The Courage to Be Grateful

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
— Czeslaw Milosz

Easter weekend and Earth Day, a fortunate conjunction—maybe in the turning world it happens frequently, maybe I am just now sensitive to it, but every year at this time I think about the Christ dropping down to hell on Friday afternoon and climbing back up—so far to go!—on a Sunday morning.

There are those texts—what are we to make of them?—in which he harrows Hell, sternly admonishes the inhabitants and then rises, stooping as he steps out into the garden that morning. What did he feel? Relief? Wonder? Or did he take it as any other day, perhaps brushing away the clutching grasp of an awful nightmare, a slight furrow to his brow as he sets about his business? The Gospels are laconic in their recitation, as if any concession to wonder, magic, the supernatural, was to create a distortion field around the Savior. And how long was it before someone called him that to his face?

I've always been intrigued by the story of the two on their way home to Emmaus that weekend. Somewhere, T. S. Eliot writes of a third, flickering at their peripheral vision: "Who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you/Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded. . . ." They ask him to stay, to eat with them, he demurs but then gives in. When he spreads his hands to bless the food they see the marks in his palms and thus he vanishes from their sight. So much to ask him and ask of him, perhaps he was like a man emerging from a cave, blinking and tearing up from the searing gaze of the sun. Perhaps every sense was heightened and rubbed raw; above all, he needed solitude, but had precious little time. There were demands, longings, fear overcome by joy, the joy of those deeply in debt whose necks had been in the noose not twenty-four hours ago and now felt the gasp of clean air bursting through their lungs as the Christ appears before them in the secret room, and no one had moved fast enough to open the locked, bolted, and barred door. And the Christ kicks free the chair jammed up against the doorknob, spins it around, and sits down with a wink. "Let's go fishing," he says.

Against all odds there is good news. The news is so good it cannot be believed, so improbable that they look to one other hesitantly to see who will be the first to look him in the face. "Who is the third who walks always beside you?"

What if the Christ were to emerge this season, walking out from behind some dark Satanic mill or more likely, out of Wall Street in the early morning. Would he seek a green place before he trod the highways and byways? "Do not touch me," he murmured to Mary, "for I have not yet ascended to the Father." Was it an embrace he needed? a strong handshake between men and then off to the blue world again?

Earth Day, when we find the courage to be grateful for all we have been given, all that has been entrusted to us, all that we have so despitefully abused and yet continues to sustain us. The phrase is Thomas Merton's from a journal entry in the sixties. He is rejoicing in the fruition of a ten-year dream, a little hermitage built up on a hill behind the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He can barely contain himself as he swings through the moonlight and the dewy grass to read and pray alone before the sun comes up. To not feel guilty, he thinks, to not feel guilty for all he has been given and enjoys in this moment. To find the courage to be grateful.

A Method for Deep Reading

Many students find it difficult to study reading assignments in depth. Part of it is simply not knowing how to get the essentials from a text. I've been experimenting with a simple method I call GSSW: Gather, Sort, Shrink, and Wrap.

In the Gather phase we read through looking for ideas that seem to stand out or lead to other ideas. In the Sort phase we cluster the ideas into chunks, building a grouping that segues into the next stage, the Shrink phase. In this one we reduce the pile of important ideas to several essentials that can be expressed, in our own words, in a sentence for each. Then in the Wrap phase we summarize and prepare to "ship" the essentials out, perhaps in a form such as a flow chart, a concept map, an if-then diagram, or a simple, clear, and visual Keynote or PowerPoint presentation.

I've tried this out in an introductory ethics course in which several essays of moderate complexity are assigned each week. The students paired up for the first two phases of Gather and Sort, and then as a class we took the important ideas and "shrunk" them to the essentials. If we'd had time, each pair could have teamed up with another pair to produce a concept map or a flow chart that would illustrate the development of the argument in the essay.

After this initial tryout the students were cautiously optimistic that the technique could work, even on an individual basis. What had seemed a formidable wall of text became permeable through this technique. To change the metaphor slightly, we saw through the walls to the foundation, beams, and struts that framed the house.

The goal of using this method is that students write an in-class essay, based on the readings, that is exemplary of organized, clear, accurate, and critical thinking.

In Wildness the World Preserved

"A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

We can divide the world and everything in it into two great piles: that which was created or evolved—it doesn't really matter which at this point—and that which was engineered. The two are threaded together in innumerable ways and cannot be extricated except by the imagination. Yet when we look at the world we see the 'natural' and the human constructs. Concrete, oil, broken glass glinting in the sun, heat radiating off the pavement, a guard rail twisted, two parallel prints where tires bit deeply and then abruptly lifted off—elements we glimpse as we churn by at 60 mph. All this happening on the skin of the earth as it suffers our constant abrasions.

