Category Archives: religion

amor fati

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Whether death is final or whether, as Socrates said, it may be the greatest of all human blessings—I have no idea. But I am relatively sure that we are all irretrievably diminished by the deaths around us from the current pandemic. I am equally sure that to make light of suffering and death by claiming that they are the inevitable outcome of economic or other forces that lie beyond human control, as apologists for capitalist excess have always done, is not only wrong headed but sinful as well.

And no sooner had I recommended a pause in open criticism of the president when he, with his characteristic blend of narcissism and arrogance, telegraphed to New York Governor Cuomo that the governor didn’t need the respirators he has asked for, downplaying the already numerous deaths from COVID-19 in New York and claiming that projections of future deaths in that state have been overblown; and besides the mess in New York is all Cuomo’s fault anyway. Future deaths will be on him and not on the president. This strategy, consisting partly of spreading the falsely reassuring notion that not everybody will be affected by the pandemic, is finding resonance with some, as indicated by the uptick in the president’s poll numbers. The Charles Koch network has been emboldened to echo the president’s claim that social distancing is a cure that’s worse than the disease it attempts to mitigate, and some of the president’s supporters among the God fearing are defying statewide distancing orders to hold massive church services. One evangelical pastor has gone so far as to refuse to accept responsibility for risking the lives of those who attend his services.

People are still going to work, still going to the mall. I encountered more people in Target today then I did during my service last night,” he said. “It’s persecution of the faith for me not to have my worship service and yet I am allowed to go out in public and shop. Why is there one standard for commerce and another for religion? . . .”

Why indeed? the good pastor’s duplicity echoes that of the president. Behind it is an admonition towards a species of moral quietism in the face of public calamity, of which more later. ‘All is well in the best of all possible worlds,’ says the president, perhaps echoing his grounding in the pop theology of Norman Vincent Peale. ‘Be happy—go back to work when I say it is time. Meanwhile, I guess we should all shelter in place, but don’t believe what the doomsayers tell you. This will all be over soon.’ If that sounds like stoicism, perhaps it should; it is at least a debased form of stoicism.

Stoicism is enjoying a revival these days, with at least a couple of pretty good books, a spate of articles, blogs, internet communities, meet-ups in various places around the world, and the like. Here’s a fairly recent article that reviews most of of these things and will put you on to other resources. Apparently the movement began in the self-help culture as an offshoot of interest in mindfulness, but it is now gathering serious philosophical underpinnings as well as some sectarian rivalry among practitioners. At my age I’m disinclined to join movements, but if I were I think I might join this one. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to support the president. But at best, in the United States in contrast to the president’s screed, the stoic revival seems to be attempting to restore the ideal of civic virtue without its sometimes poisonous grounding in Christianity.

In keeping with this new interest, I am reading around, have ordered some new books, and have just now ordered a couple of stoic medallions so that I can look forward to their arrival and carry them about me during my present isolation and perhaps afterwards. There was a time in my life when I studied the art forms generated by medieval and renaissance preoccupation with death. A gentleman of John Donne’s time, for instance, might carry on his person a medallion such as the ones I have ordered to remind himself that the funeral bell, which tolled often in those times of frequent epidemics, could toll for him just as it could for anyone else. Donne was recovering from a serious illness at the time he wrote the famous seventeenth Meditation, and he alluded to his recovery in its opening sentence:

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

2019 was my year of near death. I have had three strokes. I am left with the knowledge that I can have another stroke at any time. I have stopped driving, though I intend to keep my license current in case of emergency. As I think about my new knowledge and what it means to me personally (I stress personally), I am remembering sitting in his office years ago with a priest friend who had had three heart attacks. He spoke of how he knew that the fourth coronary would likely kill him but reflected that there seemed some serenity associated with knowing how one will die.

I have been diagnosed with a species of heart failure known as diastolic dysfunction, which sometimes affects my breathing. I am a lifelong asthmatic and as an ex-smoker I have a bit of COPD. I use oxygen at night. I take blood thinners and a statin and medicine for hypertension, though not so much of that as in former times. I am also well over eighty. But my heart condition and other factors aside from age are under control. My only radical uncertainty is the tiny aneurysm in my brain and the too-small artery that branches off from it. While I am less certain that I will die of a stroke than my priest friend was of his potential death by heart attack (and by the way he did die of the fourth coronary), it seems a fairly good bet that a stroke will kill me.

Unless, of course, I should die of COVID-19.

