Facts to Fiction

First there is the fact, but facts are empty units and possess no meaning by themselves. For example, in John Updike’s The Centaur, George Caldwell, the science teacher, steps back from the chalkboard on which he has written the weight of the earth (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons) and the weight of the sun (1,998,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons). These are just numbers and they require context to mean anything. Caldwell stepped back from the blackboard, looked at the numbers he had written and experienced feelings that those facts had stirred. Emotions are basically the name we assign to feelings. Caldwell stared at the board—the facts he had written there—and “shuddered in fear . . . The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word ‘poison.’” He confessed, “They remind me of death.” Indeed, everything about his subject matter and his vocation inspired only feelings of pain and loss. He suffered anxiety, hopelessness, despair. Caldwell stood before the classroom and looked out “at those dumb blank faces every day,” and they, too, reminded him of death. “You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace.” The empty zeros on the board have been replicated in the faces of his students. George Caldwell felt dread. 
           Caldwell bemoaned the futility of his academic position and the ineffectiveness of his struggle. He conceded his powerlessness and what he understood as his incompetence and irrelevance with a certain irony and regret. Preparing to leave for school, Caldwell announced to his father-in-law, Pop Kramer, “I love lies, I tell ‘em all day. I’m paid to tell them.” Caldwell’s despair originated in his overwhelming existential doubt to which his experience and knowledge had led him and from which he cannot escape. Death awaits all alike, and all his knowledge cannot save them. Caldwell’s student moaned to him, “I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight . . .” and Caldwell responds, “We all do. Knowledge is a sickening thing.” To his wife’s comment that it must be terrible to know so much, Caldwell responds, “It is . . . it’s Hell.” And what is hellish is that all of his knowledge offers him no sense of purpose or comfort. He experiences no reprieve from his self-described ignorance and consequent uselessness. What purpose could the teacher be to himself and to these unfortunates, Caldwell wondered of what value is knowledge to them? Unlike Chiron, his mythological counterpart, Caldwell does not believe that he has the capacity or the skill to bring these children out of darkness, not only as a result of his assumed ineffectiveness, but because there may be nothing out there but the darkness. This is no Golden Age and what besets the school is true for the world in which the school is embedded. 

Caldwell, the teacher, is the contemporary counterpart to Chiron the mythical centaur.  Chiron had taught the children of the gods—Jason, Achilles, Asclepios, his own daughter, Ocyrhoe, and the dozen other princely children of Olympus abandoned to his care. There, in that bucolic classroom the subject was ‘Love,’ which Chiron says, “set the Universe in motion.” The teacher continued: “All things that exist are her children—sun, moon, stars, the earth with the mountains and rives, its trees, herbs, and living creatures” (78). There, in that pastoral site during that Golden Age, the teacher, Chiron, walked “a little late, down the corridors of tamarisk, yew, bay and kermes oak. Beneath the cedars and silver firs, whose hushed heads were shadows permeated with Olympian blue, a vigorous underwood of arbutus, wild pear, cornel, box and andrachne filled with scents of flower and sap and new twig the middle air of the forest.” Chiron’s classroom is paradisiacal, his students bright and eager, and the teacher made whole in his pedagogical encounters: “[Chiron’s] students,” Updike wrote, “completed the Centaur.” Chiron’s is a classroom filled with light, warmth and meaning; images of circles abound everywhere in that idyllic classroom. But during that fabled Golden Age, “Love’s scepter has passed to Uranus . . . who it is said, arrived under the cover of the starless night sky to copulate with his mother, Gaia.” It is in this world dominated by darkness, death and dubious moral balance that Chiron’s contemporary counterpart, George Caldwell, functions; it is this darkness that obscures the meaning for Caldwell of which Chiron is certain. And yet it is knowledge—answers— that Caldwell despairingly doubts and which he yet desperately seeks. If Chiron’s students complete him, Caldwell’s students tear him apart. In this contemporary classroom, a tenuous truce is all that Caldwell desires: “I don’t want you to like me,” Caldwell exclaims resignedly.  “All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week.” And if in Chiron’s class the polyphony of voices formed a rainbow, in Caldwell’s room the cacophony of sound produces only storm. Resigned to almost inevitable disappointment and defeat, Caldwell acknowledges that this is no Golden Age, and yet obsessed with Death, the ultimate meaninglessness, he struggles on. Underlying Caldwell’s work in the class is his gnawing doubt about purpose and meaning in the universe. 

