mainly adrift as it tries to navigate its way in the macrosystem we call our “culture,” a dense petri dish full of loud and white noises, competing for attention with Mozart, advertisements, rustling leaves, cell phone calls, and bird songs. For about a third to a half of its waking hours this mind treads water in this soup, reaching for the salience provided by threat, pleasure and novelty. Threat and novelty incline it toward noise. Pleasure, when
shaped by mass media, especially the lures of entertainment and ads, also inclines toward noise.
These facts of life give me much to think about, including the words of doctors Sood and Jones: “…the mind that wanders is less happy and [is] predisposed to psychopathology and chronic stress….”
How can we influenced by the inventions of inventive geniuses who often deem themselves god-like avoid the destruction the Mesopotamian gods inflicted on the world? How do we balance ourselves within the noises surrounding us and the moments, and perhaps hours, able to uplift and stabilize us? How do we renew the life-giving excitements and serenities of inwardness?
We may make music and poetry from sounds, but how free can free verse be without becoming noise? The poet Robert Frost compared his type of free verse to playing tennis without a net. The ball was still kept within given lines. The worst leaders freely cross lines into the worst kind of noise war.
It is especially difficult to translate the noise of tragedies inflicted on us by the daily news. How can we make music of, and feel empathy for, those who suffer? In the novel Brisbane, by Russian author Eugene Vodalazkin, the character Gleb, a distinguished guitarist physically incapacitated by a tremor, hears in Mozart’s Requiem “not a depiction of suffering, but actual suffering.”
From Gelb we learn to ask questions. Does noise take us to or away from what matters most in life? Does it help identify us with others, or is it self-absorbed? Does noise suffer from narcissism?
Tone, pitch, rhythm, harmony, and melody are in me, and elsewhere too. Once when I was twelve I listened up. There, within view of Detroit’s grimy skyline, I was afloat on Lake St. Clair. And there, uncalled for, from nowhere and
from somewhere too present to be the mythical far-out music of the spheres, I heard a beautiful melody in the sky. It was real. It came to, and perhaps from, and into, me.
Horn Lore
Lore, like music, honors the lures of poetry over the nets of reason. If the geneticist can provide a wholly credible scientific explanation for how the leopard got its spots, Kipling’s story has its own charming, if too innocent, rationale. If poetry’s genome, language, clusters metaphors, and if metaphor’s bias is to establish associative connections that eddy and swirl in cultural streams, we’re most likely to find the clues to the origins of our lore in the headwaters of those murky streams.
The horn, celebrated as a musical instrument, is also known in its natural configurations as a thorny protuberance emanating from an animal’s head. As antlers, particularly of well-endowed stags, for example, they look down on us when conspicuously displayed as trophies in the dens where humans hibernate. If we ask the trophy hunter what the antlers symbolize the answer might dispirit us: The hunt, conquest of a wild beast, a great accomplishment achieved through skilled use of a gun, proof of the kill. Ask horn players what the horn means to them and not one is likely to make a connection between those dead antlers hanging over a fireplace and the horn that brings music into them while sending it forth into the air.
If biblical lore is to be trusted we would say that in the beginning was the word, in this case horn. But Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins does not bother with the word horn, sending us directly to the word bugle, where we learn that a bugle (Old French, from the Latin buculus and diminutive of bos, bovis, or ox) originally referred to a buffalo, and that the English word buff (think also beef or in French boeuf) made superficial work of its subject by identifying the ox by its hide rather than its horns. As tribes crossed paths and exchanged words the bugle’s bovine associations were grafted onto the Teutonic word horn. From northern Europe the word traveled south again to become a cognate of the
Latin cornu, the basis for the English word for grains (and the specific version seen in Iowa), for several scientific words (e.g. cornicle, cornify, etc.), for the unicorn as a mythical beast, for the region of Capricorn in the zodiac, for the cornucopia, an object Americans associated with the Thanksgiving celebration, and for the musical bugle, akin to the cornet.
If the horn’s marriage to the word cornu widened bovine associations to include grains, ancient myths deepen the symbolic meaning of the connection. These clues are best understood in the context of basic facts of life, notably the general aridity of the landscapes of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the twin cradles of Western civilization that developed in the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River valleys. Because life is hard to sustain in desert landscapes, water is especially revered as the stuff of life, a seminal fluid for the growth of grains and the survival of herds. Also especially revered (sometimes as “sacred cows”) are the animals themselves the cow and goat for their milk (mainly) and meat, the ox for its strength, and the ram and bull for their power to inseminate. When life is hard and survival is at issue value is measurable by the size of the herd. And when life itself is a bizarre mystery linked to the seasons, rainfall, fertility, sexuality, blood, and the mysterious role of death, it is easy to see why lifesustaining beasts would be revered as representatives of the gods.
Mesopotamian myths show that the bull had a prominent role as personification of dark but powerful life forces. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation the absolute ruler, Marduk, slays the bull man (kusarikku, or “bison”) so that he may become “the bestower of ploughland who fixes [its] boundaries, creator of grain and linseed, producer of vegetation” (Tablet VII). This usurpation of power is deemed a natural sign of progress, with the shedding of the bull’s blood a ritual sacrifice necessary to lubricate the creation process. Many other horned creatures adorn the Mesopotamian myths rams, goats, serpents all of them
suggesting that the horn is the outward and visible sign of nature’s powerful life-force.
The suggestion is given more sophisticated expression in the iconography of the ancient Egyptians. Here horned creatures are conspicuous as sacred symbols, often in hybrid combination of the human and animal, with the animal nature deemed (as Henri Frankfort suggests in his book Ancient Egyptian Religion) more powerful because more pervasive and enduring than individual human identity. Amon, king of the gods, has the head and horns of a ram that symbolically legitimize his rulership. The goddess Hathor, depicted as a cow with the sun between her horns, is a nourisher and protector of both the living and the dead. Isis, major goddess associated with the fertility of the Nile plains, is often depicted sitting on her queen’s throne, with a disk suggestive of the moon (a marker of the months and of a woman’s fertility cycles) set between cow’s horns. Nut, a sky goddess and mate of Geb, an earth god, is personified as a cow that nourishes mankind. Again the link of associations is clear: The powers of the bovine and the bull, the fertility of the earth, the cycles of sun and moon, of seasons and woman’s fecundity are represented by horns.
The Canaanites no doubt did not have the horn as a brass instrument in mind when they worshipped their golden calf, but their god as a type was representative of the worldwide reverence accorded the power and prosperity offered by bovine and other horned beasts. In Leviticus of the Old Testament we are told that the sacrificial burning of the bull on an altar creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9).
J.F. Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols itemizes many other instances that link the horn with nature’s fertility and gods––the Cilician horned god of agriculture holding handfuls of corn, the African rhino’s horn prized as an aphrodisiac, the horn as decorative motif on Asian temples, the cycle of the Zodiac initiated by Aries and Taurus, both of them horned. In Greek mythology the infant god Zeus is fed goat milk through a cornucopia, and in the heyday of the Minoan
culture young girls ritually entered womanhood by literally taking a bull by the horns and gymnastically vaulting themselves onto the bull’s back, a feat requiring what every good horn player must achieve, the balance of power and grace.
Many of these fertility associations suggesting the terrible beauty of the enigmatic mystery of life and death and the need to revere the harmony and balance implied in nature’s seasonal rounds are inverted with the historic triumph of Christianity and its disdain for the world, flesh and devil. The horn and the powerful sexuality it represents is demonized, notably when the old horned pagan gods are demoted into devils. By god-fearing minds these devils are assembled out of pagan body parts through a highly fanciful process of cut-and-paste that gives the new demons the scales and tails of reptiles, the cloven hooves and beards of goats, and various configurations of horns that once adorned the fertility gods of pagan lands. In the ritual arena the Minoan bull dance featuring young woman and bull becomes a wholly masculine affair, the Spanish bullfight, its outcome not the balance of male power with feminine grace but the death of the bull. The bull and his horns represent terrifying death rather than awe-filled life, and Nature, the bull, is to be conquered rather than revered. The word “horny” enters our vocabulary as a vulgarity, and astonishing scientific discoveries begin to empower us to engineer unnatural fertility processes. “Virtue,” in ancient times descriptive of the life-force of worth and excellence in humans, things, and animals, is narrowed to focus on suppression of the powers of the horn.
The horn as a musical instrument was conceived in a Christianized culture when industrial processes were still primitive. Its inventors probably saw the natural horns of beasts as idealized forms by which to conceive a variety of music-making devices. From the fiery ashes of new alchemies, the horn was hammered into various shapes. The spirit of experimentation drove inventors to improvise on
the forms offered by bugle, oboe, bullhorn, and perhaps conch shell. The craftsmen stirred new metal recipes in their smelting pots, fine-tuned the thickness of the metal’s gauge, twisted and turned the tubing into strange new shapes, and eventually added valves. The prototype emerged as the hunting horn, with its simple coiled tubes and narrowly flared bell. Then unnatural alchemies gave us the natural horn, also valveless but including a mouthpiece, longer coiled tubes, and wider flared bell. Then came the horn as we know it in its present incarnations, with valves and complex coils, in single, double and even triple versions. Whether golden or silvery they, as objects, seem strangely alien outside the chambers where music is performed. But now it is the horn’s natural original that is more alienated. How many contemporary horn players, going cross-country to a concert or camp, see a solitary bull in an open field and think nothing of it?
The horn’s ancient fertility associations were not lost on its early users. Long before it established its place in elegant chambers as part of the orchestra the horn participated in the hunt, sounding, in the excitement of the chase, chords recalling ancient animal sacrifice as a token of the bounty of nature at harvest time. Several composers conjure these chords in renditions both simple and sophisticated but lost to most of us today is the often subtle and deep symbolism once represented by the horns on an animal’s head.
No doubt we still have some questions to ask about the horn whose sounds so often haunt and thrill us in ways no other instruments can. If it is true that form is function, what is it about the horn’s form that provides its capacity to so deeply, and comprehensively, move the listener? It seems silly to ask: Is the horn male or female? Allow me a few poetic liberties here. The bugle, cornet, and trumpet stand out as conspicuously “male” often used as instruments of the hunt and warfare too, their clarion power not often softened into the quiet tones we associate with peaceful domestic life. This phallic quality is at odds with the horn’s
circularity, suggestive of the body and belly of the wellrounded woman. The cornucopia is perhaps a fitting analogue, its curved form androgynous, phallic on one end and open-wombed on the other, its bell shape pouring out the fruits of the earth. Is the horn music’s cornucopia, its form also androgynous, capable of including and balancing the male power and female grace that recall us to ancient mysteries and rituals?
As an object the horn is simply an instrument for circulating air. No literal fruits pour forth from its bell. The horn player is the vehicle, like the horn itself, of the horn’s raw material. Through the agency of the player air undergoes a conversion experience, with music emerging as a refinement of air’s raw power. For the Greeks and in the Gospels the word pneuma refers to both “breath” and “spirit.” Like earth and its growth processes air too is a lifegiving power. If the horn on the beast’s head once symbolized the power of the earth to bring forth new life, the horn takes a finer, more invisible vital substance in, circulates it in its guts, and alchemically transforms it into beautiful art. This music is also the fruit of nature’s womb, often available as a gift in the marketplace where few come to buy.
It probably doesn’t matter that I’ve forgotten her name. She was on loan from a university in Beijing, a softspoken woman who had left a young child behind in order to take learning wherever in the world it was going. She had experiences unimaginable to me, had been victimized by the Cultural Revolution, and had read widely and thoughtfully. In her gaze I saw a hard but becalmed stoicism that distanced her from sorrows, perhaps horrors, that have to be abstracted in order to be endured. Her mind turned smoothly and quietly, as if life had taught her that holding back was both a useful tactic and way of keeping in view the long view. She weighed words by the ounce. She did not come off as brilliant. She glowed.
“Perhaps it is more important to forget,” she said quietly.
With the stroke of that simple sentence she brushed over two hours’ worth of my babblings about memory. The importance of memory: How the Greeks had a goddess, Mnemosyne, to honor memory, give it divine presence, and how they assigned vital cultural functions to Mnemosyne’s nine daughters in the hope that these daughters’ pregnant powers would speak for important types of culture poetry (epic, hymnal, lyrical), history, music, dance, drama (tragedy and comedy), astronomy nurture them and thereby make culture thrive and endure.
It is the quality of our memory, I recall myself saying in preparation for a discussion of Elie Wiesel’s Night, that matters most. I’m aware of some of memory’s thorns: The tricks it plays on me, the way it reinvents itself, conflates fantasy and fact, is sensitive to pleasure and pain. I also take seriously collective consciousness: How nations recall, invent, mythologize, and institutionalize their histories, and how the construction of collectively shared narratives may affect the rise and fall of empires. I bore people complaining about general American indifference, even hostility, to
history, to the stereotypical ways it is conceived as a series of conflicts defined by the dates of wars and names of generals. The quality of historical memory, I like to think, might be best served not by recall of actual events but by studying a culture’s major and representative works of art.
Wiesel’s Night, which depicts a Jewish boy’s experiences as Nazis herd their victims to concentration camps, has gained stature as one such literary work. Secretly I’ve had misgivings about Wiesel’s Night. While this powerful book provides a vivid account of an individual’s harrowing experiences, it does little to provide an understanding of the complex causes, or systems, that made Nazi power and cruelty possible. While eliciting a wholesale emotional reaction against Nazi evil, it does not guide the understanding to an effective targeting of that evil, faces of which perhaps lurk in ourselves. In Night the Nazi world’s evil is real if not well understood; the non-Nazi world includes the rest of us, presumably good. As such Wiesel’s little book strikes a generic chord as melodrama rather than tragedy. The Greeks had no goddess celebrating melodrama.
“Why,” asked the woman from Beijing, “should we read this book? Perhaps it is more important to forget.”
Banishing books is unthinkable, but her simple comment suddenly made the thought of banishing thoughts thinkable. Why canonize, memorialize, Wiesel’s book? She was too gracious to explain, confident that the silence that followed her question like those Chinese paintings in which empty space seems the main subject was large enough to contain unspoken answers to the objections certain to be voiced. Wiesel’s book has brought the Holocaust to the attention of millions of readers, many of them young. But why remember the Holocaust? Maybe it is more important to forget.
I wondered if her view was both narrow and long. She had seen much the busloads of families shipped off to reeducation camps and collective farms. And she had read much no doubt about the Long March and its pleasantries.
And she came from a nation of 1.4 billion souls. Six million maybe seemed small in her view, both World Wars sideshows on a greater Asian screen. Was she saying that in the West we are self-absorbed? Should we pay more attention to her history and its enormities?
Eventually the obvious occurred to me: We are by nature calibrated toward forgetfulness, perhaps for survival purposes. As we age we forget where we put the keys, the eyeglasses, the book that was just in our lap, and if we live long enough we (most, not all) little by little seem to lose our minds, rather completely. If the opportunities for selfdisgust also increase as we age via the aches and pains, foul odors, incapacity, incontinence, etc. memory loss may be nature’s way of encouraging us to make a separate peace with death, one that makes it easier to leave our lives behind.
It’s a dark view, perhaps realistic.
So how can we speak to the quality of memory? We know that even when we’re old memory still serves us in pleasurably important ways. Nostalgic moments “relived,” for example, bring an aching pleasure of sorts that evokes the sweet sorrow of loss. And we all recall the same old reruns over and over again those defining (call them seminal) moments: The home run we hit in the bottom of the ninth, or the pop-up we dropped, or our wedding night, or that time we told the boss where to go. These select moments are re-run more frequently as we age, digging calcifying grooves into our minds deeper than the furrows on our brows. They are one way we underline the episodes vital to the story of our lives we script in our minds. Yes, the past as memorized is mainly where we live, certainly at the end of our lives and also maybe starting on day one.
But where does this leave Wiesel’s Night? Is it just another book to forget indeed is it important to forget this book and the experiences it reflects?
I’ve been trying to fill in some of the blanks the woman from Beijing left in her silences. She did offer a frame. “In
China,” she said, “we have to forget. It is the only way we can continue to live.” She knew aspects of her own history well, and would never be able to forget the painful episodes she had personally experienced. She had terrible ghosts haunting her, and she was conscious of her ghosts. So what she meant by “we have to forget” is not that we can or will forget or that we ever will be able to forgive but that we must move on, as if. She did not deny the existence of her ghosts, but found no use in passing her memories of suffering on to others moving on with their lives.
What ghosts of memory then should be heard? It’s obvious that memory is selective. The millions of lives lost in World War I, in the USSR during World War II, and in various African nations do not equally have front and center seats in the theatre of the mind. And memory of what happened is always incomplete, sketchy at best and therefore a caricature, so why we remember is central to memory’s usefulness. Do we read Wiesel’s Night in order to remember the Holocaust and thereby justify a current politics? There is a moral dimension to memory. Reading Night to justify a current politics may be morally defensible if the current politics is morally defensible.
The jury is hung-up on that issue.
In such cases it is useful to pay attention to how memory is scripted. Do we become inclined to mis-remember our histories, public and private, when we script them as herotales rather than as dramas of the absurd, as melodramas rather than as tragedies? If hero-tales give us winners and losers, dramas of the absurd level the entire field of players and require a radical re-evaluation of where we fit on the stage. If in melodrama Good and Evil are morally unambiguous and justice is achieved via vengeance performed by heroic figures, it becomes easy to find someone to blame in black and white terms. Not so in tragedy. In tragedy a suffering hero is absurdly scapegoated, made to carry the weight of a historical burden many had a
hand in shaping. We read tragedy to remember how we attach blame, misinterpret responsibility, and seek misplaced revenges. Tragedy gives us the scapegoat victims our bloodlust requires, then lets us move on beyond revenge by showing us that we resemble, at least dimly, those who brought the evils on. Such a view requires us to look at ourselves as if through a glass darkly, and to begin the healing at home.
The eyes behind that dark glass, the sense of tragedy inside a concentrated gaze, is what I remember best about the woman from Beijing.
We were getting in each other’s way clearing the table, and the discussion this time was rape. A researcher at a New Mexico University sexual studies institute claimed that the male impulse toward rape had an evolutionary base.
Monica scoffed: “You mean to tell me that rape is natural?”
“He says the potential is there in the biology.”
“So all men are potential rapists? You too? You belong to that male tribe too, you know.”
“Yes, perhaps under certain circumstances. If provoked.”
“Provoked? By what?”
“Very short skirts, for example, or…”
She began losing it. “And that’s why men rape three-yearold girls, or nuns, or helpless grandmothers? You’re trying to tell me it has nothing to do with power and dominance and…”
“Yes, but…”
“I don’t really need to discuss this with you,” she said calmly as she closed the dishwasher door. “Do you know what I mean?”
That ended it, just as my stint in the kitchen also was done. I retreated to my fireplace chair for a moment’s thought. I wasn’t entirely clear about what she meant why she didn’t really need to discuss it with me.
Because I, as ex officio member of the New Mexico sexual think tank tribe, was taking seriously research facts that humiliated and angered her.
Because Our Tribe was so outrageously wrong any further discussion would outrage her beyond belief.
Because she perfectly understood that I was in the Tribe but not of it that I had sufficient sympathy for women
victims of rape and she therefore didn’t have to get worked up about the issue with me.
Because some sort of affection was so deeply felt that it would be best to let me retreat to my fireplace chair unprovoked.
Because we both knew how much cultural work had to be done to undo basic biology.
About the time I was told to watch my tongue I became someone else.
