A Pledge of Compatriots

The writers of the Declaration of Independence closed their document with a pledge:

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. 

Nice.  It seems comfortably fluffy because of our familiarity with it.  In reality, it carries an extreme weight.  To decide to oppose your king by force, to declare that he has no authority over you or your land -- that's treason (in a royalist's perspective).  So when they say, "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor," they mean it literally: if the colonists had not succeeded in their endeavor for independence, they would have all been killed--those who signed the document (with John Hancock placing his signature in very large script to be prominent -- a message to the King).
 

If they had failed to secure liberty from the king, they would literally have forfeited every last thing they possessed; their families would have suffered in destitute circumstances.  None of them would have retained a shred of honor for their cause as they all would have been made examples of -- the signatories at least being killed ignobly.  (And just why is it that the concept of "honor" doesn't seem to weigh very much in the collective American mind these days?)

John Hancock's Huge Signature: "In Your Face, Georgie Boy!"

During the American Revolution, one of my ancestors, Capt. Fredrick Cramer, from New Jersey, fought along side George Washington.  The story goes that during one battle Washington's horse was shot out from under him.  As all officers rode white horses -- an honor and a duty as your men could see you clearly as you led them in battle (and while the horse was also making you an easy target) -- Cramer handed his white horse to Washington.

Another ancestor, a Richards from North Carolina, ran into the woods with his son as the British invaded his village and tried to rid the place of patriots.  The document indicates Richards "was murdered and his wife killed" for their support of independence.  I'm not sure there's a great difference between "murdered" and "killed" -- "dead" seeming pretty much the same for one as for the other.

It's a serious undertaking to oppose a king.  That is just what the "protesters" and "rebels" in any country have gambled: their actual lives, and fortunes, and honors in order to be free of despots and dictators, manipulators of the laws and industrial-political connivers.  They, too, risk literally everything, and many, like my ancestors, have paid with their lives for freedom.

There are ironies inherent in this independence we have: we still pay taxes on tea and windows.  Imagine that.  And who doesn't think that tax dollars (billions) are wasted every day in Washington?  Even given the inconsistencies and ironies, the freedoms to be had in the US stand apart from those in other places throughout the rest of the world.  Simply put, freedoms are immense in the U.S. -- absolutely immense when we think about the histories of many other countries.

Still...I've come to think that Americans' right to pursue happiness is often taken well beyond reasonable, equitable, or beneficial.  Does that "right" seem today to mean solely, "I can do whatever I damned well please," but fails to include my responsibility for how my actions impact the welfare of others?  So it seems to many Americans I meet here and abroad.

The Greeks (whose ideas of democracy largely became our own) saw such a person as an idiot.  Idiot is a word we get from the Greek, ἴδιος -- someone who is a private person, concerned only with their own affairs and pursuits without consideration for how their deeds affect the good of the city-state, the good of all the people, the πολλοὶ -- the very people around them who share the same community with its rights and responsibilities.  These are people with whom you have a social contract to abide by the same laws for the good of all, even at the expense of limiting some of your individual, private freedoms.  Read your Hume and Locke, if not also your Plato.  

In this context, idiocy means, say (on a large scale), collusion between crooked politicians, big-business magnates, or a collection of Bernard Madoffs (am I being redundant here?) who ferret away their own special-interest packets while not working for the public's or their constituents' best interests -- who work against the rights of all within their society.  Lobby-ism.  "Corporations are people, too."  Not.  And when that idea undermines the Constitution, the people's rights, and laws that were written for and protect the individual, not a corporation, then it all comes at the public's expense and the demise of their rights and freedoms.

On a smaller scale, idiocy means the self-serving individual who stands in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store, blocking the way, oblivious to others in the aisle, or the person who rides sloowwwly down the interstate in the passing (left) lane...blocking traffic.  Idiots.

Watch the police (from the Greek, polis, city) move one of these idiots over:

The writers of the Declaration knew this word, ἴδιος (Jefferson and others knew Greek and had read their Plato...).  We were never meant to be so free as to climb over others or impede others' freedoms while pursuing our own.  The writers saw it as Freedom with Responsibility for others.  (Is it just me, or is it contradictory to this sense of responsibility that "Capitalism" has come to mean getting ahead -- and doing so in predatory fashion -- at the expense of others?).  But responsibility: that's a large part of the Greek way -- um, the ancient Greek way.  I have no idea how this all applies to Greece's current financial situation; it will take the European nations a while -- and require much sacrifice -- to pay Greece's national tab, if they must.

But the "pledge" in the Declaration, that is a pact made among friends, among compatriots -- I have friends of over 30 years now, friends I can lean on, who know my worst and best, and of whom I know the same, and we don't throw these important connections away.  I like to think that friendship is based on not only what the friends share in common, but on a sacrifice to support each other in both freedom from things we do not desire and freedom to pursue things we do desire.  Isn't that called "happiness"?  And it's mutual.  It involves respect for an individual's sovereign independence as well as respect for our mutual good.

Friendship is a democracy, then, enabling individuals to pursue their own and others' best interests. Friends "mutually pledge to each other our lives...," as the Declaration says.  If that breaks down, notice how friendship ends -- or should end, by common opinion.  So I see it.  And that's what happened in the 1700s between King Georgie's England and the colonies: an end of friendship.

