It's been rattling around in the back of my mind, to ask: Why zombies? Why now? I think the answer (or an answer) finally occurred to me tonight.
I'm not a watcher of horror, but I found this trailer for the remake of Dawn of the Dead sometime, and it's stuck with me. What disturbs me is the familiar (the neighbor kid) turning into a predatory monster. And unlike other movie monsters, zombies (and similar phenomena like the virus in 28 Days Later) are about us becoming monstrous.
To me, this seems entirely in keeping with a broader sense I was brought up with, that the most dangerous threats are not from foreigners or monsters from beyond, but from our own carelessness and rage. Zombieism, when it has a "scientific" explanation within a movie, usually has something to do with dangerous research... it's a dystopian pandemic story, like Contagion. When it simply is, without explanation, it's like a haunting.
"When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth" is the line from the promotional poster for the original Dawn of the Dead. This makes zombies something alien, but the story itself is about reanimated corpses: in this sense vampires, but stupid, shambling vampires, out for something much less subtle that a vampire's neckbite.
Anyway, as a broad explanation, this makes sense to me. I don't know how much power is really left in foreign monsters, in this era of instant communication and global social networking.
And it makes me wonder about the construct of Faerie, as intelligence-apart-from-humanity. In the Scottish traditions I know best, Faerie is situated where humans are not: under the hill, under the sea, in the deep forest... In a world where none of these things seems that exotic, where James Cameron is about to dive the Marianas Trench to make a movie, the idea seems kind of quaint.
Perhaps an parallel of the zombie phenomenon is in order: where the seduction of Faerie in the ballad tradition comes from its alienness, perhaps a modern version is fully homo sapiens, but has made itself "other" by rejecting... what? The Faerie rejection of religiously-based morality doesn't really work as an alienating force any more. But something like that.
This requires further thought.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Nakedness
Over and over and over we get hung up on the questions of "who are we?" and "what kind of person am I?" When we name ourselves as a group, we seem to need to ask why some people are inside that group and others are outside. How do the outsiders get in? Will I ever be forced outside? Can I be a part of this group and of that other group over there?
Over and over and over, the cries of protest and rage by people who have felt the pain of exile—that is to say, all of us. We are afraid of being alone, angry that our people might decide that we are not their people.
Maggie Harrison's been creating the latest variation on this stir, telling blog viewers "YOU ARE NOT A QUAKER (so please stop calling yourself one)." All the comments and responses are heartfelt, but I find myself sliding into a tiring deja vu-like state. Who is a Quaker blah blah blah, how can we all call ourselves Quakers blah blah blah, how dare you call me out as not a Quaker blah blah blah... on and on an on.
I do like the foundational idea of Maggie's work. It is to shed the clothing we have put over our spiritual nakedness: the pretense we know what we're doing, which covers the shame we feel for being imperfect.
How I long to take all the names I wear—Quaker, non-theist, Democrat, American, Cartographer, White, Male, Straight—and take them off one by one like pieces of clothing, to be able to stand there, shivering slightly because it is February in Minnesota. And be joined by others who have also taken off their name-clothes. Not so we can have some kind of nameless orgy here on the tundra, but so we can see each other a little more truly, even just for as long as it takes before our toes begin to freeze.
And then, eventually, I and my fellows will put on at least some of those name-clothes again, and go off into the world, because we homo sapiens need these labels. This is how we make ourselves into a people. This is how we say who we are.
So why do I find myself wearied? I feel like this is becoming old territory to me, and I want to stop going around in circles, coming back to the same arguments. I want to move on.
I want three simple, difficult things:
1. I want to be allowed to wear the labels that fit me. I want to be an American, a Minnesotan, a Quaker, a straight male, of European descent, a geek, a morris dancer, a cartographer, a father, a son, a husband, someone of middling economic means, a Case, a resident of Northeast Minneapolis, a beer-drinker, a lover of various musics, a song-leader, a person, a member of the species homo sapiens... I want to be able to wear any and all of these labels, and I want to be able to participate in the groups these labels imply that I belong to.
2. I want to not have outsiders to these groups assume they know what it means when I wear any label. I want people to approach unfamiliar identities with humility—either curiously, or seeking some other label they can use if they just don't have the energy to learn about the unfamiliar label.
3. I want my fellows in the groups I belong to, to recognize that identity groups are fluid. Organizations may not be: it may be necessary to keep the inside/outside relationship of the group clear. But no organization will ever be able to exactly line itself up with people who hold identities, not least because all those identities are themselves fluid, and depend on spending time and attention: I might move to St Paul, and while I would then hold Northeast Minneapolis as a dear place in my heart, I would have less say in what Northeast means, being absent.
I think this last is really important, and points to a shortcut in our name-labels we too easily take. We think that holding an identity ought to be like earning a medal, that it ought to secure a relationship to a group, permanently. If you've earned it, you can put it away in a drawer and pull it out when needed. And some relationships are like that: the conversation picks up where it left off years ago. But some don't. Most don't.
I have a recurring dream, where I go back to my old college, and I'm so out of place. I haven't checked my mailbox for months or years. I'm not sure where my stuff is: I still have a dorm room, but haven't used it for a long time, and I need to find my stuff to bring it to where I'm living now. Professors have changed, and I don't know what courses to take for that one last term I need to get my degree.
