“I had to close down everything, I had to close down my mind
Too many things could cut me, too many things make me blind
I’ve seen so much in so many places, so many heartaches, so many faces
So many dirty things, you couldn’t even believe…”
– Moby, “Extreme Ways”
Perhaps because it’s nearly fall again, this has been one of the most vividly beautiful visits I’ve had to Southwestern. I love the way the light slants into corners of a darkened room; the high, austere gloominess of the Chapel on a quiet afternoon; that place in between Herman Brown and the McCombs apartments where the light from the moon, and the street lamps, and the stars, all seems to pool into a single place, and the rest of the campus, by extension, is utterly swathed in darkness (an appropriate symbol, I guess). Yet there’s a certain menace to it, also. When I was trekking with Rebecca across the front of the campus this morning after Sunrise Club, I mentioned that she had eight more glorious months to be here, and, being in a particularly cynical and snarky mood these past few days, she muttered hostilely, “I haven’t idealized it yet, like you have.” Yet, in walking round the campus alone this afternoon, and sitting in the library for an hour by myself, and praying in the Chapel, I eventually concluded that the accusation was unjust. I’m not yet so fully removed from this school and the time that I spent here (if indeed that’s even possible for me) that I’ve forgotten how some of the worst years of my life were spent in this place.
For I’m finding (if I ever forgot it) that Southwestern means more to me than Worship in the Chapel, and long nights spent with others in communal prayer, and making Micah laugh in the Commons, and scheming with Booth and Alex, and spinning round in circles with Shelley through the faint haze of autumn. It’s also the place—may I capture it well!—where I sat on a bench in the lamplight feeling lonelier than I had ever felt in my life. It’s also the place where I lay in my bed until long after midnight feeling restless and uneasy at the relentless, unblinking condemnation of the bare, white walls of my room. It’s the place where, every night as night set in, I would flee to the library to escape the terror of the emptiness I felt. It’s a place where I trembled and wept.
If nothing else, though, one good thing has come of it: Being here again has given me a much deeper understanding of my novel, and myself. It was during the middle of the summer that I first began to re-envision the overarching structure of the chapters on Southwestern, after reading Dr. Herbert’s book Moby-Dick and Calvinism and the first few books of The Brothers Karamazov. Our venerated Melville-enthusiast-companion contends that the reason his beloved author suffered so much emotional anguish at around the time he was writing his masterpiece was because his understanding of the world had been profoundly disturbed by a reality which was incongruent with its preconceived assertions. Essentially, his parents had raised him in a Unitarian faith which taught that God rewarded the good and rendered judgment on the wicked. For the early Unitarians, of course, prosperity was a sure sign of God’s favor. However, when Allan Melvill became involved in some unscrupulous financial arrangements, ruining the family income, the guilt he incurred on his head was so great that he suffered a panic attack and died of anguish. Now, young Herman could have dealt with this, theologically, by recognizing what might have been obvious to anyone else, then or now, that his father was something less than the paragon of virtue he had previously believed him to be. However, he did not do so; and his failure to do so plunged him into an arresting theological dilemma. God rewards the good with tokens of benevolence and smites the wicked with afflictions; everyone knew that. Yet Melville’s father had been faithful to the Lord in all his dealings, and had died at an early age in the most appalling circumstances. How do you reconcile the indisputable truths of your religious understanding with the evident realities of ordinary life? For Melville, the answer was to do essentially what I did during my freshman year here: to ping-pong back and forth from one particular conviction to its opposite, inviting doubt, and disbelief, and, ultimately, searing psychological disturbance, in the process.
The primary difficulty, as Dr. Herbert explains it, lies in this: A person who has been raised in a particular matrix of belief can never let go of the convictions attendant on it without, in some measure, doing violence to his own psyche, because those convictions form the edifice on which his personality is built, and he removes them at his peril.
Dr. Herbert describes Melville’s struggle with a predestinating God in the most mythical terms: “This dilemma lies at the heart of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael and Captain Ahab come to terms with a whale whose career of wanton destruction suggests a God run amok” (shades of the CCT!). “Melville recognized that the remorseless logic of orthodox Calvinism was not only consistent with itself; it was also consistent with realities of human experience that cannot be explained by the theory that God respects liberal conceptions of human dignity.” All true; there’s an unassailable logic to Calvinism (to say nothing of its apparent support in the Scriptures) which renders it from a rhetorical standpoint virtually inarguable. I suppose this explains, at least in part, why so many right-thinking, deep-thinking people are taken in by it.
It was during my time here at Southwestern that I grappled at close quarters with two mighty, sublime, and potentially treacherous religious frameworks. The first was Calvinism; the second, Jungianism. Looking back on it now, I suppose I fled into Jungianism as a revolt against Calvinism, and against my own apparently inexorable calling as a prophet. In large part, it appears that the liberal revolt against orthodoxy in the early- to mid-nineteenth century was a revolt against Calvinism as well. Unitarianism offered an understanding of Christianity with some basis in the Scriptures, just as Jungianism offered an understanding of my final year of high school, and first year of college, and the general mystical, disturbing, ornately symbolic, literary nature of my life, which fit the facts as comprehensively as Calvinism did. Yet Jungianism, like Unitarianism, proved to be something of a dead end. For one thing, it encouraged me to go around quoting Moby Dick with the same avidity and fervor with which I had once quoted the Scriptures aforetime; for another, I became so lost in aethereal metaphysical abstractions that I nearly lost my mind. This would seem to be the natural consequence of seeking to escape a religious understanding enshrined around an impersonal God who coldly, grimly foreordained the mechanical movements of your brutal and surreal existence. My conception of God as a being who is adamantly, almost forcefully un-relational impelled me into a metaphysical framework where relationship was utterly unnecessary.
I still have respect and sympathy for Jungianism and Calvinism—even agree with them, in fact, in certain essentials—but it appears that my novel will be a takedown of both these systems of belief. Even if that wasn’t what I had intended, the arc of the narrative would render it so. They’ve simply proven too destructive; Calvinism as I understood it came close to annihilating my faith when I first began to grapple with my calling as a prophet and the literary nature of my life. Jungianism, though subtle and more insidious, came closer still.
Yet even so, what I said at the beginning of this entry holds true, and in some inscrutable manner—I know not how, exactly—plays into it all. Southwestern is like a person: sometimes willing, sometimes helpful, sometimes cold and isolating and possessed of terrible moroseness. In the fall, these attributes take on a quality of nigh-unbearable acuteness. Even at my happiest, I still felt lonely here. The place is so spacious, and the people so few; and the scenery so lulling, so deep; you expect at any moment for the shadows in a corner or the crevice of a stony stair to swallow you alive and never let you go. You’re talking to a friend for an hour—say, Shelley on the mall, or Booth, or even Taylor, in the Chapel—and you turn to leave, and in the very instant that you turn away, the darkness deepens, and the immeasurability of loneliness is overwhelming to your senses. It engulfs you like the sea. I refuse to believe that it’s just my own extraordinary sensitivity to mood and lighting; there were many times I was alone in London, yet I never felt so lonely. (I say nothing of Chicago for, as always, the less said the better). This is a place of endless depths. And there are things that lurk here, hidden from the common eye, which lend to its inner richness a most brooding hue.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
"Nightfall in Winter that Comes Without a Star"
Near the end of last week I wrote “The Air Loom Gang,” and yesterday morning I completed “The Bower of Delights.” Today I go forth to attempt Chapter 10. I believe it will be primarily engaged with the emotions I was feeling during Christmas in anticipation of the dreaded year to come. In writing the first half of the chapter on Corey’s collapse and Booth’s return to reason at the end of January, I eventually reached a dead end because I realized that I hadn’t yet explained what I was fighting for, nor why the circumstances seemed so dire. They were truly dire. Thus when I wrote “The Bower of Delights” I strove to explain, with logic and clarity and a certain amount of emotional force, how I had come to believe that [[ Meredith ]] and I would be sexually tempted during third trimester, and why it was necessary to prevent this fearful fate. In order to do so, I had to accomplish two things: I had to convey the emotional stakes in a manner that would be understood, and perhaps even deeply felt, by a general audience (thus my assertion that in averting the immediate temptation, I would be preventing the untimely death of my beloved in the distant future), and I had to explain why having sex with [[Meredith]] was a Bad Idea. This last I attempted to tackle in two different ways: by explaining why having sex at all, with anyone, was a Bad Idea for me; and why, in particular, it was wrong to engage in amours with [[Meredith]]—because I knew her motivations for providing those delights would be primarily self-centered, rooted in her insecurities. So even people who disagreed with my understanding of chastity (although I feel I explained it in a fairly presentable, pleasing, and logical manner, I’m aware that many will disdain it from the hardness of their hearts), even those who have qualms about my Christian sense of honor should at least understand and respect that I wished not to prey on the emotional vulnerabilities of someone whom I deeply cared about. And I can feel the momentum of the narrative flowing towards the question of, “Will he be able to do it? Will he be able to show [[Meredith]] her value as a person, and prevent her from encouraging something that would hurt them both?” That momentum will flow into the chapter following, the final “Christmas” chapter, and by the time we return to the time of Booth’s return, I’m hoping it will have formed an avalanche of sorts. (My understanding of what makes a novel powerful is shifting from a focus on its “literary,” and in particular stylistic merit, to its intellectual, spiritual, and emotional force. In all the reviews I read of Inception over the summer, what seemed to move the critics the most was Christopher Nolan’s brilliance at simply explaining difficult, trippy ideas, and his ability to continuously raise the emotional stakes until your whole heart was gripped by the direful spectacle).