I sometimes try to imagine what these forests and low hills of Maryland must have looked like 200, 500, 1,000 years ago. We are not far from one of the oldest ranges of mountains in North America, the Appalachians, worn down through the millenia to a gentle slope, lying patient as a cat in the sun, and dropping roughly northeast to northwest through the Mid-Atlantic states. Even traversing the landscape atop six inches of tarmac, aggregate, sand, and bedrock, one can sense the vast body of the earth, breathing quietly, flexing now and then, the deep silence of its presence there beneath the furious assault of midday traffic.

By some counts we are losing a species every 20 minutes of every day of every year, year in and year out. But how would we know, encased within our tin boxes on wheels, speaker systems thumping with the imprecations of the latest urban prophet of conspicuous consumption? These particles of information arrive quietly through the research of scientists who pick their way through the Amazon, scour the Outback, jounce over dusty trails in the Southwest, and hover over the Great Barrier Reef. Occasionally, the tip of a message surfaces in the media tide pools to the effect that scientists speculate we have, at best, a decade or slightly more, to turn the effects of global warming around. And then the local anchor will chirp brightly, "So, Candy, what kind of weather have you got for us today?" Candy, just back from the ritual hazing of weatherpersons during hurricane season, assures us that tomorrow we'll be done with all this awful rain and that she's doing her best to gift us with sunshine. But these days scientists must pitch their findings in six words or less, the bulk of their work submerged under the surface of our collective skittishness.

I used to think that if people could just put their stuff down, stop their twitching and gyrating, and just stand silently in the midst of a forest for a few minutes, they'd be blessed into awe and wonder. But for many Nature is an acquired taste and one that they have little patience to savor. We get our minimum daily adult requirement of ecology from advertising these days, corporations having learned the value of 'going green' to increase the net return on investment.

As a teenager, growing up in the foothills above the Napa Valley, I roamed the woods with my friends on the weekends. We came across a simple tragedy one winter Saturday, as we jumped from rock to rock across a foaming creek. A doe had broken a leg as she tried to cross and had apparently drowned in a pool at the base of a cliff. We approached cautiously, thinking she might be alive and not wanting to alarm her. But the body was cold, the eyes blank. We hauled her beyond the rocks to an open space under the dripping trees, and it was then that we discovered she was swollen with pregnancy. We could see the outlines of the fawn in her belly. We decided to open her up. With a hunting knife we carefully slit her from sternum to hindquarters, and there it was: a tiny fawn, perfectly preserved, hooves white and soft like almonds, its long lashes plastered wetly, its fur dappled with patches of white. We gazed at it in silence, feeling perhaps, amidst the thunder of the creek waters and the fog between the trees, that mysteries were there for the seeing.

There was little sentimentality about it; we buried the doe in a shallow grave and covered the spot with branches. We carried the fawn through the woods, clambered up the cliffs above the creek, and eventually found our way to our high school biology teacher's house. He came out at our knock and listened patiently as we excitedly told him the story. Then together we found a box, placed the stiff little body in it, and dug a grave in his backyard. The man never blinked. I think he felt that what we'd learned that afternoon was deeper than anything he could have said in the classroom.

When I look back on it now two things stand out on reflection. One is the utter physicality of the moment: the weight and denseness of the doe's body, the graceful arch of the fawn's neck, those tiny hooves not yet hardened and black. There was the story of a life on our sweet, old Earth, a moment's wavering on a slippery rock, a crack of pain and a brief struggle alone in the forest. The fragility of our existence, any existence, magnified through the lens of adolescent wonder. And the other thing, as fresh now as it was then, is the steady realization that this other world, the one that pulses just out of  sight, is our true home.

The Synchronicity of Reading

"I decided that what I wanted most of all was. . . . to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present."  

Michael Dirda,  Book by Book

I’ve discovered, over the course of time, that I read in what might seem a haphazard manner. But there is an inner filament that illumines the way I read, a hidden gyroscope I’ve learned to trust. I pick up a book on any subject that piques my curiosity, read the front, read the back, read the introduction and the first page, and begin to settle into the rhythm of the sentences. Before two or three days have passed I know I’ll come across a parallel work or a book that complements what I’m reading. It happens so often that I’m not surprised anymore, although I’m always grateful.

