Oy

HIATT: Just back to the campaign. You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of private …

TRUMP: No …

HIATT: … your private parts.

TRUMP: No, no. No, no. I am not doing that.

HIATT: Do you regret having engaged in that?

TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.

MARCUS: You’re on the cover.

TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it …

TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.

MARUS: You chose to respond.

TRUMP: I had no choice.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it during a debate. Can you explain why you had no choice?

TRUMP: I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”

MARCUS: You told us in the debate ….

TRUMP: And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.

MARCUS: You told us in the debate that you guaranteed there was not another problem. Was that presidential? And why did you decide to do that?

TRUMP: I don’t know if it was presidential, honestly, whether it is or not. He said, ‘Donald Trump has small hands and therefore he has small something else.’ I didn’t say that. And all I did is when he failed, when he was failing, when he was, when Christie made him look bad, I gave him the– a little recap and I said,  and I said, and I had this big strong powerful hand ready to grab him, because I thought he was going to faint. And everybody took it fine. Whether it was presidential or not I can’t tell you. I can just say that what he said was a lie. And everybody, they wanted to do stories on my hands; after I said that, they never did. And then I held up the hand, I showed people the hand. You know, when I’ve got a big audience. So yeah, I think it’s not a question of presidential …

MARCUS: He said he regrets …

HIATT: Okay, let’s move on here. Let’s move on.

TRUMP: I did feel I should respond. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But I felt I should respond because everybody was talking about it.

Or you can support the guy who wants to make Jewish ghettoes in Nazi Germany out of "Muslim neighborhoods" in the U.S.

And scattered across the internet are people who would rather vote for the guy obsessed by his hands than the woman who was once our Secretary of State, just because they won't be able to feel the Bern in November, and they're going to teach America a lesson in rejecting their favored candidate.

The whole thing makes you reconsider not only whether humanity is nature's last word, but whether or not giving everyone the vote is such a good idea, after all.

"And believe me, my admiration for you hasn't died...."

My mind is clearer now
At last, all too well, I can see
Where we all soon will be.

If you strip away,
the myth from the man
you can see where
we all soon will be.

Jesus!  You've started to believe
the things they say of you!
You really do believe,
This talk of God is true!

And all the good you've done
Will soon get swept away
You've begun to matter more
than the things you say!

Holy Week begins again.  Time to dust off the original recording of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and start playing it loudly when no one else is at home (why inflict my memories on my family?).  That's the music for Holy Week at Chez Advents:  "Jesus Christ Superstar" (original record recording, please, scratches, pops, and all.  Ian Gillan is the ONLY Jesus allowed to sing the role, IMHO.) and Bach's Easter Oratorio.  On Easter, of course.  Holy Week should be conducted with the meditation that "All your followers are blind!  Too much heaven on their minds!"  But this time around I hear the words of Judas anew.  What would it mean for Jesus to matter more than the things he said?

It's a Paul v. the Gospels question, but not the simplistic question simplistic critics of Paul think is so fatal to Pauline studies and the Pauline letters.   What Jesus did matters more to Paul than the things he said because Paul only quotes Jesus saying some of the words of institution (as we call them now) of the eucharisto (as he called it then).  It's the gospels that give us the parables and the statements about Peter ("Rock") and the miracles.  Paul only has the resurrection to rely on; but it's enough for him.

So, first:  which should matter more?  The resurrection; or the sayings of Jesus?  Well, if you go with the resurrection, then it seems that is paramount, because that is now seen as the salvific act by which sinful humanity is spared the depredations of damnation.  But if you go with what Jesus said, then the focus on the resurrection (and so salvation) is the wrong place to put the emphasis, as it tends to let you off the hook for what you do, so long as you believe the right things about the resurrection on any given Sunday morning.

Do my prejudices show yet?

It really is the dividing point of Christianity.  Easter is the most important date on the Christian calendar for the Orthodox Church.  Fortunately for the Protestant churches Easter is always on a Sunday; it isn't the moveable feast that Christmas is (this will be a problem again this year).  But in secular Christianity, Christmas is the big holiday.  Easter is relegated to hats and clothes (not so much any longer, but once.  I'm thinking that was more American aberration than not, but, no matter.) and colored eggs and chocolate bunnies.  Even churches have Easter egg hunts on Sunday after the celebration of the Resurrection; and we jammed Passion Sunday into Palm Sunday because otherwise nobody would be in church to remember the Passion story (be honest; how many people do you know attend Good Friday services?  If done right, they are seriously depressing.  If done wrong, they aren't worth the bother.  I only remember Maundy Thursday service in my Presbyterian childhood; an evening communion service, but nothing else until Sunday morning, and lots of cheery sunrise services around town.  Get up early and have the rest of the day to yourself.  Yes, I am cynical; why do you ask?).  Easter is just the other Sunday when you should be in church (well, Christmas Eve is almost never on Sunday, and when it is, do you go in the morning, or in the evening?  Never both, amirite?).

Besides, the eggs and chocolate are for the kids.  I mean, you can get a box of Godiva with affecting scenes of Spring on the outside, but chocolate bunnies are definitely not for a palate craving high-dollar chocolates.

So, which really matters more?  To the "are you saved?" crowd, it's the Resurrection, whether they realize it or not.  The whole question of faith comes down to "letting Jesus into your heart", and that means accepting the sacrifice on the cross which paid in God's blood for your sin (Anselm's satisfaction theory, but there are so many variations the distinctions begin to blur unless you are really, really interested in it.  Don't even  get me started on TULIP.  Please, just don't.)  But that's the problem with salvation in Christianity:  it's used to divide the sheep from the goats, and to make sure you are among the sheep.

An idea which would appall Jean Cauvin, by the way.  Which is kinda funny.

Anyway, as I've noted before:

I've yet to meet a person whose theology emphasized individual salvation who didn't use that emphasis to deny comfort and succor to others.  Oh, they make nice noises about helping the destitute, but as far as really doing it, not much happens.  Individual salvation means you are individually responsible for the state of your immortal soul.  And if you are individually responsible for the state of your soul, you are individually responsible for the state of your life.  In this understanding, the community doesn't exist to take you in, it exists to set you straight, to straighten you out, to determine whether or not you are worthy of admission to the company of the Blessed.  Any help is short term and blunted, and meant to get you back to being responsible for yourself again, the way God intended! 

Which is as good a way as any to get me around to this meditation on Psalm 73 by Martin Buber, courtesy of Pastor Dan:

The good, says the Psalmist, is ‘to draw near to God’. He does not say that those near to God are good. But he does call the bad ‘those who are far from God’. In the language of modern thought that means that there are men who have no share in existence, but there are no men who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. ‘Nearness’ is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives.

Of course "drawing near to God" is, in salvific terms, being "saved."  Well, in certain salvation theories; and there's the rub.  How do you draw nearer to God by drawing away from other people, or by drawing a circle round those inside the blessed, and those outside (the damned)?  Is what Jesus said at all relevant to what Jesus did, to who Jesus was?  Is the Psalm as Buber reads it relevant at all?

Can we possess the salvation of the Cross, the blessings of the resurrection?  Or can we only share in them?  Paul never hoards them for only those who appreciate the gift; he throws it wildly, like seed.  He scatters it to anyone who wants to listen.

This idea Judas expresses, what Jesus did v. what Jesus said, comes up all the time.  Just this morning in an interview at Salon about the bombings in Brussels, Pastor Dan said this:

You mention this in passing: The matter of praying for enemies, including violent ones. To what extent does that make sense, and do you feel conflicted by the issue?

