Book Beings

What is it that really matters to us? Of course the particulars differ from person to person. But I’m inclined to believe we are more alike than different.

There are commonalities among all persons, despite the fact we are perpetually at each other’s throats, and despite our diverse upbringings, during which we are forced to swallow cultural, political, and religious lies from Day 1.

I have nothing against culture, politics, or religion. I am talking about the “twisting” of these essential components of any society. I am talking about the propagation of lies throughout the history of the world, and the flip side of that, which is the suppression of truth.

Not in any systematic way over the course of centuries (I am no Dan Brown School of Perpetual Global Conspiracy disciple), but in a random, episodic fashion, whereby truth is defined according to the whim of the despot of the day.

I’m not going out on a limb here saying your average Joe and Mary (i.e., the vast majority of the world’s population) are fodder for those powerful men who govern worldly things. You have, of course, your dictators and ayatollahs, who oppress and dominate and exploit their people. But you also have your Special Interest Dictators of the Western democracies, who manipulate, lie, and cheat to obtain their ends.

And there is the trickle-down effect, evident in the person of overbearing boss, abusive husband, institutional pedophile, neighborhood bully, and others who drastically diminish and often irreparably damage the quality of life of so many ordinary persons.

But human beings are all the same in that we all want to be happy, and we want to feel that our lives have meaning. Some find a distorted type of happiness and meaning through POWER at the expense of others. But most persons would like to find happiness and meaning through relationship with others and doing good (nurturing, helping, healing, building, bridging, creating, teaching, encouraging).

Unfortunately, the former have a disproportionate influence on the quality of life of the latter. And the means by which they achieve their own toxic brand of happiness and meaning inevitably lead to war, genocide, terror, economic disaster, and personal tragedy.

Nonetheless, Average Joe’s can and do make a difference within the most trying of circumstances. We can point to generations of Christian martyrs and missionaries throughout the centuries, but every culture, political system, and religion has produced heroic men, women, and children who have shown the rest of us that what is good, beautiful, and true cannot and must not be suppressed.

These Light Bearers impart to us a precious gift: the understanding that we need not define ourselves as victims or captives or even imitators of monsters (for those who would choose the dark path as the way out of their captivity).

In fact, there is no reason we cannot be Light Bearers ourselves, for there is something (or Someone) much greater at work in each of us than the world and its Hollow Men.

The poet, Miguel Hernandez, while imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War, wrote, Ata duro a ese hombre: no le atarás el alma.  (Bind that man up hard: you shall not bind his soul.)

Which begs the question, how do you bind another person’s soul? You would need that person’s permission, it would seem.

And here is the marvelous irony: those who seek to dominate others have by their own series of choices imprisoned themselves. No one has done it to them. They have simply allowed their Weakness and Corruption to bind up and lock away their souls.

Think of it. It really is quite remarkable how it all works out, this strange order and balance of things. How is such a man (or woman) capable of having a meaningful relationship with another person? And how can he (or she) have eyes that are open to what the Light Bearers reveal, or ears to hear their Message of Freedom, when they are hell bent on trying to eradicate them?

What is it that matters most to us?

I was driving to work this morning. I am an utter, shameful fool to complain of my daily commute to work. I understand that, but when I am crawling in bumper to bumper traffic I am not at my best.

Today I was making good time, but up ahead there they were, five or six cars submissively lined up behind a stopped school bus with red lights a-flashing. I took my place behind them, resenting the yellow slug of a vehicle with its extended rickety Stop sign, and thinking, “Can I get to work once, just once, without some freakin’ delay?”

Then I saw a little boy, maybe 6 years old, running hard toward the bus, little white legs in  shorts pumping away, backpack bouncing on his little back. The bus wasn’t going to leave without him, but he was running hard anyway, determined and filled with purpose.

I felt ashamed of myself, and was flooded with memories of my own children as little students bearing impossibly large backpacks on their way to school. When the boy disappeared into the bus I turned and saw his mother. A young woman wearing checkered pajama pants and a white t-shirt, staring intently at the bus as it laboriously pulled away.

What matters to you?

Family? Meaningful relationships with other persons? Doing what is good?

I recently watched the film, The Stoning of Soraya M, a true story based on the 1994 book by the French-Iranian journalist, Freidoune Sahebjam, both of which have been banned by the Iranian government.

An Iranian woman living in a remote village (not the first, nor the last, I fear) was stoned to death because she refused to grant her husband a divorce, which would have left her and her daughters destitute. Knowing it would be impossible for Soraya to prove her innocence (as per Sharia law), her abusive husband accused her of infidelity, having already threatened and recruited a simpleton into serving as second witness. Under Sharia law, two witnesses equaled death sentence, freeing the husband to marry a younger woman.

Soraya’s aunt, Zahra (a devout Muslim and Light Bearer), managed to tell the story of what happened to her niece to the journalist, who was passing through the village on his way to the border. Both Zahra and Sahebjam risked their lives to bring Soraya’s story to the world, knowing those who live in darkness fear all light.

Absurdity and darkness go hand in hand with reason and light. The works of those with locked-away souls, as perverse and gruesome as they can be, help us to see life and the world more clearly. They force us to look at where exactly we stand. What side of the chalk line.

They prompt us to ask –

If I deny my family, if I dishonor the sanctity of life-affirming relationships, if I reject what is good, what can possibly remain of me?

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men…

from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island.

Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being.

Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking…

I do try to avoid clumsy books, but I couldn’t help myself. The Return takes place mainly in Granada during that notorious prelude to World War II, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Very hard for me to pass by a book that addresses that pivotal conflict without picking it up and bringing it home with me.

The tragic story of the Ramirez family unfolds during those terrible years. There are some believable stretches (the descriptions of thousands of exhausted, starving refugees fleeing from city to city from Franco’s Nationalist forces and allied German bomber planes are particularly effective), but the characters seem more like caricatures, are never fully convincing, and are prone to speaking in cliches.