Sheltering in place has been a pretty simple matter for me. I’ll not bore you with the details. It’s of some concern to me that as our hospitals are overwhelmed by the pandemic I might find it difficult to get emergency medical care if I should need it. I have already spent a night and the better part of the next day lying on a gurney in a hallway at SLU hospital the last time I was there because no rooms were available. We have 10,000 hospital beds in this city I’m told (I hope that means in the city proper outside Saint Louis County), but that’s not enough to meet the needs of our population in normal times. I find upon reflection I am troubled less on my own account than I am  when I think of the potential needs of others. As I’ve said before I’ve had a good run at life, and though I certainly don’t like the Texas lieutenant governor’s idea that I should be willing to die for the sake of the economy, I’m philosophical, as the saying goes, about death.

Donne’s famous instruction in the seventeenth meditation echoes down the centuries in the oft-repeated admonition that we are all in this together in the present crisis. The president’s duplicitous appeals in today’s media both invoke and deny the admonition, gesturing first towards social distancing, which in seeming to deny Donne’s admonition actually affirms it, and then offering the empty reassurance that ‘this will all be over soon, and besides, not everybody will get the virus, not everybody will die.’ The moral vacuousness of this consolation ought to be obvious, but the politics of divisiveness is so powerful among us, that it may be useful to quote Donne here, as much for the venerability of the ideal as for its timeliness.

No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

For myself, today, this instruction provides a partly inexplicable serenity wrought of the knowledge that death (my own death) is an inescapable part of life that I am able to consider apart from Donne’s recourse to his home in heaven. I grew up in the church; indeed I startled my family by asking to ‘join the church’ (our Methodist confirmation) when I was nine years old. But it has been more years than I can count since I have believed that heaven and hell are places that lie beyond this world. These, I believe, are Christian metaphors for very human and worldly conditions. I think of myself most of the time as a Christian humanist, following more in the footsteps of Darwin and Whitehead than of Dante or Milton or Isaac Newton. I believe that the cosmos is rationally describable and that my inability to understand it proceeds from my human inability to see it whole; but I also believe that I can trust my partial understanding, and that my partial understanding is informed by the science of my time rather than that of ancient times.

So if I am a stoic, I am a very modern one, having discarded the science of classical stoicism just as I long ago discarded that of the Hebrew Bible. Like Montaigne, I have always been attracted to the skeptical strain of stoicism and the humility it teaches, which is why I have never felt any solidarity with the more extreme forms of postmodern thinking. These seem to me, especially when they make a leap from epistemology to ontology, not to embrace uncertainty but rather to require a certainty that borders upon hubris. I am still a Christian in that Christianity gives me the fundamental terms of what Richard Rorty has taught me to think of as my final vocabulary. I am a humanist in the classical sense of being open to the teaching of many books other than the Christian scripture and its various tropes and theologies. Humanism has taught me to regard the copious mind as a positive good, and to nourish it in others as a teacher. Now it is teaching me serenity at the prospect of my own death.

But the principal difficulty with the stoic worldview for me is not its source in outdated science. It is rather a susceptibility to conflation with naive theodicy. Leibtniz becomes Pangloss, one of whose spiritual descendants is Norman Vincent Peale. But Voltaire spoofs only the second worst outcome of Pangloss’s teaching that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The worst outcome is that to which Candide comes in the end, moral quietism, tending one’s garden as the world cries out for reform. Voltaire may or may not have approved. Certainly he had plenty of knocks to deal with in a life devoted to railing against various establishments, and certainly he retired from all of it for a time. I am presently retired as well, but I don’t plan to embrace quietism in my present flirtation with the stoic ideal.

My beloved is busy on the phone and online each day doing the various good works to which she is committed. Since I can no longer help her with much of that, I will continue to write and think. I have a good many projects saved up for a time like this one, another chapbook or two, a book of essays. By inheritance I have benefited from both my country’s disastrous adventures: slavery, and what we euphemistically call Indian removal. I have written a good deal about these things both here and elsewhere. I tried once to make sense of my story in an essay I wrote for Pembroke Magazine years ago. That essay was a failure, though I didn’t know it at the time, at least partly because the story needed more space to develop. I’m going to try again, using parts of that essay and some of the essays I have written for this blog. If I live, there will be a memoir. Beyond that, I leave to whatever gods there are.

Advent IV: The Terrible Beauty

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The winter solstice came and went night before last at 11:19 EST. It was the last (or next to last) winter solstice of our current decade. From now on the nights will get shorter and the days longer for a while as our planet continues its yearly dance with the sun. Some snow remains on the ground here from last week’s snowfall, but no new snowfall is forecast for the immediate future. Guess we’ll have to make do with sunshine for a while. As we drove home through the city streets yesterday evening after a party we noticed that snow had melted on streetsides that receive afternoon sun but not on the streetsides opposite them.

