First, I wanted to say a sad goodbye to my friend Lenora P. Blouin who is pictured with me in the profile picture for this blog. May she rest in peace! She was an amazing bibliographer of May Sarton's works and made such a marvelous impression on me when I was invited to speak at the Sarton Centennial in York, Maine a few years back. She will be missed.
The fourth Sunday of Advent is one of my favorite Sundays of the year because it focuses on the Virgin Mary and her beautiful poem and vision of the kingdom, the Magnificat (found in the Gospel of St. Luke). One of the most beautifully inspired pieces of Scripture, this song moves me every time I read and reflect on it. I wanted to share some of those reflections here.
Mary was not one to raise herself up, but she does not diminish herself either. While she praises God for his "greatness," she recognizes her own lowliness: "my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;/for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant." She allows God's choice to lift her, as she tells us that "from this day all generations will call me blessed" because God has raised her. She links this insight into a key observation that "He has mercy on those who fear him/in every generation." Her witness is one of humility and insight, not self-denigration. She is not a woman who fits easily into heterosexist schemes of patriarchal domination; in fact, I would say be very suspicious of any Christian (man) who refers to her as "just a woman," for that is a pretty good sign that s/he does not respect or build women up in his ministry. In fact, I would leave a church that referred to Mary this way. She is to be called "blessed," adored, not denigrated or reduced.
The next lines of the Magnificat accentuate Mary's position in God and her relevance; there, she refers to God "scatter[ing]...the proud in their conceit" with the "strength of his arm." God is at work here; what he does he does through us and are agency, guided by Him and His Spirit. Mary teaches us that a just society "cast[s] dow the mighty from their thrones" and "lift[s] up the lowly." Our politics are not in line with the kingdom when we work against the poor and the lowly and our connectedness with the world, and instead vote in line with the rich (or worse vote as if we were or intend to be rich; remember, Christ tells us that "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.") And, yes, Christ also says that his kingdom is not of this world, but note that those statements (see Luke and John) are made to the Pharisees and normally refer to taking up arms to protect him when he is bound for the cross to propitiate for our sinfulness. The fact that the kingdom will not be fully realized in this world does not let us off the hook for ethical action. As our wonderful presiding bishop Michael Curry recently stated, "Jesus came to show us the way out of the darkness, into the dream." As our bishop William Franklin reflects in a recent email, "God's dream, Bishop Curry said, is to reorder the way things are, to turn the world upside down. To create a world without war or suffering, without injustice and bigotry, without violence and hatred. A world ruled by love. A world where we really do do unto others as we would have them do unto us." In this email, Bishop Franklin takes this one step further, noting the error many Americans (and non-Americans) make: "Some people turn their backs on the exhausted and traumatized Syrian
refugees who are fleeing war in their own nation, viewing them all as potential
terrorists. We have the instinctive reaction to pull up the drawbridges, circle
the wagons and say that there is no room in the inn. There is no small irony
that at the same time, we celebrate the Holy Family, homeless refugees in the
Middle East fleeing a vindictive ruler." Mary's song can guide us to the way to a better (Christian) ethics.
The next lines of the Magnificat show us what our ethics should be when she sings that the Father through Christ and His followers "has filled the hungry with good things;/ and the rich he hath sent away empty." Oh, if only we could vote in such a manner and practice our faith in such a manner that this were true, that humility and knowledge would guide the political process, and not machismo and wealth! A president like our current one has been a model of the kind of leader we need in the public realm, a witness that superpowers need not be bullies (although he too has bullied some; it is hard not too when there is so much power in one country's hands!) but can be guides and can admit mistakes and correct them!
This is the vision, the promise that is made to us through Christ and that compels us not to think of ourselves but others as we vote, as we act, as we share this Advent and Christmas seasons and into the new year as well. God has come to help his servants, for "he has remembered his promise of mercy," a promise initially given to Israel but extended through Christ (and St. Paul) to the whole world. We can rest and also act from this "promise" expressed in the Magnificat that God through Christ (and Mary) made "to Abraham and his children forever." Amen, and have a blessed Holiday (the word comes from "holy day") season.
Monday, December 21, 2015
Saturday, August 29, 2015
On Dinaw Mengestu
Dear Readers,
I have been doing a bit of thinking this summer about the work of Harold Bloom and particularly his writing about the struggle between works that for him is the key to whether or not a work becomes canonical. On reading Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears--a work that Bloom would probably not consider canon-worthy overall--I have been struck how this "agonistic struggle" between various works (Bloom's terminology) occurs in this novel, particularly through its allusions, and come to the conclusion that perhaps the canonical works Mengestu surveys are just too big to be digested. In Bloom's terminology, Mengestu must not be (mis)reading the canon quite well enough.
First, a note about Bloom's work: I am struck now by how many women and minority works are included in his book The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (1994) than how many are excluded, as I was when I first read the work in graduate school. My graduate program was right in seeing Bloom as old guard and a barricade against inclusion, but they were wrongheaded in dismissing his theories, for Bloom shares many of our values as proponents of literary studies. When he is not pushed in a corner (which he seems to be) and made defensive, he can be quite a thoughtful expounder of the values of avid reading and study that many if not most of us share who have invested our lives in literary study. And, additionally, his values can indeed be shaped to be quite useful for the kinds of recovery work many of us do of voices that have either just come on the scene (as Mengestu's) or been lost somewhere in the past.
And now a bit more about Mengestu's novel: Reading Bloom this summer has made me intensely aware of (sensitive to) allusion and what he calls "intratextual" relations (I think Julia Kristeva's term "intertextual" is as accurate and more understandable). I will take one example of how this intertextual relationship shapes Mengestu's novel. The title is a translation from the Italian of the last lines of Dante's Inferno, as Dante (the protagonist of the poem) leaves Hell with Virgil and walks into the light of the stars of night. The lines themselves almost sigh with relief; I suspect that the Italian may even more sound like a sigh, as many of the translations do. The lines are quoted by our protagonist Sepha's friend Joseph, who as an Ethiopian immigrant, has tried college as a way of legitimizing himself in America without success. He likes, when he gets drunk, to say the two lines that contain the title.
The lines are cited in the novel twice--once when Joseph is described as saying them and then later in the protagonist's voice as he returns to stasis, sitting on the front steps of his store, at the end of the novel. In Bloom's view, Mengestu has challenged Dante by trying to incorporate him (agonism again), and in essence I think Bloom would be partially correct. I tend to think that what Mengestu is signifying is that Sepha, having left Ethiopia where he saw his father beaten to death before his mother and younger brother and come to America is an emergence from Hell into a kind of modern Purgatory in the streets of the city of Washington. (There is some suggestion as well of ascending to a better level of Purgatory than the one at the very bottom, when Naomi and her mother begin a kind of gentrification of the area through their renovation of a dilapidated old mansion just across from Sepha's store, but this fails miserably and the area is in even worse shape by the end of the novel.)
Now, in Bloom's idea, Mengestu must overcome Dante in his representation to achieve canonical status, and he certainly does not do this (who could?). Yet somehow the novel is successful in locating Sepha and Joseph's stories within the framework of traditional high literature. By taking on Dante and alluding to him in his title and references, Mengestu reaches for something more than just the now that is the context of his novel. He shows his awareness of the literature of the past and suggests that it still provides for us many lessons and nourishment that can continue to inform our lives and creations today. That in and of itself is a powerful message, and perhaps the best that the novel can do. It certainly makes it a worthwhile reading experience. Cheers, friends!
I have been doing a bit of thinking this summer about the work of Harold Bloom and particularly his writing about the struggle between works that for him is the key to whether or not a work becomes canonical. On reading Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears--a work that Bloom would probably not consider canon-worthy overall--I have been struck how this "agonistic struggle" between various works (Bloom's terminology) occurs in this novel, particularly through its allusions, and come to the conclusion that perhaps the canonical works Mengestu surveys are just too big to be digested. In Bloom's terminology, Mengestu must not be (mis)reading the canon quite well enough.