Identity labels are a shorthand for membership in a group, for belonging. If we do not act on those labels, if we do not live them out, we pull away from holding them. This is a terrifying prospect for most of us, because it means we are that much more alone. Even typing the second sentence in this paragraph, part of me was saying, "Nooooooo!"
Being a Quaker, to go back to Maggie Harrison, feels like it ought to belong to the territory of common practice, or creed (or belief anyway), or following a common teacher or guide. All these things we recognize as the hallmarks of "religious" commonality. But some of it, perversely, is just wearing the same "clothes," the very clothes Maggie urges us to cast off. We are Quakers because we choose to wear that label.
Can real nakedness be the basis of identity? Could it be that all the stuff we use to bind ourselves together is getting in the way? If we wish to utterly open ourselves to truth, to go out naked into February, do we need to shed the very name itself? Is the truest Quaker the one who accepts no common identity—no meetinghouse, no clerk, nothing? How could such a Quakerism survive? How would it avoid frostbite?
Over and over and over, the cries of protest and rage by people who have felt the pain of exile—that is to say, all of us. We are afraid of being alone, angry that our people might decide that we are not their people.
Maggie Harrison's been creating the latest variation on this stir, telling blog viewers "YOU ARE NOT A QUAKER (so please stop calling yourself one)." All the comments and responses are heartfelt, but I find myself sliding into a tiring deja vu-like state. Who is a Quaker blah blah blah, how can we all call ourselves Quakers blah blah blah, how dare you call me out as not a Quaker blah blah blah... on and on an on.
I do like the foundational idea of Maggie's work. It is to shed the clothing we have put over our spiritual nakedness: the pretense we know what we're doing, which covers the shame we feel for being imperfect.
How I long to take all the names I wear—Quaker, non-theist, Democrat, American, Cartographer, White, Male, Straight—and take them off one by one like pieces of clothing, to be able to stand there, shivering slightly because it is February in Minnesota. And be joined by others who have also taken off their name-clothes. Not so we can have some kind of nameless orgy here on the tundra, but so we can see each other a little more truly, even just for as long as it takes before our toes begin to freeze.
And then, eventually, I and my fellows will put on at least some of those name-clothes again, and go off into the world, because we homo sapiens need these labels. This is how we make ourselves into a people. This is how we say who we are.
So why do I find myself wearied? I feel like this is becoming old territory to me, and I want to stop going around in circles, coming back to the same arguments. I want to move on.
I want three simple, difficult things:
1. I want to be allowed to wear the labels that fit me. I want to be an American, a Minnesotan, a Quaker, a straight male, of European descent, a geek, a morris dancer, a cartographer, a father, a son, a husband, someone of middling economic means, a Case, a resident of Northeast Minneapolis, a beer-drinker, a lover of various musics, a song-leader, a person, a member of the species homo sapiens... I want to be able to wear any and all of these labels, and I want to be able to participate in the groups these labels imply that I belong to.
2. I want to not have outsiders to these groups assume they know what it means when I wear any label. I want people to approach unfamiliar identities with humility—either curiously, or seeking some other label they can use if they just don't have the energy to learn about the unfamiliar label.
3. I want my fellows in the groups I belong to, to recognize that identity groups are fluid. Organizations may not be: it may be necessary to keep the inside/outside relationship of the group clear. But no organization will ever be able to exactly line itself up with people who hold identities, not least because all those identities are themselves fluid, and depend on spending time and attention: I might move to St Paul, and while I would then hold Northeast Minneapolis as a dear place in my heart, I would have less say in what Northeast means, being absent.
I think this last is really important, and points to a shortcut in our name-labels we too easily take. We think that holding an identity ought to be like earning a medal, that it ought to secure a relationship to a group, permanently. If you've earned it, you can put it away in a drawer and pull it out when needed. And some relationships are like that: the conversation picks up where it left off years ago. But some don't. Most don't.
I have a recurring dream, where I go back to my old college, and I'm so out of place. I haven't checked my mailbox for months or years. I'm not sure where my stuff is: I still have a dorm room, but haven't used it for a long time, and I need to find my stuff to bring it to where I'm living now. Professors have changed, and I don't know what courses to take for that one last term I need to get my degree.
Identity labels are a shorthand for membership in a group, for belonging. If we do not act on those labels, if we do not live them out, we pull away from holding them. This is a terrifying prospect for most of us, because it means we are that much more alone. Even typing the second sentence in this paragraph, part of me was saying, "Nooooooo!"
Being a Quaker, to go back to Maggie Harrison, feels like it ought to belong to the territory of common practice, or creed (or belief anyway), or following a common teacher or guide. All these things we recognize as the hallmarks of "religious" commonality. But some of it, perversely, is just wearing the same "clothes," the very clothes Maggie urges us to cast off. We are Quakers because we choose to wear that label.
Can real nakedness be the basis of identity? Could it be that all the stuff we use to bind ourselves together is getting in the way? If we wish to utterly open ourselves to truth, to go out naked into February, do we need to shed the very name itself? Is the truest Quaker the one who accepts no common identity—no meetinghouse, no clerk, nothing? How could such a Quakerism survive? How would it avoid frostbite?
