Kay Neilsen, from East of the Sun, West of the Moon
Monday, July 28, 2008
'Dear Prudence
And in the tradition of Sunday posts wherein WNYC's 'On the Media' on the way home from church always seems to relate directly to whatever I had been thinking earlier in the day, here goes:
'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.
The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.
Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.
And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'
...greet the brand new day.'
'On the Media' was on the Internet today. Well, it's always on the Internet if you want to find it, at http://www.onthemedia.org, but this time it was on the subject of the Internet. Here is the link for 'On the Media' on the Internet, on the Internet.
The show was an exploration of aspects of 'digital democracy,' in which such issues as maturity, anonymity, restraint, tolerance, hate, and even my old stand-by, compassion, arose. Surely our print selves, even with name attached and bound in book form, are not identical to our living, feeling, physical, social selves; the relationship between the two is, in many cases, increasingly tenuous the further away from the nexus of social reality, relationships, name, and reputation the writer gets. And anonymous comments on the Internet are about as void of social context as anything could be.
Some people cleave to politeness and consideration regardless of venue. On the other hand, while Ira Glass on the show told of vicious, hurtful things written anonymously to the subjects of a sad and deeply personal vignette on the 'This American Life' comments section, I've seen shockingly and unconscionably mean postings on web forums about religious life and vocations, in which troubled individuals pour out their hatred by calling non-habited religious, or religious of this or that community, all sorts of disgusting things. In the latter case, I should think the self-selection involved, in which all readers are presumably hoping for and working toward the same thing, would have precluded such puerile and nasty behavior.
And yet anonymity, and by extension all the Web, seem to offer an unlimited license to let the Id run free, to discard normal conventions and even ethics in pursuit of untrammeled expression of whatever caliber. I don't know that it's gotten worse in general, or that there are simply so many more people using it, but it does seem like now a greater number of rational arguments than before in every type of venue quickly degenerate into 'You're just stupid,' to which the counterargument these days runs, succinctly, 'F- you!'
...greet the brand new day.'
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Werner Herzog to Narrate Teletubbies Trilogy for Books on Tape
And, to settle the question once and for all as to whether cat macros truly constitute adequate encapsulations of personal philosophies, and whether or not they can sometimes err glaringly in matters of established empirical fact, here is my very favorite one of all time ever in the whole world, from here. I don't think it's true -- but I sure do like it!!
The Sickness Unto Death (Not.)
And, lest you all think I am so holy and attuned to the wishes of my brethren that I am going to follow this gentleman's urging and end my life because I don't like Billy Joel, here is my reader's guide to the personal weblog, or at least to this one, and here is where I (uncharitably) address prospective and actual readers' concerns over the quality and content of this thing. I know I'm not Proust, but unless you have the very worst teacher in the world and this blog is assigned reading, it's kind of unskillful to waste time pouring out hatred when you can just click a button and go elsewhere. It does seem a bit silly to read stuff you hate, doesn't it?
'Stay me with flaggons,
Comfort me with apples: for I am sick with Love.' --Song of Songs
My good heavens. I'm reading parts of St. Bernard's commentary on the Song of Songs, and I just noticed that someone left the goofiest mean comment (anonymously) on the Barnes and Noble post. Fascinating timing, as with everything these days. Anyway, I approved it and let it in because I think it is interesting - not to mention troubling - when people are so angry that they will use any forum available to them just to get rid of one tiny piece of that venom. As though there were some literal, physical store of it, like a bank account into which and from which quantities could be put and taken. If I could spend it all, in other words, I could deplete the account and finally return to civil and friendly interactions. In emptying it I might be again made whole.
Of course it doesn't really work that way. We don't lose our anger by throwing it around as much as we can, by dishing it out to everyone who crosses our path. There isn't an actual, finite amount of it for us to shepherd or amass interest or over-limit charges on. Frankly, it builds within us the more we live in it and the more we give in to seeing the world as one filled with enemies. And unity, even in small doses, even among small groups, can seem overwhelmingly daunting when you really try to absorb the fact that even the genuine and good-willed still ineluctably see the world only through one pair of eyes. Still, telling strangers to go kill themselves does seem a bit extreme in the other direction. Even if the stranger does dislike 80s pop icons Billy Joel and Elton John.
And I think it is obvious that there is so much more loneliness and anomie in the world now than was ever even possible before. People are disconnected, often isolated much of the time -- and how can I see someone as my brother when I haven't even met him? Maybe it is a leap, but equally so is seeing the stranger as the enemy and reacting in that manner.
I was actually going to write something about this the other day, but I couldn't find a way to make it not sappy. With Mr./Ms. Anonymous as inspiration, however, I can give it a try. My point was going to be about the fairly amazing day-to-day consequences of vigorously trying to keep love and respect in the forefront when dealing with other people. Some of us believe a reward will come in the next stage of life if we treat others well in this one, but we can choose to have a very different sort of life right here by opening up our hearts now and trying to act out of love.
I'm not even referring to any grandiose schemes, or recognizable 'acts of mercy' per se. Just being nice, basically. Not taking your frustration with a bad sleep into your interaction with the bank teller. Stopping for every pedestrian. Letting the right-turn guy merge without resistance. Asking the waiter where he got his watch, the neighbor how his rebuilt Triumph is coming. Sending an email to a store manager because the clerk was extra helpful. Refusing to tailgate the slow old lady in the Lincoln. And then actually thinking about why it is old ladies drive slowly, and imagining what your own world will be like when you yourself are eighty.
This is where it gets sappy, and I don't have the skill to make it otherwise. The fact is, if you take just one day of assiduously being nice to everyone you encounter, it will be an amazing day for you. If when someone goes on about something in a way that seems stupid, or excessive, or so alien to your own understanding, you might genuinely try to read what is behind it, why that person needs to say it, and is saying it in that particular way - not only will your blood pressure drop and you stop rolling your eyes, but you will know more about yourself as well as the other person. You will also have the additional opportunity to think about why you were given that experience at that time, and thus the chance to take even more from it. And you will come home at the end of the day satisfied and full and happy, having had twenty or thirty truly human, truly pleasant and enriching encounters with other people. Sappy, perhaps, but completely true!
Anyway, here is one pretty gorgeous thing St. Bernard had to say about love, which is far better than anything I could hope to write and not sappy in the slightest:
'Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a great thing so long as it continually returns to its fountainhead, flows back to its source, always drawing from there the water which constantly replenishes it.'
My good heavens. I'm reading parts of St. Bernard's commentary on the Song of Songs, and I just noticed that someone left the goofiest mean comment (anonymously) on the Barnes and Noble post. Fascinating timing, as with everything these days. Anyway, I approved it and let it in because I think it is interesting - not to mention troubling - when people are so angry that they will use any forum available to them just to get rid of one tiny piece of that venom. As though there were some literal, physical store of it, like a bank account into which and from which quantities could be put and taken. If I could spend it all, in other words, I could deplete the account and finally return to civil and friendly interactions. In emptying it I might be again made whole.
Of course it doesn't really work that way. We don't lose our anger by throwing it around as much as we can, by dishing it out to everyone who crosses our path. There isn't an actual, finite amount of it for us to shepherd or amass interest or over-limit charges on. Frankly, it builds within us the more we live in it and the more we give in to seeing the world as one filled with enemies. And unity, even in small doses, even among small groups, can seem overwhelmingly daunting when you really try to absorb the fact that even the genuine and good-willed still ineluctably see the world only through one pair of eyes. Still, telling strangers to go kill themselves does seem a bit extreme in the other direction. Even if the stranger does dislike 80s pop icons Billy Joel and Elton John.
And I think it is obvious that there is so much more loneliness and anomie in the world now than was ever even possible before. People are disconnected, often isolated much of the time -- and how can I see someone as my brother when I haven't even met him? Maybe it is a leap, but equally so is seeing the stranger as the enemy and reacting in that manner.
I was actually going to write something about this the other day, but I couldn't find a way to make it not sappy. With Mr./Ms. Anonymous as inspiration, however, I can give it a try. My point was going to be about the fairly amazing day-to-day consequences of vigorously trying to keep love and respect in the forefront when dealing with other people. Some of us believe a reward will come in the next stage of life if we treat others well in this one, but we can choose to have a very different sort of life right here by opening up our hearts now and trying to act out of love.
I'm not even referring to any grandiose schemes, or recognizable 'acts of mercy' per se. Just being nice, basically. Not taking your frustration with a bad sleep into your interaction with the bank teller. Stopping for every pedestrian. Letting the right-turn guy merge without resistance. Asking the waiter where he got his watch, the neighbor how his rebuilt Triumph is coming. Sending an email to a store manager because the clerk was extra helpful. Refusing to tailgate the slow old lady in the Lincoln. And then actually thinking about why it is old ladies drive slowly, and imagining what your own world will be like when you yourself are eighty.
This is where it gets sappy, and I don't have the skill to make it otherwise. The fact is, if you take just one day of assiduously being nice to everyone you encounter, it will be an amazing day for you. If when someone goes on about something in a way that seems stupid, or excessive, or so alien to your own understanding, you might genuinely try to read what is behind it, why that person needs to say it, and is saying it in that particular way - not only will your blood pressure drop and you stop rolling your eyes, but you will know more about yourself as well as the other person. You will also have the additional opportunity to think about why you were given that experience at that time, and thus the chance to take even more from it. And you will come home at the end of the day satisfied and full and happy, having had twenty or thirty truly human, truly pleasant and enriching encounters with other people. Sappy, perhaps, but completely true!
Anyway, here is one pretty gorgeous thing St. Bernard had to say about love, which is far better than anything I could hope to write and not sappy in the slightest:
'Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a great thing so long as it continually returns to its fountainhead, flows back to its source, always drawing from there the water which constantly replenishes it.'
'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning,
fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?' Well, let me assure you: it's not me. My head is muddy as the Okefenokee, vague as a valley wrapped in fog, and imposing as a one-man marching band.
To wit: I found that Schimmel book today, anyway. It was cunningly disguised as a book, on the bookshelf, between a teenytiny Zizek volume and a very crappy Romanian textbook. I looked three times yesterday at that bookshelf and didn't see it. This is made all the odder by the fact that the Zizek book is so little that I could see both the spine and a good part of the front cover of the one I was looking for/at. And I'm not at all surprised anymore that that should occur on the same day that I happen to write stuff about seeing-but-not-seeing.
Anyway, here are the two lines with which Mevlana encapsulated his whole life:
'And the result is not more than these three words:
I burnt, and burnt, and burnt.'
