Poem, Prose, & Praise (4)

Spangled and Fulfilled

I was sitting at the bar in a downtown restaurant the other day. Meghan was admiring the brick wall behind us and wondered if one of its features was the result of creative construction sometime after the wall was originally built. At points throughout the wall, some single bricks had apparently been taken out, paired up, turned 90 degrees, and put back in, mortar and all, so that now there were as many as thirty or more small brick shelves for wine bottles or plants or other decorations. “It’s nice,” she said, “but it just seems so unnecessary.”

Now, most of the time I would almost certainly agree; I think many things in life are very, very unnecessary. But, on this one, I cringed a little when she said it. Why should “necessary” have the final say? In fact, aren’t there many, many places in life where “necessary” should have no say at all?

If I didn’t have this poem from Richard Wilbur in mind at the time, I certainly could have:

AT MOORDITCH

“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”

“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book.”

“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”

“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”

I did have that poem in mind while I was reading Jonathan Raban’s fantastic book, Bad Land: An American Romance. Having just moved myself to Montana for the rest of winter and into spring, it was easily picked up from the “Montana” section at a local bookstore last week. Raban traces the zealously encouraged settlement of eastern Montana in the early 20th century. Between government incentives, railroad company pamphlets, creative advertising and photography, and the enthusiastic hopes and dreams of migrants, many found the new life being offered hard to resist. But it was, on the whole, a dreadful failure.

They’d come to the land and tried to shape it according to their imported ideas of science, progress, community, landscape. Now the land began to shape them. Its message to the people was blunt: live here, and you will live barely and in isolation. It shook itself free of the litter of surplus buildings, the fence posts and barbed wire with which Lilliputian homesteaders had tried to pin it down.

The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it. Of course, nature often struck petulantly back at man, with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and fires; but this inflexible drawing of lines and limits was alien to the American temper. The prairie was not amenable to problem solving; it wasn’t going to be fixed by new farming methods, or turned green by applied electromagnetism. It was what it was, which was not at all what people had conceived it to be.

Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers, and in the abandoned cabins of the rolling stones. Those who were left were marked out by their willingness to submit to the land’s terms…”

If the decorated wall spoke to me of the crayon, Raban’s book speaks to the reality that resists that crayon.

All throughout Raban’s history of eastern Montana, which is almost perfectly told, he points to the “innocent optimism” of those who bought into the dream being sold and who attempted to make a home there.

The pamphlet readers, innocent of the reality of America, brought to the text both a willing credulity and a readiness to fill in the spaces between the words with their own local, European experience. They had no more real idea of Montana than they had of the dark side of the moon. But they were devout believers and imaginers. The authors of the railroad pamphlets were able to reach out to an audience of ideal readers of the kind that novelists dream about, usually in vain.

Surely there is much to be said about this, about the sham advertising combined with exaggerated scientific knowledge combined with overconfident idealism—it is, after all, “an American romance.” There is much to be pitied looking back on this chapter in American history, and Raban, I think, clearly loves the lives and the families that he traces through it. And of course, too much cannot be said about the historical (and continual) insistence of forcing our will onto the land, into the world—“…sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.”

I do, however, wish that Raban had more to say about that spirit of imagination, that property of vision, that tries (dares) to see more than we can see. There was recognition at times, but on the whole, the hopes and dreams of these migrants seem to be cast entirely as mistaken, as sorry and pitiful, if still lovable and relatable. And they certainly are those things—loveable, relatable, and mistaken—all of which is wonderfully told by Raban. But it seems to me that there is something missing. Perhaps the best way that I can put it is to say that I wish the book had more of a place in it for Richard Wilbur’s poem, that Raban had perhaps included a little more praise for “the heart’s crayon.”

Of course, it doesn’t mean that any desert will turn oasis with the right amount of willpower, or imagination, or prayer. Certainly our hopes have to be properly placed, directed, applied. But what if the world is not the world until the heart and mind engage it with a crayon?

