Letter to Clyde

One of the reasons I don’t want to discuss my own metaphysical positions in class is that I don’t want to seem to be using my classes as an opportunity to try to push my views onto my students. Nor do I like other people hijacking class time to proselytize, either politically or religiously. It can be a pretty fine line, given that literature almost always has moral concerns, and sometimes we rightly reject authors’ writing not for reasons of craftsmanship alone, but because their theme or tone or whatever doesn’t meet our moral standards. We have to be able to talk about things like that. But there is a difference between expressing a personal moral response to a text, and just hogging the seminar conversation to advance one’s own agenda. Because I hold this principle as a sacred academic value, I want to follow my own code myself too.

But since you ask, Clyde, I am willing to spend a small amount of non-class time; here you go:

I don’t believe in supernatural entities. The idea that some conscious being, much bigger, better, more powerful, smarter than humans, but in some other ways something like humans, at least to the extent of being some kind of discrete individual that can observe situations and has preferences and can make decisions and take actions—that some such being either created the universe and/or presides over it and/or provides it with moral significance that goes beyond the wellbeing of ordinary biological sentient beings such as humans and animals… this idea seems quite implausible to me. Maybe not disprovable, in some kind of mathematical-logic sense, but not at all a reasonable belief to hold given the rest of our state of understanding of physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, and so forth.

I have spent many years thinking and reading about the subject; I consider it pretty unlikely that somebody will come up with some new argument in favor of God’s existence which I’ve never encountered before. I am not very much interested in entering into debate on the subject, but I guess if somebody—a believer—was just trying to understand: How is it possible that such a sensitive, kind individual, someone devoted to honest inquiry into the truth, could have an atheistic outlook? I guess I could try to give some quick sketch of how it feels to think like me.

The shortest route by which to give some notion of my basic worldview is this: I believe consciousness is, demonstrably, a biological phenomenon. Individual consciousness arose as part of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to animal bodies: unlike plants, a creature that can move around voluntarily can by its own actions either increase or decrease risks to its staying alive and healthy; so it has to have a sense of itself as an individual, and a desire to protect its individual bodily integrity against all kinds of harms. Our consciousness and our bodily existence are inextricably tied together. Therefore there is no such thing as non-embodied consciousness, and thus there can be no spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, devils, gods, souls, immortality after death, etc. Consciousness only actually makes sense as an attribute of a living animal, not as an attribute of something existing on a cosmic scale or beyond physicality altogether. Stars and planets and galaxies and infinite space and pure abstractions and so forth don’t need to be, and can’t be, conscious, any more than a rock or a flower is.

These are beliefs I have--I would even call them empirical beliefs, as opposed to the faith-based kind--but they are not a moral code or a spiritual practice. They don’t really tell you much about me, Clyde. I doubt your desire for “context” has been satisfied.

Although I think atheism is a perfectly accurate label to describe my metaphysical stance, these days I’m not all that eager to present myself to the world as an atheist, since the prejudice against atheism is so deep in this country. And it’s not even just because I fear being discriminated against, it’s that I don’t want to affront people who (wrongly in my view) interpret any expression of atheism as necessarily equivalent to hostility directed against them. I went to graduate school with a Catholic man and we were walking through a parking lot one time and I saw one of those Darwin fish-with-legs on a car, and it gave me a little lift, like I assume it gives a Christian a lift to see the regular old Jesus fish. So I said, “Look, it’s a Darwin fish!” And Bill muttered darkly and shook his head. He thought the car-owner was mean, mocking Christians like that. I said, “Bill, why does it have to be mockery? Can’t the person just be saying, You have your beliefs, I have some too, mine have just as good a right to be shared and celebrated?” Bill said no. There is no possible blameless intention a Darwin-fish displayer can have. It made me sad, because I had sometimes toyed with the idea of getting such a fish and displaying it in just such a spirit as I described. But now that I realize it will inevitably be seen by many as an anti-fish, never mind, I guess.