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Purity test
In college, a "purity test" made the rounds. It's probably still making the rounds, 25 years later. It consisted of hundreds of "Have you ever?" questions: what kinds of sex have you had, what kinds of resticted substances have you ingested, where and with how many people... It went on and on, a litany of sins major and minor. Getting a high score gained you collegiate street cred. Either that or a trip to the emergency room.
"Purity" is closely associated with sinlessness, not just in our society but pretty much species-wide. A virgin maiden wears white to show she is spotless. Ritual cleansing before worship in a temple appears almost everywhere. And taboo foods and substances are "unclean."
Today, you'll see similar associations between "pure" and "natural" in consumer prodcuts. This is odd, because until recently, purity was clearly an unnatural phenomenon, requiring human or superhuman intervention. Mostly. Pure clear streams ran out of the rocks, of course, and pure ore was sometimes found embedded in rocks. But most of our physical purity is manufactured (think of Ivory Soap's trademark "99 44/100% Pure").
Nature is not pure, or at any rate, organic nature is not pure. Our body depends on bacteria in our gut to digest our food, and on trace elements in water to fill out our nutritional needs. We live now—and always have—in a soup of organic and inorganic ingredients, a constantly shifting mixture of bits and pieces.
What we want to avoid instinctively is pollution. We want to keep most of the infectious germs out of our respiratory and digestive systems so our immune system does not become overwhelmed. We want to keep toxic chemicals from subverting and breaking down the processes our internal chemistry is constantly churning to keep us intact and functioning. Pollution is mostly a matter of degree, not of true purity.
We like purity because it fits how our brains work. We like discrete objects and clearly delineated ideas. We like rules and laws because when we lose our sense of structure, we literally feel lost. And so when we say what exactly something is, and when we can even say that is all that it is, we feel more secure in the universe.
It's a running theme in this blog, but the trouble seems to come when we then take that categorization and reimpose it on the universe: purifying populations; purifying ourselves of sinfulness; purifying toxins, creating lethal concentrations of them. Purity—real, created purity—belongs in the world of ideas, and in the dead world of inorganic chemistry, not in our living world.
"Purity" is closely associated with sinlessness, not just in our society but pretty much species-wide. A virgin maiden wears white to show she is spotless. Ritual cleansing before worship in a temple appears almost everywhere. And taboo foods and substances are "unclean."
Today, you'll see similar associations between "pure" and "natural" in consumer prodcuts. This is odd, because until recently, purity was clearly an unnatural phenomenon, requiring human or superhuman intervention. Mostly. Pure clear streams ran out of the rocks, of course, and pure ore was sometimes found embedded in rocks. But most of our physical purity is manufactured (think of Ivory Soap's trademark "99 44/100% Pure").
Nature is not pure, or at any rate, organic nature is not pure. Our body depends on bacteria in our gut to digest our food, and on trace elements in water to fill out our nutritional needs. We live now—and always have—in a soup of organic and inorganic ingredients, a constantly shifting mixture of bits and pieces.
What we want to avoid instinctively is pollution. We want to keep most of the infectious germs out of our respiratory and digestive systems so our immune system does not become overwhelmed. We want to keep toxic chemicals from subverting and breaking down the processes our internal chemistry is constantly churning to keep us intact and functioning. Pollution is mostly a matter of degree, not of true purity.
We like purity because it fits how our brains work. We like discrete objects and clearly delineated ideas. We like rules and laws because when we lose our sense of structure, we literally feel lost. And so when we say what exactly something is, and when we can even say that is all that it is, we feel more secure in the universe.
It's a running theme in this blog, but the trouble seems to come when we then take that categorization and reimpose it on the universe: purifying populations; purifying ourselves of sinfulness; purifying toxins, creating lethal concentrations of them. Purity—real, created purity—belongs in the world of ideas, and in the dead world of inorganic chemistry, not in our living world.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Inheritance and Stewardship
One of the first committees I was asked to be on at Twin Cities Friends Meeting, was to address concerns about care of the meetinghouse. The problem was that the meeting couldn't get enough people to serve on the committees responsible for the physical plant, and the long-serving members who had led those committees were aging out of their ability to handle everything themselves. One of the questions we asked early on was how we could bring a sense of spiritual life to the mundane issues of physical plant maintenance.
There are plenty of traditions in which spiritual practice is bound up with work. In some traditions, prayers are counted out along with repetitious labor. In others, focused concentration on a task is used as a way to remove distraction from worldly concerns. Christian monastic traditions engage their followers in work—hard work—as part of their humble duties to God.
We aren't monks, and the work in question was not made of boring, iterative tasks like planting or wall-building. It was things like fixing the toilet and maintaining the furnace, making sure the building was vacuumed and the walks shoveled and the grass mowed.
Where we ended up, was that we wanted to emphasize a sense of "stewardship," that this was not just one more job in our daily lives, but care for a space that was built collectively for the benefit of a greater whole. This was in contrast to emphasizing "property," the value of which is worldly wealth. Stewardship suggests that we are caretakers rather than owners—a steward is not the owner of an estate, but the manager on behalf of the owner, whose job is to make the property do what the owner wants. If we regard the assets of the Meeting as in our care rather than in our keeping, the sense was, it will give that care a greater sense of spirit-led purpose.