This 4th of July, I celebrate not only the "friendship" of my ancestors who sacrificed much for what I now enjoy, celebrate not only our past and current military personnel and friends like Corpsman Vinny C., "General" Ruxlow, Maj. Hurt, and CW2 Shawn, "Majormajor" Tom, Purple Heart "Owie" Brekke, and many others who have personally sacrificed to retain freedom for us, but I also celebrate well-loved friends who have shared freedom and mutual good with me over many decades.

What a very rich place this land is -- rich no less in friendship.  It was personally costly to create, is personally costly to retain, and well worth sacrificing for, I think.  And it's always a sight nicer without idiocy.

Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism

Thomas Hardy called himself a meliorist (someone who believes everything is getting better) although many people saw him as anything but that -- he wasn't even a realist but a pessimist.  One of his poems, for instance -- "The Darkling Thrush" -- is about the old century waning as a thrush sings at the dusk of its last evening -- Dec. 31st 1899.  Hardy hears the bird sing of

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

No hope for a brand new century?  Grim.  Hardy's pessimism may echo from such poems as Shakespeare's more optimistic lines in Sonnet 29, a poem beginning in despair:

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my *bootless cries,    [*useless]
And look upon myself and curse my fate....

It doesn't end there, but turns more hopeful:

*Haply, I think on thee, and then my state,    [*by chance]
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Nice.  Suddenly "things is better."

Shakespeare, I think, was more of a Realist although he had his Pessimistic days (Hamlet -- dark and brooding over human fates, was written after Hamnet, Shakespeare's son and twin to Judith, died.  And King Lear is probably the darkest play in English literature).  But was he a Realist?  Well, Shakespeare, after all, could write lines like "love and reason keep very little company nowadays" and "young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."  There's some Realism for you.

But since we're working backwards from Hardy to Shakespeare, let's look at something from just before Shakespeare's day: Henry VIII's armour, preserved in the Tower of London.

A Man's Optimism is His Castle

You may just notice the codpiece.  Yes.  Well.  Some men may view that as pessimistic.  Let us not befriend them.  Others may see it as realistic.  Let us not befriend them.  But really.  As Mae Western-Holly-Wood (16th-century movie actress) asked, "Is that a cannon in your codpiece or are you just glad to see me?"  As my good friend Major Hurt observed the other day, "it's Henry the VIIIth because the codpiece was only 1/8th full."  Is the glass half empty or half full?  Neither: only an 8th....  It's sheer, blind Optimism -- hopeful winking with ego-wanking.

And please note: the realism of my friend can pose a Major Hurt in only one case: if he leads you in your workout.  He flies helicopters, but he's solid as a tank with a perpetual motion machine in him.  One day he'll be merely a General Hurt.  Just so he's past a Private Hurt, which could be major.  Realistically, he's the man you want in a situation that looks optimistically like it is going to turn pessimistic.

Major Hurt in His Heli

The thing is, we seem to grasp for excuses when our optimism comes face-to-face with the real.  One excuse, from Garrison Keillor, speaks of men having to pee when ice fishing: "When it's cold out, all men are created equal."  Realism.

Any of Those Purported Health Benefits of Optimism Here?

I have no real point in all this (that's Realism); you shouldn't hope for more than that (which is Optimism).  But I do think (without undo Pessimism) that we humans will choose any of the three that would suit us in a single moment, as with the lads pictured above -- or with Henry, Shakespeare, or Hardy.

How so? Could we possibly choose Pessimism in any situation?  Well, yes we could!  Just try having a Pity Party and inviting Optimism over to entertain.  Doesn't work.  We would need Pessimism to come over to start a fight to straighten things out.  And Realism?  True: he could come over and at least be persuaded to admit there is a darker side to things.  But for a Pity Party, Pessimism is your true friend.  Great party!

To celebrate a really big event, however, it's Optimism you want.  Sir Optimism, apparently, was an armour maker to royalty in the early 1500s, protecting nether egos with steeled and bright opinion.  If Henry had invited either Realism or Pessimism to his party, it would have been off with his cod.

But what about Reason?  Seldom invited.  Boring lad at a party.

Reason and humans keep very little company nowadays.

Chosing to BE.

A few years ago in my Shakespeare course, we had finished discussing Hamlet just as spring break approached.  In returning from the break, I asked students what they had done during their vacation that was exciting.  One student said, "I got a tattoo."  On her calf, just above the ankle in a very simple typewriter font, were two words and a period:

Just like that.  It took me a second to get the affirmation.  The student remarked that she had thought very seriously about Hamlet's question -- whether to remain in existence, albeit having to face life's many troubles, or to die and sleep, "perchance to dream" through eternity, a prospect bringing up other questions ("what dreams may come?"  They might be perpetual nightmares, worse than any trouble life might bring).

She said it was better to live, live fully -- and to BE through it all, no matter what life brought along.

I am still today impressed by that tattoo.  Not being tatted myself, if I ever were to get inked, those two words might be an apt statement.

The significance lies in the undercurrent of those small words.  My nephew, as some of you know, has had his fate decided for him (unlike Hamlet, who wishes that his flesh would melt and allow him a quick end).  Michael has brain cancer.  He was given -- at the end of March -- 6 months to live, but things seem to be moving faster than expected.  Daily he weakens, can scarcely stand without holding onto something, whereas mere weeks ago he could hit a baseball (although not run the bases).  His right arm and hand are debilitated.  His face muscles have stopped working, so he has no expression even in laughter, no ability to smile.  His brain is incredibly sharp, but his body fails in new ways daily.