I should care about them, I want to, but I remain lukewarm, seeing too much Victoria Hislop in them and not enough Mercedes or Concha or Antonio or Pablo.

The story of the Ramirez family is sandwiched between the current day meetings between  an old Spaniard, Miguel, a café owner who somehow has come to master English like an Oxford don, and a married, youngish, middle-aged Englishwoman, Sonia, who came to Granada with Maggie (her single-but-on-the-prowl-for-a-Spanish-husband girlfriend), presumably to get away from the overbearing English husband for a few days.

It happens that Sonia’s mother was a Spaniard who died some years ago in England. Sonia’s almost complete lack of knowledge about her mother and her mother’s past and family are nearly as disturbing as her kindly English father’s utter cluelessness about his late wife’s past and family history. (You would think the woman had wandered into their lives for a couple of weeks solely to dust and change the bedding.)

The revelations that gradually emerge during Miguel’s account of the Ramirez family during  the war and the role his little café plays in bridging the gap between past and present are predictably implausible.

Still, the novel might have survived these flaws and given the reader something to chew on but for Hislop’s inability to refrain from interjecting her opinions and biases at nearly every turn. So that during the bullfight de rigueur scene, we get this: “The cruelty of the crowd was palpable. They did not want the bull to die too soon…” Is this Miguel’s opinion? Not likely, but it is included as part of his account.

In Hislop’s world, Bullfighting = Cruelty = Nationalists, whereas Flamenco = Truth = Republicans. If she was trying to make the point that the insular-minded Nationalists represented the old Spain and its progress-hindering old traditions, flipping flamenco over to the progressive, outward-looking Republicans (which included among their ranks Soviet-trained Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists) makes little if any sense.

Clearly, dance is dear to Hislop. She sprinkles in a few intense salsa (salsa? really?) and flamenco sessions for the gals from Britain to help them let loose and break a sweat in hot, romantic Granada. But this is about more than just having a good time, as Hislop offers an ongoing meditation on the liberating effects of dance, and in particular, of flamenco, which  speaks to the deepest part of us.

Which is? The deepest part, I mean… What exactly is the deepest part of us?

In Hislop’s world, flamenco is completely divorced from God and religion, despite the Spanish gypsy’s inescapable immersion in the imagery and spirituality of the crucified Christ and la Dolorosa, the suffering Madonna, the Virgin Mary. So we are to believe that flamenco is shunned by traditionalist Spaniards but embraced by atheistic Marxists?

Interesting take.

Examples of Author Interference abound in this novel. One more. When a Republican prisoner is at death’s doorstep, Miguel/Hislop offers this insight, “The priest that sometimes exploited such men for a last minute conversion did not bother to visit.”

What clever phrasing. If the priest visits, he is exploiting. If he doesn’t bother to visit, he is being inhumane. A “heads” I win, “tails” you lose scenario for the author.

This bias is extended to the entire Catholic Church, which, it would appear, exists only to punish innocent people and ensure they never find happiness. Consider that even the Spanish refugee children who are spirited away to England and are routinely welcomed by the curious but gentle English populace, are shunned by those nasty, embittered English Catholic nuns who provide these little rogues shelter and sustenance.

Clumsiness in writing can sometimes be overlooked and forgiven. Bias and the suppression of truth cannot. Being the grandson of two Spanish Republican grandfathers, one murdered, one exiled, gives me a bit different perspective on the matter.

Yes, it is widely known the Catholic Church officially sided with Franco’s Nationalists, and it is widely known that some priests were quite active in the war against the Second Republic and the men and women who fought to defend it.

But Hislop sees the conflict as I did when I was a teen: all the Nationalists and their supporters were evil, and all the Republicans and their supporters were good.

How arrogant and self-righteous I was! Maintaining such a position, of course, placed me beyond reproach, at least in my own little mind. I could blame it on youth and ignorance. Or I could confess to having had an over-inflated sense of Self that left me no room for objectivity.

I once heard an American military expert on the radio talking about the good guys (i.e., us) and the bad guys (i.e., them), in reference to Operation Shock and Awe, and I recognized my own arrogance and felt myself cringe.

The reality, of course, is that good people with noble intentions don’t always agree and may even wage war against each other. By the same token, bad people with the worst of intentions can also disagree and kill each other. And too often the vast majority of disinterested and innocent people get caught in the middle and end up being pushed to one side or the other without fully understanding what is at stake other than personal survival.

To her credit, Hislop does not deny that atrocities were committed by both sides, but her attacks against the Nationalists and the Church are presented as undeniable fact whereas the burning of churches, the raping and murdering of nuns, and the executions of priests by Republicans, some of which was already happening before Francisco Franco’s uprising, are only mentioned in passing and have the odor of rumor rather than fact.

In her concluding note Hislop cites the decision by the Spanish Government in January 2009 to grant the right to apply for Spanish citizenship to the children and grandchildren of those who went into exile after the fall of the Second Republic. This marks the closure of what had been known for decades as the pacto de olvido, which was an unofficial national silence about what had happened during the 3-year civil war.

My two grandfathers are buried in Spain. When I go to Spain I visit the grave of the one who returned from exile in the United States during the amnesty of the early sixties. The one who was murdered was left in a mass, unmarked grave somewhere.

What right have I to point the finger or to condemn? What right has Victoria Hislop?

If the Catholic Church has too often failed its people and its God, it has also, for 2000 years and counting, preserved and proclaimed the teachings of Christ during the world’s darkest hours.

How else would you or I know, for instance, that Jesus invited those who are without sin to cast the first stone?

No, I didn’t come up with that title. Wish I had, though. David Shenk spent three years researching and writing The Genius in All of Us, and under different circumstances he may very well have listed me on his Acknowledgments page. But no…

Shenk calculated that his book was composed at the feverish pace of eight words per hour. Shenk is no Kerouac (Jack, whose mercurial writing rendered On the Road in a smattering of days), nor was he meant to be, and we should be glad for that.

