Eucatastrophe Reader

"we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves"

The Island on Bird Street

“In the archetypical (and eponymous) robinsonade, the protagonist is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilization, usually shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island. He must improvise the means of his survival from the limited resources at hand.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinsonade

In his classic work on education, Emile, Jean Jaques Rousseau argued that robinson Crusoe, taught "all that books can teach."

Island on Bird Street is, on one level, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story in the context of a Polish Ghetto during WWII. Like Robinson, Alex is “shipwrecked” in an abandoned building on Bird Street where he must use his wits to survive the elements, to feed himself, and to avoid being eaten by canibals (The Gestapo). Like Robinson, 11 year old Alex must also find the wherewithal to survive emotionally. His curcumstances seem hopeless but he continues to find just what he needs when he needs it (Robinson has a parot. Alex has a white mouse.) In some ways, we see Alex taking inspiration from his hero, Robinson Crusoe, and fashioning for himself a belief in his ability to cope with the dangers Providence places him in while nurturing a hope for rescue. "Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony,” Robinson says in Daniel Defoe's novel,

“That there was scarce any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in this world that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and to set, in the description of good and evil, on the credit side of the account."

[Plot spoiler ahead] The film, I later learned was based on a novel of the same title by Uri Orlev who was, himself, stranded in the Warsaw ghetto as a 12 year old. While a good deal of it is autobiographical, Orlov has told the story as I am sure he would have wished it to be. In real life, his father abandoned him in the ghetto and never returned. In Island on Bird Street we are not subjected to the pain of real life. We get what all of us who have been separated from the ones we love were encouraged to continue dreaming about: Reuinion. One wonders if writing our stories as we should have wished them to end is a good idea. Is this some sort of organ transplant with memories? Can we take out the bad ones and replace them with powerful stories of our choosing? Is this one of the survival skills we need as we find ourselves shipwrecked in the Islands of our modern world? Are fictional stories of how we wish things would wind up, the cure to what ails us? Or do they simply the temporary anesthesia?

Question for Comment: What is a story in your own life that you wish had a different ending?

". . . and that voice will be silenced"

Speak

“If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. “ Vincent Van Gogh

In the opening line of the movie, Speak, 14 year old Melinda Sordino's mother opens the door to her room and finds her looking in a mirror and using makeup to make her face look like a skull. “I don't want to know.” Melinda's mom, says, “There is frozen potpie defrosting on the counter. Dad is not home and I am going to therapy.” At which point she closes the door and leaves.

The line sets the tone for a movie about a ninth grade girl's struggle to vocalize a traumatic event in her life the previous summer. When parents send signals that they “do not want to know” their children, it seems that little good can come of it and Melinda suffers, psychologically, socially, and spiritually for an entire school year as a result of the secret that she keeps hidden away inside. As we make our way through the halls and classrooms of this school, we realize just how many ways that the adults in these kids' lives need to work on their communication skills. In so many ways, this movie is about the lack of communiucation skills in adults and how kids suffer from it. The following is an exchange that takes place in Melinda's English class between students and the teacher, who Melinda has named “Hairwoman”.

Hairwoman: Every word Hawthorne wrote, every comma, every paragraph break, these were done on purpose. It is our job to try and figure out what he's really trying to say.
Melinda Sordino: [voiceover] Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin a scarlet letter on his chest? "S" for straightforward?
Hairwoman: The house with the chunks of glass in its walls, is a symbol of what? Well, it would reflect, sparkle? Come on people, the house symbolizes...?
Rachel Bruin: How do you know that's what he meant to say? I mean, you could just make all that up, it's just a story.
Hairwoman: This is Hawthorne, one of America's greatest novelists. And not that it makes any difference but I wrote my dissertation on Hawthorne.
Rachel Bruin: Fine, but, I thought we were all supposed to have opinions here. I mean it's a good story especially when Hester and that guy fall in love. But I don't really believe in symbolism. I mean you can just make all that up.
Hairwoman: [about to cry] Alright class, I want you all to write a 500 word essay on symbolism. And then... turn it in!
Melinda Sordino: [voiceover] Poor Hairwoman. I hope they send her to a conference or something. I'm ready to help pay for a sub.

At a pivotal point in the movie, Melinda wanders into a hospital and finds a hospital bed to lie down in. She knows she needs help but doesn't know how to ask. So she goes to a hospital where people are supposed to help wounded people get better. “It happened” she says, refusing to deny the wound any longer. “There's no avoiding it. No forgetting” and at that point in time, she begins to find her voice again. She begins to assert rather than retreat.

The movie concludes with an exchange between mother and daughter. It is clear that the mom is not comfortable talking and even invites Melinda not to. But she begins to listen as the movie fades to black, bookending the movie with exchanges between mother and daughter that show that mom has come to realize how important it is for children to work through the issues of their internal lives with someone who cares.

Question for Comment: Have you made it clear to your children that you are there if they need to talk? And when you do, do you have something worth saying?