In the last few years, when Christians knock on my door or something, I’ve been experimenting with labeling myself a buddhist instead of an atheist, since this tends to strike people more gently. They may have no idea what buddhism is, but they take it for granted that it’s some kind of system more or less analogous to their own. It isn’t, really, but so what? They don’t get a nasty shock and we shake hands and it’s friendly and over quickly.

I have a great fondness for Jewish culture—the literature, the intellectual contributions—and a soft spot for Israel. In terms of cultural identity, though, my heritage is Christianity more than it’s anything else. There are plenty of secular Jews, but you don’t often run across people who think of themselves as secular Christians. Too bad! I feel that I have more in common with Christians who have values and temperaments similar to mine than I do with people who may share more of my empirical/scientific beliefs but are sneery egomaniacs rather than compassionate humanists. People can be right about some things and wrong about others. Beliefs can be held lightly and generously, or stubbornly and spitefully, regardless of their propositional content (contra Sam Harris). Or beliefs can be—they mostly are!—halfway held, shifting and inconsistent things. I believe delusion is part of the human condition; I catch myself in delusions of one kind or other on a daily basis. So I try to be forgiving about other people’s, with a few exceptions. For instance, if people really, really believe in a hell of literal eternal torment, and they’re down with that, they think that’s a fine way to organize a universe and a just God sees to it that everybody gets exactly what they deserve in the end—infinite suffering for some? Perfect! Well, I think that’s one fucked up idea, excuse my French. I really don’t see how people can get that idea sitting comfortable in their heads alongside their other ones about God and goodness.

Was that what you wanted to know, Clyde?

mennonite in a little black dress

I saw Rhoda Janzen’s mennonite in a little black dress at the library and I picked it up because I’m always willing to take a look at a memoir of growing up in a religious subculture. Even if it’s not exactly my cup of tea, it may be useful to recommend to my students, who often want to write about their own religious subculture but generally need to build their skills in communicating to a heterogeneous audience that includes folks with very different backgrounds and premises, up to and including non-Christians. Even atheists! So I checked it out for possible amusement/pedagogical value, despite the two strikes against it: one, it came out in 2009, so this is not a book review I can peddle anywhere, and, two, it was blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, as laugh-out-loud funny.

http://www.rhodajanzen.com/

Not that I think Eat, Pray, Love is terrible or anything. But there was a certain glibness to it, a willingness to divert attention away from truly wrenching emotions into light comedy without fully acknowledging and exploring the pain. And not that I have anything against comedy, or think it incompatible with profundity. But there is a difference between the mood and impact you can build with a protracted, cumulative life narrative, and what you can get with a bunch of episodes from a situation comedy. In the latter, there’s always a distance between us and the characters; we never fully enter into their experience. Their catastrophes tend to be played for laughs like those of a cartoon character flattened by an anvil or exploded by dynamite. I do understand, and partly admire, the self-deprecatory impulse that leads Gilbert and Janzen to cast themselves as feminine Wile E. Coyotes or Elmer Fudds: they fear, and rightly so, the self-aggrandizement of the high-tragic memoir. But really, there is room on the tragicomic spectrum for writing that allows, right alongside the laughs, sincere respect for human suffering (including one’s own, including that which is brought on by one’s own errors).

I almost quit reading mennonite in a little black dress a few chapters in, when I could see that no narrative arc was under construction. Nothing about it compelled—or rewarded— my sustained attention. But it was easy pleasant reading to dip in and out of and I left it on the kitchen table to while away odd minutes. And then, at a certain point, I had accumulated enough biographical tidbits about Janzen to know that I liked and respected her. I had encountered enough tidbits about Mennonite culture to feel I was learning something. And I had run across a few real gems of expository or meditative prose, e.g.: Feo Belcari (a 15^th century poet/dramatist so obscure here and now that his only Wikipedia entry is in Italian) is introduced in humorous, accessible terms, along with the information that there are a few people, including the author, who actually care deeply about his work. A significant theological inquiry into the relations between god and man is introduced gently in the context of a family board game and pursued many chapters later in an old woman’s reminiscences about her missionary family in China. There’s a screamingly funny (at least to a teacher) joke about undergraduate writing slipped into an account of a kind friend’s holding Janzen’s hand to get her through the heartbreak over her husband’s betrayal. There are some amusing first dates with snappy dialogue. And finally—oh, but almost too late for readers to care—we see an object of great significance from Janzen’s childhood, the symbol of her attraction to worldly sophistication, the spur to her ultimate intellectual growth and exploration outside her homogeneous community. Rhoda! Why did you wait so long to tell me about the blue silk hosiery envelope?

