Eucatastrophe Reader

“I do not think I want to go into a nunnery and wear black clothes and never laugh again.”

The Mists of Avalon (Book One) REVIEW

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel about the life of women in the story surrounding King Arthur came out in 1983 when I was deep in the weeds of my own theological studies. I am glad a friend recommended it to me as I do not often read fantasy literature, and this seemed like it was a novel of some influence in its day. [Incidentally, it appears that the author was involved in some rather unseemly episodes that involved the sexual exploitation of children, but this is something that need not be germane to the analysis of this work]. Much of the novel takes a jaundiced approach towards all things related to Christianity. Most of the women in the novel, and certainly its main character, Morgaine of the Faeries, and her sister, Viviane, “the Lady of the Lake” are begrudgingly tolerant of the ever-growing Christian religion spreading throughout Britain but are generally dismissive of its teachings, its priests, its doctrines, its nuns, and its influence.

To many young girls reading the novel in the early 1980’s, it would have given a voice to the growing resistance to a prevalent patriarchy, sexism, and moral conservatism. The novel takes a clearly supportive position towards all things pagan and in opposition to all things Christian although the main characters all seem to be pragmatists as they work towards a Britain that will at the very least avoid persecuting them. Quite clearly, the pagans of Avalon have powers that work, rules that work, attitudes towards nature and sexuality that they believe work, and attitudes toward gender that they know are more just than those of the Christian Church culture as they experience it. They see no advantages to the new Christian system as it takes over the culture.

I would like to start by saying that the portrayal of Christianity that Marion Zimmer Bradly paints is not terribly attractive. At least not to me. The Christianity as she describes it is clearly infested with all sorts of problems that most sane people would acknowledge. Bradley’s Christianity of the fourth or fifth century is dominated by priests who are often ill equipped to reason. As she puts it in the novel, “The Christ God seemed not to care whether a priest was stupid or not, so long as he could mumble their mass, and read and write a little.”

“Father Columba could say what he wished; perhaps his God was wiser than he was. Which, Igraine thought, suppressing a giggle, would not be very difficult. Perhaps Father Columba had become a priest of Christ because no college of Druids would have had a man so stupid among their ranks.”

The Christianity presented in the novel is virulently misogynistic, relegating women to the role of “male-child breeders” worthy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Zimmer Bradley’s Christianity is formidably opposed to any person exerting liberty from the clerical order and is vociferously opposed to “inner lights” of any sort, particularly when the inner light is associated with anything feminine. This is a version of Christianity where even a dream or an intuition is a sin to be confessed, especially if it is a woman having it.   

“She thought, I didn’t know I could still see in that way, I was sure I could not . . . and then she shivered, knowing that Father Columba would consider this the work of the Devil, and she should confess it to him. True, here at the end of the world the priests were lax, but an unconfessed vision would surely be treated as a thing unholy.”

Bradley’s Christianity has intolerance baked into its very nature. There is no place for any ideas that do not originate in the minds of its male clergy. “The Christians seek to blot out all wisdom save their own,” she writes, “and in that strife they are banishing from this world all forms of mystery save that which will fit into their religious faith.” Christianity as presented in The Mists of Avalon, cannot tolerate any authority but its own authority.

“In our world, Igraine, there is room enough for many Gods and many Goddesses. But in the universe of the Christians—how can I say this?—there is no room for our vision or our wisdom. In their world there is one God alone; not only must he conquer over all Gods, he must make it as if there were no other Gods, had never been any Gods but only false idols, the work of their Devil. So that, believing in him, all men may be saved in this one life. This is what they believe.”

“ . . . if the narrow-minded Christians wished to think of the great old Gods as demons, the Christians would be the poorer for it. The Goddess lived, whatever the Christians thought of her.”

Zimmer Bradley’s Christianity is so threatening to religious liberty that every decision that is made by the main protagonists are made with a single solitary political end; namely, to make it possible for Arthur to become “high king” after swearing that he will not use the power of the state to destroy Avalon, its priestesses, its rites, and all who live in it or believe in it. Morgaine and her mentors and her sister-priestesses of Avalon, in alliance with the Merlins and the Goddess, seek only “a world with room for the Goddess and for the Christ, the cauldron and the cross.”

And this leader [Arthur], says Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, “shall make us one.”

There is much to justify Zimmer Bradley’s criticism of the anti-naturalism and superstitiousness of the Christian Church as presented in the novel as well. The Christianity of the novel has a rather gnostic condemnation of all things natural while promoting superstitious traditions that have no basis in reality or pragmatic human thriving.

“Christians said they were free of the superstitions of the Druids,” Morgaine’s mother Igraine, notes, “but they had their own, and Igraine felt that these were even more distressing, being separated from nature.” The book often refers to the ways that this form of Christianity uproots people from natural rhythms, natural remedies, natural instincts, natural sexualities, natural power structures, natural clothes, natural human needs. One might argue that the Christianity of this novel treats people as though they have already gone to heaven or are on the verge of going to hell.

The Christianity of the novel is a Christianity of unwashed masses and superstitious clergy. It is led by people who weaponize religion to exert control over people more worthy and wiser than them. It is a religion of “slave moralities” as Nietzsche would put it. It is a religion of war and of oppression, of chauvinism, of misogyny, and even medical ignorance. At one point, the Lady of the Lake insists that the Christian priests not be allowed to practice any of their remedies upon Arthur for fear that they will kill him. Christians are blood-letters. Pagans are herbalists. They “follow the science” as we might say today.

The Christianity of Zimmer Bradley’s Britain is a dry, dusty, joyless, gray, boring, dull, impractical, illogical, repressive thing. The only alternative it provides for women who wish to live independently is a convent and the only thing that Morgaine can say of that alternative is “I do not think I want to go into a nunnery and wear black clothes and never laugh again.” She would much prefer to live beyond the mists in Avalon where the Ladies of the Lake and the priestesses of the Goddess maintain a culture that nurtures all things feminine and all things free of masculine nonsense. Pagans (and some of them are men) according to the central sympathetic characters of the novel are higher order thinkers. They know things that the peasants are too pig-slopped and mis-educated to understand. “Not all people are fitted for the higher mysteries,” Zimmer Bradley asserts through the expressions of one of her principle protagonists. Women like Viviane have to plug their noses to work with half-pagans like Arthur. But they do it for the good of the world, hoping someday that this religion of Christianity will recede again into the mists of oblivion as a discarded and discardable ideology. For now, accommodations must be made just for paganism to survive

But to reiterate, woven into the fabric of the novel is a portrait of a Christianity that is death to all things feminine and this may be its principle theme. To the author and to the main characters, Christianity is a religion that no sane woman should subject herself to. It requires – it demands - an active resistance, internal and external. All of Zimmer Bradley’s main characters, if they are to be respected by her, must rebel. They must first agree to comply with the dominant Christian culture on the surface only.

“Four years she had struggled to compromise with the religion Gorlois followed [Christianity]. Now she knew that, while she would show his religion a courteous respect so as not to anger him—and indeed, her early teaching had taught her that all Gods were one, and no one should ever mock the name by which another found God—she would try no more to be as pious as he was. A wife should follow her husband’s Gods, and she would pretend to do so in a seemly and proper fashion, but she would never again fall prey to the fear that their all-seeing, all-vengeful God could have power over her.”

Morgaine is told by her sister, Viviane to “never say any more to Father Columba than you must, but always believe what the Sight tells you [the “sight” is a word for “feminine intuition or mystical revelation from the Goddess], for it comes to you directly from the Goddess.”

Following this passive resistance, Zimmer Bradley’s heroines must move out from under the yoke of the Christian patriarchy by recognizing it for the malignant tyranny that it is. “I have never been able to rely on myself,” Morgaine eventually concludes with bitterness. “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor, is the mind of the oppressed,” South African dissident, Steven Biko once said. Women in Arthurian Britain needed to heed what their priestesses and the philosopher Immanuel Kant would later argue in his 1773 essay “What is Enlightenment?” when he said that immaturity is “the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance.” 

“When she [Morgaine] had been a child, she had looked for guidance to Viviane; but no sooner than she was grown to womanhood, she had been married to Gorlois, and he felt that she should look to him in all things, or in his absence turn to Father Columba for constant counsel.”

Crucial to this liberation will be the preliminary decision to reject the symbols of that oppression.

“But she [Morgaine] did not cross herself; she knew suddenly that she would never do so again. That world lay behind her forever.”

And eventually, women must act on behalf of the pagan cause, even as Morgaine uses her “sight” to warn the pagan Uther (Arthur’s father) of her Christian husband Gorlois’ ambush. At some point in time, the attempt to remain loyal to the two systems will need to be discarded even if a surface compromise becomes necessary temporarily. And in time, women must declare themselves independent of all domination by Christian culture and Christian men for themselves and for their children to follow.  

“Now that she had committed an act of open rebellion, she was paralyzed at her own temerity. But at least it had freed her from the priest, and freed Morgaine, too. She would not have her daughter brought up to feel shame at her own womanhood.”

Throughout the novel, the question women like Viviane and Morgaine are faced with is existential. Should they simply retreat beyond the mists of Avalon and build a world according to their natures without trying to preserve the “old ways” of the pagan past in a wider world where Christian influences are ever growing in influence? Or do they have some obligation to this world where their less enlightened sisters are ever being subjected to oppression and indoctrination?  I suspect that in today’s political discourse, it would be like a woman from progressive Vermont wondering if she had an obligation to fight the forces of conservatism in places like Mississippi. The temptation is the temptation that all minorities have felt over the centuries. Does one compete against forces that outnumber you? Does one try to wrest control of the levers of power back from those forces? Does one compromise with them? Or, does one retreat into an isolated commune, like the Amish, or the hippies, or the priestesses of Avalon?