This is, obviously, hard to watch -- but how infinitely more so for him to watch?  At thirteen...?  And this week he grew very angry at it all.  Yes, indeed.  We all are.  But where does one direct anger at being dealt such an unfair hand?  I recall Dylan Thomas's poem:  "Do not go gentle into that good night....  Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

It is a choice, "to BE."  It may be that one's fate is decided, and the decision is that "you shall not be."  But to BE until that time -- Michael chooses every day to be.  It may be to accept; it may be to be angry.  But he still chooses: to BE.

His cancer is not unheard of.  Another young person to have this cancer was Elena Desserich [Link].  She spent her last months in an affirmative decision to be.  She wrote notes to her mother, father, and sister Grace -- even as her ability to write and draw deteriorated.  Elena hid her notes all over the Deserrichs' house, so her family would continue to find them long after she was gone.

One of Elena's Notes

Is it possible "to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them," as Hamlet asks?  Is it possible to war against this disease and by opposing end it?  To quote E. M. Forster (writing about the sea of troubles inherent in human relations), "Not now.  Not yet."  But even still, to look on these troubles, on this disease, and to be overwhelmed, to be put off of living in the face of it all, to "lose the name of action" as Hamlet says?  Not so.

Hamlet's decision is the hardest question we face whether living or dying.  If dying, we must BE.  If living, we must BE.  It is not to divert ourselves from troubles but to face them, clear eyed, honestly, not least -- as Michael teaches me -- bravely.  He's a soldier doing his duty in the midst of the hardest imaginable situation.  And, as Milton observed, "they also serve who only stand and wait."

Michael, BEing: Right Seat, Blackhawk UH-60

Here, Not There

There is nothing quite so tumultuous as existing between worlds.  It's true: Negative Capability is essential in life if we are to meet the times when we are neither here nor there.  But what is such capability?

The term comes from a letter the poet Keats wrote to his brother on 21 December 1817:

... at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Negative Capability is seen in a person who can rest easy within unresolved situations, who doesn't grasp after certainties, who is "content with half-knowledge."  This is not the person T. S. Eliot described (and did not praise) as being "assured of certain certainties."  One thing in life is certain: uncertainties exist if not prevail.

I'm Fairly Certain This Is Keats

The ability to breathe an aesthetic element within the uncertain moment is the very same thing, I think, that allows us to listen to dissonant music and still enjoy it.

--A musical joke about Negative Capability: How did Bach's children get their father up in the morning?  They would go to the harpsichord, play each note up through an octave except for the last note.  Bach would have to get out of bed and hit the final note to create the resolution.  But he was out of bed.

To Be Certain, Remember to Bach up Your Files --
and Your Words.  B sharp and make a Note of It.

No Negative Capability there.  He could not be content with the beauty of the other notes in themselves -- could not, that is, fall off to sleep once more without adding the missing note.

Keats' nod to beauty is more vehement than it sounds (he was a Romantic, and beauty isn't just a <yawn> incidental felicity to him).  It "overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all...."

Yeah.  But there comes a time when one can exist no longer in uncertainties.  That point differs between people.  Yet even if beauty is present in the midst of uncertainties, there is a point when some (perhaps you may say it's only so of weaker persons, not the "Man of Achievement" Keats speaks of) may no longer exist with uncertainties, even with the "panacea" of beauty. We must find a resolution.

Is beauty merely a Panacea?  The opiate of those uncertain?  Perhaps so.  When the practicalities of life hit, when uncertainties of a lost job, of an Offer without a contract that goes on perpetually, shifting with words, words, led out to obscure and equivocate against other words....  It may be in such a case that one discovers that the few lesser uncertainties in the hand are worth any dozens of prospective certainties in the bush.

Beauty does little to change the practicalities of life's situations at that point.  Sometimes life is un-beautiful in being merely practical.  That, to an artist, is its worst vestige.  That beauty is not usually practical is perhaps in the very nature of -- the value -- of it.  The art we seem least intrigued by is the purely commercial and practical (well...except for the postmodernist, who thinks the smiley face is "Art" equal to the Mona Lisa, but then...that might be either the postmodernist's Negative Capability or lack of it).  The beauty we love is more often found in a museum or outdoors, making us travel to behold it -- it's not so practical as to be unremarkable.

Let's see.  Where did I get to?

After much turmoil at delays and a basket of prospective entails getting heavier at each discussion, yet with nothing certified in writing, including having no contract after a month post-offer -- an initial offer which itself was lessened due to a "miscommunication" on salary...to their benefit (read "bait-and-switch"), I kept my position at my university instead of leaving for the uncertain offer.  Call it a lack of Negative Capability, or call it a lack of beauty allowing one to exist with perpetual uncertainties, but the end is the same.  And I embrace the resolution here.

Cinderella in London

It wasn't the nasty stepsisters (or stepbrother) who did it.  They weren't nasty.  Nasty wasn't in their disposition.  Indeed, all were breathless with hopes that the ensuing impact, to all appearances about to transpire, would be softened by some miracle -- that the cab headed towards her would turn into a pumpkin.  At least pumpkin is a softer material than the metal grille of a cab.

