City on a Hill

I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's most recent Album, Wrecking Ball. It's a good album. But the thing that is interesting to me is how he is writing in large part about the Idea Of America, and how so many people are frustrated by the lack of that idea's implementation.

The songs are pretty much all from a point of view: the characters may take on a mythic Everyman quality, but the idea is that they are spoken from a singular point of view. They aren't hymns; they aren't meant to be expressions of collective truth, even when the first person plural is invoked in the first song "We Take Care of Our Own."

Why is this important? Because we each (most of us) carry around our own little America, and that is the "shining city on the hill" Reagan invoked 30+ years ago. And each Perfect Union is a little different. Most of ours conveniently leave out some constituent type of Actual American—the kinds of people that drive you, personally, nuts.

I was struck by how conveniently the otherwise beautiful and heart-wrenching 11/23/63 by Stephen King gave space to black people but had NONE in the school where the main character was teaching. Were there really no black students in small-town Texas in 1963? None? It's not that black people are absent, but they are there as phantoms, as evidence of how deeply flawed America was around 1960. But the evidence was news and signs and white people talking, not actual flesh-and-blood black people.

But then, it would have been a different story. And all stories are selective. All of them. That's part of how stories work: they allow us to pull a singular pattern out from the overwhelming swirl of life, and look at that pattern's shape.

So I invoke this idea of a multitude of Little Americas in peoples' hearts not to say we should try to do differently. I don’t think we can. I think when organizations try and make the little dreams into one big dream—and then into reality—monstrous things happen. Reichs are created, and People's Republics. Places where people desperately wear a mask of someone else’s dream, in hopes they will be allowed to survive.

At the White Privilege Conference last year, there was a roundtable discussion with a group of well-respected radical activist academics. And I was struck by the comment of one of them, to the effect that she had given up on America. As far as she was concerned, it was irredeemable, with the sheer quantity of injustice and blood on its hands. And I understand exactly where she's coming from. The United States has a lot to answer for, most of which it probably never will. Certainly not in full. But I thought how sad that comment made me feel.

I don't want to live in your perfect America. You probably don't want to live in mine. But it’s the fact that each of us (or most of us, disillusioned folks aside) have a perfect America we carry around with us, that makes it possible for us to go on trying to be part of this whole. I think that the sense of a perfected anything is necessary to go on caring. Even if we know that perfection will never come to be.

I'm reminded of "Ramadan", from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (collected in Brief Lives), where the Caliph of the Baghdad of the 1001 Nights, surveys his the perfect Baghdad. He knows it will not last, and so he persuades the Lord of Dream to bottle that perfect city, the city of his dream, and preserve it forever.

This is the false balance. When we try to protect our dream Americas, when we fight hard to keep them from bumping into the hard realities of the real America and changing in the process, becoming maybe less perfect, we are like people taking a living tradition and putting it under glass. We're like someone who shoots the last animal of its kind so we will have a good stuffed specimen in the zoo. It's not what animals are for, or traditions, or dream worlds.

(Sometimes) Forget

I've been talking to first-graders at my son's elementary school this month, about maps and the Titanic (we did a Titanic Reference Map in 1998), and what I do when I make maps. I learned back in preschool that getting too technical at this age just loses them, so I tried to use concrete examples instead of "the real words." This process can be really illuminating to me as well, opening up the true meaning of concepts I've learned to gloss over.

"Generalization" for example. The Titanic Reference Map includes deck plans of the ship, color coded by broad usage: 1st class cabins and common areas, same for 2nd class and 3rd class; crew quarters and utility...

I traced these shapes from deck plans published as part of the investigations into the disaster, plans that include placement of bathroom fixtures, dining room tables, etc. Part of my job, then, was simplification, a kind of generalization. A kind of selective forgetting.

I grew up with the idea that it was good to remember as much as possible, that it was sad that we had forgotten so much, that so much history had been lost. This idea is deeply embedded in my values. And I'm coming to realize that it's not entirely true.

What is the value in forgetting? Well, for one things, it means we have some real say in the stories we retell. If there had been strong documentary evidence (including video interviews and reams of contemporary commentary), about King Lir, would Shakespeare have been as free to construct his narrative around his own deep understanding of human relationships? And what about his "history plays," where there was more documentary evidence available to him... Shakespeare lived in a world where the fictionalization of even relatively contemporary stories was the norm, but he arrived on the cusp of an age—our age—where people paid more attention to the lines between fiction and non-fiction, where the rules around non-fiction became stricter, and where people took documentary non-fiction more seriously as a gauge of how to live in the "real world."

I've been intrigued, in my limited recent reading into North American Indian history (as it is has been reconstructed), how quickly the "historically accurate" truths of peoples' origins fade into legend: the Cahokia culture had collapsed less than two centuries before Columbus, but by the time of European contact with the Indians of the area in the 17th century, the mound-makers were people of myth. By contrast, we know the names of architects who built European monuments 2000 years old, let alone the kings who ordered them built.

Is there advantage in literate memory? Well, we certainly think so. For one thing, it's easier to prevent repeats of long-term disastrous behavior. As George Santayana famously wrote,

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Age of Reason, 1905)

And yet, there is such a thing as too much retention. Consider the Incas, who maintained their dead kings and all their descendants as living royal households. By the time of Pizarro's appearance on the scene, there had been at least 11 Inca kings, and the weight of all those monarchs households being maintained was becoming a drag on the economy. This weight may have contributed to the Inca civil war that had just been won by Atahualpa at the time of Pizarro's appearance, which had generally weakened the empire, helping make Pizarro's conquest possible.

And what of our personal knowledge? I have every composition I ever wrote on a computer—every sketch, every half-baked idea, every email—somewhere on a disc or my hard-drive. Everything. I will never ever read all these things. In fact, I will probably read almost none of them again.

When I was in high school, I started a journal/notebook, which I kept up, off and on, for ten years. Will I ever profit from looking through all those pages of stuff? I mean, it might be fun, but perhaps a small selection of those 20-odd volumes might be of some interest. I think I was inspired by things like Coleridge's notebooks, which are treasures, scrupulously edited and notated. But Coleridge didn't write them thinking they were going to to be looked at and researched and (for God's sake) published in a scholarly edition 200 years on. They were a working tool, and if they had stopped being useful, if they had in fact become a drag upon his work, I suspect they would have been given the heave-ho.

We mourn the loss of the library of Alexandria. But have we gone too far the other direction? Do we remember too much? Are we headed towards a future where, like the angels in John Crowley's Great Work of Time, we long to be able to forget, to not have been made to remember?

Where is the balance? Is there a principle that can be invoked? What should we remember, and what should we allow to be forgotten?

Careful of that dead thing

I had a terrifying dream last week. I was driving my family in the car, on a nearby nondescript suburban road (County Rd C in Roseville, MN, if you care). It was late twilight and cloudy. Suddenly ahead of us, there was a burst of flame: the afterburner engaging as a jet fighter swooped up and to the right. It startled my wife, who yelled. There were flashes in the sky, like lightning behind a cloudbank.

Then off in the distance, way off in the distance, ahead of us and slightly to the left, was a blinding blue-white flash, with a shockwave visible pushing away from it. I knew right away it was a nuclear explosion. Someone had set off an atomic bomb. My immediate question was, what do we do, where do we go? Do I turn the car around and run like hell for home? Would I make it? Would the shockwave get us this far away? Would more bombs explode?

This was the cultural shared nightmare from my growing-up years: nuclear armageddon. I don't remember actually having nightmares about it then—I remember nightmares where I watched passenger jets crash nearby, coming in low and screaming and flying all wrong, and then a cloud of moke from behind a line of trees. But not the Big One. Neither is it really a daylight nightmare for me, and hasn't been since glasnost. Terrorist attacks and pandemics are what tend to set me off in the same way today.

What the heck?

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I've been coming back over and over this spring to how we tend to avoid awareness of mortality—not just ours, but the mortality of those entities we are part of. In particular, when we found an institution, we seldom build into that institution's structure the assumption that it will one day be dissolved. Most legal entities have procedures built into their generic type: how to dissolve a foundation, corporation or church. But when we found most institutions, we expect them to go on "in perpetuity."

I think I had forgotten how viscerally overwhelming it is to actually face the end of our own bodily life. No philosophy, no rationality, just an overwhelming urge to figure out how to go on living; how to get out of this dangerous situation now.

As I keep moving forward in this exploration (can I really call it that? seems like pretty random wandering much of the time), I need to bear this in mind: the subject of endings can touch off a panicked response that seems to come out of left field. No-one who is not facing excruciating pain wants to die. And no-one who feels their very life depends on a larger organization will therefore respond well to suggestions that the organization ought to be left for dead.

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I really enjoyed, earlier this week, listening to Kevin Kling talk about what to him was a new an revelatory way of thinking about storytelling, as part of an interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. He says:

Well... with this post-traumatic stress a few months ago, after years and years, it came back with a vengeance. And I went to a therapist and she said, "You got to understand... it's not time [that heals]— it... doesn't work, it sits in such a deep place that it's not triggered in ways you would think. It's not something that time heals. It will come back." And so what she had me do, which was so right fit just with my weird, Jungian sensibility, she had me tell the story of my motorcycle accident.

It was a bit more complicated than this. She told me the story, but instead of hitting the car, I missed the car, and I went to where I was going. And by retelling the story and having a different outcome, I started sleeping better. I started, all of a sudden the post-traumatic stress really dissipated in a significant way. And it was because I retold the story in another way that had me survive in another way.

Now the struggle with me is, I still wake up in the morning with my arm not working, with all these things. So there's a reality, and then there's another story I've created. And it really seems to fit with the way we work as, as humans, especially these days. We need to rewrite our stories sometimes just so we can sleep at night.

...but it's not the reality. But we can't live in the story that makes us sleep, but we need it to sleep. And so that's my struggle now, putting those two together, taking the myths we form to make ourselves feel better and fitting it with the reality that we live in.

And I think that about sums it up.

Zombies and Faeries

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.

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?

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.

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.