As a first grader in Lowrey School I watched as Mrs. Grundman spelled out “Emil” on the black (in those days) board. I didn’t know who “Emil” was, and didn’t see the word pointing at me. At home I was “Mee-lee-oh,” a version of “Emilio,” the name on the birth certificate I’d never seen. But Mrs. Grundman held the chalk.
So I became weirdly Emil, without asking where the “Mee” and “lee-oh” in my name went. On the playground Emil stuck even when I heard myself referred to as “M-ill,” “Ee-mil” or “A-mil,” or (by my sisters) “A-moel.” For many years none of the variants (even “E-mile” or “A-mule”) distressed me as much as the bad fit my original legal first name “Emilio” (“Em-ee-lee-oh”) had become. Whenever my mother voiced the Emilio sounds of my birth certificate in the presence of my friends, bad names for her surfaced deep inside. “Emilio” was all wrong. It made me a foreigner, not the American “Emil” I was determined to become.
I wonder: How do the names attached to me shape who I am or think I am? This is an urgent question when identity politics call so many shots. If in the beginning was the Word, and if that word is allegedly godly too, what am I to make of the words I pin on myself, or of those pinned on me? When the Old Testament God (El, Elohim, Jehovah take your pick), is asked, “Who are you?” He (never She) replies, “I am that I am.” I suppose what He (It?) meant to say is, “Don’t ask silly questions, you human dot.” But the dot I am is a tiny circle so swollen with names that for decades I’ve had more trouble making sense of those names than of God’s circular self-definition. If I were to name myself by saying, “I am that I am,” people might have a hard time seeing me
as static present tense noun, and “person” as “thing.” Especially if expressed in Hebrew, my tense would seem imperfect. In Hebrew my “I am” implies “I will be” or “I am not yet who I am not yet.” Would that mean I’m in the process of making, perhaps renewing, myself?
Tree roots amaze me so I’m interested in word roots too. In Book IX of “Homer’s” Odyssey our “hero” Odysseus confronts the one-eyed Cyclops named Polyphemus, and asks: “Cyclops, do you ask me my famous name? Well, I will tell you…Noman is my own name. Noman do they call me.” It’s easy to wonder if Homer projected his own tricky ways onto his Odysseus, but Homer’s identity is thornier than mine. Many classical scholars agree Homer was a virtual Homer. They claim that the one said to have composed The Iliad and The Odyssey was really several “Homers” who for centuries collectively contributed to singing (and memorizing) those epics as oral performances eventually calcified into print in books. And Odysseus, whom so many of us call our “classic” “hero,” should be hard to admire, especially when we learn that his name is derived from the Greek word for “odious,” a word expressive of some of his behaviors but rarely applied to the “hero” he is said to be. As accomplished deceiver, draft-dodger, killer and torturer (of Melanthius, whose eyes, ears, feet and hands are cut off and genitals fed to dogs), Odysseus is also unfaithful husband, self-appointed judge, jury and executioner of twelve slave maidens, and killer and 108 of the “best young men” of his city. These heroic deeds might not qualify Odysseus for a Christian medal of honor.
Nor can I be consoled by persistent rumors that Homer, or the various Homers and their various Greek audiences, were color blind. In all the Homeric works, we’re told by people who study them seriously, no Greek word for “blue” appears. How could all those Homers have missed out on what’s so apparent about their own sky and sea, the latter often referred to as “wine-red” but never “blue”?
Alleged Homeric color blindness haunts me (“me” as an object of “I”) while troubling me with the fact that colors, while nouns, often do not convincingly refer to persons, places or clearly objectifiable things. Emilio remembers Emil as a college freshman puzzling over an essay by a cultural anthropologist named (clumsily perhaps) Clyde Kluckhorn. Kluckhorn claimed that the Chinese had no words for “yes” and “no,” that its language is based on non-exclusive categories, while English grammar is predicated on binaries such as “right and wrong,” “high and low,” and “noun and verb.” Rather obviously people who speak Chinese can express negativity, but apparently they do it in contextualized ways that reflect subtleties more complex than a hard-minded “yes” or “no.” Since then I’ve had to hold my tongue before using the word “water” a noun, a “thing” which simultaneously may conjure silvery splashes of spray or the brown soup of a rotten river.
What did Homer, or some of the several possible Homers, see when they looked at Aegean water and sky and did not attach the word “blue” to them? What do I see when a male with skin darker than mine looks me in the eye while crossing the street in front of me? Is he a father and son, a tennis player, a singer of songs, a welder, a U.S. citizen, a Methodist, a Minnesotan, perhaps a member of the Republican Party? Does he have a name, perhaps Ted? Let’s call him Ted. When I don’t have two words to say to him I am usually left with two words for me and him. I’m “white” (doubly used as adjective and noun) and he’s a “black” (mainly a noun, a “thing”).
It seems clueless to ignore the culturally obvious: That to call someone “black” identifies a person with deeply established and superstitious symbolism that equates darkness with ignorance, fear, superstition and evil. Only in a few classrooms do we hear that black represents the absence of color. It must be very difficult to be seen as “black,” and hard to feel that “Black Is Beautiful” when so many centuries full of unworthy symbolism are silently
saying the opposite. The dreadfully negative associations of the color black are deeply believed cultural prejudices. In Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick Herman Melville, a “white male” profoundly aware of the evils of colonial exploitation, clearly explains how the color white may evoke all the sinister dread we associate with black’s absence of virtue and light. But our Western cultural traditions insist on demonizing blackness. Does Ted want me to impose on him the onerous burden of deeply entrenched cultural symbolism. Does he really want to be a “black”?
What do I really know about how colors are seen? I don’t clearly understand how and why the human eye has receptors for only three colors red, green, and blue or how these receptors colorize my view of my views. I also seldom am alert enough to recognize that hue, saturation and value are the three physical features of any colors coming my way. A bluish hue, for example, may shade greenish; it may have a saturation range from darkish to vivid; and its value may range from bright to dull. These physics facts somehow colorize my views as I live my life on the run. So what do I see when I look, perhaps even gaze, at Ted? A wrong word kicks in to tell me he’s a “black.” And what does Ted see if he calls me a “white”?
When I stop to think I find it hard not to think back. Luckily, traditional legends and lore attached to the names “Emilio” and “DeGrazia” accord me plenty of prestige. A dictionary of names assures me that “Emilio” once upon a time referred to a now nameless and forgotten “industrious one.” This seems fair, given the Herculean labors I’ve endured sweating with a pen to nail words down here, and the fact that I always vote for the labor parties.
My surname gives my Depression era migrant workingclass parents plenty of class. The “De” part of “DeGrazia,” often appropriated by European aristocrats to establish their hereditary right to dominate others, is said to be a compound
of various prepositions that mean “of” or “from,” with the “Grazia” part deriving from the Christian notion of Grace, or “unmerited favor,” a major perk. Grace is said to be conferred on chosen individuals by a God whose ways are mysterious and discriminating or prejudiced but great. I imagine myself as an ordinary guy born of peasant stock, not a documented aristocrat, even if my name suggests I should entitle myself. And those who worry themselves about my eternal life should be put at ease. My first and last legal names designate me to be among the very few, perhaps one of the Book of Revelation’s elite 144,000, elected to be saved by both works and Grace.
I feel some pity for the millions left behind who can’t make similar claims.
How I recovered the use of my full first legal name demonstrates how performances can help us move on, while creating amorous rewards. Following a terrible romantic rupture insisted upon by a lovely, if insensitive, woman named Sandy Emil chose to get out of town, a rather big city, Columbus, Ohio, and he fled to Europe for two months. There, in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice and Rome, nobody seemed to care if he was Emil or Emilio. Oddly, out of habit or confusion, he remained Emil for the whole two months, not once wondering if his inability to win the attention of a few women he met along the way had anything to do with the unromantic identity Mrs. Grundman stuck on him in grade one.
However, he knew a little French, and this became the catalyst for his transformation into Emilio. Her name was Gigette. He saw her boarding the ship destined to spend eight days and nights taking them both to the U.S. She had classic beauty and lovely white teeth. “Bonjour,” Emil announced when he bumped into her, “je m’appel Emile.” For both of them Emil became “A-meal,” even as he savored the thought of her. What good taste, he said to himself about his new moniker, and how international. He
saw her proposing marriage to him with the moon beaming down on mid-Atlantic swells.
Then another shipboard woman introduced herself to him, and she was lovely too. “Hi, I’m Candy,” she said. “Hi,” Emil replied, “I’m A-meal.” Accent ague. Candy sounded almost like Sandy to him.
So another shipboard romance ensued, the first one lost forever when Gigette disappeared from view somewhere in the crowd at the Port of New York. A-meal married Candy a few months later, and became, to the astonishment of Emil’s old friends, Emile. That name hardened into a new ring when the newlyweds became Gophers and Minnesotans. And she became a DeGrazia too. Nobody knew him in Minnesota, so it was easy becoming both a Gopher and Emile.
What a difference, he later thought, one little letter of the alphabet can make. He felt exotic rather than alienated in a way he couldn’t explain, except when old friends haunted him with visits and took his Emil name in vain.
Under the influence of a naughty novel and movie titled Candy that shamed my wife Candy, she became Candace, and after ten years with Emile the Candace who once upon a time was Candy decided it was time for them to go their separate ways. This left him an opening to invent a new name for his new version of his old self. So when I saw another lovely stranger for the first time I decided to tell her anew who I am, or was. “Hi, I’m Emilio,” I announced to Monica, “How do you like me so far?” She liked him enough to become a DeGrazia too, and also has been a kind loving wife for many years.
At the altar the words “I do” are simple and grammatical, but good grammar alone doesn’t make for good taste, decency, or fidelity to reality. Nor does language make it easier on me by making a subject, object or pronoun of me. Am I a “he” or an “it,” an “I” or a “me?” Is God a noun, a pronoun (She, He, or It?), or a gerund (God-ing)? If I’m a
woman I probably don’t want men to make a noun or object modifier of me. If I’m a real man I probably don’t want to give this problem much thought. But the essential problem remains: Do I apply terms to myself that obey my sense of who I am, or does the person I am become subject to the whims of others when they point at me without necessarily having the most, and best, of me in mind? Language, like Odysseus, has tricked me many times, sometimes odiously when I’m like Polyphemus, one-eyed half-aware.
As I gaze at myself in a mirror dozens of other possible names begin to appear, all of them making a claim on me, or claiming a piece of me. Some of my names go way back. Paleontology informs me that I was derived from the homo erectus species I was sometimes accused of being in my undergrad days. Now I’m a homo sapiens, an ape-like creature with a college degree. When I’m still in a generic mood I see the word “man” and “mankind” also standing for me, and for my wife and daughters too. Curiously, when I’m reminded that I’m also a member of the “Family of Man” I sometimes feel like the odd one out of that vast international population explosion made up of foreigners, mainly. I imagine that denomination as useful, however, when I need help.
Since Emilio has sired children he perhaps qualifies to be called a family man, though as absent and absent-minded father he wonders what his wife and children call him when he’s not around. And to what “blood” family does he belong? After spending hours shaking down the family tree, he has concluded that Emilio family roots are so tangled and thin they can’t be distinguished from mud. If all the Emilios in the world were gathered into the same tent, they would have to come from such distances probably none would be considered relatives. But the same surname inspires yearly picnics, familiar bickering, and costly genealogical research to settle arguments. As “DeGrazia” Emilio assumes clan status, like a Hatfield or McCoy, and this obliges him to behave more like a “DeGrazia” than an “Emilio,” especially
toward strangers who claim to be DeGrazia clan members too. If Ted, crossing the street toward him, asked him for his name, which of the two would he provide, and would Ted know him better or worse or at all by knowing any of his names?
The “DeGrazia” designation often confuses and disables even Emilio, especially since family includes “blood relations” and bloody noses sometimes inspired by them. He is not sure what to make of his blood, or what his blood makes of him. When Emil learned that he had Type O flowing through his veins, he could be Type O without getting emotional. When someone tried to worry him about what he would do if he were critically injured and the only blood available for a transfusion was that of Nigerian, he realized how white rather than red some people expect his blood to be. Those who insist on calling him a White Male would worry that Ted’s Type O would darken all “white” skin. If that transfused blood were from Ted’s daughter or wife, would Emilio, as a White Male (or white male or “White Male”), compound his blood and skin color issues with gender confusion?
One day he pricked his finger with a needle just to be sure: Yes, his blood was beet-red, like all the other blood he had seen, especially when spilled. Then he began wondering how far back “blood lines” really go. Were all his ancestors Type O’s too, or just some, and did blood lines travel back to ancient Roman times, and before?
Emilio’s mind nags him whenever he is expected to mark an “X” in one of the little boxes asking him if he’s “White,” “Black,” “Hispanic,” “Native American” or “Other”. He feels Homeric, gazing at sky and sea with no word for “blue,” or for “Black” and “White,” coming to mind, while wondering where the little boxes for animal, vegetable, digital, and Daffy Duck are. He looks in a mirror to find a word that covers the face staring back at him. “Black” and “White” exaggerate him. Brown, when he looks carefully, is
brownish, like different cans of spilled paint moiling with hues, saturations and values. He thinks he’s maybe “Brown” but prefers “Tan” because it might help him feel sexier on a beach. But there are no boxes for “Brown” or “Tan.” Everybody carries blood-stained meat laced with lard, but he’s never seen a box for “Pink,” a color that might suggest some of Emil’s inner qualities but hardly the whole man. Now and then the little boxes come right out and ask him to identify his “race.” He used to run half-marathons.
The ancient Homers, while gazing at sky and sea, had no little box for BLUE. And when Ted is asked to put his X in a box does he ever feel that he fits neatly in? Nervous about boxing himself in on official forms, Emilio sometimes tries to innovate. More than once he’s marked boxes on the forms with a “O” instead of an “X,” even as he backed away thinking that both the “O” and “X” cancel him out.
Emil often feels he doesn’t fit in, especially when he’s called names during pick-up basketball games at the local YMCA gym. After he swiped the ball from a tattooed guy who was a Skin (he, the Emil everyone there called The Wop, was a Shirt), the tattooed brute immediately squared up to Emil’s nose ready to fight.
“Who do you think you are, you big asshole?” the Skin tattoo asked.
I dunno, the little gym rat Wop Shirt nodded to say he wasn’t sure.
“I think you’re a big asshole,” the tattoo assured him without saying, “Try doing something about it.”
Until that moment Emil hadn’t given the size of his asshole much thought. The Skin seemed to be confusing the part with the whole, without imagining they maybe had too little in common. Nor could Emil come out with what Emilio concluded quietly to himself: Well yes, here all these guys are running back and forth with me up and down the gym floor, a half-assed confluence of physical function and form, energetically engaged in a social cardio routine enjoyed
by gym rats, most of whom get along well enough without tattoos.
When Emil handed the ball to Mr. Tattoo so he could dribble it away, the tattoo seemed perfectly pleased.
“Asshole,” he hissed after he tried seven more times and finally scored on me.
After that Emil wondered if he, a big asshole, could be a patriot. He was born in the U.S. but couldn’t in good conscience check a little box labeled “Native American.” In the U.S.A. “Blacks” are suspected of being Afro-Americans (and sometimes Egyptians too), but could those African people whose ancient ancestors originally made their homes on the steppes of central Asia, be considered Russian? They are said to have wandered from the Eurasian steppes to the deserts and jungles of Africa. And could these descendants of Russians and Africans also be considered Americans? Emil’s school buddies sometimes called him a “Wop,” mainly to get some laughs, so he began calling himself a Wop so he could laugh too. But he couldn’t find the Wop word in the dictionary, so he looked up Italy in his encyclopedia. He immediately had a personal renaissance, thinking yes, he liked what he saw and decided he had to be Italian because his parents were born there. Emilio eventually backed off and started calling himself ItaloAmerican, even though he was born a few blocks from Miss (or Mrs?) Grundman’s house in Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.A.
This solved few problems. His dark skin and hair (before he turned gray, but is it really gray, silver or white?) made him wonder if he might also be somewhat Afro-American. In Venice, Italy, apparently so. There a blond-haired couple laughed when they heard Emil say a few words in his parents’ southern Italian (Calabrese) dialect. “Terrone,” they called him as they laughed in his face. So Emilio then became a “terrone” too, an “earthling” from somewhere in the south of Italy, across from Africa. That he was deemed “of the earth” flattered him, and deepened his curiosity about
origins. Since the northerners from Venice were proudly “European” and “white” in a way no “terrone” could be, perhaps he, as Italian-American, was more profoundly an African.
What is Emilio DeGrazia to do about those little boxes he’s supposed to mark with an X, like a vote? He is always somebody else, coming from somewhere else. His father’s employer, Henry Ford of automobile fame, had imported Arabs from Syria and Lebanon to work in his huge factory in Dearborn, mainly because Mr. Ford disliked the Jewish “race,” which scholars labeled “Semitic.” Mr. Ford apparently didn’t know that scholars also designated Arabs as Semites, even after they become Americans. Ted also would not have had skin tannish white enough to qualify him to own a house in Emil’s, and Henry Ford’s, home town, though about three-quarters of the men who looked like Ted, about 50,000 of them, worked in Mr. Ford’s Dearborn factory. On official job application forms Emilio never found a little box labeled “Human Race.” So Emil grew up in Dearborn going to school with many called Arabs but not one Jew or Ted, with some of Emil’s neighbors not convinced that Jews and Teds were members of the human race. Some of Emil’s neighbors had bad names for Jews, and some would have called Ted an “animal.”
Emilio’s confusion about what to call himself achieves pressing urgency when he, in a gas station, theatre, or bar, stands at a restroom door labeled “Men.” That word gives him pause, especially since he seldom enters with thoughts about rest. And if the restroom sign says “Gentlemen” he feels unqualified. At moments like this he reminds himself that he harbors the ordinary (if cryptic) biological apparatus of most males. But to what degree, if not extent, is he one of them, a “Men”? He tries conjuring episodes in his life Homerically tough enough to qualify for that fraternity. Since he’s more comfortable squatting than pointing he also wonders about the gender mix in him (or is it them?). Is he macho enough or too feminine to belong in a room for
“Men” only? He is a “male,” but are all males mainly “Men”? And if his feminine side is too strong to qualify him to linger in a men’s restroom, is this also why he reluctantly feels it’s okay to enter a restroom for “Gentlemen?”
But Emilio can’t get around being American, especially when he remembers the poet Walt Whitman saying America is large and contains multitudes. Being sort of Italian with probably once upon a time African ancestors left him wondering if who he was depended on where he presently lives. If he is to be known by where he lives, how big or small does his where have to be to fit who he is?
Emil was born in an upstairs apartment in Dearborn, Michigan, but he was moved from there decades ago. He still calls Dearborn his “hometown,” but it is no longer his home and for a hundred years has been way too big to be a town. His current effort to define himself as “Winonan” and “Minnesotan” competes with the “American” claim on him, so he has a hard time deciding what his place is in any place. In great plain and partly cloudy moments he calls himself a Midwesterner, but his identity crisis becomes acute whenever he, very quietly to himself, proclaims himself a “member of the solar system.” It’s like saying “I am that I am.” The crisis swells to existential proportions when he sees himself as a dot in a bottomless universe that includes everything that happened after and before the Big Bang. That’s why he shies away from space age ID’s.
The humility inspired by his meditations about being a “dot” is sometimes shamed by assumed names he confers on himself because of historical events. When he visited France during the war in Vietnam, he called himself a Canadian to avoid being seen as an “ugly American.” This surge of maple leaf pride gives him leave to call himself
“North American” too. North America is larger than America, contains even greater multitudes, and makes no mention of ugliness. His feet and crooked nose and teeth are very ugly, but he wears socks and rarely smiles, and those
coverups leave him with the nose problem and others he’d rather not think about or mention here.