At any rate (and the cab was going at somekinda-rate), Cinderella hurried, and that's when two things happened.  One, the magic slipper slipped.  Yes.  It fell off Cinderella's foot well into Southampton Row just as the line of traffic, led by that black cab, headed for the young maiden.  And it fell off (here's the second thing) just as she tripped.  That in itself was an event, wasn't it?, compelled by the light turning against her -- she lost the shoe, and the cab was going to run over both it and its former wearer, who now was keeping a semblance of balance while flopping across the street.  Wasn't that what we were seeing?  Flopping?

Prince Charmant (but no...he was more like a middle-aged, occasionally obtuse but generally amiable academic) ventured forth in a moment of coherence and rescued the magic slipper just as Cinderella popped up on the curb opposite, turned, and watched the unsuccessful traffic stream by her.  The stepsisters (and stepbrother) and Prince Charmant (hitherto known as...um...Bob) looked in disbelief after the princess.

The question in her eyes was plain: "my shoe?!"  It was safe.  The angels heralded its safe return, and Bob held up the slippy slipper to display the miracle.  Cheers were heard from spectators in Russell Square.  The pigeons, admittedly, cared very little and as usual pooped a lot.

Southampton Row.  Stepsisters.  One stepbrother.  One Bob.  The magic slipper that slipped.  A cab.  A deadly line of traffic.  Flopping.  The event is all there with the rejoicing.

'Urry Up, Please, It's Toim.

 Isle of Whithorn, Scotland: the Bow Set for All Time

Jet lag: time's revenge on the technologically smug who pride themselves on how easy travel is from here to there.

My ancestors left the Isle of Whithorn, Scotland, in 1821 with six other families aboard the ship Warren (built in New Bedford, Mass., and whose master -- skipper -- was William Webb).  The families first sailed from Isle to Liverpool, there meeting the Warren, and then sailed on to Philadelphia, PA.  From there they moved west to Pittsburgh, then further west.

What's a Packet? Model of the Shenandoah Packet Ship (1840) on the Liverpool-Philly Program

The Master of a Similar Packet Died of Frostbite in a December Crossing [Link]

The trip from Liverpool to Philly took six weeks at sea, which is a great deal of time to be neither here nor there.  My great-great-great grandfather's first wife, Janet Martin, of Drummoral Farm at Isle, died in Pittsburgh soon after she and James G. arrived in the US.  After six weeks tossing on an ocean, it's more likely that mal de mere, not jet lag, got her, eh?

Time is funny stuff, and there are the laws of time that we seem to operate under unquestioningly; we cannot escape it, try as we might.  But there are human-made laws of time.

For instance, one such law of time was found years back in English pubs: when closing time approached, the barman or barmaid (or barmistress, or merely a bar-stressed worker) would bellow over the public-house crowd, "Hurry up, please, it's time!"  This meant that -- as the law prohibited drinks to be served after the bar itself (not the pub) closed -- you could quickly get your last drink and sit to drink it as long as you like, but no more drinks would be pulled or poured after time was called.

T. S. Eliot incorporates this shout in The Waste Land, marking time-running-out for an urban humanity that had lost its social connectedness.  Was that a more realistic or pessimistic time?

Time.  Time and again.  Time's up.  Time's a wastin'.  Time and tide wait for no man.  Long time no see.  Have a good time.  Chicago time: "Does anybody really know what time it is?"  A New York minute.  Time flies.  Have you got the time?  Sure: I have time.  A wrinkle in time.  Isn't that a stitch?

So.  Jet lagged because of the attempt to skip over time (up since 3:15 a.m. and writing now at 6:00), I imagine other students from the group have been up and wondering why this world is asleep.  It's long past time to get up -- in England.

This time in England was a time to remember.  During this trip I was able to spend some time with one student who hurt her back (time and again to the hospital and to a doctor), and whose pain grew worse as time went.  Painful for her, but that time was, for me, a delight, allowing me two visions.  One vision was of myself in the past -- in England for the first time as a grad student; I looked back on those days somewhat as Wordsworth looked back at his first visit to Tintern Abbey through visiting it again five years later with his sister, Dorothy.

The second vision was through the student's eyes -- her first experiences of England.  Even though I told her about my first time in England as a student and could show her about London and Oxford, it was most enjoyable forgetting my prior visits and then watching another person experience these things in the present -- allowing me to re-vision parts of England through another's eyes.  That was a gift.

But the great gift from Time for me today is this: I've been married 23 years.  It has been a deeply connected time, these years.  And the irony for today, our anniversary, is that Joni and I will attend the wedding of a close friends' son, Michael, and his lovely fiancee, Anna.  It's both an old and new time to remember, a time that others will remember fondly with us for both of these times and the time in between.  United by time, in time, and throughout time.

Early in this blog I pondered the red thread that connected us with one another.  My threads tugged at me during the time in London, and pulled me through that time back to my love and to friends here.  During that time, new threads were tightly tied between me and others.  I think of the threads that we have tied to us, not merely in the present moment but throughout our time in "middle-earth."

Thank you for your time reading.  But it's time I had some more coffee, time's liquid assistant.

To Stay or Not to Stay

 Westminster Bridge and Houses of Parliament

Is England's air unlike that in any other land?  Is its land more green, more pleasant?  The distinction is not uncommonly made.