As it happens, we are each of us unique, unlike anyone else in the universe. Some of us take longer to write a book than others, longer to run 100 meters, longer to solve a math problem, cook an egg, brush a tooth, file our tax returns. But that is OK, really, and I will explain why, in a moment.

(Unfortunately, too many of us are pacing around old familiar turf like dogs wearing electric shock collars. We are afraid to tread beyond our comfort zone for fear of getting zapped.)

(Understandable, yes. But clearly self-compromising.)

Now, what if that invisible electric fence that has kept you from growing as a person shorted out months ago and there is no shock to be had? Or what if someone turned it off? How would you know?

Or what if the shock, if there is one to be had, is worth enduring to break free into a new, more excellent You?

Let’s ponder for a moment. If you could be shown, scientifically, that you are far more capable of greatness than you think, would the how-when be of interest to you? Would you be willing to say, to hell with shock collars and self-compromising mediocrity! Would you summon enough desire to burst through that invisible barrier that has kept you from being great?

You may have heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of something. An Expert. A Guru. A Wiz. An Authority. You put in your hours and after 15 or 20 years you are the Man! Or the Woman! Right?

Well, there is a misconception here, which Shenk addresses in his book. It’s not just practice that is required. It’s deliberate practice. Big difference. Constant, daily, concentrated, grinding practice that bullies you and shoves you well beyond your feel-good  zone.

For example, imagine you want to get really fit. You’re not going to accomplish it by doing the same exercise routines day after day, week after week. After a while your muscles adjust to the demands placed on them, leading to a conditioning plateau where additional gains are no longer possible. You need to mix it up, maybe do cross-training, which doesn’t allow your muscles to get lazy and comfortable. You need to work different muscles in different ways to get really fit, you need to stretch, do aerobics, sweat, huff and puff, refrain from eating tasty crap and partying all night, etc…

Deliberate practice, whether of body or mind, never quite feels comfortable because you are always being pushed in new ways, always being challenged. Deliberate practice says to hell with plateaus, I’m climbing to the mountain top!

To hammer this point home, deliberate practice is not meant to be fun. Not meant to feel good. It is a form of ongoing trauma that triggers your survival instinct, forcing your body and mind to constantly respond to the ever-shifting bullying ghost, adjusting to overcome its demands as you climb higher and higher, for as long as it takes. In this constant adjusting new tissue, new insights, new skill sets, the New You is being forged.

So here’s the bad news: being great at something, truly great, will require much of you. Say, on the order of three hours a day of deliberate practice for ten consecutive years!

Ever watch the Olympics? Hear the stories of athletes getting up at 4:00 AM every day, training for endless hours, year after year? And what’s with those Kenyan distance runners, and those Jamaican sprinters? Shenk gets into that. Very interesting stuff.

And for those of us who always thought Mozart was just born that way, here’s what Amadeus himself had to say about that in a letter to his dad:

“People make a great mistake who think that my art has come easily to me. No one has committed so much time and thought to composition as I.”

There are countless examples of “geniuses” pointing to deliberate practice and perseverance as the bloody path to greatness.

Einstein once said, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Each failure is welcomed as a new opportunity to succeed. Just ask Thomas Edison, who insisted, “I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Each of those ways was one step closer to figuring it all out.

Pretty grim, huh? Especially for those of accustomed to instant gratification.

That’s the bad news. Greatness does not come easy, not to anyone. The good news is that greatness can be achieved by virtually anyone! You just need to want it enough and be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to reach your goal.

Let me tell you a Rat Story. In 1958 researchers in Manitoba, Canada performed an experiment to compare the maze-negotiating prowess of high-achiever rats, and low-achiever rats. The rats were chosen from two distinct genetic strains. The Maze-Bright rats had consistently tested high in negotiating mazes over the course of several generations, whereas the Maze-Dull rats had flopped miserably for generations.

The researchers raised sets of both Maze-Bright rat pups and Maze-Dull rat pups in three different controlled environments, enriched (lots of colors, play, toys, bells, and other stimuli), normal (ordinary walls, some toys, some activity), and restricted (just food and water, nothing to stimulate mind or body, your typical rat slum).

The findings were quite remarkable. As expected, in the normal environment, the Maze-Bright rats performed well, and the Maze-Dull rats flopped. However, in both the enriched and restricted environments, the results were almost identical!

When raised in an enriched environment, “dumb” rats proved just as smart as smart rats. And when raised in a restricted environment, “smart” rats were as dumb as dumb rats. Genetic differences disappeared!

Hmm… I know we’re not rats, but a little extrapolation is in order, no?

Numerous studies in recent years show that the nature versus nurture debate really should be shelved, along with any notions of ethnic or racial superiority.

Traits are not inherited directly from our genes, nor are they determined directly by our environment, but are developed through the dynamic process of gene-environment interaction, what Shenk refers to as GxE.

Genes, which are stretches of DNA, are not finished blueprints with predesigned instructions for our various traits, as the Augustinian priest and scientist, Gregor Mendel, held, and the rest of us have maintained for well over 100 years.

Yes, all 22,000 genes direct the production of protein molecules. And yes, these proteins help to create cells, transport vital elements, and produce necessary chemical reactions in the body. And we can agree that different protein types provide the building blocks for all the mysterious substances and elements that bind our bodies together (e.g., muscle fiber, hemoglobin, collagen, and so on).

But what we need to understand is that genes are not alone in influencing protein construction. The study of Epigenetics shows that genes can be activated or deactivated by environmental stimuli such as hormones, nutrition, nerve impulses, as well as other genes.

As Shenk puts it,

“Genes are more like volume knobs and switches. Think of a giant control board inside every cell of your body. Many of those knobs and switches can be turned up/down/on/off at any time—by another gene or by any miniscule environmental input.”

