Eucatastrophe Reader

“Doc could not interpret the black voice of his guts.”

Sweet Thursday REVIEW

“There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.”

Steinbeck’s third novel in the Cannery Row trilogy serves up another dose of his particular brand of moral relativism. Steinbeck is a promoter of what I might call “intention ethics.” Characters can be guilty of any number of conventional violations of religious or social codes and still be regarded as saints so long as their intentions are good intentions (and they usually are). It is more important to Steinbeck to know why a person lies than to know that they do lie for example. If one is to judge Fauna, the owner of the Bear Flag (the local brothel), it is important to know how well she cares for “her girls” than to know how their business model measures up against Mosaic law. The main characters in Sweet Thursday have little regard for conventional moral codes but they exhibit what are, to Steinbeck, virtue.  In the moral ledgers of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats, vices and virtues are things to be balanced. The following conversation early in the novel sets the tone.

There was never a friend like Lee Chong," Mack said brokenly.
  "Yes, he was wise and good," said Doc.
  "And tricky," said Mack.
  "And smart," said Doc.
  "He took care of a lot of people," said Mack.
  "And he took a few," said Doc.

 They volleyed Lee Chong back and forth, and their memories built virtues that would have surprised him, and cleverness and beauty too. While one told a fine tale of that mercantile Chinaman the other waited impatiently to top the story. Out of their memories there emerged a being scarcely human, a dragon of goodness and an angel of guile. In such a way are the gods created.”

Steinbeck’s Almighty would be a being whose virtues outweighed his vices, not one that had none of the later. Where a character has more vices than virtues as is the case with Joseph and Mary (that is one name for those of you who have not read the novel), even then, Steinbeck has a capacity for winking at the shortfall. Somehow, a person with few vices can be a good person so long as they are interesting. Of Joseph and Mary, Steinbeck writes:

“Somewhere he felt there was a profession illegal enough to satisfy him morally and yet safe enough not to outrage his instinctive knowledge of the law of averages. You might have said he was well launched on his career when, suddenly, puberty smote him, and for a number of years his activities took a different direction.”

Steinbeck’s characters do not twist themselves into pretzels to be upstanding members of some local Baptist Church. They are, “at ease with themselves.”

“Doc's natural admiration and desire for women had always been satisfied by women themselves. He had few responsibilities except to be a kindly, generous, and amused man. And these he did not find difficult. All in all, he had always been a fulfilled and contented man. A specimen so rare aroused yearning in other men, for how few men like their work, their lives--how very few men like themselves. Doc liked himself, not in an adulatory sense, but just as he would have liked anyone else. Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”

You can see this moral relativity at work in the boys’ decision to have a raffle to raise money for Doc’s telescope. The raffle is completely and shamelessly rigged in such a way that the boys do not lose their accommodations (“The Palace Flophouse is the prize”).

“To Doc’s friends, Mack and the boys mentioned the rigging of the lottery, but to strangers—who cared? It was a perfect example of the collective goodness and generosity of a community.”

Fauna and the boys of the Palace flophouse and the Bear Flag brothel don’t scold anyone for scratching their itches, either sexual or alcoholic. The social codes of the respectable proletariat are less than nothing to them. Consider how Fauna talks to Doc as she is explaining why Suzie is a liability for a brothel .

“Doc,” said Fauna, “I knocked around and I seen all kinds. I tell you, if you got a streak of lady in you it spoils you for anything else. Now you never come over to the Bear Flag. You play the field. I personally think that costs you more but I ain’t one to mess in the way people want to live.”

“I don’t think I’m following you,” said Doc.
“Okay, I’ll lay out the deck. When you’re making a play for one of them babes, them amateurs, you got to do quite a lot of talking before you make the sack—ain’t that right?”
Doc smiled ruefully. “Right,” he said.
“Well, do you always mean every word of it?”
Doc pinched his lower lip. “Why—why—I guess right at the moment I do.”
“But afterward?”
“Afterward, if I were to think about it—”
“That’s what I mean,” said Fauna. “So if you happen to tell a little teensy-beensy bit of baloney you don’t blow your brains out.”
“You’d do well in the analysis business,” said Doc.”

Her characters are not people of stiff moral backbone so much as people with flexible moral cartilage. For Steinbeck, righteousness is not to be found in the observed deed but in the hidden intent. “What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us!” he writes,

“Behind the broken nose and baleful eye may be a gentle courtier; behind the postures and symbols and myths of Joe Elegant there may be the hunger to be a man. If one could be, for only an evening, whatever in the world one wished, what would it be? What secret would come out?”

Perhaps the best illustration of this morality of intention rather than the morality of compliance or the morality of consequence is the character of Hazel in Sweet Thursday. Hazel is a character of extremely limited intelligence but great heart. In Hazel’s quest to help solve his loneliness problem, he sets out to find out what Doc needs and to make it possible for Doc and Suzie to close the “couple gap” (my words) that divides them. When Suzie explains in not so many words that Doc simply does not need her and that the only thing that might make it possible for them to form a pair would be if Doc got sick or broke a bone, Hazel has a dark night of the soul but determines to break Doc’s arm. Steinbeck describes the scene of Hazel’s anguish in terms that draw close parallels to Jesus struggling with his decision to go to the cross in the Garden of Gethsemane. The chapter is entitled “Lama Sabathani” the words Jesus used on the cross to ask his Father why he had been forsaken.

“Under the black cypress tree Hazel writhed on the ground. From between his clenched teeth came little whimpers. As the night drew on and the moon went down, leaving blackness, so desolation fell on Hazel, so that he cried out against the agony of his greatness as that Other did, feeling forsaken.

Hour after hour the struggle went on, and only about three o’clock in the morning was Hazel saturated. Then he accepted it as he had accepted the poisoned presidency of the United States. He was calm, for there was no escape. If anyone had seen him it would have been a dull man who did not find him beautiful.

Hazel picked his chosen instrument from the ground—an indoor-ball bat. He crept like a night-colored cat out of the black shadow of the cypress tree.

In less than three minutes he returned. He lay on his stomach under the tree and wept.”

So, Hazel goes up to Doc’s house, finds him sleeping, and hits him in the arm with a baseball bat. And, as if on cue, every one of Doc’s friends sees what Hazel has done as an act of benevolent grace. They understand what Hazel’s intents were. They judge him by his innocent intention. And how can love be wrong that loves with good intent?

And here, dear reader, I should like to pivot and turn our focus to Doc for he is the central protagonist of Sweet Thursday. Doc has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, has an IQ of 185, and is far-and-away the smartest and most functional character in the novel. He is the owner of Western Biologicals, a company that he staffs singlehandedly, dedicated to the collection and sale of bio-organisms for research. He makes a good living. He enjoys his drink and periodic women, and he is the financial and spiritual “center” of the community. When Doc has a problem, everyone in Tortilla Flat feels it and feels despondent. “As goes Doc, so goes the village,” you might say.

And Doc has a problem. His problem, as Steinbeck describes it, arrives with a phase transition in his own psychological life. He used to be satisfied with his intellectual work and his life’s amenities but now he is not.

"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away--you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch--and your mind says, ‘Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?’ All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. ‘What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?’ And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: ‘What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?’ And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt, it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.”

Suddenly, Doc is no longer satisfied with having been useful to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. Suddenly, his “lowest self” wants “warmth.”

“Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas, when it happened, it was one day hooked on to the tail of another.”

Doc feels his gnawing lack but cannot label it.

“But now the worm of discontent was gnawing at him. Maybe it was the beginning of Doc's middle age that caused it--glands slackening their flow, skin losing its bloom, taste buds weakening, eyes not so penetrating, and hearing dulled a little. Or it might have been the new emptiness of Cannery Row--the silent machines, the rusting metal. Deep in himself Doc felt a failure. But he was a reasonably realistic man. He had his eyes examined, his teeth X-rayed. Dr. Horace Dormody went over him and discovered no secret focus of infection to cause the restlessness. And so, Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness. He collected, preserved, injected, until his stock shelves were crowded again. New generations of cotton rats crawled on the wire netting of the cages, and four new rattlesnakes abandoned themselves to a life of captivity and ease.”

But something has changed. Doc discovers what the Rolling Stone discovered; “He can’t get no sat-is-fac-tion.” The “bottom voice” will no longer be silent.

“But the discontent was still there. The pains that came to Doc were like a stir of uneasiness or the flick of a skipped heartbeat. Whisky lost its sharp delight and the first long pull of beer from a frosty glass was not the joy it had been. He stopped listening in the middle of an extended story. He was not genuinely glad to see a friend. And sometimes, starting to turn over a big rock in the Great Tide Pool--a rock under which he knew there would be a community of frantic animals--he would drop the rock back in place and stand, hands on hips, looking off to sea, where the round clouds piled up white with pink and black edges. And he would be thinking, ‘What am I thinking? What do I want? Where do I want to go?’ There would be wonder in him, and a little impatience, as though he stood outside and looked in on himself through a glass shell. And he would be conscious of a tone within himself, or several tones, as though he heard music distantly.

Or it might be this way. In the late night, Doc might be working at his old and battered microscope, delicately arranging plankton on a slide, moving them with a thread of glass. And there would be three voices singing in him, all singing together. The top voice of his thinking mind would sing, ‘What lovely little particles, neither plant nor animal but somehow both--the reservoir of all the life in the world, the base supply of food for everyone. If all of these should die, every other living thing might well die as a consequence.’ The lower voice of his feeling mind would be singing, ‘What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you're trying to identify? Are you looking at little things to avoid big things?’ And the third voice, which came from his marrow, would sing, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome! What good is it? Who benefits? Thought is the evasion of feeling. You're only walling up the leaking loneliness.’

Sometimes he would leave his work and walk out to the lighthouse to watch the white flail of light strike at the horizons. Once there, of course, his mind would go back to the plankton, and he would think, ‘It's a protein food of course. If I could find a way to release this food directly to humans, why, nobody in the world would have to go hungry again.’ And the bottom voice would sing, ‘Lonesome, lonesome! You're trying to buy your way in.’

The lowest voice has the fewest words, but they pack a punch. In them is the echo of the first divine word of complaint ever uttered in the Western religious tradition: “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

Everyone in Cannery Row detects the shift

“Doc thought he was alone in his discontent, but he was not. Everyone on the Row observed him and worried about him. Mack and the boys worried about him. And Mack said to Fauna, ‘Doc acts like a guy that needs a dame.’

‘He can have the courtesy of the house anytime,’ said Fauna.
‘I don't mean that,’ said Mack. ‘He needs a dame around. He needs a dame to fight with. Why, that can keep a guy so goddam busy defending himself he ain't got no time to blame himself.’
Fauna regarded marriage with a benevolent eye. Not only was it a desirable social condition, but it sent her some of her best customers.
‘Well, let's marry him off,’ said Fauna.
‘Oh no,’ said Mack. ‘I wouldn't go that far. My God! Not Doc!’