There has been a lot of talk about wealth recently in the public sphere. The Occupy movement uses the "99%" and the "1%" as rallying points, noting an increasing concentration of wealth over the past few decades. Conservative commentators, in turn, argue that we ought to be able to enjoy what we earn—that communist redistribution ends up sapping the initiative out of an economy.
The piece I keep thinking is being left out is the matter of inheritance. Not in the broad collective sense liberals like to trot out ("what kind of a world are we leaving our children"), although that is of course important. What I keep wondering about is specifically what parents leave to their children.
Now, I have been the beneficiary of lots of generous inheritance. My mother's parents effectively paid my way through high school and college, and the inheritances from my grandmother and my wife's grandmother made the bulk of the down-payment on our house. When I've gotten myself into sticky financial spots over the years, especially in my first ten years out of college, my parents bailed me out… nothing mind-boggling, but help that got me more quickly over bad decisions. I'm very grateful for these inheritances, and even more so as I now find myself in the position of parent.
As a father, I so want to "be there" for my son. I want to give him all I can. At the same time, I don't want to spoil him, or have him never learn form not getting what he wants. And he doesn't always get what he wants, as he will be happy to tell you.
I think the question of how to bequeath to my child goes back to the question we were asking in the Meetinghouse Care committee. Is what I am giving my child his property for him to work his will upon, or is it something he needs to take care of? To invoke stewardship doesn't necessarily affect inequality of inheritance—the sense of stewardship is a long-running theme among large land-owners in England, for instance. But when it's brought together with questions of collective versus individual ownership, it affects how we go about transferring wealth to the next generation. Is that transfer for the benefit of our child or for the continued health of the stewarded property?
A lot of our fears for our children come about because we don't trust the collective community to care for individuals. We have to care for them ourselves while we can, and train them up to take care of themselves. We wish we could do otherwise, that we could let them rest in the arms of the whole, but we don't. Some of us live in smaller communities that have some of that trust—religious communities especially, in this country, but also communities like those that came together out of the gay community in the AIDS horrors of the 1980's and 1990's.
If it came down to it, in a collapse of civilization, we'd find and make communities. Mad Max aside, we have the basis for real support and care in times of need already. In my own life, the morris dancing community, meeting, my work community, my family, and my neighbors (well, some of my neighbors) would form webs of care. We'd do what we could for each other.
But we as a nation do not trust the nation, or even our individual states, to provide that network. We depend on that national framework to hold up our economy: we have a common, nationally determined currency and laws that form the basis for most of our work outside the home. But it's clear from the way politics are headed that we simply don't want to trust our lives to this nation. There is something in that collective we do not want to give to our children.
Is it racism? Classism? Culturalism? Some unholy mixture of all our group-identity-based biases? A lot of my friends would tell you yes, that is the fundamental problem. And I agree they are problems. But they all run up against the question of personal inheritance: when we give our child this package, it includes everything, warts and all.
When we look at what we give our children in terms of fungible value—give them liquid assets so they have the freedom to do what they can with it—without also looking at the thing we are giving into their care as a thing that needs care in and of itself, we are also giving them the idea that fungible value is what is important in a thing. In short: when we give our children freedom, we also give them the false idea that they are free from responsibility.
On the other hand, too many wealthy parents give their children specific, non-liquid inheritances that those children simply aren't fitted to: children who drive their parents' company into the ground, who don't care about the old house and let it rot, who don't want to take care of that stupid artwork... Or who understand the value in these things but don't really carry it in their hearts, and so lose their souls in what their parents or grandparents acquired. They own but they do not love.
I don't see an instant way out of this knot, except that we need to rethink what it means to leave things to our children.
There are plenty of traditions in which spiritual practice is bound up with work. In some traditions, prayers are counted out along with repetitious labor. In others, focused concentration on a task is used as a way to remove distraction from worldly concerns. Christian monastic traditions engage their followers in work—hard work—as part of their humble duties to God.
We aren't monks, and the work in question was not made of boring, iterative tasks like planting or wall-building. It was things like fixing the toilet and maintaining the furnace, making sure the building was vacuumed and the walks shoveled and the grass mowed.
Where we ended up, was that we wanted to emphasize a sense of "stewardship," that this was not just one more job in our daily lives, but care for a space that was built collectively for the benefit of a greater whole. This was in contrast to emphasizing "property," the value of which is worldly wealth. Stewardship suggests that we are caretakers rather than owners—a steward is not the owner of an estate, but the manager on behalf of the owner, whose job is to make the property do what the owner wants. If we regard the assets of the Meeting as in our care rather than in our keeping, the sense was, it will give that care a greater sense of spirit-led purpose.
There has been a lot of talk about wealth recently in the public sphere. The Occupy movement uses the "99%" and the "1%" as rallying points, noting an increasing concentration of wealth over the past few decades. Conservative commentators, in turn, argue that we ought to be able to enjoy what we earn—that communist redistribution ends up sapping the initiative out of an economy.
The piece I keep thinking is being left out is the matter of inheritance. Not in the broad collective sense liberals like to trot out ("what kind of a world are we leaving our children"), although that is of course important. What I keep wondering about is specifically what parents leave to their children.
