Clay Testament

Expatriotically Speaking

2012-01-29T22:05:00.010+08:00

Since I'm regularly challenged in one or another forum to explain myself--how can I be "so far left" is usually the gist of the question--I'll try to actually do it here. Or if not actually explain myself, I'll at least lay my cards on the table. Because it often happens that people I'm debating with can't gauge where I'm coming from.

The problem for many people, especially people who've known me since youth, the thing they can't get their heads around, is that I'm a leftist. Leftists rarely come from my childhood demographic. And then when these people discover I'm also a Christian, it makes even less sense to them.

The terms "conservative" and "liberal" or "right" and "left" often aren't very useful, but I'll try to use these terms even so.

In fact I'm culturally conservative and politically leftist.

As an American, I know, such a self-definition makes me something like the opposite of normal, even to the point of making me a "bad American". This is because America as a whole is the opposite.

In terms of culture, America is largely what could be called liberal. It brings the world things like MTV, Facebook, "Sex and the City," hip hop. Though America is full of outspoken people who call themselves "conservative," this is hardly to the point when one looks at larger trends. America has long been a force of cultural liberalization. And the kind of liberalization on offer usually amounts to a demeaning and commodification of culture.

In terms of politics, on the other hand, America is largely what could be called conservative. Its economic system is rigged to suit an oligarchy, its foreign policy is nationalistic, self-righteous, trigger-happy. America is far to the right of most of its Western allies and is moving ever further rightward.

Both these trends (America's cultural liberalism and its political conservatism) have only gotten worse since I've become an adult. Thus as my country's culture drifts further and further from any respect for traditional Western learning, its economic order becomes more and more a matter of unfettered capitalism. I would like to see the opposite trends.

Politics: If we assume that a far right position favors pure free-market capitalism and that a far left position favors a centrally regulated socialism, I'd position myself a few inches to the right of Fidel Castro.

Culture: If we take education policy as a central arena of cultural debate, I could make my thinking clear by saying that I've always (with some differences) supported the idea of education put forward by Allan Bloom in the 1980s in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I am strongly in favor of a book-centered, classics-centered Western education, starting in high school but including, certainly, anything that would call itself a "university education". This means I am against the political correctness that seeks to make the American education system a culturally neutral space where no tradition of thinking is assumed. Students in my America would start reading the Western canon in elementary school and would continue well into university. To imagine that a student could graduate from any university without having studied Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, the Bible, Enlightenment thought and the history of the American Revolution--to imagine this would be out of the question. Only on the grounds of a thoroughly Western learning would students be able to opt for study of other cultural traditions. University-educated citizens must first understand ideas before they can debate them. The pathetic level of discourse one sees in American political and public intellectual debates is an embarrassment in a country with such a high percentage of university graduates.

Most of my fellow Americans are such hard-wired anti-intellectualists that they would probably howl in protest at my defense of a canon-based education. For them, university is a matter of job training on the one hand, football games on the other.

I've lived overseas since the mid-1990s--the country I'm living in has its problems too--but still I don't feel I've missed out on much in the US. And what can I have missed--the glorious Bush/Cheney years, the rise of the Kardashians, Charlie Sheen? Give me a break. Though I had some hope when Obama was inaugurated, I see I was mainly mistaken. In fact America is an echo chamber that gets only more idiotic with each passing year, and Obama, if he is re-elected, does not seem likely to stand up to the oligarchy and push for any of the actual change he once promised. So rather than watch four more years of Compromiser-in-Chief up close, I'm grateful not to have to live there.

Go ahead, compatriots and sports fans, go ahead and tell me--"If you like Fidel Castro so much, why not move to Cuba!"

My answer is simple: Because I'd rather not live in Cuba, thank you. An isolated and authoritarian experiment in socialism, Cuba has serious problems, probably the main one being that it was built on a Leninist model. But Fidel's Cuba with limited free markets--Cuba with elections and a range of political parties vying for who gets the right to manage a largely socialist economy, a socialist economy guaranteed by constitution, that would be something else. And so, though I'm glad I don't live in Castro's Cuba, I'm glad I didn't have to live in George W. Bush's USA either.

Before closing, I'd like to return to the question of Christianity. As noted above, I'm a Christian, and this seems odd to many people who hear me talk about political issues. I really don't know why. In fact both my political leftism and my cultural conservatism are informed by my faith. As for the leftism, this again, I well know, is not the norm for American Christians. But so what? I myself find nothing particularly Christian about the things many other American Christians seem to support: free-market capitalism, militarism, greed as good, unbridled consumerism. Some Christians reading this now, maybe they'd want to say, "Hey, I don't support greed as good or militarism or unbridled consumerism!" Well, maybe you don't. But if you support the political status quo, especially if you have voted Republican, I don't see how you can imagine you're not supporting these things. Think about it. What is it that the policies of the American right are grounded on if not the belief that 1) greed is good and 2) American bombs bring peace, not war. Do you really think you don't stand for these things when you vote for the right? And do you really think my idea of Christian politics is somehow "weird" compared to yours? Have you ever read, say, the Gospels?

* * *
P.S.-- But might I, to raise the sense of contrast even higher, add Marx to that list of Western classics that should be required study? Certainly Marx was wrong about many things, but he remains a massively important thinker, maybe even especially now. Terry Eagleton wrote a fine piece on Marx last year:

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027

Haakenson Sighting: Check

2012-01-22T20:08:00.008+08:00

About 5 p.m. the drizzle coming down and I'm standing under an awning in front of a Taipei supermarket. Across the pavement loping toward me is a slim funny-looking Western guy with his Asian wife. He's wearing a black leather cowboy hat which doesn't really match his red windbreaker. The two are carrying big bags of groceries--snacks it looks like, probably bought to celebrate the Chinese New Year--and I watch them approach as I puff from my one small cigar for the day.

The guy comes closer and I notice he's also sporting white-rimmed glasses under the cowboy hat.

Then the guy comes closer again and I realize it's a high school classmate of mine from my home town, Harland, Wisconsin. It's Paul Haakenson, who I run into once every ten years.

Paul is now teaching Chinese to expat kids in Asia. His work has taken him from Taipei to Jakarta to Hong Kong. He's back in Taipei to visit his in-laws for the Lunar New Year.

I last ran into Paul about ten years ago on the north side of Taipei. Starbucks had come to Taiwan and I was sitting in one of their shops when I saw a guy at the register with a teeshirt with the name Haakenson on it--a name familiar from my high school days. I got closer and recognized him. Paul explained that he was living and teaching in Taipei. I hadn't even realized it. I'd also been teaching in Taipei for a handful of years.

I ran into Paul about ten years before that (which would be about 1992) on the outskirts of a Grateful Dead concert in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. I was taking my Taiwanese wife to see the Dead as part of her American enculturation, and Paul showed up near our car. I think it was then that I learned he'd been studying Chinese in university. Was he married yet then?

But still my clearest memory of Paul comes from around ten year before that (1982 or so) in the basement of Scotty Berendt's house back in Hartland. It was a high school party, and Scotty had been impressing the hell out of us on his drums. Paul was promoting a cassette he'd brought of a band I'd heard of but had never listened to: the B-52s. The song playing--which is forever linked in my mind to the image of Paul Haakenson in a yuppy plaid shirt grooving in a Wisconsin basement--was "Quiche Lorraine." I hated yuppies in those days and hated everything that smelled of the country club (still do: see here), but Paul redeemed both himself and his shirt by being a weird fringe kind of yuppy. And I soon came to love the B-52s, which I continued to listen to up through their Cosmic Thing album. Only a few months ago I called up their brilliant "Private Idaho" on YouTube after hearing the song at a pub.

I've no idea of Paul's impressions of or memories of me. Did he notice that I've finally aged, as I noticed he has? We are both in our mid-40s, and wrinkles are making their tentative early maps round our eyes. He mentioned he'd read some of my online posts (I occasionally email links out to my whole address book, and his email's in there too) but I'm not at all sure these emails aren't just an annoyance to him. His politics or his social or religious ideas--I've no idea of these things. All I know is I'll run into him ten years from now and there will still be that white-bread midwest impression the name Haakenson can't help but bring with it, combined with the odd fringe element Paul always seems to sport: the faint weirdness intended, perhaps, to laugh at the white-bread in himself: the B-52s mystique, the Chinese, the black cowboy hat--and what will it be in 2022?

See you then, old classmate.

Buy Paul's CD here:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/groovipauli

Romney Faces Hard Sell with SC Unibrows

2012-01-13T21:15:00.014+08:00

A Disassociated Press Report, January 13, 2012, Columbia, South Carolina

Fresh from victories in the Iowa and New Hampshire Republican primaries, frontrunner Mitt Romney faces a new challenge as the GOP contest moves to unibrow stronghold South Carolina.

In a state where more than 80 percent of Republican voters have the single brow genetic feature, new research shows Romney at a serious disadvantage against rival Newt Gingrich.

"Our study shows a clear pattern nationwide," University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Doreen Klein says. "Among voters whose eyebrows separate over the bridge of the nose, Romney has a 14 percent lead. But among those voters who have a single eyebrow stretching across the forehead, Romney shows less than 4 percent support. Gingrich meanwhile comes in at 59 percent."

The Gingrich campaign is making the most of South Carolina's strong unibrow presence with a series of aggressive TV attack ads.

"We're going to hit him hard," Gingrich campaign staffer Dave Carney said.

The first of these ads, unveiled Wednesday, shows Gingrich in a loincloth roasting slabs of an unidentified large mammal over a fire. The ad then cuts to footage of Mitt Romney in a Parisian restaurant speaking French to a waiter.

"I'm Newt Gingrich," the ad ends with the candidate standing before a cave painting of running bison. "And I know what's good for South Carolina."

Unibrow and South Carolina resident Tracy Klugian at a Tea Party rally to kick off the Republican primary. "I don't know who I'm supporting yet," says Klugian, "but I'm Republican all the way. We've had enough of these foreign presidents recently."

Unibrows have a long history in the Republican Party. In this undated file photo, ex-president George W. Bush is shown with the trait. Advisers later persuaded Bush to begin shaving above the nose.

Alligators

2011-11-23T00:41:00.007+08:00

An alligator is a moldy log with a serious attitude problem; it is an in-sink disposal on four legs.

Alligators were first created by breeding George Burns with a Plesiosaurus. That alligators love golf courses isn't just because of the ponds: it's a genetic inheritance from the father.

When alligators speak, they do so with George Burns' voice. But they speak only rarely.

In Florida I have personally seen alligators that can drive cars. They typically opt for vintage Cadillacs with Shriner emblems on the trunk. They drive slowly, almost like low-riders.

I once accosted one at a red light. He sat behind the wheel of his maroon Cadillac and had his window down. His baseball cap was a meager disguise.

"You're an alligator," I said.

He laughed and pulled out his huge set of false teeth to show me.

"Want a ride, kid?" he asked through gross gator gums.

"No fucking way," I replied with a smile. "But you have a good one."

"You too."

He slipped the teeth back in and the light turned green.

Mixed with acacia gum and inserted as a pessary, alligator dung is an effective contraceptive.

Certain alligators, those that abstain from mammal carrion, are allowed the possibility of becoming Angels when they die. I have talked with Floridians who have witnessed them "turning" just after death, rising up over the Everglades in a burst of beatific light, their long bodies still reptilian, their white Angel wings spread wide.

Hallelujah.

On Kenneth Bernard; Philip Roth

2011-11-21T22:17:00.009+08:00

Only an American could write a story as small-minded and moronic as Kenneth Bernard's "Preparations". I found this short piece anthologized in Sudden Fiction International. Utterly vulgar in its pseudo-intellectualism, potty-brained in a jittery post-Puritan way, I wondered as I read along how Bernard was ever going to get his narrator out of the muck the piece begins in. But the tale only got worse and worse until, in a paroxysm of dumb cliche, the writer used his last words to label poor Anya a sweaty pig as she mutters "guttural sweet Russian" to the dying narrator. The supposedly profound musings that take up most of the body of this story make me want to wretch.

I know I haven't even explained the gist of this tale. It isn't worth doing. I post this here because it's only rarely that a writer's work makes me want to throw the book at the wall. Bernard, alas, is the 2011 winner in this category.

* * *
Only an American could have written the bleak and stoic masterpiece that is The Human Stain. A daring and brilliant book, difficult to put down, there is yet something deeply untrue in it, impossible, something that never ceases to irk one as one reads. I think it's this: All Roth's characters are believable as people--all, that is, except for his protagonist Coleman Silk. Though he's built up biographically, step by step, one finally doesn't really believe Silk is possible. He's a character too mythically American to be quite real. Silk's Americanism, if we might call it that, finally makes him a monster--which may very well be the essence of Roth's art here: to have proven that the American myth of the self-made man, if pushed to its limit, becomes either hollow or monstrous. Or: To the extent we are truly individuals, we can only be examples of a foolish hubris.

I read The Human Stain with few preconceptions, as I don't know Roth's poetics. I haven't been moved to read much of Roth, so I've little background telling me what he might intend. This is probably a good thing: I can read this relatively late book without reading it as either an installment in an ongoing literary project, or as part of a developing lifelong thesis on America.

I will continue with American Pastoral and The Plot Against America.

Polar Bear

2011-11-13T20:11:00.007+08:00

O polar bear, how you have fallen! On a barren shore, all slush and mud, you bellow your rage at an empty sea.

Your ancestors were sleek white Hunters, their ears could trace a seal's heartbeat through the ice.

Your ancestors, o polar bear!

Their angry bones peek from melting drifts; they frown at your ragged fur.

Like a bathroom mat too tattered to wash, we'll toss you out with the old newspapers, o Once-Great Hunter!

The seals rejoice at your demise, for they are in the San Diego Zoo.

Who will clean your yellowed fur? Your pristine coat has ring around the collar; it's clear you've been scrounging in the dump again.

Don't you know the science is dodgy? Do you even know what dodgy means?

Your world melts slowly like a bar of Ivory soap; your pups are born hermaphrodite.

You'll have to be sharper than that if you want to make it in this Economy.

You lanky hungered dog, I see your ribcage!

Have you no shame? To show yourself in Public like that?

The Discovery cameras are rolling! Hide behind that outhouse, Bear!

"Drill, baby, drill!" the shiny faces cry as you begin to eat your kind.

"The science is dodgy," they say. "The science is dodgy." What's to be done?

Don't turn cannibal yet, o Hunter, for I have a Plan.

We gather up those who say it's so; we gather their Ringleaders first.

We give them placards to their liking: "Global Warming = Liberal Hoax!" "Save the SUV!" "God Hates Tree-Huggers!"--real red-blooded American placards, not the kind those OWS commies wave.

We send them on a special "protest cruise" straight to your muddy shore. They'll take their complaints right to you, o Bear!

Rush and O'Reilly and Sarah and Glenn, with a clutch of their blubbery friends. We'll give them bullhorns and necklaces of sausage links.

Listen to them as long as you like. I think you'll know what to do.

Would you like Tony Hayward along? Cheney? Would you care for Champagne, compliments of Goldman Sachs, execs of which will soon be sent your way?

They have their gripes too, you know.

When you've had your fill of their arguments and whatever else, o Hunter--when, in short, there's some flesh on your scrawny limbs--then we will get down to Business for real.

Then we'll do something about your melting world.

2007 photo of a starving polar bear, by Heiko Wittenborn.

Polo Shirts are Ugly

2011-11-09T23:00:00.018+08:00

Anyone who sees me day to day can attest to the fact that I don't know much about fashion. I'm pretty indifferent when it comes to choosing clothes, usually opting for black jeans, black shoes, and a black teeshirt with a shirt over it in some color approaching, well, black. But even given my limited concern for fashion, there are some things I can see clearly. And here's one of them: Polo shirts are ugly.

Why in hell, I wonder, would anyone wear a polo shirt?

If you're a woman, a polo shirt will just make you look ditsy and dull. It doesn't matter what color you choose or what you match it with. A polo shirt, even in bright yellow, makes you look boring and boxy and half-informed. So why would you ever buy such a thing? Beats me.

And if you're a man? Here things are even clearer. At the very best, a polo shirt will make you look like a nerd. Don't believe me? Take any given nerd and look in his closet. Half his shirt wardrobe will be polo shirts or your money back guaranteed.

Think about it. When a Hollywood director has to portray a geeky suburbanite or some loser trying to pick up a woman in a bar, he will almost always put the actor in a polo shirt. Why is that? Simple. It's because guys like this, in real life, usually wear polo shirts. Directors know this, and audiences know it too. (Well, at least those in the audience not wearing polo shirts know it.)

So do you really want to look like a geeky suburbanite? No? Then why would you ever put on a polo shirt?

If a polo shirt doesn't make you look like a nerd, however, it will almost certainly make you look like a dick. This is the other kind of guy who wears polo shirts. He wears them because he wants people to know he's in a yacht club or a has a pricey membership in a golf club. Actually he either wants people to know this or he wants people to think it. Truth is maybe the guy isn't in either sort of club. Maybe he can't afford the membership. But does it really matter? Because guys who join pricey golf clubs and guys who dream of joining pricey golf clubs both have pretty much the same personality. They are dicks.

If you are a man who often wears polo shirts but still aren't convinced they make you look like a dick, there's one way you can be sure: wear your polo shirt with the collar up. This will cinch the deal. Other than wearing a Nazi uniform, there's really no better way, through mere clothing alone, to make most people who see you immediately want to break your nose. A man in a polo shirt with the collar up is screaming out "I AM A TOTAL DICK" to anyone who sees him.

Still doubt that polo shirts are all that bad? Then try a little experiment. Take the first very cool person that comes to mind and try to find a photo of him online wearing a polo shirt. Go ahead. I'll give you a few minutes.

. . . .
So you're back. You say you did try the experiment and you did find photos of a cool person in a polo shirt. Well, that's because you probably chose someone like Pierce Brosnan. Obviously there's something seriously wrong with your idea of cool. Maybe you have more general work to do before you even bother thinking about changing your wardrobe. Maybe there are more fundamental issues that need to be addressed.

Okay, I know, I know. You googled "Obama" and found pictures of him in a polo shirt. But did you find any such pictures from before he got in the White House? You didn't, did you? That's because something happened to Obama, something kind of mysterious. Not only has he started wearing polo shirts, he's done all kinds of . . . . Actually I don't want to go into it here. But the point is: the Obama example doesn't count. Because sometimes people who aren't fundamentally dicks, who aren't dickheads in essence, can end up doing dick-like things. Or maybe what happens is they change slowly, or not so slowly, from being cool people into being, well, more or less dicks. It's hard to say. But the Obama example doesn't count.

Yes, I'll be voting for you again, Mr. President. But this time around I'm hoping for something more than Compromiser in Chief.
Back to my main point. And it's this: There's good reason guys like Tiger Woods almost only wear polo shirts. There are two good reasons actually:

Number 1: guys like Tiger Woods play golf.

Number 2: guys like Tiger Woods are arrogant dicks.

For me these two reasons tend to fold into one and the same reason. But this is ultimately a deep philosophical truth about golf that is too complex and abstruse for me to go into here. I'll leave it for another time. Let me just add two more reasons Tiger Woods deserves to wear only polo shirts: 1) the name "Tiger" is the most dickish name I've ever heard; 2) Tiger Woods has terrible taste in women.

In conclusion-- Why in hell did you ever buy those polo shirts? And why don't you just make dishrags out of them like they deserve? I leave you with this:

Bats

2011-10-31T22:00:00.008+08:00

What is a bat if it is not a meat moth having a fit under the moon; if it is not a small furred contraption ever on the verge of going unhinged?

Indeed a bat is a haunted rubber toy dancing to a strobe light; it is Hecate's own hand-puppet.

Bats are defiantly stuck in the 80s goth scene. Their ears are physiologically incapable of registering names like Boyzone, Britney, Kanye. "Who?"

Bursting from the hollowed trunks of long-dead trees, bats are truly text messages sent from the cell phones of Hell.

Will the iPhone 12 be able to decipher these floppy hissing missives? The iPhone 20?

"Look forward 2 seeing u. Sooner than u think ;) Alison"

No, your Mother can never, neither your anxiety-disordered Aunt, nor can your sister Carrie when she found the severed gopher's head in her lunch box--none can shriek more piercingly than the smallest bat.

Was denkst du, Fledermausmann? Müssen wir noch Heidegger lesen?

As a teen I dreamed such dreams, and if only I had their courage now, I would fulfill them, trust me: A one-room museum displaying only the cleaned and mounted jaws of each known bat species, under each jaw a photo of the bat and a sonnet in its honor.

A bat is a mole suffering a manic episode. A mole is a depressed bat.

Bats hang while they sleep upside down. Bats sleep while they hang upside down. Bats hang upside down while they sleep. Sentence 3 is the best.

And you, Kay Thiesenhusen, where are you now?

Felipe stands next to a Bismarck flying fox, the largest bat species.

我們的罪犯

2011-10-29T21:22:00.004+08:00

家裡太安靜，太乾淨，很無聊，我太太同意。我們去買個罪犯，真正的罪犯，跟我們一起住。罪犯有點貴，真正的罪犯，但我們還是買回家。

他很吵，一直吵：一樓吵，二樓吵。晚餐時他都大談白目的計畫。我們覺得很好玩。衣服丟在這裡，煙蒂丟在那裡。有一天我的皮夾不見:非常有趣。

過了一個月我們開始覺得麻煩：啤酒罐在這裡，衣服丟在那裡。鄰居一直抱怨，警察每天來問。我們決定把罪犯退回。不過店家不願意退錢；我們只能換別的罪犯。店裡有一個很矮的，看起來很聰明的罪犯；有一個禿頭打著太極拳的罪犯，也有一個穿深藍色睡衣，慢慢地搖晃身體的女罪犯。我想我們的罪犯比那三個好，所以我們決定不要退，就帶他回家。

可是我們的罪犯不高興。他好像有一點憂鬱，知道我們幾乎把他退回。他開始花很多時間在外面。我們聽說他開始學設計。過了三個月他設計的一個電燈得了獎。有人給他錢去歐洲。在瑞士他設計的肥皂盒也得了獎。他回家後變了一個人，有一點冷冷的。他穿的衣服都很時髦，他不喝啤酒，停止抽煙，吃晚餐時他幾乎都不說話；我問他問題，他用法文回答：真的變太驕傲，終於我受夠了，就對他吼：“嘿!你覺得我們會花四萬塊買這種無聊的罪犯嗎?”

隔天早上我們發現他離開了。桌子上有四塊和三個他得獎的肥皂盒，還有一封信。他寫說他要搬去和他的比利時男友住，並且和我們保持聯絡。

The Lion

2011-10-16T19:00:00.008+08:00

The lion is the king of the beasts. Enough said.

Or almost. The fact is there really isn't much to lions beyond Sovereignty.

The lion, gruff and belching murderer, rests prone on the plain like a hand saw on a workbench. Presently the saw's teeth are not wrenching their way through the soft lengths of pine nearby, but at any moment they might. And that's the central fact about lions. What else is there?

Idle like our hand saw--i.e., when the lion isn't hungry--he will often become chatty. This is another fact about lions we might raise. Some animals find it the most annoying single thing about their sovereign.

"Hot day," the lion says to a zebra he's sauntered up to.

"Yup," the zebra says, his throat going tight.

Typically the lion will then start to complain about his "insane schedule," how some down-time would be nice but he just "can't manage it with all that's going on," how his wife is "driving him nuts for a vacation," etc., etc.--the point of all this being: "Hey, zebra, I know it's tough for you. But don't think just cuz I'm a lion that I've got it easy. Not at all! It's hard being a lion. It's hard work."

This spiel does have some validity--in a good mood the zebra will admit it--but the questions still nag: Why when you look at lions are they usually just resting on their bellies, digesting the latest kill, idly scanning the plain? Do their small bursts of activity every few days--can we say that these really count as work?

Years ago leafing through a faded Polish magazine in a small town library I came upon an illustration of two male lions in a beauty salon having their manes curled. I couldn't read the caption, but the image has ever since defined the creature for me.

Possessing unchallenged power, the lion has little to do but concern himself with Appearances. Yes, you will find that ninety percent of the lion's grotesquely swollen head--really too large for the rest of its body--is used to house a grossly outsized Ego. The lion is the vainest of animals, outdoing the peacock by miles.

But so what? What can be done about it? Lions themselves will tell you proudly how "necessary" they are for the health of the ecosystem. Convinced of their importance, their centrality even, wielding those jaws and claws besides, does anyone suspect the lion's going to give up sovereignty any time soon?

It's true the animals sometimes talk of Revolution--unseating the arrogant felines that have ruled them for too long. But wiser animals fear a revolution may not improve things: that in the power vacuum following the bloodbath the hyenas, one way or another, would take over.

Would hyenas perhaps be better than lions? The question is widely debated among animals keen on this sort of discussion. Most animals, however, faced with the uncertainty of what change would bring, opt for accepting lions as their overlords, for keeping things as they've always been. Some animals even claim the lions' sovereignty is somehow "natural".

Me, I wouldn't go that far.

Chitter-Chatter

2011-10-12T21:53:00.009+08:00

The squirrel: furry forest friend or pestiferous urban vermin? That's the topic of tonight's show where we let the viewer decide.

"Hopping his Merry Way across the sidewalk and onto the trunk of the lone Maple, I see my Friend the squirrel come to break the paved Drear of my city block. I breathe a whiff of emergent Nature."

"What sound is more frightful than the shrill chitter-chatter of the mad squirrel that dismembered the trash bag behind my Building? It dragged off a carcass of pizza crust that I watched disappear round the corner like my Hope.

"The center of Power is shifting and we do nothing to stop it."

Though it has long been known that squirrels spread Rabies to pets and children, it is only recently that researchers have proven the amazing ability of these rodents to spread Gossip.

Studies done by Hunt and Greimas at the University of Michigan (2010) suggest that an even minimally dense squirrel population can move an item of salacious Rumor across an urban space and into the suburbs even faster than traditional print Media.

The squirrel rests on its haunches, eating the Chestnut held in its forepaws. Its tail, curved into a stiff "S," stands to attention behind the upright silver body.

When the tasty tidbit concerned a prominent or fashionable young Woman, squirrels were found to spread the slander at a speed and efficiency approaching that of the Internet. This led Greimas to conclude in a Dec. 2011 interview in Zoological American that: "A squirrel is a suburban housewife trapped in a rodent's body."

Hunt, however, has disagreed with his this assessment, stating in a counter interview in Nature: "The soul of squirrels cannot be gendered or classed this way. A squirrel, in my view, is a small mammalian incarnation of the god Hermes. That is how we should treat them. Parkside libations, peanut butter, the works."

A squirrel is the pilonidal cyst of the animal kingdom; it is a compact yet motile furball of pent-up office park Rage.

Greimas: "Note the beady black eyes always on you, the twitching. You approach the tree from one side, it scutters round to the other. You go to the other side and it scutters back, the twitching tail all the while sending Messages in every direction, mean backstabbing bytes of Gossip."

Hunt: "In his role as psychopomp, Hermes led the dead to the Underworld, his caduceus held aloft and guiding them like the squirrel's tail. If only we could cleanse our eyes to see. If only we could read the divine chatter. The word hermeneutics, after all, comes from Hermes."

To move through life like a squirrel leaping branch to branch, Philosophy my tail keeping balance, my path developed by a fractal logic, out to the perimeter of one Oak, then working toward the center of Another. To accept each day with its acorns and near auto misses, ever aware of the boy with the Pellet Gun who lives down the lane.

Greimas: "My research points to one of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors as most effective. I've especially shown good results using Sertraline, which can slow the gossip-mongering of these rodents significantly."

"C'mon, kids!" Buddy Squirrel exclaimed, waving the crowd to the platform. "C'mon! The Acorn Train is about to depart! It's time to go to NutterNutterLand!"

Hunt: "United with Thoth, he brought us the Corpus Hermeticum."

Greimas: "Within ten years, I predict prudent city councils will be earmarking funds to medicate their squirrel populations."

Whether Greimas or Hunt's approach will best help us appease the Wrath of these small tree-hugging mammals, whether they are friends or chattering foes, there is one thing I think we can all agree on here: Squirrels would be nowhere without their extravagant tails.

If Evolutionists point to the tail as having evolved to help the animal balance, we can point another important survival-enhancing aspect of the tail: It's the one thing that makes squirrels cute.

Only raze the fur from a squirrel's tail and you get a largish tree-climbing rat. How long would a neurotic, hygiene-obsessed species like ourselves have tolerated such a creature in our parks and school yards, chattering at our children and denying the Trinity? How long would this verbose vermin have survived?

Whether parkbench backbiters or avatars of Greco-Roman divinity, we'd have exterminated the lot of them back in the Fifties.

詩 (要很大聲地唸)

2011-10-07T21:57:00.011+08:00

作家作家前無前無古人前無古人古董古董店作家寫出一家古董店賣二手字二手漢字寫錯的漢字便宜便宜作家賣顧客進來她不要漢字她看不懂漢字寫對寫錯對她都一樣她喜歡耳朵只要耳朵尤其是左邊的耳朵她開始捏作家的耳朵捏捏妳捏我的耳朵妳捏我的妳捏我的耳朵捏我不想我不想賣我不想賣妳捏我耳朵捏漢字漢字二手漢字寫錯的漢字左手寫的漢字我都賣我都賣很便宜我寫出一家古董店古董店前無古人我已經開張的古董店賣所寫錯的漢字二手漢字左手寫的漢字我不願我不願意我不願意賣我寶貝的捨不得剪掉的耳朵妳捏妳捏捏我的耳朵不沒有刀這裡沒有刀只有筆是我寫岀的筆我不願意賣我不願意你聽見了沒有?

J.S. Porter and Jewishness

2011-09-17T23:37:00.014+08:00

A new book by J.S. Porter is always something to celebrate. His Lightness and Soul, just out this month, does not disappoint. Full of surprises and keen insights, Porter's book takes on a difficult and long-debated subject: the literary character of Jewishness over the recent seventy-odd years. Subtitled Musings on Eight Jewish Writers, the book doesn't shy away from throwing very different figures into the ring: some of the chosen writers are avowedly Jewish, others deny their Jewishness, and one, as I will indicate below, can only be called Jewish in an oblique or ironic way.

If like me you've long cherished Jewish literature, this is a book you should read--for the sheer joy of it. Porter is one of our great expositors of the pleasures of reading. Like Alberto Manguel, considered in one chapter here, Porter teases out and explicates the multiple physical joys of book reading: the tactile attractions of the printed word; the magnetic draw that shelves of books or stacked volumes on a windowsill have for zealous readers. As in his Spirit Book Word (2001), he recounts his personal relationship with the books in question; this proves a particularly effective starting point for getting at what is singular in each writer he chooses. What we get as a result is eight in-depth readerly appreciations, eight critical portraits that give us what we, as readers, are really after: new insights into writers we already know; reasons to take up new writers we might not be familiar with.