With the times as out of joint as they are, perhaps one might take uneven snow melt as a sign. In Christian mythology, the solstice occurs on Christmas eve. Not so this year, the event having preceded the final sunday of Advent. So was Advent IV marooned then, and will we spend Christmas suspended between What T. S. Eliot once called ‘the motion and the act’? Or might we understand this time as a fortunate addition to our time of waiting, a time perhaps to tune our hearts more acutely to to the songs of angels. I’ve written of such a time more than once, how at the end of it “thousand seraphim stride the night sky . . . , their huge pennons shedding dark love. Time [as I thought then] to plant bulbs, get a new jacket, watch movies I missed.”

May we still hope for peace on earth? I should like to think so. I should like, for instance, to take the story of the Magi as a prefiguring of the pluralist politics we shall need if our planet is to survive. I cannot imagine a human future in which present world politics collide with the looming climate catastrophe. Perhaps history is again challenging us humans to reinvent ourselves, we who are “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” The spokesman for Eliot’s Magi finds the place he and his fellows sought merely satisfactory, or perhaps he means to understate the case.

. . . . . . . . . There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Perhaps all beauty is terrible. That’s the import of the Jeffers poem I have quoted here from time to time.

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
like the passionate spirit of humanity . . .

Whatever the beauty, whatever the tragedy, we are all part of it now, as we are part of a polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered world the like of which we have never known. History has thrown us together whereas before we were separate, divided by barriers of nationality, class, religion, language, gender. How to form a more perfect union in the face of dissolving difference and the fear that generates, how to do that as the enormous reality of climate change dawns on the world, as it will do, and the fear that generates. These will be the questions we humans face around the world as we reinvent ourselves.

Or not—

The Irish Terrible Beauty was wrought out of the deaths of patriots. Yeats’s great poem, “Easter 1916,” broods on the stories of some of them. I very much fear this advent IV that we humans face an even larger conflagration around the world than the rebellion in Ireland almost a century ago. The issue may well be the same: the inherited privilege of a few versus the needs and desires of the many. We hear tales of billionaire bunkers built as a hedge against uncertain future. We also hear of a billionaire Giving Pledge, though that has largely been a failure. Still, the coming catastrophe may have potential even to wipe out differences of wealth, as the systems of politics that sustain wealth and wealth production perish.

I don’t think this argues for the dawning of a Marxist future. Marx’s critique was far too tied to the particular historical circumstances in Britain at the time of its writing to be much use as prophecy. And neither Marx nor anyone else had ever (has ever) faced a catastrophe like the envoronmental catastrophe we face in post industrial times. Indeed this Advent !V I think I have to face the dawning conviction that human history from now on is pretty much up for grabs, and the more perfect union of my dreams seems less and less likely every day.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this thought disturbs me less than it might. I’ve had a good run at life, and I’m now enjoying a more or less privileged old age. I’m not able to take my privilege for granted any longer, not just because of the circumstances I outline here, but also because my health is now precarious. Still, I find I love being alive, I continue to love the world, and I think these facts do not proceed from mere tenacity. I’ve always loved what Betty Adcock calls The Difficult Wheel. “What we do have is light,” she says, we poets who “have gone out looking for God again,/having no choice,”

. . . . . . . . . . See how they still are burning—
all those classical noses, Coyote’s laughing muzzle,
Shiva’s raised foot, Christ’s cheek, the dazzle
of leafy-armed women darkening, ashy turning.

Perhaps, as Jeffers says, there was heart-breaking beauty before there was ever a heart to break for it, whatever. I don’t need religion or history or poetry to tell me there is an illo tempore not of this world. Every solstice reminds me that my world is but a speck in the great heaven. As an Episcopalian, I’m half a Catholic I suppose. I don’t go to church much, but one of my Jesuit buddies brings me communion from time to time. I love him, and when I look into his eyes I see God.

Doomsday scenarios

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We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead; . . .

The other day at Facebook I shared a New Yorker commentary by Jonathan Franzen, whose subtitle is “The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.” To which a friend immediately appended a lengthy tweet from Sarah Kaplan that begins with this observation: “I’m not linking to that Jonathan Franzen essay (which is not only poorly argued but completely mischaracterizes the scientific understanding of climate change and its impacts on society),” and then ends up more or less agreeing with Franzen. Apparently Kaplan prefers other doomsday scenarios projected by Kate Marvel and Dan Zak, but her complaint strikes me as a distinction without a difference, as we used to say. The core of her argument with Franzen, that his essay urges a retreat from the world is itself a mischaracterization, as is an attempt to sensationalize both that has just appeared in The Nation.