First, a note about Bloom's work: I am struck now by how many women and minority works are included in his book The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (1994) than how many are excluded, as I was when I first read the work in graduate school. My graduate program was right in seeing Bloom as old guard and a barricade against inclusion, but they were wrongheaded in dismissing his theories, for Bloom shares many of our values as proponents of literary studies. When he is not pushed in a corner (which he seems to be) and made defensive, he can be quite a thoughtful expounder of the values of avid reading and study that many if not most of us share who have invested our lives in literary study. And, additionally, his values can indeed be shaped to be quite useful for the kinds of recovery work many of us do of voices that have either just come on the scene (as Mengestu's) or been lost somewhere in the past.
And now a bit more about Mengestu's novel: Reading Bloom this summer has made me intensely aware of (sensitive to) allusion and what he calls "intratextual" relations (I think Julia Kristeva's term "intertextual" is as accurate and more understandable). I will take one example of how this intertextual relationship shapes Mengestu's novel. The title is a translation from the Italian of the last lines of Dante's Inferno, as Dante (the protagonist of the poem) leaves Hell with Virgil and walks into the light of the stars of night. The lines themselves almost sigh with relief; I suspect that the Italian may even more sound like a sigh, as many of the translations do. The lines are quoted by our protagonist Sepha's friend Joseph, who as an Ethiopian immigrant, has tried college as a way of legitimizing himself in America without success. He likes, when he gets drunk, to say the two lines that contain the title.
The lines are cited in the novel twice--once when Joseph is described as saying them and then later in the protagonist's voice as he returns to stasis, sitting on the front steps of his store, at the end of the novel. In Bloom's view, Mengestu has challenged Dante by trying to incorporate him (agonism again), and in essence I think Bloom would be partially correct. I tend to think that what Mengestu is signifying is that Sepha, having left Ethiopia where he saw his father beaten to death before his mother and younger brother and come to America is an emergence from Hell into a kind of modern Purgatory in the streets of the city of Washington. (There is some suggestion as well of ascending to a better level of Purgatory than the one at the very bottom, when Naomi and her mother begin a kind of gentrification of the area through their renovation of a dilapidated old mansion just across from Sepha's store, but this fails miserably and the area is in even worse shape by the end of the novel.)
Now, in Bloom's idea, Mengestu must overcome Dante in his representation to achieve canonical status, and he certainly does not do this (who could?). Yet somehow the novel is successful in locating Sepha and Joseph's stories within the framework of traditional high literature. By taking on Dante and alluding to him in his title and references, Mengestu reaches for something more than just the now that is the context of his novel. He shows his awareness of the literature of the past and suggests that it still provides for us many lessons and nourishment that can continue to inform our lives and creations today. That in and of itself is a powerful message, and perhaps the best that the novel can do. It certainly makes it a worthwhile reading experience. Cheers, friends!
Thursday, July 30, 2015
On Sanctification
[I am in a reading phase for the next chapter of my book on Sontag; it covers her second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will, which I am finding increasingly indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works Being and Nothingness and St. Genet, so I am studying these along with Sontag's collection and a wonderful book on apophatic theology in contemporary literature by Christopher J. Knight. So in the meantime I will be giving my thoughts to the blog to keep the writing flowing. Enjoy, dear friends!]
I love the following quotation from Benedictine brother David Steindl-Rast that I recently found; he writes: "What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive." I realize that for me as an Anglican Christian and non-sectarian contemplative, the process Steindl-Rast addresses here is what I would label (theologically-speaking) as sanctification. If we prayerfully do that which "brings us alive," we do it in the Spirit and with gratitude; we are becoming sanctified via Christ's agency in us and He through us sanctifies the activity we are doing. It is that simple and that profound at the same time.
Reading and studying the works of May Sarton and Thomas Merton are what first taught me this valuable lesson that Steindl-Rast has reminded me of today. Sarton believed that writing itself was a spiritual practice, especially poetry, and that we set aside the routine time of writing as a sacred and uninterrupted period of each one of our days. Sarton is completely correct, and she occasionally had to be quite gruff with people who wanted to disrupt that important time. I tend to feel the same way; I like to keep mornings for writing and I get very upset when, especially during the semester, someone wants my Saturday mornings, which is often the only sustained time I have to write all week during term. So if I too am gruff to keep that time sacred, I apologize but am not really sorry.
As writers and contemplatives, we have to keep our "alive" time and practices, whatever they are, sacrosanct so that the processes that restore and renew us and bring us more in line with what God wants for and through us can happen. Yes, I am an introvert, and probably on the extreme side of that spectrum of extrovert/introvert. Indeed, my blog probably reads strangely to those who are truly or extremely extroverts, but then again, aren't most writers who find their best fellowship with their notebooks (paper and virtual) introverts?
Which brings me to another practice which keeps me alive (apart from worship on our Sabbath, which is its sacred space and deserves another space and time to discuss more fully), and that is the time I devote to exercise. I have learned through ill health and particularly being hospitalized twice with pancreatitis (a potentially deadly disorder) that my time at the gym exercising with my trainer has to be set aside and made a kind of sacred space as well. I sometimes pray before or during my exercise time to sanctify that activity, although I am not always or consistently prayerful while working out at a gym. I know that God has put people like my trainer Aaron Newman and my gym Catalyst Fitness in my life for the reason to keep me healthy in body as well as mind and soul. For that, I am truly grateful.
Happy reading and exploring what acts bring you alive today and always!
I love the following quotation from Benedictine brother David Steindl-Rast that I recently found; he writes: "What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive." I realize that for me as an Anglican Christian and non-sectarian contemplative, the process Steindl-Rast addresses here is what I would label (theologically-speaking) as sanctification. If we prayerfully do that which "brings us alive," we do it in the Spirit and with gratitude; we are becoming sanctified via Christ's agency in us and He through us sanctifies the activity we are doing. It is that simple and that profound at the same time.
Reading and studying the works of May Sarton and Thomas Merton are what first taught me this valuable lesson that Steindl-Rast has reminded me of today. Sarton believed that writing itself was a spiritual practice, especially poetry, and that we set aside the routine time of writing as a sacred and uninterrupted period of each one of our days. Sarton is completely correct, and she occasionally had to be quite gruff with people who wanted to disrupt that important time. I tend to feel the same way; I like to keep mornings for writing and I get very upset when, especially during the semester, someone wants my Saturday mornings, which is often the only sustained time I have to write all week during term. So if I too am gruff to keep that time sacred, I apologize but am not really sorry.
As writers and contemplatives, we have to keep our "alive" time and practices, whatever they are, sacrosanct so that the processes that restore and renew us and bring us more in line with what God wants for and through us can happen. Yes, I am an introvert, and probably on the extreme side of that spectrum of extrovert/introvert. Indeed, my blog probably reads strangely to those who are truly or extremely extroverts, but then again, aren't most writers who find their best fellowship with their notebooks (paper and virtual) introverts?
Which brings me to another practice which keeps me alive (apart from worship on our Sabbath, which is its sacred space and deserves another space and time to discuss more fully), and that is the time I devote to exercise. I have learned through ill health and particularly being hospitalized twice with pancreatitis (a potentially deadly disorder) that my time at the gym exercising with my trainer has to be set aside and made a kind of sacred space as well. I sometimes pray before or during my exercise time to sanctify that activity, although I am not always or consistently prayerful while working out at a gym. I know that God has put people like my trainer Aaron Newman and my gym Catalyst Fitness in my life for the reason to keep me healthy in body as well as mind and soul. For that, I am truly grateful.
Happy reading and exploring what acts bring you alive today and always!