Another part of how I read is that I acquire books to grow into. For example, years ago I bought A.N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral, a spirited yet wistful recounting of the loss of faith among Victorian poets, critics, novelists, and philosophers. I bought it on the strength of Wilson’s biographies of Jesus and C. S. Lewis, and on his reputation as a wry observer of humanity’s spiritual condition. I found I wasn’t ready for it at the time, but I set it aside in the assurance that one day I would be. During one Christmas holiday I read it straight through, discovering therein an inside dialogue with a string of Victorian writers I’d read only in fits and starts. Then I came across a new collection of George Orwell’s essays entitled All Art is Propaganda with the first one being “Charles Dickens.”  Wanting to know more I signed up for a “Victorian to Twentieth Century Literature” class at the university where I worked and was soon immersed in Dickens’ Hard Times, the poetry of Amy Levy and Christina Rossetti, the commentary of Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle, and the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Virginia Woolf.

I’ve had Goethe’s Faust in David Luke’s vivid and earthy translation on my shelves for almost 10 years. Every now and then I’d troll its waters but without dropping anchor. Then one evening I picked up Part One and dove deep. Coming up a day later, ready for Part Two, I was not surprised to find in the mail the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly on the topic of Arts and Letters. Inside was a timeline of the development of the Faust epic, from an account of the life of Theophilus of Adana (c. 538), an Orthodox cleric who sold his soul to the devil, through Christopher Marlowe’s play (1604), Lessing’s scenes from an unpublished play on Faust (1759), Goethe’s masterpiece (1808, 1832), Berlioz’ opera (1846), Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name (1947), and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s film, Dr. Faustus (1967).

Those of a crabbed and literal mind might say that I consciously went searching for links. I’ve thought of it rather as serendipity, a lucky coincidence. But lately I’ve come to regard it as synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence of elements resulting in a new consciousness.

Reading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in years grafted me into previous readings on the craft of writing, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and thence to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a kind of sociocultural conversation on the ancient ritual of gift-giving and how the creativity of artists and writers continues the forward motion of gifting against the commercialization of art.

Where I end up after one of these treks is a long way from where I begin but it’s a journey with a narrative thread that can be understood if not explained. To the pleasure of reading widely is added the satisfaction of synthesis, the weaving together of contrasting skeins of thought into a harmonious pattern.

Do we conform everything we see into a matrix of convergences? I wonder about this as I scan the horizon of my literary landscape. Do we suffer the fate of the old saying, "If you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" I prefer to think that a loose thread from a book we're immersed in weaves itself into the fabric of another book. Part of the pleasure is the sudden awareness that this connects to that and that leads up to this. Perhaps attention becomes heightened, consciousness not narrowed but thrown wide open, a path through a dark wood suddenly giving way to a golden and towering sky.

“We turn to books in the hope of better understanding our selves and better engaging with the meaning of our experiences,” says Michael Dirda. “They are instruments of self-exploration.”

I Must Kill You Now, My Brother. . .

"We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against." Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The news that thousands of enraged Afghans surged out of their mosques on Friday, April 1, in Mazir-e-Sharif, Northern Afghanistan, and stormed the UN compound, killing 8 to 12 officials and wounding many others, came as a blow to the face. Equally shocking was the immediate cause of the rampage: the mock trial and burning of the Qu'ran by Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, on March 20. There's no question that he and his flock at the Dove World Outreach Center intended the act as a deliberate provocation. The media were alerted, the event was televised. While it did not receive the media coverage that Jones intended, the news certainly got to the imams in that part of Afghanistan. Never let it be said that a bad deed goes unnoticed around the world. The simmering anger against foreigners of all kinds in the country was kicked up to the boiling point by the act itself and the exploitation of it by the holy men of Mazir-e-Sharif. Jones and the imams: two sides of the same tarnished coin.

In moments like these it's hard not to fall into sweeping generalizations and stereotypes. We look at these heinous acts and want to strike back in kind. We search for reasons that will make sense of it all: These are rational people; have they all gone mad?

I try to imagine someone running at the edge of the crowd, curious but not yet furious, attracted like Elias Canetti notes in Crowds and Power, to the black spot where the crowd is thickest. Something is going to happen, we don't know what yet, but it's worth sticking around to find out. And then let's say the crowd arrives at the gates of the UN compound. In moments they confront, disarm, and shoot the Nepalese security with their own weapons, swarm through the gates, over the walls and into the building itself. Let us shadow our outrider at the edge of the crowd; he has penetrated the walls and has been swept with the others into the building itself. Does he stop for just a moment to ask himself where this is leading? Does he feel any sympathy for the fallen guards? Is he so blinded by anger that his vision narrows to the bodies swirling around him and the din in his head of shots, screams, cries, chants, blocks his own thoughts? Does he pull back into a corridor and let the mob surge past him, realizing that he cannot force his way back against the stream? Does he then abandon himself to the bloody rush with a mixture of fear, guilt, and a kind of strange relief? And afterward, down the hot, dusty streets to home, trying to wipe the blood from his clothes, does he wonder what his wife and children will ask? how he will reconstruct the events? what role he will play in this drama? how much heroism he will (modestly) admit to in overcoming the Great Satan?