But this not-quite-dispute puts me in mind of something I had read a few weeks ago in a Washington Post essay by Elizabeth Breunig that contains an interview with Robert Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church and one of our president’s most ardent supporters. By way of explaining his many defenses of the president against moral criticisms lodged by liberals, Jeffress explained:

As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns, If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. . . . I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.

I also thought of an essay I had written not long ago in which I was able to find no real hope for our civilization or our planet short of a miracle. That essay is here, if you want to read it. I’m far from sharing Jeffress’ understanding of scripture but allowing for the difference in how Christian humanists such as myself and evangelicals identify the causes of our respective doomsday scenarios, one may venture to point out that we share a conviction that the world is poised upon the cusp of a monumental happening. Whether that happening is to be viewed as a disaster or not is one of the many things that divide liberals and evangelicals culturally. It’s easy to deny everything from science to the cookie monster if one views present stresses as a prelude to the end times. But we have just had a foretaste of what lies ahead of us from my perspective in the fact that the president seized command of weather forecasting even as hurricane Dorian wreaked death and destruction upon the Bahamas on its way up the east coast towards the Carolinas and the Maritime provinces.

As if the well-established prospect of climate disaster weren’t enough, we in the United States have now to fear the collapse of our social safety net, the erosion or downright loss of the rule of law and the system of political norms we have built up over a long history of corporate self-discovery, together with the entire system of international alliances we have built up since the second world war. Internationally, the world is being upended by migration on a scale we have not seen since late antiquity, by the renewal of age-old ethnic and religious hostilities and the threat of new hostilities between nations and social classes as a result of short-sighted and venal attempts by governments and corporations to control and/or shape the future to produce one set of projected outcomes or another in order to serve the interests of one set of beneficiaries or another. The world stage is set, it seems to me, for the end of the epoch in which I have lived all my life.

But it is a more than moral certainty that the future will be shaped by historical forces and developments we lack present ability to discern and that projections whether from science or scripture or from the study of history, however deep, amount to seeing through a glass darkly. The present question seems to me to be what to make of whatever interim we have, a question that will present itself with differing urgencies and imperatives depending upon one’s perceived position in the scheme of things. Refugees and members of oppressed classes will understand this question differently from the many of us whose affluence affords a safe view—by safe I mean relatively safe, of course. Many of our fellow humans whose lives were recently lost in the Bahamas believed themselves to be safe, even as the hurricane descended upon them. The lesson from Dorian for those who have an ear, as Jesus said, is that all our lives, indeed all human energies and enterprises, hang by a thread.

I’ve recently had a series of experiences that have brought this truth home to me in an intensely personal way. Last fall I learned that I had a kind of heart failure that made it necessary that I change my life. Then, before I had a chance to accommodate to the changes that were necessary, I had a stroke that left me struggling with blood pressure that was too high one day, too low the next. Now, just day before yesterday I have fallen down the stairs in my house, a stairway comprising some thirteen steps, fourteen if I count the step up from the landing at the top. Fortunately I broke no bones and escaped with a few cuts and bruises, the cuts having been caused by the shattering of a tempered glass coffee cup I was carrying as I commenced my fall. The most frightening memory I have of the experience is the memory of my legs giving way underneath me and my inability to control my fall, like my stroke a calamity that could recur at any time. Somewhere in these pages I have mentioned that my old friend, A. C. Greene from Abilene once told me he believed one should have a personal reason for whatever convictions one held. At the time I discounted the thought as trivial, but I hadn’t yet lived as long as A. C., who was facing a heart transplant at the time of that remark.

I find it impossible now to separate my thoughts about the future of life in the world around me from my expectation of death. I don’t mean this in a morbid way. Indeed, as I was falling downstairs the other day I was fully conscious and have no memory of thinking anything like, “Oh God, this is it!” though my family tells me that I cried out that I was dying. Rather I thought before I hit bottom, “Oh shit, what am I going to do now!” I recall the truly terrifying loss of my legs’ ability to feel and to hold me up as I stepped from the top landing onto the first step coming down. I remember being unable to feel my left knee for a bit with the hand I found myself resting on it at the bottom of the stairs and then feeling my son’s hands massaging my ankles and calves after I cried out that I couldn’t feel my legs. I was the one who suggested that I not be moved and that we summon an ambulance; and after my deep gratitude to my beloved and my son, who is staying with us for a time, I am profoundly grateful for the professionalism of the Saint Louis firefighters and paramedics. I understand that I experienced their grace under pressure and ability to size things up and cope with me not as one of a succession of victims they see in a day’s work but as a person who it turned out was not gravely injured but might have been. They, and the teams of medical professionals who treated me at Saint Louis University Hospital, quite literally saved my life in a circumstance with which I and my family were momentarily unable to cope. As I think about it all at the remove of a couple of days from the existential crisis I find myself thinking that saving my life meant returning my autonomy as a person to me, but I also realize that their professionalism could have coped with the eventuality of my losing the ability to function autonomously and that indeed a good part of their professionalism entailed the ability to know the difference between someone like me and that other someone I was not, whose case required  levels of care that I did not require. Though my first trauma center experience involved being placed in a neck brace and having boards rammed underneath me so that X-rays could be made of my spine, it was only after these were supplemented by a CT scan that the neck brace was removed and my wounds were treated.

