Angels

In an early Torah portion the story relates that while Abraham is recovering from circumcision, he is visited by three angels to whom even in his pain and discomfort he gives rest and sustenance. Abraham washes their feet and helps them to lie down to rest. Abraham tells his wife Sarah to prepare a wonderful meal of the choicest veal and the finest bread for the visitors. When they depart and say that they will return in one year and announce that in that time Sarah will have a child. Abraham is ninety-nine years old and Sarah in her nineties as well. These angels are very good.

In each of two later Torah portions Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, is visited by an angel. In the first meeting Jacob has had a dream. In it “a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it.” And standing beside Jacob was God, thugh I am thinking it was an angel,  who promised Jacob that God will be with him and protect him wherever he would go and that the land promised to Abraham and Isaac would, indeed, become his. When Jacob awoke from the dream he said, “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it!” In the second meeting Jacob sends his family across the Jabbok and he was left alone. “And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When [the man] saw that he had not prevailed against Jacob, he wrenched Jacob’s hip at it socket, so that the socket of his hip was strained as he wrestled with him. But when the man asked to be released, Jacob refused until the man blessed him. And the man said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” This second meeting too was with an angel. Jacob’s meeting with angels have comforted and directed him.

I’ve been thinking of late about angels. My friend George called last evening. I do not hear often from him—he lives better than half the year in Arizona and when he was in Saint Paul recently there had been difficulties and we did not spend much time together. But last night he called. He had followed the weather forecasts and grew concerned about me in the cold and snow. Now, I have lived in the Midwest for thirty-five years and have very well adjusted to the weather, and though I have less tolerance now than when first I arrived here, I told George that I knew how to care for myself during the freezing weather. But, I said, his concern touched me. 

Perhaps his call was about more than the weather. And in our conversation that did range over several topics, he told me this story. George has serious medical conditions that trouble him. One recent day he had ridden out on his electric bicycle for a twelve-mile ride. George is a regular bike rider, but he suffers from macular degeneration, a condition that blurs central vision. Macular degeneration causes blurred or no vision in the center of vision; he experiences distorted lines, decreased color intensity, dark or empty areas in the field of vision. Macular degeneration is a condition incurable and degenerative: it can only get worse. George can no longer drive and despite being an intellectual can no longer read books or the newspapers. George continued his story:  recently he had taken a fall getting off of his bicycle and seriously hurt his shoulder. The pain was becoming difficult to tolerate. His orthopedic doctor advised George that without surgery he actually could live with the shoulder injury for the rest of his life experiencing pain that might at times be acute. Or, the doctor suggested, George could have surgery to repair the shoulder. George is eighty-two years old and was conflicted what path he should choose.  

Halfway through his ride George stopped for a rest and parking his bicycle he sat on a nearby bench. In a little while another bike rider on a standard non-electric bicycle asked if he might share the bench. “Sure,” said George. The two men began to talk and the man revealed that he also suffered macular degeneration, that he too had hurt both his shoulders and had undergone two shoulder reconstructions. He also revealed that he had two knees replaced. He said also that he was ninety-seven years old. 

George’s face must have lit up as the man’s talk offered strength and paths for George to take. George had met with his angel. He decided there that he going to have the surgery on his shoulder, that he was going to live through his macular degenerative eyes and that he was going to continue to ride his bicycle until he turned at least ninety-seven years old and maybe one hundred. His angel had blessed George. 

When the phone rang with George’s call, I was sitting before the fire on a cold and dark evening feeling sorry enough for myself. I am seventy-seven years old and suffer from a few medical conditions that probably won’t kill me but from which I complainingly suffer. I have just published a memoir entitled Anxious Am I. Enough said about its subject! Now, I have a daughter getting married in two weeks, and I know that it will be a happy occasion. But I have been experiencing vague anxieties regarding this change in family status that her marriage exposes for me to consider. I think I was feeling that the intact family in which I had lived for thirty years despite divorce was now to be somehow changed. No matter that we all get excellently along; no matter that the circle simply, even happily would widen;  nevertheless, the circle would be transformed. I was experiencing that change anxiously. I did not discuss this issue with George. But our forty minute wide ranging conversation comforted me; by the fact that he had thought of me enough to be concerned for my welfare; by his willingness to share some intimacy with me and listen to some of my issues.