And if not quite that—if not praise for the pull to transform, to bring something dull to colorful life—then at least a simpler love, a love that might accomplish something like it. Maybe something like what Christian Wiman has in mind in his poem “The Reservoir”:

There comes a time when it is time to be
alive by a lake where the sun dies and dies.
Brown, glintless, it lies in the land and in the mind.
A man might be forgiven for loving dust,
dead weeds and a cracked, receding shore,
a sky so empty that it has no end.

It may not be a desert turned into a garden, but surely that is its own kind of spangling and fulfillment.

it’s the voters

Tom Nichols:

But we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s gibbering for harmless political glossolalia. As Charlie Sykes said this morning, CPAC is “a serious threat masquerading as a cultic circus cum clown car,” and revealed “what a Trump 2.0 would look like.” This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law. …

We’ve all cataloged this kind of Trumpian weirdness many times, and I still feel pity for the fact-checkers who try to keep up with him. But I wonder if there is any point. By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.

“thinking in concert against theory”

Michael Weinman:

As [Hannah Arendt] sees things, the “professional thinker” in the modern age—the theorist operating in academe—has forged an amalgam of the dispassionate and disinterested pursuit of wisdom performed by the solitary philosopher and the passionate and profoundly interested pursuit of pure, unworldly, goodness performed by the lonely saint. What is destroyed in that powerful amalgam—for which Arendt (quoting Alfred North Whitehead) gives ultimate credit to René Descartes and Cartesian radical doubt—is the very possibility of common sense: “Cartesian reason is entirely based ‘on the implicit assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced’…. For common sense, which once had been the one by which all other senses [were] fitted into the common world…now became an inner faculty without any world relationship. The sense now was called common merely because it happened to be common to all.^“ In other words, Arendt argues, with the triumph of Descartes, the common of “common sense” diametrically shifts from the world to its opposite, the inner faculty—thought—that forms the object that the sense perceives. Quite literally, modern Cartesian individuals become a world unto themselves: Small wonder that the prevalence of alternative facts becomes an ever more salient issue. […]

Arendt argues that the ability to act politically—in principle given to all human beings by virtue of their birth—is constrained by the conditions of modern life, with professionalization and its compartmentalization as one key element of that constraint. To act responsibly, human beings require a practical capacity to make themselves visible to their fellows in order, together, to open up the shared world in their unique ways. Such reflexivity is facilitated by the ability to think politically, if only that ability is actually practiced, such that reflective judgment is actually exercised in public. For Arendt, this is both the means and the end of her own “exercises in political thinking,” which are intended to help political actors understand the common world and communicate in it in a common political language. These exercises are the ongoing practice of reflection in which we engage together with her as we read, accept, reject, and modify her judgments in conversation with her work and that of others. When we do so, we and she are not “doing theory”; rather, we are thinking in concert against theory.

If we acknowledge that for Arendt, theorizing was an attempt to think about and understand phenomena of the world, and that her judging was more a practice than a theory, we notice that she aimed not to display a theory of judgment for others to implement but to describe a lived experience of judging as political thinking and to explore ways we can make the common world better. Or, of course, fail in the attempt to do so. The core of this experience is uncertainty. There is no human being in the world who always makes the right judgment. We never know in a particular present moment if our judgment is “right” or if the future will confirm its truthfulness.

Unlike that human birthright, action, the ability to judge requires development and improvement. Since the common world is a political space that people share with one another in its plurality, and since this world is by definition subject to constant change and development, the potential exercise of political judgment is never fully actualized. The wealth of perspectives that can be taken into account expands again and again, and varies depending on the question the person making the judgment aims to address. Political thinking is therefore not a competence acquired once and for all, but must be grasped in its shifting dynamics.

thin liminal high and rooted

Kerri ní Dochartaigh:

The island from which I come had no choice, really, than to find a name for these dancing, beating, healing places where the veil between so very many things is thin, where it has been known to lift, right before our humble, grateful eyes.

The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces—those in-between places—those unnamable places, not to be found on any map. Are these thin places spaces where we can more easily hear the land, the earth, talking to us? Or are they places in which we are able to feel more freely our own inner selves? Do places such as these therefore hold power?

