St. Paul distinguishes between an ignorant sin and a willful sin.  If you sin willfully, of course, you’re in more danger.

Even if I become blind
but I can see you

I use something like this distinction when my students question the need to learn syntax.  You can break the rules ignorantly or willfully, I respond.  If you break them willfully, you’re more dangerous.

Even if I become deaf
but I can hear your voice

“The more you are aware of the syntax you move, see, and write in, the better control you have and the more you can step out of it when you need to.  Actually, by breaking open syntax, you often get closer to the truth of what you need to say.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

But it’s hard for most of my ninth graders to break the rules well.

I can walk to you without feet

Diane broke the rules well, and she did it ignorantly, so she broke my rule well, too.  She was an ESL student.  Diana submitted this poem two years ago for our class’s print-on-demand anthology.  When someone pointed out to her that her poem’s grammar or syntax or what-have-you wasn’t right, she asked me to remove the poem from the anthology’s proof.  I somehow persuaded her to let me print it.

I can say your name without mouth

These lines bristle with muscle from tearing the syntactical fiber, something she practiced every day.  In that way, learning English for her may have been like strength training.  So in each couplet, the first line hits me coming, and the second line hits me coming.

Even if my arms break
but I will catch you

I will catch you by heart like hands

I’ve lost touch with Diane.  I republish her poem here only as a means of critiquing it.  I don’t want to violate her copyright.

What power can sometimes come from forcing one language through another, from having to live that kind of violence.  Or how much we learn about diction and syntax from living around a toddler learning to talk.

I guess Diane will lose some of her muscle as she gets older, if muscle is the body’s way of recovering from training’s trauma.  But maybe she’ll develop a curveball and a slider to complement her heat.

Even if my heart stops
then my brain will sing for you

But how could you go back?  I just read The Catcher in the Rye.  I loved it.  How did he do that?  What was it like, living like that that enough to write that?

Even if my brain burns out,
then my blood will hug you

my lady.

What is it about the best writing from children?  It feels like mankind’s purity, like ethnic cleansing, like children’s armies to draw lessons from it for the betterment of adult writers.  Our ideas of becoming as children tend to exploit both children and adults.

Better to live in the poem, as I’d live in a house of any age.

Sometimes, hiking up a spring mountain, I slow through a cold presence, a ghost disassociated from any wind, the busy loam above me warm with ants.  It’s not old winter's residuum, either.

This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks.  This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied – the crosshatch of hawks.

My cold is a watcher and a gift, the grave’s tossed coin, the dispossession of stone.

Father Time, grant your servants grace to celebrate Leap Day this year when it has again become unfashionable to do so, and grant us strength to accept the world’s derision for our spending the long balance of another year, from our employers’ and teachers’ and perhaps the IRS's impious viewpoint, a day late.  You teach us that Leap Day is not a moveable feast, and that, assuming it were for the sake of countering the reformers’ sophistic arguments, no moveable feast is entirely removable.  For it is not for us, O Father, to repeat, remove, reorder, reform, or re-anything; it is given unto man once to die, and our days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle as the sparks fly upward.

Without Your Leap Day, the world loses an entire month since March becomes merely February’s long shadow and not worthy of its own calendar page because each date is assigned to the same days as in February; Tuesday, March second is just Tuesday’s second February second, Groundhog Day’s own shadow: the further extension of this year’s long winter and a judgment upon us for our second uncelebration of Leap Day in as many years.

We say "loses" and not "gains" a month, O Father, because the point of Groundhog Day isn’t that the day got repeated but that so many days didn’t happen – a month’s worth, it seems like; the movie seemed a bit long – and so a month’s days of our lives, as tiresome and repetitious as they may sometimes seem, went unspent and unremembered but by Bill Murray and by You, Father, and we cannot un-anything as easily as we cannot re-anything, as You know.

To gain even a day is to gain all days, O Father.  It is the day after, after all, that is after all – that is, that is eternity.  Shavout is seven weeks and a day after Firstfruits.  Sukkot, that mysterious feast celebrated by all nations at the end of it all in Zechariah, lasts a week and a day – eight days – as if the eight were reclining at Seder or at real analysis.  Let us cry out with Augustine for eternity “where the day shall not pass away but shall endure, a day which no yesterday precedes nor a morrow ousts.”  So a month and a day, Father.

Forgive the world for removing and uncelebrating Leap Day, the only uncelebrated feast that disdays and benights in its uncelebration.

Will I lament mulch sales,
           Girl Scout shortbreads, other
minor feasts I leave undone?

Still
the church -- a race that settled
oval tracks soon enough -- kept my calendar.

Beyond Safeway doors, mounds
of ringworm snow rot
           like the children's quail in February sun.

It's hard to be a moment's soil when your
concept of time erodes more each year.

A half word, a young word rising: the crumbs
           we leave the dead who flit
           past back yards
a half year ago or hence, when
           our backs are at the window.

The poets and painters I like best stand midway between day and night, between tight focus and unmitigated blur, between object and inspiration. Take Bonnard and Hopkins, for instance.

One might describe a painting’s emphasis on its object as a kind of daylight, as if the painter would have been pleased by a viewer’s remark about how realistic a face or an orange or a skyline was. On the other hand, one might describe a painting’s emphasis on abstraction – abstraction not in the stylistic sense but in the painting’s effect on the viewer – and intuition as kind of darkness, as if the painter would have been pleased by a viewer’s remark about how the painting conjured up a mood or insight seemingly at odds with the subject matter. Such a mood or insight may lead a viewer to see the subject matter in a new way or, even better, to transcend the subject matter and to join the painter in viewing the objects of the physical world as a palette for a more substantial world of intuition and feeling through the painting’s gateway of impression or intimation that leads from the object to the mood or insight.

Bonnard got the gist of his object but left it recognizable to compete with its own essence or, even better, with the painting’s own inscape. In other words, Bonnard’s viewer watches a struggle between the painting’s object and the painting itself. And this daylight and darkness fight it out in such a way that both win and that the viewer learns what it means to see and perhaps to participate in a physical world in harmony with a spiritual one through a kind of faith that leads to understanding.

For Bonnard, the painting’s execution was a struggle between its object and the painter’s original idea, or inspiration. According to Bonnard, “The presence of the object, of the motif, is extremely distracting for the painter at the moment of painting. Since the point of departure is an idea, the presence of the object invariably subjects the artist to the risk of being so influenced by the immediate view that he loses sight of the original idea . . .”

I see Bonnard working out this daylight and darkness in every painting I’ve seen of his, but it’s easiest for me to see this struggle in his interiors and his nudes. White Interior, an example of the former, permits the exotic exterior seen through the interior’s door and window in the painting’s upper-right corner to struggle to assert itself as an exterior; at first the outdoors could appear as some stuff in a cabinet or as part of the room’s décor made to balance the dark pot and plant in the upper-left corner. Likewise, the figure bending beside the table struggles to differentiate herself from the carpet. But neither the object nor the composition wins (at least, that’s how it seems to me); instead, the object and the inspiration are both enhanced.

Bonnard was a priest who had to live in his dark inspiration at the same time that his eyes were fully open to the bright, physical world. He protected his inspiration from his object even as he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by that object. For Bonnard, neither the spiritual nor the physical could win in any sense, for both would have shriveled if one were to preclude the other or if one were to serve merely as an adjunct of or prop for the other. As a result of this struggle, Bonnard’s paintings represent, for me, a mature vision.

Hopkins, on the other hand, was not a priest but a debaucher. Like Bonnard, Hopkins had equal respect for his bright object and his dark inspiration, but because he was a poet, he couldn’t have been a priest in the sense I describe. A poet doesn’t hold true to or harbor an initial, dark inspiration or idea while doing art (in their case, writing); instead, a poet loses his initial inspiration in the process of writing poetry. Part of the fun of writing poetry is discovering what the poem has to say, and that saying may have little to do with the poem’s initial calling or the poet’s first idea. The poet, then, is not faithful to his fillip.  The poet merely uses his initial inspiration to lead him inside the poem, which, unlike a painting, can have a life of its own in which darkness and light intermingle. The poet seduces his first inspiration and then leaves it in favor of the poem that inspiration brought on. My favorite poets are debauchers in this sense: men and women who compose verse in their heads during sex, people who pick up the pen at the onset of contemplatio.

As a sketch artist, Hopkins acted like a poet. Hopkins was an artist from a family of artists; two of his siblings were professional artists. But Hopkins’s art served his poetry, in a way, and his frequent and promising sketches were rarely if ever fully developed. “Having once discovered the secret inscape of what he has been observing, he is impatient to move on to the next subject,” his biographer Paul Mariani says in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (47). Hopkins used his art to discover an affinity he shared with anything created, organic or inorganic. Hopkins didn’t hold his inspiration before his object as the priestly Bonnard did; instead, he sketched his object until he found its inspiration, and then he left off. His relationship with his subject matter was undeveloped and short-lived simply because he was an effective poet.

A painter’s object can distract him from his first idea, Bonnard warned. But poetry is itself distraction from the poet’s fillip, that is, from his first idea, from his inspiration, from his reason for picking up his pen. Bonnard’s inspiration came before he picked up a brush, and the rest was priesthood. Hopkins had to have two inspirations, though: the first would come before he picked up his pen and the second would come while he was inside his poem. He had to forsake the first for the second; he was a poet.

Hopkins pined after a certain kind of fillip. He found lots of it in the countryside and language of Wales where he wrote some of his most famous sonnets, but he found none of it in the slums of industrial Liverpool where he served as a Jesuit priest. He could only compose music in Liverpool, and he complained that his muse had otherwise forsaken him there. He longed for the fillip he found in unspoiled nature, of course, not for nature’s own sake but for the poetry that would result from it.

I do not mean to suggest that Hopkins was insincere in his paeans to nature or God. He wasn’t. His theology was built on a Scotist, incarnate view of God in nature that was not favored by his Jesuit superiors and probably cost him his fourth year of study and his career as a Professed Jesuit. He paid dearly for the views his poems get across.

But it was the inspiration within the poem that meant everything to Hopkins the poet, not the inspiration that led to the poem, as necessary as that was. In a letter to Alexander Baillie, a lawyer friend of his whom he had kept up with from his Oxford days, Hopkins made a distinction between the poetry of inspiration and what he termed Parnassian verse (not the French school of Parnassian poets). Inspired poetry comes from “a mood of great, abnormal in fact, acuteness, either energetic or receptive,” Hopkins wrote. Most verse is Parnassian, however, and is “not in the highest sense poetry”:

Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing . . . in its flights. Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, -- this is the point to be marked, -- they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort or inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like.

To Hopkins, Shakespeare had the highest inspiration-to-Parnassian ratio of the major English poets; Wordsworth had the lowest. Hopkins, then, did not wish to develop his own style; he wanted, in accordance with his own poetics, to write inspired poetry.

I suggested before that Hopkins’s poetry, like Bonnard’s painting, stands midway between object and inspiration – that object and inspiration intermingle in Hopkins’s poetry, in fact – and I am almost ready to say what I mean by that. I’ve dwelt on Hopkins’s inspiration, but now I must address the object of his poetry. The object of Hopkins’s poetry is neither nature nor God nor despair but speech. For Hopkins the poet, nature, God, or despair is simply the fillip that leads to poetry. That fillip of nature or God or despair also survives as the meaning of Hopkins’s poetry (fillip rarely survives in any sense in most modern lyric poetry), but they are not the object of his poetry. Instead, speech itself is Hopkins’s object. (This is not true for all poets, though all poets deal in words.) Consider Hopkins’s definition of poetry:

Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake – and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. . . .

Poetry is “over and above meaning, at least the grammatical, historical, and logical meaning.” If the words become invisible in the transmission of the meaning, it’s prose and not poetry. Hopkins’s vision of poetry sounds like “art for art’s sake,” and it is. But it is an artistic struggle for humanity’s sake.

Applying Hopkins’s theory to his poetry, then, we find that its meaning is nature, God, or despair, but its object is language. Glenn Everett defines Hopkins’s idea of inscape as “the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things. . .” For Hopkins, a tree’s inscape is what makes it different from anything else and gives it its unique calling. A Hopkins poem about a tree, though, contains not the inscape of the tree but – borrowing from the above passage – “the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.”

To say that object and inspiration intermingle in Hopkins’s poetry, therefore, is to say that speech and speech’s inscape intermingle in it. This is done through repetition of sound found particularly in rhythm, assonance, rhyming, and the repetition of words. Consider Hopkins’s entire parenthetical digression in his essay “Poetry and Verse”:

(Poetry is in fact speech employed only to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake – and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. Now if this can be done without repeating it once of the inscape will be enough for art and beauty and poetry but then at least the inscape must be understood as so sounding by itself that it could be copied and repeated. If not / repetition, oftening, over-and-overing, aftering of the inscape must take place in order to detach it to the mind and in this light poetry is speech which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating figure and verse is a spoken sound having a repeating figure.) [Emphasis and broken syntax original!]

Hopkins treats his objects (language) the way Bonnard treats his objects (nudes, interiors, portraits, etc.). The objects struggle with the inspiration. Bonnard’s bending figure in White Interior is at once fully herself and fully integrated into – dissolving into – the composition. Hopkins’s innovations – his compound words, his broken syntax, his sprung rhythm, his Welsh consonantal chiming – all threaten to dissolve language; in fact, many of Hopkins’s first critics felt that he had done just that. But the language does not fall apart. It blends with its own inscape and thereby demonstrates that language can be as alive as any tree.

Experiencing an unfamiliar Bonnard paining may involve a few steps: enjoying its colors and composition, struggling to make out familiar objects that alternately assert themselves and collapse back into the painting’s overall impression, and then finally appreciating the participation with Bonnard with this struggle as a participation in Bonnard’s unique vision of the spiritual and physical world. These steps are similar to those taken in experiencing many of Hopkins’s poems.

Experiencing an unfamiliar Hopkins poem may involve enjoying the beauty of its language (As Hopkins repeated to his friends: read it out loud!), struggling with how the diction and syntax compare with “normal” diction and syntax, and then assimilating that struggle into an appreciation of the language’s inscape. Consider how not only Harry Ploughman but the English language itself struggles with its own inscape before coming out triumphant in this, the first stanza of “Harry Ploughman”:

Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue

Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank

Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank—

                Head and foot, shoulder and shank—

By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to;

Stand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew

That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank—

                             Soared or sank—,

Though as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a roll-call, rank

And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do—

                             His sinew-service where do.

After Bonnard and Hopkins, many painters and poets have gone over entirely to night and blur and pure inspiration. Twentieth-century American poetry especially has moved away from a full understanding of its object – i.e., language – and has often become obtuse and unapproachable. Without an object, poetry ends up frustrating readers and turning off entire generations of potential readers. A reader won’t bother struggling with a poem if she doesn’t quickly sense that the poem itself struggles and, further, that the poem’s struggle enriches it and promises also to enrich the slow reader.

Snow on snow, you
chariot of Israel:
glory or pallor?

As sugar masks spice,
so life masks life all life:
death to a dying saint.

The new snow
closed his father’s eyes
& bore him out.

An update: This morning, while reading the novelist and poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s preface to The Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon, which volume was published in 1905, I discovered a reference to Hopkins.  In her preface, Coleridge listed a number of well-known poets who had praised the unsung Dixon: Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris among them.  Then this:

There was one who gave more than praise.  A young Oxford student of brilliantly original power loved the poems of Richard Watson Dixon with such devotion that, when he entered the ranks of the Jesuits and was forbidden to take any books with him, he copied out almost all those in his possession.  Such minds as these do not labor in vain; others trust in them, follow their lead.

The world was still pregnant with Hopkins’s fame almost twenty years after his death, and Coleridge did not bother to name him in her preface.  She apparently had had access to Dixon’s papers, though, since she seems to have had access to the letter from Hopkins that had meant so much to Dixon.  I wonder if she read Hopkins’s odes that he had sent to Dixon or if her assessment of Hopkins as possessed of “brilliantly original power” was simply borrowed from Dixon.

But I love how her “more than praise” echoes Dixon’s “more than fame.”  Hopkins’s dedication to Dixon’s poetry was more than praise, and his letter thanking Dixon was more than fame.

The editor of The Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon was Robert Bridges, who later started his late friend Hopkins down the road to fame by editing The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, published in 1918 by Oxford University Press.  It would take twelve years for that 750-copy, first edition of Hopkins’s poems to sell out.

I wonder how Bridges viewed Coleridge's reference to his old friend in her preface.

1:0  Fillip

1:1  A poet finds his fillip in a poem’s flushed lips. She eats him, and he starts to work, carving psalms, like Jonah, in her taut, wet maw.

1:2  Poems’ lips are everywhere: in halls, on walls, at balls.  A poet who hears the lips a lot or who sees the lips part is a sort of sot.

1:3  A poem: part lips, part ways.

1:4  A painter’s subject can distract him from his first idea, Bonnard warned.  But poetry is distraction from the poet’s fillip, his first idea.

1:5  Poets in their ecstasy don’t channel poems.  Instead, poems in their lassitude channel-surf poets.

1:6  Poets think of parted lips, splayed legs.  But the urge to write, the fillip, is really for the propagation of poetry.  Poems understand this.

1:7  A poem is domestic, farouche. There’s nothing wild about a poem, even one through Whitman or Thomas.  Dickinson, a savage, understood this.

1:8  I recall dramatic poems at college, like Browning's & Eliot’s, but most were psych majors. (Never English; one dorm poem sniggered at my poetics paper.)

2:0  Silence

2:1  Poems part their lips, but they aren’t hookers. Many live chaste. In fact, the best poems aren’t spoken or written, & so it will always be.

2:2  Some poems are silent from the womb, some their recalcitrant poets silence, while others have gone ineffable for the kingdom’s sake.

2:3  Even a poem, if she holds her peace, is counted wise.

3:0  Shadow

3:1  A poem is apophatic, farouche.  The paper’s the poem.

3:2  The poet sculpts paper until the paper’s poetry.  A stodge of verse breaks down at his feet.

3:3  As a lawyer, I once deposed a guy at CIA headquarters. Afterwards, agents scissored the classified words from my notes. All I kept was the poetry.

3:4  The poem’s shadow is the poem.  And what’s the poem.

for lucas

1
Our writing exposes us to others.  It should.  It should.

Mention here that I teach ninth grade.

Dawn, and two feet of snow.  The sky mimes the earth’s blue.
                                                            Mines the earth’s blue.  Sapphire.
            I attribute the amber trees to sap fire or to laughing angels.  Maybe a
            stove metaphor.
                                                Minds the earth blew.
Shit.

What do docents say
when the painter leaves her lines or
her canvas showing?

Too late to say anything.  “Wait, you didn’t finish”?  ?”  (?)
Patrons ask all at the same time all
                                                          is he hiding or saying
                                                          is he saying he’s hiding
                                                          why
                                                          didn’t he finish?
She

An anchorite just prefers his own company.
Anchorites just prefer their own company.

                                                I dreamed night fell
                                                and I walked among the living.

                                                I wept.

My friend divorced.
My parents’ friend widowed.
I wept like Jesus.

An anchorite just prefers their own company.
A docent could learn something about crowd control.

                                    When I got off the bus
                                    I picked right up
                                    where I left off.

I wept openly along a boulevard of trees, extinguished.
                                    I felt the river, too.

I hide in plurals.  In readers.  I like crowds,
The many parts, of me.

           The Hubble.  A high hall of mirrors.
           WE put two men in harm;s way to 
fix a mirror!

2
A docent is not in the place to say anything.
A docent is not in a place to say anything.  All about the article
Allll about it, my friend.

I write articles: a, the. an
My characters are only slightly more developed: anne or better ann
No no my characters are even less developed: adhtoee0e0had
Writing is a sequence of bad puns.  Maybe not a sequence

your freakin t’s back: ttttt

A docent has so much to offer, like veterans
or retired people on fixed incomes.  Your blog could be more personal
          and by that I mean more revealing.

          With all the clocks and experiences
          With all the clocks and experiences
One's character is what one chooses to forget.
            With all the clocks and experiences
The sun can still rouse me.

                        I feel what my students think
                        when Paris tells Juliet “will I rouse thee.”
I know what they think.
                        I’ve taught for how many years.

My kids want to know if adults can fall for one another.
Teachers are caged leopards on the way to the Panda House.
            A mild curiosity.  Not enough to get you out of school.

                                    Is there anything left of the old sun rise?

The illusion of spontaneity
The illusion of sedulity

                       The blue, the white thickens, coarsens.
                       Readers always think more than I can imagine.

3
Writing is being stuck.  No living is the illusion of being stuck.  Writing is admitting, not creating just discovering or baking bread with or without a bread machine, heh, not without a bread machine now too late now

           hiding his saying?
             hiding his hiding?
                                                she

Don’t be offended.  Dogma can’t exist
in a poem anymore, not since Cleanth Brooks & ________ . & 87
% of all sentences are declarative, get over it.  I just made that up.  For example.

            & nothing a writer believes would show up in her character’s mouth.
                these days

                                    And poetry?
                                                         One more reference ips the scale, urns
                                                         he whole hing
                                                         black

How can I become
he holdout juror?
the go-to guy, the cavalry?
                                             the sun in the east?
                                                                                over
                                                                                        for rent
this is not how I really think, really.
How can I become

for lucas. to lucas. into lucas. by lucas. from lucas.
during & after lucas. prepositions can be sooo suggestive and overlapping but
they all overlap, really; they
all mean the same damn thing

The snow
                is white.  The sky
                                             is blue.
The poem

Your candidate knew the mic was hot.  No,
Your candidate knew the mic was hot.

but I could write like this whatever.  Docents.  Fragments & ruins.  Foreign words.

Notes

My neighbors are nice people and all, but I felt like screaming out the window just now, "Don't mar the snow!"

I mean, we've had two days' notice that this might get to thirty inches and be the biggest storm in our county's recorded history.  Wasn't that enough time to spin around in the almighty automobile?  Isn't nature trying to tell us to slow down right now?

But, at least today, I guess the snow can take care of itself.  (It's about four inches from the top of our picket fence in places so far.)

In a way, this blog grew out of Beaver Magazine, my seventh grade publication my teachers permitted me to circulate.  Other bloggers, such as Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, started out publishing among their grade-school acquaintances, too.

Blogging has eclipsed another childhood love – radio.  I used to listen to clear-channel A.M. stations skip off of the ionosphere in the evenings on my most-prized possession, a transistor radio, and I would write to the stations as far as New Orleans, Buffalo and Des Moines (I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia) to tell them what I had heard when on their stations. They would send me QSL cards verifying my clams, and I would tape them to my bedroom walls.

When I was twelve, a walkie-talkie stole my heart away from my radio.  It was called a base station, and it could broadcast a few suburban blocks.  A few of my friends had base stations, and we would take turns putting on half-hour radio broadcasts complete with music from our record players and neighborhood news.

I later became a member of our high school’s radio show club.  We would drive to a local radio station each Saturday morning and put on a quarter-hour program we had planned during the previous week.  The club introduced me to some fun characters who, like me, loved to get behind a microphone and play disc jockey or newscaster.  Then came college.

A friend of mine and I put on a kind of Jesus freak radio show every Saturday and Sunday morning on WUVA, one of the radio stations at our college.  It was back when the Charismatic movement was apolitical and contemporary Christian music was fresh and, with respect to at least its leading artists, very much its own sound.  I would prepare and give mini-sermons between the music – little inspirational tidbits, really – and I was always disappointed when my friends would tell me that their favorite part of my show was when I read the weather.

I secretly liked reading the weather: it made me feel more professional than anything else I did on the air.  It was probably the weather bits that led me to try out for a radio job during my senior year in Waynesboro, Virginia, not far from my college.  By the time they offered me the job, though, I had decided to forego radio for law school.

I haven’t returned to radio since.

But Dave at Via Negativa is making me think about radio again, or at least about podcasts.  (A podcast, after all, is radio you can schedule and carry around on an mp3 player such as an iPod.)  Last month Dave began hosting a delightful, evolving podcast that complements his blog very nicely.  For me, it’s like listening to Washington Post Radio, a service that must have been on for no more than a year.  On WPR, I could hear some of my favorite writers discuss what they were writing about, and I could hear some pretty good interviews, too.  I can do the same on Woodrat Podcast.  I hear Dave talking about his latest poetry series or interviewing his qarrtsiluni co-editor.  I hear his knockout interview with blogger Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi concerning the intersection of poetry and religious practice.  I hear a fascinating conversation among banjo players about their varying approaches to their craft mixed with recordings of them playing together.

I guess that, if you already like a writer (his subject matter, his mind, his “voice”), you’ll be predisposed to liking his radio, so long as the writer can make a decent transition from one genre to another.  (Think of the huge audiences many radio programs such as Amos & Andy and Jack Benny brought with them to television when they made that transition.)  Dave makes more than a decent transition from visual only to visual (blog) and verbal (podcast).  Dave is a gifted interviewer, affording his guests ample space to develop their answers to his thoughtful questions and adding enough of his own knowledgeable observations to keep the conversation moving in interesting directions.  Dave blogs and now broadcasts from the Pennsylvania hills, and his accent and inflection enhance the sense of place Dave’s blog has always carried.  Woodrat Radio, to me, is an oral blog.

(I don’t mean to suggest that Dave hasn’t experimented in other ways with orality at Via Negativa and elsewhere.  His videos and his recordings of his poems, most of which are accessible on or through Via Negativa, are high-quality fare, and he and Beth share such great chemistry on qarrtsiluni’s podcast episodes in which they describe the site’s visual art that you’d think they’ve been doing it forever.)

Woodrat’s Velveteen Rabbi interview is dear and informative.  Don’t miss it.

I discovered a while ago that I don’t have a voice for radio.  But Dave’s podcast demonstrates that I still have an ear for one.

You can try out Woodrat Podcast or subscribe to it at Via Negativa or on iTunes.  If you use iTunes, just type “Woodrat” in the search field.

1
A thin, blue dawn rims hills with orange corona, and a wound in youth is a rocket launch.

2
Dogma falls crisp as hoarfrost, but hormones open new worlds.

3
Aphorisms fall from an uncle’s lips like tough steak, but an artist’s life is lean.

4
Perennials die to see the sun, and the counsel of a father is magic.

5
What, my son? What, the son of my five fingers? What, the wet eye of our backyard springs? What? What?

6
Is that you, my son? Ache of my withers & rod of my stump? My son my son my seed my seed my son

7
I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?

8
My son? My sleep’s discomfiture and my age’s disconsolation? Yes, my son? What?

9
You stare amazed from every bowl of stew, my son, (5) You die at the cry of every distant beast. I am the purblind Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

10
Before you hung from an oak, three darts through your heart, you carved your pillar and spilled your seed, my son, my son!

11
A summer moon carves cold clouds, and windshield frost is the tombstone of stars.

Aphorisms fall from an uncle’s lips like tough steak, but an artist’s life is lean.

Perennials die to see the sun, and the counsel of a father is magic.

A summer moon carves cold clouds, and windshield frost is the tombstone of stars.

Dogma falls crisp as hoarfrost, but hormones open new worlds.

A thin, blue dawn rims hills with orange corona, and a wound in youth is a rocket launch.

___________________

Haiti

Haiti

H a i t i

h  a  i  t  i

h a  i    t    i

a  i    t     i

   i       t           i

              i

I have fallen into the bad habit of reposting.  Lucas Green's excellent Tweet inspired me in this instance.

I wonder if I would ever sit silently with a friend for seven days out of respect for his suffering.

I wonder if I would ever stay with him after he began to talk for the hours or days it took him to grieve his loss, to get in touch with his feelings, and to stand against his God.

I wonder if I would ever stay with him long enough to stand up for his God and to be rebuked by his God for it in the end.