Friday, July 3, 2015
Thoughts on Wollstonecraft & Stravinsky
Dear Readers,
Today, I find myself thinking a bit about Mary Wollstonecraft and her battles with depression, particularly after being left destitute by her lover, the painter Gilbert Imlay. I have never been quite sure why William Godwin, her future husband, who after her death penned his infamous Memoirs of the Writer of Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1797), felt the need to go into such detail about Wollstonecraft's two suicide attempts, once in October of 1795 and once earlier. Wollstonecraft at the time was a single and somewhat pennyless mother of an infant, alone Scandanavia at one point and not much better situated when she returned to England. What I find even more interesting in that in that period of fall of 1795 is that Wollstonecraft began writing a series of lessons for her daughter Fanny to be used after she was gone (she describes them as directed at a motherless child). I am beginning to consider the larger ramifications of her depression (a depression shared, not incidentally, by her protagonist in her final, incomplete novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1797)). I wonder if Wollstonecraft's much-derided suicide attempts can be read within their historical contexts as, yes, cries for help, but also for the result that she dreamed of a kind of a utopian social equality for women that could never be realized in her time. Perhaps her realization that it was just not going to come about for her and women in her times was just too much knowledge and insight for her to bear.
[The reflections above are not only written in relation to my own reading and rereading of Wollstonecraft, one of the authors I turn to again and again in my teaching and thinking, but also in relation to Rebecca Davis's Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book, which I am reviewing for the academic journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. It is an important book and one I hope to celebrate in my review.]
I also wanted to share my response to a recent recording I received of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, performed by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Gerard Schwartz and available on Naxos. (I had actually ordered an earlier and better recording of this work that has recently come out on LP at our local Barnes and Nobles and carelessly the cashier placed an order for this other edition. I decided to keep it when it came in, for can you really have too many copies of a favored classical work?) The sound quality on this recording is in dire need of assistance. While I love the ballet (I am in general less thrilled with the "filler" work Naxos included, his Fireworks, but then again I don't like fireworks much anyhow), the softer parts are set at a recording level that is too quiet to hear them unless the volume is way up; then the louder parts become too loud. This is a problem with some classical recordings that just does not happen in a concert hall. With much modernist music that I like, such as that by Stravinsky and Shostakovich (my favorite modern composer; check out his symphony 13), the soft lyrical portions are achingly beautiful and, like much in life, achieved with great angst and dexterity. It is a shame to lose them in a weakly-balanced post-production product.
Cheers!
Today, I find myself thinking a bit about Mary Wollstonecraft and her battles with depression, particularly after being left destitute by her lover, the painter Gilbert Imlay. I have never been quite sure why William Godwin, her future husband, who after her death penned his infamous Memoirs of the Writer of Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1797), felt the need to go into such detail about Wollstonecraft's two suicide attempts, once in October of 1795 and once earlier. Wollstonecraft at the time was a single and somewhat pennyless mother of an infant, alone Scandanavia at one point and not much better situated when she returned to England. What I find even more interesting in that in that period of fall of 1795 is that Wollstonecraft began writing a series of lessons for her daughter Fanny to be used after she was gone (she describes them as directed at a motherless child). I am beginning to consider the larger ramifications of her depression (a depression shared, not incidentally, by her protagonist in her final, incomplete novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1797)). I wonder if Wollstonecraft's much-derided suicide attempts can be read within their historical contexts as, yes, cries for help, but also for the result that she dreamed of a kind of a utopian social equality for women that could never be realized in her time. Perhaps her realization that it was just not going to come about for her and women in her times was just too much knowledge and insight for her to bear.
[The reflections above are not only written in relation to my own reading and rereading of Wollstonecraft, one of the authors I turn to again and again in my teaching and thinking, but also in relation to Rebecca Davis's Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book, which I am reviewing for the academic journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. It is an important book and one I hope to celebrate in my review.]
I also wanted to share my response to a recent recording I received of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, performed by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Gerard Schwartz and available on Naxos. (I had actually ordered an earlier and better recording of this work that has recently come out on LP at our local Barnes and Nobles and carelessly the cashier placed an order for this other edition. I decided to keep it when it came in, for can you really have too many copies of a favored classical work?) The sound quality on this recording is in dire need of assistance. While I love the ballet (I am in general less thrilled with the "filler" work Naxos included, his Fireworks, but then again I don't like fireworks much anyhow), the softer parts are set at a recording level that is too quiet to hear them unless the volume is way up; then the louder parts become too loud. This is a problem with some classical recordings that just does not happen in a concert hall. With much modernist music that I like, such as that by Stravinsky and Shostakovich (my favorite modern composer; check out his symphony 13), the soft lyrical portions are achingly beautiful and, like much in life, achieved with great angst and dexterity. It is a shame to lose them in a weakly-balanced post-production product.
Cheers!
Thursday, June 18, 2015
On Feminism (George Sand, Androgyny, Bisexuality, Etc.)
Dearest Readers,
I am in my office this morning, ostensibly working on my writing but more or less still reading The Benefactor and making sure all of the programs on my laptop are updated by the school, as it is technically their machine. The quiet here is very nice today, and the weather is temperate--not too hot nor too cool, but just right. I have the window open, the fan blowing, my shoes and socks off, and I am quite comfy.
This morning, I went to have my blood taken for my usual panel of tests before a doctor's visit. I was talking with a phlebotomist whose family had been friends with the poet and memoirist Audre Lorde and who have found some serious misrepresentations of them and her in some of the recent work on her life. I am wondering how one goes about interviewing and documenting these issues before those who know the truth about them are no longer alive. Where can we publish those kind of very valuable remembrances? What format do they take professionally for us? The phlebotomist is willing to be interviewed and I would not mind at some point perhaps later in the summer conducting and writing this interview; I would have to brush up my reading of Lorde as I have not considered her works in a long while, although I have taught in the past in Introduction to Poetry and in my Women in Literature courses.
Currently, I am working my way through Sontag's The Benefactor as well as Elizabeth Berg's Dream Lover, which Angie gave me for my birthday, and which is based on the life of George Sand. Sand is a fascinating and important writer, but, as with many writing and artistic women who lived extraordinary lives (such as Aphra Behn among others), the work they wrote and produced is itself overshadowed by the life. Sand had long relationships and perhaps affairs with many of the major male writers and artists of her day (e.g., Liszt, Chopin, Flaubert) and occasionally smoked a cigar and cross-dressed to travel as a man. The couple of her novels that I have read have been thoroughly my kind of book, so she is someone I have wanted to read about and in more deeply.
Most often, however, where I come across Sand is when I teach Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote two amazing sonnets in admiration of Sand, and which offer two (separate) lines of fascinating and relevant feminist thought--one of the sonnets argues that Sand is more woman than any woman has ever been, and the other argues that Sand transcends gender categories all together. These sonnets chart for my students and me two approaches to feminist thought: One seeks to reconstruct masculine values by emphasizing those that are most deeply female. I like this side of feminism best because of its potential to remake the world with those values-values of affect (empathy, an ethic of care, cooperation instead of competition, etc.), openness to change and the Other, and an ethics that responds deeply and empathically to contingency.
The other side of feminism (at least in those sonnets, and you can find this side most pronounced in the wonderful chapter 6 of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and some of the work of Carolyn Heilbrun) is an emphasis on moving beyond gender into a kind of androgynous space. Androgyny has perchance received a bad rap, but it is not without its strong merits. I think the Unisex movement of the sixties and seventies may have had something to do with this reputation, but that is only part of the larger picture. Julia Kristeva in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt argues rather convincingly that androgyny's real problem is its evocation of a kind of asexuality; she suggests that bisexuality is a better and more productive model of a move beyond gender and gendered categories. She may indeed be right.
Okay, so now it is back to The Benefactor, which also raises some of these issues as the major character is bisexual and rather open in discussing it. Yet I am not sure of his motivations nor his self-concept here. More about that later, I suppose.
I am in my office this morning, ostensibly working on my writing but more or less still reading The Benefactor and making sure all of the programs on my laptop are updated by the school, as it is technically their machine. The quiet here is very nice today, and the weather is temperate--not too hot nor too cool, but just right. I have the window open, the fan blowing, my shoes and socks off, and I am quite comfy.