We have built up a narrative over many years—decades, centuries?—of ‘nature’ as ‘other’. There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide humanity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the land and water that we share with one another—and with other species. What do we mean when we talk about ‘nature’? About ‘place’? I want to know what it all means. I need to try to understand. When we are in a place where the manmade constructs of the world seem as though they have crumbled, where time feels like it no longer exists, that feeling of separation fades away. We are reminded, in the deepest, rawest parts of our being, that we are nature. It is in and of us. We are not superior or inferior, separate or removed; our breathing, breaking, ageing, bleeding, making and dying are the things of this earth. We are made up of materials we see in the places around us, and we cannot undo the blood and bone that forms us.

In thin places people often say they experience being taken ‘out of themselves’, or ‘nearer to god’. The places I return to over and over—both physically, and in my memory—certainly do hold power to make me feel light and hopeful, as though I am not quite of this world. Of much more power, though, is the way in which these places leave me feeling rooted—as utterly and completely in the landscape as I ever feel, as much a part of it as the bones and excrement that lie beneath my feet, as the salt and silt that course through the water. For me, it is in this that the absolute and unrivalled beauty of thin places lies.

(This also reminds of a roof nail from 2021, about the dialectic nature of trees.)

a very good Lenten poem

“At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.” (Mark 1:12-13)

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:6-7)

Wikipedia:

The English word Lent is a shortened form of the Old English word lencten, meaning “spring season”, as its Dutch language cognate lente (Old Dutch lentin) still does today. A dated term in German, Lenz (Old High German lenzo), is also related. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the shorter form (? Old Germanic type *laŋgito– , *laŋgiton-) seems to be a derivative of *laŋgo– long […] and may possibly have reference to the lengthening of the days as characterizing the season of spring’.

In languages spoken where Christianity was earlier established, such as Greek and Latin, the term signifies the period dating from the 40th weekday before Easter. In modern Greek the term is Σαρακοστή (Sarakostí), derived from the earlier Τεσσαρακοστή (Tessarakostí), meaning “fortieth”. The corresponding word in Latin, quadragesima(“fortieth”), is the origin of the terms used in Latin-derived languages and in some others.

Jack Gilbert:

Horses at Midnight without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

“empty altars everywhere”

I like Diana Butler Bass’s Lenten theme of “empty altars.” It’s a helpful way to think of the practice of Lent, to think about all the things that we put our hearts, minds, and bodies into that will ultimately wear away or be torn down. Things, but also people. Mostly, though, I like the way that she transitions into the theme of “searching for saints.”

It should go without saying (though it’s probably worth saying) that this is not a search for the ultra-pious but for the honest, down-to-earth faithful. One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading over the years, whether books or blogs or Substack subscriptions, is not the ideas or stories that are so valuable and encouraging, but simply finding people who I trust, who I think highly of. As I’ve mentioned before, while there are a few very important ones in my life, most of them are people I have never even met. But I love finding them. Searching for saints is a fun and active project; it is not, as Bass rightly points out, “a deconstruction project.”

Here, Bass says that this is because the deconstructing has already been done. Maybe her readers are already on board with it, but I think this assumes a lot. For some people, deconstruction might look like a view of life and the world that one day just, poof, disappears. For others, it might look like (I’m sure I can’t be the first to use this) a Jenga set, removing things piece by piece and seeing if it (faith) still stands, or whether the removal of some final building block brings the whole thing down—and with a boom rather than a poof. Or, it might be that, however you have or have not understood something called “deconstruction”—whether you had even thought of it or heard of it at all—you did realize at some point that there was work to be done to (re)construct your faith in a way that seems consistent and truthful, to yourself and to others.

Every generation has to ask and answer certain questions for and of itself, and deconstruction might just be the buzz word for this generation’s self-interrogation. I have not spent enough time thinking or writing about it to know exactly where I fit in to the whole thing. Sometimes I read something about deconstruction and I deeply relate. Other times, I hear the word used in someone’s story and I am completely put off by it. With the way that Bass uses it, it’s a mix, but I think I can say that I find at least enough value in it to keep reading.