Janzen is a well-published poet. That bent no doubt has something to do with why her book reads more like a collection of humor columns than it does like a book-length narrative. It feels more like a series of good first dates than it does like a long-term relationship. Still, I’m going to give mennonite in a little black dress four out of a possible five stars. That’s about half a star higher than I gave Eat, Pray, Love, but maybe I’ve just undergone some spiritual growth since then.

I sure like Rhoda Janzen. And, students, the book has plenty of valuable craft lessons to teach, despite my complaints (the missing narrative arc, of course, and, well, some of the characterization is a tad bit flat as well). If you can fill up your portfolios with scenes and settings this well drawn, with sparkly humorous highlights and pockets of hinted-at depth, you’re getting an A, all right.

Imagine Karaoke

On Tuesday, at the Applebee’s in Harlingen, TX, I’m going to get up and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in front of a group of mostly strangers. It started out as kind of a joke in my sangha (meditation group). One of the things I think is cool about going to a church is the singing with other people, and it’s not just a select group of good singers that do it, but everybody in the congregation, for mutual connection and uplift out of the workaday mind. Well, I wanted to sing in the sangha, too. Why not compile a Buddhist hymnal? There are many great numbers with a Buddhist philosophy: “Let It Be.” “Give Peace a Chance.” “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” We were all calling out the names of songs and laughing and occasionally breaking into a line of song to illustrate. Someone mentioned a certain plaintive number from “Hair,” the disappointed-in-love ballad called “Easy to Be Hard.” Several of the other people there didn’t know the song, so I started singing it from the beginning, because I could. As a teenager in the 1970s, enthralled with 1960s culture, I played that record over and over and over. And even though I hadn’t really thought about it for 35 years, I still remembered most of the words, enough to get well advanced into the song. I can’t say for sure whether the sangha was impressed with my long lyrical memory (or my audacity), but I know I felt relaxed and happy. Confident, not of having noteworthy talent, but of my right to exhibit my averageness.

“Let’s have a Buddhist karaoke group!” I said. “Let’s buy a karaoke machine and use it for a Buddhist Karaoke Night Benefit!” I was kidding, but I also meant it. “I’ll buy the machine,” I said. “When we’re not using it, we could rent it out to other organizations.” Yes, yes, they said, go for it. (Kidding?)

We shall see! One step at a time. I found a venue. I went last week to reconnoiter, learning that the quality of singers varies widely and the crowd doesn’t heckle. The worst-case outcome is that only the two or three closest tables give only polite applause for a few seconds. The best-case is more enthusiastic applause from the half the bar that’s paying any attention and a few hoots of approval from across the room. There are many quirky song choices, not all latest-hit numbers. An eastern-inflected Beatles number, for instance, would fit in just fine. I’ve announced the event on my Facebook page: world debut of the Buddhist Karaoke Circle (which may turn out to consist of just me). I’ve chosen and practiced a song.

I’m going to do it. Tuesday. My little dare to me. My little achievable project to cultivate fearlessness and joy. Not just mine, but for all sentient beings. Imagine!

David Small's Stitches is now out in paperback. I'm using it as a text in three classes, Intro to Creative Writing, Intro to Creative Nonfiction, and Graduate Nonfiction Workshop


.

It's a great book for teaching what I want to teach--thematically rich composition, moral complexity, subtlety of the narrative focus and voice, plot structure, suspense, characterization, tone: it's all there and all working beautifully. And people like the book. And I like it, which is a bonus in teaching. Teaching a text I don't like is tolerable for one semester, maybe even two, but after that I can't stand the rereading.

