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October 10, 2007
Hello everyone,
It is undoubtedly true, what the author of the Proverbs says: we do, most of the time, sharpen one another just as iron sharpens iron, at least if the company we keep be not dull (pun intended). A sentence here, an aside there: by dribbles and drabs we build the repertoire of a lifetime if we but keep our eyes, ears, and hearts open. Good conversation makes the world go round.
I have, as you may suppose, been engaged in much conversation lately. And even when not engaged in conversation, I have been engaged in its derivatives, for the written word is but once removed from the spoken. This point was brought home to me powerfully upon reading a particularly apt short story by the celebrated author Philip Roth. In particular, I am taking a graduate course in 20th-century American short stories, a somewhat redundant designation, as the short story began as a uniquely American genre, though it has since swelled to distant shores. In addition to our other coursework, we are expected to submit one reader-based response per week to whatever story happens to fall on Friday’s reading list, and, as one may infer, Roth was a Friday read. His “Defender of the Faith” was very believable and life-like and it was not until I looked it over again that I noticed it had seams: namely the sheer amount of dialogue. One could almost have been reading a screenplay, though it was entirely transparent to me on the first read.
Given how realistic it seemed and given that I failed to consciously notice the presence of any dialogue, I realized that there is perhaps good reason the dialogue and the realism worked so well in concert without drawing attention to this union. How much of our impression of others is gained through conversation, either engaged upon or overheard? How many details do we glean about our world through interaction with others? Even the talking heads that offer up the nightly news or the smooth delivery of radio announcers are a form of speech issuing from electronic boxes. And writing is to varying degrees a continuation of that conversation, some writings more formal or stylized, but all nevertheless engaged in some form of communication or another. (Even writing-as-art is meant to be appreciated by some outside “other”: art itself is a language of a sort.) In fact, I was reviewing today one of the original proposals for the sophomore-level creative nonfiction course I am currently teaching: it suggests that English 205 hopes “to develop an awareness of the value of self-discovery through the attempt to communicate personal truths to others through writing: to assume [sic?] the value of the examined life to ourselves and others.” Certainly in that sense, writing is very much an extension of conversation, albeit of a more refined sort.
So then, a carefully crafted story might well include massive amounts of dialogue: that is, on taking the story apart, it should not surprise us to find that it not only has seams, but that they are stitched of dialogue, for the simple fact is that human reality is itself thus threaded together. Indeed, dialogue is fully in keeping with the nature of human reality: language is, if you like, the currency of relationships, the stuff by which we both bind ourselves to one another and render ourselves asunder, by which we include as well as exclude, as well as carving our niche in the world as a lover carves the initials of his beloved in a tree. And, if dialogue is very well done in a short story format, it would make sense that it would pass by invisibly, unnoticed until forced out of hiding by critical reflection, in this case by literary analysis, for dialogue—conversation—is a constant in the human realm. It is by language that we define ourselves, showing not only our hearts but our social standing, our confidence or lack thereof. Recently, I was struck in my reading how we are continually negotiating our social roles with language: the idea of negotiation cropped up twice, in fact, leaping from the page each time. In the first instance, an excerpt from Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought was featured in a recent issue of Time magazine:
Why don’t people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other’s brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity—which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship. (“Words Don’t Mean What They Mean”)
Thus, in this case, we become masters not only at interpreting what is being said, but also what is not being said: we read between the lines and daily engage in euphemisms and other niceties, because language is in part a negotiation of our relationships with one another. As with Pinker’s view of language in general, so too is language a dance of courtship in particular between romantic partners in which the level of sexual involvement is constantly being negotiated, along with other factors. As University of Chicago professor Leon R. Kass writes for First Things, the Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life in the thought-provoking and much recommended article Man and Woman: An Old Story:
The emergence of shame and sexual self-consciousness—[which arose] mutually and equally [between the sexes], it should be stressed—radically transforms relations between man and woman. Sexual attraction is now suffused with a concern for approbation and a fear of rejection. Each discovers that the other is genuinely and irreducibly other, not an alienated portion of oneself. Moreover, each discovers that his or her relation to the other is not only unfree and needy, but even demanding—all reasons why one might meet with both disapprobation and refusal.