Now, I have been the beneficiary of lots of generous inheritance. My mother's parents effectively paid my way through high school and college, and the inheritances from my grandmother and my wife's grandmother made the bulk of the down-payment on our house. When I've gotten myself into sticky financial spots over the years, especially in my first ten years out of college, my parents bailed me out… nothing mind-boggling, but help that got me more quickly over bad decisions. I'm very grateful for these inheritances, and even more so as I now find myself in the position of parent.
As a father, I so want to "be there" for my son. I want to give him all I can. At the same time, I don't want to spoil him, or have him never learn form not getting what he wants. And he doesn't always get what he wants, as he will be happy to tell you.
I think the question of how to bequeath to my child goes back to the question we were asking in the Meetinghouse Care committee. Is what I am giving my child his property for him to work his will upon, or is it something he needs to take care of? To invoke stewardship doesn't necessarily affect inequality of inheritance—the sense of stewardship is a long-running theme among large land-owners in England, for instance. But when it's brought together with questions of collective versus individual ownership, it affects how we go about transferring wealth to the next generation. Is that transfer for the benefit of our child or for the continued health of the stewarded property?
A lot of our fears for our children come about because we don't trust the collective community to care for individuals. We have to care for them ourselves while we can, and train them up to take care of themselves. We wish we could do otherwise, that we could let them rest in the arms of the whole, but we don't. Some of us live in smaller communities that have some of that trust—religious communities especially, in this country, but also communities like those that came together out of the gay community in the AIDS horrors of the 1980's and 1990's.
If it came down to it, in a collapse of civilization, we'd find and make communities. Mad Max aside, we have the basis for real support and care in times of need already. In my own life, the morris dancing community, meeting, my work community, my family, and my neighbors (well, some of my neighbors) would form webs of care. We'd do what we could for each other.
But we as a nation do not trust the nation, or even our individual states, to provide that network. We depend on that national framework to hold up our economy: we have a common, nationally determined currency and laws that form the basis for most of our work outside the home. But it's clear from the way politics are headed that we simply don't want to trust our lives to this nation. There is something in that collective we do not want to give to our children.
Is it racism? Classism? Culturalism? Some unholy mixture of all our group-identity-based biases? A lot of my friends would tell you yes, that is the fundamental problem. And I agree they are problems. But they all run up against the question of personal inheritance: when we give our child this package, it includes everything, warts and all.
When we look at what we give our children in terms of fungible value—give them liquid assets so they have the freedom to do what they can with it—without also looking at the thing we are giving into their care as a thing that needs care in and of itself, we are also giving them the idea that fungible value is what is important in a thing. In short: when we give our children freedom, we also give them the false idea that they are free from responsibility.
On the other hand, too many wealthy parents give their children specific, non-liquid inheritances that those children simply aren't fitted to: children who drive their parents' company into the ground, who don't care about the old house and let it rot, who don't want to take care of that stupid artwork... Or who understand the value in these things but don't really carry it in their hearts, and so lose their souls in what their parents or grandparents acquired. They own but they do not love.
I don't see an instant way out of this knot, except that we need to rethink what it means to leave things to our children.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Sherlock, Spock, Encyclopedia, and Corlis.
I've had this archetype on my mind. My wife and I just finished watching the first season of the modernized BBC Sherlock. My son is reading Encyclopedia Brown and (as intended by the author) trying to solve problems through knowledge and logic. And we've been reading Sherlock Holmes as bedtime stories. Star Trek's Mr Spock is in there too, and the ideal of old-fashioned science fiction in general.
It's an ideal of mental acuity and compiled knowledge, able to defeat raw ambition and violent oppression. Brains over brawn—but not trickster-y brains, mostly. Brains in service of Public Order. Sherlock as brother to Mycroft, presiding over a (mostly) enlightened Empire.
Sherlock Holmes was written before Gandhi showed the corrupt underbelly of the empire that Dr Watson had fought for, and never really addressed what that empire did to the generation of young men who marched off to destruction in the trenches of World War I. The archetype after Holmes turned away from Empire. The Star Trek universe is more ambivalent about smarts: There's Spock, of course, and his successor, Data, but these are more uncertain geniuses, uncertain about their magnificent rational minds, and tenderly exploring the gulf between themselves and that confusing, alien, emotional humanity. And defending against the seemingly perfect, rational but totalitarian Borg.
Barry Lopez's Corlis Benefideo is a bit like these characters, in his sense that if we just make enough maps, we'll get the answer to our question. If we make a broad and deep enough atlas, we'll come to know a place.
The truth is, it's too easy to keep our focus on Sherlock. He's flashy; he's impressive, and he's way smarter than us. But he is always an actor in a play. He reveals a human drama, but he seldom actually controls the drama, and he gets bored and restless when other people aren't providing the other necessary elements. He is reactive.
And Spock is not the captain of the Enterprise, any more than Merlin is king of Britain. Encyclopedia Brown is not the leader of his group, he's just the go-to problem solver. He finds the faults in the bully's story, and lets the police and the other grownups take it from there. The mistake I think people who want to identify with Sherlock as their hero, is to make him the center of everything. But he is an impatient (and in some ways self-destructive, as in his cocaine habit) outsider to most of the dramas he plays out in, withdrawing into the wings when his role is done.
Sherlock Holmes never really addresses the deeper "why" of criminal behavior. We never find out why Moriarty is such a twisted evil mastermind. That was left for 20th century crime writers, raised on Freud and his successors. Holmes' job is to simply assume the goodness of the law and to shine the light on places where it has been crossed.