I wonder if I would ever love someone enough to spend hours accusing him as a means of defending my bad theology against my friend's suffering that would, in the end, invalidate my theology. I wonder if I would ever love someone enough to risk the kind of abyss the loss of such a closely held theology might lead me down.

Would I love him enough to discover that I truly hate him, that the comfort I offer makes everything worse for him?

When I was younger, I tried to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, viewings, funerals -- anything that required me to get close to other people in their sufferings. I didn't know what to say to comfort the sick and the bereaved. Job's friends later taught me by their example that I don't have to say anything, and that it is important just to call, just to visit.

At one point, I also shared Job's friends' judgmental theology: suffering generally results from sin. My theology was another reason for my avoidance of hospitals and funeral homes. The sick and the dying pitted my heart against my stiff, sick understanding of God. Job's friends could have helped me here, too. By following their example, I might have stuck it out with others in tight quarters where, sooner or later, God would have shown up and challenged my thinking.

I see the same struggle I went through going on in each of Job's friends. The struggle plays out in their speeches to Job. They try to help Job by preaching to him about God's judgment and, in the process, making not-overly-subtle references to the tragedies that rocked Job's world. For example, Zophar, knowing full well that all ten of Job's children died when a great wind blew down the house where they were eating, is kind enough to remind Job that " . . . God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon [the hypocrite], and shall rain it upon him while he is eating." (Job 20:23)

The following may be only a partial list of remarks by Job's friends demonstrating how they connect Job's suffering with what they judge to be his sin:

I suppose one could read Eliphaz's, Bildad's, and Zophar's remarks in light of Job's tragedies and figure that these friends are simply somewhat insensitive. In this way, one might give them the benefit of the doubt, supposing that they might have added, "present company excepted" to each remark had the events of Job's trial come to their minds during their orations. It is difficult to believe, however, that these three friends would have so entirely forgotten the remarkable events that had led them to remain silent with Job for seven days. Surely the correlations in the above table are more than instances of insensitivity.

Why do these three friends act this way? Logically, of course, they proceed abductively from a faulty explanation. They believe that sin causes all suffering. At a certain stage of many people's spiritual life, this simplistic belief reinforces itself. At an immature stage of my spiritual life, I may judge others in order to feel good about myself. This makes me quite conscious of other people's faults. (Needless to say, my judgments are often quite inaccurate.) I am susceptible both to fixating on others' sins and to accepting the explanation that their sin causes their suffering.

But the root of Job's friends' behavior is really not logic but the unrecognized fear that drives the logic. Job's trials must have scared his friends. After all, if sin doesn't cause all suffering, what would keep these guys from fates similar to Job's? What good would their religion be if it ceased to protect them or even to make them feel comfortable or good about themselves? What good would their religion be to them if its essential purpose were not their well-being?

Before Job's friends show up, the third-person omniscient narrator points out that Job does not "sin with his lips" despite all of his losses. Later, though, his friends' fear drives them to remonstrate with him, and their attacks in turn drive Job to defend his righteousness. (His rebuttals against their accusations also include some snappy and sometimes sarcastic rejoinders:

Do you imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind? (6:26)

No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. (12:2)

But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. (13:4)

I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all. (16:2))

Job's friends stick around, and Job's stubborn penchant for justifying himself against God eventually causes them to lose all subtlety. By chapter twenty-two, for instance, Eliphaz no longer requires Job to put two and two together:

Is not they wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite? For thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for naught, and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry. (22:5-7)

The narrator starts the book by telling us that Job is "perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil." (1:1) The narrator returns after the speechifying to sum up everyone's chief faults. Job has "justified himself rather than God." Job's friends have "found no answer, and yet had condemned Job." (32:2-3)

Why do I and others I know feel like we have to have answers? What drives us to bright-line theologies that we will defend at the expense of old friendships and normal human kindness? My own experience tells me that fear is involved. Perhaps we have a premonition that, by pretending to possess God, we have grabbed a patient, powerful tiger by the tail.

Yet I have nothing on Job's friends. I'm not sure I would have goaded Job to defend himself, and I'm not sure I would have risked having my theology ripped away from me by the God it turns out I never knew. At once comfortable and vaguely uneasy in my piety, I'm not sure I would have shown up to comfort Job in the first place.

My Coolpix has a beach/snow setting.  The extremes, like Stalin and Hitler, meet with a handshake.

Editing in iPhoto, I turn my beach pics into snow pics by turning down the temperature.  When the sand turns white, the haze turns blue.

I live summer each winter, my frostbitten fingers on fire in a basin of water.

Sand crabs surface in backwash and burrow back next wave.

Wicker chairs bristle in the flaccid heat.

Sand fences, home security systems, and neighborhood watches promote dune protection.

For if snow is sand, then wind is water, eroding the snow it brings.

As kids, we’d build castles and dig ravines, and the tide would leave it all smooth. Time is tide, and memories are the shells we collect.

The moon keeps time, and each tide is noon.  All we build lies between the tides.

What border lies between darkness and light?  Where is it so light that one can’t see light?  And what light ever held a mirror to its light?

For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.  The waves break and churn; the shoreline shifts but never snaps.

Where does driftwood grow?  Beneath the forested sea, far from the febrile shore.

Obama will win.  He will be an unpopular president during most of his term.  Republicans will gain seats in Congress during his administration. But Obama will help to reconnect our civic life with our constitutional values.  If he lives, he will be reelected.

Or he could lose this year.  Or win and be popular.  It just helps me to understand Obama by projecting him against a blank future.

Obama will be unpopular because he is chiefly concerned with reconnecting us with our national ideals.  This concern will cause him to take a very long time to make some important decisions, and many will view his protracted decision-making as evidence of a weak presidency.  His vacillation will be more pronounced in time of crisis, because he considers decisions politically (like all presidents), patriotically (like many presidents), and constitutionally (like few presidents).  By “patriotically,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our nation in the long run.  By “constitutionally,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our Constitution and our relationship to it in the long run.

Because our national ideals and constitutional values are often at odds with short-term politics, his decisions – when he gets around to making them – will often be unpopular.  But the process even more than the product will drive many crazy.

In other words, Obama will be unpopular because he will be slow.  But Obama might just be as slow as the best of them: Abraham Lincoln.

We’re familiar with most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama, of course.  Both men are Illinois lawyers who never run anything, really, before becoming president.  (I refer to Lincoln in the present tense for ease of comparison.)  Both men grow up distant from their fathers, one emotionally and the other physically.  Both men are seen as theorists and orators whose talents arguably would be more suited for the legislature, but both men are drawn to the presidency not by ambition alone but by a desire to address fundamental discrepancies between what our nation was meant to be and what it is.  Before his presidential campaign really begins, each man becomes nationally known initially only for a single, electrifying speech he gives in the Northeast to party faithful.  The campaigns of both men emphasize their candidates’ humble origins and deemphasize their candidates’ careers in law.  Both men win their party’s nominations as dark horses against highly favored candidates from New York, favorites who many party leaders fear would be too divisive in a general election.  Each man benefits from running at the end of his rival party's unpopular administration in an election year favoring his own party's general prospects.

Some of these parallels are almost as meaningless as the ones I read as a child between Lincoln and John Kennedy (e.g., each had a secretary who shared the other’s last name).  For me, though, the most important parallels between Lincoln and Obama have to do with what makes them both slow executives: a driving desire to connect policy and public with constitutional ideals and broad principles.

Obama takes a long time to respond concerning important matters.  When he finally responds, he responds conceptually, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  He is slow to distance himself from Reverend Wright.  When he finally reacts to the public’s distaste for the clips of Wright’s sermons, though, it is in the form of a critically acclaimed speech that addresses race in America in fresh, constructive ways.  Then he is slow to respond to accusations that he is unpatriotic.  He finally reacts with a speech just before Independence Day this year that advocates a broader, less divisive concept of patriotism.  It is not a stirring speech, though, and it is not as well received as his earlier address on race.

Lincoln’s final speech is to a fired-up crowd that comes to the White House to celebrate the successful end of the Civil War.  Lincoln uses the occasion to offer an olive branch to the South and to outline a generous philosophy for admitting the succeeding states back into the Union.  Disappointed, the crowd starts to thin out before the speech ends.

Whether or not Lincoln’s and Obama’s more-important speeches are successful, they are usually theoretical in nature, connecting current events with broader themes.  Both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches generally make for terrible sound bites, since neither Lincoln nor Obama relies on cute turns of phrase.  Their rhetoric has a lawyerlike force that requires a longer attention span.  Fortunately, both men know how to keep their audience’s attention.  Both men are good writers, and one could use the best of both men’s writings as texts for teaching both rhetoric and prose.

But most of the force in both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches comes not from their literary and rhetorical skills but from the way they connect current events to constitutional values our government fails to live up to.  Indeed, both men know constitutional law well: Lincoln obsessively studied it late nights during the 1850’s in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Obama taught it for over a decade.

But this same felt connection to forgotten national values – values rooted in involved political and legal theory – that makes both men electrifying speakers also makes them slow executives.

Lincoln claims as president-elect that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”  For sure, Lincoln is a political animal; Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon famously describes his political ambition as “a little engine that knew no rest.”  But Lincoln’s claim about his political thinking is a fair one.  As president, his decisions are generally made to advance a Whiggish view of the Declaration of Independence, a view that is best expressed in his Gettysburg Address. (See Allen C. Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President for an explanation of the Whig philosophy behind Lincoln's political thought.)

At the war’s outset, the North has one goal: preserve the Union.  After the Emancipation Proclamation, the North adds the destruction of slavery to the original war aim of preserving the Union.  The Civil War amendments, bracing in their simplicity, accept African Americans as citizens.  And, long after Lincoln is dead, the Gettysburg Address helps the nation coalesce its constitutional thinking around “all men are created equal” as a guiding principle.  Lincoln takes advantage of a war he never intentionally prolongs to fundamentally change our relationship to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the Northwest Ordinance and several other founding documents – heck, he helps change how we look at the Founding Fathers).  For Lincoln, a change in what we all believe is change you can believe in.

Lincoln is derided as slow and vacillating, and this perception is accurate.  During the first months of his presidency, for instance, he seems to take forever to decide how to respond to the South’s attack on Fort Sumter.  Like any president would, Lincoln considers his options from a political and military standpoint.  Like few presidents, though, Lincoln considers his options from a constitutional standpoint, too.  I do not mean only that he considers whether various actions he could take would be consistent with the Constitution.  Lincoln considers also whether his options would preserve the constitution and augment its role in our civic life. Changing a country’s constitutional viewpoint is slow work advanced only by an astute and principled politician with a cool temperament.

But his constitutional scruples make Lincoln come across as weak and slow.  Lincoln is slow by nature, too; someone who generally likes to weigh matters long past the time the country or the Congress wants him to act.  He is slow to fire generals and cabinet members, and he is slow to take offense, even when his failing, top general who despises him walks past his own study where he knew Lincoln is waiting to speak to him, and goes to bed.  He almost loses the war, and he almost loses the 1864 election to the same general who has a completely different view of the Constitution and of the North’s proper war aims than he has.

Obama’s responds to his opponents’ unfair attacks with preternatural patience – a patience that frequently drives me crazy.  Like Lincoln, Obama doesn’t respond in kind to many attacks, and he seems to believe that the public can be drawn to act by “the better angels of our nature,” to use Lincoln’s phrase.  Obama appears not to see the danger in his opponents’ unfair charges, even though he frequently says that he does.  This vulnerability attracts a following of people who wish to protect him.  Together, they give millions of dollars each time one of his opponents attacks him in a particularly unfair and potentially effective manner.  Lincoln also frequently finds himself explaining his failure to strike back at opponents, and his inside people are insanely loyal and protective of him, too, according to one of Lincoln’s biographers, Stephen Oates. People who know Lincoln or Obama well often describe a certain vulnerability they sense.

So maybe Obama’s slowness comes from his need to sound out how each of his options may square with broader principles, as I suggest here.  Or maybe he’s slow because he’s a listener and a negotiator, a problem-solver and a consensus-builder (perhaps, like Lincoln, starting with his powerful cabinet – see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln). Maybe Obama is slow because he's stubborn: he’s not easily intimidated or goaded or tricked into reacting.  He could be slow also because he’s simply more comfortable weighing major decisions over a period of time.  He’s slow, though, for some or perhaps all of the above reasons. Even more than in the 1860’s, Americans today seem to prefer a take-charge, decisive CEO-type in the White House, and that’s neither what they got with Lincoln nor what they’ll get with Obama.

I wish she'd finish it, but she ran out of gas once she met the assignment's requirements.  She's busy with college applications and other senior stuff.

            My car crunched up the gravel driveway. It seemed oddly reluctant, managing to stall twice in twenty yards. I found myself coaxing it as if I had gone back several generations and my car were a horse and carriage. Indeed, as I approached the old manor, I had the oddest sensation of stepping back through time, as if those crumbling brick walls wanted to pull me back to the time of their youth when they proudly hosted all the flying colors of the flocking gentry, when the joyous sound of minstrels filled their halls and light and laughter spilled from every window, but all that remained of the manor’s fading splendor were grimy windows, peeling siding, and the moaning of the wind as it pushed against the dying edifice.

            I parked my car, grabbed my bags, and jogged towards the front door, my breath coming as smoke against the gray November day. The sky darkened as I drew near, and I instinctively slowed, taking in the skeletal appearance of the trees and the tarnished knocker whose shape oddly resembled that of a twisted creature in a reappearing nightmare. I shuddered and forced myself to focus on other features of the door. But its chipped paint put me in mind of dried blood, and its handle was old, worn, and ice cold.

            My great aunt, whom I had never met, lay dying in the old manor house. The house had been in our family for generations, but I had never seen it before. It was passed to the oldest son in each generation, and if there was no male heir it went to the eldest daughter and then to her eldest son. Such was the case with my aunt, my grandmother’s only sibling.

            Aunt Ethelinda was notoriously irritable and had never gotten on with anyone, even her own children. Rumor had it that her mind was going: she had been reporting ghosts and other strange and unlikely phenomena since the death of the gardener, her childhood friend and the only person she had ever been known to be close to. My aunt also had almost no fortune besides the house, and tradition had already dictated to whom that dubious property would belong. There was, then, little incentive for anyone to visit her on her deathbed. As I was the youngest adult in our family and was blessed with a moderate temperament, the task naturally fell to me.

I move in the quick
and the dead, and they move
in me, the quick and the
dead, even the long
dead dead.

the dead always live all
the dead live
always. the long
dead dead move
not in the quick
but in the dead
quick in the dead
quick in the
dead dead
in the quick.

Looking at its glitzy Christmas lights, Victoria, Betty, Granny, Bethany and I drove slowly the other night through a ritzy section of Betty’s town that I didn’t know existed until our present trip south.  The area’s nicest homes rest on top of a hill from which, along several bends of the road that connects its subdivisions, we could see the considerable lights of Columbia, Tennessee.  Looking down the hill, it occurred to me that the town’s expanse of lights was similar to what the traveling Magi must have seen, looking up at a Levantine sky not snuffed out by the kind of arrogant light pollution the homes and businesses of this typical American town generate all night.

We tended to flocks of reindeer and Santas and other recent holiday fabrications milling about most of the hill’s front yards.  Around the last curve, however, we saw it: the only crèche extant in this series of fashionable neighborhoods.  I felt like Charlie Brown in that presently ubiquitous Christmas special, finding a real, albeit feeble, tree among the shiny aluminum numbers his friends urged him to select from for their Christmas pageant.   Each sheep and shepherd and Holy Family member huddled around the suburban manger possessed a kind of inner light, most likely a sixty-watt incandescent bulb, that made the entire drama stand out among the inflatable Grinches and snowmen we had passed up to that point.

Bethlehem, the location of Messiah’s birth – exotic yet unassuming and off the beaten track – has inspired countless paintings, songs, and sermons over the past two millennia.  Bethlehem demonstrates that Heaven’s idea of good origins may not be our own; that great leaders may have humble, almost Lincolnesque beginnings; and that small, faraway places can impact the world.  Yet how can we really be sure that Messiah was born there?

In this age of rumors, unsubstantiated claims, and The Da Vinci Code, most of us still trust one or more of the Big Four to give us the Good News.  I thought it would be worthwhile this holiday season to see how each of the four dealt with the controversy surrounding where Messiah was born.

Luke’s broadcast of Messiah’s birth was as colorful as the peacocks that grace the grass in Northern European Renaissance paintings depicting that event.  If the Gospel is the greatest story ever told, Luke was the greatest at telling it.  Like Linus later in that special, I can still quote the King James Version of Luke 2 at least through the Gloria in excelsis Deo, including the famous, spare words that have helped Messiah’s lowly origins capture the world’s imagination.  Luke 2 first transmitted the understated subordinate clause that preachers have used for centuries to contrast this Ruler’s humble arrival with the advent of more imperious world leaders:

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke told a beautiful, ironic story, suitable for a bestselling memoir, the kind of master tract Messiah’s followers would later use to support his candidacy.  And Luke gave no hint of a controversy over the location of Messiah’s birth.

Matthew spoke of no birth controversy, either, but the pains to which it went to document Messiah’s every childhood move make one suspect that it had a keen eye for an anticipated, future controversy long before more than a handful of people recognized the Messiah as such.

Matthew’s treatment of the circumstances surrounding Messiah’s birth was somewhat more prosaic than Luke’s.  Maybe it was the accountant’s by-the-numbers mindset; maybe it was Matthew’s aging, hard-boiled and higher-than-average Jewish audience; or maybe it was just Matthew’s slant: demonstrate how Messiah’s birth comports with prophecy.  Matthew doesn’t broadcast as much to capture the imagination; it’s designed to convince folks of Messiah’s bona fides.  And Messiah sure did a lot of traveling as an infant and toddler: Bethlehem, Egypt, and Galilee, each stop necessary to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy about where the Messiah would hail from.  Matthew tracked each stop, and along the way Matthew also helped Messiah explain his early-childhood contacts with the Magi.  Who knows what ideas Messiah’s later constituency might otherwise have assumed those agents of an enemy religion implanted in his head?

Matthew seemed to have anticipated what the Birthers would later focus on: if Messiah were not born where Scripture required him to have been born, then he would be ineligible to serve as Messiah.

Mark, the smallest of the Big Four, just didn’t cover Messiah’s birth.  It may have been an issue of resources.  With objective journalism falling on tough times, you can’t be everywhere.

The Big Four were only the Big Three for decades; John came late in the century.  The latecomer makes a point of marching to its own drum, and its different approach makes Matthew, Mark, and Luke look as if they share a common viewpoint, as if they were cut from the same cloth – the same unknown source that has been the object of a lot of conjecture among religious circles.  John delights in distinguishing itself from the other Big Four by describing itself “fair and balanced,” a barely concealed slight against its fellow networks.

Although Mark never mentions the location of Messiah’s birth, John wins the prize for being the least factual about where Messiah was born, “fair and balanced” or not.  John doesn’t usually publish editorials as news, but it supports its claim to unbiased journalism in part by broadcasting debates in which one side is, shall we say, under-represented.  John recorded two debates involving where Messiah was born, and though it never out-and-out said that Messiah was not born in Bethlehem, it always gave the Birthers the discussion’s last word as if they had the winning argument.  Here’s the first debate:

Many of the people . . . said, Of a truth this is the Prophet.  Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee?  Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?  So there was a division among the people because of him.

At this point, John could have reported something like, “Of course, it’s established beyond any doubt that Messiah was born in Bethlehem.  We have a government record, the testimony of friends and strangers, a contemporaneous birth announcement, no evidence to the contrary . . .”  But it didn’t.  Ah, well.  Anyway, this people’s debate John recorded ends in something like a draw.

But a second debate broadcast by John – this one among the Pharisees – ends more definitively in favor of the Birthers:

Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him?  The officers answered, Never man spake like this man.  Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived?  Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?  But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.  Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,)  Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?  They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.  And every man went unto his own house.

This “Messiah” is from Galilee and not Bethlehem.  End of discussion.

Would it have been too much for John & Friends to have pointed out that the controversy isn’t real, that there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that Messiah was born anywhere but in humble Bethlehem, and that Messiah is not disqualified to serve as Messiah?  I suppose not, but John’s role is not to clear up baseless rumors.  John reports; you decide.

I have written poems that advance ideas I’ve never held and that give into feelings I’ve never had or at least have never admitted to having had.  Is that bad?  I’m not sure why I do it.

Though maybe it’s the poem’s fault.  The poem takes over, and it wants to go places.  It binds and gags me and stuffs me in the trunk.

A better explanation may be Richard Hugo’s, found in his book The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing.  A poem has two subjects, Hugo asserts.  Your triggering subjects “ignite your need for words.”  I feel a poem somewhere in a triggering subject, but as I write I begin to discover the poem’s real subject, often quite different from the triggering subject, the one I set out to write about.

Often I have lived only a little of the ideas and feelings my poems advance.  Hugo has lived much of his, if the poems he inserts into a couple of autobiographical essays are any indication.  I think I’m using poetry to create imaginative rehearsals.  “Imaginative rehearsals” is a term I learned from a book by a high school teacher, Terry Gallagher, to describe a benefit from books to young readers.  If you live imaginatively through books, the idea goes, you’ll be better prepared to make decisions when you get older.  If you try things out vicariously through novels and narrative poetry, you don’t have to make the same mistakes the characters make.

When Bethany was three and four years old, we would play school with her small characters and blocks.  Bethany, whom no teacher has ever suspected of misbehavior, always had one misbehaving character who disrupted every class with a simplicity and joy that neither Bethany nor I often demonstrate outside of home.  Maybe these playtimes were imaginative rehearsals.  More likely they were our shared opportunities to express a side of us that we suppressed outside of play.

Poetry is play, and a poem becomes a playmate that surprises us.  Sticking with our play’s original rules causes a poem to sulk and maybe go home.  What pair of kids plays imaginatively and yet ends up doing what they had planned to do at the outset?  To channel the imagination is to send it home early.

Hugo grew up a staunch formalist and shared New Criticism’s disdain for judging a poem by how well it conveyed a moral or got across its ostensible subject matter.  His book amounts to a spirited defense of creative writing workshops in English departments as well as a summary of advice he gives his college students during his own workshops.

Part of that advice to young poets was to drop qualms over a poem’s morality:

It is easier to write and far more rewarding when you can ignore relative values and go with the flow and thrust of the language . . . . Doesn’t this lead finally to amoral and shallow writing?  Yes, it does, if you are amoral and shallow.  I hope it will lead you to yourself and the way you feel.  All poets I know, and I know plenty of them, have an unusually strong moral sense, and that is why they can go into the cynical world of the imagination and not feel so threatened that they become impotent.  There’s fear sometimes involved but also joy, and exhilaration that can’t be explained to anyone who has not experienced it.  Don’t worry about morality.  Most people who worry about morality ought to.

Hugo writes that the imagination is cynical in the sense that “it can accommodate the most disparate elements with no regard for relative values.  And it does this by assuming all things have equal value, which is a way of saying nothing has any value, which is cynicism.”  Like a classic cynic, the imagination is value-neutral.

A lot of the stuff I write on Twitter is about death.  Unless I am mistaken and am already dead, these posts are imaginative rehearsals, among other things. 

Hugo’s vision of poetry – poetry with a life of its own that the poet uncovers by pursuing or playing with the poem – a poetry of self-discovery, a psychological poetry hidden in mundane topics, a world in a grain of sand – is the essence of twentieth century lyric poetry, I think.  I generally prefer it to the more clever Metaphysical poets and the more ardent Romantic poets of previous centuries, but I am a child of the twentieth century.  However, I don’t think that many of my fellow American Evangelicals have ever reconciled themselves to some common practices and subjects in twentieth century art and literature, particularly the practice of using two subjects, as Hugo describes, and the subject of death.

Why focus on death? they may ask.  Instead of being preoccupied by death, why not write something uplifting?

I wonder if my imagination is taking me down roads I closed off to myself early in my religious years.  I remember our Charismatic church’s memorial service for its founding pastor who accidentally drowned on vacation in Mexico in 1979, the same year Hugo's book was published.  When the congregation permitted itself to show grief and even anguish in the middle of the service, the service leaders admonished the crowd and led it in some rousing songs of hope.  It felt like an emotional cover-up.

We American Christians sometimes cover up death today in more subtle ways, using phrases like “passed on” and “passed away” in place of “died,” as if death were something to fear or were some kind of sin or weakness that had overcome the Dear Departed.  We are complicit with our funeral industry in sanitizing death and in keeping it off our streets.  (I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One this past summer, a novella dripping with sarcasm of America’s notions of death and its funeral industry.  It’s fun reading if you get a chance.) Didn't the Preacher exhort us not to avoid the house of mourning but to hang out there?

But see how imaginatively New Testament characters and writers spoke and wrote about death in just these representative passages (all from the King James Version):

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? (John’s gospel)

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Colossians)

I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. (1 Corinthians)

For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.  So then death worketh in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians)

I'll never die?  I'm already dead?  I die daily?  Death works in me?  How can these verses’ conceptions of death be reconciled without some admission that their authors used death imaginatively, that death stirred their imagination?

There’s even a sense in which death belongs to us in the way that we belong to Christ:

For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.  (1 Corinthians)

How can we fully possess death and whatever benefits accrue from death if we refuse to embrace it in any sense or even to speak of it without euphemisms?

Here’s my favorite verse about death (the first sentence from the New American Standard Version and the second from the Revised English Bible):

For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. Who is equal to such a calling? (2 Corinthians)

Events and feelings trigger poems, but certain smells – different smells for everyone – trigger strong feelings and memories.  Paul claims here that he and his crew act like incense offered to God that triggers different feelings in different people.  An application of parallel construction leads to a surprising message: for those that “are being saved,” Paul & company are a scent of death that leads them to death. For “those who are perishing,” on the other hand, Paul’s crew offers a scent that leads to life.

Once a Christian is on his way to salvation – having his mind renewed and his perspective altered – Paul would become a walking challenge to him.  He would smell death around Paul and would be drawn to follow him into a life of self-denial.  Am I still too young a Christian to smell this about Paul?  Do I still reject the idea of death as something that was only at work in me when I was perishing outside of Christ?  Is my Christianity so stunted that I remain obsessed only with the life it offers me?

I love the obsession with death evident in many of the works of Flannery O’Connor, a religious and Catholic writer.  I love the full-bodied spirituality of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  I’m on my third reading of this uplifting, Christian novel.  (I find that most novels that call themselves Christian aren’t; in fact, many novels by people of other faiths or of no faith at all contain more truth than most novels in Christian bookstores.)  The Brothers Karamazov is tragic, but as Oswald Chambers points out, life is “wild and tragic.”  Dostoevsky doesn’t do dishonest spiritual highs.  His characters walk through, and not around, the valley of the shadow of death.

There is an objectionable nihilism I find in some writings by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.  I do not say that poetry is good simply because it is about death.

What is religious imagination? If our religious mind must travel down only prescribed avenues, the phrase amounts to an oxymoron.  I suppose that, until a Christian finds himself well on the way to salvation, the imagination is largely an unredeemed instrument, at best a two-edged sword, scary as death.  But as we grow in grace and in death and life, we become more human – more like God designed us to be.  We find God all over the place, even in death.  I think the Desert Fathers and many other saints and poets discovered God at times at play in their imagination and poetry.  Not always, but at times.

1 P.M., and about 14 inches.  They promise us another 5 to 9.  I haven’t walked in a blizzard in a long time, but I couldn’t face the wind and snow for some of my walk this morning, particularly on the highway cresting the hill.

I graded all night long and got one out of five assignments I’ve saved for the holidays done.  I hope to take everyone sledding tomorrow at a distant cousin’s nearby hill.  In a couple of days, we’ll head to Tennessee to visit Victoria’s family for Christmas.  I’ll set up shop at a Duncan Donuts, her mom's town’s local wi-fi spot, for my grading and, hopefully, blogging.

The barbershop stretches long like a coffin, a final home lined with mirrors and furnishing time for honest reflection.

I don’t know how she wakes me, but she holds a big, round mirror behind my head.  Behind it, she smiles: a midwife.

My black and white hair drifts down in my shade, a peaceable kingdom of birth and death in the linoleum grass.  I live for birth and death.

She spins me half way.  Spin me until the mirrors finish and I leave as a tree, tall and cared for, a presence with no face or backside.

Edward Hopper’s Gas captures, for me, the American idea of frontier.  The setting has nothing to do with a frontier, I'll admit: a service station attendant in vest and tie performs an unknown act of maintenance on, or recordkeeping with, one of his three pumps.  Behind him is a country road and, beyond that, all of nature takes the form of uniform trees and seems to brood, somewhat menacingly as dusk advances, at the attendant and his brave station lights.  The attendant is alone with his back to this uncertainty, and there are no cars – despite the prominent road and service station – to assist him.

Up until the weather turned, Bethany and I have taken the W&OD trail to Purcellville.  Traveling back, we frequently see a large highway sign just beyond a small grove of evergreens.  The sign seems out of place, since the highway’s roads and cars aren’t visible (though we can hear the cars menacing below our raised trail), and the sign seems outlandishly close and large for the bicycles that travel by it.  The sign says only, “Gas,” and its arrow points in the direction we’re riding.

In my Gas, nature is in the foreground with civilization menacing her from behind.  Nature’s frontier seems to be advancing on her and threatening her way of life.

This contrast between Hopper’s Gas and my own struck me again today as I took my camera out in the snow to one of the few groves of trees left in our neighborhood. The grove survives only because of its utility as a buffer between the highway and the strip mall that enclose it.  I had to work hard not to get either of them in my viewfinder, but then I gave up and let the shots come naturally.

Snow acts like forgiveness, covering up some pretty scarred-up landscape and making it beautiful.  It gives sharp things soft, rounded edges; it makes dirty things clean again.  The more it falls, the more it erases.  But it has its work cut out for it the longer I live – maybe it seems that way because of how long I’ve lived – and it seems to snow less each year.

I haven't forgotten about slow reads.  I've been going day and night at school, putting together a lot of new stuff this year including a new multi-user blog and grading like a madman most waking weekend hours.

My heavy grading time is October through January because of the concentrated writing we do fall semester under a writers’ workshop model.  We move from predominately writing to predominately reading in the spring.  I gradually have more time to myself as the days gradually lengthen.

Here’s a link to my honors classes’ blog.  It’s not so pretty, but it sure beats what I had the last few years.  I built it with WordPress MU (“multi-user”) with a Buddy Press overlay.  (Buddy Press is a nice set of plug-ins that makes a wpmu install into something like a private social network.)  Though I turned off many of Buddy Press’s coolest features (e.g., friends, forums, the wall) to promote esprit de corps and to have the kids focus on blogging, what’s left is great: Buddy Press provides thoughtful site-wide navigation.  And wpmu is much better than I remember it from two years ago.  Plug-ins replace many of my old code hacks, the skins are much more plentiful and attractive.  They’re also more versatile because of widgets bloggers may drag and drop into their sidebars.

I blog as Alan this year.  I’m one of the worst bloggers there, about as infrequent there as I am here.  I’ve got to get my game on.

Some kids complain about the blogging, but they end up liking it better than my alternative, which is the same amount of writing but unpublished.  When we stop blogging in March, they generally don’t want to let go of it.  But, by then, I’m exhausted from keeping tabs on it.  (I have to read everything that eighty-plus bloggers post, including their comments!)

It’s worth it.  Blogging has done more than anything else to help my writing, and every year I see it helping many of my writers at school, too, over time.

Here’s a letter I sent to the editor of Newsweek this past week.  For the life of me, I can’t see why it won’t be published this week.  It’s short.  It's from soneone who lives in the subject state, and it brings up a major point the article overlooks.  It even gives into that requisite touch of petulance at the end.  Go figure.

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

If next month’s Virginia gubernatorial election is “the first big electoral test of Barack Obama’s presidency,” as Steve Tuttle’s article “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” states, modern history suggests that Mr. Obama will fail it.  No sitting president has seen his party win Virginia’s governorship since Richard Nixon saw Republican Mills Godwin win it in 1973.

We Virginians seem to want our state and national capitals in different parties’ hands, perhaps to keep Richmond, which is only two hours south of Washington, out of Washington’s orbit. Maybe Virginians also have a smoldering desire for these nearby capitals to remain at odds as they were when Richmond, like Washington, was the capital of a union of states.  Whatever the reason, the presidential election seems to vaccinate Virginians against the winner the following year.

Virginia and New Jersey hold the only gubernatorial elections during the years presidents are inaugurated, and every four years the national press frames these elections as early referenda on the newly elected or reelected president.  In Virginia’s case, at least, it’s quadrennial nonsense.

Like ringmasters pointing out the giant and the midget in an old-time circus's freak show, we English teachers teach the run-on and the fragment together in stark contrast. But I think our students sometimes get the mistaken idea from this pairing that we're concerned about the lengths of these famous non-sentences, and as a consequence, we tend to produce writers whose paragraphs are peopled with sentences that aren't too short or too long but are all just right.

From reading our students' writing, I believe that syntactical second place goes to short sentences, and last place goes to the long ones.  Why the prejudice against long sentences?  The misnomer "run-on" hurts, sure.  Who would know from its name that it involves two or more improperly joined sentences?  Also, long sentences increase the odds of misplaced modifiers and other forms of bad grammar, but that's hardly a reason to give them up.  Finally, almost a century of American writers have fallen under the spell of Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and others known for their spare syntax, but Hemingway was as proficient with long sentences as he was with short ones.  Great literature and good writing are made up of short and long sentences as well as the medium ones, but we've lost some of the art of writing the long ones.

My honors classes are learning how to write cumulative sentences, defined as a base clause and one or more modifying phrases.  (The previous sentence is a good example of a cumulative sentence: the clause precedes the comma, and a participial phrase follows it.)  The cumulative sentence is great for teaching phrases and clauses and their associated grammatical and punctuative rules.  Also, the sentence form emphasizes tone and description and therefore helps students relate syntax to good writing.

We're using cumulative sentences to help us explode moments – that is, to help us focus our readers on important moments in our narratives.  We're posting some of our sentences on Edmodo.com, a Twitter-like microblogging service for schools with the added advantages of enforced privacy (Twitter can be private, too, but one must rely on students to keep it so), unlimited characters per post, and threaded comments.  This month, my honors students are practicing cumulative sentences and replying to others' cumulative sentences with more phrases to make the sentences longer and richer.

This post is sandwiched by two instances of writers responding to this assignment.

When I learned that a South Carolina representative had been the man who heckled the president tonight, I thought of another South Carolina representative who breached decorum when our Union was even more divided between North and South: Congressman Brooks’s caning of Sen. Sumner in 1856.  I wonder if Rep. Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” will be defended as vigorously in some quarters as Rep. Brooks’s caning was in the Southern press.

Here’s a comment I left on an unrelated post last month:

I don't think there's been a time in U.S. history (I can't pretend to speak of other countries' histories, hubris or no hubris) when so many people's sources of news were so biased. I've read about the campaign of 1800, the newspapers leading up to the Civil War, and yellow journalism, but I don't think they rival today's media for misinformation and vituperation. One national poll this month found that only 42 percent of respondents who identify themselves as Republicans believe that Obama was born in America. (He'd be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency if he were not, of course.) That statistic amazes me. What does it take to come to that conclusion concerning Obama's birth despite all evidence to the contrary? One talks in terms of facts, but one puts more credence on what the party (or racial or media) line is than on the facts. Facts can be twisted, you know? But I know who I am and what team I'm on.

The ramifications of such thinking are frightening.

Some mornings, when the light grows and I set myself to grow still, I imagine that I am debating George Bush.  I’ve fallen into this daydream for years now: it digs at something, I believe.  So the moderator asks Bush to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with.  Bush answers, “Christ, because he changed my heart.”

My place is to lose the election, to have historians view the best version of my answer – halting, unduly complicated, vaguely insincere – as the election’s turning point, and not even that, because I was losing before George Bush said Christ.

Stevenson could not win, Carter could not govern, and Lincoln, you know, governed, but only over civil war.

During long, two-term moonlit nights, we remember the reach of sunset, its sweet, spectacular defeat, its fire framed in an arched corridor where we shovel our dark ideals and reflect, demiurgical and orange-faced, an incarnate sun, a clear fabrication, a foundry of Fathers.

Late summer feels like late in life
when earth becomes a playhouse for my youth.
We built the house that made us man and wife.

I play a ghost, a haze of August sunsets rife
with blended pigments pantomiming truth.
Late summer feels like late in life

before the nimbus frost makes saints of white-
haired lovers.  Forty years of afterglow imbrue
a scrim of sheets that made us man and wife.

Old men like me try not to dream, to start the strife
Joel prophesied.  Let younger men envision youth.
Late summer feels like late in life

when histrionic children play my prime and I,
whom none consults, will build no ticket booth
against the house that made us man and wife.

She hugs me tight.  Old age, a patient knife,
has cut youth’s cast from those concealed from youth:
late summer’s bright ablation.  Late in life
we build the house that made us man and wife.

A read write poem.  The portion of Joel's prophecy alluded to is here and here.

The sink is full of tulips, six red and six white tulips, tulips quiet as the rest, tulips no longer bent to wind but to my hand.  I raised them, I loved them, but I recollect my office.  I cut them by my stoop.

I immerse the tulips and cut them again, a passion of the first cut, my hands pale and viridescent, my wrists refracted in broken solidarity, both wrist and stem (carpal and carpel) as outward signs of the plant’s circumcision, a circumcision instituted between spats between Abram and Sarai before they were fishbowled into Abraham and Sarah, their steps and words and connubial glances exaggerated into bas-relief by virtue of a written record.  All writing is Braille, coarse and exaggerated, and Sarah resented both pen and knife as if they were strangers or at least unexpected guests in a state of perpetual arrival, perpetually and absently kicking the sides of their sandals against the stoop.

I have trained only some of my flock to ignore the flowers and to array the stems, to array them as adroitly as Jacob arrayed his rods to help his flock conceive or as wonderfully as Aaron arrayed his that budded, the vasewater lipping the stems as if it were sucking a weathervane of wind, the filmy surface otherwise as flat and calm as altarpiece, and (I preach to them) the flowers will array themselves, but most of them care only for flowers.  And I myself must not reach for consolations beyond the beds beside my stoop.

One tulip does not survive its second birth, its head resting against its hollow torso like John’s on Jesus’, its vasal aspect one of studied humility like the deacon who hasn’t spoken yet, the churchman with the mind of God.  Well, dead of an aneurysm, is it? – the air it fragranted by my stoop rose up its throat like a penitent’s sob or like ecstasy in a close room, and the breeze that first bent it now lowers its voice and pushes against my kitchen screen like the rest of Sunday: “And his bishoprick let another take.”  I must make arrangements.  And I will step by my step with a knife; with a knife I will stoop by my stoop.

Clement of Alexandria “felt that high matters of theology should be treated with reverence as being concerned with divine mysteries, and it would be dangerous to put into writing a full and extended statement for all to read. . . . Religious language, he felt, is akin to poetry.  A certain diffidence is proper to it.”  Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, 94.

“Certain doctrines, never formally defined, are as yet held by the Church with an unmistakable inner conviction, an unruffled unanimity, which is just as binding as an explicit formulation. 'Some things we have from written teaching,' said St. Basil, 'others we have received from the Apostolic Tradition handed down to us in a mystery; and both these things have the same force for piety.' [On the Holy Spirit, xvii, 66] This inner Tradition 'handed down to us in a mystery' is preserved above all in the Church's worship. Lex orandi lex credendi: our faith is expressed in our prayer. Orthodoxy has made few explicit definitions about the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, about the next world, the Mother of God, the saints, and the faithful departed: our belief on these points is contained mainly in the prayers and hymns used at services.”  Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, 204-05.

“Theology is poetry. Now a poet spends a great deal of time listening to his unconscious and slowly hauling up a poem, word by word, phrase by phrase, until something beautiful is brought forth, we hope, into the world that changes people's perceptions, and we respond to a poem emotionally.  And I think we should take as great a care when we write our theology as we would if we were writing such a poem instead of just trotting out an orthodox formula or an orthodox definition of God or a catechism answer so that when people listen to a theological idea, they feel as touched as when they read a great poem by, say, Milton or Dante.”  Armstrong, Karen. "The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong." 8 June 2008. Podcast. "Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett." American Public Media 6 Aug 2009.

1

You get labeled.  Some of these labels are accurate, and some are not.  Some are helpful, and some are not. All labels are true: they accurately describe how the labeler sees the labeled one or how he wants the labeled one to see herself or be seen by others.  All labels are false: even the best ones tend to diminish the one labeled.  The finest eulogies diminish the dead.

Names are labels, too, though not as much these days, as a whole.  Still, though the name “Brandon” means nothing to me, because of her past experiences Victoria will attempt to put anyone named Brandon on the trading block any September she spots one on her class roster.  Like any words, names absorb connotations.

We are more than the sum of our most veracious labels.  Some labels go deeply into who I am – some more deeply than I realize – but none of them goes deeply enough to be fair enough, to touch or much less to capture who I am, or to do anything more than adumbrate some installment of me.

But labels and names have hurt deeply enough, and they have helped deeply enough, to confirm my belief that I have an ineffable, unknown name that my life may be obscurely moving toward that may in some sense capture who I am, at least to the extent that I am captured by Jesus.

Cats understand something like this about themselves, or at least T.S. Eliot thought they did.  Every cat must have three names (though I’ve never known a cat to answer to any): an everyday name, a unique name, and an unknown name.  Concerning the last:

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
    The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
    Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
        His ineffable effable
        Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

(“The Naming of Cats” from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. (So all this “effan” talk (as in, “Man, that move was effanineffable!”) started with Eliot.))

One distinction between a cat and me is that, according to the poem, a cat already knows his ineffable name; it is unknown only to others.  But I attribute this difference to the cat’s higher spiritual attainments.

In Revelation, Jesus gives a new name, unknown to anyone but the person given it, to every person “who overcomes” (2:17).  How can I relate to such a gift?  Is it an hereditary title?  A term of endearment?   Since no one else would know the name besides the giver and the recipient, I think this name would constitute less of an honor than an expression of intimacy.

I never found this reward too appealing until recently.   Why would I want anyone – even God – to label or rename me?  As a teenager, I didn’t accept the rich identity my father offered me.  Instead, I pieced together my own identity.  The pieces that went down deep inside of me were of this order: “I am a Christian” and “I am better than you” and “I am a failure.”  I required my faith to support my ideas about myself, and challenges to my faith, whether intellectual or experiential in nature, felt deeply threatening.

A few hard knocks later, my identity is more wrapped up in another.  It is my experience – I can’t speak for others – that the deepest sense of self comes from being loved.  Jesus loves me after all.  “For the Bible tells me so” was never enough.  And, if things work out, he’ll call me by a new name no one else will know.

2

Why do Christians see themselves as Christians?  It’s just another label.  In the Bible, Jesus never called anyone a Christian.  God didn’t, either.  And either did any apostle or New Testament writer or any other Christian.

I mean, it’s a fine label and all.  It’d be hard to replace it, even if we wanted to.  (Could you imagine Christians trying to agree on a new name for the religion?)  But is the name helpful as a means of seeing ourselves, of identifying ourselves to ourselves?  “First and foremost, I am a Christian.  That is, I’m a Christian before I’m a father, a husband, a doctor, an American, or a Republican.”  (I couldn’t resist that last one.)  Speak for yourself.

More voices: “If someone accused you of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  I don’t know.  The criminal lawyer in me asks, what are the elements of the crime?  I’d have to find out what my accuser means since the label has picked up a lot of good and bad historical baggage.  It’s not even always clear in the Bible what people meant by “Christian.”  The word is used only thrice in the Bible, and on each occasion it’s a label used only by people outside of the church.

The Bible’s first two references to “Christian” are in the Book of Acts.  In one reference, the narrator explains the term’s origin (a label used by the people of Antioch for the disciples there), and in the other, King Agrippa refers to himself as a potential “Christian” when he came to Caesarea in order to judge Paul relative to the accusations made against him.

And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord.  The news about them reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.  Then when he arrived and witnessed the grace of God, he rejoiced and began to encourage them all with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord; for he was a good man, and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And considerable numbers were brought to the Lord.  And he left for Tarsus to look for Saul; and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And for an entire year they met with the church and taught considerable numbers; and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.  (Acts 11:21-26)

Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.  And Paul said, I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.  (Acts 26:28-29)

It’s interesting to me that, while Paul didn’t object to Agrippa’s term “Christian,” he went out of his way to refer to himself in another way – “such as I am” – and so to adopt no label for himself in this context at all.

The last use of the term Christian in the Bible is in one of Peter’s letters to the church, where the label is at the bottom of a list of otherwise negative labels his readers might have been subject to have been stuck with:

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.  Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.  (1 Peter 4:15-16)

(I added the bold font in the above excerpts.  The italics, which are part of the King James translation, indicate words not directly translated from the original but added to make the text more understandable.)

It should be noted that, while Peter used the term “Christian” to refer to the disciples, he used it only to describe it as an accusation other people could have made against the disciples.  One gets the feeling that “Christian” may not have been as positive a label for the people Peter was writing to, or for the people those people lived among, anyway, as it had been for the Antiochans or for King Agrippa.  In his book The Early Church, Henry Chadwick points out that, for about two hundred years after Nero, many Romans considered Christians to be both incestuous and cannibalistic (26, 29).  Nevertheless, it seems clear from 1 Peter that, whatever the negative connotations were that the general public associated with the term at that time, the Christians were to understand them as false accusations that would make their suffering them akin to Christ’s suffering.

Chadwick notes that, after Anticoch, the term "Christian" "quickly spread as the popular term" among the communities where the disciples lived (16).  There were also other labels other Biblical characters outside of the church used for the disciples.  Many Jews first referred to the disciples as “the Nazarenes” (Chadwick 16, 21).  The word “sect” appears twice (Acts 24:5 and 28:22).  I like “sect” because it emphasizes the church’s roots as an offshoot of Judaism.  But I can understand why “sect,” unlike “Christian,” doesn’t show up as part of any church’s name today.  It carries a sort of illegitimate and narrow connotation at a time when many churches, even very small ones, wish to associate themselves with denominations or “apostolic streams” and include phrases like “World Outreach Center” in their names.

I’m fine with “Christian” as a label.  I’ll concede for the sake of argument that it’s a better label than “sect.”  But I think it’s unscriptural – unchristian, if you will – for us Christians to define ourselves to ourselves as Christians – as something God never referred to us as.

Here’s a related and an even more disturbing proposition, perhaps.  Isn’t it unscriptural for us to see ourselves – deeply, I mean – at the level of who we are – as a member of a religion (i.e., Christian) or of a denomination or of a particular church?   In the Old Testament, people identified themselves to themselves and among themselves as members of families and tribes and nations, and the New Testament uses the same language of identity.  We are members of God’s family; we are children of God.  Heck, we’re made in God’s image.  It’s easy to go to war against the other team (“Christians” vs. “heathen,” for instance), but it’s hard to go to war against sisters and brothers of the same God, even if we believe those sisters and brothers have left, or have never found, their spiritual families.  And if persecution ever took away all of the nice buildings and titles and traditions, could we not hope to be left with spiritual and natural fathers and mothers, families and clans?

It isn’t popular today to define ourselves in terms of where we came from.  (E.g., I am of the house of Rollins or Jaworski.)  The displacement of war, the breakdown of families, and the wash left from waves of Western thought have made it impossible or undesirable for most, I guess.  Indeed, I have tended to see myself as what I do (e.g., I am a teacher), what I enjoy, or how I see the world, and not from whence I came.  Further, most church teaching isn’t oriented to this understanding of ourselves.  But in Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom, I am invited to see myself by where I’m from.  Like Jesus, we come from God and return to God.

The New Testament invites us to see ourselves in many ways: disciples and workers, ambassadors and prisoners, servants and kings, priests and stewards, saints and sinners, to name just ten.  While I would argue, perhaps not convincingly, that “children of God” or “beloved” might be the richest identity for Jesus’ disciples to inculcate with the help of the Holy Spirit, it is not to the exclusion of God’s other ways of seeing ourselves.

I’ll continue to call myself a Christian when the need arises, and I’ll accept that appellation from others when I think I understand it.  But I rank it, as Eliot’s cat might, as one my least effanineffable names.

porch
light
moth
ring 
screen
door
SLAM
slam

moon
light
sweet
cyme
marsh
pitch
chirp
chirp

light
porch
black
moth
screen
door
spring
s t r e t c h

con
ver
sa
tion
SLAM
slam
chirp
chirp

Teaching grammar to children who don’t see themselves as writers ensures that they will neither see themselves as writers nor learn grammar.

Teaching grammar as a strategy for writing will ensure that students who see themselves as writers will write pinched prose.  Writing is a way of thinking, and pinched writers become pinched people.

When I first started teaching, I taught grammar separate from everything else.  The kids never learned it.

Last year, I made a big push to teach grammar as a strategy for writing.  We practiced grammar by exemplifying it in our writing.  We created proverbs out of compound sentences.  (Many proverbs from many traditions are translated into compound sentences.)  We Twittered complex sentences.  The kids’ writing improved some, but they still didn’t learn much grammar.

I’ve come to believe that grammar as a strategy for writing, no matter how cleverly I connect grammar to writing instruction, unduly subordinates the writing to the grammar.  Learning to write through learning grammar makes writers focus not on the creative process but on making the writing manageable (i.e., limited and unchallenging) for editing.  Writers end up writing with their inner editor watching over their shoulder, if that is possible, even metaphorically.

To switch metaphors: writing builds, and grammar inspects.  But what if the contractor hires the building inspector as her foreman?  Nothing would get done.  Most counties allow builders to schedule the inspectors at certain phases of the building process in order to keep inspectors off of the job site until the builders say they’re done with a particular stage.  This helps workmen understand that they’re building for the builder and not for the inspector.  Editing works that way, too.  Generally, writers need to keep their editor side away during the creative process.  It would help this separation of functions if I would relate but separate my writing and grammar instruction.

Writing and grammar go in different directions not only with their mindsets but also with their concepts and terminology. For instance, when we use complex sentences to teach writing, we necessarily learn the rules regarding subordinating conjunctions and punctuation.  In the process, writers somehow learn to put the most important information in the most important clause – the independent clause.  But putting the most important information in a subordinate clause instead can add a layer; there may be a reason, for instance, why a narrator or other character may use a particular syntax to downplay certain information, and that choice may build characterization and mystery or may bury a clue or an instance of foreshadowing.

Even the name “complex sentences,” a phrase I’m required to use, hurts writing instruction.  The name is fine for grammar, suggesting as it does the combination of two different kinds of clauses.  But should a writer consider the use of two clauses of any kind as complex – either as too difficult for a writer or as too demanding for a reader?  Writing short sentences sometimes makes writing clearer, but writing only short sentences, whether simple, compound, or complex, makes students’ writing dull, undeveloped, and simplistic.  Ernest Hemmingway himself didn’t write mostly in short sentences, and either do most other good writers.

Grammar instruction emphasizes nouns and verbs, and it trains students to modify them with adjectives and adverbs.  But modification is best done with phrases and clauses, and most nouns and verbs in good writing don’t serve only as the cornerstones of subjects and predicates, respectively, of independent clauses, but also as objects or participles in phrases or as verbs in dependent clauses.  Consider this sentence from the foreword to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

Try using grammar to teach writers to write anything as informative and enjoyable as that!  If I ask my students this fall to characterize this Nabokov sentence, at least some of them will size it up rather quickly and call it a “run-on sentence.”   A run-on sentence is another unhelpful grammar term for writers: students learn from it that long sentences are bad.  (Of course, the term “run-on” is a bad one from a grammatical standpoint, too, since it refers only to improperly joined clauses and not to long sentences.)

We don’t teach students how to write anything like Nabokov’s sentence because even we teachers can’t translate such sentences into grammatical terms.  The thinking seems to be that if we teachers can’t diagram longer sentences, then how can we ask kids to write longer sentences?  You see how insidious grammar instruction can be in stunting the growth of writers and their sentences.

My writers won’t start off writing English like Nabokov, of course, even though he had the disadvantage of being ESL, unlike most of my kids.  But my writers need to learn strategies for consistently writing great sentences modeled after great sentences they find in great books they like.  They’ll also need, in lieu of grammatical terms, a small lexicon of syntactical terms that will help them easily discuss strategies and to see them as such.

Although my students will later learn specific sentence strategies as juniors and seniors, I’d like to give them a foundation for effective sentence writing in ninth grade.  I haven’t found any material on the ninth grade level yet that does this.  I’m taking a DVD course this summer from The Teaching Company called “Building Great Sentences,” though, that is helping me with the theory. The course’s professor, Brooks Landon of the University of Iowa, isn’t teaching teachers – he’s teaching writers – but his approach is giving me lots of ideas on how to get students to write longer sentences by using free modifiers with repetition and rhythm along with what Landon calls downshifting and backtracking.  I hope my writers’ shorter sentences will improve also as my writers mix them with improved longer sentences.

My students can learn the fancy names for the sentence types in upper grades.  My goals are more limited: I want my writers to write more consistently like the authors they admire and, through doing so, to see themselves as writers at the sentence level.  (“Like” is the operative word: there are ways I write like my favorite novelist, Dostoyevsky, even though I’d never compare my writing to his, if you understand me.)

Landon builds his ideas about sentence writing on the teaching of rhetoric instead of grammar. The course guidebook’s extensive bibliography indicates that a lot of people have written about the sentence from a rhetorical standpoint, but I don’t think much of it has made it to the high school classroom yet.  And the writers he lists propose different strategies and different terminology for writing great sentences, but the writers have reached nothing like consensus about either the strategy or the terminology.

One promising book in the bibliography is Martha K. Kollin’s Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects.  Perhaps her book would have helped me more this past year since it demonstrates, as its readers suggest on its Amazon home page, how to use grammatical terms and concepts to teach rhetoric.  I certainly don’t think one can divorce grammar and rhetoric in teaching rhetorical syntax, and I’m open to relating the two disciplines so long as the drawbacks of traditional grammar instruction, which I’ve touched on above, can be avoided.  The cheapest used copy of this book is currently around thirty dollars shipped; I’ll buy the book when I can afford it.

The lack of uniformity in the area of rhetorical syntax (syntactical rhetoric?) is all right.  I’ll come up with my own strategy and terminology from the best of what I read and see other teachers teach, and then I’ll revamp it over the ensuing years.  And, at least this year, I’ll combine writing and grammar instruction to this extent: I’ll first teach my students how to run the plumbing, if you will, and then I’ll teach them how to inspect it.  The plumbing inspectors won’t be running the pipe, but they won’t be cutting through drywall to get to it, either.

Bethany has been writing this short story for weeks.  When she finally sends the tiles to the publishers, perhaps the bathroom will get cleaned.

After circling the globe in search of complete copies of novels fate has permitted him to read only the first few pages of, the Reader ends up in a library where he meets seven other readers.

The following are parts of pages 247 through 250 of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler here, and I promise to delete the book’s material from this site by the end of the year.  It seems appropriate for a novel that purports to be interactive and that involves its reader (that’s you, by the way, and most of the text involving you uses second-person narration) as its main character to employ some of the gadgetry of Web 2.0, and I think Calvino, were he alive today, would agree.

First reader:

The gaze of the reader opposite you, instead of resting on the book open in his hands, wanders in the air.  But his eyes are not absent: a fixed intensity accompanies the movements of the blue irises.  Every now and then your eyes meet.  At a certain point he addresses you, or rather, he speaks as if into the void, though certainly to you:

“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering.  In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me.  If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.  The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages.  But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”

Second reader:

“I understand you perfectly,” another reader interjects, raising his waxen face and reddened eyes from his volume.  “Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation.  Or, rather, the object of reading is a punctiform and pulviscular material.  In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader’s attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning.  They are like elemental particles making up the work’s nucleus, around which all the rest revolves.  Or else like the void at the bottom of a vortex which sucks in and swallows currents.  It is through these apertures that, in barely perceptible flashes, the truth the book may bear is revealed, its ultimate substance.  Myths and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules, like the pollen that sticks to the butterfly’s legs; only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations.  This is why my attention, in contrast to what you, sir, were saying, cannot be detached from the written lines even for an instant.  I must not be distracted if I do not wish to miss some valuable clue.  Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein.  This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentence.”

Third reader:

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time.  Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware?  Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern?  Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before.  At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment.  At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together.  The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself.  The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

Fourth reader:

A fourth speaks up: “If you mean to insist on the subjectivity of reading, then I agree with you, but not in the centrifugal sense you attribute to it.  Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings.  This does not come about without some effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, enter into a relationship with the books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text.  For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.”

Fifth reader:

“In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book,” a fifth reader says, sticking his face out from behind a pile of bound volumes, “but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories.  There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost.  In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.”

Sixth reader:

A sixth reader, who was standing, examining the shelves with his nose in the air, approaches the table.  “The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading.  At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.  At times it is the incipit of the book, the first sentences. . . . In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”

Seventh reader:

“For me, on the other hand, it is the end that counts,” a seventh says, “but the true end, final, concealed in the darkness, the goal to which the book wants to carry you.  I also seek openings in reading,” he says, nodding toward the man with the bleary eyes, “but my gaze digs between the words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the words ‘the end.’”

Eighth reader (the novel’s protagonist):

The moment has come for you to speak.  “Gentlemen, first I must say that in books I like to read only what is written, and to connect the details with the whole, and to consider certain readings as definitive; and I like to keep one book distinct from the other, each for what it has that is different and new; and I especially like books to be read from beginning to end.”

I had Victoria buy two tubs of icing for Warren's cake.  You need only one, but I love white icing.  I made the cake (Warren asked for a white one), and Bethany and I slathered the icing on it.

Things did not go well.  Victoria bought "Whipped" icing, which is this fluffy stuff, too airy to give you much traction.  When Bethany and I put the layers together, the top layer would keep sliding off of the bottom layer a minute later.

We tried and tried to keep it straight, but it kept sliding off.  And each time we tried, more of the cake got mixed up with the icing.  Pretty soon, the whole cake looked old and beat up.

Then Bethany had an idea.  To play up the aged-cake motif, she decorated the cake with roaches and flies.  For roaches, she halved some of the donut holes Victoria had bought for the breakfast phase of Warren's sleepover, and she curled black antennae out of her art wire.  The flies were grape Skittles.

If that weren't enough, she made some of the flies airborne by propping them on white wire she had curled and stuck in the cake.  The wire suggested the flies' flight paths.

Warren and his pals loved it.  They thought the pests were as tasty as the cake.  But I cut my tongue on a flight path trying to lick the icing off.

From Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler, translated by William Weaver:

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear.  It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost.  A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives.  But is the climax really the end?  Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional model, perhaps four-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable.  What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

My fiction reading is plodding, plotless, and nonlinear, and I’ve been getting in touch with a desire for intimacy at the bottom of my reading and writing.  I guess I’ve been mistaking books for bodies.

(Inspired by Lucas Green’s “terrible reader” posted on porous borders earlier today.)

At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that some moment.  The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.  [From the diary of Silas Flannery in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler]

I hope I didn’t make you feel too uncomfortable last month.  I guess my paragraph in my “Of Time and the River” post about what I wanted out of readers and writers was kind of creepy:

If I wrote you a book review or report, it would only foreshorten the book, creating waterfalls in the navigable, tidal river.  Besides, even if I wrote the best book review, it would only stand on its own, pour itself into only its own river, so – best case – I’m no longer reading with you when you read it.  I want you to read with me.  We’d feed off of each other’s reactions, but even that’s not enough, ultimately.  You have to read the book with my reactions and associations, and I have to read it with yours.  So you have to read it with me, maybe as me, and maybe me as you, or maybe in heaven one day.

I think I’ve been going through an aesthetic crisis of sorts, though “aesthetic crisis” is a ridiculous formulation, almost an oxymoron that belittles both words.  Maybe I’ve just reached some kind of impasse with reading and writing.  For the past few years, I’ve struggled with the place of writing in a more contemplative life.  I like what I’ve learned about contemplation and writing both, but I strongly suspect that writing – at least as I’ve understood writing – detracts from a more contemplative life.  Carrying around all those words, fussing over sentences and diction in my daydreams . . . how can I clear my mind when I have such a demanding hobby on top of everything else?  It has helped me spiritually and mentally, granted.  Is writing part of my calling, or is it only a distraction?

And am I trying to make reading and writing do what contemplation does?  If so, why?  To justify a compulsion?  Or to find reading’s and writing’s limits – to satisfy myself that reading and writing can’t do what I want them to do?

Part of us is very intellectual, wanting to read all the books in the library – or even wanting to write all the books in the library.  Then there’s the other side of us, which is sheer silence, inarticulate – the silence of nature, of the sky, of pure being.  [Joyce Carol Oates, quoted in Greg Johnson’s Invisible Writer, A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates, 10-11]

And, off and on during the writing process, I think about readers.  Not readers in general, but you.  (Still creepy, huh?)  I wonder how my writing may carry on some sprawling conversation blogging helps bring about – sprawling for me, anyway – sprawling over topics and web logs and, after five years, over some remarkable time.  You’re in my head, in other words.

The author must more or less consciously create the image of the reader he is addressing.  [Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, 76]

Creative activity is often – again, perhaps always – powered by the drive to accomplish, in terms of the production of an object of art, an adjustment or readjustment in certain obscure relationships with other persons.  [Walter J. Ong, The Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays and Studies, 19]

Living with an audience is like learning to surf.  The ocean – the audience – is too much.  Surfing puts the audience in its place, and it requires balance.  Blogging's spikes in readership and positive, life-giving comments are fun to ride but can lead to some hairy wipeouts.  In writing, I feel what Ong calls the "adjustment or readjustment in certain obscure relationships" at both the intellectual and the inarticulate levels that Oates refers to.  What is going on?

Writing that “Of Time and the River” post helped me feel more what I want from reading and writing.  I was speaking of impulses and drives, trying to feel something primary or primordial going on inside of me.  What is it I want from you?  If you’re in my head as I read and as I write, why is that feeling of wanting to understand your writing and wanting to be understood in my reading rooted in wanting to be one with you: a marriage of true minds, and a polygamous one at that, since I’d have other intimates – others readers and writers – others with whom I’d be one?

Yet though there is a sense in which every reader writes the book he reads, paradoxically the writer is the one person excluded from such an activity by virtue of having already written the text.  Thus the reading figure comes to signify not only the reader’s pleasure but also the writer’s alienation, both from the reader and from his own text.  As Beckett said apropos Proust: ‘Art is the apotheosis of solitude.’ The very medium of language which unites reader and writer also drives them apart. . . . To read a book, to love a person, it is necessary to be other than that book and that person, and we read in order to overcome our otherness.  [Peter Washington, from his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition to Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler]

The end of contemplation is theosis, at least in Orthodox thought.  Is my desire for oneness with my readers and writers more deeply similar to my interest in contemplation than I had suspected, and in a fundamental way legitimate?

If so, could it be also an aesthetic cry for help (another pitiful oxymoron?), part of an unconscious suppression I’ve participated in as an American reader and writer of the early twenty-first century, years after New Criticism began dominating classroom instruction and prevalent attitudes toward reading and writing?  Though New Criticism’s greater influence on me may have come before I had ever heard of New Criticism, I have also studied it, enjoyed its delicious fruit (as Louise Rosenblatt said of New Critics, “their practice was always better than their theories”), and defended it in discussions against deconstructionism and all other comers.

But I am no longer sure that a poem is an object.  I think this New Critical notion has tended to suppress an experience of intimacy I have begun to discover as a reader and a writer.

A primary tenet of New Criticism is that a poem or any other work of literature is an object, that it has a separate existence from its author and the particular period and artistic movement in which it was produced, and that it may be considered as a work of art without reference to these outside things.  The independent object-ness of a poem allowed Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and the other New Critics to consider the poem on its own linguistic and aesthetic terms.  While the New Critics later incorporated scholastic tools, such as historical and genre-oriented studies, to buttress their aesthetic literary readings, they stayed true to their view of a work of literature as being primarily an object.

The “object” tenet allowed New Criticism to move American literary criticism away from earlier textbooks and criticism that examined poems only for their message and their place in the poet’s biography and in literary schools and movements.  A poem cannot be reduced to its message, the New Critics asserted, and, to me, New Criticism was one of the greatest gifts to the world for getting that idea across.  But perhaps a poem cannot be reduced to an object, either.  Seeing a poem as an object distances the poet from her readers and bars the reader from a more intimate reading experience.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?  [Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 154]

Since I wrote my “On Time and the River” post last month, I stumbled on a quote by Walter J. Ong, whom I mentioned earlier, that seemed to express something like my impasse:

As contemplation [of a work of art or literature] enters upon a more serious stage, the human being is driven by the whole economy of what it is to be man to find opposite himself, in that which he contemplates, a person capable of reacting in turn.  This drive is primordial and will not be denied.

That’s it! I thought.  Reading (and maybe writing) as a primordial desire for intimacy.

It’s sad (and, as we’ll see, ironic, too) that the guy is basically out of print.  Ong offers a major, early critique of New Criticism.  He is grateful for New Criticism’s attack on what Ong calls “the personalist aberration” and “personalist deviationism” in criticism, tracing this aberration back at least as far as Dr. Johnson, but he is critical of New Criticism’s tenet that works of literature amount to objects.  He published the essence of his critique in 1954 in his essay “The Jinee in the Well Wrought Urn,” which became the first chapter of The Barbarian Within and Other Fugitive Essays and Studies published in 1962, the preface of which, in turn, refers to the “now aging New Criticism.”  (It’s aging pretty well: Cleanth Brooks’s seminal essay collection The Well Wrought Urn has been in print continuously since its original publication in 1947, while I had to pay forty bucks for a copy of The Barbarian Within that came, as advertised, with the binding falling apart.  If I had wanted the book in one piece, it would have cost me a good deal more.)

Mark McGurl, whose book The Program Era was a subject of my “Of Time” post, writes that Ong “with Marshall McLuhan would come to symbolize the [1960’s] fascination with the relation of print and other media technologies to the human voice” (231).  Ong was also part of what McGurl calls “the reflexive return to orality” that began more or less in 1960 with Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales, which advanced the notion that Homer’s epics were oral compositions.

Orality has been clawing its way back.  Starting in the sixties, the emphasis in university writer’s workshops nationwide switched from “show don’t tell,” a formulation that predates New Criticism but that dovetailed with that school’s emphasis on mimimalism and irony and on its attention to craft, to “find your voice.”  (Under the guidance of New Critical tenets, however, the writers workshops swallowed up this newer mantra, too, taking the orality out of “voice” and changing the mantra’s essential meaning to something like “discover yourself, or at least your individuality, in your writing.”)

Ong’s ideas fit me.  He finds that in an important, theoretical sense, all of literature, and not just Homer’s epics, has a “primary oral and aural existence.”  A poem is not an object but “radically a cry, a sound emitted from the interior of a person, a modification of one’s exhalation of breath which retains the intimate connection with life which we find in breath itself . . .” (Barbarian 28)  (Ong’s argument should not be confused with any form of deconstructive criticism.  Indeed, far in advance of deconstruction’s heyday in the 1970’s and 80’s, Ong advanced arguments reiterated later by literary critic George Steiner and others that the parsing of sounds below a level recognizable to the speaker is not grist for meaningful literary criticism simply because such sound is not “heard” in any meaningful sense. “[I]t is fallacious to imagine that words are capable of being reduced to impulses,” Ong says (52). It occurred to me, reading Ong, that the New Critics brought deconstructive arguments upon themselves as the next logical step to their tenet that poems are objects.)

Ong positions words (and, consequently, poems and other literature) as both interior to the speaker and invitational to the hearer:

For, although, as Eliot justly maintains in [his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”], works of literature are “not the expression of personality but an escape from personality,” and in this are unlike ordinary dialogue, they are nevertheless not quite an escape to an object, a thing adequately conceivable, even analogously, in terms of surfaces and visual or tactile perceptions.  Works of literature consist in words, and, as we have suggested, words themselves retain in themselves ineluctably something of the interiority of their birth within that interior which is a person.  As cries, they go “out,” but they are not extensions of, or projections of interiority.  In this sense Camus’s and Sartre’s view of man as an interior exteriorizing itself is quite inadequate to the totality of the human situation.  We are more accurate if we keep our metaphors closer to the world of sound and think of speech and of works of literature as “amplifications” or, better, as intensifications of an interior.  All words projected from a speaker remain, as has been seen, somehow interior to him, being an invitation to another person, another interior, to share the speaker’s interior, and invitation to enter in, not to regard from the outside. (32)

That’s Ong’s basic formulation, stripped of its supporting arguments.

A couple of other schools of thought have also kept me from suffocating under New Criticism up to now, but neither of them has the potential reach that Ong does, I believe.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read Walter Pater and the so-called impressionist critics, but I admire Pater’s desire to turn his reactions to literature into more literature.  I’ve seen this idea picked up by a modern literary critic I mentioned earlier, George Steiner, in his book Real Presences.  Louise Rosenblatt, whose transactional theory of poetry is the second school I refer to, criticizes Pater for “charming us away” from the initial art that serves as the subject of his own art (Rosenblatt 132), but isn’t that the point?  Pater is simply reading like a writer, and there can be – and most often should be – a fine line between poetry and good literary criticism, I think.  Literary criticism that can’t admit that it goes beyond its subject is kidding itself.

Rosenblatt criticizes Pater in part because her project is to stay at the center of the reading experience, and in that project she resembles Ong.  She claims that a poem “must be thought of as an event in time.  It is not an object or an ideal entity” (12).  A poem is “an event in the life of a reader, as embodied in a process resulting from the confluence of reader and text” (16).  Rosenblatt applies to reading the transactional theory initially developed by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley in the 1890’s.  Transactional theory in psychology eschewed a stimulus-response model, noting that “the living organism selects from its environment the stimuli to which it will respond” (17).  For Rosenblatt, calling a poem a stimulus (or an object) and a reader a passive responder to that stimulus or object shortchanges the reader’s role in a poem.  Her book has helped me understand the levels of my involvement as a reader, and because her principal focus has always been on pedagogy, her book has put some theoretical backbone into my lit teaching.

But to pull off her transactional analysis, Rosenblatt makes a distinction between the text of the poem, which she sees as static, and the poem itself, which she sees as the event – the transaction between the reader and the text.  Ong, however, goes further.  He sees the text as in one sense dangerous, threatening to reverse the “objects as words” formulation he believes the pre-typography world was more sensitive to.  “In a sense every one of man’s works is a word,” Ong says (49), an internal expression, an external invitation to the speaker’s interior, and destined to perish, in an actual word’s case, “as soon as it has passed to the exterior.”

Understanding “words as objects” doesn’t just keep us from being better readers, as Rosenblatt asserts.  For Ong, it keeps us from ourselves and, thereby, others.

Here are other quotes from “Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self,” one of the essays in The Barbarian Within, all of which in one way or another help me begin to understand my own “cry” in my recent post (i.e., “I want you to read with me.  We’d feed off of each other’s reactions, but even that’s not enough, ultimately.  You have to read the book with my reactions and associations, and I have to read it with yours.  So you have to read it with me, maybe as me, and maybe me as you . . .”):

If we can conceive a thought within ourselves, it is the sort of thing that our fellows – the more perceptive ones, anyhow – can enter into.  If we can think it, others can, too.  (50)

Every human word implies not only the existence – at least in the imagination – of another to whom the word is uttered, but it also implies that the speaker has a kind of otherness within himself.  He participates in the other to whom he speaks, and it is this underlying participation which makes communication possible.  The human speaker can speak to the other precisely because he himself is not purely self, but is somehow also other.  His own ‘I’ is haunted by the shadow of a ‘thou’ which it itself casts and which it can never exorcize.  (52)

This other within must hear all, for he already knows all, and only if this other, this thou, hears, will I become comprehensible to myself.  (53)

Although the wearer of a wolf mask among primitives is not a wolf, he somehow really participates in wolf-ness.  In this situation, where the object-world is not clearly differentiated from the world of voice and person, belief has not the depth of meaning it enjoys in a civilized society, for the same reason that science itself has not: the two are confounded with each other, for the dialectic which sets them apart with some precision has not yet sufficiently progressed. . . . As the tension between visual and vocal grows [in theater over the ages], and with it the use of the truly dramatic character and the formalized separation of drama from life, there grows also, paradoxically, and awareness of the foundation in real human existence for dramatic character.  A character in a drama is a person set off, advertised as other.  Yet this state of being-set-off, this remoteness in the midst of intimacy, is found in real life, too, and experience of drama teaches us to recognize the fact. . . . The sense of being-set-off is not annihilated by intimacy.  Indeed it is heightened . . . For in assuring me of my closeness to your consciousness, this dialogue assures me also of the uniqueness of your consciousness and of its ultimate inviolability – of the fact that, naturally speaking, I can never know what it is to be you, can never share this ultimate experience of yourself with you.  (60 – 61)

. . . any utterance, even a scientific utterance, is the manifestation of a presence, which cannot be “grasped” as an “objective” of knowledge can be, but only invoked or evoked. . . . we know how difficult and unconvincing it is to apply the notion of “grasp” to a poetic work.  The notion can, of course, be applied to some extent.  We can speak of “grasping” Hamlet orThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Absalom, Absalom!  But to so speak is not very satisfactory, not convincing.  It seems much more real to speak of the response which these works evoke from us.  The “evocative” quality – which is to say, the “calling” quality – is paramount in a work of real literature.  Literature exists in a context of one presence calling to another.  (58 – 59)

Ong’s essay weaves these ideas with theories of why the “evocative quality” of the more detached writers, such as Joyce or Faulkner, is more poignant than that of Poe, who can’t achieve the “masklike detachment” of the former; what it means to read a poem; the role of criticism today; the intimacy of music; why poetry is “in one sense communication par excellence”; and why the “poetry of withdrawal” common in the twentieth century is a good thing.

º º º

All of that interests me.  The quotes bunched at the end of this post's last section make me understand what I've been feeling as a reader and as a writer, and they validate those feelings to a large extent.  But what really draws me to Ong is his central project – the reorientation of poetry and the rest of literature from object to voice.  It feels like my slow spiritual reorientation from Evangelical Christianity to a more Orthodox formulation.  The reorientation also suggests a strong connection between my current aesthetic impasse and my earlier, full-fledged identity crisis.

I think I’m approximately at the same space aesthetically as I am theologically.  The theological aspect of my identity crisis a dozen years ago parallels the aesthetic theory behind my current reading and writing impasse.  New Criticism represents, for me, a kind of fundamentalism that nurtured and directed my aesthetic pleasure in reading early in life.  But just as I discovered twelve years ago that my version of Evangelical Christianity was my chief mechanism for keeping me from myself, I am discovering that New Criticism is enforcing a kind of false separation between aesthetics (beauty) and intimacy in my reading and writing.   Understanding literature as voice might help me bridge that separation, and it might even help me resolve the conflict I feel between contemplation and writing.  Reading, writing, sex, contemplation – one looks for the one in the two and, finding it or something like it, becomes herself again, maybe for the first time again.

New Criticism’s emphasis on the autonomy and “object-ness” of literature, particularly its exegesis of literature without regard to historical or literary movements or to the writers’ biography, reminds me of Evangelical Christianity’s essential approach to the Bible.  (Cleanth Brooks would turn over in his grave at such an association: he used New Criticism’s tools to advance a high-church conception (i.e., irony and metaphor) of literature against a reformist conception (experience) associated with the Romanticists, as Harold Bloom has pointed out.)  Some critiques of both New Criticism and Evangelical Christianity point to the same historical forces that parented them: the Enlightenment and its philosophers (on the Evangelical side, see Nancey Murphy’s excellent, slow read, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism) as well as the Gutenberg press.

The 1960’s was a pivotal decade for both Evangelical Christianity and American criticism, and both pivoted from text to orality, or, more truly, from text alone to text tempered with orality.  In what McGurl calls a “reflexive return to orality,” the sixties generation implemented recording technology, experimental writing, and aspects of theater to emphasize a more immediate, intimate, and voice-oriented approach to literature.  At the same time, the Jesus Movement and the Charismatic Movement brought a more immediate, intimate, and spirit-oriented understanding of Christianity to Evangelical circles.  The Charismatic Movement’s emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit, particularly speaking in tongues and modern-day prophecy, is part of that movement’s commitment to orality and intimacy. (In the Bible, of course, “spirit” can also be translated as “breath,” which is a term Ong uses along with “cry” and “voice” to emphasize literature’s intimate and oral basis.)  Indeed, while Homeric scholars were beginning to debate how much of the Illiad was created during poets’ oral performances, Charismatic Christians were beginning to debate how much credence to give prophecy spoken during church services at which the gifts of the Spirit were manifested.

It is significant to me that both the literary and theological movements toward orality succeeded only in “balancing,” but not transforming, their respective fields.  On the literary front, college and high school writers workshops still maintained a New Criticism-certified “object” approach to literature with the same attention to craft; the experimental orality of the 1960’s served mostly to reemphasize sound in printed or electronically published poetry.  But it is still principally only the sound of the silent, written word.  With or without the writer’s care for sound and her implementation of sound devices, very little poetry is experienced orally today.  (There are signs of change today as there have been off and on since the 1950’s, however.)

On the theological front, much of Evangelical Christianity, including Charismatic churches, has absorbed the Charismatic movement with little change to dispensational theology prevalent since the nineteenth century.  Many Evangelical circles have dropped the dispensational formulation that “spiritual gifts passed away with the apostles,” but most have kept other dispensational notions, particularly eschatological and exegetic ones.  The movement has caused many Evangelicals to overemphasize a New Testament distinction between the two New Testament words for word, logos and rhema, but it hasn’t put much of a dent in fundamentalism’s literal (from the Latin for “letter,” a concept which Paul compares unfavorably with “Spirit”) approach to the Bible.

But the movements towards orality both in literature and in theology ultimately point to more than mere adjustments.  Various Orthodox theologians understand the Charismatic movement as something between God’s grace in the face of, on the one hand, and a culture’s severe reaction to, on the other, a Western Church that long ago separated mysticism from theology and relegated religious experience in large part to either saints or kooks.  The Orthodox Church still commits little of its theology to the formality of paper, preferring instead to house it in their liturgy and other practices – practices that are mostly oral in nature – that have existed for centuries.

And Ong, for his part and in the name of literature, concludes “Voice as Summons for Belief” in 1958 with the hope that “voice is in some ways regaining a prestige over sight, that we are at the end of the Gutenberg era.”

I hope so, too.  But if my own intellectual, personal, and spiritual struggles over the past dozen years are any indication, it may be just the beginning of the end.

I was born two weeks late, and people say I’ll be late for my own funeral.  In between, I prided myself on my success in asking professors for extensions on essay deadlines, and I still remember the total: ten extensions out of twelve requests.  I tried harder as a lawyer to be on time, but I was still late twice over the course of a fifteen-year career.  One time, the arresting officer wrote the wrong court hearing time on my client’s summons, and I walked into court to find that the judge had started the trial without me.  (Somehow we won the case, even though I missed half of the testimony.)  That incident wasn’t my fault, really, though the judge never knew that.

But on the morning of 01-21-85 (I still remember the date), I somehow forgot to look at my calendar.  I got a call from the judge’s secretary fifteen minutes after a hearing I had requested had started.  I walked nervously into federal court forty-five minutes later to find the judge, the other lawyers, my client, and several witnesses silently waiting for me.  I was found in contempt.

I was almost late again this week for another important matter.  We left my mother-in-law’s house in Columbia, Tennessee on Tuesday morning around eight o’clock, and I figured that we had plenty of time to get to my parents’ house in Tidewater, Virginia – the house I grew up in – by ten o’clock that evening to start a two-day visit.  But because of a tractor-trailer accident east of Nashville and my new route through Virginia’s mountains that had proven to be far curvier and slower than I had expected, we had gotten as far as only Danville by ten.  Victoria and the kids wanted to stop at a hotel for the night, but I . . . I couldn’t.

We got to my parent’s place at three o’clock Wednesday morning.  We slipped upstairs without disturbing my parents or their large dog.  Once everyone was settled, I tiptoed up the attic steps.

In Columbia Tennessee
last night at a certain point
my mother-in-law’s
neighbors stopped launching
fireworks and just threw
them up in the air
by their tails.

Stuff we can't even buy back
home.  They exploded too low
and their front lot rose like
a freight elevator to stardome.
The neighbors said “Shit!”
and “god . . . damn!”

and drank more beer. In time
a 'Cuda snarled and curled
around the cul-de-sac.
They kept it on for
bass and lit and tossed
more fireworks and
cigarettes.

We were still in green lawn
chairs and weren’t exactly
applauding anymore.  Clods
of low embers were slowly
blowing over my
mother-in-law's rancher.

But there was something
in the trees' dark arms or the
women’s indistinct swank
or just the sinuous
cisatlantic smoke

That made me want to take our
kids and yellow sparklers
and say hello.

The Internet is a boss place to find lesson plans.  While looking for ideas to sharpen my students’ critical reading skills recently, I came across a set of plans entitled, “Using Excerpts about Slavery.”  The plans employ excerpts from four different works: a history textbook serving Virginia students in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, a slave narrative, an Englishman’s travelogue, and a Frederick Douglass speech given in 1850.  According to the brief “Notes for the Teacher” that preface the material, the teacher should require students to consider and discuss the excerpts in small groups on successive class days, focusing on the excerpt’s credibility and engaging with a set of “Questions to Consider” that follow each excerpt.  It looked promising.

The notes begin with the lesson’s goal: “Students need to be cognizant that any historical account is one person’s truth. An author’s point of view is colored by his or her own experiences and belief system. Lack of direct experience can result in an author making assumptions that are not borne out. As an example, who but a slave could effectively understand the perspective of a slave or what the life of a slave was like?”

In order to judge the lesson’s utility for my own classroom, I read the first excerpt [ellipses original] and answered its questions:

Excerpt from Virginia: History, Government, Geography 
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964[1] 
“How Negroes Lived under Slavery,” pp. 368-376

A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes. . . The house servants became almost as much a part of the planter’s family circle as its white members. . . The Negroes were always present at family weddings. They were allowed to look on at dances and other entertainments . . . A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other. . . The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous.

Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked. . . But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.

1Textbook used in Virginia schools as late as 1972.

The “Questions to Consider” and my answers:

1.  How long after the Civil War was this written?

Not quite a century.

2.  Who do you think the authors were?  Could they have been former slaves?  Why or why not?

I think all three of the textbook’s authors were Virginians.  I don’t have any direct knowledge about two of them, but the third one was my aunt.

My aunt was not a former slave.  I presume from my answer to the first question that the other two authors were not former slaves, either.  Like a good judge, then, I could decide this question without reaching the merits of the authors’ race.  But I surmise that all of the authors, and not just my aunt, were white.  None of the former slaves in this country were white.

3.  How do you think they came up with their account of slavery?

My aunt would entertain us from a black-leather wing chair pierced with brass tacks in a small library lined on all four sides from floor to ceiling with books, mostly leather bound, standing muffled on shelves caged by glass panes.  The house was always clean and slightly musty, like my college’s rare books room I would discover years later, and it had no air conditioning, serviced as it was continually from before the War with a fairly dependable breeze from the tidal Rappahannock River, which was framed by the library’s only window.

My eldest niece would visit us at about the same time of life I first remember visiting my cousins on the Rappahannock, and when she was dishing out nicknames at a family dinner my somewhat loquacious father became “Grandfather Sit-in-Chair.”  Similarly, I can’t remember my aunt anywhere else but sitting erect at her chair’s edge – the back of her chair serving more as a reflection and an extension of herself than as a support – with her legs crossed and her index and middle fingers slowly incising a long cigarette that accentuated her small, slim build.  She’d waive the cigarette back in conversation, and sometimes throw her head back in laughter, but her posture always held firm and her elbow always seemed to hold the chair’s arm under subjection. Her smoke smelled like elegance and hazed the fading and cracked binding on the red and tan and black books behind her.

My father was a raconteur, but my aunt was more of a conversationalist.  She would turn her head from my parents to my siblings and me and ask us questions with a frankness that serves adults better than the sugary tone many of them employ with children.  Our answers would elicit a comment from her that would get the adults laughing, but we never felt ashamed or excluded.  We were happy to sit on the antique, Oriental carpet and play with the wooden toys she and my uncle favored for our cousins.  If my generation had been raised on my aunt instead of on Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin, it would have had a better inkling of what an interviewer and conversationalist could be.

The old house sits on a large tract of land down several country roads from my uncle’s law practice at the county seat.  After paying our respects to the adults for a suitable length of time, my two siblings and I would reacquaint ourselves with the antique-filled first floor, and then, with our cousins, we’d head outside.  At some point we’d always see Floe and Sammy.  Floe worked in the house and Sammy worked outside in the fields, helping with the garden and keeping things in repair.  I don’t remember ever seeing Floe and Sammy together, but my siblings and I liked both of them immensely.

One day, when my brother and I were both teenagers, we became conscious that our conversations with Floe always started and ended with the same subject: our growth.  My mother would take us through the narrow kitchen blocked entirely by Floe, who was either ironing or, more often, baking.  “Ummm-mmm!  My how you grown, child!  My how you grown!” Floe would say to us, wagging her face at us with a hand on her hip but sometimes just glancing at us out of the corner of her eye as she prodded the family’s dinner around on a skillet.

Sammy was also genial – a slim, middle-aged man whose gait pointed up his feet and knees and elbows – but our conversations with him were equally limited.  I remember only his responses to my aunt’s directives, remarks like, “Yessum, I’ll have that done by supper,” or “Yessum, over against the shed.”  My youngest cousin, a bit younger than my brother and I, would always address Sammy as “Sammy-boy,” picking the habit up, I guess, from my uncle, and it didn’t seem to bother Sammy, or my uncle, one bit.  I grew up addressing all adults by their title and surnames, but I never learned Sammy’s or Floe’s last names.  I don’t think I addressed them as anything.

Besides his responses to my aunt, I remember only Sammy’s laughter.  He’d laugh at most anything anyone said, laughing even when most people would have responded with words.  His good-natured laughter seemed as deep as an empty well.

When my brother and I were in our late teens, we speculated that the pay must have been pretty good for Floe and Sammy to act the way they did, and we suspected that they shed their roles with my cousins’ family when they were off duty.  But we didn’t know for sure.  We never really talked to them.  They didn’t seem to pay much attention to anything that animated us: news or politics or sports, for instance.  Looking back on it, I would have been surprised, I think, to have stumbled on Floe with her feet up, reading the newspaper at my aunt’s place, even though she lived there for a while, or to have seen Sammy in front of my relatives’ black-and-white TV.  In fact, I would have been shocked to have caught him in the house at all, now that I think of it.

To answer the question, I’m not exactly sure how my aunt came up with her account of slavery, but I know that she was a real historian and that she was certain of her facts.

4.  Do you believe the account is an accurate portrayal of slavery? Why or why not?

I first read this account in history class as a seventh-grader in the Newport News public school system.  It’s funny reading it now, word for word, because none of the wording surprises me but only bolsters my recollection of what I was taught.  I remember the general points from my textbook: the slaves were happy, happy to work hard, appreciative of their masters for taking the risk and the responsibility out of life – appreciative in a way children never are – and disdainful of the far-away, brooding political storm that centered on them in the abstract.

I don’t think I believed it or disbelieved it.  I remember wondering about it.  I remember trying to put myself in the slaves’ shoes for a little while in our all-white classroom at Riverside Elementary, not a half mile from the James River near its mouth.  My aunt’s words seem to paint a picture in my head of how the slaves could have enjoyed a simple life of labor under the beneficent hands of their masters.  But (I remember thinking) who would want to always do what someone else said? 

Maybe they were dumb, I remember reasoning.  Too dumb to survive on their own or too dumb not to know it was not much of a life.  We had two African-Americans among our four classrooms of seventh graders when I was there, a girl and a boy.  I wasn’t friends with either of them, but both were popular and seemed smart enough.  They seemed to act like white children, mostly, except for certain phrases they would use as well as a manner of speech that ran counter, in some critical respects, to what we were learning in English class.  I remember thinking how long it had been since the Civil War and wondering how much these two might have been like the slaves.

I thought about Martin Luther King, who was assassinated a year before my seventh grade, the Watts riots I saw on the news, and even the vandalism King’s assassination had occasioned in my hometown’s faraway downtown.  I thought two ways, and I had two pictures in my head – one of happy slaves and one of angry slaves.  I don’t remember either picture winning out.

I do recall reading my aunt’s textbook and concluding that slavery would not be a life that I would choose for myself.  But if the Negroes really liked it, I thought, more power to them.

5. The excerpt is from a book that was once used to teach children in Virginia about slavery. Why would a textbook want students of Virginia to believe slavery was a positive experience for slaves?

You may or may not learn your roots in history class, but you learn your place.

Book reviews are only about books.  I want to write reading reviews.  Could Twitter help?

I shoot long shots because I want to photograph a river one day.  Not the mouth without the source or the source alone but the whole meander and rush and sail.  I can’t crop worth a crap.

If Thomas Wolfe had been a photographer, he’d shoot like me.  He couldn’t bear to edit, you know.  He’d have forced his editor, Max Perkins, to learn Photoshop. 

People Twitter all kinds of stuff that unfolds – baseball games, political conventions, boat trips – and then, even when the event lies unfolded, people still go back and read the unfolding, if it were good enough – the unfolding, that is, not the event unfolded – though maybe seeing all of those Tweets in reverse chronological order – and why does what makes a river not enter it by its mouth?  Does a river just perpetually throw up? – makes the unfolded less than the unfolding, makes Twitter web pages not as good as getting Tweets piecemeal on Twitter clients.  (Twitter’s all about immediacy, right?)

But books unfold, or at least their plots do.  Books proper bristle open and thunk shut and sleep shut, really, but they don’t unfold like maps or trips or meetings or news stories or even newspapers.  Besides, how can I Twitter a book if I can read it anytime and anywhere?  Is a book an event if I have that much control?  Sitting on my porch and watching the morning unfold is more of an event than reading a book, perhaps.  (Though one may quite effectively Twitter a book, too.)

Can I Twitter the act of reading a book?  Even with all of the control we have over our reading, the experience of reading can sometimes feel more "eventful" than almost anything.  Here is some Twittering from my reading of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a book you should read because I’m your friend.  (If you must have a book review (and I do love book reviews, really), The New Yorker earlier this month published a great article on the program era that amounts to a review of McGurl’s book.)

(I’m not really going to do this on Twitter.  I don’t want the character limit.  I want just the immediacy.  Thomas Wolfe, remember?)

Page 147. O’Connor to her friend who pointed out how similar O’Connor and her character Hulga were to each other: “Now I understand that something of oneself gets through and often something that one is not conscious of.  Also to have sympathy for any character, you have to put a good deal of yourself in him.  But to say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration.  A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Those elements of the personality that don’t bear on the subject at hand are excluded.  Stories don’t lie when left to themselves.  Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you.  Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.”  “Stories don’t lie”: great sentence, but what does it mean?  (I lied.  I was going to type this Tweet for another reason, but then I got stuck on that sentence while I was typing it and forgot my initial reaction.  No real time – sorry.)

Page 147. “As a minor term in a dialectical binary, ‘self-expression’ lies in wait, ready to reassert itself not as a contributory feature of the literary work but as the end-point of it all.  It was already doing so in the Beat movement in the 1950s and would soon do so on an even larger scale in the progressive educational revival of the 1960s, which saw the emergence of the now ubiquitous pedagogical imperative to ‘find your voice.’”  Sin lieth at the door!

Page 146. O’Connor would agree with Cassill: “’The writer of an original story begins to shape his material by accepting an emotional commitment to it – very much as if he himself were the first character to appear in the story to be.’  This ‘scaffolding’ is then ‘totally replaced by structural elements of the story itself before the story is done.’”  Wolfe would disagree.

Page 146. “. . . however heavy the scare quotes we might wish to put around the relevant terms.”  So there’s a name for that: “scare quotes.”  “’Scare quotes.’”

Page 145.  This still isn’t real time.

Page 144. He doesn’t pretend to be above New Criticism or even over it yet.  I guess we’re all too freshly widowed to have healthy marriages.

Page 137. “As [O’Connor] put it in a panel discussion held at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia . . .”  What research!  Probably made his grad students do it all.

Page 137. “. . . is left to crumb the table . . .”  I love that verb.  When did crumb become a verb?  Too lazy to consult OED.

Page 137.  What was on page 136 that made me think of that?  Who cares.  Stay immediate.

Page 136.  I can’t talk about literature in social settings.  Names and books don’t come to mind.  Feelings, or the memory of feelings, do.  It’s like writing a poem at a party (though I admit I’ve never tried it).  That professor I had, the first day of class: “I am your enemy” to those of us who wanted a smattering of literature for the cocktail circuit.  What was his name?  Big beard.  He knew nothing about kids.  Just loved to hear himself talk.  Probably great at parties.  But, see, I can’t even come up with names, even of acquaintances I’ve known for years.  No wonder I hate parties.

Page 134-35.  What a great paragraph on O’Connor!  . . . . “’For the reading of literature ever to become a habit and a pleasure,’ she wrote, ‘it must first be a discipline.’  And ‘if the student finds that his is not to his taste?  Well, that is regrettable.  Most regrettable.  His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.’  For O’Connor, a devout Catholic who made something of a show of her obedience to the institutional authority of the Church, not only was religion understood as a kind of discipline, a willed acceptance of human ‘limitation’ before an Almighty God; but so was discipline itself a kind of religion, an article of faith arguably as basic to her thinking and writing as her specifically theological commitments.  Discipline meant obedience to rules, and rules were established and maintained by institutions; and to submit to the authority of these institutions, while painful, was also a source of great potential pleasure, aesthetic and otherwise.  Not that O’Connor’s sense of institutions was either monolithic or simplistic.  Seen in the light of her devotion to the church, the authority of worldly liberal institutions like universities was certainly questionable, and subject o her usually humorous derision.  And yet the habit of obedience to the one was obviously transportable, under the right conditions, to the other, where what Sarah Gordon has called her ‘obedient imagination’ could be cultivated as a specifically literary resource.”  She died at 39?  People lived full lives back then. (Also not real time: I’d love to say that to my charges: “Your taste should not be consulted.  It is being formed.”  Wouldn’t the principal love the phone calls!)

Page 133.  Brooks and Warren's Understanding Fiction “confirms how much the discipline of creative writing as we know it owes to the large-scale intrusion of practitioner-critics like Warren himself into the domain of literary scholars, beginning in the lat 1930s.  The New Criticism put the point of view of the artist at the very center of postwar literary studies . . .”  Unstinted praise for Warren!  Francine Prose may be hard on New Criticism, but she owes her Reading Like a Writer to them.

Page 122. My butt hurts.

Page 99.  DeVoto in 1936 on Wolfe’s work: “long, whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction, badly if not altogether unacceptably written, raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, grunts.”  And the reviews have gone downhill from there.  I’ll have to remember that, though: “words unabsorbed in the novel.”

Page 99.  Wolfe defends himself to Fitzgerald by pointing to Don Quxiote and Tristram Shandy.  To hell with “the aesthetic benefits of subtraction,” he says.  Meantime, Henry James’s “show don’t tell” evolves from 1930s forward into “a more general understanding of good fiction as founded on discipline, restraint, and the impersonal exercise of hard-won technique.”  Now you can’t say “show don’t tell.”  But I do.  To ninth graders, granted.

Pages 97-98.  So the guy who coined “writer’s workshop” was the real-life version of Professor Hatcher inOf Time and the River.  Who knew?

If I wrote you a book review or report, it would only foreshorten the book, creating waterfalls in the navigable, tidal river.  Besides, even if I wrote the best book review, it would only stand on its own, pour itself into only its own river, so – best case – I’m no longer reading with you when you read it.  I want you to read with me.  We’d feed off of each other’s reactions, but even that’s not enough, ultimately.  You have to read the book with my reactions and associations.  So you have to read it with me, maybe as me, or maybe in heaven one day.

Religion is affection, Jonathan Edwards wrote.  So is writing, I think.  All writing is travel writing.  Henri Nouwen (Bread for the Journey) writes about the traveler’s affection:

Traveling – seeing new sights, hearing new music, and meeting new people – is exciting and exhilarating.  But when we have no home to return to where someone will ask us, “How was your trip?” we might be less eager to go.  Traveling is joyful when we travel with the eyes and ears of those who love us, who want to see our slides and hear our stories.

This is what life is about.  It is being sent on a trip by a loving God, who is waiting at home for our return and is eager to watch the slides we took and hear about the friends we made.  When we travel with the eyes and ears of the God who sent us, we will see wonderful sights, hear wonderful sounds, meet wonderful people . . . and be happy to return home.

The only writing genre is the postcard.  There’s something both kind and callous about sending one.  All writing may rise and foreshorten to “Having a great time; wish you were here.” I want you here and not just here but behind my eyes to see what I think and know and feel, we have to share the eyes so at least tell me what you see, the binoculars’ timer sounds inexorable as a stream there’s only thirteen seconds left on my last quarter I dropped into the binoculars before we go dark

Writing and reading sometimes seem as necessary and as insufficient – and as loving and lonely – as life.

(The photos are from our recent hike on Mount Weather.)

This morning, the morning after Virginians finished learning who would compete in this fall’s gubernatorial general election, the Washington Post declared that the election “is expected to drawintense national attention.”  Can the Democratic Party keep its victory streak in statewide office alive in this center-right state? the article asks.

But Virginia’s gubernatorial election always draws national attention, just as New Jersey’s does.  I just found a column in the October 21, 2005 Washington Post entitled, “Why Many Eyes Are on the Virginia Race.”  This is why pundits outside of Virginia and New Jersey always see national implications in those states’ gubernatorial races:

1. Virginia and New Jersey are the only states to elect their governors the year after a presidential election.  A lot of pundits outside of those states interpret the election results as the first referenda on the current, ten-month-old national administration.
2. Politicians are interested in what issues and tactics may or may not work in the changed political environment resulting from a new presidential term.  Successful issues or tactics could carry over into the following year’s off-year congressional elections.
3. There’s no competition – no other statewide election of any kind for political junkies to follow the year after a presidential election when they are fighting withdrawal symptoms.

The last Democrat and the last Republican to be elected governor while his party occupied the White House was Mills Godwin.  He won as a Democrat in 1965 and as a Republican in 1973.  (Godwin was the embodiment of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy: a conservative Democrat who switched to the Republican Party when he had not changed, he said, but his party had become too liberal.)  To put it another way, the party occupying the White House has lost in each of the last eight Virginia gubernatorial elections.

I do think the presidential election acts as mild vaccine on Virginians the following year.  There’s an unspoken need for Richmond to feel distant from Washington, which is, after all, just two hours north of Richmond, that may assert itself every four years, and having the governor’s mansion and the White House in the hands of different parties may help satisfy Virginians’ desire for a kind of divided government.  Maybe Virginians also have a smoldering desire for these nearby capitals to be at odds, as they were when Richmond, like Washington, was the capital of a union of states.

Whatever the reason for Virginia’s streak, it could fall this year.  A kind of political miracle happened yesterday: a state senator in third and last place in two statewide polls a month or so before the Democratic primary beat his opponents by a 50% to 26% to 24% margin.  Sure, it’s hard to accurately poll in gubernatorial primaries when the vast majority of people don’t vote and most of the ones that do don’t decide on whom they’re voting for until shortly before the election.  But Virginians apparently took a second look at R. Creigh Deeds just in time. (Creigh is pronounced like the “cre” in “credence.”  I’ve never heard of the name before, but it sounds vaguely preppy.)  (The first look Virginia had at Deeds was against Bob McDonnell, the Republican gubernatorial nominee Deeds will face this November, when Deeds lost to McDonnell by around 700 votes in Virginia’s attorney general’s race four years ago.)

Thanks to the Washington Post’s well-timed endorsement, Northern Virginia voters were reminded that Deeds risked alienating his Western Virginian constituency by advocating and voting for higher taxes to fund Northern Virginia roads.  He also benefited for his opponents’ perception that they had more to fear from each other than from Deeds.  They spent a great deal of energy attacking each other, and with some success.

It was also a matter of (with apologies to the Anglican liturgy) thoughts, words, and Deeds.  Terry McCauliffe, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman last year and the former Democratic National Party Chairman during the Bush II years, emphasized his innovative ideas for raising money to fix Virginia’s transportation and educational systems (e.g., McCauliffe proposed commercializing patents generated by Virginia’s public universities as a way to restore some of the income stripped from them during Republican gubernatorial administrations).  McCauliffe is widely seen in Virginia as a carpetbagger, a term carrying far stronger negative connotations in Virginia than in New York, the adopted state of his former employer.  Employing his national fundraising prowess, McCauliffe heavily outspent his opponents.

Brian J. Moran is a fourteen-year veteran of Virginia’s House of Delegates and a brother of Jim Moran, the Northern Virginia Congressman.  He received the most endorsements and the kindest words from the Democratic establishment.  But he tacked left on a few issues during the campaign, and many Democrats perceived it as pandering.

Deeds sort of grows on Virginians, I think.  He’s from rural Bath County.  When he says he’s not Governor Kaine’s intellectual equal, people tend to believe him.  His most common mannerism seems to be opening his mouth wide, shaking his head from side to side, and waiting for the next words to form themselves from somewhere deep down his esophagus. He’s not much of a speechmaker, but he’s a good debater and pretty good with a sound bite.  He also happens to have seventeen years’ experience in the state legislature where he has built a reputation as an effective legislator, a high-road campaigner, a hard worker, and – this is quite unusual – someone who puts the concept of the state over the concept of his region of the state.

Deeds isn’t Obama, which is a good thing.  Virginians broke another streak last year – voting Democratic in a presidential election for the first time since 1964 – but they want someone authentic.  Deeds seems to be himself, and Virginians – at least the ones who voted yesterday – seem to have discovered that.  His reputation is also way too centrist to ever be tagged generally as “out of touch with Virginia,” a winning mantra for Republicans in the past.  The Democrats elected the only one of their three candidates who I think could beat McDonnell and break the White House’s losing streak dating back to the year Jimmy Carter was inaugurated president.

I have never swum the waters above the heavens.
I have never sailed the waters above the heavens.
I have never drunk the waters above the heavens.

God created the heavens for the waters:
the heavens divide the waters and the waters.

The earth drank the waters below the heavens
and never looked back, or up.

The psalmist sang to the waters above the heavens,
sang for them to praise the Lord.

Galileo looked up but did not see the waters
above the heavens, for he did not look for the waters

above the heavens the way
Ponce de León had looked for the waters:

the latter sailed the waters below the heavens,
the waters that divide the dry land.

I have not so much as tossed a stone
across the waters above the heavens.

I’ve eaten several slices of a large, five-to-eight-topping pizza every other Friday night or so for the past several years. Regular, “hand-tossed” crust, too – not thin crust.  Some meals I eat the whole pizza.  It’s part of this Bill Phillips Body for Life diet I’ve been on for eight years now: you get to pig out once a week.  My version of Mr. Phillips’s diet plan has managed to disgust everyone I love, and what little I’ve related here is probably enough to disgust you.

But it gives me some credibility as an expert on what to do with all that pizza crust.  I’ve tried the brackish stuff that comes with some delivered pizza or gets served with bread at many suburban restaurants.  I’ve tried vinegary, store-bought dipping sauces, too, but nobody gets it right.  For the last three years or so, I’ve been experimenting each fortnight with olive oil and lots of spices, and I’m happy enough with my current concoction to release it here:

Two parts ground black pepper
Two parts dried oregano leaves
One part cumin
One part chili power
One part garlic powder
However much unfiltered, extra virgin olive oil you’d like to dilute the spices in

Eat a slice of pizza, and then stir the ingredients with the slice’s outer crust.  Bite the moistened end, and stir the ingredients again with the remaining crust.

This sadness feels Medieval,
locked in ice and dusk

-- Lisa Russ Sparr, “Penance I”

Rounding the century and having bested the last eighty years’ most malignant forms of government – fascism and communism – Western liberalism had only to fear problems stemming from the economic success its political success had fostered: pollution, global warming, and something about the computers all shutting down at the century’s stroke of midnight.  All of these problems stemmed from our not thinking about the future, the last of them – a failure to write computer script that would recognize years beginning with 20 instead of 19 – being perhaps the perfect analogy for our lack of forward thinking.

Nine months into the new century’s term, we realized what must have lurked in our collective subconscious all along – that we had rounded not only a century but also a millennium, and that our biggest contribution to our biggest problem was not a failure to look forward as much as it was a failure to look backward.  Our political response to radical Islam, we decided, must be rooted in something more millennial and seminal than the liberal notions that gave birth to our young governments.  Everything became negotiable to meet a new, ancient threat.

President Bush’s speech to an emergency joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001 seemed both eloquent as well as terribly naïve and misleading.  Within two minutes of beginning his speech, he claimed that terrorists attacked us because “they hate our freedoms.”  What could a movement based on a fundamentalist view of Islam care one way or another about modern Western political thought?  Surely the terrorists didn’t strike to take away political freedoms.

The nation seemed reassured, however, in the months following the speech as Bush’s War on Terror began to cross policy lines America had never crossed before, most notably in instituting a “preemptive war” and in torturing prisoners of war.  This is how one must respond to an ancient struggle employing twenty-first-century terror, we reasoned.  Our democracies are at once too new to comprehend the philosophical and religious underpinnings of radical Islam and too slow – too mired in slow notions like “due process” – to respond to new biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.

Writing in the street-level shadow of 9/11, Paul Berman contradicts all of this.  Radical Islam has less to do with the ancient struggle between Islam and Western Christianity as it does with twentieth-century totalitarianism that we never really defeated in the first place.  Islamic terrorism is not a combination of ideology that predates liberalism and a method of warfare that postdates it – a combination that would blow us away from ourselves and make us search for solutions that have nothing to do with liberalism, such as torture.

Berman’s 2003 book Terror and Liberalism examines the writings of radical Islam’s greatest and most influential thinkers, particularly Sayyid Qutb and his younger brother Muhammad – the latter a professor of Islamic studies who taught Osama bin Laden – and describes their similarities with the philosophies supporting the one-party states of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  The aesthetics of terror, the ideal of submission, the aggrandizement of suicide, the myth of racial or religious purity and Armageddon, the uniqueness of parochial interests, the divinity or near divinity of the strongman ruler expressed through his accepted madness, the cult of death, and the extreme and oft-expressed hatred of liberalism’s freedoms – all of these intellectual symptoms are as present in radical Islam as they were in Mussolini’s fascism or in Stalin’s communism, Berman argues.  Islamic terrorism has more to do with eighteenth century Romanticism than it does with a literal interpretation of Koranic passages.

An effective Western response, then, is not out of reach.  Radical Islam is no less modern than we are.  But we have to understand the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy more than we do of radical Islam to have a chance.  Implicit in Berman’s book is the notion that our failure to understand our enemy points to the less obvious and more dangerous failure to understand ourselves.  Berman does a fair job of this, comparing the historical and philosophical differences between American European liberalism.  His examination of liberal democracy is not nearly as detailed as his examination of fundamentalist Islam, however, and that is disappointing.

Berman is no pacifist, and he cites the Gettysburg Address in his book in support of his notion that liberal democracy must have a universal appeal and must be militant at times, as well as true to its values, to survive.  Berman is a chief philosopher of the liberal hawks, most of whom supported Bush’s 1993 invasion of Iraq, though Berman doesn’t address the relative merits of that invasion in his book.

Bush was right to describe the 9/11 terrorists as “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” Berman argues, and Bush was right in certain other particulars, most notably in championing women’s rights in Afghanistan in the months following our attack on that country.  Berman establishes, however, that most of Bush’s actions in the “war of ideas” were pathetic, and he demonstrates that Bush was wrong, of course, to surrender the very ideals he said we were fighting for by adopting torture.

But what is liberal democracy?  And until we understand who we are, how can we trust our government to fight effectively and in accordance with whatever set of ideals we claim to possess?  In the resurfacing debate about torture that led to yesterday’s dueling speeches by President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, Berman’s book is important.

1

All thought
is two
dimensional.
Like so.

2

All non
parallel
lines will
someday
intersect
someday
some sweet,
sweet day

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent suggestion that Texas might feel obligated to secede from the Union over President Obama’s proposed tax plan brought the Civil War back to many Americans’ minds.  Seeming to confuse his wars, though, the governor made his remarks at the Austin version of a “tea party” rally, one of a series of “Taxed Enough Already” rallies popularized by Fox News and held on this year’s Tax Day.  (Hendrick Hertzberg has a great satire in this week’s New Yorker on Perry’s remarks, by the way.)

The governor broached secession by incorrectly stating that the “deal” admitting Texas to the Union in 1845 included a right to secede.  He then went on to say:

My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pays attention.  We’ve got a great Union.  There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it.  But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what might come of that.

The tax plan that serves as the ostensible reason for Texas’s second secession would, starting two years from now, increase the top marginal tax rate for those making over a quarter million dollars a year from 35 to 39.6 percent.  The proposal also would decrease income taxes for Texans making under that amount, but the proposed tax cut didn’t get much play at the Austin rally.

Texas last seceded from the Union on March 4, 1861, the day Lincoln was first inaugurated.  The immediate cause of the Southern states’ secession was the election of the nation’s first “Black Republican” president, and based on exit polls showing Southern white males voting disproportionately against Obama this past fall, I wonder if the election of the nation’s first African-American president had anything to do with the governor’s thinly veiled threat.

Texas is a special case, I suppose, having being a sovereign nation for a decade preceding its admission into the Union.  According to the Hertzberg article, a recent poll shows that a third of Texans support secession, and without researching it, I suppose that the current percentage does not reflect a great increase in that sentiment since Obama’s election or his proposed tax cut.

Still, the concept of secession should be troubling to Americans, not just from a political point of view but also from a philosophical one.  Simply put, the argument in favor of a right to secede is the argument against a right to revolt, and the right of revolution – a right we must hold to now as much as we did in 1776 – is a basis of our political liberty.

The political problem with secession is simple.  If a state can secede instead of submit to the lawfully exercised will of the country’s majority, then majority rule is defeated and, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” will have perished from the earth.  A state claiming a right to secede permits by its example any political subdivision thereof to follow course, and the result will necessarily be, as Lincoln pointed out during his first inaugural address, either anarchy or despotism in the long run:

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Secession, then, doesn’t work well a practical political doctrine.

Worse than the dysfunction inherent in secession, however, are its counterrevolutionary implications.  John C. Calhoun, the chief philosopher of secession, made the case for secession by discovering “state rights” in place of the individual rights, including the right of revolution, that were of utmost importance to the Founders.  As Harry Jaffa puts it in A New Birth of Freedom, “It was Calhoun’s writings . . . that transformed the question of individual and minority rights into the question of state rights” (281).

Calhoun’s attack on individual rights started with his attack on the Declaration of Independence’s ideals and on Locke’s ideas expressed in his Second Treatise that forms the basis for the “all men are created equal” in the Declaration and the basis for similar language in eight American colonies’ prolegomena to their Revolutionary-era constitutions.  Calhoun discounted Locke’s “all men in the state of nature are free and equal,” claiming that man, being a social animal, “cannot exist in such a state.”  Calhoun disagreed with Locke – and, indeed, with Aristotle – by recognizing no prepolitical state for humankind (Jaffa 410).

Calhoun’s choice, of course, was to view Locke’s “state of nature” from an anthropological standpoint, while the Founders, Locke, and Locke’s antecedents referred to man’s “state of nature” from an ontological standpoint.  Calhoun, then, did not believe that man entered into society by a voluntary association but by necessity.  The individual therefore has no rights that attach to her at birth, Calhoun believed:

Instead then of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances.  Instead then of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won – and when won, the most difficult to be preserved.

As Jaffa puts it, “In [Calhoun’s] final analysis, whatever men lack in power, they lack in right” (418).

In his excellent introduction to Political Writings of John Locke, David Wootton points out that three political philosophers covered the gamut of arguments in favor of the Whig position just prior to the English Civil War.  James Tyrrel asserted that the king’s subjects might have to rebel, “but only, he believed, to defend the principles of the established constitution.”  Algernon Sydney argued the republican position that ancient Rome, Machiavelli, and Venice’s constitution were the best models of government in place of what was threatening to become an absolute monarchy.  And Locke asserted a set of inalienable rights that have become the foundation of liberalism (14 – 15).

The Declaration of Independence, of course, deliberately echoed sentiments current a century prior to it during the English Civil War in order to best assert its case against the crown and Parliament.  In writing the Declaration and the state constitutions asserting independence, the colonists were able to choose from the English constitutional theory of Tyrrel, the republican theory of Sidney, and the liberal theory of Locke.  They all deliberately sided with Locke, asserting his famous proscription against taxation without representation, and they avowed his theory of a right of revolution against the English king.

Calhoun did not believe in a right of revolution, however.  According to Calhoun, because people have no inalienable rights, people have no right to revolt.

In a sense, since 1800 we exercise an institutionalized right of revolution every time we participate in an election.  The election of 1800 – our fourth presidential election – was the first régime change in world history accomplished by a ballot.  It came two years after Jefferson threatened a revolution through the Kentucky Resolutions.  “One might even say that the victory of the Republicans in the election of 1800 came about because of the [revolutionary] threats implied in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,” Jaffa opines (416).

Jefferson believed that “the right of revolution, and the threat to exercise that right, had throughout history been the only recourse of the people against the evils of tyranny,” according to Jaffa.  The treat of revolution still functions today – a threat not subsumed by our record of peaceful elections – should even a democratically elected government act against the safety of its people.  Calhoun would disagree – ironically, since the supporters of secession in Lincoln’s time tried to take the moral high ground by fashioning themselves as the defenders of minority rights against an oppressive majority.  Instead, they were, wittingly or unwittingly, the defenders of a brand of states rights that nullified individual rights, including the right to revolt.

Calhoun’s refusal to recognize individual rights apart from the state, including a right to revolt, led to his assertion of a state’s right to secede.  Calhoun developed a theory of “concurrent majority” under which any interested minority had a veto over the federal government’s action (Jaffa 432).  Significantly, the position that would lead to the veto would be based not on reason, which Locke and the Founders believed all men had access to, but on the narrow, mutual interests of the minorities involved.  Just as Calhoun looked to Rousseau’s more anthropological notion of the state of nature to counter Locke’s ontological version, Calhoun seemed to reach for Rousseau’s version of the will in the development of his concurrent majority theory:

Except upon prudential grounds, the governed may not consent to what is intrinsically unjust, as Lincoln argued against Douglas.  The reconciliation of conflicting interests must ultimately proceed from a conception of right that is independent of the interests themselves.  But Rousseau introduced into political philosophy the idea that political justice is to be found in the form of the will, rather than in the reason that informs the will.  More than anyone else, Rousseau is Calhoun’s intellectual progenitor. (432)

Under Calhoun's theory, because no univerally recognized rights would be involved in a secession threat, and because reason (Locke's law of nature) is not appealed to, the minority could have its way against the majority over relatively trivial matters.

Governor Perry’s opposition to Obama’s tax plan, for instance, seems to be based on interest – the interest of those making more than a quarter million dollars a year – and not on reason.  (Opponents of Obama's plan could rightfully make a smilar assertion against the plan, too, of course.)  Interests may help legislators craft an alliance to pass a law, but interest alone was never intended to serve as grounds for revolution.  (The Founders never envisioned secession under any circumstances.  Unlike Calhoun, who believed the Union began by contract in the form of the states' ratification of the Constitution, the Founders believed that the Union preceded the Constitution.  "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . ." (emphasis mine).) (Calhoun faced another hurdle in the Constitution's preamble, which doesn't begin, "We the States . . .)

Calhoun’s exclusive reliance on positive law reminds me of denominations that rely exclusively on positive theology.  Without linking positive theology with a healthy, existential understanding of God through a “negative theology” – perhaps a more mystical approach to God – positive theology tends to separate us from God and from ourselves.  Similarly, Calhoun believed that people were in no sense human without government and had no rights outside of it:

In Calhoun, there is no doctrine of individual rights apart from the positive law of any given community.  He does not recognize any criterion outside the political process to which men can appeal to justify rebellion against tyranny. (Jaffa 418)

For Calhoun, man was made for the state, just as Jesus’ Pharisees believed that man was made for the Sabbath, and not the other way around.

This is the chief problem I have with most jurists who rely almost exclusively on what they call the framers’ “original intent” in interpreting the Constitution, particularly those jurists who see their support for “states rights” as a corollary to the support of that intent.  Lincoln and his Republicans were willing to enforce the letter of the Constitution, even to the extent of supporting slavery in the original states and enforcing the return of fugitive slaves, but “they insisted . . . upon a distinction between the Constitution’s compromises and its principles” (Jaffa 90).  Former Chief Justice Rehnquist, on the other hand, refused to recognize any principles antecedent to positive law.  “Rehnquist’s ‘original intent’ has less in common with the intent of those who ratified the Constitution than with the intent of those who ‘de-ratified’ it in 1860 – 61” (87).

Calhoun’s refusal to recognize natural rights was influenced, of course, by his philosophy that recognized slavery as a “positive good.”  Any recognized inalienable rights would attach to slaves just as they would to other South Carolinians.  Locke understood that his natural rights philosophy, if adopted, would spell the end of slavery, and Calhoun understood that, too.  For Calhoun to deny inalienable rights to slaves, then, he had to deny them to everyone.  And his twisted logic is still all that supports a state’s claimed right to secede from the Union today.

Calhoun’s first written support of states rights against the Union came in 1828 when, as the United States’ vice president, he anonymously authored South Carolina’s “Exposition and Protest” during the nullification crisis (Jaffa 278).  In doing so, Calhoun saw Jefferson as his model, since Jefferson had anonymously drafted the Kentucky Resolutions while he was vice president thirty years earlier (522).  Jefferson was not supporting a state’s right to secede based on positive law, however, but a people’s right to revolt based on natural law.

Governor Perry seems similarly confused.  By reintroducing a state’s right to secede during a protest modeled on the Boston Tea Party – a famous precursor to the American Revolution – Perry has indeed confused his wars.  Let Perry endorse revolution instead of secession.  Let’s see what he’s got.

One day my fiscal year may start on May One.

Maybe that day will be May One.

On May One, harden not your hearts, as the Scripture hath said, while it is still called “May One.”

I have reels of tanks rolling down Moscow streets on May One.

One year, one day, on May One, snow fell in Reston woods on May One.

We need a president who will be ready on May One.

There is no yesterday or tomorrow; we have only May One.

“Can one lift her food with her fork in her left hand? After she cuts her meat? If all at the table know that she’s left-handed?”  “‘May one?’”

Our sinistral president signs bills on May One.

“One day” may be May One.

“Okay: ‘May One?’”

Tonight is the first night the temperature wants to stay above sixty.  It’s 2 A.M and my window’s still open.  I had forgotten at least one smell of summer – the smell of a somewhat musty, steel-mesh screen.  I didn’t think of it all winter, but it came back like the birds.

No June bugs are slapping themselves against the screen yet, and I hear no frogs or crickets.  They’re coming, I’m sure.  And the moths, too; I’m looking forward to the moths.  They flit from grass like soot from a chimney, I recall.  It will remind me of cold weather.  I want to see that again.

I have no reason to think I won’t.  I’m glad I’m here, though, and I might as well say it.  I’m looking forward to those moths.

The guy with the plunger walked into the Rotunda before us.  Did Jefferson design the Rotunda with plumbing, I wondered, or was the plunger a kind of mace with a stylized Rotunda at one end and the groundsman (as they call them here) some officiant of a secret rite performed in Virginia’s most hallowed hall?

The first paragraph of the Rotunda’s web page describes Jefferson’s vision of an “academical village,” emphasizing a life of interactions among professors and students and the credo that “learning is a lifelong and shared process.”  The Rotunda is one of two bookends of the Lawn, which is otherwise lined with Jefferson’s student housing, rows of dorms punctuated by classical-styled, brick pavilions in which the professors live.  As the university got older, though, it grew away from Jefferson's student-professor housing model.  Its student housing today is much like that of other universities.  I never saw a professor near student housing when I went here.

The plunger seemed to focus me.  I was on the lookout for the Rotunda’s bathrooms and found them to be the size of powder rooms and tucked, like so many of the building’s utilitarian functions, between the oval or circular rooms and the rectangular exteriors on the north and south porticos.  What are the curved rooms for?  Jefferson used them as classrooms, but one oval room is now a museum exhibit, one is a meeting room for the university’s board of visitors, and the circular room on the top floor under the dome is a multi-function room surrounded by short spokes of bookshelves that create an outer rim of alcoves for students looking for a bright, quiet place to study between classes.

The Rotunda’s curves brought to mind Calypso’s “smooth cave,” the suggestive shorthand Odysseus employed for his seven years with “that loveliest of goddesses.”  After seven years of higher education and another quarter century of life, I still find college seductive.  Could one go back, or do the years make it both compelling and impossible?  Could Odysseus have returned to Calypso’s island – I mean, beyond some kind of reunion weekend?  Would Penelope have heard of such a retelling?

It was everybody’s spring break and I saw them everywhere, the parents and the high school juniors, on tours and in restaurants and hotels and in the reflective doors of closing elevators: mirror images of Bethany and me, the students stopping on one floor and the parents averting their eyes as the doors slid to again.

Bethany and I crossed the university’s main drag from the Rotunda to Alderman Library so Bethany could see what was holy to me.  The stacks in the library’s rear are half-floors of books, dust, and and carrels where I spent hours most weeks studying and snoozing as an undergrad.  We walked down the narrow, submarine-worthy stairwell to my favorite haunt, floor 3M, institutional green and just as musty as I had last left it some long-ago spring.  I remember feeling hidden, not so much by the stacks’ relative seclusion as by its half floors and the associated idea that no one would make his way down those stairwells unless he needed some obscure volume of Italian or Russian literature.  It was my favorite spot on Grounds.

We spend our lives between things, and the between-ness carries the loneliness we claim.  A dear friend sent me an email this morning asking me for guidance.  His recent birthday brought him squarely by middle age, and he’s feeling some of the same anguish he remembers me going through at that floor of life.  I told him how something in me would like to go back to my identity crisis – the comfort, the new vistas . . .

Bethany wants to pursue her art in college, and she took part in a sculpture class at Virginia’s new studio art building just before we visited the Rotunda.  We left Charlottesville for Richmond that night and visited Virginia Commonwealth University, home of the nation’s premier sculpture program, the next day.

Unlike U.Va., VCU is all angles and retrofit; its campus is a mostly a hodgepodge of buildings reclaimed from Richmond’s rundown downtown.  No former president-slash-amateur architect planned the place, but the campus’s energy is palpable.  Bethany and I ended our art program tour at VCU’s Fine Arts Building, a sprawling, aircraft carrier-sized rectangle on the north end of one of the university’s two main campuses.  We fell behind the other parents and prospective students because we wanted to see what was going on in every studio.  I’m glad we did.

“And, do you know, they accepted me?”  Her voice caught.  She seemed close to tears with gratitude though she had been in the program a full seven months by the time Bethany and I met her, a woman about my age who was painting a picture of a jagged city skyline.  She stood out to us as soon as we entered the studio.  It could have been her age – she and I were the oldest people in the room, by far – but I think it was her spirit.

She put down her brush and recounted her story.  Her children had recently graduated from college, and she and her husband felt free to pursue lifelong dreams.  Her husband was busy with a new career, and she had returned to school.

“This is such a holy place,” she confided, her voice catching again.

Via Negativa published my article on teaching diction and syntax with Twitter earlier this week.

The Washington Post, my local paper, recently folded its business section into its national news section, eliminated its separate book section and relocated what remains of its book features into its style section, and, worst of all, reduced its comic pages from three to two.  The Post isn’t alone in downsizing, of course.  Some of my favorite magazines arrive at my mailbox looking like waifs from lack of advertising, and many of their operations have reduced their staff and features.

It’s no different here.  To weather the recession, I just eliminated the slow reads digest – that ezine I’ve collected email addresses for on these pages for years – and I gave the pink slip to Google’s Friend Connect.  I’ve also put off my annual spring, site-wide redesign and expansion until further notice.

I did add a new category, “church & state,” and I renamed another category.  “Reviews” are now “books” because my written interactions with books rarely resemble reviews anymore.

B, Warren, and I walked along the Virginia side of the Potomac a few miles above the falls yesterday.  The sun was out, and the temperature rose to fifty-five or so.  The path got muddier and windier as we walked along, and pretty soon we were past where the other strollers would turn around.

We came to a narrow inlet that was still largely covered with ice.  Warren lamented that there were no stones around; he loves skimming stones, and so do I.  We continued up the inlet and came across thousands of hand-sized stones, many of them excellent for skimming.

We skimmed stones for a long time.  We also threw the larger and rounder stones way up into the air and watched and listened to them hit the ice at various thicknesses. After B finished seeing and holding a lot of trees and rocks, she skimmed stones with us.

It seems like a long time since we’ve explored together.  I sit around so much, reading and writing, working.  I had forgotten how many of my dreams involve traveling and exploring by myself or with friends.

“But you won’t believe this” – here Fr. Dioscuros lowered his voice to a whisper.  “You won’t believe this, but we had some visitors from Europe two years ago – Christians, some sort of Protestants – who said they didn’t believe in the power of relics!”

The monk stroked his beard, wide-eyed with disbelief.  “No,” he continued.  “I’m not joking.  I had to take the Protestants aside and explain that we believe that St. Anthony and all the fathers have not died, that they live with us, continually protecting us and looking after us.  When they are needed – when we go to their graves and pray to their relics – they appear and sort out our problems.”

“Can the monks see them?”

“Who, Protestants?”

-- William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (page 406)

But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

-- Jesus (Matthew 22:31-32)

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I have limited the dead.  My communion of saints has been a communion of only those now living – a more immediate communion consistent with a world and a religion that lasts no longer than a generation.  My old world view is as much to say that Jesus was born in 1948, died and rose again in 1981, and will come again before this generation passes away.

And what if he doesn’t?  What if another generation comes instead?

In the Torah, God had Israel pile stones and observe festivals in order to remember.  Future generations – the Torah’s readers – were consulted on the spot, seemingly, concerning how the event in question would benefit them and how they would best be informed and reminded of the event.  The Torah reads, for instance, as if no one would escape Egypt until God finished explaining to Moses how the Israelites would celebrate Passover in the Promised Land.

The New Testament isn’t like that, at least in the early years.  When I was young, a good friend of mine just about flunked out of school, waiting for the Savior’s soon return.   What was the point of an education if the world is about to end?

The Early Church I’ve lived in was so early that angels had to remind us, as they reminded Jesus’ disciples at his ascension, to stop staring into heaven.  That’s early enough that the New Testament’s biggest memorial – the Lord’s Supper – was still an agape feast, and any attempt we made during the Charismatic movement to participate in a sacrament seemed awkward and overly formal – “quenching the Spirit,” I believe we said.  Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?

One way of living in the Primitive Church is to despise every seeming compromise that a subsequent generational cycle began to require of Christianity.  In this way of living, one makes everything consistent with how one reads about the first generation: denominations become Pharasees and the feds become the Romans, for instance.  There is little need for memorials, for mysticism, or for the dead.

But even before the New Testament generation died away – even before most of the New Testament’s books were written – memorials began.  In his book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Albert Schweitzer summarizes how the Eucharist changed over the course of Christianity’s first generation to incorporate new meaning from Jesus’ mysterious sayings surrounding it:

Once the necessary intensity of eschatological expectation had died down, and the view of the “Lord’s Meal” as a thanksgiving-meal which looked forward to an early reunion with Christ at the Messianic feast had consequently become untenable, the Meal at once ceased to be a real meal, and the food and drink ceased to be thought of as consecrated to be holy food by the thanksgiving and petition of the coming Kingdom and the return of Christ.  As the original meaning faded, the new meaning arrived at by going back to Jesus’ sayings about the bread and wine found its way in – namely that the bread and wine were . . . in some sense the flesh and blood of Christ.  This substitution of the new for the old came about as something self-evident, since Jesus’ mysterious sayings at the historic celebration were generally known from the Gospels, since Paul had already made use of them in interpreting the church’s “Lord’s Meal,” and since the old Thanksgiving-celebration still remained unaltered in the liturgy.  New and old thus continued side by side, until the old entirely lost its significance and in the course of generations withered and fell away.  (272)

Schweitzer claims that Paul is a hero in part for transitioning the church to a form of “in Christ” mysticism that helped it survive the earth’s survival.  To do it, Paul blurred the lines among the living and the dead in Christ and the lines between the temporal and the eternal:

While other believers held that the finger of the world-clock was touching on the beginning of the coming hour and were waiting for the stroke which should announce this, Paul told them that it had already passed beyond the point, and that they had failed to hear the striking of the hour, which in fact struck at the Resurrection of Jesus.

Behind the apparently immobile outward show of the natural world, its transformation into the supernatural was in progress, as the transformation of a stage goes on behind the curtain.

For the man of insight who dares to see things as they really are, faith ceases to be simply a faith of expectation.  It takes up present certainties into itself.  This invasion of a belief in the future by a belief in the present has nothing to do with the spiritualizing of the eschatological expectation; it arises in fact from the intensification of it.  During that world-period between the Resurrection of Jesus and His Coming again the transient and the eternal worlds are intermingled.  Thereby the conditions for a peculiar Mysticism are created.  In consequence of the actual condition of the world, not merely by a pure act of thought as in other mystical systems, he who has the true knowledge can be conscious of himself as at one and the same time in the transient world and the eternal world. (99)

In describing the universality of Paul’s “in Christ” mysticism, Schweitzer – a Protestant, of course – comes close to Orthodox amillennialism (a view based on the idea that the millennium in Revelation coincides with the church age) and Orthodox views on the inseparability of mysticism and church doctrine.

In fact, in his 1998 foreword to William Montgomery’s English translation of The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Jaroslav Pelikan quotes from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church:

All true Orthodox theology is mystical; just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology, when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, “academic” in the bad sense of the word. (xviii – xix)

Pelikan sees the reissuance of The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle and The Orthodox Church as symbolic of the greater church’s greater acceptance of mysticism over the past few decades.

Orthodoxy seems like a rich faith, a faith that has slipped past the narrower thinking present at the beginning of the first last generation.  Both in its doctrine and in its mysticism, the Orthodox Church demonstrates its catholicity, encompassing, as it does, both the past and the dead, and emphasizing with its eschatology both the spirituality inherent in this life and our hope in the next.

Many Protestants find Orthodox views concerning the dead illogical or superstitious.  I wonder, though, if their distaste is based more on a limited notion of the communion of saints and a misapprehension of the mysticism Schweitzer describes than it is on modernity alone.

The Orthodox explain that they don’t pray to the dead or make them mediators between God and man, but that they merely ask the dead for intercession.  They assume that the dead saints’ proximity to God may help in this regard.  So, when the Orthodox ask others for prayer, the “others” in question may be dead or alive.

I have spoken to the dead, beginning with my grandmother.  I cannot say that they have appeared, but like Fr. Dioscuros, I have felt their presence.

I like “like,” but I hate “wait.”  Some of my snootier colleagues get around to expressing their exasperation with this generation’s overuse of “like,” but I never hear anyone complain about what drives me bats: my students’ use of “wait” in addressing me.

For my entire five-year teaching career, most students have addressed me as “Wait,” as in “Wait, do we need to write this in our sketchbooks?”  People with little recent contact with teens might imagine that the student calling me “Wait” was asking me to slow down or to return to a subject that I had just finished covering.  Those people would be right in some cases but not in most.  I am most often addressed as “Wait” when I am not speaking to the class at all.  I might be walking around the classroom helping people.  I might be bending over my backpack for a mint or staring out the window, searching for snow clouds.

“Wait,” then, feels like an unfair accusation.  It’s as if the person addressing me assumes that I’m insensitively plowing on, or that, even if I’m not doing so in this instance, I’ve plowed on often enough to earn the nickname. Maybe one or more of them is subtly threatening me with a lawsuit, suggesting that I have Left One Child Behind.

When I’m lucky enough to have a student address me by my name, I’m still not in the clear.   The questioner often has another annoying lead-up in store for me, though in this case I have a passive-aggressive means of getting even.

“Mr. S?”

“Yes?”

“I have a question.”

Here I fall silent.  My silence is designed to communicate that the student’s declaration tells me nothing that I am not quick enough to surmise.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling lucky or uncommonly ornery, I rub the silence in by continuing some activity at hand that involves no eye contact with the student, such as staring at a monitor and nudging a mouse.

Invariably my questioner, realizing that I am not going to say “Yes?” again or even “Mm-hmm?” eventually asks his question.  And it feels so good to me.

You may think that I am being petulant.   But if you got hit with this stuff twenty or thirty times a day, you’d find ways of coping, too, and of convincing yourself that you’re doing it for your students’ sake.  I believe that I am inculcating my slice of today’s youth with less provocative means of addressing adults and of propounding questions.

As for “wait,” I wait until the spring to get my revenge.  In the process of teaching some rudimentary Elizabethan English during our study of Romeo and Juliet, I make my students address me as “But soft” every time they start at me with “Wait.”  Most of them smile thoughtfully while saying it slowly – “Butt Soft” – and they ask their questions.

By June, I have done my part to retrain another set of young interlocutors.

I have a long history of writing unsolicited missives to the Evangelical church, that large, middle ground among American Protestants between fundamentalism and liberalism.  While my own thinking has moved away from some traditional Evangelical tenants, my bond with my Evangelical brothers and sisters seems stronger than ever.

I wrote an earlier draft of this letter for some close friends of mine, and one of them asked me to present it to a group of people in the Christian intentional community movement this morning.  I rewrote the paper with them in mind, though nothing in it has anything to do with intentional communities.  But a broader audience helped me make it easier to understand.  My thanks to Bill of Shadows and Symbols, who read an earlier draft and gave me some strong feedback.

Most of my readers aren’t Evangelical, I’m pretty sure.  Readers not used to Evangelical church language may be struck with the offhand way I seem to speak about God and the self-assurance with which I present my views.  That’s how we talk to one another when we’re working out our Evangelical thinking.

Sam Soleyn, a friend – not a close friend, but a friend, and a close friend of a close friend – wrote a letter that also helped my thinking a lot.  I mention Sam and his letter in my missive.  If you take my link to Sam’s letter, you’ll be struck, I think, by his certitude.  I hope you won’t hold it against him.

By inviting mega-church pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren to give his inaugural invocation this month, Barack Obama has magnified a squabble within America’s Evangelical community.

The narrow bone of contention is this: should a pro-life, pro-Proposition-8 pastor give the invocation for a pro-choice, anti-Proposition-8 president?  Since the Culture Wars began thirty years ago, no president has given such a high-profile honor to the side generally opposing him, so the Evangelical church has not had to address such a question until now.

What Do We Do About Obama?

This small controversy magnifies a larger controversy in the American Evangelical church: what are we supposed to do about Barack Obama, a practicing Christian who has captured the imagination of America’s youth and a politician who has little taste for fighting the Culture Wars that have dominated national politics for decades and who, if his cabinet choices are any indication, seems intent on governing from the political center?  What reaction should we have to the new civic stirring not seen in the country since John Kennedy’s administration, or perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt’s?

And what stand should the church take concerning Obama’s economic proposals, which show every sign of continuing the expensive, government-expanding prescriptions inaugurated by his predecessor over the past three months?  What about the opportunity the economic crisis gives him to reshape American capitalism, to address chronic trade deficits with – and massive federal debt owed to – China and, to a lesser extent, other nations?

As citizens whose civic decisions are informed by our understanding of the kingdom of God, should the American Evangelical church be inclined to support Obama’s efforts, to oppose them, or to stay on the sidelines perhaps more than a responsible, democratic citizen feels comfortable in doing?  Finally, whether supporting, opposing, or hiding, how will the church be impacted by Obama, by the national crisis many people sense on the horizon, and by the country’s new civic stirrings?

The Church’s Divided, Generational Response to Obama

God may have given us a prophetic picture that will help the American church understand the short-term and long-term meaning of Obama’s election.  The picture also gives us some idea of where we are in world history and of how we might comport ourselves as American Christians over the next years.

The picture is the story of Joseph.  In this picture, Joseph is Obama, Egypt is the country he’ll lead, and Jacob and his other children are Joseph’s kin – America’s Christians.

It may be easiest to start with Warren’s decision to pray at Obama’s inaugural.

Have you noticed that the Evangelical controversy over Warren’s decision is generational, for the most part?  The older, Baby-Boom-generation culture warriors generally line up against Rick Warren’s decision, seeing it as a betrayal of the pro-life and anti-homosexual-rights causes.  The younger generation of Evangelicals, however, seems to take the invitation in stride.  This younger generation, who are generally pro-life as well, are more attuned than the older generation to social issues that liberals have cornered during the Culture Wars, issues like poverty, the exploitation of women and children, and global warming – issues also that Warren himself has become attracted to over the past three years.  While not Democrats, many of these younger Evangelicals have little interest in the Republican Party and little hope in a political solution to chronic Culture War issues.

Spiritual Boomers’ Fears for the Next Generation

Listening to the debate is like listening in on the somewhat comical and yet poignant squabble at Jacob’s camp about whether his sons should go to Egypt for food.  Jacob was against it, but his sons persuaded him to let them make the trip.  When Jacob later learned that Joseph was in charge of Egypt, God felt the need to speak to Jacob in order to reassure him that going to Egypt was the right thing to do:

Do not be afraid of going down to Egypt, for a great nation will I make of you there.  (Genesis 46:3)

It is the older, Baby Boom generation of Evangelicals that will have the hardest time adjusting to what God may be doing through an Obama administration.  Baby Boom Evangelicals understand that their children are growing up in a far less secure world than they had grown up in.  They worry that, in order to meet these outward-oriented challenges, the next generation may compromise their values. 

Baby-Boomer Evangelicals need to understand that they aren’t the first generation to see this happen.  According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book Generations, almost every fourth generation of Americans is an idealist generation, coming of age during a spiritual renewal and entering old age just before or during a time of national crisis.  All idealist generations worry that their children will compromise their spiritual values in the process of gaining or maintaining civic stability.  Many of the Puritan generation (another idealist generation) in old age, for instance, “looking down on the troubled souls of their grown children, feared the young would trade ideals for security and thereby destroy everything that mattered” (Strauss 127).

God’s Mixed Message to Jacob – and to the American Church

One can see Jacob making a similar calculation as he contemplated what he might have regarded as his surrender of God’s promise to give him and his descendants the land of Canaan.  And there was also that nagging prophecy his father Isaac had told him about, the one in which his grandfather Abraham heard that his descendants would be afflicted for four hundred years “in a land that is not theirs” (Genesis 15:13).  Was moving to Egypt the beginning of this horror?  Was Jacob walking his progeny into a trap?

God told Jacob that his people would become a great nation in Egypt.  But God also told Abraham that his people would be afflicted in Egypt.  Both, of course, came true.  But, from Jacob’s standpoint weighing his options in Canaan, how could Egypt be both a blessing and a curse?

If Jacob struggled with this set of seemingly conflicting messages, then the Evangelical church will really struggle with its role in twenty-first-century America.  The American Evangelical church has rarely been adept at digesting what seem to be mixed prophetic messages from God.  And God may be giving the church a seemingly conflicting message today.  Obama, his generation of leadership, and the policies they will institute may turn out to be first a blessing and then a curse.

A Chronic Deficiency in the Church’s Prophetic View

I’ll pause my application of Joseph’s story to what is happening in America today in order to examine what I believe to be a major deficiency in the church’s prophetic outlook.  Unless this deficiency is addressed, the church’s prophetic vision will remain behind the vision of secular poets, songwriters, and even politicians, and the church will understand neither what is transpiring in America nor what its own role in it might be.

The church’s prophetic deficiency lies to a great extent in the church’s exclusively linear understanding of history and prophecy.  The American Evangelical church generally insists on an exclusively linear approach to history and prophecy despite all biblical and historical evidence that history is both linear and cyclical.  The Bible has both a linear and cyclical view of history.  It speaks of former and latter days, suggesting a continuum, but it also speaks of generational cycles, most notably in books such as Judges and Ecclesiastes.  By seeing history and prophecy only in a linear continuum, the Evangelical church comes up with thin and inaccurate portrayals of the future. Most famously, solely linear views of history have caused American church leaders to make fools of themselves by making countless inaccurate predictions of Yeshua’s return.  These portrayals generally serve to mislead or frighten Christians, and their inaccuracy eventually tends to make some Christians cynical about prophecy in general.

Adding a Cyclical View to a Linear View of Prophecy

The church would do well to read two well-received books on generational history by William Strauss and Neil Howe:Generations, published in 1991, which I mentioned earlier, and The Fourth Turning, published in 1996.  Seventeen years have elapsed since Strauss and Howe wrote Generations, and twelve years have elapsed since they wrote The Fourth Turning.  Based on generational precedence, the books predicted events in the ensuing years with what turned out to be great prescience, though with some specific errors as well.  Nevertheless, if prophets are to be judged on their track records, then Strauss and Howe are more prophetic than anyone I’ve heard prophesy in my lifetime about the future in the name of God.

As Strauss and Howe point out, one can see the four generations pictured in the Bible, beginning with Moses’idealistic generation.  The following generation – Strauss and Howe call them the Golden Calf generation – was a streetwise reactive generation.  The children of Moses’ idealistic generation were the Joshua generation, a civicgeneration that Moses’ generation discipled but who were much more efficient at implementing a more civic (one might even say worldly) mandate.  The reactive, Golden Calf generation later sired the following generation, the “First Judges Peers,” an adaptive generation like our own Silent generation that dominated Congress through much of our Culture Wars, “the obliging young adults who served the mighty Joshua; and the midlifers whose exercise of power was marked by political fragmentation, petty feuds, and uncertainly about the future.” (See Bill O’s fuller treatment of Strauss and Howe’s theories in his post “At the Dawn of the Fourth Turning?”

The Importance of Living as Prophetic People

Prophecy, signs, and an understanding of the times are important since God uses them to give Christians a context in which to operate in a given age as well as a backdrop for his specific instructions, which often make more sense in light of God’s bigger picture.  The reason why the tribesmen of Issachar had an understanding of the times was precisely so Israel would know what to do (1 Chr. 12:32).  We should not let a deficient, linear view of history and of prophecy keep us from living as a prophetic people.

Issachar’s gift keeps us from spending large chunks of our lives in futility.  People praying that nationwide revival will take place in the next few years, for instance, need to understand that a large revival at this point in our generational cycle would have no historical precedent.  Without a rudimentary understanding of history’s cycles, then, Christians will grow frustrated after many hours in misdirected prayer.  We need the context of a proper prophetic understanding to pray and to act properly.

How a Cyclical View Helps Us

While not accepted by all historians, generational history has made great strides in the past few decades and has aided many leaders with a framework with which to understand movements, national crises, spiritual awakenings, and shifting and recurring views on parenting, children, gender roles, old age, government interventions, and religion.  Generational history helps to explain crime cycles, educational test score cycles, and changing roles in government.

A purely linear view of history doesn’t help in this regard at all.  Our Evangelical, linear view of society teaches us, for instance, that society is gradually but steadily falling apart and will not get better until Yeshua’s return.  Yet history belies this simplistic assertion.  Crime rates and test scores have ebbed and flowed throughout our nation’s history.  Currently, our crime rate and test scores are both relatively high, a combination typical of our point in a recurring generational cycle.  Crime rates and test scores have fallen dramatically before in our country, and every sign is that they will both fall again.

How Did We Get So Exclusively Linear?

Our Evangelical view of history is linear in part because of the life experience of its most influential members.  The American Evangelical church has always been most influenced by America’s idealistic generations that serve as the foot soldiers in the large spiritual awakenings that occur once each generational cycle and always in the idealist generation’s coming-of-age years.  These idealistic generations – the most recent of which is the Baby Boomers – rebel against the spiritual depravity their fathers’ material successes bring. They live their lifetimes in a society that starts with oppressive order but ends in spiritual chaos and national crises.  We all tend to see national events and trends during our lifetime as part of a greater linear continuum, of course, and the spiritually influential idealist generation in every American generational cycle always sees society move from control to chaos.  Thus we have generations of Evangelical leaders who see their lives being played out against a backdrop of a society moving inexorably toward a biblical apocalypse.

This is not the experience of other generations in the American generational cycle.  The more practical and street-wise reactive generations that follow idealist generations, for instance, come of age in culturally stratified and relatively depraved societies, come into midlife leadership during national crises, and live out the rest of their lives in societies that enforce stricter moral codes.  Their view of history is generally also linear, but it is usually less apocalyptic.

Having had the idealist generation’s apocalyptic view reinforced over several generational cycles, there’s almost a fear in recognizing the cyclical aspect of history’s nature.  Are we denying the truth of the second coming by recognizing that society moves in cycles?  Hardly.

Refusing to Choose Between Cyclical and Linear History

A linear view of history leads us inexorably to Yeshua’s return and allows for progressive factors such as international trade, international government, and scientific and technological advances.  A cyclical view, on the other hand, accounts for much of the fits and starts, the disjointed way in which generation follows generation and the timing and relative placement of spiritual movements and national crises.

An understanding of how God generally works over generations is like a pastoral understanding of how sin and grace work in different types of people.  People are as individual as snowflakes, yet pastors (and businesspeople and educators) know that, in some ways, categorizing perople by personality types can be helpful.   Generations are all different but may be grouped into types, too, and prophets should be as familiar with generational types as pastors are with personality types.

So we need a more balanced and biblical view of history and prophecy, one that recognizes history’s cyclical aspects as well as its linear ones.  It’s not a choice of one or the other. When we are open to both, we are open to a richer picture of what God is saying to the church.  A linear view of history correctly teaches us that Yeshua is returning, but a cyclical view of history keeps us from seeing ourselves as the culmination of history.  Such a generation-wide exercise in narcissism would earn Job’s sarcastic rebuke to his shortsighted friends: “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you!” (Job 12:2)

Generational theory gives us the necessary tools and insight to receive what God may be saying to us about Obama, his streetwise, reactive Generation X leadership, and the next few decades in our national history.  I use Strauss and Howe, though one might use other, less renowned generational theorists for this purpose.  Without some appreciation for the cyclical aspect of history from one source or another, however, the American church stands a greater chance of choking on the message I think God may intend for our nourishment.

Our Coming National Crisis . . . and Our Past Ones

Generational history confirms what many of us have suspected for years: in the next ten or twenty years, America will face a national crisis that will threaten its survival, much as Egypt faced at the time of Joseph’s rise.  Egypt’s crisis was economic in nature, stemming from seven years of famine.  America’s crisis could be economic, too, though it could as easily be military, ecological, climatic, social, and/or terroristic in nature.

America has faced such a crisis once every generational cycle, beginning with the Glorious Revolution and following with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II.  Between each crisis has come a spiritual awakening, starting with the Puritan Awakening, the Great Awakening, the Transcendental Movement, the Missionary Awakening, and, most recently, the Boom Awakening and the Jesus and Charismatic Movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  A period of unraveling, such as the one we are coming to the end of, arrives after each awakening and before each crisis.

According to Strauss and Howe, we are moving to the end of a twenty-plus-year-long unraveling phase in our own generational cycle.  Unraveling periods are characterized by deepening social anxiety as institutions fall into disrepute and as America seems to drift politically.  Politicians focus on Culture Wars and put off longstanding civic problems the country does not have the political will to address.  It happened in the 1920’s, and it is happening again today.

The End of the Culture Wars

American Culture Wars always grow up between spiritual revivals and national crises.  On at least one occasion, a Culture War helped bring on a national crisis – America’s Civil War.  But Culture Wars usually fade away, just as Prohibition was repealed during the last generational cycle as that cycle moved from its third (“unraveling”) phase to its fourth and final phase, the crisis phase.

Our Culture Wars will fade, too.  The national crisis we’ll be involved in over the next decade or two may resolve some of them for us.

The Upside to National Crises

A national crisis is a bad thing, of course, but, along with sometimes resolving Culture Wars, it often generates the political will and unity necessary to solve longstanding civic challenges.  Supporters and critics alike are amazed at the opportunity the current financial crisis is affording Obama before the first days of his administration.  Polls show that the country in general is supportive of his spending of close a trillion dollars to get the economy fixed.  Political friends and foes alike believe that Obama could get in almost all of his more expensive proposals through, including energy reforms and health care, under the guise of fixing the economy.  He even has the necessary political cover for it, thanks to the current administration’s successful attempts at persuading Congress to write similar checks for up to seven hundred billion dollars.

The current financial crisis is not the national-survival-threatening crisis I speak of, but it may be a harbinger of it.  As such, the alignment of events in Obama’s favor is a sign to  the church of the crisis season we are entering.  In fact, for a season, I think God may allow the financial situation to get worse each time the public shies away from supporting Obama’s strong medicine.  The reason?  The church needs to understand that, during a national crisis, “everything is new and yielding,” as Benjamin Rush said of his own American Revolution era (Strauss 178).  Our institutions and assumptions are more malleable now than they have been since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.  Many government institutions and the assumptions about the government’s role vis-à-vis our freedoms and finances are about to change, and most of these changes will last for another cycle of four generations, should our nation last that long.  And God has special roles for national leaders during crisis periods.

This is not to say that Obama’s decisions will be the correct ones or that the church should invariably support him.  It is only to say that Christians should have a prophetic understanding of the times and of Obama’s presidency in order to develop a humble, prophetic voice at a national level.  We should not have a linear view of history -- of our own life cycle, in essence -- in which we resist every economic change in the name of God, or at least in the name of the God we associate with the stifling 1950’s and twentieth-century capitalism.  A closer look at Joseph and his times may help us with this prophetic framework.

Survival vs. Loss of Freedoms

The Bible has nothing bad to say about Joseph even as he spent fourteen years transforming Egyptian society into a dictatorship under which Pharaoh ended up owning everything and everybody.  Presumably, the Bible’s lack of negative commentary concerning Joseph’s plan means that this state of affairs – the loss of economic and political freedom – was better than the alternative, which was worldwide starvation.  Here’s how David prophetically looked back on Joseph’s role:

He called down famine on the land and cut off their daily bread. But he had sent on a man before them, Joseph, who was sold into slavery, where they thrust his feet into fetters and clamped an iron collar round his neck. He was tested by the Lord’s command until what he foretold took place. Thing sent and had him released, the ruler of peoples set him free and made him master of his household, ruler over all his possessions, to correct his officers as he saw fit and teach his counselors wisdom. Then Israel too went down into Egypt, Jacob came to live in the land of Ham. There God made his people very fruitful . . . (Psalm 105:16-24, REB)

I do not mean to say that we’re facing slavery or that we should submit to it should it come.  But we may lose financial and personal freedoms as a result of a national crisis that could occur over the next twenty years and as a result of how Obama or his successors and Conrgress deal with the crisis, assuming that our country survives in some form.  This loss of freedom – even perhaps a partial or complete loss of national sovereignty – will be part of God’s judgment on our country for the decisions we’ve made against his will, decisions that both right-wing and left-wing Americans can easily compile, if  not agree upon yet.  But God has sent Obama and his street-wise, practical generation (Gen X) to help lead America through whatever crisis it will face and to help it survive as well as can be expected.

In his mercy, then, God may have raised up Obama to begin to help America prepare for its crisis so it can survive and endure.  At times, Christians won’t have much of a choice but to consider helping Obama or his successors out, since the survival of many Christians will depend on it.  We won’t be able to take a geographic out, either, since the crisis will be more or less worldwide, just like the crisis that Jacob and his sons faced.

Obama and his Generation as Joseph

If we look at how God’s picture of Joseph may describe Obama, we may be more likely to understand what God is doing through Obama and his Generation-X cohorts.  Joseph had a hardscrabble existence as a young adult, first as a servant and then as a prisoner in a foreign country.  Obama, too, spent some of his teen years overseas, separated from his father as well as his sister.   He received his training in the inner city, which may be comparable in some respects to Joseph’s prison.

Immediately following Obama’s election, America was treated to the unusual spectacle of primitive-looking Kenyans dancing in celebration of their native son’s election.  This is a sign to the church – a reminder of how a small band of unsophisticated shepherds to the east of Egypt rejoiced when it heard the news of how its native son Joseph had, against all odds, risen to lead that great nation.

Obama’s story of alienation, drug use, and then hardscrabble rise is picture-perfect for his Generation-X cohort, too.  Boomers have long derided Gen-Xers as lazy, valueless, and treacherous, just as every idealistic generation has done to the reactive generation that followed it.  Yet reactive generations, sandwiched between the more dominating idealistic and civic generations, have produced some of our country’s most effective leaders, including George Washington and Harry Truman.  Probably no student of cyclical history was surprised that Obama has taken steps demonstrating his preference for governing from the center.  His cabinet is as distinguished and as ideologically diverse as Washington’s, and on average as moderate.  Obama, like Washington and Truman before him, will have lively cabinet debates, but he will govern with little regard for the kind of ideology that drives the decisions of presidents of idealist generations, such as the Boomers’ Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  While Obama’s presidency and the presidencies that follow it will most likely have more impact on the next cycle of generations than either of Obama’s two immediate predecessors, it won’t be seen as a victory of what we now define as liberal orthodoxy.

It may be a blessing from God that the likes of Clinton and Bush and their idealistic Boomer generation probably will not be president during the next national crisis.  The idealistic Transcendentalist generation was in power in both the North and South as the Civil War approached.  “. . . [B]orn to heroic parents, indulged as children, fiery as youth, narcissistic as rising adults, and values-fixated entering midlife . . . [Transcendentalists] ultimately chose to join technology and passion to achieve the maximum apocalypse then conceivable” (Generations 205).

What other qualities do Obama and Joseph share?  The long-running presidential campaign that just ended offered us a view of Obama’s qualities, and they mesh well with Joseph’s:

Inspiring and organizing people.  Obama speaks to get people to act.  Even when he was forced to give a speech in Philadelphia to protect himself from the effects of Rev. Wright, it turned out to be a persuasive call for a national dialogue on race.  Obama has attracted people with his rhetoric, but he has also helped those people find their place in the most impressive presidential campaign in U.S. history.  His campaign was both personal and technological with a modern corporation’s care for extending and protecting its brand – a perfect fit for the candidate and the times.  It was well organized, but it allowed for a lot of flexibility on the local level.  In the end, his description of it as a grassroots movement wasn’t too off the mark – a grassroots movement overseen by a master community organizer who learned to do nationwide what he had done on the streets of Chicago.  The number of donations, donors and volunteers to his campaign has broken records, as we all know.

Obama’s people seem at a loss over what to do with the three million members they have signed up to his web site.  So far it has just raised money for the inauguration and for charity.  A national emergency may make this list, or a similar one, a leading national force again.

Joseph sold Pharaoh and an entire nation on his plan, and then he mobilized the nation to follow thorough on it.  If we face a crisis, Obama may need to mobilize and organize Americans in a similar fashion, and he seems to have better skills than any recent national politician to do it.

Valuing pragmatism over ideology.  One of Obama’s biggest problems will be the Democratic Congress.  To return to a previous point for a moment, I think Obama may prove in the long run to be one of the least ideological presidents we’ve had, even though his Congressional voting record would suggest otherwise.  Obama was preaching post-partisanship when post-partisanship wasn’t cool, back a year ago when the other Democratic candidates were trying to inspire primary voters with a vision of Democratic Party ascendancy.  I remember one Washington Postarticle in particular that questioned whether Obama’s bipartisan message during much of 2007 could possibly win the nomination of an angry, eager Democratic Party (Washington Post, "Does Obama's Message Match the Moment?" 17 Oct. 2007).

Joseph also had little concern for precedence or ideology as he implemented a plan to save Egypt from starvation.  His reforms for collecting and distributing food were unprecedented, apparently.

Sticking with the plan.  Joseph must have gotten a good deal of heat for sticking with his plan no matter how silly it seemed to do so during the plentiful years.  Obama and his advisors stuck to their overall campaign strategy, showing very little worry or shifting, for instance, when his poll numbers didn’t rise as quickly as he had expected against Hillary Clinton late last year.  When McCain picked Palin and then later “suspended” his campaign to save the nation from its financial crisis, Obama again stuck with his plan, never criticizing McCain’s choices until doing so implicitly a week before the election. Obama has shown that he can stick with a plan even though the payoff isn’t evident to most.

Seeing around the corner.  Joseph’s foresight was vindicated in the end, and some of Obama’s foresight has been vindicated, too.  Obama was criticized for stances he took with regard to Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran, but in each case the Bush Administration found itself forced to follow his lead.  With regard to Pakistan, Obama suggested that we not ignore any evidence of bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s whereabouts but that we attack them, unilaterally if necessary.  He got a lot of heat for that position, but four months later President Bush did just as he suggested: he attacked Al Qaeda positions inside Pakistan, and he did so with moderate success.  The second instance is Iran, where Obama has advocated direct engagement at lower diplomatic levels and not at the presidential level unless and until progress is made.  Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand this distinction, and he ridiculed what once was an unquestioned tenet of our foreign policy under presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy.  Later we learned that President Bush had again adjusted his foreign policy to follow Obama’s lead.  He dispatched officials who are negotiating directly with Iran.  With regard to Iraq, Obama advocated a sixteen-month withdrawal timetable, was criticized for it, and then had his approach, if not the specific number of months, affirmed in essence by the presidents of both Iraq and the United States.

(I hope you’ll excuse the sometimes politically biased nature of the four previous paragraphs.  I wanted to state the issue most favorably to Obama in order to make a point about his specific gifts.)

Our Children: The Latest “Greatest Generation”

Aging Evangelical Boomers wonder how their children will relate to an Obama presidency and to presidencies that follow.  Some aging Evangelicals expect their children – biological and spiritual – to smell what they consider to be a rat and to counter Obama’s policies.  By and large, this will not happen.

Our children will generally settle in and support Obama and his immediate successors, just like the people of Egypt supported Joseph.  The Missionary generation of the early twentieth century – another idealistic, values-oriented generation like the Boomers – had a rebellious youth and a narcissistic, Culture-War-filled adulthood, and they couldn’t comprehend how 100,000 of their children could flood Boston Commons in 1933 and chant in honor of a new president, “I promise as a good American to do my part.  I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times” (Fourth Turning 292).  This young, G.I. generation was the latest of our country’s civic generations, the “Greatest Generation” that saved democracy during World War II and helped forge the governmental institutions we’ve lived under since the 1930’s.  The Millennial generation, now moving into adulthood, promises to be the next civic generation, and they have given America the spectacle of a government-supporting, political youth movement unseen since the days of FDR.

Our inner-oriented and spiritual Boom generation has already warmed to many aspects of the Millennial generation, but we Boomers may eventually be disappointed with them.  The Millennials are easy to disciple: like all civic generations, it longs for the spiritual guidance offered by the elder idealist generation before it.  But our current youth generation is not the generation that will usher in or show forth our Boomer notions of the Kingdom of God.

How Boomers Will Sometimes Misunderstand Millennials

Civic generations are far more outward-oriented than inward-oriented, and their spirituality always has less of a judgmental and apocalyptic feel than does the idealistic generation that mentors them.  They insist that their religion, like everything else about them, be practical, positive, and supportive of their civic mission.  In other words, the Boom generation has given birth to a generation that looks more like their G.I. fathers than themselves.  It will be up to the Millennial generation’s own children to begin to break the bonds of the institutions the Millennials themselves will help to fashion.

To many aging Boomers, this Millennial can-do, civic spirit will seem anathema.  The apostle Sam Soleyn, for instance,wrote the church that Obama literally summoned a spirit of self-reliance when he proclaimed during his election-night speech: “Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people."  Sam’s view that Obama literally invoked a spirit tells me that Sam saw something in the spirit – specifically, a call for a young, civic-minded generation to come into its own.  Sam was right: it was a significant moment.  However, Sam’s literal take on Obama's use of the phrase "summon a new spirit" also demonstrates that he sees the moment in a negative light, as a spiritual member of an idealist generation might well do. And accepting Sam’s literal view of Obama’s statement on its face, Sam is also somewhat negative – and somewhat unfair – in characterizing the specific spirit invoked as that of self-reliance instead of patriotism, responsibility, and brotherly love.  If we’re literal about the invocation, we should in fairness be literal also about what’s invoked.  While Sam’s characterization is insightful, it is also indicative of a spiritual Boomer’s dissatisfaction with a civic generation: we rejected self-reliance in our fathers, and we will come to reject it in our daughters and sons, too.

The Release of a Secular, Practical Civic Generation Is Good!

Just as Obama released a civic generation to its purpose on Election Night, wise Boomers will learn to follow his example and do the same.  Because generational types mirror personality types, it is helpful to compare generational relations with family relations.  Children often resemble grandparents in ways that challenge parents, and so do generations.  Wise parents not only recognize this but give themselves to their children in ways that foster their children’s calling.  One can see this on a generational level, too.  Strauss and Howe think so: “Historians agree that the spiritual fury of the Great Awakening fed directly, decades later, into the political fury of the American Revolution.  According to Nathan Hatch, ‘Few would doubt that the piety of the Awakening was the main source of the civil millennialism of the Revolutionary period’” (Generations 163).  The Boomers’ spiritual energy can feed the Millennials’ civic energy, just as the idealist Awakener generation fed the civic Republican generation.(1)

This self-reliance (if you will), unspiritual as it might seem to many spiritual Boomers, is precisely what every American civic generation is principally about.  God is wise enough to use civic generations for his purposes, and he always offers them a spiritual identity and expression that satisfies them.  Whether members of that generation accept their God-given identity and expression is another matter.  And civic generations are the most overtly secular generations – think of most of the Republican generation and the G.I. generation leaders – who, as a whole, see their elders as somewhat moralistic and impractical (which, as a whole, they are).

Historically speaking, if the self-reliant, overtly secular Millennial generation didn’t show up, America would be in a lot of trouble.  In seven generational cycles, civic generations have failed to follow idealistic and reactive generations only once -- at the onset of America’s Civil War.  During that generational cycle, the idealistic Transcendentalist generation’s Culture Wars were never resolved but spilled over into overt war.  Indeed, in 1991, Strauss and Howe hoped that the national crisis they spoke of would not come early.  If it did, then Boomers would still be in power, and “the national cycle suggests that the risk of cataclysm would be very high.  During the 2000—2009 decade, Boomers would be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and institutional power.  From a life-cycle perspective, they will be exactly where the Transcendentalists [the Civil War cycle’s Prophet generation] were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper’s Ferry.”  For all of their theory and emphasis on spiritual matters, idealist generations are very warlike when in power at or near national crisis.  It’s better to have them on the political sidelines where they can serve as advisers – particularly as spiritual advisors – to  reactive and civic generation leaders, just as Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, and their idealist generation successfully served reactive generation Washington and civic generation Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe during and after the American Revolution.

So, under Strauss and Howe’s theory, the biggest drama each generational cycle is whether or not a civic generation will show up at all.  Happily, every sign points to their arrival.  Like every young civic generation before it, the Millennial generation is marked by rising test scores; an earnest desire to please; a willingness to be discipled by their elders, particularly on spiritual matters; a practicality that worries their idealist predecessors; and a penchant to value social structures (think Facebook and YouTube) over individual pursuits.

To me, the biggest sign that a civic generation has arrived and is coming into its own is its strong response to Obama’s candidacy.  Civic generations often do very well being led by someone of the immediately preceding reactive generation.  The release of a new civic generation under a Generation-X leader may be an indication that, by God’s mercy, America will be a lot more prepared for a national emergency than if Boomers remained in power.

A young, civic-minded, can-do generation has indeed been released on the world, just as it has been released during every American crisis age since before the republic, with the unfortunate exception of the Civil War.  The release of the Millennial generation to its God-given, civic calling is a good thing even though, as a generation, it will often act unjustly and will often lack the spiritual insight of either its parents or its children.

Joseph’s Success Empowered Future, Malevolent Pharaohs

I return now to the mixed signals God is giving the American church today, similar to the mixed signals Jacob got from God as he was deciding whether to move to Egypt with his family.  God is telling the American church, I think, to be open to the possibility that Obama and his immediate succesors may help lead a new generation to see us out of a future national crisis, even though the crisis is in some measure a judgment against our country and even though the measures, like Joseph’s, will amount to future impingements on our economic or personal freedoms, or both.

God may also be saying that our posterity will suffer under those measures.  Not our children, mind you – many of them will be helping to enforce those measures in various ways.  But a day will come when Obama and his reactive generation are gone from leadership, and the policies and institutions that were necessary to lead us out of a crisis may well be used to hamper the poor and the church that associates with the poor.

Remember that ominous beginning to the Book of Exodus? “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).  Although they helped to save Egypt – helped to save civilization, in fact – Joseph’s policies created a mechanism for a future Pharaohs to persecute his own descendents.  Joseph left the office of Pharaoh with institutions and powers that made future Pharaohs much more powerful and more menacing figures.