But, strangely, the discovery of unfreedom is freely made and partly liberating. If there can be refusal, there can also be acceptance. A new dimension of freedom—with momentous consequences—alters the sexual necessity. Each seeks no longer mere submission, but willing submission; each seeks to win the heart of the other. Each seeks approval, praise, respect, esteem—perhaps, first, as a means of securing sexual satisfaction, but soon enough as an end in itself. Through courtship and flirtation, inspiration and seduction, a new dialectic is introduced into the dance: approval, admiration, and regard require keeping lovers apart at the beholding distance, yet the original sexual instinct drives toward fusion. A new and genuine intimacy is born out of the delicate need to preserve and negotiate this distance and its closure [emphasis mine]. And yet, the friendship of the lovers remains inherently problematic: on the one side, difference, dependence, and demand; on the other side, the wish for approbation earned and freely given. This tension, sometimes recognized, often not, energizes human eros and raises it to new possibilities. (Man and Woman: An Old Story)
This idea of negotiating distance and its closure also plays a part in the education of one’s children: it is not the loss of innocence that is to be avoided, but rather a loss of innocence that takes place too rapidly. Put another way, education is all about the controlled loss of innocence. The loss of innocence is all part of a child’s initiation into adulthood, but there is a timetable that is to some degree a negotiation between parent and child. Sexual relationships are healthy, wholesome, and vital both to those involved and to the race as a whole in the proper contexts: it is when they are removed from that context that they become problematic. One generally hopes to see one’s children grow up to marry and have children of their own in loving, happy, committed relationships. If a sexual relationship is to be healthy and thrive, the partners must mutually negotiate distance and closure through the totality of language, from the words spoken to non-verbal forms of communication. When one forces oneself on another in an unwelcome advance of any sort, this is obviously not love: love is mutual and being mutual, it requires a negotiated reciprocity. Negotiated reciprocity is simply another way that respect is made manifest, and no relationship positively thrives for long in the absence of mutual respect.
In any case, Kass presents a compelling picture of the sexes originally offering to one another a mirror in the primordial account—Eve provides Adam with a self-awareness not before existent (and vice-versa)—their sameness and difference alike combine to form the awareness that has collectively become the human culture and race: that is, the fact that we come in pairs of sexed opposites and all the mystery that entails in and of itself produces enough tension and fodder to keep the race occupied for untold lifetimes to come on a spiritual, emotional, and intellectual plane every bit as much as the physical where sexual regeneration occurs. As Kass would have it, this interplay between the sexes—this sexualized tension—has perhaps done more than anything else to propel the race forward in all ways, physical obviously, but in the deeper realms of emotional and spiritual as well, from misunderstandings to the depths of love. There is good reason that the classic love story and the intrigues of romance are tales as timeless as the race itself that will never fall from fashion or grow stale: movies, books, song, dance, painting, poetry, sculpture: there is not a single medium that does not in some of its manifestations present the tales of star-crossed lovers in varieties as infinite as the persons who perform and craft them. Love accepted and rejected is certainly not the only theme of art, but it is a dominant theme that will never die out as long as human beings have navels: as long as human beings are born in pairs of sexed opposites.
Life, love, language: good gifts, all. Good gifts are invariably double edged, their very goodness capable of causing much heartache and pain when misused, mishandled, or misunderstood. If they were not so very good, they could not be so very bad. It does, when one considers, put a new twist on that pair of opposites we call pain and pleasure: like birds of a feather, they flock together because they form two sides of the same whole: like glades and hedges, together they form the same beautiful garden. What is capable of bringing great pleasure, also causes great pain in its lack or misuse; what is used to create openness and union may also cause closure and separation. Union is not always positive and separation negative, but the two together can form their own positive or negative: what makes this the glade that it is (and not some other) is precisely it hedges: what creates closure can also create union even in the act: as we recently noted, if I choose this marriage partner, I am simultaneously rejecting other partners: the hedge that fences in this glade ensures that it be not confused with that one. That what is very good can go so very bad when mishandled and misappropriated explains a great many things that seem paradoxical and opposite. That is why, of course, love can so quickly turn to seeming hate; that is also why such a glorious creature as man can go so terribly wrong when he goes awry.
Then too, true progress is tedious and slow precisely because our lives here on earth are so short and the transmission of lessons learned is always imperfect from generation to generation. In an unpublished manuscript about the late poet and author James Whitehead, Thomas E. Dasher writes:
In discussing the danger of writers becoming too concerned with social issues, Whitehead told an interviewer, “the problem with causes very often will be the fact that people who get caught up in causes somehow believe that the cause will remove them from the responsibility of their mortality. The fact is we are finite, mortal creatures, and all of our efforts for order and reason and decency will not go as far as we wish they would because we don’t live long enough. In the human race, each generation dies off and the next generation learns only a very little bit from the previous generation. History teaches us relatively little, although what it does teach us is terribly important. Science seems to go forward, while art—and faith—are always starting over. Thank God.”