Does Pastor Terry Jones feel the hand of God soothing him as he prays? As he watches himself on TV, reads about himself online, and takes in the questions flung at him by reporters, does he feel a dissociation from the events? Does he watch from a distance as this person he knows, Terry Jones, straightens his shoulders, furrows his brow, and ponderously justifies his actions before the world? Or is it all so far away, so much like an event unwinding before him that he must drop his eyes to snap himself back to the present?

Canetti says we lose our fear of being touched when we join a crowd. We and the crowd are one, one body surging this way and that, a body without a head, witless, slavering, beast-like, mindless. . .

But that's not like our Pastor Terry Jones. His is a mission, a battle against evil, a redressing of all the wrongs suffered by honest, God-fearing Americans since 9/11. It's lonely at the top with this kind of knowledge. Pausing to peer in the mirror as he shaves he studies the lines around his eyes and feels the burden of righteousness on his shoulders. As he straightens his tie, his hand upon the doorknob, he takes a breath, knowing the press will be camped on his lawn. The message must go out he thinks. Lord, give me the strength I need to speak the truth. Help me to take the sufferings that come my way as You did, going to the cross to die for me, me! Your humble servant. . . And he opens the door to his day of infamy.

Now the blaming begins. Now come the expressions of outrage, the impotent words of heads of state, throttling their visceral rage and modulating it into phrases of stern neutrality. Now come the bands of pundits, swiveling in their chairs on the Fox news sets, calculating the odds of the next poll chronicling the decline of the President's opinion ratings. Expect an avalanche of tweeting from potential candidates for 2012. Someone somewhere watches in quiet satisfaction as stocks rise. There is money to be made in any tragedy.

And our Afghani outrider, the one who let himself be swept along in the mob? We may see him now, alone in his home, pausing before he kneels for prayers, his hand up to his forehead for a moment, as if he began a motion he doesn't know how to complete.

Let Me Have Your Attention

"My mind to me a kingdom is,/Such present joys therein I find/That it excels all other bliss/That earth affords or grows by kind. . . ." Sir Edward Dyer (1550? - 1607).

In April, 1931, George Orwell wrote a short piece entitled "The Spike" for a magazine called Adelphi. In it he describes time he spent as a tramp. He was a tramp, a homeless person, partly of necessity and partly because he wished to understand the particular forms of suffering that tramps go through. One virulent irritation was boredom. Orwell came to think that boredom was the worst of a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and worse than the feeling of social disgrace. "It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel," he said. "Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds."

Today, Orwell would be accused of elitism and would be made to tweet an apology to all his followers. But Orwell was nothing if not honest, and having lived the life on the street could speak with authority. One need only pass through any metropolitan area to see the homeless on benches, median strips, near metro stations, or on corners, many of them slumped against a wall, sleeping huddled against the cold or in a quiet corner of a coffee shop. Their days unwind with agonizing slowness, each minute trudging after the next. In this essay, Orwell recounts how he was saved from the ten hours of daylight boredom in the spike (homeless shelter) by the blessed reprieve of working in the kitchen. Even so, one suspects that with his powers of observation and his interests in literature, politics, and history, Orwell would not likely suffocate in boredom.

There are two elements at work here: memory and attention. Memory, because we are hardly human without it, and attention because it is necessary to learning. William James devotes a chapter of his seminal work, Psychology, to attention, describing it of two kinds. There is the effortless, involuntary and passive kind, and there is the active and voluntary kind. Involuntary attention occurs when we follow a train of thought that is interesting as a means to an end or when the mere association with the thought burnishes us with a sense of satisfaction.

Active, voluntary attention is that which we make a determined effort to accomplish by bending our minds to it. James remarks that it is a feeling which everyone knows, but which is indescribable. We sense it when we try to discriminate between sensory experiences, or attend to one voice near us against a babble of other voices. It is an effort whose accomplishment slips through our fingers like water. James says, "There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time (his emphasis)." James describes a process that sounds like the building, layer by layer, of a pearl around a grain of sand. The mind, finding something interesting, comes back to it, turns it over and over until the novelty wears off, then drifts away, only to return for the feeling of both familiarity and the stimulation of finding something new. And here is the sentence that lit up for me like a Jumbotron: "No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change."