This flipping and turning of gene-knobs begins at the moment of conception and continues throughout a person’s life, to the moment of death. This process of gene-environment interaction “drives a unique developmental path for every unique individual.”

You cannot control everything that happens in your life, of course, but you do have a much bigger say in who you can become and what you can achieve than previously thought.

The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk, contains life-changing power between its covers. It is a powerful testament to the uniqueness, promise, and dignity of each and every human being.

If you have always perceived yourself to be a Maze-Dull human, find yourself an enriched environment within which you can flourish and make the commitment to being the most excellent person you can be. No one, not you nor I, nor your dull, uninspired neighbor, is doomed to mediocrity.

I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing  seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters.

Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile, mesmerize… Suicidal persons often look for grand landmarks to mark their  passage. You have to be careful in such a place, especially if you are one of Oates’s characters.

Oates has made this extraordinary natural phenomenon personal to a disturbing degree. Her words create a timeless being of immense seductive power that waits for you and me with resolute patience, like Death itself.

The personalization of The Falls is one reason I like Oates’s novel, despite its flaws. The other two are the erratic and insulated Ariah Erskine, and the maddening story of Love Canal.

The novel begins with two virgin newlyweds groping their way toward marital consummation in a Niagara Falls hotel, the soon-would-have-been-too-old-to-be-married daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the primed-to-receive-his-own-parish-church young Presbyterian minister.

Intimacy between the young couple turns embarrassingly grotesque. Before the following morning has fully revealed itself, the groom has hurled himself to his death into the famous and unforgiving gorge.

In order to assert some degree of control over her circumstances, the shaken Ariah determines she is damned, identifies herself as a damned creature, and arranges to live her life with no expectations other than disaster.

Oates beautifully crafts those days of shock and disorientation, Ariah’s stubborn refusal to be overcome by her circumstances, and the ripple effects of the weird tragedy as family and community assess the groom’s unthinkable act. The Widow Bride of the Falls takes on a mythic quality as the years pass, an altogether distinct being from the real widow bride.

Ariah’s damnation perspective colors the rest of her life, and is only partly softened during a several-year period of relative happiness that corresponds to her second marriage. Dirk Burnaby, a local attorney and son of a wealthy family, inexplicably falls in love with the skinny near-spinster at first sight as she stands daily watch at the rail above the gorge, waiting for her groom’s bloated corpse to appear.

Burnaby’s love does not free Ariah from her persecution complex, however, as she remains the perpetually pursued fugitive. As a result, she forever dons the armor of cynicism and sarcasm, and refuses steadfastly to be controlled or broken by persons or circumstances.

She expects damnation to revisit her at any moment. It does, of course, the moment Burnaby decides to obey his conscience and represent working class families in their initial suit against an alliance of the powerful and wealthy – the chemical companies, developers, contractors, politicians, judges, medical establishment, and board of education of the city of Niagara Falls.

The brazen negligence and disregard for the life of the poor and working class people demonstrated by those responsible for the toxic waste site known as Love Canal is rendered with cutting precision by Oates.

As much as I found myself captivated by Burnaby’s heroically naïve and doomed attempt to Beat the Power on behalf of the disenfranchised, and by the story of Love Canal itself, this important element, because it is developed to too great an extent, gives the novel a fractured quality.

Love Canal and Burnaby’s quest take on a life of their own. Yes, it is because of what happens to Burnaby as a result of his involvement in Love Canal that we see Ariah’s fatalism come to fruition and her life and that of her children forever altered. The Burnaby Quest could have, and maybe should have, formed the basis for a separate novel, however. But because it remains such a prominent element in The Falls, which is really Ariah’s Story, Ariah is gradually reduced to secondary status.

Oates has too many stories to tell to fit into this one novel. Nonetheless, the content of the novel makes it a compelling read, its loose structure notwithstanding.

Are character’s italicized thoughts sprinkled throughout the novel necessary? I could have done without most of these phrases that have little meaning or fail to create mood. They get in the way, adding nothing to the narrative or to our understanding. Is there a necessary musical quality or cadence I am missing maybe?

A few of the sections are narrated in the first person by someone who at first sounds like one of Ariah’s children, Chandler, Royall, or Juliet. But you quickly realize the speaker has referred to the three siblings by name. So is this speaker a completely unaccounted-for fourth sibling? An unborn child? A ghost? I am perplexed….

Some characters seemed destined to play larger roles in the outcome of the story, but later simply exited like phantoms. I am thinking in particular of “the woman in black,” who reappears briefly years later to perform a curious act and then vanishes forever. To a lesser degree, Burnaby’s mother also seemed headed toward some significant moment, but then slipped silently off into the sunset.  The Holocaust survivor and widower, Joseph Pankowski, Ariah’s neighbor, also seemed destined to play a bigger role, but he too is dismissed without event.

A lot goes on in this novel, too much. Ariah’s story becomes lost in the second half of the novel. Very late in the story Oates introduces Bud Stonecrop, a strange, laconic, and physically powerful young man with a shaved head, who she invests with great sexual power. Conveniently, he ends up being the key to resolving the family’s uncertainties about their husband and father’s demise, and bringing closure and redemption to Ariah and her small brood. Interesting character, but he does seem a bit of an afterthought.

The Falls does have some wonderful moments, but Oates seemed to lose interest in Ariah as she went along. Ariah’s existential predicament, which should have been the foundation upon which to build the novel, is reduced to a series of superficial defense mechanisms and sarcastic remarks.

If Ariah will not show who she really is, and who she becomes in the end, shouldn’t Oates show the reader? A neat little resolution (forged by a new and lesser character) is attached to Ariah in the end, like a life-time achievement award, a plastic silver badge to wear on her second-hand blouse.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to write a story about a perfect man and show how that perfection jarred with the world. He created Prince Myshkin, a somewhat Christ-like figure, and placed him with less perfect persons in a complicated scenario populated by Russian aristocrats.

