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.

Grace Abounding

All week I've been transfixed by pictures of the destruction in Japan. One photo in particular is seared into my image bank. It shows a stretch of waterfront in the afternoon sun. The photo is naturally divided into thirds with the top third revealing a long curling wave towering behind a line of wildly whipping trees, and beyond that a tempestuous sea. The middle third shows buildings, homes, power lines, low shrubs, a trailer, a pack of cars huddled together in one corner of a parking lot. The bottom third of the picture is bisected by a silvery line, possibly a train track, with just the tops of some service buildings in the immediate foreground. As the eye adjusts to the scale and motion within the photograph we see, incongruously, a building upended and we realize, with growing horror, that the wave is already thundering ashore as fast as a fighter jet, tearing up everything in its path. In this moment an image frozen in the warm light of the afternoon becomes a lens through which we see the coming agony. In two, three, five seconds, nothing there will ever be the same again. What once was is no more.

In the 1790 edition of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book that is overshadowed by his far better known The Wealth of Nations, Smith notes that however selfish people may appear to be they nevertheless can feel sorrow for the sorrow of others. "The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it," he says. Smith lays out a psychology of the emotions, illuminating the ways in which we put ourselves in someone else's place to feel with them what they are experiencing.

"To seem not to be affected with the joy of our companions is but want of politeness; but not to wear a serious countenance when they tell us their afflictions, is real and gross inhumanity," he says.

I read these words this week as a kind of anodyne against the sentiments of some that the earthquake, tsunami, fires, and nuclear meltdown were God's judgment on the atheistic Japanese nation. As one person put it on a Facebook exchange, "maybe God was trying to send a message to the Japanese people." It reminded me that certain religious leaders attributed 9/11 to divine judgment on New York City for its gay and lesbian population. With a god like that who needs the devil?

This is the age of the public execution rendered with brutal efficiency on those who flout the norms. Thus it was that two public figures fell from grace this week for making jokes about the Japanese tragedy. Governor Haley Barbour's spokesperson made a tasteless comment and was fired by the end of the day. Barbour, having bent the needle on the Offense-O-Meter himself in past months, and being a possible candidate for the presidency in 2012, was quick to excise the cancer of his fool's intemperate remark, while over at Aflac the voice of the duck was heard throughout the land in a remark that was remarkable for its callousness. Neither politicians nor corporations want to be tarred with such a PR disaster; Aflac is a major provider of insurance in Japan.

"The cruelest insult," continues Smith, "which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their calamities." If Smith were here today how would he regard these insultors? Ever polite, ever circumspect, and ever discerning of human foibles, Smith would hold up these gilded apples to the light and discover their rotten cores.

We could imagine a range of possible explanations for their actions. Perhaps they suffered a kind of synaptic overload and couldn't handle the barrage of horrific images. In defense, they turned to an ancient weapon against fear and anxiety: laughter. Sorry about that, but better you than me. But laughter of that sort has a very narrow bandwidth and is usually reserved for those who are up to their knees in it and have earned the right to make light of their burdens.

Perhaps they are the sort that simply cannot pass up an opportunity to grab the mic, tap it loudly and bellow, "Is this on? Can you hear me?" We can and we wish not to, thinking of the proverb that even the dumbest person can be thought wise if he keeps his mouth shut.

Or—and this may not be such a stretch—they are simply taking a leaf from Charlie Sheen's playbook and attempting such outrage that they transcend normal limits of crudeness to turn their brutishness into performance art. In the same issue of Newsweek that features a cover story on Japan's earthquake there is an admiring piece on Charlie Sheen's public implosion. We are living, says the author, Bret Easton Ellis, in a Post-Empire reality in which civility has run its course. The radicals of yesterday (read 60s) are today's moneyed moguls. They have about them the stale air of set pieces, exhibits from a bygone era, a time of nostalgia and ferment long dead. By contrast, Charlie Sheen represents the death of civility, manners, courtesy. He is the reality of the celebrity who mocks his own image, makes light of the whole entertainment culture, and throws a bomb into the midst of America's dark satanic media mills. We can't make up our minds: is he completely nuts or is this all a subterfuge to remake his sodden career by giving the finger to everybody who would tut-tut at him?

The consensus Ellis flicks up before us is that for this era, all of two weeks and counting, Charlie Sheen is winning and this is the new reality. So maybe these two, giddy with their power to tweet to thousands, stepped—no, jumped—over the line of propriety, thinking that in the shine of Sheen's glare their little infractions might get some laughs.

"We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner," says Smith.

Lest we become self-righteous, Smith cautions us:
"Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentments by my resentments, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them."

With that in mind, if you, like me, were both moved by the plight of the Japanese and offended by those who would make light of this tragedy for their own shallow ends, then take some small comfort in your humanity. With all that would reduce today that noble concept to its lowest common denominator, we realize, with Smith, that "The amiable virtue of humanity requires, surely, a sensibility, much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind. . . . Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary."

We, all of us, have a long ways to go. There is nothing for it but grace abounding.

Why I Write (Apologies to Orwell)

There can be no excuse to start yet another blog except the compulsion to explain. It's not like I haven't done this before. I've started and crashed three other blogs, some of them with real promise. But like my attempts as a child to keep a diary they just kind of. . . wimped away. So I make no promises about the duration of this one. Nor am I going to rely on that good 'ol Protestant whip, guilt, to keep this ship at cruising speed. Not going to get me on that one. Here's where I rely on my 60s legacy of irresponsibility to say I'll do this as long as I want and no longer.

One reason the others didn't work is that I tried to separate them. I had one for teaching with film, one for issues about teaching and learning, and another on spirituality and literature. What I came to realize is that I don't make these distinctions when I'm swimming in the "stream of consciousness," as William James put it. These themes are all there together, like flotsam, bobbing up and down in the eddies and currents, and there I am, trying to clutch them as I hear the falls roar downstream.

I observe this particular form of honesty in my wife, whose blog, Unrealistic Expectations , speaks of what she likes, loathes, and finds weird but compelling. She writes a lot and all of it is interesting and worth reading. I, on the other hand, have felt that everything I publish must be perfect. Since that's not remotely possible my output has been doomed from the start, a kind of Crohn's disease of writing.

But I'm also bedeviled by a fussy irritation with the chatterati, the professional gossipers who pass for journalists on many of today's media faucets. I've held the view that opinions aren't worth much, including my own, and it would be better to really know what you're talking about before you speak. That's before I really understood what Montaigne (1533–1592), that eloquent French gentleman slacker, was on about when he invented the essay (English for essais), what he called his "tries" or "attempts." His interests ranged far, wide, and deep, he had a beguiling blitheness about mixing up the facts, and he followed where his nose took him. So now we've got all these glimpses of life through Montaigne's eyes, priceless gems he scattered from his castle's tower window.

I'm not in that league by any means but it's the form I feel most comfortable with. Attempts, tries. . .to back up and take another run at it. Eventually there may be a breakthrough of sorts, a moment of clarity, and that's enough to justify yet another blog.

Perhaps it's a way to scratch the explaining itch. We'll see.