To wit: I found that Schimmel book today, anyway. It was cunningly disguised as a book, on the bookshelf, between a teenytiny Zizek volume and a very crappy Romanian textbook. I looked three times yesterday at that bookshelf and didn't see it. This is made all the odder by the fact that the Zizek book is so little that I could see both the spine and a good part of the front cover of the one I was looking for/at. And I'm not at all surprised anymore that that should occur on the same day that I happen to write stuff about seeing-but-not-seeing.
Anyway, here are the two lines with which Mevlana encapsulated his whole life:
'And the result is not more than these three words:
I burnt, and burnt, and burnt.'
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Alright, Fine: I Love Amazon
Even if it means I have to hate myself as a consequence.
I did it again. Last night. I don't know what compels me; I don't know what keeps me from listening to the sane half of my brain, but last night I thought, 'I'm already over in the U-District, so why not try Barnes and Noble?' After all, there's no shipping charge, there's no week-long wait, it's late at night and summer break, so I can get a parking space in the same zip code - and you never know, there might be something I want there...
Now, the last time I gave in to a late-night fit of ill-founded book-buying optimism was so traumatic I had to leave the store hastily and vent my frustrations here. This time: likewise - and I can only hope that there will be no next time.
The basis, such as it is, of my sporadic B & N Happy Thoughts is that once, years ago, I walked in and they had the Annemarie Schimmel I wanted. That's pretty great, right? Who cares about Annemarie Schimmel, right? She's not exactly Deepak Chopra, Oprah, Rachael Ray or the Idiot's Guide to anything. So, my reasoning goes, if they could have her, they might then have ___________ (insert something equally unpopular).
In all likelihood, the Schimmel was probably someone's special order the person never picked up. And I twisted my one-time good fortune into a fatuous Cause for Hope.
Bad move, because it's painful going in there. Those two times I've gone in there in the last few years the music nearly induced an existential crisis. The first time it was one of those baby-voiced girl singers; this time it was Billy Joel or Elton John. I can't tell the difference, I don't want to tell the difference, and it made me want to seek out The Idiot's Guide to Inducing Spontaneous Deafness over in the self-help section. Moreover, at Barnes and Noble, they don't 'shuffle.' They play entire albums. If you don't like it, you will keep not liking it. Song after cloying song after cloying song, as you search the racks fruitlessly, remembering that the essential truth about Barnes and Noble is that, although they have many, many books on many long and tall racks, the one book they always don't have is the book you came in to buy. Nor even one like it, one on the same subject, one by the same author, one related by school of thought or era or even the vaguest of pedigrees.
Suffice it to say I not only didn't find what I was after, I didn't find anything close. I broadened my parameters to 'anything by him,' then 'anything on him,' then anything by anyone on the same topic as what I had come there to find. Even that failed. Then to restore my hope I thought maybe I'd just buy a Schimmel book I've lost somehow, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which is a tremendous book and an absorbing read and I think what happened was I spilled honey on my old one and chucked it out.
But you can guess how that chapter of the story ended, too. I left the store cranky, my hair no longer perfect and a cloud of bees inside my head. I stopped at the Jack in the Box on the way home, bought some of their (delicious! deep-fat-fried!) 'French Toast Sticks,' and drowned my sorrows in a Diet Coke.
I did it again. Last night. I don't know what compels me; I don't know what keeps me from listening to the sane half of my brain, but last night I thought, 'I'm already over in the U-District, so why not try Barnes and Noble?' After all, there's no shipping charge, there's no week-long wait, it's late at night and summer break, so I can get a parking space in the same zip code - and you never know, there might be something I want there...
Now, the last time I gave in to a late-night fit of ill-founded book-buying optimism was so traumatic I had to leave the store hastily and vent my frustrations here. This time: likewise - and I can only hope that there will be no next time.
The basis, such as it is, of my sporadic B & N Happy Thoughts is that once, years ago, I walked in and they had the Annemarie Schimmel I wanted. That's pretty great, right? Who cares about Annemarie Schimmel, right? She's not exactly Deepak Chopra, Oprah, Rachael Ray or the Idiot's Guide to anything. So, my reasoning goes, if they could have her, they might then have ___________ (insert something equally unpopular).
In all likelihood, the Schimmel was probably someone's special order the person never picked up. And I twisted my one-time good fortune into a fatuous Cause for Hope.
Bad move, because it's painful going in there. Those two times I've gone in there in the last few years the music nearly induced an existential crisis. The first time it was one of those baby-voiced girl singers; this time it was Billy Joel or Elton John. I can't tell the difference, I don't want to tell the difference, and it made me want to seek out The Idiot's Guide to Inducing Spontaneous Deafness over in the self-help section. Moreover, at Barnes and Noble, they don't 'shuffle.' They play entire albums. If you don't like it, you will keep not liking it. Song after cloying song after cloying song, as you search the racks fruitlessly, remembering that the essential truth about Barnes and Noble is that, although they have many, many books on many long and tall racks, the one book they always don't have is the book you came in to buy. Nor even one like it, one on the same subject, one by the same author, one related by school of thought or era or even the vaguest of pedigrees.
Suffice it to say I not only didn't find what I was after, I didn't find anything close. I broadened my parameters to 'anything by him,' then 'anything on him,' then anything by anyone on the same topic as what I had come there to find. Even that failed. Then to restore my hope I thought maybe I'd just buy a Schimmel book I've lost somehow, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which is a tremendous book and an absorbing read and I think what happened was I spilled honey on my old one and chucked it out.
But you can guess how that chapter of the story ended, too. I left the store cranky, my hair no longer perfect and a cloud of bees inside my head. I stopped at the Jack in the Box on the way home, bought some of their (delicious! deep-fat-fried!) 'French Toast Sticks,' and drowned my sorrows in a Diet Coke.
Friday, July 25, 2008
'It is hard for an empty bag to stand upright.'
Said Benjamin Franklin (and you already know I love him recklessly), who preceded it with 'Poverty often deprives a man of spirit and virtue' and a semicolon, and tonight on the local NPR station KUOW a host had a brief interview with a Mercer Island pastor who wants to host a new Tent City at her church (and thought she was going to). The host asked Rev. Leslie Ann Knight, the United Methodist minister on whose church's property the encampment would be sited what she thought of the residents' protestations that such use of the church's property would force Mercer Islanders to look at portable toilets and showers. The reverend answered that those objections were not factually accurate, as the camp would be situated on the church grounds such that those facilities would not be visible from the street. She then went on with a bit of the humanitarian stuff one would anticipate and hope for, but I just want to climb under the covers into my pulpit for a minute here and attempt to digest the inhabitants' basis for resistance.
The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'
The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.
'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.
But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?
Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.
And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.
Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.
Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.
Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.
Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.
Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???
The interview was on today because Mercer Island residents have just filed a new lawsuit attempting to prohibit the city from allowing the camp within its borders. From court documents quoted in the Olympian newspaper: "Neighbors will be forced to look at Honey Buckets, temporary shower facilities, tents and an array of equipment necessary to serve the camp," the lawsuit says. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer likewise reports that residents complain 'the homeless camp would endanger the "comfort, repose, health and safety" of nearby residents, in part because the camp would be a "visual blight" on neighboring homes. It also asserts that the city of Mercer Island issued a permit for Tent City in violation of city law.'
The 'health and safety' issues have indeed been addressed by the Mercer Island authorities - including law enforcement, which will have a regular presence at the encampment including 'routine walk-throughs' - and by all previous host jurisdictions of Tent City's various incarnations, and it is patent that neither is adversely affected by the temporary residence's presence. That, however, is a factual matter, and thus easily resolved. At least in theory.
'Comfort and repose,' however, are less amenable to objective measurement, and I believe the good citizens when they assert that they will be made uncomfortable by the presence of poor people visibly in their midst. I take them at their word that being 'forced to look at' so thin a veneer of civility, in the form of a portable toilet or camp shower, only feebly veiling the most basic and physical of human needs would perturb their repose.
But what else are we 'forced to look at' everyday? Thousands of things! Why should poverty be the one we refuse to admit into our line of sight?
Well, it's not. We see, if perhaps not look at, the poor every day. But unless you ride the bus or work at DSHS or the public defender's office or county hospital, the poorest of the poor are often conveniently arrayed in groups of one, thus obviating any need to register them consciously as part of a pattern. It's a lot like shoes: until you hang them over every door in the house by the 10s or 20s or 30s to prove a point to yourself, you don't really have to know you have 12 pairs of semi-identical square-toe black 2 1/2-inch-heel sling-backs.
And if you don't feel like proving a point to yourself, it might be hard to find a justification.
Unless the justification antecedes and supercedes the apparent matter-at-hand, such as mercy, or love, or compassion, might. And this is where I get cranky. I am not lying or exaggerating when I say the law-and-order issues are a straw man. All that stuff has been (tediously, thoroughly, exhaust/ingly/ively) covered in every 'concerned citizens' meeting ad nauseum since Tent City began. This is all about aesthetics, and not-in-my-backyard, and solecism, and apathy, and a terrible, horrible, blindingly unskillful misunderstanding of what Poverty in its deeper sense really looks like.
Poverty is saying 'I can't bear to be reminded of poor people having to shower, or poop.' Poverty is thinking 'My happiness is so brittle I can't risk it by looking on suffering.' Poverty is knowing that your late-summer luau-themed barbecue's ambiance would be utterly ruined by the sight of a homeless man shuffling back to camp eating a Slim Jim with two litres of Fanta (always cheaper than Coke!) tucked under his scabby arm.
Poverty is knowing the value of your house, but not the value of a man.
Again, I reiterate, every day we are forced to look at all manner of things. They may not register fully, as with one homeless person, or one stupid billboard, but in either case, the nature of vision being what it is, the majority of what gets processed by the optic nerves and the brain is information we haphazardly encounter, not stuff we asked for. I was 'forced' to look at three Hummers today. I think they are hideous, I think they offend terribly my refined aesthetic sensibilities: what redress do I have? The Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles more than once involitionally entered my field of vision: I am certain I shall never recover fully. I have likewise, despite my best efforts to the contrary, ocularly encountered orange plastic shoes, orange plastic flowers, 'Country Geese' as a decor element, 'Tuscan' toilets and 'Tuscan' subdevelopments, Unitarian lady ministers in pseudobatik two-piece ensembles with 'chunky' earrings, reality TV, 1960s architecture, 'flip-flops,' and people wearing their inside clothes outside.
Not to mention the green dumpster against which I was raped, the Albanian laborers in Athens serving as human donkeys with three-foot-high stacks of bricks laden on their bent backs, irreparably abused pets queued up for euthanasia at the animal shelter, the shooting we drove past on our way to register me for sixth grade at my new school, the three men beating up one guy on the freeway exit as I attempted to make it to a Nick Cave show in LA, the clear pure blue East Coast morning of September 11th, the black and hideous aftermath, the lover's hands reaching out to circle my neck, not caress my cheek: none of these I asked to see. None of these shall I ever fully surmount. --And these guys are worrying about Porta-Potties???
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)
Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.
...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.
But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.
At any rate.
Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.
However.
Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.
That fact notwithstanding.
I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.
So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.
But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.
Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.
However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.
But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.
Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'
The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:
'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'
And likewise something like this:
'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'
Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.
I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.
...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.
But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.
At any rate.
Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.
However.
Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.
That fact notwithstanding.
I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.
So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.
But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.
Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.
However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.
But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.
Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'
The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:
'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'
And likewise something like this:
'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'
Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.
I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
'There is something in humility
which strangely exalts the heart.' -St. Augustine
Just to bring humility, tolerance, and the common limits of our human understanding more fully into this rant about arrogance, bigotry, and factionalism, here is a quote about science and religion from turn-of-the(other)-century Muslim scholar Mustafa al-Maraghi. I want to use a Muslim because about as many Christians as atheists consider them unschooled and indelicate of thought, and also because the Muslim's relationship to the Qur'an as revealed rather than written, unchanging, untranslatable, and truly as the Word Inlibrate, is of a quite different order from other traditions' belief in and veneration for their own holy books. (In other words, I guess I conceive of this as the strong form of the argument to which other traditions could likewise accede in moderated form ?)
'True religion cannot conflict with truth, and when we are positively convinced of the truth of any scientific remark which seems to be incompatible with Islam, this is only because we do not understand correctly the Qur'an and the traditions. In our religion, we possess a universal teaching which declares that, when an apodeictic truth contradicts a revealed text, we have to interpret the text allegorically.'
Such a stance wisely refuses to conflate a holy book with a science text, to demand from one what it can never give and what, moreover, the other was explicitly designed to provide. It also places what might be an unsettling responsibility on the reader to read his book as well as the natural world carefully -- but this should be unsettling only if you find using rationality in your pursuit of wisdom and truth ignoble. For me, it points again to the need to recognize our limitations: there is much that each of us will never understand in this lifetime. Even if you don't believe there is one who is omniscient, it is pretty clear that humans are not. And a stinky-type atheist might do well to recognize that he is as limited in his understand as both the stinky and the thinky believers.
Just to bring humility, tolerance, and the common limits of our human understanding more fully into this rant about arrogance, bigotry, and factionalism, here is a quote about science and religion from turn-of-the(other)-century Muslim scholar Mustafa al-Maraghi. I want to use a Muslim because about as many Christians as atheists consider them unschooled and indelicate of thought, and also because the Muslim's relationship to the Qur'an as revealed rather than written, unchanging, untranslatable, and truly as the Word Inlibrate, is of a quite different order from other traditions' belief in and veneration for their own holy books. (In other words, I guess I conceive of this as the strong form of the argument to which other traditions could likewise accede in moderated form ?)
'True religion cannot conflict with truth, and when we are positively convinced of the truth of any scientific remark which seems to be incompatible with Islam, this is only because we do not understand correctly the Qur'an and the traditions. In our religion, we possess a universal teaching which declares that, when an apodeictic truth contradicts a revealed text, we have to interpret the text allegorically.'
Such a stance wisely refuses to conflate a holy book with a science text, to demand from one what it can never give and what, moreover, the other was explicitly designed to provide. It also places what might be an unsettling responsibility on the reader to read his book as well as the natural world carefully -- but this should be unsettling only if you find using rationality in your pursuit of wisdom and truth ignoble. For me, it points again to the need to recognize our limitations: there is much that each of us will never understand in this lifetime. Even if you don't believe there is one who is omniscient, it is pretty clear that humans are not. And a stinky-type atheist might do well to recognize that he is as limited in his understand as both the stinky and the thinky believers.
Personally, I Love that Santa Claus Joke
But I'm an idiot, so it stands to reason. Also I still love the one from a Christmas cracker about a million Christmases ago, wherein the psychologist asks the patient how long he has thought he was a dog. The patient replies, 'Depuis que je suis chiot,' which was even funnier to me when I thought that 'chiot' meant sheep, which gives you a significant and no doubt chilling insight into my desperate sense of humor.
And since you didn't ask, and since the only joke I've put on here was the ghastly one about Santa Claus and pizza, here's an equally well-traveled one about Jesuits and Dominicans (there are millions, I assure you, and at times the Dominicans get the upper hand instead):
A Jesuit (sometimes it's a Franciscan or something else) and a Dominican were debating about whose order was the greater. After months of arguing, they decided to ask for an answer from God when they died. Years later, they met in heaven and decided to go to the throne of God to resolve their old disagreement. God seemed a bit puzzled about the question and told them he would reply in writing a few days later. After much deliberation, God sent the following letter:
And since you didn't ask, and since the only joke I've put on here was the ghastly one about Santa Claus and pizza, here's an equally well-traveled one about Jesuits and Dominicans (there are millions, I assure you, and at times the Dominicans get the upper hand instead):
A Jesuit (sometimes it's a Franciscan or something else) and a Dominican were debating about whose order was the greater. After months of arguing, they decided to ask for an answer from God when they died. Years later, they met in heaven and decided to go to the throne of God to resolve their old disagreement. God seemed a bit puzzled about the question and told them he would reply in writing a few days later. After much deliberation, God sent the following letter:
My beloved children,
Please stop bickering about such trivial matters. Both of your orders are equally great and good in my eyes.
Sincerely yours,
God, S.J.
So the Bartender Says to the Horse --
Why the long face?
Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.
Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.
Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.
So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.
Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.
When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.
And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.
But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.
This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.
Although it helped me terrifically with French!
Alright, so I explained why I like and respect thinky atheists. But there are plenty of stinky atheists, too, and my bonhommerie is as stressed in thinking about them as it is with the feelgood self-help pseudopagans who take their spiritual direction alternately from 'Prosperity Gospel' quacks and shrink-wrapped plastic 'I Ching' sets from Barnes and Noble.
Part of the stinkiness I can't bear is their frequent supercilious meanness. Anybody who believes anything is dumb, not just different, wallowing smugly in willed ignorance, so restraint isn't called for: the idiots won't get the joke, anyway. Of course, religious people can be just as intolerant as this in their rhetoric, as well -- and knowledge of that fact is sometimes fodder for the mean atheists' lack of consideration. But for now I'm leaving uncharitable believers alone, since they really make my head bleed, and sticking with the angry atheists.
Now, before you say, 'And what about all those rants about Calvinists on here, Vif?', let me remind you they were not about real Calvinism nor even about John Calvin. When I go off on Calvinism it is about the entrenched and invisible secularized vestiges of Calvinism that underpin so many of our attitudes, habits, and neuroses here in the U.S. It's a bit like Althusser's ideology, a bit like Barthes' mythology, and a lot like a troublesome patch of morning glories which, despite having all the flowers and stems and leaves mowed down, are just as present as ever because their roots have already spread widely through the garden. You don't have to believe in the existence of God or John Calvin or even Geneva in order for these Calvinistic assumptions or aspirations to affect your view of culture, commensality, kindness, pleasure, and success. You just have to live in the United States for a while.
So, that having been resolved to all parties' satisfaction, my stinky atheist of the day is Mr. Eddie Izzard, who appears to believe that declaring his atheism over and over earns him a de facto Genius rating and the right to make jokes ridiculing the most heartfelt and sincere of beliefs. He likewise lampoons God and Jesus themselves in extended fashion as bumbling idiots, with Jesus as a sort-of sad sack sucker-Messiah who doesn't know what he is doing and doesn't much care.
Honestly, there are ways to do religious humor. I've seen plenty of stuff that succeeds mightily and yet doesn't offend even when it pokes fun at or contrasts particular beliefs or practices. And I don't just mean brilliant Jewish insider humor, but as well stuff from outside that yet manages to convey a level of respect for the subject. It is not impossible, not at all, but it requires subtlety, maturity - and compassion.
When people cry 'Is nothing sacred anymore???' they seldom intend their lament literally. Rather, it is a wish for a return to some measure of delicacy, consideration, and politesse: what most mean is 'Is nothing off-limits anymore? Is nothing private anymore?' and 'Is nothing beyond the bounds of decency and common courtesy anymore?' It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politeness.
And this is where Izzard's juvenile monologue about idiotic Creators and half-wit sons loses my interest. It was, and should have remained, settled a couple centuries ago that the natural sciences can tell us little of value about religion, and that religion likewise can tell us much about the cultivation of the soul but rather little about geology, or geometry, or cattle-breeding. That an individual has come to this epiphany in the 21st century and is shocked to find religion lacking in scientific insight (as in Izzard's version of Noah) just seems odd to me. A person can find himself unmoved by religion for various reasons, but that there is inadequate discussion of thermodynamics in John of the Cross is one, were it me, that I would feel slightly silly proffering as the crux of my atheism.
But I would also say that even if the individual believes the experiences of John, or Jonas, or Rumi or Rahman Baba to have been 'all in their heads,' ridiculing their interior experience, in addition to being uncharitable, mean-spirited, and thus indefensible morally, is also simply as stupid and pointless in a pragmatic sense as making fun of a friend who thinks he looks better in his new haircut than he does: it's his haircut; let him live in it. You have a right to your own path of haircut self-discovery, and if on it you decide you prefer to continue with the tried-and-true No. 3 in perpetuity, you absolutely are under no obligation to get a copy of your friend's style.
This reactionary approach moreover conduces to the sort of us-v.-them mentality that - you guessed it! - religion is famous, and endlessly parodied and excoriated, for: they're stupid, we're not, so join our club. That an atheist presumably above the fray should resort to the same dirty tactics he would quickly condemn in others is, while not shocking (since we're all only human) still lazy - and, again, puerile. I would cringe and wince and undoubtedly throw up a little in my mouth if I had to read my high school journals filled with every pithy quote from Camus and Gide and Rimbaud that I felt could serve to prop up my (age-appropriate, let me add) stance that Religion is idiotic crap for crappy idiots who like crappy things. Thank God no one gave me a microphone, because in my defensive and angry posture I, too, sounded a bit like a crappy idiot.
Although it helped me terrifically with French!
Monday, July 21, 2008
In any process, the total energy of the universe remains the same.
--First Law of Thermodynamics
Well, I did it again. This morning bright and early I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet at the meal program as soon as I got there. It was, aside from putting on and taking off a pair of earrings that didn't seem quite right, my first significant act of the day.
The twist, however, is that, although I always, always have my phone with me, even on late night Diet Coke and Good-n-Plenty runs, I actually reconsidered it this morning. Who's going to call at that hour? No one. If someone is having an emergency, I am not the person he or she would call, since unless it involves emergently needing a pair of used size-5 heels or the source for a line of poetry or an emergency brunoising of some carrots, I am going to be of no help whatsoever. I don't know how to change your tire, and I simply can't give remote hairstyle advice.
So I thought about it.
Then I thought, If I die between home and the soup kitchen I'm going to need the phone to call someone and let them know I've died. I'm stuck without it; I have to bring it. So I did, and so it ended up in the toilet.
Well, I did it again. This morning bright and early I dropped my Blackberry in the toilet at the meal program as soon as I got there. It was, aside from putting on and taking off a pair of earrings that didn't seem quite right, my first significant act of the day.
The twist, however, is that, although I always, always have my phone with me, even on late night Diet Coke and Good-n-Plenty runs, I actually reconsidered it this morning. Who's going to call at that hour? No one. If someone is having an emergency, I am not the person he or she would call, since unless it involves emergently needing a pair of used size-5 heels or the source for a line of poetry or an emergency brunoising of some carrots, I am going to be of no help whatsoever. I don't know how to change your tire, and I simply can't give remote hairstyle advice.
So I thought about it.
Then I thought, If I die between home and the soup kitchen I'm going to need the phone to call someone and let them know I've died. I'm stuck without it; I have to bring it. So I did, and so it ended up in the toilet.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
'Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus' --T.S. Eliot
So, on the day after the prudential judgment talk, while Fr. Fones was still at Blessed Sacrament (where you can attend a real live Dominican Rite Mass on 8.8.8), when I cornered him (which is what I do - when I can muster the courage, which is most of the time these days - with anyone religious or otherwise who is living out his or her vocation), he brought up Mother Teresa's view of those she served: that what she saw was the suffering and wounded Christ in each and every one of them.
She said it numerous times to different people, as that was precisely what compelled her to do what she did. But the version it brought to my mind was when a journalist asked her if she didn't have an ethical problem, or wasn't in some way in conflict with her faith, serving those who were dying of AIDS. Mother Teresa said something about not even understanding what he meant, and repeated that all she saw was the suffering Christ.
And a couple different aspects of that interaction really strike me as relevant to issues we face when addressing the problems of poverty and homelessness. One thing that is just terribly sad is that the reporter (I don't recall at all if it was a secular or religious reporter, big-time, small-town, male, female, or anything else) appears to be trying to create two classes, to separate himself and Teresa in their righteousness on the one hand from the dying sinner on the other. (Again, no idea whether he was really feeling that, or just playing devil's advocate to get a good quote, or perhaps even a gay man himself really hoping she was indeed as loving as he wanted to believe.)
The other issue it brought to my mind was how we look at 'those sorts of people' in general. I think very, very few, even among believers in Christ, manage to see glimpses of Him in the wretched of the earth. Fine: very few of us are saints, so that stands to reason. But we tend not even to see ourselves in them! That should be a much easier leap - and yet we so frequently see their suffering as proof not of our unity, shared longings, and common fears, but as clear signs of the gulf between us. To their fallenness we contrast our responsible jobs; to their lack of restraint we contrast our calm demeanor and good relations with coworkers; against their battles with addiction and petty crime we recall our sober investment practices and our determined, successful New Year's Weight-Loss Resolutions.
But I will repeat that any one of us is a finite number of tragedies away from our own version of just that level of despair. Some of us are broken more easily, some require decades of horror and abuse in order finally to abandon hope. And we can never know what it would take until we, too, are there ourselves. Just as the invisibles on the street didn't know. Just as they never hoped for the day when their suffering would be so inconsequential that most people wouldn't even see it as suffering, but justice, judgment - or simply an inconvenience.
I am not a pessimistic person, but I see a few bad winters ahead. With gas, electricity, and heating prices rising, the elderly in many places are not going to be able to heat their homes. With the mortgage crisis continuing, more families will be displaced. With food prices rising along with all other bills, contributions to already overtaxed food banks are diminishing - and thus, so, too, will access. My 'positive' spin on my fears is that, with more 'normal' people finding themselves on the margins, it may become easier for the other normal people to begin to see poverty not as a moral failing or a vice but a complex state of affairs brought on by many factors. Perhaps the struggling banks and airlines and weak dollar could be held up to the sceptical as examples that bad things can indeed happen to good people (well, corporate 'persons,' at any rate). Perhaps a negative $200,000 downturn in the value of one citizen's home could serve as testimony that if external conditions could affect one life so dramatically, they or a different set of circumstances might well be able to operate in a similarly striking fashion elsewhere.
In other words, I am hoping that all the nastiness that is still to come will help people to realize it could happen here, and it could happen now, and it could happen to me. Maybe for one person it will take a job loss, for someone else that and the loss of home, too, and for the very strong maybe no job, no house, a DUI conviction and a departing spouse. But if Mother Teresa could pray for years with loneliness and despair in her heart, I think many, many people in the coming years will receive the gift of brokenness. I hope it helps them see the humanity, and the divine, in the rest of the wounded.
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus' --T.S. Eliot
So, on the day after the prudential judgment talk, while Fr. Fones was still at Blessed Sacrament (where you can attend a real live Dominican Rite Mass on 8.8.8), when I cornered him (which is what I do - when I can muster the courage, which is most of the time these days - with anyone religious or otherwise who is living out his or her vocation), he brought up Mother Teresa's view of those she served: that what she saw was the suffering and wounded Christ in each and every one of them.
She said it numerous times to different people, as that was precisely what compelled her to do what she did. But the version it brought to my mind was when a journalist asked her if she didn't have an ethical problem, or wasn't in some way in conflict with her faith, serving those who were dying of AIDS. Mother Teresa said something about not even understanding what he meant, and repeated that all she saw was the suffering Christ.
And a couple different aspects of that interaction really strike me as relevant to issues we face when addressing the problems of poverty and homelessness. One thing that is just terribly sad is that the reporter (I don't recall at all if it was a secular or religious reporter, big-time, small-town, male, female, or anything else) appears to be trying to create two classes, to separate himself and Teresa in their righteousness on the one hand from the dying sinner on the other. (Again, no idea whether he was really feeling that, or just playing devil's advocate to get a good quote, or perhaps even a gay man himself really hoping she was indeed as loving as he wanted to believe.)
The other issue it brought to my mind was how we look at 'those sorts of people' in general. I think very, very few, even among believers in Christ, manage to see glimpses of Him in the wretched of the earth. Fine: very few of us are saints, so that stands to reason. But we tend not even to see ourselves in them! That should be a much easier leap - and yet we so frequently see their suffering as proof not of our unity, shared longings, and common fears, but as clear signs of the gulf between us. To their fallenness we contrast our responsible jobs; to their lack of restraint we contrast our calm demeanor and good relations with coworkers; against their battles with addiction and petty crime we recall our sober investment practices and our determined, successful New Year's Weight-Loss Resolutions.
But I will repeat that any one of us is a finite number of tragedies away from our own version of just that level of despair. Some of us are broken more easily, some require decades of horror and abuse in order finally to abandon hope. And we can never know what it would take until we, too, are there ourselves. Just as the invisibles on the street didn't know. Just as they never hoped for the day when their suffering would be so inconsequential that most people wouldn't even see it as suffering, but justice, judgment - or simply an inconvenience.
I am not a pessimistic person, but I see a few bad winters ahead. With gas, electricity, and heating prices rising, the elderly in many places are not going to be able to heat their homes. With the mortgage crisis continuing, more families will be displaced. With food prices rising along with all other bills, contributions to already overtaxed food banks are diminishing - and thus, so, too, will access. My 'positive' spin on my fears is that, with more 'normal' people finding themselves on the margins, it may become easier for the other normal people to begin to see poverty not as a moral failing or a vice but a complex state of affairs brought on by many factors. Perhaps the struggling banks and airlines and weak dollar could be held up to the sceptical as examples that bad things can indeed happen to good people (well, corporate 'persons,' at any rate). Perhaps a negative $200,000 downturn in the value of one citizen's home could serve as testimony that if external conditions could affect one life so dramatically, they or a different set of circumstances might well be able to operate in a similarly striking fashion elsewhere.
In other words, I am hoping that all the nastiness that is still to come will help people to realize it could happen here, and it could happen now, and it could happen to me. Maybe for one person it will take a job loss, for someone else that and the loss of home, too, and for the very strong maybe no job, no house, a DUI conviction and a departing spouse. But if Mother Teresa could pray for years with loneliness and despair in her heart, I think many, many people in the coming years will receive the gift of brokenness. I hope it helps them see the humanity, and the divine, in the rest of the wounded.
'The Starry Heaven above Me, and the Moral Law within Me.'
('Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.') - Kant
I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.
But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.
However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.
By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.
An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.
It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.
Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.
I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.
But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.
However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.
By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.
An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.
It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.
Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.
'I went out to a hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head.'
Too much writing elsewhere (including inside my head, where those page-long sentences sometimes remain until I can manage to parse them out at least somewhat before wrestling them into print) to get stuff down here in the past few days.
But the problem is, when I do this I get lost on here, and by the time I come back I've had nine gorgeous conversations, sixteen confusing ones, finished reading two books, and written a few novel-length journal entries. Then I come back here and wonder, What was I saying? Not to mention, Did I figure out what my blog 'persona' (which seems at times a necessary contrivance in order just to get the thing done!) is going to be yet? And, do I have to?
Anyway, I went to a lecture by Fr. Michael Fones, of the Catherine of Siena Insitute, the Dominicans, and Catholicism in general, about prudential judgment, which is, I think, an overall good thing to practice, whatever your religious or irreligious stripe. It was an engaging and useful talk, and it was directed primarily toward how the use of prudential judgment might inform our political decisions. I am as frustrated as anyone else about the state of governance and politics, and I have no intention of going into depth about my abundant grievances here (which would also result in destroying the coyly vague, nonsectarian portion of my blog persona - the only part of that persona that remains consistent!) - without which it would be difficult to justify lambasting the reprehensible actions of politicos of every stripe when I see fit. Nor am I going to give the outline of what he said; maybe he will put the slides or a print version online - because it was a very useful presentation - and then I will put in a link.