These afflictions he carries into sports arenas, where he cheers himself by cheering too loudly to hear himself think. Why does he routinely vote for Democrats and root for strangers wearing blue and gold uniforms, or red and white, or black and gold, and never pink? He was born in Michigan, lives in Minnesota within view of a small cabin he owns in Wisconsin. For years he faithfully attended The Ohio State University, and two children, one a Hawkeye, pursued college degrees in both Iowa and Minnesota. So is he a Wolverine, Gopher, Badger, Buckeye, or Hawkeye, or all and none of them all at once, or more or less? He’s seen several gophers and several badgers, usually dead, next to stretches of highway corn, but never a wolverine in the flesh in a Michigan forest or field. He’s learned that a buckeye is a scrubby tree, and can imagine hawks having eyes, and that is something to cheer about. He often cheered himself to distraction for his son’s high school soccer team, the Winhawks. There is no such bird, and never was, but its name requires everyone who really cares about the Winhawk soccer team to dress up in black and orange, but only on football days. He knows one thing for certain: He’s a trueblue Winhawk when his son’s team wins its soccer games.
Life becomes a serious irritant whenever his lovely, kind sister Aurora Frances asks if he’s a Christian yet. For years she’s been praying for him to anoint himself with that word, biding her time for it to become definitive of him. Decades earlier she announced that she was a Christian rather than a Roman Catholic, and insisted that Christians did not come in different flavors, like ice cream. Emilio found Christian theologies confusing, some easier to believe than others, so he never could comfortably call himself an Augustinian or Calvinist, or transubstitutionist or transubstantiationist. Was he both, or none of the above? Some of his best friends call themselves pagans, but he shunned that designation in order to keep the peace in his sister’s living room. Atheists
generally seemed to get along with other people well enough to be called Christians too, but Christians insist atheists don’t qualify for membership.
Moreover, if Emilio called himself a “Christian” he’d also have to worry about what’s Christian about Christianity, and that’s like asking what’s American about America, a question that could lead to asking what’s Christian about Americans. After U.S. bombers drop another load of bombs on targets crowded with civilians, he wonders if it’s fair to call himself “peace loving,” “moral,” “patriotic,” “loving,” and “American” at the same time. So he can’t decide what to call himself as political animal (“animal”!) and citizen, except often confused about why things are called what they are. Whenever his sister Frances (Aurora is her lovely, and pagan, first name) asks him what he is, he says, “I think I’m maybe what you say I am, A-moel.”
This agnosticism makes such a profound atheist of him that his sister prays harder for the salvation of his soul. In the doctor’s offices where he is obliged to fill out forms asking him to state his religious preference, just in case, there is no little box labeled “Agnostic.” I don’t know, he says to himself as he checks the box labeled “Other.” And more than once after making his little X mark he says to himself, “What’s an ‘Other’”?
Mee-leeoh–Emil–Emilio’s identity issues send him looking for a landfill whenever he thinks about the adjective debris that gets stuck to him. He’s described by a lot of words, wholesale and piecemeal, with hundreds of modifiers weighing in on him. Who is he, officially and unofficially? Middle class. College Grad. Senior Citizen. Retiree. Alumnus. Bored. Nice. Humble. Arrogant. Jerk. Dumb. Nasty, Brutish and Short. Adjectives cause bad dreams and waking worries. He can be seen walking alone, trudging down the street with his eyes looking for something inside the cracks in concrete. Though he likes to sleep naked in bed, especially during Minnesota blizzards, he often spends
hours conjuring names out of his head as he lies there wondering what people would call him if they saw him naked in bed.
As he tries to name himself he negotiates his way through the ones he takes for granted, those he’s been given, those he dreams up, those he fears have been given to him, and those he’s attached to himself, while facing the fact that most don’t seem to wholly fit who he is, seems, or is becoming. This is such a common problem that it raises serious questions about ID cards, voting rights, and the fate of democracy.
Now and then I ask myself what names I most deeply feel. But since feelings come and go I eye with suspicion the names I most and least passionately take to heart. When I’m watching ads on TV it’s especially hard to keep track of them. I’d like facts to decide who I am, so I would like to see serious studies aimed at determining how well or how poorly funded identities are. If names are worn like layers of clothes, it would be useful to know who has invested in what I’m branded (or not), and why. Such knowledge might offer hints about how hierarchies of names are determined, and whether there is a direct or inverse relationship between funding and any hierarchy of names. I therefore invite researchers at major universities to do a comprehensive costbenefit analysis to determine what people are worth in relation to what they are said to be, and by whom. Who promotes, advertises or funds the various versions of the persons I am said to be, and why? Such knowledge might offer real facts about how the hierarchy of my names is determined, and whether my actions in real life, or someone else’s vested interests in me, reflect the way I rank the versions of who I am.
Let’s take the example of Karl, chairman of the board of his local Lutheran Church. Karl postpones the board meeting on Sunday because there’s a Viking football game he wants to attend. He paid $1500 for his tickets to four
games, and he’ll also pay for gas, parking, hot dogs, and a beer, plus taxes to subsidize the new stadium. He knows that his Vikings are not the ones who long ago conducted murderous raids on Irish women, but on this football Sunday he’ll delay the saving of souls. Does this delay make Karl more Viking than he is Lutheran? Does his willingness to pay taxes to subsidize the privately owned Viking stadium make him a socialist? And who has invested funds to make Karl the Vikings fan and Lutheran he is?
Now and then I remember to apply the test of time to validate the authenticity of my names. How long do my names stick to me, and when do they become unstuck and perhaps consigned to a memory (forgetfulness?) hole? How much time do I spend each day being one of my names? Do I spend more time being what I’m said to be than who I say I am? The kid I still am also asks, “Good or bad time?” Am I mainly American and unhappy when I watch the news, and mainly Emil for the hour I’m a gym rat? How intensely am I who I am, and for how long does this intensity last? Are there some names that hang on and on, making me miserable or happy for whole days and nights?
But maybe I can console myself by adorning myself in layers of names. All labels carry social glue. The clusters of labels attachable to me allow me to brand myself in fashionable and often restrictive ways, and social life becomes more agreeable when I agree to tolerate the labels someone attaches to me. I prefer not to be called a shitface, but if people can agree I’m also a Gopher, male, human, American, asshole and gym rat, the evil bastard I am said to be settles to the bottom of the moiling stew that flavors me.
Even as he’s being boxed in by the boxes, Emilio is constantly told to think outside the box. Often he feels like an outsider right after he votes. When he confronts the little boxes on election days he watches his hand routinely voting for the Democrat Party candidates, even when he knows that the “part” of the word “party” makes him a partial
partisan who is likely to feel incomplete, unfulfilled, and rather helpless right after he votes. His tiny and solitary vote locks him into boxes others have carefully prepared for him. He’s gray-haired but hardly pale-faced, yet he feels pressured to call himself a White Male. But being one makes a villain of him. Inside liberal boxes he, a White Male,” is obliged to be an enemy of women’s rights and serious threat to “Blacks.” It’s all rather odd. I consider myself more intensely a “feminist” than a “White Male.”
Do I begin hating myself based on what people call me, or do I become what I’m called? I, like the good Christian my sister thinks I am not, would prefer to be known by works rather than belief. This is one reason my identity complex has given me a new appreciation of writers, actors and dramatists. We know good actors when they are “in character” that is, when they’re good at pretending to be someone other than who they appear to be in public. Great acting occurs when only the portrayed character, not the actor’s name, seems real. As an actor any name attached to me requires a performance that in turn elicits conviction, feeling and art if it is not to devolve into its opposites faithlessness, insensitivity, and artifice. And because I have name clusters I should decide which roles I can perform without resorting to prompts, masks, or phony behaviors.
I’m inclined to believe that performances can be more real, or more phony, than names. There’s some theological basis for having no “self” to name. Translators of the renowned philosopher Martin Buber have been troubled by his “I-Thou” distinction. Buber used the German word du, and for years du was translated not as “you” but “Thou.”
When does the “you” you are supposed to be become a “Thou” or (also in Buber’s terms) when does a du become an “It”? Only the quality of my performances call them also my relationships with others and actual behaviors elevates a “You” to the dignity of “Thou” or turns a behavior into an “It.” In this view I do not become known, and respected, by what I call myself.
Socrates and Apollo ask me to “Know Myself,” but not specifically as an “I” or “Thou.” This commandment seems harder to obey than Moses’ big Ten, especially if there are many names compressed into a dot-like existential self. Life, as a drama, offers many performance opportunities, and all these options can confuse us about what roles are worth acting out. I try to choose my roles carefully. The poet I seldom call myself is obsessed with trying to adjust the relationship between words and the bewildering complexities we call life. Shakespeare, famous poet about whom so little is known, wanted no one digging up dirt around the tombstone bearing his name. He apparently felt he could rest in peace represented by his creations as various as Hamlet, Caliban, Titania, Bottom, Weird Sisters, Prospero and Puck. John Keats, poet, was convinced his name would dissolve and disappear. He had these words inscribed on his tomb: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” His name is still remembered by a few, but some of his lines may outlast his name.
It’s almost too late to get more serious about identity issues. There’s nothing humorous about what I’m trying to say next. This essay was not really motivated by a deep need to explain Emil’s ID complex and conversion experience into an Emilio. It’s mainly driven by how we talk, crucially, about “race.” “Black” and “white” talk is dominant. But the science of race is conclusive: There is only one race: homo sapiens, or “human” even though those clueless enough to call themselves Social Darwinists, not to be confused with scientific Darwinists, have often perversely argued otherwise. Most talk about “race” amounts to an entrenched and nasty game of name-calling and let’s pretend. Let’s pretend, most of us too often say, that there are two races, black and white, and that other blurrier one, all those “yellow” millions from distant Asian places. Liberals, as insistent as fascists, crudely and artificially colorize public discourse into polarizing terms. The routine use of these terms, habitually broadcast by mainstream media, re-draws
the bold lines that keep our society divided. To call people “black,” “white” or “yellow” is to separate, not integrate.
I’m typical in that I’m generally expected to be simultaneously conscious of and blind to “race.” I’m acutely aware that for many of those most deeply engaged in the politics of “race” what they call “color blindness” is deemed a racist excuse for resisting change. They insist that color consciousness is like original sin: It cannot be wiped away through works, grace, generosity, tolerance, politics, marriage, children, or clarity of vision. I too understand the feeling of solidarity roused by slogans such as “Black Lives Matter.” But the partialities of politics also deepen and tribalize divides. The “All Lives Matter” slogan, useful to neo-fascist during the 2020 presidential elections, was conspicuously aired, and it moved some middle ground voters toward extremist right-wing views that undermined progressive reform efforts.
Emilio the “White Male” faces our collective challenge whenever he sees Ted, a “Black,” walking along the sidewalk toward him. In dangerous streets he and Ted together have good reasons to be at once alert and color blind to threats posed by scarlet blooded criminals of all types. But sinister associations tie Ted to the ignorance, fear, superstition, and evil associated with the color black. They make a threatened, and devious, Odysseus of me. “No Man am I,” my devious mind tells me to hear Ted silently saying as he approaches me. I then repeat after me: “You are not a person like me, a nice man. You are a black, a threat.”
How does Ted see me? If I’m prejudiced against Ted, do we say the unspeakable: He maybe is prejudiced against me.
Why wouldn’t he be?
Untainted young minds free of narrow adult terms offer our best hope. I recall telling my first-grade son that “the black kid” could outrun any other kid on the playground. My son looked at me deeply confused. “Black kid”? He didn’t know who, or what, I was talking about. I mentioned the
Black Kid’s first name, and my little boy’s eyes lit up. “Oh yes, Davonte runs a lot faster than I do.”
Would Aegean sky and sea look blue to my son, or would he have to learn what colors to attach to them?
What can we do? The obvious: Look Ted in the eye and try seeing first his basic and common humanity. Train my mind to say about him, and about my own mistaken view of myself as a White Male, “I am that I am,” and trust that Ted is also quietly saying that about himself. But some facts of life should not be obscured. American slavery is one of those facts, as is the real truth that most of the descendants of slavery have suffered immeasurable wrongs, and that many still do, even as, and because, skin hues have been scapegoated as a way to deflect attention away from more important issues: Low wages, income inequality, unprofessional police practices, infrastructure development that ruins communities, family disintegration, inadequate housing, corrupt banking and real estate practices, gun proliferation, permissive attitudes toward distractions and drugs, poisonous incarceration, mental health problems, educational standards shifted to profitability, shrinking public school funding, and other well-studied forces we know underly the problems we face.
If there is a dull satisfaction that creeps up on me from believing that boredom’s slow time can stretch my lifetime out, it can be exhilarating to sense that a lifetime spent searching for wisdom inevitably leads to the abyss of mystery. Let’s call that mystery a Black Hole into which all knowledge of the arts, sciences, humanities, politics disappear, even after the effort to comprehend them has been persistent, conscientious, even noble. More than once I have arrived at that Black Hole, as I gaze out the window or at the latest news, as if my bed or chair is the Hole’s event horizon, with all knowledge there swirling out of sight down a drain. What can I do then but say farewell to my stranger mind, it’s been nice not wholly knowing you. I’ll just take another stroll in the woods to see what I can see. The trees, whether naked or in bloom, and neither visibly female nor male, impose no beliefs or behaviors on me. And there, even at night, colors come alive, some like oil slicks with rainbows in them.
Ididn’t know what to make of it. Crotalus horridus. Here I am, gazing at the blank page as if waking from a trance, and there at my feet a rattlesnake is writhing itself out of its skin. Yes, fear suddenly freezes in my spine, and I’m too paralyzed to think it through. Pen in hand and writing tablet on my lap, I sit numb as a stone and watch the creature twist and turn itself inside-out until its labor is done. Then, as if I suddenly exist, it fixes me with those eyes for the stillest moment of my life.
Later, in the safety of my city house, I find time to review the scene. You know how sometimes it’s good to get the days mixed up how you wake on Saturday thinking it’s already Monday again, until it slowly dawns that you can curl up to the luxury of not going to work. Right after the rattler finally slumped down and slithered out the cabin door all naked and new, it put me in a holiday mood.
And even now, when the cabin is in its deep winter freeze, there’s no getting Crotalus horridus out of my mind. When I stare at snow I’m warmed by the thought of ancient serpents shimmering in a haze of midsummer heat hanging over the grasslands of a receding Tigris or Nile, or yet camouflaged in desert landscapes littered with stone ruins. In the rippled water and sand of these dim pasts serpents undulate like speckled molten glass, while in pagan palaces sages gaze in wonder at the mazy motions of woman and serpent performing concerts of sacred ritual, their meanings inscribed in code on statuettes, walls, tablets, vases, and amulets. Wherever the serpent lurked in ancient times its beauty and venomous powers inspired fear and respect, its veneration linking it to the Bride, the
and Tree of Life, and to the Great Mother Goddess of earth, harvest, and fertility. Other ancient myths confer on snakes the power of healing, wisdom and peace, hardly works we associate with princes of darkness.
How far we are from those times. How difficult to imagine these days why all children in a West African village once achieved their life insurance by touching a serpent’s tail, or why in the Punjab the snake was worshipped for nine days by members of all religions and castes, or why in Madras anyone who killed a cobra was deemed a murderer who had to do penance for three days and nights. Closer to home we learn that the Cherokees considered the rattlesnake as chief of the snake tribe, that anyone harming one was required to beg pardon of the snake’s ghost, and that the Seminoles dreaded doing deliberate injury to the rattler, wary that any wrong could be righted by the reptile’s relatives. One of my most modern medical encyclopedias celebrates the Crotalus remedy for a wide range of serious disorders hemorrhaging, strokes, infections, delirium, angina, blood disorders. In 1837 Constantine Hering, homeopath of great repute, established that the remedy was especially effective for those who are melancholic, sluggish, and forgetful of their names and of their way home.
What am I, child of reason and technology, to make of such beliefs, or of the fact that one of those relatives made itself at home just a few feet from my chair, the one place where solitude and quiet conspire with me to constrict experience into words. Was that individual Crotalus horridus heaven-sent to inspire me to a conclusion of some sort, an agent there to lift the spirits of my pen? Or was its mission entirely dull, the shedding of its skin before my eyes nothing but a function of biology blindly fatally? happening in my small time and space?
We struggle to see ourselves clear, past superstitions, into whatever scripts happen before our eyes. Curled and writhing, the rattler is a fluid hieroglyph that like all significance easily slips away. Not often are we privileged to get a close-up view, particularly to read the thing’s eyes, which are, as we like to say, something else.
From our distances all snake eyes look alike, their stare narrow, unmoved, intense, and slightly askew like the dots of a deuced roll of the dice. Such eyes offer us nothing warm-hearted and liberal like the large owl eyes of deer, dark-skinned children, and certain mutts. Entire contexts disappear in the spell of such eyes the branches and leaves dancing in the breeze and brushing the cabin window just a few inches from my left arm, the two hawks circling high above, now and then suddenly present as shadows overhead, even the box-elder bugs trafficking in the sunlight on the windowsill. The snake’s eyes, zeroes narrowing to nothingness, spell hate on minds gone blank.
But these are not the true eyes of Crotalus horridus, which we will see by turning to the pages of an authoritative book. There we learn that the rattler’s pupils are vertical, as if perfectly designed to take some primitive version of us, homo erectus, in. If, as Einstein is said to have said, we only know what time it is when there is but one clock in the room, time froze the moment the serpent locked its eyes on me. There I was, as if imprinted on the serpent’s mind, and I don’t know what broke the connection of that straight mutual stare. When the rattlesnake averted its eyes my world became bigger than both of us again. I remember how the snake relaxed its head on itself the way a lazy cat uses its own body as mattress, pillow and down comforter, then, as if I were a privileged spectator, resumed its skin-shedding business at my feet. When it finished, turned tail and slithered toward the door, my heart began pounding like a drum that must have sent small creatures in the grass deeper into their hideaways.
Experiences of this sort take us down and into our dreams, where inevitably a serpent rears its head. Our hearts are running away with us and we see ourselves scream, for the thing is catching up, this one faceless, an enemy with no name, one we’ve never personally wronged. We close our eyes to swoon into unconsciousness, and later we tell everyone that’s when we woke up.
Troublemakers these snakes, this particular one invading my writing space to come clean. We ask, Why don’t they stay with their own kind? My cabin is situated on a Mississippi River bluff where rattlesnakes are known to have congresses of their own on rock ledges and in caves. Does leaving a cabin door ajar grant any one of them the right to invade my turf? I can say yes now that I recall one of the signs of the times, as obvious as the flags saying “Don’t Tread on Me” were to the Redcoat mercenaries: The molting happened on July Fourth, my wife Monica’s birthday, a revolutionary time.
That snake, busy with the business of turning itself entirely inside-out, apparently believed it had a right to be wholly indifferent to my feudal rights. The Laws of Nature conferred on the rattlesnake a right to my space, perhaps one more deeply grounded than the permit that allowed me to crowd my cabin so close to the snake’s bluff.
In lucid generous moments we’d rather not step on toes or tails, prefer to live and let live, and that’s when we like to take a walk in the woods. But our problem follows us there, sleeps in the weeds, basks in the sun warming a rock ledge, ready to ambush a mouse too casually taking in the sights and smells. The testimony of friends and movies warns us that such ambushes really occur, from trees, yes, but more often when giant reptiles rear their jaws from the yawning depths of city sewers “to eat people,” as one movie reviewer notes, “in interesting and visual ways.” We emerge from the safety of movie houses in places like New York, Detroit, and the Twin Cities and walk home to our beds, looking in vain for a psychiatrist to see us through the night. Something big in those evil streets lurks with intent to devour us whole.