In which case, I need to determine what remains to be explained before we reach that point. December 2003 was the point where my life became truly mythological at last, although the act had been in process for a space of several months; where I found myself living in some surreal, epic wasteland where the whole world was in peril and I was responsible for holding back the rising tide of darkness which threatened to devour me, my closest friends, my school, and then, beyond even that, the earth itself. How did it come to this?
In the previous chapters I established that, however it might have been happening, and for whatever purpose, I was living in a story with supernatural dimensions. All my predictions about the beginning of the second trimester, about [[Meredith]], about Priscilla, had now come true. For the moment, I wrote, it was safe to assume that I had been given some kind of prophetic understanding. Near the end of Chapter 8 I elaborated on the reasons why I chose to view these circumstances from within a Christian framework—any other explanation would have been too crazy; would, indeed, have MADE me crazy. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable, considering that I appeared to be dealing with prophecy and demons, to determine that religious explanations must have lain behind the riddles.
But to this point I’ve been holding off that portion of the puzzle which was added (most surreally) by the situation with [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]]. Their emergence was the central plotline of the sixth and seventh chapters. When I called [[Mortimer]] to tell him what was happening in Alvin, he reported that the same things were happening to him in [[Toronto]] (several hundred miles north). Indeed, they had been happening for the same length of time. He said that on more than one occasion demons had assaulted his body with the evident intention of possessing it. He said he had been tempted (as I was) to dabble in Finnish magic. He was just as surprised as I was to discover that this was going on elsewhere, with someone he knew very well. When I asked him what it meant, and why this was happening to us, he told me it appeared that the forces of heaven and hell were gathering up their forces for a major battle—possibly the final battle—and that we were being summoned to fight in the conflict ahead.
I did find it odd that [[Mortimer]] and I were both experiencing the same apparent supernatural phenomena, but found his reasoning fallacious. Granted, it only made sense that if we were being singled out for attack with such severity, and at the same time manifesting the power of God to a parallel degree, then something was in preparation. But to deduce from thence that we would be figures of import in a major spiritual conflict, let alone the end-times conflict, was a step too far. At least that was my feeling until [[Petunia]] wrote her letter explaining that she had been having these experiences as well, and that her visions had revealed that she was destined to marry, and then murder, the Antichrist himself.
So what was I supposed to think? That we were entering a time of global tribulation, that the people close to me would be among its chief participants, had been affirmed now by my own unusual experiences and those of two other people, none of whom at first had known about the others. Yet, at the same time, it just couldn’t be true… it was absurd, unthinkable… it was an age-old deception adapting itself with insidious force to the circumstances of our times. There are few more susceptible temptations for a radical, eschatologically-minded young Christian than to believe that he’s being called to participate, to fight, in the events of Revelation. It’s inconceivable to us that we would have to live and die and fade away from history into the all-devouring oblivion of time like the great mass of common men. There is a potent exhilaration in believing that we stand on the wheel of the world at the end of time; that ours it is to break the seals and bring about the end. Yet if that was all we were experiencing now, then why was there such a prevalent sense that this was happening, and why it had been affirmed with so many miracles and oracles and visions? What was all this madness? What did it portend?
That was my central dilemma, abetted and bolstered, as we have before proven, by the inexorable iron of a single irresistible idea. It’s likely that I shall attempt to tackle that dynamic again on some level. Yet what I really want to do with this chapter, above and beyond all other considerations attendant on it, is to create metaphor on the level of myth. It ought to be fundamentally focused on my tumultuous emotional state during the weeks immediately prior to the beginning of 2004, and it ought to convey those emotions through clear, vivid images. And it seems to me that in order to do this, I need to speak simultaneously from two contrasting points of view: one, that I see myself being pulled with potent, ineradicable force towards something I can scarce comprehend, still less resist; two, that the end of the world is coming, but that before the dusk falls on the earth, it will fall on my school, and my personal sense of a battle awaiting me when I return in January—a battle to prevent [[Meredith]] from destroying herself and me, a battle to save Corey, a battle to keep the whole school from edging downward into darkness. In all my previous assaults on this chapter it seems to me that I’ve written primarily from the first place, when the second is the strongest, and most entertaining, but even the second is incomplete without the other, and the tension created between them is what lends this section of the story weight and depth and substance.
As a consequence, the reality that lies around this chapter ought to be something akin to the sense you feel in the middle of The Two Towers, at around the point where Elrond and Galadriel have given their expository speeches, and the two hobbits (Pippin and Merry) witness the march of the Ents to Helm’s Deep. (It certainly helps, of course, that [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]] both speak like Tolkien, now and through the rest of our adventures).
* * *
"If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true, he will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or by the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death, an image of the splendor of the kings of men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.
"But you, my daughter… you will linger on, in darkness and in doubt. As nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell, bound to your grief, beneath the fading trees, until all the world is changed and all the long years of your life are utterly spent."
"The power of the enemy is growing. Sauron will use his puppet Saruman to launch an assault on the peoples of Middle Earth. Isengard has been unleashed. His eye now turns to Gondor, the last free kingdom of men. His war on this country will come swiftly. He senses the Ring is close.
"The strength of the Ring-bearer is fading. In his heart, Frodo begins to understand—the quest will claim his life. You know this; you have foreseen it. It is the risk we all took.
"In the gathering dark, the will of the Ring grows strong. It works hard now to find its way back into the hands of Men—Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The young captain of Gondor has but to extend his hand, take the Ring for his own, and the world will fall. It is close now, so close to achieving its goals. For Sauron will have dominion over all life on this earth, even unto the ending of the world.
"The time of the Elves is over. Do we leave Middle Earth to its fate? Do we let them stand alone?"
In which case, I need to determine what remains to be explained before we reach that point. December 2003 was the point where my life became truly mythological at last, although the act had been in process for a space of several months; where I found myself living in some surreal, epic wasteland where the whole world was in peril and I was responsible for holding back the rising tide of darkness which threatened to devour me, my closest friends, my school, and then, beyond even that, the earth itself. How did it come to this?
In the previous chapters I established that, however it might have been happening, and for whatever purpose, I was living in a story with supernatural dimensions. All my predictions about the beginning of the second trimester, about [[Meredith]], about Priscilla, had now come true. For the moment, I wrote, it was safe to assume that I had been given some kind of prophetic understanding. Near the end of Chapter 8 I elaborated on the reasons why I chose to view these circumstances from within a Christian framework—any other explanation would have been too crazy; would, indeed, have MADE me crazy. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable, considering that I appeared to be dealing with prophecy and demons, to determine that religious explanations must have lain behind the riddles.
But to this point I’ve been holding off that portion of the puzzle which was added (most surreally) by the situation with [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]]. Their emergence was the central plotline of the sixth and seventh chapters. When I called [[Mortimer]] to tell him what was happening in Alvin, he reported that the same things were happening to him in [[Toronto]] (several hundred miles north). Indeed, they had been happening for the same length of time. He said that on more than one occasion demons had assaulted his body with the evident intention of possessing it. He said he had been tempted (as I was) to dabble in Finnish magic. He was just as surprised as I was to discover that this was going on elsewhere, with someone he knew very well. When I asked him what it meant, and why this was happening to us, he told me it appeared that the forces of heaven and hell were gathering up their forces for a major battle—possibly the final battle—and that we were being summoned to fight in the conflict ahead.
