Starting Points
Like many a young man I was big on ideas - especially my own. I have long since realized that my big ideas were the intellectual equivalent to the other side of my challenges - like learning to ski and snorkel without without either killing myself or drowning. But it’s easier to kid yourself intellectually in the classroom than it is athletically on some diamond peak in the Sierra, or on a ‘serious’ Hawaiian beach. What brought me into the real world was the realization that when real understanding came into my life it came not in ideas but in images. Even more so, it was the realization our systems of understanding are themselves man-made images.
This realization about my reliance on images came as I re-started digging through Erich Auerbach's ideas on history. And digging is a good work - like what you do to get to the garage after a two day snow. He wrote only one book that I have tried to read. “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.” The official title was Mimesis - which he pronounced me-MAY-ziss. Wrote it in Turkey in the ‘30s, in exile from Germany. And he arrived at Yale ten years before I did.
What has continued to work on me is his insistence that you cannot understand past writings without understanding the language and mindset of the men who wrote them. And our own language and mindset don’t mesh with theirs. So our translations of historic writings come from us. We create them and do so out of our minds, out of our language systems. The words and phrasings we use to translate them are ours - not theirs. And that applies to our translations of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Talking about images here, I will use one as an example. The gospel of St. John begins - in Greek - with the phrase “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.” The Greek word for ‘word’ is logos. Now, the word ‘word’ - our word ‘word’ - did not exist back when the gospel was written. And their word ‘logos’ had - in our English - a few possible eqiuvalents, all our own words. Word, and speech, and speaking. So - In the beginning was speaking, and speaking was with God, and God was speaking.
But the difference there is more than a word. The word “word” is sort of static. It sits still. The words “speech” and “speaking” are not static, they are dynamic. Even more, they are relational. So another image. An image involving a master of words, but also relational speech with a real punch. Ithinks back very fondly to a warm night alongside of a freezing lake in the heart of the Oregon Cascades. Only three or four of us, all alone in that huge Alpine valley. Maybe 45 years ago. Poet Bill Everson - a master of stand alone episodes God knows, each one of course with him on center stage - as he was roaring out one of Ledbelly's songs. Conci Camp version. "If you bet on Stewball, and well you might..." slamming his huge hand down in full-swing slaps onto his solid thigh; keeping that rapid, pumping beat going, bouncing from foot to foot like a stoned giraffe. Then stopping and throwing his hands up in the air and roaring with laughter. Looking at me, almost baiting me to turn loose. What a wildman. But words and spirits and selves come out in their own ways and on their own terms. Many years later it was sad to see how my wildman had became a very tamed old man. Dylan Thomas's call to rage against the night was a young man's call. It is pointless to rage when simply trying to keep from stumbling in that dark night is so demanding and in its demands so humiliating.
Sometime during the last year I decided that there would be no more books. Most people seem to write about subjects that you can put on the cover of a book. For the last twenty years or so I have been going in a different way. I've been writing about the languages which writers - from historians to scientists to theologians - use to make their points. And what I have been describing are the limits of languages. They may be good at persuasion but they don't have the inner means to really prove anything. So what comes across as a great proof is really not much more than another editorial and we end up focusing uncertainly. Sitting down at the computer and hoping to focus on anything requires a high tolerance for uncertainty - partly because the needed hand-eye co-ordination that kids' baseball coaches take for granted is a battle for me now. Lacking it in a world run by the merchants of absolute certainty you move to the back of the pack
Which, actually, is a good place to be. A dozen years ago I came up with a memoir I called "The Story of an Accidental Outsider." Looking back there was nothing accidental about it at all. From the very start either I chose to be among the outsiders or, where there wasn't a choice, I ended up there anyway. At this point I do have some interest in figuring out why. Family history? Genetics? Time and locale? Whatever, I suppose it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that that outsider's place has proven to be very privileged because it has freed me from being an apologist for whatever system I happen to be in. Systems trade on certainty. Its insiders become its apologists. Strip the system of its certainty and it becomes another human reality, which for me actually is more intertrsting and more of a challenge because keeping it humane is the biggest challenge of all. Merchants of certainty end up with blood on their hands.