My dear friend Tom, local expert on black holes and knots, bears witness to an extraordinary visitation from on high. A buddy of his, a tough Montana cowboy, once confused a rattler with the low-hanging limb of a dead elm. For God-only knows why, the cowboy couldn’t resist the urge to grab. Suddenly the limb went soft and curled out of
his hand, dropped down on his shoulder, and sank its fangs into his arm. Legend has it that our hero believed a barroom claim that rattlers were wimps, too scared to release their venom except as an afterthought when their fangs were hightailing it out of an arm or leg, like bandits shooting back as they run for the hills. So our cowboy stayed cool, took a strong hold of the snake’s head and held it in place before it could make its getaway. He hung on for dear life as he walked to his Chevy pickup, and with one hand drove the twenty miles to the clinic where the doctors and nurses, somewhat aghast, watched him cut the rattler’s head free from a body furiously winding itself up to pump every last drop of its venom into him. The fangs slipped right out, and the cowboy slipped out of the clinic, Tom swears, with the undying fealty of the clinic staff and nothing but a small bandage on his wound.
A pretty true story we have here, cowboy tall-tale with a nerve-rattling twist, and about as true as all good stories aren’t.
Being snakebit imagine it, the pinpricks of pain, the surprise oozing with blood where fangs enter flesh, the slow dawning that the event really is, followed by the flurry of panic and heartbeat stampede, the silent oh no not me shout in the dark as we feel the black hole of life widening to take me, yes me, in, even as we begin our eventual surrender to the inevitable, our hearts becoming serene as if suddenly satisfied by the undulating waves of darkness swallowing us as it coils like a galaxy swirling out of control in bottomless night, our own eyes now reptilian, unblinkingly open to the wonder invisible at the tunnel’s end.
Once bitten himself, a lawyer in a nearby river town has made a profession of performing tit for tat on rattlesnakes. Even on coffee breaks he is known to slip away into the grass on the nearby bluffs armed with nothing but a pistol and fork-tongued stick. He knows exactly where to go, and within minutes he returns with a whopper and story about
the bigger one that got away. Once upon a time he was famous for entertaining his clients with savory cuisine, until word leaked out that he was serving them snake steak and calling it frog, fish, chicken, and even beaver tail. One particular client said it wasn’t the taste that disgusted him, but the idea that rattlers eat rats, tail and all. When people ask the lawyer how he stays so slender he says it’s a combination of diet and exercise and an avoidance of criminal litigation, pro or con. To the lawyer the rattlesnake is not only dolce but utile. Snake heads, fangs, rattles and hides he wholesales to dealers in flea markets, saving the prime pieces for his own boots, belts, elbow patches, and ties. When he comes out for lunch and the sun hits him just right, it’s tempting to think of him as a shining success. On the wall behind his desk he displays a hide measuring six feet plus in length, and someday, he says, he’ll fashion it into a nice shawl for himself, with a slit for his head to pop through.
Unless symbols may be deemed useful, it’s hard to say if the ancients had any such practical uses for snakes. If the very earliest humans engaged in bear cult ceremonies perhaps because those hairy beasts, when erect, are venerable exaggerations of ourselves it is also well-known that serpents, from paleolithic until classical times, were among the most popular latter-day saints, especially among women. But if human development is evolutionary, what are we to make of the shift from bear to serpent ceremonials, given that reptiles are assigned a rung on the evolutionary ladder far below bears? Was serpent worship throughout the millennia of human biological progress an atavistic expression of the avant garde, or did culture miss good old biology? Or are we missing something: Did snakes have special powers back then that we’ve left behind in history like the empty skin next to my writing chair, a thing (let’s face it) that reminds us of one of civilization’s great advances, the condom?
The serpent’s power to charm is hardly a thing of the past. Teenage boys and their ilk perhaps suffer from serpent charm more than any other type. Imagine some good boy, young or old, staring through a keyhole of the mind at some bare-bosomed Geraldine doing a dirty dance with a constrictor chum in Joe’s Last Chance Inn. Oh how he’d love to be that snake. Then imagine me in my writing chair, the rattlesnake wriggling its way out of its old clothes and showing itself off naked to me. Who am I supposed to be, constrictor that would love to be hanging all over Geraldine, or object of desire for the rattler exposing its nakedness on my cabin floor? Both give me the creeps. Only a snake can have it both ways.
It should be better advertised that certain snakes have profound powers of memory. It’s convenient to call their ability to find their way back to their family dens instinct rather than memory, though we wouldn’t dream of saying that it’s instinct that drives us home from another boring day at work. My profoundest respect for rattlers is based on their ability to achieve, on occasion, a last-ditch if primitive form of justice, which we properly should name revenge. The experts remind us that ectotherms, after being mortally wounded, take to death in a leisurely way; so it’s natural that their muscles can continue to contract when they appear to be dead. Woe to the tourist who approaches rattler roadkill with the intention of carrying it off as a trophy to some knotty pine den.
If the sun shines auspiciously on it, the road-kill rattler may strike. Even severed heads have been known to bite a hand trying to feed some idle curiosity.
There has to be a moral code, passive aggressive Manichean, implicit in such acts. The dead snake’s head must have some faculty call it deep memory of being wronged that requires it to strike. The wrongs endured by snakes are historic, predating Eden, but the Edenic Fall no doubt geared the whole of the Judeo-Christian world to
bring such violence down on serpents as a species so that the snake’s best hope for survival even today is to stay underground. That inclination to bite back is it an entirely obtuse reaction by a head dead to the need to protect its right to life, or is it a cunning and desperate stab intended to even a long-remembered score? I prefer to conclude that Crotalus horridus carries a primitive ethical code in its body, one designed to gain revenge on an entire species, us, if possible. Is it any wonder that snakes, like impoverished warriors from jungle regions all over the globe, are often taken for terrorists?
God only knows what my personal rattler’s true feelings for me actually are. Dread, pain, fear, loathing, pleasure, apathy, maybe sudden blind attraction to me, the warmth of my dear heart how can we measure if any of these emotions shivered through its scales? We measure nature by methods so boorishly technical that we conclude that what isn’t measured dread, pain, loathing, pleasure, apathy, maybe attraction to me doesn’t deserve chapters in our texts. The ancients managed without all our precisely measured facts, content to see their way through life with a handful of enduring truths. All those ancient snakes were different enough, like so many clocks in a clockmaker’s shop, but collectively they were chthonic timepieces predictably telling time on earth even when cloud cover obscured the cyclic operations of moon, sun, and stars. Women’s menstrual periods, as faithful as the Apostles and phases of the moon, were good enough reason to measure the year by monthly twelves. But serpents were likewise wise enough to come out of the earth each spring to sun themselves like fat new grasses all summer long, then molt before the chill returned to inspire them to descend into their underworld dens for another winter’s snooze. Little wonder then that there are so many ancient frescos, paintings, statues, and figurines depicting the serpent as consort of the Great Mother Goddess, or entwined with the sacred tree, or lurking underground with grains yet to spring
out of the soil, or swallowing their own tails in a ouroboric gesture symbolic of the wholesome perfection of the lifedeath roundeur of a well-seasoned earth. Even the classical Greeks, geniuses of modern sciences, couldn’t ignore the troubling presence their manly philosophy failed to reduce to reason: Their chosen queen Athena, virgin owl-goddess unnaturally birthed from the thundering brain of a jealous sky god, is often depicted as grounded by a tangle of snakes at her feet.
These were serpents the Greek gods and heroes could destroy but not fathom not when Zeus conquered the dreaded dragon Typhon, or when Apollo crushed the Python that lurked in the depths of his temple of moderation and self-knowledge, monster that haunted him through his long career of love-failures with women, not to mention his nineteen pederast relationships. To our Greek hero-gods these defeated serpent-monsters, descendants of Gaia, were powerful female troublemakers who needed to be put in their place. Hecate, harmless witch-hag, would be easy enough to keep in her underworld, but anybody with a head as tangled as Medusa’s had to be, for simple masculine heroism’s sake, cut off.
Anti-snake prejudice probably peaked historically when St. Patrick engaged the enemy in the search and destroy phase of his Irish campaign. If one is to credit rumors that persist, it was the entire success of this serpenticide that made the planting of potatoes possible, and in turn energized Irish interest in poetry and God. In their military campaigns the ancient Greeks preferred to capture women instead of snakes, knowing that women, unlike the general population of males that died so easily by their swords, could be caged, controlled, and cursed. To live without them was impossible, so to control them strictly was imperative; otherwise how could any man ever entirely free himself from the likes of a Lamia, serpent-woman immortalized by the poet Keats in brilliant terms:
She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seemed, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.
No, creatures like this were dangerous to certain men. Best to do what one has to do without establishing eye contact with them, especially if matronly, and best to remember that the name Venus flowers from the same root as the word venom.
An odd notion strikes me from nowhere right now. Did I fail to mention that the rattlesnake at my feet was doing a belly-dance? Given that its head and tail amount to a fraction of its entire self, that its body is belly entire, what other kind of dance could she have been doing as she squirmed out of her old skin? Consider too that in mating season rattlesnakes tend to travel in pairs, that in the time of great snake heat the other one, her mate, might have been lurking inside the cushion of my chair, actually.
My father, a deeply religious man, does not hesitate to name snakes Satan, and if he had had a weapon in hand he would have made short work of the little four-foot rattler at my feet, belly-dance and all. He can’t tolerate open windows and doors, and if there’s a crack anywhere in his belief system he fills it with concrete faith. But his loving rebel son, with a mind more ajar, has long wondered how Satan got his scales and tails. Some distance from actual rattlesnakes, as
well as religious study in a wizened library, is required if one is to do historical justice to this sorry tale.
What facts did I find in books? That following Constantine’s great victory over invading hoards in A.D. 310, the new Christian administrators of the Empire started making use of leftover pagan god body parts. Cloven hoofs, horns of all sizes and shapes, old goat beards, tridents, sphinx wings, and a whole range of serpent stuff fangs, scales, forked tongues all these were solid construction materials for a brand new line of devils necessary, we now know, to fan the flames as more and more idols, books, pagans, Moors, Jews, and eventually Christians themselves were consigned to fire. Personally, I think the ancient Hebrews thought better of Satan, employing him first for unpleasantries as God’s agent in the Garden of Eden, then promoting him from being a betting partner to a career as God’s prosecuting attorney of innocent Job, with the author of Second Samuel eventually conferring on him all the rights and privileges that go with becoming a proper noun. Imagine the motherly pride the Church Fathers felt as their Satan-child swelled in their minds. They had replicated Zeus’s parthenogenic birth of Athena and Dionysios, a feat so extraordinary that only someone as remarkable as Dr. Frankenstein, thanks to modern technology centuries later, could accomplish anything like it again.
Once the Church Fathers had accomplished their miraculous births, how could theologians resist the urge to picture the Author of Our Woe in their texts, their carefully wrought words providing forms just dim and spectacular enough to be useful to believers eager to conjure this new terrible Lord of the Underworld? As other artisans, painters, sculptors, and artificers got in on the act, Satan, latter day sphinx with head of a man and serpent-beast body sometimes winged, abandoned all Nature to begin his reign as Art.
Voila! Thus Evil, otherwise so banal, officious, and righteous as an arrogant boss, now brilliantly haunts the corridors of the mind as evil god.
If rattlesnakes could speak with our one tongue, wouldn’t they complain about guilt by association, the heavy scapegoating laid like jackboots on their heads? What are we, they would say, but beautiful sausages that stuff ourselves once or twice a year with a flea-ridden mouse no human would touch? Compare us with yourselves, you devourers of whole chickens, pigs, cows and mish-mashed bratwursts. We are more family-oriented and spectacularly more colorful, efficient, and peace-loving than you. Do you resent us because we spend your workdays lolling in our dens with family, or sunbathing on warm rocks? Do you fear we will unionize your office help for more vacation time? Instead of licking us, wouldn’t you prefer to join us for a change?
Crotalus horridus rattles us to the core.
The flesh shimmers imagining the wonder of the thing: This tunnel of rib-caged flesh adorned by sun-shined scales, its tapered tail circled by rings designed to give fair warning to enemies, as if this creature’s head is so swollen with dignity that it prefers not to squabble with inferiors; the muscular undulations that move it over the ground in a motion unifying power and grace; the spark of electrical life centered in a brain that animates eyes just like ours curious, wary, confused at once omniscient and ignorant; the inclination to stay home, the sunny rocks near the cave on the south-facing bluffs; the need to interrupt a life of lounging to feed, molt, mate, and without progress, pension portfolios or management improvement schemes, to carry on a process that has worked to perfection from the dawn of life until now, when the triumph of mankind has made the snake our enemy.
But could that rattler undressing itself at my feet have imagined me to be its enemy? It showed me no shame as it did its little undressing act. At worst it was wholly indifferent
to my presence in the room. Maybe live and let live was all its thought, or (I doubt it) perhaps it wanted to make me privy to rattlesnake ways, wanted me to share the feeling of making a new breast of things. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what I really saw at my feet in the cabin that day, certain only that I am here now writing this, and the snake is here too now requiring me to take another look at it. Especially in the presence of fear that we might be swallowed by monsters we’ve never seen, some of our tales swallow us.
So where are we now? Here and now, earthlings all, we are pinkish globs of cells so dominating that July Fourth rattlesnakes are inclined to let us be. Winters we curl our warm-blooded selves into a mass, preferring to write longhand, our scrawl a crawl toward another day of spring sunlight that may uncongeal the blood. Then we will walk, not drive, through the woods, going slow enough to see with each step. Maybe there, by the side of a path, we’ll be privileged to see one in time, just before it turns tail and disappears.
How beautiful, the colors, the motion, the designs on its back. What wonderful inherent organism, its ability to renew itself by slipping out of itself, a sheath too narrow and sinuous to be any mammal’s womb. Little wonder that even the jealous Jehovah, who has managed to maintain his grip on millions of minds, once upon a time gazed on all rattlesnakes that creep on the ground and said yes, they too are good.
Why should I not believe that when a man eats a lion he assumes the lion’s carnivorous nature, or that when a man is eaten by a lion the man’s humanitarian impulses enter the lion’s life? Digested lives seem semi-permeable. Because I digest and eventually am digested I am in everything, and everything in some measure is in me. Everything lives inside everything else. Everyone lives inside everyone else. And everything and everyone make their rounds: Appearing, disappearing, dying, being born.
I look at this process through a glass darkly. I spend my life looking through this dark glass, which is at once transparent, smudged and opaque, and always stained by the words I use. This dark glass is within, but also outside of me. Everything is in everything else.
I spend a lifetime trying to understand The Life I live, and my gazing puts me in touch with mysterious happenings. I learn, for example, that dung beetles know enough to find their way to their shit-ball feasts by homing in on the light of the Milky Way. Scientists have established that star-light is dung beetle guiding light. I envy dung-beetles this power, one I suspect I lack. Dung beetle knowledge takes me to the abyss call it the rim of mystery that leaves me clueless about why creeping dung-beetle creatures have achieved mastery of Milky Way light while we, standing on the top rung of our imagined ladder of evolutionary success, remain in the dark.
My ignorance is of two types: There is first the ignorance of emptiness and innocence, disastrously confused with “purity” and moral virtue. This kind of ignorance puts me on a mission not to know the work of scientists, scholars and sages. It ignores and even actively denies the existence of knowledges.
Then there is earned ignorance. Earned ignorance is achieved through the work and play of knowledge-seeking. Ever-widening mystery lies at the bottom of everything I say I know, and everything I know is particular, practical, local, too universal, conventional, temporary, and incomplete. I earn my ignorance when I understand that the more I know, the less I know. Earned ignorance is the Ph.D. students earn in the school of hard intellectual knocks.
That I know so little is the foundation of what I know. What then is belief? It is the braillework of words we attach to the symmetries, noises, and wars that result when knowledge hits walls in our heads. It is knowledge’s end game, a tactic I use for avoiding the shifts and tricks of my ignorance, the bottom line I draw in the shifting sands of a bottomless well. It makes property claims, with lawyers hired to prove that fence lines exist because everyone does not live inside everyone else. It is one more shade drawn by language, artifice and art over the dark glass through which I see and invent the world.
I believe that belief feasts on mystery, and that life, call it Spirit Life, lives in mystery. Spirit Life is a trickster that keeps its performance secrets from us. It’s Jesus walking on water, and Jesus sitting on sand in cut-out blue jeans as the Mississippi River rolls by. It’s in the moisture roots crave, and it’s in the stems, blossoms and fruits that eat us when we eat them. It’s in the shit-balls the dung-beetle rolls to his hole by the light of the Milky Way. It breeds anonymous powers, and it has no name and all names at once.
Idid not decide to be a writer. It was decided. My mother sang while she worked, but I didn’t have the sense to sing the moment I, a second grader, saw firstgrader Sandy, her blond hair shimmering in the sun as she stood by the teeter-totter. Call it love, that vague stirring with the wrong words that go with it, the urge to merge. Then in fourth grade I wrote a long short story about a kid who strikes out the side with the bases loaded in the last of the ninth. My need to win approval needed words. And I also was compelled to be a writer in sixth grade because Mrs. Ildza called me to the front to recite my poem about the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Mari and I still had not found the word to rhyme with the Maria word. I needed music then too.
And there I was suddenly in the middle of a sleepless night in 1973, trying to get images of the Vietnam war out of my mind. I don’t know why I threw aside the blanket and walked to a wide floodplain lake of the nearby Mississippi River and stared at the blackness of the water and said I'm going to swim across and back all alone, and do it, dammit. I was really scared of that black water, and then I just dove in and swam and went home all wet and spent the night writing the core of my first published short story.
I wonder now whether silence or words is the best response to whatever haunts and troubles me. Good music, especially when wordless, is better than silence. In my next life I choose to be a musician rather than poet when I grow up.
I made a couple unmusical statements on the dust jacket of my novel A Canticle for Bread and Stones: “A serious writer wants to communicate a vision that evokes a passionate response. The purpose of art is to clarify life for the purpose of making it more worth living.” What I really meant to say
is what I want all my writing to say: Everyone lives inside everyone else.
I can be a real grump. I’ve tried to monitor the sources of my grumpiness, and one consistent pattern has emerged. I’m grumpy when I don’t write, less so when I don’t write every day. Conversely, even the dreary TV news can be pretty okay if I’ve put in some good writing time.
Therefore I’ve tried not to be a grump by shaping my schedule so I can dance some words over the page a couple hours every day. I’ve begged, pleaded, bribed my way toward having my mornings free. In those mornings I go to the same chair in the same room with a cup of coffee, a pen, and two blank sheets of paper. Spartan-like. None of this “inspiration” stuff.
It’s amazing how inspiration comes when you’re staring at the blank page, locked into freeing actual words onto the page. That writing chair is a good place to make the separate peace vital to citizenship in the invented worlds that must be lived in and fleshed out over time.
You know, one could write one book a year if one could turn out one really good page per day. Now that doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, one page per day.
I too have to cope with what I now like to call "fallow" times. You know the urge to clean toilet bowls (I don’t), make the bed, shovel the junk from the basement to the garage. Anything that will get me out of that writing chair.
I know I’m in trouble when I nervously wander around the house as if lost, looking for something to read, do, or eat. Or worse, I turn on the TV news.
These times can stretch out into days, and as they stretch we begin to doubt and lose commitment and hope. Silence, its wordlessness, is annoying then, especially if we lose sight of the fact that the earth continues to spin silently during its fallow times when everything is churning and getting
mushed up in preparation for new growth, without being forced.
So we need to wait too, but during these down times we really have to be on high alert for luminous sightings that come to us whole, often suddenly visible in a piece of music or painting or landscape, and that give us permission to realize them in words. These sightings sometimes come while we’re driving in a car, looking out of the windshield as if it’s a page on which something (not the oncoming traffic) is being written. They’re not likely to come while we’re wasting ourselves. We have to be gracious and patient hosts, welcome them as guests into our silences, let them begin speaking to us. They like to visit mornings, it seems, when we’re in that two-hour space staring out the window at the blank page.
Imagine being an extraordinary male like the Prometheus of Aeschylus, who was not (like Zeus) interested in cowgirls. Zeus seemed hung up on them; his creative energy was narrowly sexual, his fertility (as Sky-God inseminator of unsuspecting earthlings) promiscuous, unformed, merely "natural" and therefore inartistic. Prometheus, his fire, was life-giving too, but there was a moral and practical dimension to it that helped shape the aesthetics of his “gifts” the gift of fire itself (useful for cooking and other hearth-work, for purifying, for forging plowshares and other tools), the gift of language, the gift of living with hope as a troubling fact of life.
But women, excuse me please, can give birth and males can't. I’m not a god, but I’m jealous of female birthing power. Male devotion to technological “Progress” I see as an attempt by males (mainly) to usurp the birthing function from women. (See Mary Shelley on this topic, and other more recent parthenogenic scientific developments such as cloning that prefigure Zeus' two successful attempts Athena and Dionysios to expropriate biological creativity
from women). So women have the power to give birth, be creative that way, and write and sing and paint. For hapless males who don’t work in genome labs the creative biological urge tyrannizes them with pleasure for seven seconds or seven minutes or less, then abandons them to the cold hillside of pillow talk where they're suddenly anxious about what to do with their lives if this, sex, is all there is to it, the climax of a life doomed to be lived for roughly eighty years or more.
Since men can't create life out of themselves without using unnatural technologies, and since they are blessed, cursed, with a creative impulse, those who don’t write, sing and paint become very good at developing the “art of war,” the scientific devices that give birth to life’s perverse inversion, death. *
Males also have to cope with the fact that traditionally they have been expected to be the "breadwinners," a socially accepted activity normally synonymous with doing lifenumbing inartistic work for pay usually squandered, along with creative energy, on conventional play, mainly sports.
*
Whenever I think about Kerouac and Hemingway and all that boozing and tough self-destructive living, how it’s supposed to give writers some feel for “real” life, I lie down and take a good snooze. Their hard living is easy enough to imagine in naps. I think writers should take good care of themselves eat lots of garlic and greens, breathe whatever fresh air they can conjure, swim laps, play pickup basketball, get good rest, and so on. The quality of a writer’s personal and social “ecology” will shape the aesthetic of the writer’s vision and work. Loathing, self-loathing in particular, is an insufficient basis for literature.
And there’s a lot to be said for keeping good company actual friends, face to face in a real space (not merely cyber spaced-out space), preferably in an actual place which we are
working to build into a sustaining and sustainable community, friends who are supportive but also honestly critical. And we need the friendship of really good art books and music and architecture so engaging that they help shape our perception of how things ought to be.
I believe in apprenticeship, preferably with a trusted mentor or two or three. Part of the apprenticeship process should require, I think, a certain filling up before the process of serious literary expression, the type intended for publication, begins. The number of people who consider themselves writers is staggering, given the proliferation of programs in a creative writing industry booming nationwide. I keep thinking of that one philosophical sperm cell swimming insanely toward the hot pulsing egg in Barth's “Night Sea Journey,” the wreckage all around, the zillions of losers washed up on shore. Obviously, if each student (certainly on the MA or MFA level) is required to produce a book-length piece of work as a thesis, a certain tonnage of work is also being shopped around to agents and publishers. This is good in a way, because it creates a grass roots base for creativity, but it can be a killer too because college degrees not usually leading to significant publication can create crippling disillusionment.
I have one other concern: That creative writing programs emphasize creativity at the expense of, and in some cases as an enemy of, critical thinking and other basics of general education, as if poetry and fiction don't have to live in a world of prose, science and fact. I'm appalled by how little interest many creative writing students have in politics, history, art, economics, architecture, any science and the whole course of what we used to associate with “the great ideas.” Often poems and stories seem quite divorced from any history outside the individual self, as if identity is entirely self-created by current notions about a recent personal experience.
“Ay! Me!” said Juliet on her way to suicide.
I side with William Blake, who affirms that a “fiery” creative impulse is present at birth. Call it “Promethean.” Children need to build, draw, sing, and play with words, and when they don’t they get cranky and I get cranky with them. The TV and now computers and cell phones, always present to confuse a child’s needs with its wants, cheerfully distract children into a passivity that makes the wonders outside their small window invisible to them. Instead of encouraging them to breathe good air and eat fresh forbidden fruit, we let children suck on their own juices in front of small screens until enough self-loathing develops to project onto others.
All this is obvious, even to the wizards working for computer companies who smirk all the way to the bank after selling American parents on the need for more technologydriven "education." Why not a piano in every classroom instead? Or more than a part-time art teacher? Or more use of old and cleaner technologies that have proven their worth pencil and paper?
Predictably, almost inevitably, people who have read Enemy Country, my small collection of short fiction about the “Vietnam experience,” get around to asking me: “Oh, were you there?” (Or, more flatteringly, “When were you there?”) I have a number of responses I keep to myself, notably the cute and nastier ones.
The question is particularly troubling when we consider how selectively it is asked. Usually only certain subject matters qualify war, suffering, and injustice. If the writer’s answer is no, I’ve never been to Vietnam, never had AIDS, and have never been a battered wife, a general disappointment digs its nails into the writer’s hide as another question forms in the silence: “Then how could you possibly know?”
If we do certain kinds of writing, and about certain subjects, few care about how we come to knowledge. No one expects the detective novelist to have been a detective, and no one expects the poet writing about birds and trees to be a biologist. Poets especially feel exempt from the footnote. But writers who have not experienced the suffering they portray, and those daring to depict certain subject matters say, for example, males writing about women run the risk of being dismissed because their work is not based on direct personal experience.
Cultural politics always helps shape the questions and silences. A veteran of war denying a civilian author the right to a view of war undermines the civilian’s right to have a view and to make a claim. Women who claim that males cannot hope to represent womanhood deny the possible legitimacy of several womanhood types, and the right of males to offer their views. When writers cave into such intimidation, they censor their creative instincts. They will have only their narrow-censored selves to write about. “Writing from Experience” is only as good as the depth, scope, and quality of the writer’s “Experience.” A lot of people lead interesting lives but fail to make art of them. Shakespeare never saw Denmark or Italy, Dante and Blake never toured heaven or hell, Faulkner was not an idiot, and Macondo exists on no map. If it is to be authentic life can’t be artlessly lived. It also must be dreamed, felt, imagined, shaped, and understood. *
New novels, especially the pulpy best-selling ones, again will victimize countless square miles of forest this year. A few will take away our breaths while all of them together will be doing just that.
The bulldozer called “Progress” is doing its number in our fictional worlds too. Fiction seems to have abandoned itself to recording the incivilities individual selves inflict on other individual selves. To Scott Russell Sanders contemporary
fiction “seems barren in part because it draws such tiny, cautious circles, in part because it pretends that nothing lies behind its timid boundaries. Such fiction treats some ‘little morality play’ as the whole of reality and never turns outward to acknowledge the ‘wilderness raging around.’ We’re in a kitchen, bedroom, barroom, office where characters talk.” (See Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall, 1987).
Nature has its own nook in bookstores too, apart from other literature. The Nature Section.
But there’s no avoiding the influence (“in-flowing”) of any flood, drought, or chemistry the biological, astral and even molecular conditions at play in all little morality plays. Our stories are shrinking our sense of place into decorative sets rather than fields of force with a say about how the play turns out. If novelists hold mirrors up to nature, they will have to look beyond the faces that appear in them. The forces that shape our lives are often in a visible landscape or invisible chemistry. The problem is how to give these forces presence and forceful roles in the fiction’s world. It is not enough to try to get by with a little description now and then.
*
When word arrived that my first novel, Billy Brazil, was to be published, I had an urge to hide. Being published means going public; my private affair with the page was coming out of the closet once and for all.
I have enjoyed a few decades of virtually anonymous publication, a few dozen stories, poems and pieces appearing one by one in literary journals scattered like leaves into distant neighborhoods. I say anonymous because my name is just one among thousands. Though each published piece provides an honor and small sense of accomplishment, publication conjures no real audience. It mainly amounts to the translation of words in manuscript into words in print, a process substantially as private as putting them on the page. Now and then I get some response a letter, and once a telephone call. And now and then a friend would take one
of my pieces home for the night. But the writing and publishing were still mainly all one, a mainly private affair. Even my mother remained clueless about my love affairs with the page.
News of the first novel changed all that, mainly because there was actual news, publicity. Strangers, but also friends and relatives, even a few enemies, would read the book, and I would have to live with that new fact. The strangers would be easiest to deal with, for I probably would not hear from them. The others concerned me much more. My fear of disappointing them was real. I would suspect (even know) they didn't like my work, or, as some would safely say, didn't “get” it. I'd also have to live with the fact that my words implied standards of behavior and belief I personally fail to live up to, that my readers would silently say, “Mon hypocrite, mon auteur!” They'd see me everywhere in my pages, their detective's instincts hard at work trying to match my words with their knowledge, real or fictional, of my life. They’d speculate about what is “true” and what is “made up,” and smirk at the strange passages the creative imagination requires the writer to take beyond a life visibly ordinary, sedentary and dull. They’d also look for and find themselves in the story's characters and plot, perhaps becoming unhappy with their discoveries, then unhappy with me. So maybe writers fear most those who love and know them best their husbands, wives, friends, children, lovers, Dad and Mom.
“My biggest fear,” one troubled woman first novelist confessed to me, “is that my mother might read my book.” I now share that fear, but as I stare at it the fear begins showing me its other face: “What if my mother (or dad, spouse, lover, mentor, friends, even enemies) is never uncomfortable or downright angry with what I write?” Then where has my writing not taken me, what have I risked, and what have I wrought? Will I have explored and entered into that disturbing Otherness necessary to the telling of any sort of truth?
In “The Custom-House,” his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne broods about the portraits of Puritan ancestors looking down on him with disapproving eyes. The ancestors are worried that “the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss on it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. ‘What is he?’ murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!’”
These dreary ancestors aren’t dead, and their dreary puritanism is alive if not well, no more worthy of glory now than it was in Colonial times. And the need to be “serviceable to mankind” nags. We keep asking ourselves: Are we scribblers fiddling while the planet turns into a wasteland? Is the writer’s work worth the living, breathing trees it is printed on? Is writing just a way we have of avoiding the slow untidy grind that leaves an immediately useful mark on people in real need? Should we do something instead?
Doubt, an African orphan too weak to brush flies from his eyes, accuses as it stares at us from the blank page. Like the poor, books will always be with us, elbowing each other for squatting rights on a bookstore plank even as they are overwhelmed by the vast and polluted cultural tide swelling with TV and hi-tech contraptions. I hit bottom when one of those rolling boom boxes drives by my front porch, its woofers pulsing like bombs about to blow up my whole neighborhood. It’s hard to escape the noise vulgar, metallic and violent that has naturalized itself into our daily routines. Silence, so often blank, blind, and meaningless, seems virtuous in the presence of such noise.
We love words in part because there is consolation in their quietude, in the private intimacy they can achieve with one
reader in a distant place. If they fall on deaf ears words do little harm, just as it’s unrealistic to imagine them doing great good to great numbers. So as writers we’re never off the hook when it comes to doing the hard, noisy, generous and actual work of feeding the poor and getting rid of rotten politicians. The ethical imperative of all the great religions, the rule higher than any doctrine and belief, does not require us to tell a story or recite a poem. The ethical imperative is the Golden Rule, and the great sages were fond of conveying the import of that rule through their own silences.
The written word is quiet enough. As writers we secretly know how little we have to say, how there is nothing new under the sun. More difficult to hear are the silences that tempt us to turn a blind eye to injustice, suffering, and evil’s daily routines. In silent moments we know when we’re adding to the noise and should know enough to keep our peace. We also know the difference between a silence that leaves us blank and afraid, and one alive with wide-eyed awe. It is the wonderful silences that call to us, require us to scribble our way toward a new story or poem.
It’s not music we make, but it’s good honest work, a good enough deed.
Some call the paralysis writer’s block. The pen in a hand, raring to go, stands stiffly alone, like a loser at a high school dance who can’t find words for incapacity, or for the beauty seen all around. The brain is clogged, with too many words already down the drain. Why should anything more be said? Life and death are fluid and incalculable. Why inflict more words on them, as if words make perfect sense and therefore have influence and control?
The pen tweaks the mind: I’m your habit, it says, and your lover too. That’s what you said to me years ago, especially then when you never wholly understood what you were doing with me. But here and now you need me like air, water, and sleep. If you fail to obey you’ll shrink and make no sense of the life that happened to you. When you lay me down I’ll no longer be yours, eager to please. That pretty girl or boy at the high school dance, the one unspoken to, left behind. Let them go into their histories, and let go of those unknowns. Let them go away. Then look for them here instead, on a blank page, your careful hand feeling for them.
A presentation delivered at the Institute for Theological and Interdisciplinary Studies, St. Paul, Minnesota, March 17, 2017. Updated, March 2021, and again August 2023.
My website officially named “The Writing Life” has disappeared in the dark web. In a time when (to use Yeats’ words), “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” I prefer to have my writing life both ways. Because so many millionaires don’t pay taxes, I’ve lost faith that the only certainties are taxes and death, and I’m also uncertain about the value of my writing life. I live with a mind clogged merely with possibilities, and with probabilities both pessimistic and hopeful. The label “The Writing Life” has a one-size-fits-all categorical imperative to it. We know there are many ways of life, some rather lifeless, and one perhaps lively enough to call “A Writing Life.”
I am one of literally millions who presume to have something to say in print. I have written almost every day for more than fifty years, and several small press books have my name on them. I have twelve more unpublished booklength manuscripts, devoutly revised, sitting like lonely widowers in my attic. My wife Monica and I also have coedited several other books and anthologies. So I write, I have written, and I will write, even though teaching has paid the bills, and an occasional editing job helps a little. My last book, Eye Shadow, almost ten years old now, has maybe sold 100 copies. All my books are at the top of the Least Seller lists.
Now and then a student asks, “How can I make money as a writer?” My reply: “Learn how to write really effective ransom notes.”
To embark on a writing life is to set sail rather tranquilly on the proverbial sea of troubles. What a writer faces is the wreckage of a century or more its horrendous wars,
plagues, and other miseries, all of them with their posttraumatic debris still present, often submerged, and largely unavoidable. Our new technologies from teletype to cellphone, from auto to spaceship, from rifle to H-bomb, from newspaper to internet make troubles more alluring, accessible, and confusing than the quiet moments a writer faces when staring at the blank page. Consciousness is easily scattered, if not shattered, by awareness of our pasts. The fragmentation pulls us in two directions at once: Toward distancing and distraction, and toward what Wallace Stevens called “The Sacred Rage for Order.” It perhaps takes a combination of whimsy and courage to put a message into a bottle and to heave it into the debris of our last hundred years.
For me the rage for order is rather sacred, satisfied in two basic ways necessary, I believe, to a well-lived life: Epiphany and myth. Epiphany we know as a Christian festival celebrated on January 6, the twelfth day of the New Year, a renewal season, now also the date we link to the insurrectionist violence at the U.S. Capitol. But the term also refers to a sudden intuition or revelation of meaning, or spontaneous insight, radiant, that arrests us with awe. Though our words seldom do an epiphany justice, we always regret allowing one to slip away without trying to find words.
The other satisfaction I require is myth. By myth I don’t mean a fictional story easy to associate with what’s so unreal as to be merely made-up and therefore synonymous with foolish fantasy. Mythos, in Greek, merely means “story,” but let’s call it a definitive narrative a life story, a his-story and her-story, a series of events told sequentially that conveys a meaningful theme. We have deep needs, I think, for narratives that make sense to us, that we can believe in, and that we can find ourselves in. We are also hungry for narratives, aglow with epiphanies, that sequence and contextualize their radiances.
This need for myth, for narrative connection, is painfully felt in an era of broken myths. In our culture the once dominant Biblical myths have been challenged by Darwin and common sense, and made even more incredible by Biblical literalists. A lot of our young people aren’t believing the Biblical myths. The myth of the American Dream, the one that once upon a time gave hope to millions, agonizes under the influence of profiteering and corrupt leadership. When public myths fail to satisfy, they fail to unify.
I try to keep some prescriptions visible when I dare to lift my pen. (I do write with a pen.) One is that I am both a mirror and lamp. That is, my obligation as a writer is to reflect, at least as accurately as a mirror would, some aspect of the world’s real facts and circumstances, tell some sort of truth about them, at least typical, with precision. The other is a recognition that as a “lamp” I am expressing myself, inclined to make the story all about me. So I am at once subject and object, observer and the observed. How well these roles combine is dependent on how well I balance their claims. Do I care about the world “out there” enough to let me express it over the objections of my other self, the one driven by passions such as resentment, despair, lust, ambition, love, fear and wishful thinking? How do I convey inconvenient truths while communicating what I honestly think and feel about a subject?
These questions trouble me. I have a hungry mind inclined to ask questions like this, and so do you or you would not have followed my words here right now. My writing life is based on a deep need to know. I’m compelled to write what I try to understand and believe, and perhaps come to mainly through the writing process.
My writing life how did it begin? My parents came to the U.S. in 1936 from a small and very poor village in southern Italy. Italian immigrants in their day, and even recently, were called “wops,” “dagos,” and “guineas,” the latter label
likening them to “blacks.” Neither of my parents attended school except for a few days now and then. But there was a lot of talk in our house especially at the dinner table. Emilio was my first name at first, Italian was my only language, and English entered me when I was allowed outside the house. The only book in the house was a Bible written in Italian, until a salesman talked my parents into buying a set of Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia. I spent hours looking at the pictures in those volumes, awestruck, again and again, by a full-page shot of the A-bomb dropped on Japan. When, in the first grade, the teacher wrote “Emil” on the blackboard, I didn’t know “Emil” stood for me. “Emil” was somebody else in my teacher’s mind. It took decades for me to become known again as “Emilio.”
The power and weakness of language became known to me years later in a college freshman English class. In an essay entitled “The Gift of Tongues,” Clyde Kluckhorn, a linguistic anthropologist, wrote something I found hard to believe: “You can’t say in Chinese, ‘Answer me yes or no,’ for there aren’t words for yes and no. Chinese gives priority to ‘how’ and non-exclusive categories. European languages to ‘what’ and exclusive categories.” Black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, and noun and verb are exclusive categories.
That we perhaps therefore think in either-or, black and white and good and evil terms because our language inclines us that way makes me wonder about the very language my writing life depends on. Does the English language require processes (a noun such as “weather”) and even “things” (a noun such as “ocean”), to remain static even though they are in motion, behaving as verbs? Is our current political/religious polarization in part a function of how our language writes and wrongs our lives? If my writing life depends on a language that is structurally biased against many of my perceptions, am I wasting my life?