When I ended the call I knew that I had met my angel. It was a rare and meaningful event. And it would be sufficient. We can wrestle with ourselves and hold on tightly to our anxieties and our troubles until we receive from the angel our blessing. We have to only realize that it is an angel with whom we are struggling. 

We're In for a Very Bumpy Ride

I am troubled by the present rhetoric in the news that has defined Trump’s victory to be the result of his appeal to those who have felt left out of the process, left out of government’s concern, left out of the culture of the nation, basically to those who feel they have lost and are yet losing power. The analysis seems to offer a philosophical position that attributes the election by an electorate of an autocrat angered that their position of power has been usurped by the population over which they have once asserted power. This idea has appealed, of course, to the supporters of the red-hatted movement to Make America Great Again, when people like them would again assume power and order the nation’s priorities: they are to a large extent white, male, Christian (leaning to the evangelical) gun-toting, working class, macho citizens. These are Trump’s legions. I have wondered exactly when was America great in the first place: during the genocide of Native Americans? the time of the burning of accused witches? during the days of slavery? or the time of the Japanese internment at Manzanar? What about the days when America ignored the actions of the Nazis in the horrors perpetrated in the death camps? What about during the era of Jim Crow and legal segregation, or the days of public misogynistic declarations and gender discrimination by the general public and elected officials? What about during the Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq Wars? When exactly was American great? But, advocates of the Make America Great Again are the same people who chose to vote for a convicted criminal who was twice impeached, whose language in campaign speeches would not be the kind of talk that would be permitted by their children; who spewed repulsive calumny on his opponents and swore to revenge those who he claimed to be disloyal to him, the country be damned; who has declared that he would be a dictator on Day 1, and has reportedly said that he would from jail release into the streets the felons who have been legally convicted of violence and insurrection and who threatened the nation and its representative in their attack on the Capitol in their Trump-inspired attempt to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of  power on January 6, 2021. No, there are not good folks on both sides.

In his essay on Tolstoy’s theory of history, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin refers to a Greek saying: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin distinguishes between these two views: the fox, he says, “pursues many ends unrelated or even contradictory, connected if at all only in some de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.” These are the people whose thought explores a variety of avenues, whose vision is varied , unsettled, and supple. The fox acknowledges, since “we cannot legislate for unknown consequences of consequences of consequences,” and hence remains open to several possible paths in every situation. Not relativist but as Berlin attests, pluralist. Pluralism, he writes, “is the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, full men, capable of understanding other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other.” The pluralist is Tristram Shandy. The hedgehog, however, says “I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problem of society, I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even with the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached,” The hedgehog relates everything to a single vision, to one system,—"a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all they are and say has significance.” Trump and his followers are hedgehogs, and the red hat is the symbol of the one, single vision. 

            Trump’s actions of late—his cabinet picks—are not the exercise of prudent government formation, but rather, the actions more like a host handing out invitations to a private party. The choices he has made for cabinet appointments are to those of his friends who have remained loyal to him through all his lies and misdeeds, are those who  little experience for the positions to which they have been nominated, and at least one of them, Matt Gaetz, has has already withdrawn his nomination because he has been accused of serious ethical and even criminal violations. Gaetz who had been nominated with barely two year’s experience as a lawyer had been picked to be the nation’s chief legal officer. Robert Kennedy Jr. has been chosen to occupy the Department of Health as Secretary of Health? He is the man who decries vaccinations that have proven effective in combatting disease, who advocates for unsafe raw milk and demands the removal of fluoride form the water despite a mass of evidence proven its effectiveness in dental care. Peter Hegseth had been chosen to head the Department of Defense despite the fact that he has no experience—and probably very little knowledge—in the workings of the military or its administration. Besides, like his boss, he, too, had been accused of sexual assault. His boss has been already convicted of this crime! And now we have the nomination of Linda McMahon to be Secretary of the Department of Education, a department that Trump has promised to eliminate. Her qualifications: Linda McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Mr. Trump’s first term and is a former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment! I wonder when was the last time she even visited a school?

No, there are only friends invited to this party and not competent officials. And where are the Black and Latino men and women who Trump demanded he receive their vote. The invites were selective. Like a drunken fraternity affair, this party should prove raucous and destructive.