Nevertheless, Caldwell is constrained to keep on keeping on. Puzzled by the word book carved into the walls above the urinal in the boy’s bathroom, Caldwell suddenly understands that the original carving has been altered. “Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a BOOK.” The novel wonders, what is a teacher but one who daily makes that effort to turn every FUCK into a BOOK knowing painfully that there is no end to the FUCKS in the world. And that reminded me of Holden Caulfield who found the word ‘fuck’ scratched on the stair where Phoebe and other children would see it. Holden acknowledges that it is impossible to erase all the ‘fucks’ in the world! Schools seethe with the immanent potency and danger of colliding tectonic plates. In the halls of schools echoes whisper, and in the classrooms the steadfast, steady sound of the teacher’s commanding voice seasoned with despairing notes of warning pin students to their seats with questions and imprecations, demands and disapprovals. In Caldwell’s classrooms, a palpable tension charges the air that arises out of the antagonism between he and his students and teachers, a tension borne out of the clash of conflicting desires and seething resentments. Crumbled paper and pencil shavings, candy wrappers and sheets ripped out of notebooks litter the surface; gum and snot coat the underside of chairs and desks. Everyone knows—because they have been contributors to such detritus—not to reach under except to add to the array; even custodians avoid this onerous task until year’s end.  The desks and chairs, sometimes rooted and sometimes free standing, held in place only by the severity of the teacher’s compulsion, scrape and grate painfully on the floors; tipped back chairs fall heavily backwards to the alarm of the one seated and the delight of everyone else but the terrified, exasperated teacher who foresaw this event and stood powerless to prevent it. Shoes chafe noisily on the floors. Atop the desktops books, papers and pens are arrayed, underneath it all  are concealed signs written and carved for rebellious purposes and signs of some presence: “I❤️ Paul; Mr. Billings is a dork; π=450 calories. Fuck everyone!”  In the science rooms the pungent odors of sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde hang aloft oppressively and then ooze out of the doorways to mix obscenely in the halls with the unappetizing aromas of food preparation emanating from cafeteria kitchens. The unsavory smells hang suspended in the air, and then they settle, like ice-nine, on everything, threatening to freeze all movement. In sum, the mingling of odors produces a potent dankness particular only to schools, places of worship, and mortuary crypts, such as that where Romeo and Juliet ended their lives. But those smells also stem from environmental pollution that now threatens human existence even though remedy exists to mitigate and even eliminate the threat of extinction. There are those, however, who deny the danger and offer plans that only exasperate it. Despite the fact that he cannot cease to pursuit it, knowledge offers Caldwell little ease. It seems to be useless and suggests to him only death. In The Centaur the school becomes the world.

For Caldwell, the school seems rife with animosity, hostility and futility. Heading out with his son to school each morning, Caldwell cries out, only half-humorously, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels . . . Off to the hate factory” (49). Caldwell is even terrified of the principal, Mr. Zimmerman, during whose evaluation visit to Caldwell’s classroom he sees what seems to be chaos, and Caldwell worries that he will be fired. The difficult and apparently futile effort in which he daily engages overwhelms him and he beholds his failures everywhere. At the school basketball game, plagued by his own doubt, Caldwell observed in attendance his former students whom he imagines as the products of his failure: “Living corpses, they didn’t even have the sense to stay out once they got out . . . What in hell are you supposed to do to keep them from ending like that?” These students make Caldwell anxious representing as they do evidence of his uselessness. “He shies away from these old students, [t]he hunch in their shoulders reminding him of the great whole skinned carcasses hung on hooks in the freezer of a big Atlantic City hotel he once worked for.” Wherever he looked, Caldwell confronted death, failure, and futility, and he painfully suffers from his inability to relieve either his own dread or what he imagines to be the despairing fate of his students. But none of those feelings were inherent in the numbers he has written on the board. They needed translation.

But it is not merely those students who cannot leave the school that causes Caldwell to consider his ineffectiveness: even for those who have become active citizens does Caldwell assume the consequences of his failure as a teacher. Suffering from a toothache, Caldwell visits the dental office of one of his former students who proceeds to extract the tooth. “The kid had wanted to become an M.D. but hadn’t the I.Q. so he had settled on being a butcher.”  Caldwell recognized the pain branching from the tooth extraction in his head as a “consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such.” This is the pain that echoes from the first pages of the novel when Caldwell’s ankle receives the arrow: his suffering is passively received and actively enacted. His frustrations confront him everywhere; his seems an irrelevant existence. This is no Golden Age, he states, though I think that there might be gold to be found. Updike portrays Caldwell as a forsaken saint in this modern tarnished world.  He says to his son, “I’m a dime a dozen,” but Peter responds, almost exasperatedly but in admiration, “But there’s nobody else like you, Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.” And the student that has caused Caldwell the most difficulty, Diefendorf, becomes a teacher because of his love and respect for his teacher, George Caldwell, and writes in the obituary for this teacher, “To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration  . . . there was never any confusion that indeed ‘Here was a man’” This self-sacrificing, questing teacher, functioning seemingly without effect and purpose, one whose character and efficacy remains unquestioned by the novel. This is the transcendence of feeling! Though he never would recognize this status, Caldwell is the hero of this novel that is embedded in mythology. George Caldwell is a hero in a fallen world, the contemporary guardian of knowledge and virtue. The novel’s naked facts have thus become a transcendent truth. Neither is ours a Golden Age. As the Talking Heads sing, “This ain’t no party, This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around/No time for dancing, no lovey-dovey/I ain’t got time for that now!” The Centaur (1962) portrays poignantly the anguish and triumph of George Caldwell, the teacher, struggling to discover and to communicate some order and ultimate meaning to life, but whose purposes seem forever frustrated by the world in which he functions. Overwhelmed by the nature of his task, Caldwell confesses to Hester Appleton, the language teacher at Olinger High School, “There’ve been times in my years here when the kids have got me so down I’ve stepped out of the classroom and come here by the drinking fountain just to hear you in there pronouncing French . . . .”. As for myself, in those despondent moments, I sometimes head to the nearest cinema or I take to my bed! Like Caldwell I seek solidity, certainty, beauty, even faith, but all around experience doubt and ambiguity, ugliness, and spite; Caldwell stands in a classroom scene replete with tension, conflict, and frustration. There, in that space assigned to learning, menace, chaos, dissatisfaction and failure seem to reign.  In that classroom, “Fists, claws, cocked elbows blurred in patch-colored panic above the scarred and varnished desk-tops . . .” Ah, I have read the newspapers and I know where I am!