"Life is a great adventure or nothing"

Mystery of the Nile (IMAX)

IMAX: Greece - Secrets of the Past

IMAX movies have become somewhat formulaic but, they are still great ways to adventure without risking your life or spending a lot of money. As these two were soon to disappear from the Netflix instant play list, I decided to take myself a poor man's vacation and do a little exploring along the Nile and around Greece. I can't say that I was disappointed. Though it would be great to get a video projector someday and show my own IMAX movies here at my house.

"Life is a great adventure or nothing," Hellen Keller once said. And all adventures must start with an act of running away from home I guess. Thanks to IMAX, we don't have to. But it is sad to think of a life that includes only adventures viewed and none ventured. The explorer, Roald Admundsun once suggested that adventure was just "bad planning". One wonders if there are really any adventures left in the world. Maybe just love.

Question for Comment: Where would you like to take an adventure?

"My God this is torture"

"My God this is torture."

This Emotional Life

This is the conclusion one draws from watching monkeys be deprived of physical affection, or even pseudo-affection. Little monkeys die. they go crazy. They malfunction. Likewise, human infants, adolescents, and adults need to maintain social and physical contact throughout their lives or they begin to suffer. But to maintain that social relationship, they often have to take painful measures to modify themselves. One parent interviewed in the documentary expresses the pain that he feels when he reflects upon how he had to change to meet the needs of his son. "This is not the dad I wanted to be," he says, "I have to be somebody else who is best for him. And that is a hard thing to give up."

We see a similar dynamic in couples who must learn to reformat their personalities to some extent ... or risk losing their partners.

If you want an interesting documentary on the state of scientific thought about the emotions, attachment (1) fear (2), or happiness (3), look no further. I am not sure there was anything shocking other than putting people in isolation is akin to torture and that there is a phrase called “hedonic adaptation” that means that we acclimate to happiness and find less of it in the same circumstances after a while. In short, humans have a tendeny to be a certain degree happy and if their lives improve, they are somewhat happier but then adapt up to the curcumstances to the place of happiness that they were in before.

If you have ever read Alexander Solshenietsyn's book, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich though, you might already know that.

Question for Comment: Where do you pursue happiness these days?

"Chew and choke as much as possible"

"Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible." Abraham Lincoln's orders to General Ulysses S. Grant

American Experience - Ulysses S. Grant, Warrior President

Three hours of the life of Ulysses S. Grant is probably more than most people would find entertaining. Its a good thing I don't have to come to mutual agreements on the movies I watch. The first third of his life is all failure. The second part of his life is all carnage. The third part of his life is mostly political compromise or corruption. And the last part is throat cancer from smoking twenty cigars a day for too much of his life. But through it all I could not help but find a fascinating life. The documentary mentions that before the war, Ulysses S. Grant was one of the biggest nobodies in America. For a good deal of the war, Ulysses S. Grant was just about the most maligned person in America. After the war, he was the most popular person in America until he wasn't and then got cancer and was again. He was never going to be the most popular general in the Union Army while the war was on because of the strategy he adopted to win it. He understood that this war was going to be a numbers game – a war of attrition and that the only way the North would lose a war like that was if it did not accept that kind of war soon enough.

Other generals were inclined to seek and accept battles where they were sure to win by several touchdowns. Ulysses S. Grant was willing to fight any battle he could so long as he didn't lose it by more than one or two. He knew that what he had that Lee didn't, was men. What he did not have that Lee did, was time. Other generals would let the Confederates catch their breath after a battle. Grant didn't. His strategy seems to have been “I may not beat you but I am not going to let you breathe after you beat me up.” He knew how to win big by taking risks and for that reason, he had to get used to losing big by taking risks. What he wouldn't do was sit around a campfire waiting until there were no risks. At Vicksburg, he took a huge gamble and it paid off. At Cold Harbor, he took one and got hammered. (I say “he” but I mean “his men.”)

Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters,

Ulysses S. Grant

For several hours, I found myself somewhat immersed and enthralled with the reading of Grant's Memoirs after the documentary was over. Grant's response to the commander of the defensive forces at Vicksburg who had asked for a few hours of armistice and a parley were typical Grant:

“Your note of this date is just received, proposing an armistice for several hours, for the purpose of arranging terms of capitulation through commissioners, to be appointed, etc. The useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg, will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war. I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange the terms of capitulation, because I have no terms other than those indicated above."

At three o'clock Pemberton appeared at the point suggested in my verbal message, accompanied by the same officers who had borne his letter of the morning. Generals Ord, McPherson, Logan and A. J. Smith, and several officers of my staff, accompanied me. Our place of meeting was on a hillside within a few hundred feet of the rebel lines. Near by stood a stunted oak-tree, which was made historical by the event. It was but a short time before the last vestige of its body, root and limb had disappeared, the fragments taken as trophies. Since then the same tree has furnished as many cords of wood, in the shape of trophies, as "The True Cross."

Pemberton and I had served in the same division during part of the Mexican War. I knew him very well therefore, and greeted him as an old acquaintance. He soon asked what terms I proposed to give his army if it surrendered. My answer was the same as proposed in my reply to his letter. Pemberton then said, rather snappishly, "The conference might as well end," and turned abruptly as if to leave. I said, "Very well." General Bowen, I saw, was very anxious that the surrender should be consummated. His manner and remarks while Pemberton and I were talking, showed this. He now proposed that he and one of our generals should have a conference. I had no objection to this, as nothing could be made binding upon me that they might propose.”