I don’t feel conflicted by it, but then I’m a conflicted Christian. I don’t expect it to make much sense to someone who isn’t. From the Christian perspective, we always have to come back to the perspective that Jesus died for us all. He died for his enemies as much – if not more – than his friends.

And not just for the good people.

Maybe it's just an easier shorthand to refer to the deed rather than the words, because you don't really connect the Crucifixion to your enemies except through the words of Jesus; and, not coincidentally, the words of Paul.  But to explain that you have to put the words in context, and as Pastor Dan notes, that's not a simple task.  Easier to mention the deed (actions speak louder than words), even though the interpretation of that deed is itself a complex exegesis.

Not for nothing I'll quote the conclusion of that interview, because it saves me writing it out again, and because it points to the true importance of the Crucifixion, the lesson that has to be learned over and over again, the lesson of Holy Week and why it isn't about "just us":

Today you tweeted: “Reminder: this week we remember a man tortured to death as a potential threat to the security state.” I think I know what you mean here, but if you could tell us a little more about where you’re going with that.

The Romans were literally an occupying force in the state of Israel; it was a military occupation. The way Jesus’ enemies got the Romans to execute him was to say, “This guy wants to lead a rebellion against your occupation.”

And the Romans take the bait. If you think about what happens in that scene with Pontius Pilate: Pilate isn’t even convinced that Jesus is the threat he’s made out to be. But, he’s not going to take any chances, so he goes ahead, and kills him.

Because Jesus is a nobody. Pilate pays no price for executing just some other guy who’s getting wise about our presence in Palestine. He’s not even a military threat – but he might possibly be one. And the response is, “Torture him, kill him. Be done with it.”

Now, understanding that story, whose side do you think we’re supposed to be on? I don’t think you can really hear that story, and take it in, and not think that you’re supposed to be on Jesus’s side. And the consequence of that is you have to reject that kind of state-sponsored violence against powerless people.

One of the points is, This government is repressive and dysfunctional. And Jesus comes in way to say, both to the oppressed and the oppressors: “This isn’t working. There is a better way to do things.”

When you start to get ahold of that, it opens up all these different possibilities. We don’t have to act in a way that’s taking advantage of one another. We don’t have to act in a way that’s violence toward one another. Life can be more than it is right now.

"Always hoped that I'd be an apostle; knew that I would make it if I tried.  Then when we've retired we can write the Gospels, so they'll still talk about us when we've died. " Almost 45 years later, those words till conjure up certain images.

Sorry; the stereo is going as I type.

The message of Jesus is easily encapsulated in the basileia tou theou, a phrase I refuse to translate because all the translations mislead into "kingdom" and "empire" and "God" in ways we're trained to listen for and understand, and I want to wear away all those meanings and plant the seed in fresh ground.  New wine in new wineskins, and all that.  Besides, I like the echoes of "basilica" there; it's appropriate, in its own way.  It's easily encapsulated there, but it's not easily conveyed there.    Which is fine; it shouldn't be easily conveyed.  You have to study the words of Jesus to understand it; and you have to study the deeds, to.

Which is not to say Jesus should matter more than the things he said.  Even God doesn't earn that distinction.  That's the creation of an idol; a figure of stone or wood or even feathers, an object of human creation, a golden calf.  We don't need that.

St. Patrick's Day 2016

Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.

High King of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright Heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Words: Ancient Irish; translated to English by Mary Elizabeth Byrne, 1905. You may also find a version of the words in Eleanor Hull’s Poem Book of the Gael (1912).

Music: “Slane,” of Irish folk origin. Slane Hill is about ten miles from Tara in County Meath. It was on Slane Hill around 433 AD that St. Patrick defied a royal edict by lighting candles on Easter Eve. High King Logaire of Tara had decreed that no one could light a fire before Logaire began the pagan spring festival by lighting a fire on Tara Hill. Logaire was so impressed by Patrick’s devotion that, despite his defiance (or perhaps because of it?), he let him continue his missionary work. The rest is history.

I recognize the story about the music may be apocryphal; but it's worth passing on.

The definitive recorded performance is by Van Morrison, with the Chieftans, on Hymns to the Silence.

(repeated from 2005, when, I now realize, the translation above was 100 years old.)

Just Us

Lots of thumb sucking about the Merrick Garland nomination.

Salon has two or three articles (daily!) which will lament one non-liberal aspect or another of Judge Garland's record.  TPM, on the other hand, has two or three articles (daily!) about what a brilliant political maneuver it is for Obama to nominate Garland, as it puts the GOP between a rock and a hard place, and tightens the screws on the vise (sorry, early morning metaphors come out of the blender.  And as for people complaining about English spelling, how do you distinguish "vice" from "vise" without spelling?  We have a lot of words like that, because English has too many words and not enough sounds to accommodate them all.  Through and threw, for example; dear and deer; meat and meet; wait and weight; know and no; the list goes on.  But I digress.....)

And Slate makes the perfectly reasonable argument that Garland is a stalking horse for a fight between Obama and Congress.

Most of the complaints about Garland (which you can find, for a short time, at Salon; or there are links in articles at Slate or TPM) are about how illiberal he is, what a disappointment he actually is to the liberal Democratic base, etc.  There are comments about how he will be another Anthony Kennedy, as if that is the worst thing possible.  No, the worst thing possible is that he be another Scalia; or, worse yet, an absolute cipher like Thomas.

Frankly, I'm tired of the Supreme Court being so political.  Scalia reveled in that role.  He enjoyed writing outrageous opinions that got people arguing about what he said.  He wanted the attention.  Alito is as bad as Scalia, but nobody notices him.  Thomas is as thoughtful as mud, and as stuck in one place as the proverbial stick; but who cares?  Scalia turned the Court into a WWW cage match, and any shredding of the Court's reputation for august and objective review of the law was destroyed by the man.

And we need to replace that fig leaf.

Judicial realism is a theory of jurisprudence that arose from sitting judges who observed their own behavior as judges and came to the conclusion they decided on a "hunch" (It's actually called the "judicial hunch" in jurisprudence) what the right outcome of a given case should be, and then applied legal reasoning to get there.  The legal reasoning is the fig leaf, meant to justify the conclusions of the Court and essentially sell it as justice.  It's not a perfect system, but it's better than all the others; as someone once said of democracy.

Think of the cases recently where this hasn't really worked.  Hobby Lobby.  Citizens United.  Bush v. Gore.  Do we really need to politicize the Court further by making every appointment to the highest bench in the land a political mud fight which makes shutting down the government look tame by comparison?  Must every battle be absolute, Robert Bork defeated on one side, Lani Guinier on the other?

For the sake of the entire judicial system:  no.

Garland's nomination may well be simply a clever political play by Obama.  Or maybe he thinks Garland deserves to be on the Supreme Court, and the nation deserves to have him as a Justice.  Heaven knows, the country could do worse than have more Justices who simply want to decide cases, than Justices who want to make a point against all those they disagree with.  We have cable news for that.

"Context is all."

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first—rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.  --John Lennon, 1966

I remember hearing about this, but this is the first time I ever read the words on context, or even knew what else Lennon said.

When I heard about the interview, the line about Jesus was all anyone wanted to talk about.  I was more sanguine, even then (I was a dour child).  I figured he was right, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but why did Jesus have to be popular?  Now, looking at it in context, I shrug.  Because I'm 50 years older?  Maybe.  Because rock 'n' roll is gone and Christianity is still here?  Partially.  But mostly because this critique of Christianity:  "Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me," is as old as Christianity itself.  And it's a little like Linus' famous cry in "Peanuts:"  "I love mankind!  It's people I can't stand!"