In one sense, of course, art and faith do not start completely over again; in another, both art and faith have to be embodied by each subsequent generation who appropriate them for their own context and age. Martin Buber has written an excellent essay entitled Teaching and Deed that looks at precisely this transmission of cultures and its renewal from one generation to the next: he suggests that “a holy spark can leap across the gap” between forebear and offspring, a metaphor that to this mechanic’s son also calls to mind spark plugs and their conversion of combustible fuel to energy, a transmission of one medium to the next.
And speaking of engines and their parts, the gears that drive this complicated human machinery are largely those of language, both that of words and gestures. It might well be that such an understanding of language in which facial expressions, body language, and actions count as much or more than words also helps explain why critics—especially continental critics and most especially post-structuralist French critics of the psychoanalytic school—emphasize the idea of “a text” involving not merely that which has words (traditionally bound between two covers and now available electronically and otherwise), but as further encompassing virtually anything and everything that requires interpretation: their book is not to be judged by its cover precisely because it may well have never had one.
On this reading, then, when, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is given by the kindly father a potion that will, when swallowed, cause her to appear as though one dead, her lifeless body becomes “a text” that must be read—interpreted—by the other characters in the cast. And, of course, what makes Romeo and Juliet the tragedy that it is has to do with the misreading of many such “texts” throughout the second half of the play. The lesson the immortal bard and poet would seem to have for us is that we live in an uncertain world, fraught with ambiguity, particularly in the context of human interactions and relationships. When we misread such signs and portents, untold misery and misrule are the invariable result, human misunderstanding a lethal force that can and often does leave the world stage strewn with dead and lifeless bodies, rightfully called “Tragedy.”
Another short story we read in the American 20th-century class brought home a further point of language and its power to shape: its role, its force, its import. Bernard Malamud’s 1964 “The German Refugee,” originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, recounts the tale of a narrator who we learn “in those days”—that is, in the days of the Great Depression—was “a poor student who would brashly attempt to teach anybody anything for a buck an hour” and mainly gives “English lessons to recently arrived refugees.” His clientele, as it happens, consists largely of prominent intellectuals forced to flee Germany. The particular intellectual whom the narrator describes is a man named Oskar Gassner, a Jewish scholar who is a respected German author, lecturer, and university professor. However, his English is clumsy at best and we learn in the tale, at once heart-warming and heart-rending, that the Nazis have not only stolen from him the obvious, but also something not as immediately tangible: they have divested him of his language and hence of his identity and his dignity.
With broken English at his command, he has no way of being the luminary that he truly is: all the brilliant thoughts and ideas trapped inside his mind are forced to remain there, as he has no way of communicating them to another. Long used to being articulate with his words, he is now greatly humbled, his speech no longer any different than that of a school child—in fact, the speech of the child may often be superior—because his eloquence fails to translate into the new and difficult language. That is a sobering thought to me, since I tend to take my own language skills for granted, making my way in the world in large part through words. And unfortunately, there is a tendency at times to view non-native speakers with impatience and disgust: we might very well have done it ourselves at some point or another, not even realizing our own lack of empathy for what it is. For that matter, failed communication is frustrating, both for the one trying to communicate and for the person attempting to understand. Our identity is tied to our culture perhaps more than we realize if in no other sense than in the language we speak. To take away our language would be to severely impair us, for while we could still think and reason, we could not communicate our thoughts well. This would be doubly devastating to us if in our own language we were particularly articulate, our syntax now reduced to that of a common school child just learning his ABCs:
To many of these people, articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of language—that they could no longer say what was in them to say. They could, of course, manage to communicate, but just to communicate was frustrating. As Karl Otto Alp, the ex-film star who became a buyer at Macy’s, put it years later, “I felt like a child, or worse, often like a moron. I am left with myself unexpressed. What I knew, indeed, what I am, becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.”
* * * * *
“You’ve written many articles and lectures before,” I said. “What I can’t understand, though I know how hard the situation is, is why you can never get past page one.”
He half lifted his hand. “It paralyzis my will. The whole legture is clear in my mind, but the minute I write down a single word—or in English or in German—I have a terrible fear I will not be able to write the negst. As though someone has thrown a stone at a window and the whole house—the whole idea—zmashes. This repeats until I am desperate. ... I have lozt faith. I do not—not longer possezz my former value of myself. In my life there has been too much illusion.”
I tried to believe what I was saying, “Have confidence, the feeling will pass.”
“Confidenze I have not. For this, and also whatever elze I have lozt, I thank the Nazis.”
(Malamud, Bernard. “The German Refugee.” Qtd. in The Best American Short Stories of the Century: 441, 445.)