Anyway, so, I loved Stitches, let's have no mistake about that. Nothing but praise for the design and the execution. And, I largely share what I take to be the author's moral assessment of the characters. The parents have clearly not done a good job of parenting: the failure to give their son appropriate medical attention is appalling. "Neglectful" and "cold" are a generous description of the mother; many people if not most might call her abusive, though perhaps her methods aren't way out of line with cultural norms: David is shouted at and slapped when he runs off to play where he was told not to, losing his shoes in the process.

Make no mistake: I do not approve of the mother's behavior. Small shows her slamming around the house in resentful silence for days on end; I don't think it's right to give little children a punitive silent treatment for more than a very brief time, though what constitutes brief I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (I don't favor hitting, but a parent has to have some means of indicating disapproval in moderation. Though maybe a childless person shouldn't pontificate too long on the subject.)

I don't believe the author intends us to read this narrative in the simple way some people like to read: identifying wholly with the boy and having zero compassion for the mother, investing 100% of their empathetic imagination in his perfect innocence and her perfect contemptibility. Look: the boy calls out for his mother's protection against a roughhousing older brother and against his harsh, unstable grandmother; doesn't that mean she must have provided him some degree of maternal protection on some occasions? In fact, we see David's mother's spontaneous impulse to shield him from her own mother's menace, and, by a short imaginative hop requiring only a one-link chain of inference, we realize that as bad as David's childhood may be, his mother's was likely worse on the average day.

Even the grandmother is handled with some measure of compassion in the narrative. She is discomfitted when her grandson can't understand her country speech, and does a pained double take when David asks what a crucifix is and she realizes the extent to which her daughter has rejected the religion of her childhood. David then wounds her deliberately when he says "Mama says people who say 'ain't' are stupid!" The grandmother's had a pretty hard life, but--let's have no mistake about this--I think it's worth calling her "evil" if we're ever going to use that word at all for assessing people's behavior. But the evil grandmother is portrayed not as someone animated by an inexplicable force of unprovoked malice and consciencelessness (like the evil people in much popular culture and a certain brand of politics); she's a damaged person, like David, like his mom. If David's misdemeanors--joyriding, truancy, etc.--are mitigated by the suffering and mistreatment he endured beforehand, aren't the felonies of the mothers mitigated by their suffering and mistreatment too? Not excused, mind you. We can understand and pity without necessarily forgiving. I think it hurts to be evil. Maybe there are a few exceptions--joyous psychopaths--somewhere, but not in this book.

There's only one place where I can't quite go along with what I take to be the book's assessment of the characters. I sort of feel I'm kicking over the pedagogical traces even to say this. Shouldn't I keep my own attention on form and technique, leave the students (at least the undergraduates) to work out their moral reactions free from my influence? What do you think of the characters, class? What do you think David Small thinks? Yes, by all means bring your own life experience to bear, but remember to keep coming back to the details of the text....

No, I can't help it. Listen: I think the psychiatrist did a wrong thing. I don't consider it wholesome to start therapy with a 15-year-old by saying "Your mother doesn't love you." What a dangerous, potentially injurious thing to say, even if it were definitely true and the shrink definitely knew it to be true. But I also don't think he had any very good grounds for making that assertion. How long could he have spent with the mother at that point, a couple hours? What arrogance, to be so certain about another person's inner life! And, yes, I think there is an element of Freud-inflected, mother-blaming misogyny there. The mom and shrink probably made mutually poor impressions on each other at their initial interview; the mother thinks psychotherapy is "throwing money down a hole." And, whew, that reminds me: the parents were paying for this. The Small couple paid for a shrink three times a week to reinforce David's worst feelings about his mother. Yeah, the therapy made David feel better about himself, but at his mom's expense. Oh, so, turns out it's the (male) shrink whose love is supposed to be true! Well, it's pretty easy to love someone for only an hour at a time, when you're getting a good salary, and you never have to take that teenager home with you and bear full responsibility for them, bailing out of jail and so forth.