In 1937, Welshman Ivor Novello wrote these lines:

Rose of England breathing England’s air

Flower of liberty beyond compare

While hand and heart endure to cherish thy prime

Thou shalt blossom to the end of time

Rupert Brooke's famous poem of 1914, "The Soldier" describes a soldier pondering what should happen if he fell in a foreign war:

                                                              There shall be

          In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
          A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
          Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
          A body of England's, breathing English air,
          Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

William Blake, decrying the "dark Satanic Mills" of the industrial revolution, contrasted a local steam-powered flour mill (the Albion Mill near his home) with the "Green and pleasant land" of England, and he asserts (does not ask!),

          And did those feet in ancient time

          Walk upon England's mountains green:

          And was the holy Lamb of God

          On England's pleasant pastures seen!

 Blake's Artistry

The poem was cast as a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry [Link] and became a mainstay in English culture.  It featured in the movie Chariots of Fire -- the movie's title drawn from the poem.

And the distinction is not made merely of England but of London itself.  Samuel Johnson's observation is well known:

          When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

One severe punishment used in English history was banishment (an offender often being sent to Australia or America).  Ahem.  There's a point.

It is common to idealize a place, and plenty of people see England (to go back to Conrad once more) as anything from "one of the dark places of the earth," to the "English heaven" Rupert Brooke mentions.  However that may be in actuality, from my students I continue to hear this: "I want to stay here."

I understand this feeling and what lies behind it: responsibilities are greatly diminished and fun is more pronounced: no jobs to sit at, no traffic to unduly complicate life (although Dr. G. has led students in any number of odd directions as if he were, to quote Monty Python, "deliberately wasting [our] time").  There are no taxes to pay, no business dealings, no government forms to fill out.  Here we are largely removed from the complications of normal life.

What's not to like in that?

The culture, as the dialects, are rich in tones here (just listen to an American say "haff-passt fo-wer" instead of the resonant "hahf pahst foh" of British English); the history of England has more to intrigue us than the "history," say, of someplace like Des Moines, where, if you want an active culture, you must buy some yogurt.  And what's more?  Think of the most beautiful aircraft ever made, the Spitfire:

The Curves of an English Swallow

Right: much of this is opinion and idealization, and the reality is that much of the England I grew to love is increasingly missing or already gone -- the little things as well as the big: wood floors in the Tube trains, pubs with snugs (replaced by loathsome corporate pubbing, one franchise calling their pubs a "collection," with each pub having the same menu as the others).

Capitalist Commercialization has probably been the single most destructive force in replacing English culture, from uglifying the skyline to plasticizing punts.

Everything changes, yes.  And the question more centrally is just how much of England (or France, or America or Germany or...) is still its own traditional culture, what with the influx of diverse peoples and the rise of the "world citizens" who have no home and, so plenty of post-colonial writers tell us, feel as if they belong nowhere?

Monica Ali writes about an England that Bangladeshis enter, struggle to remain in, or long to leave for "home" -- where ever home may come to exist.  In her novel, Brick Lane, the protagonist is Nanzeen, a woman married by arrangement to a man 20 years her senior and with whom she has at best only what Dickens described in David Copperfield, a statement believed to be directly related to his own marriage:

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose."

It reveals the obvious: it is not where, not when, one exists that is the sum of life.  It's the connection, the being at "home" that makes it.  Ali's protagonist stays in England to make a life for herself and her two daughters while her husband goes back to the Bangladesh he has idealized.  And Dickens?  In the novel, Dora dies, so David Copperfield gets to marry the woman with whom he shares a deep parity.

I?  I will go back, of course, to my "home" because of what makes it thus: my love.  I'd rather we be in England together, but circumstances do not allow it.

Unlike what people say about vacation spots, my England is a great place to visit and (in part) to grow up in as a student -- and, feeling most at home there, I've always wanted to remain here.  Idealized or no.

In Time of War II : Lipstick for the Dying

Children of the Holocaust

The  Imperial War Museum houses, among its many displays, an assertively reverent section devoted to the Holocaust.  Of course, the photos overwhelm; the stories leave holes in us, and the shoes of children devastate.  Molded to the shape of the little feet they once carried, these shoes now carry implications heavy beyond those of adult suffering.

Who Can Lift Such Weight?

Bansky, if you do not know already, is a street artist with great wit and vision.  He has become a very sought-after "artist-with-stencils," and one would have to possess a packet to purchase a piece of his work.  His is well-earned success [Link].

One of his bits is this:

Banksy's Holocaust: Serious or Trivializing? Read on.

I used this image in my course on "Life in Wartime," and -- in an exercise of visual rhetoric -- asked students to analyze its message.  They invariably thought it trivialized the seriousness of suffering in the concentration camps and was, thus, unfit as "art" was concerned.  So, perhaps, it appears.

About the time I first saw this work, I also found this account from a military official involved in the liberation of the Nazi camps:

_________________________________________________

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

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In reading this account, my students saw into the dilemma.  There is, of course, life after Holocaust for the few that survived, which meant the need to be a person, the need to reject institutionally-defined non-identity, and the need to re-establish oneself as a sovereign entity -- ultimately the need to become and to assert an individual life in the face of nameless death.

Primo Levi, a survivor of the camps, recalled this about the total erasure that the camps effected for the individual:

"For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man.... They will even take away our name" (italics, mine).

One producer of a documentary on the Holocaust said this regarding Levi's words: "It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp" -- that is, both body and entity, including their very names -- something that goes on still [Link].