He is working in a fixed system of truth, morality and justice, within which he jumps about like an agile monkey, acknowledging that there are sometimes places where morality and decency trump law, but always believing that revealing the truth will clarify the situation and make moral choices clear.
It's a nice dream.
It's an ideal of mental acuity and compiled knowledge, able to defeat raw ambition and violent oppression. Brains over brawn—but not trickster-y brains, mostly. Brains in service of Public Order. Sherlock as brother to Mycroft, presiding over a (mostly) enlightened Empire.
Sherlock Holmes was written before Gandhi showed the corrupt underbelly of the empire that Dr Watson had fought for, and never really addressed what that empire did to the generation of young men who marched off to destruction in the trenches of World War I. The archetype after Holmes turned away from Empire. The Star Trek universe is more ambivalent about smarts: There's Spock, of course, and his successor, Data, but these are more uncertain geniuses, uncertain about their magnificent rational minds, and tenderly exploring the gulf between themselves and that confusing, alien, emotional humanity. And defending against the seemingly perfect, rational but totalitarian Borg.
Barry Lopez's Corlis Benefideo is a bit like these characters, in his sense that if we just make enough maps, we'll get the answer to our question. If we make a broad and deep enough atlas, we'll come to know a place.
The truth is, it's too easy to keep our focus on Sherlock. He's flashy; he's impressive, and he's way smarter than us. But he is always an actor in a play. He reveals a human drama, but he seldom actually controls the drama, and he gets bored and restless when other people aren't providing the other necessary elements. He is reactive.
And Spock is not the captain of the Enterprise, any more than Merlin is king of Britain. Encyclopedia Brown is not the leader of his group, he's just the go-to problem solver. He finds the faults in the bully's story, and lets the police and the other grownups take it from there. The mistake I think people who want to identify with Sherlock as their hero, is to make him the center of everything. But he is an impatient (and in some ways self-destructive, as in his cocaine habit) outsider to most of the dramas he plays out in, withdrawing into the wings when his role is done.
Sherlock Holmes never really addresses the deeper "why" of criminal behavior. We never find out why Moriarty is such a twisted evil mastermind. That was left for 20th century crime writers, raised on Freud and his successors. Holmes' job is to simply assume the goodness of the law and to shine the light on places where it has been crossed.
He is working in a fixed system of truth, morality and justice, within which he jumps about like an agile monkey, acknowledging that there are sometimes places where morality and decency trump law, but always believing that revealing the truth will clarify the situation and make moral choices clear.
It's a nice dream.
Friday, November 11, 2011
The Agnostic Gospel Choir
I had a blast back in August singing in a Village Harmony adult camp. The obvious highlight for me was singing the solo part of a gospel number, “Ain't Got Time To Die." It felt good, was a fun stretch for me, I'm told it sounded good... and in reflection it was a very odd choice for me.
As I've discussed earlier, though I belong to a denomination that many think is a Christian sect, I am not a professed Christian, nor do I carry may of the hallmarks of such: I do not accept Jesus as my savior, nor do I accept God as Father, or believe most of the stories in the gospels as literal, if-you-had-been-there-with-a-video-recorder-you'd-have-seen-it-too truth. I'm some flavor of agnostic, one with pretty strong non-theistic sensibilities. Deistic, maybe, but... here I am really enjoying singing gospel tunes.
OK, there's really nothing new here. I learned “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and all those other spiritual standards back in grade school. They were cultural artifacts—good songs from the African-American tradition. I learned a lot of them off of Weavers records: Lee Hays was a lapsed minister's son. I sing and love Christmas carols. I sang Vivaldi's Gloria and Schubert's Mass in G in school. And so on, and so on. You'll have a hard time singing choral music in this society without singing music meant for church services—but over time we've developed a framework where if it's sung in concert, it doesn't count—the whole performance has a big frame, a set of quote marks around it, just as performing in HMS Pinafore doesn't suggest you have any experience as a sailor.
Out of concert, and the frame is not so clear. When the Blind Boys of Alabama opened for Peter Gabriel a few years ago, we were all singing and dancing in the aisles, and then one of them said something to the effect of his feeling the power of the Lord and this whole hall praising Jesus, and OK fine, who am I to say otherwise, but it felt a little awkward because, well, I was singing along but I didn't mean the words literally.
Or my atheist/pagan fellow singer who got in a huff about all the religious songs—old-time gospel, mainly—that cropped up in a row at a pub sing. Or the fellow singer at the camp who wondered what his fellow Jewish friends would think about him singing gospel with such gusto.
The “frames and quotes" think only goes so far. I find a lot of the white-folky versions of spirituals I grew up with pale and even a little offensive. I joke about forming an "agnostic gospel choir" for people like me who love to sing the songs but aren't interested in being the house choir for a faith we don't really share. But as I think about it, the built-in insincerity would end up showing, one way or another. It would be fake.
Because what makes gospel work is something I just don't have that explicitly: utter commitment. Not that gospel singers are free from sin, or perfected saints in any sense, but when they sing, and sing well, it requires the whole body to dig in and hold up the song, and the lyrics are about as un-ironic as you can get. And that's part of the appeal, and it's something I and a lot of urban liberals like me simply don't carry around with us in any sort of coherent package.