Several codes were called in the trauma center during  my stay that were accompanied by staff rushing one way or another. At one point I remember overhearing someone describe a nearby patient who had used up two cans of Narcan spray without regaining consciousness. Today, in the aftermath of having my life saved by timely intervention, I find that I remain more or less indifferent to the prospect of my death as I have been since I began to think about it some years ago. I plan not to descend the stairs again at home until we are able to install a chair lift; which is to say that if I fear anything it is the prospect of falling again. I know I need to resume a certain level of participation in the various communities that make up my social life, something I had ceased to do since my stroke. I especially need to return to something like my pre-stroke level of exercise. Perhaps falling downstairs was a memento mori, for it has reminded me that for some time I have had the desire to write about what ageing feels like. My normal writing pose is, I think, ageless. Most friends and family tell me that I am not old. Still, I think there is something about my time of life that I would like to seize upon and perhaps affirm, something that has escaped me so far. I have no interest in my life story as a narrative of decline or progress. I’ve lived through various ups and downs in my checkered career, as my old friend Sam Ragan used to say, and I have enjoyed it all richly. Recently I read a New Yorker essay by Ceridwen Dovey entitled “What Old age is Really Like” that may have fueled my desire to write about ageing. Dovey, who is young, nevertheless writes engagingly and perceptively about the elderly in a way I can relate to my own lived experience. But there is something missing from her analysis. I only realized what it was when I began to realize today that I have both aesthetic and moral expectations about death that reveal themselves only as I think about the prospect of planetary death as well as my own.

Midway in her argument, Dovey mentions the work of Kate Rossiter, “Who advocates fostering ‘ethical responsibility’ rather than empathy in medical practitioners.” Dovey is on her way to explaining a comment by a friend, who became a geriatric specialist, to the effect that “There’s something almost greedy about empathy because it relies on the notion that we can somehow assimilate the other.” While I can understand a preference for professional responsibility over empathy in medical practitioners—certainly the professionalism I have noted among the many folk who intervened to save my life was not empathy. Indeed empathy might have stood in the way of that professionalism. But I am finding the rest of Dovey’s friend’s comment about empathy incomprehensible. Empathy is what binds us together as a human community, the love that Jesus urged as the second great commandment. It is a thing that medical practitioners, especially surgeons, have to learn to restrain; but woe to the practitioner who entirely loses the ability to identify with the other. “A respectful and thoughtful distance” may be “part of what enables us to respond to the other’s needs,” but it is empathy, with all its potential for enabling harm and misunderstanding, that calls the other to our attention as a fellow human. Please understand that I make no exclusive claims for Christianity, but I note that after the first and great commandment to love God, Jesus taught the love of neighbor—and his formalization of the commandment is specifically to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. That’s a pretty good definition of empathy.

Which is why I have never been able to reconcile myself to Pastor Jeffress’ understanding of the world. It requires me willingly to consign the great mass of humanity to perdition. But I still have to understand why it is that contemplating the prospect of my own death takes on meaning as I view that prospect in light of the possibility of the loss of earth. I doubt that Franzen or Kaplan or any of the other writers I mention in my opening statement really believes that time has run out for our planet. But they all accept as an ever more probable certainty that our children’s children will inherit a ruined planet plagued by cataclysmic disaster, largely unfriendly to life as we have known it; and that this circumstance is being brought ever closer to us by our commitment to the extractive practices upon which we depend to sustain economic growth. It’s not my intention to pursue this argument further except to point out that it is human nature that persuades Franzen that human kind is incapable of doing the necessary work to combat climate change. I have no belief in a personal god, but it has been an article of faith for me that life will survive my death, that generations will survive to remember, if not me, then at least my time, that earth, wonderful beyond any power of mine to imagine it; as I say, earth, wonderful, generative, infinitely various and inventive earth, and the cosmos beyond, “When I consider the heavens” the psalmist wrote: and all of time and the great and wonderful planetary systems with their stars and comets and deep black holes—that all of this will survive my death. And it will, of course. What happens on this small planet in no way cancels the great scheme of time and the universe. But how shall I bear myself towards death when my small planet and my beloved country may indeed be destroyed by human error and mendacity; that is the question I ask myself now.