The students also became aware of the dilemma of the artist.  Most often, the artist (in words, in paint, in performance) must express something outside the experiences of the audience. Who has experienced the Holocaust?  Very few remain.  And who, not having been in a camp, can communicate that experience truly?

Banksy and I haven't seen one another in some years and haven't talked about this piece.  Oh--right.  I don't know him (or her).  But the sensitivity of this piece speaks movingly about the sovereignty of human existence.

A statement in the Imperial War Museum deeply impressed me (it was posted next to a dissecting table from a concentration camp -- used to dissect and analyze mentally "unfit" children who had been killed).  The statement was from a Catholic churchman in 1941:

If we allow the mentally challenged to be "euthanized" as "unfit" and essentially "unproductive," it is but a moment more and other elements of society will conveniently be deemed "unproductive" and killed.  Next are simply the physically disabled who are mentally fit but costing society too much.  Then the elderly.  And then...?  You.  No one is safe.

So the message has proved true in various places on the globe since the 1940s.

Equivocation and the flowing robes of state-sanctioned license have a long history of working to justify politicians' inhuman endeavors.  Inhumane acts have been precipitated regularly and repeatedly within civilized societies--nearly as a standard of operation and sanctioned by shiny laws.  It was illegal to hide Anne Frank in the 1940s; it was legal for her to be murdered.  That is not ironic: that is literal.  It is real.  As the woman at Honfleur (quoted in the previous posting) said to me in exasperation regarding repeated German exploits in France, "Quand encore?!"  --When again?!

Questions anyone?

 A Survivor of Institutional Expedience

On our day at the Imperial War Museum, I told a couple of my students about a Holocaust survivor who spoke at one of my classes -- Peter Pintus [Link].  I told them his story, and, although they had read and had heard many other stories in the museum, they somehow fixed upon his as more -- what? -- immediate?  actual? -- because I had worked with him?  I don't know.

He was not only a gifted person, but a very funny man, once surprising me with his wit in a moment of bawdy humor.  Before speaking in my class, a young coed with a rather large bosom came into the coffee shop in a low-cut top as he and I were talking over a cuppa.  And he noticed her.  Finally, when the young woman left the cafe, he turned to me and said, "That young woman had a top like a nuclear bomb."  I: "What do you mean?"  He: "It was 90% fallout."

About his suffering, and his life after war -- well, the students didn't want to leave the class after his talk; indeed, they wanted to take him home, he was such a gentle, funny, delightful man, respectful of any human being regardless of race, gender, religion.

But the real story: when a child, he was a blue-eyed, blond-haired little boy.  Aryan by all appearances.  So when his mother took him to see Hitler drive by in various parades, this short little boy stood at the front of the crowds who were spread along the street to observe.

At one parade, a black-booted SS member parked his car in front of the boy and his mother.  Then the soldier saw the little boy standing there, unable to see over the car.  Because the boy was blond and blue-eyed, he was picked up by the SS man and seated on the hood of the car to see the parade up close, and (as Peter said to me), "When Hitler drove by, I was as near to him as you are to me this moment."  If Hitler (or the SS Ass) knew that this little blond, blue-eyed boy was half Jewish...?  You know the story.  And that's why -- when the Nazis in fact found out -- this boy was eventually placed in a work camp from which, after some years of hard labor on starvation rations, he escaped and survived in the woods by eating grass.

Shiny Murder

Stuff hits the fan for someone in every century of human history.  But the amount of it that had hit the fan early in the last century for so many led Churchill to name it -- even before the end of its second decade -- "the terrible Twentieth."  That was before the Holocaust and before the nuclear age.

Lipstick perhaps doesn't cure the ills of a society that precipitates such immense wrongs.  But it can help when there's little to appease the pervasive ills of an age.

Who knew so little could do so very much?

Thanks, Banksy.  Keep talking.

In Time of War I: Bedlam

London WWII : Blitzed

Blitz noun: An intensive or sudden military attack.  Londoners survived the Blitz.  literal: London during both world wars was blitzed. figurative (heard on a sidewalk this afternoon): Last night I got totally blitzed.

Most everyone is well aware that London was heavily bombed during WWII.  But during the First World War, German aircraft -- both dirigibles (blimps) and planes -- bombed London.  For example, on 4 September 1917, RAF pilot Cecil Lewis was in London when one an attack from a blimp occurred.  The Germans were trying to hit Somerset House, important to the war effort, but hit the Savoy hotel (the bomb went through four floors), with another bomb falling by Cleopatra's Needle along the Thames embankment.  The damage that Lewis describes in his memoir Sagitarius Rising has been left just as it was: pierced bronze sphinxes (holes today that you can put your fingers into) and chipped granite stonework.

Cleopatra's Needle: Damage to Stone and Bronze Sphinx (Photo: author)

St. Paul's Cathedral suffered damage during the second war, some remnants of which have been left in the stone on the back of the cathedral.  The remarkable photos of it during the blitz impress, not least when you consider that people were actually atop the church during the bombing to put out fires.

St. Paul's during a Night of Bombing

St. Paul's: Interior Damage

Churchill carried the English through, in part by his tough wit and good humor.  Wit: one instance was while he visited America.  A woman admonished him when he requested a "breast" of chicken for dinner: 

Woman: "Winston, in America we don't say that."