If I want to help the world reshape itself should I have become a painter or film-maker instead? When I walk into the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence and see a “devil” painted in bright colors on the wall, I walk out having a strong picture in my mind I may not ever rid myself of because the picture is so vivid and “real.” That picture perhaps has become fixed as a stereotype and cultural norm for thousands who have visited the Baptistry. It makes the “devil” “real” for many of them, and has profound cultural influence. Images on walls command attention because they stand still, but those contrived in motion picture scenes may be even more powerful. The Exorcist, a movie that seems tame by contemporary standards of Hollywood horror productions, increased public belief in the devil by 21%, according to a Gallop Poll taken when the movie was popular across the nation.
Because of its inherent liabilities writing makes special demands on the process of creative invention. The word “devil” written in ink on a piece of paper appears to a nonreader as black splotches like those on a Rorschach Test. To gain standing in our minds the word requires a reader to impose an imaginative construction on it. As readers and writers we enter our words with our musings, and attach their images to the black splotches. Many of those images are derived from other forms of art. The ink splotches ask us to invent a “devil,” and to accord it with images already in our minds, even if no such thing as a devil exists in the real world. It is difficult to free oneself of the prejudices language and its cultural associations may create in us. When I see a dark-skinned man walking my way, I’m likely to call him a “black” rather than a “man.” The words writers choose, consciously or not, shape how they, and their readers, see the world.
Language’s inherent weaknesses are why it’s so hard to make sense of things, and why so many people, living uncomfortably with the uncertainty of probabilities, prefer the certainty of beliefs that are often unbelievable. The
passionate need for certainty, call it also the need for truth and emotional security, collides with the writing life conscious of language’s liabilities. Thus writing is a complex, untidy process, especially since there are so many words free-floating in minds careless about their own functions. If words can lead us so easily by the nose, why learn to read? Or, if it’s too late to unlearn, why read? Or why read a lot of books? Why not let one Good Book alone be our guide and be done with it? Why complicate things? Simplify, simplify, simplify said Henry David Thoreau in Walden, one of his thick books. Return to Nature, said Wordsworth in all his books. Apply Windex to the language window and pretend to wipe clean. Then go to a football game and scream your brains out.
Is there anyone here who says no, or yes, to this? We want to believe in the probability that poetry, novels, histories, and memoirs books, even when read privately are important ways of developing a mature and conscious understanding of the world.
An image that came to me rather late in life is that languages are windows standing between me and a world teeming with the facts of life. The windows may be frosted, tinted, transparent, dirty, broken, or artfully inlaid with colorful stained glass. But they inevitably refract our experience of life. Language, that which is in us and that which we hear, both filters and transforms our experiences. So we all see through language windows, more or less darkly. This wonderful and strange process is complicated by the fact that we are at once subjects and objects in motion, never stepping, as both subjects and objects, in the same stream twice. So through language the world is at once filtered and fluid in ways that can be very complex and confusing, if we give our thoughts some thought. When I, as a writer, write words on a page I want them to authorize a perception, and a reader expects the words to provide grounding, a sort of certainty. Now and then both writer and reader come away
satisfied, often forgetting that the book, with all its words, is a window in motion too, moving us as we are moved.
We’ve all come back to the same book twenty years later and seen something, more or less, we didn’t see the first time through. Some books we grow out of, and some we come to understand in a new way. “A good book,” said Lionel Trilling (a writer), “reads us.” After I spent the better part of my life learning how to read, I realized that Moby-Dick, for example, is in part a book about how to “read” a whale. Only then did I begin to see how Melville’s book “reads” me. We move on as we are moved.
Moby-Dick is a long and sad wail of a tale about, in part, a whale’s tail, and we all love a story. So let me begin a story, a very short history. In the beginning was a grunt a strange sound that caused someone to smile and ask for more grunts until over a long space of time a set of grunts flowered into the many languages now spoken on earth. That grunt initiated what we could call The Age of the Spoken Word. This age is by far the longest era in the history of humanity, and the spoken word was the major means of communication for millennia until, let’s say, the year 1440 A.D., about the time the printing press was invented. Yes there were books before the printing press, but precious few, and only a few people, often very powerful male members of priesthoods, could claim they knew how to decode them. The ancient Greeks and Romans, and the People of the Book Jews, Christians, and Muslims developed their belief systems and institutions toward the end of the Age of the Spoken Word, basing their beliefs, institutions and politics on understandings derived from meanings coded in a fairly small number of special manuscripts and books.
This Age of the Spoken Word also lent itself to storytelling, most of it face to face. In those primitive thousands of years people had to face each other within hearing distance in order to be understood. And they often met in groups. They could agree or disagree in person, or sit
quietly while hearing actual spoken words. Once spoken these words disappeared forever into the surrounding white noise, unless they were snared by memory, that thing in our head that tricks and abandons us. Poets came along, offering themselves as priests and historians, as depositories of traditions, lore and norms. Poets memorized the memorable, and they became “books” personified. One poet named “Homer,” for example, is said to have written The Iliad and The Odyssey. Don’t bet on it. Very probably there were many nameless Homers, who memorized versions of the story of Troy and retold it, from memory and therefore no doubt with revisions, for the five hundred years between 1180 BCE, the approximate date when the historic siege of Troy took place, and 700 BCE, when the first written accounts appear on parchment. There, on that parchment, 500 years of fluid memorization was frozen as print on pages. That parchment is one of our main windows into the world of ancient Greece. Is it any wonder that so much about Achilleus, Helen, and Paris is Greek to us, and that the “great hero” Odysseus was maybe once not considered so great, given that his name is derived from the Greek word for “odious”?
Chapter Two of my little history we might call the Age of the Book. Let’s say this chapter runs from the first printing press in 1440 to 1990, or roughly 560 years. During this period books, and the increasing number of people who learned to read, had a major influence on how culture, religion, and politics turned out. My writing life began in the first grade, at the very tail end of the Age of the Book, when I didn’t know someone was trying to make an “Emil” of me on the blackboard.
The Age of the Book died young when it collided headon with what is now Chapter Three, the Digital Age and here, rather suddenly, we are, enmeshed in the world-wide web. The irony is that never before have we had so many books as now, and so many Digital Age writing lives. In 1989 about 45,000 books were published in the U.S., but
1,052,803 books were published in the U.S. in 2009, triple the number published just four years earlier in 2005. Add to these astounding numbers the fact that in 2013 alone 458,564 books with official ISBN numbers were selfpublished, with unknown thousands more self-published books in print without ISBN numbers. By 2017 the total number swells to 1,350,000 newly published books, with more than one million self-published books with ISBN numbers appearing, an increase of 28% over 2016. It seems impossible to know how many self-published books without ISBNs also exist, though the world-wide web informs us that in 2010 there were 129,864,880 published books worldwide. In the Digital Age we are experiencing a chain reaction explosion of writing episodes, and each episode comes from a writing life of some sort.
This explosion offers unprecedented options for poetic writing lives. The recent proliferation and decentralization of poetry writing (if not reading) may be seen as a blessing that offers literally hundreds or thousands of opportunities for writers of poetry to express themselves. It may also be seen as a problem that is leading to the subversion and invisibility of honored poetic forms. Clearly, the contemporary poetic writing life is coming at some cost for most. More and more poetry journals charge submission fees, and only a few pay for what they publish. Free verse comes with a cost, mainly to poets these days.
Meanwhile, Whitman’s dream of poetry as widespread leaves of grass on democratic landscapes is being realized. David Alpaugh, in “The New Math of Poetry” [The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2010] finds the growth of poetry “stunning.” Today there are more than 2,000 poetry markets, with about one new journal, both print and on-line, being born each day, and with more than 100,000 poems published each year. Will anthologists cull the very best and make them the definitive examples by which a writing life may anchor itself?
Were a conscientious anthologist of this year’s poetry to spend just 10 minutes evaluating each published poem, he or she would need to work 16,666 hours, which means it would take eight years to assess the eligible poetry for a 2010 anthology. If the current rate of growth continues, an anthologist trying to do that in 2100 will spend 141 years reading what promises to be that year’s minimum of 1,760,750 published poems.
Faced with this runaway math, we should not be surprised to find editors abandoning their noble search for the best poetry available, in favor of more practical, defensive selection strategies. What results are special focus anthologies likely to appeal to special interest groups.
Meanwhile, book industry sales are in serious decline, independent bookstores are almost extinct, and book prices on-line undercut retail book sales, lowering their value as commodities. Commercial publishers and literary agents are more wary and difficult to access than ever, and their eyes are focused on bottom lines. Today a published book has less than 1% chance of being stocked in a bookstore or library. With hungry minds we walk into the book section of a thrift store and are overwhelmed by so many fifty cent choices we become like the centipede who, when he was asked which leg he first moved, became a cripple.
Given these numbers a writer’s chances of being published, or self-published, are improved, though rejection is the norm. Frequent rejection is an emotional fact that may profoundly affect the writing life, and rejection comes more intensely when readers, often friends and colleagues, ignore a published work. So why not perfect the art of the ransom note? Why not Facebook instead, and die tweeting?
Why bother with books at all?
A lot of our young people, wholly given to their digital devices, are silently asking why they should bother to write, or read, a book. We, children of the People of the Book, saw
the printing press as a remarkable “progress” achievement that liberated people from the hierarchical authority of priests, Protestants believed it was vital to read their personal Bibles and find their religion via the agency of their private minds. Books, many believed, could help us make us democratic and reasonable, entertain us, and show us howto. In short, when the book, as an invention, became the fashionable norm, it was supposed to expand individual consciousness, empower science and universities, and ground politics, religion and culture on a rather unnatural process, the ability to read and write words. Ironically, book progress in the Digital Age is trending toward the privatization of consciousness. In making sense of words on a page we talk, perhaps mainly to ourselves, even as more and more of us feel the urge to speak out on digital devices.
In the unquiet sweep of history the communication act, for thousands of years a social process based on speech, has become commodified and commercialized. Most of us read books on the best seller lists mainly because they are the most aggressively and expensively marketed. The mass of other books are like the millions of lost souls described in the Book of Revelation left behind.
It is here, asea in the swelling tides of book production, that the writing life swims, sinks or treads water. A “successful” writer, one who satisfies the expectations of a commercial publisher, or more humbly the one who meets the production costs of non-commercial publishing, inevitably confronts the money problems of the writing life. Book “launches” and readings, media appearances, and active digital “presence” are necessary functions of the financially viable writing life. The writer is expected to be a salesperson, and it helps to be young and good looking. Those who avoid or reject the salesperson role as a necessary function of the Digital Age writing life are very likely to rise to the top of Least Seller lists. They’ll be speaking mainly to themselves in print. On the other hand, writers who act as salespersons too may find their writing time shrunk, and
their purposes for writing obeying the demands of the marketplace rather than the muse.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that the book, during the 560 year Age of the Book, shaped politics, religion, science, and culture in major ways. As we grouped ourselves into nations, we developed national literatures, or “canons” a hierarchy of books deemed “classic” and definitive: Required reading for children and adults. We looked to experts critics, academics, and the politically engaged to authorize acceptable reading lists. These experts were often distanced from marginalized groups, those most likely to benefit from reading more books. Today school textbook selection is heavily influenced by politically active committees in Texas, California and Florida, which have the largest and most politically contentious markets for textbooks, most of them produced by big corporate publishers. Forty-eight states follow their Texan, Floridian and Californian leaders.
While some canons have been seen as necessary to the legitimizing of educated elites and champions of empires and creeds, they also have been partially responsible for starting actual fires. The Bible and Koran, and their literary offshoots, are the most notorious examples. Now these canons are coming under fire, even as their extremist devotees firebomb each other. Today postmodern critics and other ethnic and religious groups also see each other’s canons as parochial expressions of prejudice. In the Digital Age all canons are suspect, subject not to peer review but to often nameless internet attacks. The very notion that some books are enduring and definitive has lost viability. Very few students today, for example, are required to read a “classic” such as The Scarlet Letter, and to use it as a way of discussing the moral implications of adultery, religion, and social responsibility. The Bible and Shakespeare (and maybe a sanitized Homer) persist as celebrity cultural classics, but their uses reflect biases for the celebrity of these works. We all think we know something about Moses, Jesus, Achilles, and Hamlet, but very few of us can name two neighbors who
know the first thing about Titania or Othello, or who have read Leviticus, or who can explain why Hera is so angry at Zeus. Today instead we tend to go on mostly solitary journeys into books, and we have millions to choose from as we struggle to define and coalesce our various identities. While some keep insisting on a common core curriculum of books (and language) as necessary to national unity and identity, it also has become obvious that minorities, women, and the minimally lettered are not necessarily in tune with the lessons of the curriculum and often feel alienated from and oppressed by it. The values and standards based on traditional required reading lists are now seen as a blessing or curse by different identity groups. Writers in any era and nation have been subjected to “political correctness” questions, and today’s writing life cannot ignore the social issues inspired by politicized differences of opinion about gender, skin color, ethnicity and sexuality. For understandable reasons identity groups that have been socially and economically excluded, marginalized and oppressed are asserting their right to be literary presences. These groups are creating their own literary magazines, their own literary criticism standards, their own literary personalities and professorships. Their many “voices” are being expressed in unprecedented ways. Because all art has political resonance, it is reasonable to expect politically engaged writers to claim a piece of cultural turf for their party members.
A writing life has to achieve balance on the uncertain grounds of this cultural shift. While gifted writers can control polemic urges in the interests of art, those same writers face the question of whether their work will be valued per se, or because it is an expression of their personal identities and party loyalties. A writing life that seeks to validate itself via public funding and grant opportunities is not immune from the demands of identity groups deemed marginalized. Public arts grant programs, often the only financially viable way to momentarily subsidize a writing life,
often require writers to identify themselves by gender, “race,” ethnicity, age and location. These categories imply favoritism. One writer I know who sought grant support to complete a work about a young woman trying to understand love and sexuality offers a perhaps typical example of how the judging of writing is done. Tell me why, wrote a panelist for a state arts program, why a male “is best suited to explain how young women feel about love and sexuality? With the current socio-political events, this presents as out-of-touch.”
A writing life today requires a realistic recognition that acceptance or rejection or publication of work routinely depend not on the artistic integrity of the work but on an author’s group affiliation or accident of birth. The authenticator of writing often is not critically examined and subject to impartial artistic standards. Writers with an eye toward commercial success also need to consider these trends as they consider supply and demand.
For writers trying to keep in touch with social-political realities these trends pose troubling questions that invite complex responses. A conscious writing life normally requires that writers not be out of touch with political realities: That ethnic, class and sexuality groups are unequally and often unfairly represented in a literary culture historically dominated by “white males,” even as many literary journals, many of them rather new, now feature the work of identity specific voices. A contemporary writing life requires acknowledgement that the publishing industry and academic literary establishment in the West have been driven by white male, and class, biases. Under these circumstances, how does a serious writer respond to the insistence that an author’s identity should be the major authenticator of a writer’s work, and to the obvious fact that many males have written poorly about male experiences, and that many women have written about love, romance and marriage in ways that upset literary critics and feminists?
The larger question is how a writer’s identity as a member of a class or group affects the creative process. Is one
required to be a veteran of war in order to write a credible work about war, or may participation in a war cripple a writer’s ability to write about war? Can research, study, and observation validate in a way personal experience does not? Does a writer’s empathy the ability to understand and feel outside the self crucially matter? If not, then should women be purged from Hemingway, and such figures as Joe Christmas and Dilsey be dismissed as phony constructs of a southern male, and “white,” sensibility? Should males be redacted from the works of Jane Austen and the Brontes? Because women are minor presences in Melville’s Moby-Dick, should that book be disqualified as a major classic? Are a writer’s life and work synonymous, or is the work as an imaginative construct perhaps more authentic than the facts of a writer’s biography?
It’s fair to say that other minorities have had to confront the same problem, and in more trying circumstances, and that under-represented voices deserve legitimacy and presence. It is also fair to say that a writing life, its artistic value and authenticity, should not be held hostage to the polemics of identity.
One potential upside to the disintegration of cultural canons created during the Age of the Book is the democratization of opinion. The enormous growth of Artificial Intelligence promises to result in a deluge of new books. AI’s scope and power are multiplying exponentially, and its gurus casually inform us that AI’s “intelligence” will far surpass the brightest human intelligence. AI’s machines will know more than humans know or ever will be able to know, and experts have been candid about how AI one day will achieve independence from, and control over, humans. Given these likelihoods, l have yet to hear AI advocates discuss how “conscience” might be programmed into AI “brains.”
While AI is likely to lead to job loss for those who write for a living, AI does promise to make book production more possible and widespread. Anyone who has something anything to say will be able to access an AI database able to express what a budding author can’t imagine or say in personal human terms. AI already can generate answers good enough to pass law school exams, or “write” a sonnet based on Shakespearean and Petrarchan models. Short stories too. Why not novels, epics? It will be able to generate texts better than those produced by careful labor done under the influence of midnight oil. We now can look forward to a technologically invented literature greater than the greatest human works preserved in ancient libraries. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to attach his or her name to a book created largely by AI will have the opportunity to do so.
This further democratization of the writing life has its obvious downside too. What counts as “authentic” when all professional and artistic standards are relative, “equal, ” and possibly generated by AI? Even claims about “fake news” will be validated by belief, not facts. As a technology the printing press centralized authority in institutions that found literacy useful. In the Digital Age, authority is diverse, worldwide and contentious some would say “democratic” too. The professionalism, expertise and research we expect of it lurks invisibly in the ether, up for grabs in the noplace of cyberspace.
So why write? Why get up almost every morning and sit in the same chair waiting for ink marks to appear on a blank page? Because we are blessed, and cursed, with a faculty that has the power to transform our lives. This faculty has no Ph.D. It’s called, loosely, imagination the image-making power we link to the word “creativity,” one of our favorite words to use carelessly.
We refer to “creativity” and “art” a lot, mainly vaguely, and they can make trouble for us. For example, “art,” seldom confused with its family member words “artifice”
and “artificial,” can make us terrified of devils that do not exist. Or it can make us feel good by taking us on fanciful trips away from daily troubles and facts, or by seducing us to fall in love with unrealistic flowers that never wilt or die. It can distract us from what we need to address if we are to survive, or hold us in thrall to that which (from the French entretenir) “entertains,” that is, amuses while holding, arresting, us. Art can be manipulated ingeniously for purposes that do us no good. For every half-hour of TV network news, for example, “art” provides us with twelve minutes of ads, each ad calculated to distract us from what we think is important news of the day. An old man of fifty who has watched one hour of TV every day has spent 101 whole 24 hour days watching ads, or 303 eight-hour days, or a total of 288,000 ads. One analyst (Walker-Smith) claims, “we've gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970's to as many as 5,000 ads a day today,” many of them digital. These ads are directed at our “imaginations.” Most are effective or they would not exist, and we also are “entertained” by them, that is held in their grip, even as words, and books, lose their influence. They are so pervasive that it’s arguable that entertainment, not Fords and GM trucks, is the major American gross domestic product, and that the products provided us by Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue, financed by Wall Street, have created the opaque, engrossing, clever, and “artistic” picture windows through which we, as Americans and human beings, are expected to find ourselves. How much time, money, and grief do we expend trying to live up to the images in the ads we see? Do they shape our writing lives?
So why do I write? I am not immune to the lure of vanity. I’ve believed in the ads for literature developed during the Age of the Book. We were told that certain writers are “great.” Why not believe that greatness may exist in a book you’ve written? So why not be a great writer, a reality star, like a president? If a poor immigrant can become an American millionaire, why can’t a son of Italian immigrants
become a best-selling millionaire, and famous too? Have I dreamt like this, at least more than once, only to find that after the writing was finally done with me the book felt dull and inadequate in my hands, and that my book, now published, was open to public view, and, horrors! with my name on it.