 

 

On Contexts and Stories

It had been raining for two days. The old adage I have seemingly always known promised that April showers will bring May flowers. Somewhere that may be true, but in Minnesota that assurance doesn’t safely hold: even into the month of May the weather remains problematic—I recall a snowstorm in the more recent past that took place in mid-May and deposited twelve inches of wet, heavy snow on the deck of my then Wisconsin home. The rains in April may be somehow a portent for Spring—but not always here in the Mid-West. Here in Minnesota the wiser flowers wait to bloom until at least mid-June. In fact, Spring is not an actual season in the upper Mid-west where I have lived for the past thirty-five years: we most often go from winter to summer in a single day and the rains occur amidst thunder and lightning though sometimes they are gentle.! But, it is now November, and it has been raining for two full days. During this time the rains don’t soften the frozen soil for the flowers to burst through or provide them with the necessary water for their rooting sustenance. Rather, these autumnal rains help the leaves fall from the trees and float to the ground. I see that the trees outside my window are fast becoming bare. I watch the squirrels gather up the tumbled leaves and with the soggy materials gripped firmly in their mouths scurry up the disrobed trees to build their winter home. Thoreau writes that the fallen leaves “teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe.” Not me, not yet. The falling leaves and bare trees do remind me of death, and so I return to my writing. What falls from the sky is still rain even as it is in April, but today the rain feels different than it does in April or May: today it is a bleak November rain and holds little promise for a milder future. And a rain-filled Election Day has come and gone, though its repercussions will affect us for decades. And the rain it raineth every day!

Things become known from within the context in which they are experienced; the original response to events is that of the body; that bodily response becomes associated with an emotion which in the future will be evoked when the body experiences a similar context. After the bitter winter in Minnesota, forty-five degrees feels quite warm in April and May; the body loosens and the mood lightens. But today, in November, forty-five degrees feels rather chilly, and when I go out of the house today for my morning walk, I will put on my insulated winter jacket, wool mittens and stocking cap. My body will tighten and try to hold in its warmth; my mood will be wary. I prepare for winter. I am more hopeful in Spring, more cautious in Fall and Winter. In November’s forty-five degrees I put away my short pants, but in May’s forty-five degrees I take then out of winter shortage. Like the buds on the trees, in May’s forty-five degrees I begin to open and enjoy the rain. In November’s rains I begin to close and stay dry inside, but in May I’ll be found singing in the rain. 

A recognition of the significance of context seems to me necessary for an examined life. To know ourselves means that we acknowledge the contexts of our lives as the place from where the stories we narrate and have narrated have their genesis. I know that there are many stories that do not come to the surface, and that there are stories that are consciously or unconsciously refused, though I know that these buried and unnarrated stories have yet their influence. The narrator of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda says, “No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistakes in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about.” We fill the unavoidable gaps in our knowledges then with narrative. Emily, in Ann Patchett’s novel, Tom Lake, says about the origin of the narrative of her painful break-up with Peter Duke, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, says about Nate Timblin, “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all: we are stories. Emily the narrator shares the name of the character in Thornton Wilder’s play that our narrator played in high school, university and summer stock!

Story telling is how we create sense of our lives. Ben, one of two narrators in Anne Michael’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, says “But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by happens in memory.” That assumption is the source of the pop and scoop narrated into story, and that assumption is responsible for the question about what we want to answer—or deny—at the moment. Ben considers the life of Jakob Beer who had lived with Athos the geologist who was a “splendid anthropomorphist,” and Ben acknowledges that Jackob had to have been shaped by storytelling cared for as he was by a master story teller. And who is not shaped by storytelling? The forces within us that inspire our behaviors and thoughts require excavation and study and as they are unearthed the story evolves. Our desire to know occurs in a context: “No thing is sudden . . . Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms so history is the gradual instant.” The forces that produce the volcanic eruption had been in place for years, centuries and eons. Geologists and archeologists, like Athos study those events and uncover the artifacts about which they then narrate stories. In Fugitive Pieces, Ben’s father demands from Ben’s piano practice perfection. But the context of this demand is that Ben’s father, is a Holocaust survivor, and as Ben acknowledged, his father “understands his son’s piano playing practice as a moral imperative: each note setting order against chaos . . .” This moral imperative is the buried force in Ben’s father desperate demand of Ben, and the demand also represents the father’s felt responsibility to Ben. Finally, his father’s demand shapes the contexts of Ben’s gusts and storms. Out of his turmoil Ben narrates his story. It is of course a different story than either his father or mother might narrate, but then, it derives from a different context.