The tower of Babel yet overstretches the nations, even as globalization becomes increasingly the norm. Many of the individual letters of the various languages are the same—many of the same sounds are as well, though strung in different orders—and perhaps it may well be that “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet II.ii), but such lines are delivered with no little irony: “What’s in a name?” Apparently, at times, irreconcilable difference, as with the names of Montague and Capulet. Language that brings together is also capable of dividing apart: the means by which we negotiate is the very means which can serve as a prison more effective than any bars of iron. Thus it is that human awareness in itself comes with a double-edged sword: not only do we have the language barrier, both inside and outside of a given language, the very means by which we rise above is also the very means by which we stick in our stilettos, failing to “sheathe our words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak” (“Words Don’t Mean What They Mean”). We are not always cruel to be kind: a great many times, we are cruel to be cruel, our tongues slashing and ripping others to shreds. And should we be more civil, we have but to turn to the world of entertainment where the definition of a good laugh is often listening to someone’s verbal daggers being plunged into another’s breast, particularly if the swordsmith is sharp-witted and shrewd, his victim deemed dull and dim-witted. That the strong shred the weak evokes applause: the gladiatorial games of Rome live on.
We mentioned man going terribly wrong when he goes wrong precisely because he is made of such stellar stuff: some time ago in Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve, we spoke of Chesterton’s notion that Christianity did not posit a neutral human nature, but rather two very distinct natures at odds with one another; as he puts it in Orthodoxy: “Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite.” He does not say that the two views are mutually exclusive so much as that upon the differences of understanding hang differing assumptions about teleology, which in turn inform the ways in which we organize our political and social institutions. From a Greco-Roman point of view, moderation is embedded into the societal fabric, all forces pressing toward the center: from the Judeo-Christian, anticipation of extremes is factored in. On the one hand, there is a negative anticipation, on the other a positive: that is, to put measures in place that anticipate and safeguard against falling into temptation and ultimately sin (anticipation of the negative) is not the same as inspiring others, through the beauty of language and art and other means, to rise to their full potential (edification toward the positive). Those approaches to the faith that continually recognize this dualistic nature and inner tension, that on the one hand are not horribly caught off guard by fallenness and put sanctions in place to guard against temptation and who on the other advocate aspiring to virtue, grace, and a fixing of the mind on things above, tend to be the healthiest. Put differently, those approaches to the faith whose Godly wisdom and worldly insight are evenly tempered tend to be strongest and most balanced at the point.
As with the Renaissance and their concept of the “dual vision” of humanity, we have in Chesterton’s conception at once virtue and vice, the good side of the human heart and the bad, the unique status of the human being as being a little below the angels and a little above the beasts, a creature whose biological urges and instincts are largely animal but whose aspirations and pursuits are potentially divine, the one capable of transforming the other or the other the one: as Aristotle notes in his Politics, either downward toward the beasts or upward toward the gods. What is more, the Renaissance “dual vision” goes further: is man a mortal creature, made of flesh and bones or is he constituted of the life and breath of God? When he dies, what will happen to him? What is his destiny and purpose? Is he more god or more beast? what will the gateway of death demonstrate when it at last settles the question for every man? Nowhere does this theme resound more fully than in Shakespeare, from Jacques the malcontent’s famous “All the world’s a stage” speech in the comedy As You Like It to the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet’s tragedy. In the former, all the men and women are merely players on a stage, nothing more, and each act passes to predictable end, from “the infant / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” to the “big manly voice, / Turning again toward childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound” as he wheezes and gasps for breath, to the last act of all before the curtain falls: “sans everything.” In the latter, if to die is but to sleep, what if we dream? That is, we know not whether death will be simply a passing into nothing or if it rather will involve a new beginning, for if we speak of death as sleep, we must acknowledge that even in sleep, we do not merely lie down and forget but are rather greeted by a consciousness of a different sort: the dream. What kind of sleep, then, will death be? the dream or the perpetual night?
Yes, the human creature has a dual nature and Pseudo-Macarius knows it well: “The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there” (The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter 222.) We are between God and beast; the sword again has two edges. The human creature is not hideously marred and pocked with sin, unfit for anything save flagellation and hell, nor is it always the paragon of virtue, the stuff of the heavens and stars: it is what it is, it is a mixture of both, generally desirous of the good but apart from God incapable of carrying it out. It is a finite, bounded creature that daily depends for its sustenance on the provision and grace of God from the food it eats, to the liquid it drinks, to the clothes it wears, to the ability to again awake and arise after a night of rest, to the grace it needs to escape pettiness, pride, temptation, and sin, and aspire higher into the spiritual realms toward the God in whose image it is fashioned. Far from being the basis of continual self-loathing as though an inept God made a despicable heap of depraved rubbish when he crafted the human race (and particularly our own person), an acceptance of the grace and provision of God can rather be as C.S. Lewis describes it in his Four Loves: “Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become ‘jolly beggars.’” One wonders if Lewis did not have St. Francis of Assisi in mind, whose dependency on God was a paradigm of joy and virtue. The saint’s secret was simple: gratitude liberally commingled with communion.