As I've discussed earlier, though I belong to a denomination that many think is a Christian sect, I am not a professed Christian, nor do I carry may of the hallmarks of such: I do not accept Jesus as my savior, nor do I accept God as Father, or believe most of the stories in the gospels as literal, if-you-had-been-there-with-a-video-recorder-you'd-have-seen-it-too truth. I'm some flavor of agnostic, one with pretty strong non-theistic sensibilities. Deistic, maybe, but... here I am really enjoying singing gospel tunes.
OK, there's really nothing new here. I learned “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and all those other spiritual standards back in grade school. They were cultural artifacts—good songs from the African-American tradition. I learned a lot of them off of Weavers records: Lee Hays was a lapsed minister's son. I sing and love Christmas carols. I sang Vivaldi's Gloria and Schubert's Mass in G in school. And so on, and so on. You'll have a hard time singing choral music in this society without singing music meant for church services—but over time we've developed a framework where if it's sung in concert, it doesn't count—the whole performance has a big frame, a set of quote marks around it, just as performing in HMS Pinafore doesn't suggest you have any experience as a sailor.
Out of concert, and the frame is not so clear. When the Blind Boys of Alabama opened for Peter Gabriel a few years ago, we were all singing and dancing in the aisles, and then one of them said something to the effect of his feeling the power of the Lord and this whole hall praising Jesus, and OK fine, who am I to say otherwise, but it felt a little awkward because, well, I was singing along but I didn't mean the words literally.
Or my atheist/pagan fellow singer who got in a huff about all the religious songs—old-time gospel, mainly—that cropped up in a row at a pub sing. Or the fellow singer at the camp who wondered what his fellow Jewish friends would think about him singing gospel with such gusto.
The “frames and quotes" think only goes so far. I find a lot of the white-folky versions of spirituals I grew up with pale and even a little offensive. I joke about forming an "agnostic gospel choir" for people like me who love to sing the songs but aren't interested in being the house choir for a faith we don't really share. But as I think about it, the built-in insincerity would end up showing, one way or another. It would be fake.
Because what makes gospel work is something I just don't have that explicitly: utter commitment. Not that gospel singers are free from sin, or perfected saints in any sense, but when they sing, and sing well, it requires the whole body to dig in and hold up the song, and the lyrics are about as un-ironic as you can get. And that's part of the appeal, and it's something I and a lot of urban liberals like me simply don't carry around with us in any sort of coherent package.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Feelings
I had a dream a few nights ago, where I was some sort of volunteer assistant teacher in an inner city school. The kids in my group were all African-American boys, about second or third or fourth grade. They had a series of little books about feelings on the table near them, and they were really pissed off about having to read them. Their objections amounted to, "Don't you go telling me what to feel, asshole." Probably not in that language, but I could feel their rage coming off them.
And so I tried talking with them, saying, "You know, of course you have a right to feel what you feel, but do you really always want to be drawn into a fight whenever you feel mad, or burst into uncontrollable tears when you feel sad? And when someone else is mad, do you have to just go with getting mad right back and getting into a fight with them?" I think that's what I said, or something like that. Hard to remember; it was a dream. And I woke up before I could hear any sort of reaction from them.
I've had a couple heated discussions on Facebook lately. One was with a guy in my neighborhood arguing that conceal-carry laws are good: he carries a gun as he walks around the neighborhood and it makes him feel safer. I'm not a fan of conceal-carry, but it turns out most of our energy about this comes not from facts but from communal beliefs: he's a passionate defender of individual liberties, while I tend towards a passionate interest in communality and mutual responsibility. When you get to statistical studies, having a firearm is more dangerous to the carrier because of household accidents and moments of passion, and in terms of public safety, conceal-carry a statistical wash.
But here's the thing I noticed about our back-and-forth: he came out of the box spitting mad—calling names, making accusations, saying things that weren't threats but carried the structure of threats ("If you... then I..."). And of course he has a "right to his feelings," but what I was seeing was how much his anger in and of itself washed over the relationship. It almost instantly stopped being just his anger. It was anger that I also had to deal with.
We use the word "feelings" to describe emotions, and this makes sense for little kids that are just learning about themselves: "What do you feel?" is a really good question for little kids to step back from themselves and name the churning mass of stuff inside them.
But I'm wondering about the use of that word in adults, because feelings in a group of people are more like waves: they aren't felt by you as an individual, they are emanated. They are like germs: sometimes your neighbor gets infected, sometimes her immune system kicks in with its own anti-emotion. But none of us live in emotional bubbles. Even those of us who try to, end up emanating their own weird little "can't touch me" vibe.
The other Facebook discussion was with a friend of a friend, about this letter and quickly turned into a debate about tyranny (taxation) vs reckless individualism (anti-taxation). And the guy I had the tête-a-tête with was pretty hyperbolic. He's clearly been through the comments-section school of political commentary and debate.
If you read the comments section of pretty much any article on the internet that touches on politics, you know the language: a group of villains is named, fear-and-anger-inducing words are invoked, and and either a plea for divine retribution or a call to arms concludes. These are the tools we use to try and win arguments. Except they utterly fail at that. They help us gather allies, and maybe we swing one or two people who are confused and unsure where they stand, but they don't turn anyone from the enemy camp, because they make it clear the enemy camp is the enemy.