Much, however, remains buried. The narrator of Daniel Deronda says, “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.” The narrative we create depends on those gusts and storms; certain contexts call up certain gusts and storm. These can be understood as a source for our stories. We must survive the storm, however. Events occur, but what we remember and narrate is reflective of what we can come to know about our gusts and storm; what we know is moral. What we consciously remember and what we narrate of our memory is that which possesses value for us. How we narrate that knowledge depends on the questions that one has. In his autobiography the philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood says, “That what one learned depended not merely on what turned up in one’s trenches but also on what questions one was asking: so that a man who was asking questions of one kind learnt one kind of thing from a piece of digging which to another man and revealed something different, to a third something illusory, and to a fourth nothing at all.” Sometimes it is the therapist, a trusted loved one, or even sometimes a stranger who asks the questions. And there are some who never ask questions, who disregard their contexts, but they tell stories nevertheless.

Memory sometimes is buried and out of sight but not out of force. In Fugitive Pieces, the geologist Athos says, “If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.” These maps are important to the geologist, but the work of the geologist demands presence at the site and digging in the earth. The map might indicate the events, and there are maps that show the topography. But the map is not the territory, nor is the event the story; that event must be narrated to be known and then it becomes the land and not the map and the narration includes my travels through it: it is the story. From the map I can learn the names and places and contours, but it is while traveling the territory that what lies beneath and has been buried can be learned. In the ghettos the Jews buried their valuables. “All across Europe there’s such buried treasure. A scrap of lace, a bowl. Ghetto diaries that have never been found.” But these artifacts lie waiting to be excavated. One cannot get lost studying a map, but walking the territory leaves time and space to get lost: to find oneself it is important first to be lost. It is in those details during discovery that one creates and others may find the pop and scoop of the story. 

On Evil

 

 I had recently read and then had reread Anne Michaels’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, a story on one level about the connections between the trauma suffered as a result of the Nazi execution of the Holocaust and the long-term effect of that trauma on memory. Memory is the basis of our subjectivity: it is what we know. The two narrators, Jakob Beer and Ben, struggle to construct a life after the attempt by the Nazis to eradicate the world of Jews. The Nazis had murdered Jakob’s parents and his sister, Bella, who they had first kidnapped in the aftermath of their murderous raid; Jakob survived only by burying himself in the mud and had been rescued by the geologist Athos, who then hid the child, Jakob, under his coat and as if pregnant with child carried him before to safety in Zakynthos, Greece. But the effect of this trauma has left Jakob feeling lost. He remembers: of his sister Jakob can say only, “I had no choice but to imagine her face,” but the memory is fleeting and painful. Of himself he says, “I was like the men in Athos’s stories, who set their courses before the invention of longitude and never quite know where they were . . . They looked at the stars and knew they were missing information.” And Ben, the narrator of the second half of the novel is the son of Holocaust survivors for whom the experience in the camps organized not only future their lives but that of their son. Ben says, “ . . . that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you’re silted up and can’t move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most.’” Ironically, Ben had discovered that the Nazis had murdered two children of his parents, and that his name is not really a name but a title and a means of maintaining some emotional distance should the Nazis come again: in English ‘ben’ is not a diminutive of Benjamin but in Hebrew means only ‘son of’. For both Jakob and Ben, the experience of the Holocaust has shaped their lives and their memories and sometimes in ways of which they are only partially aware.I think that their silences reflect this buried knowledge. 

In my contemporary world, the Nazis have become a daily presence. Only this week in this edition of the New York Review of Books there is a review article about three recent books concerning the rise and acceptance of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the decline of the Weimar Republic.  Over the almost forty years that I have subscribed to this and other journals there have been a regular progress of reviews regarding books and films addressing the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. I had grown up during the 1950s and 1960s in total silence regarding the Holocaust, a non-recognition of it—my parents never raised the issue, ever—and I do not remember an single reference  of it during my high school or college education. We worried then about Ethan Frome but not Anne Frank. I suspect this silence, this absence of the Shoah in my consciousness has had its effect nonetheless. I have since consumed whatever was available to me regarding it. There exists at least one entire bookshelf in my home that focuses on the Nazis and the events of the Holocaust and its long-term effects and repercussions. I have screened a great number of films, both documentary and fictional, that depict the events of those horrible years and the consequences of it for its victims. I have read the novels. And I consume the articles in the journals. In my mind and in my cultures, there seems to be an insatiable hunger for news and analyses concerning Nazi Germany, its ideologies and activities. The Holocaust has become an almost daily subject of talk, and the Nazis have become for our culture the embodiment of evil.