Ultimately, the heroines of Avalon determine to (to use a Christian term coined by Jesus) be the “salt of the earth” and “a city set on a hill.” They determine to maintain the purity of Avalon but also to exert their influence in bringing about political protections for their way of thinking and living in the wider culture of Britain. They retain a belief that some day Christianity will somehow come to see the world in wiser and more “pagan” ways and that maybe someday, somehow, beyond what seems possible now, Christians will value the things that pagans know should be valued.

“The Christians valued chastity above all other virtues, while in Avalon the highest virtue was to give over your body to the God or Goddess in union with all of the flow of nature; to each, the virtue of the other was the blackest sin and ingratitude to their own God. If one of them was right, the other was of necessity evil. It seemed to her that the Christians were rejecting the holiest of the things under heaven, but to them, she would not be considered much better than a harlot. If she should speak of the Beltane fires as a sacred duty to the Goddess, even Igraine, who had been reared in Avalon, would stare and think that some fiend spoke through her.”

Christianity has been fully absorbed by a rather gnostic variant that most students of the original would regard a forgery foisted upon the Christian community in the years after the first expression. The Christianity of Britain in this novel is the Christianity of The Handmaid’s Tale. It is this form of the faith that Morgaine fears will eventually pollute the pure waters of her nature-worshipping paganism.

“But in sober truth,” says Morgaine in her prologue, “I think it is the Christians who will tell the last tale.”

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist utopia of Avalon meanwhile remains a compelling alternative to all who can discover it and find it in the ever-thickening mists that conceal it from the dominant Christian culture. This world of matriarchal bliss lies ever “hidden in the mist which concealed it, except from those initiates who had been schooled there or those who were shown the secret ways through the Lake.” Of its rites and rituals, not all can be revealed. Some things are “mysteries it is forbidden to write.” But “Those who have felt their brow burned with the kiss of Ceridwen [the Goddess] will know whereof I speak.”

“Avalon now lay eternally surrounded in the mists, hidden from all but the faithful, and when men came and went in pilgrimage to the monastery which the Christian monks called Glass Town, the Temple of the Sun was invisible to them, lying in some strange otherworld; Viviane could see, when she bent her Sight upon it, the church they had built there.“

And thus, the pagans can see both worlds but the Christians only one. I am sure that this novel received a good deal of criticism and maybe even calls for censorship on the part of the Christian “right” when it was published. Its presentation of Christianity is a portrait of rather medieval dimensions. Many will of course argue that modern Christianity is also a portrait of medieval ideas and sometimes it is. I myself would not have censored the book were I to be a devout Christian and were I to have had daughters (or sons) who discovered the book in their local library. The novel’s portrayal of Christianity is often deserved and where it is not deserved, it cautions us to beware of a form of Christianity that has been present since the days of the Church Fathers. One need only go read some of the works of some of the Patristic fathers (these would have been men asserting leadership of churches in the 3^rd and 4rth centuries). Here, for example, is the theologian Tertullian, putting 4rth century Christian women in their place.

“And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?”

Tertullian goes on to decry the use of cosmetics, jewelry, the dying of hair, the accentuation of beauty, the display of the body in any immodest way, the use of accessories to fashion, the overuse of colorful clothes, etc. He clearly seeks to repress that part of feminine expression that often gives them power over more muscular men. This sort of misogyny and repression have been part and parcel of all human institutions for as long as we can remember and it is no virtue to somehow pretend that the version of Christianity that Avalon rejects has never been represented somewhere in every period of church history.

I remember writing a 20 page paper on the mechanisms by which the early church adopted a culture of “women-shaming” and of male domination, particularly in the field of education. To address the paper’s themes and evidences here would make this an entire new essay altogether. Suffice it to say that I am delighted that Marion Zimmer Bradley took this rather ugly manifestation of Christianity to task in this novel. Godspeed to her work.

I do think it unfortunate that religions can often and so easily be identified with medieval versions of themselves. It is doubly unfortunate that things in the original are often lost – often corrupted – often hi-jacked by ideas altogether foreign to their original inspirations. And then detractors will not allow that set of ideas to be anything other than its ugliest manifestation. Just as people are rarely as bad as they are in their worst moments, so also ideas over historical time.

In conclusion, it should also be said that the novel provides an outline of many core beliefs in the pagan creed while laying siege to medieval Christianity. There is a belief in pagan rites and rituals, some rather controversial. There is a belief in lines of spiritual energy that “crisscross the earth.” There is a belief in reincarnation and a belief in spectral visions and medicinal herbs. There is a belief in the powers of healers and spiritual marriage (i.e. relationships with lovers from former lives that may not be synonymous with the people you are married to.) There is a belief in hereditary spiritual gifts (passed through matriarchal lineage) and a belief in the powers of incantation to control or influence nature. One might note that Viviane’s paganism is a paganism that allows for annual fertility rights that can lead to unwanted incestuous pregnancies and abortion as a solution to them. The paganism of Avalon is not without its critics even among its own priestesses (thus does Morgaine eventually leave Avalon) and this is, perhaps, how it should be with all religions that “go rogue” from basic human nature.   

Question for Comment: Have you ever been attracted to or repulsed by a certain religious group or ideology? How do you explain your reaction?

“We are going to learn a century from now we're biologically determined.”

Robert Sapolsky Interview REVIEW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA

Robert Sapolsky argues in this interview that humans have absolutely no free will. “Show me the neuron. Show me the neuron …” he insists. “There is no causeless cause. Every biological event has a history.” He notes that modern science has demonstrated that we have a good deal less free will than we used to think we had. He draws from this the conclusion that eventually we will see that we had none. He uses the example of schizophrenia which at one time was something blamed on “bad mothering.” We now know that the children of perfect mothers could have schizophrenia. Generally, he believes that we will all be relieved to discover, once we discover it, that it is no longer appropriate to praise ourselves or blame ourselves. “Things we call free will now,” he says, “we are going to learn a century from now were biologically determined.”

These assertions lead him to conclusions that can be somewhat startling.

He believes that it is a tragedy that we treat people who make poor decisions as though they were responsible. Mind you, he would put people who are likely to injure others in some sort of confinement until they were “better” and not likely to harm others, but he would not punish them as though they were the originators of their crimes. When asked if this would be good for society, he confesses that it is  probably a good thing that he is a neurobiologist and a researcher and not a law enforcement officer and a judge.

“The damage that we did … thinking there was choice! . . .  My God! The way I have treated people in my life thinking they were responsible!”

For Sapolsky, from the age of thirteen, he has been convinced that there is no God, no free will, and no existential purpose for life. He regards the idea of a God that loves us as a myth. He suggests that while religion can be a solution to anxiety, it is religion itself that creates the anxiety. Myths “reduce anxieties that myth invented,” he says.

He thinks of criminals as “cars with broken brakes” and suggests that they be locked in garages where they cannot cause accidents until those brakes are fixed. It is his belief that over time, science will figure out how to fix those brakes. “We are complicated machines,” he argues, “Broken machines, not evil souls.“ And thus, “Every bad person is nothing more or less than the outcome of their biological luck.” And therefore, he concludes that “The entire criminal justice system has to be abolished.”

Admittedly, he confesses towards the end, his beliefs cause him some confusion when he starts to think about how one might implement them in real time. Similarly, he admits that he is as prone to blame others for their misdeeds and praise himself for his successes as anyone. Everything emotionally arousing comes along and I forget my science,” he insists “… but only for thirty seconds.” In other words, he is trying to retrain himself to reflexively respond emotionally and not just intellectually to what he believes is scientific evidence.  

The interviewer asks him if this is not similar to Nazis at Nuremburg defending themselves by saying “I was just following orders.” Sapolsky has an answer to this that satisfies him. “Does [having no free will] mean that I should be allowed to run around and kill people?” he asks. “No.” "You can’t turn 'I was just following orders' to ‘I cannot change.’” “Organisms change,” he insists. “We do not choose to change because we do not choose to do anything. We are changed by circumstance.”

Question for Comment: What do you think? Will the world be a better place when we no longer ask of anyone, “What is wrong with you?” unless our intention is to help them fix the issue? And what of this blog post? Did you choose to read it? Or did circumstances beyond your control make that choice for you?

"He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue."

Things Fall Apart REVIEW

http://www.msturnbull.com/things-fall-apart.html

This novel gives one so many things to write about. One could write about sexism, about the power of proverbs or mythologies or storytellers, or superstition in the shaping of culture. One could talk about equality and inequality, about parenting, about the clash of religious narratives, or about gender roles generally. One could talk about the rise and fall of cultural systems and how the demise of old systems impacts both the strong and the weak in that society.

The main character, Okonkwo, was clearly born with an ample and self-renewing supply of testosterone and fortunately for him, his culture was set up to reward that trait. Onkonkwo, being blessed or cursed with all his testosterony manliness, values all things he defines as manly and demeans all things he defines as effeminate. “Age was respected among his people,” Achebe tells us, “But achievement was revered.” Onkonkwo is a driven man from early childhood when he identified the unmanly vices of his father and the manly virtues of his tribal leaders.

Fortunately for Okonkwo, he was born into the most testosterony tribe of all the tribes nearby. “Umuofia [Okonkwo’s village], “Achebe explains,

“was feared by all its neighbors. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country.”

There is even a name for the sort of man that Okonkwo’s clan finds reprehensible, an efulefu. “The imagery of an efulefu in the language of the clan was a man who sold his machete and wore his sheath to battle"

Okonkwo likes to wrestle. When his clan gives him the opportunity, he likes to dress up in his war gear and go kill people. “On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity,” we are told, “he drank his palm-wine from his first human head.” Okonkwo “has no patience with unsuccessful men.”