Doc, one step ahead of them, tries to apply the ‘dame solution.’ for that has been his modus operandi here-to-for. ‘Doc tried to solve his problem in the ancient way,’ writes Steinbeck,

“He took a long, leisurely trip to La Jolla, four hundred miles south. He traveled in the old manner, with lots of beer and a young lady companion whose interest in invertebrate zoology Doc thought might be flexible--and it was.”

But as it turns out, what Doc needs, what the lowest self in Doc’s fertile mind needs, is not some new “skank.” He is about to find out the difference between “Eve” and a barnacle. Doc has absolutely no interest his travel mate. Steinbeck puts it this way:

“He recited no poetry to her. The subject of her eyes, her feelings, her skin, her thought, did not come up. Instead Doc told her about octopi--a subject that would have fascinated her two days before.”

“There’s no need for giving the girl a name,” Steinbeck writes as he and Doc dismiss what she has to offer his need as irrelevant. “She never came back to Western Biological. Her interest in science blinked out like a candle.”

“The girl said good-by and went away, and Doc did not know she was gone. For that matter he did not know she had been with him.”

Doc now plans to meet his emotional longing with an intellectual poultice. He will author a paper. “I’m going to call my paper ‘Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy,’ He states. And then he commences to experience an unrelenting case of writers block, brought on by a full scale rebellion of “the lower self.”

“He read what he had written; dull, desiccated, he thought. Why should I presume that an animal so far removed from the human—perhaps I’m fooling myself. The middle voice sang subtly, ‘Looking for yourself in the water—searching, little man, among the hydroids for your soul—looking for contentment in vanity. Are you better than Mack that you should use the secret priestly words of science to cover the fact that you have nothing to say?’”

“And the bottom voice mourned, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome! Let me up into the light and warmth. Lonesome!’”

It is at this point that all the citizens of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flats recognize that Doc, their local genius, the pride of their lives and mainstay of their existence in many ways, is in serious trouble.

“What was Doc’s trouble? Even he didn’t know. He was deeply, grievingly unhappy. For hours on end he sat at his desk with a yellow pad before him and his needle-sharp pencils lined up. Sometimes his wastebasket was full of crushed, scribbled pages, and at others not even a doodle went down. Then he would move to the aquarium and stare into it. And his voices howled and cried and moaned. ‘Write!’ said his top voice, and ‘Search!’ sang his middle voice, and his lowest voice sighed, ‘Lonesome! Lonesome!’ He did not go down without a struggle. He resurrected old love affairs, he swam deep in music, he read The Sorrows of Werther, but the voices would not leave him. The beckoning yellow pages became his enemies. One by one the octopi died in the aquarium. He had worn thin the excuse of his lack of a proper microscope. When the last octopus died he leaped on this as his excuse. When his friends visited him, he would explain, “You see, I can’t go on without specimens, and I can’t get any more until the spring tides. As soon as I have specimens and a new microscope, I can whip the paper right off.”

His friends sensed his pain and caught it, and carried it away with them. They knew the time was coming when they would have to do something.”

“When trouble came to Doc it was everybody’s trouble.” Steinbeck gives us a window into the ever-gathering internal storm.

“His middle voice argued, “Maybe you don’t believe any of it. Why can’t you laugh at yourself? You could once. You’re trapped in a cage of self-importance.”

“Lonesome!” the low voice cried in his guts. “No one to receive from you or give to you. No one warm enough and dear enough.”

Doc wanted desperately to go back to his old life—the hopeless wish of a man wanting to be a little boy, forgetting the pain of little boys.”

He is like a man whose last shell has molted and his new shell has yet to arrive. His posse begins to speculate that Doc needs more than a “dame.” He might – horrors! – need a wife. “I got a theory, if you ain’t too pie-eyed to listen,” says Mack, the leader of the boys.

“When he had them quiet he went on, ‘When you hear my theory you might get kind of violent. I want you to sleep on it before you talk. I think Doc needs a wife.’”

“What!”

“Well, hell, he don’t have to marry her,” said Mack. “You know what I mean…” If the absinthe had not given them tolerance, he might have had a series of fights right then. “Kindly do not interrupt,” he said. “I will now review the dame situation in the U.S. You take a look at divorces and the reasons for them, and you can only think one thing: the only guy that shouldn’t have nothing to do with picking out a wife is the guy that’s going to marry her. That’s a fact. It’s a fact that if he’s left alone, a guy practically always marries the wrong kind of dame.”

“Play it safe and don’t marry nobody,” said Whitey No. 2.
“There’s some guys can’t operate that way,” said Mack.
“Are you suggesting we turn Doc, our true friend, in?”
“I asked you not to shoot off your face until you slept on it,” said Mack with dignity.
Hazel tugged at his sleeve. “Ain’t you joking, Mack?”
“No,” said Mack, “I ain’t joking.”
“If anything bad come to Doc, you know what I’d do to you?” Hazel asked.
“Yes,” said Mack. “I think I do—and I think I’d have it coming.”

Meanwhile Doc, squirms in his loneliness like one of his octopi stranded in a receding tidepool.

“He set his chin. ‘I will get the spring tides at La Jolla,’ he said to himself. ‘I will get a new microscope.’ And the very lowest voice whispered, ‘Somewhere there’s warmth.’”

Enter that warmth, in the person of Suzy, a recent addition to the team at the Bear Flag brothel, who comes with no degrees, no money, no skills to speak of, and little aptitude for the “work” she has applied to do. What she does have is something that Doc cannot ignore, an unquenchable courageous integrity (outside of the brothel thing which, as we have discussed, Steinbeck is not morally opposed to) and an inability to prevaricate.  

“Say, Doc, you got a funny business—bugs and all like that.”
“There are funnier businesses,” he said sharply.”She stiffened. “Meaning my business? You don’t like my business, huh?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. There it is. But it does seem to me a kind of sad substitute for love—a kind of lonesome substitute.”
Suzy put her hands on her hips. “And what’ve you got, mister? Bugs, snakes? Look at this dump! It stinks. Floor ain’t been clean in years. You ain’t got a decent suit of clothes. You probably can’t remember your last hot meal. You sit here breeding bugs—for Chrissake! What do you think that’s a substitute for?”
In the old days Doc would have been amused, but now his guard was down and he caught her anger like a disease. “I do what I want,” he said. “I live the way I want. I’m free—do you get that? I’m free and I do what I want.”
“You ain’t got nothing,” Suzy said. “Bugs and snakes and a dirty house. I bet some dame threw you over. That’s what you’re substituting for. Got a wife? No! Got a girl? No!”
Doc found himself shouting, “I don’t want a wife. I have all the women I want!”
“Woman and women is two different things,” said Suzy. “Guy knows all about women he don’t know nothing about a woman.”
Doc said, “This guy is happy that way.”
“Now you’re happy!” said Suzy. “You’re a pushover! If no dame’s got you it’s because no dame wants you. Who the hell would want to live with bugs and snakes in a joint like this?”
“Who’d want to go to bed with anybody that’s got three bucks?” said Doc cruelly.
Suzy said icily, “A smart guy. A real smart guy. He’s got what he wants. Seems to me I heard you’re writing a great big goddam highfalutin paper.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows about it. Everybody’s laughing at you behind your back—and you know why? Because everybody knows you’re kidding yourself. You ain’t never going to write that paper because you can’t write that paper. You’re just sitting here like a kid playing wish games.”
She saw her words go home as surely as though she had watched arrows drive into his chest, and misery and shame overwhelmed her. “I wish I didn’t say that,” she spoke softly. “I wish to God I never said that.”
“It might be true,” said Doc quietly. “Maybe you put your finger on the truth.”

Indeed. She put her finger right on the truth. Like a nail gun.

Fauna later asks if Suzy would like her to help her “trap” Doc and Suzy declines, much as she finds that she cares for him. Indeed, Doc’s willingness to let her be a mirror of truth for him impresses. “No,” said Suzy,“I wouldn’t sandbag no guy. Especially Doc.” “Everybody sandbags everybody,” Fauna, replies. “Let’s don’t sandbag Doc,” Suzy insists trying to draw the conversation to a close.

“I don’t want to lay no bear trap for him, Fauna.”

"Fauna was smiling to herself. She said, 'I guess a man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it. You just set still, Suzy girl. Don’t do nothing. Nobody can’t say you trapped him if you don’t do nothing.'”

And sure enough, when we return to Steinbeck’s “Doc narrative,” we find “the varmint” setting, baiting, and stepping in his own trap. Fauna simply determines that she will not him take an excess of time getting to the truth he is too “smart” to see. Steinbeck writes of her devious plan,

“There will be those who will consider that Fauna took too much upon herself in engineering a marriage without the knowledge or collusion of either party, and such skeptics will be perfectly right. But it was Fauna’s conviction, born out of long experience, that most people, one, did not know what they wanted; two, did not know how to go about getting it; and three, didn’t know when they had it.

Fauna was one of those rare people who not only have convictions but are quite willing to take responsibility for them. She knew that Doc and Suzy should be together. And since they were too confused, or thoughtless, or shy to bring about that happy state, Fauna was prepared to do it for them. Her critics will cry, ‘Suppose she is wrong! Maybe this association has no chance of success.’ And Fauna’s answer to this, if she had heard it, would have been, ‘They ain’t doing so good now. It might work. What they got to lose? And when you look at it, what chance has anybody got? Doc put on a tie, didn’t he? And if I’m wrong it’s my fault. Sure, they’ll fight now and then. Who don’t? But maybe they’ll get something too. What’s the odds for anybody?’

And if it was suggested that people should have the right to choose for themselves after thinking it over, she would have replied, ‘Who thinks? I can think because I ain’t part of it.’

And if she had been accused of being a busybody she would have said, ‘Damn right! Done it all my life!’ You couldn’t win an argument with Fauna because she would agree with you and then go right on as she had planned. She had taken up astrology because she found that people who won’t take advice from a wise and informed friend will blindly follow the orders of the planets—which, by all reports, are fairly remote and aloof. Doc would refuse astrology, so he had to be sandbagged. Fauna expected no thanks. She had given that up long ago. Doc could not interpret the black voice of his guts, but it sounded loud in Fauna’s ears. She knew his loneliness. When she was with him, that low voice drowned out all the others.”

In the end, Doc is trying to respond to a need for water (connection) with an excess of condiments (intellectual work). One of Doc’s friends has it about right,

“There’s a lack of fulfillment in you. I think you have violated something or withheld something from yourself—almost as though you were eating plenty but no Vitamin A. You aren’t hungry, but you’re starving. That’s what I think.”

“I can’t imagine anything I lack,” replies Doc oblivious to his “lower voice” still. “I have freedom, comfort, and the work I like. What have I missed?”

“Well, last night, in every conversation, a girl named Suzy crept in—” says Old Jay.

Eventually, Doc learns what Fauna knows. As Steinbeck puts it, “The low voice of Doc’s guts burst through at last.”

“I’m lonely,” he said. He said it as a simple matter of fact, and he said it in wonder.”

Doc’s lower voice will no longer let him rest. “Low min”d all of a sudden expresses himself with complete sentences.

“Do you know any man and woman—no matter how close—who don’t have good and bad? Let me out! Or, by God, I’ll set my claws in you and I’ll tear at you for all your life! Let me out, I say! Feel this, this red burning? That’s rage. Will you let it out or will it fester here until it makes you sick and crazy? Look at the time.”