Why do you think Christianity has fractured into so many churches and denominations over two millennia?  And yet, Christianity is still here.  No brag, just fact, as Will Sonnett used to say.  I'm not lording it over the 20 something John Lennon, or dancing on his grave.  It's just really an unremarkable statement, even 50 years ago.  It's not terribly insightful.  It's meant to be daring, a little boy sticking his tongue out at the bishop; but really it's just childish, rather than wise.

This stuff is much worse, even 50 years later:

“Show business belongs to the Jews,” Cleaves quotes “The Beatles” collectively as saying, in a version of her reporting that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in July of 1966. “It’s part of the Jewish religion.” (In a press conference in Los Angeles in August, Lennon tersely admitted that the quote came from him: “You can read into it what you like, you know. It's just a little old statement. It's not very serious.” The crowd of journalists didn’t ask him to follow up.)

Lennon also tells Cleave that he is considering sending his son Julian to a French lycée in London, but muses “I feel sorry for him, though. I couldn’t stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren’t they?” Ringo Starr, meanwhile, refers to the band as being so close they’re like “Siamese quads eating out of the same bowl.” He jokes of his wife, Maureen, that “I own her, of course.” She was 16 when they met—he was six years older—and “her parents signed her over to me when I married her.” Paul McCartney decries racism in America, “a lousy country where anyone who is black is made to seem a dirty nigger.” That line made it to the cover of Datebook, too, above Lennon’s Jesus quip.

Of course, the boys are simply repeating what they grew up learning.  And what it proves is that Donald Trump isn't tapping into anything the British didn't bequeath to us as a culture long, long ago.  We love mankind; it's people we can't stand.

Fight the Power

When I read the headline here, my first thought was Candide; specifically, the conclusion of Voltaire's wonderful novel, where Candide decides the only thing he can do is learn the lesson tending his own garden; and it is a lesson, says Candide, we all should learn.

Sadly, that wasn't quite the message Daniel Shultz (f/k/a "Pastor Dan") had in mind.  I still think it should have been.

He's right, American Protestants are too fractious a lot to group into one monolith split into two halves:  "Progressive/liberal" and "fundamentalist/evangelical."  The astute reader will note we aren't even touching on the Catholics and Orthodox varieties of American Christians.  They aren't monolithic, either, not even within their own denominations.  There's quite a distance between the U.S. Conference of Bishops and Catholic theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez and Jan Sobrino (prominent liberation theologians, the latter a Jesuit, IIRC).  But that's not the real problem with laying a smackdown on Donald Trump and his religious supporters because a) progressive/liberal Protestants (at least!) don't like Donald Trump and b)  it isn't Two Corinthians.

Stop me if you've heard this one....

It's a curious thing, but people in general resent the evangelical efforts of more conservative Christians; the ones whose theology teaches them that the Great Commission is a part of their soteriology; that their very salvation is dependent upon evangelizing others.  At the same time, when it suits their interests, non-evangelicals and non-Christians want progressive/liberal Christians to proselytize by countering the message of Donald Trump and his religious supporters.  Which pretty much reduces us to a useful club you want to wield when it suits you, and then put back in the golf bag when you're done with it.

Pardon me if I decline to serve as your best weapon.

But beyond that there's the whole problem of:  "What's in it for me?"  To decry Donald Trump because of his religious support is to weigh in on what kind of religious believer Donald Trump is.  And why on earth would I want to do that?  I grew up among well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) people determined to determine the quality of my religious faith.  Why would I want to engage in the same practice I despised in my youth?  I grew up realizing faith was a matter of actions, not words; but also, as I learned the language in seminary, to engage in judgment is to put yourself under judgment, too.  If I explain why Donald Trump is unworthy from a religious (more properly, theological) standpoint, don't I put my theology on trial and subject it to judgment?  So who am I to judge?  Do I hold an exalted position because I disagree with the supporters of Donald Trump? I don't support Donald Trump, period.  I am a Christian.  Do those two things require that I judge others for their support of Donald Trump?

Why?  Again, what's in it for me?  Is there a moral duty that I judge others?  As far as I can tell, that would run directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  It may be I strongly disagree with the religious opinions of Donald Trump and his supporters; but I may disagree with yours, too.  If I start with them, why should I stop with you?  No, you don't want my opinion; you are seeking what you think will be my power; my power for you.

Again, I decline to be your best weapon.

My theology teaches me to preach the basiliea tou theou by living the basiliea tou theou, and to the extent I do that, I consider myself faithful.  What my theology doesn't teach me is to set myself up in opposition to anyone else, not even the world.  I have no interest in reshaping the world to my perception by force:  by "saving" anyone or by gaining enough political power I can impose my theology/morality on others, or by proving others wrong by shouting my religious beliefs louder than they shout theirs.

If you want to do that, go right ahead.  But don't try to tell my I'm not doing it right because I won't accommodate you.  My beliefs are not a matter of your convenience.  Too many have already leant their beliefs to the convenience of political power; why should I lend mine?

On the other hand, Jonathan Orbell has a point:

Some of us feel a moral impulse to condemn the ugly sentiments at work in the Trump camp. But we have to keep the broader structural realities in mind—deindustrialization, an unequal economy recovery, the dissolution of the middle class.

A look at Trump’s most recent wins at the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries as well as the Nevada caucus show that the reductive dismissiveness of progressive Christians is turning dangerous. A deeper, more graceful introspection to the root causes of Trump’s ascendance could go far in combating the very forces that have made him a viable presidential candidate.

Considering the stakes, we can’t afford not to do so.

I'm not so sure the utilitarian argument ("We can't afford not to do so") is the right one.  I prefer the theological argument:  countering the root causes of Trump's ascendance that Orbell describes is part of preaching and practicing the basiliea tou theou.   We don't do it (those who agree with me, I mean) because we have to; we do it because we are called to.  Maybe there's a compulsion there, still; but it's a compulsion with a different root.

The answer, after all, is not to fight power with power; the theological answer is to fight power with powerlessness.

Let's talk about death

I swear to God, when you were young you used to gather your cloak about you and go where you wanted to go.  But when you have grown old, you'll stretch out your arms, and someone else will get you ready and take you where you don't want to go."--John 21:18, SV

You have to imagine a goofy-looking skinny guy in a yellow raincoat with a water-proof hat on, seated, holding a duck, and looking earnestly at the camera as he says:

"Let's talk about death."

Except he says "ducks."  It's an actor portraying a character from "Greater Tuna," the play about small-town Texas that almost made a career for the two actors who wrote and acted it for many years.  The line doesn't appear in the play; it's from an ad for the play that ran so many times I remember the ad better than most of the play itself, which I saw not quite as many times as the ad.  I do remember another line from the play, an advertising slogan for the town's (the smallest town in Texas, supposedly) gun store, run by DeeDee and named for her:  "If DeeDee's can't kill it, it's immortal!"

Let's talk about death.

Interesting book review at Slate on this topic, again concerned with how we die.  The one book I've read on this topic, back in seminary, doesn't get mentioned specifically, but does point to where these conversations usually go:  nowhere.  That book, How We Die, made a splash when it appeared, gave its author some celebrity, won some notable awards, and disappeared without a trace.    Books do that.  Rare is the book that actually changes the conversation, and it is the conversation about death that The Good Death wants to prompt.  I know this because the author of that book actually responded to comments at the Slate review, which kept the comments from descending into the usual internet blather.