This morning, I went to have my blood taken for my usual panel of tests before a doctor's visit. I was talking with a phlebotomist whose family had been friends with the poet and memoirist Audre Lorde and who have found some serious misrepresentations of them and her in some of the recent work on her life. I am wondering how one goes about interviewing and documenting these issues before those who know the truth about them are no longer alive. Where can we publish those kind of very valuable remembrances? What format do they take professionally for us? The phlebotomist is willing to be interviewed and I would not mind at some point perhaps later in the summer conducting and writing this interview; I would have to brush up my reading of Lorde as I have not considered her works in a long while, although I have taught in the past in Introduction to Poetry and in my Women in Literature courses.
Currently, I am working my way through Sontag's The Benefactor as well as Elizabeth Berg's Dream Lover, which Angie gave me for my birthday, and which is based on the life of George Sand. Sand is a fascinating and important writer, but, as with many writing and artistic women who lived extraordinary lives (such as Aphra Behn among others), the work they wrote and produced is itself overshadowed by the life. Sand had long relationships and perhaps affairs with many of the major male writers and artists of her day (e.g., Liszt, Chopin, Flaubert) and occasionally smoked a cigar and cross-dressed to travel as a man. The couple of her novels that I have read have been thoroughly my kind of book, so she is someone I have wanted to read about and in more deeply.
Most often, however, where I come across Sand is when I teach Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote two amazing sonnets in admiration of Sand, and which offer two (separate) lines of fascinating and relevant feminist thought--one of the sonnets argues that Sand is more woman than any woman has ever been, and the other argues that Sand transcends gender categories all together. These sonnets chart for my students and me two approaches to feminist thought: One seeks to reconstruct masculine values by emphasizing those that are most deeply female. I like this side of feminism best because of its potential to remake the world with those values-values of affect (empathy, an ethic of care, cooperation instead of competition, etc.), openness to change and the Other, and an ethics that responds deeply and empathically to contingency.
The other side of feminism (at least in those sonnets, and you can find this side most pronounced in the wonderful chapter 6 of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and some of the work of Carolyn Heilbrun) is an emphasis on moving beyond gender into a kind of androgynous space. Androgyny has perchance received a bad rap, but it is not without its strong merits. I think the Unisex movement of the sixties and seventies may have had something to do with this reputation, but that is only part of the larger picture. Julia Kristeva in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt argues rather convincingly that androgyny's real problem is its evocation of a kind of asexuality; she suggests that bisexuality is a better and more productive model of a move beyond gender and gendered categories. She may indeed be right.
Okay, so now it is back to The Benefactor, which also raises some of these issues as the major character is bisexual and rather open in discussing it. Yet I am not sure of his motivations nor his self-concept here. More about that later, I suppose.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
On Susan Sontag's The Benefactor
Dear Readers,
Here I sit, listening to the last couple of movements of Mozart's Symphony #35, the Haffner symphony, on a rainy day with the pounding of the jackhammer as construction workers spend their second day outside of my home. I have been reading Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor (published in 1963), and find it quite good, even though most critics and many of her friends thought it wasn't her best. I am definitely more interested in her essays than her fiction, but this novel has captured my imagination because its main character, Hippolyte, is a disenchanted intellectual who has left the academic world in pursuit of something else which he cannot define. (For those of you who know me, don't worry--I am not planning on leaving academics.).
The novel is told in flashback so far, working through that wonderful charting of memory that the best Modernist novels do so well. It is written from the vantage of Hippolyte as a sixty-one-year old, looking back on his twenties and the choices he made then. He is very much someone I find sympathetic. Listen to how he explains his disenchantment with academics even though he is an intellectual and one who quests after knowledge: "Inspired [at university] by the project of becoming learned, I enrolled in the most varied courses of lectures. But this very thirst for inquiry, that led to investigations which subsequently preoccupied me, did not find a proper satisfaction in the divisions and faculties of the university. Do not misunderstand me, it was not that I objected to specialization...Neither did I object to pedantry. What I objected to was that my professors raised problems only to solve them, and brought their lectures to a conclusion with maddening punctuality." I just love that description and find it fascinating that we have changed only somewhat in our ways of teaching since then, and perhaps not quite enough. Further, I think this description is in part autobiographical and could be applied to Sontag, who herself left academics around this date having not finished her dissertation on Simone Weill, and living much of her time after leaving in Paris. (If Hippolyte now moves to Paris or even Europe in his twenties, I will know even more certainly that he is based on her.)
One brief note here about the use of memory--I know that in this novel, Hippolyte is going to start blurring his real life and his dream life. I love the interplay between memory, remembrance and the present, and how faulted memory can shape present life. Sontag has a compelling vision of the memoryscape of her central character here, as she is very well-read in Freudianism and Surrealism. This lack of playing with memory, remembrance, and its relationship with the present is the key reason I find Stephen King's Lisey's Story an important but ultimately unsatisfactory novel; memory in that novel is just too darn clear!
The book cover of The Benefactor lists as its models Kafka, and this influence is certainly apparent. I also see a strong influence of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his later books like Look at the Harlequins! (one of my favorites), which may date after Sontag's early novel. Where I am in the novel Hippolyte is becoming more and more obsessed with his own mind, and particularly his developing habit of vivid and rather verbal dreaming. (Sontag will explore the dreamworld again quite strongly in her second novel Death Kit (1967), which is also more profoundly Surrealist and, at least to me, not as successful as The Benefactor appears to be). Yes, as critics have noted, The Benefactor has all of the hallmarks of Surrealist fiction, but even more because of Sontag's essays and background, I think we can conclude that Freud in general and his Interpretation of Dreams in particular has a lot to do with the structure of this novel's explorations. (Of course the influence of Freud on Surrealism and the impact of Surrealism on Freud is a long and interesting history that I know too little about at present to write with any precision.) Thus I see the early '60s in Sontag's work--both essays and fiction--as a long, drawn-out conversation with her ex-husband Philip Rieff and his apologetic approach to Freud (more about that in my book on Sontag when it comes out!).
Good fiction has a way of drawing us in, often through empathy. (This is one of the reasons why I find most postmodern fiction unsatisfactory, as I find nothing to hold on to in relation to the characters. Please fault me here if you choose, but my model for the best novels ever written are still Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.) So far in my reading of The Benefactor, I would list it as one of Sontag's better novels, alongside The Volcano Lover. I will let you know what I think as I continue reading this fascinating early text.
Here I sit, listening to the last couple of movements of Mozart's Symphony #35, the Haffner symphony, on a rainy day with the pounding of the jackhammer as construction workers spend their second day outside of my home. I have been reading Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor (published in 1963), and find it quite good, even though most critics and many of her friends thought it wasn't her best. I am definitely more interested in her essays than her fiction, but this novel has captured my imagination because its main character, Hippolyte, is a disenchanted intellectual who has left the academic world in pursuit of something else which he cannot define. (For those of you who know me, don't worry--I am not planning on leaving academics.).
The novel is told in flashback so far, working through that wonderful charting of memory that the best Modernist novels do so well. It is written from the vantage of Hippolyte as a sixty-one-year old, looking back on his twenties and the choices he made then. He is very much someone I find sympathetic. Listen to how he explains his disenchantment with academics even though he is an intellectual and one who quests after knowledge: "Inspired [at university] by the project of becoming learned, I enrolled in the most varied courses of lectures. But this very thirst for inquiry, that led to investigations which subsequently preoccupied me, did not find a proper satisfaction in the divisions and faculties of the university. Do not misunderstand me, it was not that I objected to specialization...Neither did I object to pedantry. What I objected to was that my professors raised problems only to solve them, and brought their lectures to a conclusion with maddening punctuality." I just love that description and find it fascinating that we have changed only somewhat in our ways of teaching since then, and perhaps not quite enough. Further, I think this description is in part autobiographical and could be applied to Sontag, who herself left academics around this date having not finished her dissertation on Simone Weill, and living much of her time after leaving in Paris. (If Hippolyte now moves to Paris or even Europe in his twenties, I will know even more certainly that he is based on her.)