There is more to the story than I am telling here but, eventually, all that will be required is for Hazel to break the sleeping Doc’s arm with a baseball bat, for Suzy to come over and ask if he needs some help, and for Doc to say, “I need you all right. I’d be lost without you.”

“Brother,” says Suzy, “You got yourself a girl!” “

And thus is Hazel’s mission accomplished and John Steinbeck’s story concluded.

Doc asks Suzy if she can drive to La Jolla. She says, “Yes of course,” and asks for two hours to get ready. Two hours that she uses to get the boys to teach her how to drive.

Lies, after all, are not wrong, if the liar and her friends all have good intentions.

Question for Comment: Steinbeck’s story Sweet Thursday suggests that there isn’t always a logical reason for how we go about settling upon a solution to our deepest longings for connection.

Here is the sound of Doc’s reasoning mind telling him that Suzy is a mistake:

“I’m supposed to have this wild free brain without conventional barriers. And what did I do? I balanced a nasty ledger. I weighed education, experience, background, even probable bloodlines. Some of the worst people I ever knew had the best of all those. Well, there it is. Saying it has made it even clearer.”

“Middle mind had its way. Doc thought, Let’s look at this. Here is a man with work to do. The girl—what is she? Let’s suppose every good thing should come of a relationship with her. It still would be no good. There is no possible way for this girl and me to be successful—no way under the sun. Not only is she illiterate, but she has a violent temper. She has all of the convictions of the uninformed. She is sure of things she has not investigated, not only sure for herself, but sure for everyone. In two months, she will become a prude. Then where will freedom go? Your thinking will be like tennis against a bad player. Let’s stop this nonsense! Forget it! You can’t have it and you don’t want it.”

“Let me put it this way: there is nothing I can do. They say of an amputee that he remembers his leg. Well, I remember this girl. I am not whole without her. I am not alive without her. When she was with me I was more alive than I have ever been, and not only when she was pleasant either. Even when we were fighting I was whole. At the time I didn’t realize how important it was, but I do now. I am not a dope. I know that if I should win her I’ll have many horrible times. Over and over, I’ll wish I’d never seen her. But I also know that if I fail I’ll never be a whole man. I’ll live a gray half-life, and I’ll mourn for my lost girl every hour of the rest of my life. As thoughtful reptiles you will wonder, ‘Why not wait? Look further! There are better fish in the sea!’ But you are not involved. Let me tell you that to me not only are there no better fish, there are no other fish in the sea at all. The sea is lonely without this fish. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

“Let me face this clearly, please! I need her to save myself. I can be whole only with Suzy.”

“He stood up and he did not feel silly anymore and his mission was not ridiculous. ‘So long,’ he said to the rattlesnakes. ‘Wish me luck!’”

Is Doc making a good decision here?

"As if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood."

Mists of Avalon V

In the Hebrew Bible, we read a story in the book of Joshua about the people of Israel taking possession of their “Promised Land.” Moses has led them out from slavery in Egypt and forty years later, they stand on the borders of Canaan, ready to cross the Jordan and begin their new life as a settled community atop the ruins of a people and culture that they intend to dispossess. When they arrive at the present day site of Shechem, Joshua places half the people on Mt. Gerazim and half on Mount Ebal and has them recite the blessings and cursings of the law as laid down in Deuteronomy. First among the commandments is the command to have “no other gods before me.”

Soon after, a debate emerges in the religious faith of the community. Are they to have no other gods that matter more than their God? Or no other gods at all? In keeping with the ideas of the time, it seemed foolish to many to ignore the gods who had been, for time immemorial, living upon and influencing the life of the land they had just occupied. These Hebrews were also inclined to take into consideration some of the gods of Egypt whose powers they clearly saw at work in the land of Egypt. Many see the need to pay necessary allegiance to the gods who resided in the land of Canaan. They had their own God (Yahweh) to be sure, for had not Yahweh delivered them from bondage in Egypt? But should he not be simply their principle divine benefactor in a world of many divine benefactors? Not long after that occupation as recorded in Joshua, they have a rather eclectic assortment of deities that they are in the habit of appeasing.

Joshua eventually calls them all together and holds them to account:

In Joshua 24, the people are assembled again at Shechem and Joshua recounts the great deeds that the Lord their God had performed in their service. He concludes his narrative with a demand that they put away their accessory gods. Their response is, to summarize, “We plan to serve Yahweh always. No need to worry about that. But to discard all other gods would be the height of foolishness.” Here is how the argument goes.

“’Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’”

Then the people answered, ‘Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!  It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled.  And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.’

Joshua said to the people, ‘You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins.  If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.’

But the people said to Joshua, ‘No! We will serve the Lord.’
Then Joshua said, ‘You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to serve the Lord.’
‘Yes, we are witnesses,’ they replied.
 ‘Now then,’ said Joshua, ‘throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.’
And the people said to Joshua, ‘We will serve the Lord our God and obey him.’

Notice that they do not say anything about discarding the foreign gods. They intend to remain loyal to all potential divine powers. Spiritually, they are committed to “diversifying their investments.” The argument is a simple one when it is all boiled down to gravy: Is it in a person’s best interest to put all their eggs in one spiritual basket, or is there something to be gained by selecting from a menu of several alternatives?

In Mists of Avalon, Book Four, this theological debate comes to the forefront and there are several positions that reveal themselves. There are those among the Christians who believe that all spiritual powers other than the Christian God are demonic in origin and evil in nature, but they believe that people are allowed to believe wrong if they wish to. And then there are others who would eliminate any and all competitive options. There are those among the pagans who believe the same of the Christian God presented by Father Patricus and his ilk. There are pagans who follow their pagan deities and traditions and who pay homage to the Goddess but who see no harm in letting the Christians believe as they choose and sometimes, they adopt some of the Christian rites and rituals. There are those Christians who lean into their Christian faith but find nothing of great harm in letting the people who wish to remain pagans remain so. There are some characters who think that both paganism and Christianity are suspect and they believe in neither. There are some who believe that they are two names for the same thing.

 Arthur, who holds the final power to effectively promote one religion and suppress the other, is someone raised in Avalon (paganism) who has been made king by Christians. Over the course of his reign, he moves in the direction of his wife’s orthodox and fundamentalist faith but he maintains that it is his duty to protect Avalon and the Druids and religious liberty generally. The Merlin is willing to serve as an adviser in Arthur’s Christian court in spite of the fact that he remains a Druid committed to the work of the Goddess. Morgaine exemplifies one who believes that one should stay true to their pagan beliefs even in Camelot and that if the time comes where this is not possible, they should retreat to Avalon to retain their integrity. She eventually executes the Merlin for being a traitor to Avalon. Morgause is generally a skeptic towards all religious institutions but favors the one that gives her the most power or freedom. Lancelot is an agnostic until later in life when he has a holy experience of the grail, unsure of whether his experience flows from Christian or pagan wells, content in the possibility that it could be either or both. Multiple minor characters find themselves in between these extremes or off their map altogether.

Arthur’s queen is always found on the side of the Christian fundamentalists, insisting that the sacred groves of paganism be cut down. And then, she finds herself barren and calls up her local Lady of the Lake, Morgaine for a spell. Sigh. But periodic inconsistencies are a vice everyone in the novel allows themselves from time to time. Almost no one remains an absolutist other than Viviane and Patricius whose positions at the heads of their respective religions incentivize them to be absolutists.   

Sometimes the main characters are forced by some expediency to pretend that they are one thing when they are really another. Consider this exchange between Gwen and Morgaine:  

“’But if the young people now are turning back to heathen ways, then we must do something—perhaps, even, cut down the grove.’

‘If you do, I shall do murder,’ Morgaine thought, but schooled her voice to gentleness and reason. ‘That would be wrong. The oaks give pig food and food for the country people—even here we have had to use acorn flour in a bad season. And the grove has been there for hundreds of years—the trees are sacred—‘”

Arthur tries to reason with his wife’s intolerance from time to time, but to no avail. All the influence goes one way.

“[Arthur] said dryly, ‘The Merlin of Britain is one of my councilors and has always been so, Gwen. Those who look to Avalon are always my subjects too. It is written: Other sheep have I which are not of this fold. . . .’
‘A blasphemous jest,’ Gwenhwyfar observed, making her voice gentler, ‘and hardly suitable for the eve of Pentecost—‘”

 “It would be a sad day if it should be lost forever,” Arthur says of Avalon, the island home base of paganism.

“As it is sad for the peasant folk to lose their own festivals . . . town folk, perhaps, have no need of the old rites. Oh yes, I know, there is only one name under Heaven by which we may be saved, but perhaps those who live in such close kinship with the earth need something more than salvation. . . .”

Gwen would be delighted to see Avalon go the way of Atlantis.

“’Avalon, that accursed place!’ She wished it would sink into the sea like the lost land of Ys in the old tale, and never be heard of again!”

Arthur is content having men of virtue serve as his companions. Their religion is of no particular concern to him.

“’I have always wanted my Companions to be men dedicated to the right,’ said Arthur. ‘I do not demand that they be godly men, Galahad, but I have hoped they would be good men.’”

The mind of Arthur’s wife is not elastic enough for this kind of sophistry. As Marion Zimmer Bradley puts it, “If Gwenhwyfar were not so fanatically, mindlessly Christian, she would have loved Morgaine well.”

Galahad is the sort of Christian that does not care to eliminate anyone else’s faith but he will be happy to see erroneous faiths die out. He hopes that Arthur will live a long life and have a long reign but he looks forward to the demise of pagan believers in the long run.

“May that time be far—surely, my lord, you will live many, many years—and by then all those old folk who still believe they must give allegiance to the pagan ways will have gone.”

Periodically, the members of these different camps dispute one another.

“The sacred groves still stand, and in them, the old ways are done as they have been done from the beginning of the world,” says Morgaine’s paramour, Accolon.

“We do not anger the Goddess by denying her worship, lest she turn upon her people and blight the harvests and darken the very sun that gives us life.”

Galahad is startled by this statement.

“But this is a Christian land! Have no priests come to you to show you that the evil old Gods among whom the Devil had sway have no more power now? Bishop Patricius has told me that all the sacred groves have been cut down!”

‘Not so,’ said Accolon, ‘nor will be while my father lives, or I after him.’

Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Gwenhwyfar saw Accolon lay his hand on her wrist. She smiled at him and said nothing. It was Gwydion who said, ‘Nor yet in Avalon, while the Goddess lives. Kings come and kings go, but the Goddess shall endure forever.’ What pity, Gwenhwyfar thought, that this handsome young man should be a pagan! Well, Galahad is a good and pious Christian knight, who will make a Christian king!

Morgause represents the universal skeptic in many ways. She finds Christian sacraments particularly boring but she disagrees with Morgaine’s refusal to at least pretend to hold to the faith of the dominant powers. She knows where her bread is buttered.