I did find it odd that [[Mortimer]] and I were both experiencing the same apparent supernatural phenomena, but found his reasoning fallacious. Granted, it only made sense that if we were being singled out for attack with such severity, and at the same time manifesting the power of God to a parallel degree, then something was in preparation. But to deduce from thence that we would be figures of import in a major spiritual conflict, let alone the end-times conflict, was a step too far. At least that was my feeling until [[Petunia]] wrote her letter explaining that she had been having these experiences as well, and that her visions had revealed that she was destined to marry, and then murder, the Antichrist himself.
So what was I supposed to think? That we were entering a time of global tribulation, that the people close to me would be among its chief participants, had been affirmed now by my own unusual experiences and those of two other people, none of whom at first had known about the others. Yet, at the same time, it just couldn’t be true… it was absurd, unthinkable… it was an age-old deception adapting itself with insidious force to the circumstances of our times. There are few more susceptible temptations for a radical, eschatologically-minded young Christian than to believe that he’s being called to participate, to fight, in the events of Revelation. It’s inconceivable to us that we would have to live and die and fade away from history into the all-devouring oblivion of time like the great mass of common men. There is a potent exhilaration in believing that we stand on the wheel of the world at the end of time; that ours it is to break the seals and bring about the end. Yet if that was all we were experiencing now, then why was there such a prevalent sense that this was happening, and why it had been affirmed with so many miracles and oracles and visions? What was all this madness? What did it portend?
That was my central dilemma, abetted and bolstered, as we have before proven, by the inexorable iron of a single irresistible idea. It’s likely that I shall attempt to tackle that dynamic again on some level. Yet what I really want to do with this chapter, above and beyond all other considerations attendant on it, is to create metaphor on the level of myth. It ought to be fundamentally focused on my tumultuous emotional state during the weeks immediately prior to the beginning of 2004, and it ought to convey those emotions through clear, vivid images. And it seems to me that in order to do this, I need to speak simultaneously from two contrasting points of view: one, that I see myself being pulled with potent, ineradicable force towards something I can scarce comprehend, still less resist; two, that the end of the world is coming, but that before the dusk falls on the earth, it will fall on my school, and my personal sense of a battle awaiting me when I return in January—a battle to prevent [[Meredith]] from destroying herself and me, a battle to save Corey, a battle to keep the whole school from edging downward into darkness. In all my previous assaults on this chapter it seems to me that I’ve written primarily from the first place, when the second is the strongest, and most entertaining, but even the second is incomplete without the other, and the tension created between them is what lends this section of the story weight and depth and substance.
As a consequence, the reality that lies around this chapter ought to be something akin to the sense you feel in the middle of The Two Towers, at around the point where Elrond and Galadriel have given their expository speeches, and the two hobbits (Pippin and Merry) witness the march of the Ents to Helm’s Deep. (It certainly helps, of course, that [[Mortimer]] and [[Petunia]] both speak like Tolkien, now and through the rest of our adventures).
* * *
"If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true, he will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or by the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death, an image of the splendor of the kings of men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.
"But you, my daughter… you will linger on, in darkness and in doubt. As nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell, bound to your grief, beneath the fading trees, until all the world is changed and all the long years of your life are utterly spent."
"The power of the enemy is growing. Sauron will use his puppet Saruman to launch an assault on the peoples of Middle Earth. Isengard has been unleashed. His eye now turns to Gondor, the last free kingdom of men. His war on this country will come swiftly. He senses the Ring is close.
"The strength of the Ring-bearer is fading. In his heart, Frodo begins to understand—the quest will claim his life. You know this; you have foreseen it. It is the risk we all took.
"In the gathering dark, the will of the Ring grows strong. It works hard now to find its way back into the hands of Men—Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The young captain of Gondor has but to extend his hand, take the Ring for his own, and the world will fall. It is close now, so close to achieving its goals. For Sauron will have dominion over all life on this earth, even unto the ending of the world.
"The time of the Elves is over. Do we leave Middle Earth to its fate? Do we let them stand alone?"
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Chapter 8: The Air Loom Gang (Complete)
“The intense concentration of self in the middle of such an immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”
– Melville, Moby-Dick
(Ch. 93, “The Castaway”)
In my study of abnormal psychology I had encountered the strange case of a man named James Tilley Mathews, the first schizophrenic on record and a resident of the Bedlam asylum in London in the early part of the nineteenth century. Such was the clarity of his mind and strength of his belief in the delusions he espoused that a team of medical practitioners examined him and found no evidence of insanity (a diagnosis apparently bolstered by the fact that the stories which could be verified one way or the other—for example, his claim that he had been involved in the drafting of a secret peace treaty between Britain and France and thrown in jail to die by the prime minister—were invariably proven true).
Mathews believed he was privy to the machinations of a vast criminal conspiracy, centered in London but with tentacles spread throughout the British Isles, that was actively working to arrange a war between the major European powers with the ultimate goal of destroying the West. At the heart of this ruthless organization stood a small but nefarious band of Dickensian villains, four men and three women, who were stationed for many years in an apartment hard by London Wall. Among them were Bill, or “the King,” the leader of the band and foremost operator of the Air Loom Machine; Jack the Schoolmaster, so-called because he continuously recorded the gang’s doings in shorthand (merrier than the King, he was fond of remarking, “I’m here to see fair play!”); the Middle Man, an engineer and manufacturer of air looms; Augusta, a small, reedy woman with sharp features, who, though sunny and amiable to outward view, was savagely and incontestably temperamental when she failed to get her way; and Charlotte, a ruddy brunette, a “steady, persevering sort of person” who sometimes felt herself to be a prisoner, and lived in a state of perpetual remorse .
Mathews was determined to expose the secrets of this dastardly assembly to the world at large. However, he was prevented from doing so by means of the extraordinary machine that they operated. This machine was an air loom, a convoluted series of tubes and valves which could “assail” its victims with a warping fluid from a thousand feet away. The assailments were varied, but invariably effective. “Fluid-locking” held the tongue in check, preventing speech; “cutting soul from sense,” a chemical means of severing the mind and heart, dissociated memory and intellect; “kite-ing” lifted an irrelevant, ridiculous idea into the brain and made it hang there, like a kite borne high on the wind, to the exclusion of thoughts more purposeful and sane; “lengthening the brain” distorted any normal thoughts the brain might have and warped them into primal, agonizing forms; and “lobster-cracking” was a sudden, spontaneous assault on the entire nervous system, likely to result in death.
For years the “Air Loom Gang” had forestalled Mr. Mathews’ diligent attempts at exposure by “assailing” him with gruesome acts malign and shiny metal wands, which, being waved, would instantly transport them out of sight.
In my attempts to unravel what was happening at Alvin High School, and what had now grown, apparently, to incorporate at least one other person elsewhere (that I knew of), I had asked myself, “What if the religious explanation for this is the wrong one?” In other words, “What if there’s an explanation lying somewhere between ‘whacky coincidence’ and ‘cosmic warfare’ that I haven’t even thought of?” This, at least, was Booth’s initial opinion. While he found it odd, as I did, that events were stacking up in such a linear, literary manner, and for that reason thought it unlikely that this was all but a fevered coinage of my brain—especially not now that others were involved who could attest to having undergone experiences similar to mine—he was hesitant to frame the unexplainable in terms of my Judeo-Christian understanding.
“The universe is really vast,” he told me, in his probing, forthright manner. “And it has a lot of dimensions. I’m not saying that ‘weird’ things can’t happen, I just don’t think that we should confine our interpretations to something written by a small group of people living in the first century. Do you see how narrow that is?”
I conceded his point—it was certainly narrow. The problem was, if not coincidence, if not a case of mass psychosis, what other explanation was there but religious? I could lower the barriers of my epistemology only so far—then, after a certain point, I was living in Rapture Ready world, a perverse, illimitable, unguarded universe with no constraints, no rules, reasonless and void, where the explanation was as likely to be a wolf in a granny costume, or a group of baton-waving British conspirators, as anything else. It could be the Leviathan! It could be Zarathustra. It could be anything at all. I preferred not to live in that world. I would rather my novels remained my novels, not my whole existence. In short, the limitations on my reason, undergirded by religious (and specifically Christian) understanding, were what kept me sane. If I should lose that—if I drifted out into the boundless waste of all-permitting chaos—if I lost my sense of possibility and finitude—then I was utterly, completely lost.
Thus in a sense, I agreed with Booth, but not in the way that he intended. He was right, the universe is vast—too vast, I felt, to wander through it wantonly unguided, all alone. The narrowness of my worldview was among its chief attractions—as who should suggest to a shepherd that he “broaden” the borders of his sheepfold by removing its gates? There was a certain kind of safety in restriction. I tried to look at it as Booth suggested, but I simply couldn’t do it—it was frightening—and, after earnestly attempting for a time, eventually gave up in despair.
– Melville, Moby-Dick
(Ch. 93, “The Castaway”)
In my study of abnormal psychology I had encountered the strange case of a man named James Tilley Mathews, the first schizophrenic on record and a resident of the Bedlam asylum in London in the early part of the nineteenth century. Such was the clarity of his mind and strength of his belief in the delusions he espoused that a team of medical practitioners examined him and found no evidence of insanity (a diagnosis apparently bolstered by the fact that the stories which could be verified one way or the other—for example, his claim that he had been involved in the drafting of a secret peace treaty between Britain and France and thrown in jail to die by the prime minister—were invariably proven true).
Mathews believed he was privy to the machinations of a vast criminal conspiracy, centered in London but with tentacles spread throughout the British Isles, that was actively working to arrange a war between the major European powers with the ultimate goal of destroying the West. At the heart of this ruthless organization stood a small but nefarious band of Dickensian villains, four men and three women, who were stationed for many years in an apartment hard by London Wall. Among them were Bill, or “the King,” the leader of the band and foremost operator of the Air Loom Machine; Jack the Schoolmaster, so-called because he continuously recorded the gang’s doings in shorthand (merrier than the King, he was fond of remarking, “I’m here to see fair play!”); the Middle Man, an engineer and manufacturer of air looms; Augusta, a small, reedy woman with sharp features, who, though sunny and amiable to outward view, was savagely and incontestably temperamental when she failed to get her way; and Charlotte, a ruddy brunette, a “steady, persevering sort of person” who sometimes felt herself to be a prisoner, and lived in a state of perpetual remorse .
Mathews was determined to expose the secrets of this dastardly assembly to the world at large. However, he was prevented from doing so by means of the extraordinary machine that they operated. This machine was an air loom, a convoluted series of tubes and valves which could “assail” its victims with a warping fluid from a thousand feet away. The assailments were varied, but invariably effective. “Fluid-locking” held the tongue in check, preventing speech; “cutting soul from sense,” a chemical means of severing the mind and heart, dissociated memory and intellect; “kite-ing” lifted an irrelevant, ridiculous idea into the brain and made it hang there, like a kite borne high on the wind, to the exclusion of thoughts more purposeful and sane; “lengthening the brain” distorted any normal thoughts the brain might have and warped them into primal, agonizing forms; and “lobster-cracking” was a sudden, spontaneous assault on the entire nervous system, likely to result in death.
For years the “Air Loom Gang” had forestalled Mr. Mathews’ diligent attempts at exposure by “assailing” him with gruesome acts malign and shiny metal wands, which, being waved, would instantly transport them out of sight.
In my attempts to unravel what was happening at Alvin High School, and what had now grown, apparently, to incorporate at least one other person elsewhere (that I knew of), I had asked myself, “What if the religious explanation for this is the wrong one?” In other words, “What if there’s an explanation lying somewhere between ‘whacky coincidence’ and ‘cosmic warfare’ that I haven’t even thought of?” This, at least, was Booth’s initial opinion. While he found it odd, as I did, that events were stacking up in such a linear, literary manner, and for that reason thought it unlikely that this was all but a fevered coinage of my brain—especially not now that others were involved who could attest to having undergone experiences similar to mine—he was hesitant to frame the unexplainable in terms of my Judeo-Christian understanding.
“The universe is really vast,” he told me, in his probing, forthright manner. “And it has a lot of dimensions. I’m not saying that ‘weird’ things can’t happen, I just don’t think that we should confine our interpretations to something written by a small group of people living in the first century. Do you see how narrow that is?”
I conceded his point—it was certainly narrow. The problem was, if not coincidence, if not a case of mass psychosis, what other explanation was there but religious? I could lower the barriers of my epistemology only so far—then, after a certain point, I was living in Rapture Ready world, a perverse, illimitable, unguarded universe with no constraints, no rules, reasonless and void, where the explanation was as likely to be a wolf in a granny costume, or a group of baton-waving British conspirators, as anything else. It could be the Leviathan! It could be Zarathustra. It could be anything at all. I preferred not to live in that world. I would rather my novels remained my novels, not my whole existence. In short, the limitations on my reason, undergirded by religious (and specifically Christian) understanding, were what kept me sane. If I should lose that—if I drifted out into the boundless waste of all-permitting chaos—if I lost my sense of possibility and finitude—then I was utterly, completely lost.
Thus in a sense, I agreed with Booth, but not in the way that he intended. He was right, the universe is vast—too vast, I felt, to wander through it wantonly unguided, all alone. The narrowness of my worldview was among its chief attractions—as who should suggest to a shepherd that he “broaden” the borders of his sheepfold by removing its gates? There was a certain kind of safety in restriction. I tried to look at it as Booth suggested, but I simply couldn’t do it—it was frightening—and, after earnestly attempting for a time, eventually gave up in despair.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
History and the Jews (an Excerpt from Chapter 2)
What effect those classes might have had on others, I do not know; what effect on me, can scarcely tell. Most notably, it bred in my heart an undying fascination with the Jewish people, and a deep reserve of sorrow for the sufferings that they have undergone. As I studied the founding of the state of Israel for a class project at the end of the spring trimester, I was struck by the absurdity and injustice of the fact that the Jews had been maligned, mistreated, and murdered unceasingly in nearly every place they dwelt—ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, northern Africa, Spain, France, Germany, Russia—by Romans, Christians, Europeans ancient, medieval, and modern, the present-day Arabs (who had launched a war to exterminate them on the day of Israel’s founding, but with no more success than the others)—a line of persecution stretching back almost 4,000 years to the time of their fathers. I was perplexed by their ability, not only to survive, but even to thrive in such conditions, hated, tormented, bereft of a home, and made to wander to and fro in the earth. “Athens, Sparta, and Rome have perished,” wrote the French philosopher Rousseau, “and their people have vanished from the earth; Zion, though destroyed, has not lost her children. They mingle with all nations but are not lost among them.” Yet now, after 2,000 years, they were living once again in their ancestral homeland, had revived, and were speaking, their ancestral language (Hebrew), and were practicing their ancestral religion, the very scriptures of which had promised their return a full five hundred years before the Romans even drove them out! What was the parting of the sea compared to this?
Any overarching philosophy of history is incomplete which fails sufficiently to answer these two questions: Why are the Jews so hated? and, how do they survive? Mr. Blankenship may have felt forbidden by the code of his profession to assert his own opinions, but he vaguely gestured us from time to time in the direction of an answer. He told us the story of how Frederick the Great, the emperor of Prussia (and perhaps one of his favorite historical figures), challenged his physician to cite one clear, definitive, incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. “The Jews,” his physician replied, with no hesitation. “The Jews.”
And I, for my own part, averred; yet even my faith in this hypothesis was shaken when we reached our study of the Nazi holocaust. The danger inherent in a religious understanding of the continued existence of the Jewish race is that it threatens to ignore, or lightly brush over, the question of why they are hated—and, more than this, what madness must dwell in the minds of their adversaries that makes them so determined, so efficient, and so inconceivably cruel that, given the choice between merely killing them outright (say with guns or gas), or leading them the long way to slaughter through tortures and torments, so many have sacrificed simplicity for sadism. It is a form of evil so targeted, so pervasive, and so malicious as to seem supernatural. Many millions of men have been slain throughout history; but few have been slain like the Jews. We learned of a young Jewish couple that was murdered attempting to escape Auschwitz in the uniforms of SS officers; the man was hung, yet the woman, sentenced to be burned alive in the crematoria, slit her own wrists on the way to execution rather than submit to such a grisly fate. We analyzed the fate of the Jews of Jedawbne, Poland, seven hundred of whom were hunted down and executed by their neighbors before the Germans arrived. The Jews were rounded up and forced into a barn; the barn was burned while, just outside the door, the townsfolk made merry on instruments to drown the accusation of their screams. Jews were experimentally frozen, blinded, injected with all manner of diseases, whipped, starved, and amputated without the benefit of anesthesia. Children were murdered by the thousands. And, as it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war, the administrators in charge of the death camps redoubled their efforts—in Auschwitz on a single day in the summer of 1944, 9,000 were slain, and the graves eventually proved too small to hold the growing piles of the dead.
For a single supreme, interminable moment, it appeared that Satan was triumphant. Never had the world’s Jewish population been in greater danger. If the war had gone the other way, if Britain had been lost, or Hitler not repulsed in northern Africa and on the eastern steppes, it would have been their end. Over time, it came to seem that this had been the point, and all the military carnage but a sideshow to distract the major powers from his true intent—the systemic annihilation of every living Jew. We learned that the Grand Mufti of Palestine had conspired with the Nazis for the elimination of all those living in the Middle east and Northern Africa, and would undoubtedly have done so had the Deutches Reich prevailed there. “Arabs!” he declared in a radio broadcast on March 1, 1944, “rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”
Yet the menace of those days had been obscured by the glazing over of time. It is difficult to explain to a person wholly unacquainted with the subject the nature of the evil which once confronted, and at one point threatened to destroy, the human race; it is too shocking, too monstrous to believe—like something in a fairy-tale or myth. Carl Jung wrote that in the twentieth century, for the first time in history, evil became a tangibly-existing force, an individual, distinct entity—“darker than death or night” —whose titanic, tyrannical power and malignity satanic threatened the fundamentally-modern belief that progress was inevitable, and good would always triumph . “We have discovered that evil too is a progressive force,” wrote the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, “and that the modern world provides unlimited prospects for its development.” There had been evils aplenty in history, but few so starkly hellish, so infernal, as the evils of the century past. To put it more simply, we were living in the days of myth and miracle, and, for the most part, knew it not.
Then again, seen in another light, perhaps we had always been.
For, above all else, it was Mr. Blankenship’s contention—a contention that, in time, had become the shared conviction of the most devoted of his students—that history cannot be understood at all without some comprehension of its abnormality. Day by day, and hour by hour, he fought to combat the exhaustless, almost universally pervasive idea that history is nothing but a tedious and unbroken record of financial exchanges and meaningless, bloody disputes over bits of barren land. No, in Mr. Blankenship’s classes, history was grand, surreal, vivid, violent, and shocking—but the one thing it had never been, would never be, was dull. History for Mr. Blankenship was neither Marxist nor mundane. It was only this way of seeing that could begin to make sense of the inconceivable atrocities and evident miracles of history. We learned how, in an event later known as “the Defenestration of Prague,” two Catholic regents (and a “pleading secretary”) were thrown out a window in Bohemia, plummeting fifty feet and landing, soiled but otherwise unharmed, in a bed of manure. It was this event which inaugurated the Thirty Years’ War. We studied the improbable military career of Frederick the Great, who warred against the might of all Europe, won a long series of apparently providential victories in battle, though all the while heavily outnumbered and under-supplied, and whose capital was only spared humiliating desolation when, as the continental forces closed in on the city, his arch-rival, the empress of Russia, suddenly died, and her successor, Czar Peter III, immediately declared his undying allegiance to the Prussian emperor. Thus, against all reason, at the very moment of destruction, Frederick won the war.
Of these and other inexplicable, unfathomable turns is history composed.
Mr. Blankenship had a lecture on time that he liked to deliver whenever he discerned apathy gaining a foothold in the classroom. He stood up at the lectern in the center of the room and said the one word, “Now.” When the echo of the word had finished sounding in our ears, he noted that even before he had finished uttering the “ow” part of the word, the “n” had fled into the past.
There are two lessons to be gleaned from this. The first is that the past and present aren’t as separate as we sometimes like to think. The present is already seeping away into memory, but history is ongoing, and it happens all around us.
The second lesson is this: Given the limitless absurdities we’ve catalogued in history, and life’s near-infinite capacity to surprise us, the one thing we should never, ever do is to declare something too unbelievable to be true.
Any overarching philosophy of history is incomplete which fails sufficiently to answer these two questions: Why are the Jews so hated? and, how do they survive? Mr. Blankenship may have felt forbidden by the code of his profession to assert his own opinions, but he vaguely gestured us from time to time in the direction of an answer. He told us the story of how Frederick the Great, the emperor of Prussia (and perhaps one of his favorite historical figures), challenged his physician to cite one clear, definitive, incontrovertible proof of the existence of God. “The Jews,” his physician replied, with no hesitation. “The Jews.”
And I, for my own part, averred; yet even my faith in this hypothesis was shaken when we reached our study of the Nazi holocaust. The danger inherent in a religious understanding of the continued existence of the Jewish race is that it threatens to ignore, or lightly brush over, the question of why they are hated—and, more than this, what madness must dwell in the minds of their adversaries that makes them so determined, so efficient, and so inconceivably cruel that, given the choice between merely killing them outright (say with guns or gas), or leading them the long way to slaughter through tortures and torments, so many have sacrificed simplicity for sadism. It is a form of evil so targeted, so pervasive, and so malicious as to seem supernatural. Many millions of men have been slain throughout history; but few have been slain like the Jews. We learned of a young Jewish couple that was murdered attempting to escape Auschwitz in the uniforms of SS officers; the man was hung, yet the woman, sentenced to be burned alive in the crematoria, slit her own wrists on the way to execution rather than submit to such a grisly fate. We analyzed the fate of the Jews of Jedawbne, Poland, seven hundred of whom were hunted down and executed by their neighbors before the Germans arrived. The Jews were rounded up and forced into a barn; the barn was burned while, just outside the door, the townsfolk made merry on instruments to drown the accusation of their screams. Jews were experimentally frozen, blinded, injected with all manner of diseases, whipped, starved, and amputated without the benefit of anesthesia. Children were murdered by the thousands. And, as it became increasingly evident that Germany would lose the war, the administrators in charge of the death camps redoubled their efforts—in Auschwitz on a single day in the summer of 1944, 9,000 were slain, and the graves eventually proved too small to hold the growing piles of the dead.
For a single supreme, interminable moment, it appeared that Satan was triumphant. Never had the world’s Jewish population been in greater danger. If the war had gone the other way, if Britain had been lost, or Hitler not repulsed in northern Africa and on the eastern steppes, it would have been their end. Over time, it came to seem that this had been the point, and all the military carnage but a sideshow to distract the major powers from his true intent—the systemic annihilation of every living Jew. We learned that the Grand Mufti of Palestine had conspired with the Nazis for the elimination of all those living in the Middle east and Northern Africa, and would undoubtedly have done so had the Deutches Reich prevailed there. “Arabs!” he declared in a radio broadcast on March 1, 1944, “rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”
Yet the menace of those days had been obscured by the glazing over of time. It is difficult to explain to a person wholly unacquainted with the subject the nature of the evil which once confronted, and at one point threatened to destroy, the human race; it is too shocking, too monstrous to believe—like something in a fairy-tale or myth. Carl Jung wrote that in the twentieth century, for the first time in history, evil became a tangibly-existing force, an individual, distinct entity—“darker than death or night” —whose titanic, tyrannical power and malignity satanic threatened the fundamentally-modern belief that progress was inevitable, and good would always triumph . “We have discovered that evil too is a progressive force,” wrote the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, “and that the modern world provides unlimited prospects for its development.” There had been evils aplenty in history, but few so starkly hellish, so infernal, as the evils of the century past. To put it more simply, we were living in the days of myth and miracle, and, for the most part, knew it not.
Then again, seen in another light, perhaps we had always been.
For, above all else, it was Mr. Blankenship’s contention—a contention that, in time, had become the shared conviction of the most devoted of his students—that history cannot be understood at all without some comprehension of its abnormality. Day by day, and hour by hour, he fought to combat the exhaustless, almost universally pervasive idea that history is nothing but a tedious and unbroken record of financial exchanges and meaningless, bloody disputes over bits of barren land. No, in Mr. Blankenship’s classes, history was grand, surreal, vivid, violent, and shocking—but the one thing it had never been, would never be, was dull. History for Mr. Blankenship was neither Marxist nor mundane. It was only this way of seeing that could begin to make sense of the inconceivable atrocities and evident miracles of history. We learned how, in an event later known as “the Defenestration of Prague,” two Catholic regents (and a “pleading secretary”) were thrown out a window in Bohemia, plummeting fifty feet and landing, soiled but otherwise unharmed, in a bed of manure. It was this event which inaugurated the Thirty Years’ War. We studied the improbable military career of Frederick the Great, who warred against the might of all Europe, won a long series of apparently providential victories in battle, though all the while heavily outnumbered and under-supplied, and whose capital was only spared humiliating desolation when, as the continental forces closed in on the city, his arch-rival, the empress of Russia, suddenly died, and her successor, Czar Peter III, immediately declared his undying allegiance to the Prussian emperor. Thus, against all reason, at the very moment of destruction, Frederick won the war.
Of these and other inexplicable, unfathomable turns is history composed.
Mr. Blankenship had a lecture on time that he liked to deliver whenever he discerned apathy gaining a foothold in the classroom. He stood up at the lectern in the center of the room and said the one word, “Now.” When the echo of the word had finished sounding in our ears, he noted that even before he had finished uttering the “ow” part of the word, the “n” had fled into the past.
There are two lessons to be gleaned from this. The first is that the past and present aren’t as separate as we sometimes like to think. The present is already seeping away into memory, but history is ongoing, and it happens all around us.
The second lesson is this: Given the limitless absurdities we’ve catalogued in history, and life’s near-infinite capacity to surprise us, the one thing we should never, ever do is to declare something too unbelievable to be true.
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Sound of Inevitability
Before I discuss what I want to write about tonight, I need to do some basic setting up. One of the reasons I have had so much trouble with my novel in the last few months is because I devoted an insufficient amount of time at the beginning to explaining the beliefs and assumptions which had shaped my worldview at the time of the events I’m describing—strange, otherworldly assumptions, for the most part, but essential to understanding the insanity with which high school ended, and my subsequent mental and emotional collapse. Half of all storytelling, I’ve discovered, is the way you set things up. Yet I had gotten so focused on building the arches, I forgot to lay the stones.
But you know, I love complexity and complication. Couldn’t live without ‘em. One of the aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that I especially appreciate is the ease with which his characters find themselves in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. Hamlet hates his uncle. The ghost of his father appears and reveals that he was killed by Claudius. Hamlet now has a motive for revenge—but is utterly unable to act. Why? For about a dozen different reasons, and those critics who have tried to render a simplistic explanation for his motivations are mistaken. Hamlet is not, pace Laurence Olivier, “the story of a man who could not make up his mind,” it is far, far more than this. It is the story of a man who was prevented from killing his uncle because he feared for his sanity; because he suspected that the apparition he had seen might be the devil; because, as next in line for the throne, he couldn’t afford to present an appearance of instability and chaos to the people of his kingdom and their enemies across the way; because Claudius was cunning, yea, almost as cunning as the prince himself, and Hamlet knew that in this most direful of all acts, the execution of a head of state, and his own kin, canniness and caution were needed. Yet he couldn’t continue delaying this doom, not forever, because the nets were circling round him, there were several other people, some with armies, seeking to avenge the deaths of their own fathers either on the unfortified iron of the state, or on Hamlet’s neck; Claudius was growing more murderously conscious of his purpose with each day that passed, his school mates had proven unsympathetic and treacherous, and his mother—and his love—were in the most calamitous distress.
The more I consider the matter, the more it seems that literature was made to analyze this very thing. Looking at just one example from my own life, we can see the role that my misunderstanding of fate played in shaping the Quixotic adventures of my final year of high school and my subsequent collapse. There’s a section in the newly-revised edition of my second chapter where I describe my belief that certain calamities are so horrific, they can send shockwaves “backwards, into generations past.” Thus I became convinced that my One, True Love would be killed in a gruesome and violent manner early in her life, an idea which was reinforced by the very passion with which I held it—surely I would never have clung to such a horrible presentiment with such unwonted ardor if I wasn’t imbibing the fumes of some future event. Right? The fact that I believed this so steadfastly was the clearest indication of its truth. The inevitable conclusion, of course, was that the event had been predestined and (like Trinity’s death in The Matrix) was therefore inescapable.
It was this pall of inevitability lingering over the events of my life which leant it much of its tragic, dark-hued coloring. When I learned that a certain person would be tempted into doing something not at all in her best interests (or in anyone else’s), my immediate conclusion was that God had given me this prophecy so that I could have the dubious pleasure of watching it come to pass and being powerless to stop it. Mortimer and Petunia largely shared in this deterministic understanding. After I had finished explaining that I felt my relationship with this girl was predestined to end badly, because all my relationships with women were predestined to end badly, because all of them were fractal precursors of a fearful-to-think-upon future catastrophe (see how convoluted it all got?), Mortiner was deeply sympathetic. “Don’t you see,” he advised, “you have to remember the Greek tragedies—they saw the future, and they did everything they could to prevent it, and their preventing it is what caused it. You cannot outsmart the future. That’s like Satan trying to prevent God winning in the end. You cannot outsmart the future.” (This warning is all the more eerie and prescient given that the thing we were trying to prevent did, indeed, happen, in a way that we had never imagined). “It’s like in the play X, there are two choices, and you can take either one of them, but there’s still only one future, because the future already knows which choice you’re going to make.” (Oddly, Petunia repeatedly expressed similar sentiments in her correspondence from that time, where she fretted over how she was inescapably predestined to kill the Antichrist, who of course turned out to be Mortimer, and why I was taking advice on inevitability from a man damned to hell from before the foundation of the world is anybody’s guess).
Yet not only is this bad philosophy, it’s bad theology. And not only is it bad theology, it’s bad Calvinist theology. I’m only beginning to learn that the world frame of fatalism on which I’ve been hanging my faith for the last ten years bears almost no resemblance to the actual Calvinism that actual Calvinists actually teach. However, in this essay I’m less interested in what actual Calvinists actually teach than in what I believed at a particular time, and the reasons why to this day I find it still so, well, inescapable, and why it’s affected my thinking and circumstances in the ways it has.
Unfortunately, though, just because something is bad theology doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The fact remains: That thing did happen. Every semester ended in the most dramatic manner, normally without my own connivance. Prophecies were continually fulfilled. If I was so wrong all along, why could I never escape it? This was one of the conundrums at the heart of my emotional collapse on Christmas morning of 2004. I had been hiding since Graduation in the belly of the whale; I wept, I fled in terror, the iron entered into my soul, etc., etc.; I had breezily concluded that my life was nothing more than a romantic quest that I could never solve, and that somehow in my unfathomable brilliance I had concocted all the prophecies (and their fulfillments!) to sustain my mind in mystery and awe. And yet… and yet, Galileo would say, it was true… which suggested at the very least that I would never be able to escape my prophetic calling—obviously, since here it was again. Inescapability—it’s everywhere!
Now it would be erroneous to argue that my current acquiescence with respect to the calling is another validation of the verity of my previous conception of fate. I was given the choice to flee, and flee I did for several years, but I returned with willingness. In the end, it is that single fact which I expect will break the hitherto-unassailable, because unexamined, chokehold of malevolent misunderstandings. That, and perhaps also my eventual (you might even say inevitable) realization that a wholehearted belief in a vengeful and arbitrary determinism is the ultimate, determining factor in deciding what we fight, and what accept; and, by extension, what occurs, and what does not.
But you know, I love complexity and complication. Couldn’t live without ‘em. One of the aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that I especially appreciate is the ease with which his characters find themselves in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. Hamlet hates his uncle. The ghost of his father appears and reveals that he was killed by Claudius. Hamlet now has a motive for revenge—but is utterly unable to act. Why? For about a dozen different reasons, and those critics who have tried to render a simplistic explanation for his motivations are mistaken. Hamlet is not, pace Laurence Olivier, “the story of a man who could not make up his mind,” it is far, far more than this. It is the story of a man who was prevented from killing his uncle because he feared for his sanity; because he suspected that the apparition he had seen might be the devil; because, as next in line for the throne, he couldn’t afford to present an appearance of instability and chaos to the people of his kingdom and their enemies across the way; because Claudius was cunning, yea, almost as cunning as the prince himself, and Hamlet knew that in this most direful of all acts, the execution of a head of state, and his own kin, canniness and caution were needed. Yet he couldn’t continue delaying this doom, not forever, because the nets were circling round him, there were several other people, some with armies, seeking to avenge the deaths of their own fathers either on the unfortified iron of the state, or on Hamlet’s neck; Claudius was growing more murderously conscious of his purpose with each day that passed, his school mates had proven unsympathetic and treacherous, and his mother—and his love—were in the most calamitous distress.
The more I consider the matter, the more it seems that literature was made to analyze this very thing. Looking at just one example from my own life, we can see the role that my misunderstanding of fate played in shaping the Quixotic adventures of my final year of high school and my subsequent collapse. There’s a section in the newly-revised edition of my second chapter where I describe my belief that certain calamities are so horrific, they can send shockwaves “backwards, into generations past.” Thus I became convinced that my One, True Love would be killed in a gruesome and violent manner early in her life, an idea which was reinforced by the very passion with which I held it—surely I would never have clung to such a horrible presentiment with such unwonted ardor if I wasn’t imbibing the fumes of some future event. Right? The fact that I believed this so steadfastly was the clearest indication of its truth. The inevitable conclusion, of course, was that the event had been predestined and (like Trinity’s death in The Matrix) was therefore inescapable.
It was this pall of inevitability lingering over the events of my life which leant it much of its tragic, dark-hued coloring. When I learned that a certain person would be tempted into doing something not at all in her best interests (or in anyone else’s), my immediate conclusion was that God had given me this prophecy so that I could have the dubious pleasure of watching it come to pass and being powerless to stop it. Mortimer and Petunia largely shared in this deterministic understanding. After I had finished explaining that I felt my relationship with this girl was predestined to end badly, because all my relationships with women were predestined to end badly, because all of them were fractal precursors of a fearful-to-think-upon future catastrophe (see how convoluted it all got?), Mortiner was deeply sympathetic. “Don’t you see,” he advised, “you have to remember the Greek tragedies—they saw the future, and they did everything they could to prevent it, and their preventing it is what caused it. You cannot outsmart the future. That’s like Satan trying to prevent God winning in the end. You cannot outsmart the future.” (This warning is all the more eerie and prescient given that the thing we were trying to prevent did, indeed, happen, in a way that we had never imagined). “It’s like in the play X, there are two choices, and you can take either one of them, but there’s still only one future, because the future already knows which choice you’re going to make.” (Oddly, Petunia repeatedly expressed similar sentiments in her correspondence from that time, where she fretted over how she was inescapably predestined to kill the Antichrist, who of course turned out to be Mortimer, and why I was taking advice on inevitability from a man damned to hell from before the foundation of the world is anybody’s guess).
Yet not only is this bad philosophy, it’s bad theology. And not only is it bad theology, it’s bad Calvinist theology. I’m only beginning to learn that the world frame of fatalism on which I’ve been hanging my faith for the last ten years bears almost no resemblance to the actual Calvinism that actual Calvinists actually teach. However, in this essay I’m less interested in what actual Calvinists actually teach than in what I believed at a particular time, and the reasons why to this day I find it still so, well, inescapable, and why it’s affected my thinking and circumstances in the ways it has.
Unfortunately, though, just because something is bad theology doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The fact remains: That thing did happen. Every semester ended in the most dramatic manner, normally without my own connivance. Prophecies were continually fulfilled. If I was so wrong all along, why could I never escape it? This was one of the conundrums at the heart of my emotional collapse on Christmas morning of 2004. I had been hiding since Graduation in the belly of the whale; I wept, I fled in terror, the iron entered into my soul, etc., etc.; I had breezily concluded that my life was nothing more than a romantic quest that I could never solve, and that somehow in my unfathomable brilliance I had concocted all the prophecies (and their fulfillments!) to sustain my mind in mystery and awe. And yet… and yet, Galileo would say, it was true… which suggested at the very least that I would never be able to escape my prophetic calling—obviously, since here it was again. Inescapability—it’s everywhere!
Now it would be erroneous to argue that my current acquiescence with respect to the calling is another validation of the verity of my previous conception of fate. I was given the choice to flee, and flee I did for several years, but I returned with willingness. In the end, it is that single fact which I expect will break the hitherto-unassailable, because unexamined, chokehold of malevolent misunderstandings. That, and perhaps also my eventual (you might even say inevitable) realization that a wholehearted belief in a vengeful and arbitrary determinism is the ultimate, determining factor in deciding what we fight, and what accept; and, by extension, what occurs, and what does not.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Answers that Need Questioning: Dostoevsky, the Millennium, and Freedom
My reading of the first hundred pages of The Brothers Karamazov has given me some new ideas about the manner in which the subject matter of the novel ought to be approached. You look at a man like Dostoevsky; his power wasn’t so much in the answers he presented as the questions he asked. This is deeply freeing, not least because I have so many questions. When I finished the fourth chapter of my novel a year ago next week, I had resolved that the importance of my novel was in giving understanding; in teaching. One of the great realizations of the summer was that I could not know everything, and no one would hurt me for it.
The strength of a novel, in fact, is in not knowing everything. Walter Russell Mead this morning wrote a fabulously scintillating review of a novel by Rajendra Pachauri, the now widely-reviled former head of the UN International Panel on Climate Control. The novel is entitled Return to Almora, and remains sadly unavailable here in America, but Mr. Mead has done an artful job of satiating our excitement in the meantime with a foretaste of the many pleasures to be found there.
The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable. Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:
“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder. “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls. But we must also bring peace on earth. There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion. Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything. We have to raise our voices against this evil.”
Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach. As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:
“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part. She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation. She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”
That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book. No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence. No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please. In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic. We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people. Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.
(http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/08/22/rajendra-pachauri-voodoo-scientist-and-lone-ranger-of-love/)
This is the very thing that you are not allowed to do in a religious novel, or, really, in any novel. I haven’t read any of the novels of Ayn Rand, for example, but from what I understand, her greatest failing as a novelist is believing so strongly in the truth of her ideals that her characters become one-dimensional vessels, heroically strutting about, square-jawed and muscular, conversing with one another at length about the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of all doubt and regret.
If my translation of the Psalms has taught me nothing else, it’s demonstrated amply that the Bible was never the question-quenching, sorrow-stifling book I once believed it was. There are times when it’s not so much a sermon as a two-way disagreement. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest.” There’s a delightful passage in Psalm 39 where David (in the Hebrew) begs the Lord to turn away His face, “that I may smile again, and regain strength, before I go hence, and be no more.” He seems to think he would be better off if God forgot about him altogether. Job regularly exhorts his sympathetic friends for thinking they can comprehend the ways of God. At the end of the book, the Lord reiterates this point.
The world is too complex for simple answers. This is as prominent a theme in the Bible as it is in Dostoevsky. “The words of the wise are as goads; and as nails driven by the masters of assembly, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:10). Goads are long, nail-like devices which shepherds use to herd sheep towards safer pastures, when the sheep are proving (if you’ll pardon the expression) intractable. Solomon is suggesting that he wrote the present book as a goad to inspire his readers towards deeper thought. He doesn’t necessarily believe, for example, that the spirit is consumed with the destruction of the body (Ecc. 3:19), or that it is better to have been miscarried than to live (the bulk of Chapter 6). He’s engaging in a (remarkably effective) rhetorical strategy to “goad” his audience into thinking critically about the nature and purpose of their existence under the sun. It’s the same strategy used by Jesus in the Gospels when He answered the Pharisees’ questions with questions. (Side note: The advice columnist Ann Landers was once asked by a reader, “Why is it that Jews always answer questions with questions?” Ms. Lander’s response was, “How do you expect them to answer?”)
This, I suppose, is the difference between novelists and theologians. Theologians give answers; novelists ask questions. Both, however, have their place. In the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus returns to fifteenth-century Spain, performs a few miracles, and is immediately taken in to be questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. The old arch-inquisitor fixes him with “jealous leer malign” and demands that He speak; but Christ says nothing. There follows a long speech, in which the Inquisitor reveals that the Catholic Church has willingly usurped the role of Christ on earth by accepting the three temptations which Christ resisted in the wilderness. The devil tempted Christ with miracle (the turning of stones into bread), mystery (the leaping from the temple), and authority (the kingdoms of the world). Christ refused all. The Inquisitor explains that this was utter folly; folly which the Catholic Church has now undone, with the understanding that human beings cannot bear to be free. “For in those three questions,” says he, “the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.”
Of the temptation to miracle the Inquisitor notes:
"Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven… I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born."
There is something almost Kierkegaardian in the manner with which Dostoevsky refuses to accept the traditional meanings of standard texts. In its own way, it anticipates Borges. Everything is challenged. Dostoevksy was a believer, not a blasphemer; as with Kierkegaard, he seems to have believed that the inability to question the accepted interpretations of the sacred was the greatest blasphemy of his age. Here he suggests that the reason God shrouds Himself in mystery and leaves us guessing at His mere existence is because, if He revealed Himself with unassailable clarity and evidence indisputable, as Richard Dawkins has insisted that He do, we would immediately worship Him in the wrong way. In worshipping God the Supreme, the Incontrovertible, the Proven, we would have hewn for ourselves an idol; and we would fall to worshipping that idol, rather than the true and living God. It’s the old, old story of the calf in the desert; only the Inquisitor (rightly or wrongly) suggests that it will continue even after His return.
Think of it this way. Even if your wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, and you have every guarantee that she’ll remain that way to the end, you still don’t want to love her for that reason only. Otherwise, you’re not really in love with her at all. Christ came to earth in meekness, not in power, because He knew men worship authority and indomitable strength; thus, when He resisted their attempts to make Him king, they did away with Him. And He will not return to the earth until the people of the earth are desperate for a king who exercises His power not through tyranny, but love. He will “execute kings on the day of His wrath,” that’s true! But a few verses earlier in the same psalm, David prophesies, “Your people will offer themselves to You freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3). He is meek and He will reign in meekness with a rod of iron. If that was the kind of king men truly wanted, Christ would have returned a thousand years ago. Men claim that they want peace and freedom, but what do they want, really? They want to be ruled over; they want to be told what to do; they want to be controlled. The natural inclination of man is to seek someone to control him. That’s why in America we have a “soft tyranny” of entertainment and distraction. Unconsciously, we all must truly sense that our superiors are keeping us in line by offering this endless train of toys and gifts; but, as Booth said, what do you do when the people want to be controlled? The promise of the Millennium is something altogether different, and, to the natural mind, more frightening: real freedom. Christ offers men real freedom in the age to come. But they don’t know what to do with it; don’t even want it, really; which is why in every age they sell themselves to sin.
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Why? Because he wills it so.
The strength of a novel, in fact, is in not knowing everything. Walter Russell Mead this morning wrote a fabulously scintillating review of a novel by Rajendra Pachauri, the now widely-reviled former head of the UN International Panel on Climate Control. The novel is entitled Return to Almora, and remains sadly unavailable here in America, but Mr. Mead has done an artful job of satiating our excitement in the meantime with a foretaste of the many pleasures to be found there.
The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable. Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:
“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder. “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls. But we must also bring peace on earth. There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion. Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything. We have to raise our voices against this evil.”
Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach. As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:
“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part. She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation. She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”
That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book. No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence. No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please. In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic. We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people. Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.
(http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/08/22/rajendra-pachauri-voodoo-scientist-and-lone-ranger-of-love/)
This is the very thing that you are not allowed to do in a religious novel, or, really, in any novel. I haven’t read any of the novels of Ayn Rand, for example, but from what I understand, her greatest failing as a novelist is believing so strongly in the truth of her ideals that her characters become one-dimensional vessels, heroically strutting about, square-jawed and muscular, conversing with one another at length about the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of all doubt and regret.
If my translation of the Psalms has taught me nothing else, it’s demonstrated amply that the Bible was never the question-quenching, sorrow-stifling book I once believed it was. There are times when it’s not so much a sermon as a two-way disagreement. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest.” There’s a delightful passage in Psalm 39 where David (in the Hebrew) begs the Lord to turn away His face, “that I may smile again, and regain strength, before I go hence, and be no more.” He seems to think he would be better off if God forgot about him altogether. Job regularly exhorts his sympathetic friends for thinking they can comprehend the ways of God. At the end of the book, the Lord reiterates this point.
The world is too complex for simple answers. This is as prominent a theme in the Bible as it is in Dostoevsky. “The words of the wise are as goads; and as nails driven by the masters of assembly, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:10). Goads are long, nail-like devices which shepherds use to herd sheep towards safer pastures, when the sheep are proving (if you’ll pardon the expression) intractable. Solomon is suggesting that he wrote the present book as a goad to inspire his readers towards deeper thought. He doesn’t necessarily believe, for example, that the spirit is consumed with the destruction of the body (Ecc. 3:19), or that it is better to have been miscarried than to live (the bulk of Chapter 6). He’s engaging in a (remarkably effective) rhetorical strategy to “goad” his audience into thinking critically about the nature and purpose of their existence under the sun. It’s the same strategy used by Jesus in the Gospels when He answered the Pharisees’ questions with questions. (Side note: The advice columnist Ann Landers was once asked by a reader, “Why is it that Jews always answer questions with questions?” Ms. Lander’s response was, “How do you expect them to answer?”)
This, I suppose, is the difference between novelists and theologians. Theologians give answers; novelists ask questions. Both, however, have their place. In the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus returns to fifteenth-century Spain, performs a few miracles, and is immediately taken in to be questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. The old arch-inquisitor fixes him with “jealous leer malign” and demands that He speak; but Christ says nothing. There follows a long speech, in which the Inquisitor reveals that the Catholic Church has willingly usurped the role of Christ on earth by accepting the three temptations which Christ resisted in the wilderness. The devil tempted Christ with miracle (the turning of stones into bread), mystery (the leaping from the temple), and authority (the kingdoms of the world). Christ refused all. The Inquisitor explains that this was utter folly; folly which the Catholic Church has now undone, with the understanding that human beings cannot bear to be free. “For in those three questions,” says he, “the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.”
Of the temptation to miracle the Inquisitor notes:
"Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven… I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born."
There is something almost Kierkegaardian in the manner with which Dostoevsky refuses to accept the traditional meanings of standard texts. In its own way, it anticipates Borges. Everything is challenged. Dostoevksy was a believer, not a blasphemer; as with Kierkegaard, he seems to have believed that the inability to question the accepted interpretations of the sacred was the greatest blasphemy of his age. Here he suggests that the reason God shrouds Himself in mystery and leaves us guessing at His mere existence is because, if He revealed Himself with unassailable clarity and evidence indisputable, as Richard Dawkins has insisted that He do, we would immediately worship Him in the wrong way. In worshipping God the Supreme, the Incontrovertible, the Proven, we would have hewn for ourselves an idol; and we would fall to worshipping that idol, rather than the true and living God. It’s the old, old story of the calf in the desert; only the Inquisitor (rightly or wrongly) suggests that it will continue even after His return.
Think of it this way. Even if your wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, and you have every guarantee that she’ll remain that way to the end, you still don’t want to love her for that reason only. Otherwise, you’re not really in love with her at all. Christ came to earth in meekness, not in power, because He knew men worship authority and indomitable strength; thus, when He resisted their attempts to make Him king, they did away with Him. And He will not return to the earth until the people of the earth are desperate for a king who exercises His power not through tyranny, but love. He will “execute kings on the day of His wrath,” that’s true! But a few verses earlier in the same psalm, David prophesies, “Your people will offer themselves to You freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3). He is meek and He will reign in meekness with a rod of iron. If that was the kind of king men truly wanted, Christ would have returned a thousand years ago. Men claim that they want peace and freedom, but what do they want, really? They want to be ruled over; they want to be told what to do; they want to be controlled. The natural inclination of man is to seek someone to control him. That’s why in America we have a “soft tyranny” of entertainment and distraction. Unconsciously, we all must truly sense that our superiors are keeping us in line by offering this endless train of toys and gifts; but, as Booth said, what do you do when the people want to be controlled? The promise of the Millennium is something altogether different, and, to the natural mind, more frightening: real freedom. Christ offers men real freedom in the age to come. But they don’t know what to do with it; don’t even want it, really; which is why in every age they sell themselves to sin.
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Why? Because he wills it so.
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