That being said, one great point he made is that if we are to be wise citizens we cannot afford to be one-issue voters. I think that seems obvious at first hearing, yet on reflection I would argue many, many people are at least nearly that: one concern is so close to their hearts that it overrides their reason on other issues. In the United States this becomes a thorny problem due to the persistence and rigidity of the two-party system wherein a huge portion of voters will never find a candidate with whom they can fully agree. For a candidate to shirk part of a party's platform means no party money, which means in practice unelectability for the daring renegade. So candidates must swallow those aspects they don't entirely agree with -- and then voters must, as well, when they get to the booth to choose the lesser of two evils.
Too much writing elsewhere (including inside my head, where those page-long sentences sometimes remain until I can manage to parse them out at least somewhat before wrestling them into print) to get stuff down here in the past few days.
But the problem is, when I do this I get lost on here, and by the time I come back I've had nine gorgeous conversations, sixteen confusing ones, finished reading two books, and written a few novel-length journal entries. Then I come back here and wonder, What was I saying? Not to mention, Did I figure out what my blog 'persona' (which seems at times a necessary contrivance in order just to get the thing done!) is going to be yet? And, do I have to?
Anyway, I went to a lecture by Fr. Michael Fones, of the Catherine of Siena Insitute, the Dominicans, and Catholicism in general, about prudential judgment, which is, I think, an overall good thing to practice, whatever your religious or irreligious stripe. It was an engaging and useful talk, and it was directed primarily toward how the use of prudential judgment might inform our political decisions. I am as frustrated as anyone else about the state of governance and politics, and I have no intention of going into depth about my abundant grievances here (which would also result in destroying the coyly vague, nonsectarian portion of my blog persona - the only part of that persona that remains consistent!) - without which it would be difficult to justify lambasting the reprehensible actions of politicos of every stripe when I see fit. Nor am I going to give the outline of what he said; maybe he will put the slides or a print version online - because it was a very useful presentation - and then I will put in a link.
That being said, one great point he made is that if we are to be wise citizens we cannot afford to be one-issue voters. I think that seems obvious at first hearing, yet on reflection I would argue many, many people are at least nearly that: one concern is so close to their hearts that it overrides their reason on other issues. In the United States this becomes a thorny problem due to the persistence and rigidity of the two-party system wherein a huge portion of voters will never find a candidate with whom they can fully agree. For a candidate to shirk part of a party's platform means no party money, which means in practice unelectability for the daring renegade. So candidates must swallow those aspects they don't entirely agree with -- and then voters must, as well, when they get to the booth to choose the lesser of two evils.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Confusing but Comforting
I am a bit mystified. There has been an odd surge in numbers of people reading this goofy blog in the last week, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
Here is what I have covered in that time period:
-Catholics
-Compassion
-Commandments (yikes, eh?)
-Cats
-Cats
-Cats
-Courtesans
-Cooking
-Canada
-Cohen
-Campesinos in California (four of whom have died in the past month), and
-Comedy, even.
So you can see why I'm shocked. I didn't once cover Angelina Jolie, or how to make a million dollars in a week. I can only imagine what will happen when I get to the letter D.
Here is what I have covered in that time period:
-Catholics
-Compassion
-Commandments (yikes, eh?)
-Cats
-Cats
-Cats
-Courtesans
-Cooking
-Canada
-Cohen
-Campesinos in California (four of whom have died in the past month), and
-Comedy, even.
So you can see why I'm shocked. I didn't once cover Angelina Jolie, or how to make a million dollars in a week. I can only imagine what will happen when I get to the letter D.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Four California Farmworkers Dead in Four Weeks
Ramiro Carillo Rodriguez, 48, Thursday became the second farmworker to die of heatstroke in the past week and the fourth within the last four weeks in California, following Wednesday's passing of Abdon Felix Garcia, 42, and before that, Jose Hernandez, 64, and pregnant Maria Isabel Jimenez, 17, whose fiancé had finally saved up enough money and bought a wedding ring.
There have been laws in place in California since 2005, when the state under the leadership of Gov. Schwarzenegger became the first in the nation to attempt to provide heat protection for farm laborers. However, any law is only as good as its enforcement, and so far the past legislation has failed due to lack of implementation and oversight. In the midst of California's current heatwave, Schwartzenegger announced a more vigorous and comprehensive training program for employers. Failure to provide minimal heat protection such as access to water, shade, rest, and a trained first-aid response to symptoms is wanton cruelty and nothing more. If four dentists, politicians, or lawyers had died in four weeks from identical, foreseeable, and preventable work-related injuries, I can only imagine that we would have seen a flurry of civil and punitive action. My hope is that the recent spate of needless deaths - of human beings every bit as worthwhile as dentists or lawyers - will result in more vigorous and comprehensive punitive measures if employers continue to neglect their legal, not to mention ethical, obligations
The last link is to a news story about the new measures; here is the UFW's piece:
campaign/heatdeath13
There have been laws in place in California since 2005, when the state under the leadership of Gov. Schwarzenegger became the first in the nation to attempt to provide heat protection for farm laborers. However, any law is only as good as its enforcement, and so far the past legislation has failed due to lack of implementation and oversight. In the midst of California's current heatwave, Schwartzenegger announced a more vigorous and comprehensive training program for employers. Failure to provide minimal heat protection such as access to water, shade, rest, and a trained first-aid response to symptoms is wanton cruelty and nothing more. If four dentists, politicians, or lawyers had died in four weeks from identical, foreseeable, and preventable work-related injuries, I can only imagine that we would have seen a flurry of civil and punitive action. My hope is that the recent spate of needless deaths - of human beings every bit as worthwhile as dentists or lawyers - will result in more vigorous and comprehensive punitive measures if employers continue to neglect their legal, not to mention ethical, obligations
The last link is to a news story about the new measures; here is the UFW's piece:
Ramiro Carillo was the fourth farm worker in the last two weeks to die of heat stroke and the second this week alone!
E-mail Gov. Schwarzenegger today!
Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, 48, father of two, died in Selma, CA on Thursday afternoon after working all day for Sun Valley Packing in Reedley thru a farm labor contractor. Ramiro had complained being sick from the heat. He was taken home by his foreman. He passed out almost as soon as he got in the house. By the time an ambulance got there he was dead on arrival. He leaves behind two children ages 13 and 16.
Ramiro's death makes two farm workers dying of heatstroke last week, four farm worker heat deaths in the last 8 weeks and the 13th farm worker heat death since CA Governor Schwarzenegger took office.
Something needs to be done immediately to prevent more needless deaths. Please help.
Click here to send a fax to California Gov. Schwarzenegger (if you live in California, a cc of your e-mail will also go to your legislators) and tell them this has to stop now.
Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez's death follows the deaths I told you about on Thursday. 42 year-old farm worker Abdon Felix Garcia, father of three, died on Wednesday after spending the morning and early afternoon working for Sunview Vineyards in Arvin. The coroner says Felix's body core temperature was measured at 108 degrees just 13 minutes before his death. 64 year-old Jose Macarena Hernandez died during a record-breaking heat wave on June 20 while harvesting butternut squash in Santa Maria on land owned by Sunrise Growers. UFW President Arturo Rodriguez attended his funeral yesterday. And then there was the heat death of 17 year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez who died while laboring in the Stockton area grape vines.
Governor Schwarzenegger came to Maria Isabel's funeral and said he would do everything possible to prevent this from happening again. Has he done everything he can? With the recent deaths of Ramiro Carrillo Rodriguez, Abdon Felix Garcia and Jose Hernandez it is clear the state does not have the capacity to protect farm workers.
As California's summer sizzles we must do everything we can to insure that no more farm workers fall victim to the heat because the laws written to protect them are not enforced. Speaker Emeritus Fabian Nunez has introduced legislation which has moved out of the assembly and which is now in the state senate. It will make it easier for farm workers to organize and enforce the laws that the state cannot enforce.
Please take action immediately and click to fax California Gov. Schwarzenegger (if you live in California, a cc of your message will also be e-mailed to your legislators) and tell them something needs to be done NOW. It’s time to put a law in place that will allow farm workers to protect themselves!
Thank you for caring.
Arturo S. Rodriguez
President
Avalokitesvara Meets Aristotle, or Metta in the Modern World
The other night we were talking about the Fifth Commandment. As with everything else, Catholics have a rich understanding of the larger meaning of this rule. One direction it got me thinking, since it has always been the focus of my own spiritual path, is about compassion, or gentleness, or love, as one's abiding principle. Though this is not a specifically Catholic position, there is room for it within orthodoxy. I can believe the Church's position on just war, for example, but in searching my own conscience find no examples in history or current events in which this doctrine has been put into action.
But sticking (at least for the moment) to absolute orthodoxy, within the Catechism itself the Commandment's proscription against murder is understood to extend to anger. Anger construed in its active sense as wishing another ill is, I think, fairly obviously the opposite of charity/caritas, which is itself the active version of love or, viewed differently, the inevitable fruit of compassion. In this view, there is some transactional quality behind even the impulse to charity, inasmuch as it would seem to me that, lacking the ability to feel the other's position, being therefore unable genuinely to embrace empathy or compassion, there is no soil for mercy or charity to grow in. It is not simply a matter of 'If A then B,' which is, if you believe it, rather a lot by itself, making charity not merely a result but an inextricable concomitant of compassion and love. It is as well the understanding that 'If not A then not B,' -- and 'If not B then clearly not A.'
In this framework, my good works evidence my love, and lack of love, by contrast, confers a quite different meaning on ostensible works of charity. I argued tonight that once someone internalizes this comprehensive compassion there are certain acts that the person will never be able to do, there are certain choices that will never again have to be made. It is a different way of being, a different way of interacting with the world. If one has reached the point of being able to see the Divine, the Buddha-nature - or in Quaker terms, the Inner Light - within others, the point of being able readily to relate to another's suffering, it is not a matter of choosing not to strike. Certain reactions do not arise, and therefore certain responses are precluded a priori. They are precluded unconsciously, actually, since the mind does not have to go yet again to the point of laboring intellectually over a matter which was in fact long ago decided.