This exchange is archetypical of Grant. He is not going to take time to disengage when he has his opponent on the ropes and knows it. “Stay down on the mat and you won't get hurt. Try to get up and I will be all over you. Nothing personal, mind you but … I am not here for tea.”

You have to wonder if there is some sort of Aspergers at work here. How do you greet someone as an old acquaintance and tell them you will reduce his city to rubble by morning if he doesn't surrender unconditionally?”

Grant relished in his victory at Vicksburg, achieved providentially the same day as the Union victory at Gettysburg. “The Vicksburg paper,” he writes in his memoirs,

“which we received regularly through the courtesy of the rebel pickets, said prior to the fourth, in speaking of the "Yankee" boast that they would take dinner in Vicksburg that day, that the best receipt for cooking a rabbit was "First ketch your rabbit." The paper at this time and for some time previous was printed on the plain side of wall paper. The last number was issued on the fourth and announced that we had "caught our rabbit."

When Grant gets the opportunity to promote officers under him, it becomes clear that the traits he saw as necessary to win, are those he insisted on in his inferiors. He speaks thus of general William Tecumseh Sherman as he prepares to invade Georgia:

“Johnston [Confederate] had been preparing himself for this campaign during the entire winter. The best positions for defence had been selected all the way from Dalton back to Atlanta, and very strongly intrenched; so that, as he might be forced to fall back from one position, he would have another to fall into in his rear. His position at Dalton was so very strongly intrenched that no doubt he expected, or at least hoped, to hold Sherman there and prevent him from getting any further. With a less skilful general, and one disposed to take no risks, I have no doubt that he would have succeeded.”

Grant speaks of General Johnston's tactical retreats across Georgia and of the complaints that the Southern command received about his lack of willingness to engage but Grant avers that Johnston was doing the right thing to keep the war going and that his own General, Sherman was doing the right thing to keep plowing ahead to shorten the war. “Johnston's tactics in this campaign do not seem to have met with much favor,” Grant writes:

“Either in the eyes of the administration at Richmond, or of the people of that section of the South in which he was commanding. The very fact of a change of commanders being ordered under such circumstances was an indication of a change of policy, and that now they would become the aggressors—the very thing our troops wanted.

For my own part, I think that Johnston's tactics were right. Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it did finally close, would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a separation.”

Grant is being Grant when he writes of the Wilderness campaign,

“Our losses in the Wilderness were very severe. Those of the Confederates must have been even more so; but I have no means of speaking with accuracy upon this point.”

After the Fall of Atlanta and Savanah and the destruction of the Confederacy's food and war supplies in the Shenendoah and elsewhere, the southern cause begins to collapse. Grant writes:

“The men of both Lee's and Johnston's armies were, like their brethren of the North, as brave as men can be; but no man is so brave that he may not meet such defeats and disasters as to discourage him and dampen his ardor for any cause, no matter how just he deems it.”

There would come a day when Ulysses S. Grant's throat cancer would put him in similar straits. Indeed, I suspect that grant was thinking of himself as he wrote these lines. He was, as the reader may or may not know, writing this memoir in the last days of his life as a means of supplying his wife and children with an income after he died.

Question for Comment: Have you ever fought for something for a long time and won it? What cause are you committed to now?

Ethics Class Final Exam: The Moral Voice

Romero

Consider for a moment that each of us has a moral voice as unique and personal to us as a fingerprint or a retina scan. Our moral voice may be the consequence of a unique blending of genetics, experience, and will. It may be fixed or fluctuating. It may be a well guarded secret or a matter of public display. But we all have one. All too often we are, ourselves, unaware of it or understand it only vaguely. Lack of clarity with respect to moral voice can lead to indecision, anxiety, and paralysis in our personal decision making. It can leave us vulnerable to the forcefully expressed moral values of others and without remediation, we can find our lives sliding by – expressions of other people's moral sense.

The creation and articulation of a moral voice can help guide us in making daily decisions as well as in attracting and keeping the right friends and partners. It can become a reference point in moments of uncertainty and doubt, a default position when we are faced with complexities we haven't time to sort out. If we are leaders, it gives a certain assurance to those who follow us. If we are followers, it gives a clear warning to those who lead us. If we are visionaries, it gives us guardrails on the road to actualizing those visions.

When we look back at history, we find certain individuals whose moral voice came through with perfect pitch – whether right or wrong, they spoke with exceptional clarity about right and wrong. People like Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Jean of Arc, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, Oscar Romero, Ayn Rand, and maybe even Elizabeth Wurtzer (Prosac Nation) all gained listeners because they had declared themselves to themselves before articulating themselves to others. None were perfect. None entirely correct. But each spoke in a way that they could be heard. People can listen to them speak, as one might listen to a tuning fork, and use that clarity to formulate their own moral voice. Perhaps in a different key.

Your final exam in this course involves making a concerted effort to find that moral voice within yourself. By no means are you required to supply a complete one. Indeed, we are all coming into our voices as we live, learn, and think, but you are being asked to reflect on the Ethical theories that you have grown up with, been influenced by, and been exposed to. One might think of these ethical voices, the voices of people like Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, Paul, Immanuel Kant, Carol Gilligan, John Rawls, Confucius, Frederick Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Joshua Chamberlain, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and the author of the Bagavad Gita etc. as pigments of paint that give us options as we paint. But they are not the only colors available to us.

Recently, I was reading a book about the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. In it, the author, James Gaines made the following observation about Bach's ability to assimilate alternative musical theories and forms and create his own.

“He was almost frantically productive in these years, hungrily assimilating all the latest music of every nation and just as avidly subsuming it in works that were completely its own. By the time he left . . . he had learned everything he needed to turn music on its head. . . . In his study of every structural and stylistic device of his time, Bach was a musical omnivore.” (Gaines, James. Evening in the Palace of Reason. p. 113, 125)

Later, Gaines writes:

“In his remarkable book, Bach and the Pattern of Invention, Laurence Dreyfus raises the interesting question of whether a university education might actually have got in Bach's way. His willful mixing and matching, destroying and rebuilding to his own specifications the forms and styles of his time was distinctly at odds with contemporary aesthetic. The Enlightenment's way of knowing a thing is to identify, separate, and classify it, the encyclopedic impulse. Bach's way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backwards, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new. The fact that he kept himself well away from the theoretical mainstream – Germany, not to mention Europe, may indeed have helped him follow where his own driving genius took him, which is to say well beyond notions of music as merely a craft or a great depiction of theological texts or a graceful appeal to taste. Rather, Bach presented the model of a composer grappling creatively with himself in the world. This relation of the artist to his art would be truly adopted only a century after Bach by the Romantics of the 19^th century.” p. 185-186

What I am asking you to attempt here on this exam is somewhat similar to what Bach was doing with Music. It is to find yourself as an Ethical Receptor/Thinker/Feeler/Actor. “How can [anyone] meet us face to face till we have faces?” C. S. Lewis once asked.

As an assignment, I think this will be either difficult or hard depending on how much thinking work and experience living you have done. In order to maintain a semblance of structure to the process of grading it, I will simply say on the outset that you will not be graded for your conclusions. You will not, for example, get a C for leaning too heavily in favor of Moses and too lightly on Kant. If you are twenty, you will not be required to write as though you were forty. But I will insist that you make some reference to what you have learned from your textbook, what you have learned from classwork, what you have learned from the sources and films we have watched, and what you have learned from personal reflection. I should see some reference to each of those woven in somewhere on every page. I will expect you to intelligently comment on (not necessarily agree with) at least five of the theories we have covered. You will be free to make use of any and all resources as you write.

I look forward to your responses.

"Oh to be 25 again and get it right"

Prozac Nation (Movie Tie-In)

Elizabeth Wurtzel

In her book, The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand disparages literature that focuses its attention on characters who are interesting solely because they struggle. For her, a struggle that involves values - that involves a person with values seeking to achieve something that reflects those values in the world is a subject worthy of a novel. A person who struggles because they have no values or because they do not value themselves is not a worthy subject for art. For Ayn Rand, a person wallowing or floundering in a quicksand of meaninglessness, rage, or depression is not "heroic". He (or she) is pathetic maybe - though in the technical sense of the word, a pathetic person is one who evokes "pathos" or feeling, and Rand rarely expends the energy of real feeling on anything but that which she values and the people who value what she values.

She would would, I suspect, find Prozac Nation, emesis inducing.

In the Afterword to the book, the author, Elizabeth Wurtzel writes: "Prozac Nation is, as far as I'm concerned, a memoir with no particular thesis or point, nothing in it championing any cause ... telling only a small personal tale of one girl's mental hell."

Her life is a tragedy, partly of her own making and partly of her own lack of wisdom, ethics, self-control, or spiritual guidance. What she has, is an ability to remember, record, and describe hell. She does not have an ability to stay out of it or get out of it. It provides an honest uncompromising vivisection of a young woman's pain, attributing some of her sorrow to the dysfunctionality of her parents, some to her chemistry, some to her selfishness, some to her drug habits and sexual habits, and some to her crippled sense of honor and ethics. One must grant her this: She's honest. Wurtzel writes in her book, "To ask anyone how he happened to fall into a state of despair always involves new variations on the same myriad mix of family history. There is always divorce, death, drunkenness, drug abuse and whatnot in any of several permutations." If she sees Prosac as a solution to her problems, she never makes that case clear in her book or in the movie. The closest she will come is this:

"In the case of my own depression, I have gone from a thorough certainty that its origins are in bad biologiy to a more flexible belief that after an accumulation of life events made my head such an ugly thing to be stuck in, my brain's chemistry started to agree. ... What many people don't realize is that the cause-and-effect relationship in mental disorders is a two-way shuttle: It's not just an a priori imbalance can make you depressed. It's that years and years of exogenous depression (a malaise caused by external events) can actually f*** up your internal chemistry so much that you need a drug to get it working properly again"