One brief note here about the use of memory--I know that in this novel, Hippolyte is going to start blurring his real life and his dream life. I love the interplay between memory, remembrance and the present, and how faulted memory can shape present life. Sontag has a compelling vision of the memoryscape of her central character here, as she is very well-read in Freudianism and Surrealism. This lack of playing with memory, remembrance, and its relationship with the present is the key reason I find Stephen King's Lisey's Story an important but ultimately unsatisfactory novel; memory in that novel is just too darn clear!
The book cover of The Benefactor lists as its models Kafka, and this influence is certainly apparent. I also see a strong influence of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his later books like Look at the Harlequins! (one of my favorites), which may date after Sontag's early novel. Where I am in the novel Hippolyte is becoming more and more obsessed with his own mind, and particularly his developing habit of vivid and rather verbal dreaming. (Sontag will explore the dreamworld again quite strongly in her second novel Death Kit (1967), which is also more profoundly Surrealist and, at least to me, not as successful as The Benefactor appears to be). Yes, as critics have noted, The Benefactor has all of the hallmarks of Surrealist fiction, but even more because of Sontag's essays and background, I think we can conclude that Freud in general and his Interpretation of Dreams in particular has a lot to do with the structure of this novel's explorations. (Of course the influence of Freud on Surrealism and the impact of Surrealism on Freud is a long and interesting history that I know too little about at present to write with any precision.) Thus I see the early '60s in Sontag's work--both essays and fiction--as a long, drawn-out conversation with her ex-husband Philip Rieff and his apologetic approach to Freud (more about that in my book on Sontag when it comes out!).
Good fiction has a way of drawing us in, often through empathy. (This is one of the reasons why I find most postmodern fiction unsatisfactory, as I find nothing to hold on to in relation to the characters. Please fault me here if you choose, but my model for the best novels ever written are still Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.) So far in my reading of The Benefactor, I would list it as one of Sontag's better novels, alongside The Volcano Lover. I will let you know what I think as I continue reading this fascinating early text.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
On (Teaching) English Romanticism
Dear Readers,
I have been working on my ENG 419, British Romanticism, syllabus for fall, and enjoying immensely rethinking and focusing this course which I have taught previously. My brief description that I give to the students on the syllabus reads as follows: "The first generation of English Romantics was faced with the cataclysm of the French Revolution and its aftermath, which meant war for Great Britain and the threat of invasion. Yet the Revolution represented at least in name some of the very values that the British held dear (i.e., liberty, equality, and brotherhood). We will examine this semester the works of English Romantics who are considering in deep and analytical ways the impact of the Revolution and the emergence of ideas of individualism and nationhood in the 1790s into the early nineteenth century. We will read those who saw the French Revolution as the end of civilized behavior and the death of chivalry (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France), those who saw it as an opportunity to transform society in remarkably liberal ways (Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), those who used the period as a time for great and transformative making of art and literature (William Blake, Vala/The Four Zoas, The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem), and those who used the ideas of the period to transform the domestic novel into something very different than what it had been (Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter and Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock)."
The work I have become most excited about in the list is Godwin's Enquiry. According the back blurb, this work marks the beginning of "philosophical anarchism." I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the Enquiry, unless the one ("philosophical anarchism") shades in its definition a bit into modern libertarianism. There is still way too much generosity and care for the other in Godwin to fit fully or comfortably into the libertarian camp, though; for the versions of at least American libertarianism I know tend to be very deeply individualistic and self-obsessed, not acknowledging nor caring that we are part of the same society and that as part of that society--that social contract, to use Rousseau's phrasing--we bear some responsibility one to another. Philosophical anarchism falls into some of the same traps but its utopian spirit, which tends not to be so narcissistic, is attractive though not practicable or implementable as I see it. Godwin seems to me to be arguing for something that still shares the interconnectedness of what will become more fully the socialist impulse (after Marx) in England in the nineteenth century than perhaps either philosophical anarchism or libertarianism.
More significantly, at least for my reading of Godwin, is his notion of literature. Godwin is not willing nor desirous of separating the various forms of texts--literary, historical, philosophical--into categories, but sees them all adhering to one another under the notion of literature and their using/employing the literary in their makeup. He has a very high calling for the transformative impact of literature and the literary on culture and this is a vision of his that I deeply share as well. Perhaps this is why Godwin also was invested in what can only be labelled a kind of philosophical and, at least in the care of Caleb Williams, a proto-Marxist fiction, and later with children and the production and circulation of children's books. It will be fascinating to see what the students this fall make of this impressive man, his political/philosophical treatise, and the historical context(s) from which it emerges.
I have been working on my ENG 419, British Romanticism, syllabus for fall, and enjoying immensely rethinking and focusing this course which I have taught previously. My brief description that I give to the students on the syllabus reads as follows: "The first generation of English Romantics was faced with the cataclysm of the French Revolution and its aftermath, which meant war for Great Britain and the threat of invasion. Yet the Revolution represented at least in name some of the very values that the British held dear (i.e., liberty, equality, and brotherhood). We will examine this semester the works of English Romantics who are considering in deep and analytical ways the impact of the Revolution and the emergence of ideas of individualism and nationhood in the 1790s into the early nineteenth century. We will read those who saw the French Revolution as the end of civilized behavior and the death of chivalry (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France), those who saw it as an opportunity to transform society in remarkably liberal ways (Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice), those who used the period as a time for great and transformative making of art and literature (William Blake, Vala/The Four Zoas, The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem), and those who used the ideas of the period to transform the domestic novel into something very different than what it had been (Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter and Eliza Fenwick, Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock)."
The work I have become most excited about in the list is Godwin's Enquiry. According the back blurb, this work marks the beginning of "philosophical anarchism." I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the Enquiry, unless the one ("philosophical anarchism") shades in its definition a bit into modern libertarianism. There is still way too much generosity and care for the other in Godwin to fit fully or comfortably into the libertarian camp, though; for the versions of at least American libertarianism I know tend to be very deeply individualistic and self-obsessed, not acknowledging nor caring that we are part of the same society and that as part of that society--that social contract, to use Rousseau's phrasing--we bear some responsibility one to another. Philosophical anarchism falls into some of the same traps but its utopian spirit, which tends not to be so narcissistic, is attractive though not practicable or implementable as I see it. Godwin seems to me to be arguing for something that still shares the interconnectedness of what will become more fully the socialist impulse (after Marx) in England in the nineteenth century than perhaps either philosophical anarchism or libertarianism.
More significantly, at least for my reading of Godwin, is his notion of literature. Godwin is not willing nor desirous of separating the various forms of texts--literary, historical, philosophical--into categories, but sees them all adhering to one another under the notion of literature and their using/employing the literary in their makeup. He has a very high calling for the transformative impact of literature and the literary on culture and this is a vision of his that I deeply share as well. Perhaps this is why Godwin also was invested in what can only be labelled a kind of philosophical and, at least in the care of Caleb Williams, a proto-Marxist fiction, and later with children and the production and circulation of children's books. It will be fascinating to see what the students this fall make of this impressive man, his political/philosophical treatise, and the historical context(s) from which it emerges.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Sontag, Freud, Said
[Dear Readers--This is a draft of an afterword to a chapter in my book on Susan Sontag that may or may not appear in the final version. The chapter concerns Sontag's early relationship in her writing to the work of Sigmund Freud, and takes up as a contrast the work of Edward Said and one of his last public addresses, delivered at the London museum for Freud. Let me know your thoughts!]