For myself, Porter's chapters on Leonard Cohen and Harold Bloom were especially enjoyable. I found echoes of my own readings as well as new assessments I hadn't considered (both Porter's own assessments and those of the many people he quotes: this writer is a great collector of critical remarks). Probably most worthwhile for me, however, was the chapter where Porter, strategically, put John Berger in conversation with Simone Weil. Berger, the ever down-to-earth British art critic, and Weil, the doggedly idealistic left-wing Neoplatonist (I'm aware how odd my characterization is) illuminate each other as they illuminate what a commitment to the underdog can mean in terms of life and literary practice. What was especially useful for me here was the new introduction to Berger, a writer I haven't read since university and one I will now spend some time getting to know.

The problematics of what is Jewish make for only part of the intellectual interest of this book. Given that Porter's concerns are mostly readerly, the question of how and why these writers are Jewish, though repeatedly addressed, must finally be answered by the reader--and answered on what are perhaps mainly literary or textual grounds. That there are no easy answers should be no surprise: What, after all, do figures like Harold Bloom and Simone Weil have in common beyond a certain amount of DNA going back to the ancient Near East? Weil probably would have found Bloom a bombastic aesthete. As for Bloom's assessment of Weil, I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's pretty grim.

Does the Jewishness of these writers reside in a certain spiritual register, a certain half-tangible something inherited even against the grain of what may have been the writer's very secular family history? Or does it reside rather in a particular deep-seated respect for texts and debate--a tendency to take the written register as something nearly as important as the real world? As George Steiner wrote in My Unwritten Books (and as quoted by Porter in his first chapter):

The tablet, the scroll, the manuscript and the printed page become the homeland, the moveable feast of Judaism. Driven out of its native ground of orality, out of the sanctuary of direct address, the Jew has made of the written word his passport across centuries of displacement and exile.

Whatever the Jewishness at issue here, it probably can't reside in a religious identification. Of the eight writers considered, only Leonard Cohen claimed to be a practicing Jew, and even he was occasionally called upon to defend his Judaism against other Jews who didn't appreciate his Zen practice or the often Catholic symbolic register of his work. His words to these doubters, which Porter quotes, are magisterial:

Anyone who says
I'm not a Jew
is not a Jew
I'm very sorry
but this decision
is final

I use the word magisterial to characterize these lines. And it is apt. Who if not Leonard Cohen possessed majesty in his artistic struggle--in its brutal honesty, its questing up and down the scale of high and low, in its utterly authentic spiritual need?

Much of Porter's chapter on Cohen is dedicated to the novel Beautiful Losers. Porter brings out the scattered brilliance of this work: its annoying side and its undeniable genius; he quotes critics who were maddened by the book even as they sought to put a finger on its power. Here, one feels, is perhaps the closest Porter's book gets to defining Jewishness. Jewishness as a kind of openness that nonetheless answers back; a willing spiritual wrestling with the many perverse angels of the day-to-day. Clearly discernible in Cohen's work, is this not also the Jewishness that, in part, made for the greatness of the first books of the Bible? Is it not this willingness to admit in writing to what is unassimilable? To always portray the here and now along with the painful elements that don't fit? This, I believe, is a large part of what is "Jewish" in significant Jewish writing.

In considering John Berger's essay on Simone Weil, titled "A Girl Like Antigone," Porter gets at what may be an important element of Berger's style, and again approaches what I sense as the Jewishness that really underlies Porter's book. I will quote at length:

Near the close of [Berger's] meditation on Weil's short life of thirty-four years, he returns to her . . . apartment on Rue Auguste Comte where, when writing, she could see the rooftops of Paris. In a single sentence, he captures the unity of her conflicting tensions with the insertion of a conjunction: "She loved the view from the window, and she was deeply suspicious of its privilege." The word and holds the tension and reintegrates the splitting of love and shame. They belong together

On a previous occasion Berger made similar use of the and. I'm quoting from memory. He said once about a farmer in his French village that the man loved his pig and ate his pig. And joins, it honors; it doesn't resolve or excuse. You can love a pig and eat it. You can love a window and feel ashamed for having a privilege that many are denied. But is a different kind of conjunction. It qualifies, prioritizes. Berger prefers and; he prefers it stylistically and morally. (67-8)

In the blank space after these sentences, as I sat reading Porter's book on the Taipei subway on my way to work, I scribbled the words that came immediately to mind: "As does the Old Testament." Berger prefers the and; he prefers it stylistically and morally--as did the J writer and, to a degree, as did the redactors who wove the J text into Genesis, Exodus and so on. The and is one of the great stylistic supports of ancient Hebrew prose (and poetry).

Above I indicate that Porter's book treats of eight Jewish writers, but this isn't quite true. Included as well, as somehow "Jewish," is Edward Said, the great Palestinian activist and intellectual. Said himself, toward the end of his life, joked that he was perhaps the "last Jewish intellectual." The ways in which this may be apt underline the degree to which Jewishness, as viewed in a literary-intellectual light, may indeed be a particular comportment toward difference, an openness to debate: again, Jewishness as a stance similar to something I believe Leonard Cohen has in spades--the willingness to wrestle, and to do so in words, regardless of whose hip may get dislocated.

Check out J.S. Porter's Lightness and Soul at Amazon.com

Go to J.S. Porter's blog

Which Are Most Precious

2011-09-12T22:01:00.004+08:00

And if you ask me which are the most precious things, will they really come into mind so that I may tell you? Or are they maybe too deep for me even to name, much less grasp?

But already that you can ask what is precious to me--this is precious, no?, this possibility of asking and waiting for an answer. And my hearing you ask and taking time to think how to answer--already these are a gift that is mysterious, hard to define.

Is language a gift or a trap? Is it to have this tool for understanding the world and myself, for constructing the world? Or is it to have been constructed myself, this "tool" that has already made me even as I begin to use it? "Eric," "you," "me," "mama," "no".

Is language, this precious gift, is it also this tool that is a system both flexible and stringent, open and learnable, and that is also a mystery? Is it a tool, as I believe, that brings you closer to me, or is it rather one that puts you behind names? "Student," "teacher," "mine," "brother," "you".

And if you ask me about God, is sensing God's presence a gift or a delusion, I would say a gift, and to me precious. That God's presence can be sensed, and that God made himself known in Scripture--again in language, but language that brings one closer to Another; or separates, if one is not careful.

But can we really be careful in this way, careful so as to know when we bring closer and when we push away?

Also the mystery of the Bible that always challenges me: Which of its sentences are true, the voice of the Spirit, and which are those that are human writers trying to speak the voice and getting it wrong? But this mystery--isn't this also a gift? The mystery in all these things--is it not part of what is precious?

Also to have someone to love, and the gift of this love lasting many years: my wife. This is precious to me.

And the mystery of our connections to each other: all of us, all humans, family and others, coworkers and strangers; the mystery that we can communicate and sympathize with each other in language and other ways, even if only a glance. This is a great gift and still always a mystery.

That I can hear the voices of people around me: feel and hear the shape of their different voices in different languages. Again: the mystery of the way these different languages have made the world (or trapped it?), in some ways the same world, in other ways different for each language and each person.

Also the gift of writing, that I can hear the voice and feel the shape of the world of others long dead, friends who died hundreds of years ago, friends who left me this gift of their texts, and I, also a friend, give them voice by reading them.

The gift of all my friends, many of whom are my students: watching them develop and try to make sense of the world. Watching them laugh and joke. This is a great gift: something precious.

Of course the gift of health and sustenance, not to be overlooked just because, through undeserved good fortune, I have had them. Many, through undeserved bad fortune, have not. May I learn to do more to help them.

The gift of all the more physical things, but I mention them last, too many to list: the smell of the earth and trees; the beach: its hot sand and cool water meeting; the taste of whisky, coffee; all the other tastes.

Your English is Suck

2011-09-11T23:46:00.002+08:00

September in Taipei.

After teaching English here for fifteen years, I've gotten to see a handful of my students get into the best university in Taiwan (which is really quite hard) and another handful get into overseas universities and grad schools in England, the US or Canada. Of course this makes me feel good, especially seeing a kid I taught basic English doing grad work overseas. But there's another side to teaching them English. As English ability continues to spread here, I see my recent groups of students memorizing hip hop lyrics and movie tags. And I hear then using more pop English in their conversations.

I'm friends with a lot of them on Facebook. Following their conversations in comments, etc., is good for my Chinese, and sometimes they even break into English. This morning one of my teen students, a girl who doesn't study much, got into an argument with her schoolmate, a girl I don't know. After 20 lines back and forth in Chinese, getting angrier and angrier, they finally got so angry they broke into English:

A: You are shit!
B: You eat shit!
A: No I don't eat YOU. No way girl!
B: You are fucker than shit!
A: Huh? What is fucker than shit???
B: YOU ARE!!!
A: Your english is suck!!
B: You fuck suck shit! Fuck OFF then!!!
A: Learn english, bitch!

Maybe I could work this up into a TV ad for my English school. Voiceover: "Is your English fucker than shit? Well then. . ."

Rhino

2011-09-09T22:15:00.006+08:00

A rhino is anything but a dumb beast.

It stands impassive, always on flat ground, eyeing you like an elder who is too disappointed to speak.

A rhino is a natural gnostic, having been constructed by an amateur god who set out to make a dinosaur.

Knowing it has been welded together from the junk in a minor god's scrap yard, the rhino is under no illusions about mundane being.

Unlike the gazelle, fooled by its own lithe grace, the rhino knows it is trapped in matter.

This makes it resigned, and normally serene. But a rhino is also capable of sudden violence.

Placed low on the sides of its barge-shaped head, a rhino's beady eyes give it 290 degrees peripheral vision. This means it is subject to being annoyed by a wider range of things than you or I.

"I don't mind you hanging around here," those eyes say to anyone keen enough to read them, "but if you start making a nuisance of yourself, I will gore you with my horn and trample you under foot. Sorry."

A rhino is a creature that typically remains unimpressed.

It watches the cheetah's kill with disdain, almost as you would watch a young CEO showing off his Ferrari.

Rhinoceros with Salvador Dali. Photo by Phillippe Halsman.

Giraffes

2011-08-17T21:41:00.007+08:00

A giraffe is a slim character, chancery style, a lank loiterer always in the way.

Never trust a giraffe with your car keys.

A giraffe is a pillar of dust and dung, feigning gold; it is a broken bamboo rocker wrapped in faux fur; indeed a giraffe is a pair of crutches designed by Louis Vuitton. Overpriced, and far too long to fit under any armpits.

Giraffes are the supermodels of the Serengeti. Their diet of twigs and leaves gives them just enough energy to strut back and forth. If you expect more, bring cocaine.

Giraffes may look peaceful, graceful even, but the truth is they are bored stiff.

If a giraffe could speak, this is what it would say: "It's always the same game. The acacia tree grows taller to keep us from eating the leaves, then we grow a little taller to reach the leaves. Then the acacia tree grows a little taller again and so on. I see no end in sight. We're fed up with it. You got a light?"

Yes, giraffes would smoke if they could.

I'd love to watch a small herd of giraffes just smoking, ignoring the acacia trees as best they can, sunk in ersatz ennui.

Do not believe the Animal Planet cranks. The little knobs on their heads are NOT atavistic antennae from an age when giraffes rented themselves out as radio towers to enterprising Australopithecines.

Giraffes are the Floss-Picks of the Sun.

"I'm at Marcy's place and we're up in her bedroom on the second floor. And things are starting to heat up, you know? And I look and there's this giraffe head in the window watching. About two feet from the screen. Just standing there smoking and watching us. So I yell out, 'Hey, fuck off, you!'"
"Did it go away?"
"You bet it did. Caught the perv red-handed."
"Red-hoofed."
"Huh?"
"Never mind."

The Chinese word for giraffe is "long-neck deer". The Chinese word for owl is "cat-headed eagle". The word for dolphin is "sea-swine". I'm not kidding you.

Giraffes have no end of trouble with escalators.

If they opened a Kentucky Fried Giraffe, four kids could gnaw on the same drumstick simultaneously.

If you interbred a giraffe and a banana, you'd get an oblong sofa pillow covered with soft fur of a dappled yellow and brown. It would probably be marketable.

My Small Gripe with Gabriel Gudding; My Larger Gripe with Sam Harris

2011-08-14T00:00:00.045+08:00

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS (ADDED 10/12/11):

On a web page promoting his new book I see that Gabriel Gudding is listed as teaching "ethics" at Illinois State University. My recent interactions with Gudding make me wonder how such a match-up can possibly work out: Gudding and ethics. How can a man who believes so strongly in censorship teach ethics in an American university?

Gabriel Gudding demonstrates a deep-seated contempt for one of the founding tenets of our democratic culture: namely, the belief that open debate is good in itself; that the free expression of ideas is an inalienable right. As he's proven repeatedly, Gudding's first reaction to ideas he disagrees with is to try to censor them: he will erase them from the debate and then, which is even more telling, he will try to erase the evidence of his censorship. I have seen him do this enough times now to be finally disgusted by it. My disgust in this case is mixed with a deep disappointment, and since I have taken Gudding's work seriously in the past, my disappointment makes the experience almost painful for me.

The fact is that I'm an admirer of Gudding's poetry and have written on it. Now, however, I'm convinced Gudding is a hypocrite, and find it hard to see a match between the poet and his work. His work certainly has power (or did: I haven't seen any of his recent poetry) but as for the man himself--teaching ethics? How do students who don't agree with his preconceptions fare when he comes to correcting their papers? I'd be curious to know. Given his pigheaded and immature sense of his own rightness, how can he conduct anything like a balanced discussion in an American university ethics class? I'd like to see it.

This post is titled "My Small Gripe with Gabriel Gudding". That's what I titled it when I first began keeping record of my debate with him. Now I don't feel the gripe can be called small. The following entries trace the development of a thoroughly failed conversation that, had it been conducted in good faith, could have proven worthwhile for all concerned. In some other world I suppose.

* * *ORIGINAL POST:

I know it's a small thing to be even typing about. Still I am quite disappointed.

I've long been an admirer of Gabriel Gudding's work, having taught it in my classes and written about it (esp. his 2007 Rhode Island Notebook). I share many of Gudding's notions of what our poetic writing should be now: his universalizing satire; his crackbrained playfulness; his hilarious portraiture of animals and the importance he accords them. Gudding's skill at mapping the borders of the speakable in our American idiom makes him one of our best currently working linguistic geographers.

In some things, however, I tread quite different ground from Gudding. In the matter, for instance, of religious belief. In terms of religion or "spirituality" or "spiritual practice" (terms Gudding may prefer, I don't know) Gabriel practices vipassana meditation, whereas I am a Christian. My Christianity has often been unorthodox, but certainly it is in the Christian tradition that I find the most compelling explanations of what we are to do here as humans.

I do not consider Gabriel Gudding a sub-par mind because he hasn't adopted Christianity; likewise I'd hope that those who practice vipassana wouldn't be dismissive of Christians. The thought is a challenging one for many of the politically correct, I suspect, but it's actually true that one can have worthwhile discussion with people who subscribe to something as unprogressive as Christianity.

I've been friends with Gudding on Facebook for a time, after first meeting via email. Things I post on Facebook are open for comment from friends, that's the idea after all, and I believe most people think of wall posts this way. Especially if one has a wide swath of friends, over 500 say, one should consider that wall posts are open to a range of comments.

Gabriel posted a youtube link featuring part of a talk by Sam Harris. Harris, a major figure in the "New Atheism" movement, has been arguing for years that the three Western monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, should be vigorously criticized and eventually hounded out of existence because they are demonstrably false and even dangerous in our modern world. It is important to note that Harris is not merely a critic of fundamentalism (I too am a strong critic of fundamentalism) but is against religious liberals or moderates too, whom he sees as people pretending to have faith. I've read Harris' major early work The End of Faith (2004) and many of his articles and interviews since. I know his arsenal of arguments and am not very impressed. I find him repetitive and reductive, and think his attack on religion in the name of science is misguided and arrogant. If you want to hear Harris giving some of his best soundbites--he almost always says the same things--you can do so here.

Gudding posted this same link under the title "Christianity, Judaism, Islam as Rationalization of Barbarity." It was mostly the dismissive title of the post that irked me. After I listened to Harris' remarks, which taught me nothing new, I posted the following:

Simone Weil, Erasmus, Desmond Tutu, Rumi, Theresa of Lisieux, Thomas Merton--a few prominent rationalists of barbarity.

Gabe replied to me:

Your irony notwithstanding, Eric, I think what you write is, on its face, correct: the people you mention are, in a very real way, each an apologist for a system of domination. My sense is Harris would say that what makes /some/ of the writings and ideas of the thinkers and activists you mention useful is not their theism in general but their moral perspicuity in particular. And that moral sense does not stem from religion. Harris answers this common objection within the first 90 seconds, or so, of the video.

Gudding's reply suggests that I don't quite understand Harris' position on the innateness of ethical impulses. But I do understand it; I just don't think it's significant in the current argument, given that aggressivity and selfishness can also be shown to exist in infants. Harris may point out that humans don't need religious systems to teach them empathy, that such empathy comes with being human. But so what? By the same token, selfishness and aggressivity also come with being human, so why, in this instance, imply that the these latter traits are learned from the Bible or the Koran or organized religion, but empathy is not. It's a very clear case for both Gabe and Harris of wanting to have their logical cake and eat it too. I posted the following rejoinder:

Yes. Harris would have it that our moral sense is innate but that our depredations stem from our scriptures. It's a kind of Rousseauism almost. And here again, which is typical for him, Harris suggests that the reason people believe in one of the Western monotheisms is simply that they are looking for a list of rules to teach their children. This is incredibly reductive. The grounds of faith or belief are deeper and wider; they are other. I find Harris to be a windbag. He is a philosopher to the same degree that Pat Robertson is a saint.

Now Gudding could have continued our discussion by clarifying just how he understands Harris' logic (what is the relevance of invoking the innate in this context) or by taking up some other point on which he disagreed with me. But he didn't. Instead he just deleted my post. He removed my remarks from the page because, I suppose, he found them unworthy of the forum of discussion he had opened by posting Harris' speech to begin with. By quickly censoring my remarks, Gudding ensured that the page was left with my one initial comment followed by his correction of my "common objection" to Harris. Though presumably my subsequent points weren't worth debating, in any case Gudding thought they couldn't be allowed to stand as the last word. So he just censored them.

It's a little thing, I know, but still it has really disappointed me. Scrubbing one's blog or facebook page of unwanted comments is something I associate with the likes of Sarah Palin, not a champion of the vagaries of voice like Gudding. I think it would be prissy (to use a word Gudding likes) to suggest that my remarks deserved to be deleted because they were somehow offensive. If I call Harris a "windbag," it's because I think this characterizes him perfectly. Complacency plus rhetorical skill equals windbag. Gabriel Gudding, a poet, should know this formula. And who is more complacent than Sam Harris?

What are the ethics of Facebook posts and the debates that ensue? I think they're clear in this case, and that Gudding did something shabby by erasing my remarks. But of course if one agrees with Harris that Christians and other monotheists are anathema in a modern society, then it becomes rather easier to justify censoring their contributions to any given debate. Just as, given how clearly things are laid out by Harris, it wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing to begin burning their scriptures, in the hopes that finally these people will just go away and a New Age of Enlightened Scientific Spirituality may dawn.

Since I am a Christian, it is assumed that I disagree with Sam Harris' arguments because I don't understand them. And as for those who lack understanding, what they write in the public arena--isn't it better to simply make it disappear? Doing so is not so much a matter of censorship really as it is a matter of good editing. This is also part of Harris' attitude to religious discourse--the more clearly arrogant part. For him there is something uncouth about people who would cherish the tradition left us by the Bible. After all, many of the accounts in the Bible can be shown not to accord with science, so what other than stupidity could lead people to find in it the spiritual treasures they claim? Presumably Harris and his cohorts in the New Atheism movement think they could do better in the matter of writing texts worthy of humanity's worshipful attention. The arrogance of hoping to supplant the Abrahamic traditions with the skimpy models and metaphors and neurological maps Harris has to offer is almost embarrassing.

Richard Eskow at Huffington Post has done a good job of sizing up Harris' contribution. Particularly useful is the way Eskow uncovers one of Harris' most egregious vices: the man's knack for setting up strawmen which he can then easily knock down. Harris, in fact, has spent much of his ink over the past decade drawing caricatures of modern believers, then vigorously attacking these same inky figments of his own discourse. A pseudo-philosopher like Harris can make a public career from such intolerant, reductive stuff. Poets have more serious work to do.* * *As of 8/23:

Surely story is not the stuff of science. I'm not so sure. . . . If story is not the stuff of science yet is about how we get on with making our ever-changing livings, then science, not story, must change. --biologist Stuart Kauffman, Investigations

Since I've ranted as much as I have above, there's nothing for it but to make a complete record. When I noticed Gabe had deleted my post, I politely protested by posting the following: "Was going to add something to this discussion, but I see you've gone and deleted my most recent remarks, so why should I bother?" Gabe then deleted this complaint. I intended to leave it at that, not planning to further engage Gudding on the question of atheism. But another participant, John Poch, a poet and creative writing teacher like Gabe, began to post under the Harris link, and I followed their back and forth until finally I decided to add something more. My addition concerned what I saw as Gabe's too narrow notion of "story". Gabe, this time, left my remarks stand and replied to them, adding some links that might, he believed, better educate me. I didn't however find these links very educating. I think Gabe understands what I'm getting at in my last postings, but I don't think he comes close to agreeing with me that story is always already inclusive for humanity. Anyway, I post the whole discussion here for the record:

Eric Mader: Simone Weil, Erasmus, Desmond Tutu, Rumi, Theresa of Lisieux, Thomas Merton--a few prominent rationalists of barbarity.

Gabriel Gudding: Your irony notwithstanding, Eric, I think what you write is, on its face, correct: the people you mention are, in a very real way, each an apologist for a system of domination. My sense is Harris would say that what makes /some/ of the writings and ideas of the thinkers and activists you mention useful is not their theism in general but their moral perspicuity in particular. And that moral sense does not stem from religion. Harris answers this common objection within the first 90 seconds, or so, of the video.

Eric Mader: Yes. Harris would have it that our moral sense is innate but that our depredations stem from our scriptures. It's a kind of Rousseauism almost. And here again, which is typical for him, Harris suggests that the reason people believe in one of the Western monotheisms is simply that they are looking for a list of rules to teach their children. This is incredibly reductive. The grounds of faith or belief are deeper and wider; they are other. I find Harris to be a windbag. He is a philosopher to the same degree that Pat Robertson is a saint. [deleted by Gabe]

Eric Mader: Was going to add something to this discussion, but I see you've gone and deleted my most recent remarks, so why should I bother? [deleted by Gabe]

John Poch: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot...here's your system of domination, Gabe.

Gabriel Gudding: Hi John. I don't see the point you are making. Is it that these four despots killed millions of people because they had at various points been adherents of Marx? And that this somehow has to do with the Abrahamic religions? If so, that is a non sequitur. The following link might save you some time. It's a list of common objections, in the vein you attempt, to atheism, along with their counter-arguments: [link: "Common Objections to Atheism and Counter-Apologetics" at wiki.ironchariots.org]

John Poch: You might admit what happens in societies that eschew religion, in the societies that were the most adamantly atheistic. I make no claims about Marx. I find it appalling that you could support argumentation linking Abrahamic religions to barbarity, but you would deny that atheism has anything to do with nearly 100 million people killed. Recently.

Gabriel Gudding: John, have you watched Harris's talk?

John Poch: I watched it. It's a very limited and skewed view of Western religions, especially Christianity. The fact that he says there is very little worth in the scriptures is ridiculous and incredible for a supposed learned person. I find much beauty in the scriptures, much love, forgiveness, and the greatest story ever told. Harris is an apologist for a system of domination whether he knows it or not. Recent history shows that if we take God out of society, it crumbles. Morals crumble. (Note the atheist leaders I mentioned above.) The most charitable nations aren't those atheist counties he mentions. They might have less high crime rates, but I don't think he proves this has anything to do with religion. And his first assumption is wrong, as the scriptures don't teach that morals are an escape from damnation.

John Poch: Don't give up on stories, Gabe. Some of them are based on a true story.

Gabriel Gudding: Absent evidence, those stories, John, are lies and fantasies. You can purport that the story you were told (versus some other religion's) is factual. That doesn't make you right. It just makes you ignorable. And foolish.

Eric Mader: "Absent evidence, those stories are lies and fantasies." Think about the line you're drawing here. I submit, Gabe, that the belief that you or I have rights, or that there is such a thing as rights, is grounded on a story--a long and very valuable story retold in the Enlightenment but one which itself has no "evidence" (in your sense) to ground it. To be honest about it, there isn't really reliable evidence to prove much beyond Descartes' Cogito--if that. The scientific method on which you and Sam Harris think we must depend is the working out of but one among many stories--a story that is very useful for some things and irrelevant to others. In terms of science as a ground for ethics, we have plenty of inspiring examples from the 20th century, to which John also referred, and which should make us think twice. Do you really believe the scientific method is your most valuable story genre? Your meditation practice is also grounded on a story, Gabe, a kind of narrative you've told yourself about how the mind or the self should be, and a kind of practice that puts this narrative into action. Being that this practice was communicated to you in language, there are necessarily parts of it grounded on metaphor rather than anything like evidence. And language being a deeply metaphorical phenomenon, we may even say all of it, all of your notion of how vipassana is valuable, is metaphorical. Thus to accuse Christians of believing in something that is "only a story" is a pretty paltry jibe. In my mind, it is paltry to the verge of being meaningless. There are many levels on which stories can be engaged, many different kinds of epistemology according to which they may be valued.

Gabriel Gudding: Hi Eric. Given what you write here, I find myself wondering if you really know about the meditation I practice, the nature of scientific method, or the state of current moral philosophy as it is informed by neuroscience, if you are suggesting that scientific method is just a story, one among many, or that vipassana is based on a story, that science can say nothing about values, or that scientists just tell each other stories. In terms of discursive models (as a metaphor of comparison), it might be more accurate to say that scientific method is a rigorous dialog, a disciplined conversation, that does not admit mere assertion, no matter how compelling or widely-adopted a story, if it does not accord with facts. In that very clear sense, no, it's not a story. // In terms of the 20th C: which army's belt buckles bore the inscription, "Gott Mit Uns"?; how many religious wars were fought?; and, prior to that, how many continents were not conquered in the name of a god? (answer: one). // As for your other assertion, that science can say nothing about morality, take 20 minutes and see if any of this makes sense to you: [link: Sam Harris: "Science Can Answer Moral Questions" video at ted.com]

Gabriel Gudding: Or (for the others reading this) this superb panel: [link: "The Great Debate Panel" at thesciencenetwork.org]

John Poch: A good book to read is Can Man Live Without God? by Ravi Zacharias.

Gabriel Gudding: Does it contain chapters on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? Or is it a part of a whole series on living without Magical Superbeings.

Eric Mader: Have gone through most of your links and listened to the Harris spiel for TED and I'm still not much impressed. Harris, I think, is arguing more persuasively against cultural relativism than he is against me. / I think the notion of "story" I was getting at in my remarks of 8/18 is wider than your reply suggests. You offer the discursive model of dialogue as better suited to what science is. And so: a dialogue developed over time becomes what? A drama, or kind of story. Again, the reason the dialogue is engaged to begin with depends on its participants accepting a certain STORY as to its value or as to what it is they are engaging in. Which is not to say that I think the history of science is "just a story" like any other--say, similar in weight or structure to the story of Hansel and Gretel. No, I think it is obviously very weighty, and quite specific as to its "genre rules," if you will. But a story it is, nonetheless. It is a story about truth-finding believed in by its adherents: certainly rightly believed in when it is kept within its purview of verifying fact statements about things that can be tested by repeatable experiments. Often wrongly believed it when it is taken as the main provider of human (say: existential) truths. / And I'd also add: neither is the Christian story similar in weight or structure to Hansel and Gretel. Again, as with science, there's a difference of weight and "genre rules," and there's a huge difference in the truth value placed on the story by those who engage in it. / Given your enthusiasm for these somewhat blunt atheist apologetics (appropriate perhaps for arguing with fundamentalists or people with a weak sense of logic), you may consider the points raised below by Marcus Borg about "fact fundamentalism" to be worthless and just more proof of how we as a culture are (or should be) at "the end of faith." I myself don't agree with Borg about many things, but he's come part of the way toward explaining how we non-fundamentalist Christians understand the truth of the Bible. I review one of his books here. Borg speaks to some of the issues raised by Sam Harris-style discourse: Link: Marcus Borg and the Language of the Bible

Gabriel Gudding: Hi Eric. I wdn't say Harris is arguing against cultural relativism per se. The argument is against culturally prevalent disrespect for facts about well-being. The allies are anyone with respect for facts and evidence -- anyone who doesn't pretend to know things they don't know (life after death, invisible Magical Superbeings (Satan, Djinns, Devas, Archangels, River Spirits, Jehova, Wotan).

Gabriel Gudding: I suppose I should add, though I can't believe it really needs to be said, that if science is just "a dialogue developed over time... A drama, or kind of story," then I imagine successful surgeries, vaccinations, calculus, the cure for polio, sanitation, lightbulbs, dentistry, and the mindboggling intricacies of solid state physics that go into making your computer -- are also just stories. Attempting to reduce the host of hard-won, centuries-long projects housed under the umbrella of "science" -- projects that have saved and bettered countless lives -- to "a drama" (presumably so you can intellectually equate a favorite antiquated text about virgin birth, a magical savior hero and an apocalypse, with a world-wide and centuries-long effort to better ourselves) is ambitious. I imagine a lot of ambition is necessary to maintain these fantasies.

This was not however the last posting. Understandably disgusted by Gabe's suggestion that the Christian God and the Tooth Fairy were in the same intellectual category, John posted remarks to the effect that such sarcasm was "unbecoming" to Gudding, that the comparison was "ignorant," and that he would no longer debate such issues with him. Gabe, again donning his Sarah Palin garb--which perhaps looks good on him, I don't know--deleted John's remarks.

* * *As of 10/10:

This week John Poch and I again debated Gabriel Gudding on the question of atheism, and again the results were so frustrating, our efforts were so unscrupulously manipulated by Gudding, that I've decided to play the Wikileaks card once more and post the whole dialogue here for the record.