Granted, we know that David's mother certainly didn't love him in a uniformly good or effective way. Granted she made consumer goods and partying a higher priority than nurturing him as she should have done; but it's ridiculous to suppose she didn't care whether her own son had cancer: she was in denial about the lump in his neck, is the reasonable explanation. Do you think love is a blanket of kindness, settling evenly over every interaction with the loved one and (especially in the case of parents) smothering every more self-centered desire? I have loved and I have been loved. I am not a parent, but I have parents, and I am here to tell you that love is not a blanket of kindness.

David, if you read this, I loved your book.

In Franz Wright's remarkable poem "Robert, Cat" a man feels his cat bestows "unqualified forgiveness." This may just be the speaker's persona, of course, not the author's view, but I feel like disputing it anyway, since lots of pet owners do hold this notion that animals have feelings that are just like ours, only deeper, purer, unsullied by ulterior concerns. The thing is, we really don't know what animals' mental states are like. Maybe Robert the cat doesn't even have any clear memory of having been mistreated by the speaker, if, indeed, he ever even had any sense of mistreatment in the first place. Heck, I can't even count on my own spouse bringing the same frame of reference to any interaction that I bring to it, so how can you make that assumption in an interspecies relationship?

If I step on a fire-ant nest in the yard, and get bitten, I don't harbor any feeling of resentment toward the individual biting ants. I don't think, "You little bastard, you're the one who did me wrong." In my head, a vague sense of menace and annoyance surrounds the whole anthill, but that's it. Suppose tiny robot servants carefully plucked just the "guilty" ants from my body and saved them in a separate petri dish, I would have no feeling about those ants that was different from any other fire ants.

That's why I've always thought hell was such a crazy idea. That a supposedly omnipotent being would bother to punish such comparatively insignificant consciousnesses at all, let alone infinitely, is preposterous. Or to love them, either, in any but the most abstract and not especially gratifying way.

Nope, hell is invented by humans, for humans, in a paroxysm of masochism or hate.

I'd put the whole Wright poem up here, but I don't want to run afoul of copyright. It's worth a look.

*Lit* - Mary Karr

I read Mary Karr's *Lit* this week. I've gotten interested in addiction memoirs. David Sheff's *Beautiful Boy* was so lovely. (Should I go and read the son's memoir too?) Anyway, *Lit* was pretty gripping, there's some fine writing. I got just a weensy bit tired of the how-I-kept-resisting-God narrative thread, which was repetitious and plodding.

But I read with interest about all Karr's relationships, some with famous people whom I admire, like Tobias Wolff, others with people I never heard of before, or whose names had been changed anyway, like her ex-husband, or people for whom Karr gives only a first name, like "David," who she bumps into at an AA meeting halfway through the book, socializes with at a halfway house, and later has a stormy affair with. David gets "Mary" tattooed on his arm even before they've "kissed on the lips," and then later he breaks her coffee table in a raging fight.

It was an interesting relationship, well integrated across 130 pages, though on restudying it, I find the David story takes up less than 6 pages total itself.

And then I'm done with the whole memoir, and I'm reading the back matter, which includes a *Huffington Post* interview, and the interviewer asks about people Karr wrote about maybe not seeing things just the way she did, and she says, among other things, "Whatever David Foster Wallace's motivation was for throwing my coffee table..."

Whaaaat!?

I would have read the book quite differently if I'd known that "David" was David Foster Wallace. So I go back and read the relevant parts again and feel like a fool for not twigging before. Karr was playing a tricky, coy game with us, wasn't she? The first sighting of David includes the trademark bandana, the vocabulary, the logic; when he begins to write Karr love letters they are "meticulously footnoted." How did I not notice those things? But of course I wasn't expecting David Foster Wallace. And why didn't she just tell me, isn't that deceptive? But no, it's simply accurate to her experience, because he *wasn't* David Foster Wallace yet, back then. And maybe she's bending over backwards to take the high road and not exploit the connection. But then she does put in the bandana and the footnotes, so is it kind of *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* having it both ways?