* * *
As an afterword to
this discussion of Sontag’s relationship to Freud and his thought, I wanted to
reflect for a moment on a more productive usage of Freudian theory than Sontag
offers. Sontag is right to reject the simplifying
of Freud’s ideas and their appropriation by the status quo. Further, Sontag’s own rejection of Freud is
wrapped up with her turning away from married life and the work (or even
co-work) she did with ex-husband Philip Rieff (in his book Freud: The Mind of a Moralist), which did in essence reduce art to manifest and
latent content, with the ability of the critic/analyst being to uncover the latent
content at the expense of that on the surface and her experience of the work of
art in all of its complexity. Edward
Said in his brief, late lecture Freud and
the Non-European (2002) maps a more productive and continuing engagement
with Freud’s ideas. Following on the
chapter in his early book Beginnings: Intention
and Method (1985) that explicates Freud’s writerly method in Interpretation of Dreams, and his Modern
Language Association presidential
address “Humanism and Heroism” (published in PMLA in May 2000), Said has provided another path for the use of Freud in
these later ages.
In Freud and the Non-European, Said turns
to Freud’s last book Moses and Monotheism
as a model for the kinds of analysis of fractured identity that has become
pivotal in twenty-first century life and nationhood. Freud’s
work in general and his last work in particular become, in Said’s phrasing, “an
overturner and a re-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies.”[1] Freud’s methods and texts become a way of (re)mapping
the boundaries between selves and histories; Said reflects that Freud
lends himself
especially to rereading in different contexts [as all great literature does],
since his work is all about how life history offers itself by recollection,
research and reflection to endless structuring and restructuring, in both the
individual and the collective sense.[2]
Said’s concern, as an Palestinian exile, centers on Freud's reading of his Jewish identity, which since Freud's death has become monolithic and exclusionary toward the Other in powerful and violent ways.
Freud’s Moses and Monotheism,
because it sees the roots of Judaism and monotheism in Moses’s identity as a
Egyptian before he becomes the leader of the Israeli contingent out of Egyptian
slavery, locates the Other (in this case, the Egyptian and the origins of monotheism
in relation to the worship of Aton, the sun god, under the ruler of Amenhotep
IV) at the heart of the Jewish identity.
Thus Freud’s fracturing of identity in his model of psychoanalysis and
his suggestion that nationalist identity is also inherently fractured and made
other than itself from its very origins provide a model for accepting the other
rather than rejecting it with violence.
Said maps how this
understanding of identity can actually lead to peace and peaceful coexistence
between radically different individuals, groups, and nations. Although many want to belong to identifiable and definable groups, or (in Said’s
terms) want “desperately” to run in “nationalist or religious herds,” the cost
of this kind of group-thinking and belonging often leads to violence toward and annihilation of the Other and a non-recognition that the Other is a part of the self.[3] Freud provides us with another model, an “exemplification”
in the work itself “of the insight that even for the most definable, the most
identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity…there are inherent limits
that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and truly one, Identity”
that would subject all others to it.[4] In this Freudian model, the narrative of history can
be seen in all of its complexity, “being always that which comes after and, all
too often, either overrides or represses the flaw” inherent in any seemingly
unitary notion of identity.[5] Freud in Said’s view allows us to “speak
to other besieged identities”; for
identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot
constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw
which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always
outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later,
perhaps, even triumphed.[6]
Said
presents a model for reading Freud that has some of the same liberatory effects
that Sontag found in rejecting Freud to embrace the (surface of the) artwork itself. He presents his readers with a model of identity via Freud’s
late work that allows the Other to be recognized even in the most unitary nationalist
and religious traditions, because the Other is always there anyway, within and without. Divorced from Sontag’s own early Freud
scholarship and not tangled in Rieff’s sympathetic and discerning apologetics for much of Freud’s
thought on literature, art, and culture, at least in Rieff's earliest books, Said’s own consideration
in Freud and the Non-European would have engaged Sontag’s own deeply held desires for a model of psychoanalysis that provides complexity and an open-ended, engaged, immersive thought for society in the
twenty-first century.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Chiaroscuro
Dear Readers!
My personal trainer yesterday challenged me to get out of my head and live more in my heart than I have, especially in the gym and during the workout. I have been trying to think this through--or, more appropriately, feel this through. I know I have a tendency, as many academics do, to overthink and sometimes approach things perhaps too intellectually; it is why we are fit for the jobs we do. (Actually, I am not so sure that it is possible to overthink, especially in our society where so much thinking doesn't occur, but he may have a point, at least as far as my workouts go.)
Frankly, gyms are hard places for many of us to "tune in" to our heart, soul, or spirit. One of the reasons I like yoga (even though I do not get to formal yoga sessions as much as I would like) is because the music and the poses help me to tune in and listen closely. Gyms in general are so loud--in fact, so loud that even if I wanted to listen to classical or ambient music during my workout as a way of tuning in, the blaring thump-thump-thump of the bass in the sound system drowns it out. Our gym is better than some, but there are still far too many speakers set far too loudly. I suffer from hyper-vigilance, a condition I cannot cure, which means that the noise probably gets to me more than some, but I believe this may be the case for many more than those who are as vocal as I am about it.
Additionally, I do not do repetitions or counting multiple sets of large numbers well. This comes from being bored very easily, and having adjusted my life pretty well in these forty-six years not to be bored. I naturally tune out when I am doing something repetitive, tuning in to my thoughts, which are normally more interesting then the activity, and then I lose count! My wife has taught me a trick of counting in sets of ten, which seems to be working better--at least I do not find myself losing count as often.
All of this being said, I have to return to the central thought here, which is living less in my head and more in my heart in general (and in the workouts in particular). What I discovered as I reflected on this throughout yesterday and yesterday evening was a kind of chiaroscuro in the soul that I had not quite owned yet. Yes, I have been through years of counseling and dealt bravely and courageously with a lot of very difficult issues, coming to a place of happiness and contentment with much about myself, although this does not mean that I am not driven always to be better. However, I must admit even though I do not like this fact that there is still much anger in my heart, even though I am in general a grateful and upbeat person (which is not an act). I am angry about broad issues--for instance, income inequality. Growing up in Appalachia in a poor coal mining region, I saw much poverty and struggle, even in my own family. And the story that those who are poor do not work hard enough is just erroneous. My blessed maternal grandmother worked for years, lived on a small income from her husband's black lung, and gave so much love to me and others, could barely keep her house warm enough in the winters. I do not know why she had to live like that when there are others, while others in Buffalo and elsewhere that I have known can remodel their homes for tens of thousands of dollars when the home was just remodeled a few years previously and is quite luxurious as it is.
I am also angry that people are not nicer to one another and more considerate, instead of just being in it for themselves. The anonymity of the Internet allows many people to express things that they might never say in person to another. And the hate expressed in many posts there just makes me despair of people's hearts. I wonder sometimes where the love has gone.
Chiaroscuro is the balance of light and dark elements in a painting. I think this is also a good term for what I see in my own spirit these days, and which I am coming deeper to understand and perchance accept. The light and the dark have to be a balance, I suppose; otherwise, it is all light with no shadow telling you what is light and what isn't. By growing to accept some of this anger, and turn it into a thirst for justice perhaps, I may be able to go deeper and live more authentically in the moment as I workout, write, teach, pray, and do all that I do.
My personal trainer yesterday challenged me to get out of my head and live more in my heart than I have, especially in the gym and during the workout. I have been trying to think this through--or, more appropriately, feel this through. I know I have a tendency, as many academics do, to overthink and sometimes approach things perhaps too intellectually; it is why we are fit for the jobs we do. (Actually, I am not so sure that it is possible to overthink, especially in our society where so much thinking doesn't occur, but he may have a point, at least as far as my workouts go.)
Frankly, gyms are hard places for many of us to "tune in" to our heart, soul, or spirit. One of the reasons I like yoga (even though I do not get to formal yoga sessions as much as I would like) is because the music and the poses help me to tune in and listen closely. Gyms in general are so loud--in fact, so loud that even if I wanted to listen to classical or ambient music during my workout as a way of tuning in, the blaring thump-thump-thump of the bass in the sound system drowns it out. Our gym is better than some, but there are still far too many speakers set far too loudly. I suffer from hyper-vigilance, a condition I cannot cure, which means that the noise probably gets to me more than some, but I believe this may be the case for many more than those who are as vocal as I am about it.