Our debate started when Gudding posted a link to an interview with Harvard professor Steven Pinker about the latter's recent book Our Better Angels, and as part of the link called out to John Poch and I by name as two readers who may be interested to learn something from Pinker. If this was not an invitation to 1) read the link and interview, and 2) weigh in in the comments section, I don't know what such an invitation would look like. In short, John and I were directly invited to enter a discussion of the arguments Pinker raised. Once we did, however, Gudding did his best to make our points disappear by either deleting them or making it impossible for them to make any sense in context. As you will see. I post the whole discussion here:

GABRIEL GUDDING: Pinker interviewed about his book on the remarkable declines in violence since the rise of liberal democracies - gainsaying both neoconservative and theistic arguments, as well as some on the far left, as to how bloody modern nation states are. [link to Sam Harris' interview with Steven Pinker regarding Our Better Angels]

John Poch and Eric Mader might both find this interview interesting, and the above-mentioned talk at EDGE.org, as Pinker specifically addresses the repeated accusations from the christian right (which are variations of the supposition that the 20th century is remarkably violent because it is marked by atheism). Specifically this:

[quoted from Pinker:] First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.

Third, according to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

Fourth, many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe.

When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights. I present data from the political scientist Rudolph Rummel showing that democracies are vastly less murderous than alternatives forms of government.

ERIC MADER: Gabe: Yes, I mostly agree with Pinker here. The liberal democracies that developed out of the West's Judeo-Christian culture have proven far less prone to systematic bloodshed than the other modern political systems. Ultimately we can thank Christianity's highly developed concept of the individual for bringing us this political order, just as we can thank the West's hard-won distinction between church and state for keeping us free to choose what we will believe.

I remember John and I responded to your previous pro-atheist posts by pointing to an inconvenient truth: namely that it was precisely the atheistic political movements of the last century that committed the most horrendous atrocities. I think this truth still stands regardless of Steven Pinker's neat demographic arguments about percentages of world population slaughtered in the Crusades vs. the gulags or the Cultural Revolution. So I will reiterate: it was NOT political movements based in Judaism or Christianity that brought us the nightmares of modernity, but rather movements that found their legitimacy precisely in some version of "science". In the Soviet Union and China, it was the economic-historical "science" of Marxism (tweaked by Lenin in the one case and Mao in the other) that lent legitimacy. In Nazi Germany, it was a "science" of race and the relative strengths of the different races that did so. Both these movements championed "science" as a new and more reliable foundation for political order.

You may balk about Nazism in this regard. But the attempt to link Nazism to Christianity is, in the essentials, misguided. German Christians were certainly found in support of the movement, but it was also German Christians who offered the most principled resistance. There's a reason we don't see crosses paraded in the footage of Nazi marches and rallies. The swastika is not the cross: the Nazis were offering something sleekly modern and new: a neo-pagan Volk movement that sacralized the state and its leader, a movement that had "science" to back it up. I don't see Jesus as a significant element in this movement.

You imply in your remarks that when John and I offer these kind of arguments about the mayhem wreaked by atheism in modern history that we are presenting the arguments of "the Christian right". Well, John is not on the right, and I for one am solidly on the left. I understand, Gabe, why you'd like to round all us Christians up in the same corral--it's easier to dismiss us as morons then--but the truth is that it's not possible. American Christians cover a wide political and intellectual spectrum, and even many of those who ten years ago could predictably be put in the Republican camp are breaking ranks.

But back to the issue at hand: I submit that political powers that go to "science" to generate their ethical ground will most likely bring forth nightmares. We've seen it very clearly in the last hundred years. Sam Harris seems to me especially glib in this respect. The more I read or hear of him, the more I am convinced: Harris is a rhetorically gifted adult trapped in a teenage intellect. I wouldn't want to live in any modern state that grounded its ethical and legal norms on neuroscience.

[Infuriatingly, Gudding deleted this lengthy reply of mine, then posted the following, which he also soon deleted:]

GABRIEL GUDDING: Sorry, Eric, I ask that you reply to the content of the interview, rather than what you find ideologically incorrect about it, if you want to post about it here. Also, please avoid ad hominem attacks if you want to post about it here.

ERIC MADER: I did reply to the content of the interview. Your judgment as to what is ideological does not provide a neutral ground for discussion. I'll very reluctantly remove my remarks about Sam Harris, since you consider them ad hominem, and repost my original reply, which you just deleted, as follows: [Here I reposted my comments, without the remarks on Harris]

JOHN POCH: Dear Gabe, It certainly doesn't take a Christian to look at the world and see that the governments who reject Jesus' most ardent principles are the ones who, by far, murdered the most people. If you think Jesus (the Prince of Peace) message in any way would "advocate" millions of murders, you haven't read His words. People certainly misinterpret words and facts, as you do in your argument against Jesus. You say "fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism". Happily? You believe that? The totalitarian movements you unwittingly defend are most certainly a rejection of Jesus' teachings and his life. Speaking of fairy tales...if you think people are evolving (better) morally, then you have based your thinking on a narrowly chosen set of data (SEE Pinker/Harris) based on one false assumption--religion is at fault for the bad stuff and science gets the credit for the good! But what should it matter to those who take science's natural selection as THE WAY? Honestly. I can't believe you are still in denial about what atheists did in the last century. You can pick whatever proportions you want, but atheism has a bloody and disgusting RECENT history. Hopefully Sam Harris can change that with his new brand of it. Christianity admits to a fallen world that is humanity's fault as a result of our bad choices. You could try to pin it on God, but if He doesn't exist, you end up with us Christians to blame. The truth is: it's our own fault. All of us. Of course, you have to keep up your wishful thinking that it's only the religious who are at fault. Yet we have a Redeemer who can wash it away. White as snow. Gabe, you get your ideas about religious people from Time Magazine or Atheist blogs or Daytime TV or some weird notion in your head. I will remind you of the Salvation Army's motto: "Doing the Most Good" as a parting thought. Atheists don't show up en masse to help those afflicted by natural disasters. Christians do. Come, let us reason, sayeth the Lord. --Isaiah

ASHLEY CAPPS (poet and Gabriel Gudding's wife): "It certainly doesn't take a Christian to look at the world and see that the governments who reject Jesus' most ardent principles are the ones who, by far, murdered the most people." But the point is that those "murderers of the most people" weren't acting as agents of atheism, or as explicit rejecters of Jesus, any more than they were acting as rejecters of aliens or rejecters of astrology--their atheism, where it was in fact atheism, was irrelevant to their agendas, and where they rejected mercy, kindness, fairness, and humanity, they were *not* rejecting "Jesus's most ardent principles"--compassion and goodness do not come from or belong to Jesus! So to point to despotic movements in which the leaders were not acting on explicitly religious ideas, and call those "atheist movements", and then compare the atrocities of your so-called "atheist, Jesus-rejecting" movements and the atrocities of Christians, in order to say, "atheists have done and do more harm than Christians" just seems like willful obfuscation, an incorrect conflation that produces false dichotomies.

ASHLEY CAPPS: "Atheists don't show up en masse to help those afflicted by natural disasters." ?? Really? How could you know this? No one would know, actually, because when atheists show up to help, they aren't out there advertising their goodwill as representative of some sort of divine virtue deriving from divine superpowers. They don't show up as ambassadors of atheism. But they do show up, and I would challenge anyone to prove that atheists don't show up en masse. Most of the atheists I know are active volunteers on behalf of the welfare of both humans and animals, and the daily disasters that beset them.

GABRIEL GUDDING: Thanks to both John and Eric for replying. I am fascinated by christian and other theological reactions to actual data, having seen what these delusions do to people. So, a response to Eric, leaving off John's reply for now. Eric, you say: "The liberal democracies...developed out of the West's Judeo-Christian culture that liberal democracies." My response: this is just factually wrong. Wikipedia link: origins of liberal democracy

JOHN POCH: Hi Ashley, I believe that compassion and goodness actually do come from and belong to Jesus, who is God and Creator, and from whom comes the world, good. I partly agree with you that the despotic movements did not act on explicitly religious ideas, as these movements and political institutions were devoid of true religion which has at its heart the idea of human life as sacred and are therefore much more open to perpetrating atrocities. But I wonder if it hasn't been shown that many believers have been and continue to be imprisoned, tortured, and murdered for their faith in communist countries.

GABRIEL GUDDING: Thank you, John, for your fascinating replies. Where Eric's response was mostly factually incorrect, you are claiming the universe was created by an omnipotent celestial hominid who is your personal protector -- an ape who has consigned billions of other apes to eternal suffering. Thank you for sharing these notions here.

GABRIEL GUDDING: From a co-founder of a liberal democracy who apparently didn't get Eric's memo about liberal democracies being Judeo-Christian: "And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."

ERIC MADER: As for Jefferson's line about the virgin birth, I've quoted it myself when debating dominionist Christians who try to paint the Founders as Christian. Most of the Founders, I know, were deists, or in any event showed very little commitment to Christianity in its strict orthodox version.

And why would I, as a Christian, bring up this example of Jefferson's skepticism? For one, I do not like to see people making up American history to suit their religious or political position; secondly, I highly value separation of church and state. As a Christian, I know Christianity is best served by not becoming the official religion of a major power.

As for the place of Judeo-Christianity in the development of the modern West, I'm not thinking of Weber, as you suggest in your note. I will try to get something you may consider "factual data," but this is a matter of a more sweeping interpretation of historical movement and intellectual history. In any case, I believe you would acknowledge that dominant cultural orders often bring about resistance to them within which resistance there remain key elements of the order being resisted. A good example of this is the rise of fundamentalism (Christian, Jewish, Islamic) in response to modernity. Karen Armstrong demonstrated this dialectic very well in THE BATTLE FOR GOD.

In the case of Europe, culminating in the 18th century, the dominance of the churches, especially the Catholic Church, led to an intellectual resistance culminating in the Enlightenment, which resistance itself depended on an insistence on the value of individuals, of individual right and responsibility, that would have been unthinkable without the Christian cultural background/context of particular notions of the individual (the individual as precious, as responsible, as standing before God). Also essential for these Enlightenment thinkers was a concept of the state as something independent of religious authority. This had precedent in medieval practice, and again was buttressed in new ways by the Reformation. Crucially, the modern states were founded on the idea that different denominations had the right to co-exist within one political body. Again, all of this was a matter of complex developments within CHRISTIAN culture, developments that needed particular predominant concepts of "individual," "right," "domain," "soul," "God," to even have occurred. No liberal democracy would have arisen in either Islamic, Buddhist or Confucian political orders.

[Here Gabe did something rather odd. He went and deleted his first remarks on the Harris interview with Pinker--those remarks where he specifically called out to John and I as people who'd be interested in what Pinker has to say. I don't know why Gabe did this, but the affect it produces is pretty obvious. It changes the nature of the whole discussion. With his introductory remarks intact, John and I are responding in good faith to an intellectual challenge from Gudding. He wants to hear from us, and he gets to hear from us. Once Gudding's opening challenge is erased, however, the whole dynamic of the post changes. Now, to anyone who comes upon it, it will appear that Simple Gabe innocently posted a link to a new book by Steven Pinker when suddenly, wham, in came these two Christians who started attacking Gudding, or the book, or . . . well, it's hard to say-- Really, what are these two going on about? In short, by removing his own opening remarks, Gudding cuts the debate as a whole away from its context. Its context is erased. Also, there's a marked change in Gudding's tone in his reply to my remarks on the Enlightenment:]

Gabriel Gudding: Eric, it might be easier to read the book before refuting it. It just came out yesterday. Give yourself some time.

Eric Mader: Granted. But I don't think the issue at this point is so much Pinker's book itself, but more general questions of liberal democracy, Judeo-Christian culture, atheism, and how these relate to each other and especially how they relate to crimes against humanity in history. All of us in this discussion are educated enough to have positions on these questions without reading Pinker's book in specific. Harris' interview, in any case, is there to be read.

Gabriel Gudding: that's. what. the book. is about. in part. hey: maybe read the thing before getting all in a bunch that it doesn't accord w/ yr christian worldview. live a little.

John Poch: I find an unseemly sarcasm in this argument, so I'm bowing out. I haven't found this very fascinating, except for Eric's cogent and open discussion. Gabe, you could be a little more thoughtful and sensitive, as you wish Christians to be. I am happy to be part of a wonderful company: Dante, Milton, Hopkins, Smart, Wilbur, Heaney, Milosz. And yet, Larkin remains one of my favorite poets. He respected a desire: "a hunger in himself to be more serious." Your(and Ashley's) ridicule of my faith doesn't seem to come close to this but maybe it's just this awkward facebook forum. I have heard it said that one of the strategies of the new atheism is to shame the faithful by aligning them with base superstitions. I hope you do realize the problem with this. There are universities, entire libraries full of investigations and thoughtfulness about our faith, and billions who are believers, where no one treats the Easter Bunny or Spiderman this way. I ask for a little respect, even as I give science a great deal of respect. But maybe that is not possible with your worldview. I thank you for the challenge, though, as I do not worship blindly, and I hope to comport myself as the Apostle Peter suggests, "always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence". If I have been irreverent, I apologize, as I do have that wacky view that God creates each of us in His image.

[After which post, John noticed that Gudding had deleted his initial remarks.]

John Poch: I feel it necessary to delete all but the last of my posts here. Gabe has changed or eliminated the context of this debate by deleting his original post and other parts of it. I'm sure he meant nothing malicious by it, but it is quite unfair to the discussion.

Gabriel Gudding: John, It's not sarcasm -- just a lack of respect for your superstition. Your faith demands respect it doesn't deserve. So there are many books: There are (and were, before they were burned by religious zealots) also libraries full of books on Zeus, Apollo, astrology, Hanuman, Mithras, Zoroaster, Islam, witches, dowsing, alchemy. They can't all be right. Yet you claim the one true religion (as do they all). And your god is an omnipotent celestial ape ("man" is created in god's image, so god is an ape). So the lack of respect stems from:

(1) Your narcissism. That you alone are right, of all those above. And your god is also a hominid who created everything. Crazy. Without any evidence.

(2) Your faith is brutal. Your ape god consigns billions of people to hell who don't believe as you.

(3) Where a supposition is made without evidence and respect for truth, it can be dismissed without evidence and respect for the non-truth. If you can provide proof of your celestial ape, produce it. But don't demand respect for something that is on its face ludicrous. It's adolescent.

After this last post by Gudding, all of John Poch's posts were deleted. I believe by John himself. I understand John's decision to remove himself from a debate that had seen such direct mockery of Christianity, and one that, finally, was being skewed by selective erasures.

But what is my own place in this tangle? And why have I posted all of this here? If I've done so, it is mainly, as indicated, for the record. Gudding himself has little respect for the record: he quickly airbrushes out opposing ideas the way a Stalinist photo editor would airbrush out figures purged from the politburo. I don't think this Soviet comparison is going too far either. Having read plenty on the New Atheism, I now suspect that both Gudding and his mentor Sam Harris would be more than willing to send religious people to re-education camps if they were ever given the power to do so.

The arguments in our debate are one thing; they can speak for themselves if viewed in sequence. But I want to ensure, finally, that I'm not misunderstood as to this issue of making a record of these arguments.

Gudding finds both John and I ridiculous because we are Christians. He finds it hard to treat religious people with any intellectual respect. Of course this is obnoxious to John and I, but I, for my part, would acknowledge that it is his right. Though the culture he grew up in as an American owes many of its key ethical strengths to its Christian roots, Gudding certainly has the right to think Christians are laughable. That's not my main issue with him. What has incensed me, and finally convinced me that he is a hypocrite, is his enthusiasm for censorship. I don't recognize his attempts to make statements disappear; I don't recognize his right to this particular instance of airbrushing. If I spend fifteen minutes of my time writing out ideas regarding a subject important to me, especially if I've been more or less invited to do so by someone who disagrees with me, that person will not get away with deleting any of my ideas from the discussion. If someone wants to make my faith and intellectual grounding look ridiculous, I invite him to try, but he will not then in addition make my answers to his provocation disappear.

And further: I refuse to acknowledge Gudding's right, having taken part in a dialogue, essentially an organic structure of discourse moving back and forth between participants, to erase even his own previous statements. He does not have the right to provoke debate, then remove his provocation so as to make those who responded to it look unduly aggressive. This to me is another key piece of the ethics of our interactions here below. Dialogue is to be respected as one of the foundational activities of humanity: it is one of our most essential modes of being in community. Gudding with his sub-standard philosophical abilities might not get this last idea, but his lack of philosophical rigor here is beside the point: he is responsible both for respecting others' right to speech, and for what he himself has said.

I will also argue that the fact our debate took place on Facebook, in the context of his "wall," does not change these basic ethical points. Gudding may want to argue that this was not a public debate because it happened in the context of a space shared only by his Facebook "friends". To me this changes very little, for two fundamental reasons: first, Gudding's friend list runs to over two-thousand people. Facebook dialogues in such a context are more or less public. Second, to the degree that one wants to argue this way, it impoverishes the public arena: it impoverishes the very ideas of free speech and the public good that is open debate and discussion. It is one of the (perhaps ultimately unfortunate) facts of our public life that many of our significant debates will take place in the arena of one or another participant's Facebook wall. A Facebook wall is rightly presided over by the person who opened it, but that does not mean this person then owns the discourse that occurs thereon. If the person posted an item to "Public," it is in effect just that: publicly debatable. I think this particular ethical aspect of Facebook walls is pretty clear to intelligent people, even people shallow enough to admire the likes of Sam Harris. A further comparison might put the issue in context. As follows: I would never consider taking a lengthy email correspondence and putting it online without all participants' agreement. To do so would be clearly wrong, as someone writing email to me may intend the content of the writing to be kept between ourselves. And so I would never do it. But was our debate on atheism here a private thing? It was not framed as such, nor conducted as such, because it wasn't such. There is no such thing as a private correspondence that simultaneously has thousands of potential viewers. The obvious conclusion: Gudding has abused his Facebook controls to censor and manipulate what was in essence a free discussion. We might expect a person with little understanding of our public life to debate like this, but when a teacher of ethics and poetry at an American university does it, it is good reason to call that person out as a hypocrite.

七月在佛羅裡達

2011-08-12T22:07:00.008+08:00

July 2

我在台北已經十五年忙著寫英文。現在回到美國休息一個月 , 我可以練習一下用電腦寫中文。可是 . . . 很慢!寫這兩句已經開始頭痛。

July 3

每次來到佛羅裡達州讓我覺得自己蠻瘦。

July 4

我坐在我媽的花園抽著煙 , 看著 David Foster Wallace 寫的諷刺小說 The Broom of the System 。這裡有點熱 , 但是我不能在客廳看書 , 因為我媽在看電視 (Casey Anthony trial) 。花園裡四邊可以看到孌色龍 , 可是這些變色龍太懶惰 , 不變色 : 在淺綠色葉子 , 米色石頭 , 藍色的椅子上 , 牠們保持同一個顏色 : 半綠半棕色。

July 5

我今天帶鄰居兩個孩子去看電影。他們想看"變形金剛"，可是票都賣光了 , 我們只能看戲院另一部電影"變性金剛" , 一部泰國片。孩子覺得很有趣 , 可是回家後他們的媽媽罵我半天。

Quote of the day: "I wish you'd think about what you say instead of always just saying what you think."

July 6

我媽是個很保守的七十歲的基督徒。雖然我自已是個比較開方的天主教徒 , 但是我們不常討論宗教的事。因為她好幾年有類濕性關節炎 , 媽身體很多關節（手指，膝蓋）是人造的。她走路十分鐘 , 要坐下什息 ; 所以我每年來拜訪她 , 我們最常的活動是看書和看 DVD 。我們相處的蠻好 ; 只有政治的事我們不同宜 : 講到 Obama 她很快發脾氣 ; 她恨他。然而 ,對我來說，是她支持的共和黨引起了美國現在的問題。我想避免討論這個主題 , 可是沒辦法 , 她每兩天一定要罵我是笨蛋支持 Obama 。

July 8

我媽兩隻貓很喜歡我。牠們應該知道我對貓過敏 , 所以想取笑我一下。我坐在沙發上看電視時 , 有一隻來咬我的腳趾 , 另一隻在沙發背上接近我用尾巴徐徐地打我的頭。過了十分鐘 , 我打噴嚏。我媽說 : "Aww, aren't they cute? They LIKE you."

July 21

前幾天我寫幾句有關我媽花園裡的變色龍。變色龍是每天可以看到的。但是我今天在公園看到一隻我沒着過的動物 : 我看到一隻孌色狼。

To Sum Up

2011-08-02T10:46:00.009+08:00

There are idiots in every country in the world and idiots can be annoying or even dangerous.

Sometimes idiots even become presidents or national leaders. In that case, millions of people will suffer.

It is important to know how to recognize idiots and to know what kind of idiots they are, so that you can protect yourself and your loved ones from danger or many wasted hours.

But I don't really want to write about idiots here, what I want to write about is pandas. Pandas are not really bears, like most people think, but are actually cats pretending to be bears. They are large, stinking vegetarian cats posing as bears so as to appear more special.

Pandas should be illegal. The only thing worse than a panda is a Kung-Fu panda. And the only thing worse than that is a Kung-Fu panda in 3-D.

How long are you going to let them fool you? They are going to eat through all the bamboo forests in the world and then they will start eating domestic livestock and children. There are videos to prove this.

That pandas are cats and not bears should be obvious to everyone by now. All you have to do is look in the encyclopedia.

Cats are actually not even mammals. What they are is reptiles that have evolved fur so as to appear to be mammals. Cats may seem very cute when you look at them, but that is just an act. When humans are not looking, cats commit all manner of evil and unhygienic acts.

If you see wild dolphins in the ocean, you may want to swim near them, but this is not a good idea because wild dolphins might not like you and also sharks often follow dolphins because they feed on them.

If they think you are being a pain, wild dolphins can kill you by butting you with their heads. But even if the dolphins ignore you, the shark may interpret your swimming which is less graceful than the dolphins as the movements of a dolphin having a seizure, and the shark may then attack you because it thinks you are easy prey, which is just about right, you stupid New Age twit.

Some authorities believe that cats are actually trying to take over the universe.

Chameleons that have not encountered predators for a long time may become so lazy that they forget how to change color. Such chameleons are good for nothing and do not even deserve to be called chameleons.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Do not be fooled.

The Jurors Speak

2011-07-06T04:26:00.004+08:00

Casey Anthony's 'Bella Vita' tattoo.

Juror #3: Thing is, most of us here, we just felt, well, we felt there was a REASONABLE DOUBT that Casey didn't do it. I mean, it might not of been her is all. For myself personally, I think it's very possible a girl might clean her trunk with chloroform--especially, you know, if that trunk really stinks.

Juror #11: Yeah, I gotta agree with you there. I once let a few packs of ground beef in my trunk for ten days and, whooo, I'm tellin' ya, I wish I'd o' thought of chloroform myself.

Juror #4: Chloroform ain't that hard to get is all I know. My brother Zeke, he uses it all the time to sedate gals down at Randy's.

Juror #7: Whoah, girl! Randy's? I'm down at Randy's every Friday! I think I know your brother--Ned, right? He's a hoot!

Juror #4: Yeah, Ned. He's got plenty o' chloroform in his trunk, and he ain't no murderer. He ain't never killed no one, least not as I know.

Juror #6: I been to Randy's a few times. Can't say as I know Ned. But for me, well, whether Casey really done it or not, that's one thing, but it shore would be a pity to send a girl with such nice tits to the death chamber.

Juror #1: You got that right, Don. I mean, we here in Orange County, we got a regular deficit o' gals like that. This ain't no Miami up here. We can't afford to gas gals like that.

Juror #12: You guys are jis NAUGHTY! You shouldn't let yourselves be swayed by stuff like that! The fact is, most of us, we chose Not Guilty because someone else might o' feasibly done it. I mean, they couldn't PROVE BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT that Casey done it. That's just how it is.

Juror #6: That's true.

Juror #12: As for myself, I'm wondering about that meter reader. That guy was a MEDIA HOUND. And you know what they say--how criminals go back to the scene of their crime. Well, that guy just kept goin' back to look at that skull. How many times that guy go back there?

Juror #4: I'm thinking it was drowning. That girl loved that pool too much, and they just didn't keep that door locked. That poor girl drowned, and then the meter reader probably saw it and decided to get famous by putting the body in the swamp.

Juror #1: It is certainly possible that meter reader got into the house through the same door Caylee got out. He had to get in to get the laundry bag to wrap her body in. Those meter readers, you gotta keep an eye on them always. They see a lot o' things from their job description, they're lookin' in everybody's yards and windows, and a really important question that comes from this case is--What kind of other trouble you think meter readers might be gettin' up to? We gotta keep a better eye on them.

Juror #8: After what that girl's father did to her, how she escaped her TRAUMATIC THOUGHTS by creating all those fantasy friends, I been thinkin' this is really what they call a case of MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER. I don't care what the doctors said, that girl just couldn't of made up so many fake people. She's a SCHITSAPHRENIC.

Juror #6: Well, I'd shore be willin' to help her with some massage therapy is all I got to say.

Juror #12: Shut your pie hole, Don! I jis told ya this is not the place! You wanna talk like that, you wait till Casey shows up down at Randy's, then you go offer her your massage therapy an' see what she says!

Juror #1: I'd shore buy her a drink. I'm waitin' for it! I think bein' a juror an' all, she owes me one.

Juror #6: Now there you're thinkin'!

You've been in Taiwan too long if . . .

2011-06-20T23:30:00.008+08:00

1. You stop conjugating verbs.

2. You look both ways before crossing the sidewalk.

3. You turn left from the right lane.

4. 70 F feels cold.

5. You see three people on a motorcycle and figure there's room for two more.

6. "Squid" sounds better than "steak."

7. There are more things strapped to your motorcycle than you ever put in a car.

8. You drive on the shoulder to pass traffic.

9. The main reason you stop at a 7-11 is to buy tea eggs.

10. Firecrackers don't wake you up.

11. You can distinguish Taiwanese from Hakka.

12. You consider fish chins, drunken chicken and black fungus to be normal menu items.

13. Taxi drivers are considered "good drivers."

14. You've seen versions of this list before.

15. You stop and look both ways before driving through a red light.

16. "A", "an" and "the" are optional parts of speech.

17. You wear out your horn before your brakes.

18. The police call you to get information about other foreigners.

19. You know which place has the best noodles and duck meat at 3:00 a.m.

20. You speak Chinese to your foreign friends too.

21. You own a karaoke machine.

22. You leave the plastic on all new purchases.

23. Forks feel strange.

24. The shortest distance between two points involves going through an alley.

25. People don't see you for months, and when they do, they don't ask you where you've been.

26. You hear Chinese remakes of Western songs before you hear the originals.

27. You stare at other foreigners.

28. Over half of your clothes were bought at night markets.

29. You become an expert on bug zappers: the best brands and where to get them.

30. You have an arsenal of subtle verbal dodges to deflect taxi drivers from prying into your personal life.

31. You know which turn signal should be on when reversing the wrong way down a one-way street.

32. You get homesick for Chinese food while away from Taiwan.

33. Praying at a temple for a winning lottery number becomes a regular thing to do.

34. Other foreigners give you a funny look when you tell them how long you've been here.

35. You can't think of any good reason to leave.

36. The Statute of Limitations has expired and you still don't go home.

37. You understand that smiling and nodding is Chinese body language for "Go away and leave me alone."

38. You've spent more time on the island since 1990 than most of the Taiwanese you know.

39. Locals are surprised to find out you can't vote in the upcoming election.

40. You never bother to ask locals questions like: "Is that north of the park?" or "Is that on the east or west side of the campus?"

41. Pizza just doesn't taste right unless there's corn on it.

42. Your preferred parking spot is on a sidewalk (and you get upset when someone else parks there).

43. Most meaningful conversations take place in doorways or on slow-moving motorcycles.

44. Your job title has more than three words.

45. You think the service in restaurants isn't that bad.

46. You're always the first on the elevator to hit the "door close" button.

47. You start cutting off the gravel trucks.

48. You eat squid on a stick.

49. You no longer send home bizarre and humorous articles from the paper.

50. You think of walking down the sidewalk as a sport.

51. You spend more time driving on the lines instead of in between them.

52. You read books from back to front.

53. You start to like Kaoliang more than XO.

54. You think packs of dogs are cute.

55. You are back in your home country and you say "hsie hsie" instead of thank you.

56. You think that all babies have flat heads in the back.

57. You think that $3,000,000 NT for a golf club membership is a steal.

58. You drive like this all the time.

59. You think that Taiwan is really trying to protect endangered species.

60. Your pinkie nail is over one inch long.

61. You catch yourself telling a taxi driver to hurry up.

62. You hum along to the tunes in the taxi.

63. You think walking up Yangmingshan looks like fun.

64. You think it's normal for people over 30 to zigzag down the sidewalk.

65. You can tell the difference between spring rain, plum rain, and the rainy season.

66. The last time you visited your mother you presented her with your business card.

67. You can tell, just by looking, which moon cake has the egg in it.

68. You feel nervous and giddy when you get around fresh air.

70. Everything you own is pirated.

71. You get used to the habit of not paying any tips while traveling.

72. You can read and write romanized Chinese in three different systems.

73. The red light is merely suggestive to you.

74. You greet people by inspecting whatever they're carrying or telling them how fat they've gotten.

75. You can no longer tell the difference between a cracker and a cookie, or toast and bread.

76. You stop telling people about the giant cockroach you saw.

77. Metal scaffolding at construction sites seems much more dangerous than bamboo scaffolding.

78. You can tell the difference between different foreign accents in Chinese.

79. Your parties have an agenda, but your meetings don't.

80. Getting in an accident, you tell the ambulance driver which hospital to take you to.

81. You stumble going up a flight of steps that are all the same height.

82. Rats are considered "wildlife."

83. You salt your fruit.

84. You don't much mind drinking beer with ice cubes in it.

85. You don't expect to get workable directions, whether in English or Chinese.

86. You wear your coat backwards when riding a scooter.

87. You make elevators go faster by boarding first and taking over the controls.

88. You're very concerned about not losing face.

89. The words "Ice Cream" never enter your head when you hear the garbage truck.

90. You don't feel comfortable using a urinal unless there's a woman mopping the floor behind you.

91. You say "Wei?" instead of "Hello?" when you pick up the phone.

Any you'd like to add to this list, feel free to do so in the comments. --E.M.

Pearl Milk Balls

2011-06-02T22:35:00.023+08:00

The people are all in an uproar
The talk shows are flooded with calls
From parents irate
Who cry it's too late:
"Our sons have pearl milk balls!"

The government's caught with its pants down
Unsure just where the blame falls
Or who holds the buck
For having raised up
The boys with the pearl milk balls

The "hormone" was doled out slowly
From thousands of street-side stalls
That sweet chewy drink
Was not what they think
It's given them pearl milk balls

The future it looks a bit bleaker
All swish and raucous cat calls
But who will confess
To this free-market mess
If they're packing just pearl milk balls?

--.

Anyone new to Taiwan will immediately notice how the locals go for all things soft and chewy: chewy candy, chewy desserts, even drinks with chewy "pearls" floating in them. "Pearl milk tea" is probably the most famous of these local delicacies.