So to focus the attention of students or audiences we must come back to an idea from as many angles as possible, first through a discussion, then perhaps a demonstration, now a clip from a film, and then the solving of a problem together with a partner. Those are techniques intended to play to our weaknesses, but what of the genius who can apparently sit alone for hours, deaf to the world and completely absorbed with the ideas streaming through her head? James says that its her genius that makes her attentive, not her attentiveness that makes her a genius. The difference between her and the rest of us is that she has a method of hooking one idea to another to make a train of thought, while we, poor, inchoate butterflies that we are, simply flit about from one delightful flower to the next. The good news is, however, that "whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has."

The practical application of this is simple: find something familiar that the student knows and attach the new thing to it, and encourage the student to "re-echo" the words he is hearing. And this brings us back to Orwell and his terminally bored compatriots. An educated mind has something to play with, images, associations, ideas not yet fully formed, questions, hopes, memories. Waiting in a doctor's office, loathe to thumb through a celebrity rag, we may yet travel through infinite and intimate spaces as we attend to our new and present sensations, relate them to the old and familiar, and say 'What if?. . .'

Blake offered us "infinity in a grain of sand." It's there, if we but pay attention.

The Dali State

"In the transition stages of falling asleep and waking up again the contours of everyday reality are, at the least, less firm than in the state of fully awake consciousness. The reality of everyday life, therefore, is continuously surrounded by a penumbra of vastly different realities."  Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 42.

Somewhere I once read that Salvador Dali would take a nap every afternoon in the heat of the day, lying upon a couch with a spoon clutched in his fingers. As he slipped into sleep and his fingers relaxed, the spoon would clatter to the tiled floor and Dali would spring up, his head full of the bizarre images that we see in his paintings—headless torsos, eyes on legs, soft clocks dripping over the edges of tables, crutches supporting distended body parts. It was from this transition state that Dali derived so much of his imaginative power; he had learned how to lure it up from the depths and coax it out into the harsh light of day. Such a wonder should not go unremarked. I have experienced this time and time again, usually while waiting at interminable traffic lights in my commute to the university where I teach.  Lest the reader draw the conclusion that I am an accident waiting to happen, let me say that so far my powers of concentration and alertness haven't let me down. I may also have guardian angels who draw down overtime and hazardous duty pay.

My Dali state does not take the form of vivid images but of words that for the brief duration of seconds is like overhearing the one-sided conversation of an alien anthropologist reporting back to base camp. I marvel at the collision of ideas, metaphors that lunge out of dark crevasses, similes like clanging cymbals, and the occasional meteorite of a thought arriving at the speed of light from a distant galaxy. I wish I could conjure up this stuff when I'm staring at a blank computer screen.

Being a product of the mid-twentieth century, I naturally view all this through psychologically-tinted glasses. It's all there in the unconscious, I reason, so at some point I must have snatched up these bright baubles and tossed them into a bin for later use. But instead of a sober and reflective scrutiny of them through the lens of reason I see them flung in the air, catching the light as a mad juggler tosses them from hand to hand. In the Dali state they have a coherence that vaporizes when the light turns green and the SUVs around me lumber into motion. Just as our dreams impress us with their genius in the dark hours but seem overwrought in the first light of day, so the messages one gets in the Dali state find no place in polite conversation.

Yet, in pre-modern times such messages were often thought to be of divine origin, having arrived in the nick of time to avert catastrophe or to predict one. Millenia before Freud lit his torches in the labyrinthine tunnels of the mind the boundaries between waking reality and the visions that unfolded behind the eyes of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah and many more throughout the centuries, were seen as permeable. Not only that, the scripts of these ultimate reality shows were written down, turning the mysterious and numinous into prose for us to idly ponder in these witless and distracted times. Would we know a vision if we saw one? I'm under no illusion that these traffic-light dreamlets are anything more than the venting of steam from an overactive curiosity reactor, but that's partly the point here. The "plausibility structure" of ancient religions made room for such phenomena; there is no space in our metaphysical blueprints for anything like that.

I've longed to sense the numinous, "to dream dreams and see visions," as Isaiah promised the Hebrews 2700 years ago—though I have no wish for the prophetic life. Even a cursory tour through the Old Testament is enough to convince one that prophecy is a career devoutly to be avoided if God will allow. But I seem to have little capacity for transmission, though I do believe the receptors are there. Perhaps the signal needs to be amplified or there is presently too much noise in the channel. Wordsworth lamented:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 

He was willing to look for Triton bursting up from the ocean's depths just to be in touch again with the numinous, the mysterium tremendum. We could wish as much.