Take the statues, for instance. This is not a topic that I have ever felt the need to write about, but it’s a good example of these mixed feelings. Bass seems to speak unequivocally about the good of taking down statues, but I’m less sure. I wouldn’t darken the doors of Fox News to save my life, but I liked Charles Krauthammer’s thoughtful take on the statue debate in 2017 (even if it aired on what might be the most thoughtless host-show ever to appear on television). Krauthammer mentions the varying motives behind Civil War statues and monuments, varying motives which he says calls for varying responses. And he goes straight to one that he says might be the most sacred, The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which bears this inscription:

– NOT-FOR-FAME-OR-REWARD –
– NOT-FOR-PLACE-OR-FOR-RANK –
– NOT-LURED-BY-AMBITION-
-OR-GOADED-BY-NECESSITY-
-BUT-IN-SIMPLE-
-OBEDIENCE-TO-DUTY-
-AS-THEY-UNDERSTOOD-IT-
-THESE-MEN-SUFFERED-ALL-
-SACRIFICED-ALL-
-DARED ALL ~ AND-DIED-

Should many statues and monuments be torn down? Yes. Is the taking down of Confederate monuments de facto a helpful example of the stripping down of “cultural altars”? Surely not. But the point is not to talk about Confederate statues. The point is that the attempt to strip away everything that I view as wrong might itself be just as problematic.

As Bass puts it, “Ash Wednesday invites us to accept this truth of human existence—we are dust, what we build is dust, and sometimes you have to clean out the attic.” She goes on to say that there is a “concurrent truth” to this: “dust matters because it is the very stuff of creation.”

Dust matters. Sometimes I think the act of “deconstructing” forgets this, or loses sight of it. Bass rightly moves straight from the “empty altars” of Lent to asking the question, “What do we do now? What will we fill these empty spaces with?” But I can’t help lamenting just how empty all those spaces are. Surely some of us could wake up and find that we didn’t leave enough dust to work with at all.

There is a very important and concurrent truth to the idea that “dust matters.” Since we are made of dust, we have to remember that dust will never be gone. It’s where we come from and it’s where we go. So eventually, for creatures made of dust, “cleaning” can become deeply ironic and self-defeating. (And of course, an obsession with “stripping the altars” can quickly set up an altar of its own.)

Bass says, “The deconstruction has been done, these shifts in church and community are well underway.” True enough, in some cultural sense, but on the whole I think—I hope—that it assumes too much. The whole of history—world, state, human, church—is dust. Glorious, gritty, gory, gorgeous dust, from one end to the other. Sometimes, I think the altars and the attics are empty enough, and we might all do better to simply search for saints. Let the altars empty and deconstruct and return to dust as they will.

“a secret pouch of listening”

Naomi Shihab Nye (wonderfully read and illuminated by Pádraig Ó Tuama here):

I FEEL SORRY FOR JESUS

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember ‘Telephone’, that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

Poem, Prose, & Praise (3)

I wasn’t sure what this would turn out to be, but in the end it seemed to fit with the Poem, Prose, & Praise theme, which is something that I thought was going to be a bigger Covid project three years ago, but it turned out to be just a fun couple writing activities.

IT HAS COME TO THIS

I have been thinking about this poem by Wisława Szymborska every day since I read it on one of the flights coming back from Ukraine in December:

No Title Required

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
It’s horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone.
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak

In a sense, it’s obvious why the poem would be meaningful. Coming from a hospital in eastern Ukraine, how does the daily, constant sound of rockets and artillery, destruction vibrating nearly every air molecule, compare to time off in Savannah, Georgia. One train and three flights, and I’m back on the other side of the world. How do you go, in less than two days, from a war-torn oblast, with Smerch rockets rattling the doors to the basement you’re sleeping in, to a peaceful walk through Forsyth Park with your dog? Last week, I sat on brick steps that today lie blown to pieces and looked out through empty autumn branches onto a cityscape that might as well have been colored in black and white. This week, I’ll be taking the brick sidewalk down a bright and sunny Bull Street to the Marsh Island Channel, surrounded the entire time by evergreen oak and Spanish moss that seem to have no end, in space or in time. The contrast between the two could not be more stark. And yet, in the middle of that transition, I find myself on a plane reading a poem that seems to say that the movement of an oval pebble with the tide could somehow be commensurable to my movement across the globe.

Still, I can’t help loving this poem. It helps that I don’t think the poem is saying that one thing is never any more or less significant than another. Obviously, for us—each of us or all of us together—there will be moments in life that are more significant, more condensed with meaning than other moments. But the poem is at least saying that we can’t know, with absolute certainty, what is and is not ultimately important—even for ourselves. And the reason we can’t know, says the poem, is because “the tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.”

The other day, I was flipping through an old commonplace notebook from 2018, and I came across a line from this passage in Julian Barnes’s Staring at the Sun:

Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snow-ploughs had been out chivvying the road up from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off pleasure, but the reverse; for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.

A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, now almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the snowline: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds; drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver—like a lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean gripped the frosty guard-rail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and more frightening than she had thought possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. . . . Someone else had promised, “It’s like looking at Creation”—but that too was only words. Jean was fed up with words. If the Canyon shrank the watchers at its rim to midges, it shrank their noises—the prattle, the whoops, the camera clicks—into mere insect hum. This wasn’t a place where you made self-deprecating jokes, fiddled with your exposure meter, or threw snowballs. This was a place beyond words, beyond human noise, beyond interpretation.

The phrase “beyond interpretation” has a lot of depth. It’s not beyond experience or observation, not beyond meaningfulness or praise, but it is beyond interpretation. I think the point, at least for me, is not that it is beyond interpretation but that it should be beyond interpretation. It belongs there. It should be the way things are for us. There’s no reason, it seems to me, that “the extravagant, fish-eye view” of our own lives should be any less confounding, whether we are standing at the Grand Canyon or standing anywhere else.

When I thought about trying to write something, anything (though I admit, it isn’t much) about coming back from Ukraine, the first thing that I could think of was this: “Sometimes, I don’t know what I’m doing. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.” In fact, for several weeks, those two sentences are almost all that came to mind.

I walked into that sandbagged hospital in November and one of the first people I saw was my friend Bill. He looked at me, shook his finger in my direction, smiled and said, “You said you weren’t coming back.” And he was right. When I left Ukraine at the end of March last year, I did say I wasn’t going back, and I did think that I wasn’t going back. But like I said, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I am becoming more and more okay with this.

Also in that little commonplace book is a quote from Gilbert Meilaender’s The Way That Leads There, and it is one of my favorite quotes, one of my favorite thoughts in the world:

We cannot really know ourselves, Augustine concludes. Only God manages that—only God can catch the human heart, see it whole, and hold it still. Hence, only God can discern the ultimate significance of any moment in a person’s life.

We don’t know all that brought us here or all that will bring us there—or even where “there” is. We don’t know exactly what it will take to make the world right, or totally wrong, nor how big or small or numerous the steps might be that send us in one direction or the other. To step back for a moment and to view myself as one tiny speck within that intricate and dense tapestry—whether that speck-that-is-me is on this side of the world or the other, in a hospital or a coffee shop—is to see that any moment in life might be “bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful or more frightening than we know.” And hopefully then we might admit that humility is the most necessary human quality, that life has seasons as well as days and moments, and that I cannot know which ones will ultimately be the most fruitful or the most meaningful.

Sometimes, all I can say is, “It has come to this: I am sitting in a coffee shop.” And sometimes, that’s enough, that’s all I need to know right now.

“dumb, loud, depthless and broken”

Peggy Noonan, on last week’s Superbowl ads:

What do we discern from them about how the nation’s ad makers see their country? That we’re a nation of morons, a people with fractured concentration, a people with no ability to follow even a 60-second spot, a people who need loud noises and obsess on media and respond only to movie stars playing movie stars spoofing movie stars. The feeling was one of exhaustion, of a culture folding in on itself.

The Ethics of Authenticity

Who are you? Where do you stand on [fill in the blank]? Are you for A or B?

No, it’s almost never put in those words. But it might as well be.

Almost every day I am given some form of two alternative stances that, if I don’t outright despise, I cannot simply choose between. Nor—to step upon the ol’ soapbox—can I aim to hold them in some (harmony-implying-but-ultimately-bullshit) “tension.” And though I do, on some rare occasions, consider myself a “centrist,” I never actually think of myself as occupying some average-of-the-whole or some equidistant space amid the clamoring noise-makers. Well, that last one might be accurate, but only because it describes how I feel whenever I read the news or hear about the latest imperative fear. That is to say, the experience of being stuck in the middle is descriptive and sad, not hopeful and prescriptive—and I want prescription!

Not only do I want some real prescription for life, I need it. It’s quite difficult to figure out “who you are” or “where you stand” when much of the time all you can tell is what you are not and where you do not stand. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s enough just to know what to say “no” to. But “authenticity,” however anyone understands it, requires more.

I was looking for a quote from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity and decided to just reread the book. I think the first time I read it, I was reading for an objective knowledge (and by “objective knowledge” I mean “critique”) of the “culture of authenticity.” This time, I was reading it just for me—always a better way to read!—partly to take a look at my own “atomism” and “fragmentation,” of which there is plenty.

Here’s the line I was looking for:

We are expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

I happen to love the reality, the many implications, of that statement. For all its frustrations, I love the entangled and entangling reality of life. I love that authenticity is hard to define, that it can be good or bad. I love that trying to chase authenticity is almost always self-defeating, but that if you stop trying so hard you might find it where you least expect. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed.”

If authenticity reflects the question “who am I?”, then the ethic of authenticity seems to reflects that question as we are meant to ask it of ourselves. Like most books that address widely entrenched notions and beliefs, the resolution it points toward is far from being clearly laid out. But the description, diagnosis, and general way forward are, I think, exactly right. (And the book is no less relevant for being over 30 years old!) The overarching warning Taylor repeats is quite simple: don’t be shaped or confused by two mutually-condemning forces. When it comes to “authenticity,” to “being true to oneself,” we should understand it as a good that is abused, and to join either the “boosters” or the “knockers,” as Taylor puts it, will help no one. We need to find better ground to stand on:

. . . not in a middle ground so much as on a completely different ground. I suggest that in this matter we look not for the Trend, whatever it is, up or down, but that we break with our temptation to discern irreversible trends, and see that there is a struggle here, whose outcome is continually up for grabs.

That last part seems very important, and my growing, entrenching cynicism needs to hear it. This is not simply a third viewpoint, a perch from which to watch the world burn or to wait while the two sides (of any given debate) eat each other alive. In fact, this “completely different ground” is a little deceptively described. It is an opportunity for an involved presence, one that is unwilling to concede any permanent losses but, instead, looks for a persistence of possibility—within the space being criticized! Much like James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence,” rather than offering pessimistic critique, and better even than an impassioned contention for the truth, Taylor thinks what we need is to “enter sympathetically into its animating ideal and to try to show what it really requires.” (What does this remind me of…?)

The opposite, as Gilbert Meilaender once put it, though on a more sentimental level, would be “a failure to love that which we criticize and seek to change.”

And so I’m back to the middle after all. But I’m still not thinking of my being “in the middle” as defined by some midpoint. No, I am, or want to be, “in the middle” as defined by being among.

The problem, of course, is that most of this is really hard, long-suffering work. It takes a lot of faith to see a persistence of possibility, even in myself alone. Here, or anywhere that matters, there are no shortcuts allowed, and no final victories either. Instead, “we understand [our predicament] as open to contestation, as a locus of probably unending struggle.”

It may not sound very cheery, but given the helpless alternative, I’m hearing it today as good and hopeful news, and as an obligation to pursue it.