So why did I write all those years, why do I continue to write, and why, now and then, push another book into a world overcrowded with books, especially now when attention spans have gone digital? Yes, there is ego satisfaction in completing a work, saying yes, I did it, even as the sense of accomplishment fades. And nervous fears kick in at the moment a book goes, mainly invisibly but nakedly, public. I console myself with reminders that the process rather than the product is what matters by far, that every first word on a first page is a quiet act of both arrogance and courage, a journey into the largely unknown. I have a hungry mind, not unlike the minds of the people who once upon a time wandered into a bookstore called The Hungry Mind not far from where I am sitting now. The unknown pulls me toward what is not well understood, and I have an urge to give what I discover some shape and desirability, so I may make it a living part of myself. Much of what I have written reflects our troubled times our wars, politics, mental illness, immigration, sexuality, religion and the process of writing has helped me clarify my personal sense of these issues. Have my words changed the world for the better? Not much. Maybe a tiny bit here and there, and only a tiny bit, mainly by creating a mainly imagined solidarity with those who share my views.
Do I sound religiously corny if I say my writing life seeks to satisfy a spiritual need? It’s not a sectarian need, but it is, I think, a common one, largely unsatisfied by the commodification of imagination linked to the products offered by Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. Many of the writers who produced our millions of books
perhaps feel a similar need. Many are on quests to discover meanings only imagination can reveal to them.
I refer here to a special type of imagination, our imagemaking power hungry to make sense of realities, the nag that insists on seeing clearly, precisely, systemically, and sympathetically. Now and then I’m actually awake enough to notice that life’s miracles are routinely passing me by. Now and then my imagination arrests them, and me. Then I have a chance to glimpse what I’ve not seen clearly enough. The destitute drunk on the streets, the teenager with glazed eyes, the sewer pipe, the woman in the bed next to me, the politician’s face as he thinks twice imagination allows me to picture them, make their stories come alive for me. When operating at its highest level it enters its subjects, gets to their core, assumes their voices, and sees through their eyes.
The poet John Keats explains Shakespeare’s achievement for us. “It at once struck me,” said Keats, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean Negative Capability.” This Negative Capability Keats spoke of is the rare ability to achieve sympathetic understanding of otherness. This ability allows a writer to enter others great and small, show them from the inside, even as the writer remains the outsider who is directing the show, like a little god.
So who is this William Shakespeare, who on his tomb instructs us to let his bones, as markers of his name, rest in peace? Think of Juliet’s words when she speaks of Romeo. They might be Shakespeare’s words too:
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
So what did William Shakespeare do? He took his characters and made little stars of them.
So who is he? William Shakespeare is Hamlet, to be and not to be; and he is Lear, the wounded old man; and he is Iago, scheming; and Falstaff, the drinking lunk full of mead and wit; and he is Lady Macbeth, daring her husband to stick it to her; and he is Rosaline; and Bottom, and Titania and Oberon; and he is both Romeo and Juliet, and Friar Lawrence, and Prince Hal and crippled Richard, and he is servants and murderers. He is, of course, none of them, and he is at once all of them. And all the while he is merely Will Shakespeare, a solid middle-class man, who had it in him to be both nobleman and democrat, while being fairy, weird sister, and Puck.
When I’m writing poorly I lack Negative Capability. I’m a know-it-all omniscient narrator with an arrogant tone, like this. I think I’m smart enough to be smarter than the next, and certainly the current (in 2019), President of the U.S.A. When I’m writing poorly I am not entering my subject matter, trying to understand it sympathetically from within. When I’m writing poorly I lack compassion.
So here we are, throwing out little message bottles out into the debris all around, our words concentrated and privatized in them, all of us clinging to the belief we have a story to tell that’s worth living by. William Blake’s words come to mind: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” As our Digital Age sends us into the bottomless labyrinths of cyberspace, many writers persist. They turn inward to their small selves to search for and to form the epiphanies and myths call them “systems” too that bring some meaningful radiance to their lives. They hope to share this radiance, go public, publish it. I can think of no better way to go. That’s why I have a writing life.
I’ve always admired the honesty of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” Frost’s traveler comes to a fork in a forest path and confronts a choice. On a whim not based on logic or practicality he takes the road that seems “less travelled by,” though the other is worn “about the same.” Will his choice take him to some pleasant Walden Pond idyll, a more harmonious life in “Nature”? Frost, a farmer, was only occasionally charmed by “Nature,” a tuft of flowers here or there. He had a dark philosophical view of nature, seeing clearly that it has deathdesigns on all of us. This dark design was on his mind when he concluded that “way leads on to way.” He well understood that the chain reactions that result from the choices we make send us toward unknown futures and fates. And not only the unknowns but death hang silently over him as he, on a whim, “chooses” his path: “I doubted if I should ever come back.”
This thought becomes especially poignant when I’m suddenly sitting in the Mayo Clinic Emergency Room with something unknown going terribly wrong with my heart. The odd thing is that though I’ve arrived at a fork in my life journey, I’m powerless to avoid the limited options suddenly in play. In short, I’m looking at death as one of them. But it’s very strange that from my bed everything seems everyday ordinary the nurses and aides coming and going, the colors of the chairs and walls, the tops of trees swaying outside the windows to my left. The road not yet taken, death, is nowhere in sight. Out of sight and almost out of mind, with the question, “What next?” walking me backward down memory paths already well-trod.
I’ve studied literature the better the best part of my life, and I’ve shown a prejudice for the darker, and tragic, narratives. Tragic heroes, unlike poor Oedipus as reigning king, usually die in those stories, and we close the book
satisfied that this is how some personal histories rightly and of necessity conclude.
We learn, I think, best from them.
My studies also have taught me that a life well-lived requires a narrative worth living in. A self-story, a system or myth, provides a mental construct by which we can find order, direction, and meaning. Some of us align ourselves to traditional myths the Christian story, for example and find comfort and meaning in them. Those skeptical of traditional religions I am one are on their own to create their own. "I must create a system,” said the poet William Blake, “or be enslaved by another man’s.”
Skepticism nags those who try to construct a story worth living in. The problem is complicated by the fact that we live in a sea of stories, many of them in conflict. And I don’t want a story too narrow-minded to represent me. I live in a community and nation and therefore have many complex ways of seeing myself as a character. It’s hard for me to see myself as an American, peace lover, meat-eater and package of neurons, flesh and bones all at the same time. And it’s hard to prioritize my various identities. When I’m also expected to act out my roles as male, black, white, or “other,” I often find myself conflicted or confused. I suspect we all live in strange, perhaps unprecedented, times. While “the spirit of the times” seems so whacky that the need to develop self-stories that stabilize us seems obvious, we are simultaneously asked to “deconstruct” the many narratives confusing us. As ancient scriptures about gender are being re-examined, “male” and “female” are no longer what they used to be. Our stories about America are also a tight fit. Since the Vietnam war our American dreams and national heroic mission as saviors of democracy have fallen into serious self-doubt and disrepute. How in the world can so many in the world see us as bad guy imperialists? At home political factions have stories so far apart they can’t agree or compromise. Many even doubt scientifically established
facts, especially well documented revelations about evolution, pandemics and climate change. Skeptic believers dismiss them as fictions loaded with lies. And a U.S. president tells his people that the even the work of honest journalists is “fake news”.
So many stories, so much to believe, and to disbelieve. All this untidiness makes it hard for a personal narrative, or nation, to find stability. And the stories go on and on, and they don’t end happily ever after the way they once did.
So how do I find stability and standing as I wobble uneasily on the grounds of shifting relativities? How do I process the inflow-glut resulting from the massive availability of information available with a finger click, and how do I square the internet’s potential to make me virtually omniscient while making obvious how clueless I really am?
All this is going on in me while I’m sitting in the Mayo Clinic Emergency Room wondering what to think about what my heart is making of me.
I’m no hero-saint and certainly have missed many of the marks I’ve set for myself, but there’s some consistency about the story I tell myself about myself. I’ve tried to invent myself as a kind and courteous character, and all that. I’ve tried to be an active and engaged citizen, thinking globally and acting locally, and all that. And if there’s been a bottom line to my personal narrative, a dominant habit, it’s that I want to know. More and better. I read and study, and I write because it helps me align the swirls in my brain to neat sentences on a page. That way I can better see what I think. Do I write fictions? Yes. Do I make things up? Do I invent characters? Yes. But what I write represents, for me, some revelation of the knowledge-hungry true story I try to tell as I’m living in it. A long teaching career has enabled me to perform and professionalize my way of seeing myself.
But as I lay in the ER bed trying to hear my heartbeat, my true story about myself suddenly took a weird turn. I know I’m going to die someday as we (and others) certainly must,
but still my life wasn’t supposed to end like this, or this soon, or (frankly) ever. And because it might end very soon it wouldn’t have what every good story requires, a satisfying closure for its hero, me. Nurses and aides are coming and going, the colors of the chairs and walls are dull, and the trees outside the window keep swaying in the breeze. Everything continues being ordinary, and the death experience I now face is suddenly unthinkable and underwhelmed by the ordinary. Strangely too, there is no alarm or fear. The fact that I certainly will die, perhaps later today, triggers no terror in me. But there is a concern: If my life history has been so clueless about what I am now facing, is there something fundamentally defective with it? If so, have I wasted my life?
I think about my story’s bottom line the need to know that is, pursue knowing to the end. And it is easy to conclude it has been a silly and shortsighted quest. I know the Promethean and Faustian myths well enough, how the knowledge hunger these figures tried to satisfy created misery not only for themselves but others. Prometheus his name means “Foresight,” as if knowledge provides it stole fire from Zeus in order to improve humanity’s lot. His theft got him chained to a rock, forever. The various Fausts sold their souls to gain forbidden knowledge, the earlier ones for golden rewards, others for its own sake. And Goethe’s enlightened Faustus was devoted to the improvement of humanity. In time these knowledge-thief types metamorphose into Dr. Frankenstein, scientist with good intentions and a curiosity so out of control he creates a pathetic monster who visits horrifying unintended consequences on the community. To go from Dr. Frankenstein to the genius physicists who have given us the H-bomb, genetic engineering, cloning and Artificial Intelligence requires no long leap of the imagination. Present trends seem potentially catastrophic in unprecedented ways, with new technologies being unleashed at the speed, not so metaphorically, of light.
What I carried into the Mayo Clinic ER with my ailing heart was not my personal disaster but the planet’s, with a few of its inhabitants possessed by a runaway curiosity and obsession with technological innovation with major links to profit-making. I wondered if in the presence of the latest devices that could save my life, knowledge adventures were likely to destroy the world.
The politics of the question is especially troubling. As a university professor I’ve seen many teachers, writers and researchers who live in stories much like mine. Their mission is to learn, know, educate, and communicate. Many have lived their whole lives devoted to that mission. Knownothing politics and its Fake News narrative is now busy invalidating everything I, and my conscientious colleagues, deeply believe.
To stare at this prospect with a very troubled heart is to stand uneasily on the rim of a bottomless black hole in which no tendril of knowledge is visible. Death is the deepest and most final ignorance, and in the end we all end up falling into it. It’s deeply troubling to imagine my personal quest, my citizenship, and my professional life descending into that black hole and disappearing into its meaninglessness. Call it existential despair. Call this prospect also the heartbeat of the beast of the new Know-Nothing Fake News narrative found so deeply entertaining by millions of Americans. Bad politics was my ER catalyst for a descent into end-of-life despair.
The Know-Nothing in me whispers that I can solve my despair problem easily enough by subscribing to otherworldly belief heaven and hell and its gods and its unsystematic belief systems. They tell me all I need is belief in heaven and hell as after-life options. What can the knower in me honestly say in response? Only that knowledge and belief are as far apart as notions of heaven and hell. I can’t believe what I can’t know, or at least deeply suspect is not believable.
My rather sudden appearance in the ER places me in a limbo of sorts. The room is shiny and highly professionalized, and I feel banal in it, surrounded by nononsense business as usual technologies, furnishings, and uniformed personnel, all of them providing socially sincere smiles whenever possible. My extraordinary act of maybe dying is happening in an ordinary scene that the workers here redundantly take home with them to their wives, children and dinner tables. I feel like a body object being leered at, with no one desiring me and some no doubt quietly turned off. And the odd thing is that I’m rather bored with it all. I don’t feel alarmed, scared, or excited by what’s happening to me. But I am curious: I want to know what’s happening.
My desire to know is a consolation that grinds against my worry that the life-giving potential of technologies will be outweighed by their wholesale expropriation for exploitation and trouble making. I have no axe to grind against the good work done by scientists and engineers. The core of my concern is that human curiosity seems out of control, selfcensored to be indifferent to unintended consequences, and too often driven by profit, power, or ego motives. If I’ m curious about how seeds can be engineered to increase yield and resist weeds, how can I not be curious about whether all weeds and pests can be eliminated from the planet? Why then would I worry about whether weeds and pests are necessary to the planet’s well being? If I can split an atom, how can I not be curious about whether a stockpile of H-bombs maybe can deter a nuclear attack? So why worry myself with the possibility that a terrorist will make a nuclear device small enough to pack in a briefcase and powerful enough to destroy New York City? If I’m curious about my health and genetics, how can I not conduct genomic research that may help scientists create a new super-race of human beings, perhaps (unlike me, born too soon) someday immortal? Why should I worry about who will qualify for the new technoimmortality, and who (or what algorithm) will push the
appropriate buttons? If I’m so hungry to know, how can I not be elated by the explosion of digital technologies that make information retrieval almost instantaneous? Why worry that a world-wide web of interlaced technologies may fail or be subverted, in ways that may block out massive life support systems and lead to chaos?
Is curiosity licentious when it lacks a conscience and sense of history?
My heart problem came swiftly on, it seems, and silently, secretly, as if it had no history or origin. Its visitation, I suspect, is natural, and I know for certain what nature eventually will do to me. I hear how natural I am when I listen to my heartbeat via a technological device my heart’s pulses sloshing back and forth like soggy clothes in my mother’s old washing machine. My heart’s untidiness takes me outdoors, beyond the buildings and traffic to forests, fields, and rivers, the ebbing and flowing, the buzz of insects, the silent digging of worms, the beautiful, and unpredictable, designs made by schools of fish in coral reefs, the swaying of seas, and the strangely beautiful small monsters that live beneath reefs. And when I know enough to think about it, I pay attention to the invisible winds that toss and turn the trees outside the walls and windows of the building I’m in, the tree motions so fluid compared to the static symmetry of the building I’m in. I envision millions of peasants moving from dirty small plots of land into gigantic high-rise flats. I see cities enduring out of control mushroom growth. I see these cities fogged in veils of car exhaust. I see the brilliant colors blue and green fading into grey. I see Progress everywhere, with Nature on a sickbed, shriveled.
And I my studies and teaching, my colleagues, my university, our knowledge quest have enabled this dark conclusion. Could we have done otherwise? In a tragic narrative the suffering hero learns too late. Can we do some things better before it’s too late? I ask myself if I’ve been foolish and too late.
I think of Henry Reed, a World War II veteran, who published a collection of poems entitled Lessons of the War. My favorite is “Naming of Parts,” a darkly beautiful interior monologue describing a soldier’s gun-cleaning protocol, a ritual duty required as flowers bloom and bees make their strange form of love to them. Reed weighs nature’s ways against the iron requirements of the gun he is sworn to use: “The point of balance we have not got.” And yet I tell myself that a point of balance, though still unknown, may be known. I see information multiplying at a chain reaction rate as the world’s population swells geometrically. I see my privacy going defunct, my individual movements tracked by invisible technologies. I see wars destroying great cities and small towns, and waves of refugees, with children and sacks on their backs, looking for somewhere to pause. I see how unfair life is, how fortunate I am to be in a bed in the Mayo Clinic ER, with life-giving people and technologies all around. I see human enterprise, indifferent to ignorance and absurd Fake News claims, swelling out of control, while nature maintains its elemental motions and forms. Information, and what some call “knowledge,” its parent, may be increasing at a space age rate, but the earth does not increase its area or change its direction around the sun. New chemistries may give us new remedies and thrills, but iron, magnesium and sodium are elements that remain elemental. These elements are in me too, and will remain with my remains, even as the earth continues to circulate.
I see myself among these remains, nosing the trend, as I’ve aged, toward self-disgust with my bodily functions. I, knowledge-seeker, must abide by the limits of my subject matter. There are limits to knowledge too. Perhaps I’ve gone far enough in life, my presence and looming absence a necessary part of its balancing act. Perhaps the world has had too much of me, and the non-elemental may become useful as compost.
The point of balance we have not got: Where is it to be found? In the middle somewhere as we muddle along. It is
one thing to desire knowledge in order to solve real and immediate human problems. But knowledge seeking is likely to go wrong when it stems from a need to dominate, usurp, control and own nature’s sluggish life-giving ways. The mad geniuses driven by profit motives and prestige inadequacy, are not likely to find the point of balance in paths where knowledge is dedicated to maintaining natural healing ways rather than replacing them. The point of balance will be difficult to negotiate, given the current popularity of speed and acceleration and the bold ambitions of researchers and venture capitalists. Work slowdowns may be proper and necessary. Nature’s ways are mysterious and slow, and the slow evolution of the high-status humans currently enjoy as king of beasts suggests there are long-term benefits to going slow.
A slowdown might also help us locate a social point of balance. Let’s call it modest living that prioritizes the elemental: Food, clothing, shelter, clean water, soil and air. Add family, friends and a sense of community and we have the basic elements of a satisfying life.
My strangest ER feeling is a sense of calm. I’m bemused by what’s happening to me, and I am curious about what the dials are telling the health workers hovering over me. The workers seem reasonably contented, with moderate incomes. They seem conscientious, caring and knowing, mainly satisfied doing their work. I’m part of their ordinary hospital day, and they’re trying to make things better for me.
I’d rather not explain my calm away as a symptom of debility, or of depression caused by failing capacities. Maybe the calm is grounded in a cockiness about how medical technology assures me I have nothing to worry about. I don’t think so. I entered the ER with a conviction that the world is wacky and out of control, in part because of technology, and I find my calm oddly stabilizing in a world I see lacking a point of balance. I want to tell someone I think it’s getting too late, but then I tell myself to remain
silent and vigilant because there’s a lot I don’t know. So I’ll let my calm speak for me.
As an amateur Italian, son of Calabrese immigrants who came to the U.S. at the height of the Great Depression, I heard, and learned, the dialect my parents spoke at home. In my mind home always had an Italian flavor, even though my first language was an embarrassment outside the house where I, like millions of other “American” immigrants from all the continents, felt like an outsider in a nation seething with identity crises. Could I be both “Italian” and “American,” and outsider and insider and somehow both, or neither? How could I translate my innocence into a viable and mature identity without believing, as Tancredi says in Giuseppi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, “Things will have to change, if they’re going to stay the same”?
I happened on Lampedusa’s Leopard several decades ago and breezed rather cluelessly through the novel, impressed by prose (in translation) at once poetic, thoughtful, and elegant. At that time I was studying English and American literature, trying to negotiate the conflicting claims of radical democracy and the allure of European high styles. It took too long for me to understand how High (“classical”) Art had been erected on the bent backs of poor people like my parents. This understanding has not undermined my desire, and need, to properly value wonderful and well-made forms.
As amateur Italian I was surprised to learn that “Italy” had to wait until 1860 to be “unified.” It only vaguely occurred to me that the lands called “The United States,” its regions and ethnicities hell-bent on uncivil war, was, in that same year, less unified than Italy.