The "good death," as I've said before, is our new obsession.  In the mid-19th century when coma was an undefined term and hadn't yet entered the medical lexicon, much less the common vocabulary, the concern was with premature burial.  Poe didn't invent that anxiety, he exploited it.  People who were thought dead were buried alive; at least that was the story.  Suddenly every death had the potential of being, not final, but merely postponed until a date to be announced later.  When Twain quipped that the rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated he was picking up on this still-remembered fear as much as mocking his reappearance in public life.  And then, of course, he had the good grace to die when he wanted to; when Halley's comet returned to this neck of the solar system.

Good death, indeed.

I've actually participated in one "good death," and it was good.  The father was dying (of cancer, IIRC) and hospice care was treating him at home.  As the family pastor I was there the night he died. It wasn't easy on the family, but it was easier than standing vigil in a hospital room.  He died in his own bed.

Then again, I've known people who refused to allow the funeral of their spouse in the church they'd attended together all their adult lives, because they didn't want the memories of the place tainted by seeing the loved one there in a casket.  Imagine returning to the bedroom your spouse died in, much less the bed.  How many of us could do that?

Death is a very personal thing.  A "good death" for you might be a terrible death for me.  And then there are all the societal concerns with death.   We investigate deaths in ways we don't other incidents.  This morning there is news of a traffic jam due to the investigation of an accident that involved at least one fatality.  "Steer it clear it" is the law here; you don't wait for the police to show up to restore traffic flow, and in minor accidents there's little investigation at all.  But in the case of death, care must be taken, responsibility assessed much more seriously.  Which sets up this exchange in comments at that Slate article:

Bradley WilliamsWe do need to read and digest the language of the assisted suicide Oregon model laws/bills before we expound on our positions.

They are riddled with loopholes that work together to eviscerate the flaunted safeguards.

For example how many times have you nodded your head when the proponents declared that the lethal dose must be self-administered?

Well, read the language of the law/bill and you will find that there is no means provided to insure that marketing point. For example “self-administrate” was mentioned 6 times in the 20 page Colorado HB 16-1054 and yet there was no means provided to confirm that the lethal dose was forced on not.

In fact what is provided in all the bills/laws is that there may be no investigations allowed after the death. This is a red flag to repair our public safety net.

According to their own records in OR and WA a dangerous public policy that is being established is a low bar of "medical standard of care" is poisoning for people that "fear" the loss of autonomy.

We are all at risk of abuse by these poorly composed laws/bills.

PS: What other activities in the US prohibit investigations?

Ann Neumann @Bradley Williams There are myriad dangerous substances that we regulate quite well in society. I fear that opponents of aid in dying are stuck in a look where they demand proof of wrongdoing, coercion and elder abuse and when they don't find it, they say, Look! Just because it can't be proved doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The laws are quite specific and not a case of abuse has come out of Oregon after being on the books for more than two decades.

I looked and looked for clear cases of abuse or coercion. All those who claim it exists have ideological reasons to do so. I'd love a good argument for how these laws endanger elders, who are miserable and suffering and dying. I've yet to find one.

Pamlet @Ann Neumann @Bradley Williams Well, what is concerning is more subtle cases of coercion -- the "I don't want to be a burden" people.  Or the people whose lives could be made more bearable by appropriate mental health or palliative care.  There are so many problems with the way healthcare is delivered in this country that I'd like to be absolutely sure all of that is in place before I feel there's a level playing field where people are making this decision from the best state possible.

I'm never comfortable with claims that the law prohibits something that seems to be commonsense and especially common in all other matters of death (a cause of death must be officially established, no matter how cursory the procedure for doing so), so I can't speak to the allegation that Oregon law prohibits investigations of assisted suicides.  It seems pretty dubious to me, in fact; but the final comment raises the more serious question (and Ann Neumann ducks the issue of those legal questions entirely, which was disappointing):  the "subtle cases of coercion."

Ms. Neumann has an entire conversation in the comments about how we monetize life (and we do) and how we hide that fact from ourselves.  But that's part of the problem of the "level playing field" and how we, as a society, establish that people are "making this decision from the best state possible."  For all the talk about "liberty" in the comments, choosing to die (i.e., suicide) is not an individual decision.  Society has always had an interest in the deaths of any one of its members.  It's rather absurdly libertarian to say that it doesn't.  But I can tell you, as the child of parents still living and now living in town near me, the idea that parents are a burden on their children is a real one; and it can shape the decisions parents (and children) make.

I don't mean anything dramatic by that; but the elderly can easily feel they are more burden than blessing, and while such thoughts don't always turn to suicide, they do cloud the pleasure of living  It can be a slippery slope down to "it's better for everyone if I just die now."  It also gives us some comfort that we will be in control to the very end of our days.  But often, we simply aren't.

I have been in the room when a family member was asked by the doctor whether to remove care or continue it.  That is not a simple decision, and it shouldn't be.  The fact is, just as in the case of a suicide, you live with the consequences of that decision, no matter what it is.  Death by "natural causes" is always easier to reconcile than death by assistance, or by removing machines or restraining efforts.  My parents have "DNR" orders, but someone will still ask me, when the time comes, what I want done.  I've seen people face that question, and it's never as simple a decision as you think it will be.

And until I have to answer the question, I honestly do not know what my answer will be.  Change the facts, change the outcome, and that's the problem.  We never know the facts ahead of time, and while there are cases of people being kept alive because of some hope of recovery which has actually long passed (one such incident is noted in the Salon review, citing the book), when we review such cases we are never the ones who have to live with the responsibility of turning off the machine, of letting our loved one die.

There is a reason we struggle with that; and it's a good reason.

"Good death" sounds so good; but who is it good for?  Us?  The person who is dying?  "Whose life is it, anyway?," was once the question.  But the right question is:  whose death is it?  While everyone dies alone, death is still a social activity.  It involves people other than the person dying.  "No man is an island, separate unto himself," Donne wrote; and he was right.  Every person's death involves me, especially when that person is a family member.  I've been in the room when people died, and the relief of knowing you did all you could, and their time had simply come, is palpable.  Or the comfort of knowing you let them die as they wished, in their own bed, among family, doing nothing more than alleviating what pain you could, can also be a comfort.  But change the family, change the outcome:  one size does not fit all, and circumstances can change at every moment.  "Good death" is a good idea, but you have no guarantee you'll get that.  And you have no guarantee you'll leave that for your family.

The biggest problem with death is that it is final, and we have such a problem imagining that for ourselves, even for our loved ones.  I don't talk to my parents daily, but I still can if I choose to.  I try to imagine what life will be like when they are gone, but if I'm honest with myself, I can't.   I may find it easier to accept their deaths than they found it to be for their parents, if only because I'm older now than my parents were when my grandparents died, one by one.  But am I so old I won't miss my mother and father when they are no more?

"My death, is it possible?"  Word comes today of the funeral of Nancy Reagan, which order of service she specified from the opening tune to the closing song.   It left me wondering if she specified that women wear dresses and no clogs would be allowed.   I'm honestly glad I never had to do a funeral like that; funerals were my domain, since weddings were the province of bridezillas and their mothers (it was usually the mothers).  I could do a funeral as I saw fit, maybe working in music that was requested, but even that was rare.  No doubt such direction from beyond the grave suited the family; one less things to worry about, one more memory of the dearly departed.  But if the family had decided on their own service, on doing a memorial that remembered the woman they loved, what could Nancy Reagan have done about it?

"My death, is it possible?"