Churchill: "Madame: what do you call it, then?"

Woman: "We call it 'white meat.'"

The next day the woman received a corsage from Churchill that bore a note: "Madame: you may pin this corsage on your white meat."

But Churchill's sterner stuff helped carry England through the war.  Hitler had said early in their attacks, "in three weeks England would have a neck wrung like a chicken."  When England remained standing (albeit alone as Italy and France made a separate peace), Churchill remarked Hitler's failed agenda: "Some chicken! Some neck!" [Link]

In the program notes for Terence Rattingan's play Flare Path (about British a bomber crew during the war), there was a criticism that England committed war crimes by bombing German civilians.  It is not an irony that Hitler had decreed to the German people that there were no civilians in Germany: they were -- every one of the women, children, and men -- combatants.  In consequence, they inherited the war their chosen leaders gave them.  Churchill set the mode -- if such a war was necessary:

There is only one thing that will...bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack...upon the Nazi homeland.  We must be able to overwhelm him by this means, without which I do not see a way through.

Max Hastings (quoting Churchill, above, in the programme guide for Rattigan's play) sees this comment as revealing Churchill's "desperation."  Far from it.  It is utter common sense.  This was to nip the war in the bud, something that did not happen in the First World War as Churchill -- a soldier in that earlier event -- well knew.  This was experience talking, not desperation.  To kill the German chicken, it must be done quickly and thoroughly.

After all, the World War, like a game of football, was already into its second half, as everyone in Europe knew.

A woman in a restaurant in Honfleur, France, said this to me (in French) as we talked about the two wars: "two times the Germans were here.  When again?!"  I had never before, nor have since, heard a French person express that.  It was the same sense that Churchill knew: it must be stopped this time or it would continue.

Germany is a different country from what it then was, despite prejudices and propensities that have continued there just as they have in any other place on the earth.  The lessons of wars -- any wars from those at Illium or Iraq -- are these.

War is beyond any possible measure for its separations, for its griefs upon griefs, which are the real losses.  These are losses beyond all the materiel, prosperity, and accumulated culture and wealth despoiled in a conflagration.  What is the area or volume -- the squared or cubed dimensions -- of suffering in war?  That is unanswerable and is like someone asking "is the color yellow round or square?"  War is of a nature that it cannot, for its suffering, be defined or measured.

What strikes me about all war is seen in the parallel to the playground bully: war is a heyday for the bully when he is in the ascendancy -- and when he deludes himself about having a "right" to violent means toward a "justified" end.  These mental constructs are lies which bullies tell themselves, lies that everyone but the bully can see through.  And so, the Germans had on their military belt buckles in both world wars the motto "Gott mit Uns" (God with Us) -- as so many armies throughout the millenniums have believed of their self-justified causes.

 

But always, when the war comes home to the fascist bully, when he has picked on a foe beyond his ability to beat, that's when (sudden irony!) the returned violence is perceived as a moral wrong, and the bully sees himself as a victim.  The bully cannot operate without a sense of his own entitlement, the self-induced blindness and indifference toward, the wrongs he inflicts upon others.  These are the luxuries that bullies cannot do without.  Responsible and moral souls have no such luxury.

But as to wars fought solely as a defense, the war that England met which they faced with immeasurable bravery -- there is the paragon of keeping calm and carrying on.  It means standing up to a bully no matter the outcome, to protect those without help, to physically stop the bully.  It means using force and violence.  There is no other way.  You can't sit down to tea with him; in his lust for the toys of power, he cannot hear any language but his own, cannot hear any sense of reason.  And anyone who speaks against his aims is, of course, an enemy.

 

He is a three-year-old in a tantrum wanting what he cannot have and is unfit to remain in polite company.  The toy he is not entitled to must be pried from his hand.  He may well be and should be soundly spanked.  And...he will always consider himself to be the righteous party violated and unjustly treated.

Set all this aside for one other consideration on war.

It is a fitting irony that the Imperial War Museum (which many of my students will visit tomorrow) sits on what was the site of the Victorian insane asylum "Bedlam."  War is insane.  To be good at war is an imperative in this world, a necessary evil to protect one's citizens and to enforce a modicum of law in the world.  As Churchill duly and reverently pointed out, those of us living owe immeasurable debt to those who fought and died so that we might live and live freely.  But to prefer and precipitate war without actual cause or provocation (I know...there's the rub) -- that is the epitome of insanity.

Three scholars of WWI, Becker, Andoin-Rouzeau, and Temerson, have asked what war means for everyone involved in it.  Their question assumes that there are the dead -- of course, a given.  But then, for those of us who remain, there is this question:

What is the weight of the dead upon the living?

That may well be the most prescient and sane question about war that we can ask, especially if we answer it very clearly before entering a war.

One-Time Bedlam: the Imperial War Museum
Honoring the Fallen while Documenting the Insanity of Wars

WWII Bedlam war death Churchill Hitler Justice e London St. Paul's bombing Blitz

A Spire or Two

Dreaming Spires

Oxford, a town of "dreaming spires," was full of carnations and champagne yesterday.  The Oxford students are in the midst of their exams, wearing a white carnation if they have completed their first exam, a pink if beyond their second, and a scarlet if they have finished all their exams.  Add to the scarlet carnation a party hat, a bottle of champers, plenty of confetti, a noise maker, and other essentials, including last but foremost friends in the college garden.