But earlier there were books. They came from questions that I followed often obsessively. You do not end up published without wanting to be published. And that meant having some ideas and questions worth talking about, the organization to get them asked and answered, and the courage to risk having them put before the public. Now at the end of many years of a wonderful life I find that there are few real questions. Not that the others have been answered. They have just become irrelevant.
I just mentioned that where it all came from doesn't matter. But once it did. There was one question , a low-keyed but intrusive one. It kept coming back, usually when I was feeling swamped by the number of interests popping up in my head. Where did all this come from? I don't remember what I meant by 'all this,' but I do remember that the question 'Who cares?' was never there. I cared. And it was the 'where' that was the real question, the 'where' that tied it all together. When I recall the ‘whos’ they were always on some stage – without the stage they were not there. There were no place-less wanderers in that world. And it was the the where, the context that made it real. Because behind that context was another world, a world behind a scrim, and a world with its own people, its own agendas, its own venality, venereality, hatreds, and envies that, from behind the scrim like a Greek chorus placed their controlling demands and curses on those of us on the stage. We could really choose, and really act out our choices. But we were actors in a controlled world.
For reasons I find useless to explore I ended up spending the last fifteen years either living in or returning to the world of Soviet prisons and terror. As an outsider of course. But enough of an insider to have faced pneumonia and the partial loss of vision with only the remains of Soviet medicine immediately available. For a man with access to excellent medical care so immediately available in Berkeley, and the experience of needing it and receiving it on more than one occasion, being on your own in a place and with people who just assume that being on your own is how it is that reality is sobering. That the alternative is multiple flights from Eastern Europe back to JFK you know even alternatives are worrisome. hat run their own risk. At the risk of seeming over-grim by reaching back to earlier years - and there were very grim years - I can’t even think of the faceless disappeared whose ashes lay beneath the high, dripping wet, and cold November grasses in Birkenau without first feeling again the cold water of that terrible immobility seeping into my pants cuffs and socks and shoes. Place for me still is at least as much a participant in life as the people on it. So at the start I present this apology, or apologia, for the place that place will hold in these views.
And I choose this one because writing it came at key time in my life, much of it focused on surviving a heart attack that nearly killed me. As Dr. Johnson wrote, more or less, The Prospect of being hanged on Monday Morning marvelously Concentrates the Mind. So does waking up on Monday morning, wrapped in wires and tubes, to be told that you almost didn't make it to Monday Morning.
The following is taken from a memoir published by Doubleday in 1985
We were called the silent generation. We found our voices late because the words of gratitude come less readily than cries of rage. The middle fifties were a time. of peace. And we were confident and hopeful. That there was a monster being bred for our undoing in Indochina we did not know. That we lived alongside a resentment as old as the slave markets of the South and as inflammable as the wooden slums of Newark and Detroit we dared not suspect.
Mere children during the Depression, we watched the newsreels of the war impressed with the confidence that was the government's pub lic policy. We came into adulthood knowing that evils could be tamed by human effort and believing that our efforts, properly formed, could do the taming. In a time of opportunity like ours, when military uni forms meant weekly drills and summer cruises, it was only the cynic who raised his voice. Heirs of the Western world, we lived convinced that our patrimony was permanent.
In the spring of my senior year I was asked by Catholic friends to join them for a weekend retreat at a Trappist monastery. I did not know what a retreat was. I had never seen a monastery. Yet I decided to go along. I suspect that the appeal of a few days in the country, away from New Haven's gray and still wintry bleakness, and in the company of. the friends who would all soon go their own ways, was why I chose to go. .