Funerals are for the living, not the dead.  I even did a funeral for an atheist.  His wife was the church organist, he had wanted nothing to do with the church.  I didn't even know she was married until he died.  It was an interesting funeral because it was at the church, as she wanted.  His friends were perplexed by the ritual, the prayers, the funeral sermon.  I didn't care.  I did it for her.  He was beyond caring, but she wasn't.  I wasn't defiant; I was just calm.  It was so much easier than doing the graveside service for my beloved uncle, while I was in seminary.  He was a preacher's kid, but he'd left the church as soon as he could and never looked back.  I did it for my aunt, for my cousins I am still closest to of all the cousins (his wife was/is my mother's twin; my father was his best friend since college).  I did it for them, but it certainly wasn't for me.

Let's talk about death.

Is it a process, or a final event?  I first realized that question while teaching "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."  Is that title about the entire story, or about the final sentence?  "The Death of a Salesman" raises the same question:  the entire play, or just the last few lines of Act II, and the epilogue?   Yes; no; maybe.

Let's talk about death.

It is Lent and two weeks from today will be Good Friday.  I will not observe it.  I will be taking my mother to see her twin sister, who now lives near her children, about 2 hours away.  My aunt has dementia; Alzheimer's, senility, call it what you like, it means the same thing.  She is not as lost as Alzheimer's patients I've known, but she lives in a world of memory and fantasy now.  She is confused.  She is lost to us.  My mother is going to see her for what will probably be the last time.

We're going on Good Friday, because it's a good day to travel.  We will be observing Good Friday.  We just won't realize it.

Let's talk about death.

There is no sacrament of death in the Christian church.  Thomas Merton pointed that out, explaining that the ashes on Ash Wednesday neither started Lent (Lent begins the first Sunday of Lent, not before) nor death.  But the closest the church comes to paying attention to death anymore is during Lent.  We stare it in the face on Good Friday.  Which is why so few of us gather together at a church. We don't want to talk about death.  We don't want to share it.  We want Easter Sunday:  candles and lilies and sunrise services and hymns about life and victory.  O death, where is thy sting?  Back there, on Good Friday.  We took that day off.  We skipped over it.  We slept in so we could get up early on Sunday during daylight savings time and see the sun come up and sing a hymn to it.

Wallace  Stevens has nothing on us.  Wallace Stevens was a piker.  Wallace Stevens as a porto-New Atheist, thinking he understood something we Christians don't.  He was wrong.  We're still pagans at heart.  We'd still rather chant our boisterous devotion to the sun than visit the domain of the blood and sepulcher.  We don't like ghosts either; we don't want to linger on the porch where they might be found, the yawning hole that is indeed the grave of Jesus where he lay.  It reminds us of death, of our death.  We'd rather plan our funerals.

Let's talk about death.

"My death, is it possible?"

God grant me a good death, and if not, at least grant me the ability to find a good death on my own.

You are going home this night to your home of winter,
To your home of autumn, of spring, and of summer;
You are going home this night to your perpetual home,
To your eternal bed, to your eternal slumber.

Sleep you, sleep, and away with your sorrow,
Sleep you, sleep, and away with your sorrow,
Sleep you, sleep, and away with your sorrow,
Sleep, O beloved, in the Rock of the fold.

The shade of death lies upon your face, beloved,
But the Jesus of grace has His hand round about you;
In the nearness to the Trinity farewell to your pains,
Christ stands before you and peace is in His mind.

Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calms.
Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of guidance,
Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves.
Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life
Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life.

Let's not talk about death.  Let's just rest.  Rest is good.

"I dreamt music...."

And oddly enough, it sounded just like something by Vangelis

So today on my local NPR station they ran this episode of "The Engines of our Ingenuity," which points out that:

Research has shown that the brain processes music using absolute pitches. Hook electrodes to the right parts of the brain, run the signals to speakers, and you’ll hear Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in exactly the same key as it was played. This in turn begs the question. If the brain processes actual pitches, not relative pitches, how do we recognize “the same song” when played in another key? Or even more, when we speed it up, change the instrumentation, and add accompaniment?

Or consider how we recognize sound at all. The song of a bird creates a pressure disturbance in the nearby air. This disturbance is carried outward in the form of a pressure change in the surrounding air, otherwise known as a sound wave. When it arrives at our ears, experience tells us it’s the song of a bird.

But here’s something quite remarkable. Suppose that someone is running a lawnmower at the same time the bird is singing. The lawnmower creates its own sound wave. But it doesn’t arrive at the ear as a separate wave. It mingles with the bird’s song and arrives at the ear as a single wave. Yet our brains can clearly and distinctly separate the wave into two sounds – that of a lawnmower and that of a bird. Throw in the whoosh of a passing car and the hum of an air conditioner and we can separate all of them. For our ears and brains it’s easy. Yet, for all practical purposes, it’s impossible for today’s computers.

There’s a lot about music and the brain we don’t understand and perhaps never will. But that shouldn’t stop us from enjoying music’s visceral pleasure, whether found in a grand masterpiece, or just a simple folk tune.

Which made me think of the cave paintings in Lascaux, placed deep underground where the artists had to deliberately search out where to paint their pictures.  Or even the paintings in the Lower Pecos region of Texas; both sites prove art is as fundamental to being human as is food and shelter.  When I was in college my German educated German professor tried to interest us in matters beyond the usual curriculum of American students, i.e., the "classics" of Greek literature.  He explained the theory then extant, that as the people moved to the land we now call Greece they found life so much easier than in northern Europe that arts and philosophy could flourish, because they no longer had to struggle against the elements for mere survival.  It was a common explanation for the rise of religion, too: it became more a part of society as society become more agricultural and therefore more settled.  In other words, as we have leisure we become "more human."

Except, as I say, the cave paintings at Lascaux or the rock paintings in Texas, bespeak a human need to create art, probably connected to a human need for religious expression, and neither depends on first meeting the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs.  At least not at the levels to which we have become accustomed, and which we would consider a minimum.

And now it turns out music is identifiable as part of the very function of our brains; and yet how that works remains a mystery.

Perhaps we will solve that mystery; perhaps we won't.  If we don't, we will probably (extrapolating from current trends, always a mug's game) decide it wasn't that important after all.  But it is something "impossible for today's computers."

So, whither AI?  Do we really foresee the ability to "replicate a human mind"?  I guess it depends on how we define "mind," huh?  As numerous science fiction writers have pointed out, what we might get might well be an emotionless monster, a cybernetic psychopath; if only because we really have no idea what we mean when we say "mind."

How do you replicate that which you cannot know?  Will AI have a subconscious, an ego, id and superego?  Freudian psychology is out of style, so probably no one expects that, now.  But will it have memories?  We still believe an important part of being human is to have memories. Just ask Rachel in "Blade Runner."  She even assays a tune on the piano.

If AI is not religious, artistic, musical; is it still a replication of a human?  The idea of religion alone today prompts the knee jerk response of "Danger, Will Robinson!  Danger!"  Because if we can't have a robot like the one on "Lost in Space," what might we end up with?

There’s nothing wrong with technology, digital or otherwise, as long as we recognize its limits and see it for what it is. ”We’re not against the technology itself,” Keen, author “The Internet is Not the Answer,” pointed out. “There’s a problem not with the technology… but with the ideology around the technology.” He says it’s become a new kind of “liberation theology.” Keen asks: “Who is going to own these platforms?… We haven’t thought this stuff through.” (James Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies was also part of the debate.)

What the happy talk about AI and technology shows is that for some people – even for very smart people like Rothblatt – digital technology has indeed become a religion. And it summons a kind of awe that could be very dangerous.

