Jung Over, Part Two: Geography of the Self

Last month, I took instruction from a dream concocted by my unconscious mind, and wrote about it on this blog. It was confirmation of Karl Jung's theories of dreams.

This time, I've re-read something in John Updike that I experienced in a dream, and once again I find confirmation for Karl Jung's teachings.  Jung thought that dreams of homes are dreams of our own bodies;  the human inhabitant is the soul. 

Updike begins his memoir Self-Consciousness with a long essay about his childhood home.  When he was around 50, he left his Mother and second wife watching the movie Being There in the old cinema of Shillington, PA, while he took the chance to wander up and down the street where he'd lived as a young boy, and where he'd strutted as a teenager.  "You had to be there" never was more appropos, as he detailed ordinary places to the point that I was just about exasperated. That the whole town was merely the furniture of his consciousness, and he, center of this universe, was almost embarrassing.  But then he reached his conclusion:

Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them is the center of the universe.  What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God? ... [Reviewing the town] I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed. (40-41).

Elsewhere in this blog, I review Updike's final book of poetry, in which he writes one more time of his Shillington childhood, admitting that he has written of these many times, because "for me, they have no bottom." (See my Updike page.)

My Shillington is Cincinnati.  My grandmother lived in a modest but immaculate home in Madeira, north of the city.  It was a home purchased by her son, my Uncle Jack, in the late 1940s.  She moved in when Jack and his wife Blanche moved to the swanky Indian Hills neighborhood. 

Not long after my grandmother died, I had a vivid dream from which I awoke with tears streaming down my face.  That was unprecedented, and I took notice!  In the dream, not so different from my actual final visit to her home following her funeral, I searched every room of her home for "the secret to me."  Something there, I didn't know what, was the key to my personality and my future.  I cried because I could not find it.

A moment's reflection, after I awoke, revealed that the "key" was nothing in the house, but the house itself:  a sense of myself as loved, worthy, special, that I felt whenever I visited my grandmother's home.  Her antiques and her notions of interior decoration (pink shag rug in the kitchen, pink marbled wall paper and chandeliered sconces in the tiny bathroom)  made the place, for me, the epitome of class.

Updike's memoir moves on to other topics.  He modestly focuses on his physical weaknesses that, by forcing him to compensate, contributed to his eventual success.  His sense of indignities as one of the poor boys in Shillington motivated his "revenge" of becoming the town's single celebrity.  His account of the humiliations of stuttering turns into an account of his success as a writer in a chapter called "Getting the Words Out." 

I'm amused, at 54, to read his description of being in his mid-50s, a bit foolish-looking to others, a bit oblivious to the current popular trends, and yet feeling that his life is really just beginning.  He had become like the father-in-law that he used to ridicule.

I wonder at the fact that I've now spent time rereading a memoir by an author whose complete works I've read, imbibing fictional versions of those same memories.    There's a part of me that feels ashamed to be spending my time and energy on someone so self-absorbed. 

Still, as Updike tells us, the materialists have it all wrong.  If they deny God and the realm of spirit, they deny the "very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept" (250).

Well, Updike is wise, and Jung is right:  my Grandmother's house is also me.  When I was about to leave her home for the last time, I burst into tears and sobs that I hadn't had at the funeral.   I ran back to her bedroom and sobbed, not for her, but for the loss of the little boy who had been her grandson: no one else would remember him.  Thankfully, I was able to keep a couple of chairs from her home, which had seemed to me thrones for a young prince.   I have them, still.

So the places of our youth are also symbols of ourselves.  Jung is right, Updike intuits that, and my dreams to this day confirm it. 

The Whipping Man at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre

In the first 120 seconds of The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez,  a wounded Confederate soldier collapses inside the door of a derelict ante-bellum home and screams out some names.  A black man cautiously advances from a back room carrying a rifle and lantern.  When he realizes that the soldier is a young man of the household, he kneels, lays his hand on the young man's head, and pronounces a blessing in Hebrew, "Baruch Adonai...." 

It's disorienting to juxtapose Jewish tradition with our Civil War expectations, and instantly moving.  The rest of the play unpacks that moment. Plotwise, we learn who those names are, and what has happened to them.  Themewise, the idea of Southern Jews climaxes in a Seder.

We get highly involved with these characters, thanks to the acting of Jeremy Aggers (Caleb, the soldier), Keith Randolph Smith (Simon, the black man),  Another character who first appears as a truly scary apparition through a window, turns out to be comic relief and also catalyst for truth-telling.   He's "John," played by an appealing young local actor John Stewart.

We are embraced by the set, as the beams of the ceiling stretch out over us; and we embrace these three men as they discover the secrets that each is hiding at the start.

The seder itself is a highpoint.  Improvised from rough wartime resources, this ceremonial meal becomes a celebration of release from slavery.  The takeaway moment follows when John, unable to make a choice, is paralyzed with fear.  This is freedom, his mentor Simon says.  And it's not easy. 

Two other moments stand out, because they are so theatrical, and happen almost out of time.  Late in the show we see a kind of flashback with the soldier Caleb standing (he loses a leg in an early scene that induced audible gasps and squirming early in the show), reciting a letter to his beloved, written in the grandiloquent prose of those 19th century letters.  Another moment is occasioned by the fact that Passover in 1865 was also the Good Friday of Abe Lincoln's assassination. Simon re-enacts his  encounter with Lincoln.  Simon bowed; Lincoln bowed. 

The only thing not to like about the show is its title.  Yes, it relates to a revelation in the plot.  But isn't there something that could relate somehow to the freedom, choice, and Passover? 

Meditation for Holy Week: Liturgy as Theatre

Phil. 3:1 To write the same things to you is not irksome to me.

Until Holy Week, I'd had mixed feelings about Episcopal liturgy. The routines were more comforting than "irksome," but I was new to the church, and her traditions did seem to lack spontaneity. 

Then, one Palm Sunday, I understood how all that repetition amplified the impact of small changes. We waved palms, processed to music with bells, chanted prayers, and hissed, "Crucify him!" on cue. The rest of Holy Week brought changes to setting, lighting, and vestments. We re-enacted the Last Supper and sang more austere music.  It hit me then that liturgy is a year-long drama. In fact, it's a musical!  But we're not the audience: we're the actors.  

That doesn't mean we're faking anything.  When I was a sullen teenager, mom used my membership in the drama club to correct my attitude towards my father. "You like to act. You owe it to your father to act as if you can stand to be around him!"  To make my performance convincing to Dad took the effort to ask about his work, to listen to his music, to appreciate the things he did for me.  No surprise:  Acting led to actuality.

In the same way, in church, we recite eloquent prayers even when we don't feel them, we repeat the Creed even though we doubt, and we line up for Eucharist no matter what. Disciplines of Lent and rich drama of Holy Week add emphasis to a year's liturgy.  Taking time to worship as if it's important makes it so.

Creating Innovators with Homework?

In a speech to the faculties of Atlanta-area independent schools yesterday, author Tony Wagner spoke from experience as teacher, administrator, and educational researcher, one who has spent years studying innovators in industry, arts, and education.  He outlined lists of "three most" and "seven most" important practices listed in his book Creating Innovators.During the Q-and-A session that followed, I waited too long to ask my one-word question, "Homework?"  While I waited, I figured out what he'd probably say.

First, if the homework is intended simply to convey factual information, it's a waste of time.  With the world wide web in our pockets, factual information is now a "commodity," worth little. 

But, what if the homework teaches a skill?   Wagner said, in today's market, "It's not what you know, but what you can do with it."   If the homework is akin to practicing a musical instrument, mastering a certain baseball pitch, or working through a new app, then that's a good kind of work.  Could that, too be done in the classroom?  Teams do drill on the basketball court, but the best players practiced countless hours on their own -- Michael Jordan being the famous example. The kind of skill that has to be mastered alone would be highly important to the student, and a waste of class time.

Because Wagner says that the world's job market puts a premium on collaborative creative work, I suppose that he would prefer that class time be spent in getting teams of students to find -- not "the answers," but alternative solutions to problems.   

What would he say about reading assignments in books of literature or accounts of history?  He'd probably ask the purpose for the assignment.   If it's just to learn the facts, he'd say that's not the best use of a student's after-school time.  If the reading exercises a student's discernment, or the application of a lesson to a text, then that's stretching the student's ability, and a good use of time.  Could that time be spent in the classroom, with the teacher available for one-on-one coaching, and time available for students to compare what they learned?   I'd opt for that, if possible -- simply because our lives after school are so full of other things, like blogging, and exercise, and commuting, and dinner, and rehearsals, etc.

But Wagner puts the highest value on passion, and that gives us a kind of homework that will take time and concentraation outside of class.  "If a young person is passionate about something," he said, "they'll master the skills and acquire the information" as needed.  So class time should go to something my colleague Justin Loudermilk introduced to me, his "20% Project."  He allows students 20% of their class time to collaborate on something they care deeply about, and they all take time outside of class to complete it. 

After his talk on passion, collaboration, and creativity, the very first question from a teacher was about grading.  I'm struck by how often we teachers, threatened by a kind of teaching that isn't like what we experienced, stiff-arm it with a question, "Well, yes, but how are we supposed to grade that?"   Wagner said that he'd recommend having only three grades:  A, B, and "Incomplete."  Sounds like my approach, too: to keep the kids working on a project until it's the best they can do with the objectives they face using the skills they've developed by a deadline. 

After all, I felt affirmed in the choices I've made as a teacher, and motivated to find more ways to collaborate.  My writing students are currently at work "exploring" through research topics of interest to them about which they're curious, asking questions that don't have easy answers.  I wonder if I missed an opportunity to make this, too, collaborative?  I used to have a "magazine" project when I taught history, for which students created a kind of portfolio of essays, stories, time lines, graphs, and reviews related to a chosen theme.  It might be worth considering.

My drama classes do collaborate a lot; next year, with my class time extended from one quarter to a full semester, I should consider more ways to have collaboration. 

Jung Over: Dreams the Morning After

I awoke this morning, disturbed by a dream in which a friend of mine dealt with his teenaged son by jerking him outside and slapping him.   His son hit him back.  Watching in anguish, I thought the father had made a mistake.  I followed the young man up to his room, where he curled up on his bed.

Now, pioneering psychologist Karl Jung took dreams seriously as helpful communications from our unconscious minds to our reasoning conscious minds.  The unconscious, he said, communicates not in words but in metaphor, using symbols and stories.  In his view, even when we dream of others, we're dreaming of an aspect of ourselves.  

Me and Mia

Awake in the dark, I wondered where my dream came from. 

Then I heard the breathing of my own teenager -- a puppy named Mia --  curled up in her bed.   Yesterday, she was more than usually aggressive towards other dogs in the park, and I'd been more forceful than usual pulling her aside and insisting that she sit and stay.  I'd been thinking, "I've handled this badly.  I've got to do something, but forcing her down isn't it.  I don't know what to do."  I'd been feeling remorse, affection, regret, yearning for re-connection to the dog. 

The thoughts and feelings I'd had during that event were exactly those that I shared with "my friend" in the dream. Jung was right:  My heart is telling me to pull back and not to confuse Mia with my mixed signals.  I surely don't want her to associate other dogs with my anger, or to think of my hands as instruments of pain.

This seems to be clear evidence that Jung was on to something real.  Where is he in discourse today? 

Psychology was as present in the first decades of my life as weather -- in cartoons, sitcoms, suspense movies, art, magazine racks, and speculative talk among adolescents (when I was one) -- so it's astonishing to me how Freud, Jung, and dream analysis have vanished from conversation.  The last time I heard anyone take any of that seriously was pre-Prozac, around 1990, Jung was ascendant, and Joseph Campbell had a bestselling book about world mythology and archetypes in our dreams and lives. 

At about that same time, The University of the South was developing Education for Ministry, an undergraduate theological course studied through local parishes.  A central feature of this program is a process of "Theological Reflection," by which participants analyze a real-life event for its concomitant thoughts and feelings.  After everyone recalls events in their lives when they shared the same thoughts and feelings, all use their imaginations to concoct a metaphor for those thoughts and feelings.

We are, in effect, inventing a dream that expresses the reality in the language of the unconcious.

The next step in the process is to cast about in culture and Scripture for another story or image that relates.

There you have Jung in a nutshell:   Our faith stories and our ancient myths speak to us universally as dreams speak to us individually.

Homeboys' Blessings

Jesuit father Greg Boyle was interviewed by Krista Tippett for her radio show "On Being."  He once tried to make peace through shuttle diplomacy among LA's street gangs, but he gave up on that: "There is no conflict," he says, "only violence." 

Instead, he has focused on getting members of different gangs to work side by side on other projects.  He tells of blessing one, adding, "While I love you, you can sometimes be a pain in the butt."  The boy-man replied, "The feeling's mutual."

His main insight seems to have been that all of these boys and "homegirls" are fleeing from something, and he offers something positive to want.  He tells of a boy -- now a man on the other side of drug addiction and crime -- whose mother told him at age six to kill himself and save her the pain of raising him.  She beat him, and he wore three tee shirts into adulthood, to cover up the wounds.  "But now I love my wounds," he says. "How else can I help others with their wounds if I don't love mine?"

Is he afraid of death? He quotes the Dali Lama:  "Death?  It's just a change of clothing."

He quoted Ruskin, that our main calling in life is to "delight in each other."  When Krista Tippett asked him about why he chose the epigram for the book, he confessed,"Oh no, it's my Krista Tippett nightmare coming true.  I don't know why I chose it.  Now I'm revealed as totally shallow." But the poet observes how all of us wish to be told "I love you," and asks why we can't be the one who tells thaqt to others.

So, from a hard-hitting, mean streets area of the world, there's a call from the warm and fuzzy side.

Here's a link to his website:  http://homeboyindustries.org/

God's People Grow Up

Romans 1:14 I am under obligation both to Greeks and barbarians.

A lawyer confessed, "I still think of God the way I did when I was 10." At 40, he had a mature understanding of family, law, and country; but it took a few weeks of our class in EfM (Education for Ministry) for his faith to grow up, too.  

In today's readings, spanning 1000 years of history, we see God's people outgrowing their adolescent view of “enemies.”  First, the Psalmist prays for his enemies to "dissolve ... like snails in slime" (Psalms 58:9).  Later, Jeremiah meets Jerusalem’s enemies face to face at the gate, to pronounce their doom. Then Jesus not only faces the despised Samaritans, but welcomes them, dismaying his disciples. Finally, Paul explains to indignant members of the church that he is "obligated" to "barbarians" as well as to them.  

From "slime" to "obligees" is a huge change in attitude towards outsiders. Was it God who grew more accepting, or did God's people need time to accept that God loves all of His creation?  Then, in the 2000 years since Biblical times, has God continued to spur our growth?   I think history answers that question: When Paul wrote, women were property, slavery was common, and power was both inherited and arbitrary.  So much has changed in ways that even Paul did not anticipate.  

I can't speak for anyone else, but, through the Episcopal Church, my understanding of God in the world has changed -- I would say "deepened" and "grown" -- in ways that I wouldn't have approved when I joined thirty years ago.  Change came partly through study, but more through interaction with wise and gentle parishioners, lay and ordained.  I am still learning to open my mind and heart to people not like me, as we are obliged to do.

Is Theology Just Inflated Self-Expression?

reflecting on John Updike's review of biographies treating Paul Tillich and Karl Barth.  The review was printed in 1976, and re-printed in a collection of Updike's essays, Hugging the Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.)

I asked a philosophy professor, my friend Susan, what is the basis for any statement by any theologian?   She and I have been reviewing theology from ancient times to modern in the context of the four-year "Education for Ministry" curriculum (EfM) prepared by the University of the South at Sewanee.  Episcopal churches across the country sponsor classes.

She had no ready answer, and agreed with me that each theologian seems to develop assertions based on Scripture (and other theologians) read by the light of personal experiences and temperament. 

Before reading one more chapter in our EfM text concerning theologians Barth and Tillich, I turned to John Updike, recalling that he'd been influenced by both.  As book reviewer, and even as novelist, Updike always seems open-minded.   He judges his subjects lightly by their own intentions as expressed in the subject's own words. He draws our attention to patterns and doesn't have to add much commentary.

After reading a couple biographies, Updike highlights what Barth and Tillich had in common (826).  In broad outline, they shared a lot:  sons of pastors both born in 1886, students in Germany, socialists, lovers of arts, exiles from Nazism.  Both respected "play" as an important aspect of living. Tillich emerged from World War I a "virtual atheist" while Barth, army chaplain,  compared himself to a trumpeter who makes no sound.  Neither was a faithful husband. Hannah Tillich considered mixing his manuscripts with all his porn and letters to mistresses, and wrote of his tantrums whenever she caught him;  Mrs. Barth evidently accepted her husband's  female "personal assistant" and traveling companion into their household throughout their marriage.

While Barth's "last word" was "not a word such as grace but a name: Jesus Christ," Tillich's mission was to be a bridge (his word) between culture and Christianity.  Updike observes, "But a bridge has no content, just traffic" (833).  He quotes Tillich's reflection on being " a dreamer" from adolescence on, with the danger of mistaking "imagination for reality" (832).  It's in this context that Updike opines that, for Tillich at least, theology is just "inflated introspection."  Updike is pretty harsh about Tillich's theology, calling it vague, and giving samples to show that Tillich's "theological affirmations take place at the weakest possible level of the verb to be," as in The Courage to Be.

Updike clearly favors the book about Barth, and also Barth himself, who appears to be a happy warrior.  In old age, both theologians doubted their own value (835)  "Am I a phony?   I fear so," wrote Tillich; while Barth wrote "All the success that life has brought me is no use at all."  Updike agrees, writing --

Theology is not a provable accumulation, like science, nor is it a successsion of enduring monuments, like art.  It must always unravel and be reknit.

Updike neatly summarizes the life's work of both men:

Both confronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them -- Barth by claiming that He was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that He was present, weakly, in everything (836).

So far I've been getting my theology from texts about theology, not straight from theologians.  I might think differently if I were to get a stronger personal feeling for these people, as I do from knowing Augustine's life story and Aquinas's lovely lyric "Humbly I adore thee...."  But, theologians from Origen onward seem only to have been fabricating metaphors that are unraveled by critics who find loose threads, and re-knit, in a cycle that repeats century after century. 

Knowing that the cycle is a cycle is valuable; and knowing the source against which all these theologians exerted their imaginations is valuable; and coming up with our own metaphors based on our own experience is valuable -- indeed, it's half of what we do in EfM.  But reading what others in other times came up with to describe their experiences of Scripture?  It's a bit like reading a book of crossword puzzles that someone else has worked through.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: The First Things That Come to Mind

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR begins with a thrilling overture by Andrew Lloyd Webber that I can still hum for you 40 years after I last heard it.  The overture, in turn, is lifted from a thrilling confrontation between Pilate and Jesus, still the most intense passage of musical theatre I know.  At ten, having seen the show and then memorized the 8-track tape recording of it, I resolved to write an opera -- it's still on my bucket list.   I even tuned into the Tony Awards that year to root for SUPERSTAR against the big winner that year, a show called COMPANY by someone named Sondheim who didn't yet mean anything to me. So I'm a fan of Webber from way back.

I recently directed Webber's JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, performed by a group of middle school actors who put all of their energy into the roles, charming the audience.  My bassist (age 13) sometimes jumped up like a rock star, and my drummer (14) added variety.  Playing the keyboards, I was swept along by the bouncy fun of Webber's score, even while I was aware that page after page we were simply repeating the same unvaried, undeveloped snippets of riffs familiar from classic pop/rock songs. 

So my recent production of JOSEPH underscored what I've thought about Lloyd Webber since SUPERSTAR:  Here's a composer with immense facility who, time and again, settles for the facile. 

For example, take JOSEPH.  The story in Genesis gives a composer/dramatist some opportunities for rich layers of feeling: a loving father believes his conniving sons' story that his favorite son has died, the brothers repent, Joseph weeps and forgives them, and concludes, "What you intended for evil, God intended for good." But for those moments in the play, librettist Tim Rice and the composer settled for irrelevant pastiches of a western song and a calypso, and a straightforward repetition of the opening idea that, if you want "to be famous, to be a big success," then  "any dream will do." One lovely balad, "Close Every Door," mentions a "promise" from beyond this world, but that's as close as Rice and Webber get to the heart of the material.   

What else comes to mind with Andrew Lloyd Webber?  I was thrilled by "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" when I heard Karen Carpenter perform it in context, complete with the lead - in of Juan Peron's bombastic recitative and the crowd's insistent chant, "Peron! Peron!"  Excited, I bought the original recording of EVITA. But then I saw it, and felt embarrassed for the performers, who expended all that sweat and sound for nothing:  A girl from the farm becomes serial mistress, sleeping her way to the top.  What was I supposed to care about here?     I memorized the LP of CATS, but walked out at intermission during two different touring productions, so bored that I spent the first acts scribbling in my program all the ways that the choreographer found ways to stage the dancers rolling, leaping, kicking, lining up, circling....  What was the point?  I saw JOSEPH in Washington and thought, "My kids and I could write something this good in a couple hours."  I eagerly bought the cassette tape of the PHANTOM score when it first appeared, but when I popped it into the car's tape player, I blushed to hear something so obvious as the opening A-minor chord slipping down in half-steps and then the stupidly irrelevant and inappropriate disco-pop song that follows -- "The phantom of the opera is there, inside your mind."   (I did like the operatic pastiches, though).

I loved the REQUIEM and the VARIATIONS.   The variation that turned into  "Unexpected Song" moves me every time I hear it, though the lyrics (added much later) fumble the title's analogy -- "Like an unexpected song / That no one else is hearing."  Huh?

I bought the CD for SUNSET BOULEVARD with Glenn Close as star, and then saw a touring production with Petula Clark, who brought humor to the role of Norma Desmond.  I enjoyed the show, a "beauty and beast" variation in which the aged has-been movie star is beast and the handsome young screen writer is beauty.  I've listened to it again tonight, and I'm thrilled again by the momentum of the opening sequence, and I admire the efficiency of the composer as he recycles the same tunes over and over.

The same year that SUNSET was a hit, Sondheim's PASSION told the same story of an attractive young man beset by an obsessive ugly woman.  Both make a listener uncomfortable; Sondheim with Lapine looks deeper than the creepy side, while Lloyd Webber and his collaborators settle for the obvious "echh" side with pity for the celebrity who's lost her fame.

I'm interested in some of Lloyd Webber's other projects.  I eagerly listened to ASPECTS OF LOVE, which some critics compared to Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, but it seemed bland.  WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND got pretty bad reviews, but I was interested in the premise, taken from an obscure 50s movie about kids who mistake a fugitive for the second coming of Jesus.  THE BEAUTIFUL GAME sounds interesting, a musical about soccer and the troubles in Ireland, but it, too, failed to catch on.  I don't recall what it was that kept me from ordering the CD, but I retain the impression that, once again, Lloyd Webber was said to have flirted with something exciting and meaningful, but had settled for the first thing that had come to mind.  My mentor Frank Boggs was impressed by THE WOMAN IN WHITE, but, as so often seems the case with A. L-W., , it was the technical presentation that he lauded.

I read a review of the PHANTOM sequel LOVE NEVER DIES in a London Theatre newsletter, and it praised the music for being Lloyd Webber's best in decades, while lamenting the stupidity of the book.

If the critic is right, then LOVE NEVER DIES is the exception that proves the rule: Lloyd Webber often settles for the first thing that comes to mind.  He said as much when he admitted spending more time than usual,  half a year, on the REQUIEM,   He cuts corners.  He outlines a melody, he sets it to a strong, expressive harmony; but then he repeats it to fill spaces between the big balads or pastiches.

Still, I love watching Lloyd Webber at the piano with Sondheim in a YouTube video, where the two mash up "Send in the Clowns" and "Music of the Night" in tribute to producer Cameron Mackintosh.  It's no exaggerration to say that, between them, these two composers instigated  all of my intellectual life -- whether we're talking about religion, music, lyrics, or aesthetics in a more general sense.  

I can thank Sir (Lord?) Andrew Lloyd Webber for so much.  So "Thank you" is the second thing that comes to mind.  

Daron Vroon's Sermon:: Miracles, Magic, and more

Reflection on sermon by Father Daron Vroon of St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta, Georgia today; and on meditations by Jeremiah Sierra printed in Forward Day by Day in November 2012 (go to www.forwardmovement.org)

Responding to today's Gospel reading about the wedding at Cana, our young associate rector Daron Vroon made a strong impression on me and everyone else who spoke to me after the service.  

He began by tellling us of a comedy sketch by English comic Rowan Adkinson, who adds to John's gospel a couple of miracles, in King James' English: he turns a carrot into a rabbit and saws a serving girl in half who is magically restored.  "Surely this is the son of God!" Adkinson has servants exlaim.   Fr. Vroon said it was funny but disturbing to equate the miracle of Jesus with a magic trick.  If God is a distant "watchmaker" who occasionally "interferes" with nature, the questions arise, "Why doesn't God do this more often to prevent disasters?  Why doesn't He interfere to help me?" 

But that view leaves God out of our daily lives.  Instead, Fr. Vroon  asserted that God is ground of all our being, all the time.  He quoted St. Augustine's sermon on the same Gospel reading, pointing out that the making of wine is always a miracle, just as the resurrection of Lazarus is not less awe-inspiring  than the birth of an infant.  God energizes nature, Fr. Vroon says, and a miracle is simply a clear view through nature to what God is always doing for us: sustenance, transformation, resurrection....

I've long enjoyed reading Forward Day by Day, a booklet printed and sold for $1 in Episcopal Churches.  This past issue's meditations on daily readings in our prayer book were especially interesting in November.  Here are some comments that I check-marked in early mornings when, flanked by faithful dog Luis and anxious puppy Mia, I read these meditations on scripture:

On Luke 13:10-17, about the woman whom Jesus heals on the sabbath, Sierra writes,  "My to-do list is supposed to organize my life and make it easier, but instead it becomes a cloud of failed ambitions looming over my head."  How true!  And, worse, "the internet...ends up being a tether we can't seem to cut."  But this was as true 2000 years ago, when people were bound by religious rules.  "God frees us from our guilt and sin: why can we not let ourselves...breathe a little?"

In another meditation, Sierra admits, "When my girlfriend or some other prophet challenges me, I ...have to work hard to refrain from [stoning] the prophets who are sent to help me."

About the prodigal son, Sierra observes that one son "thinks he has run away from the love of his family, but, like his brother, he never left."

In another meditation on James's admonition to "be quick to listen, slow to speak," the author remembers working with the public at the church office. "It was easy to get angty... But when I kept quiet and heard them out, I'd be able to help in small ways." 

About the line in Luke 16 that no slave can serve two masters, the author  tells us about buying stuff as a sop to his loneliness.  "It's not that money doesn't matter.  It's that money serves as empty calories for our hungry hearts." 

Responding to James 3:13-4:12 "Do [these conflicts among you] not come from your cravings that are at war within you?" the author comments, "Like fruit, we rot from the inside out, and we usually don't notice it until something bites into us.  [Sometimes] it's difficult to locate the source of our anger and anguish...."  I know that last feeling especially well.  It's the main reason I write in my journal, to locate the hidden source of nagging feelings.

Sierra's meditation about the parable of the servant who buries his master's investment ends with these words:

But we shouldn't let other fears get in the way -- the fear of risk, the fear of losing the gifts that we've been given.  When we do this, we end up burying what we have in the dirt, and we end up as paralyzed by fear as the servant who buried his gold.

Robert Olen Butler's Fiction

Garrison Keillor highlighted writer Robert Olen Butler on today's "Writer's Almanac" on NPR, and I'll take the occasion to review my own appreciation of him, written in 2007.  That article begins:

Four books by Butler that I've enjoyed.

I'm always a little afraid when I start to read fiction by Robert Olen Butler. I know he's going to draw me into a corner of our world made strange in some wonderful way through a character's eyes. I know that he'll surprise me. I also know that, looking back on the story or novel, I'll see that the surprise was inevitable, usually implied from the start. I know well the feeling of delighted anticipation that often grows as we approach the climax. But I also know its opposite, a feeling of strong dread that makes me regret having started in the first place.

Most wonderfully, Butler's fiction often builds towards something dreadful that turns into a something joyful, surprising, and still inevitable. That worked on a grand scale in his novel MR. SPACEMAN, and repeatedly in short stories, which are his specialty....

Read the rest:  http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/01/anticipation-and-dread-robert-olen.html

Benjamin Franklin v. Brat Farrar: Why History Beats Mystery

Reflections while reading two books:  novel BRAT FARRAR by Josephine Tey (1950; Scribner Paperback 1997) and biography BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AN AMERICAN LIFE by Walter Isaacson (2003; Simon and Schuster paperback 2004).

Hey, B. F. is the monogram for main characters in both books that I'm reading now!  Is that proof that truth is stranger than fiction?  Reading both a chapter of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin and a chapter of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar in one sitting, I can attest to one thing:  When an author provides a quirky detail so ridiculous, touching, or coincidental that the reader thinks it must be made up, then non-fiction is at its most appealing, and fiction is at its worst. 

I've reached the part in Isaacson's biography where Ben Franklin successfully obtains France's commitment to American independence.  But his every move was reported to England by his secretary Edward Bancroft, a spy.  More surprising, and more fun, is that Bancroft speculated on trade and rushed his insider information to his stock broker before he reported to the King's spymaster Paul Wentworth, who also had a financial interest in the information.   We read reports by Wentworth about agent 72 and 51 (Franklin and Deane) who are hot for 107 (Independence) (Isaacson 345).  He invited American Silas Deane to rendezvous at an exhibition in Luxembourg and a certain public bath on the Seine, though Deane replied simply that the spy could drop by the American's office anytime (344).  Franklin uses British involvement and "secret" counter-offers of peace as leverage to make the French act sooner than later, and he plays up the American victory at Saratoga to get the treaty that made independence possible.  The outline of the story and the basics of the characters are already well-known to me; the details make the history personal, and I now look at a century note with a knowing smile as if that portrait reminds me of an old pal.

Now, friends have lauded Josephine Tey to me for decades, and I find much to admire in her Brat Farrar.  I especially enjoy those elliptical passages where something important happens between two lines in a manner that calls to mind either her contemporary Noel Coward or else Harold Pinter.  Here, we meet the title character and a man named Loding, and we know the basics of their initially adversarial relationship in the first words they speak:

"Well?" said Loding at last.
"No."
Loding took a mouthful of coffee.
"Squeamish?"
"I'm not an actor."  (Tey 26)

Other characters converse in the same understated manner:

"What became of Cousin Walter?"
"Oh, he died."
"In an odour of sanctity?"
"No. Carbolic.  A workhouse ward, I think."  (21)

Tey sets up her novel of suspense in a way that appeals to me, alternating chapters between predators and the intended victims.   We quickly get the idea of what's going to happen, and so we wonder how far it will go before the victims realize how they're being duped.

Still, I'm exasperated by all the novel's fictions that are stranger than truth.   The boy's body was never found;  the young man with the striking resemblance to the long-lost boy just happens to be an orphan with a past that's a blank; the unscrupulous actor who knows the family just happens to encounter the false twin just at the time when the family estate is due to go to the surviving brother; and -- wouldn't you know? -- the old dental records perished with the late family dentiist.

While reading the biography feels like a story I already know is opening up for me,  reading the crime novel feels like a series of predictable crises are closing in.  It was a relief to put down Brat Farrar and to open Benjamin Franklin.  

This may be an example of something Stephen Sondheim describes in his second volume of lyrics, Look I Made A Hat, when he and a playwright friend were bored stiff at a play filled with purportedly exciting events and dramatic plot twists.  Incident is no substitute for surprise, the playwright remarked.    Author Frederick Buechner once described (in The Book of Bebb) a high school class's stories filled with the "requisite number" of suicides, terminal illnesses and car crashes because young writers try to use death to make up for the lack in their stories of "anything that resembles real life."

I usually love to read mysteries, so I'll have to think a bit more to figure out what line this one crossed.  

Arts Promo, Sports Style

(Speech for an arts awards assembly in the Middle School of The Walker School today.  I've cut out the names of students.)

A week ago, a seventh grade girl presented an inspirational speech from a movie by Sylvester Stallone, and then we saw an exciting video based on that speech.  We saw gladiators prepare for battle, a man lift a huge weight, and a dad tell his boy that it's not about how hard you hit, but how you take hits and still go on.  

Arts teach something like that.  To show how, I can imagine the video I'd make.

First, we'd see a middle school band starting a new piece, and we'd hear a noise like cars honking in a traffic jam in Marietta as the train goes by.  Closeup of Mr. Kofoed, smiling through gritted teeth.  He says, "Let's try that again."

Cut to Mrs. Simpson's art class.  A girl works on a colorful picture of a bird.  Suddenly she crumples it up and pulls out another blank page.

We see 8th graders scatter all over this auditorium.  Some girls squeal, "Oh, it's a death ray!"  Some boys are crawling under the stage yelling, “I found a bomb!”   Suddenly, one boy on a metal platform falls down screaming, "My leg! My leg!" The teacher runs over to the boy, in a panic.  Someone says, "No, B----, you don't even come in yet."  The boy jumps up.  The teacher, relieved, wipes sweat from his brow.

Cut to girls dancing to "All I Want for Christmas is you."  Their smiles seem forced.  They all turn different directions as a boy goes by on a skateboard, laughing at them. One girl says, "A---, that's not working."  The other girl sighs, "Take it from the top."

Cut to another bird picture.  The girl crumples up this one too.  New blank page.

We hear something like the sound of seven hungry cats in a cage, and we see a closeup of Mr. Johnson saying to his orchestra students, "That's so much better than yesterday!  Now, can we work on playing it together?"

We see Mrs. Hawk, telling a group of sixth graders, "You can be anything you want to be!  A star athlete, a clown, a toothbrush.  All you have to do is imagine it."

Cut to another bird picture.  This time, the girl adds a crooked branch -- frowns, but keeps going.

There's a picture of the sun rising over the third wing of Walker School.  We hear the voice of Mrs. Walker, stern, but caring.  "You all have different personalities, and you all have different voices – especially L----   -- but you all must listen to each other and blend as one voice!  Now, start again from ‘Hallelujah!’”

As the chorus begins to sing, we see Mrs. Simpson hanging a beautiful picture of the bird and branch in our Middle School hall.

Finally we hear Mr. Loudermilk while credits scroll across the screen:   Art is always about sharing your ideas with others who have ideas of their own, and working through draft after draft, rehearsal after rehearsal, giving up some ideas and adding new ones, adding layer on layer of detail until it’s something better than you dreamed of. 

That’s not just true in art.   It’s how we live and work and build our lives.”

Cue the theme from Rocky.  Video, over.

Tony DeSare with Atlanta Symphony on New Year's Eve

Singing a rapid-fire version of "Just In Time," singer-pianist-songwriter Tony DeSare set off a fine New Year's Eve show with his trio and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  Billed as a young crooner, he and his trio moved way beyond being a Sinatra tribute act.

He did, in fact, channel Sinatra over Nelson Riddle's orchestral arrangement of "Night and Day." but he then sang Prince's "Kiss."  Reducing that song  to its essentials - lyrics, barebones accompaniment, melody -- DeSare revealed it to be traditional blues, with the bonus of internal rhymes, making it a good companion piece to Cole Porter's standard. 

Craftsmanship is important to DeSare.  His Berlin song "I Love a Piano," besides showcasing his keyboard chops, also integrated the melody with its cousins "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Rhapsody in Blue."  Later, departing from the printed program, DeSare delighted the audience with seventeen variations on "Jingle Bells" with spot-on imitations of piano riffs and vocals of Michael McDonald, Elton John, and also  styles ranging from ragtime  to classical.

Beginning with just piano and vocals, bringing in full orchestra, he and arranger Tedd Firth freed Journey's  ballad "Faithfully" from its 80s sound, and it came out sweet and soaring.

His own compositions were effective.  There was a show-stopping "New Orleans Tango" that played with the musical conventions of two kinds of song, and "How I Will Tell You I Love You" (I may have the title wrong), in AABA form, which builds its lyric on subdued word play -- as, "When you break the rules, I'll bend them around you." 

He got laughs with "Fire," and then hushed the hall with an intimate original ballad, "First Last Kiss."

He was the headliner; the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra delighted us in the first half of the evening with light classical hits including "Dance of the Hours" and Leroy Anderson's "Classical Jukebox," which, like DeSare's "Jingle Bells," had us enjoying variations on an annoying tune, "Put another nickel in ...the nickelodeon...."

Teaching Playfulness, Reaching God

(Reflection on blogposts of my own that are tangents to themes in yesterday's posting about John Polkinghorne and Kate Braestrup -- link http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2012/12/macro-god-micro-god.html)

This morning I re-discovered some long-forgotten insights while searching for something else.  I typed in "sondheim + god" to find a copy of my own article for the SONDHEIM REVIEW's issue #50,  but I found a lot more, besides, and they all interlock nicely with yesterday's posting, "Macro God, Micro God."

As a teacher of both middle school students and adult churchgoers, I want to remember "Teaching Beauty," a post from 2007 (http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/07/teaching-beauty-art-philosophy-and.html).  For teachers of children, there's this insight: "Interpretation will not get you to appreciate the beauty. The beauty attracts first, promising depth, and then you want to dive in. Interpretation is part of the diving." That is to say, we teachers who teach interpretations are slamming doors in students' faces just when we should be coaxing them through to undiscovered country.

This discussion of beauty leads by tangent to a commentary about interpreting the Bible, prompted by this exchange between a priest and the late, grating atheist Christopher Hitchens.  They found common ground in a belief that beauty transcends matter.  But they clash over Scripture:

Hitchens' critique of religion begins from reading Scriptures as a fundamentalist would. When the interviewer pointed this out, Hitchens snapped back, "It's either God's word, or what use is it?" He thinks that ends the discussion, but of course, it's only a start. Hitchens thinks religion is lies, and art is good. I'd simply retort, "Religion is art." That's not to say that Christianity and the Bible are fiction.

There's some explanation about the nature of the Bible before the article pulls together all the strands: "Can Hitchens see that a leap of faith is an act of imagination? ...[F]aith is a pleasure that changes lives and builds community."

Another article repeats Polkinghorne's question, "What is the evolutionary value of Mozart [or any other examples of gratuitous and graceful ingenuity]?"  The question arose when a book of puzzles based on New Yorker cartoons struck me as evidence of the real "Intelligent Design."  Will Shortz comments about the "snap" when all the interlocking pieces fall together, which reminds me of a quote from Ellington, to the effect that this snap "is happiness."  This leads in the article to a tribute for one of the most strikingly useless pieces of cleverness I've ever seen, a book of French "poetry" that's actually punning on English verse.  Got that? For a fuller explanation, go to http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/01/cartoon-puzzles-real-intelligent-design.html

Another article for teachers relates to gratuitous play, without reference to God.  We read about a corporate consultant who sets aside the agenda when there's an impasse, to "play." That means, he sets a goal and encourages divergent ways to reach it.  This is inclusive, not to be confused with exclusive "competition." There's a memorable anecdote connected to this, about an encounter between a polar bear and a sled dog on a chain.  What looked at first like a horror in progress turned into laughter.   http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/09/playings-thing.html

Finally, there's an article about ARCADIA, a play that incorporates every thread in this article.  In fact, it's all in one paragraph:

What Stoppard says, and demonstrates so convincingly through these polished but real characters, is that the big questions are interesting, the ones on the biggest scale and smallest scale - big bang, or sub-atomic particles -- but it's the unpredictable nature of what happens in between that makes life worth living. Hannah, after the big blow up, makes a comment about faith. She says that she has no problem with God or spirit, but she can't stand the notion of an afterlife: "If we're going to find out everything in the end [I'm quoting from memory].... if all the answers are in the back of the book, what's the point?" What these characters demonstrate as they talk and talk and talk, is the pleasure in finding out through investigation, surmise, and testing hypotheses. http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/08/stoppards-arcadia-math-and-tenderness.html

Macro God, Micro God

(reflection on EXPLORING REALITY: THE INTERTWINING OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION by John Polkinghorne, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005; and on Krista Tippett's radio interview with Kate Braestrup about her memoir HERE IF YOU NEED ME.  Link to a transcript of the interview @ http://www.onbeing.org/program/presence-wild/transcript/4957#main_content  )

The old days were soaked with God, as we can read in European literature from Milton backwards. My forebears named Him casually in both contracts and curses, credited Him for both natural processes and chance incidents, and invoked His judgement upon every human action. Science wrung God from daily discourse, leaving behind a mere puddle. The Deity became a mere "God of the gaps," default cause for every effect that science hasn't explained - a set that shrinks every year.

Not so fast, says author John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist-turned-Anglican Priest. I heard him on Krista Tippett's radio program On Being (nee Speaking of Faith) and have now read his book EXPLORING REALITY. He argues that science has found more room, not less, for miraculous events, response to prayer, and the ongoing involvement of a concerned and omnipresent Creator.

His view of a cosmic God who works miracles is irrelevant to Kate Braestrup, also a guest of Krista Tippett's program.  She says, "You know, God doesn't have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together."  She finds God in everyday life, but not in the way our forebears saw God's hand in every event.

The two authors look at God from opposing sides, but their perspectives are not mutually exclusive.
 
Polkinghorne Widens Gaps for God
In his book EXPLORING REALITY, Polkinghorne pulls together threads from his more substantial works in this slim book to make a sampler for those who won't deny science in order to keep faith. Here's a sampler of what I got from reading it:

First, you don't have to be a Quantum Physicist to ask the question that made a theist of me in my teens: What could possibly be the evolutionary "survival value" of Mozart's music, or the joy we have in perceiving it?   Asking myself that as an agnostic -- though for me it was "A Little Night Music" by Sondheim and not by Mozart -- I could answer only that there's more to us than mere matter, and It's good.  And It has good taste!

Science now supports the religious feeling that our universe is more than the sum of its particles, Polkinghorne tells us. "Reductionism" of everything to merely mechanical processes is so 20th century, he says; "emergentism" has replaced it, awareness that phenomena can "emerge" from interactions of objects, as "Wetness" emerges from interactions of water molecules. The quality that we call "consciousness" is another emergence, Polkinghorne says, concluding that "mind" and "matter" lie on a continuum.  He explains (but I still don't get) how quantum experiments were affected by the act of observing them.  At the quantum level, particles affect each others' behavior far beyond the reach of any communicating force. He speculates about the effects that minds, collectively, have on our universe.

Polkinghorne wants us to know, above all, that Science has outgrown determinism.  R.I.P., Laplace (who imagined that the cosmos has unfolded, and will unfold, on a trajectory determined from its outset), and also Marx and Freud. Chaos theory interferes with the old view.  "Chaos theory" is a misnomer, he says, for the study of chance variations that  make great effects across a wide range of phenomena. This is the "butterfly effect," by which the fanning of a butterfly's wing in a tropical jungle can result in a windstorm on the other side of the planet.

Chapters on physics prepare Polkinghorne's reader for affirmations of the existence of free will. A chapter on "Time" disposes of the old idea that all time is contained as if in an aquarium. That old view is partly supported by Einstein's insight that observers can experience time in different ways, depending on position and speed, allowing the conclusion that our perception of time's passing is only a matter of limited perspective. But Polkinghorne thinks that's overreaching.  For him, time is more like a narrative, and trajectories can be knocked off-course.  He sees room in the universe for a God to interact with us, to make things happen, even resurrection.   

In the rest of the book, Polkinghorne applies "critical realism" to religious doctrine.  Here, I was on more familiar territory.  I recognized vintage C. S. Lewis when Polkinghorne reasons that men of ancient Israel would not have put their lives on the line for Christ without firm belief that Resurrection happened really (83), not as a stunt or a symbol; nor would they have composed Gospels in which they themselves would appear so foolish, nor women would appear so influential.

He makes a big deal of the doctrine of Trinity, something that I've always accepted without much thought as a kind of metaphor for a being beyond our comprehension.  For Polkinghorne, understanding the Creator as a being involved in time, not outside of it, is key to everything else -- free will, prayer, miracles, the Incarnation of Jesus, and the operation of the Spirit.  Jesus' calling to the Father from the Cross was an event within the life of the Trinity, even a crisis, but  not a charade played out for our benefit.  Polkinghorne uses ancient sources to reason that the Spirit is active in all human lives in all times, and other faith traditions are therefore Spirit-led, too, though incomplete without acceptance of Jesus' resurrection.

The life of the world to come?  Polkinghorne tells of "branes," short for "membranes," imagined in "superstring theory" as parallel universes layered together like layers of skin. Resurrection may have poked a hole in the "brane."  How will we all meet Jesus, face to face, if we are all resurrected bodies?  He imagines, half-seriously, the idea of a vast universal reception line where Jesus says a few kind words to each of us.  Instead, he wonders if Jesus is embodied by all of us, taking literally the metaphor of the church as "Christ's body."

More interesting than his speculations about how it all will happen is his wondering why -- or, more accurately, why not immediately?  If there will one day follow some universe free of two kinds of "evil" (natural and moral), then why should we have to endure the viruses and wars of this one? His best answer is that Creation is empowered to create itself - everything from galaxies to viruses, with humankind in between.

Braestrup Narrows God's Field of Operations
Kate Braestrup is both a cop and Unitarian Universalist pastor, working as chaplain for Maine's park rangers. In her work, she has been present at "miraculous" rescues of little children lost in the woods, and "tragic" recoveries of corpses. "Miracles" are what we call it when chance events lead to saving a life; but Braestrup observes that tragedies are equally improbable:  numerous chance events put  a predator in contact with his victim in an opportune time and place. She sees the hand of God, not in the chance incidents, whether "miraculous" or "tragic," but in the fact that teams of law enforcement officers and community volunteers give of themselves to help when bad things happen. She tells Tippett,

...God is love. And I mean that pretty literally, that God is, if nothing else, and that's a big if, but if nothing else, God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other. And for me, that is actually enough. That cultivating it, that thinking about it, worshipping it, working towards it, taking care of it, nurturing it in myself, nurturing it in other people, that that really is a life's work right there, and it doesn't have to be any bigger than that. You know, God doesn't have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together. Right? You know, it's plenty just the God that I work with.

Asked what she says in the worst cases, Braestrup replies, "If someone asks, you know, 'Where was God in this?' I'll say, 'God was in all the people that came to try to help, to try to find your child.'" 

She speaks with Tippett about events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy when communities pull together to help those in need, and someone invariably asks, as Dorothy Day did at the San Francisco earthquake, "Why can't we always live like this?" Braestrup tells us that such caring and courageous behavior is more common than these calamities, although she allows that sometimes "it fails," as in the case of Kitty Genovese.

At another spot in the interview, she takes issue with some Christians for whom life and life after death are paramount. She quips that life isn't really so important to us at all: "Half of the time when I'm ... responding to a tragedy, [it's] someone who was willing to risk his life for something really as evanescent as ... excitement. [For example] he was driving a snowmobile 70 miles an hour, and he bashe[d] into a tree. I mean, we risk our lives all the time."

Synthesis
While one author looks to the cosmos for God, and the other looks no further than the next person's eyes, they unite in believing that there's a shared spirit working in us, inspiring us to love, motivating us to risk ourselves for others, strengthening us to accept loss and move on.  For one, that's an aspect of the Trinity; for the other, one third of the trinity is enough, and the rest is just speculation. 

Les Miserables: Something Appealing, Something Appalling

Appealing actors give their all to make us believe that rhymes and melody arise on the spot, while an orchestra plays discreetly in the background, and we buy it.  The crowd in a suburban multiplex applauded at the satisfying reprise of "Can you Hear the People Sing," an effective transfer of curtain call to film. I heard sobs earlier, from different areas of the theatre. 

The director Tom Hooper told NPR that he approached this musical as an alternate world where everyone sings their feelings, and his job was to let the actors practice their craft.  He arranged for them to sing with live piano accompaniment transmitted to their ears by accompanists responsive to the actors' every pause and breath -- and copious tears. He shot many songs in close-ups, continuous shots that let us see that tears arose from within the actors, not from filmmakers' trickery. 

The picture's first twenty minutes give us harrowing images of class brutality, but it's not a Marxist manifesto: we end up unironically at Versailles (if my recognition isn't faulty) in fancy dress.  In between, the police chief's single-minded pursuit of justice can't help but appear ridiculous, though Russell Crowe sings well and acts with conviction. He has to sing one of the lyricist's egregious rhymes, "nip in the bud" to go with "blood."  My friend Suzanne and I snickered.  

I surrender to the movie. I love the characters, and the actors who embody them, and the orchestra that generates such lovely sound behind them. 

My reservations are as old as the original Broadway production's cast album. I'd heard so much about the show that I bought it immediately when it arrived.  I cried more than once listening to the two-LP set.  I also cringed with shame for crying at it, fully aware how I'd been manipulated both by the musical's creators and by Hugo himself.  It's a formula:  Give us appealing characters, put them in situations where they sacrifice themselves, and we'll cry.  An hour after listening to the music, I ran into former student Scott Johnson, then in high school, and proposed that we could probably sketch out a show as effective in an afternoon.  He wasn't so interested, though he has gone on to a career as songwriter-singer.

It's gripping, its cast members inspire loyalty, its music and lyrics (except for "in the bud" and Hugh Jackman's vibrato on "Bring Him Home") go by as if it were perfectly natural for charactes to sing: I'm sold.

The More Things Change: Ben Franklin's Fiscal Cliff

(Just a note about pages I've read lately from Walter Isaacson's book BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE (Simon and Schuster paperback, 2004).)

Either raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals or face drastic cuts to defense of homeland under attack:  we've been here before, in 1750s Pennsylvania, known to Middle School US History teachers (and a few dozen others) as the era of the French-and-Indian War, Ground Zero. 

The so-called Proprietors, descendants of William Penn and others named in the colony's original charter, were wealthy and privileged by birth.   When Ben Franklin proposed formation of a militia and proposed a self-tax to supply British forces coming to assist the colony in its defense, the Proprietors balked, and the Governor supported them. 

Franklin got the Assembly to set up a militia -- strictly voluntary, to appease the pacifist Quakers in Assembly.  To those who objected to fighting on behalf of Quakers who remained home, Franklin wrote, "That is to say you won't pump [water from a sinking] ship, because it will save the rats as well as yourself" (170). 

Eventually, the Proprietors agreed to a one-time voluntary grant, leaving their tax-exempt privileges untouched.

Franklin had no more success getting support from other colonies that shared interests in the western lands, as each colony's assembly was jealous of its own power.   It was in this context, not the later Revolutionary War, that Franklin printed the first political cartoon in North America, the segmented snake over the motto, "Join or Die."

One of Walter Isaacson's themes in this life of Franklin is the idea that liberty is a communal interest, not just an individualist's privilege.  

What We've Forgotten About Ben Franklin

(Reflection on BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE by Walter Isaacson, New York: Simon and Schuster paperbacks, 2004.)

One hundred pages into this one-volume life of Ben Franklin, he is already an appealing character and exemplar of the America I knew as a child.  I wonder if we've lost touch with him?

His biographer finds significance in Franklin's lineage.  He was the youngest son of a youngest son, going back four more generations.  His family name "Franklin" itself was originally a designation for "tradesman." Not one trade, but many; not one place, but dozens, as the scion of each new generation sought his fortune away from the family -- our famous Benjamin included, running away from his brother's print shop in Boston to make his fortune in Philadelphia.  Franklin's father Josiah was a non-entity in other biographies I've read, but he emerges as a type familiar to me from my own father and his father.  Taking issue with the accepted belief that Josiah nixed young Ben's advancement to Harvard solely because of expense, Isaacson suggests that Josiah probably judged Ben to be unsuited for the clergy (Harvard being primarily a seminary). Instead, when Benjamin showed distaste for his father's candle-making operation -- and an interest in going to sea -- Josiah took Benjamin on a tour of Boston's trade shops, giving the boy a life-long appreciation for all trades, and an instant liking of printing.

Through his twenties, at least, Franklin's energy was devoted to self-improvement.  That's not too surprising, and we see that in the ubiquitous sports culture today.  In fact, I learned this morning that "No pain, no gain" is a bumper-sticker version of Poor Richard's "No gains without pains" (99).  What's different is how self-improvement for Franklin was to be achieved largely through community involvement.  He studied "how to win friends and influence people" as the older people in my life used to do, and reached the same conclusions:  Ask more questions than one answers, listen well, look for talents in others and faults in oneself, avoid direct confrontation and change minds indirectly by asking questions that make others see faults in their reasoning, and give all the credit to those who support one's project. 

After a couple of misadventures, including a fool's errand to London where he found himself without means, Franklin began his own advancement by "networking" with other young men in Philadelphia.  This "Junta" practiced debate, supported each other in public and in business, and delivered papers to each other on improvements for the town and for themselves.  It was through the Junta that Franklin set up the lending library (for self-improvement through study), fire department, and a regularized system of "watchmen" (police), staying in the background as an organizer,  giving credit to those who contributed to each project.

By the time America reached the 1920s, Franklin's approach to success through civic organizations was both well-established and scorned by modernist intellectuals.  Isaacson quotes D.H. Lawrence in the 1910s on "escaping" the "barbed-wire moral enclosure" of Franklinesque thinking (100).  In high school, after reading BABBITT (1922), I felt that author Sinclair Lewis had scored some easy points making fun of the unoriginal, uninspired, unintellectual title character, but had missed the goodwill and energy that came through even Lewis's disdain. 

The 60s counter-culture was a reiteration of Lewis's smug-ugly attitude.  Since then, the ironic view of earnest self-improvement has dominated the popular mindset.  It rears up in school, often -- except when the subject is sports.  Well, that's a topic for another blog post.

Following Lincoln's Moral Compass

(Reflection on the film LINCOLN directed by Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Tony Kushner. Based especially on Doris Kearns Goodwin's LINCOLN: A TEAM OF RIVALS.)

A compass will surely lead you North, says Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln in the recent film, but it cannot tell you of swamps and mountains in the way.   I'm paraphrasing Tony Kushner's remarkable screenplay, here, because that single line encapsulates one of the three qualities in Lincoln that I most admire, and this response to the accusation that he has "no moral compass" is the most succinct that I've encountered in a lifetime of reading about the 16th President.

The screenplay is structured to show both Lincoln's relentless pushing towards his goal (winning Congressional approval for the 13th amendment) and the maneuvering he has to do to get there -- including canny backroom political deals as well as personal moral persuasion.  His dream of piloting a ship towards a vague shore, shown early in the film, underscores the main line of the film.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film captures another trait of Lincoln.  Scene after scene, he is the least imposing character in the room:  gaunt, weary, intent on others' words -- whether these are tight-lipped politicos pronouncing their certainties about the future, or cheeky young soldiers black and white who voice their aspirations to their Commander-in-Chief.  Yet we are always drawn to watch him.  He was a man who listened.  He drew others out, hearing both what they said, and what they implied.  In the film, Lincoln is always taking into account the minutiae of political and military decisions and weighing the personal impacts they'll have against national, partisan, and moral concerns. Two moments stand out this way:  a scene in which Lincoln signs a pardon for a deserting soldier, and a scene at the telegraph office where, all alone, he listens to the young telegraph operator's opinion, then slyly revises his dictated telegraph message for Confederate negotiators to be maddeningly ambiguous -- affording his administration what would today be called "deniability."

In the movie, when Lincoln has made up his mind, he quietly turns the other person's speech around to persuade them face-to-face. It's in the White House kitchen, away from a state ball elsewhere, that firebrand abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens accuses him of having "no moral compass." Lincoln's answer sways Stevens and tips momentum towards passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery, Lincoln's main objective in this movie.

The other trait that I've always loved is Lincoln's sense of humor.  The actor portraying Secretary of War Stanton (to my eyes a perfect embodiment of the Stanton I've seen in photos and read about in biographies) blusters away in anger when Lincoln begins "one of his stories" at the telegraph office where everyone awaits news from a critical battle.  It happened a lot in real life. I've read elsewhere that Stanton did publicly chide Lincoln for inappropriate levity, and Lincoln reportedly replied, "I laugh because I must not weep."

I searched the internet for any historical basis for the "moral compass" line, and, finding none, took time to read then-Senator Obama's appreciation of Lincoln in a speech at the Chicago Institute.  I share his vision of the man and President.  Link here: http://chicago.about.com/od/chicagopeople/a/ObamaSpeechAL.htm

I also happened upon this anecdote, of personal interest to me: 

Mr. Lincoln was so poor that when he was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, he had to ask his friend Coleman Smoot for a $60 loan. "Smoot," asked Mr. Lincoln, "did you vote for me? Admitted Smoot, "I did that very thing." Then, Mr. Lincoln responded, "that makes you responsible. You must lend me the money to buy suitable clothing, for I want to make a decent appearance in the Legislature." (Richard J. Behn, 2004 is Research Director of the Lincoln Institute.)