Okonkwo exudes contempt for all things unmanly. He despises his own father’s unmanliness as a precursor to all other despisings. This revulsion for effeminacy is so baked into who he is and as we will eventually see, he would rather die than be other than what he is. “It [his contempt for women and women-like men] was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.” And two of the traits that he finds most objectionable are “gentleness and idleness.” If he catches his own son being lazy, he beats him. If he smells the slightest hint of gentleness in his sons (or in himself) he savagely attacks it. When some man in his presence exhibits any trait that he associates with women, he humiliates them.

“Okonkwo had said ‘this meeting is for men.’ The man who contradicted him had no titles. This is why he called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit.”

Oooo-rah.

Okonkwo’s values are rooted in his culture and time, but they are somewhat universal to all periods of time where chauvinism is considered the most desired of traits. Okonkwo is dedicated to conquering others, subduing others, acquiring resources, acquiring status, demanding subservience, dominating decision making processes, winning, owning, bullying, beating, ruling, having, intimidating.

“Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. Okonkwo wanted his son to be a great farmer and a great man. He would stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness which he thought he already saw in him.”

Achebe never states Okonkwo’s mode of operation more clearly than when he talks about Okonkwo preparing for battle,

“Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums. It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth. He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue. It was like the desire for woman.”

It comes as no surprise that Okonkwo has several wives and that his first wife is someone whose name hardly ever gets mentioned. While Okonkwo has several daughters, their usefulness to him can be seen in pragmatic terms only. He is aware of the status advantages that will accrue to him if he marries them off into important families in the clan. “Okonkwo was very lucky in his daughters,” the novel informs us, though “he never stopped regretting that Ezinma [his favorite child] was a girl. Of all his children she alone understood his every mood.” In other words, the greatest asset that a woman in his family can have is the ability to anticipate and carry out his desires.

Okonkwo makes every concerted effort to reproduce his “masculine” values and chauvinistic practices in his many sons. It is only when he begins to see the way that his son Nwoye treats women with contempt that Okonkwo begins to permit himself to be hopeful for his maturation.

“On receiving such a message through a younger brother or sister, Nwoye would feign annoyance and grumble aloud about women and their troubles.

“Okonkwo was inwardly pleased at his son’s development, and he knew it was due to Ikemefuna [an adopted son from another tribe]. He wanted Nwoye to grow into a tough young man capable of ruling his father’s household when he was dead and gone to join the ancestors. He wanted him to be a prosperous man, having enough in his barn to feed the ancestors with regular sacrifices. And so he was always happy when he heard him grumbling about women. That showed that in time he would be able to control his women-folk. No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.”

When Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, decides to convert to Christianity, Okonkwo beats him and drives him out of the family and uses Nwoye’s fate as a club to intimidate all his other sons.

“Now that [Okonkwo] had time to think of it, his son's crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one's father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Although he had prospered in his motherland Okonkwo knew that he would have prospered even more in Umuofia, in the land of his fathers where men were bold and warlike.

How could he have begotten a woman for a son?

He sent for the five sons, and they came and sat in his obi. The youngest of them was four years old.

"‘You have all seen the great abomination of your brother. Now he is no longer my son or your brother. I will only have a son who is a man, who will hold his head up among my people. If any one of you prefers to be a woman, let him follow Nwoye now while I am alive so that I can curse him. If you turn against me when I am dead, I will visit you and break your neck.’"

Achebe tells his story with what one might call “a straight face.” Okonkwo’s “toxic masculinity” is not condemned anywhere but neither is it celebrated. He lets the reader draw their own conclusions about whether Okonkwo’s virtues are actually vices and his vices, virtues. At one point, the tribal elders determine that Okonkwo’s adopted son Ikemefuna, must be killed and Okonkwo, fearing that his manliness will be questioned if he does not participate, murders the boy (who he admires more than his own biological son) with his machete.

“He heard Ikemefuna cry, “My father, they have killed me!” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.”

“’When did you become a shivering old woman,' Okonkwo asked himself, 'you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.'”

Ultimately, his clan proves vulnerable to the message of the missionaries. Perhaps many recognize that there is something tragic about a cultural value system that mandates the subjection of women, the demeaning of gentleness, the glorification of war? The tribal elders (those who exhibit traits like Okonkwo) observe that “none of the converts was a man whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people.” That is, the new Christian ideology appeals to those who, for generations, had been the objects of derision and subjugation in traditional Ibo culture. This was a case of “low man on top now.”

It is obvious that the form of Christianity that is infiltrating this region of Africa is, or will soon be, is a tool of British imperialism. Okonkwo certainly sees it that way.

“Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women.”

“He has put a knife on the things that held us together,” Okonkwo says of one of the tribal leaders who “defected” to the missionary side of this culture war, “and we have fallen apart.”

In the novel, Okonkwo is banished from the village for a period of seven years but he longs to return and re-establish himself in his old position. Achebe describes his separation from his village as being something like a fish being thrown up “on a dry sandy beach panting.” When Okonkwo returns to find that the village no longer regards him the way that it used to, he has no use for life at all. And so, we ask ourselves, when considering the title of the novel Things Fall Apart, does Achebe intend for us to see the destruction of Ibo culture and of the men like Okonkwo who so energetically embodied it, a move towards progress or demise? Or was it both? Clearly, Okonkwo is someone who Nietzsche would call an ubermench. A superman. An alpha. Someone who demands that his culture place exclusive value on men exactly like him. Okonkwo is used to being treated like the very reason that there is a village at all. Okonkwo is used to exerting influence and he is used to being rewarded for doing so. As Achebe puts it,

“At the most one could say that [Okonkwo’s] chi or ... personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says ‘yes’ his chi says ‘yes’ also. Okonkwo said ‘yes’ very strongly; so his chi agreed.”

So long as Okonkwo’s village agreed with his estimation of his own status and importance, Okonkwo thrived in it. “There was a saying in Umuofia,” Achebe tells us, “That as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”

When those drums stopped beating for him, Okonkwo wanted no part of the dance.

And his final decisions make that abundantly clear.

Question for Comment: Do you live in a culture (or subculture) that values who you are? Do you make any effort to see to it that it does? Or would that be pointless?

A Critique of "Steinbeckism" in Tortilla Flat

Tortilla Flat REVIEW

In John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath, we meet a former preacher, Jim Casy, who is now a migrant worker. Tom Joad, the novel’s main character, learns that Casy was the preacher who baptized him, but now Casy has "lost the call" and his faith:

Tom: Ain't you the preacher?

Casy: Used to be. Not no more. I lost the call. But boy, I sure used to have it. Oh, I used to get an irrigation ditch so squirmin' full of repentant sinners I pretty near drowned half of 'em. Not no more. I lost the spirit. I got nothin' to preach about no more, that's all. I ain't so sure of things.”

Tom offers Casey a drink and Casey continues espousing a theory of ethics that I will call “Steinbeckism”

“I asked myself, what is this here call[ed] Holy Spirit? Maybe that's love. Why, I love everybody so much, I'm fit to bust sometimes. So - maybe there ain't no sin, and there ain't no virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain't so nice.”

This aptly describes Steinbeck’s moral position towards the paisanos of Tortilla Flat.  In the first pages of the book, Steinbeck refers to the indigent people (bums and winos and prostitutes) of Tortilla Flat as a noble band. He compares them to Arthur’s knights of the round table, for like the knights, their vices are regulated by their virtue-ladden chivalric code. The ‘knights” of Tortilla Flat may drink too much – often way too much. They may lie incessantly. They may steal from the local grocers and housewives. They may seduce married women or run whore houses. They may cheat, embezzle, fornicate, swear, tell lewd jokes, fight, beat each other up, scheme, connive, poach, commit arson, and then drink some more . . . but they have a code of honor and a sincere faith in a superstitious form of religious belief and in the end, they care for one another, and that is all that matters. “There’s just what people does.”

Steinbeck introduces his characters in the first page of the book with the following adulatory praise.

"It is a story of how these three became one thing, so that in Tortilla Flat if you speak of Danny’s house you do not mean a structure of wood flaked with old whitewash, overgrown with an ancient untrimmed rose of Castile.

No, when you speak of Danny’s house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it. And this is the story of how that group came into being, of how it flourished and grew to be an organization beautiful and wise. This story deals with the adventuring of Danny’s friends, with the good they did, with their thoughts and their endeavors. In the end, this story tells how the talisman was lost and how the group disintegrated."

Danny, who is the “Arthur” of this legend, his a houseless man who inherits two houses and eventually opens one house to some of the other local ne’r-do-wells who form a “family” of rascals – a group that one might proudly say of, “Boys will be boys.”  It is not long before you begin to see the general tenants of “Steinbeckism” expressed in the mouth of the “arch-bishop” of this band of merry men, Pilon. Pablo asks Pilon if is a bad thing that Ruiz donates to the church with money that Ruiz basically steals from men who have passed out drunk at a local brothel.

"’A mass is a mass,’ says Pilon. ‘Where you get two-bits is of no interest to the man who sells you a glass of wine. And where a mass comes from is of no interest to God. He just likes them, the same as you like wine.’”

This of course would be flatly contradicted by a number of prophets from the Old Testament but, it passes muster in the world of Steinbeck’s “knights of the round table.” For the rest of the novel, the paisanos entertain us with their irreverent shenanigans and peccadilloes. Danny’s crew grift for a living and sleep around like ally cats but ultimately, Steinbeck cloaks them in a mantle of sainthood (as we shall see).