Unfortunately, researchers have recently discovered that many local companies produce these candies, desserts and jellies with the help of an emulsifier that is, well, basically plastic. This plastic emulsifier is cheaper and, not surprisingly, has a longer shelf life than natural alternatives. So Taiwan's population has unknowingly been consuming plastic as an ingredient in many of its food products: in the desserts mentioned, plus some fruit juices, plus children's chewable vitamins, syrups, and many other products too. It amounts to a huge health oversight on the part of society at large.

But how could this happen? Why wasn't this known until now? Because the government, firmly capitalist in outlook, never wanted to interfere in the free market, so there is scarce any regulatory arm. And what is the fallout of this huge ingestion of plastic? Research suggests the the plastic in question is linked to a variety of health problems, stunted male development being one, since it functions in the developing male body almost like a surrogate female hormone:

DEHP is suspected to be an endocrine disruptor, which could lead to the shrinking in size of the penis and testicles in men and thyroid dysfunction.

This is all still preliminary, but, wow, don't you just love free-market capitalism? Twenty-three million Taiwanese have been eating this stuff regularly since the 1980s, and, if my guess is right, its use in products has steadily grown over that time, most of it being in food and drinks marketed to kids. --E.M.

--.

Reports from the Taipei Times:

Kids more Vulnerable to DEHP intake

Food Scare Leads to Massive Recalls

The [R]apture

2011-05-22T19:31:00.011+08:00

I woke up this morning disappointed to find I had not been taken up in the Rapture during the night. I did remember snippets of a pretty rapturous dream, but I believe the Rapture, the real one, is supposed to be more conclusive.

Tell you the truth, though: I think one of my new grey socks may have been raptured on the 21st. I could only find one of them while getting dressed.

The question is: Is it possible my grey sock had been living a more virtuous Christian life than me? And why would just one of the socks be part of the Elect, the other one left behind?

(NB: The wing-nutty doctrine of the Rapture is based on a misinterpretation of a passage in one of Paul's letters. By no means all Christians believe in it. The strongest refutation of the Rapture I've yet read can be found in N.T. Wright's brilliant book
Suprised by Hope, especially pages 124-36.)

Taiwan's Micro-Apocalypse

2011-05-12T22:19:00.006+08:00

The way I see it, last night "Master Wang" was just about to lose his whole following, but today he has an out. The Master's escape route is just big enough that he can squeeze through it with a sector of his sect intact. You have to think in terms of the psychology of apocalyptic movements. This morning when I noted over coffee that there had been a serious earthquake in Spain, I immediately imagined the defensive reflex of the Wang followers.

"Okay," they'll say. "Taiwan didn't break in two. But look--there was a major earthquake. Master Wang's geography was just off."

This is the way devotees of a paranoid system reinforce their core beliefs.

And then today--oh, joy!--there was the supreme oddity of a tornado tearing through south Taipei.

"Just like the tornado cut the sky in two, so Master Wang saw the island cut in two in his vision. The tornado is a warning of what will come."

I haven't watched TV news today, so I don't know if anyone is making such poetic claims. But again, the way I see it, Master Wang's stature can only be bolstered by the parallel happenings: one major earthquake, one weather anomaly. The Master just needs to adjust his prediction.

Oh, and of course there's more evidence the energy around the island was skewed yesterday. In Taipei there were two instances of women who jumped in front of MRT trains.

Kool-Aid anyone?

The End of the End of Taiwan

2011-05-11T23:08:00.001+08:00

I'm guessing some people are actually disappointed. Today is coming to an end and there was no devastating earthquake. As many of you know, local prophet "Teacher Wang" predicted that today, May 11th, would see Taiwan literally torn in two by a cataclysmic quake, its cities inundated by tsunami waves. A whole sect of Wang's faithful has escaped into the mountains, well out of tsunami range, having set up dwellings there in the form of blue shipping containers. But midnight is almost here, and there's been no quake. I'm afraid these people will greet the first minutes of May 12th with a sigh and a recognition of their foolishness. Either that or they'll insist Wang Lao-shi was just off on the date: that the quake will come soon enough. "By the end of the year, for sure."

Or--I suppose it's possible--right after I hit the Post button on this entry my apartment will begin to quake with more than the usual quake, and then it will start to quake even more seriously, and then. . . well, then you won't be hearing much from me any more.

I'm on 5th floor here. Is that out of tsunami range? I suppose that depends on the tsunami.

Somebody's gotta do it

2011-05-04T03:13:00.000+08:00

Dear Friends and Students:

I think it is about time I revealed to you something many of you have long suspected anyway. These suspicions I can understand. You see how my legs flex as I mount the stairs, you watch my shoulders and pectorals as I jot things on the whiteboard, and you wonder: "Is this guy really just a teacher?" Today I intend to answer this question once for all.

In fact the suspicions are correct. Besides being a language teacher and (sometimes humorous) literary satirist, I am also a Navy SEAL. I admit it. So there.

But why now? Why reveal this double life after having covered it up for so long? It's a matter of the truth really. Making a truthful record for history, I mean. Because some of the things being said in the media about the recent action in Pakistan just aren't true. The following entries from my journal should clear up some of these questions. Also explain why I wasn't in class Monday.

E.M.

Sunday, May 1, 14:00 Taipei

I'm having a late Sunday brunch with the wife and Barack calls.

"Eric, we've got something we need you in on. We're picking you up in 10."

"Whoah, wait a minute! I just sat down to lunch. What is it?"

"I'm putting together the best team possible. You've got to be in, Eric."

"But--"

"GPS says you're at the Taipei Hyatt. Be outside in ten minutes. Front entrance."

"Barry, c'mon, we've been through this. I'm not going to Benghazi. I don't even think we should be putting people on the ground there."

"This isn't Libya. Ten minutes. Front entrance. You'll be briefed on the way."

My wife could see by my face.

"Barry?" she said.

"Sorry. Something's up."

Sunday, May 1, 16:30 En route

On a transport with Luke and Rashid, from CIA. Luke is shitting bricks. He's going over the layout of this compound in north Pakistan they assume bin Laden is in. I'm highly doubtful, but yes, the compound looks interesting. Should be fun, whoever's in it. We'll probably be shooting up some Pakistani gangster lair.

Sunday, May 1, 18:40 Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, Uzbekistan

What a laugh! They flew my SEAL combat uniform out special (they had to take out of the glass case at West Point where it was on display with some of the other items I used during the Achille Lauro hostage rescue). But the uniform doesn't quite fit. Hard to get zipped.

Don: "You're getting slack over there. Too many of those Chinese dumplings."

I: "Yeah, we'll see who's slack if it's really the Sheik in that compound."

Monday, May 2, 10:00 En route

There are eight of us. Three of the guys I've never met. They're also the only three against my idea of getting curry at Abdullah's in Islamabad before we hit the compound. But we take a vote, so curry it is.

"I interrupted my lunch at the Hyatt for this," I point out.

Monday, May 2, 12:50 Islamabad

What I like about Abdullah is he's always discrete. After we'd landed the choppers on the building across the street, he welcomed us into his restaurant and led us to a private room on the second floor.

"I see you're on business today," he says. "No one notice you this way."

The curry is as usual. Best on the planet. Even the new guys agree.

Monday, May 2, 14:30 Leaving Abbottabad

One of the choppers had trouble going in. We had to scuttle it. Turns out it really was bin Laden's compound. I was surprised he didn't have more firepower. A cakewalk really. We worked our way through the rooms and finally up to the third floor. The Sheik was in there with a woman, only the two of them. I told him to let her leave first, we wouldn't hurt her. No response. I repeated it in Arabic. Then the woman yells out, "I will die with Osama! We are martyrs, you crusader swine!"

"Have it your way," I barked in Arabic in reply. (My Arabic's kind of rusty. Listening to the tape later and checking it, I see what I really said was probably more like, "Have it a haddock." Oh, well.)

It's true they were both unarmed. But I didn't know that as I swung round the corner and took aim. The woman threw a TV remote control at me and mid-flight I thought it might be a grenade. So they both got it.

When we stormed the compound, Bin Laden and the woman were watching reruns of old Glenn Beck shows with Arabic subtitles. There were a few other DVDs there: Finding Nemo, It's a Wonderful Life, and Batman Begins.

People are talking about the Pakistan government being embarrassed that bin Laden was living comfortably not far from their top military academy. What I want to know is--what about Pakistan Blockbuster? Bin Laden's Blockbuster ID was right there on the coffee table. The Batman movie was two days overdue.

Tuesday, May 3, 14:00 Taipei

I twisted my neck raiding that compound. The wife: "Don't even tell me."

"Abdullah's doing well," I said.

I was younger in this photo. That's me on the right.

THE JUNK MAIL QUATRAINS

2011-05-01T16:32:00.000+08:00

1.

I tried dozens of depression medications before I found
Tattoed Girl Pleases Dick with Pierced Tongue
It was My Dearest Islamic Family Friend Mr Danbaba Rawaa
Sent it to me in an Urgent Message

"You are probably surprised to be
Receiving this letter," Rawaa wrote,
Also offering a LOAN, Drippin Wet Bikini Teens
And a Penis Enlargement Method with Proven Results

Busy though I was, I of course responded Promptly
To this particular Assalam Alaikum
My PayPal would otherwise be Canceled
If I didn't submit Personal Information Now

2.

At first all they said was WORK WITH ME
To make this gay creampie gagging day possible
I was an Important Friend, more so than I'd thought:
The UN was trying to Release My Payment

FW: panty throat sucked breasts city
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Even if he popped a handful of V1AGRA at 50% off
Salvador Dali probably couldn't paint such a scene

Besides, why did I need to make $9000-A-Month-From-HOME
When here the Arab Organization of Soda Manufacturers
Was waiting for me to Submit my Paper for the August Convention?
Then, suddenly, stone clothes pulled my invito

3. Stone clothes! Stone clothes!

Fuck mouthful plays floor possible
Is how Fannie Lou Hamer (finally) Changed My Life
It was yet another Urgent Notification
Requiring I enter a PERSONAL ID

No problem: In this Fresh Young Account Alert
They wanted me to join Project Qatar
Gave me Katy Perry nude photos
To prove they were my Only Dear One in God

But should I go for the FuckBook invite code
Or the Last Chance Job Opportunity?
I know what you're thinking, Miss Fatima Doka:
Nasty Gangbanged Students Burn Belly Fat Faster

What I'll do, then, here with my normal-sized dick
Is I'll just sit back with my tanned teen and win
THE UK NATIONAL LOTTERY on you folks
That'll show you herders who bags the best prizes!

[These lines were woven from one week of Email Spam. My junk box gets around 30 junk letters a day.]

And more cowbell

Obama Birth Certificate "Too Long": Republicans

2011-04-29T14:15:00.000+08:00

Washington, D.C., August 29, 2011, The Disassociated Press

Two days after the Obama Administration released the President's official long-form birth certificate, Republican groups around the nation are swiftly unifying around a single response: the document is way too long.

"It's a handful to read through," complained Dick Toole of the Kentucky Tea Party Nation. "Heck, my birth certificate isn't half that long."

Speaker of the House John Boehner echoed a common sentiment: "Many of our supporters don't read, and this lengthy document is an affront to those Americans who are thus challenged."

Other Republicans felt suspicious of certain names on the certificate, especially pointing to the "foreign-sounding" name of the hospital where the President was born.

"So it says he was born in Kapiolani Hospital," quipped Wisconsin Tea Party organizer Lisa McNane. "That doesn't sound like an American name to me. Is it some kind of Muslim or politically correct ethnic name? I was born in a hospital with a completely English name: Waukesha County General."

Potential GOP candidate Donald Trump, who is credited by some with pushing the Obama Administration to release the official Hawaiian document, has also responded to the administration's move. His remarks could not be heard clearly, however, since he made them with his head stuck shoulder-deep up his ass.

MORE COWBELL . . .

Shining: The Trailer

2011-04-17T18:12:00.000+08:00

Remember Jack and "all work and no play"? The following trailer kind of reminds me of Fox News reporting during the Bush years. The difference being that whoever did this is brilliant--spin as a high art:

Ideal Libraries (ZEI's Tuesday Mythology Class)

2011-04-15T21:21:00.000+08:00

For some months our Tuesday night class has been reading chapters from Ursula K. LeGuin's Changing Planes. At the beginning of her chapter "Woeful Tales from Mahigul," the narrator describes Mahigul's Imperial Library, which I take to be a portrait of the writer's own ideal library. After reading this opening part of the chapter, I told my brilliant group of Tuesday students to write descriptions of their own ideal libraries for homework. Here are some of them:

Michelle writes:

My ideal study room should be without my brother, since he's noisy. With him taken care of, we can talk about the decoration and devices in the room. There should be enough light (not light bulbs in the morning, but sunlight) because warm sunlight through the window always makes me feel calm and soothes any headache that might be caused by math problems. Also good music would play an important part, as music gives me a good mood to study boring subjects like math or physics. And then, to mention something that is important but that could hardly happen in a city such as Taipei: a good view when I look out the window. I know it would cost an arm and a leg to realize this dream, since Taipei is a crowded city and urban land prices are always high. A good view, including a big space with trees and flowers or a blue sea or bright sky, can give my eyes a rest after a tiring war against Chinese, math . . . all the school subjects and assignments our teachers had given. Hmm. In any case, this is my "ideal room," so never mind about money. Without this factor of money, I think I could get my ideal study room some day. Maybe in the distant future?

Jenny Huang writes:

The library is called "Magic Library." Everyone in the library carries a book with them, a book to which you can pose any question about the library. The lights in the library are like stars, shining and beautiful. The book can fly anywhere, and tell you its stories. Like the universe, the library is dark, but you can read the book clearly. There is also a ball in which you can seat yourself. You can use the ball to fly anywhere you want. Inside it you can also eat anything you want. The book everyone carries is somewhat like the Internet--it can also find any information you need, all you have to do is think about it. It is really an interesting library, to which all are welcome. But think before you enter. Because many people enter, but never leave, like the "Hotel California."

Schani Lin writes:

My ideal study room will be in a quiet forest. It's a two-storied building, and my study room will be on the second floor. Sunlight enters through the glass ceiling which can put me in a good mood to study boring subjects. A balcony is outside the room. When I get tired, I'll go there to breathe some fresh air. If there's a hard problem in math or science, I'll go to the garden to take a walk and think of the solution. Quiet also plays an important role in my study room. When it's quiet, I can think of more things, be more creative and come up with better ideas. I hope one day I'll have my ideal study room for real.

Sherry Chen writes:

Press ENTER on the remote control and in a few seconds a book flies to you. You don't have to walk around to choose a book to match your taste: in this library, books fly to you without your touching them. YOUR MIND IS TELLING THE LIBRARY DIRECTLY WHICH BOOK IS THE BEST FOR YOU!

It's the biggest library in the world because you can call for a book any time or anywhere, you don't have to go to a building to borrow books or give them back--they'll fly.

All the books are housed in an island called "Holy Library." It's a fantastic place for readers. You can read in the mountains, at the beach, or even on a dolphin or in a big clam shell in the sea. All the books are stored in a cave with many entry and exit holes that allow them to fly in and out.

But the most special and praiseworthy part of the library is that you can dream the book you want. Push ADVENTURE on the remote control and it will give you two wires. Put the wires to your temples and what you get is not just a story in words, but an adventure. You can be any character in this story, and in this dream mode, you experience directly what is in the character's mind. You might be a hero, a vampire, a piece of ear wax, an amber or a mosquito.

For readers in the "Holy Library," books are power, words are magic. They travel through them, learn from them. Will you choose ENTER or ADVENTURE? Will you accept what your mind needs? Are you a strong enough reader for this library?

Lillian Huang writes:

In the future, nobody will have to go to the library, because people will already have their own library at their fingertips.

Once you pick up iPad10, it will be hard to put down. That's the idea behind all new design--thinner, lighter, the best for students.

1) Thinner and lighter

It's 50% thinner and lighter, so it feels even more comfortable in your hands. It makes surfing the web, playing games, listening to music, checking the mail, reading, writing . . . all so natural that you might forget there's incredible technology under your fingers.

2) High resolution

Download books from your iPad10 and you will be even more well-read. Full-page illustrated science books, art books, novels--everything is gripping on the beautiful, high-resolution iPad display.

3) LED backlighting

LED backlighting makes everything you see remarkable crisp, vivid, and bright.

4) Print everything wirelessly

With just a few taps, you can go from viewing something on the iPad screen to holding a printed copy.

Besides all this, with most books in the iPad library, you can change the text size or jump to any chapter right from the table of contents, and you can use bookmarks to make notes.

It's perfect for students.

(This is not an Apple ad--just my imagination.)

JS Porter, Thomas Merton, Ludicity

2011-04-04T23:20:00.000+08:00

Untitled brushwork by Thomas Merton.
I've just today finished reading Canadian critic JS Porter's Thomas Merton: Hermit at the Heart of Things. The book will very likely make a Merton enthusiast of me. His writing here, as in Spirit Book Word, is infectious in its balance and intimacy. Porter is a great case study in the wisdom of only writing on what one cares about. The feel for Merton's predicament and character comes through better than it ever could had he followed a standard biographical format.

I'm guessing, when I do my next Amazon order, that I'll go for some of the Merton poetry and translations, and also for some of the political writings. Porter is especially taken with very late Merton, the great synthesist and student of Zen continuing to practice his omnivorous journaling to the end. I'm probably going to be more taken with middle Merton, especially the poet and political essayist. The correspondence with poet Robert Lax looks especially interesting in any case.

In any case, Merton, is on the reading list.

* * *ON LUDICITY:

Aside from being a Trappist monk, poet, translator, and political activist, Merton was also an artist. One of the passages in Porter's book that struck me is from a letter Merton wrote to Lax regarding his "calligraphies":

Me and Ad Reinhardt [F] have been carrying on correspondence by obscure telepathies and hidden calligraphic paintings of which I must tell Charlie I got ten million. I make the fastest calligraphic paintings in the world, twenty nine a second, zip zip zip all over Kentucky they fly in the air the doves bear them away to no galleries. My art is pure I tell you it is pure. Like I said got swarms of calligraphies the only thing wrong with them says Ad is they too small, only about a foot long, real calligraphies got to be so vast you can't get them out of the building. (87)

This approaches a tonal register I love, that same kind of light and ludicrous impertinence that is so effective in Gabriel Gudding or Max Jacob. Though not a fan of either nonsense verse or surrealist automatic writing--not at all--I'm very interested in writing, usually prose, that is slipping toward nonsense. What is needed in such writing is not the all-out automatism of the surrealists, but rather a subtler dose of automatism, just enough to effect that slippage toward the border. There is in this register a flat earnestness that is also somehow childlike, naive, ridiculously pedantic in its reverent irreverence. Merton is onto this in his letter to Lax.

If asked why I think such writing important, I'd have to say it's because it's just this mode that shows us most clearly what we are always in any case doing when we use language: we're making impertinently confident truth claims, spouting like children who've only grasped a corner of the Truth but somehow think they're qualified to teach others (usually smaller children) in the ways of the world.

Did the monk employ such studied ludicity elsewhere or only in correspondence with Lax?

[Some of my remarks above were adapted from a letter to Porter.]

Get JS Porter's Hermit at the Heart of Things through Amazon.com

Fukushima Nuclear Country Club: A Modest Proposal

2011-03-27T17:34:00.000+08:00

Though it's been two weeks since Japan's devastating tsunami put the Fukushima reactors out of operation, authorities there are no closer to containing radiation leakage. The news gets graver by the day while officials only keep repeating that there's little danger to the public.

Sea water near the plant now shows 1,850 times normal radiation levels. Friday it was revealed that two TEPCO workers got their feet soaked with water irradiated at a level 10,000 times normal. That was at reactor 3, the one that previously most worried experts. Today we read that pooled water tested at reactor 2 rates 10 million times normal. Thousands and millions are very different beasts.

Still, there's a Japanese official to ensure us that there is little real danger: "Certainly we have to be concerned about the fact that the level of radiation is increasing. But at this point, we do not . . . envisage negative health impacts."

That's an official with Japan's nuclear safety agency. Presumably he's talking about negative health impacts on people who live in Kenya or Scotland.

It's time Japanese authorities admit they can't keep a lid on this disaster. And since the experts aren't doing much to improve things, I suggest they heed the advice of someone who knows next to nothing about nuclear energy but who generally shows the highest wisdom in getting out of complicated scrapes: namely myself.

I propose a simple two-step solution to this nuclear crisis.

First, bury the offending reactors under untold thousands of tons of wet cement and sand. The Japanese are masters with cement, most of the corruption in Japan has to do with cementing over areas of public land that don't need it, so why not give all the gangster-run construction companies a huge collective no-bids contract to bury the Fukushima plant? The possibility of burying it has been floated already, and it seems to me time to put it into effect.

Once buried, the Fukushima plant will look like a series of rolling hills or sand dunes. And this is where my innovative second step comes in. What do Japanese officials love more than golf courses?

In my second step, then, the newly buried nuclear plant will be converted to a challenging 18-hole golf course. Near the course will be built mandatory housing for the top 20 TEPCO officials and 30 selected government officials who will join them. These fifty officials, it should be understood, will be required by law to live in this luxury housing complex next to the Fukushima plant.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of feeling sorry for the Japanese people suffering in shelters and for those "suicide workers" forced to try to fix the Fukushima plant. I think it's time the higher ups got closer to the action themselves.

The fifty officials, now obligatory VIP members of the new Fukushima Country Club, will be required to golf at least two 18-hole games per week for the remainder of their lives. While out enjoying the course, each official will carry with him a personal Geiger counter specially rigged to deliver radiation readings to workers who will monitor such readings at a collection center 100 kilometers to the south.

I think the brilliance of my two-step scheme is evident. If strictly implemented, the security of the radiation boiling under the cement and sand dunes will be carefully monitored by the movement of the VIP golfers/inmates on the course above. Everybody wins.

It will of course be up to the Japanese to decide just which of their officials should be relocated to this new elite golf club. But as a special favor to me, who thought up the while idea, I would like them to be sure to include Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara.

Mélusine Lin: Poems of the Sacred Wood

2011-03-22T16:27:00.000+08:00

For those who read Chinese, some links on Mélusine Lin's recent poetry book--a book review and a video:

THIS JUST IN

2011-03-16T23:13:00.000+08:00

After centuries of civilization
And not a single hecatomb in his honor
Poseidon shakes tectonic plates
Heaves a killer wave at Japan

Experts call for evacuations
See need for no-fly zone
Citing likelihood of meltdown
At Charlie Sheen's LA residence

IAEA warns disaster worse
Than Britney Spears meltdown
Or even Three Mile Island
The actor rated "one point below Chernobyl"

On Dancing with the Stars
Bin Laden also calls for no-fly zone
Against Ghadafi
Terrorist on Terrorist
In prime-time smackdown

Porn starlet says Libyan strongman
Only lasted three minutes

Was it a sleeper cell or Larry King
Put the powdered anthrax
In Piers Morgan's In-box?

Markets tumble as Obama Administration and NATO
Foot-drag over possible further sanctions
Against Glenn Beck's mouth

Fox News forces continue to pound
Rebel-held territory in breakaway oil rich
Wisconsin enclave

Millions wonder
What's it really like to bed Lady Gaga?

Open pools of spent sound bites ignite
Sending white smoke into the air
Over CNN headquarters in Atlanta

The Japanese deserve as much
Rants Tokyo Mayor

Sun rises on another Taipei day
I sip my coffee
Count my blessings

WHY I DO NOT WORK FOR THE CIA

2010-11-15T15:40:00.001+08:00

1.
I do not work for the CIA because I am too dumb
And I am not a Mormon
Besides my patriotism is lacking
I wouldn't have passed any of their tests
It's clear I do not work for the CIA

2.
Do I maybe, after all, work for the CIA?
It's hard to believe I do
I begin my day later than them
And teach language at night
CIA people would be analyzing language
Arabic and Urdu and such
Documents of specs in Chinese
But me I teach language
The CIA wouldn't be teaching anything
They'd be writing up reports to answer
Yes or No Yes or No
But me I teach and joke with students
Trying always to play out the Maybe
For as long as possible

3.
I keep to myself and drink scotch
This is very CIA
How long have I been CIA now?

4.
I'm damn good at what I do in fact
My Chinese is better than many a fellow agent's
And my French was once good too
I still get the subjunctive wrong less often than many a Mormon
Who passes me sober in the halls at Langley

5.
I've never been to Langley
There's no way I'm CIA
I'd have cracked under pressure sooner
And told everything I know

6.
Though I've been under immense pressure at times
And have cracked twice or more
I've never quite told everything I know
But it wasn't because I was holding back
Out of patriotism or to protect some asset
But because I didn't quite know how to put it
How to frame it I mean
Everything I know
And sometimes I didn't even know really
That I knew it

7.
This kind of thinking is definitely not CIA
Maybe that's why I'm such a precious asset to them
They wouldn't risk me on any small mission
Translating chatter from Urdu
Instead they coddle me
Keep an eye on my drinking
They've pared me down to one cigar a day
They're encouraging me now to find a new health club
Get back in the shape I was in
When we were winding down the Cold War

8.
In fact I will not find a new health club
I'm tired of this far-flung Asian assignment
I want them to know it too
I'm tired of the metro ride back and forth
The students half of whom are ADHD
I'm waiting for my station chief to finally have enough of me
And drop word that I'd be better off
Somewhere with more action
Berlin or Rome
Nice would be nice
But I'd settle for Damascus or Tel Aviv
As long as it wasn't too dangerous
In short somewhere my skills can be used

9.
Now that it's clear
I'm solid CIA
I must pay off those back taxes soon
Plan a visit to Langley
I must stop messing around with Maybe
And get back to basics
Yes or No
Me or You
One of us is in the wrong here

On Red State Spelling

2010-07-20T22:07:00.000+08:00

IN MY MAILBOX:

From: . . . .
Subject: Fwd: Obama Admits/Not a Natural Born Citizen
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:05:04 -0400

Obama Admits He Is Not A Natural Born Citizen!!!

Please read this before it is pulled off the internet!!!

Obama admist he was born in Kenya and is a Muslim. If it were Bush, we would have udder chaos! Why are we NOT dragging him out of the Whitehouse???

Is this evidence enough?

Obama admits he is not a Natural Born Citizen & Also Admits He Is A Muslim

Maybe the "Birthers" are on to something.

THE AMAZING PART OF THIS TRAVESTY IS AMERICANS CONTINUE ALLOWING THEMSELVES TO BE RULED BY AN ILLEGAL ALIEN.

Watch it before it’s pulled!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwhKuunp8D8&feature=player_embedded* * *Dear . . . :

Thanks for sending this. My connection here is slow, so I'll watch it when I get a chance on the computer at the office. Of course Obama was born in Hawaii.

What I like about this email forward is how it follows the usual red state spelling rules. Note that it says "If it were Bush, we would have udder chaos!" An udder is a part of a cow. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a red state tendency to use farm terminology when something else is meant. One email talked about the Clintons in the White House and their "fowl language." Fowl language means bird language. The words wanted are "utter" (not udder) and "foul" (not fowl). This is part of the fun of reading all these Fwds!

I also remember reading one about all the "bazaar people" Obama has given positions to. I suppose we are meant to understand that the president has promoted Turkish carpet salesmen to high positions.

And in this Fwd there's the usual advice to watch the video soon--"before it's pulled!" As if our administration is regularly trolling through youtube.com and deleting things it doesn't like.

"By their fruits ye shall know them," Matthew quotes Jesus saying. Yes--and by their spelling ye shall know the weight of their arguments.

E.

Bet you didn't know this. . .

2010-07-04T22:29:00.000+08:00

Cucumbers are the best vegetable source of the mineral niacin, which helps maintain brain power as we age.

Eating fresh cucumber helps keep the body cool in hot weather because it provides vitamin D2.

Women who lie back with a slice of cucumber on each eye are not being foolish. Studies have shown that this simple cucumber treatment does more to fight wrinkles than most top-line eye creams.

Peeled raw cucumber with a bit of baking soda cleans chrome surfaces better than most polishes.

A pea-shaped chunk of raw cucumber held in the navel with a bandaid has been found to prevent pregnancy in blond women.

Adding a couple of slices of cucumber to your gas tank at the start of each month can decrease wear on pistons and improve gas mileage by as much as 3 percent.

The ancient Olmec civilization of Mexico used pressed, sundried strips of cucumber as paper, keeping temple records on the thin sheets. Pressed and dried, cucumber is surprisingly tough and takes ink almost as well as normal paper. A fun project for elementary school classrooms!

Cucumber juice rubbed on the face and body before sunrise can make one invisible to video surveillance cameras until early afternoon.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan did all his presidential debates with a cucumber in his pocket for good luck. He wouldn't go on stage without it.

Unpeeled cucumbers can freshen the air in closets and cabinets. Replace every couple months.

Have a job interview? Going with a cucumber up your ass can make you appear more alert and on top of things and increase your chance of getting hired by up to 40 percent.

*Information not provided by American Association of Cucumber Growers.

FREEDOMLAND--A Painless Proposal for Breaking Up America

2010-07-03T18:26:00.000+08:00

Hawaii will go blue, but don't worry, Sarah, Alaska is securely on the FREEDOMLAND side.

Perhaps not since the Civil War has the U.S. been as politically polarized as it is now. To listen to folks on the Right, Republicans and Democrats have radically different visions of what the country should be, and the pundits are generally in agreement about only one thing: common political ground is shrinking by the month.

The Republican Right, inching ever further rightward since the 1980s, has been driven nearly insane by the election of Barack Obama. The Tea Partyers are furious, first of all, that Obama's victory was even possible in their America. But secondly, they're angry that the new president--the cheek of it--has actually dared enact legislation out of sync with their agenda. Such legislation must be un-American because, in Tea Party logic, they themselves innately embody America. Energized by a media machine whipping them to a frenzy 24/7, the new American Right is not going to give up its strident platform any time soon.

The Left, meanwhile, can hardly believe there's anything serious in people who compare Obama to dictators like Stalin or Hitler. For the Left, the new American right has gone from somewhat looney and ill-informed to full-throttle bat-shit crazy.

But the red-staters' comparisons to Stalin and Hitler are indeed serious. These people, whatever they know or don't know about modern history, believe what they're saying. And it does seem the case, finally, that there are TWO Americas out there, neither of which is likely to give up its vision.

On the one side, blue state America sees worsening problems that need a strong federal government ready to adopt pragmatic solutions. On the other, red state America sees government itself as the problem and wants none of it.

How can we resolve this conflict of ideology which, it is obvious, only gets more bitter by the month?

I call on the Obama Administration and its supporters in Congress to quickly adopt legislation that would give red state America what it wants. I'm proposing a radical transformation of the country, but one that would, if followed, allow an amicable end to the culture wars. There are two stages to my proposal:

STAGE ONE

Cut the tax rate for red state Americans to ZERO. Yes, ZERO taxes. Taxes are clearly their number one gripe and it is finally all too obvious that millions of Americans think paying taxes is unpatriotic.