During the cold war we were fearful that nuclear war would destroy the planet. Now, the cold war has returned to threaten us with death by a thousand cuts. I feared this in the aftermath of 9/11 as we charged pell-mell into an ever more culturally and morally debilitating endless war that has paralyzed us now in webs of ever more intrusive surveillance and militarism and laid the groundwork for a massive, worldwide loss of personhood hardly contemplated in former times. I cannot, in this circumstance, withhold empathy from any human being. We are all of us, liberal, evangelical, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jew, black and brown and pink like me, male, female, queer, trans and genderless, Dine, Lakota and the many tribes, bound together in the community of those who will die in uncertain times. Alice Major is Edmonton’s Poet Laureate. I was put on to her recent book “Welcome to the Anthropocene” by the Dan Zak essay I cite above. Her prologue begins “Alas. poor child, you’re born / in medias res — the stage is set / with swirling depictions of a globe / in panic, . . . /  And you have got to figure out the script. / It’s that recurrent nightmare / of being unprepared, of never / having studied, and now it’s curtain time.” But as the poem continues it seems to imagine at least the possibility of some better dream that is “just our human / situation — the only plot we’ve got / in this play without an author.” The poem’s speaker takes her leave with an apology, ” . . . I can’t help you. I am just / another figure in the chorus / of greying heads, wringing her hands / or pointing to a star.” And then this:

. . . Don’t look for gods
descending in a basket,
or prompters in the wings.
Declaim one memorable soliloquy.
Turn a spotlight. Or pick up
pelting litter from the stage.
There is no ending, happy
or otherwise.  Just play your part.

We are like the “dear white children” in Auden’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia” playing, casual as birds “among the ruined languages.” Perhaps the best we can hope for the story of our time is that it tell of our promise and our death. Or perhaps it might tell of our promise only and leave the death to God. We are like the astronauts in Michener’s Space, trapped on the moon with no possibility of return, whose last words evoke the humanist dream of Walter Miller’s classic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, wherein a band of monks is able to replicate the whole of human civilization after the bomb from a fragment of a grocery list left to them by Leibowitz, their founder.

—Blessed Saint Leibowitz, keep ’em dreamin’ down there . . . you know the rest.

in the act of finding

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Since I began this blog there have often been periods when I’ve not posted or times when I’ve put off writing particular pieces I’ve promised in favor of paying attention to events. I’ve posted nothing for the past six months partly because I’ve been paying attention to events in a way that is new for me and has seemed more conducive to silence than to speech. (Writing is speech for me, perhaps because I am old fashioned, or just old, perhaps because I am a poet). In this essay I hope to be able to delineate what I think I have learned, or am learning, in my new round of attending.

As a way of beginning I am recalling a conversation with an old friend, the Rev. Jimmye Kimmey, a priest of The Episcopal church for whom I have lasting and deep admiration and affection. I don’t remember the context, what it was that caused me to ask my friend what I asked her, but I do remember that it was something in the news of the times towards the end of the last century, something that disturbed me with the suggestion that misogyny was far more widespread than I thought. “I’m wondering for the first time,” I said, “if most men hate women. Is that really true?” Her answer surprised me. Very quickly and quietly she said, “Yes, men hate women.” No qualifier, nothing to let me off the hook as a man, but as we continued to talk it was as though she had touched my hand when she spoke. We were in one of those communicative moments when difference falls away and humans confront one another outside the norms of prejudiced discourse.

Another friend, Rob Anderson, has studied such moments, He and his partner, Kenneth Cissna, have written extensively about what they call Moments of Meeting, in a study of conversations between Carl Rogers and Martin Buber that was published by SUNY Press in 2002. Whether such moments, or some public equivalent or set of equivalents can be constructed as part of an attempt to retain or revive mass participation in various performances of the public good among us, I don’t begin to know. But I mention Rob and Ken’s book as a way of making a generalized statement at the outset about what I think is at stake for us in this century as peoples who in the final analysis must live together on this small planet as we confront what is coming to seem more and more like a worldwide backlash against the liberal world order we have known (and taken for granted) during most of my lifetime. Could a transformational moment of meeting take place between congressional Republicans deeply invested in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and women just as deeply invested in frustrating that confirmation? We already know the answer to that question. Here’s another. can we imagine such a moment of meeting between a group of women who oppose the Kavanaugh nomination and women who are now defending it?