 

 

Huntley and Brinkley and Beethoven's Ninth

It is a remarkable journey I travel listening to the second movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I do not think I here say anything itself remarkable, for my words pall before the reality of this symphony. To my mind, the 9th is one of the world’s sublime creations.

And the journey through this second movement, filled as it seems to me with struggle and triumph, with pain and joy, with ugliness and even beauty challenges and stimulates me.

But no, I don’t mean this posting to be some exposition on Beethoven’s 9th symphony or even its remarkable second movement. (Of course, to call the second movement remarkable almost assumes that the others are not so; this is not so. Each is consummate in its own manner.) Rather, when I hear the opening measure of the second movement, I am reminded of the opening seconds of the Huntley-Brinkley report on NBC news during the 1960s and early 1970s.

I do not know who chose the theme music for this program, but clearly it was someone who understood the nature of the news, and meant the music to set the tone for the reporting of it. Whoever chose this music understood what was the substance and consequence of the news report, and to prepare for its presentation chose the dramatic and portentous opening measures that culminate in portentous beats of the tympani drum. The news mirrored the journey of the second movement, both filled with struggle and triumph, with pain and joy, with ugliness and even beauty. And so the close of the movement with its furious in driving rhythm accompanied by the pounding of the tympani drums served well as the conclusion of the news program; a fitting end to the arduous, climactic journey which the symphony and the had engaged us. It was the perfect frame for this production. At the end of both, I was relieved, even exhausted, and glad for the moment of rest.

I cannot help but compare the solemnity with which the news was treated then to the superficialities and silliness that accompanies it now. Then the news was significant and important, and to report it required dignity and a sense of solemnity. Today, regardless of the content, the tone is glib or melodramatic (which might be the same thing), the newscasters insubstantial and undignified, and too often crude and insensitive. I don’t know that they know anything about what they report, and what they report partakes of little matter. News has become just another reality TV show, manipulating events to entertain and not to inform, to accumulate viewers and hence, advertising dollars. These so-called news programs address themselves to those who would not journey, but who remain content with fast food take out and home delivery. If the news has not changed, then its means of being reported has undergone a precipitous and somewhat dangerous decline.

Beethoven is no longer suitable as introduction or conclusion to the news of the day. I would have better for my children. I take them to concerts of Beethoven’s symphonies, and subscribe to too many substantial weeklies.

Felix Holt: the Radical

Over the past 21 years I have posted almost 1000 articles to my blog, Of Clay and Wattles Made and this will be another. Some of those postings addressed issues not unlike what I might have written in a journal if I were a more careful journal keeper. Thoreau might have edited his journals to give them organization for future use, but I am not so careful a scholar. My blogposts were expressions of personal, aesthetic and cultural issues that I wanted to think more about than I might have in casual consideration. Though a public blog few were read by others. No matter. As Montaigne had said years earlier, “And if no one reads me have I wasted my time entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts.” I was for the most part entertained. They were personal, written, edited expressions about the world—the universe—in which I lived, functioned and thought, expressions not of facts but of feelings which were translations of those facts. The feelings were the facts embedded in context.  Sometimes I translated those feelings into moral and ethical principles. And in those postings occasionally I addressed issues of politics that ended up too often as screeds against the winds that too often smelled of excrement. These latter posts were angry comments many of which I am not now proud, not because I felt wrong but because they were composed in a white heat; I suppose I might have been more circumspect, though during Trump’s second term I have noted that anger is often the feeling expressed in the opinion pages of the newspapers to which I am a resistant and too often regretful subscriber. I have too often written my anger into my blog. Thoreau says that to read a newspaper daily is like a dog returning to his vomit: I appreciate his observation. But somehow it is a vomitus with which I am familiar and though foul-smelling it nevertheless grounds me: or rather, distracts me from grounding myself.
           Sometimes in my postings I have bemoaned the state of education in the United States; I have spent almost fifty years as a teacher in the public high schools and in one public university and before that I was a student in the schools and colleges. There I began to understand and to think in a language that had not been part of my upbringing nor public discourse; in my readings I acquired a perspective that broadened my understanding of myself and my expanding and expansive world. Thoreau writes, “It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” Even before I had studied Thoreau this was the belief I embraced and promoted in my classrooms; I thought it made me a liberal teacher of literature and a good professor of education preparing teachers for the schools. I thought teachers should be wise and with wisdom; I though everyone should be taught to be wise. Thoreau writes, “we should learn liberality.” I did. And I blame the education system for the ignorance that has pervaded our country and that elects corrupt, even criminal and unfit leaders. To think has become anathema in the schools; following rules and algorithms is the accepted methodology of the classrooms. We have just to hear about the silencing and even punishing of students who protest the ways things are and demand an ethical and moral liberality that detests corruption and criminal activity in the supposed leaders of the country. We watch the lists of banned books in school libraries grow, and watch in horror as life choices have turned chooses into criminals.
           I read this in George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, published in 1866. It is considered Eliot’s political novel but I believe it is more complex than that. Felix cannot vote because the Reform Act of 1832 only gave the vote to owners of property that had achieved a sufficient value. But Felix calls himself a radical because he advocates for a greater liberality in British political life. He argues for an informed populace that knows right from wrong. Standing before a crowd of mostly ineligible voters he says, “I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful . . . How can political freedom make us better, any more than religion we don’t believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? An while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petter private ends,—I say no fresh scheme of voting will med our conditions.” Here, I thought, is a novel from 1866 that speaks to our present corrupt administration with an accurate bitterness. 