According to my plan, red state Americans will no longer have to pay ANY of their hard-earned money to the inefficient, parasitic government in Washington. Along with paying no taxes, they will finally be freed from government intervention in their lives. Because along with my proposed radical tax cut, I propose that inefficient socialistic services no longer be imposed on red state Americans against their will.

For example, there will be no socialistic public school system telling their children how or what to read. In particular, modern biology will no longer be shoved down their throats, and anything individual red state communities deem is science will henceforth be taught as such. Each school district, if not each mother and father, will have the freedom to decide what is considered science in the classroom.

But also: there will be no socialistically maintained road system and none of those state-funded socialistic flunkies called "police" enforcing the law with their government-paid cruisers. Just as red state Americans will be able to read or not read at their will, so they will be able to drive any speed they want on or off roads anywhere they want. The roads will finally be as they were meant to be: free thoroughfares through a free country.

In red state regions there will be no more government agencies enforcing food or drug safety, which, let's face it, is simply a drag on what would otherwise be vibrant sectors of the economy. The prices of drugs, no longer needing FDA approval, would surely go down, and the number of new medicines that would hit the market . . . in fact it's almost staggering to imagine. No more corrupt federal government saying what can or can't be sold as food or medicine. No more annoying ingredients labels to read. (If folks can even read because, remember, there will be no more socialistic elementary schools.)

There will also be no more government agencies enforcing unconstitutional limitations on firearms. This will be a big step forward for freedom. Red state Americans will finally be able to shoot or not shoot others whenever they want with whatever firearm they deem appropriate to their defense in each instance.

What's more, there will be no more corrupt judges "legislating from the bench" because there will be no more judges. In red state regions everything will be decided outside of court in the armed space of the public arena--in short, just the way the Founding Fathers meant it to be.

These are just a few of the elements of my proposed New Declaration of Red State Independence. But remember: the key to all of this sudden freedom is quite simple: CUT THE RED STATE TAX RATES TO WHAT THEY SHOULD BE! Freedom can only flourish as a result.

Just imagine it, you Tea Partyers--ZERO sales or income tax! Your red state economies will thrive with the sheer amount of Pure Freedom let loose in the market. No more licensing for food or drugs or weapons or anything. No more driver's licenses even. No more complicated regulations on what banks or investment gurus can do with your money. And the money you earn--you get to keep 100 PERCENT of it! Which is how it was meant to be in a democracy. There will be no more government leeching off you. I can hear the hollers and hoots of approval already. Yeeehawww!

STAGE TWO

But now we come to Stage Two. At first I thought there'd be no need for a Stage Two, but after modeling some likely results of my Stage One proposal I realize I was wrong. After Stage One has been implemented, several things seem likely to happen, viz.:

1) Red state Americans will enjoy such a MASSIVE AMOUNT of SHEER FREEDOM that they will no longer be SUITED for living in or even visiting the corrupt blue state regions.

2) The newly liberated red state economies will be THRIVING so much that the disparity in economic power between red and blue state regions will make it necessary to establish safe borders.

Because of these two factors, I came to understand that a further radical step was necessary.

In Stage Two, red state America will be forcibly "seceded" from blue state America. Yes, the U.S. will finally become two separate countries. I know many red-staters will be only too glad to be free once and for all from the corrupt liberals in Washington. And many blue-staters, though perhaps more sentimental, will come to see the need to let their newly FREE red-state brothers and sisters go their own way.

The two new countries will have to be renamed, I know. I recommend calling the red state regions simply FREEDOMLAND. As for the blue state side, a name will have to be decided democratically, i.e., in the old, slow and corrupt way.

Texans and Alaskans and others have long been talking about secession. My plan, I think, is the best way to effect a final and reasonable secession without civil war.

And so to sum up: I call on the Obama Administration to enact swift legislation leading to the TOTAL FREEDOM of our Tea Party and red state brothers and sisters from the corrupt system of democratic government they now suffer so grievously and totalitarianly under.

I chose this 4th of July, our national day of independence, to make my proposal for this new and secondary independence of red and blue folks from each other. Clearly it's time we went our own ways.

Clay III.136

2010-05-30T20:57:00.000+08:00

Scriptive Abbey. The monks and nuns are of a stunning physical beauty. They live as a co-operative, each however with his or her own room. Their bodies are covered with texts from [. . .], tattooed upon them in cuneiform script. They are dedicated to amours, study and prayer.

There are three tattoo-scribes who work in the entrance hall--the Roman alphabetic transliteration fully legible on each of their six wrists. The various pictographs or ideographs that come to be used in the increasingly scriptive text will be translated over the rest of their bodies which over time will become reference works.

Those who come to read our text pay by the hour, and must decipher it as they will, the reference works being called up to the individual rooms by patrons for an added fee. The religious pay their way being read.

Of course there will be bodies of text preferred by each patron, either for the text itself or for the ensemble of the book as it gathers the text. Patrons will have to make appointments with each book to be read, and books cannot be taken out.

With each generation the task of this reading becomes more difficult, as the script becomes more scriptive. Patrons must then arrange to meet with an older book so as to corroborate their reading of the text under scrutiny. The text as a spoken word is held in the keeping of scribes and the religious, who may, it is true, eventually lose it themselves.

Such employment would hardly succeed in America at present, though the abbey or bibliothèque or brothel may work in Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo. The book needs relatively few hours of availability in order to pay its keep, and can spend the time thus gained in study, amours and prayer.

Many a book will not allow him- or herself to be handled before he or she has been well read.

NB: Prospective books have no choice of what text or texts they are made. The tattoo-scribe chooses to copy what and where he or she will. The full text of [. . .] must be preserved--i.e. legible--in the library at all times.

Je m'adresse à Béatrice André-Leickmann, à Jean-Louis de Cénival, à Jean Bottero, à Christine Ziegler, à Ake Sjoberg, à vos étudiants, aux parisiens choisis: j'ai besoin d'artistes de tatouage, de jeunes hommes et femmes dévots, d'une grande maison pas loin du centre-ville, d'un traducteur, et de votre collaboration dans la scriptivité continuelle et progressive du [. . .], i.e. je vous prie de m'emmener à Paris pour étudier là-bas. --Eric Mader-Lin

Clay IV.1

2010-05-23T16:04:00.000+08:00

THE CLAY TESTAMENT: VOLUME IV

Knowledge: what does the word properly mean? There are ways of understanding the word that abuse it terribly, that force the word's and the world's fall further than one could previously have imagined. And these ways are now in the mainstream--they have long been so.

Many will immediately resist this writing because of what they take to be "knowledge." They will insist that any writing about our relations with God must be a kind of hocus pocus about which we should all know better. "God is dead," they echo. "We live in the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages."

I do not agree that our century knows better. I would insist we know worse. As 20th century men and women, we do know "more," in a way, but to know more, for us, is to know worse. The manner in which we know is not better. It is, for many, no longer knowledge.

Clay IV.2

2010-05-23T16:02:00.002+08:00

Being, grace, knowledge--the three supreme gifts. Can any of them be given without the others also being given in some degree?

Clay IV.3

2010-05-23T16:02:00.001+08:00

Revelation is never complete.

Clay IV.4

2010-05-23T15:59:00.000+08:00

History was broken with the coming of Christ. Not just historiography, but history itself: history in its sense as referring to the possibilities and exigencies of our existence.

The coming of Christ, the realization of the meaning of this coming, have broken history. But the realization of the meaning of Christ is not complete: it goes on continuously, it goes on yet. Our lives, to the extent that we follow Christ, continue to fulfill some part of this realization.

If we are thinking aright, we recognize that "history broken" is not a closed book, but rather a deed performed by God and then given over into our hands to realize. To realize here is first to know, then to make actual our part of knowledge in the fallen world. Our knowledge and faith is made actual both through our own creative works and through what we let wither away as being of the outside, as being inessential to the work we recognize.

Clay IV.5

2010-05-23T15:56:00.001+08:00

The question of the Fall. It is for me a question of a territory in which God's power is not in full effect, in which this power is present rather as potential, and in which, further, there is another power present. Humanity's turn away from God, figured in the story of the Garden, is always a turn toward another.

I do not believe that Creation is the work of a demiurge, but neither do I believe the Creation is entirely predestined by a God whose being is all of being. No, there is something else, an Other besides God's work, an Other that, at least as regards this territory the earth, may end up undermining this work through the weight of its resistance, the tenacity of its darkness. It is a question for me--and I do think of it in rather Manichaean terms--of a battle for the world and the souls of men. I would not, however, say with the Gnostics that the souls of men are to escape this territory, leaving it to fall into nothing. No, the material realm, this earth or universe which is the territory of God's work, is not to be abandoned in a movement of quietistic pessimism; it is not to be abandoned as garbage. That is not the goal of the battle we are in. But neither is the universe entirely good. There is a worm at the core of creation, a worm that was present at the very beginning.

The traditional doctrines are powerfully formulated as regards these questions. Nonetheless, they are not as compelling as a truth approached, among others, by the Gnostics. The Gnostics, however, have obscured the truth as well.

The truth is neither with certain of the Kabbalists who insist that God needs our constructive attention to maintain his being, nor is it with the Calvinists who insist that our being and our salvation are eternally predetermined by God.

Criticism and Philosophy

2010-04-28T23:31:00.000+08:00

Reading Joe Wenderoth and Gary Lutz. There's a kind of septic undertow dragging in the work of both. Lutz especially is chin deep in it--his style a delicate flailing as he's dragged away in a flood of the various excreta we flush.

Lutz is the more accomplished stylist.

Both writers are sick fucks, but Lutz is clearly the sicker.

Despair and shit and the body are recurrent themes in Gabriel Gudding's work too, but somehow Gudding has none of the potty negativity of Lutz and Wenderoth. (Could we speak here of the Potty-Hegelians?)

Also reading Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. Browne turns a wonderful phrase and demonstrates a generous spirit for his time and place. But intellectually Browne was a crabbed provincial next to Montaigne. (Which may not reflect that badly on Browne. Nearly everyone was a crabbed provincial next to Montaigne.)

One wonders how Shakespeare would have written had he taken up the essay as a genre.

* * *

Is it the importunity of beings that makes us yearn for Being?

There are many that would not tolerate the nagging of beings were it not that they glimpse Being and feel that part of them is grounded in Being.

But perhaps this is putting it badly. Not that "part of them" is grounded, but that some grasp of Being would, they hope, offer a ground on which they could build an edifice against the painful storms of unknowing that wrack them. That wrack us.

Is it the importunity of beings that makes us yearn for Being?

My body, with its daily nagging, is one of these beings of course, or rather is itself a panoply of beings, as is my mind, in which I am not sure where to place the "I."

Is it only this importunity, this nagging--at times merely troublesome, but finally deadly--that makes us project "Being" to begin with?

I would agree with Heidegger by saying No. Being is not merely an illusory projection, a trick of language or a dead end: to say it is is to speak from a structure that has ignored the question of Being. Not answered, but ignored.

Beings are objects of pleasure, or annoyances, or toys, or threats, or traps, or illusory, or all there is.

Being is illusory, or all there is.

Parmenides: the greatest philosopher.

Obama: Tea Partiers Understand Me

2010-04-25T22:58:00.000+08:00

My name is Barack Osama Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States, and I am here today to acknowledge my many abominations.

For you who have supported me, I ought to apologize for what follows. I know a lot of you have been offended by the criticisms aimed at me--the wailing on Fox News, the never-ending Tea Party slurs--but regardless of your anger at these attacks, well, the fact is things aren't always as clear as they might appear. So although many of you may feel disappointed by what I'm about to say, I'm still going to say it. I'm going to come out with the whole truth. And first of all I think it's time to admit that, yes, the Tea Partiers have more or less understood me.

Where should I begin here? I suppose I could start with one of the more serious charges. And so . . . Yes, it is true that I am a communist. A pinko. The right wing has long claimed it, and I'm ready to admit it. Though I've pretended to support the American way of life, for many years I've been secretly dedicated to overthrowing it. My goal has been to organize the laboring class into a movement strong enough to destroy the American capitalist system. I, Barack Obama, believe in the Communist Revolution.

But while being a secret communist, it's also true that I'm a slick corporate insider, a wheeler and dealer within the corporate system. Many have pointed this out, and many have attacked me for it. They point out that I've given huge handouts to big corporations, handouts of PUBLIC money, while doing nothing for the little guy. This is what all those corporate bailouts were about. The truth here is that I wasn't so much stabilizing the American economy as patting corporate cronies on the back. Because I'm a corrupt capitalist insider.

Now of course it hasn't been easy to be both a communist radical dedicated to destroying corporate America and a capitalist insider pouring cash into the same corporate America--but the truth is I've been both, as my Tea Party critics will tell you. Because I'm actually, as some Tea Party pundit might say, a COMMUNO-CAPITALIST, or an OLIGARCHO-COMMUNIST, or maybe, as Glenn Beck himself would say, an OLIGARHOLEFTY.

These are complex words, I know, but the point here is that I'm a complex guy. My goal is to undermine America whether I use my communist left hand or my capitalist right hand. And even if these two hands, well--even if they don't agree with each other.

As a communist I'm of course a committed atheist. But as the sharp analysts at Fox understand--who have never allowed mere logic to dampen their insights--being an atheist hasn't stopped me from also being a SECRET MUSLIM RADICAL. That's right. When I'm not busy promoting my deeply anti-religious, atheistic vision of society, I Barack Hussein Obama am secretly working to spread the religion of the one true God Allah, a belief I learned from my father while growing up in Kenya and which I later fine-tuned while studying in radical madrasahs in Indonesia.

You caught that, didn't you? How I admitted right there that I grew up in Kenya? In fact the birthers are right about me. My Hawaiian birth certificate IS a fake! I know this will be hard for my supporters to accept, and I know it will even be somewhat hard to BELIEVE, because, as has been pointed out, there were announcements of my birth in two different Honolulu newspapers, announcements posted right then, in August 1961. So why would there have been Honolulu newspaper announcements of my birth if I wasn't really born in Hawaii?

Well, the truth is that it's all because of the deeply anti-American and radical beliefs of my parents. That and their prenatal faith in my radical future in politics. Because thankfully my parents were wise enough to BRIBE the Hawaiian authorities and the two newspapers to FORGE all this evidence just in time for my birth--which birth happened, to tell the whole truth, in three different places simultaneously: Kenya, Leningrad, and the holy city of Mecca. Yes, I was born in three places AT THE SAME TIME, which foretold my destiny of today following at least THREE POLITICAL PATHS at the same time.

I told you I was a complex guy, didn't I?

Did I tell you I was a secret Muslim radical? That's true of course, but it's also true that I am a proponent of black Christian liberation theology. I got that from Reverend Wright in Chicago. That split I had with Wright during the campaign--that was all just for show, to help me get elected. Because along with Reverend Wright I believe the religion of Jesus is a religion of the downtrodden standing up to their oppressors. But unlike Reverend Wright, I believe this while ALSO being an atheist and while ALSO following the religion of Mohammed. Jesus is my true mentor in liberating the people, as is Mohammed, and I understand Jesus to have taught something similar to that taught by my other mentors, Che Guevara, Osama bin Laden and Batman.

I worship Allah and Jesus as I practice atheist Marxism and try to help my jihadist colleagues in the Middle East. I stand with the downtrodden against their white oppressors as I funnel astronomical amounts of cash into corporations run by these white oppressors. I don't believe in Jesus or Allah but am definitely a communist radical as I arrange these huge giveaways for American corporations that I'm also trying to destroy.

Does all this make any sense? Sometimes I'm not sure. Truth be told it's tough being me, tough being Barack Osama Hussein Obama. You don't know the half of it! I'm trying to do so many opposing things at once! How did I ever even get into all this? But this is just the way I am. And I've got to hand it to the sharp folks in the Tea Party movement for figuring me out. Because sometimes I have trouble understanding myself. Sean Hannity, those biopics you did were truly brilliant. But really--it's the Tea Partiers who've seen the REAL ME.

While we're at it I should say something about my education. Because a lot of Fox pundits seem to be really interested in this. I put it down to the following: Not having any education of their own, they're interested in how I got mine.

It's true I studied a lot of radical things in university: Marx, Che, Saul Alinsky, a lot of comic books, Mao, Mussolini, Sayyid Qutb, Danielle Steel, Bakunin. It's also true my pricey law education was paid for in ways most Americans would find objectionable. Half was paid by Havana and the other half by Saudi sheiks. Havana sometimes didn't get me the checks on time, but those sheiks--Whew!--they threw so much money my way that I still have some left over, which I've used for stockpiling euthanasia drugs so I can take part in the culling of elderly people.

Yes, Palin got it right when she said the health care reform was really about establishing death panels. I know most rational people laughed off Palin's remark when she made it, because, hey, there wasn't anything even remotely suggestive of euthanasia in the actual text of the bill. But really the laugh is on my supporters. Because it's true what Palin said. Because me and Rahm, see, we've developed this secret invisible ink. So we wrote in all these clauses about setting up death panels RIGHT UNDER THE VISIBLE TEXT OF THE BILL. Pretty sneaky and evil, huh? I couldn't have done it without Rahm. He really has the ideas sometimes.

So I'm using some of the Saudi money to stock up on euthanasia drugs so I can help out snuffing some of those grannies in D.C. hospitals. I can't wait till the invisible ink becomes visible!

Many Tea Partiers have compared me to the far right-wing dictator Hitler while others compare me to the left-wing leader Stalin. Though these historical figures were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, it's true that I admire them both because they're both so evil. Evil is just what I'm into. I'm going to destroy everything pure and good in America and I'm going to do it by using all the un-American ideologies AT THE SAME TIME. So what if the different approaches don't agree with each other? What's that to me--a man who was born in three cities? Sometimes I even get the feeling I might be SUPERHUMAN.

As for the protesters who made posters of me as the Joker--I don't really think that's apt. Maybe Rahm could be the Joker, but not me. I'm bigger than the Joker. I'm Mao and Hitler with a shot of Caligula tossed in. I'm the King of Pop returned from the dead as a leftist Tutankhamen.

It's just the plain and simple truth that I'm a communist fascist atheist crony-capitalist snooty Ivy League backstreet rabble-rousing crypto-Muslim Christian liberation theologist ACORN-pimp-managing socialist eugenicist. I admit it. The Tea Partiers, guided by the perceptive analysts of Fox News, have shown admirable logic in figuring me out. You really gotta hand it to them.

And Joe Biden--did you know he's really a Uighur Muslim trained in plastic explosives in North Korea? I bet you didn't know.

Moran's Pub

2010-04-05T15:24:00.000+08:00

I remember it was a Thursday afternoon. I'd ducked out of the office a bit early and decided to stop in at Moran's on the way home for a pint. When I walked in the door the place was strangely quiet, the barman wasn't behind the bar and the only soul in sight was an odd looking fellow who eyed me as I sat down at the bar. After a moment he came up and sat next to me, introduced himself, and said: "You know, I think I can explain, because darn near the same thing happened to me! I remember it was a Thursday afternoon."

"What?" I said.

"It was a Thursday afternoon," he repeated. "I'd ducked out of the office early and decided to stop in at Moran's on the way home for a pint. When I walked in the door the place was strangely quiet, the barman wasn't behind the bar and the only soul in sight was an odd looking fellow who eyed me as I sat down at the bar. After a moment he came up and sat next to me, introduced himself, and said: 'You know, I think I can explain, because darn near the same thing happened to me! I remember it was a Thursday afternoon.'

" 'What?' I said.

" 'I'd ducked out of the office early,' he said, 'and decided to stop in at Moran's on the way home. When I walked in the place was quiet and the barman wasn't behind the bar. There was a fellow who eyed me strangely as I sat down at the bar. After a moment he came up, sat down next to me, and said: "You know, I think I can explain, because darn near the same thing happened to me! I remember it was a Thursday afternoon."

' " 'What?' I said.

' " 'After leaving the office,' he said, 'I decided to stop in at Moran's. When I walked in the place was strangely quiet. There was a fellow who eyed me strangely as I sat down at the bar. He came up, sat down next to me, and said: "You know, I think I can explain, because the same thing happened to me! I remember it was a Thursday afternoon."

" ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " 'I decided to stop in at Moran's after work,' he said. 'But when I walked in the place was dead quiet. There was a fellow who eyed me strangely as I sat down at the bar. Then he came up to me and said: "I think I can explain because the same thing happened to me! It was on a Thursday afternoon."

' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " 'I stopped in at Moran's after work,' he said. 'But the place was dead quiet. There was a fellow who eyed me strangely as I sat down. Then he came up to me and said: "The same thing happened to me! It was on a Thursday afternoon."

" ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " 'I stopped in at Moran's,' he said. 'The place was dead quiet. There was a fellow there who eyed me strangely. He came up to me and said: "The same thing happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " 'It was dead quiet at Moran's,' he said. 'A fellow there eyed me strangely, then came up and said: "The same thing happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

" ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " ' " 'Moran's was dead quiet,' he said. 'A fellow who eyed me strangely said: "The same thing happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " ' " 'Moran's was quiet,' he said. 'A strange fellow came up to me and said: "This happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

" ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Moran's was quiet,' he said. 'A strange fellow said: "This happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Moran's was quiet. A strange fellow said: "This also happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a strange fellow said: "This also happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a strange fellow said: "This also happened to me! It was on a Thursday."

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a fellow said: "This also happened to me on a Thursday!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a fellow said: "This also happened to me Thursday!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a fellow said: "This also happened to me!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?' I said.

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'In Moran's a fellow said: "This happened to me!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'A fellow said: "This happened to me!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'A fellow said: "It happened to me!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'A fellow said: "Happened to me!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Fellow said: "Happened to me!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Fellow said: "Happened!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Fellow: "Happened!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'What?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "Happened!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Wha?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "Happened!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " 'Wha?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " '?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " '?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "!"

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " '?'

' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "!"

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " '?'

" ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' " ' "!"

By this point the fellow was gesturing and shaking as like he was in a kind of fit. I didn't know if I should prod him to snap him out of it or if I should turn tail and get outa there.

The barman Niall came out just then and his eyes widened to see the man in such a state. Seems he'd seen this before, which made me none too comfortable to be engaged in this dialogue.

Finally in his swaying and gesturing the fellow bumped against me and snapped out of it.

"It was. . ." he said looking at me in fright. "It was like that for me too!"

"Gilbert," Niall began.

"Let me be!" Gilbert said. "I know what I heard and I won't be told otherwise. It happened on a Thursday right here, smack on the same hour, and the fellow went on and on til he was shaking, just like I was telling it."

Niall didn't reply, but began pouring me a pint.

"But how did it end?" I asked the man.

Niall frowned that I was pursuing the question. He shook his head and retreated back down to the store room from where he'd come.

"How did it end?" the man repeated. "How did it end, you want to know? You really want to know?"

I thought it over. My pint stood on the wood before me, a perfect head to it. Glancing at Gilbert, I could see the sweat beading on his forward, the question he had asked still in his eyes. Clearly he was burning to finish the tale.

"No," I said. "Not today. Maybe next Thursday."

Gilbert slumped like the air was let out of him. He got up and went back to where he was sitting when I came in.

* * *
The next Thursday I was there early, waiting in a corner. Gilbert was nowhere to be seen, however, and again Niall was down in the store room. After ten minutes or so a new fellow came in, gave a look round the place, and went up to sit at the bar. I started to feel a kind of itch in me, a compulsion to speak to the man, even though I'd never seen him before. I got up and walked over to where he was seated. I sat down next to him and introduced myself.

"You know, I think I can explain," I began, "because just about the same thing happened to me! It was a Thursday afternoon."

"What?" the man said.

------------------------------------------------------
If one draws a finely detailed map that includes a representation of that map, the map within the map will include the map, as will that map, and so on ad infinitum.

In one of his more famous tales, Borges quotes a gnostic teacher from Uqbar who taught that "both mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of mankind."

One mirror is bad enough in this regard. If you stand between two mirrors not perfectly parallel, you will see yourself arcing off in an infinite series of repeated reflections, the images tapering off into a silvery distance. This often happens on elevators with mirrored walls.

Could one reproduce this effect in writing? I've tried in the above tale.

My Guns and My Regrets

2010-03-28T16:55:00.000+08:00

I got my first gun when I was nine or ten, a BB gun with a hand pump under the stock. It was a lousy gun. It fired metal BBs sold by the thousand in cardboard boxes, BBs which exited the barrel at such low velocity I could visually trace their arc through the air. My gun was so weak that if I was wearing jeans I could shoot myself in the leg without feeling much of anything. Even so my mother considered the gun dangerous because at close range it could doubtless "put out an eye." Close range in this case being about three inches.

Though my BB gun was weak, I certainly tried my best to kill things with it. I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, near an exceedingly placid town called Hartland (literally "Stagland," from the old word hart: adult male deer). Though the place I grew up was placid, I was not. One side of our house faced a forest and the other butted up against an 18-hole golf course. In short there were animals of all kinds to shoot at: rabbits, gophers, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels and birds of every sort. Deer could even still be seen sometimes. I shot at all these animals, occasionally even hitting one, but none ever dropped down dead. The BBs coming from my gun were far too weak for that. Once hit, the animals would just stir, then run or fly away.

So my situation as an aspiring hunter was annoying, and it only became more so as time went on. I remember once in frustration I snuck up on our neighbor's dog, a golden retriever, and shot her in the side. She turned her head, looked at me and began to wag her tail. Not even a yelp. That was the last straw.

During the many months I hunted with that BB gun I'd managed to kill only one thing: a frog. It's true I hit quite a few frogs while down at the pond near my house, but only one had actually been slain. Probably I'd hit it at just the place where the spine was weakest. Or maybe it was already dead before I shot it.

In despair I pestered my parents to buy me a proper gun: a .22 rifle for instance.

"There's no way," my father said. "You could kill someone with a .22."

"Then how about a pellet gun?" I asked.

"You don't need a pellet gun," my mother said. "They're too dangerous."

"Mike Schroeder and Doug Omen both have pellet guns," I replied, referring to two other boys in our whitewashed, country-club neighborhood.

"They're both older than you," was my mother's answer.

"Only by one year," I said.

"Well, we'll have to think about it."

That was the answer I wanted. At my next birthday I got my pellet gun: a Sheridan rifle with a silver barrel, a high quality make in fact. It had a pump under the barrel that one could pump up to ten times. The more you pumped before shooting, the more powerful the shot would be. Although my BB gun would only make a "ping" sound when fired at a glass bottle, my pellet gun would smash the bottle outright. The killing could begin in earnest.

My first real kill was from my bedroom window, which was on the second floor looking west over a small stand of trees. Already during the BB gun days I'd made a hole in the screen so I could shoot at animals from my room. The day after I got my pellet gun I saw a woodpecker on one of the trees outside. "Rat tat tat. . . Rat tat tat tat. . . ." I took aim and shot. The bird fell to the ground. Tossing the gun on my bed, I rushed downstairs and outside to see the kill. As it turned out, the woodpecker wasn't dead. I'd only shot its beak off. I found the beakless bird flopping around on the ground at the base of the tree. What was I to do in such a situation?

I picked up the bird and held it. Its warmth and the speed of its heartbeat transmitted themselves instantly to my palm. I was surprised at how light the bird was. I held it that way for a moment. Two little drops of blood fell from its wound onto my wrist. Carefully putting the bird back on the ground, I went to get a rock. I smashed the bird with the rock, putting it out of its misery. But what to do with the corpse? Carrying it to the edge of the yard, I tossed it into the high grass.

In fact during all this there was a lump in my throat. Although elated about actually killing something, I also felt bad the animal hadn't died straightaway. I felt there was something sickening about it, that I'd done something wrong. But soon I forgot this feeling.

Over the course of the following months I shot a handful of chipmunks, two or three rabbits, countless sparrows and robins and red-winged blackbirds, a crow, two squirrels and dozens of the gophers that lived in holes and stuck their heads up along the fields edging the golf course. It was mainly while shooting the gophers that I had the company of Mike Schroeder and Doug Omen, who also lived on the golf course and whose houses were near a large stretch of field the gophers seemed to like particularly. But they couldn't much have liked that field during the first summer I had my Sheridan. I believe the three of us depopulated the whole neighborhood of them. While we were busy at this gruesome work, the fat summer-dressed golfers would yell curses at us and wave their clubs in the air because we'd hunt just off the margin of the fairways and disturb their game. Finally word of our hunting got round to our parents, who were also club members, and I was told I could no longer hunt along the edges of the golf course. So we hit the woods and went after chipmunks and birds instead.

I remember once while out hunting with Mike we cornered a squirrel at the top of a dead tree trunk. The squirrel clung tightly to the trunk, about thirty feet above us, and scurried round from one side of the trunk to the other. But Mike and I took turns shooting and managed to hit it a couple times. Eventually, weakened by its wounds, the squirrel couldn't scurry round the trunk any more. But still it clung tightly to the tree, refusing to fall. I remember how we then sunk another pellet into the squirrel's back, then another, and finally a third. It was only with the third or fourth slug sunk into its body that the squirrel's claws finally gave way and it fell down to the ground with a heavy thud. Mike and I laughed at our triumph and I carried the squirrel back home, where I intended to use a heavy-gauge wire cutter to cut its tail off. I collected them.

I think I got that first pellet gun when I was eleven. I later got another pellet gun, a pistol that used CO2 cartridges, and I also occasionally went pheasant or duck hunting with my father, when I'd get to use an actual 12-gauge shotgun.

Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I must have killed several hundred animals and birds with these guns. Then suddenly, at age fourteen, the lump in my throat returned and I couldn't kill them any more. I even stopped fishing, which was another one of my favorite sports. I no longer wanted to kill even the fish.

By the time I reached the age of sixteen, I felt a horror of all the animals I'd killed. I remember once coming upon some boys trying to electrocute a gopher they'd caught in a wire cage. I thrashed one of them and chased the others away, finally setting the gopher free. I also mangled the cage they'd made so it couldn't be used again.

At age seventeen, just before my last year in high school, I decided to spend the summer away from home. I set up a summer job in northern Wisconsin in a resort town called Minocqua. I'd be bussing and waiting tables at one of the resort restaurants.

There was an Indian who worked in the same resort. He was in charge of the boats they rented out and he also did work around the resort grounds. He'd drink a few beers in the bar every night and talk quietly to the bartender. Once I overheard him explaining to another man that white men's hunting was a terrible thing, that it was in fact a terrible sin. When the other man left and I'd punched out I decided to talk to him a bit.

