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?