And this is all very pressing to me, given my own particular road of spiritual development. On my path, compassion, tolerance, and gentleness have always seemed the most necessary bedrock, the attributes without which other virtues are either meaningless or impossible. Moreover, in order to attain those three, one must start with the very first stone, which is humility. One cannot understand the struggles of another, let alone wish to ease the other's suffering, if he cannot first comprehend - viscerally, completely, in the profoundest depths of his soul - the truth of 'there but for the grace of God go I.'
My view is simple: there is no species of human suffering that is the province only of one type of human. The paths that lead to suffering are as diverse as the people who choose them and who are thrust into them, but in the end, sadness, loneliness, and fear are experienced as the same thing by us all, at whatever age, in whatever country, with whatever level of education or wealth. Whatever someone else is feeling, the specifics of his or her situation notwithstanding, is something each of us has, will, or can feel ourselves.
It is easier to feel compassion and thus be giving when the stakes are low, when the issue is something like rude and aggressive driving, or getting overcharged by a mechanic, than when it involves actual hatred or violence -- but that is where the principle is proven. That is where a person either lives his truth or renounces the core of his beliefs. Responding calmly to mild stress is one thing; very, very, very few of us even consider running over pedestrians on a crosswalk because they are making us late for a business meeting. In situations of real violence or deliberate victimization, literally turning the other cheek is a significantly deeper commitment.
One of the things I take greatest comfort in within Catholic spirituality is the huge emphasis laid on individual discernment, on prudent use of one's own conscience to determine the correct path in novel circumstances. This is likewise one of the things I most respect about the Friends; both share a belief that with prayer and devout listening we have it within ourselves to hear God's will, an amazing God-given power of judgment. In Catholicism, obviously there is more dogma and doctrine than with the Friends, but if after the best use I can make of my conscience I find in that something I cannot fully accept, or one element, such as mercy, the necessity of which outshines all other imperatives, that is between God and me, so long as I don't portray my actions as being representative of all official Church teaching.
And that is a tremendous gift of spiritual liberty, borne of a deep respect for the many ways we in our wondrous diversity can inhabit God's Word. If this catholicity of gifts and spiritualities were not recognized, then in a manner of speaking either the Carthusians or the Franciscans would have to be 'wrong.' Either the noble soldier serving his country or the grandmother in the Peace and Justice Ministry would be a heretic, and somebody or other would have to chuck either the thinky Chesterton, the silent John Main, or the loving Jean Vanier off the proverbial Train to Glory. I'm glad we get to keep them all!
Saturday, July 12, 2008
And to Think I Missed the 'Golden Girls' Marathon...
Eddie Izzard, Seattle, Paramount Theatre Review: Grrrrrrr.
I can't remember the last time I walked out of a show, and I have never before tonight had the misfortune of needing to walk out of a show I had been excited to see, but Eddie Izzard's performance, at least of the Seattle leg, in his 'Stripped' tour, was ghastly. Izzard normally does a lot of improv over a basic plan or outline. Here, it was as though there were no bullet points, no prior planning whatsoever, so there was nothing to improv about other than lazy references to past routines. Moreover, while it was indeed Eddie Izzard on the marquee, Eddie Izzard that I came to see, it was for Eddie Izzard performing comedy that I bought the tickets.
I realize this tour has had at times a grueling schedule, and that he has been on the road a long time. That means that the 'no bullet points' thing is not true; what is true is that instead he has had the same outline for too long, and he's sick of it, and it shows. It may have all been as brilliant as his past stuff when he started doing it months ago, but it felt like since he knew the funny bits too well he didn't bother getting to that point for the audience, as though we, too, should already know by what amusingly convoluted logic he was going to take us from Noah to ducks running the world. And since we knew, he didn't have to do the routine; he could just hint at it, and we would humor him, since he is Eddie Izzard doing Eddie Izzard.
But 'Eddie Izzard' isn't the funny bit, nor are inane and exhausting digressions or incoherent murmurings or referring obliquely to previous successful humor. The funny bit is Eddie Izzard being funny, integrating that rambling and making the journey to the point more entertaining than the point itself. In the same way I would feel cheated to have seen Charlie Parker or Edith Piaf come onstage and just 'be' Charlie Parker or Edith Piaf, it felt like Izzard was attempting little beyond pointing to himself and insisting, 'What? I'm effing Eddie Izzard! That's funny! I'm funny! Therefore my just being here should be good enough for you!' He had all the mannerisms of Eddie Izzard, all the energy, and the diction was spot on; what was lacking was the show.
Whatever. We had tasty Chinese food and good company in the International District after. And until I dropped a lipstick on my beige skirt and had to change in the car, I even looked undeniably 'summery.'
I can't remember the last time I walked out of a show, and I have never before tonight had the misfortune of needing to walk out of a show I had been excited to see, but Eddie Izzard's performance, at least of the Seattle leg, in his 'Stripped' tour, was ghastly. Izzard normally does a lot of improv over a basic plan or outline. Here, it was as though there were no bullet points, no prior planning whatsoever, so there was nothing to improv about other than lazy references to past routines. Moreover, while it was indeed Eddie Izzard on the marquee, Eddie Izzard that I came to see, it was for Eddie Izzard performing comedy that I bought the tickets.
I realize this tour has had at times a grueling schedule, and that he has been on the road a long time. That means that the 'no bullet points' thing is not true; what is true is that instead he has had the same outline for too long, and he's sick of it, and it shows. It may have all been as brilliant as his past stuff when he started doing it months ago, but it felt like since he knew the funny bits too well he didn't bother getting to that point for the audience, as though we, too, should already know by what amusingly convoluted logic he was going to take us from Noah to ducks running the world. And since we knew, he didn't have to do the routine; he could just hint at it, and we would humor him, since he is Eddie Izzard doing Eddie Izzard.
But 'Eddie Izzard' isn't the funny bit, nor are inane and exhausting digressions or incoherent murmurings or referring obliquely to previous successful humor. The funny bit is Eddie Izzard being funny, integrating that rambling and making the journey to the point more entertaining than the point itself. In the same way I would feel cheated to have seen Charlie Parker or Edith Piaf come onstage and just 'be' Charlie Parker or Edith Piaf, it felt like Izzard was attempting little beyond pointing to himself and insisting, 'What? I'm effing Eddie Izzard! That's funny! I'm funny! Therefore my just being here should be good enough for you!' He had all the mannerisms of Eddie Izzard, all the energy, and the diction was spot on; what was lacking was the show.
Whatever. We had tasty Chinese food and good company in the International District after. And until I dropped a lipstick on my beige skirt and had to change in the car, I even looked undeniably 'summery.'
Friday, July 11, 2008
Clavardage and Cohen
Completely trivial post, but:
My new absolute favorite word is the Québecisme clavarder. I don't know what the Académie Franςaise has to say about it, but it's a portmanteau word (or mot-valise if you're speaking French while throwing French words around) comprised of bavarder, to chat + clavier, and it hopes, on the heels of courriel's success (courrier + électronique = email) to replace chatter, tchatter, and even tchatcher, for electronic chat.
Not that it matters, but it gets my vote.
To celebrate clavarder's victory over my heart, here is my favorite stanza from my favorite song ('Joan of Arc') by the irrefutably (and even Québecoisically) Canadian Leonard Cohen:
'Then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And high above the wedding guests
He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.'
My new absolute favorite word is the Québecisme clavarder. I don't know what the Académie Franςaise has to say about it, but it's a portmanteau word (or mot-valise if you're speaking French while throwing French words around) comprised of bavarder, to chat + clavier, and it hopes, on the heels of courriel's success (courrier + électronique = email) to replace chatter, tchatter, and even tchatcher, for electronic chat.
Not that it matters, but it gets my vote.
To celebrate clavarder's victory over my heart, here is my favorite stanza from my favorite song ('Joan of Arc') by the irrefutably (and even Québecoisically) Canadian Leonard Cohen:
'Then fire, make your body cold,
I'm going to give you mine to hold,
Saying this she climbed inside
To be his one, to be his only bride.
And deep into his fiery heart
He took the dust of Joan of Arc,
And high above the wedding guests
He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.'
Thursday, July 10, 2008
'Laissez-vous faire, Milord,
Venez dans mon royaume!'
And I'm sorry to be redundant about my royaume, such as it is, but when I turned on the BBC World Service very late last night (this is what happens when there are too few dishwasher-volunteers and one's 'nap' ends at 11:30 PM), the first upcoming story they promoted was about an 800-year-old Dominican church in Maastricht, once serving a long-since-destroyed friary, eventually turned into bike storage, and now become a bookstore. (Both those links go to stories on the converted building.)
Seriously. I don't ask for this stuff. And it's getting odd. I'm scared that if someone should send me a gift of an old book found in their grandfather's attic they thought would amuse me, it's going to be Tintin and the Black Friars, or that if I haphazardly throw on an Edith Piaf CD in the car, 'Milord' and 'L'Accordéoniste' will have been replaced somehow by a recording of a Dominican Mass.
(By the way, try one on for size at the historic Blessed Sacrament church in Seattle's University District, on 8/8/08, as part of their centenary celebration. I make no guarantees about la Piaf or Tintin being there, however.)
And I'm sorry to be redundant about my royaume, such as it is, but when I turned on the BBC World Service very late last night (this is what happens when there are too few dishwasher-volunteers and one's 'nap' ends at 11:30 PM), the first upcoming story they promoted was about an 800-year-old Dominican church in Maastricht, once serving a long-since-destroyed friary, eventually turned into bike storage, and now become a bookstore. (Both those links go to stories on the converted building.)
Seriously. I don't ask for this stuff. And it's getting odd. I'm scared that if someone should send me a gift of an old book found in their grandfather's attic they thought would amuse me, it's going to be Tintin and the Black Friars, or that if I haphazardly throw on an Edith Piaf CD in the car, 'Milord' and 'L'Accordéoniste' will have been replaced somehow by a recording of a Dominican Mass.
(By the way, try one on for size at the historic Blessed Sacrament church in Seattle's University District, on 8/8/08, as part of their centenary celebration. I make no guarantees about la Piaf or Tintin being there, however.)
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
There Is No Time in Space
So, for those of you who are following, the story:
He brought a bird into the house in his mouth. I couldn't tell if it was alive, but now that is becoming the default selection. I claim ignorance, and I should, but I have read about as much regarding domestic cat behavior at this point as someone with other obligations can be asked to. I understand what he is doing, I respect its origin, and I hate its consequences.
Anyway, ultimately I got the bird, and it was still living. Prior to that, I heard sounds issue from the cat's mouth which I hadn't been aware cats could make, sounds more reminiscent of a low-rent lion or a big dog than a small domestic longhair. Eventually I found a way to scruff/disable the cat with one hand and scoop up the bird gently with the other. I found the bird a box and a sweater, put all three in the washroom, and called the wildlife rescue.