At one early point in the novel, Pilon spots a comrade who he knows has been squirreling away money in the woods. Pilon aims to uncover where the hiding place is. He must however figure out how to justify the theft.

“Now, with his groundwork of pity laid, Pilon moved on to his solution. ‘Would it not be a thing of merit' he thought, ‘to do those things for him which he cannot do for himself? To buy him warm clothes, to feed him food fit for a human?’ ‘But,’ he reminded himself, ‘I have no money to do these things, although they lie squirming in my heart. How can these charitable things be accomplished?’

"Now he was getting somewhere. Like the cat which during a long hour closes in on a sparrow, Pilon was ready for his pounce. ‘I have it!’ his brain cried. ‘It is like this: The Pirate has money, but he has not the brain to use it. I have the brain! I will offer my brain to his use. I will give freely of my mind. That shall be my charity toward this poor little half-made man.’ It was one of the finest structures Pilon had ever built.”

Another word for “structure” here would be “rationalization.” Pilon has figured out how to justify stealing the Pirate’s hoard of cash in such a way that the act can be seen as a charity to the Pirate.

Pilon is particularly good at this sort of “weasel’s cunning” when it comes to moral justifications for things like theft. It is, as Steinbeck portrays it in the novel, an “endearing quality.”

"It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous. Honour and peace to Pilon, for he had discovered how to uncover and to disclose to the world the good that lay in every evil thing. Nor was he blind, as so many saints are, to the evil of good things. It must be admitted with sadness that Pilon had neither the stupidity, the self-righteousness, nor the greediness for reward ever to become a saint. Enough for Pilon to do good and to be rewarded by the glow of human brotherhood accomplished."

Pilon tries to get the Pirate to disclose the whereabouts of his cache honestly, but the Pirate is not easily connived, being himself a bit of a conniver. And so Pilon must shift into another gear of beneficent deceit.

"In a moment Pilon knew two things certainly: first, that the Pirate had money hidden; and second, that it was not going to be easy to get at it. ... ‘So it must be guile,’ Pilon thought. So those gifts, that in him were so sharpened, must be called into play.”

Another “knight” at Danny’s “Round Table” is “Big Joe Portagee.” Joe is a frequent inhabitant of the Monterey jail.

"The Portagee liked the Monterey jail. It was a place to meet people. If he stayed there long enough, all his friends were in and out. The time passed quickly. He was a little sad when he had to go, but his sadness was tempered with the knowledge that it was very easy to get back again."

Danny, Pilon, the Pirate, and Joe Portagee become fast friends and room-mates in one of Danny’s new houses. There, they find opportunities to pass around jugs of wine whenever they can manage to beg, borrow, or steal them. Steinbeck is indulgent with their alcoholism, suggesting somehow that the harm that they do when they are drunk is never “real harm.”

"It was curious how soberly they drank that night. It was three hours before they sang even an obscene song. And it was late before their thoughts strayed to light women. And by the time their minds turned to fighting they were almost too sleepy to fight. This evening was a great good marker in their lives."

These small vices are of little consequence to Steinbeck’s moral universe. The paisano’s are “good paisanos.” For example, at one point, they ally themselves to steal food for a local prostitute with children. "Theirs was no idle boast,” writes Steinbeck of their altruistic exploits.

“Fish they collected. The vegetable patch of the Hotel Del Monte they raided. It was a glorious game. Theft robbed of the stigma of theft, crime altruistically committed — what is more gratifying?”

The Pirate raised the price of kindlings to thirty cents and went to three new restaurants every morning. Big Joe stole Mrs. Palochio’s goat over and over again, and each time it went home.”

“Now food began to accumulate in the house of Teresina. Boxes of lettuce lay on her porch, spoiled mackerel filled the neighborhood with a strong odor. And still the flame of charity burned in the friends. If you could see the complaint book at the Monterey Police Department, you would notice that during this time there was a minor crime wave in Monterey. The police car hurried from place to place. Here a chicken was taken, there a whole patch of pumpkins. Paladini Company reported the loss of two one-hundred-pound cases of abalone steaks.”

The reader is meant to chuckle delightedly. Business owners and corporations will hardly miss what is being pilfered after all, right? This is the sort of crime that even angels might endorse.

Towards the end of Tortilla Flat, Danny goes on a serious bender. He has had a bit too much of life as a householder doing good for the community and he yearns for the absolute freedom of former days when he owed no allegiance to anything. He runs off, gets into fights, philandering, stealing regularly (sometimes from the other “knights”) and drinking almost incessantly. The paisanos start to get concerned when Danny starts stealing from them.

While Danny’s mates begin to condemn Danny’s behavior, secretly, they envy him. "Sad as they were at his moral decay,” Steinbeck writes, “the friends were not a little jealous of the good time Danny was having.”

"If he is not crazy, he will be punished,’ said Pilon. ‘Be sure of that. Danny is sinning in a way which, sin for sin, beats any record I ever heard of. Oh, the penances when he wants to be decent again! In a few weeks Danny has piled up more sins than Old Ruiz did in a lifetime.’"

We learn eventually, that Danny is dying. And knowing this, his friends band together to “care” for him. Pilon concludes that what Danny really needs, is a party. A big party. With lots of everything that Danny loves in life. “Where can we get wine?" Pilon asks.

The friends all arrive at the same unthinkable thought at the same time. Remember, these are all grown men. They want to get Danny roaring drunk but have no money.

“Their minds combed the possibilities of Monterey like rat terriers in a barn, but there were no rats. These friends were urged on by altruism more pure than most men can conceive. They loved Danny.

“Jesus,” Maria said, finally, "Chin Kee is packing squids."

In other words, wait for it, they could WORK for a day to EARN the money. Shocking!

“Their minds bolted, turned with curiosity and looked at the thing, crept stealthily back and sniffed it. It was several moments before their shocked imaginations could become used to the thing. ‘But after all, why not?’ they argued silently. ‘One day would not be so bad — only one day.’

Their faces showed the progress of the battle, and how they were defeating their fears in the interest of Danny's welfare.

‘We will do it,’ Pilon said. ‘Tomorrow we will all go down and cut squid, and tomorrow night we will give a party for Danny.’"

Steinbeckism is on full display here. So long as what they think they are doing is in Danny’s best interest, what they are doing is good. And the measure of their goodness can be seen in all its millennial glory. Three grown men have decided that they will work for a day to get the money to buy the wine instead of stealing it. One can almost hear the angels singing their “Hallelujahs.” And what a party it turns out to be. Steinbeck tells it like the paisanos had built a cathedral or a hospital or an orphanage in Calcutta. Their party is almost to be seen as an offering to God.

“That was a party for you! Always afterwards when a man spoke of a party with enthusiasm, someone was sure to say with reverence, 'Did you go to that party at Danny's house?’ And, unless the first speaker were a newcomer, he had been there. That was a party for you! No one ever tried to give a better one. Such a thing was unthinkable, for within two days Danny's party was lifted out of possible comparison with all other parties that ever were. What man came out of that night without some glorious cuts and bruises? Never had there been so many fights; not fights between two men, but roaring battles that raged through whole clots of men, each one for himself.”

“Oh, the laughter of women! Thin and high and brittle as spun glass. Oh, the ladylike shrieks of protest from the gulch. Father Ramon was absolutely astounded and incredulous at the confessions the next week. The whole happy soul of Tortilla Flat tore itself from restraint and arose into the air, one ecstatic unit. They danced so hard that the floor gave way in one corner. The accordions played so loudly that always afterwards they were wind-broken, like foundered horses.”

“And Danny — just as this party knew no comparison, so Danny defied emulation as a celebrant. In the future let some squirt say with excitement, ‘Did you see me? Did you see me ask that nigger wenches for a dance? Did you seen us go 'round and 'round like tom cats?’ and some old, wise, and baleful eye would be turned on him. Some voice, sated with having known the limit of possibilities, would ask quietly, ‘Did you see Danny the night of the party?’"

“Some time a historian may write a cold, dry, fungus-like history of The Party. He may refer to the moment when Danny defied and attacked the whole party, men, women and children, with a table-leg. He may conclude, ‘A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength.’ Referring to Danny's superhuman amorous activity that night, this same historian may write with unshaking hand: ‘When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.’

"Where Danny went, a magnificent madness followed. It is passionately averred in Tortilla Flat that Danny alone drank three gallons of wine. It must be remembered, however, that Danny is now a god. In a few years it may be thirty gallons. In twenty years it may be plainly remembered that the clouds flamed and spelled DANNY in tremendous letters; that the moon dripped blood; that the wolf of the world bayed prophetically from the mountains of the Milky Way.”

Danny’s exploits, both sexual and alcoholic were regarded as Homeric epics worthy of religious worship. And in the middle of it all, he leaps off a cliff into the gulch and ends his life in a blaze of life-affirming impulsiveness. And thus does Danny and the episode of the round table come to an end.

“After their trip to the gulch the friends sat for a while on the front porch and celebrated the memory of their friend. Loyally they remembered and proclaimed Danny's virtues. Loyally they forgot his faults.”

As with one soul, the three friends get a few gallons of wine to commemorate their beloved patron saint. A curtain catches fire and rather than putting it out, the friends of Danny collectively determine that without Danny, the house has no real value to society anymore. They prefer to go back to their former lives sleeping out under the stars and bridges and on the beaches of Monterey. They let the house catch fire and the firemen come try and put it out to no avail.

"Thus must it be, O wise friends of Danny,” Steinbeck opines.

“The cord that bound -you together is cut. The magnet that drew you has lost its virtue. Some stranger will own the house, some joyless relative of Danny's. Better that this symbol of holy friendship, this good house of parties and fights, of love and comfort, should die as Danny died, in one last glorious, hopeless assault on the gods. They sat and smiled. And the flame climbed like a snake to the ceiling and broke through the roof and roared."

And thus does the tale of Camelot end. To return to “Casey’s Creed,”

“I asked myself, what is this here call[ed] Holy Spirit? Maybe that's love. Why, I love everybody so much, I'm fit to bust sometimes. So - maybe there ain't no sin, and there ain't no virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain't so nice.”

Steinbeck would later apologize for exposing the people he writes about to “the vulgar touch of the decent,” as he called them - people who found his paisanos humorously childlike, like Hucklebury Finn. He himself, tends to see them as perfectly morally developed and not children at all apparently.  

Question for Comment: Do you think Steinbeck’s celebration of an altruistic hedonism and its accompanying moral permissiveness is an appropriate correction to an overly dogmatic and theocratic Puritanical morality? To Victorian prudishness? Or is it a dangerous over-correction that eventually leads to cultural decay and human misery in societies that adopt it? It should be noted that Steinbeck’s morality works in a fictitious world where there are no real consequences from alcoholism, violence, prison recidivism, adultery, fatherless children, sexually transmitted diseases, crime, theft, and cultures of dishonesty. In a Steinbeck novel, no one ever seems to really get hurt” when we simply let “boys be boys.” Does this fact redeem the novel and make it a sort of moral world escapism that maybe we all need from time to time?

The Gathering Place

The Art of Gathering REVIEW

http://xn--webducation-dbb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Priya-Parker-The-Art-of-Gathering_-How-We-Meet-and-Why-It-Matters-Riverhead-Books-2018.pdf

At some point in time in the height of Covid-19 pandemic isolation, I put a sign over my front door that simply said, “The Gathering Place.” It was then and still is now, aspirational. When my son loaned me the book he had just finished, The Art of Gathering, and recommended I read it, I began looking forward to my 4rth of July weekend when I could do so.

Priya Parker is a professional “gatherer” – someone who organizes gatherings for all sorts of people, families, corporations, non-profits, etc. this book is a distillation of what she has learned from her experience and from the experiences of those who do this sort of work regularly. The book is an attempt to think intentionally about what goes into making a gathering of humans a life-transforming event. The chapters unfold in a sequential and logical order, answering the following vital questions: Why have you decided to gather? Who does it make sense to invite and exclude from the gathering given its purpose? Where is the best setting for any particular gathering? How does one plan for and prepare people for a gathering? What goes into being a responsible host? What should the rules of the gathering be? How important is the first few minutes of the gathering and what gets it off to an ideal start? How do you encourage people to be their authentic selves instead of merely projected selves once the gathering gets underway? How does one plan for and facilitate “good conflict” at a gathering? How does one structure an ending to one’s gathering?    

Everything starts, she says, with “purpose.” In chapter one, she insists that you have to decide why you are really gathering. She illustrates by looking at a community and restorative justice organization that asked itself, “What is the purpose of the justice system we want to see and what would a court look like if it were built according to that purpose?” She uses the example of a baby shower (a genre of gathering that has been in existence for perhaps longer than anyone can remember). “Many of the ritualized gatherings in our more intimate spheres,” she writes,

“—weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies—have been repeated over time such that we become emotionally attached to the form long after it accurately reflects the values or belief systems of the people participating in it.”

Purposes cannot be determined without intentionality. She calls this work “the Passover Principle”  

“Because of a question that is ritually asked at the traditional Jewish Seder on that holy day: ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ Before you gather, ask yourself: Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t?”

“A good gathering purpose should also be disputable,” she continues,

“If you say the purpose of your wedding is to celebrate love, you may bring a smile to people’s faces, but you aren’t really committing to anything, because who would dispute that purpose? Yes, a wedding should celebrate love. But an indisputable purpose like that doesn’t help you with the hard work of creating a meaningful gathering, because it won’t help you make decisions. When the inevitable tensions arise—guest list, venue, one night versus two—your purpose won’t be there to guide you.”

For Priya Parker, the art of gathering cannot be determined after the setting is chosen and the guest list is established.

“The purpose of your gathering is more than an inspiring concept. It is a tool, a filter that helps you determine all the details, grand and trivial. To gather is to make choice after choice: place, time, food, forks, agenda, topics, speakers. Virtually every choice will be easier to make when you know why you’re gathering, and especially when that why is particular, interesting, and even provocative. Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out. When in doubt about any element, even the smallest detail, hark back to that purpose and decide in accordance with it.”

And even the name you give to the gathering matters, she will later demand. “To name a gathering affects the way people perceive it,” she writes, “The name signals what the purpose of the event is, and it also prepares people for their role and level of expected participation.”

And thus in chapter two, only after the purpose of the gathering is established, she begins to look at the dicey question of who gets invited (and who does not). “The guest list is the first test of a robust gathering purpose,” she says, “It is the first chance to put your ideals into practice.” A facilitator of gathering may need to make uncomfortable choices. “Inviting people is easy. Excluding people can be hard . . .”

“Even when you get clear on your gathering in this way, there is never an easy way to say ‘Please don’t come.’ That’s why so many of our gatherings end up being hijacked in the name of politeness. But here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it. I have learned that far too often in the name of inclusion and generosity—two values I care about deeply—we fail to draw boundaries about who belongs and why”

“Conflict often unearths purpose” in those who gather to organize a gathering she notes. “It becomes clear to me that when you don’t root your gathering up front in a clear, agreed-on purpose, you are often forced to do so belatedly by questions of membership that inevitably arise.” She insists that it is always best to start by planning purpose and have the arguments over who to invite only when purpose has been established. She does not recommend “backing into purpose through the question of whom to invite.”

What if people find out that you are gathering and did not invite them though? Surely, that is a social evil to be avoided, no? She tries to explain how to “exclude generously.”

“So how, you might ask, do I exclude generously? This issue comes up a lot when I’m organizing large, complicated meetings for clients. These are some of the questions I ask them: Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose? Who threatens the purpose? Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to invite?”

In the same chapter, she introduces the question of venue. Ocne you have established a reason for gathering, what settings can best help you achieve your goal and what settings should be discarded? “Here is the problem,” she says,

“Venues come with scripts. We tend to follow rigid if unwritten scripts that we associate with specific locations. We tend to behave formally in courtrooms, boardrooms, and palaces. We bring out different sides of ourselves at the beach, the park, the nightclub. As Patrick Frick, a fellow member of my tribe of professional facilitators, told me, ‘The environment should serve the purpose. . . . You should, for starters, seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening.”

“In my own work I try to have my clients choose spaces and locations that resonate with their deeper goals,” Parker writes,

“For a workshop on people trying to find their path forward in life, a twelfth century monastery in southeastern France set on one of the routes to the Camino de Santiago, a literal path of pilgrimage. For an architecture firm discussing the future of cities, the Hollywood Hills, overlooking all of Los Angeles. For a comedian looking to take his craft to the next level, the famed writing room of the satirical newspaper The Onion. I have seen, over and over again, that when a location inspires a client and makes them feel closer to their purpose, it makes my job as a facilitator much easier, as they are already halfway there. Consider your own gatherings. What if for your company’s next sales training you assigned employees to each spend the day underground with a subway busker, to build their empathy and connect them with the most extreme version of what they do? What if you held your next college reunion in a cemetery, reminding your classmates, directly if morbidly, that time is of the essence for fulfilling the ideals they professed in their youth? Sadly, the failure to embody is more common.”

In a humorous anecdote, she recounts the story of a business merger where leaders of a French company met with leaders of an American company to discuss the merger. The French company selected a chateau in France for the gathering and everything about the venue communicated to the Americans that they were never going to be seen as equals once the merger was concluded. The gathering itself went off the rails. “The Château Principle” she says, “in its narrowest form, is this: Don’t host your meeting in a château if you don’t want to remind the French of their greatness and of the fact that they don’t need you after all.”

In chapter three, the author then initiates a conversation about the role of the host. “How will you run your gathering?” What she makes abundantly clear is that the effective facilitation of gatherings is not the result of facilitator abdication. Deciding to cede control of the gathering to the gathering itself simply leaves the guests vulnerable to the most aggressive “pretender to the throne” she says, quoting Isaiah Berlin who once quipped that “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” “An essential step along the path of gathering better,” Parker points out,

“is making peace with the necessity and virtue of using your power. If you are going to gather, gather. If you are going to host, host. If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it—and rule it with generosity.”

“Generous authority is not a pose,” she continues,

“It’s not the appearance of power. It is using power to achieve outcomes that are generous, that are for others. The authority is justified by the generosity. When I tell you to host with generous authority, I’m not telling you to domineer. I’m saying to find the courage to be authoritative in the service of three goals.”

These three goals are listed as follows: “Protect your guests, equalize your guests, and connect your guests.” The Art of Gathering goes into some detail about how each of those goals is best accomplished. By doing these things, you protect your guest from spending an evening doing things that they did not sign up to do, you create a space where external social hierarchies do not infest your gathering with unnecessary power dynamics, and you make it possible for people to make connections with one another, not with projections of one another (what the psychologist M.Scott Peck in his book The Different Drum, would call “pseudo-community”). “Build a web, build a web, build a web,” the author later commands, “because it’s not about their connection to me. It’s this psychological inter-stitching of the group that allows you and them to take risks, build together, and have the boldest version of whatever gathering they’re having.”