I don't have any idea how "the ideology around the technology" has "become a new kind of 'liberation theology,' " except to thoroughly misunderstand what liberation theology is (it is a theology which has much more to do with Bernie Sanders praising the Sandinistas than with actualization of the self).  And the question isn't even "Who is going to own these platforms?".  The question is:  what makes us think replicating a "mind" is even possible?

We are trapped in our words in this conversation, and this really isn't a conversation for tyros.  Music can be a profoundly intellectual exercise, as the work of J.S. Bach exemplifies.  But Bach wrote music for humans, not machines, and even his tuning exercises (The Well-Tempered Clavier is meant to, among other things, establish the notes of a properly tuned keyboard.) are profoundly moving, reaching us in ways words simply cannot explain.

And then there's the whole question of hypnosis.  How is it that mere words can be so powerful?  Is that not, too, a function of mind?  Imagination.  A function of mind, or a dereliction of reason?  We've been having this conversation for millennia; the Romantic revolution was the latest irruption in the conversation, and we aren't through discussing it's observations yet.  Can we leave out music, art, creativity, and still have "mind"?  Can we identify these things clearly enough to replicate them?

If the awe is dangerous, it's only dangerous in relation to what it is directed toward.  We need to temper our assurance in what we can make our technology do with a bit more humility about what we don't really understand.

After all, that's been the message of every "mad scientist" story since science fiction created that stereotype.

The Blame Game

So I watched the Democratic debate tonight (Thank you, WAPO, for live streaming it!), and one thing kind of stuck in my craw.

More than once, Bernie Sanders said that global warming was the fault of major corporations and their greed.  Now, I grant that corporations exist to make money, and not much else, and they don't much care about costs they can offload on others.  I've worked (somewhat) in Texas oil fields and seen just how nasty those areas can be, all in the name of extracting the black gold and devil take the hindmost when it comes to the environment around the drilling or the storage sites.   Oil people ain't tree huggers, not by any stretch of the imagination.

But really?  Greedy corporations forced me to buy gasoline for my car for the past 45 years and burn it without too much consideration of the consequences?  I knew the problems of air pollution and the need for pollution controls on internal combustion engines back in high school, so by the time I was driving I was already learning what my car was doing, and I was already concerned about it.

But I had no idea it was the gas company's greed that was making me burn gasoline in my car; or use electricity provided by coal, or natural gas (not much hydro in Texas.  None, so far as I know.).  I had no idea it was coal companies and gas companies that were coercing me into burning fossil fuels with abandon because they wanted my money.

I mean, maybe that argument would have appealed to me when I was 18.  But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.  And trying to tell me our biggest, most intractable problems are problems because Exxon doesn't want to talk about global warming and the Koch Brothers spend money on propaganda about it, when the real problems of global warming is giving up our cars and our electricity production (unless we go to nuclear, because solar is never gonna supply enough) and our life styles which depend so much on fossil fuel, well....

It's like that old line I heard attributed to Huey Long about taxes:  "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that feller behind the tree!"  Yeah, Exxon is a big rich greedy corporation.  But I'm the one buying gas at the fuel pump.  I'm the one paying the electric bill so I can type on the computer machine.

I'm not the problem, though!  Greedy corporations are!  Yeah!  Let's blame them!

Whoever "them" are.  Don't blame you, don't blame me; blame that feller behind the tree!

Battle lines being drawn

Southern Beale takes exception to Bernie trying to "shush" Hillary, and apparently it blew up on Twitter during the debate.

NPR tells me today Sanders' "ghetto" remark was a gaffe if only because it presumes the life of an American black family is lived in, or getting out of, the ghetto.  I grew up in a small East Texas town without a ghetto.  The north part of town (typical for Southern towns, for some reason) was the "black" part of town, meaning a place of poor land values and poorer dwellings, where blacks were isolated by economics and by law, laws that fell but didn't displace people automatically.  Of course, 50 years later even I know enough not to speak broadly of the problems of blacks in America being rooted in living in "the ghetto" and being poor.  It's blinkered at least to speak that way, if not nearly racist.  You might as well say all "Mexicans" are migrant farm workers, and all Asians are nerds who run the world.  And it ignores entirely the rural poverty of America, a poverty that affects whites as much as it does blacks and Hispanics.

It would change my tune if you replaced Robert Kennedy in that picture with Bernie Sanders.  But I don't expect that to happen, either.

The funniest part is, what was "most important" in the debate depends entirely upon your perspective.   Then again, perspective matters.

In some ways Bernie is a product of his background, as we all are; and his background includes "shushing" women (if I ever did that to my wife in our nearly 40 years of marriage, I'd have been a worse husband than I've been, and be legitimately in as much trouble as I deserved) as well as seeing the problems of blacks as those of poverty.  We fought that fight in the '60's; the "War on Poverty" was a defining struggle, although it went about as well as the "War on Drugs."

Maybe "War" is our problem?

But Bernie reflects his history, his background, his assumptions; and more and more they collide with modernity.  I'm hardly a millennial, but to hear a white man talk about the problems of blacks being connected to life in the "ghetto," well, I wonder what decade that guy is stuck in.  As Larry Wilson asked:  “Did you just say all black people are poor and live in ghettos?”  To which he added:  “I think I just found your racial blindspot, dude.”

The problem with discussing race is that we all have blindspots, because we all start with the assumption that our experience is normative.   Yes, context matters; but context is much more than the words a politician says at a particular time; they include the historical setting in which those words are spoken.

Presidential campaigns are very, very long job interviews.  One of their functions is to be revealing.  That's one more reason never to be the subject of one.  There's something about the process that is actually disqualifying:  the people who want the job probably shouldn't have it.  The people who should, shouldn't have to go through this.

They do have to, though; and it's never pretty.

It's only swords....

Well, I couldn't get any love for the BeeGees, so now I'm pissed off!

This excerpt at Salon raises two interesting questions:

Are our hearts restless until they rest in God?

and:

Is this insight into the weaknesses of religion all that new, or is it, as Howland Owl said of nu-clear physics, not so new nor so clear?

And, of course, the burning question:  what is religion for?  Is it meant to instill moral behavior and observance of moral codes?  Or is it meant to teach wisdom, and if you, the individual, either refuse the lesson outright (atheism), or take the lesson for good advice but not really to be followed that strictly (what that rabbi calls the "ordinary religious believer"), or is taken as a club with which to beat others (not a group the rabbi addresses, which is an odd lacunae), or even is transformative of the person (as in the example of Paul, Abraham, or Moses, what the rabbi calls the "spiritually attuned"), then the problem is yours?

Put more simply: is religion for the spiritually attuned and the ordinary religious believer, or is it for all humankind?  The rabbi seems to think it should have been the latter, but instead became the former, and that is the fault of monotheistic religion:

As these [monotheistic] religions entered the world stage, alongside their charge to love God and love humanity, they began to wage war with those who preceded or followed them. Wherever monotheism developed, it was accompanied by the belief that the one God could be truly represented or correctly understood by only one faith community. Love of God, or more accurately being loved by God, was perceived to be a zero-sum game—the more one was loved, the less another could be.

And so, together with the love of neighbor came the hatred of the other. Together with kindness to those in need came the murder of those who disagreed. Monotheism became a mixed blessing and a double-edged sword.

But, to be fair, it was always going to be a double-edged sword.  Jesus even addresses the issue directly:

And he said to them, When I sent you with no purse, or knapsack or sandals, you weren't short of anything, were you?

They said, "Not a thing. "

He said to them, "But now, if you have a purse, take it along; and the same goes for a knapsack.  And if you don't have a sword, sell your coat and buy one. For I tell you, this scriptures must come to pass where I am concerned: 'And he was treated like a criminal';  for what is written about me is coming true.