As we drove north into the Connecticut hills and then to Massachusetts' .rolling, rural farmlands we found that the spring thaw was more advanced than along the coast. The sun was moving overhead from its winter's course on the horizon, and it was already warm and bright. Buds had begun to swell, giving the silver gray of the barren trees a deep red cast. Already the roadside grasses were showing green under the taller and breaking stalks of last year's growth. Looking at the coming of spring in these rolling hills I never once anticipated how pivotal this weekend and this spring would be in my life.
My side window musings ended abruptly when we pulled up, incongruously it seemed, at the front door of a prosperous dairy farmhouse. The door was opened by a monk in a white canvas tunic surmounted with a black hood. He counted us with his eyes, assuring himself that the five of us had come. Then he showed us to a stable now converted to a dormitory for visiting college students. He was running late and seemed impatient with our desire to wander off. After a rapid rundown of blankets, linens, and showers he moved toward the door. Vespers, he said, would be in twenty minutes. Good, I thought, it will soon be time for vespers. After my first view of the dairy, the farmhouse, the converted stable, and this businesslike monk whose dress seemed so affected in this setting, it was good to hear mention of something that sounded monastic. Then I wondered what vespers were.
Over the brow of the hill, and hidden from the view of the farm house, lay the monastery's low stone buildings. Gray-brown fieldstone walls supported broad slate roofs. They seemed examples of studied simplicity, combining the directness of modern lines with the classicism of Roman arches.The abbey church was imposing, and our path across the shoulder of the concealing hill showed it at its most imposing, especially the long sweep of roof that stretched from the low walls up to a high peak. Bells were ringing as we followed our guide, still impatient and still running late, along the unpaved farm road to the church. I expected to be led to the front door of the church, but our approach revealed that the front opened into a courtyard walled in by a square of abbey buildings. We were led instead to a small door opening into the right transept of the cruciform church. We entered into a narrow, stone-walled chamber separated from the body of the church by a heavy iron grille.
The grille was so placed that we could not see the monks, whose chanting we soon heard, nor could they see us. Two women, kneeling in front of the grille, further blocked our view. They were, I assumed, the owners of the Jaguar and the wood-paneled station wagon parked alongside the unpaved road. In the darkness of the church, dimly lighted by the setting March sun I could make out the impressive expanse of roof but very little beneath it.
I tried to sit down on what proved to be a very uncomfortable straight-backed wood-and-rush chair. However, I noticed that my friends were all kneeling and were using the rush-covered bench that jutted from the back of the chair in front of each one. I tried to kneel as they were, but the little bench was too high for comfort. The edge and the rush cut into my knees, so I sat again, not knowing what to expect next.
My impressions to that point were no preparation for what I would experience. The prosperous farm with its imposing guesthouse; the new stone buildings attempting to combine simple, modern elegance with monastic tradition, and obviously done at great cost; the two women in winter tweed, one with a silk scarf covering her head, the other wearing a black lace mantilla-they all bespoke the kind of worldly and image-conscious church which I knew so well and which interested me so little.
After sitting as far back in my chair as its discomfort would allow I was startled to see a moving flame light the dark just in front of the grille. Then I saw that it was part of a candle lighter carried by a monk in his early twenties. The youthfulness of his face was accentuated by his shaved head. The tonsure looked so inappropriate, even unnatural, on a man as young as I. He lighted six tall candles in the semidarkness in front of the grille, revealing a rectangular, utterly simple stone altar. Then he circled back in front of the grille. As he passed he gave a quick and furtive glance at the small group of outsiders. The intensity of that glance fed my growing sense that there were radically different worlds on either side of that grille.
As soon as the candle lighter disappeared a feeble voice-that of the aged abbot I was told later-began chanting in Latin. The chant was taken up by a contrastingly strong-voiced, large community. Then the abbot, bending under the weight of the heavy cope he was wearing, moved to the altar and into our view. He was accompanied by three young men. With the help of his assistants he began incensing the altar, walking around it as he did so. The grille partially obscured my view, but I could follow their progress by the clanking of the censer's chains and the puffs of yellow smoke that rose into the air. As the abbot returned to the center of the altar the lesser of the three assistants knelt before him and received a large morocco volume from the first assistant. The kneeling man rested the top of the open book against his forehead, the bottom on his outstretched palms. With this human book-stand before him the abbot chanted a short prayer, there was a brief response from the unseen monks, the book was closed, the book-stand stood up, and the abbot and his assistants disappeared from view. The same intense young man returned, but with his head firmly lowered he succeeded in keeping his eyes within the grille and snuffed out the candles. The kneeling women crossed themselves, stood, and slipped out the door. I was alone and in silence.
Our senior year was a time for making plans. Graduate programs had to be laid out and schools chosen. Then came the applications for medical school, law school, and graduate programs in the humanities. We approached our faculty friends for letters of recommendation hop ing that a good word from an eminent scholar might tip the scales in our favor. And we filed applications for the fellowships we hoped would make the studies less pressured.
Our futures were as public as our lives together. We debated the merits of the different graduate schools and the value or futility in trying to prepare for the graduate records exam or the legal and medical aptitude tests until the small hours of the morning. With each other we went through the excitement of making plans, the fears of rejection, the relief that came with a letter of acceptance and the celebration that followed upon it.
Those planning European studies had the luxury of making what we jokingly called appropriately aristocratic plans, little realizing how accurate we were. Was it best to land at Cherbourg or Le Havre? Which routes were best to take south before returning to Paris, London, or the English university towns before classes began? I had decided to go to law school. But after my experience' at the monastery the pleasure of anticipation had gone out of my plans. My application went off to Columbia Law School, and the acceptance came back bringing with it none of the sense of accomplishment that should have been there. And then, out of nowhere but with a compelling clarity, came a realization. "I am not going to law school." I cannot describe this as a decision. One part of my mind, unbidden it seemed, presented this conclusion and I simply acquiesced. With the acquiescence came a great sense of relief. It was as though a terrible and joyless duty had been lifted from me.
The law school se plans were in response to my family's expectations that we would all do well. Following their years in the war my four older brothers were setting out on professional and business careers. They and my cousins, like their parents before them, would do well. It was a quiet and simple assumption, something not spoken as much as taken for granted.
Doing well did not necessarily mean becoming rich. That was quite secondary. It meant excelling. Anyone could be part of the crowd and could follow the crowd's rules. And anyone could be ordinary. We, on the other hand, were told that we could be different. We were expected to excel. Excellence brought its rewards. It meant self-respect, and it meant the respect of one another. Excellence did not necessarily require power, but it did include freedom from the frustrations and indignities that beset the rest of humankind. Most people, it was pointed out, talked about things and other people. But excellence presupposed the development of an intellectual life, the ability to look critically at life and the world, and the means to talk about ideas.
Excellence also demanded its price. It required that you work to become the master of your environment, which took discipline and determination. It required that you look at the earthiness of ordinary people with a certain tolerance but also with the realization that earthiness could get in the way of important goals. This description now sounds more like the Stoic values of the ancient Romans than those of a Catholic family. But the rituals of our religion had no need to trespass into the field of the principles we lived by.
Stoicism in the life of an adolescent pressured to do well can become manipulative and self-centered. I was a prime example. The critical transformation from self-interest to the morality that comes only on experiencing the worth of others I had yet to realize. Cleverness and the bending of rules was not yet a matter of morals. For me at that time it was simply a matter of method. In my last year in college I began to recognize this fundamental moral inadequacy. Several incidents stand out in my memory with a clarity that extends to the details of surroundings and dress. These incidents were all connected with the one moral issue that did manage to penetrate our comfortable world, the McCarthy investigations of the middle fifties.
I was a member of a university club whose sole purpose was to bring together small numbers of undergraduates and faculty. That that was the chief value of a university escaped me at the time. University education was already beginning its move from ethics to technology. But the year of the educational technologist had not yet come. We were practitioners of intellectual fencing and might have spent our energies in these effete games had we been left on our own. But we were not without the influence of wise men.
One afternoon I was introduced to a gracious and gentle young man, the guest of one of the club members. He turned out to be a high school senior out college-shopping. His camel-colored sweater, which almost matched the shade of his hair, and his khaki pants spoke of life in a college town. We were talking about the McCarthy investigations and the question of Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. Dr. Oppenheimer's loyalty was under attack in Congress and in the press. Since security clearance was required for work in government-sponsored atomic en ergy projects, and since the government was involved in almost all the projects, security clearance was almost a must for an atomic physicist. Association with anyone denied that clearance could be politically and professionally dangerous.
The young man sat listening to us and then mentioned that his father worked with Dr. Oppenheimer in Princeton. Our social sense would have permitted him to shift the conversation from what might have become a personally uncomfortable discussion. Instead, with grace and intelligence, he defended the two scientists as well as the freedom necessary for their work.
Like my friends I was prepared to defend intellectual freedom from demagoguery, using a fashionable combination of reason and rancor. But this young man was not interested in our games. He was personally involved in this national scandal and was distressed by it. What for me was an interesting subject that never threatened my own self-interest was a painful reality to him.He did more than defend the scientists. He made a personal appeal for us to respond with compassion to their plight. I was taken aback to find myself talking with someone, appreciably younger than I, who believed in the integrity of others and who had the courage to defend them publicly and before strangers.
The second incident, some weeks later, was almost a continuation of the first. In the same small room I was discussing the ongoing investigations with two friends. One of our teachers, Cleanth Brooks, a writer and noted New Critic, was seated in the corner near a window reading by the light of the late afternoon sun. As the discussion progressed he lowered his journal and looked at us, from one to the other, obviously following our conversation. Apparently we reached one of those points where what is to be said has been said, and we fell silent. He leaned forward in his chair and asked us, very seriously, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" I must have appeared startled by his question, for he looked at me and repeated it: "What are you going to do about it?" Where our conversation went at that point I do not remember.
What I do recall is the challenge he set before us and, implicit in it, the belief that we were capable of doing something. That I could do something other than cope with the pressures facing me did not seem real. That I ought to do something more had never occurred to me. I was going about the business of having my wits sharpened and my mind educated so that I might better go about the pursuit of my own interests. Mr. Brooks left me with the suspicion that what I was doing was not only wrong but a waste of my own human ability, a suspicion that stayed with me.
A third incident helped push me further to the turning point. William Carlos Williams had been our family doctor and had seen me through my childhood ills. I had arranged for him to read his poetry at the university and in the course of making the arrangements I had come to see him as a poet and intellectual, no longer only as the family doctor. He had been nominated for a national honor, poet in residence at the Library of Congress I believe it was called then, but because of right wing pressure the nomination was withdrawn. He was hurt by the withdrawal but also saddened to see people of supposed substance caving in before political pressure. He was discussing the nomination and withdrawal, and the enslaving effect that fear and prejudice can have in the life of an individual. Summing up his own reasons for advancing his ideas despite their unpopularity he quoted the scripture. "I remember being told when I was a young man that Jesus had said 'Know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' " I was chagrined to think that this man, a nonbeliever, should take the words of Jesus more seriously than did I, who, at least nominally, professed to believe them.
As our conversation continued his valuing of a mind freed from fear and prejudice stood out in contrast to my own self-serving pragmatism. He was wondering how honorable men could yield to the pressures of demagogues, a question I could answer quite easily. Recalling pictures of integrity pushed beyond its limits was painful for him. But the pain was his, not mine. Rather offhandedly I commented that these men were probably afraid, as though that fear not only explained but justified their actions. He was pensive for a moment, then spoke of something else.
Later I realized the rebuke implicit in that silence and in the change of subject. It was only implicit, and perhaps un-thought. But it was real enough to make me begin to wonder whether my attitude to injustice would be so cavalier were I its victim. (End of excerpt)
I