In chapter four, entitled, “Create a Temporary Alternative World,” the author talks about the importance of establishing a set of rules for the gathering in advance. All gatherings have codes of behavior, written or unwritten, which govern the interactions between people in that gathering. Those rule-sets can reflect commonly held mores but they can also disrupt those standard rules in ways that can either impede or accentuate the purpose of the gathering. In some cases, rules can be pre-arranged that forbid people from proselytizing, or from marketing products, or from forming cliques, etc. Parker makes a big deal out of how rules can create space between the world outside the meeting and the world inside the meeting. They can literally make different kinds of thinking and interaction possible. They can provide a “alternate universe” for people to try out being a different kind of community altogether.

“A colleague in the conflict-resolution field taught me a principle I have never forgotten,” the argument continues, “90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.” All of the discussion thus far has dealt with what goes on before the gathering starts. With chapter five, the fun actually begins. Parker titles the chapter, “Never Start a Funeral With Logistics” insisting that the first minutes of a gathering are crucial to everything that will follow. Using the first few minutes of a gathering to cover incidental details, signals to the gathering that the purpose of the gathering is somehow secondary to its institutional needs. [This is why whenever I teach face-to-face classes, I like to get right into the subject I am teaching about in the first few minutes. I leave the details about the syllabus until later.]

In an effective gathering, it is vital that the participants understand that they are there to accomplish the thing that they were told they were there to accomplish even as they enter the space where the gathering is to take place. She insists that the gathering’s purpose be “felt in those first moments.” “Priming matters,” Parker insists,

“Because a gathering is a social contract, and it is in the pregame window that this contract is drafted and implicitly agreed on. Why is a gathering a social contract? Because it proceeds from an understanding between host and guest, sometimes stated and sometimes unstated, about what each is willing to offer to make it a success. Another way to say that is that all gatherings come with expectations. There are expectations of the host—that the agenda will be followed or that food will be served. There are expectations of the guests—that they will do their homework and come prepared with ideas; that they won’t bring their three cousins along; that they will dance their heart out and get others to do so. These expectations are present whenever people gather, and the prevailing understanding of what they are constitutes a gathering’s social contract.”

“A gathering’s social contract is often invisible to us, even when we are carrying out its commands,” we are told. It is up to the facilitator/s to know and to protect that social contract right from the outset. “And so part of the job of the pregame is to find ways, implicit and explicit, to communicate to your guests what they’re signing up for by saying yes to the invitation.” She notes that most people have an “anti-bucket list” of things that they do *not* want to do before they die. It is unfair for a facilitator of gatherings to ambush them with precisely these things that they would have avoided if they had known.

Parker has a lot to say about “transitions” – about gatherings as “states of being” or “worlds” that people travel to and from. “The idea of helping people transition from one state to another is embedded in many rituals of traditional societies,” she contends,

“It’s the equivalent of a doctor taking off her jacket and putting on her white coat as she enters her office. It’s the act of Muslims washing their hands and feet before prayer. It can be the removal of shoes before a Japanese tea ceremony. The only difference with modern gatherings is that the passageway is not prescribed. You need to create it. And one of the easiest, most natural places to create such a passageway is the doorway”

“No matter what environment you’re given as a gatherer, you might ask yourself how you could create a transition of this kind—a passageway that tunes out the prior reality and captures people’s attention and imagination. By doing so, you create a starting line and, even more important, you help your guests cross it as a collective.”

In chapter six, we start looking at the crucial role of authenticity in any gathering that hopes to be transformative. A gathering is not a real gathering if it only assembles every person’s “best self” and not their “entire self.” Parker introduces the chapter by saying,

“Now your event is under way. The tracks are laid. Things are rolling. Your thoughts may turn to where many of my friends’ and clients’ thoughts do: the question of how to get those you gather to be more authentic. How do you keep people real? I have some suggestions. Fifteen, in fact.”

In short, she has a lot of ideas for how to incubate transparency and authenticity in a gathering. It’s worth the price of the book to read the chapter in full, I suppose. One of her suggestions resonated with me in particular. She suggests that people be encouraged to share their “experiences over their ideas.” “Many gatherings would be improved if people were simply asked for their stories,” she writes, referring to the popularity of the radio program and podcast, “the Moth.”

She mentions one gathering where people were tasked with having a one-on-one conversation with a stranger.

“In lieu of food, at each setting was a Zeldin invention called the “Conversation Menu” that led the pairs through six “courses” of talk. Under the heading of “Starters” were questions like “How have your priorities changed over the years?” and “How have your background and experience limited or favoured you?” Under “Soups” was an invitation to ask, “Which parts of your life have been a waste of time?” Under “Fish”: “What have you rebelled against in the past and what are you rebelling against now?” Under “Salads”: “What are the limits of your compassion?”

This is a part of the creation of an alternative world talked about earlier in the book, a world where honesty is incentivized over posturing. “Strangers, unconnected to our pasts and, in most cases, to our futures, are easier to experiment around,” she suggests,

“They create a temporary freedom to pilot-test what we might become, however untethered that identity is to what we have been. They allow us to try out new sides. In front of a stranger, we are free to choose what we want to show, hide, or even invent.” She invented an activity she calls “15 Toasts” where people are encouraged to share something about themselves that others do not know.

“At each 15 Toasts since, I almost always say something like ‘Tell us something that would surprise us,’ or ‘Leave your successes at the door,’ or ‘There’s no need to slip in an accomplishment.’”

One of her colleagues tells her that he draws a swimming pool for the people in his gatherings, telling them that “there is a deep end and a shallow end” and that they can choose whatever end they want to enter. It is important, “to offer an “invitation to intimacy, but depth is a complete choice.”

In chapter seven, Parker discusses how to facilitate what she calls “good controversy.” “Enough about warmth. Let’s talk about heat,” she says.

“The panel, like the university, is a venue that prides itself on being about debate,” she bemoans, “when in fact it has given in to the dogma that controversy must be avoided at any cost.” “How do we create gatherings that can hold some heat without burning up in flames?” she asks, “How do we cause, and have the group benefit from, good controversy?” Effective gatherings, she insists, require some element of risk. “The group was suffering from what many of us suffer from,” she writes of one failed experiment with pseudo-gathering,

“A well-meaning desire not to offend that devolves into a habit of saying nothing that matters. They were not getting ideas out into the open. Because of this, they couldn’t have a rich and honest dialogue, air their very real differences, and make an important decision together that they would stand by. And by avoiding what truly mattered to them in the name of not ruffling feathers, they were evading the questions they most cared about answering.”

“What, you might ask, is “good controversy”? Good controversy is the kind of contention that helps people look more closely at what they care about, when there is danger but also real benefit in doing so. To embrace good controversy is to embrace the idea that harmony is not necessarily the highest, and certainly not the only, value in a gathering.”

“To address these areas of heat, you need to know where they are. Thus you make a heat map. You can do this by asking yourself (and others) the following questions: What are people avoiding that they don’t think they’re avoiding? What are the sacred cows here? What goes unsaid? What are we trying to protect? And why?”

Parker will often ask invitees to provide answers to a set of questions before the gathering begins. This provides a better understanding of where the group can be led into honest conversations. Two questions she asked in these surveys stuck out to me more than others: “If you were to say something that was politically incorrect, or taboo, about this process or project, what would it be?” And, “What do you think is the most needed conversation for this group to have now?”

In wrapping up the book, the author invests an entire chapter talking about the importance of ending a gathering well – of planning for that ending even before the gathering has begun. “When it comes to our gatherings,” she tells us,

“Far too many of us are that horrible person who never really breaks up with anyone but just stops calling. That person may tell himself that he is being kind or low-key. But guests, like romantic partners, deserve a proper breakup.”

“Great actors spend as much time thinking about the parting. Great hosts, too. Because great hosts, like great actors, understand that how you end things, like how you begin them, shapes people’s experience, sense of meaning, and memory.”

As she delves into the specifics of what comprises an effective ending to a gathering, she notes two aspects in particular.

“A strong closing has two phases, corresponding to two distinct needs among your guests: looking inward and turning outward. Looking inward is about taking a moment to understand, remember, acknowledge, and reflect on what just transpired—and to bond as a group one last time. Turning outward is about preparing to part from one another and retake your place in the world.”

“What of this world do I want to bring back to my other worlds? ”your guests should be asking as they depart. I liked her idea of having guests fill out a card where they write a note about key take-aways or commitments to change to their future self that can be mailed to them as a reminder some weeks or months later. And, to reiterate the importance she placed on purpose at the beginning of the book, she stresses that purpose should hold sway to the very bitter end. “Just as you don’t open a gathering with logistics,” she concludes, “you should never end a gathering with logistics, and that includes thank-yous.”

Makes me want to start gathering.

Question for Comment: If you were to organize a gathering a month from now, what would be its purpose and who would you invite?

Alzheimer’s will “not be ignored”

Still Alice REVIEW

“Neurons unable to connect effectively with other neurons atrophy. Useless, an abandoned neuron will die.”

“What is Alzheimer’s like for the person who has Alzheimer’s?” That is the theme of Lisa Genova’s novel, Still Alice. Along the way, it explores the relationship between connection, memory, and identity. It explores the experiences of partners, children, colleagues, and neighbors of people who deal with this disease. In some ways, it simply asks the same questions that all great novels ask: “What does it mean to be human?”

Alice teaches and researches the subject of linguistics at Harvard University. It is almost poetically ironic that she is the foil by which we learn about a disease that attacks our ability to use and make use of language. One of the first words we see her lose access to is the word lexicon (the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge).

The chapters of the book are organized by month over a two year period. The novel weaves in some information about what Alzheimer’s does in a human brain but the story is really about what decline in brain function does to your life. That is where this story plays out.

Here is a bit of the science:

 “Her knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease admittedly swept the surface only lightly. She knew that the brains of Alzheimer’s patients had reduced levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter important in learning and memory. She also knew that the hippocampus, a sea-horse-shaped structure in the brain critical for the formation of new memories, became mired in plaques and tangles, although she didn’t really understand what plaques and tangles were exactly. She knew that anomia, a pathological tip of the tongue, was another hallmark symptom. And she knew that someday, she’d look at her husband, her children, her colleagues, faces she’d known and loved forever, and she wouldn’t recognize them.”

Soon after learning that she has the disease, she has to begin facing the decisions that one must face when they realize that an irreversible neurological process has begun (as of this moment in time). Who do I tell? Who should know? Who should be left to figure it out? Alice’s daughter is in the process of starting a family. Alzheimer’s is a genetic disease that fertilized embryos could be screened for. Genova includes the following conversation between Alice and her daughter, Anna:

“Im going to go ahead with the in vitro. I already talked with my doctor, and they’re going to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on the embryos. They’re going to test a single cell from each of the embryos for the mutation and only implant ones that are mutation-free. So we’ll know for sure that my kids won’t ever get this.”

“It was a solid piece of good news. But while everyone else continued to savor it, the taste turned slightly bitter for Alice. Despite her self-reproach, she envied Anna, that she could do what Alice couldn’t—keep her children safe from harm. Anna would never have to sit opposite her daughter, her firstborn, and watch her struggle to comprehend the news that she would someday develop Alzheimer’s. She wished that these kinds of advances in reproductive medicine had been available to her. But then the embryo that had developed into Anna would’ve been discarded.”

In Still Alice, Alice’s husband, John, is also a teacher at Harvard and a researcher. Only he works with cancer. Genova contrasts the two diseases in the following paragraph.

“Alzheimer’s disease was an entirely different kind of beast. There were no weapons that could slay it. Taking Aricept and Namenda felt like aiming a couple of leaky squirt guns in the face of a blazing fire. John continued to probe into the drugs in clinical development, but she doubted that any of them were ready and capable of making a significant difference for her, else he would already have been on the phone with Dr. Davis, insisting on a way to get her on them. Right now, everyone with Alzheimer’s faced the same outcome, whether they were eighty-two or fifty, resident of the Mount Auburn Manor or full professor of psychology at Harvard University. The blazing fire consumed all. No one got out alive.”

The novel is full of moments. Here is the moment where Alice takes some memory tests in the doctor’s office and is faced with the fact that there is a limit to the ways that she can compensate for the actual neurological losses that her brain is sustaining. Perhaps it is like Robert E. Lee realizing that will and pluck cannot overcome the loss of too many soldiers.

“She swallowed her panic, and it lodged, heavy and hulking, right above her diaphragm, making it uncomfortable to breathe. Either her pathways to the details of the story were impassable or she lacked the electrochemical strength to knock loudly enough on the neurons housing them to be heard. Outside of this closet, she could look up lost information in her BlackBerry. She could reread her emails and write herself reminders on Post-it notes. She could rely on the default respect her Harvard position embodied. Outside of this little room, she could hide her impassable pathways and wimpy neural signals. And although she knew that these tests were designed to unveil what she couldn’t access, she was caught unsuspecting and embarrassed.
“I don’t really remember much.”
There it was, her Alzheimer’s, stripped and naked under the fluorescent lighting, on display for Sarah Something to scrutinize and judge.

There are moments in the novel where she has to “surrender” capabilities that have always defined her as a person. She begins to realize that at some point soon, reading will become impossible.

“She returned, wrapped herself in the blanket, sat in one of the chairs, and opened her book to the dog-eared page. Reading was fast becoming a heartbreaking chore. She had to reread pages over and over to retain the continuity of the thesis or narrative, and if she put the book down for any length of time, she had to go back sometimes a full chapter to find the thread again. Plus, she felt anxious over deciding what to read. What if she didn’t have time to read everything she’d always wanted to? Prioritizing hurt, a reminder that the clock was ticking, that some things would be left undone.”

She also begins to experience the loss of navigational memory. In the first episode of this unfolding tragedy, she finds herself unable to orient herself in the middle of Harvard Square, a place she has worked for decades. And then months later, a similar moment happens in the context of her own home.

“Just as she reached the front door, an urgent pressure in her bladder announced itself, and she remembered that she really had to pee. She hastened back down the hall and opened the door to the bathroom. Only, to her utter disbelief, it wasn’t the bathroom. A broom, mop, bucket, vacuum cleaner, stool, toolbox, lightbulbs, flashlights, bleach. The utility closet.
She looked farther down the hall. The kitchen to the left, the living room to the right, and that was it. There was a half bath on this floor, wasn’t there? There had to be. It was right here. But it wasn’t. She hurried to the kitchen but found only one door, and it led to the back porch. She raced over to the living room, but of course, there wasn’t a bathroom off the living room. She rushed back to the hallway and held the doorknob.
“Please God, please God, please God.”
She swung the door open like an illusionist revealing her most mystifying trick, but the bathroom didn’t magically reappear.
How can I be lost in my own home?”

And then, there is the moment when the death of some neural connection makes it impossible for her to remember that her sister had died in an auto accident when she was a teenager. She remembers that she had a sister, but not what happened to her.

“Where’s Anne?”
“Anna’s in Boston, with Charlie.”
“No, Anne, my sister, where’s Anne?”
Lydia stared at her without blinking, all lightness drained from her face.
“Mom, Anne’s dead. She died in a car accident with your mother.”
Lydia’s eyes didn’t move from Alice’s. Alice stopped breathing, and her heart squeezed like a fist. Her head and fingers went numb, and the world around her became dark and narrow. She took in a huge breath of air. It filled her head and fingers with oxygen, and it filled her pounding heart with rage and grief. She began to shake and cry.
“No, Mom, this happened a long time ago, remember?”
Lydia was talking to her, but Alice couldn’t hear what she was saying. She could only feel the rage and grief coursing through her every cell, her sick heart, and her hot tears, and she could only hear her own voice in her head screaming for Anne and her mother.
John stood over them, drenched.
“What happened?”
“She was asking for Anne. She thinks they just died.”
He held her head in his hands. He was talking to her, trying to calm her down. Why isn’t he upset, too? He’s known about this for a while, that’s why, and he’s been keeping it from me. She couldn’t trust him.”

Surely, if your own sister died, you would remember, right? Apparently, Alzheimer’s does not particularly distinguish between memories. It rages like a wildfire through a California suburb selecting which houses to devour and which to leave alone.

Some of the poignant moments in Still Alice are less traumatic and more mundane, but no less destabilizing. Like the morning at the table when Alice cannot remember what cream cheese is called.  

“She cut her sesame bagel in half and took a bite. She didn’t like it plain. Several condiment options sat on the table—wild Maine blueberry jam, a jar of peanut butter, a stick of butter on a plate, and a tub of white butter. But it wasn’t called white butter. What was it called? Not mayonnaise. No, it was too thick, like butter. What was its name? She pointed her butter knife at it.
“John, can you pass that to me?”
John handed her the tub of white butter. She spread a thick layer onto one of the bagel halves and stared at it. She knew exactly how it would taste, and that she liked it, but she couldn’t bring herself to bite into it until she could tell herself its name. Lydia watched her mother studying her bagel.
“Cream cheese, Mom.”
“Right. Cream cheese. Thank you, Lydia.”

And then there are moments when she remembers what she has been told that she has forgotten. How strange to not remember that your sister died in an automobile accident decades ago, but can remember being told that you had forgotten this!

“The phone rang, and John went inside the house to answer it. The first thought that jumped to the front of Alice’s mind was that it was her mother, calling to let them know she was going to be late getting there. The thought, seemingly realistic and colored with immediacy, appeared as reasonable as expecting John to return to the patio table within the next few minutes. Alice corrected the impetuous thought, scolded it, and put it away. Her mother and sister had died when she was a freshman in college. It was maddening to have to keep reminding herself of this.”

Maddening.

Alice’s daughter asks Alice what it is like to find oneself shedding neurons like skin cells.

“Having Alzheimer’s. Can you feel that you have it right now?”
“Well, I know I’m not confused or repeating myself right now, but just a few minutes ago, I couldn’t find ‘cream cheese,’ and I was having a hard time participating in the conversation with you and your dad. I know it’s only a matter of time before those types of things happen again, and the times between when it happens are getting shorter. And the things that are happening are getting bigger. So even when I feel completely normal, I know I’m not. It’s not over, it’s just a rest. I don’t trust myself.”
As soon as she finished, she worried she’d admitted too much. She didn’t want to scare her daughter. But Lydia didn’t flinch and stayed interested, and Alice relaxed.
“So you know when it’s happening?”
“Most of the time.”
“Like what was happening when you couldn’t think of the name for cream cheese?”
“I know what I’m looking for, my brain just can’t get to it. It’s like if you decided you wanted that glass of water, only your hand won’t pick it up. You ask it nicely, you threaten it, but it just won’t budge. You might finally get it to move, but then you grab the saltshaker instead, or you knock the glass and spill the water all over the table. Or by the time you get your hand to hold the glass and bring it to your lips, the itch in your throat has cleared, and you don’t need a drink anymore. The moment of need has passed.”

And yet, we begin to see that there are times when Alice does not realize that she is saying something that she just said moments ago. She is still smart. She is just smart with a defective and untrustworthy mechanism for recording memory. Just when she starts to feel confident, evidence appears that she has no right to be. Alzheimer’s will “not be ignored”

“They were on their way back when she ran up beside him. On a compassionate whim, she was about to tell him that he didn’t have to run with her anymore if he didn’t want to, that she could handle this route alone. But then, following his turn, they ran right at a fork onto Mill Road toward home where she would’ve gone left. Alzheimer’s did not like to be ignored.”