Additionally, I do not do repetitions or counting multiple sets of large numbers well. This comes from being bored very easily, and having adjusted my life pretty well in these forty-six years not to be bored. I naturally tune out when I am doing something repetitive, tuning in to my thoughts, which are normally more interesting then the activity, and then I lose count! My wife has taught me a trick of counting in sets of ten, which seems to be working better--at least I do not find myself losing count as often.
All of this being said, I have to return to the central thought here, which is living less in my head and more in my heart in general (and in the workouts in particular). What I discovered as I reflected on this throughout yesterday and yesterday evening was a kind of chiaroscuro in the soul that I had not quite owned yet. Yes, I have been through years of counseling and dealt bravely and courageously with a lot of very difficult issues, coming to a place of happiness and contentment with much about myself, although this does not mean that I am not driven always to be better. However, I must admit even though I do not like this fact that there is still much anger in my heart, even though I am in general a grateful and upbeat person (which is not an act). I am angry about broad issues--for instance, income inequality. Growing up in Appalachia in a poor coal mining region, I saw much poverty and struggle, even in my own family. And the story that those who are poor do not work hard enough is just erroneous. My blessed maternal grandmother worked for years, lived on a small income from her husband's black lung, and gave so much love to me and others, could barely keep her house warm enough in the winters. I do not know why she had to live like that when there are others, while others in Buffalo and elsewhere that I have known can remodel their homes for tens of thousands of dollars when the home was just remodeled a few years previously and is quite luxurious as it is.
I am also angry that people are not nicer to one another and more considerate, instead of just being in it for themselves. The anonymity of the Internet allows many people to express things that they might never say in person to another. And the hate expressed in many posts there just makes me despair of people's hearts. I wonder sometimes where the love has gone.
Chiaroscuro is the balance of light and dark elements in a painting. I think this is also a good term for what I see in my own spirit these days, and which I am coming deeper to understand and perchance accept. The light and the dark have to be a balance, I suppose; otherwise, it is all light with no shadow telling you what is light and what isn't. By growing to accept some of this anger, and turn it into a thirst for justice perhaps, I may be able to go deeper and live more authentically in the moment as I workout, write, teach, pray, and do all that I do.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Beginner's Mind
Dear Readers:
I have been thinking a lot these days about Beginner's Mind, a Buddhist concept that has major implications for our understanding of the writing process and improving our life itself. Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (one of the best books about writing out there) argues that returning to "beginner's mind" is "what we must come back to every time we sit down and write." This is certainly a best and a true practice. The blank, white page is, in essence, a nice symbol for beginner's mind.
What got me thinking again systematically about beginner's mind--beginning at the beginning--was going back through Susan Sontag's essay "Thirty Years After..." in a close reading for the introduction to my current book project on Sontag's essays. Sontag reflects that she always likes looking forward, and never likes looking back. (The essay was for a reissue of her collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays.) Sontag often avers that she is always at the stage of beginning and that that place is the most exciting. For me, that has been true over and over again.
If I had to define beginner's mind, I would say it is beginning where you are, in the moment and place and time where you find yourself, and with the tools readily at-hand, and knowing that you and that moment are sufficient to gain and do what you need. It means recognizing what you know and what you don't know, and being excited to find out more.
One of my best examples of beginner's mind happened when I was an undergraduate at Marietta College. One of the most monumental decisions that I made as an undergraduate (even though I did not recognize it at the time) was signing up for a history class on a subject I knew nothing about. I liked the professor, Dr. William Hartel, who was my adviser, and I have often had the attitude that if I know nothing about a topic, then I have everything yet to learn, and that to me is exciting! The course was on the French Revolution; when I signed up for the junior-level history course (I was a first-semester sophomore), I could not even tell the dates of the event(s). My interest in this period and, in particular, what came before the historic events of 1789 in Europe have become a guiding interest of my research and teaching in academics, as my areas of specialty are English and European literature from about 1660 to roughly 1840. That is perhaps my prime example of beginner's mind.
Beginner's mind also means the habit of returning to the beginning time and again. I must confess, I tend to hate repetition, whether in teaching or exercise. I have to stop and take a breath every time I go to the gym and do the same warm-up exercises that my trainer has prescribed. I have to make a conscious decision to do it rather than run out the door (it's own form of exercise, I suppose). It is the same with eating healthy, especially when it is perfectly good leftovers (that, by the way, is a battle I do not often win; I almost always opt to go out rather than face leftovers). Yet each time has to be a new beginning--no regrets for the last meal or last workout, forging ahead from the start once again.
I often ask myself as I write both what I know and what I don't know. Sometimes, in fact, when I am writing, I am cowed by all that I don't know, and this can cause me to stop and stall. When that happens, I return to beginner's mind, affirming what I know and what I know I don't, but can find out. The most exciting part of writing is the findings and indeed epiphanies one has in the process of writing itself. If you always know where you are going, then getting there becomes less fun!
I have been thinking a lot these days about Beginner's Mind, a Buddhist concept that has major implications for our understanding of the writing process and improving our life itself. Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (one of the best books about writing out there) argues that returning to "beginner's mind" is "what we must come back to every time we sit down and write." This is certainly a best and a true practice. The blank, white page is, in essence, a nice symbol for beginner's mind.
What got me thinking again systematically about beginner's mind--beginning at the beginning--was going back through Susan Sontag's essay "Thirty Years After..." in a close reading for the introduction to my current book project on Sontag's essays. Sontag reflects that she always likes looking forward, and never likes looking back. (The essay was for a reissue of her collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays.) Sontag often avers that she is always at the stage of beginning and that that place is the most exciting. For me, that has been true over and over again.
If I had to define beginner's mind, I would say it is beginning where you are, in the moment and place and time where you find yourself, and with the tools readily at-hand, and knowing that you and that moment are sufficient to gain and do what you need. It means recognizing what you know and what you don't know, and being excited to find out more.
One of my best examples of beginner's mind happened when I was an undergraduate at Marietta College. One of the most monumental decisions that I made as an undergraduate (even though I did not recognize it at the time) was signing up for a history class on a subject I knew nothing about. I liked the professor, Dr. William Hartel, who was my adviser, and I have often had the attitude that if I know nothing about a topic, then I have everything yet to learn, and that to me is exciting! The course was on the French Revolution; when I signed up for the junior-level history course (I was a first-semester sophomore), I could not even tell the dates of the event(s). My interest in this period and, in particular, what came before the historic events of 1789 in Europe have become a guiding interest of my research and teaching in academics, as my areas of specialty are English and European literature from about 1660 to roughly 1840. That is perhaps my prime example of beginner's mind.
Beginner's mind also means the habit of returning to the beginning time and again. I must confess, I tend to hate repetition, whether in teaching or exercise. I have to stop and take a breath every time I go to the gym and do the same warm-up exercises that my trainer has prescribed. I have to make a conscious decision to do it rather than run out the door (it's own form of exercise, I suppose). It is the same with eating healthy, especially when it is perfectly good leftovers (that, by the way, is a battle I do not often win; I almost always opt to go out rather than face leftovers). Yet each time has to be a new beginning--no regrets for the last meal or last workout, forging ahead from the start once again.
I often ask myself as I write both what I know and what I don't know. Sometimes, in fact, when I am writing, I am cowed by all that I don't know, and this can cause me to stop and stall. When that happens, I return to beginner's mind, affirming what I know and what I know I don't, but can find out. The most exciting part of writing is the findings and indeed epiphanies one has in the process of writing itself. If you always know where you are going, then getting there becomes less fun!
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Remembering Aunt Myrt
[In honour of Mother's Day, I wanted to share this tribute to one of my mothers, my great-aunt Myrtle Elizabeth Layton. Myrt was there for me from my birth until her death in 1993 at the age of 90; her memory to this day nurtures and sustains me. This posting is a revision of an exercise begun from Natalie Goldberg's book on memoir writing mentioned in my very first post. Cheers!]