            And so I was intrigued by Mary Midgley’s observation in her essay “The Problem of Natural Evil.” She offers an interesting perspective on the issue of the Nazis and evil. For her the Nazis and its collaborators were evil, no doubt. Midgley acknowledges that evil is powerful because the destruction it performs has no positive aim in it; it is simply anti-life, a refusal of life. Terry Eagleton had argued that evil is the death-drive turned outward. I accept this idea. Evil exists, Eagleton writes, as “an unbearable sense of non-being which must be taken out on another.” Daniel Deronda, in George Eliot’s eponymous novel, too, refers to evil as a denial of life. Daniel says to Gwendolyn Harleth, who fears that her inaction led to her husband drowning death and makes her, thus, a murderer; Deronda says to her, “Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or later it works its way outside us—it may be in the vitiation that breeds evil acts—but also may be in the self-abhorrence that stings us into better striving  . . . No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.” In our Western world the implementation of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews has come to represent not mere wickedness or immorality but the substance of ultimate evil. Hannah Arendt was wrong to think that Eichmann had no motives at all: “he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” I believe that this attribution to him of ignorance has been revealed as false. He later admitted to a friendly listener, "To be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the ten point three million [European Jews], I would be happy and say, 'All right, we managed to destroy an enemy.' This is not a man without motives depicted here in his words. Rather, they were a clear expression of evil: a denial of life without cause. 

            Now Mary Midgely does not deny this evil of the Nazis; rather she suggests that the contemporary focus so exclusively on the Nazis, this attribution of ultimate evil to the Nazi regime can therefore encourage wishful thinking that suggests with the defeat of them that evil has been  eliminated. And more, the obsessive focus on the Nazis can, Midgely avers, “turn out to be yet one more way of missing their successors—who do not need to be spiritually bankrupt to this extent to be genuinely dangerous—and of inflating mere ordinary opponents to Nazi status.” Alain Finkielkraut writes, “The world has seen other genocides since the war. Only vanity would claim moral privilege or a monopoly on extermination for the Jews, for in this domain the Nazis were precursors rather than exceptions to the rule.” What Midgley and Finkielkraut are arguing is that to turn the Nazis into the ultimate epitome of evil, the primary exemplar of evil, is a way to avoid recognizing others who are also life-deniers, or a belief that allows us to contemptuously define those who disagree with us as Nazis or fascists.

            And this leads me to Donald Trump who I believe to be a contemporary embodiment of this life-denying evil. Charles Savage has written in the New York Times, “Donald Trump says he’d deploy the U.S. military on domestic soil, including to suppress protests he deems riots, patrol Democratic-run cities he deems crime dens and hunt for undocumented immigrants. The strongman tactics would carry profound implications for individual rights and constraints on federal power.” And what would those actions be in service to except the assumption of absolute power to eliminate perceived political enemies and those perceived to be disloyal, but includes the country’s immigrants that includes Melania and her family. He has already made public his threats. Trump claims that immigrants are animals. Again, from the New York Times and again directly quoting Trump: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” He continued, “They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” About whom is he speaking? Trump’s words are a denial of life. He has transformed human beings into venomous substances that must be eliminated. They are animals who must be contained, at best. The language mirrors that of the Nazis. That is what the Nazis said as they exterminated Europe’s Jews and Gypsies, and Disabled. And I recall that Hitler’s first plan was to rid Europe of Jews was by mass deportation. Later he took to murdering them.

            Of course, Trump is not the only one who accuses the immigrant of being less than human: Trump has his minions and like him they are very dangerous. They are life deniers. They murder and destroy and sometimes do so with impunity. And election day is Tuesday, November 5, and this embodiment of Evil could be elected President of the United States.