Since I can't understand direction, I only vaguely know where anything is. I didn't expect anyone to be there, but I hoped there would be a rescue box in the manner of unwanted-baby 'drop boxes' in some hospitals and fire stations in some countries in some centuries, including ours. The website and the phone message didn't mention that, but since I was shaking I called back a second time to see if perhaps I had missed something, and I got a human being, which was definitely something I had missed on the first go-round.
He said he was still going to be there for a while and that I could bring the bird in. I prayed the whole time and I knew my gas would hold out. But he (John) (of PAWS in Lynnwood, WA) showed me all the things that were wrong and told me he would have to put the bird to sleep. The bird was very injured, but I had nothing to offer it other than a slow death, with a predator pacing and moaning on the other side of the door. He at least had peace to offer at his disposal; I had only pain and more fear to give the little sparrow.
But he at least showed me a box of bunnies, with their eyes still not opened. A lady had accidentally ruined their little nest, and when the mother returned, she noticed that and left. They were thin and long, and John had fed them once so far, and the one he was concerned about was looking more lively. I sat in my car and cried for the sparrow, that this John could return to its tiny broken body very soon and alleviate its suffering, and for the little rabbits, that their bad start might be forgotten with a long life of surreptitiously ruining lettuce crops in Lynnwood. Or Issaquah, if they prefer microgreens.
Even though I needed to, I felt a bit odd sitting in a car outside an animal rescue and crying, so I put on the GPS and pulled out. I wasn't really looking or listening, though, so I just turned onto the first 'highway' sign.
About a half-hour into the trip, though, I started to feel unfamiliar. I didn't know the street signs; I didn't understand why I was seeing the exits for the cities I was seeing; I had no idea what either Diane Rehm or her guests on the low-playing NPR or 'Aonghus' on the GPS had been saying; I realized a tour bus, of all things, had actually passed me for going too slowly; and I wondered which direction I might be going in and, indeed, on which highway. I looked at the gas meter: it was E, but not really less than E, although I don't know from firsthand experience that there is on this car a visual cue signaling in an unmistakable manner 'less than E.' I looked around: it was indeed a highway, so in terms of speed, I could shoot for somewhere between 50-70 MPH and be considered to be driving reasonably. And, frankly, since less than 50 had served me (not necessarily 'well,' but then, I hadn't been noticing) thus far, rather a good part of me hoped that my lack of speed would signal a dangerous lack of confidence to any nearby highway patrolmen, who might be enlisted, after having pulled me over, to tell me where, precisely, I happened to be at that moment.
I would insert 'But thank God for GPS' right about here into this narrative, were such an interjection not so patently disingenuous. Aonghus kept telling me to take all sorts of terrifying side-routes, winding backtracks, and rural byways which, though scenic enough in the daytime to justify all manner of diversion, are nonetheless potentially fraught with peril at one million o'clock in the night for a failed practitioner of feline behavior modification, a crying and hopeless bird rescuer, a sleep-deprived owner of what is, in fact, the most comfortable and ridiculous bed in Seattle, a geographical and spatial ignoramus, and a girl still in the same just-fine-at-4PM kitten-heeled mules and red sweater set at one (1 AM) in the morning, hoping against hope, praying for the safe passage not simply of the broken sparrow, the tiny, stupid, closed-eyed bunnies, the unknowing, inappropriately grateful, un-Buddhist cat, but everyone who broke all of those, and all of us, and for everyone who is yet to come and break or be broken, just to get home somehow, someway, sometime, soon enough to make it to Prince of Peace tomorrow by at eleven.
Okay, twelve-ish.
And on the way home, once I figured out where I was and had been and could be headed if I made some judicious choices I pointed south and then took the 520 bridge back. Once I figured out how to get there. And four seagulls lined the way across on my side, where I've never seen birds sitting like that before.
I don't think anyone is afraid to die; I think only they are afraid that when they go, no one will be there to pet their head. It's that moment, not what comes after. And really, dog, cat, parrot, sparrow, or human, it is that touch that tells us that we were really here, that we really belonged. That we were known, and we were loved, and that we can leave now, knowing our imprint never vanishes, and our life was never for nothing. Hold me tight, and fast, and gentle, and true - now, only now, whatever you've done before. Only this moment exists, and I can die on the streets alone, or I can die in your arms. Don't offer me absolution; offer me Love -- and then you, and I, and God, can do anything. This is what keeps me coming back to 'soup kitchens' (sorry, Bill, for the 1930s vocab) - to meal programs: the sparrow. The broken, the small, the weak, the wounded. The mild, the frightened, the too-trusting, the untrusting, and the never-yet-to-be-begun. Open your arms and you'll be surprised what falls into them; lean back into the unknown and you'll be shocked at who cradles your fall.
He brought a bird into the house in his mouth. I couldn't tell if it was alive, but now that is becoming the default selection. I claim ignorance, and I should, but I have read about as much regarding domestic cat behavior at this point as someone with other obligations can be asked to. I understand what he is doing, I respect its origin, and I hate its consequences.
Anyway, ultimately I got the bird, and it was still living. Prior to that, I heard sounds issue from the cat's mouth which I hadn't been aware cats could make, sounds more reminiscent of a low-rent lion or a big dog than a small domestic longhair. Eventually I found a way to scruff/disable the cat with one hand and scoop up the bird gently with the other. I found the bird a box and a sweater, put all three in the washroom, and called the wildlife rescue.
Since I can't understand direction, I only vaguely know where anything is. I didn't expect anyone to be there, but I hoped there would be a rescue box in the manner of unwanted-baby 'drop boxes' in some hospitals and fire stations in some countries in some centuries, including ours. The website and the phone message didn't mention that, but since I was shaking I called back a second time to see if perhaps I had missed something, and I got a human being, which was definitely something I had missed on the first go-round.
He said he was still going to be there for a while and that I could bring the bird in. I prayed the whole time and I knew my gas would hold out. But he (John) (of PAWS in Lynnwood, WA) showed me all the things that were wrong and told me he would have to put the bird to sleep. The bird was very injured, but I had nothing to offer it other than a slow death, with a predator pacing and moaning on the other side of the door. He at least had peace to offer at his disposal; I had only pain and more fear to give the little sparrow.
But he at least showed me a box of bunnies, with their eyes still not opened. A lady had accidentally ruined their little nest, and when the mother returned, she noticed that and left. They were thin and long, and John had fed them once so far, and the one he was concerned about was looking more lively. I sat in my car and cried for the sparrow, that this John could return to its tiny broken body very soon and alleviate its suffering, and for the little rabbits, that their bad start might be forgotten with a long life of surreptitiously ruining lettuce crops in Lynnwood. Or Issaquah, if they prefer microgreens.
Even though I needed to, I felt a bit odd sitting in a car outside an animal rescue and crying, so I put on the GPS and pulled out. I wasn't really looking or listening, though, so I just turned onto the first 'highway' sign.
About a half-hour into the trip, though, I started to feel unfamiliar. I didn't know the street signs; I didn't understand why I was seeing the exits for the cities I was seeing; I had no idea what either Diane Rehm or her guests on the low-playing NPR or 'Aonghus' on the GPS had been saying; I realized a tour bus, of all things, had actually passed me for going too slowly; and I wondered which direction I might be going in and, indeed, on which highway. I looked at the gas meter: it was E, but not really less than E, although I don't know from firsthand experience that there is on this car a visual cue signaling in an unmistakable manner 'less than E.' I looked around: it was indeed a highway, so in terms of speed, I could shoot for somewhere between 50-70 MPH and be considered to be driving reasonably. And, frankly, since less than 50 had served me (not necessarily 'well,' but then, I hadn't been noticing) thus far, rather a good part of me hoped that my lack of speed would signal a dangerous lack of confidence to any nearby highway patrolmen, who might be enlisted, after having pulled me over, to tell me where, precisely, I happened to be at that moment.
I would insert 'But thank God for GPS' right about here into this narrative, were such an interjection not so patently disingenuous. Aonghus kept telling me to take all sorts of terrifying side-routes, winding backtracks, and rural byways which, though scenic enough in the daytime to justify all manner of diversion, are nonetheless potentially fraught with peril at one million o'clock in the night for a failed practitioner of feline behavior modification, a crying and hopeless bird rescuer, a sleep-deprived owner of what is, in fact, the most comfortable and ridiculous bed in Seattle, a geographical and spatial ignoramus, and a girl still in the same just-fine-at-4PM kitten-heeled mules and red sweater set at one (1 AM) in the morning, hoping against hope, praying for the safe passage not simply of the broken sparrow, the tiny, stupid, closed-eyed bunnies, the unknowing, inappropriately grateful, un-Buddhist cat, but everyone who broke all of those, and all of us, and for everyone who is yet to come and break or be broken, just to get home somehow, someway, sometime, soon enough to make it to Prince of Peace tomorrow by at eleven.
Okay, twelve-ish.
And on the way home, once I figured out where I was and had been and could be headed if I made some judicious choices I pointed south and then took the 520 bridge back. Once I figured out how to get there. And four seagulls lined the way across on my side, where I've never seen birds sitting like that before.
I don't think anyone is afraid to die; I think only they are afraid that when they go, no one will be there to pet their head. It's that moment, not what comes after. And really, dog, cat, parrot, sparrow, or human, it is that touch that tells us that we were really here, that we really belonged. That we were known, and we were loved, and that we can leave now, knowing our imprint never vanishes, and our life was never for nothing. Hold me tight, and fast, and gentle, and true - now, only now, whatever you've done before. Only this moment exists, and I can die on the streets alone, or I can die in your arms. Don't offer me absolution; offer me Love -- and then you, and I, and God, can do anything. This is what keeps me coming back to 'soup kitchens' (sorry, Bill, for the 1930s vocab) - to meal programs: the sparrow. The broken, the small, the weak, the wounded. The mild, the frightened, the too-trusting, the untrusting, and the never-yet-to-be-begun. Open your arms and you'll be surprised what falls into them; lean back into the unknown and you'll be shocked at who cradles your fall.
God Only Threw the Humans Out of Paradise
The rest we insisted upon banishing with our own hands.
Well, now it's one million o'clock here in Dhaka or wherever my time-zone stamp says I am. It would be earlier, or, more accurately, I wouldn't know it was later, were it not for the three-hour middle-of-the-night drive to the wildlife shelter with a wounded house sparrow on a sweater in a box by the floor heater.