My copy of Lampedusa’s Leopard lay untouched well past the Trump presidency and the January 6 insurrection he inspired. On a whim perhaps a desire to take flight from political realities at home into an “Italian” past that seemed
as idyllic as travel posters, I re-read The Leopard, and on finishing it kept revisiting it to rethink what Lampedusa’s words were saying to me, perhaps in timely ways.
Like most books presumed to be enduring, The Leopard has to sink or swim on the strength of how it addresses present realities. Lampedusa is in the news. Hardly a month passes without another report about a shipload of desperate immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean or being hauled to shore on the island named Lampedusa. I also am aware that Don Calogero has evolved into the Don Corleone glamorized and normalized by Hollywood into an American type. I’ve never been to Sicily, but my three trips to Calabria have consolidated my sense that Italian southerners, and Sicilians “terroni” are looked down on by many natives in the north. As I think of Sicily and Calabria, their villages and towns, the sullen faces of those struggling to make ends meet, the beauty of landscapes hardened into a craggy charm graced by well-manicured gardens and fields giving their colors to stone houses hanging on to cliffsides, I also wonder about the people there, the uncles hoeing the fields, the grandmothers in black watching from balconies, and the others, faceless and anonymous, descendants of Don Calogero, some also Mafia and ‘Ndrangheta members, their bosses safely smiling in the high-rise offices of Turin and Milan, their clients including Russian autocrats and cryptocurrency creeps, their managers bureaucrats deftly juggling the opposing claims made on them by Enlightenment democracy and neo-fascism.
What would Jesus, Father Pirrone, and Lampedusa say about them?
What did Lampedusa say, or fail to say, in The Leopard? His novel, we know, was written and issued as a last will and testament of sorts. It is perhaps most admirable for the elegance of its style and wry ironies and for Lampedusa’s honesty in not pretending to be a latter-day saint. He is as candid and as brutally honest as his decorous aristocratic
pose allows him to be. If he were with us today lamenting the current state of affairs, he would say, “I told you so. Things need to change, and that will make them worse.”
That Lampedusa takes the long view is part of what makes his Prince worth hearing. Don Fabrizio stands both apart from and above European history and the struggle to unify Italy into a viable nation-state. He is aware of the past’s presence in modern affairs, how the invasions of Sicily have depressed the character of its people, and how that character also has been darkened by relentless sun and an unforgiving terrain. He sees that for ordinary Sicilians life is nasty, brutal and for some too long. But his long view too seldom, and only momentarily, comes close enough. We see streets but seldom the interiors of houses, or hearts. Most conspicuously missing are the interiors of the minds and the dreams of the peasantries surrounding Donnafugata. Singularly absent is the Prince’s own wife Stella, who spends her lifetime in Lampedusa’s book hidden away in her cryptic Donnafugata chambers, almost entirely speechless, invisible, and allegedly in accord with him. A.L. Rowse, in his brief introduction to the novel, has his head tucked up in his own dark space when he romantically conflates the wife Stella with a sky full of beautiful stars. Stella has less presence and less standing in the novel than the Prince’s dog Bendico. But ah, says the dreamy Prince about Stella: “When she was faceto-face with him she raised her veil, and there, modest but ready to be possessed, she looked lovelier than she ever had when glimpsed in stellar space.”
We never see what thoughts about the Prince’s life as husband, and libertine, lurk behind that veil, or what she was required to invest in the Prince so he could own her.
And so it is with the women and girls in Lampedusa’s elegant, thought-filled novel. If Plato and his courtier NeoPlatonists would wonder about how the Prince makes love, on paper, they’d find that the Prince’s honesty about lust deserves as much praise as his confusion about love. It took
some daring for him to take his priest with him to the brothel so his sin could quickly be wiped out, again. And he is forthright about the young and extraordinarily lovely Angelica, reduced as he is to dancing with his true-love dream damsel just before she is given to Tancredi, nephew the Prince seems to value more deeply than his own son or any woman in his life, perhaps because the youth has the charm and cunning necessary to inherit his uncle’s survival style and part of his future father-in-law's almond grove. The Prince understands love in his own way: “Flames for a year. Ashes for thirty,” and no one at the wedding “found the red geranium he had put in his buttonhole to be any reflection of hell.”
Death, with its way of shortening all long views, makes a pessimist of the Prince, even as it darkens the days of poor Sicilians who believe in the afterlife. Lampedusa’s pessimism is cynicism graced by ironic style elegant enough to keep things as they are. All will come unequally to naught. Nothing can change that existential fact. Therefore (it does not follow) nothing here on earth, or Sicily, can be changed. The Prince’s opportunity to become a knight willing to confront death’s devotion to cynicism arrives as a visitation from the young Chevalley, on a chivalrous mission to enlist the potential influential unifiers and reformers of Italy. The Prince’s narrative introduces the young idealist to Sicily. Sicilians, the Prince claims, are Machiavellians, or like doctors who won’t examine the blood and urine samples to achieve real understanding of illness. He thinks they’re lazy and ignorant. Chevalley is informed that brigands returned an un-ransomed kidnapped boy by the installment plan fingers first, then a severed hand, then a head, sans pot of basil. Democratic idealism, in short, educational reform, or economic improvements are impossible in Sicily, so Garibaldi’s dreams have no reality in them. Don Fabrizio provides his reasons for refusing Chevalley’s invitation to be a senator in the New Italy: Sicily’s people have been degraded for so many centuries no new efforts will change,
or ease, the degradation. Talk about the role the Prince’s own aristocratic class has played in this degradation is avoided. As young gentleman Chevalley should understand how disingenuous, and inconvenient, it would be for the Prince to contribute his deep thoughts to efforts to improve the lives of ordinary Sicilians., or of young Italians returning to their roots, the fields and villages in the south, to resurrect those lands.
His encounter with Don Calogero to approve the marriage of Tancredi to Angelica makes clear to the Prince how capitalist wealth and ambitious greed will degrade his wealth and lethargic supremacy. He trusts that Tancredi has the savvy and style to slow the degradation of the Old Order and is willing to marry this foster son into the nascent Mafia class. To cut a marriage deal with Calogero is for him a historic necessity, one he’s aware will more slowly do him in. His time is coming, and he can’t have it all, including Tancredi’s Angelica. Best to dance life away, alas, alack, with, and too soon, without her. No trips and committee meetings in Piedmont required.
The dance with Angelica its freedom defined by formal rhythms and steps designed to artfully impress put on a good show for the Old Order the Prince represents. Not on display is how the Old Order is also responsible for the ongoing disorders outside palace walls. It’s untidy out there, muddy, bloody too. A prince now must make do with what a prince still has, and then, alas, alack, die like all old peasants, but not in a fetid bed.
What is his achievement? Well-manicured gardens, villas, paintings, statues. A palace Donnafugata’s chambers in which ladies can live apart and drown their resentments, affogate, while the Prince enjoys the grace under pressure required of surrender to lost causes. In his palace he too can zero in on stars in boundless space through the narrow mind of a telescope widened by knowledge and style provided by great books. And there too, hidden away in Donnafugata’s
chambers, endures a collection of relics and frames created by Carolina and “a certain Donna Rosa, a great fat old woman with connections in all the churches, convents, and charitable foundations of Palermo and its surroundings.”
“Treasures! What lovely frames!”
A special version of wealth, prettier than bitcoins. But alas, alack, all but five of the relics are “inauthentic,” fit for the rubbish heap rather than the auction house where the wealthy spend their hours inflating the value of Great Art.
Is it fair to ask if the Prince’s priests, peasant workers, favorite daughter Concetta, and faithful wife Stella are also relics, inauthentically drawn?
The enduring allure of Lampedusa’s Leopard is his poetic take, rich with ironies, on the long view. The Prince’s take, however, is two-faced: It looks backward to an impossible time when the Old Order, like the old Prince imagining himself with Angelica, will carry on as before, and forward to the certainty of decline and death. Between these poles Don Fabrizio negotiates his way for himself, and on behalf of the leftovers of his class, a life of “profitable altruism,” the adjective “useful,” the noun “useless.” The palace and Mother Church next door to it are both adjectives and nouns.
What then is “aristocratic” about his class? What is “aristos” “best” about them? What potential positive influence does the Prince and his class have on Italy?
“There exists a deity,” claims the Prince, “who is protector of princes. He is called Courtesy.” Courtiers honor this god by learning his well-established and formal requirements, and they offer themselves as examples for the world to honor. Courtesy, like elegant paintings, palaces, and poetry, as such becomes a lovely relic too, indistinguishable from its cognates Artifice and the Artificial, while able to rise above, or keep itself safely apart from, rancor in times of trouble or war. Even in these times Courtesy is said to command respect, generate dignity, and promise security.
Given the high expectations accorded to Courtesy, the Prince’s scorn of Don Calogero as representative of the new wealthy class overwhelming his Old Order runs deep. The new greedy class will rise without benefit of Courtesy. Here is aggressive ambition “free...from the shackles imposed on other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners... [Don Calogero will move] through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.”
The Prince gives elephants a bad name. Our Prince virulently distinguishes himself from the Don Calogero type. Don Fabrizio will continue to present himself as honest and decent “enough,” and certainly good mannered enough when he refuses Chevalley’s offer to help unify and reform Italy. In Don Calogero the Prince saw clearly what we confront today: The narcissism of a capitalist aristocracy and the rise of neo-fascism, with the likes of Donald Trump as would-be lord of the New Order, his gilded toilet bowls, his Mara Lago palace estate, his model Melania (a Stella in the making) desperately posing as deathless Angelica, and his Trump Tower spire aspiring toward the stars with him these new vulgate forms of art nostalgically expropriated from the Old Order, and useful for generating the illusion of elegance and status that enlarge freedom to cheat, lie, and undermine the honesty, decency, and courtesy of contemporary young idealists like Chevalley. What did our Prince fail to give the world, even after Lampedusa saw the palace in Palermo destroyed by a bomb made in Pittsburgh? Our Prince withheld his voice from important conversations, failing not only to support but even to participate in discussions of how a people might reform themselves. Believers in such discussions are often idealists who believe in lost causes, and the young who, unlike Tancredi, look mainly forward rather than at some new scheme providing a comfort zone. Tancredi will dabble
in futures, and relics as Art. The Chevalleys will insist on developing a new politics, economics and aesthetic sense, one framed by art at once anti-fascist, democratic and ennobling, even “classical” in original ways accessible enough to honor and engage those who work long and hard to make an honest living.
Iforget for how long, but I’ve had black holes on, or in, my mind. When they were first discovered they seemed part of a bizarre science fiction yarn, conjured like those rooted entirely in pulpy sci-fi magazines. Imagine them: A huge star collapses in on itself, concentrates its mass into a space so small it creates a gravitational force intense enough to attract and “swallow” other stars and eventually whole galaxies. But where do these stars and galaxies “go”? To the pinpoint center of the black hole, a “singularity” where space/time curls into a dot of infinite compression. The perimeters of these hungry drains can be smallish, no bigger than our Grand Canyons. And the holes themselves, open-mouthed as they are, are secretive: Once swallowed, no object can ever exit and no instrument and relay information about what it’s like in the hole. If you, Dear Reader, were in such a hole, your situation, seen from the point of view of someone outside the hole, would be grave.
It’s wonderful to see our sciences bringing us to the edges of abysses that renew our sense that life is awful and sublime. As the landfill of human knowledge swells with new discoveries, the horizon of our ignorance expands with our longing to add to it. We want to know what, for example, is on the other side of black holes. What is “the other side”? Through the Faustian smirk on a condescending face God (by whatever name) in his/her omniscient silence says you, nosy, will just have to wait and see.
Little by little I earn my ignorance, cursed-blessed by my curiosity. For good reason Eden’s tree has two names: Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in one section of Genesis, Tree of Life in another. When I was seven an encyclopedia invaded my house, and from then on the two blossomed forth as one. The fruit offered by the encyclopedia looked good enough, so I kept reaching for it. It had its worms, but
they didn’t keep me from chewing away, now and then gagging and spitting out.
The Good and Evil part is sweetest at the core. While lawyers and ethicists like to slice things thin, I think it best to trust from the gut what the good old messy heart has to say. Evil makes the heart shrink, and sets in motion the loathings that distance us from each other. Sin, as Paul Tillich says, is separation.
The “knowledge” articulated in the sentences above is sure to fail me when my power to know, divorced from the heart, kicks in. I loathe certain acts murder, war, abuse so how can I extend bonds of sympathy to killers, warriors, bullies? Can I separate persons from the terrible acts they often commit? Our social and political myths the stories we’re told are there to make good citizens of us make it hard to divorce individuals from their acts. These myths tell us that we are what we think and do, and that character is destiny. They tell us that individuals have free will and choice, that they therefore are responsible call them blameworthy for evil acts, and that “society,” as a collective individual, has a right to exact justice by committing violence against evil-doing individuals and groups.
The sciences, however, tell me a different, and conflicting, tale. Here “knowledge” has no interest in free will. Events––astronomical, atomic, geological, biological, genetic grind their way through life inexorably and often apparently incoherently, obedient only to the laws governing the mechanisms inherent in their substances and ever shifting processes. In this view human free will is a fantasy, one mainly useful for assuring me that I, rather than natural laws, have control over my destinies.
I went to school to learn how to become a good American a citizen responsible for my behaviors, free, selfgoverning. But when the bell rang to take me to my science classes I learned that I’m a child of natural selection,
chemistry, genetics. So, presumably, are my behaviors, right and wrong.
The fruit from the Garden of Eden trees are bittersweet. My favorite apple is the Harrelson, hard and tart.
I stare at my apple, its white pith browning, eventually looking unsafe to eat in the invisible air. Oxidation reduction. Rust and decay. The natural work of apple chemistry.
Maybe a dog, whose brain seems most responsive to the knowledge-seeking of a pointed nose, is spared the dilemmas of Melville’s grand whale, its eyes bifurcated, out of sight of each other, perhaps Kant on one side, Locke on the other, divided, trying to make sense of things. My eyes are not set entirely apart like the whale’s, but my nose is not nearly as keen as a dog’s. The dog’s nose seems capable of bringing the dog to points of discovery. And maybe the whale’s bipolar eyes bring things to full circling in its mind. But what can I know with my organs of perception so compromised?
I teach my children to wish upon a star, and the preacherpriests have us looking heavenward to find God’s truth, theirs. In truth, on clear nights I gaze at the vast silver-white spectacle of the Milky Way, wonderful and beautiful, set against a chasm so empty and black it makes invisible the billions of swirling worlds the naked eye is too mindless to see or understand. Make sense of that of black holes no bigger than my thumb that swallow entire galaxies whole. Of anti-matter inexorably making a fiction of Newton’s Law of Gravitation. Of neutrinos perpetually riddling my body like bullets too tiny to be said to exist. Of the Second Law of Thermodynamics requiring all things to devolve into incoherence. Gazing at the heavens with a mind full of physics riddles me with thoughts so grave they sink away, with all significance, into the black holes of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my philosopher-fathers, told me to tune my truths to Nature’s ways. But until he became older and more ignorant his idea of Nature had a
New England look to it rather like a summer landscape painting, done in soft oils, of woodlands and hillocks coddling Walden Ponds. Diaphanous white clouds, no black holes. Live according to Nature’s Laws? Put myself in tune with Nature red in tooth and claw, with survival of the fittest notions that wrong-mindedly have given us a cruel Social Darwinism, that leave holocausts in the wake of its Progress postures, with a natural selection mechanism that by chance will probably secure the future for roaches, termites and bacteria rather than for citizens of Paris and New York, while black holes suck the marrow from my mind. With each new space probe the horizon of my ignorance expands, leaving me at once wondering at the strange beauty of the incoherence of life and consciousness and at the bizarre darkness in which I am to enjoy my daily life.
I am consoled by ten thousand small things. My cat Milo, feeling cosmic cold in the hint of early autumn air, leaps up to purl next to the warmth in my chest. He, his animal heart, wants my warmth and wants to get along with me, so he puts up with what my irritating hands need, the feel of his soft fur. The relationship is made easier by the fact he’s well-fed on a cat food stew of flesh manufactured from the body parts of other living creations. This stew slips easily out of sight into the black hole Milo is destined to enter too.
In a few minutes Milo will be done with me, will leap away from me to some curiosity. He apparently also needs to know. I then turn and throw my arm over my sleeping wife’s shoulder, and she, feeling me in her dream-state, groans away from my arm’s advances or half-turns to welcome it.
So what do I see as the bottom line of forces at work in the life I so vaguely and merely conventionally understand and at bottom find incomprehensible? Two primal forces: Attraction and Repulsion. I can’t allow myself to succumb to the easy way out of calling them Love and Hate, or worse, Good and Evil. Both seem inexorable, bound to serve needs momentary and familiar or eternal and mysterious. They do their thing, as the saying goes, leaving good and evil in their
wake as surely as day follows night, growth follows decay, and stars go blind and dumb in black holes.
It is not yet for me to fully understand why stars are attracted to black holes, or whether a repulsive force awaits a swallowed star in order to send it on its way to a new destiny. Nor do I know what attractions lie in store for me when I’m in my black individual holes. And it is not for me to know if the forces that attract and repel are performing a balancing act, call it Karma or equilibrium, that honors a large stability indifferent to individual smallish fates. The desire to rush to judgment, to certainty and conclusion, attracts and repels me. I want to say, for example, that every human invention metals, alphabets, the printing press, the automobile, nuclear energy, the genome has given Progress a good name for hundreds of millions. I also can’t ignore that each of these inventions already has made life miserable for hundreds of millions, or someday will. It’s clear my curiosity cannot resist their attractions and is repelled by the way they inexorably turn against our wellbeing.
Friends, lovers, marriages, democratically elected governments, and all creeds, however sacred and intensely believed in, turn me both on and off, more equally as I distance myself into an aerial and historical view. I want to know and don’t want to know, spend my entire life studying my way out of Eden and desiring to return to it.
This is the duplicity that makes me consciously human. The blessing and curse of consciousness requires me to tread water in an ocean at once too deep and way over my head. I do so comfortably in the best of times, as the troubles that come with struggling to keep the mind afloat give way to the pleasure of surrendering. The promptings of the heart are still my best moral guide, the simple Golden Rule an expression of attraction’s attraction to the right thing. This I try to do regardless of repulsion’s lordship over consequences, its ironic way of having its own say in the
service of mysteries that give me glimpses of their terrifying faces as they keep slipping away into the unknown.
Various pieces of “Words for the Silences” appeared in issues of Minnesota Literature Newsletter between 1989 and 1991.
“Snakemate” first appeared in Burying the Tree. Plainview Press, 2006.
“Late Thoughts at the Mayo Clinic ER” appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera, Shipwreck Press, 2018.
“Horn Lore” appeared in Horn Magazine, 2016.
“The Woman from Beijing” appeared in Shadows and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory. Monadock Writers’ Group, 2011.
Emilio DeGrazia, a resident of Winona, Minnesota, has authored four books of fiction, including Seventeen Grams of Soul, winner of a Minnesota Book Award, and Enemy Country, a Writer’s Choice Award winner. A founding editor of Great River Review, he also has co-edited (with his wife Monica) 26 Minnesota Writers, 33 Minnesota Poets, and The Nodin Poetry Anthology. His most recent books are a collection of essays entitled Burying the Tree, a collage of memoirs called Walking on Air, and Seasonings, a collection of poetry. He also has served as Winona’s Poet Laureate. He’s twice served as Poet Laureate of Winona, MN. Emilio’s most recent collection, What Trees Know, was published by Nodin Press in 2020.
Emilio DeGrazia
211 W. Wabasha St. Winona, MN 55987
Edegrazia@winona.edu
507-454-6564