 

Stories: in Progress

Shakespeare’s Prospero says, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on . . .” Prospero doesn’t say that our lives are composed of dreams, as in the bland directive to “live your dreams,” but rather, that our lives are the source material for our dreams and even our nightmares. Prospero suggests neither that our life is a dream—though some, are said to possess dream lives, nor does he say that our lives enact our dreams—or even our nightmares. Our life, continues Prospero, is bounded by sleep: the sleep before birth when we are enwombed and the sleep after death when we are entombed. But until that latter time, when as Hamlet fears, dreams may come when we have shuffled off that mortal coil and we are no longer capable of doing anything from those dreams, in that interim between that before and the after, well, that is our daily lives. Our dreams do not direct our lives, but it is our lives which influence our dreams.

Now, this would be almost a cliché—we no longer hold that our dreams are the work of the gods and that their influence is evident in our dreams— but one implication of Prospero’s statement suggests that our dreams are stories about our lives. Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw material of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In waking life we story the dream-story, and then these diurnal lives become the resources for the next dream. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened. 

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why she should do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had would be the facts, but the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think at all about it: mostly in their lives people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. But then we dream, the dream work operates on the dream day and creates the story that carries into the next day and that can be narrated, and these narrations become the storied material of daily life. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance allows space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts. One narrator, Ben, in Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces says, “But the search for facts, for places, names influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.” The facts obscure, and if they do not lie, then they don’t tell the truth. While in the throes of turmoil the emotion consumes and seems to be all that exists and the emotion becomes the fact. But when the raw and immediate emotion subsides then the possibility of story arises. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and the dream knowingly or unknowingly becomes storied. First, the daily life and then the storied dream. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  

 

 

 

 

Distraction and Digression

Of late I too often opt for distraction, an experience I think opposed to the more productive practice of digression. Distraction directs me away from a present activity or state of awareness for a brief or longer period of time. The distraction might momentarily relieve a tension I am experiencing in an activity in which I am presently engaged by pulling me out of the engagement and into some mostly irrelevant event. I admit that in these times we need to be distracted, but here I am writing about mostly me. One danger of distraction is that it often leads me to the kitchen searching the refrigerator or stuffing my hand in the cookie jar. For good reasons I prefer to keep the latter empty and the former uncluttered, but the flesh is weak . . . and to alleviate my guilt I hand-bake the sweets. Not that it takes too much effort (though the clean-up is a bother—I am a careless cook); recently I have succumbed to purchasing King Arthur Flour boxed mixes: add eggs, milk, butter and vanilla, mix well, and for scones plop eight rounded portions on a prepared baking sheet and bake. For muffins I simply add the mixture into well-oiled muffin tins. I enjoy even this semi-prepared method; though still requiring clean-up, the distraction of baking and eating does give me pleasure and relief.

I have been, of late, drawn in distractibility too often to the smart phone where there are so many rabbit holes to fall into (oh, the places you go!), and to streaming shows from the computer onto a 32” external monitor screen, and to the reading of different novels, one in the mornings (Middlemarch and at present, Daniel Deronda) and another, at present, The Good Soldier, in the afternoons. But those aren’t so much distractions as engagements. I had startedLonesome Dove for the afternoons but found it, well, characterless despite the full cast of characters. I didn’t value the narrative style: declarative without much insight into character: basically a flat account. In McMurtry’s novel the character is defined by the omniscient narrator and not by the complex consciousness of the character; indeed, there is there almost no entrance into the operations of any character’s consciousness. The narrator tells what each character thinks but doesn’t show any character thinking! Didn’t much care. The reading was not much distraction, and I put the book (all 855 pages) away with a thud. But in these times I’ve chosen distraction too often.