He explained to me how white men just kill animals for sport, that they have no use for the animals they kill and no respect for the animals' souls. The Indians, on the other hand, only killed what they needed and would balance the deed of killing with the proper rituals of respect. The Indians had maintained harmony with all the souls of the world's living things, whereas the white men were corrupted to their core and understood nothing about the souls. He also explained that such disrespect for the souls of nature meant that the souls of these men would end up in hell after their deaths.

I told him I had respect for these ideas, that for years I'd felt there was something sickening in killing animals just for sport. I also told him my story, how I'd killed hundreds of animals with my pellet gun when I was a kid. I told him how I'd felt sickened that first time killing the woodpecker at age eleven, but that somehow it hadn't stopped me from going out hunting again the next day. I explained about all the gophers and robins I'd shot, about how I'd cruelly sunk pellet after pellet into the squirrel's back until it fell from the tree, about how my friend and I had laughed after the kill and how I'd later cut the animal's tail off with a wire cutter. I told him about the pheasant's head that got shot off, about the rabbit I literally blasted into two pieces at close range with my father's 12-gauge. I asked him if there was something I could do to atone for all the animals and birds I'd slaughtered, if there was some Indian ritual that could set things right with nature.

The Indian took a sip from his beer and shrugged sadly. "There's nothing you can do," he said quietly, gazing at the bar. "You're going to hell."

My regrets about killing animals continued into university. I became a vegetarian my freshman year and began to study political science. And then I learned about cultural criticism and Marxism. I began to understand why the country-club neighborhood I'd grown up in had always so annoyed me: why I'd never wanted to golf or play tennis with the other rich kids but was always interested as a child in guns and hunting and later, as a high school student, in Jim Morrison and marijuana. It was the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of that ridiculous bourgeois place: the church-going hypocrites who claimed to worship Jesus but thought only about their countryside estates and their ever more expensive, ever flashier cars. All through my childhood I'd watched them out on that golf course with their beer bellies and fat asses wrapped in plaid. On Sunday I'd see them at church listening to sermons and singing hymns to an ancient Palestinian spiritual leader they claimed as their "Savior" but whose teachings they didn't make the slightest effort to follow. Even a kid like me, even a kid with the weak, milquetoast American education I'd had, could see how ridiculously out of tune it all was.

The neighborhood I'd grown up in was neither urban nor truly rural. It was that indefinable nowhere land called "the suburbs." And being a richer suburb than most, it proved to be all the more alienated from real life. It was a neighborhood where each home stood apart like a miniature aristocratic estate. This meant there were no sidewalks, no real place where the community of kids could gather. One rarely saw one's neighbors, who entered and left their houses in their expensive cars. Or if one saw them it was out on the golf course, where they pretended to enjoy themselves playing a sport that they liked mainly because of its prestige factor.

So as I continued in university I started to analyze more and more my experience growing up, the kind of culture I'd grown up in, how it had shaped me and distorted my sense of the world--or rather how it had tried to distort my sense of the world, for with my intellectual awakening I'd in some measure escaped from it. And eventually my regrets at shooting all those animals started to pale next to a different regret, one based not on things I'd done but rather on things I'd neglected to do. It was a sin of omission that began to bother me, one that could be formulated as follows: During all those years living in that neighborhood I'd had a perfectly good pellet gun at my disposal, so how was it--I asked myself--how was it I'd never thought to use that gun to sink a few pellets into the fat asses of those overstuffed pseudo-Christian slobs who showed off their ridiculous plaids every weekend on that golf course? All those fat asses bending over to take their shots and never a single shot taken by me. How was it I hadn't been smart enough then to leave the poor gophers alone and shoot the culpable golfers instead? This eventually became my central regret, and it still burns in me today.

Steiner on Heidegger

2010-03-22T00:20:00.000+08:00

Notes on/quotes from George Steiner's book Martin Heidegger

One may get to the heart of the matter by asking: How is a page of Heidegger to be read, what orders of meaning can be drawn from it? For Heidegger it is the right asking that matters. (18)

The beginning of our asking should be treated with the same dignity as the goal we hope to reach.

One starts out on "a path." There are different paths one may start on, and one can't know if the path one has chosen will lead where one hopes. One must be sure, however, that the path is at least "in the forest"--i.e., in what is proper to philosophy and not somehow extraneous to philosophy. For Heidegger most of Western philosophy has been a matter of elaborating things extraneous to philosophy.

One does not read Heidegger so as to understand his texts if understanding means the ability to summarize or explain in different words, a different idiom. One reads so as to experience his texts, his project.

Steiner: "What blazes in Heidegger at best is a slow lightning. Heidegger would have been the first to underline the preliminary, fragmented nature of his labors. He conceived of these as a didactic, purgative preparation for a revolution in thought and in sensibility yet to come." (xxxiv-v)

Steiner takes up the issue of Heidegger's association with the Nazi movement and concludes: 1) there is no way to demonstrate that Heidegger's work in Being and Time had any direct influence on the Nazis; 2) there are in fact many areas in which Heidegger's concerns overlap with aspects of Nazi ideology; 3) the most troubling fact of all is not Heidegger's original collaboration, but his complete silence on the Holocaust after the war. (Heidegger said almost nothing about the Holocaust for the remainder of his life.)

Steiner's treatment of these questions seems at times very condemnatory, at other times even-handed: Heidegger's associations with Nazism are neither treated as insignificant, nor however are they reason to neglect Heidegger's philosophy.

Considerations on a 1955 colloquium in France: Was ist das--die Philosophie?

Heidegger's insistence on listening to etymology: "The word 'philosophy' speaks Greek." Steiner elaborates:

It is not we who are using a word that happens to be derived from the classical Greek lexicon. The power and agency of statement lie inside the word philosophia . . . . It is language that speaks, not, or not primordially, man. This, again, is a cardinal Heideggerian postulate, to which I must return. (22)

Heidegger: "[Philosophy] determines the innermost basic feature [Grundzug] of our Western-European history." Philosophy is the founding and shaping impetus of our history.

Philosophy for the Greeks was a working through of their astonishment before the question of Being/beings. Heidegger:

All being is in Being. To hear such a thing sounds trivial to our ear, if not, indeed, offensive, for no one needs to bother about the fact that being belongs to Being. All the world knows that being is that which is. What else remains for being but to be? And yet, just this fact that being is gathered together in Being, that in the appearance of Being being appears, astonished the Greeks and first astonished them and them alone. (26)

It is the task of philosophy to be, as Steiner puts it, "incessantly astonished at and focused on the fact that all things are . . . . This astonishment . . . what Heidegger will call 'the thinking of Being' . . . sets philosophy on the way toward the question of what it is that is, of what it is that indwells in all extant things, of what it is that constitutes beingness . . . ."

Socrates and Plato were the first to take 'the steps into philosophy.' This is to say, they were the first to pose the question of existence in an analytic-rational guise. Theirs is a great achievement, says Heidegger, but . . . also a symptom of decline. Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, who came before, did not need to be 'philosophers.' They were 'thinkers' (Denker), men caught in the radical astonishment (Thaumazein) of being. They belonged to a primal, therefore 'more authentic' dimension or experience of thinking, in which beingness was immediately present to language, to the logos. Just what it signifies to experience and to speak being in this primary and 'thoughtful' way is something that Heidegger labors to explain, to illustrate, and, above all, to 'act out' in his late writings. (27)

As to the question of what philosophy is, we should not seek an answer--for to seek an answer is to guarantee a "philosophic" answer--but rather a response, a correspondence [Entsprechung]. Steiner: "A 'thinker,' as distinct from a post-Socratic or academic philosopher, is 'answerable to' the question of being." (29)

The history of philosophy is thoughtless, unthinking. Though we must engage a dialogue with "that which has been handed down to us as the Being of being," we must not do so from within the history of philosophy. Rather philosophy must be "the expressly accomplished correspondence which speaks in so far as it considers the appeal of the Being of being." (30) The summons:

Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of "grasping" and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying "to listen to the voice of Being." It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for. Of this answerability, the thinker and the poet, der Denker und der Dichter, are at once the carriers and the trustees. This is because it is in their oneness to language (to the logos), in their capacity to be spoken rather [than] to speak--a distinction that will become more intelligible as we proceed--that the truth, or can we say with Wordsworth and Hölderlin "the music of being," most urgently calls for and summons up response.

. . . Philosophy is a "distinctive manner of language," a manner that interconnects thought with poetry because "in the service of language both intercede on behalf of language and give lavishly of themselves." (32)

Heidegger was to rephrase his central question in a number of ways: "What is the Being which renders possible all being?" Steiner: "To ask why there is being instead of nothingness is to ask of the foundations (Ursprung, Urgrund) of all things. But it is also, and explicitly, to put in question the nature of the questioner himself (this will lead to the Heideggerian notion of Dasein, of that in man which 'is there'), and it comports a constant questioning of the language which enables us to, or inhibits us from, posing the question in the first place." (36) Language both enables us to and inhibits us from posing the essential questions. This is what both philosopher and poet must realize first of all.

Heidegger: "Words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are." (37)

Heidegger insists that the forgetting of being is the cause of our particular dilemma. Steiner:

How did it come about that the most important, fundamental, all-determining of concepts, that of being, should have been so drastically eroded? What "forgetting" of being' has reduced our perception of "is" to that of an inert piece of syntax or a vapor? . . . To Heidegger, the history of Western civilization, seen from the two crucial vantage points of metaphysics after Plato, and of science and technology after Aristotle and Descartes, is no more and no less than the story of how being came to be forgotten. The twentieth century is the culminating but perfectly logical product of this amnesia. (38)

Steiner regrets that Heidegger neglected to use the question of music as an analogy to the question of being, as an example of an experience that we cannot summarize in other words. (43-5)

The forgetting of the question of being is now entrenched in language: it is an historical-linguistic cover-up managed through the triumphant constructions of metaphysics. Steiner: "If the 'question of being' . . . strikes us as vacuous . . . the reason is, literally, linguistic." Heidegger: "Many words, and precisely the essential ones, are in the same situation: the language in general is worn out and used up--an indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used as one pleases, as indifferent as a means of public transport." (45)

Steiner begins an analysis of the words for being on page 46.

The Greek terms for being: ousia, or, more fully, parousia; and physis.

We have wrongly translated parousia as "substance." Parousia rather has a cluster of significations: homestead, at-homeness, a standing in and by itself, a self-enclosedness, an integral presentness or thereness.

As for physis: to emerge, to come to stand autonomously, to grow; nature.

Heidegger points out that neither term can be translated as existence, which means "a standing outside of." One may thus say that the Greek existence is almost the opposite of being. Heidegger can ground his critique of Sartrean existentialism in this etymology. Against existentialism, we must work toward a true ontology.

Steiner: "Being lives essentially in and through language. If we had no comprehension of being . . . there could be no meaningful propositions whatever, no grammar, no predications. We would remain speechless. But 'to be a man is to speak.' Man says yes and no only because in his profound essence he is a speaker, the speaker. . . . For Heidegger, to be is 'to speak being' or, more often, to question it." (50) Heidegger: "For it is questioning that is the piety of thought." (55) Steiner:

Heidegger [analyzes] what he takes to be the relation of "is" to a number of decisive "surrounding" concepts. These are "becoming," "appearance," "thinking," and the notion of obligation in "ought." This analysis is conducted via seminal passages in Parmenides, Pindar's Ninth Olympian Ode, fragments of Heraclitus, and the celebrated first chorus from Sophocles' Antigone. . . . Heidegger's return to origins, whether in the etymology of a word or in the stream of thought, is not, as we have already seen, an arbitrary or pedantic archaism (though there are elements of both in his work). It is, at its best, the expression of a deeply meditated conviction that in human thought, as in all important phenomena, "the beginning is the strangest and mightiest." (51-2)

Heidegger:

Language is the primordial poetry in which a people speaks being. Conversely, the great poetry by which a people enters into history initiates the molding of its language. The Greeks created and experienced this poetry through Homer. Language was made manifest to their being-there [Da-sein] as departure into being, as a configuration disclosing the essent. (52)

Steiner writes on the problematic of the grounding of idealism on pages 52-3. The permanence of being vs. the flux of becoming and how thought "actualizes both being and what is opposed to being." Steiner: "That which is actually seen to be stands opposed to the changing appearance of the seeming. It is thought, not the eye, that distinguishes between permanence and motion, between essence and appearance." Thus Heidegger: "Thought is the sustaining and determining ground of being."

The metaphor of the arrow pointing upward or downward. Steiner: "As soon as being realizes itself as 'idea,' as soon as essence is 'idealized,' the arrow points upward. It points, inevitably, to 'ought,' to the category of the exemplary, the prototypical, the teleological and obligatory. In the realm of 'ideas,' essents are endowed with a purpose, a forward-directed rationality, a 'should.' This conjunction of futurity and obligation is the core of Platonic and Kantian idealism."

Steiner: "For Plato the Being of beings resides in eternal, immutable matrices of perfect form, or 'Ideas,' for Aristotle in what he calls the energeia, the unfolding actuality that realizes itself in substance. The Platonic notion engenders the whole of Western metaphysics down to the time of Nietzsche. The Aristotelian concept, with its concomitant investigation into 'first causes' and 'dynamic principles,' lays the foundation of our science and technology. [par.] For Heidegger, neither of these two legacies, the idealist-metaphysical and/or the scientific-technological, satisfies the original, authentic condition and task of thought which is to experience, to think through the nature of existence, the 'Beingness of being.' From Sein und Zeit onward, Heidegger conceives it as his essential enterprise to 'overthrow' (in a sense yet to be defined) the metaphysical and scientific traditions that have governed Western argument and history since Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger will urge relentlessly that these two great currents of idealization and analysis have sprung not from a genuine conception of Being but from a forgetting of Being, a taking-for-granted of the central existential mystery. More than this: Heidegger will seek to prove that it is the continued authority of the metaphysical-scientific way of looking at the world, a way almost definitional of the West, that has brought on, has, in fact, made unavoidable the alienated, unhoused, recurrently barbaric estate of modern technological and mass-consumption man." (28)

A long central chapter on Being and Time

Steiner: "To 'think Being' is the task of H's Fundamentalontologie, that 'ontology of foundations' which is to be distinguished utterly from the Platonic model of ideal Forms, from the Aristotelian-Aquinian network of cause and substance . . . . The 'fundamental ontology' is to replace all specific ontologies such as those of 'history,' of the physical or biological science, or sociology. . . . How does a fundamental ontology proceed? By differentiating absolutely between the 'ontic' and the 'ontological,' this is to say between the realm of external particulars, of beings, and that of Being itself. Let us note at once: the 'ontic' and the 'ontological' are as different as any two concepts or spheres of reference can be. But the one makes no sense without the other. . . . Without the 'beings' whose 'isness' it is [for us as Dasein, of course], 'Being' would be as empty a formulation as pure Platonic Form or Aristotle's motionless mover. Only by keeping this distinction sharply in mind can we ask: Was ist das Seiende in seinem Sein? In the Sophist, Plato equates this question with the attempt of mortals to wrestle with Titans." (80-1)

To repeat: "Without the 'beings' whose 'isness' it is [for us as Dasein, of course], 'Being' would be [an empty formulation]." And, according to Heidegger, it is only as Dasein that we can think Being, it is only Dasein that experiences Being as a problem. To speak in a theological register, Dasein is different from both animals and God: neither animals nor God experiences Being as a problem (though these two--presumably--avoid the problem in very different ways).

The question of Being is the problem that Dasein must wrestle with. Thus Heidegger insists that what he calls 'everydayness' and what he calls 'facticity' are constitutive of Dasein--not accidental properties added later, as if one could somehow consider Dasein abstracted from its '"being there" in the world. Heidegger uses the composite term In-der-welt-sein to stress how radically we are immersed, rooted, grounded in the world. Steiner: "[H]uman has in it humus, the Latin for 'earth.'" (82)

Theological question: But if Dasein is at its core a pre-existing soul/spirit/spark 'thrown here'? Heidegger doesn't acknowledge this of course, and he uses the concept thrownness differently. But does his very use of this concept indicate a Platonic slant? Can one speak of thrownness without also evoking the the questions: Thrown whence? Thrown whither? (Steiner notes on page 85 that for Heidegger "the notion of existential identity and that of world are completely wedded. To be at all is to be worldly. The everyday is the enveloping wholeness of being." See also p. 87.)

Steiner: "A being that questions Being by first questioning its own Sein is a Da-Sein. Man is man because he is a 'being-there,' an 'is-there' . . . . The ontic achieves Da-Sein by querying the ontological. It does so, uniquely and necessarily, by means of language. Thus, in a way that only the later Heidegger develops, Da-Sein and Sprache are mutually determinant." (82)

Steiner: "Man's being is a 'being-there.' Heidegger now expounds on the nature of 'thereness.' The crux is Alltäglichkeit, signifying 'everydayness.' All Western metaphysics, whether deliberately or not, has been Platonist in that it has sought to transpose the essence of man out of daily life. It has posited a pure perceiver, a fictive agent of cognition detached from common experience. It has disincarnated being through an artifice of introspective reductionism of the sort dramatized by Cartesian doubt and Husserlian phenomenology. This is why metaphysics has loftily relinquished the study of metaphysics to psychology, the understanding of behavior to morals or sociology, the analysis of the human condition to the political and historical sciences. Heidegger utterly rejects this process of abstraction and what he regards as the resultant artifice of compartmentalization in man's consideration of men. (82-3)

The world comes at us in the form and manner of things. The things that constitute Dasein's being-in-the-world are not just any things, but what the Greeks called pragmata and what Heidegger calls Zeug. Heidegger explains pragmata as "that which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings." His word Zeug has been translated as "equipment," "instrumentation." In German Werkzeug is "tool." Steiner: "The distinction between 'anything' and Zeug is essential to Heidegger's entire world-view." Presentness-at-hand is opposed to readiness-to-hand (Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit). The former characterizes the matter of theoretical study, the latter the things that are taken up. And so, rocks are present-at-hand to the geologist but ready-to-hand for the stonemason. Steiner: "That which is zuhanden, literally 'to-hand,' reveals itself to Dasein, is taken up by and into Dasein, in ways absolutely constitutive of the 'thereness' into which our existence has been thrown and in which it must accomplish its being." Heidegger:

The process of hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammer's character as a tool, but it has appropriated this tool in a way which could not possibly be more suitable. . . . [T]he more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become. . . . No matter how sharply we just look at the "outward appearance" of Things, in whatever form this appearance takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at things just "theoretically," we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one. It has its own kind of sight, by which it acquires its own Thingly character.

Steiner: "Appropriate use, performance, manual action possess their own kind of sight. Heidegger names it 'circumspection.' . . . Heidegger's differentiation is not only eloquent in itself; it brilliantly inverts the Platonic order of values which sets the theoretical contemplator high above the artist, the craftsman, the manual worker." (89-90)

On pages 91-4 Steiner treats of Heidegger's understanding of the "they" and the structural foisting of responsibility in the social order--in short, inauthenticity. Steiner:

Inauthentic Dasein lives not as itself but as "they" live. Strictly considered, it scarcely lives at all. It "is lived" in a hollow scaffolding of imposed, anonymous values. In inauthentic existence we are constantly afraid (of other men's opinions, of what "they" will decide for us, of not coming up to the standards of material or psychological success though we ourselves have done nothing to establish or even verify such standards). Fear of this order is Furcht. It is part of the banal, prefabricated flux of collective sentiment. Angst is radically different. In its Augustinian, Pascalian, and, above all, Kierkegaardian sense, Angst is that which makes problematic, which makes worthy of questioning, our being-in-the-world.

Following this is a like differentiation. Heidegger distinguishes between the authentic language of Dasein, which he calls Rede, and the inauthentic language (in which Dasein is lived through the "they"), which he calls Gerede. Rede may be translated as "speech," Gerede as "talk" or "idle talk," with these two terms bordering on gossip, cliché, jargon, other such concepts. Steiner points out that there are no suitable English translations for the terms, Rede being "less formal than 'discourse,' but certainly less colloquial than 'talk.'" (94-5)

On the distinction between Furcht and Angst, Steiner writes:

Dasein "is in anxiety." Angst is the taking upon oneself of the nearness of nothingness, of the potential non-being of one's own being. "Being-toward-death is, in essence, anxiety," and those who would rob us of this anxiety--be they priests, physicians, mystics, or rationalist quacks--by transforming it into either fear or genteel indifference alienate us from life itself. Or, more exactly, they insulate us from a fundamental source of freedom. . . . Angst reveals to Dasein the possibility of fulfilling itself "in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARD DEATH--a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the 'they,' and which is factual, certain of itself, and anxious." . . . The taking upon oneself, through Angst, of this existential "terminality" is the absolute condition of human freedom. . . . The refusal to see death as "an event," the stress on the dialectical oneness of existence and ending, arises closely and consequently from the whole construct of "being" and of "time" . . . . Without finitude there can be no truth. We are at the antipodes to Plato. (106-7)

Being and Time is a poetic work as much as a philosophical work. Or rather: for Heidegger the two inextricably overlap.

After Being and Time

After Being and Time Heidegger begins to give concealment ontological precedence over unconcealment. Steiner: "It is the mark and nature of significant truth to stay hidden, though radiant in a through this occlusion. Man, moreover, is not the enforcer, the opener of truth (as Aristotle, Bacon, or Descartes would have him), but the 'opening for it,' the 'clearing' or Lichtung in which it will make its hiddenness manifest. . . . Truth, [Heidegger says,] relates fundamentally to 'nothingness.' This 'nothingness,' however, is not nihil ('nothing'), or Vernichtung ('annihilation'). It is Nichtung, an untranslatable neologism in which 'negation' is made an active, creative force. This negation takes away from Dasein its self-evidence, its habitual inertia. It restores to Dasein its primal astonishment in the face of being. To be thus astonished is to . . . lay oneself open to the concealed presentness of the truth."

Heidegger begins to realize that in Being and Time he had fallen back into the language of metaphysics, "albeit wrenched into idiosyncratic shapes." This language cannot achieve access to the essential secret of the truth, to that hiddenness of generative nothingness at the heart of being. "If being is to be thought in depth, if Western through and society are to be freed from their anthropomorphism, from their arrogant humanism, a new kind of language must be found. Already, Heidegger is moving toward the idea that it is not man who speaks meaningfully, but language itself speaking through man, and through certain poets above all. By 1933, he is turning, increasingly, to Hölderlin." (115-6)

Heidegger: "Language is the house of Being. Man dwells in this house. Those who think and those who create poetry are the custodians of the dwelling." (127)

Steiner: "[D]welling in a house of which he is, at his rare best, a custodian, but never architect or proprietor, the thinker must be prepared to speak seldom, to speak fragmentarily when he speaks at all, and to suffer constant misunderstanding and contradiction. . . . To think fundamentally is not to analyze but to 'memorate' . . . to remember Being so as to bring it into radiant disclosure. Such memoration--again Heidegger is strangely close to Plato--is pre-logical. Thus the first law of thought is the 'law of Being,' not some rule of logic which, in any event, is a late product of the opportunistic-mechanistic impulse, incarnate in Aristotle, to classify beings, to index the world according to man's purposes and convenience." (129-30)

"It is art that allows the later Heidegger to delineate, to make as palpable as he can, the antinomy of truth's simultaneous hiddenness and self-deployment. It is art that enacts the dialectical reciprocity of cloture and radiance. . . . [The work of art conserves and gives] to Being a dwelling and a sanctuary such as it can find nowhere else. . . . Art is not, as in Plato or Cartesian realism, an imitation of the real. It is the more real. And Heidegger's penetration of the paradox leaves traditional aesthetics far behind." (134-6)

"True art, true knowledge, true technique are a 'vocation,' a 'calling forth' that imposes upon man his native 'calling.' Since Roman engineering and seventeenth-century rationalism, Western technology has not been a vocation but a provocation and imperialism. Man challenges nature, he harnesses it, he compels his will on wind and water, on mountain and woodland. The results have been fantastic. Heidegger knows this: he is no Luddite innocent or pastoralist dropout. What he is emphasizing is the price paid. Things, with their intimate, collaborative affinity with creation, have been demeaned into objects. . . . We have compelled nature to yield knowledge and energy, but we have given to nature, to that which is live and hidden within it, no patient hearing, no in-dwelling. Thus our technologies mask Being instead of bringing it to light." (139)

"The fatality of technicity lies in the fact that we have broken the links between techne and poiesis." (141)

"The nerve of poetry is the act of nomination. Authentic poetry does not 'imitate,' as Plato would have it, or 'represent' or 'symbolize,' as post-Aristotelian literary theory supposes. It names, and by naming makes it real and lasting. . . . Poetry is not language in some esoteric, decorative, or occasional guise. It is the essence of language where language is, where man is bespoken, in the antique, strong sense of the word." (145)

"Obsessed with instrumentality, with informational functionality, language has lost the genius of nomination and in-gathering as it is explicit in the original meaning of logos." (146)

Hölderlin: "Mankind dwells poetically, in the condition of poetry."

The question of Being, concealment and tautology

Steiner: "Being is not itself an extant, it is not something that can be identified with or deduced from particular beings . . . . To inquire into being is not to ask: What is this or that? It is to ask: What is 'is'? . . . Even to ask is to realize that this question has not been posed nakedly in Western thought since the pre-Socratics and that Western systematic philosophy has, indeed, done everything to conceal the question. But it is also to realize that human speech, either through some inherent limitation or because the impress of conventional logic and rational grammar is too incisive, cannot give an answer that simultaneously answers to, is authentically answerable to, the nature of the question, and satisfies normal criteria of intelligibility. This, says Heidegger, leaves only the resort to tautology. . . . [But] it may well be that the 'tautologous is the sole possibility we have of thinking, of thinking through, that which dialectics can only conceal.' We cannot paraphrase is. We cannot explicate the 'isness' of Being. We can only state it tautologically: Sein is Sein ('Being is Being')." (154) Steiner refers to the period in which Heidegger thus defends tautological thinking as a "tranquil, summarizing moment in [Heidegger's] lifework." It does seem to me however to indicate that although Heidegger has well articulated the problem he has not gone beyond an initial wrestling toward an answer. Such tautological formulae (Sein ist Sein) may stand as the best we can accomplish, but they can only be tentative. There may yet be more that language can do, if, perhaps, it stretch itself out of its current shape. Of course it is the poets that are called to undertake this deforming and reforming of language.

Is it true that only by concealing itself Being can make beings appear? That to give being to something Being itself must withdraw? The problem of this dialectic between the concealment of Being and the unconcealment of beings seems particularly worthy of thought.

Lévinas: "Being does not identify itself with [any being], not even with the concept of being in general. In a certain sense, Being is not (il n'est pas). For if Being were, it would in its turn be a being: il serait étant à son tour, whereas Being is, in some way, the very occurrence of existence in and of all beings, l'événement même d'être de tous les étants."

Richardson: "Being contracts into the beings it makes manifest and hides by the very fact that it reveals." "Being as the process of non-concealments is that which permits beings to become non-conceald (positivity), although the process is so permeated by 'not' that Being itself remains concealed (negativity)." This latter seems to me overconfident in its playing with positivity/negativity. There is something else at issue or at work.

Steiner: "To this process of concealment which brings forth openness, as the chemical medium, invisible in the darkroom, brings forth the picture, Heidegger gives the Greek name for truth, aletheia ('the unconcealed')." (66-8)

We might begin to query other metaphors like Steiner's darkroom metaphor: one of them might bring some light to the question.

Check George Steiner: Martin Heidegger at Amazon.com

Clay IV.6

2010-03-21T23:32:00.001+08:00

If we assert God's omnipotence, then we might suppose that God's full and present power was withdrawn from our territory as a result of God's own will, and that this withdrawal came upon the act of creating the man of free will. This withdrawal, in some respect, would then be simultaneous with the coming into being of the man of free will.

In other words, God's omnipotence is limited by his own will: it is an omnipotence that doesn't assert itself as the absolute director of events in the world.

This is one old solution to the problem, admittedly not a very satisfactory one. Another is to suppose that God is not omnipotent, but that the world is truly a battlefield between God and some other force or forces. A third solution is that offered by the Gnostics: namely, that the world was created not by the true God, but by a deficient being such as Yaldabaoth. A fourth solution, perhaps the most sophisticated, is offered by process theology.

In any event, the assertion that "the Lord works in mysterious ways"--meant to imply that the horrors of history are all somehow part of a loving God's plan--this is unacceptable if only because it refuses to pose the question.

Clay IV.7

2010-03-21T23:30:00.001+08:00

The first verses of Genesis suggest that God did not create the universe out of nothing. Rather the universe arose obliquely on that site where God's word met the Abyss. It is in this sense that we call God the ground of being. We may call him, to be clearer, the ground of true being.

An Other was present as the universe arose, an Other that was part of the Abyss. This Other's presence corrupted the universe to its core, a corruption reaching even the heart of men. This corruption we call the Fall, and it inaugurated humanity's fallen history.

Our fallen history led eventually to God's second act of creation, his second act of love, namely the sending of the Christ. It is this second act of creation in which we now live, and in which we place our highest hope, for with the sending of the Christ we are given the possibility, through the Spirit, of defeating that which had corrupted the first creation.

To the extent that the message of the Christ, called the Word made Flesh, touches our souls and ignites them, to this extent can we be saved. It is here both a question of our willingness to receive this gift of the Word, and to bring it to its fruition.

The future of the world is thus not entirely in God's hands. Rather the world is an embattled territory, neither abandoned by God, nor ruled by God, but at once fallen and under the dispensation of a potentially saving grace. Our words and actions are elements in a cosmic battle not only for our souls, but for the universe. This should impress upon anyone who can recognize it the true meaning of the phrase "the dignity of man." We here in the fallen world are called to complete some part of God's creation. We are nothing less than this.

Odysseus vs. Irus

2010-03-16T15:23:00.000+08:00

ZEI students rewrite the Odyssey, cont'd. When the beggar Irus got word that there was a newcomer begging in the palace, he was furious. He came to kick out the intruder. But the intruder refused to leave! Soon it was clear there was going to be a battle of beggars. The suitors were delighted with this entertainment. When Odysseus removed his clothes, however, Irus saw his rival's muscular body. He shook with fear. But it was too late to back down.

May's Version

. . . . The suitors around them were also astonished.

"How can an old beggar have such a muscular body?" they wondered.

Those who at first wanted to see a bloody movie, Beggars' Fight, started to tremble and thought about fleeing. Of course the unluckiest of all was Irus: he wanted to run, but his feet were rooted to the spot. All he could do was cry for mercy.

"Have mercy!" he begged. "You must be an 'Odysseus' of beggars."

"You will regret your bad attitude," Odysseus replied. "You insulted me, and today you will learn your lesson--that one must show hospitality to strangers."

As soon as Odysseus finished speaking, his muscles began to get bigger; his pectorals were swelling and his arms were growing. He began almost to look like a balloon in the shape of a man. But he still continued to grow, swelling larger and larger, because he had eaten too much spinach earlier in the morning in preparation for his fight with the suitors. Swelling and swelling, suddenly BOOOM! the balloon exploded. The great hero Odysseus was dead! He had died in his beggar's disguise.