 Eventually, the moment arrives when Alice has to face the fact that she can no longer continue to play the role of a college professor adequately. These are painful moments. Her supervisor calls her in to talk about last semester’s student reviews. Alice confesses that all the shortcomings the students have noted are legitimate. She is not able to do her job to the level that she has always expected of herself. What would that feel like?

“I’m not ready to leave, but I agree with you, as much as it breaks my heart, I think I should stop teaching. I’d like to stay on as Dan’s adviser, though, and I’d like to continue to attend seminars and meetings.”

I am no longer a teacher.

“I think we can work that out. I’d like you to have a talk with Dan, explain to him what’s going on and leave the decision up to him. I’d be happy to coadvise with you if that makes either of you more comfortable. Also, obviously, you shouldn’t take on any new graduate students. Dan will be the last.”

I am no longer a research scientist.

“You probably shouldn’t be accepting invitations to speak at other universities or conferences. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for you to be representing Harvard in that kind of capacity. I have noticed that you’ve stopped traveling for the most part, so maybe you’ve already recognized this.”
“Yes, I agree.”
“How do you want to handle telling the administrative faculty and people in the department? Again, I’ll respect your time line here, whatever you want to do.”
She was going to stop teaching, researching, traveling, and lecturing. People were going to notice. They were going to speculate and whisper and gossip. They were going to think she was a depressed, stressed-out addict. Maybe some of them already did.
“I’ll tell them. It should come from me.”

Over time, Alice has to face the fact that this disease is not only going to take way her ability to contribute in her place of work. It is going to begin impairing her very ability to connect with the members of her family.

“Alice knew that the woman sitting across from her was her daughter, but she had a disturbing lack of confidence in this knowledge. She knew that she had a daughter named Lydia, but when she looked at the young woman sitting across from her, knowing that she was her daughter Lydia was more academic knowledge than implicit understanding, a fact she agreed to, information she’d been given and accepted as true...”

“. . . She could see Lydia’s history as well, but somehow this woman sitting across from her wasn’t inextricably connected to her memories of her youngest child. This made her uneasy and painfully aware that she was declining, her past becoming unhinged from her present. And how strange that she had no problem identifying the man next to Anna as Anna’s husband, Charlie, who had entered their lives only a couple of years ago. She pictured her Alzheimer’s as a demon in her head, tearing a reckless and illogical path of destruction, ripping apart the wiring from “Lydia now” to “Lydia then,” leaving all the “Charlie” connections unscathed.”

“Tearing a reckless and illogical path . . .”

This is something that this book has helped me to better understand as I converse with my own mother and realize that there is no real identifiable pattern (that I can see) in the things that she remembers, vaguely remembers, forgets, and absolutely forgets. In Still Alice, Alice’s family makes videos for Alice that she can enjoy – almost like a memory exoskeleton. A surrogate for a system for remembering that is breaking down.

“The DVDs Lydia had made came at just the right time. Each story told by John and the kids ran only a few minutes long, so she could absorb each one, and she didn’t have to actively hold the information in any particular story to understand or enjoy the others. She watched them over and over. She didn’t remember everything they talked about, but this felt completely normal, for each of her children and John didn’t remember all of the details either. And when Lydia asked them all to recount the same event, each remembered it somewhat differently, omitting some parts, exaggerating others, emphasizing their own individual perspectives. Even biographies not saturated with disease were vulnerable to holes and distortions.”

“She could only stomach watching the Alice Howland video once. She used to be so eloquent, so comfortable talking in front of any audience. Now, she overused the word thingy and repeated herself an embarrassing number of times. But she felt grateful to have it, her memories, reflections, and advice recorded and pinned down, safe from the molecular mayhem of Alzheimer’s disease. Her grandchildren would watch it someday and say, “That’s Grandma when she could still talk and remember things.”

Alice begins to feel the weight of relational disconnection as it becomes ever more difficult to receive, retain, and respond to linguistic forms of communication. “She could feel herself declining,” Genova writes of Alice. “She could feel herself slipping into that demented hole. Alone.”

“I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone,” she moaned, sinking further into the truth of her lonely hole each time she heard her own voice say the words.”

The ability of her brain to somehow convert an idea into a coherent message is being compromised daily. For example, this heart-wrenching passage.

“Alice wanted to tell Lydia that those were excellent schools. She wanted to ask her about the programs that most interested her. She wanted to tell her that she was proud of her. But her thoughts from idea to mouth moved too slowly today, as if they had to swim miles through black river sludge before surfacing to be heard, and most of them drowned somewhere along the way.”

“What if I see you, and I don’t know that you’re my daughter, and I don’t know that you love me?” she asks her daughter.

Lydia responds:

“Then, I’ll tell you that I do, and you’ll believe me.”

Here is where deep existential and ontological questions emerge.

“Alice liked that. But will I always love her? Does my love for her reside in my head or my heart? The scientist in her believed that emotion resulted from complex limbic brain circuitry, circuitry that was for her, at this very moment, trapped in the trenches of a battle in which there would be no survivors. The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart.”

Some months later, at a check up with the neurologist, we learn that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s destructiveness can be mitigated for a time if a brain is naturally resourceful, like a military general who is outnumbered but tactically brilliant. But the eventual outcome is resistant to optimism. In the end, Grant has more resources and men than Lee. Appomattox Courthouse is waiting for all who enter the fray. “Well, there are probably a few things going on here,” Alice’s doctor tells her husband,

“Her illness probably started long before she was diagnosed last January. She and you and your family and her colleagues probably disregarded any number of symptoms as fluke, or normal, or chalked them up to stress, not enough sleep, too much to drink, and on and on. This could’ve gone on easily for a year or two or longer. And she’s incredibly bright. If the average person has, say for simplicity, ten synapses that lead to a piece of information, Alice could easily have fifty. When the average person loses those ten synapses, that piece of information is inaccessible to them, forgotten. But Alice can lose those ten and still have forty other ways of getting to the target. So her anatomical losses aren’t as profoundly and functionally noticeable at first.”

“But by now, she’s lost a lot more than ten,” said John.

“Yes, I’m afraid she has. Her recent memory is now falling in the bottom three percent of those able to complete the tests, her language processing has degraded considerably, and she’s losing self-awareness, all as we’d unfortunately expect to see.

“But she’s also incredibly resourceful. She used a number of inventive strategies today to answer questions correctly that she couldn’t actually remember correctly.”

As Alice’s cognitive abilities decline, she tries to capture in a speech what it feels like: “I’m losing my yesterdays,” she says.

“If you ask me what I did yesterday, what happened, what I saw and felt and heard, I’d be hard-pressed to give you details. I might guess a few things correctly. I’m an excellent guesser. But I don’t really know. I don’t remember yesterday or the yesterday before that. And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with. I can’t offer it the names of the United States presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can’t give it the names of the state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.”

“I often fear tomorrow. What if I wake up and don’t know who my husband is? What if I don’t know where I am or recognize myself in the mirror? When will I no longer be me? Is the part of my brain that’s responsible for my unique ‘meness’ vulnerable to this disease? Or is my identity something that transcends neurons, proteins, and defective molecules of DNA? Is my soul and spirit immune to the ravages of Alzheimer’s? I believe it is.”

“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

I am not sure that a person with Alice’s level of impairment could have written or read this speech but . . . it serves as Alice’s closing statement and it is okay with me if it remains.

Perhaps this is what people with Alzheimer’s need? Maybe they need us to tell them why we love them today, just as they are. And maybe they need us to help them figure out how to love us in some tangible way today . . . Maybe, unable to remember all the things they have done for the people they loved, they need to know that they still can love us somehow. Maybe that simply means letting them pray for us?

Maybe we have to surrender all the ways that we used to love and be loved and invent new ones. Alice reflects on her loss of linguistic ability.

“But to tell the truth, she was very far from okay. She could still read and comprehend small amounts of text, but the computer keyboard had become an undecipherable jumble of letters. In truth, she’d lost the ability to compose words out of the alphabet letters on the keys. Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She’d said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.”

Maybe dealing with Alzheimer’s involves saying “tearful goodbyes” to the way we used to love people and “earn” their love in return? In Still Alice, Alice and her husband look at the textbook they once wrote together.

“I wrote this book with you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I remember. I remember you. I remember I used to be very smart.”
“Yes, you were, you were the smartest person I’ve ever known.”
This thick book with the shiny blue cover represented so much of what she used to be. I used to know how the mind handled language, and I could communicate what I knew. I used to be someone who knew a lot. No one asks for my opinion or advice anymore. I miss that. I used to be curious and independent and confident. I miss being sure of things. There’s no peace in being unsure of everything all the time. I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what’s happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and family.
She wanted to tell him everything she remembered and thought, but she couldn’t send all those memories and thoughts, composed of so many words, phrases, and sentences, past the choking weeds and sludge into audible sound. She boiled it down and put all her effort into what was most essential. The rest would have to remain in the pristine place, hanging on.
“I miss myself.”
“I miss you, too, Ali, so much.”
“I never planned to get like this.”
“I know.”

A few days ago, I had a dream and in the dream I had built a dam in a Vermont brook out of all my files and notebooks and course notes and outlines, etc. and then the dam broke and started washing downstream. I tried to collect it all but I could not save everything, and some things I saved were too muddy or smeared to read and I had no idea how I would get the dam rebuilt. Perhaps this is a premonition. Alzheimers is genetic after all. 

Question for Comment: If one knew that they would someday get Alzheimer’s, what might they do to prepare for it? And what can one take from this novel to help them better care for and improve the quality of life for their loved ones who have it?