And of course there’s a larger question behind these questions about a particular historical circumstance involving particular cultural commitments and instrumentalities. It’s the question we, like J. Alfred Prufrock, have had dropped on our plate by the new century which seems to be turning the world upside down. I’ve been trying to think about what’s at stake in my own confrontation with this question, as well as how to frame an interpretation of it that will suffice for the time being. At the head of this piece I am returning, as I often do, To Wallace Stevens:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
        Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

In declaring my desire to find a poem, I ask for something I think precedes defending the public good. What factors, conventions, instrumentalities impinge on my taking the public good seriously. What commitments do I have as a human individual with my particular history and acculturation that may impinge upon my thinking; and if I find myself at fault, what can I do about it? Another old friend, the late A. C. Greene, said to me once that he thought one should have a personal reason for whatever one believed about life. At the time I thought the remark was a fairly shallow obiter dictum, but I no longer think so.

And for a while, too, I was satisfied with the recommendation I have made in a number of essays, that we as a people need to revive politics and participatory democracy. But I now think something else has to happen before I can recommend conventional politics seriously to any young person who believes that voting is a sham and that direct action, protest, union organizing, and like modes of social action are superior to established ways of what we now call bringing about change. What needs to change after all? Isaiah Berlin says at the outset of his first essay on liberty that when ends are agreed upon in a polity all politics is instrumental. We now live with the reality that questions about the ends of life and society form occasions for bitter and irreconcilable dispute among us. Some even take the view, famously associated with Margaret Thatcher, that society doesn’t exist. As I think about my country these days, I am less able to return a political answer to Chernyshevsky’s question, “What is to be done?” than I was when I wrote about it in 2016 shortly after the election.

Much has been said as the present U. S. regime has run its increasingly destructive course almost to its midpoint, about the undoubted fact that this regime has flouted most norms of decent behavior. But the conflict over the Kavanaugh appointment has exposed another set of norms that the majority of Americans who oppose the present regime find embarrassing and distressful. I am one such American. As a descendant of slave owners I have directly benefitted from the peculiar institution. My mother’s parents were shaped by post-reconstruction southern ideology. I grew up in the twilight of the Jim Crow era, internalized its values, attended segregated schools. As a descendant on my father’s side of white settlers who came to the southwest in the last days of the Oklahoma land rush I am a beneficiary of ethnic cleansing of the North American continent, of Manifest Destiny, as well. What these facts mean to me now is that my thinking for most of my life has been embedded in acceptance of a social hierarchy that assigns roles to its members on the basis of the accidents of birth and history. It’s all very well for us to tout American meritocracy, but in my case privilege came before any merit of my own

When someone like Brett Kavanaugh proclaims that he got into Yale by virtue of virtue when in fact his was a legacy admission, we understand how meritocracy works at a different scale of entitlement from mine. Leaving race and ethnicity aside for the moment, I have been struck in the past few days by how often I have heard it claimed that all of us men, if we are honest, will have to admit to attempting to rape a woman, or women, when we were young; and that therefore, if Kavanaugh is found to be guilty of moral transgression as a young man, how will the rest of us escape whipping? In the immediate aftermath of Lindsay Graham’s tirades against women and the Democrats in the U. S. Senate, it was this argument that was the subject of a number of telling critiques of masculinity written by women, of which this one might serve as an example. I think I am one of a number of men who have never raped, or attempted to rape anyone; but I have had a long and complex education in regard to my own participation in the sexist hierarchy that dominates modern culture worldwide, no less so in this presumably enlightened place than in those “shithole countries” our enlightened leader enjoys stigmatizing. But if Graham’s target was more Democrats than women, then his tirades take on a further dimension as critiques of Democrats who support Dr. Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh but defended Bill Clinton in an impeachment trial in which Graham was the prosecutor. You can’t have it two ways Graham seems to tell us. If you defend the essential innocence of Dr. Blasey Ford against the youthful depravity of Brett Kavanaugh, then you should at least acknowledge your culpability when you defended Bill Clinton against defenders of Monica Lewinsky. Consent aside, the power differential between Clinton and Lewinsky should have caused you to vote for impeachment.