And I am spent with this. It is not my cat. I don't own a cat, the proof being a) I never went somewhere looking to get one and b) the fact that the cat who comes here also goes outside. If I had a cat, I would have had to get one, and if I had a cat, he would live with me. Clear, my friends, as an unmuddied lake.
Despite the stark reality of my owning no cats, in the last week alone I have had to try to rescue three or four animals brought into my house by a cat. And the reason the cat is here is the same reason I try to save the other animals: I care about them, and I don't want any to suffer needlessly. Hence, when the people who adopted the cat locked him outside in the summer heat and the winter snow, when I saw him huddled under cars for shade and hunched up on warm hoods for heat, I wanted to give him shelter. Sanctuary. I wanted to prevent his suffering. When one day I came home to find him outside my window on the balcony, I slashed the screen to rescue him then, but left it slashed to allow him constant access to shade, heat, caring, food, and water.
Now, I know of course that animals die in the wild all the time. But the reality is that indoor-outdoor cats wreak havoc on already-precarious urban wildlife - and all of that killing is unnecessary and directly attributable to human choice, which is not the case with robins and earthworms, or raccoons and salmon smelt. And yet I have no standing with this cat. I don't own him by law, so I would be stealing if I were to confine him. And I would likely be condemning him to death by lethal injection, since he is adult, if I were to lie about his provenance and commit him to a shelter.
--And I know from shelters! I have to live with myself for the rest of my life knowing I killed many, many discarded animals - sometimes with no greater justification than that we simply had no more room left for more unwanted pets. Sometimes we had completely run out of foster homes (meaning that all the employees and volunteers, as well, had more than we could take care of), so we had to kill animals because they had the canine or feline equivalent of head colds: it made them 'less adoptable,' and we could only afford to keep the most adoptable...
Any 'progressive' shelter will tell you they don't 'kill for space.' Some shelters will claim to be fully 'no-kill' shelters. But imagine what that means: if every 2.2 seconds a companion animal in this country is being euthanized, it is not happening all in one place. Given that people throw away their pets and their unneutered pets' offspring at a shocking rate, in order to be in any way accurate about being 'no-kill,' a shelter must never accept a discarded animal who is less than 100% ideal in temperament, age, species, breed, and health, and thus brilliantly, stunningly, immediately adoptable -- or Fido or Caesar or Bijou with his limp, or his greying muzzle, or that trace of kennel cough, is taking up valuable kennel space that could be turned over quickly by some eight-week-old smush-face Cavalier King Charles, thus boosting adoption statistics and 'proving' no-kill claims.
What this means in reality is that a no-kill shelter is in reality one of two things: a 'refer-kill' shelter, or a shelter so hideously selective that almost nobody gets in. In the first case, if predictions about your marketability prove untrue, you get shipped off to somewhere else more accustomed to difficult choices and unpleasant ends. You'll get killed in the end, perhaps, just not at the same place your story of rejection began. In the second case, God help you if you look a bit too much like last year's 'Beethoven' just as this year's '1001 Dalmatians' comes out.
So it was that I started out as a volunteer at a humane shelter, cleaning cages and cuddling puppies, insulated from the reality that divided volunteer from employee. But my enthusiasm for the cause was commensurate with my compassion, so I went up the next level. Whereupon reality set in. We were a private, not municipal, shelter, so some individuals above four months old survived. Just not a lot of large breeds, active breeds, sight hounds, scent hounds, or animals who bore the stigma of their past abuse. If you had been beaten down, we didn't have time to raise you back up. We didn't have the money. We didn't have the foster homes. But at least, I told myself, in your last hour, in your last minute, you had me, and you had a hand on your shoulder, and a kiss on your head, instead of another kick. You went gently, and I loved you.
But there is no justification for killing what shouldn't be killed. However fearful or even dangerous an animal in our shelter had become before he reached us, he had become so not through his nature, but through man. And I might be easing you gently into death, but had you only been loved you would have had ten more years of running and playing, ten more years of returning thousandfold the comfort you had been given.
Anyway, ultimately I couldn't do it anymore. Four and five litters at a time, needing to be dispatched ASAP, of three-week-old diseased and deformed kittens born in bad conditions from feral and domestic cats on the property of the same man who year and year again refused to let us trap and spay and release - free! at no cost to him! with no more litters needing to be born only to be killed immediately! - was one of the things that did me in. So, too, was falling in love over and over with little guys too scared of everything by that point to be sufficiently predictable so as to be good pets. Guys whose natural reaction to everything they had experienced condemned them. Guys who deserved, not death, but a meadow and some soft food and a slow, slow building of trust so that one day, years in the future, when they were completely ready, they could roll over and get the best damned belly rub they had ever had.
That's what ended my animal-welfare career. In brief format, at any rate. But back to tonight. Except not now, when I have already made this entry far longer than I had intended, by unintended digressions, which I can only hope were illustrative of something -- if not, necessarily, my intended topic.
Well, now it's one million o'clock here in Dhaka or wherever my time-zone stamp says I am. It would be earlier, or, more accurately, I wouldn't know it was later, were it not for the three-hour middle-of-the-night drive to the wildlife shelter with a wounded house sparrow on a sweater in a box by the floor heater.
And I am spent with this. It is not my cat. I don't own a cat, the proof being a) I never went somewhere looking to get one and b) the fact that the cat who comes here also goes outside. If I had a cat, I would have had to get one, and if I had a cat, he would live with me. Clear, my friends, as an unmuddied lake.
Despite the stark reality of my owning no cats, in the last week alone I have had to try to rescue three or four animals brought into my house by a cat. And the reason the cat is here is the same reason I try to save the other animals: I care about them, and I don't want any to suffer needlessly. Hence, when the people who adopted the cat locked him outside in the summer heat and the winter snow, when I saw him huddled under cars for shade and hunched up on warm hoods for heat, I wanted to give him shelter. Sanctuary. I wanted to prevent his suffering. When one day I came home to find him outside my window on the balcony, I slashed the screen to rescue him then, but left it slashed to allow him constant access to shade, heat, caring, food, and water.
Now, I know of course that animals die in the wild all the time. But the reality is that indoor-outdoor cats wreak havoc on already-precarious urban wildlife - and all of that killing is unnecessary and directly attributable to human choice, which is not the case with robins and earthworms, or raccoons and salmon smelt. And yet I have no standing with this cat. I don't own him by law, so I would be stealing if I were to confine him. And I would likely be condemning him to death by lethal injection, since he is adult, if I were to lie about his provenance and commit him to a shelter.
--And I know from shelters! I have to live with myself for the rest of my life knowing I killed many, many discarded animals - sometimes with no greater justification than that we simply had no more room left for more unwanted pets. Sometimes we had completely run out of foster homes (meaning that all the employees and volunteers, as well, had more than we could take care of), so we had to kill animals because they had the canine or feline equivalent of head colds: it made them 'less adoptable,' and we could only afford to keep the most adoptable...
Any 'progressive' shelter will tell you they don't 'kill for space.' Some shelters will claim to be fully 'no-kill' shelters. But imagine what that means: if every 2.2 seconds a companion animal in this country is being euthanized, it is not happening all in one place. Given that people throw away their pets and their unneutered pets' offspring at a shocking rate, in order to be in any way accurate about being 'no-kill,' a shelter must never accept a discarded animal who is less than 100% ideal in temperament, age, species, breed, and health, and thus brilliantly, stunningly, immediately adoptable -- or Fido or Caesar or Bijou with his limp, or his greying muzzle, or that trace of kennel cough, is taking up valuable kennel space that could be turned over quickly by some eight-week-old smush-face Cavalier King Charles, thus boosting adoption statistics and 'proving' no-kill claims.
What this means in reality is that a no-kill shelter is in reality one of two things: a 'refer-kill' shelter, or a shelter so hideously selective that almost nobody gets in. In the first case, if predictions about your marketability prove untrue, you get shipped off to somewhere else more accustomed to difficult choices and unpleasant ends. You'll get killed in the end, perhaps, just not at the same place your story of rejection began. In the second case, God help you if you look a bit too much like last year's 'Beethoven' just as this year's '1001 Dalmatians' comes out.
So it was that I started out as a volunteer at a humane shelter, cleaning cages and cuddling puppies, insulated from the reality that divided volunteer from employee. But my enthusiasm for the cause was commensurate with my compassion, so I went up the next level. Whereupon reality set in. We were a private, not municipal, shelter, so some individuals above four months old survived. Just not a lot of large breeds, active breeds, sight hounds, scent hounds, or animals who bore the stigma of their past abuse. If you had been beaten down, we didn't have time to raise you back up. We didn't have the money. We didn't have the foster homes. But at least, I told myself, in your last hour, in your last minute, you had me, and you had a hand on your shoulder, and a kiss on your head, instead of another kick. You went gently, and I loved you.
But there is no justification for killing what shouldn't be killed. However fearful or even dangerous an animal in our shelter had become before he reached us, he had become so not through his nature, but through man. And I might be easing you gently into death, but had you only been loved you would have had ten more years of running and playing, ten more years of returning thousandfold the comfort you had been given.
Anyway, ultimately I couldn't do it anymore. Four and five litters at a time, needing to be dispatched ASAP, of three-week-old diseased and deformed kittens born in bad conditions from feral and domestic cats on the property of the same man who year and year again refused to let us trap and spay and release - free! at no cost to him! with no more litters needing to be born only to be killed immediately! - was one of the things that did me in. So, too, was falling in love over and over with little guys too scared of everything by that point to be sufficiently predictable so as to be good pets. Guys whose natural reaction to everything they had experienced condemned them. Guys who deserved, not death, but a meadow and some soft food and a slow, slow building of trust so that one day, years in the future, when they were completely ready, they could roll over and get the best damned belly rub they had ever had.
That's what ended my animal-welfare career. In brief format, at any rate. But back to tonight. Except not now, when I have already made this entry far longer than I had intended, by unintended digressions, which I can only hope were illustrative of something -- if not, necessarily, my intended topic.
'Between soup and love,
the first is better.' -Spanish proverb
I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:
- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism
----and Dominicans.
You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...
The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.
Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same potluck pot au feu as the rest of the overnight guests.
An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (
Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.
One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.
In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...
And you thought I couldn't do it.
I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:
- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism
----and Dominicans.
You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...
The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.
Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same
An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (
Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.
One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.
In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...
And you thought I couldn't do it.
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