            But actually Felix Holt is hopeful and advocates for citizens who “had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all.” What Felix Holt calls for is an ethical foundation for living and for political and religious action. To an understanding of the contexts of our facts. For years I have offered in my critique of education an opinion that it has failed to promote an attainment of wisdom that might lead to a liberality; rather it has narrowly focused on skills for a marketplace that might enrich the already wealthy and leave in power the corrupt and corruptible. What Felix, Thoreau and myself bemoan is that too many “have no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another,” who “have wasted their own drinking money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five shrilling piece when it was offered them.” 

            Ah, yet another screed, but it intrigues me always that our contemporary state of things is not new; as Dylan sang, “it’s all been done before, it’s all been written in the book.” Ours is not just a political problem but an ethical one. And one with which I wished education would address.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Far Have the Mighty Fallen!

On April 29 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy hosted the largest State dinner of his administration honoring 49 living Nobel laureates and 124 other prominent intellectuals, artists and scientists, including Robert Frost, James Baldwin, J Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Frederic March, Isaac Stern, Mary Hemingway, Katherine Porter, and John Glenn. In his welcoming speech, the President said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.: The room laughed loudly and applauded.  Frederic March read from an unpublished work by Ernest Hemingway.
           On June 14, 2026, President Donald J. Trump hosted a U.F.C. event at the White House to celebrate his 80^thbirthday. The event was priced at $60 million and the President sat at ringside to watch fighters whale at each other “inside an eight-sided cage wrapped in cryptocurrency advertisements.” Trump has financial stake in cryptocurrency. Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times wrote, “The use of the trappings of the White House for violent cage fighting. The corporate sponsorships. The eruption of casual cruelty . . . Money, ego gore, vanity, hype and the flash of the camera, all mixing on the South Lawn of the White House.” The crowd roared.
           Around 100 CE the Roman poet Juvenal coined the term ‘bread and circuses.” Bread and circus referred to the provision by the emperors of free grain handouts and spectacularly vulgar gladiator games and chariot races at the Circus Maximus to entertain the public which then remained submissive to the direction of the current emperor and was then, kept politically passive. The government used the bread and circuses to keep the citizens complacent and ignorant.

My Lord, I think, how far we have descended as a civilized culture. Culture rises up out of a civilization and encompasses and promotes the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a group or society. Culture is a learned way of life that includes language, religion, social norms, and the arts, that are passed down from generation to generation and are continuously evolving over time. There are speech codes n dress codes that advertise a culture, In any civilization there are, of course, many cultures, but the dominant culture does what it can to suppress alternative cultures and so to pass itself off as the only acceptable reality. The attacks on Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, the Kennedy Arts Center and the awarding of Medals of Honor to Trump worshipers and sometimes even convicted criminals tells a great deal about the culture that this administration promotes. The language, the pettiness, violence and vindictiveness current in the behaviors of Trump and his sycophants speaks of a degraded culture, one not of aspiration and beauty but of cruelty and narcissistic aggrandizement. This culture promotes fascism.

Trump more recently threatened to destroy the civilization of Iran, but instead he has outraged the civilization and denigrated the civilization of the United States and set about returning out cultures to the darker ages. The violence and bloodshed of UFC events are one thing, but to place them on the front lawn of the nation’s house is offensive and speaks to a contemptuous display that eschews the intellect, music and art, theater and literature that has arisen as a culture in this civilization. Henry David Thoreau argued that every child should hunt when young but that the sport be abandoned for the attainment of higher laws. The Trump administration prefers to remain steeped in the mud and grime of the swamp and promotes a violence that knows few boundaries; he means to keep the country down there with his administration. One of the fighters, Bo Nickal, leaned down to thank Trump for hosting the event. It takes such a special person,” he said, “to be able to have the balls to do something like this.” Need I say more?