You couldn’t help but love the gentle and humble prince, or hate him. Were you a truer person in his presence, or were you threatened by his purity? He graciously accepted being referred to as an idiot, happily acknowledging his lack of knowledge regarding most subjects of worldly concern.

But Myshkin could see into the hearts of men and women. He was no idiot. But the world, because it could not understand such a man, took pleasure in calling him The Idiot.

Perhaps The Innocent would be a more appropriate way to refer to Prince Myshkin. But is someone who is capable of seeing into the human heart an innocent? Is someone with such knowledge, which is greater than all the knowledge of the world, innocent?

Jesus Christ was innocent of any crime, or sin, as he hung crucified at Golgotha. Jesus could see into the hearts of men and women, know their light and their darkness. He knew everything that was in the human heart, yet was there ever anyone more innocent?

Having such knowledge is not like having an illegal firearm in your night table drawer or marijuana plants in your basement. Knowing evil does not make one evil. Is a physician who diagnoses a cancer in his patient doomed to develop cancer?

Like Jesus, Prince Myshkin enters into a world of sin, recognizes sin, but does not himself succumb to sin.

It takes a supremely special person, a saint or a Man-God, to remain innocent in this, our world.

As far as the rest of us… We were innocent once, before our knowledge of good and evil, before that first moment in our tottering little lives when we consciously chose to put our needs and pleasures before those of others, regardless of the collateral damage our choices may have caused.

To have knowledge of sin and to succumb to it regularly is uniquely human. This is not to say most people do not want to be good. We are good, most of us, but we are weak and inclined to make poor choices.

The state of the world shows us as much. As do literature and history. As does the Bible, which in addition to recording the Inspired Word of God, doubles as a chronicle of human folly.

No one ever called a sheep an idiot, to my knowledge, but maybe the Divine Shepherd was acknowledging a special brand of obtuseness in his metaphor for his followers, those who hear his voice. Sheep, though docile, are not noted for their acumen, after all. And they tend to stray.

If someone were to refer to Christians as The Flock of Idiots, should we be offended? For having heard His Voice, what excuse have we for our sins? Does our deeply embedded human weakness explain it? Does it entitle us?

This observation may engender smiles from those who don’t like Christians on principle, but no one ever said Christians were not sinners. It could be argued we are the greatest of all sinners.

The way I look at it, perhaps The Innocent better represents Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, whereas The Idiot is more suggestive of Leonard Marnham, the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s 1990 novel, The Innocent, one more like us (sheep or non-sheep, doesn’t matter), than the saintly Russian.

Not saying Dostoyevsky erred in his choice of title. Far be it from me… No, The Idiot is the perfect title because it makes clear The World’s interpretation of innocence. And similarly, I do not question McEwan’s choice of The Innocent, so finely laced with irony.

It happens that Marnham has worn his innocence for longer than most, like a baptismal gown that has shrunk and disintegrated with each passing day, until, at 25, there is no more gown and he is left naked. He is no different from the rest of us. It is just that some are late bloomers.

Marnham is a radio technician who has left his home in England, where he lived with his parents, to work for the Americans in West Berlin in 1955, the beginning of the Cold War.

To his surprise, he is assigned a small role in a joint US-British covert operation (setting up and repairing tape recorders), which involves the building of a secret tunnel from the American sector to the Soviet sector. The goal of the operation is to tap phone lines and intercept communications of the Soviet High Command.

For 25 years Marnham has led a comfortable, sheltered life.  He lacks knowledge, not only of the world, but of people. Everything is new and surprising. His first apartment, his role in the covert operation, post-war Berlin, the  Americans, the Germans, women, sex.

Unlike Prince Myshkin, he is unable to see into the hearts of men and women. He cannot see into his own heart, nor probe his insulated self. His is a lethargic, immature spirit, more attentive to proper protocol and social etiquette than to human emotion. He lacks decisiveness and conviction. He is like a pampered child, completely self-centered.

Marnham may think he is in love with Maria, the German woman he met in a night club. But his inability to see into her heart, and to understand her fears, leads him in one moment to treat her in a way that shakes her to the core. He sluggishly recognizes his mistake, and wins her back after some time, but she no longer sees the safe young innocent she was first attracted to.

When Maria’s former husband, a drunken German veteran, enters their shared life, Marnham is confronted with a series of disastrous circumstances that change his life forever.

Like most of us, Marnham the Innocent is ill-equipped to act unhesitatingly in a crisis. He is trapped in a miasma of fear, guilt and self-preservation. Maria, the survivor, infinitely more experienced, draws him out and sets him (and herself) in motion on a dark path, having made the decision for them both.

We can understand why Marnham ends up doing what he does, maybe. Each act can, perhaps, be justified, however unthinkable. We can place ourselves in Marnham’s shoes, take each step with him, and, given the sinister peculiarities and difficulties of the situation, think, yes, maybe I too would do the same. Maybe.

But all extenuating circumstances and justifications aside, would it be right?

Perhaps, ultimately, The Innocent is the one who, immune to self interest, trusts that doing what is right is the path to salvation, even as The Idiot breathlessly seeks the elusive escape hatch that leads to perdition.

Lennon and McCartney had an almost effortless ability to create something new and interesting from disparate themes, images and sounds. Their infectious energy and awesome brilliance still make me laugh.

And despite Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ineluctably falling down on all our heads one day, the Lads shined a light of wonder that made us like the world and each other and the idea that all you need is love, despite all the incomprehensibilities that separate us.

Unfortunately, our experience of life is colored too much by the unoriginal and mundane. Though Popular Culture embraced the Beatles (and their prowess for generating money for the many), more often than not PC’s predictable, formulaic stories hashed out in books, music, art, film, and TV have given us a New Mediocrity in which to stew.

Maybe that’s the place most of us like to be and the language we speak best. Ratings, Best Seller Lists, Top 40, Box Office seem to suggest as much.

Sure, if we seek diligently we can extract a good from anything, ascribe a good to anyone. If, if, if we try. And we should.

But heck, do we need to be reassured all the time, like 5-year-olds marching off to first day of kindergarten? Do we need to consistently be granted smug expectations? Is it so bad to be challenged and provoked by fresh insights, moral dilemmas, unforeseen circumstances, unthinkable choices and outcomes? Would it be the end of us to see through someone else’s eyes on occasion?

I’m talking about pushing against walls. Or climbing them. Because LIFE IS BIG!

Jim Morrison sang, Break on through to the other side. My other side might be different from Jim’s, and yours from mine. But are we destined or meant to only know what we already know?

Nah, don’t think so. But that’s a question each one has to ask himself…

So I begin to think in Walrus terms. Not John Lennon. Not J.D. Salinger. But the Collective Walrus (or Walrus Collective). A mass of Walri? Being as One, and massed against the rocks.

And I see Polar Bear, singular and hungry as he lumbers onto the scene. And I’m thinking, “Ah, man, the baby walri…”

But Collective Walrus is thinking Polar Bear = Threat, and that mountain of shifting, wobbling gray matter whirls to face it. In moments all the young disappear behind a blubber wall sprouting imperial tusks.

PB hesitates, discerning no easy target, then hurls himself upon CW (or WC), targeting a small female that, shockingly, is larger than he.

It is then you sense the tragedy that is about to unfold. Off balance and unable to pierce the thick skin, PB is forced to withdraw for the moment. Nervous random tusks have inflicted first wounds.

PB studies the situation. It is most problematic. He appears small now against the immense excited males with their coarse tusks and immovable bulks. They are easily twice his size, and massed together they are daunting. He paces about and targets a new victim. Again he falls upon a female, but soon withdraws, collecting fresh wounds.

Only desperate, starving polar bears will challenge the Walrus Collective, the narrator grimly offers. Sobered by recognition and understanding, my sympathies shift.

Time and again PB falls upon one of the smaller walruses, but each time with less conviction. Finally, exhausted and severely wounded, PB circles a patch of ice like a tired dog selecting a place to rest, and gingerly curls himself into Death.

Just feet beyond the dying animal, the Walrus Collective have already forgotten their adversary and resumed their patient routines, la-de-dah.

J.D. Salinger died recently at 91. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge as a young soldier and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1945. He wrote The Catcher in the Rye and a number of stories about members of the Glass family, those brilliant, preoccupied folks, and then dropped out of the world.

Of course what Salinger endured and witnessed in War changed him, his mind, his dreams and visions, his approach to relationship, his view of others and God. It affected his artistic choices, what he chose to write and how he wrote it.

Hapworth 16, 1924 was Salinger’s last published story. It appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1965. He went to live in a secluded rural area of New Hampshire, provoking various characterizations from Society, among them coward, recluse, and grump.

Now there’s talk (based on letters to a friend) that he wrote regularly during his extended sabbatical, beginning at 6:00 each morning. (Hooray!)

You could say we all, in good standing with Society or not, are destined to face the Collective Walrus one way or another.

Trying to get what we need to keep going vocationally, artistically, psychically, biologically, financially is a foregone conclusion, no? Getting wounded in the process, falling down, getting up, falling down, becoming invisible, forgotten, all foregone, yes?

(Your point being?)

There is the Rising, see, for those who believe, see. And for those who don’t believe too, see, because unbelief is another form of belief, yes?

Can’t wait to see where Salinger has yet to take us.

Who the hell do you think you are?

Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office, church…).

Who do you think you are? sans “the hell” can appear less accusatory, though I’m betting most times it’s not. How often, for example, have you heard a forthright person earnestly ask another, Who do you think you are?

Completely stripped of challenge, hostility, resentment, accusation? Not often, I wouldn’t think.

So, let this then, possibly, be the first time for you. I ask you (warmly and earnestly, if rhetorically, but with only good intentions), Who do you think you are?

There are teeming hordes itching to answer it for you. You are a heathen to some, an infidel to others. A saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary. You may very well be all things to all people.

Like Jesus, for instance. What must have gone through his mind as the apostles apprised him of the many identities the speculating populace had ascribed to him.

Jesus asked Peter, Who do you say I am?

Couldn’t control what others thought. But Jesus thought it important for Peter to know for himself who he thought Jesus was.

Important because for some, the answer to that question is the answer to the first question. If you believe Jesus is the Son of God (i.e., one with God the Father and thus God Himself), then you know who you are.

What you believe is who you are, whether you are Christian or not. And if the words you speak are what you believe – if they are an integral part of you, not to be separated from your very flesh – then your word is who you are.

The problem with imposing on someone else a who-you-are-ness, a you-are-a-heathen, you-are-an-infidel, a saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary, is that you are showing the world a who-you-are in so cross-eyed, unfocussed, and self-defeating a manner that you become lost to yourself.

This was Saul’s (i.e., Paul’s) problem on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians. He got so cross-eyed and unfocused that he went blind, for a time, and became lost. But being lost is not the worst condition, if later found.

If you are what you believe and what you say, and if you say another is this or that, and your word is who you are, then who you are could be a shrill cry, or an angry shout, or maybe even an ass kiss, depending on where you are coming from.

Or at least that is who you are until you take a much closer look at yourself (myself) and find the center that holds everything together and from which all good springs.

Otherwise we are falling men. Still. Paradise Lost and counting…

Speaking of which…

Don DeLillo’s post-9-11 novel, Falling Man, touches the sky and drills down into our well of being and who-we-are-ness with ancient questions about life and death, and whether any of this means anything and whether God is.