Of course the Clinton impeachment trial was not about whether the president “had sex” with Monica Lewinsky. It was about obstruction of justice. Clinton lied, as was argued, to protect both his privacy and that of the young woman. But the legal issue of a trial, even an impeachment trial, is sometimes a mask for more profound issues, as countless episodes of Law and Order have now taught us. The Clinton trial was about the relative importance to the republic of Clinton and Lewinsky. Recent Republican strategy has sought to make the Kavanaugh hearings about the same issue. The participants have not cooperated to the fullest extent, but there remains tremendous cultural pressure to protect the norm which decrees that the life and the reputation of an entitled white male transcend in importance the life and reputation of any woman, however accomplished she may be or however wronged by said entitled white male. Many who defend Kavanaugh are resorting to claims that Dr. Blasey Ford’s memory is faulty, or that she was paid to lie as part of Democrat conspiracy. May they continue to be comforted by these rationalizations as events unfold; for if the present FBI investigation turns out to be the whitewash many of us expect, the facts of Kavanaugh’s young life will continue to emerge as enterprising reporters dig for them. The bottom line is that Kavanaugh’s privilege is the privilege of his historical moment and also both deeply and tragically human and deeply and tragically American, as Clarence Thomas’s privilege was in 1991, as Bill Clinton’s was in 1998.

Which leaves me where?

The culture of violence against young women and the drinking cultures of many American prep schools and the colleges and universities to which their graduates regularly gain admission are widely known and widely tolerated in the liberal establishment. This toleration crosses political boundaries and is as prevalent among voters for liberal political candidates as among those who voted for the present regime. I say these things on the basis of long experience. They constitute an open scandal. One cannot with integrity deny or defend it, no matter one’s political persuasion. Graham’s attack on women and the Democrats is wrong, not so much wrong headed as wrong hearted, expressive of an almost sociopathic absence of empathy, but it points to a discomfort that all of us, male and female, who gave Bill Clinton a pass must feel. And beyond the Clinton experience, such discomfort is the condition of our time. It is exacerbated on every hand by the inhumanity of the present regime, but it is a discomfort in which we all know, or ought to know, ourselves implicated—all of us who are part of the privileged liberal political class, who vote, or contribute, or organize, or protest. We may seek innocence in driving hybrid automobiles, in working to overturn discriminatory laws and policies, in opposing rape culture, in striving to redeem our public schools, in helping to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But there is no innocence to be had in these pursuits. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t follow them, only that we should understand that our hearts are not pure.

It seems more than a month since the funeral of John McCain, for that remarkable social event is now a world away. But for me what was most remarkable about the McCain funeral and what keeps the memory of it fresh in my mind was not only that it illustrated the vitality of American civil religion and its clear opposition to the anti-religion of right-wing piety, but also that it was seen to do so. It was heartening for a while as I thought about it, but the cultural fissure it revealed began to trouble me almost immediately. Marilynne Robinson persuades me in her new book, What Are We Doing Here (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) that American liberalism, whether religious or not, has its roots in English puritanism, which gave rise to the abolitionist movement as well. But there were also those Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, and members of smaller groups who embraced the southern cause during the civil war, some of whom remained outside the national consensus even if they participated in postbellum reunifications. I was baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, that is the historically pro-slavery southern Methodist church. I was a member of a Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina in the 1960s that nearly split apart over whether it would admit African Americans to attend Sunday services.

We live now—I live now, with the deep conviction that the political and legal fixes we installed in the last century hoping to create a more equitable and just society than the one we had inherited have in some crucial way failed. They have changed some behavior, but they have not changed our hearts. As a thinking citizen, I can adjust my behavior to reflect a decent respect for demands for equality from those marginalized and oppressed by the social system in which we all live. I have been doing so all my life as I have come to understand those demands and desire to be allied with those who make them rather than with those who oppose them. But at eighty something I understand that my managed behavior is on the social surface. My heart is not the heart of a man who hates women or persons of color or practitioners of religions other than my own, but it remains tainted by the bigotry that is built into the social milieu within which I act and whose assumptions I internalized as a child. My education as a social being over the past forty to fifty years has been an embarrassment of occasions upon which I have been forced to recognize the casual homophobia, the casual sexism, or the casual racism, of my behavior and to know what these casual misbehaviors reflect. I think sometimes that I remain a religious person, in spite of a broad area of apostasy in my makeup, because I remain profoundly aware of sin, mostly in myself, trapped somewhere in the wisdom of Solomon—“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” I can no more shed this awareness than I can shed the privilege that sometimes masks it.

So if I were to find the poem I seek, it would be a poem of the heart, a poem that would evoke some moment of meaning in which a speaker and an invisible polyglot audience fold themselves into one another like lovers, heeding neither the craft nor sullen art of any language, certainly not mine. A poem that would evoke a moment of love we fail to find as citizens. Prayer aspires to it.