No one in the palace understood what had happened. They were all too amazed at the mystery.

Jenny Lin's Version

Indeed the fight was a cruel nightmare for Irus. At first Odysseus hit him in the face, and he nearly fell to the ground, jabbing Antinous in the arm by accident as he swung backward. When he again stood still, Odysseus prodded him in the chest and kicked him in the stomach.

"Hurray!" Amphinomus yelled and whistled for Odysseus.

"You mad fool!" Melanthius said, and kicked him. "What is Irus doing? C'mon, Irus, kick your rival!"

Irus wanted to surrender and beg for clemency. The fury surged in his heart as he was beaten by Odysseus, who finally gave him a full punch to the chest as he stood hesitating.

Irus was on the ground, Odysseus standing on him as victor.

Ariel's Version

Odysseus saw the beggar's face: it was white as chalk, and the beggar was trembling. But the suitors didn't care, they were still yelling for the fight.

Odysseus spoke to Irus: "Dear brother, let's not fight," he said. "Let's be friends. We can help each other and share what's here."

"What are you talking about, man?" Irus said. "Kill me! Kill me! You don't have to let me go."

Odysseus shook his head. "No, brother," he said, "really I want to be your friend, because I'm lonely, and you're lonely. Please, let's be friends."

Then Irus smiled. "Okay, old man," he said.

But the suitors were angry; they wanted to see the fight. They started to throw things at the two beggars. Just then Penelope appeared and told them to stop and ordered the maids to lead the beggars inside and take care of them.

Jenny's Version

"Let's fight!" Odysseus revealed his sharp teeth.

The two beggars began a fierce fight. Irus gave him a boxing, but Odysseus quickly dodged and gave Irus a sharp kick as fast as lightning. Irus fell like a hurt cat, weak and with no ability.

"You'll regret your foolish treatment of me," Odysseus said. "You'll pay for your cruelty!"

"Old beggar, old beggar!" Irus begged, grabbing Odysseus' knees. "No, no! Noble elder, please don't kill me. I have to take care of my parents and young children. Forgive my foolishness!"

"Don't worry," Odysseus said. "I will take care of them. Now you will get what you deserve."

Suddenly time stopped. Poseidon appeared with a can of spinach and said to Irus: "Irus, try this. It'll make you stronger."

Irus ate it. Almost instantly he towered up into the sky, his right foot becoming as big as the palace itself. He began to stomp on the suitors and all the people of Ithaca.

Leyner and Saunders: Two Kinds of Edge

2010-02-26T14:29:00.000+08:00

Mark Leyner and George Saunders are the premier American satirists of the recent two decades. They are right on target in terms of what they intend to send up, and they are a riot to read: they both consistently make me laugh out loud.

There are striking differences between the two however. One difference I discovered recently is that I can maybe reread Leyner once or twice, whereas the best of Saunders' work I can return to repeatedly. Why is this?

Whereas Leyner's work is driven by cynicism, Saunders is the rare case of a razor-sharp satirist driven as much by cynicism as by warmth. This makes Saunders, for me, the greater writer. It is also, I think, the reason Saunders can capture the American idiom (the voices of different classes, professions, generations) in a way Leyner can't.

Leyner's character Mark in his novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville is a teenager only in a very conscribed Leyneresque way: it is hilarious, brilliant writing, but Mark, like Mark's dad, are both more or less Leyner himself slightly refracted. Take a Saunders story, on the other hand--"Pastoralia," or "CommComm," or the amazing Huck-inspired "Bounty"--and each character is a wonder of suffering linguistic specificity; they are palpable to the point you can see their hands gesture and feel their facial expressions as they speak.

Leyner offers off-the-wall, trenchant literary hijinks of a high order. Saunders is something different. Saunders is almost a matter of the miraculous.

Best of the Best:

Saunders: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Saunders: Pastoralia

Leyner: The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

The Fat Tax: An Idea Whose Time has Come

2010-02-17T09:46:00.000+08:00

What bracket will you be in?
Picking up today's paper, I read that film director Kevin Smith was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight because he was too fat to fit in his seat. Smith claims he had no trouble fitting in the seat--"I could buckle that seat belt"--and is now in a rage against the airline.

A few years back another overweight flier tried to sue an airline for making her buy an extra seat to accommodate her flab. The airline, she said, was discriminating against her because of her body shape.

All this raises the question: Should fatties have to buy an extra seat to fly?

My answer is simple: First, hell yes! And second, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In the same paper with the news bit on Smith was an editorial about the problems we Americans now face with our gargantuan budget deficit. Because of our unpaid-for two wars in the Middle East, and what with the government stimulus package and painful Wall Street bailout, we now face years of deficits in the trillions of dollars. How will we ever cover such huge expenses? I think, for a helping hand, we should look to huge Americans.

What I am proposing is very straightforward, a novel way of reforming the tax code. Until now, an individual's tax bracket was determined based on income. Starting next year, we should add a new and more effective criterion. We should determine a person's tax bracket based on his or her weight.

The fact is that we as a nation are way overweight. And we are now also deeply in debt. This is bad for our health and bad for our economic future. Take a stroll round the local shopping mall and you'll realize the merit of my plan. Hundreds of billions of dollars could be raised if we started taxing all those sagging bellies and elephantine hips. It's time all those man boobs cost a little. At least as much as breast implants.

My proposed tax would presumably be a hit with the couple now in the White House. Our president now faces more criticism for his ballooning budgets than for anything else on his agenda. And our First Lady has undertaken to fight obesity. Hmm. Isn't it true that a fat tax would be a way to solve both these problems at once? What's more, I think Michelle Obama would support my proposal even though, based on what I've seen, it may knock her into a higher bracket.

The fact is that if seriously overweight Americans were required to pay seriously higher taxes they might finally decide to get off those tens of millions of sofas and shake their booties a bit.

The question arises as to how this proposed tax reform would be implemented and enforced. How, in short, would we go about the business of assessing a given citizen's tax burden? I already have ideas on this.

You know how on highways you'll occasionally see signs that read "Weigh Station Ahead"? Those signs are for semi trucks of course. I suggest we open similar Weigh Stations for tax assessment purposes. (Though I do think there are people who may finally have to use the semi-truck weigh stations, given the poundage at issue.)

We could open up Weigh Stations in every town, and each year before tax day citizens would have to come in with their IDs and get weighed. First, the assessor on duty would measure the person's height, then the person would be required to walk over a long series of weight-sensitive tiles. I picture it like walking down a hallway, but in this case each section of the hallway is calibrated to buzz at a certain weight, the poundage decreasing as one walks.

And so, stepping off the yellow starting line, you step onto the first large tile. That first tile will only buzz if over 350 pounds is placed on it. So far so good. It didn't buzz. But the tile after that buzzes at 330 pounds, and the one after that at 310 pounds, and so on down to the lightest weight.

The further you make it down the hallway without setting off the red buzzer light, the lower your tax bracket and the less you'll have to pay. If however you set off one of those first few tiles-- Well, brother, looks like you'll be covering a hefty chunk of our national debt this year. Needless to say, you'll be encouraged to lower your tax bracket next time around.

I know the fast food and soft drink lobbies will fight tooth and nail to defeat my proposed reform. Nonetheless I'm looking to some of our thinner members of Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, to sponsor it. And like I say, I believe Obama will be behind it, so there's little chance of it getting vetoed.

In any case it is time Americans stopped whining about fiscal difficulties and started putting their money where their mouth is. Instead of stuffing that mouth with thick-crust pizzas and bag after bag of "diet cookies."

With a new fat tax, America's health care burden will shrink as obese folks realize they're paying too much to Uncle Sam and decide to cut calories. Admittedly there will probably be cases of citizens who try to perform lipposuction in their kitchens or who desperately amputate limbs in a last-ditch effort to lose poundage before Weigh Day. But such cases should be few and far between, and can be considered unfortunate casualties in what is a necessary policy of national austerity.

As for myself, my bracket will not be the lowest, that's for sure. I have a small belly problem, and I won't make it to the end of that hallway. But I'm willing to do my part for America. I'm willing to pay a little extra. And you? If you are not one of those shameless slobs we see lumbering through food courts, ice cream cone in hand, all across this Great Big Nation, you have every reason to give your support to this new proposed fat tax. Write your representatives today.

Director Kevin Smith is upset. Cry me a river.
Michelle will be paying a little extra too.
Yeah, you're laughing now.
Safety in numbers.
These gals will be a doing a swimsuit calendar to raise money.
"Lemme tell ya what I think of your proposal, Eric. . . ."

Daniil Kharms' Orchestra

2010-02-02T04:32:00.000+08:00

I'll begin with a few of Kharms' texts:

BLUE NOTEBOOK #10

Once there lived a red-haired man who lacked eyes and ears. He was also lacking hair, so he was called red-haired only in a general sense.

He couldn't speak, as he was lacking a mouth. The same with his nose. Even arms and legs, he just didn't have any. Nor stomach, nor backside, nor spine. And no intestines. He didn't have anything! Therefore it is totally unclear who is being discussed.

It's better if we don't talk about him anymore.

* * *
EVENTS

Once Orlov overate on mashed peas and died. And Krylov, having found out about it, died too. And Spiridonov died of his own accord. And Spiridonov's wife fell off the cupboard and died too. And Spiridonov's children drowned in the pond. And Spiridonov's grandmother took to drink and went off panhandling. And Mikhailov stopped combing and got sick with dandruff. And Kruglov drew a lady with a whip and lost his mind. And Perehrestov was wired 400 roubles and started acting with such self-importance that he got fired from his job.

All decent people, but they don't know how to keep a firm footing.

* * *
PRAYER BEFORE SLEEP
March 28, 1931 at 7 o'clock
in the Evening

Lord, smack in the middle of the day
a laziness came over me.
Permit me to lie down and go to sleep, Lord,
and while I sleep, oh Lord, pump me full of Your Strength.
There is much I wish to know
but neither books nor people will tell me.
Only You can enlighten me, Lord,
by way of my poems.
Wake me up strong for the battle with meanings
and quick to the governance of words
and assiduous in praising the name of God
for all time.

* * *
SYMPHONY #2

Anton Mikhailovich spat, said "ech," spat again, said "ech" again, spat again, said "ech" again and left. To hell with him. Instead let me tell you about Ilya Pavlovich.

Ilya Pavlovich was born in 1893 in Constantinople. When he was still a boy, they moved to St. Petersburg, and there he graduated from the German School on Kirchnaya Street. Then he worked in some shop; then he did something else; and when the Revolution began, he emigrated. Well, to hell with him. Instead, let me tell you about Anna Ignatievna.

But it's not so easy to tell about Anna Ignatievna. First, I know almost nothing about her, and second, I've just fallen of my chair, and have forgotten what I was about to say. So let me instead tell about myself.

I am tall, fairly intelligent, and dress prudently and tastefully. I don't drink, I don't bet on horses, but I like the ladies. And the ladies don't mind me. They like it when I go out with them. Serafima Izmaylovna has invited me home several times, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also said that she was always glad to see me. But I was involved in a strange incident with Marina Petrovna, which I would like to tell about. A quite ordinary thing, but rather amusing. Because of me, Marina Petrovna lost all her hair, became bald as a baby's bottom. It happened like this: Once I went over to visit Marina Petrovna, and bang! she lost all her hair. And that was that.

* * *
SOMETHING ABOUT PUSHKIN

It's hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn't know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.

And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.

Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.

Yet, after Gogol, it's a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can't write anything about Gogol. So I'd rather not write anything about anyone.

* * *
Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was one of the key members of the Russian avant-garde literary collective OBERIU, Union of Real Art. Kharms’ work cannot really be classed as surrealist, and Matvei Yankelevich, the most dedicated Kharms scholar working in English, argues that the frequently used epithet “absurdist” is not accurate either. How then to characterize these texts?

Kharms is working at the kind of destructive narrative techniques one finds in another writer in my personal canon: the master French prose poet Max Jacob.

One might also note, from the above, that Kharms was a believer, again like Jacob. The “Prayer before Sleep” is heartfelt, and the line Only you can enlighten me, Lord, / by way of my poems reveals how Kharms understood poetics as it relates to faith or revelation. Kharms considered his work a channel of grace; a quest, through his creative/destructive poetics, for enlightenment.

“Blue Notebook #10” is frequently quoted in introductions to Kharms. When I first read this text, it reminded me of Lichtenberg’s famous paradox: “A knife without a blade, from which the handle is missing.” Kharms was fluent in German and knew German literature well (Gustav Meyrink’s uncanny novel
The Golem was one of his favorite books). Was #10 written in response to Lichtenberg?

“Symphony #2” is of particular interest. It's the most brilliantly orchestrated piece of non sequitur I know of. Kharms moves from an unknown old man hacking, to the dryness of an encyclopedia entry, to self-ridiculing slapstick, to what starts to shape up as something approaching the erotic, but finally collapses in a totally shameful, ridiculous, utterly deadpan blast of absurdity--an anticlimax that couldn't be improved on. I say the progression here is orchestrated, and it is: thus the aptness of the title "Symphony." In a sizable handful of texts, Kharms, like Max Jacob, is above all a consummate conductor.

Both Kharms and Jacob died as victims of the extremist ideologies of the mid-century: Kharms in 1942 of starvation in a Soviet mental hospital; Jacob in 1944 of pneumonia while awaiting transfer to a Nazi concentration camp. Both writers practiced an art of intractable ambiguity, though Jacob, it is true, was victimized for being Jewish rather than for his playfully Cubist texts.

Kharms is best read in Matvei Yankelevich’s collection
Today I Wrote Nothing. I offer two of the pieces quoted above (the prayer and “Something about Pushkin”) in Yankelevich’s translation. The book has been widely praised for giving English readers access to this important voice in Russia’s literature. It is only in the recent couple decades that the Russians themselves rediscovered Kharms’ work. In his introduction, Yankelevich explains how close the manuscripts came to being lost forever. We are lucky to have them.

The Gospel of Thom Smit

2010-01-20T13:34:00.000+08:00

I.-- Once upon a time was the Word. And the Word was without form, and void.

In short, the Word was many words, and sometimes even things.

One could not tell the difference in any place, for all words and things were different; they were all different from each other, and they were even more different from the Word. And the Word, in its turn, was different according to whom you asked, and in what words you asked.

What's more, all was such that one could not fix one's eyes on any thing, or fix one's ears on any word, and expect it even to stay the same as itself.

In short, all words were different from themselves, and all things were different from any words, and also from each other, and also from themselves.

Even one's eyes were different, the left one from the right, and either eye was certainly different, very different, from either ear; and the ears protruded from each side of the head: in short, they were very different.

Then Thom Smit was born.

II.-- And Thom Smit did grow to be a youth of fourteen years, and his virtue did show forth in many ways.

And the people were astonished by his words, for he spoke as one with wisdom, and not as one who watched TV.

Said he: "Just as our elders, weakened by years of compromise, submit to the presence of those they loathe, so do our melons soak the fouled waters of the plain, till they poison both themselves and those that partake of them."

And: "Submit not to both these poisons. Though you eat the melons to the skin, yet leave the elders to chew their own bitter rinds."

And Thom Smit did take ceramics class at the Pottery Barn of the strip mall as you drive into town from Monona.

And he did throw him many a mean pot. And he did paint upon his pots designs and symbols, and the people did look at what he painted, and did say, "What hath this youth?"

For they said: "This youth is not like others, but hath him a perversion of the head."

And the owner of the Pottery Barn in those days was named Chuck, and Chuck did keep the pots of Thom Smit in the back, lest other youths should see them, and lest they should speak of them unto their parents. For on the pots were many things that youths should not see.

And some of Thom Smit's pots did the owner break outright, pretending they had cracked in the kiln. "For this one," sayeth Chuck unto his assistant, "this one is surely too much; I will not even fire this one."

And Thom Smit did suspect Chuck of thus breaking his pots, and spoke sorely unto him.

And Thom Smit did take him a can of maroon glaze, and did pour it into the drawer of Chuck's desk.

And the can was a large can, and did foul the books and papers in that desk, dripping even unto the floor.

And Thom Smit did break seventeen ceramic owls made by the ladies of St. James Lutheran. And Chuck did see him do it, and did hear him speak bitter words as he did it.

And Thom Smit was no longer welcome at the Pottery Barn, but did take up tennis.

Said he: "Our world is all preprocessed, and full of fakes; fakes upon fakes. The boredom of Formica covers all things here, even unto death."

And all of these things were when Thom Smit was still but a youth of fourteen years.

III.-- And it came to pass as Thom Smit was a young man that he went forth like many of his generation to work as a barista.

And this work was as he was a student at the university in the town of Madison; and the cafe in the which he did work was near upon the university, and was often filled with people.

And the people of the cafe were of many sorts.

And Thom Smit did work next to the scribe of that place, and he did serve forth the drinks unto the people.

And the prophet of that place in those days was named Cosmo di Madison. And Cosmo di Madison did preach the word of the Lord unto the people there. But the people heeded him not.

And Cosmo di Madison did resent the presence of Thom Smit at the espresso machine, and did make him out to be a servant of Belial.

And Cosmo di Madison complained sorely to the scribe of that place, and spoke many bitter words.

And the scribe of that place recorded the words of Cosmo di Madison, for in those days did he note down all his words.

And it came to pass when Thom Smit heard the words against him, that he did say unto Comso di Madison, and he said it unto his face: "A prophet art thou not, but art rather a paranoid schizophrenic."

And: "The symptoms are obvious upon you, O Cosmo di Madison, and all do know it. Thou art one who barkest at the moon. Woof woof!"

And Cosmo di Madison did not suffer the words of Thom Smit in silence, but did rail against him to all that would hear.

And Cosmo di Madison would drink no drink made by his hands, but did speak of such drinks as having a poison in them.

And one day Thom Smit did say unto Cosmo di Madison: "Today it seemeth you have not taken your medicine, O great prophet, and so it is that you speak forth loudly your prophecies, and the people heed you not."

And: "Today I have a hangover, O prophet, and care not to hear you. So get you hence through the door, or pay for your coffee like the others. If you cannot pay, so must you go hence to the street. For today I have a hangover, O prophet, and care not to hear your prophecies."

And upon hearing these words a rage did come upon Cosmo di Madison, and he did complain ever more sorely of Thom Smit, and did attribute to him many conspiracies and sundry larcenies.

And the scribe did write down all his words, for in those days did he write down all the words that the prophet did say.

IV.-- From the Scribe's Journals:

Thom Smit--to think he is a student of engineering! He's blond and small, of muscular build. He's a great reader of Gilles Deleuze, and considers himself a Nietzschean. It's lucky for me he's at the cafe. He's proving an excellent foil for Cosmo di Madison. I've recently got him reading Rabelais. --May, 1992

Cosmo di Madison now recognizes in Thom Smit a nemesis worthy of the swiftest action. That I'm responsible for his being hired at the cafe is generally known, and I confess it openly. I should have seen the man's character for what it was. Needless to say, Cosmo di Madison has forgiven this lapse on my part, pointing out that Pseudo-Sergeant Major Smit is obviously a professional and had been trained by Kissinger's people specifically to pull the wool over my eyes. Cosmo di Madison himself was almost taken in. "At first I thought he was just a loser like all the other losers. But it's worse than that. He's a fucking impostor--ya hear me?" --July, 1992

Remarks of Cosmo di Madison on Thom Smit:

1. "That useless fucking bastard calls himself a fucking lieutenant major, but he's just a fucking high school dropout drug addict who couldn't tell his ass from a hole in the ground if his life depended on it."

2. "How many customers do you think that fucking punk is gonna short change before Mark [the owner] wises up and fires him?"

3. "You know he's got his finger in the till and he's supplying all the barbiturates to Craig and Monkey Butt. Kissinger's got him working the joint to make sure they do their job and try to drug me every fucking chance they get. I wasn't born yesterday what do you think! Pssh! That fucking Craig has been selling the barbiturates on the side too.... Oh, don't act so surprised! You know it goes on."

4. "Mark needs to spend more time in his shop. I got enough stuff to do keeping the customers clean. If Kissinger buys out your staff, this place is finished, ya hear me? I won't come back. Ya hear me? You just see what'll go down then. Mark will wish he never even heard of this town. Ya hear me?"

V.-- And soon after these things had come to pass, behold it did happen that the spirit of the Lord came upon Thom Smit, and he began to speak in parables.

And all at the cafe did wonder upon it, and did say, "What hath Thom Smit, that he speakest thusly?"

And he did leave his work at the cafe, and ceased from his study at the university.

And Thom Smit went forth to preach unto the people like Cosmo di Madison, for the spirit of the Lord had moved him.

And Thom Smit did wander the streets on the west side of Madison, whereas Cosmo di Madison did preach in the downtown.

And Thom Smit preached the word unto the people of the west side, as you head out of town toward Monona. And the people heeded him not.

And thus it was that the people said amongst themselves: "Is Thom Smit also one of the prophets?" And these words are as a proverb even unto this day.

VI.-- And Thom Smit built his house on sandy ground, and sowed his seed upon the rocky wayside, and combed his hair with a goblet.

And he took a fox for a mango, and made of it a hairy puree.

And many did laugh at him, and said: "Thom Smit does not know his ass from a hole in the ground."

And they said: "Thom Smit could not find his ass with both hands."

But verily it was said unto them, and it was said by Thom Smit: "A day shall come to pass when none shall be able to tell their ass from a hole in the ground. And then shall a great wailing be heard."

And he said: "Only those who from the very beginning could not tell their asses from holes in the ground--only such as these shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven. All others shall be cast out, and their asses shall be grass, and they will know not if they have been turned into a golf course, or what. Boy, will there be wailing then."

And he said: "Those who mistake their asses for a wheelbarrow shall inherit the earth."

And he said: "Blessed are they who try to catch flies in their mouth. Blessed are they who would rather hang out in a juice bar than flay the fox with the big boys."

And he said: "My father is a colonel and I am a sergeant major. My father could thrash all your male relatives with his left hand if he wanted. My father has forty-seven Cadillacs."

But the people heard him not, and they sent him packing from their patio parties; and their daughters did tend to throw garbage at the back of his head.

But verily, reader, can you tell your ass from a hole in the ground even now?

* * *

Further like matter here:

Gospels from the Last Man: The Complete Deeds and Sayings of Cosmo di Madison

Gudding's Bestiary

2010-01-17T20:40:00.002+08:00

I first encountered Gabriel Gudding's hair-raising work not six months ago in David Lehman's anthology Great American Prose Poems. Lehman included Gudding's stately, footnoted tirade "A Defense of Poetry," in which the poet unleashes what I now know to be very Guddingesque gambits: no-nonsense direct address, Rabelaisian bodily humor; a subtle, defamiliarizing mix of verbal registers, animals, and more animals. It's fair to say this last struck me most. My own writing tends toward animal tropes and fables.

After reading the piece in Lehman's anthology, I had to place an order to Amazon to get Gudding's first book, which I read and reread while waiting for his second book to arrive, his 436-page road poem entitled Rhode Island Notebook. Written between 2002 and 2004, Notebook records the writer's musings as he drove back and forth between his wife and daughter's residence in Rhode Island and his own residence in Normal, Illinois. It's a journal of sorts, written by a brilliant poet working to keep a long-distance marriage together and struggling in particular to stay close to his young daughter even as the marriage finally fails. There's much agonistic battling of heartbreak in its pages, but there is also, all along, a preternatural poetic verve, a new kind of American beauty that is both virile and playful. I've read nothing like it for years. As writer and humane observer of himself and others, Gudding has accomplished something I wouldn't have believed possible: he's written a long poem that is, through most of it, unputdownable.

Aside from the many themes the poet delves into (dung, the life of rivers, the Iraq war, alcohol, American history) Gudding also displays his penchant for animals. There is in effect a kind of Gudding bestiary one can construe across his two books. Rhode Island Notebook contains one of his many poetic epistles to animals, this time a letter to the whole huddling lot of them:

DEAR ANIMALS

Many of you do not have breasts. This is
undeniable. I think immediately of amphibia,
the reptilians, birds--none of these possess
breasts nor anything upon which a nipple may
be mounted. I for instance have no fur.

. . . Though you and I
have very little in common, and I find your
bodies disturbing, I must say that despite your
biological distance from me, you and I ought
perhaps to have some coffee, should you drink
it--or possess a mouth.

What's more, I know that many of your penises
are odd, your vaginas strange, and your
faces long, flat or otherwise with horns. I
notice none of you wear watches, whereas I
gain distinct pleasure from a new watch . . . .
This is a totally human delight. Yet you must
have your own delights, like honking in a pond
or looking at your hooves for hours.

Sincerely,
Gabriel Gudding

The flatness and wonder are characteristic of many of Gudding's most unsettling and effective passages. Elsewhere we find gnomic evocations like the following:

The chicken will never be let into
the European union because
it is not only impoverished, it is also not a
European country it is a chicken (47)

Butterflies are the bowties of fairies. (69)

Spiders are held together by very small tendons. (55)

I took the pig's shadow and made a
suit of it. The suit smelled of ham
and slop. A suit of ham shadow. (69)

A substantial portion of a cat's energy
goes into the production of fur.

The mentality of the housecat is principally that
of a decentralized bureaucrat, she is a loose soft
clerk who has lost the hallways. The groin
is full of leaks. (47)

A chicken is a chain of meat and bone
and a two-watt brain. (48)

There was no summer because the memo
ordering it was swallowed by the Gar. Stella
should not have. Who but the fish
can fully know worrisome lilies. (122)

I did not understand the dog, I think
that is why it bit me. (121)

A dog at heart is made of dust
and dust is wind that's mad (122)

There is the long sequence on "meat bees" which begins on page 123 and is woven into the next dozen pages:

Just crossed the Hudson. It is
caked w/ ice floes. Very deep
snow along hwy

A mammoth cloud is strapped to a bee
who tows it down to make
a slow fog. The meat of
a bee is weak and tastes of egg.

Meat bees are few in the
winters around Birmingham. Yet
here they fly, like flecks & bolts
of squeaking mutton.

. . .

Bees come from a
land of Clocks.

. . .

The face of the puppy was a
bumpy bacon. Yet we did not
skin the dog for its face. Instead we
sought to catch and flay the meated bee.

The beefy bee was like an large airborne pill
but w/ a coating of meat that made it
juicy.

. . .

If I do so drive my rubber car
through the winds and plains of night
It is for to hunt the bee
and bring my family food.
Illinois State Line 9:52 PM CST
1012 M
But I do so for the sake of Merica,
to quieten its cloying huzzing.

A bee is a pill between wings.

I am like Cordelia who remaineth
quiet. But the bee is not. The
bumblebee reminds America
of the internal combustion engine
--and therefore all bees
must be suppressed:
bee meat is loud. (123-133)

There are the 70-mph drive-by observations:

Intricate nest of dogs and heavy cats
on hillside
garnished in a fluttering of Ducks.(69)

There are many hawks observed as Gudding covers his thousands of miles, many flocks of geese, and two sequences around the eagle, the first beginning:

We burned the eagle w/ Petroleum, pumpin
2 bullets into its tiny knees. We took a
nutcracker to its beak. (32)

I quote these animal passages only because they continue what is for me one of the most interesting strands in Gudding's work: his ongoing poetic adjudication of the oddness of animals and the oddness of our sameness/difference from them. Much of the poet's writing on animals is rough and tumble, but there is fellow feeling: a recognition of the importance of animals to any assessment of our own place in the world.

There's much else in Rhode Island Notebook to slap one awake besides the fragmentary bestiary. Gudding's poetics has in huge measure just the things I most value in literature. Foremost, he has a strong sense of the complex relations of literary humor to both suffering and healing. This is a theoretical or philosophical insight which, for Gudding, is of a piece with his practice as poet. The humor he deploys is not that of the aloof satirist, but rather that of the clown--a clown whose understanding and suffering lead to laughter and who laughs in order to further understand, and perhaps be healed.

Gudding's theory of humor has many antecedents, but I'm guessing one of the more important ones is Rabelais (a writer who, besides, is alluded to in Notebook), particularly in those aspects Bakhtin underlined in his writing on medieval laughter and the carnivalesque.

The poet also has a keen awareness of defamiliarization as one of the essential functions of literary language: namely that literature exists to break the frozen perception of things by exposing it as merely conventional. Literature reawakens the strangeness of all those things we'd come to take for granted. In one interview he puts it thus:

The purpose isn’t to be strange for the sake of strangeness. The point is to slow down the perception of the reader, so that the reader is not experiencing the poem automatically. Once our perceptual habits become automatic, we’ve dampened our innate capacity for wonder. So, one enstranges language not to put on a gratuitous display, but to allow again for wonder, to make, as Shklovsky says, “the stone stony again.”

All poets employ defamiliarization to different degrees: strong rhetoric is often a matter of effective defamiliarizing. Strictly speaking, one may say that tropes do double service: in service to the poetic, they defamiliarize; in service to ideology, they are agents of familiarization. It would be interesting, I think, to study Gudding's own arsenal of defamiliarizing moves and to compare them with the similar/different techniques of his contemporaries. There's something in Gudding that stands apart, and it seems to me that this difference is in the way his work defamiliarizes.

Finally, Rhode Island Notebook shows a poet ever aware of how language is used to hoodwink the gullible--aware especially of how depressingly effective official rhetoric is. Part of Gudding's work, then, is ideology critique, and in this vein his essay on dung is a masterpiece, a concise American rejoinder to the psycho-corporal economics of Freud and Bataille. Gudding pinpoints the "prissy" right there in the heart of what many compatriots take to be the most manly segment of the population: the red-state South. In this he is certainly correct. A central point in this road journal is that America is no longer so much the home of the brave as the echo-chamber of the fearful: security obsessed, isolated, prissily afraid both of the other and of its own private dung.

Alan Sondheim has called Rhode Island Notebook "the first 21st century classic." Sondheim also underlines what the book is not: "What could have been an experiment in conceptual writing has emerged into an exhilaration that makes me glad I'm still alive." This is apt. Gabriel Gudding's theoretical sophistication hasn't kept him from writing a brave and hilarious and readable book.

Rhode Island Notebook is published by the Dalkey Archive Press, the same folks who bring us Flann O'Brien.

Check Rhode Island Notebook book at Amazon.com

Links of interest:

"On Kindness and Hipness as They Relate to Cultural Production":

ttp://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue09/gudding.htm

The above-quoted interview on poetry and creative writing:

http://gabrielgudding.blogspot.com/2009/08/mipoesias-interview-on-creative-writing.html

Gudding takes part in a roundtable discussion on humor in poetry:

http://jacketmagazine.com/33/humpo-discussion.shtml

Some of my teen students in Taipei try their hand at Guddingesque defense:

11/2009

Clay IV.8

2010-01-17T20:33:00.001+08:00

Luther's compelling thought that he was "nothing" in relation to the grandeur of God. Accepting such a thought also means that God's redeeming love is given to nothing. And what does accepting that mean?