This Inescapable Planet where things get hairy, a Vale of Tears to some, the ultimate Cosmic Cruelty to others. Sometimes the world roars too loud and is too big and jagged and rough and who we are is bled down to feeble word-breaths by disoriented, ash-covered survivors: I am standing here. I am standing here. I am standing here.

This Inescapable Irony of people praying God help us kill them and God don’t let them kill us.

Different people, same God. In fact, one God.

DeLillo unfurls the performing artist known as Falling Man:

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump.

As earnestly as you or I may ask such a reckless, outrageous, crazed, attention-starved man (or is he an avatar? an angel?), Who do you think you are?

Should we?  What happened to Who do we think we are?

We judge, we judge, inescapably…  (Why not accept he is what he believes and is the word he speaks in Silence?)

If I am hearing him right, the Falling Man, Silence is the language we all should master on the off-chance of genuinely hearing one another unencumbered by shrill cries, angry shouts, and maybe even ass kisses, should that be the case.

My parents couldn’t speak, read or write English when I was a toddler, and being a first-born child and having no other siblings to read books to me or other family or neighbors to read to me, it wasn’t until First Grade that I got hold of my first real book in my nervous little hands and learned to read reading it.

I don’t remember the title, or what the cover looked like, but I do remember Ted and Sally and Grandfather and ducks and red truck, and I have to admit I have yet to outgrow the imagery and its promise. I had my own little Sally baby sister, adored my very own Grandfather (a starkly different man from the jovial, somewhat self-satisfied Farmer Grandpa), and was or became a devoted lover of animals, trees, the good earth, perhaps to a fault in the opinion of some, but having been raised in a working class urban area with apartment houses stuck side by side may have a bit to do with that.

I ask myself: Was it that first book that made me the man I am? Or was I already who I was going to be regardless, and TedSally-GrandfatherFarm-RedTruck were simply reflecting back to me who I was becoming? Furthermore, was the happy encounter/bonding between that book’s imagery and who I was developing into at six what caused me to become the book being I am today?

Questions, questions…

Some would argue we’re all supposed to be farmers. They’ll point to those vocation tests we’ve all taken at some time or other, in grade school or high school or online nowadays. Based on results, just about everyone I know is suited to be a farmer, would be good at it, would feel it a fulfilling life worthy to be lived.

The good earth. Simple folks are us (we, if you prefer). Reaping and sowing. Sun, sweat. Harvest moons.

I do think there is something to this. In the movie, Gladiator, Maximus (aka the Spaniard) couldn’t wait to leave Caesar’s far flung endless battlefields and get the heck back home to his farm in Spain. The man was an accomplished killing machine, an esteemed officer in Caesar’s armies. All fine and good, but he wanted to go home to be a farmer.

A former Notre Dame football coach once said men are called to be warriors. It is in their DNA, or some such thing (I am paraphrasing). This propensity to compete, to wage combat, apparently, suits men perfectly to be Soldiers of Christ (what Catholic children become upon completing the sacrament of Confirmation).

This has nothing to do with the Crusades or fighting Islam. This has to do with fighting the powers of darkness, the principalities of evil, wherever and whoever. The language is colorful and useful to some extent. (Where would Michael the Archangel be without his sword?)

But if we are not alert, the language can distort who we are.

Spent New Year’s Eve evening in the movie theater with my bride watching the movie Avatar. Lots of fighting there too, but what caught my attention was an elaborate heroic marketing video selling young people on joining the National Guard that was shown before the movie.

Now I have no problem with anyone joining any branch of our Armed Forces, but this lengthy movie-quality advertisement, unfortunately, reeked of propaganda. All of the branches of the military have produced such videos. They appeal to what is noble in us, and particularly in the young, who are trying to find out who they are and evaluating their self worth on a daily basis.

And what, say you, is wrong with this? It is dishonest. The video is a heat seeking missile that targets what is most alive in its destination, in this case the hearts and illusions of young men and women. It fails to honor their dignity as human beings by denying them truth, or at least some kind of balance.

The truth is that, yes, you can do great things as a soldier. You can defend and help and build. But you can also attack, kill, and destroy. And you can suffer emotional trauma for the rest of your life. And you can do horrible things you thought you were incapable of doing. And you can smell the stench of rotting corpses and walk among the ruins that were once people’s homes. And you can have your life consumed by all that would destroy your mind and soul.

Or maybe not.

Some are called to be soldiers? Maybe. If they are, they will find their way to where they need to be. But for those who are not called to be soldiers, and that is the vast majority of men and women, full disclosure would seem the honorable thing to do. Let the young make informed decisions. Manipulation sends the wrong message.

I do not believe men are born warriors. I do believe most of us are born lovers, like the Man-God, Jesus. If you want to use military language to invest what is being said with greater substance, so that it becomes more real to you, so be it.

Some Christians use the term prayer warrior to identify their role in the war against evil. Fine, just remember the difference between the metaphor and the real. Keep language in perspective. Are we called to kill or bring about life? Destroy or build?

The shivering, exhausted soldier pressed against a rock during night guard duty in a remote outpost is missing his loved ones and his home. He is dreaming of long, peaceful, if somewhat uneventful days. Of simple pleasures, maybe even quiet boredom. Does a man lying in bed with his wife pine for the windswept outposts of distant forsaken lands?

Life always, and all that nurtures and engenders life. Are we all closet farmers? The farm is a place of life. The battlefield is a place of death. Things on a farm rise up. Things on a battlefield fall.

Ted and Sally gave way to The Muddy Road to Glory, some years later. A young boy caught up in the Civil War. The boy took me away from the farm, set me on a long path of delusion for a time, but I’ve my red truck now, and my acre of land.

You’ll surely think of other examples, but for me two that stand out as being highly representative of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” are the 1996 Yankees (who won the World Series without a super star on the No-I-in-Team team) and Pink Floyd’s trenchant observation of the precariousness of the human condition in The Dark Side of the Moon.