Not only did I have to go back and study every page in *Lit* on which DFW appears, I had to google up "mary karr and da..." by which time Google completed the phrase for me. In an interview in *Busted Halo* Karr says a few more things about DFW. She's not all hagiographic about him like most people who reminisce. She describes his famous solicitousness as kind of an act and says he was a "pussy hound" "in a creepy way" when she first knew him. So maybe it wasn't just incredible imagination that enabled him to write *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men*.

Debt is sharecropping

Unlike most people I know, I regulate carefully the spending of small amounts of money on things like clothes, haircuts, manicures, books I want to read once but can just as easily get on interlibrary loan if I wait, bottled water, soda, coffee, treats and prepared foods, eating out, and in general any food item that doesn't derive from the grocery store or somebody's garden. How did it come to seem normal for middle-class and even working-class people to spend so much on prepared food so many times per week? This is not, by the way, moralizing on behalf of elaborate slow-food family dinners--not that I'm against that stuff either, if you like it--but for myself I favor the fastest food there is: bread and peanut butter and fruit straight out of the fridge, for instance. The cost in both time and money is negligible. I really don't understand the desire to spend more. Why isn't retaining their money worth more to people than a series of impulsive mini-luxuries and illusory conveniences throughout the week?

Advertising has something to do with it, and so does habit and social norms, and a general background level of prosperity--compared to the third world, anyway. (I'm aware that relative incomes are slipping in the US for all but the top percentiles.) And each individual item, taken singly, doesn't cost a huge amount. It just costs way more than it needs to and is unnecessary. A twenty-dollar bottle of moisturizer? Thanks, I'll hold onto the $20, "because I'm worth it." (I know, I know, that's not even anywhere near the high end products.)

I don't mean to scold or set myself up as superior. Everyone has the right to determine their own priorities; I just advocate awareness: for instance that the cumulative amount spent buying sodas each month (compared to the amount spent on more nutritious food staples) really does reflect the proportionate position a person thinks soda ought to occupy in his life.

I'm aware too that my habits are way outside the norm, freakish by current cultural standards. It hurts to suspect that some of my nearest and dearest may think me "cheap." I don't think of myself that way. I didn't buy the cheapest house I could find, or the cheapest car. Ditto furniture and major electronic appliances. Those are long-term investments and I want to get the best long-term value I can. I love going to museums or getting tickets to other artistic performances. But I don't want to drop unmonitored little bits of money on restaurant food or objects and services whose ability to provide satisfaction is fleeting. The cumulative effect is significant.

This is not a moral issue. It's practical, like a well-insulated house. You want all the money you invest in heating and cooling to go directly to your comfort, instead of being dissipated uselessly outside of your own living space. You want to eliminate leaks.

The worst sort of financial leak there is, is consumer debt. Of course, go into debt for a house or car or an education: those things can be worth it because in the right circumstances they promote your long-term assets. But nothing else is worth debt. All money spent paying interest is money that could otherwise have been spent to enhance your life. If you cumulatively spend more on consumer purchases than you can cover with your income, and make up the difference with credit cards, you are reducing your spending power, not increasing it. This is obvious enough, and in fact, I've learned recently that a slight majority of US citizens don't pay any interest at all to credit card companies, either because they don't have credit cards (about 25%) or (another 30%, including me) because they pay off every new charge within the grace period before the interest is applied. Prior to googling up some statistics while writing this blog post, I was under the misapprehension that the average American pays a whopping credit-card interest charge on a regular basis. Not so. But a good-size minority does, only a whisker less than half. The average amount of income that went to credit-card debt among households carrying a credit-card balance was 21% in 2004. Now, since the financial meltdown, it's down to under 17% in most places, but still, OMG, 17% is a sixth of your income, a hefty fraction, and many people are forking over that much or even more of their resources mostly just to purchase the privilege of continuing to owe money while chipping away with a teaspoon at the original purchase amounts (paying the credit-card minimums ensures that total interest expenses will comfortably outweigh the principal amount). What a trap.

A person mired in consumer debt is in exactly the same position as a sharecropper.