And they said, "Look, Master, here are two swords."

And he said to them, "That's enough. " (Luke 22:35-38, SV).

The rabbi says:

For the person of faith, to believe is most often not a decision but an outcome of the search to fill a void that is experienced with palpable immediacy in everyday life. As a result, this faith is by and large impervious to critical analysis and counterclaims. 

Well, Augustine would agree with that; at least according to the most common interpretation of the Confession.  But I would happily offer a counter-argument:

"Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee," Augustine famously said; and somebody took off with that and called it a "God-shaped hole" in us that we must fill, and that became exclusionary and the favorite hammer of the fundamentalists with which to prey up on the rest of us, and for a long time I couldn't make peace with Augustine because of it, and I just rejected the idea outright. And then, just yesterday, just a day or two ago now, I understood. It isn't that we have this hole, this lacking, this emptiness that only "God" can fill. It is that we have needs, wants, desires, which are bottomless: and there are good ways to satisfy them, and less good; and even bad ways. And the fullest satisfaction, we can call "God." 

But then again, just as when God was present before Elijah and there was thunder, but God was not in the thunder, and fire, but God was not in the fire, and an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake, neither is God contained in the hole we have in our experience, nor even is God contained in our fullest satisfaction.  I think faith is by and large impervious to critical analysis and counterclaims; but I equally think faith is nothing more complicated than trust, and that to trust in God is to struggle with God.  Because God is not us; and we are not God.  God is no more a mere projection of human need than the U.S. Constitution is simple document with a singular interpretation available to an "originalist" reader.  God may yearn for humans; humans may yearn for God.  But the danger in seeing this relationship as on built fundamentally on yearning is the same danger we create whenever we try to simplify God.  It is the same danger we face when we try to simplify our relationships with others:  spouses, friends, family, intimates.  The closer we get to another person, they more we are tempted to simplify them, so they suit our needs.  But there is an ethic of the other, and of the Other, that recognizes they are irreducibly not self.

And that's the sword that always has two edges.

Which takes us back to the question of what religion is for.  If it is meant to teach morality and "right" behavior, and very little more, then it will always be dividing groups into "us" and "them."  It's not only inescapable, it's baked into the pie.  This is, by the way, the usual excuse for mistreatment of Jews:  that their relationship to the God of Abraham makes them "special," and therefore "superior," and therefore:  get 'em!  It's a misreading of the law and the prophets and even the covenant, but it's a popular one (has been for millennia), and even if it is tacitly set aside in the post-holocaust world, it still continues to confuse and divide.  And it's wrong.

So perhaps wisdom begins with setting aside religion as necessary or required, although it is certainly fundamental to being human.  Atheists would deny that immediately, but then atheists are the ones busy denying religion in order to cast off religion.  It's what we used to say in the 6th grade when girls were still supposed to be icky:  if you can't stop talking about her, even to talk about how icky she is, it means you're attracted to her.  Art history teaches us that religion is part of being human:  the prehistoric cave painters in France didn't crawl deep underground through narrow passages just to doodle on the walls or because it was hot outside.  Those paintings have been linked to religious practice, although the religion itself is long gone.  Religion is neither necessary nor required; it is as much a part of being human as being social and using language.

How we use it, is the question.  If you want to distill it to a set of rules, of "do's" and "don'ts", you can; but you miss the entire point of the exercise.  If you want to study it, become part of it, let it become part of you, in order to gain wisdom, to understand life, to pursue happiness even (the least part of it, in some ways; the best part, in others), then you will come closer to what religion truly is.

But, like God, it should always stay other to you.  So long as it does, so long as you don't define it into a handkerchief you can fold neatly and keep in your pocket for emergencies, for the unforeseen sneezes of life, then you remain true to it.  Which is a lesson on how to treat people, too.

It's only subvocalized morphemes.....

You know, I actually used to have this album.  

I don't think I do anymore; which is probably just as well. 

 Junior high was a very sappy time.....

This article raises the concept of subvocal speech; that we do "talk to ourselves" even when we don't articulate speech.  As I'm writing, for example, I'm thinking of the words and "hear" them in my voice as I produce them.  You'd think thinking about that process would be akin to the centipede in the rhyme asked which leg comes after which, which raised it's mind to such a pitch it lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run.

But oddly, it works just fine.  In fact, without it, I don't think I could type at all.  A different set of thoughts goes through my mind when I pause to insert a link, like the one above (not there yet, as I type, but it will be as you read).  If I stop, often I "lose my train of thought," and forget what the conversation is I was having that allowed me to type words on this screen.  So I continue the thoughts until I'm done, and then go back and correct typos or insert links or otherwise format the post.

I don't, it should be obvious, think about what my fingers are doing.  That WOULD leave me distracted in the metaphorical ditch (I just corrected my thought to type to word "metaphorical" there; insert it, actually) considering how to...well, type.  Indeed, typing is so reflexive that if I move my fingers one key over, I can produce gibberish without realizing it (say I'm not looking at the screen).

And how hard it was to learn not to look at my fingers but watch the paper, and later the screen (it seemed even harder to switch attention from the paper to the screen).  O the wonders of cognition!

And we aren't even through, yet.  I've been re-watching "The X-Files," and just again watch "From Outer Space by Jorge Chung," the episode where Charles Nelson Reilly is trying to gather material for a book by interviewing witnesses to an incident involving Mulder and Scully.  I always enjoyed that one because it so reflected the reality of a lawsuit:  everyone involved, especially when the case involved eye-witness testimony of a traffic accident (business cases were a bit duller on this point), had a different version of "what really happened."  But when one witness is hypnotized to recover "lost" memories of an alien abduction (this is "The X-Files," after all), Reilly pauses to wonder at the power of hypnosis, at how much can be accomplished with mere words (the "power of suggestion").  And how we don't really know how, or why, that works.

It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your mind away.

I've also recently watched a Netflix series (actually BBC, but Netflix labels it as their own), "River."  The titular character is a Detective Inspector in London who is "haunted" by the dead.  Not in "The Sixth Sense" way, abut as part of his psychology. The eventual armchair psychological explanation is that his mother abandoned him to a cold, uncaring grandmother in a Swedish landscape (the star is Stellan Skarsgard, whom you may have seen in the Avengers and Thor movies recently) with, apparently, no children.  His fantasy dead people apparently are his one barrier against loneliness.  He often physically struggles with them, to the consternation of on-lookers as he battles empty air.  It put me in mind of myself; not that I've ever seen corporeal bodies as solidly as River does (it makes for good drama, but not necessarily verisimilitude, except to convince one the man has serious problems), but I still talk to myself and I used to imagine a group of peers talking with me.

Again, not so corporeally as in a TV show, and not to the point they were real people or I thought they were.  It was simply a way of working through my thoughts.  As I got older they disappeared (they were never there, that's too strong a way of putting it, but no matter), and yet I still talk to myself.  My running joke is that what worries me is not that I talk to myself, but that I argue with myself, and sometimes I lose the argument.*

My wife tells me she sometimes sees me driving and notices my lips moving (when I drive past her, not when she's in the car).  I do vocalize to myself when I'm alone, sometimes.  I've been doing it for nearly 60 years, I'm not going to stop now.  But here's the interesting question, the one no one asks because we assume there is a "self" inside our head, and we accept, more or less, the Western constructs of mind and self and soul:  and the interesting question is:  when you talk to your "self," who are you talking to?  And who's doing the talking?  Perhaps more importantly:  who's listening?