I’ll add Richard Powers’s National Book Award winning novel, The Echo Maker, to the list with its disparately unifying elements of sandhill cranes, disoriented humans, and the mysterious note left on the hospital bed of a 27 year-old man, Mark Schluter, who nearly died in a car accident during a winter’s night on a lonely country road in Nebraska.

Each of the novel’s five parts takes its title from the five lines of the anonymous note left on Mark’s bed. And each part begins with a meditation on the nature and migratory habits of sandhill cranes (FYI, one of the Anishinaabe peoples of North America were called Cranes, or Ajijak, meaning Echo-Makers).

Mark’s sister, Karin, his only surviving relative, leaves her self-affirming job and returns to their home town to take care of Mark until he can take care of himself. When Mark begins to speak words again, Karin’s heart skips a beat, but she mistakes them for attempts at communication. Mark is simply echoing what he hears others say, the doctor tells her.

In time Mark recovers most of his faculties and memory (he doesn’t remember the twelve hours before the accident or the accident itself). Unfortunately, he believes his sister is an imposter, commissioned by some sinister covert agency to torment him. To Karin’s growing dismay, he continually punishes her with despairing questions about the whereabouts of his real sister.

When Karin tries to apply reason to their exchanges, Mark dismisses her attempt as deception. He won’t be duped, he assures her, and creates his own reasons for why things are as they are.

Like Karin, Blackie, his dog, is also an imposter. When Mark returns to his recently acquired  modular home, he is convinced it, along with the rest of neighborhood, is a fake, and marvels at the depth of effort and expense committed to fooling him. Mark is suffering from a rare cognitive disease called Capgras.

Desperate for help, his sister emails the famous cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber. Surprising himself and his wife, Weber flies from New York to Kearney, Nebraska to meet Karin and Mark. Weber fails to do anything but disappoint Karin and leaves after a couple of days of note-taking, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his brief visit.

As the new, temperamental, child-like Mark accommodates himself to his fake dog and fake home, and abides the ever-present Karin-wannabe, Karin begins to mold herself to her new reality: “There was no back to get then to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that.”

How fragile the brain, mutable the mind. According to Weber, Brains of any flavor produced reasonable explanations for unusual perceptions.

Maybe we’re all a bit disoriented.

Weber left Kearney only moderately troubled by the fact he was unable to help the Schluters. But increasingly perturbed by the realization that maybe he was a phony? He could not deny his motivation for going to Kearney was total self interest. He was curious, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add to his portfolio of anecdotal narratives.

Not coincidentally, criticisms of his latest book sting him like a scorpion. His peers begin to view him as a lightweight who shuns scientific method, preferring to be the novelty-hungry public’s fabulist.

Weber is forced to peer into himself. Does he share Roger Waters’s (of Pink Floyd) concern, There’s someone in my head but it’s not me?

How well do we know ourselves? When is the last time you or I took a long hard look at ourselves? In this shrinking world of text messaging, tweets, and facebook, has examination of one’s conscience become obsolete? The domain of medieval mentalities?

Know thyself… easier said than done, no?

Oh, I suppose we think we know ourselves. We post a head shot of ourselves on Facebook, tell the world who we are in 150 words, invite others to befriend us and do the same…

Given the infinity of choices this world offers us, we hone our choosing skills and get good at picking this over that. We know almost instantly who or what we like and who or what we don’t. We have become a decisive, impatient race. Time waits for no one.

We know things, the difference between A and B, and which we like better. We like the feel of surface. We like to surf. We face-book and tweet to our heart’s content. But do we know ourselves well enough to predict with total certainty how we will react to any given situation?

Because we don’t know ourselves that well (we don’t, I think), and we don’t always know why we choose A or B or do or fail to do this or that, what’s the point of trying to figure someone else out, much less judge him?

For

we are more than we appear to be

we are more than we appear to be

we are more than we appear to be.

On the Eve of Thanksgiving a black cloud hangs over us – since 2001, approximately 2100 United States military men and women have committed suicide. This was a front page story in the paper a few days ago. Staggering number in its own right. When you consider that this figure is roughly half of those killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and more than twice those killed during Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), you begin to appreciate the scale of this tragedy.

Pat Barker’s fictional World War I trilogy, Regeneration, addresses the sometimes irreversible emotional and mental casualties suffered by British officers. Mutilation of one’s mind and spirit can be more devastating than physical mutilation. Too often “mental problems” are brushed aside by the medical establishment and by society.

It is easier to treat a torn limb than a torn soul, after all. The awesome uniqueness of each human being is perhaps too elusive to grasp, like water, and soon we stop trying. In a hundred years, have we advanced at all in dealing with psychological trauma and the effects of war on the human psyche?

There are too many ways to die, and there are ways to die without ending dead. The horror of what we do to each other bores into us with such force that sometimes there is no room left to be.

The next day I read about a Belgian man who had been thought to be in a vegetative state for 23 years, exactly half his life. Advanced monitoring techniques revealed that the man’s brain was functioning normally, however, and apparently had been functioning correctly for all the time he was thought to be in a coma.

I’m reminded of Joe Bonham in Dalton Trumbo’s novel, Johnny Got His Gun.

Once the human being was rediscovered, efforts were made to communicate. When Joe’s head-thumps against the pillow were recognized as Morse code rather than the spasms of a poor wretched beast, the doctors tapped back.

When the machine did what it hadn’t been able to do all those years before, the doctors created a way for their patient, now 46, to communicate with other people using a computer. The still immobile but mentally fit man, soul intact, expressed gratitude that he would now be able to read, and communicate with friends and family. He would now be able to “enjoy life.”

If a man can enjoy life after lying in a bed for 23 years with the world thinking him dead, how sinister must War be for 2100 of our strongest and youngest to hurl themselves into the arms of Death?