I was powerfully reminded the other day of Isaiah 55:8–11—one of those inner promptings to turn again to the passage and read as though for the first time, particularly in answer to the unhappiness described in the previous issue. You have read this passage countless times, no doubt: it is the one in which it is said that not only are God’s ways as far above our own as the heavens are above the earth, but also that his word does not return void or empty but accomplishes the purpose for which it is sent. The gospel message to me is a picture of this word in motion: what passes from God we receive into ourselves through prayer. The Godhead issues forth its perpetual essence, perfect in unity and desirous of drawing all creatures to itself, and we, in voluntarily receiving that essence into ourselves in prayer, return it in again in communion, and are drawn up into that holy center. Put differently, we offer back unto God what he has given us, thus returning to him the gift of prayer, having accomplished the purpose for which it was given: to unite us with him. We are thus drawn up into communion with the Trinity, for all things come from God and to God again return:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts than your thoughts.
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will my word be which goes forth from my mouth;
It will not return to me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.”
Certainly these verses could be taken on many levels, for in a sense all that we are, all of life—all of everything—comes from God and to God returns again and finds its completion. And it is entirely appropriate to see in these passages the reconciliation of all creation: the reconciliation of ourselves and those for whom we pray and the transformation that accordingly transpires on every plane like billowing ripples on the surface of a pond. If the heart of God is set on restoring that which is lost and healing that which is broken—if the heart of God is the epitome of altruism and love—then we have our golden mean in place. The composite picture is nothing short of a total restoration on virtually every level: man to God, man within himself, man to man, man to earth. It is thus fittingly foreshadowed elsewhere in Isaiah that a bruised reed he does not break and a smoldering wick he does not extinguish.
It seems, through the example of Jesus in the gospels, that God longs to commune with us in prayer. If we were created for him—if he is not only the fuel that makes us run but the very source of light and love—there could be nothing more natural and human than this shared fellowship with him: the closer we draw to the divine center, the more fully we fulfill our created purpose, the more natural and organic we become. A loving God interested in healing the breech between himself and all persons naturally would long to see reconciliation established.
Prayer, then, is God’s gift to us—the language through which we commune with the divine. Hence, the gift of prayer is in turn pleasing to God when we offer it back to him voluntarily, because prayer changes us, conforming us to his will. A gift is a voluntary thing: it has to be given freely and freely accepted for it rightly to be called a gift in the fullest sense. God gives prayer to us and we return it, thus establishing communion. In giving his gift back to him in voluntary exchange, we become increasingly united with him, to him. Being united to him, we are ourselves transformed and caught up higher, up and toward the center.
Prayer not only connects us with God, it teaches us to value the things he values: the effect of prayer accomplishes our transformation. Therefore, when we pray for another person, we are praying in total harmony with the heart of God who longs for just such peace and reconciliation to take place. As we pray for another person, we ourselves are being made more and more in his image and likeness, learning more and more to love the things he loves. Just as God is well pleased in our transformation, so too he is pleased that we are acting as transformative agents for the rest of his created order. And watching God work his will through our prayer accomplishing the very things he longs to accomplish, further increases our own faith. What is more, he is often pleased to use us for the very task we pray, lending wings to our feet and causing us to further embody, and return back unto him again, the same message he sent forth, now transformed, accomplished of its mission. Praying from a heart of love for another is to pray in keeping with God’s will, whose heart is love and who delights to see his creatures thus love one another as he loves them. Again, to pray from a heart of love for another is to effect one’s own transformation toward that which is increasingly God-like.
The very language that is capable of separating us from God and others is also capable of restoring us back again. The author of language is not man, but God, language a gift given along with life and limb. All that is has but a single source: it comes from that source and in time proceeds back again from whence it came. Language, in this sense, is given to us from God, passes through us, and returns again unto God. All comes from him, and, like the sun making its circuit through the heavens, returns again to him. It is cyclical, but it is also teleological, though the restoration of all of creation is considerably slowed by the shortness of our lives. Even here, however, if we could but see all things as they are, we might find a special grace and mercy. But in the meanwhile, all of creation groans in eager expectation, both the hedges and the glades and all else in between.
God bless,
Eric
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