When Jon Stewart made his plea for civility and less hyperbole ("These are hard times, not the end times...") this summer, I was interested to see some of my left-wing friends get pissed off because to them Stewart seemed to be saying "Stop fighting for what is right." And I didn't really know what to say to that, because of course we want people to fight for justice. And liberty. And freedom. And communal responsibility.
But who are they fighting? And how do you fight a demagogue, or a whole sea of demagogues? When we say we are going to fight, we invoke a specific set of analogies: there is a battle, there is an enemy, there is going to be some kind of combat. There's a poster/t-shirt slogan, "fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity," which makes the point crudely, but the problem is, we don't know how to talk about large structural issues except by fighting.
And I think the root of the problem is the tidal-emotion thing I started this post off with: When I am passionate about something, a lot of what you—my audience—are paying attention to is the passion. The work of understanding the something itself does not come in presentation, it comes from our internal processing and piecing puzzle pieces that fit our internal unanswered-question puzzle-pieces.
And so I wonder about the place of passion in public debate. It seems to me that opening more of a place for testimony from personal experience, and clear, interesting delineations of the field of debate, are needed. But that's me. Actually, I was bowled over by this discussion of the divided mind, from a recent talk at the Royal Society of Art. It may sound boring from the title, but the conclusion about the sort of balancing needed in our world, is profound:
And so I tried talking with them, saying, "You know, of course you have a right to feel what you feel, but do you really always want to be drawn into a fight whenever you feel mad, or burst into uncontrollable tears when you feel sad? And when someone else is mad, do you have to just go with getting mad right back and getting into a fight with them?" I think that's what I said, or something like that. Hard to remember; it was a dream. And I woke up before I could hear any sort of reaction from them.
I've had a couple heated discussions on Facebook lately. One was with a guy in my neighborhood arguing that conceal-carry laws are good: he carries a gun as he walks around the neighborhood and it makes him feel safer. I'm not a fan of conceal-carry, but it turns out most of our energy about this comes not from facts but from communal beliefs: he's a passionate defender of individual liberties, while I tend towards a passionate interest in communality and mutual responsibility. When you get to statistical studies, having a firearm is more dangerous to the carrier because of household accidents and moments of passion, and in terms of public safety, conceal-carry a statistical wash.
But here's the thing I noticed about our back-and-forth: he came out of the box spitting mad—calling names, making accusations, saying things that weren't threats but carried the structure of threats ("If you... then I..."). And of course he has a "right to his feelings," but what I was seeing was how much his anger in and of itself washed over the relationship. It almost instantly stopped being just his anger. It was anger that I also had to deal with.
We use the word "feelings" to describe emotions, and this makes sense for little kids that are just learning about themselves: "What do you feel?" is a really good question for little kids to step back from themselves and name the churning mass of stuff inside them.
But I'm wondering about the use of that word in adults, because feelings in a group of people are more like waves: they aren't felt by you as an individual, they are emanated. They are like germs: sometimes your neighbor gets infected, sometimes her immune system kicks in with its own anti-emotion. But none of us live in emotional bubbles. Even those of us who try to, end up emanating their own weird little "can't touch me" vibe.
The other Facebook discussion was with a friend of a friend, about this letter and quickly turned into a debate about tyranny (taxation) vs reckless individualism (anti-taxation). And the guy I had the tête-a-tête with was pretty hyperbolic. He's clearly been through the comments-section school of political commentary and debate.
If you read the comments section of pretty much any article on the internet that touches on politics, you know the language: a group of villains is named, fear-and-anger-inducing words are invoked, and and either a plea for divine retribution or a call to arms concludes. These are the tools we use to try and win arguments. Except they utterly fail at that. They help us gather allies, and maybe we swing one or two people who are confused and unsure where they stand, but they don't turn anyone from the enemy camp, because they make it clear the enemy camp is the enemy.
When Jon Stewart made his plea for civility and less hyperbole ("These are hard times, not the end times...") this summer, I was interested to see some of my left-wing friends get pissed off because to them Stewart seemed to be saying "Stop fighting for what is right." And I didn't really know what to say to that, because of course we want people to fight for justice. And liberty. And freedom. And communal responsibility.
But who are they fighting? And how do you fight a demagogue, or a whole sea of demagogues? When we say we are going to fight, we invoke a specific set of analogies: there is a battle, there is an enemy, there is going to be some kind of combat. There's a poster/t-shirt slogan, "fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity," which makes the point crudely, but the problem is, we don't know how to talk about large structural issues except by fighting.
And I think the root of the problem is the tidal-emotion thing I started this post off with: When I am passionate about something, a lot of what you—my audience—are paying attention to is the passion. The work of understanding the something itself does not come in presentation, it comes from our internal processing and piecing puzzle pieces that fit our internal unanswered-question puzzle-pieces.
And so I wonder about the place of passion in public debate. It seems to me that opening more of a place for testimony from personal experience, and clear, interesting delineations of the field of debate, are needed. But that's me. Actually, I was bowled over by this discussion of the divided mind, from a recent talk at the Royal Society of Art. It may sound boring from the title, but the conclusion about the sort of balancing needed in our world, is profound:
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