She is a creature who has been raised to think highly (almost exclusively) of her immediate needs and to have an almost complete lack of impulse control. If it occurs to her to sleep with a best friend's boyfriend, she does, and then calls it “an accident”. If she is offered drugs from a complete stranger, she takes them. If she feels moody and depressed, she crawls in bed for a week. If she feels jealous, she expresses it by throwing dishes. She wounds people when she's hurt and demeans them when she feels superior. In short, she is a train with no tracks that values her absolute freedom. When she gets it, and drives herself off a cliff, she can only howl at the pain itself and mix it with the pain that can reasonably be attributed to others. An Amazon.com review of her new book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, says of her, “She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11.”

In Douglas Smith's review of the book, he writes disparagingly of the practice of medicating or therapizing one's way to happiness.

“In summary: When Elizabeth Wurtzel's life went well, she was happy. As Sigmund Freud said, two of the most important aspects of anyone's life are love and work. When Elizabeth Wurtzel did well in these areas of her life, she was happy - and with no help from psychiatry. When her life went poorly, she was despondent or "depressed," whether or not she was taking Prozac and lithium or other psychiatric drugs or undergoing other psychiatric "therapy." Whether she realizes it or not, her 368 page memoir illustrates that her salvation, both before and after Prozac, came from living a life she enjoyed, not from any of psychiatry's so-called therapies.”

http://www.antipsychiatry.org/br-pro-n.htm

Personally, I would not be inclined to share Smiths rather complete distrust in therapeutic or medical approaches to depression. But I do think that Elizabeth Wurtzel's money might have been better spent on a good ethics class and time for some sort of meditative practice, combined with some relationships with some stable people that allowed her to experience life as a well-parented child. We all suffer. Sometimes we suffer from not having what we want for too long. Sometimes we suffer from having too much of what we want too often. This is a story about a young woman suffering from both. I thought about hoping that she managed to turn things around. I went looking. I found an article she wrote for Elle at the age of 41 and I am not sure she ever did. One of the boyfriends she cheated on, she records, tells her: "I was your only chance at happiness—now it’s over for you." "Oh, to be 25 again and get it right," she says,

"People who say they have no regrets, that they don’t look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse. Because if you’ve lived a full life and don’t feel bad about some of what you did, pieces are missing. Still, there are some mistakes that one is eventually too old—either literally or spiritually—to correct. I can’t go back."

Question for Comment: What is your recipe for curing depression?

"Every great movement of ideas changes everything"

“By changing how the world is perceived, every great movement of ideas changes everything.” p. 135

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (P.S.)

James R. Gaines

Evening in the Palace of Reason takes the life stories of two men and uses them as a means of understanding a crucial transition in the History of Western philosophy, religion, science, and the arts. It similarly highlights a moment in time and space where two ways of seeing the contemporary world clearly can be seen to have diverged. Author, James Gaines takes us into the music halls of the palace of Frederick the Great and portrays the meeting of two men – two men who could not have been more diametrically opposite in their views of the world – and shows how their lives and choices created their differences and led to the ideas they held about music in particular and the world in general.

“Put all too simply, as any one sentence description of the Enlightenment must be, myth and mysticism were giving way to empiricism and reason, the belief in the necessity of divine grace to a confidence in human perfectibility, the descendents of Pythagoras and Plato to those of Newton. In music, as in virtually every other intellectual pursuit, intuitions, attitudes, and ideas of a thousand years were being exchanged for principles and habits of thought that are still evolving and in question three centuries later. Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian Bach met at the tipping point between ancient and modern culture and what flowed from the meeting would be a more than a musical expression of that historic moment.”p. 8

Gaines leave no doubt about who he favors in this battle of titans.

“Bach's Musical Offering leaves us, among other things, a compelling case for the following proposition; that a world without a sense of the transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful.” p. 12

He concludes with the words,

“Bach's music makes no argument that the world is more than a ticking clock, yet leaves no doubt of it.” p . 273

But never-the-less, it is a fun ride getting to the conclusion.

In contrast to Bach, who sees God in the musical harmony of the entire universe, Frederick the Great is a man who comes to believe in a mechanistic universe, a world with no meaning whatsoever. Gaines writes:

“Perhaps the ultimate statement of 18^th century materialism was Man a Machine, a monograph by Dutch physician Julien Offroy de la Mettrie, who argued that there really is not much difference between people and animals. … Years later, in a eulogy for la Mettrie, Frederick commended his mechanistic worldview this way:

“He could clearly see that thought is but a consequence of the organization of the machine, and that the disturbance of the springs has considerable influence on that part of us which the metaphysicians call soul. He boldly bore the torch of experience into the night of metaphysics; he tried to explain by aid of anatomy the thin texture of understanding, that he found only mechanism where others had supposed an essence superior to matter.” p 204

For Frederick, this view of the world manifested itself in a belief that music need have no higher purpose than to please the listener. “The rule of nature, in music, is nothing but the ear.” he might have argued. p. 123

“After he [Frederick] finished his History of the Seven Years War, he wrote to a friend a letter that showed just how deep and despairing his cynicism had become:

“To write History is to compile the follies of man and the blows of fate. Everything runs on these two lines, and even so the world has gone on for eternity. We are a poor race, which is very restless during the little time it vegetates on this atom of mud called the earth. Whoever passes his days in quietness and repose until his machine decomposes, is perhaps more sensible than they who, like so many torturous circles, spiked with thorns, descend to the grave. In spite of that, I am obliged to go round like the wheel of the watermill, because one is dragged by one's fate.”

He lived for another twenty years after he wrote that.” p. 246

Whereas Frederick the Great was spending his life killing people in the thousands with his various wars of aggression, Bach was busy appreciating music and creating. He had little time to reflect on the meaninglessness of anything while creating prodigious ammounts of music that, as the book describes, was bursting with meaning on many levels. To Bach, music was not simply notes on a page. It was a sublime means of communicating meaning. He had no reason to believe that God's creation was any different.

“He was almost frantically productive in these years, hungrily assimilating all the latest music of every nation and just as avidly subsuming it in works that were completely its own. By the time he left . . . he had learned everything he needed to turn music on its head. . . . In his study of every structural and stylistic device of his time, Bach was a musical omnivore.” p. 113, 125

I particularly appreciated the fact that Bach had a passion for learning that went way beyond what he might have gotten at university if he had attended. Gaines mentions one instance where his lack of credentials caused those who were evaluating him for a job to disparage his abilities.

“Bach, the only candidate without a university education, before a selection committee replete with doctorates, finally got the job almost by default. At the crucial meeting, one town councilor, Dr. Abraham Platz, concluded “as the best is not available, I suppose we must take one of the second rate men” – a statement for which he has been justly immortalized.” p. 164

“In his remarkable book, Bach and the Pattern of Invention, Laurence Dreyfus raises the interesting question of whether a university education might actually have got in Bach's way. His willful mixing and matching, destroying and rebuilding to his own specifications the forms and styles of his time was distinctly at odds with contemporary aesthetic. The Enlightenment's way of knowing a thing is to identify, separate, and classify it, the encyclopedic impulse. Bach's way of understanding something was to get his hands on it, turn it upside down and backwards, and wrestle with it until he found a way to make something new. The fact that he kept himself well away from the theoretical mainstream – Germany, not to mention Europe, may indeed have helped him follow where his own driving genius took him, which is to say well beyond notions of music as merely a craft or a great depiction of theological texts or a graceful appeal to taste. Rather, Bach presented the model of a composer grappling creatively with himself in the world. This relation of the artist to his art would be truly adopted only a century after Bach by the Romantics of the 19^th century.” p. 185-186

For Bach, perfections were not to be found in this world, a world deeply in need of redemption. “Those who want to assist the people and their affairs and to help faithfully are thanked as the world is accustomed;” he wrote in the margins of his commentary on the writings of Luther,

“It kicks them and wipes its shoes on them. Therefore learn to recognize the world; you will not make it different; it will not direct itself according to you; above all other things learn and note that the world is ungrateful.” p. 173

Though Frederick may have had a similar disilusionment with the world, he had nothing else besides.

“I think that the only really happy men are those who love no one.” he would write, “I regard men as a herd of stags in the park of a nobleman with no other function than to breed and fill up the park.” Bach in contrast, saw man's life as full of purpose and meaning. He simply understood that few there were who could appreciate that meaning.

[Note to Self: Chapter 12: The Night of a Musical Offering would make a fantastic comparison with Michaelangelo's expression of genius in the book, The Sistine Secrets. Both men knew how to communicate truth to power through their respective artistic mediums. See also page 85 and 130-131 in particular for a discussion of Bach's “musical lexicon” and the whole debate between the Age of Reason and Age of Romanticism.]

Evening in the Palace of Reason concludes with reflections on the significance of this meeting between Bach and Frederick in the following words:

“The modern world is a creature of both Enlightenment and Romanticism but completely the offspring of neither. The Enlightenment, which sets out to rid the world of its superstitious credulity, still usefully instructs us to find and tear down veils of illusion where ever they exist, to be just to one another, and to keep studying; even if empiricism could not find the perfect order in the universe, after all, it took us to the moon. The Romantics, who came to the rescue when trust in reason failed, suggest that we embrace the world, imperfect as it may be, that we listen to the stirrings of the unconscious and remember that, whether we wished to be or not, we are the creators of our lives and our world. Yet these two postures stand opposed, one warning of the danger that the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind in the illumination, the other pointing out what can happen, what has happened, when we trust ourselves to myth.”

Question for Comment: Do you see meaning in the universe and life where many others don't? Or do you not see meaning where many others do? What makes you say to yourself, “this is all more than just a machine”?

Romanticism and the Self-Made Soul

The Romantic Manifesto ..a Philosophy of Literature

Any Rand

The Romantic Manifesto is an anthology of essays by Ayn Rand, assembled with the intention of single-handedly reviving the Romantic movement (as Rand defines it). Ayn Rand never did shy away from Himalayan objectives. In preparation for this work, she first defines Romanticism as a movement characterised by commitment to personal values. While emotional, it is not, she says, a movement that is primarily concerned with the elevation of emotion. Indeed, to Rand, it is nothing short of a commitment to reason. Her argument is that emotion and passion are side effects of one's commitment to values and that the pure Romanticist IS emotional because of an apriori commitment to values. “What the romanticists brought to art was the primacy of values,” she writes:

“an element that had been missing in the stale, arid, third and fourth hand (and rate) repetitions of the classicists formula copying. Values – and value judgments –are the source of the emotions. A great deal of emotional intensity was projected in the work of the romanticists and in the reactions of their audiences, as well as a great deal of color, imagination, originality, excitement and the all the other consequences of a value-oriented view of life. This emotional element was the most easily perceivable characteristic of the new movement and it was taken as its defining characteristic, without deeper inquiry.” p. 105

“Romanticists saw their cause primarily as a battle for their right to individuality and – unable to grasp the deepest metaphysical justification of their cause, unable to identify their values in terms of reason – they fought for individuality in terms of feelings, surrendering the banner of reason to their enemies.” p. 105

Like a religious reformer returning to the seminal sacred texts or like a strict constructionist, returning to the framer's intent in interpreting the Constitution, she argues that true Romantics do not hold emotion sacred so much as the values that they derive from reason. And it is in committing themselves to values that they live life passionately and emotionally. Rand pities the souls who live out their lives as objects, drifting in the tide of emotion and whim because they have surrendered their reason and values to others. “For good or evil -- and usually, for evil” she says of the common man, “he is left at the mercy of a subconscious philosophy which he does not know, has never checked, has never been aware of accepting.” p.31

Even the act of falling in love, she says, is not so much a matter of emotion but of reason, philosophy, and values. Rand argues that we love those who we discover value the values that we value. “There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life,” she says,

“love and art. I am referring here to romantic love in the serious meaning of that word – as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love – with the essential sum, that fundamental stand in our way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals and smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul – the individual style of the unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, in response to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.

Many errors and tragic disillusionment are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide and if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism – in terms of human suffering – is to believe that love is a matter of “the heart” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy Love is the expression of philosophy.” p. 32-33

Rand would agree with c.S. Lewis when he wrote:

"Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." We can imagine that among those early hunters and warriors single individuals -- one in a century? one in a thousand years? -- saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. But as long as each of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing (I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision -- it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude. . . .

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not... as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? -- Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. . . .

[Companions will be doing something together, and so too will friends] be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined... Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. That is why those pathetic people who simply 'want friends' can never make any... Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers."

She argues that art provides us with concrete idealized pictures (be they embedded in literature, sculpture, or painting) of values.

“Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if it were precepts. This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man's life.” p. 20

In several places, she illustrates by comparing the art of the Classical Greeks and the art of the Middle Ages.

"Consider the difference it would make if – in his need for philosophical guidance or confirmation or inspiration – man turns to the art of ancient Greece or to the art of the Middle Ages. Reaching his mind and emotions simultaneously, with the combined impact of abstract thought and immediate reality, one type of art tells them that disasters are transient, that grandeur, beauty, strength, and self-confidence are his proper, natural state. The other tells him that happiness is transient and evil, and that he is a distorted, impotent, miserable little sinner, pursued by leering gargoyles, crawling in terror of the brink of an eternal hell. The consequences of both experiences are obvious – and history is their practical demonstration.” p. 23-24

“An artist (as, for instance, sculptors of ancient Greece) who presents man as a godlike figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man – and he presents a figure embodying strength beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man's proper, natural state. An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of the Middle Ages) who presents man as a deformed monstrosity is aware of the fact that there are men who are healthy, happy or confident; but he regards these conditions as accidental illusory, as irrelevant to man's essential nature – and he presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man's proper natural state.” p. 37

For Rand, the choosing of art is tantamount to the choosing character. Art portrays the goals to which character will eventually conform itself. And this is why she has nothing but disdain for modern art. “I do not know which is worse;” she reflects, “to practice modern art as a colossal fraud or to do it sincerely.” p. 77

“'Something made by an artist' is not the definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

'Something in a frame on the wall' is not a definition painting.

'Something with a number of pages' in a binding is not a definition of literature

'Something piled together' is not a definition of sculpture.

Something made of sounds produced by anything' is not a definition of music.

'Something glued on a flat surface' is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might be good in occupational therapy for retarded children – though I doubt it – but it is not art. 'Because I felt like it' is not a definition or validation of anything. There is no place for whim in any human activity – if it is to be regarded as human there is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, but non-objective in any human product. This side of the insane asylum, the actions of the human beings are motivated by conscious purpose; When they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist's office. And when the practitioners of modern Art declared that they don't know what they're doing what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.” p. 79

If we would have great models to emulate, we must have great art, she insists. And great art is not vague or unclear or distorted. It gives us characters of virtue who can explain why they are virtuous. It presents us with characters making choices – choices similar to those we must make if we wish to live lives based on rationally chosen values.

“Most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, and inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great,decisive battles – and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet.” p. 84

“If an author keeps telling us that his hero is virtuous, benevolent, sensitive, heroic, but the hero does nothing except he loves the heroine, smiles at the neighbors, contemplates the sunset, and votes for the Democratic party – the results can hardly be called the characterization.” p. 88

“Since art is the expression and product of philosophy,” she writes, “it is the first to mirror the vacuum at the base of a culture and the first to crumble.”p. 113 Her call to a resurgence of Romanticism, is a call to the creation of art that mirrors not what is around us but what should be around us. “Romanticism was the great new movement in art,” she writes,

“Romanticism saw man as a being able to choose his values, to achieve his goals, to control his own existence. The Romantic writers did not record the events that had happened, but projected the events that should happen.” p. 123

“Man is being a self-made soul – which means that his character is formed by his basic premises, particularly by his basic value premises. In the crucial, formative years of his life – in childhood and adolescence – Romantic art is his major and, today, is only source of a moral sense of life.”

“If man is to gain and keep a moral stature, he needs an image of the ideal, from the first thinking day of his life to the last.” p. 147

“In the translation of that ideal into conscious, philosophical terms and its actual practice,” she adds, empathizing with young people who she believes are growing up in an age where literature and art is infected with a debasing and mockery of values.

“a child needs intellectual assistance or, at least, the chance to find his own way. In today's culture, he's given neither. The battering which which his precarious, uninformed, barely-glimpsed moral sense of life receives from parents, teachers, adult 'authorities' and little secondhander goons of his own generation, is so intense and so evil that only the toughest hero can withstand it – so evil that of many sins of adults towards children, this is the one from which they would deserve to burn in hell, if such a place existed.

Every form of punishment, from outright prohibition to threats to anger to condemnation to crass interference to mockery – is unleashed against a child at the first signs of his romanticism (which means: at the first signs of his emerging sense of moral values). 'Life is not like that' and “Come down to earth!' are the catchphrases which best summarized the motives of the attackers, as well as the view of life and of this earth which they seek to inculcate.

The Child who withstands it and damns the attackers, not himself and his values, is a rare exception. The chilk who merely suppresses his values, avoids communication, and withdraws into a lonely private universe, is almost as rare. In most cases, the child represses his values and gives up. He gives up the entire realm of valuing, of value choices and judgments – without knowing that what he is surrendering it morality.

The surrender is extorted by a long, almost imperceptible process, a constant, ubiquitous pressure which the child absorbs and accepts by degrees. His spirit is not broken in one sudden blow: it is bled to death in thousands of small scratches.” p. 147-148

Her antidote is Romanticism – a conscious rejection of culture and art that presents no challenge to the soul daring to climb upwards and against the current of mediocrity. And while she herself has a clearly defined sense of her own values, she is not excessively particular. Echoing the sentiments of her favorite Romantic author, Victor Hugo, she simply advocates that each and every person make use of their reasoning process to construct and commit themselves to a life that values life.

“The emphasis [Hugo] projects is not “What great values men are fighting for” she writes of Hugo's last great novel Ninety-Three, but: “What greatness men are capable of when they fight for their values!” p. 157

Question for Comment: What values do your children hold to? Where do those values come from? What forces in their lives seek to erode their commitment to them? How can you play a part in fostering a spirit of resistance to values-dilution?

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood

Machiavelli once argued that success was dependent upon the skill of image management. Daniel Day Lewis, playing the part of Daniel Plainview, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's character James Arnold Ross, in the book, Oil! (Itself, loosely based on the character of Edward Doheny, a California oil tycoon) takes on the Machiavellian mantle to portray for us a hundred year old world of wealth, scandal, dishonesty, and greed. We have little doubt that the director intends for us to draw some parallels to business leaders in our own day.

Plainview takes on the image of a philanthropist but we are never really sure that the generosity is ever more than a facade.What is ironic is the fact that he adopts an orphan, perhaps as a means of better "selling" himself as a family man but, in time, begins to grow into the attachment of the role. Daniel Plainview is a man who lives on the edge of human attachment - coming close to evolving as a man as he finds himself making connections. But an accident separates him from his adopted son - a betrayal separates him from his new found half brother - a flagrant episode of exploitation separates him from any potential for religious community. With each successive "close call" he becomes more and more incapbable of thinking about his relational wealth with the same commitment that he thinks of his financial wealth.

In the end, he is a lonely, broken, inebriated, surely, disillusioned, loner - sitting in a huge mansion with its own bowling alleys but no peace and no human affection. He is a victim of success in some ways - income millionaire - family pauper. He is a man who almost formed attachments but, betrayed and dissapointed by his faltering attempts, gives up trying and rides a gusher of oil to hell -so to speak.

Daniel Plainfield is a parable of Lazerus and the Rich Man told in modern terms. By the end, he is all barns and banks and no beauty and grandbabies. A man who sold his soul for the whole world and profited nothing.

Question for Comment: If offered, would you trade some of your human contact for money? Or some of your money for human contact? What measure of wealth do you regard as of more value to you in life?