 

On Strength

I open most new books with some apprehension. I am concerned: where am I and to where am I heading; do I want to be there? I wonder: who are these people, and do I want to keep company with their like? I have long suspected that a child’s aversion to reading might stem from the strangenesses entailed in entering a new book. I think of the child’s distress when dragged into the company of strangers: withdrawn, shy, uncomfortable and begging to be taken home. “When can we leave?” they ask. Blanche Dubois may have depended on the kindness of strangers, but I think children are uncomfortable there. Entering the perplexing world of a new book is a similarly estranging event and requires some effort to overcome.

When I do begin a book I leave this world and enter another, and at the outset I wander about somewhat lost. Sometimes I stay that way; there are sentences I read that I recognize I may never understand. Suddenly within those pages I am placed in contact with a population of new characters not necessarily of my familiarity or liking; I decide to journey with them to an assortment of new and even strange events; I follow the narration of someone whom I am not certain I can trust, and am presented with new ideas in vocabularies with which I may struggle; often my current itch is scratched. Thoreau says that a good book is one that requires that the one stand on tiptoes to read it. My calves grow sore though the itch gets relieved. Reading ought to be an active and not at all a passive practice, and one must have sufficient courage and strength to properly read. From the library what book will the reader pull off of the shelf and check out at the front desk. Sometimes I pick up a book for reasons that remain a bit vague and I say, “Here I am. Introduce yourself;” I ask, “What have you to say to me?” To the narrator I confess, “You can be unreliable but intrigue me.” Sometimes when I browse in the bookstore, I read a jacket cover, purchase the book and hope that it will give relief to the pricklings in my imagination. I have occasionally experienced many a relief and joy in this manner. The exact etiology of the inspiring discomfort is not always clear at the outset but in the reading I will learn its source and gain some relief and even sometimes wisdom. I call upon my patience and make myself available. 

Why this book at this time and place. Thoreau does acknowledge that by his reading he wishes “to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced.” Ironically Thoreau was a Concord townsman writing a book that was meant to address “our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.” I have wondered if he was condemning his own book to the remainder shelf because he was urging his town people to look beyond Concord for the writers with the wisdom that would their change lives. 

And sometimes I go to the bookshelves and elect to reread a book I remember having enjoyed in the past. Though the characters might be familiar and the story known, I know the experience of reading will be different; I am different. Such was the case in the choice to reread George Eliot’s novel, Felix Holt: The Radical. The appellation ‘radical’ has been pejoratively and erroneously thrown about a great deal these days by this present Republican government, though the term didn’t have the same meaning in the context of Britain in 1832. I had brought the book down to Lotus Land actually for reasons unknown: the last time I had read the novel was in the very early 1980s when I had been awarded a fellowship to study the Serial Novel: Dickens, Eliot and James at Longwood College (now University) in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County. Prince Edward County gained some notoriety when in the wake of Brown vs. The Board of Education it closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Farmville was also the last town through which Robert E. Lee passed on his way to Appomattox to surrender his armies to General Ulysses S. Grant to end the bloody Civil War. To seminar every morning I brought my heavy journal and the current text and engaged in discussion of the section we were studying; then I was free for the rest of the day. I had my lunch in the College dining hall and for the afternoon I sat on the sun plentiful college lawn and read the next day’s assignment. Then I would. turn to the other novels of the author under study that weren’t on the syllabus; George Eliot’s Felix Holt was one of the books I read. I was young then and without too many responsibilities. In the copy I have carried down here there are my early markings and annotations. I carried it down here now to Lotus Land because I wanted to stay immersed in the narratives of the 19^th century novel and to enjoy the depths of George Eliot’s style and ideas. And in the reading I came across a passage that had not scratched any itch then but did now. 

The narrator of Felix Holt raises the issue of strength; what is strength, the narrator wonders. The narrator’s addresses the  dilemma troubling Rufus Lyon. He had taken Annette and her baby into his home having found then abandoned and hungry on the roads; Lyon fell in love with her and this passion causes him a great deal of anguish. To act on his feeling would challenge his position as a vicar in the Church of England. Because Annette is a Roman Catholic.  Will Lyon’s exercise of strength allow him not to act on his love for Annette and continue to serve his Church of England congregation, or will he give up his ministry and marry Annette for whom he longs. To renounce Annette or to marry her was the situation that raised for the narrator the nature of and necessity for strength. The narrator wonders: Is strength revealed in the mere exercise of raw power which would  send her and her child to a convent because and so protect his position and the peace of his life? Or, the narrator wonders if perhaps strength is a “blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens.” Is strength a willed ignorance, a refusal to see the complex contexts in which events arise and in which decisions must be made? Rufus Lyon is aware of these contexts and it is this awareness that causes him so much anxiety. And then I was led to consider the idea of strength when applied to our present so-called leader, of Donald Trump whose narrow vision s advertised as his strength is characterized by an unwillingness to see outside his tunneled perspectives leading him to be able not to see how his heartless arrogance had led for millions cruel, unnecessary agonies and privation; Trump’s strength is exercised to increase his power. Or, the narrator wonders, is strength “the narrowness of a brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day.” I again thought of Trump and his pathological narcissism that apparently guides his actions; such might explain his obsessive concern to ensure that his name and visage appear everywhere and often where it does not belong. Is Trump’s strength defined by his vindictiveness that uses his position to punish those whom he believes have somehow hurt him when offering critique to his actions or accusations of his inappropiate behaviors? Or, the narrator wonders, is strength that which “tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation?” Trumps’ absolute refusal to acknowledge uncertainties or mistakes and wrong decisions that have led to serious consequences for the United States and for the world. His strength, he asserts, tells him that he alone was born to set things right! But he is not Prince Hamlet, not even an attending lord. 

Strength has customarily connoted a positive quality: we go to the gyms to increase our strengths; pump irons and work the machines. Strength is what gets us to the finish lines in races and marathons. Strength is what we require to deal with the complexities of our lives including that when engaged with our families, our relationships . . . our even our studies. Be strong, we are from childhood advised. But Eliot’s narrator suggests to me another perspective on strength and one that complicated how I approach the world and my relationships and my studies. Reverend Lyon chooses to make Annette Ledru his wife and adopts Esther her daughter as his own. The decision costs him dearly and changes the direction of his life. But his act reveals an exercise of strength that understands and accepts the consequences of his actions; his act recognizes that his love demands fulfillment; nonetheless recognizing that the needs of others might take precedence over his own offered Annette rights of refusal. Acknowledging his doubts, his weaknesses and the needs of others, the character of Rufus Lyon reveals his strength.
           I am not far into this rereading of Felix Holt: The Radical, and I do not yet know what itch it was meant to scratch. But the narrator’s brief meditation has already clarified for me some of the concerns that trouble me about Trump and his administration and about the nature of strength. I came to see that Trump’s claims of strength in governing are merely a self-serving promotion, revealing what that so-called strength often amounts to: limited intelligence and a deeply disturbed personality. His claims of strength reveal his weakness. And there are others too susceptible to his influence who also claim strength, but what they display is overt prejudice and personal folly, exposing both the narrowness of their thinking and the absence of real strength.

On the firing of Scott Pelley

The firing of Scott Pelley from CBS News reveals two things at least. Pelley had been at CBS since 1989 and though I am not an interested viewer of CBS or “60 Minutes” he has apparently during his long tenure produced exemplary work. On Monday at a meeting run by newly-hired Nick Bilton, Pelley strongly objected to the management of “60 Minutes” for which he has been a correspondent since 2004 and to the evisceration of not only the show’s correspondents but the entire news department by Bari Weiss and company. Pelley also objected to her hiring of Nick Bilton who had little or no experience in network broadcasting. The New York Times reports, “The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months. [The firing] also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has had very little or no experience in broadcast TV to oversee the show.” The Times’ notes that ironically, the program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen. It seems to me another very sad day for the United States.
            I think the first thing I have learned, as if I didn’t already know this from the agenda of Trump and his administration, that during this dangerous second term dissent in any form or legitimate outlet is forbidden. To disagree means to be disappeared. To express any disagreement with orders from above will result in serious and threatening consequences. This is, of course, the technique of a fascist regime where obedience to authority is paramount and dissent is met with harsh consequences and usually accompanied by vicious and often obscene calumny. Trump’s obscenity-laced rhetoric denigrates the office of the president and demeans its audience, makes mockery of dignity, decorum and civility. Such speech belongs in the gutter and explodes out of the mouths of children. And yet, there are people, cruel and coarse themselves, to whom these obscenities are cheerfully received and even welcomed; the level of public discourse has become trampled in the dirt. 
            And the second thing I have learned is that there are still principled individuals who refuse to bow to authority and are prepared to stand up to power and suffer the consequences. In this time of abject sycophancy from so-called leaders and of an alarming ignorance of Trump supporters who seem to have little concern for the imperial and corrupt presidency and its incompetent and often illegal behaviors of their leaders, it comforts me to hear a man like Scott Pelley refuse to keep silent when injustice and incompetence threaten to overturn the democratic governance of the United States and bring suffering to those least able to get relief. The country is at war despite the deceitful campaign promises that there would be no foreign war; the populace is suffering, except of course the billionaires, despite Trump’s boast that he will make affordability his goal. But his scowling face on a new $250.00 bill that only he and his billionaire friends can carry; his name everywhere on buildings for which he has no relationship and for which he can claim no responsibility for its existence; for his usurpation of ownership despite the  unconstitutional of his greedy grasp seems to be foremost in his limited attention span and uncertain mental capacity.  But Scott Pelley reminds me there are principled people still willing to confront stupidity and power grasping greed; Pelley’s action reminds me of Howard Beale in “Network,” who tosses the television out of the window crying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” I am safe here in Lotus Land, I hope. 
            Daniel Webster’s support of the Compromise of 1850 which affirmed fugitive slave laws was excoriated by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Pho! Let Mr Webster for decency’s sake shut his lip once & forever on this world. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.” Where are these voices now? Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” “What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity.” Alas, we have so few of them now.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                 

Beanfields

I am not exactly certain what was the itch that needed scratching that led to my again picking up John Nichols’s novel The Milagro Beanfield War. The last time I had read and studied the book was in the late 1980s when I wrote my dissertation on the radical novel in America. I was attempting then to redefine the radical novel that had last been formally studied in the 1950s by Walter Rideout in his book, The Radical Novel in America, 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. He had defined the genre, sometimes referred to as the proletarian/socialist novel, as constrained in scope and complexity by a politics that was philosophically steeped in Marxist and socialist ideas. By reputable critics these novels had been soon dismissed as naively propagandist and they relegated them to the remaindered shelves. Then, at a Leonard Cohen concert I had attended at Town Hall in New York City during the years of the Reagan administration, as Cohen sang “First We Take Manhattan” I wondered by some oblique connection what had happened to the political novel now that in the present moment some resistance movement seemed so necessary. In the dissertation subsequently published as Anonymous Toil, I offered a theory that addressed the 20^th century concerns then permeating modernist writings narrated the development of individual consciousness occurring within a social environment that the protagonists struggled to resist and overcome in order to achieve individual autonomy and personal freedom. The literature the critics valued portrayed the effort of the self to achieve maturity and independence in rebellion from that society. Individual growth occurred in isolation and in the singular personal consciousness. I argued in my study, however, that the radical novel explored how individual consciousness developed the individual joined with the community and its social struggle. Or, as Woody Guthrie sang, “You can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union.” Hence, the radical novel as I interpreted it concerned the coming to consciousness as a result of joining community in the struggle. In union there was the opportunity for political and personal strength. I believed my work had a new perspective on literature; I thought my thesis possessed validity and its theory was sound.  Alas, Walter Rideout’s book is still very much in print, but I believe I and a few dear friends yet own the last few available copies of Anonymous Toil that sit awaiting lonely on my bookshelf. 
            It was back then that I studied The Milagro Bean Field War and identified it as a radical novel. Through the presence of that tiny beanfield belonging to Joe Mandragón the town of Milagro united and declared war on Ladd Devine and company and the entire governmental apparatus that enabled the greedy, money-making schemes organized by Devine and company that was busy destroying their homes and livelihood to satisfy their greed. the beanfield united the often quarrelsome community of Milagro. Actually, it had been on impulse that Joe Mandragón had decided to irrigate the little field in front of his dead parents’ west side home to “grow himself some beans.” Irrigating his field required that he cut a ditch and divert water that had been made unavailable by the Company’s ownership of water rights. Originally, as the community gathered to protect the beanfield, Joe sulked, “Just leave me in peace about my beanfield. People start helping me, sure as hell it’ll get screwed up.” But some of the old timers remembered that in the old days “people were more together.” Joe had something to learn from his beanfield. Amarante Cordova, who refused to die despite recurrent announcements sent out by his daughter Sally to his family members announcing his imminent death and requiring their immediate presence, demanded of his daughter to “tell all the family” of Joe’s beanfield and the help that required their immediate presence. But upon hearing this last request Sally burst into tears crying she would not send out one more notice of Amarante’s impending death that would not occur! But Amarante said to her, “But we have to tell everyone what José has done. They must see this thing and take part in it before they die. Tell them the shooting is about to start—" That tiny beanfield required a large community to protect. Even without Joe’s encouragement, the town began to unite around the beanfield. One day when Joe had come to stand guard of his field he found Amarante already on duty. seated by it carrying his ancient rifle. Joe Mandragón suspiciously asked Amarante what he was doing at Joe’s beanfield bearing a loaded rifle, and Amarante winked and laid a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Handing over the guard, Amarante left and said to Joe, “I’ll be back soon . . . I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of this field.’ And Joe responded, ’You and me together, friend, we’ll keep those bastards at bay, qué no?’ Joe was learning. In the course of the novel he will come to understand that it was the whole community of Milagro that protected him and his beanfield. “I love these people,” Joe exclaimed. Though at the beginning Joe thought “it was his field, his bunch of crummy beans; he loved them, he loved enchiladas and burritos, and he would fart a lot because of these purebred Milagro beans.” But when he’d planted them he had not really known what he was doing, and he had certainly not anticipated the particular consequences that had occurred . . . now that this officially was not his beanfield anymore.”

But if it was a spontaneous act of frustration that originally led Joe to illegally cutting a ditch and redirecting water to irrigate his beanfield on the little more than seven-tenths of an acre of land that he owned from his family, then “soon after the initial euphoria wore off, he had begun to wonder if his beanfield might be such a great thing after all,” There was a great deal of fighting and contention arising over it, sometimes with lethal weapons. These ongoing and escalating encounters, like the battle at Concord Bridge, were the opening skirmishes of the Milagro beanfield war. As the community gathered around Joe and his beanfield that beanfield became the focus for resistance to the community. The coyote angel said to Amarante guarding Joe’s beanfield, “Listen cousin, the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you little screwed -up underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that’ll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.” There would be freedom and an end to oppression. But first Joe Mandragón and other Milagro citizens had first to understand themselves as members of that community, had to realize that his beanfield had united the citizens of Milagro against the powers that had stolen from them their land and water rights. Ruby Archuleta produced a petition that would organize the town into an association protesting the land appropriation and the grasp of water rights by the capitalists and government officials who stood to profit from these robberies and veritable enslavements of the citizens. Slowly as community formed around the beanfield more citizens signed the petition. Ruby recognized that the whole town “would have to harvest his beans in a symbolic manner, every person who signed the petition picking a handful of beans. They would harvest them the same way churches had been built in the old ways, with every family contributing some adobe bricks and pitching in with labor so that it was a symbolic labor of all with a part of everyone’s earth in it.” For a brief moment Milagro had become united and the war of the small against the large was won. Joe and his beanfield had created a united and committed community to improve the lives of all citizens of Milagro. The war had been won.