“Morgause put a plump hand over her mouth, smothering a yawn. However often she attended Christian ceremonies, she never thought about them; they were not even as interesting as the rites at Avalon where she had spent her childhood, but she had thought, since she was fourteen or so, that all Gods and all religions were games which men and women played with their minds. None of them had anything to do with real life. Nevertheless, when she was at Pentecost, she dutifully attended mass, to please Gwenhwyfar—the woman was her hostess, and the High Queen, after all, and a close relative—and now, with the rest of the royal family, she went forward to receive the holy bread. Morgaine, attentive at her side, was the only one in the King’s household who did not approach the communion table; Morgause thought lazily that Morgaine was a very great fool. Not only did she alienate the common people, but the more pious among the King’s household called Morgaine witch and sorceress, and worse things, among themselves. And, after all, what difference did it make? One religious lie was as good as another, was it not?”

Arthur’s son Gwydion challenges the right of any King or Queen to “presume to declare one truth for all of mankind throughout the world?”

“Call you that presumption?” Gwenhwyfar immediately responds, “It is the one truth, and a day must come when all men everywhere will acknowledge it.” King Uriens find’s this a reprehensible excess. This leads to contention between he and Gwenhwfar.

“’I tremble for my people that you say so,’ said King Uriens. ‘I have pledged myself to protect the sacred groves, and my son after me.’
‘Why, I thought you a Christian, my lord of North Wales—‘
‘And so I am,’ said Uriens, ‘but I will not speak ill of another’s God.’
‘But there are no such Gods,’ Gwenhwyfar began.
Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Arthur said, ‘Enough of this, enough—I did not bid you here to discuss theology!’”

The Queen can not let her absolutism rest though. “A day will come when all false Gods shall vanish and all pagan symbols shall be put to the service of the one true God and his Christ,” she says. Morgaine gives her a piece of her mind:

 “’I did not speak to you, you canting fool,’ said Morgaine furiously, ‘and that day will come over my corpse! You Christians have saints and martyrs—do you think Avalon will have none?’”

 “My dear sister,” Arthur says pleadingly, “I beg of you, do not quarrel with me about the name by which we call our Gods. You yourself have said to me that all the Gods are the One God.” He says to his son, “Oh—times I believe one thing, times another, like all men. It does not matter what I believe.” He holds loosely to anything that might threaten to disturb his ability to govern a diverse population.

Sometimes, characters soften their stances and acknowledge that much of their contentiousness is the consequence of leadership, and not the original vice of those they lead. “It was not Gwenhwyfar herself that she hated,” Morgaine admits, “it was the priests who had so much influence over her.” And yet, it is difficult for her to extend grace to those who slavishly follow Gwen’s tribe even deeper into absolutism.“Gwenhwyfar’s ladies were the kind of pious idiots with whom Gwenhwyfar always surrounded herself,” Morgaine mopes.

The Merlin Kevin is asked why it is that there has to be just one way of seeing the world.

“’Why should we all meet in one afterlife? Why should there not be many paths, the Saxons to follow their own, we to follow ours, the followers of the Christ to worship him if they choose, without restraining the worship of others. . . .’

Kevin shook his head. ‘My dear, I do not know. There seems to be a deep change in the way men now look at the world, as if one truth should drive out another—as if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood.’”

Kevin is among that tribe of “Unitarians” who thinks that people make too much of the peculiarities of their respective faiths. “It is the sword of the Gods,” Kevin says of his pagan faith and the sword Excalibur,

“And all the Gods are one. I would rather have Excalibur in the world where men may follow it, than hidden away in Avalon. So long as they follow it, what difference does it make which Gods they call on in doing so? . . . ‘I know not what to call myself now,’ said Kevin quietly, ‘save perhaps servant of those who serve the Gods, who are all One.’”

Sometimes, characters do evolve from their original positions to be sure. Morgaine, for example, holds views towards her Goddess that are similar to the views of ISIS toward Allah. But in time, she begins to realize that one should always consider the possibility that the founders of religions are not always fans of their own followers.

“In those days they [Christians] came in numbers to Avalon to escape the harsh and shrivelling winds of persecution and bigotry. [Father] Patricius had set up new forms of worship, a view of the world wherein there was no room for the real beauty and mystery of the things of nature. From these Christians who came to us to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.”

Morgaine just resents the way that the Christians abscond and appropriate with the sacred objects of other faiths into their own and then do not acknowledge the origins of their power.   

“They would use the Holy Regalia of the Goddess to summon the Presence . . . which is One . . . but they would do it in the narrow name of that Christ who calls all Gods demons, unless they invoke in his name!”

“Now, using the ancient things of the Goddess, they would invoke their own narrow God; yet instead of the pure water of the holy earth, coming from the clear crystal spring of the Goddess, they have defiled her chalice with wine! But never again will they be profaned by priests of a narrow God who would deny all other truths. . . .”

Sometimes, characters find themselves caught in a trap of their own logic regarding their faith systems. “If some priests are bad men,” said Nimue, “I find it not wholly beyond reason that some Druids might be good ones.”

“There must, thought Gwenhwyfar, be some error in that reasoning, but she could not make it out.”

At one point, Lancelet and Morgaine get into a conversation about the relative merits of Morgaine’s paganism and Patricius’ Christianity.

“’If [Arthur] survives the quest of the Grail—or if he should abandon it—still his rule will be circled about by the priests, and through all the land there will be only one God and only one religion.’ Morgaine says.

‘Would that be such a tragedy, Morgaine?’ Lancelet asked quietly. ‘All through this land, the Christian God is bringing a spiritual rebirth here—is that an evil thing, when mankind has forgotten the Mysteries?’

‘They have not forgotten the Mysteries,’ she said, ‘they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.’

 Lancelet smiled bitterly. ‘Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work through lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God’s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.’
Morgaine knew that he spoke truth, and bowed her head in anguish.”

This perhaps is the clearest statement of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own critique of Christianity. That it is a religion for lazy people who want to live in paradise without making themselves worthy of it? Though clearly, Morgaine is no saint herself.

As the novel draws to a close, both Avalon and Camelot begin to disappear, as if the places where ideas are born and thrive disappear as the ideas that had their origin in them stop being believed. The paganism of Avalon and the syncratic tolerance of Camelot are both eventually displaced by a disbelief in all that is sacred. And so both Camelot and Avalon recede into the mists, inhabited only by ideological monastics who accept that they can no longer have any influence in the world outside them.

In the last chapter, Morgaine visits the Christian church at Glastonbury where ostensibly, pagan worship has been completely obliterated. But what she finds there startles her, for instead of the worship of the goddess being banished forever, she finds that Morgaine’s ancient paganism has simply taken root in the vocabulary and forms of the new faith. The grail of the goddess has become the chalice of the Christian communion.

“In her dream she went, as she had never done in any Christian church, to the altar rail for the sharing of their bread and wine, and Lancelet bent and set the cup to her lips and she drank. And then it seemed to her that he knelt in his turn, and he said to her, ‘Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are one God, and we are all One, who serve the One.’ And as she took the cup in her hands to set it to his lips in her turn, priestess to priest, he was young and beautiful as he had been years ago. And she saw that the cup in her hands was the Grail.”

Morgaine finds herself sitting with the nuns and seeing them as sisters in a faith older than either her own paganism or Christianity.

“Never did I think I would stand side by side with one of these Christian nuns, joining with her in prayer. But then she remembered what Lancelet had said in her dream. Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are One . . .”

The sacred well of Avalon has now simply become the sacred well of the chalice. Though the nuns do not know it is the same, Morgaine realizes that it is.

“‘Come up to the cloister with me, sister,’ said the nun, smiling and laying a hand on her arm. ‘You must be hungry and weary.’ Morgaine went with her to the gates of their cloister, but would not go in. ‘I am not hungry,” she said, ‘but if I might have a drink of water—‘
‘Of course.’

The woman in black beckoned, and a young girl came and brought a pitcher of water, which she poured into a cup. And she said, as Morgaine lifted it to her lips, ‘We drink only the water of the chalice well—it is a holy place, you know.’ It was like Viviane’s voice in her ears: The priestesses drink only the water of the Sacred Well.’

As she rose, the girl said, ‘If you wish, Mother, I will promise to come here and say a prayer every Sunday for your kinswoman.’ For some absurd reason, Morgaine felt that tears were coming to her eyes. ‘Prayer is always a good thing. I am grateful to you, daughter.’

‘And you, in your convent, wherever it may be, you must pray for us too,’ said the girl simply, taking Morgaine’s hand as she rose. ‘Here, Mother, let me brush the dirt from your gown. Now you must come and see our chapel.’ For a moment Morgaine was inclined to protest. She had sworn when last she left Arthur’s court that she would never again enter any Christian church; but this girl was so much like one of her own young priestesses that she would not profane the name by which the girl knew her God. She let the girl lead her inside the church.

Morgaine followed the young girl into the small side chapel. There were flowers here, armfuls of apple blossom, before a statue of a veiled woman crowned with a halo of light; and in her arms she bore a child. Morgaine drew a shaking breath and bowed her head before the Goddess. The girl said, ‘Here we have the Mother of Christ, Mary the Sinless. God is so great and terrible I am always afraid before his altar, but here in the chapel of Mary, we who are her avowed virgins may come to her as our Mother, too.’

‘But Brigid is not a Christian saint,’ Morgine thought, ‘even if Patricius thinks so. That is the Goddess as she is worshipped in Ireland. And I know it, and even if they think otherwise, these women know the power of the Immortal. Exile her as they may, she will prevail. The Goddess will never withdraw herself from mankind.’

And Morgaine bowed her head and whispered the first sincere prayer she had ever spoken in any Christian church.

‘Mother,’ she whispered, ‘forgive me. I thought I must do what I now see you can do for yourself. The Goddess is within us, yes, but now I know that you are in the world too, now and always, just as you are in Avalon and in the hearts of all men and women. Be in me too now, and guide me, and tell me when I need only let you do your will. . . .’”

In the end, Morgaine concludes that one need not draw Joshua’s distinction between Baal and Yahweh.

“She need only step through the mists here, and be in Avalon.”

Question for Comment: Would the world benefit from a process of synchronizing religions? Or is it better served in a world where they all compete? A question of capitalism applied to religion I guess.

“They must learn not to think shame of holy things!”

The Mists of Avalon IV Book Three

There are a number of angles that would be interesting to take in this exploration of book three of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. [See other previous posts in the past few weeks]. Among them is the interesting way that both the “pagans” (what I call those who prioritize nature and the Goddess and mystic rites and intuitive approaches to knowledge and the feminine in life generally) and the Christians (those who prioritize order and law and sacred text and church hierarchy and the masculine in life generally) feel insecure about the presence of the other and wish to use political power to maintain their cultural hegemony.

There are those on the side of the church who would like to see Arthur use his power as high king to diminish the influence of the pagans and restrict their rights and ability to publicly argue their perspective. Similarly, there are those in pagan Avalon that see their entire religious world view threatened by Arthur’s trending adoption of hard-line Christian fundamentalism. They have a long-term plan to raise Arthur’s son Mordred (Gwydion) to be a Druid who can eventually wrest control from the Christians and put Avalon back on the ascendency in the throne of Britain. Recall that Arthur was made king with the endorsement of both sides. He wears the “Holy Regalia” of Avalon and wields “Excalibur,” the sword bequeathed to him by the Lady of the Lake, but he also has been endorsed by the church leaders and bishops and thus rules as a “Christian King.”