I remember Aunt Myrt’s mole on her chin—it was big but
not obtrusive; if anything, it added to her charm, making her look like a
welcoming peasant mother of the sort you would love and who would serve you
cookies and conversation (which she often did in abundance!).
I remember so well her beautiful spirit and
her kindness—she was the one who shared my grief over my grandmother’s death
most profoundly. It was she with my maternal grandmother and father who had the task of raising me from around four months old when my mother left. Before I was in kindergarten, she was the one I spent mornings with so that my grandmother, Mom Pete (as she was called by many, although her name was Helen) could do her housework and have quiet time (not that I was ever that noisy or much trouble, as Aunt Myrt used to like to tell me). When I went to first grade, I was right around the corner from her house and I and my cousin Eric Scripp (who was in sixth grade) would go to her house for lunch.
Aunt Myrt's was always a soft place for me to land. She and my grandmother were very close; two sisters born just over a year apart (Myrt was older, from March 16th, 1903 to Helen's August 10th, 1904) who cared mutually for each other's children and grandchildren, and helped each other through the various sots and thralls of life, including the depression and lengthy widowhoods after long and happy marriages. (I asked Aunt Myrt once why she did not date after her husband Jake died; she said that she had happily dealt with having a man around for years, and now didn't need the bother.) My Dad says that, amazingly, he never remembers them disagreeing or arguing about anything.
When my grandmother first had her debilitating stroke (I was ten at the time; 1978), Myrt tried to stay with us and take care of her, even though she was older and not in perfect shape herself. It was too much; Dad and her daughters told her that they would have to get help in for Mom Pete, but that she would be welcome to be there as much as she wanted to keep her sister company and help in things within her ken, like cooking (she was a great cook). I think hardly a day passed that she wasn't either there or calling on the phone and talking to her sister. She was so very faithful!
I remember her strength, which often came out in the guise of stubbornness, as well—when she was sick with a cold in her late eighties (after boasting for years
that she never got a cold), she refused to eat because
her daughter Louise was, as she said, “too fussy.” Louise called me, I came down, and Louise went back over to house to have a rest herself. As Louise walked across the street to her own home (Myrt at this point lived in a trailer across from her daughter, moving from a two-story house when her hip got too bad for her to manage the stairs), Aunt Myrt followed her with her eyes out the front window, then immediately went
into her kitchen and fixed herself something to eat (fried potatoes and onions, I
believe, which was her favorite back then); then, she took the nap that Louise had wanted her to take. I am thankful that Aunt Myrt never found out that I was in cahoots with Louise and Marian (another daughter who lived nearby) to get Aunt Myrt to eat and to rest, or I would have had an earful!
Myrt met my wife twice--once when a group of us came home from college to the town carnival and she was sitting outside on her porch behind the bandstand to listen to and enjoy the live country music and visit with all the people who walked by going back to their cars. The other time was just in her home with Dad, Angie and me. She liked Angie a lot, and actually thought we had already married, and was pleased. More importantly, she told me that my grandmother would have approved of Angie; of that she would know better than anyone. Myrt always promised that she would dance at my wedding, and somehow on our date in heaven, I think she was (probably a polka, as that was her favorite dance and one that she taught me as a teenager).
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Starting Here
Welcome, readers!
There is something to be said for the practice of blogging as a means of keeping the writing juice flowing. I am a new blogger though not a new writer. I have published one book (Understanding May Sarton) and several articles and poems. Sarton is a model for me as a writer and even as a blogger; her journals are like blog posts and I wonder if she had lived into the age of blogging if she would have gone in that direction as well. It would be fascinating to see her writing in this format! (If you have never read Sarton, start with any of her journals; my starting place was Recovering but I would recommend any of them, especially Journal of a Solitude).
I am also interested strongly in religion and spirituality. I am a liberal Anglican/Episcopalian--not liberal theologically (mostly) but politically, which grows out of my commitments to my faith which includes pacifism and social justice. My faith makes a Christian socialist at heart, though I would characterize my socialism as neither of the Marxist nor Maoist varieties (although I have learned much from studying Marx). I rather think I am a kind of agrarian socialist as the Levellers or Diggers were in Seventeenth-Century England. As the title of my blog suggests, I am very interested in the contemplative life, and find much in ancient and medieval Christianity (and some more recent writers like Thomas Merton) that supports that life. I have also learned a lot from Buddhism, particularly Zen, although I do not share many of their beliefs. Finally, I am an associate professor of English, which is one of my motivations for starting this blog as a practice place for other writing I wish to do.
A few summers ago (actually 2009) I started doing writing exercises from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Faraway in the process of beginning to think about a memoir. I wrote many many pages and I will share some of these in revised form as well. Please offer feedback and thought; no name calling please. I like friendly, heart-felt, and intellectual discussions, something we do not see much in the public or internet sphere these days. (I have been recently called names and threatened on facebook by complete strangers and some former friends.)
One of the things I am thinking about these days is the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, particularly in the works of Susan Sontag (I am writing a book on Sontag). She does not like the term postmodern and considers it a mere outgrowth of the earlier form. I have been reading A Postmodern Reader, an older book on these issues from SUNY press in the 1990s, and it is interesting to me that many claim certain essays of Sontag's and thus Sontag herself for definitions of postmodernism; something I think she herself would not have liked. (The essays they tend to claim for postmodernism are her early essays on Camp and other new sensibilities; by the 1980s, when postmodernism seems to be on its way to being fully conceptualized, she is already writing her tributes as in Under the Sign of Saturn of her models--all male--from the past.) If there are any avid Sontag readers out there, what do you think of connecting her with postmodernism?
Well, I think that is all I will write in the blog for today. See you soon!
There is something to be said for the practice of blogging as a means of keeping the writing juice flowing. I am a new blogger though not a new writer. I have published one book (Understanding May Sarton) and several articles and poems. Sarton is a model for me as a writer and even as a blogger; her journals are like blog posts and I wonder if she had lived into the age of blogging if she would have gone in that direction as well. It would be fascinating to see her writing in this format! (If you have never read Sarton, start with any of her journals; my starting place was Recovering but I would recommend any of them, especially Journal of a Solitude).
I am also interested strongly in religion and spirituality. I am a liberal Anglican/Episcopalian--not liberal theologically (mostly) but politically, which grows out of my commitments to my faith which includes pacifism and social justice. My faith makes a Christian socialist at heart, though I would characterize my socialism as neither of the Marxist nor Maoist varieties (although I have learned much from studying Marx). I rather think I am a kind of agrarian socialist as the Levellers or Diggers were in Seventeenth-Century England. As the title of my blog suggests, I am very interested in the contemplative life, and find much in ancient and medieval Christianity (and some more recent writers like Thomas Merton) that supports that life. I have also learned a lot from Buddhism, particularly Zen, although I do not share many of their beliefs. Finally, I am an associate professor of English, which is one of my motivations for starting this blog as a practice place for other writing I wish to do.
A few summers ago (actually 2009) I started doing writing exercises from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Faraway in the process of beginning to think about a memoir. I wrote many many pages and I will share some of these in revised form as well. Please offer feedback and thought; no name calling please. I like friendly, heart-felt, and intellectual discussions, something we do not see much in the public or internet sphere these days. (I have been recently called names and threatened on facebook by complete strangers and some former friends.)
One of the things I am thinking about these days is the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, particularly in the works of Susan Sontag (I am writing a book on Sontag). She does not like the term postmodern and considers it a mere outgrowth of the earlier form. I have been reading A Postmodern Reader, an older book on these issues from SUNY press in the 1990s, and it is interesting to me that many claim certain essays of Sontag's and thus Sontag herself for definitions of postmodernism; something I think she herself would not have liked. (The essays they tend to claim for postmodernism are her early essays on Camp and other new sensibilities; by the 1980s, when postmodernism seems to be on its way to being fully conceptualized, she is already writing her tributes as in Under the Sign of Saturn of her models--all male--from the past.) If there are any avid Sontag readers out there, what do you think of connecting her with postmodernism?
Well, I think that is all I will write in the blog for today. See you soon!
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