Beanfields and my dissertation had been on my mind because down here in Lotus Land I had been rereading Thoreau’s Walden, and again been drawn to the chapter “The Beanfield.” I wondered about my own beanfields. Down here I considered writing a book entitled tentatively Walden on the Pacific and which would be structured mirroring the chapters in Thoreau’s book. The beanfield was for me an important chapter. Thoreau’s cultivated his bean-field, albeit one a great deal more extensive than that of Joe Mandragón. Thoreau wrote, “Meanwhile, my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed . . .” I believe that seven miles would produce a great many beans, though ironically, unlike Joe, Thoreau did not eat beans! Thoreau commented, “Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice . . .” So, the question arises: why did he grow beans in the first place?  Indeed, he ponders this question himself: he wonders, “But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows . . . What should I learn of beans or beans of me.” In the effort to care for his beans he would learn something though of course at the beginning he did not know exactly what that might be. He insists, “I was determined to know beans,” 

I wondered why beans and not rose bushes? And in one sense I do not believe that there is an exact answer to this question, why beans? And I recognized that if not beans, then it would have been something else. The effort was all part of the experiment that his life at Walden was meant to try. Thoreau wrote, “We may try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earth like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes.” I think that the care he took to grow his beans must have taught him a great deal about beans and gardening and himself. It was the process and not the product that drove Thoreau to his rows of beans. If he were to realize a crop, then he had to make the effort. Of course, by the time these lines were first written in his journal in 1845 and then as part of Walden, Thoreau had long left his cabin and no longer planted beans and probably still had not taken to eating them. But that is one answer to the question “Why plant them?” Every activity became part of his experiment at Walden Pond, to assess what exactly he needed to live—life is so dear—and what he could do without. In “Economy,” Thoreau had written, “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge . . . “ Beans were part of his personal experiment: “to make the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work.” 

But after that first summer Thoreau did not ever return to planting beans. There was something else he sought that he could not realize from his effort in the garden. This was the conclusion at which he had arrived from his experiment: “This further experience I gained. I said to myself I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me . . .” Feeding the body was important but it was not enough; his life needed more. Those virtues more than the beans and the corn must be the yield from his morning’s work. If he had wanted his beans to grow, then he had had to make the effort: it was his morning work! But those other seeds were not as easily nurtured as were the beans and corn; mistakes were made and the virtues did not grow. “Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.” We are not all we hoped to be and sometimes it would seem we are too subject to the gravity of another object and we crash into it and sometimes break apart. To the gravity of what object had Thoreau gotten too close? Down here in Lotus Land I think I believed I might be safe from the fierce pull of another’s gravity, but I was a fool to think so. I have to acknowledge that wherever I go I have to take me with me. “By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free (italics added), of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed . . .” I believe that in this way our seeds are made barren, have lost their vitality, and will not yield any crop. Beans brought Thoreau not merely into contact with history but with a universality of which he was a part. “As I drew still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of the modern day.”  Though he loved his solitude, the beans suggested continuity and community. 

But I don’t mean to identify the two beanfields as identically motivated or even politically aligned, though there is certainly a politics behind Thoreau’s morning work in the beanfield. Thoreau does offer another motive for growing beans. His life, after all, was always an experiment and as in any scientific work it demanded a conclusion. “Why should I raise them,” he asks and then answers, “perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.” That exclamation gives meaning to the chapter that has itself become now a parable: a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. Here in Lotus Land far from my home during the wintry Midwest and now choosing to reside here for a considerable stay, I can often be found hoeing my beans as I write on the computer or read my Walden in my chair. But as Thoreau exclaims of his beans, “These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The true husbandman (sic) will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.” I sometimes hear in Thoreau’s last sentences in “The Beanfield” Marx’s utopian decree, “From each according to his ability. To each according to his needs.” Thoreau’s beanfield promised a world without regret, failure or want. 

As for those other seeds, . . . well, I am still struggling to grow them. 

Oh, yes, Joe Mandragón’s beanfield had created a community but it did not last. Maybe next summer Joe might plant such seeds as sincerity, faith, innocence and they like. However, in the present, bested by VISTA volunteer Herbie Goldfarb in breaking Charley Bloom’s bucking horse, Sunflower, that Joe had not been able to stay atop  at the rodeo, Joe walked up to the beaming rider and punched “that smart-ass East coast son of a bitch right in his prissy little nonviolent mouth.” Ah, but if the seeds be not lost . . .