So, I am here writing now and distract myself thinking about distractions and digressions. Politics is all about me these days and I am not at peace. (I have just deleted 107 email messages cluttering my junk mail folder: every Democrat in the country asking me for financial assistance, some of them asking multiple times. I am certain that f I gave to each I would be broke!) I need distraction and turn to the streams. I am repulsed and alarmed by the vituperative rhetoric of the Republican party and yet am appallingly drawn to their verbal garbage perhaps in some perverted interest. There is always the Big Lie and the name-calling. Latest news comes from North Carolina and Mark Robinson who proudly claims he is a black Nazi and has advocated a return to slavery! He boasted that he would own a few himself. And there is yet the absurd and dangerous accusation that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Whew! These politicians cheapen the electoral process in their discourse and pollute the environment with their lies and insults. I have given up any careful reading of the newspapers—no distraction there and no room for digression—except occasionally in the arts and leisure sections (too laden with reports about award ceremonies and red-carpet outfits in which I have little to no interest. I don’t care), and on the obituary .pages. If I’m not there I know I’m not dead, so I can eat a good breakfast and go back to bed. When I awaken, I pick up the nearby novel or turn to the shows streaming or to the relevant novel, depending on the exact time of day. Napping is a steady activity—or non-activity, so to speak. But often, I think, those naps are also a distraction! There are other anxieties from which I would flee. Distraction consumes not an inconsiderable part much of my day and does not yield much satisfaction despite the depleted contents of the cookie jar. At first, I considered that the present distractions were in the service of avoiding the work of writing, but ironically, writing is what I am engaged in now writing about distraction. I am considering that the distractions were simply an attempt to avoid deep thinking!  My Freud teaches me that the distractions serve as screen for something else and serve purpose for something other than mere avoidance, though, of course, it does serve that purpose very well. Perhaps. Maybe there is a larger project that I am avoiding: there sits 90 pages of something on the computer, a project begun three years ago and to which I return occasionally and briefly! And then there is the politics and always the omnipresent anxieties.

Digression seems to me to serve as an integral part and saving grace in the exercise of the day. I would invite more digression which nourishes me. Digression seems to open paths from the one on which I presently travel. Digression is how you sometimes have to go a long way out of your way in order to come back a short distance directly. (And who could have imagined that in this writing I would paraphrase Jerry in Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” a play that I had studied for my high school senior thesis on the Theater of the Absurd. Then, I saw a production of the play then at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village when tickets were five dollars and on occasion rats ran across the stage.) Tristram Shandy writes “That tho’ my digressions are all fair,—as you observe,—and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and often too as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs, so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.” I think that these digressions are versions of the stories Newspaper narrates to her listeners in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Her listeners don’t want just the facts: rather, they urge her to put in some pop and scoop and story it up! Without the digressions the linearity of it all becomes deadening. It is all contextless facts. If we stick blindingly to the path before us, well then, there is a great deal in the brushes off the path we would not know about. Digressions are productive. Listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree or his “The Ballad of Ruben Clamzo” for the benefits and joy of digression. I don’t always know what might be discovered in the off-path journeys of digression, nor who I might be when I return from those digressive wanderings I take. Digression provides context to a text and deepens meaning. Digression is the pop and scoop Newspaper adds to her narratives. 

 

Of cats and dogs

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the nature of a story’s narrator. Or course, quite everything becomes a story told, though some might pretend what they narrate is just fact and the truth. But even a complex fact lacks context which a story provides. But someone must narrate that story even if just to themselves and and that narration derives from a particular time, place, psychology and motive. Now, Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw materials of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In our waking life we story the dream-story. We narrate our lives; the character of the narrator determines the story that becomes definitive but finally, it is just a story after all.  The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened and what we think about what happened, but until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened or even what we think!

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. One of her audience, Rusty, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had is the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they were drawn. We demand context for sense and meaning, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think very much about it: mostly people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance offers space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts that make up our daily life. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the soon-to-be television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but about herself Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all might have meant. But really it is all a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had also played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We define ourselves by the stories we narrate. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  We know others from the stories they tell. We narrate and we hear narration: the character of the narrator is central. What story do they tell, how is the story told, and what sense generates the story. Answering these questions tells us about the narrator.

All this is a too-long prologue (and story) concerning one of Trump’s comments in the recent Presidential debate. In his story-telling Trump accused immigrants of invading—our cities and eating our cats and dogs! Invading, as if at war and by this story turning the white citizenry into endangered victims similar to the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine and Gaza. Trump said, "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." City officials in Springfield responded saying that there was no credibility to the accusation. It is difficult to discount the absurdity of Trump’s story here . . . but the character of the narrator of this tale is the point here. The story that Trump has narrated is a blatant lie that he has intended to pass off as truth. In fact, he has no facts and context to validate his story; he has made up everything. one has to wonder about his motive. Does he really believe his lie, which might suggest he is delusional, or is his story meant to inspire hatred and violence. Trump’s narrative characterizes him as a liar, a racist, a hate-monger. But I mclaim that Trump is the story he narrates: like Nate Timblin, certainly a fragment, but as Trump, he is a dangerous legend, a deadly force and a nightmarish fright. This narrator can at best be described as unreliable, and the stories he tells are ugly, dangerous and destructive.