I find it valuable to talk to myself.  Complex thoughts need an airing, and I seldom put them on paper:  they become concrete then, and distorted, and often lost to speculation.  Well, for me, anyway.    At some point the scientific insight or mathematical formula or philosophical revelation or artistic impulse has to find completion in the concrete; but until it is ready, it has to be mulled over in deep privacy.  But am I mulling it over with someone?  And who would that be?

This doesn't get to the roots of schizophrenia.  That's a mental condition I have little knowledge of, and while I've encountered people with multiple personality disorder, again it isn't so dramatic as it is portrayed on television or in the movies.  Schizophrenia is a complex condition: I don't want to reduce it to something simplistic.  I'm just interested in the idea that we all have a voice in our heads (I've never doubted that) and how what works in what we call "thinking."

Because how we define thinking is very much a matter of culture and preconceptions.  We none of us have an "objective" idea of what our thoughts are, or how we produce them; and the very idea that we could has produced a fair number of problems.

The Romantics got us thinking about ourselves as selves, rather than as social creatures in a rigid hierarchy.  Read Gray's "Elegy," and there's no hint that the anonymous village dwellers now in the graveyard ever had an "internal life;" and yet that poem is considered a pre-Romantic work (and rightly so).  We don't really get to that "stream of consciousness" portrayal of an interior life until Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," a story so contemporary to us we fail to see how radical it is.  Neither Twain nor Dickens ever produced anything so reflective of an interior existence, and it isn't until Joyce and Woolf that we commonly think it took root in literature.  The major difference between Bierce's effort (one reproduced in "Chickamauga," where the protagonist is a deaf child who can't hear the battle going on around him and only reacts, finally, to the devastation of his home, and not to the battle that rages around him) is that Bierce, like Poe, disdained novels.

Poe tried to return to pre-Romantic thinking when it came to thinking about thinking (well, Poe among many others).  Wordsworth set us on the path to Freud with his emphasis on childhood as the shaper of adulthood and memory as the repository of the self (an idea he took from Locke).  Poe emphasized "ratiocination," even as he wrote stories of grotesques and their bizarre experiences (and, like Bierce, introduced us to interior lives, though those lives were often too strange to be models of human experience, but rather models of insanity or, a la "The X-Files," stories too strange to be accepted as true.).    But his narrators were always talking to someone, always telling their tale in much the same way as Pamela (one of the first epistolary novels) or David Copperfield did.  Bierce's Peyton Farquhar in "Owl Creek Bridge" had no one to talk to in the moment between the fall and the sudden stop.

Still, Poe resisted the nascent idea of Romanticism, that human thought involved heart as well as head, feelings as well as reason.  And so the idea that our thinking could be the product of being human, rather than being "rational," rooted itself still deeper in our culture.

When we say these things to ourselves, the better to understand them, who are we speaking to?  And why is speech, silent or subvocal or vocal, so important to us?  Why is it mere words can hypnotize us, even give us memories which aren't possibly true?

Of course, words are not the limit of our experiences.  If you cannot put your love for someone into words, do you love them less?  Do you not love at all?  As Wittgenstein said (I'm listening to a Mozart piano concerto now as I write, some hours after I started this), if I can't explain what music means to me, how can I explain anything important?  (Ravel wrote the "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand," or whatever the correct title of that is, for Wittgenstein's brother Paul).  But if I can't explain it, if I can't, in the cliche (Shakespeare's, I want to say; but maybe I'm confusing Iago's disdain for wearing his heart on his sleeve), heave my heart into my mouth and let it speak from there, is my love any less true?

What do we do when we can't put things into words? Sighs too deep, and all that.  Paul says that's when God intervenes, but he means that in a more specific context.  Our thought is not language, but language expresses our thought, even if it is only the three words "I love you."  Perhaps those are sufficient; often, they are not.

It's only words; but words are all we have.  Well, that and music, art, hugs, looks, behavior, attitude, clothes, gestures....

And who we talk to; especially when we talk to ourselves.  Whatever that means.

*Interestingly the creator of "River," Abi Morgan, says she talks to herself, too, and her children notice.   I'm sure it's very widespread, and it's never really bothered me that I do it.  I really wonder how much I vocalize my thoughts now, and whether I don't notice, or I don't do it as much.

Heart in the Deep of Texas

I love Austin (Texas).  Lived there for 15 years, owned my first house there, my daughter was born there.  Some of my best memories are there.

But there is this image of Austin as a deep blue pearl in the red velvet cake of GOP lunacy.  This story proves that no place is so singularly perfect.

It also proves that the fish rots from the head, all the way down.  Way, WAY down.

In the Mood

I said sometime back that I was going to a Rothko exhibition, and would report back on the experience.  Well, I voted today so I'm feeling expansive (no baked goods, sadly; not even a donut. But I still enjoy voting, even though the ballot in Texas is always ridiculously long.  We elect everyone, practically down to the janitor in the Capitol.  Supreme Court Judges, Appellate Judges, District Court Judges; County Court at Law Judges; County Commissioners; Constables; District and also County attorneys; and I haven't exhausted the list.  Eventually you just vote for a name, or skip it and leave half the ballot blank.  Who can keep up?  Still, I feel good after; it's something old fashioned in me, ).  So, feeling expansive, I start with the idea that museums were originally meant to be places for education; and now I am educated.

I'd never been too interested in Rothko's work because what I knew of it was primarily the Chapel, and I thought the space too dark for the works, and the works themselves too dark for anything but sunlight.  These paintings, I learned, are the "Black" series, so the darkness in them is intentional, not happenstance; and their placement in the Chapel is intentional, too.  I wasn't failing to see those panels in the setting they were intended for:  I was failing to look.

The retrospective helped, too.  I've found it easier to grasp an artist's work in the context either of art history, or in the setting of as much of their work as possible.  There was a Monet exhibit at the Museum sometime back; I've always loved Monet, but seeing as many of his paintings as possible in one place, especially the paintings he made of one location across the passage of a day, was a revelation.  I was equally stunned by Rothko's work, especially as I saw it work toward the "Black" paintings.

It also helped that there was music there.  A chamber orchestra was playing in the galleries the day we viewed the paintings.  That was happenstance, good fortune for us; not planning.  They played 3 pieces; one only a few years old, the other written within this century (or late last century), and a piece of a larger work from Mozart.  I meant to keep the program to pass on the titles, but I don't have it now.  The newest piece consisted, as best I can describe it, of long notes held for several measures (there was no particular rhythm to it) on the stringed instruments (no woodwinds or brass, no keyboards either).  It blended perfectly with the paintings, and put me even more in the mood to look at Rothko's work and see what he was doing.

By the time I got to the room where the orchestra was, it reduced to a quartet (I don't think it was actually any larger than a sextet), and they closed with the Mozart.  It was as beautiful and appropriate to the setting as the other compositions were.  I mention it because we too easily forget that art can be enjoyed with the senses; that music can compliment the plastic arts and enrich the viewing experience.  That, and I too little get to hear live music played on instruments.  Although I'm a child of the '60's musically, and one of my best memories is seeing CSNY on their only tour in a stadium in Irving (the Cowboys stadium before they moved again), I more and more find amplified music (guitars, singers, etc.) to be false.  Live music:  the human voice without amplification, strings and woodwinds and brass, has a timbre and beauty that the best recording equipment can't capture or reproduce.  More and more I find, if I can't hear it live, I don't want to hear it that badly (not that I have trashed my records, CD's and MP3's).

It added a layer to the experience of the Rothko's that opened me to the entire experience more fully.  I'm going to go visit the Chapel sometime this summer, when I have the time to go down there.  Might have to take a iPod with me, though.