The honey-colored stone of the old buildings glows in the sun.  Bells in towers are ringing someplace regularly.  But the city itself -- even if you take a walking tour from an informed guide -- is "an impenetrable fortress" as one author put it.  The university must be experienced by a longer stay and one that is experienced on the inside.  Period.  If one cannot be a student of Oxford, it will never be the same.  A conference, a short course, or some such event will give some vague inkling of the life inside.  But it's not a degree from here in any sense.  A walking tour -- unequivocally -- will not avail, albeit the facts one learns through such an event might be interesting in themselves.  But you will stand out painfully.

For all that has remained the same over the centuries, some aspects of Oxford today have changed very significantly in the last twenty five years since I was first here.  All but a few of the cobblestone streets have gone -- paved over.  There are no lasting monuments for those who visit, of course.  Rather, as appropriate, the colleges remain monuments to the minds not only shaped here but also those minds that influence us -- no matter how distant we may be mentally or physically from Oxford -- those influences coming down to us from social, political, scientific, or educational theories and reforms.  I forgot literary.  Odd, that, given why I'm here.

It can also be an intensely affected city.  In presenting a paper at Hertford College some years back, the company of professors greeted one another in a large common room with wines and bites (the puns here are appropriate: one evening two professors whined at each other until very nearly -- and dead seriously -- came to blows over an insignificant point about Evelyn Waugh in WWII).

But that first evening, a young student approached me, asking in the thickest Oxford accent I'd heard before or since. "So, you're from AYE-oh-wauh, auhn't you?"  Yes..., I said.  "We're nay-bauhs" he said.

Really?  I didn't recall an accent anything like this in the mid-west of America.  "Where are you from?"  He pours out the word, so thick that it takes me a moment to understand it, "Oh-Mauh-hauh"  -- that is, Nebraska.  He'd been in Oxford for three years (with mid-year trips back home).  I looked at him in disbelief and inquired about his studies, refusing to believe that an American, mid-western dialect could be so thoroughly obliterated in three years.  Even Hugh Laurie's accent (he was born and raised in Oxford) was nothing near this absurd noise.  Affected or infected?

Overall, education is distinctly and increasingly a business.  The spirit of inquiry is very profitable, and colleges built anywhere from the 1100s to 1500s are housed in buildings that want to fall down, as we surely would want to if we were 500 or more years old.  The colleges need money, not merely to maintain their old and grand buildings but also to maintain their presence and their image.

So, too, in the states.  Image is just about everything, and there the image, including -- if not foremost -- the presence of highly-visible facilities and programs have taken the place of real and patron-funded inquiry, exploration, and learning.  At Oxford, one of the more visible elements being used is one (very large) college hall, Christ Church's, for the Harry Potter movies: it features as the dining hall at Hogwarts.  One must pay to visit the hall, something true of many colleges that allow groups in.

Commercial Venture: Cashing in on Harry P.

Still, I think there must be something of real inquiry somewhere in Oxford as the spires continue to point upwards.

To see Oxford by guided tour -- as with London or any place else -- is to both aid and defeat learning the city.  You stand in a group, which in itself is an eyesore, an embarrassment, and an impediment to people trying to navigate on bikes and afoot around you in the narrow streets and lanes.  You LOOK like a tourist, ACT like a tourist (rubber-necking and bobble-heading), and, frankly ARE a tourist, not a student involved in inquiry.

And such a tour costs money, of course, and then...you hear facts, facts, and more facts, which, as my colleague who arranged the fiasco said, "the students will forget right away."  It's the detachment from the meaning of the place; it doesn't speak to experience.  As a tourist anywhere, you merely gaze upon facades.  "Better a day in thy courts than a thousand outside."  Tours are largely useless.

The spirit of exploration and guided inquiry is that mode of learning by which which we discover, but more: it is that mode by which what we have learned enters our beings.  It's not the mere facts we seek in inquiry; it's a change of being that comes through seeing the world through others' vision -- even if we see only imaginatively and temporarily.  And we remember such inquiry as experiential.  Learning by experience is largely undermined by guided tours, and the spirit breaks by interminable rote and by standing on pavements for what was it...?  Over two hours.

That is not to aspire.

Punting in the Cherwell

But punting is.  For one, it is thoroughly English.  Never doubt it.  Punting is in large part inspiring, and some who aspire to punt merely pole themselves in a circle, hitting other boats and causing chaos that an education in physics should be able to resolve.  Punting is a course in physics itself, a course that many do not pass.  But if you can pole the boat along and steer it well, it's a quiet delight amidst ducks, geese, brightly-beaked little black fowl, and swans.  The ducks, with their young, are a delight, with the yellow, popcorn-brood bobbing along, coming right up to the boats for tidbits -- or is it for champagne?

Yes, after all, one must admit what one learns here, painful realization though it may be.  The ducks follow the punts for one thing only: the drink.  The students have enabled the ducks far too long (centuries, in fact), so that it is now a genetic disposition in them: a punt and a pint.  Oxford has recently opened a REHAB facility for ducks, who, by the way, are quite good punters in their own right (if sober), albeit most of the time they're not able to quite stand up at the stern without falling in.

One Specimen: He Left Aflac for Oxford

We would not be ducking education by drink, punt, or guided tour.  We'd rather be exploring and inquiring.