Arthur has the benefit of both sides in his halls of council. He relies on both the Merlin Father Patricius for example. He also has the advice of moderates on both sides. There are people like Lancelot who remain pragmatistic, seeing the similarities and complementarian possibilities for Christian and pagan perspectives to live in harmony. Keven the Bard (pagan-light) can often share a similar disposition to synchronistic thinking. At times, champions of the pagan movement can see advantages of the other side and sometimes they can see the flaws in their own positions. Similarly, even people like Gwenhyfar, who is staunchly Christian will doubt her own authorities. She is not above being tempted by Morgaine’s magical powers, especially with reference to solving her own infertility problems. Surely, Morgaine has a charm for that.

In other words, the conflict between pagan and Christian has the same spectrum of players that we see in contemporary cultural conflicts. There are people who are hard-line “never-compromisers.” There are “In-betweeners.” There are loyal agnostics and agnostic loyalists. And there, sitting in the middle, in the seat of power – Arthur. And next to him is a queen who can move him in one direction or the other. Who could doubt that if Arthur had married Morgaine rather then Gwenhyfar. this story would have played out differently. As I may have mentioned in my last post about MoA, Gwenhyfar is to Arthur and Christianity what Jezabel was to King Ahab and Judaism. Mists of Avalon would tend to look at someone like Jezabel favorably.

My respect for Marion Zimmer Bradley is growing. When I first started this novel, it seemed to me that she had not created a “fair fight” between the paganism that she obviously favored and the Christianity that she obviously did not. But over time, I can see that she allows her pagans to be less than saints and she does allow some of her Christians to be decent blokes. Neither of their religions render them immune to vices or virtues.

For example, here are a few of the vices of some of her pagans. There is Morgause who we are told has a bit of problem with child abuse. She explains that when she beat her step-son, Gwydion, “it only made him more defiant, unless she was prepared to beat him insensible;” “And once,’ she continues, “losing her temper, she had frightened herself with how hard she had struck the harmless child.”

We can also see that there are political fundamentalists on the Pagan side who are just as ruthless in their quest for political power as a means to furthering their spiritual kingdoms as the Christians are.  “It is the appointed time, Gwydion.” Vivian says to Arthur’s son, born of Arthur’s sister Morgaine,

“You are Druid-born, and of two royal lines. You are to be given the ancient teachings and the secret wisdom in Avalon, that one day you may bear the dragon.”

“It is what lives in their dreams and imagination that we must control for Avalon,” Viviane says to Morgaine of her intention to control religious speech and dominate the public square.

“Or this struggle with Christ will be lost and their souls lie in slavery to a false faith! The symbol of the dragon should be always before them, that mankind seek to accomplish, not to think of sin and do penance!”

Viviane sees Christianity as an existential threat to Britain, Christian and pagan. “Would you have it that I should sit by and see Avalon go further into the mists, even as the fairy country?” Viviane says.

“I am saying, Lady,” the Merlin, Kevin replies,

“That it may even now be too late to prevent it—Avalon will always be there for all men to find if they can seek the way thither, throughout all the ages past the ages. If they cannot find the way to Avalon, it is a sign, perhaps, that they are not ready.”

“Still,” said Viviane sternly in response, “I shall keep Avalon within the world, or die in attempting it!” “—We will have no king turned apostate and tyrant, forcing that god of slaves and sin and shame down the throats of our people!”

“If we set him [Gwydion] on Uther’s throne, we can bring him [Arthur] down if we must, and all the more readily if there is one of the old royal line of Avalon, a son of the Goddess, to take his place. Arthur is a good king, I would be reluctant to make such threats; but if I must, I will—the Goddess orders my actions.”

“The Goddess orders my actions.” Or as the crusaders put it, “Deus Volt” [“God Wills it!”] or as Muslim terrorists are wont to say as they crash planes of innocent passengers into buildings, “Allahu Aqbar!” One might hear the sound of Irish Catholics or Protestants. or members of Al Q’aida or ISIS, or Adolf Hitler in that statement. In Mein Kampf, Hitler states,

“Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

How far would Viviane go to keep Avalon relevant if not dominant in the world? Would infanticide be a step too far? It would not.

“The one thing we can be certain of is that [Queen] Gwenhyfar shall remain barren,” she asserts, understanding that if Gwenhyfar has a son by Arthur, Britain might be lost to Christian kings forever.  

“Should she conceive again, there are spells to make certain she carries not the child to birth, or past the first few weeks. As for Arthur’s heir . . .’ She paused, and looked at Gwydion, still sitting like a sleepy child, his head resting on Niniane’s lap. ‘There sits a son of the royal line of Avalon—and son to the Great Dragon.’”

At one point in the novel, Viviane says implacably, “They must learn not to think shame of holy things!”

And yet she could use a medicinal “weapon” against an unborn child that a mother desperately wants! For her, that “must” is a political imperative. Not far from how Balin the “Christian” feels when he says, “I beg you, my Lord King, let me strike down all these wizards and sorcerers in the name of the Christ who hates them all—”

Not all Pagan’s would be willing to go this far. Certainly Kevin the bard would not. Be he can still betray the same sort of disdain for Christians that some Christians reserve for him. “Though even Taliesin shares his chamber with the bishop— I do not admire his taste,” Kevin says of Merlin, “I would sooner be housed in the stable with the other donkeys!” Morgaine is not above curling her lip at the extremism of her rivals on the other side of the ideological fence. “Gwenhyfar is overpious,” Morgaine murmurs at one point, “and felt her lip cruel in disdain.”

While someone like Viviane can offer a back-handed compliment to someone like Arthur who she regards as a good king, even if he is compromised, so also, even someone as devoutly Christian as Gwenhyfar can see that Morgaine the priestess of Avalon is a good person. “How could any woman be so good when she worshipped devils and refused Christ?” she asks herself of Morgaine.

Pagans (as well as Christians) in the story can be rather harsh with any member of their own side who adopts any of the accoutrements of the other side’s faith. Morgaine at one point, criticizes Keven the Merlin of adopting too friendly a posture towards Arthur’s Christian Court. She excoriates him for “slippery sloping” himself into assimilation by not standing up to every Christian policy. “Next you will say you have become a Christian!” she scolds Kevin, “Why wear you not beads and a crucifix?”

“Do you truly think it would make such a great difference, Morgaine, if I did so?” Kevin responds.

In previous posts, I have highlighted Marion Zimmer Bradley’s critique of the brand of Christianity she deems offensive. My theme here is her willingness to allow her Pagan characters to make moral mistakes as well. Their belief in the Goddess does not render them immune to their humanity in other words.  Take for example this passage in book three of the novel where Morgaine basically concocts a “date rape drug” to give to Lancelot.

“But first Morgaine would give him this potion which would put him at the mercy of the rut in him, so that he would not stop when he found he held not an experienced woman and his paramour, but a shrinking virgin. . . . For a moment Morgaine stopped to pity Elaine, because what she was cold-bloodedly arranging was certainly something like rape.”

“For a moment she thought she should seek out Elaine, try to prepare her, encourage her to think of this as the priestesses were taught to think of it: a great force of nature, clean and sinless, to be welcomed as a current of life, sweeping the participant into the torrent . . . but Elaine would think that even worse sin.”

And the Goddess approves of this?

And then there is this thinly veiled endorsement of drug use.  

“They looked like a couple of dried seeds, but they were the tiny mushrooms which grew so rarely near Avalon. They were no use as food, and most folk thought them poison, for they would cause vomiting and purging and a bloody flux; but taken sparingly, fasting, they could open the gates to the Sight . . . this was a gift more precious than gold.”

No doubt many true pagans will not see this as anything unsavory. I guess I prefer to come by my “sight” naturally.

The pagans of the Mists of Avalon believe that their world view is perishing. They see the need to defend it and to resurrect it (“the lost cause”). Avalon stands in for a symbol for a way of seeing the world that “is vanishing into the mists” (in this novel, literally). Soon, no one will be able to find it. No doubt, some people today think the same way about their country, their faith, their sense of morality, or their ethnic identity. They fear that unless something is done soon, an ancient and revered way of life will disappear under the avalanche of something terribly inferior. No sacrifice to keep that from happening would be too great.

“Then all the more must we move quickly, to bring Arthur down and set a king on the throne of Britain who will restore Avalon to the world and the Goddess. . . .”

“’If Avalon dies,, said Niniane, ’then Britain is without her heart and will die, for the Goddess has withdrawn her soul from all the land.’”

Just as Marion Zimmer Bradley creates characters who see the ideology of their pagan opponents as manifestations of immaturity or evil, so also do the pagans regard the doctrines of the Christians in an equally patronizing way.

“No doubt, thought Morgaine, he [Arthur] was telling the exact truth as he saw it. How could he be so good and wise a king, and have so little imagination? Or was this the secret of his kingship, that he held to simple truths and sought for no more? Was this why the Christian faith had lured him, that it was so simple, with a few simple laws?”

Through the central heroes of the story Viviane, Morgaine, Kevin, Taliesen the Merlin, Arthur, and Lancelot, Marion Zimmer Bradley has given us a picture of any divided community where there is an ideological majority and a minority – where sides are pitted against one another in a Darwinian struggle for survival and the battle is won and lost in skirmishes over control of  for the education of children, the struggle for control of political power, and the ever contested battlefield of the public imagination. Lancelet may be the story’s true heroic character for he believes in loyalty, in friendship, in integrity, in bravery, in fidelity to oaths, in justice, and basically in the symbol of Camelot. Were Lancelet to obtain power, we could see him working as a conciliatory force of mediation (even as Arthur tries to do but is inhibited from doing by his commitment to Gwenhyfar). At some point in book three, Lancelet makes this rather stunning confession of pragmatism: “’It is what happens in the soul of the man,’ said Lancelet,

“Not whether it is Christian or pagan or Druid. If Gareth faces the mystery in his heart, and it makes him a better man in his soul, does it matter whence it comes, from the Goddess or from Christ or from that Name the Druids may not speak—or from the very goodness within himself?”

It makes you wonder if both sides would not make a Better Britain if they could all agree with Viviane, “not to think shame of Holy things” (either yours or someone else’s). It makes you wonder if we might not live in a better world if both sides could stop periodically and ask tough questions of their own sides. For example, at one point, Morgaine is thinking about how screwed up all the romantic connections she is familiar with are – people winding up with people other than the ones they love and what-not. “it is just like the God of the Christians to make such blunders—he does not like lovers,” she says. And then adds as an afterthought, “Or is it the Goddess who jests cruelly with us?”

Conversely, at one point, after Gwenhyfar has been raped by the evil Maelgwn, she starts to question the veracity of her trust in her Christian world view. “Perhaps it is all a great lie of the priests,” she speculates momentarily “so that they may tell mankind what to do, what not to do, what to believe, give orders even to the King.”

The entire story hinges on the ability of the central pragmatists (mediators and moderators and synchronizers) to withstand the pressures of the extremes:

“’He [Arthur] must swear again to honor his oath to Avalon, or you must get the sword from him again,’ said Niniane, ‘and you are the only person living to whom this task might be entrusted. Excalibur, the sword of the Holy Regalia, must not remain in the hands of one who follows Christ.’“

Extremists. They will be the death of us all.

Question for Comment: What is your relationship to extremism now that I have told you mine? How much compromise do you allow yourself and others and how do you determine where those lines will be?

“You Christians are overfond of that word, unseemly, especially when it relates to women."

The Mists of Avalon Book Two REVIEW

I wonder if it will ever be possible for Christianity as a religion to emerge from the reputation that it may so rightly have acquired in the Middle Ages? I wonder if modern writers and film makers would allow it?

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s portrayal of Christianity in the days of King Arthur never asserts that that Christianity of the novel is the Christianity of today, but it difficult not to be left with that impression. Bradley’s Queen Gwenhwyfar is a stunted human in so many respects. She is full of an internalized chauvinism planted, or so Bradley would assert, by her choice of religion.

Gwenhwyfar hung her head. “I am not wise; I am very stupid. Even among the sisters, I learned only enough to read my way through the mass book, which they said was all I needed of learning, and then such things as women learn—cookery and herbs and simples and the binding of wounds—”

Her Christian father responds consolingly:

“There, there, my girl, don’t cry. You must trust me to know what’s best for you. That’s what I’m here for, to look after you and make a good marriage with a trusty man to look after my pretty little featherhead.”

. . . And then basically “sells” her to Arthur along with some horses in exchange for a better connection to the royal family. Bradley’s Christian women are taught to distrust their own intuitive powers in exchange for a reliance upon clerical oversight.

“Nevertheless, although she prayed continually for her daughter, Igraine had resolutely refused the constant temptation to use the Sight.”

Igraine’s priest, Patricius, sternly encourages her to lobotomize herself. “I think too many people presume to read the divine Scriptures,” he councils her, “and fall into just such errors as this . . .  Those who presume on their learning will learn, I trust, to listen to their priests for the true interpretations.”

To this, the revered Druid, Merlin, smiles and counters gently,

“I cannot join you in that wish, brother. I am dedicated to the belief that it is God’s will that all men should strive for wisdom in themselves, not look to it from some other. Babes, perhaps, must have their food chewed for them by a nurse, but men may drink and eat of wisdom for themselves.”

Clearly, Bradley’s Druids are better philosophers than her Catholic priests.

In a similar way, Bradley’s pagans are better guides to understanding the importance of nature and natural processes. Merlin chides Father Patricius for wanting to destroy the sacred wells of the people. “You would do a great disservice to the people of this land if you close their sacred well.” He says to Patricius, “It is a gift from God— It is a part of pagan worship.”

“The eyes of the Archbishop glowed with the austere fire of the fanatic,” Bradley tells us.

For Bradley’s Christians, nature is to be used and exploited. It bears no value outside of its value to human consumption. Man, is to have dominion over nature. That is all. For Bradley’s pagans, this is a sacrilegious approach and a violation of all that they hold to be sacred in Nature. They see themselves serving Nature. Not ruling over it.

“The difference is deeper than I thought. Even those who till the earth, when they are Christians, come to a way of life which is far from the earth; they say that their God has given them dominion over all growing things and every beast of the field. Whereas we dwellers in hillside and swamp, forest and far field, we know that it is not we who have the dominion over nature, but she who has dominion over us, from the moment lust stirs in the loins of our fathers and desire in the womb of our mothers to bring us forth, under her dominion, to when we quicken in the womb and are brought forth in her time, to the lives of plant and animal which must be sacrificed to feed and swaddle and clothe us and give us strength to live . . . all, all of these things are under the domain of the Goddess and without her beneficent mercy none of us could draw a living breath, but all things would be barren and die.”

Furthermore, Bradley’s Druids and pagans are the better therapists, more emotionally intelligent and adept at emotional awareness and regulation.

“Gwenhwyfar thought she would smother with the rage that was choking her. But no, she must not be angry, it was not seemly to be angry; the Mother Superior had told her in the convent that it was a woman’s proper business to be married and bear children. She had wanted to be a nun and stay in the convent and learn to read and make beautiful letters with her clever pen and brush, but that was not suitable for a princess; she must obey her father’s will as if it were the will of God. Women had to be especially careful to do the will of God because it was through a woman that mankind had fallen into Original Sin, and every woman must be aware that it was her work to atone for that Original Sin in Eden. No woman could ever be really good except for Mary the Mother of Christ; all other women were evil, they had never had any chance to be anything but evil. This was her punishment for being like Eve, sinful, filled with rage and rebellion against the will of God. She whispered a prayer and willed herself into semiconsciousness again.”

These caricatures would be laughable if they were not sometimes true. And in some Christian traditions, universally true. I should like to think that Christianity has matured out of these notions and that the Patristic fathers no longer haunt the sanctuaries of more enlightened forms of faith but . . . I am not unaware of the pockets where these ideas are still held.

Bradley’s portrayal of Christianity leaves the reader with the impression that its celebration of the celibate life is a statement of condemnation for all expressions of human sexuality. Christian sex appears to exist solely so that male nobles and monarchs can have heirs. It is difficult to find a character that remains Christian and sees sexuality for its own sake as a normal part of healthy human relationships. One has to keep from being converted to stay sexually sane it would seem. “It would be amusing to see some of these stiff-necked Companions of Arthur lose their proper manners around a Beltane fire!” Morgaine notes at one point. Morgaine pities “the convent reared” Gwen for her total lack of knowledge or exposure to anything resembling what we might call a “sex ed” course today.

“Suddenly, with an impulse of kindness, [Morgaine] wished she could give to Gwenhwyfar, who after all had been convent-reared and had none of the old wisdom, some of the instruction given to the younger priestesses. Then she would know how to let the life currents of sun and summer and earth and life flood through her. She could truly become the Goddess to Arthur and he the God to her, so that their marriage would not be an empty form, but a true inner binding on all the levels of life. . . . She almost found herself searching for the words, then remembered that Gwenhwyfar was a Christian, and would not thank Morgaine for such teaching. She sighed, frustrated, knowing she would not speak.”

For Bradley, the Christian way of life “is a denial of the forces of life which ran within the very pulse beat of the world.” “They denied life rather than affirming it,” she observes through one of her characters, “from the life of the heart and the life of nature to the life that ran at root between man and woman. . . .”

This same retardation of sensual experience applies also to music. “Why yes, madam, music is sacred—“ Morgaine has to explain to Gwen. “did you not learn the harp in your nunnery?”

“Gwenhwyfar shrank. ‘No, it is unseemly for a woman to raise her voice before the Lord.”

Morgaine chuckles and responds,

 “You Christians are overfond of that word unseemly, especially when it relates to women. If music is evil, then it is evil for men as well; and if it is a good thing, should not women do all the good things they can do, to make up for their supposed sin at the beginning of the world?”

Later in the story, Gwen listens to the sound of the Druid harpist, Kevin, and the author of The Mists of Avalon provides the reader with an example of all that is lost to Christian Britain as a consequence of its subjugation of pagan spirituality.

“Gwenhwyfar listened, spellbound, and her serving-woman crept to the door to listen too, aware of sharing a royal gift. He played for a long time in the gathering dusk, and as she listened, Gwenhwyfar was borne away into a world where pagan or Christian made no difference, war or peace, but only the human spirit, flaming against the great darkness like an ever-burning torch. When the harp notes finally stilled, Gwenhwyfar could not speak, and she saw that Elaine was weeping softly in the silence. After a time she said, ‘Words cannot say what you have given us, Master Harper. I can say only that I will remember it always.’”

Bradley’s Arthurian Christianity is also no match for the advantages of pagan universalism. Bradley’s pagans and Druids are perfectly capable of extending tolerance to encompass other faiths and other positions while Bradley’s Christian priests are not. Merlin will often remind his Christian counterparts in the Church that “the Goddess is beyond all your other Gods. Religions may come and go, as the Romans found and no doubt the Christians will find after them, but she is beyond them all.”

It should be worth noting that the pagans of Avalon are not entirely sure if there is a Godess, or if, the Godess is a human personification of the abstract force within nature. Morgaine wonders at one point if it would be good for the monks to be more tempted by women.

“Or would these mad priests bid the maidens be gone and think them demons, come to tempt the faithful? And for a moment it seemed she could hear the voice of the Merlin: Let all men be free to serve what God they best like. . . . Even, she wondered, one which denied the very life of the earth? But she knew Taliesin would have said, Even so.”

This tolerance even with those spiritualities that one disagrees with is a trait of paganism the author suggests. Never of Christianity. Is that the case in real life?

The more Arthur’s knights fall under the “spell” of the church in Mists of Avalon, the less open they allow themselves to be to other world views, and eventually, one of them murders the Lady of the Lake with an ax right in front of Arthur’s throne. Intolerance finds its logical expression in “righteous violence.” It is as though the Inquisition had arrived in the fourth or fifth century right along with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. It is interesting how the Christians in the story are so much more educated about anything in the Bible that could lead to repression and exclusion and violence if taken to its logical conclusion. Of the Bible’s counterforces, they seem to be unaware, as if they have been kept willfully ignorant.  

As the story progresses, Gwen’s conviction that her barreness is a consequence of her impiety (some would say her humanity) grows and she becomes more and more “Christian” (read: influenced by the Christian clergy). She begins to express tendencies towards religious intolerance and even persecution. And though she thinks that Merlin is the most virtuous “priest” she knows, the fact that he is a Druid and not a Christian priest becomes more important to her than his obvious virtues. Bradley writes:

“Arthur, when [Gwen] begged him at Christmas, had promised her that he would put down the Beltane fires in the countryside; she thought he would have done it before this, except that the Merlin had forbidden him. It would be hard for any, Gwenhwyfar thought, not to love the old man—he was so gentle and good; if only he were Christian, he would be better than any priest. But Taliesin had said it was not fair to the country folk, either, to take from them a simple awareness of a Goddess who cared for their fields and their crops and the fertility of their beasts and their own wombs.”

Merlin is the only influence counteracting that of the priests, ever jealous of their power and control in Arthur’s Christian kingdom. “Still, my queen,” Merlin cautions Gwen,

“None can be the master of another’s conscience. Even if you think it wicked and shameful, would you pretend to know what is right for another? Even the wise cannot know everything, and perhaps the Gods have more purposes than we, in our little knowledge, can see.”

You never hear this ideological generosity coming from a Christian in the story. Unless it is Arthur, fast becoming the disciple of his more “pious” wife and fast losing his ability to function according to the dictates of his own enlightenment. It is so interesting how, in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s retelling of the Arthurian narrative, it is the Christian Queen Gwenyfhar who plays the role of Ahab’s Jezabel in the Bible. Jezebel, the pagan queen of the Canaanite fertility god, Baal, in the Biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, is considered the evil temptress who lures her otherwise orthodox husband into the “apostasy” of ancient nature religions. In Mists of Avalon, the “evil influence” goes the other way and it is Queen Gwen, influenced by her Christian priests, who drags the noble former pagan, Arthur into an ever more soul strangling “Christian perdition.” Bradley has inverted the characters entirely.

Perhaps the greatest criticism that Marion Zimmer Bradley levels at Christianity is its “infernal” notions about marriage. We do not get the sense that the pagans and Druids care about marriage all that much. They see relationships between the sexes as somewhat temporary arrangements unless they wish to be otherwise. Indeed, Avalon approves of some sexual liaisons that last no more than one springtime evening. Are there any long-term committed relationships among the pagan citizens of Avalon? I cannot think of any in the story as I have read thus far. Attachments between men and women (or between women and women or men and men and between two men and one woman or two women and one man) are all considered natural options to be chosen from a menu of “natural” alternatives.

In contrast, Christian marriage locks a person into a heterosexual couplet that cannot be escaped until death does that couple part. For Igraine to marry Uther, her Christian husband Gorlois must die. For Gwnhyfhar to marry Lancelet, Arthur would have to die. For any Christian to leave a marriage to cohabit with another person would be a mortal sin requiring confession, repentance, and penance. Once in, there is no determining that a mistake was made. No backing out. No second chances. One just has to pray that a Saxon murders your partner to escape the confines of a marriage once blessed by the church I guess. Bradley inflicts great suffering upon her Christian characters for their allegiance to this idea.

Throughout the novel, pagan characters pity the Christian characters for their devotion to this unrelenting principle. “Dear God!” exclaimes Igraine,

“Uther looked so at me when I was Gorlois’s wife—as if he were starving and I were food high out of his reach. . . . What can possibly come of it if they [Lance and Gwen] love one another? Lancelet is honorable, and Gwenhwyfar, I would swear, virtuous, so what can possibly come of it except misery?”

And again,

“Igraine saw that hopeless, transfixed look in his [Lancelet’s] eyes when he looked on Gwenhwyfar, and the brilliance of the girl’s smile as she looked up to him. She [Igraine] could not hear now what they were saying to each other—she had no doubt it was innocent enough. But they needed no words. Igraine felt again the despairing awareness that this would come to no good, but only to misery.”

Morgaine too pities the miserable condition of unrequited love that Gwen and Lancelet must endure as a consequence of her religious scruples about marriage to Arthur. “And I do pity the woman he has wedded,” Morgaine says.

“And as she spoke the words she knew they were true; for all her fear of Gwenhwyfar, not unmixed with hatred, she knew that she did pity her—marrying a man who did not love her, loving a man she could not wed.”

In a self-imposed Christian culture, Gwen and Lancelet are not free to let “nature” take its course as their pagan neighbors might.

“Lancelet. He was so good, never did he press her for more than a Christian woman and a wedded wife could give him without dishonor . . . yet it was written that the Christ had said himself, whoever looks upon a woman with lust has committed adultery already with her in his heart . . . so she had sinned with Lancelet, and there was no mitigation, they were both damned.”

According to the author, in the suffering exhibited in both Gwen and Lancelet, we see the “tragedy” of the Christian ideal of lifetime monogamy as compared to the greater liberties allowed by the more “organic” pagan nature religions. If these two lived in Avalon, they would not suffer as they do.

He [Lancelet] seized both her arms, pulling her down. “No, make this not a jest, Gwen—you know it and I know it, and God help us both, I think even Arthur knows it, that I have loved none but you, or ever will, since first I set eyes on you in your father’s house. And if I am to remain a true man to my king and my friend, then I must depart from this court and never set eyes on you again—” Gwenhwyfar said, “I would not hold you, if you feel that you must go—”

“If you feel it is your duty to go,” she said, “then you must go.” And tears flooded down her face, blurring her sight. He said, and his voice was strained as if he had had a mortal wound, “Gwenhwyfar—” He so seldom spoke her formal name, it was always my lady or my queen, or when he spoke to her in play it was always Gwen. When he spoke it now, it seemed to her she had never heard a sweeter sound. “Gwenhwyfar. Why do you weep?” Now she must lie, and lie well, because she could not in honor tell him the truth. She said, “Because—” and stopped, and then, in a choking voice, she said, “because I do not know how I shall live if you go away.” He swallowed hard and took her hands between his own and said, “Why, then—why, love—I am not a king, but my father has given me a small estate in Brittany. Would you come with me away from this court? I—I know not, perhaps it would be the more honorable way, than stay here at Arthur’s court and make love to his wife—”

He loves me, then, Gwenhwyfar thought, he wants me, this is the honorable way . . . but panic flooded through her. To go forth alone, so far, even with Lancelet . . . and then the thought of what everyone would say of her, should she be so dishonored. . . . He lay clasping her hand in his. He said, “We could never return, you know—never. And it’s likely we should be excommunicated, both of us—that would mean little to me, I am not so much a Christian as all that. But you, my Gwenhwyfar—”

She put up her veil over her face and wept, knowing what a coward she was. “Gwenhwyfar,” he said, “I would not lead you into sin—” She said bitterly, “We have sinned already, you and I—” “And if the priests are right we will be damned for it,” Lancelet said bitterly, “and yet have I never had more of you than these kisses—we have had all the evil and the guilt, and none of the pleasure which is said to come from sin. And I am not so sure I believe the priests—what sort of God goes about every night like a night watchman, peeping here and prying there like an old village gossip to see if any man beds with his neighbor’s wife—”

“The Merlin said something like that,” Gwenhwyfar said, low. “And sometimes it seems to me sensible, and then again I wonder if it is the Devil’s work to lead me into evil. . . .”

Morgaine would say that Gwen had been discipled by the Catholic priests to be “more pious than was reasonable.” The Druids and the mistresses of Avalon would not find themselves in this excruciating conversation because they would be relying on their own inner impulses for guidance and not their clerical rules (though mind you, pagans like Morgaine can become over-reliant on the political-sexual political pressures of people like the High Priestess, Viviane as well).

Morgaine, raised in Avalon, is cognizant of the internal pain that her cousin, the pious Gwenyfhar, is subjected to as a consequence of her spiritual commitments to her religion.

“Morgaine suspected that she pined after Lancelet, and knowing Lancelet, Morgaine thought with a touch of contempt that he would neither leave the woman in peace nor lead her wholeheartedly into sin. And Gwenhwyfar was a good match for him—she would neither give in to him nor give him up. She wondered what Arthur thought, but it would have taken a braver woman than she to ask him.”

Why does she wonder what Arthur thinks? Because Arthur is a baptized pagan in his core. Christian piety is a political matter for him. Not a spiritual matter. And Morgaine suspects that Arthur is a good deal more free to let people follow their natures, even if two of those people are his beloved wife and his best friend.

As we near the end of Book II of The Mysts of Avalon, we see Gwenyfhar sublimating her unfulfilled desires for connection with Lancelet into a desire to bear Arthur a child. She begins to obsess about her sinful desires for Lancelet and speculates that it is this that keeps her God from giving her a child and heir. More and more, she is convinced that Arthur needs to become more Christian – more pious, more intolerant, more public with his faith, more strict with his people’s pagan rites. And yet, she also wonders if maybe this could be a mistake as well. She comes to Morgaine and asks for some sort of potion or spell that will remove the stigma of bareness from her. “What makes you believe the Goddess I serve can send you a son,” Morgaine responds,

“When your God, who is supposed to be greater than all the other Gods, cannot?”

“It sounded like blasphemy, and Gwenhwyfar was ashamed of herself. Yet she found herself thinking, and saying aloud in a voice that choked as she spoke, ‘I think perhaps God cares nothing for women—all his priests are men, and again and again the Scriptures tell us that women are the temptress and evil—it may be that is why he does not hear me. And for this I would go to the Goddess—God does not care—‘”

". .  . —my friend, my cousin,” she addresses Morgaine “—what do you say?”

At this point, all readers should understand what the author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, would say: namely, “You have chosen the wrong religion.”

One wonders however if perhaps, just perhaps, she had simply chosen a flawed version of that religion. And might the same be said of some people who's lives are not well served by versions of paganism that they choose?

Question for Comment: When you consider your own perceptions, prejudices, and presuppositions about religion – either pagan, Christian, or other, how do you know that you are not judging the mis-representation of the thing rather than “the thing itself?”

 

"Why did I feel that I had known you before the world was made?”

The Mists of Avalon, Part II

In the ancient Hindu epic, The Ramayana, there is a moment when the hero and heroine of the story first meet and are smitten with some sort of powerful inexplicable attraction.  Rama and Sita are both dazed and confused by the moment, as if they had been struck by lightning. The writer explains that moments like these where we “fall in love” with what I would call “known strangers” are caused by connections between people that still exist from previous lives.

The following passage comes from R.K. Narayan's translation of the Ramayana (Hindu Epic) 

 ---snip----

THE RAMAYANA, Narayan's Prose Translation

They [Rama and his brother] crossed the moat surrounding Janaka’s palace, with its golden spires soaring above the other buildings of the city. Now Rama observed on a balcony princess Sita playing with her companions. He stood arrested by her beauty, and she noticed him at the same moment. Their eyes met. They had been together not so long ago in Vaikunta, their original home in heaven, as Vishnu and his spouse Lakshmi, but in their present incarnation, suffering all the limitations of mortals, they looked at each other as strangers. Sita, decked in ornaments and flowers, in the midst of her attendants, flashed on his eyes like a streak of lightning. She paused to watch Rama slowly pass out of view, along with his sage-master and brother. The moment he vanished, her mind became uncontrollably agitated. The eye had admitted a slender shaft of love, which later expanded and spread into her whole being. She felt ill.

Observing the sudden change in her, and the sudden drooping and withering of her whole being, even the bangles on her wrist slipping down, her attendants took her away and spread a soft bed for her to lie on.

She lay tossing in her bed complaining, “You girls have forgotten how to make a soft bed. You are all out to tease me.” Her maids in attendance had never seen her in such a mood. They were bewildered and amused at first, but later became genuinely concerned, when they noticed tears streaming down her cheeks. They found her prattling involuntarily, “Shoulders of emerald, eyes like lotus petals, who is he? He invaded my heart and has deprived me of all shame! A robber who could ensnare my heart and snatch away my peace of mind! Broad-shouldered, but walked off so swiftly. Why could he not have halted his steps, so that I might have gained just one more glimpse and quelled this riotous heart of mine? He was here, he was there next second, and gone forever. He could not be a god—his eyelids flickered… . Or was he a sorcerer casting a spell on people?”

The sun set beyond the sea, so says the poet—and when a poet mentions a sea, we have to accept it. No harm in letting a poet describe his vision, no need to question his geography. 

... At the guest house, Rama retired for the night. In the seclusion of his bedroom, he began to brood over the girl he had noticed on the palace balcony. For him, too, the moon seemed to emphasize his sense of loneliness. Although he had exhibited no sign of it, deeply within he felt a disturbance. His innate sense of discipline and propriety had made him conceal his feelings before other people. Now he kept thinking of the girl on the balcony and longed for another sight of her. Who could she be?" 

-----snip-----

“No harm in letting a poet describe his vision, no need to question his geography.”

In other words, some stories are so useful and impossible to falsify, we should give them a place at our mental sinner tables. The Renaissance humanist Petrarch would describe a similar moment that he felt when this woman named Laura walked out of a church one day.

“Love caught me undefended to his shaft
The entrance for his ambush and surprise
Against the heart wide open through the eyes.”

In Petrarch’s case however, the feeling was not mutual and he never asserts that there was some past life nostalgia playing a role.

In Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel of Arthurian Britain, pagans borrow this ancient idea and attribute the power of their present attractions to past life entanglements. They bemoan the fact that one of Christianity’s great disadvantages derives from its creedal assertion that human beings are souls with only one opportunity to live their lives. “They have pronounced it a heresy that men live more than one life,” one of her characters complains of the Christians, “—which every peasant knows to be true.”

“’But if men do not believe in more than one life,’ Igraine protested, shaken, ‘how will they avoid despair? What just God would create some men wretched, and others happy and prosperous, if one life were all that they could have?’”

As in the story of Rama and Sita in the Ramayana, the romances of previous lifetimes linger and complicate present romantic entanglements.

“One thing at least was made clear. If she [Igraine] and Uther had known each other, loved each other, in the past, it explained why she had this tremendous sense of familiarity with him, why he did not seem a stranger, why even his boorish—or boyish—manners seemed not offensive, but simply part of the person which he was and had always been.”

Igraine tries to put the feeling into words.

“It seems to me that life is too great a thing to live it only once and then be snuffed out like a lamp when the wind blows. And why, when first I looked upon your face, did I feel that I had known you before the world was made?”

It is interesting that other traditions, religious, philosophical, and otherwise, have tried to explain the experience of love-at-first-sight in spiritual terms. In the story of Adam and Eve, we are given to understand that God must have opened up Adam’s chest and taken out a rib to make his counterpart, Eve. Perhaps this story helped explain the experience of pain in our chests that we feel when we are separated from someone that we love. Perhaps the story is an attempt at explaining where that pain comes from. The story makes sense when you work back from the experience of heartache and try to backward engineer into a likely narrative the cause. The story argues that heartache is a reminder that we are somehow “missing a piece”?

At one point in the The Mists of Avalon, Morgaine meets Gwen who has stumbled into Avalon through the mists.

“Suddenly Morgaine knew what had happened. The veil had thinned, as it did occasionally in spots of such concentrated power, and somehow this girl had had enough sensitivity to be aware of it. This happened, sometimes, as a momentary vision, so that someone could see the other world as a shadow or a brief vision; but to move through into the other world was rare.”

This may be what happens to Rama and Sita. They emotionally “glimpse” a hidden metaphysical reality. It suggests that every once in a while, we are given uninvited peeks into what goes on behind the façade of life that we think is “all there is.” It is usually such a short glimpse that we remember it as a dream or an illusion, if we remember at all. And if we do reflect on it, we are compelled by the brevity of the event to doubt it.

So, beliefs in the mysterious connections of past lives is one of the disruptors that characters in Camelot and Avalon have to contend with as they try to sort out who they should pair up with. But there are other disruptors as well. Among them are political philosophies, religions, ignorance of psychology, and defective theologies.

So many of the complications between main characters are created by a political system that requires kings to have sons to maintain stable dynasties upon which domestic peace can be maintained. Lacking any democratic processes to maintain central government and national defense, arranged marriages become indispensable to the very life of the nation. Alliances between rival factions and interests can only be maintained by stable, sustained dynasties and for that reason people do not simply get to marry whomever they would like. Lacking a mechanism for transferring power, marriageable daughters are crucial to “corporate mergers.” They are not free to align themselves with their mates chosen by their own inner lights.

To complicate things further, neither the Christians nor the pagans have a clear understanding of how attachments work in the human neurological system. They have no concept of the neurobiology of human attachment and the addictive forces that this neurobiology assembles in its effort to keep parents involved in the protection and nurture of children. If they understood some of these processes, they might be less inclined to initiate or risk unsustainable or impossible emotional entanglements.

Lastly, the theologians of Arthurian Britain are doing no one any favors. Their ideas about women, about men, about sexuality, about God’s view of natural human development, about religious freedom, and about the “proper” role of women in society all play a role in radicalizing leaders and creating an incubator for chaos. People in Camelot keep secrets that undermine honestly, authenticity, and the possibility for learning. Camelot’s theology discourages a “culture of error” where human beings get to experiment, make small choices, and then learn from their mis-calculations. Rules about marriage make it impossible for characters to cut costs when they have made poor decisions.

And so, people suffer the consequences of their own unexamined ideas.

As do we all.

Question for Comment: What beliefs that you grew up with have not served you well?  

“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?

"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

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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?

"The average human being is a failed saint"

Strangers Drowning REVIEW

Strangers Drowning by Melissa MacFarquhar is a fascinating look into the world of the serious altruist. It is a book about people who take self-sacrifice to “iron-man competition” levels. The characters that are depicted in the book could either be classified as “saints” or “mentally ill” I suppose. They all exhibit tendencies of the OCD personality (almost like they are reverse narcissists, perhaps). One finds themselves wondering “should I be emulating these people or pitying them?” The author refers to the subjects she studies as “do gooders.” There is a hint of criticism in that choice of words I suppose isn’t there? There are so many lovely quotes in this book that could be drawn upon in a discussion about ethics, I think I will simply provide a few and respond with some questions for discussion:

MacFarquhar writes:

“Do-gooders are different from ordinary people because they are willing to weigh their lives and their families in a balance with the needs of strangers. They’re willing to risk the one for the sake of the other. They, like anyone else, believe that they have duties to the family, but they draw the line between family and strangers in a different place. It’s not that they value strangers more: it’s that they remember that strangers have lives and families, too.”

It is interesting that this impulse to expand the definition of family is one that made Jesus such a revolutionary and frustratingly idealistic moralist. He clearly demanded that people see the “family” in people who were not family. His insight was probably the notion that as others did the same and looked at you as family, your life would significantly improve even as you raised your level of sacrifice. They, it was thought, would “sacrifice back.” Do you think they would?

“The do-gooder, on the other hand, knows that there is crisis everywhere, all the time, and he seeks them out. He is not spontaneous – he plans his good deeds in cold blood. He may be compassionate, but compassion is not why he does what he does – he committed himself to helping before he saw the person who needs him. He has no ordinary life: his good deeds are his life.”

MacFarquhar notes that the altruists that she has focused on are intellectually driven as much as, if not more so, than emotionally driven. Some do-gooders are supremely calculateing in the way they practice their sacrificial priorities. Like Kant, they prefer to give with uncluttered emotional motivations. They calculate their way to caring rather than feel their way. Do you think this makes it easier or harder to be an altruist or to act altruistically?

“A do-gooder might not go so far as hatred or abandonment, but the fact that he even asked himself how much he should do for his family and how much for strangers – weighing the two together in the same balance – may seem already a step too far. Not all religions permit one to neglect a family for the sake of strangers.”

“Suppose a man could save either his wife or two strangers from drowning, Williams proposed. A Utilitarian might ask: is it permissible for the man to save his wife? But even to ask that question in such a situation was to have, as Williams dryly put it, one thought too many. A Loving husband would save his wife spontaneously, without consulting moral rules at all. To Grant morality the power to adjudicate impartiality in situations like that would be to abandon what gives human life its meaning. Without selfish partiality – to people you are deeply attached to, your family and friends, to place – we are nothing. We are creatures of kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.”

Is there something wrong with spontaneity? With what we feel like doing? With what nature would suggest? These are the arguments of the Romantics like Rousseau and William Blake and Goethe. This dilemma is highlighted in Robert Frost’s poem “Love and a Question” where a newly married husband has to wonder if he is obligated to invite a homeless man in on a cold October night the first day of his honeymoon. Should we ever decide against nature? Is the price we pay for doing so too high?

“George Orwell found Gandhi’s beliefs [in asceticism] repellent. He wrote, “it is too readily assumed that the ordinary man only rejects saintliness because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, but it is probable those who somehow achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”

This goes back to that idea of the saint. For centuries, cultures have made saints out of people who have been particularly good at self-sacrificing behavior or even martyrdom. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs by John Foxe (first published in 1563) comes to mind in my Protestant tradition. Should we, as a culture, put saints on a pedestal? Offer awards and recognition to people who go above and beyond in their willingness to sacrifice? Or should we celebrate people who live more balanced lives?

“To accept this idea of utilitarianism – that in principle at least, we owe as much to distant strangers as to people we are close to – is to reject a core part of what most people believe. Even to dismiss the importance of physical distance is extremely radical. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has pointed out, a strict utilitarian would not rescue the child from the shallow pond at all [if to do so meant getting all muddy]: he would leave the child to drown, sell his unmuddied clothes, and donate the proceeds to a charity that could save more than one child with the money. That is how bizarre it is to dismiss physical distance. But, of course, displacing the preeminence of duty to family is a far greater leap. You might say that this question of family versus strangers is one of quality rather than quantity: who must I help, rather than how much? In practice, though, there are almost always many more strangers in dire need, than relatives.”

“There are many more strangers in dire need than relatives.” That is impossible to contest. And we must, at some level, understand that if we practice altruistic purity when others do not, we will soon be in serious crisis of scarcity. We assume that will be what happens. If you are a saint, it is a rare person who will, even if they are impressed by you, reciprocate with you. Is there something wrong with this realism?  Should we put all our chips on the table anyway? Someone once told me in teaching that if I wanted my students to bleed, I had to hemorrhage.

“When Peter Singer‘s mother developed advanced Alzheimer’s, Singer, in violation of his theories about both giving and personhood, had spent a lot of money paying nurses to take care of her. ‘Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before,’ he said, ‘because it is different when it’s your mother.’”

Critics of Singer love to point out his inconsistency and argue, “See! His standards were too high even for him!” Is this a case of Singer “seeing the light” or a case of Singer walking into the dark?

“To a romantic, desire is less something to be restrained, as a do-gooder would restrain it, then the very stuff of life. ‘Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,’ wrote William Blake, one of the first romantic poets, with contempt. ‘And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.’ To a certain kind of romantic, the struggles of a do-gooder with himself can look misguided to the point of suicide.”

Does it require a certain mutation to be a consistent altruist? That is, must there be some sociopathy involved in serious altruism? A state of natural disconnection or dissociation from normal human emotion?

“What do gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes, though not always, their joy is purchased with other peoples joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.”

“Do-gooders learn to codify their horror into a routine and a set of habits they can live with. They know they must do this in order to stay sane. But this partial blindness is chosen and forced and never quite convincing. It takes a strong stomach to see the world’s misery, feel a sense of duty to do something about it, and then say to yourself, I have done enough, now I’m going to shut my eyes and close my ears and turn my back. Do-gooders who last have strong stomachs.”

What do you think about this habit of forcing yourself to “know and keep on knowing” one’s impact on others? Is it possible to be just too good at it and is that as detrimental to flourishing as having too little ability to empathize and care?