Sam Soleyn, then, may be right in saying that the institutions formed under Obama and his immediate successors will be turned against the real church of the Millennial generation.  But a more cyclical (and, I think, biblical) view of history would suggest that these instruments and institutions won’t be turned against our children so much as against our children’s children.

Our Next Oppressive First Turning

In American history, the periods between national crises and spiritual awakenings resemble the years of groaning that Israel suffered under Pharaoh’s hardships.  The last such “first turning,” as Strauss and Howe label these times in our generational cycles, was oppressive, though not to mainstream American Christians, per se.  The late 1940’s and 1950’s witnessed a uniformity of cultural expression unthinkable in our current, late-third-turning segment of a generational cycle.(2)  The period following a crisis generally sees institutions, newly formed by necessity under that crisis, in high regard, and the civic generation that helped form those institutions generally guards them in midlife with their considerable political power.  This will happen again should our country survive its coming crisis in some form.  By and large, our children will help guard these dearly won institutions from all threats, even if, in doing so, it harms a significant segment of society.

Our Next Spiritual Awakening . . . and Our Next Idealist Generation

I believe that a significant segment of the national and world population will be on the short end of the political stick following the crisis, and they will be oppressed and persecuted.  Compromises with our economic creditors and with growing military powers or terrorists may create international institutions that will have a greater reach than our own generational cycle can imagine living under.  What we call the church will be divided into those that support the oppression and those that are among the oppressed.  The church, which has already been growing exponentially in the third world and in lower strata of various countries’ societies, may begin to be associated internationally with the third world and with those marginalized strata.  Seeking no worldly power but nevertheless threatening the worldly powers with a spiritual awakening, the post-crisis poor and disfranchised may find themselves on the wrong side of these newly minted institutions.  Our children’s children, then -- a new idealist generation that may be more tried by more fire than our own Boomer generation -- may well fulfill the promise of our own idealistic generation, called to lead future generations into a fuller understanding of the kingdom of God.  And there will be a new institutional church and a new authentic church, one on each side of the institutional divide.

Perhaps the next idealist generation will hear about how the last previous idealist generation, the Boomers, generally squandered its chance to help lead the intervening civic generation to its destiny.  Perhaps it will hear of somewhat more successful idealist generations, such as the Awakening generation that discipled the Republican generation, a civic generation that enshrined our liberties (and, tragically, the slavery of African Americans).  Perhaps it will realize its calling to nurture an international community with a spiritual awakening that will sweep not just the nation but a better part of the world.

Just as God may be raising up a Joseph of sorts for our coming civic crisis, God will raise up a deliverer (or, far more likely, many deliverers) like Moses to administer an awakening and to lead his people out of the tyranny caused by the political apparatus Joseph and his cohorts will leave behind.

But let’s not be too quick to say that Christ will return then and there.  He might, but let’s not say so.  I reckon it’s better to say with John: Come, Lord Jesus.

Boomers’ Spiritual Seeds in Millennials

In speaking in terms of generations, I do not speak of everyone within a generation.  Generations are made up of all types.  Each generation has a dominant personality type, however, and faces similar upbringings and adult challenges associated with that generational type.  Generations within a generational type imprint the nation’s history with similar accomplishments and tragedies.  Many in the can-do Millennium generation will carry the spiritual seed from their Boomer parents, especially from those parents who have learned how different a child’s calling may be from their own.  Many of these Millennial children will carry these seeds even as the full expression of that generation will be more civic and less spiritual in nature than its parents’ generation.  Those Millennials will understand, in a unique way specific to their milieu, what it means to live in the kingdom of God.

In Conclusion

This piece is not a call to support Barack Obama, nor is it an attempt to make him more palatable to Evangelical sensibilities by cloaking him with the many-colored coat of one the church’s chief heroes.  Instead, I’m only one voice in an important dialogue that might lead to a broader and more prophetic framework for the Evangelical church to use in relating to future national and international events.

I do not mean to suggest that Obama is Joseph, one of the few major biblical figures without a documented shortcoming.  Obama, by his own admission, has many shortcomings, and I’m sure we’ll discover many more than we are aware of now.  I suggest, rather, that Joseph may provide us with a prophetic picture of Obama's role, just as Joseph's time in power (preparation and crisis) give us a way to see some aspects of our own times.

Through Barack Obama’s election, God may be giving the Evangelical church the opportunity and the motivation to shed its myopic, linear-only, and idealist-generation-oriented view of history and prophecy for at least a generation.  If the Evangelical church does so, it may be better able to release and serve the immediately succeeding generations.  The framework from our dialogue might also be helpful in deciding which candidates and bills to support and which invocations to give, but that is less consequential.

I am speaking generally and am surely wrong in many particulars.  Still, I hope something in here helps.

__________

1 The Evangelical church is far from recognizing generational roles in the accomplishment of significant milestones, such as the United States’s political independence, the abolition of slavery, and civil rights. In insisting that America was founded as a Christian nation, for instance, the Religious Right recasts the civic Republican generation of Jefferson and Madison as an idealist generation like their fathers (Awakeners). The Evangelical church does not accept the secular nature of the Republican generation, just as it won’t accept the secular nature of the Millennial generation. The Evangelical church would be better off recognizing successful relationships between idealist and civic relationships, such as that between Awakeners and Republicans. It would be more historically accurate, and it would help the Boomer-oriented Evangelicals discover how its spirituality can positively influence and support the civic-minded Millennials.

2 It is interesting to me that the Religious Right looks back with longing to the oppressive Forties and Fifties. Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and the Beaver have become this Evangelical generation’s version of Egypt’s leeks and garlics that the Bible’s Wilderness generation longed for in Egypt. Idealist generations spend their childhoods in culturally oppressive first turnings and long for the reassuring fruit of that oppression during unraveling periods, such as the present third turning.

I sometimes confuse apocrypha with apocalypse, apocalyptical with apocryphal.  Sure, they look and sound the same, but I think something in me feels like they mean the same, too.  The Apocrypha and the Apocalypse both seem out of the New Testament mainstream and seem vaguely threatening to that mainstream.  The Apocrypha, it might be said, is a bunch of books that could be God’s Word that is often printed with God’s Word.  Who was behind this, and what was he trying to do to my concept of God’s Word?  It's as insidious as the beasts with their lying wonders.

In my Evangelical mind, the New Testament seems sandwiched in time between true-sounding stuff that might be false, and false-sounding stuff that must somehow be true.

Hanukkah, of course, is a minor Jewish holiday instituted (probably) in the apocryphal Book of 1 Maccabees.  Actually, the Catholics and Orthodox include 1 Maccabees in their canon, but the Jews and Protestants don’t.  The Jews, of course, don’t have much use for sola scriptura, so everyone’s on board with Hanukkah one way or another but us Protestants.

I didn’t celebrate Christmas for years, either, not finding any evidence for that holiday in Scripture.  (Under this reasoning, Hanukkah has a greater claim to legitimacy than Christmas since Hanukkah at least makes it into the New Testament: we catch Jesus celebrating it in the Gospel of John.)  Now I celebrate both holidays.  While this inclusive approach may or may not be commendable, it’s been fun.

1 Maccabees feels like the Bible to me.  Its central character reminds me of Nehemiah, a defiant leader who bucks the odds with a lot of success. As soon as his dad dies and leaves the Jewish resistance movement in his hands, Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee rallies many of his fellow Israelis in their guerrilla warfare campaign against one of Alexander the Great’s political descendents, his vast army, and the Jewish “renegades” who have gone over to the dark side.

1 Maccabees also reminds me of the Book of Esther.   Both books have the Jews’ apocalyptic struggle against annihilation by their conquerors as their themes, and neither book makes any direct reference to God.

The story of Hanukkah also reminds me of my two children.  Judah, who had a difficult time going along with what everyone else was doing, could be Warren's patron saint.   Once when Warren was three, Victoria was getting him ready for Sunday school.  He raised a lament, apropos of nothing: “But I don’t want to obey my teachers!”

Two years later, Warren was skating counter-clockwise while the other three hundred children on the ice rink were skating clockwise.  Victoria stopped him and told him that he needed to skate “like everybody else.”

Warren stared incredulously.  “Why do I need to do that?”

(Victoria treasured up these sayings in her heart, wondering what role he might play in the latter days.)

For me, Bethany comes into the Hanukkah story once the Jews recapture Jerusalem.  The Jews clean up, rebuild, and rededicate the temple.  Bethany is very dedicated to God and finds a lot of meaning in worship.  The Bible’s comparison of our bodies with the temple of God resonates strongly with her.

Bethany especially likes the story about the miracle of lights.  When she was little, she’d watch the candles as we’d read in the storybook about how the one-day supply of oil lasted the eight days it takes to celebrate Hanukkah.

The only problem is, the miracle of lights never makes it into 1 Maccabees.  Its writer, always reticent about more than inferring divine intervention, leaves the miracle of lights story to be told in the Talmud.  My Protestant mind scoffs: the miracle of lights is too apocryphal for the Apocrypha!  But the story sounds like the God of the Bible, and watching Bethany relate to it over the years, I’ve become a believer, too.  It’s hard to arrive at the whole truth according only to Protestant lights.

I’ve included two photographs.  The first is of Bethany at age four, intent on the menorah she had made out of clay.  The second is of Warren, taken tonight, lighting the shamash out of order with a blowtorch.

Happy Hanukkah.  Here’s to truth and light.

Somehow I end up with Fords, and somehow they all let me down.  Fords follow cars I like (and even name): my Ford Pinto wagon followed my VW Squareback (tan; hence, “the Pig”), my Ford Mustang followed my Toyota Corona (dubbed “the Sewing Machine,” due to its engine, by my father), and my current Mercury Sable wagon followed my Subaru Impreza (“the Zipmobile”).  With the exception of the Subaru, the three foreign cars were dreams I scraped up money for and bought near the end of their lives.  The Subaru was the only new car I’ve ever bought, but I totaled it on an icy overpass a few years back.

After the death of each dream car, my parents graciously step in with a bailout plan, and one of the plan’s conditions is always a Ford.

This cycle has gone on uninterrupted since my sister and I bought the Pig back in 1977.

My Fords die relatively young, and my Sable, after about 65,000 miles, has been in the shop for about a month.  The repair guy’s shop has a great reputation, and he has always treated me well.  He hasn’t figured out what’s wrong with the Sable’s electrical system.  He recognizes, though, that his customer isn’t hot to get his car back, so my car hasn’t gotten much attention from him over the past few days.

I’m at the point in my car cycle where I’d scrape together some cash and buy another small, foreign, dream car.  But this time I have no cash, and I no longer want a car.

Cars don’t allure me anymore.  I like the idea of being green, but it’s more than that.  Even electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars don’t move me, perhaps because I’ve been reading about these cars for decades and have felt like the auto industry and Congress misled me about their willingness to make it happen.  But the allure is gone mainly because cars are such bothers.

My life, already pedestrian in my students’ view, is becoming more pedestrian in the more pedestrian sense of the word.  I ride my bike or walk to school and to the public library.  Our neighborhood’s one-month-old grocery store is a seven-minute walk from our house.  Last month, I quit the gym I’ve been a member of for the past ten years in favor of one that will open in two weeks around the corner from the grocery store.

Victoria’s Sienna would make us a one-car family, and I wouldn’t mind if I never drove a car again.  We live just off the W&OD bike trail; maybe I’ll scrape up enough money over the next couple of years for a good used road bike to replace my current, yard-sale clunker.  Thanks, folks, but no more automobile bailouts.

Four Anglican Communion bloggers have lit my Advent candles.  Simon Kershaw at Thinking Anglicans (I dislike the name's implication) homilizes the life of Nicholas Ferrar in preparation for Holy Communion to be celebrated at his grave in Little Gidding:

Nicholas Ferrar and his family, living a quiet and godly life at Little Gidding, did not forget the poor and needy. They welcomed into their household a number of poor widows, they provided alms and education for many, and Ferrar, utilizing his training in medicine, ran a dispensary for the neighbourhood.

Fr. Scott, who pointed me to that post, picks up on its Four Quartets overtones at Fr. Scott & Co. Ask Some New Questions.  Indeed, Fr. Scott chose to link not to the post but to theThinking Anglicans site itself, where the hopeful, big-themed Nicholas Ferrar post is surrounded by posts filled with links to dire-sounding news reports concerning the recent American Episcopal Church rift.

Like Four Quartets, Beth’s words often feel like music to me, and here she is at Cassandra Pages, sweating out and enjoying a new challenge in preparation for the Advent Lessons and Carols program at her cathedral today:

We've just learned an exciting new piece, a setting of the poem "Earthquake" by Thomas Merton, composed for the choir by the director and organist, Patrick Wedd. It's unlike anything I've ever sung, with twenty bells rung in chords by choir members and free-form chanting of the text in some places, where each of us starts and ends a phrase individually before the choir comes together again on a following phrase.

Finally, Paula of Paula’s House of Toast posted “Advent,” a new poem with four stanzas accompanied by four striking photographs, all of which reminds me also of Four Quartets.  Here’s the first stanza:

There is no lack of lack. 
The wind, restless and laden, sinks, 
erases what might lead us back to where
the leaves unbleach, unmould
to ancient, ever-virgin green
or so we think.
There is no way but what's beneath the feet.

By the way, you can catch Beth’s choir’s performance today at Radio Ville-Marie (click “Nous ecouter en direct” in the upper-right portion of the window).  When?  4 P.M., of course (EST).

Each year my high priestess, not without blood, phones to recite the story of my birth.  We danced at the Chamberlin against a night of few stars, she says, colonnade women and poplin men in brick-soled bucks on bluegrass. Heat lightning tugged at tankers in a dark offing.

We were at a point; you’ve seen the Chamberlin from a skipjack, rising and falling against sky and Hampton Roads, respectively; well, we rose and fell in the barest swell, I’m sure, the Navy Band’s brass and dress whites narrowly ruffled in black water. It was hot, a solstice hot, not unrelenting but apogeic; I think a June night is an anomaly and a celebration, brief as it is, and a summer night young enough to admit that summer hasn’t come, and 1957, too, the boom year of baby boom babies, the height of something you were born to fall from, and the top of a clock; I wanted you born by midnight.  I didn’t want you born on the thirteenth.

To the side, in a green dress, your grandmother, just five years older than you are today, her hair a black and silver you never knew, talked with her friends. (I have never thought of her with either friends or dark hair, I think to myself, but later I realize that I had thought last year when Mom had called how I had never thought of her that way; this year, though – I think for the first time – I think: nor have I ever thought of her in a cotton dress.)

Between numbers, after months of expansion, the contractions, the clock hands climbing and not falling, the heat a haze and not unrelenting, a presence and a midwife, really, and your father, excusing himself from his fellows, took me by an elbow, if you can picture that.  His long, black Studebaker bent around Newport News Point to 50th Street and the hospital, ablaze above the James River and its own silent ships.  The doctor and I worked to have you born today; your father, outside, rocked on his heels.  11:43.  There you were, and she hangs up again.

I look out my window, appeased.  I cradle the phone.  I can see the same moon that floated below those ruffled colonnades.  But I reflect that the hospital is now a parking lot, and my June nights have become like asphalt, too, expanded and contracted by a hundred solstices, buckled like lips turned upwards for their mother’s kiss.

November and poetry.  I named my only stuffed animal November; I don't know why.  I became aware of him when his eyes were scratched out and his rabbit ears were torn from their metal wires.  I remember accepting on some level that I had done this before I was I, before I remembered anything, and I remember feeling that I would never love November as much as when I didn’t know I loved him and didn’t know anything the way I did then, feeling the way I felt then and trying to see myself scratching out his eyes in love.

The memory of writing poetry is as dark as when I left school tonight just past six, gusty and cold as January night.  I walked past the bike rack I had given up a month ago, and I got in my Sable wagon.  Something electrical happened to it yesterday.  The radio and clock don’t work, half the dash lights are out, and the heat and defroster are frozen on, full blast.  I was warm by the time I stopped at the strip mall to pick up the pizza and subs.  I won’t need to get any of it fixed for a while, though I miss the radio.  I must have hit the knob six times during the five-minute drive home.

November we write poetry, mostly in muck we shape later.  We aim to make a mess, I say.  Don’t worry about spelling, poetic forms, rules of any kind.  Some days it’s work, but some days you’re unconscious.  I remember a college day playing ball in Blow Gym, and shot after shot falls; I steal the ball and race for a lay-up, three guys behind me, but I stop and do this jumper at the end, the three guys flying by me and hitting the wall.  I don’t remember it going in, but I remember knowing it goes in and being happy for the knowing and not seeing, for the forgetting that makes memory.  One guy, a real gym rat, pats me, says, “It’s a good thing you pulled up ‘cuz we were coming down on you.” That day made the other days all right.

Moving from desk to desk this week, I pushed through a hundred and twenty writer sketchbooks.  I promised not to read them but only to count the pages and finger the dog-ears.  Show me shop floors strewn with shavings and sawdust.  Brown leaves blown back through black afternoons.

Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
-- Rolf to Liesl in The Sound of Music

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Merton wondered whether he and Fundamentalist Christians served the same God.  I wonder similarly if YourBO is MyBO.  Unless you’re frank, I may not learn how MyBO offends you.

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”  What do you make of that?

If you break open Obama’s memoir and take a gob of pages in each hand, bearing down somewhat with your thumbs on each open page as you might to read it, the book applauds. My daughter thought so, too.  Now, mine’s a used paperback; my mother read it at home this past summer in Tidewater where pages can get a little soggy.  Anyway, it’s the loudest book I’ve ever held.  And I think Isaiah’s prophecy that “all the trees of the field will clap their hands” has come to pass in my day, in MyBO.

This week, even the hazard of a cabinet appointment marginalized MyBO.

I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.  “I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.”

Christians argue most over Genesis and Revelation.  We are half-blind in different eyes, each the other's spitting image.  We see trees as men, walking.  But MyBO sees the past and future rooted in each clattering leaf.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests.  I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power – that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.  It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky.  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce.  They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another – the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

That’s from pages 436 and 437 of Dreams from My Father.  Obama was in Kenya then, crying over his father’s grave.  There was no plaque on it, nothing in writing.  When he returned years later with a wife and a Harvard law degree, he found a plaque.

The GOP wrote Bill Ayers all over Obama’s book.  Turns out it was just their copy.  So they offered Pilate $10,000 to revise it, but they panicked when they read the blank proofs.  TheirBO came out last week as OurGOP and sold millions of copies.  What I have written I have written.

Thomas Merton and the baobab tree.  Neither MyBO nor I can cite sources.

We are dogs, rooting in crotches.  The past is present in a scent, the future’s brazen innocence.  MyBO is me; YourBO is you.

And Liesl’s dreamy echo: “To write on.”  There’s something indiscriminate about an empty page.

Yesterday was pouring rain.  We came, maybe five minutes apart, walking past the Obama yard sign and the For Lease sign into a suburban professional park suite smelling of fresh paint, thin and white.

By the time the fifth one of us had filed in, we pretty much looked like Ashburn: three women, two men, a black, four whites, a teacher, a government contractor, my Jewish buddy who lives behind me, and two ex-lawyers.  Five.  Different ages, too, from maybe twenty-five to sixty.  The lobby didn’t feel giddy or self-congratulating, as I had feared, though it felt like a roomful of stories untold by people who liked to tell them.

The campaign guy, a quiet kid with thinning blond hair, probably in his early thirties, mentioned the rain and suggested that we canvass by phone, and one of us, a young black woman, acquiesced.  The rest of us said no, we weren’t there for no phone.

The campaign guy looked at us and scratched the back of his neck.  “Yeah.  Okay,” he said, walking to another room with a sheaf of paper.

None of us told our stories, but I knew that some of them would come out canvassing from under umbrellas.  Debbie and I decided to go as a pair until we got comfortable enough going solo so we could cover more ground.

That’s what the [community organization] leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried with them some central explanation of themselves.  Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them.  Sacred stories.  (Dreams from My Father 190)

My father ran for office once – an unsuccessful run for the Newport News City Counsel.  I remember looking at the yellowed copy of the Daily Press that had come out sometime during the year of my birth.  My father, the headline read, “Throws His Hat in Ring.”  It gave me some clues about what the Old Man did when he left home in his white Lincoln convertible every day: a top hat, maybe a circus, his smiling face in the morning paper.

My parents and I used to canvass for Democrats in a white and increasingly Republican end of town.  The blacks lived down in East End, across the tracks from the shipyard, the municipal buildings, and what little else was left of Newport News’s downtown by the time I was a kid.

I remember at about ten years of age folding and unfolding a simple card a friend of my father’s had prepared.  Unfolded: “Vote Alan Diamonstein.”  Folded: “Vote Alan in.”  We handed our cards out to unfailingly polite neighbors who seldom voted for our candidates.  Sometimes our candidates would win, anyway, aided by the bloc vote from East End.

I haven’t canvassed since, until yesterday.

Our last house together had a front porch, so we each had two hands free.  Debbie, a cheery, slightly heavy woman who had been airing out the Obama cards she had dropped in the rain, introduced us to him.

The man, gray bearded and brusque, seemed a lot older than thirty-three, the age the campaign manifest had assigned to him from the registrar’s office.  “Obama.  Obama,” he assured us.  He had voted for Bush the last election but wanted his vote back.

“I’ve voted for a Republican in every presidential election since 1980, until now,” I confided to him.

Debbie looked up at me.  As we walked down the driveway, she said, “You’re good at this.”

“Thanks!” I said.  “You’re good, too.  We’re real, you know that?”

My father, a raconteur, has told me a certain story only twice.  At a vestry meeting at our midtown Episcopal church during the Fifties, he had made a short, impassioned plea in favor of permitting black people to worship there.

“Jenkins raises his voice and says, ‘You’re a nigger lover,’” my father told me.   Jenkins was a generation older than my father. “It was awful.

“A week later, Jenkins pulls me aside. ‘I’m sorry, Warren,’ he says.  ‘I shouldn’t have called you that.’”  My father’s eyes get a little wet like they do at the end of some stories.

Only recently have I understood that the denouement was the most important part of that story, that it didn’t tie up a loose end so much as it reflected a reversal of fortune.  It has been hard for me to understand Jenkins’s generation.

Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me.  “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say.  Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.”  Or “The Kalenjins – well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”

Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways.  “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say.  “We’re all part of one tribe.  The black tribe.  The human tribe.  Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”

And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans were all crazy anyway.  You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”

And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry.  He also had such ideas about people.”

Meaning he, too was naïve; he, too, liked to argue with history.  Look what happened to him  . . . (Dreams from My Father 348)

Debbie and I were on opposite sides of another suburban street with expensive homes.   The rain had stopped, but I still carried my umbrella, now at my side.  My canvassing manifest indicated that my next house was home to a young, first-time voter, but her mother, a black woman peering through an eight-inch opening in the doorway, told me that her daughter was away at college.

I introduced myself as an Obama volunteer who lived just behind the high school.   (“Don’t let them think you’re from Maryland or something,” the campaign guy had told us.  “I mean, I’m from Illinois, and we get a lot of volunteers from Maryland.  But if you’re from around here . . .” He finished his thought with a shrug.)

“Have you decided whom you’ll be supporting for president – Barack Obama or John McCain?” I asked her.

“Who do you think I’m supporting?” she asked.  The doorway stayed eight inches wide.

I thought about my canvassing of white neighborhoods in Newport News with my parents forty years ago, and about the support we always assumed would come from an area of town I learned to be afraid to visit.

I won’t take the bait, I thought.  I wanted her to feel empowered, to feel the irony I was savoring at that moment.  A white man trying to get a black woman to vote for a black man for president.  Here in Virginia, where I grew up.

“Well, I don’t know!” I said.  “Are you for Obama or McCain?”  I smiled, probably somewhat coyly.

She didn’t answer.  She turned her head and pursed her lips.  The opening held steady at eight inches.  I glanced down looking for a chain lock, but there wasn’t one.

Finally, I said, “I assume you’re for Obama.  Are you planning to vote?”  And I went through the rest of my spiel.

She was ambivalent about volunteering for the campaign, but she confirmed the phone number the campaign had gotten from the registrar’s office.  I told her that she might get a phone call from my campaign guy asking her if she was ready to help out somehow, maybe with canvassing or phone calls, at least with some paperwork.

She accepted my offer of two absentee ballot forms.

She closed the door, and the rain picked up. I checked off a box or two on the manifest.  I don’t think she’ll volunteer.

WHEREAS, we have fought the Culture Wars for almost three decades, and

WHEREAS, the Culture Wars being typical of an unraveling phase of a generational cycle, the said phase and cycle described by leading generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997), an unraveling phase (a phase also called a “turning”) in which, according to Strauss and Howe, “people have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral reform, and lifestyle experimentation. Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, during an unraveling (a.k.a., a third turning), such as the one that most of us have spent the majority of our lives in, “as moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means. Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred. Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, the unraveling itself shows signs of unraveling, beginning with the spiritual maturation of significant segments the politically influential Evangelical Movement, a growth which has seen these segments champion causes, such as poverty and health care, that are more closely identified with the Democratic Party, which growth is a signal that the Culture Wars are ending, and

WHEREAS, the unraveling appears to be unraveling faster at the presidential level, since the divisive, sixteen-year era of Boomer presidencies is drawing to a close and since no generation since Abraham Lincoln has returned to the White House after leaving it (Generations 459 - 60), Boomers being an insufferable “prophet” generation (of which I hereby admit to being a member) at the front lines of both sides of the Culture Wars, one president on either side of that war and elected in large part to advance the cause of his side in that war; drawing to a close, I say, since, at least arguably, none of the four national, major-party candidates in this election are Boomers, each ticket containing oneSilent Generation member (McCain and Biden) and one Gen-Xer (Obama and Palin), “arguably” since one might argue with Strauss and Howe’s formulation of the Gen-X Generation as beginning in 1961 instead of 1964, as is more traditional, though Strauss and Howe’s formulation seems to be particularly apt for Obama, born in 1961 and showing little inclination to re-fight the Culture Wars, himself a poster child for Gen-X cool, pragmatism, and rough upbringing, and

WHEREAS, the said unraveling may be unraveling faster since this presidential election may be the first in American history in which all four major-party candidates are from what generational theorists call recessive generations, the civically dynamic Hero Generation (e.g., the G.I. Generation) and the spiritually dynamic Prophet Generation (e.g., the Boomers again) being the most influential and the Adaptive Generation (a.k.a., the Artist Generation and e.g., the Silent generation) and the Nomad Generation (e.g., Gen Xers) sandwiched between those dominant generations to help correct their excesses, the Adaptive Generation as ameliorators (think how McCain, long an inclusive politician, has adapted himself (as people in Adaptive Generations will do to the younger Prophet generation’s ways) to the divisive Boomer Culture Wars during this campaign as, in his view, I guess, a necessary and justified means to a good end) and the Nomad Generation as pragmatists (Obama stating frequently, for instance, that his foreign policy would be free of ideology), and

WHEREAS, parenthetically, this anti-Boomer, recessive correction was confirmed again to me as late as this morning in a video email from David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager who, parenthetically, seems to have adopted Obama’s clipped cadence and facial mannerisms when speaking, and who, in announcing that the Obama campaign had added over 632,000 donors in September, pointed out that “the two groups who have given us the most contributions are retirees and students,” who, of course, are Silents and Millennials – not Boomers – all (and by “all,” I mean the stuff in this paragraph and in the non-parenthetical paragraph above it) of which may point to a major corrective ahead of, and a national and unconscious preparation of sorts for,

WHEREAS, a fou