Under such a theological dispensation, God's love for man is beyond mystery: it is a love for nothingness. God's love for man is comprehensible only if man in his own right has being, and if man's soul, in its ground, has something of God's essence in it. To say this is not to say that men are gods or that men can become gods. It is only to say that there is something of God in us, something eternal and indestructible, something at the root of us that means, first, that we exist somehow "in God's image," and, second, that we are somehow worthy of God's love.

Clay IV.9

2010-01-10T22:21:00.001+08:00

A, B, C, D, . . . . Letters were invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent. Thus the tradition has it. Letters are signs of sounds, these sounds being, in turn, signs of things we think. Our thinking--that we do think--is a sign of our being created in God's image. It is our thinking more than anything about our outward appearance, our shape, that is suggested by the biblical lines: "Let us create man in our own image."

Yet our thinking and the things we think are shot through everywhere by the marks of the Fall, and these marks seem to be there also in our language, that is to say there already in the very medium of our thought. So that some have been led to wonder if the signs themselves were not carrying the burden of the Fall: the signs themselves dragging the soul into the body of a fallen language and thus molding its thought as a fallen thought. Here the tradition reverses itself, and we may say that our thinking becomes the sign of sounds that we make, or rather the sign of the particular sounds our parents made, and their parents before them, going back to the moment when our language became corrupted. (In turn, the sounds that the generations of men have made can be understood merely as would-be signs of the primal letters, which letters we cannot know. Also, the alphabets in which we write cannot approach that originary divine alphabet, although our human creation of alphabets suggests our longing to do so.)

That thought and language are shot through with the marks of the Fall means also that the language of revelation is itself shot through. The text of the Bible does not escape the vagaries of (fallen) language, (fallen) thought. The Renaissance humanists' supposition that Hebrew was somehow "the language of God"--that one would hear "God's own words" if one could properly read aloud the Hebrew text of Isaiah--this notion was obviously mistaken. And any notion similar to the Muslim teaching, which holds that the Koran is not just a divinely inspired text but is itself an attribute of God, eternal and uncreated, is even further from the truth.

The texts of revelation, the texts of the Bible, are composite: they give the truths of the divine as these truths have been embodied in language. These truths, embodied in language, seem to us both clear and somehow mysterious: they call out for interpretation. But our interpretation, while certainly uncovering something of the divine, will itself be subject to the fallenness of language. One might say it is even more so subject. Thus it is that the interpreter should never hope to present descriptively and clearly what scripture itself could only give forth as paradox or incommensurability. And thus it is that interpretation can never fully answer the call of scriptural texts.

The radical fallenness of language and thought, once it is recognized as such, leads to what I will call the Doctrine of Perpetual Error. This doctrine acknowledges the following: we are always in some manner in error as long as we are in language. And to conceive of our being, the being of men, other than in language is of course impossible. In other words, we are in perpetual error, and we can only hope to formulate something like allegories of the truth, or shadows of a truth that is necessarily beyond our grasp. This doctrine also implies the following: all of the Christian scriptures, all of the Christian creeds and teachings, are in some manner in error: they are approaches to the truth of the divine that are the best our human understanding can attain.

Our attempts to formulate the truth are like shots in the dark. How close have they come to the mark? The answer to this question, if an answer is to be found, can only be found under the two illuminating lights of gnosis and the tradition.

Happy New Year 2o10

2009-12-31T23:39:00.000+08:00

In 3 hours Taipei 101
will ignite As yet mankind's
tallest monument to Business Savvy
and our defeat of Gravity

In 3 hours the building
an oversized Flashbulb
will go off And our rough
Anno Domini 2009
will be laid to rest
with 2008 of the others
some dismal some blessed

Already 10 years of this shit century We'll
eat ourselves into the ground
before the next

Homo sapiens sapiens
We are

Hardly sapiential
Knowing only how to grasp at colorful things
And put them in our Mouths

Mouths serve us to speak
Not even 1 percent inspired speech

99-plus percent planning
Arranging for Input

Of more colorful
things Baubles
To put in our Mouths

Down into the Gullet
of Dust we go
a paroxysm of Cannibalism
Soon 20 billion of us
Fossilized white and brown
Fossilized in the soil
whence we came

End Fruit of Enlightenment Man's
Hope, of Communist Man
Free-Market Man
Blubbering Family Values Man

All buried under a Toys 'R Us
Apt garish mausoleum
for Homo puerilis americanus
Homo invictus sinicus
Homo sick sad ape
Too smart for its own good

Mortar fire between Two Rivers
Mortified Francis Fukuyama
And all the Apologists
of Walmart

To bury Gobekli Tepe
That was a piece of Wisdom
9,000 B.C. too late
already for a reprieve too late
for the mash-up material being
Man

From dust having come
To ashes returned
A poison wind rakes over
The dead steppes of Asia

10 years into our last Mad Dash
A final spate of Happy Meals
Screaming baboon Imperial
machinations
Soundbite justifications
We grasp at the last colorful things
To stuff in the last Mouths

Idiotic Story Contest

2009-11-21T21:20:00.000+08:00

This is an idiotic story contest. The rules for entering are as follows:

1) Your story must be in English.

2) Your story must contain no more than 350 words.

3) Your story should be idiotic enough to make the average reader wince at how stupid it is.

Of course I'd love to get stories written by actual idiots. This, let it be said, is my ideal. What I'll probably get, however, are stories of feigned idiocy, or discovered idiocy, or exploratory idiocy--all of which have their literary/philosophical merits.

Given the length of the tales at issue, it's in some sense a matter of "Postcard Fiction" or "Postcard Stories." And since many of the best postcard stories already have a certain idiocy to them, I'm hoping to hear from some of the usual practitioners.

The prose poem is also a genre productive of much brilliant foolishness, and prose poems in narrative mode are of course very welcome. The border between "prose poem" and "postcard story" is well beyond porous in any case.

When I've received one hundred texts idiotic enough to enter the contest, the contest will be over and I will take suggestions for methods of choosing winners. If methods are not forthcoming from contestants, I'll just have to pick some of the idiots I know to help judge the tales.

Finally I'd like to publish an anthology. A tentative title might be Cretinous Tales. Any of you morons have a better idea?

So send me a tale or two yourself and forward this URL to any writers (or idiots) you know. Those who enter the contest recognize that if their stories are accepted they will be put directly on this web page. Writers retain copyright to their work, but the tales will be available online at least until the contest is closed and the anthology is pending.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader

For now I post three of my own tales, in ascending idiocy from first to third. I will arrange submissions on this page alphabetically by writer's name as I receive them. Send to:

inthemargins03@hotmail.com
CRETINOUS TALES
LEFKOWITZ

Jason Lefkowitz had a habit of opening his mouth in any old place and launching into a story even when he had no story to tell. This often caused embarrassment or misunderstanding. Cashiers would interrupt him, “Excuse me, sir, but there are other customers in line,” taxi drivers would say “It’s your penny” and keep driving, and once on business in Edinburgh he was beaten pretty badly outside a pub by a gang of football fans who spat and said, “Fucking poof! Fucking chatty poof!”

Jason’s stories would usually begin earnestly enough. A pleading look in the eye, he’d touch his chosen listener on the arm and begin to narrate in a soft voice: “Once there was a locksmith who’d always dreamt of. . .” or “It happened in the days of Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. . .” or “It had been three years since she’d last seen Rick.”

But since Jason normally began his stories with no notion of where they were heading, the tale would soon drift into irrelevance or anachronism, each tale becoming a different tale as he told it, and his surprised listener becoming embarrassed or frustrated, the look on his or her face saying clearly: “What’s going on here? What do you want from me?”

It went on like this for a number of years. Jason’s repertoire of stories became no larger because from the beginning he’d never known any single, unified story, nor had he ever sought to construct one. His compulsion was simply the act of narration itself. In this he was like a carpenter who wielded tools on the lumber he was given without any plan to build anything, but simply in order to exercise the use of one tool after another. What would such a carpenter end up with after a day’s work?

Nothing that would stand; nothing that could fall.

E.M.
* * *

HUNTER

Ah, the Black Peruvian Rose! In all the world only one living example remaining! Ever since Hunter had first seen it in a photograph--he was thirteen, paging through a magazine while his mother tried on boots--he’d dreamt of one day setting off in search of this rarest of botanical wonders, of journeys through distant lands in quest of those soft petals of perfect singularity. And so his destiny was decided in the corner of one posh London boot dealer. Hunter would become a world explorer!

How many years struggling over the wilds of Peruvia! How many nights camped on ice-covered passes, the bitter Andean winds blowing through the tent flaps!

The Indians laughed at him, everywhere he went they overcharged him for alcohol. The experts too did what they could to discourage him. Many said the last Black Peruvian Rose wasn’t to be found in Peruvia at all, but in Chile. Others said it was in Ecuador or Colombia. Still others said Peruvia wasn’t the country’s proper name: the place he was in was called Peru. Hunter paid them no mind; he kept up his quest. All along he knew that the last living Black Peruvian Rose was in a private hot house on Chicago’s north side. But even this didn’t deter him. The adventure stories he gained as an explorer helped him with the chicks.

Hunter kept up his quest, his only companion a llama blind in one eye. The Rose finally died in its pot. Discovery Channel is doing a documentary.

E.M.* * *

WOLF-DOG

This story happened 350 years ago in Boston. There was a dog that lived in a rich lawyer’s house. The dog’s father was a dog, but his mother was a wolf. He was a wolf-dog.

The maids in that lawyer’s house were very strict. They would never let the dog go up on the furniture. All the dog smelled every day was sexual repression and intolerance for other viewpoints.

But the lawyer was good to the dog. The dog trusted the lawyer the most because he was good to him.

Then the lawyer went west for the Big Gold Rush. He trained the dog to pull his covered wagon and they headed out over the plains. The Indians attacked them, but the dog killed all the Indians except two.

In California the lawyer found a huge vein of gold and became very rich. Those were days when great fortunes were made. The dog pulled the wagons of gold for the lawyer. But one day at night the dog heard the wolves howl in the forest. So he escaped to join them. Finally he had found his true brothers.

The wolves taught the dog to kill men and to use a rifle. The dog killed many men with them, and they were bloodthirsty together. Many years passed.

Then one day they came upon the lawyer in the forest. He was old now and walking with a long golden cane. The wolves were ready to kill him, and they said to the dog, “Let’s go,” but the dog was confused in his heart, he didn’t know what to do.

When the wolves sensed the dog’s hesitation, their bloodthirsty nature came out. They turned on the dog and tore him apart with their jaws. They killed him that way. It was just like with Actaeon.

E.M.

Idiotic Like Gabriel Gudding

2009-11-15T14:56:00.001+08:00

(CLICK to enlarge. From left: "the three Jennys"--Jenny Huang, Jenny Chen, Jenny Lin; Shirley, Sabrina, Jerry, Yoyo, Michelle, William, May, Yvonne, Lillian; absent: Schani, Daphne, Sherry, Ariel)

In my almost fifteen years teaching English in Taipei, I've had maybe three classes stand out for creative enthusiasm. One I began my first year here, and the students and I ended up writing a short teen vampire novel together. I'm teaching another of these gifted classes now at the Zephyr English Institute, under the course title Creative Mythology.

The class is around a dozen preteens and teens, meeting once a week for two hours after school. We've been working mainly on reading Greek myth and writing in response to it. Sometimes however I break into something else. Two weeks ago I took the perilous decision to teach them Gabriel Gudding's brilliantly crackbrained poem "A Defense of Poetry." The poem begins like this:

1. The lake trout is not a furious animal, for which I apologize that you have the mental capacity of the Anchovy.

2. Yes the greatest of your sister's facial pimples did outweigh a Turkey.

3. I was eating Vulture Beast Cream, I was eating Lippy Dung Corn, and I said "Your ugly dog is very ugly," for he is.

4. And that is when I turned and a snowflake banged into my eye like a rusty barge and I killed your gloomy dog with a mitten.

5. For I have bombed your cat and stabbed it. For I am the ambassador of this wheelbarrow and you are the janitor of a dandelion. Indeed, you are a teacher of great chickens, for you are from the town of Fat Blastoroma, O tawdry realtor. For I have clapped your dillywong in a sizeable door.

Recently we've been working through an English version of the Odyssey. After Odysseus' men barbecued Hyperion's cattle, I decided to take a break from Homer and introduce Gudding's American poem. Since the kids know English as a second language, before reading Gudding I had to teach them the new vocabulary they'd find (in these first stanzas, for instance, they probably wouldn't know capacity, anchovy, outweigh, barge, dandelion). Yes, I left dillywong undefined.

The kids' English is good enough that we had a riotous time of it. I admit we didn't read Gudding's footnotes and skipped some of the stanzas. At the end of the second class, I surprised them by collecting all their copies of the text, leaving them only the vocabulary sheets and a printout of the first few stanzas. "Why are you taking the poem away?" they wondered. It was because I didn't want them to copy Gudding too closely. I handed out an opening they were to use in writing their own "Defenses of Poetry":

A DEFENSE OF POETRY

by ___________
1. Since your name is _________ and since your ________ is/are like the _____ of/on the _____________, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the _____________

The students were to take it from there, trying to use the new vocabulary they'd learned. Follows some of their work. Many decided to address the class clown, Jerry. Two of them addressed countries (Myanmar, China). The first poem, by Shirley, is addressed to me:

SHIRLEY'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Eric and since your mental capacity is like the dung of a janitor, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the most foolish teacher in this school. We are the pompous students, you are the powdered trout. We are the rusty mitten.

3. You look like a buffalo trying to stab a wheelbarrow.

4. You yap like a feces from the stork, and never think about your disjointed nose. You puke like a pimple, and seldom think about your outsized anchovy.

5. You wear frosting on your head, and eat earwax like a barf bag. You wear sequins on your feet, and sleep on the roadblock.

6. You dream of lassoing Sherlock and Watson, but keep toting Prufrock from your buttock.

7. Upon occasion you argue with Jessica like an airliner in flame-out.

8. Finally your realtor tells you: you will be decapitated with a dandelion.

WILLIAM'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Buffalo, and since your features are like the roses on the feces, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the president of the wheelchair and the sweeper of a sunflower.

3. The salmon is not a pompous animal, for which I apologize that you have a tote bag full of dung.

4. Yes the greatest of your brother's earwax pieces did outweigh an elephant.

5. For I have punched your airliner and burned it.

6. For I am the administrator of that flintlock and you are the chairman of the bowels.

7. Indeed you are the office holder of the barg bag.

JENNY HUANG'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Myanmar and since your face is like the reflector of the moon, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the worker with the bell, and I'm the president with an artificial tooth. You have to lasso the stork since you're a tawdry salesman.

3. If you're a conductor of ducks, I'm the monarch of fishes. People will become crows small as ants.

4. Having no feet, they fly and fly, covering the sky. Having no feet, they cannot rest.

5. The whale planet is drowning in water. The geyser spouts trash, trout, anchovies, dung, wheelbarrows, barges and dandelions higher and higher everywhere.

6. Tens of thousands of crows fall from the sky like rain.

7. The crows really need barf bags in which to die, some earwax to avert going deaf, some frosting to cover their eyes.

8. What a nauseating and beautiful world!

MAY'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your garden is like the sequins on a barf bag, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the pompous pimple, and I will stab you with a rusty knife. Even if you outweigh an airliner, it is still a piece of cake to me.

3. For your earwax piles higher than a giraffe, and an army of janitors would be angry to have to clean it. They know hundreds of wheelbarrows would still not be enough.

YVONNE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your mental capacity is like the anchovy on an old pizza, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are a stork with rusty bowels. I'd be surprised if the realtors would lend you a wheelbarrow to leave.

3. I write just one syllable for you, beginning with sh and ending in t, and the letter between is not o.

4. But that will have no effect on your pompous peristalsis, to stop which the janitor put a mitten in your fundament.

5. The yapping dog cooks you a pimple.

6. Because the barge has been stabbed by my ambassador, because the buffalo has lassoed your buttock, I give you a barf bag full of powered earwax.

7. At the roadblock you are stopped by a flintlock covered in sequins. They cover you with frosting and decapitate you.

SABRINA'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Sejaisc and since your buttocks are like the side view of a sick bag, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. You are going to get trouble if you keep babbling, and you'll get double trouble if you play with the barbel.

3. When you stop making trouble, you'll be able to get a bubble made with barbule. Hey, stop chewing bubblegum and playing Barbie!

4. For you are a pompous pimple, I will squeeze you every time: juicy bao zi.

5. The pork-flavored Pocky in your pocket makes you look so porky.

6. The door to the restroom holds mold. To beat the boss, flap him to Oz.

7. I overlook your Mediterranean and your toro belly, but look over your purse and pocket. Never-ending love deer, four kids and Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

8. A Whomping Willow lassos pupils to play Wii with it in the Forbidden Forest where crazy things grow.

JOSEPH'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since your ears are like the caves on the mountain, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For your are the monkey. I'll kick your ice cream to sweeten my shoes. Then Eric will fall in love with me, for he has a sweet tooth.

3. After that, monkey, go away. Go to the farm and have your pumpkin pie. The pumpkin pie you prefer has bugs in it.

4. Jerry is the stupidest man in this world, singing and playing with his bug pumpkin pie. He takes the bugs into his cave with him, a big happy family.

5. Jerry makes the dandelions achy. Stabbing dung is his favorite pastime. He dreams of toting dung as a career. Anything to make him tawdry.

6. The buffalo is very pompous, proud of its peristalsis. On its skin a lot of sequins, but the sequins will rust. So the buffalo hires a janitor to clean its sequins.

7. Sometimes the buffalo is crazy. Sherlock takes a flintlock to shoot it.

MICHELLE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is China and since you behave like a gangster soaked in blood, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you think you are the legal master of Taiwan. According to you, Taiwan is not a country but a piece of your territory. You will always be averse to those who say otherwise.

3. Nonetheless, though you can't bear that Taiwan is disjointed. Sorry to say, but for God's reasons Taiwan is not any part of your body--especially not your buttock!

4. Didn't you know that not just Taiwan but all the countries of the world are fed up with you? For your black products and “three deer” milk are nothing but poison. Food made from earwax, clothes from which the sequins fall a week after they're bought . . . Maybe we should just load up a fleet of barges with all the goods Made in China and ship them right back to you.

5. I know you've never needed any ambassador. Because you prefer weapons to long talks. But now you have one, right here in Taiwan! For a long time you were yapping like a dog to no effect, but now thing's are different.

6. Yes, Mr. Ma Ying-“Joke” is your ambassador. Huh? Didn't you know most people in Taiwan and the world think Ma is a joke? Perhaps your mental capacity is not up to understanding this. In this respect, in understanding, we are more fortunate.

7. But one thing you're right about--Ma is really the President of Taiwan. He's like a king actually. So he can do what he wants. But it won't be long before the Taiwanese punch Ma. It'll happen before you have Taiwan in your pocket. You are bigger, it's true, but we will protect our country. Because no one wants to be your bowels, or your little pimple, or any other part of your poisoned body.

DAPHNE'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Vivian and since your legs are like the legs on a stork, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the realtor whose pimples outweigh the houses she sells.

3. The police prepare barf bags when they set up a road block. For the drunks they stop. And so in your neighborhood they should have barf bags too. For when you walk buy.

4. If you keep making noise, I'll kick your buttock.

5. Buffalo dung outweighs itself.

6. It's difficult to lasso a stork.

7. Your hair is like a dried dandelion. When the wind blows, it flies everywhere.

SCHANI'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Eric and since your lips are like the anchovies on the pizza, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are the janitor of this Barf Bag and I am the ambassador of a buffalo. You are from the town of petty Realtors.

3. Your dung collection, your pompous pimples and your dog's rusty feces together outweigh our school.

4. You haven't got a greater mental capacity than that of your earwax.

5. Eric is yapping with a wheelbarrow on a dandelion.

6. Your peristalsis doesn't work because of the barfight in your bowels between storks with rifles made of frosting and lake trout swinging disjointed mittens.

7. That airliner with sequins will be stabbed by a tawdry and pompous pigeon.

8. I am going to powder your buttock with a flintlock.

9. Your poem discomfits even that rusty yapping dog.

10. I am going to punch and decapitate your petty rabbit.

11. Yes, I know that you want to tote a barge made of dung.

12. Yesterday I saw a powdered realtor stabbing a yapping buffalo.

JENNY LIN'S DEFENSE OF POETRY
1. Since your name is Jerry and since you aim your flintlock like a buffalo at an instrument panel, I will tell you that with you I am fed up.

2. For you are barge realtor. I would advise you to see Prufrock and ask him how to lasso mitten realtors.

3. Since you have been bitten in a barfight, your mental capacity may be unsteady and sometimes you wonder if your skull is disjointed.

4. Your favorite cartoon Happy Tree Friends nearly made you stab the janitor and in court you pretend to be an innocent, mad person.

5. Once you saw a stork crossing the sky and threw up your clarinet to knock it down. Then your clarinet hit you as it fell and you yourself fell from the second floor. You may not remember that your clarinet somehow became rusty after that.

6. Another day you ended up in jail because of the Barf Bag Road Block Incident. You were dragged away with your limbs tied tightly and your mouth taped up because you kept asking questions.

7. You yell out, “Help me, someone! Help me!” A voice answers: “Shut up, Jerry! Why are you always so noisy?”

8. You realize you're in ZEI, the class looking at you.

Clay IV.16

2009-10-31T20:06:00.000+08:00

If there is some part of God in the human soul, then the emanationist theory of creation presented in the Gnostic myth is in some respect an allegory of the truth. But where the Gnostic Christians would have the being of man stolen by the Demiurge Creator, I believe the being of man was given by the true Creator God.

Clay IV.17

2009-10-28T15:57:00.001+08:00

Often in writing I refer to the world. But I am ambiguous about this term, and use it mainly out of habit acquired from others. That the world has already come to an end is obvious to me. And so my usage of the term the world is to some extent obsolete.

Our planet: that is a different story. The planet persists, spinning on and on after the end of the world. And inhabiting our planet, this wreck of the world, billions of men dig their trenches in preparation for a future that recedes to nothing. What can their future be? So much tells us that their reward will be death, chaos, suffocation. That they will suffocate under the stench born of their own labors.

Is there any way to avert this end? The tradition tells us that there is in the redemption. When it writes of "a new heaven and a new earth," I understand this new earth to be what I mean by world. Thus it will be a "new world." How can we conceive of this? We make our suppositions, as St. John of Patmos made his. And we hope that the redemption will succeed.

Clay IV.18

2009-10-18T20:27:00.000+08:00

I conceive of God as the ground of being, but I cannot conceive of God as omnipotent and omniscient as regards the universe we live in. At least not omnipotent and omniscient as these are normally understood. To do so is to project God as a tyrant and ourselves as something like automata.

There are many mysteries in the Christian faith, but this particular mystery, namely that of theodicy (i.e., how an omnipotent God created and rules a world wracked by evil), is one that shouldn't be upheld as such. I do not consider it a mystery, but rather a falsehood.

Clay IV.19

2009-10-18T20:21:00.000+08:00

Regardless of their fallenness, it nonetheless remains that thought and language are the privileged signs of our being created in God's image: they are the marks of our closeness to God. Anywhere one encounters thought or its traces one may sense a sign of God's calling to man and of man's closeness to God.

Thus it is that I sense the miracle of the creation far more in an individual utterance, or in a written text, than I do in any of the scenes of outward nature. For me, the vault of the sky is a far lesser miracle than the discourse of two children overheard in the park.

* * *
It was in 1989 that I began to be drawn down this path.

There was a voice I heard at first, and it became a matter of not losing that voice.

The traces of the voice are there as writing. Writing is what is done so that the voice will not be lost.

I do not consider writing just another technology. Rather I think of writing as a special gift from God, or as a mark of God's greater gift.

Let the other technologies abuse and be abused as they will: only let writing remain as this gift.

I have given texts to others in hopes of finding some who will realize that writing is a sacramental activity.

Of course I know there is much writing that is not part of the sacrament. Witness the billion words of nothing being dashed out everywhere around us. That writing falls into nothing even as it is written; its writing is already the pull of nothing.

Never has so much writing been done as now, and perhaps never has so little Writing been done.

I hope to find those who realize writing as a sacrament.

* * *
Am I part of the body of the Church catholic? Different readers will answer this question differently. I myself will say: Yes, I am a Christian. And: Yes, I am part of the body of the Church. These assertions on my part should be clear from everything I've written.

I would like to say I am part of the Christian Duration. I would like to say I am a Durationist. What this means I will try to make clear in my writing from here on.

Obama is the Antichrist: An Open Letter to the, um, Scholars Behind the Video

2009-10-01T23:22:00.000+08:00

If you haven't seen it yet, here's the video:

An open letter in response. . .

Dear Fellow Concerned Christian Scholars:

First off let me say that I was delighted to learn from your short video that our current president, Barack Obama, is actually the Antichrist. I'm guessing when you first discovered Obama's name in Luke 10:18 that you were drop-jawed in amazement, flabbergasted.

I try to imagine how it happened. There you were, in Abilene, or Lubbock, or Arlington, just minding your own business and practicing your ancient Hebrew by translating Gospel passages into that language--when suddenly, Wow, there's this staggering utterance from Jesus himself:

I have seen Satan fall like Barack Obama.

It's amazing really, and it must have left you in awe. I don't know what I'd do if I suddenly ran into a line like that. I'd probably light my hair on fire and run from the house screaming.

I know there are some will probably claim your discovery only came to you because you were looking for passages to demonize our president. Let these liberals say what they want. I would never attribute such low motives to you. And why not? Because I can tell by the honesty and warmth in the faint southern accent of the man narrating your video that you are good Christian people and are thus not likely to spend your time going out of your way to demonize others. Especially not a man who has dedicated his life to serving his country.

In fact I firmly believe you yourselves must have been deeply disheartened to discover that your country's elected leader, the man representing you to the world, is actually an incarnation of the Evil One. Probably at first, after making your discovery, you were tempted to keep quiet about it out of shame before the world. And out of a sense of patriotism. But you believe in truth, and truth will out. So finally you had to come forward. Yes, I really feel I understand you.

Though your scholarly methods in this video are excellent all round, I was a little surprised by your assertion that Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, is "the most ancient form of Hebrew." Of course Aramaic is not the most ancient form of Hebrew, but a different language. Probably as scholars you know this, but your presenter, nervous in front of the microphone, just slipped up temporarily. Whatever.

Also it's a little strange that you take Jesus' words, presumably spoken in Aramaic, and give them in Hebrew. I understand that in Aramaic the phrase "lightning from the heights" wouldn't come out sounding like "barack o bama" and that your whole video would be pointless if you used the Aramaic. But I think I get your deeper meaning here: Jesus, though he spoke Aramaic, normally thought in Hebrew, Hebrew being his Father's language. Jesus held his Father's language in greater esteem than his mother tongue. I'm guessing you guys are Protestants, aren't you?

Of course another little problem is that "barack o bama" in Hebrew wouldn't mean, as you say, "lighting from the heights" but rather "lightning and the heights." It's a minor problem I know, I'm sorry to bring it up, and who needs such nitpicking anyway? Your heart is in the right place, and that's what counts when doing linguistic analysis of ancient languages, no?

I'm in full support of your implied assertion that New Testament references to "lightning" are really references to Barack Obama. Actually when I first saw your video, I was really excited by it, I couldn't sit still, I was hopping around the living room gesticulating. Ask my wife if you don't believe me. It's not every day I see such a major breakthrough in scholarship presented in four minutes on YouTube. I was giddy about it, so I took your ideas and went looking around elsewhere in the New Testament. Though not a scholar of the caliber of you guys exactly, I do know my Bible pretty well. And I wanted to see what else God might have said about President Obama. The first passage I came upon was Revelation 4:5, which says the following:

From [God's] throne came flashes of Barack.

Now that's really interesting, I thought, what to make of it? Of course here I've translated the word lightning into our president's name, just as you do. So the text of Revelation seems to say that Obama was sent by God, or that "flashes" of Obama (maybe televised speeches, or appearances on Letterman?) come from God Himself. Almost like how God sends his Son, or the Spirit.

In truth I was kind of uncomfortable with this idea, because, hey, though I respect our president and all, I'm not about to start calling him the Second Coming of Christ. So I decided to go back to the Gospels to see if there was anything else that God said about Obama.

Let me tell you it's pretty amazing what I found. It's actually World-Altering maybe. It's going to change Everything.

In the same Gospel you used, the Gospel of Luke, in chapter 17--really I'm surprised you didn't notice it too--Jesus is talking to his disciples, warning them not to go after false prophets, not to be taken in by those who are not the Real Thing. Then Jesus, in describing his Second Coming, says he will be like our current president. He says it right there in the Bible!

For the Son of Man will be like Barack, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.

Of course Jesus doesn't say here that he will be Barack, only that he will be like Barack. But what the heck? If it's permissible, as you do in your video, to say that "lightning and the heights" really means "lightning from the heights," why can't we just get rid of the word like in this later passage of Luke? Or why can't we change it to a similar word, namely as? I mean, if when Jesus is talking about lightning he's really talking about Obama, isn't he here saying that he will come back as Obama?

If that isn't enough to convince non-Bible believers, I mean the skeptics who don't read the Bible seriously like we do, then there's this verse, Matthew 24:27:

For as Barack coming from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Now Chicago is kind of in the east, don’t you think? And Barack is truly visible all the way to the west--with TV he's visible anywhere really. So again we have the same implication here in the Gospel of Matthew.

I don't know about you, but when I think that our current president, Barack Obama, is really Christ come back to earth I get kind of teary eyed with emotion. I mean I get teary eyed that it's happening now, in my lifetime. That I myself had the choice of voting for Christ or voting Republican (i.e., against Christ) and I voted the right way. Because I voted Obama. Or, as you might say, I voted from the heights.

Come to think of it, this last election was maybe the great winnowing and sifting Jesus speaks of in the Gospels--that those who voted Obama will be gathered into the granary, but those who voted Republican will be burned up like chaff. And there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

As for me, I'm anxious to go back to the Old Testament and begin looking into all the prophecies and revelations about our current president. I really can't thank you enough for your scholarly acumen in setting me on the right track. I'm now starting to think that maybe, since Obama is actually the Second Coming, maybe McCain was the Antichrist. You think? Or maybe it was Cheney. To be honest I'm guessing Cheney is more likely. I'll have to look up how to say Dick in Hebrew. I also kind of suspect, in this fascinating new End Times scenario, that maybe Sarah Palin is the Whore of Babylon. You think?

I invite you or anyone else to comment below on these remarks about our current End Times predicament.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader