From James Matthew Wilson’s “From a Rooftop”:
To look out on the city of your birth,
as headlights trace a pathway through the dark;
To see the distant white upon the dome
That governs every avenue and park,
Will leave you sensing what you had called home
Is where the body longs to meet with earth.
There had been a time when, terrified of chaos, we had all prayed for a strong system, for a powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. This fear of chaos is perhaps the most permanent of our feelings—we have still not recovered from it, and it is passed on from one generation to another.…
What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions. Since we could offer no better prescriptions of our own, it was logical to accept the ones proposed from on high. The most we dared do was offer advice in some minor matter: would it be possible, for example, to allow different styles in carrying out the Party’s orders in art? We would like it so much. … In our blindness we ourselves [tried desperately] to impose unanimity—because in every disagreement, in every difference of opinion, we saw the beginnings of new anarchy and chaos. And either by silence or consent we ourselves helped the system to gain in strength and protect itself against its detractors…
So we went on, nursing a sense of our own inadequacy, until the moment came for each of us to discover from bitter experience how precarious was his own state of grace. This could only come from bitter personal experience, because we did not believe in other people’s. We really are inadequate and cannot be held responsible for our behavior. And we are saved only by miracles.
Stepping out of school that day was the best thing that ever happened to me. I walked away from the wire fences, rigid rules, punishment by caning and strapping, and I was set free. So it was too when I first understood why amateurs had the better life, independence brought beyond peer pressure and authoritarianism. It was another of those, ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do it, so I did it’ moments. They lived in the love of their woodworking, and it made no difference how good they were at doing it, or how very bad they were…they lived for the doing of it!
[…]These volunteers, and volunteers is indeed what they are, these entrepreneurs, these altruistics, pursue their quest for mastery no matter the obstacles they encounter. They willingly get together with other woodworkers, share their knowledge and skills, and band together to promote the art of what they believe in. Professionals tend to use the term amateur negatively, to draw a contrast between themselves and amateurs, even though, as said, amateurs might well be more knowledgeable, more dedicated and more skilful than any professional counterpart. Using the term derogatorily cannot really displace the essence and innocence of amateurism, so better to not distance themselves from the limitations of making only for money; many a professional will usually distance themselves from the term amateur as we have come to know it through the decades where most professionals fail to recognise the skills and abilities that carry the missing element in most professional realms and that is the significant ingredient we recognise simply as a love for the craft we do.
[…]All in all, I am an amateur woodworker and hope to be so for the rest of my life.
I would like these words engraved over my lintel:
When the love of craft inspires us, self-discipline takes us into the deep.
Much else to be appreciated in that piece — ie. eg. “With an assurance of a predictable result, your positive feelings parallel the mind’s intent of your thought processing”; and, “But it wasn’t until I abandoned the ease of machine making altogether that I truly understood how machines became fully, dictatorially rigid and fixed and hand tools delivered the greater freedoms of versatility in the high demand of minute by minute critical thinking.”
I’m also struck by the overlap with yesterday’s short video from Two Birds Film, “The Good Farmer.”
Long live the loving amateurs.
William E Pannel:
Pastor Arthur Simon, Lutheran clergyman, lives on New York’s Lower East Side. In a moving volume, Faces of Poverty, he describes the bland sameness of those who flee from the challenge to love one’s neighbor.
“It (the middle class) is self promoting because it places too high a value on our own comfort: it indicates an inordinate desire for earthly possessions; and it is nourished by a search for status. It is exclusive because in this style of life people of similar background and circumstances are drawn together like iron filings by a magnet, into neighborhoods which have systematically eliminated the less worthy. It is evasive because it cuts us off from precisely those people whose needs are most acute and to whom the Gospel recommends us most of all.”?
Self promoting, exclusive, evasive. One could passionately wish these words exclusive of the church. But, of course, the church is middle-class, even that section of it called evangelical, and rather than challenge the oppressive system which denudes men of their humanity, the church reflects these majority values. Sargent Shriver, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, reveals considerable savvy when he says that “Christianity sometimes seems to have a case of moral hemophilia: its sense of social responsibility is bleeding away. The test of 20th Century Christianity is not how much the poor enter into the life of the church, but how much the church enters into the life of the poor.” Amen. One wonders if the church is Christian enough to understand this, for of all people, the children of the poor pioneers are now those who like to excuse their insensitivity by quoting Christ’s words about “the poor ye have with you always.” Sure, as long as the well-off do not care.
William E Pannel, introduction to My Friend, the Enemy, 1968:
My own personal hang-up stems from my growing desire, and I must add, need, to be properly related to my people, whoever they are, and to Christianity, whatever that is. My understanding of the latter is that Christianity is “Christ in you,” a definition calculated to set at rest my evangelical friends. This ought also to define the former, and so it does until I venture out of my study to associate with the rest of God’s family. Then the ideology blurs, and our devotion to each other becomes tentative and halting. Yet it is this search for family and the desire to belong that animates the current crisis in human relations. Martin Niemoeller declared several years ago that when the Heidelberg Confession was formulated the burning issue was “Who can find a merciful God?” Today, he said, the crucial issue is “Who can find a merciful neighbor?” If the church dares to wax theological and declare correctly that Jesus Christ is the answer to both questions, then she had better prepare to defend herself. I personally know churches in all kinds of denominations whose flight to suburbia testifies eloquently to their rejection of me as a brother and neighbor.
But then perhaps I am making too much of this. After all, isn’t our “citizenship in heaven?” Yes, but that gives little balm when viewing the bloodied form of a twelve-year-old lying face down on Newark’s cold pavement. Scriptural quotations about the end time and the spirit of the age fail to soothe a breaking spirit when one views children looting a neighborhood store for a paltry bag of potato chips. But what would my white brother know of this? He taught me to sing “Take The World But Give Me Jesus.” I took Jesus. He took the world and then voted right wing to insure his property rights. A riot can make you feel more lonely than suburbia will ever know.
So I’ve written a book, but the writing of it has settled very little. I’ve learned a bit more about myself, but writing has only intensified the anxiety and agony of being an alien in one’s own land. I respond to Frantz Fanon, who declared: “An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness.”
You can never be too careful when you travel. You can go in search of disease and poverty and stumble upon holy ground. And you can find resilience, courage and faithfulness that will inspire you and challenge you for the rest of your life.
And:
And it is hard to imagine how the philosophic abstractions of modern liberalism, all those calculations behind the veil of ignorance, can motivate a flesh and blood passion to sacrifice for the good of our flesh and blood neighbors. This is not to deny that purely secular accounts of human rights are possible, but it is fair to say that they are under considerable stress and questioning, even by those who wish the philosophic project well. […] As societies lose the intellectual resources to sustain the morality of human rights, the religious justification for those rights will play an ever more important role.
And:
I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of trying to help someone and finding that they have more to offer you than you could possibly give. Several years ago, I was in Kampala, Uganda, in a refugee community on the side of a steep hill. Most were women and children who had fled from up north, where a brutal cultish rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army had killed large numbers of the men.
Many of the women had terrible stories of rape and violence. Some of the boys I talked with had been kidnapped by the LRA and trained as soldiers, forced, I was told, to do terrible things such as murdering family members and neighbors in their home village so they could never return. The center of the settlement is a steep walled open pit mine.
The women support themselves by getting rocks from the pit and breaking them into gravel with small metal hammers. Each day, they add to the pile for several hours. After Hurricane Katrina on America’s Gulf Coast in 2005, these women, many of them HIV positive, somehow collected $900 and sent it to the American Embassy to help with relief efforts.
When I visited them and thanked them on behalf of our government, I have never seen a group of people more proud of themselves. I was given a handwritten note that read: We want to express ourselves that we are the richest in the world. We are not poor. We are free. We also want to love others truly.
Generosity of the poor is often more impressive than anything we give them. And we should be honored to take their side and humble enough to learn from them.
It’s a campaign of mass murder being conducted for political theater. … What Donald Trump is doing is simply blowing up boats in the Caribbean because they are full of South American people that he would like to murder, for political purposes, because it’s good theater. […]
I think the way to think of this, uncomfortable as it is to say, is that Venezuela is Ukraine and we are the Russians.
I was trying to figure out what to call our cultural sense that we can’t judge something dangerous without a “study” to demonstrate the danger, but I’ve realized it’s simply that we do not believe in the faculty of judgment. Kant’s third critique outlines judgment as the faculty that brings together the realms of nature and freedom, and the need for a study to determine an obvious dangers reveals a failure to recognize just this capacity. If we don’t recognize the capacity we’ll do little to develop it, making the problem worse.
The two most important and at the same time most controversial judgments Arendt made were simple, but both carried complex challenges. She reported Eichmann’s story, noting his bureaucratic mentality and boastful claim that “officialese is my only language,” and she judged him incapable of telling right from wrong. Thus, she implied that the Jerusalem court’s “guilty” judgment, with which she certainly agreed raised general questions about the role of motivation in deeds such as Eichmann’s. Eichmann did what the laws of his state, justified by raisons d’état, asked of him—without knowing the laws to be wrong. The concept of mens rea (intent), so crucial to modern legal philosophy and procedure, has never been adequately associated with a “law of humanity” higher than state law. Even though she accepted and approved the Israeli legal proceedings, Arendt felt that only with such a “law of humanity,” only with new legal and moral categories, could justice truly be rendered to individuals involved in state-instigated crimes or “administrative massacres.” Secondly, Arendt reported how the moral corruption of the Nazis’ totalitarian regime affected other countries and societies, including the society of the Jewish victims, and concluded that such corruption poses unprecedented challenges to judgment in general—past and present. She wrote of the past, but she addressed the crisis of judgment she saw in the present. As she put the matter to [Karl] Jaspers: “Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.” Inability to judge and refusal to judge were her themes in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Hannah Arendt offered her report and her own judgments in full awareness that both would be controversial and that she would be accused of arrogance for making judgments in a time when anxiety about judging was so widespread. In a set of rough notes she made for a public discussion of the book, she linked her awareness to the phenomena—past and present—she had studied; she named the sources of her own lack of anxiety about judging. “For conscience to work: either very strong religious belief—extremely rare. Or: pride, even arrogance. If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”
Hannah Arendt (Sonning Prize acceptance speech, Copenhagen, April 18, 1975):
Persona, at any event, originally referred to the actor’s mask that covered his individual “personal” face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play. But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding through that the word persona was derived: per-sonare, “to sound through,” is the verb of which persona, the mask, is the noun. And the Romans themselves were the first to use the noun in a metaphorical sense; in Roman law persona was somebody who possessed civil rights, in sharp distinction from the word homo, denoting someone who was nothing but a member of the human species, different, to be sure, from an animal but without any specific qualification or distinction, so that homo, like the Greek anthropos, was frequently used contemptuously to designate people not protected by any law.
I found this Latin understanding of what a person is helpful for my considerations because it invites further metaphorical usage, metaphors being the daily bread of all conceptual thought. The Roman mask corresponds with great precision to our own way of appearing in a society where we are not citizens, that is, not equalized by the public space established and reserved for political speech and political acts, but where we are accepted as individuals in our own right and yet by no means as human beings as such. We always appear in a world which is a stage and are recognized according to the roles which our professions assign us, as physicians or lawyers, as authors or publishers, as teachers or students, and so on. It is through this role, sounding through it, as it were, that something else manifests itself, something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably identifiable, so that we are not confused by a sudden change of roles, when for instance a student arrives at his goal which was to become a teacher, or when a hostess, whom socially we know as a physician, serves drinks instead of taking care of her patients. In other words, the advantage of adopting the notion of persona for my considerations lies in the fact that the masks or roles which the world assigns us, and which we must accept and even acquire if we wish to take part in the world’s play at all, are exchangeable; they are not inalienable in the sense in which we speak of “inalienable rights,” and they are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner self in the sense in which the voice of conscience, as most people believe, is something the human soul constantly bears within itself.
It is in this sense that I can come to terms with appearing here as a “public figure” for the purpose of a public event. It means that when the events for which the mask was designed are over, and I have finished using and abusing my individual right to sound through the mask, things will again snap back into place. Then I, greatly honored and deeply thankful for this moment, shall be free not only to exchange the roles and masks that the great play of the world may offer, but free even to move through that play in my naked “thisness,” identifiable, I hope, but not definable and not seduced by the great temptation of recognition which, in no matter what form, can only recognize us as such and such, that is, as something which we fundamentally are not.
Dag Hammarskjöld:
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I‘s. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one—which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.
Emily Dickinson:
