I watched Grizzly Man last night. I was impressed. I might write more about it, but I’m not sure there’s too much to say. Tim Treadwell lived the life he wanted, had the death he wanted, and his life was then amply and skilfully documented by Werner Herzog. I consider it a life well-lived, which did not have a bad end – considering the problems he had otherwise.
And the movie is worth watching just to hear the way Germans of Herzog’s stamp say “bears” – bay-uhs.
Andrew Sullivan engages with the Adam and Eve question – whether they existed – after an NPR story on a few thoughtful evangelicals doing what thoughtful evangelicals in the end must do: repudiate Biblical literalism, and make a place in the pews for some simpler mind.
All this is terribly obvious, and I was raised with a faith that had no problem with the fact that there is no evidence, anywhere, for Adam and Eve outside the literary tradition in which they were created. To me this matters about as much as the fact that there is also no evidence for the existence of the Brothers Karamazov or Father Zosima – a fictional character who also “wrote” one of the greatest spiritual autobiographies of all time. I have recently – like most people, I suppose – had reasons for melancholy about man and woman and marriage, and still when I hear things like Peter Gabriel’s song “Blood of Eden” – saturated with Genesis and Jung in equal parts – I find its validity in no way impugned by the fact that the human genome project cannot trace us back to a single (human) ancestor.
As I say, I was raised with this. My father, who was a priest, thought of Original Sin not as some mechanical thing derived from Adam – how pathetic, really, that Adam is considered the first sinner, that Eve is not given credit for this merely because she is a woman – but a description of the truly fallen state of all mature people: to be filled with unfulfilled desire, to know failure, to feel broken and insignificant despite all efforts at wholeness, to be forced into humility by a reality you would but cannot change. I think this is true, and I do not believe this guilt or inadequacy we feel in ourselves is the creature of religion. I think it is the suffering religion – and much of human culture otherwise – attempts to alleviate. For me all the satisfactory answers to the problem have the form or force of a religion.
Both fundamentalists and skeptics – who in so many ways are so similar – will object that an entire theological edifice has been built on this foundation. No Adam and Eve means no Original Sin, which means no need for a compensatory Redemption. It also means that death cannot be ascribed to man’s disobedience, but that it is part of God’s plan.
I answer that the theological edifice is not necessary to the religion – that the religion consists of things beyond our rational efforts to understand them. The rationalizations of religion change from age to age. The rationalization for the Crucifixion has certainly altered in time: one early Orthodox interpretation thought the Crucifixion was paying a debt back to the devil – God bought mankind back from the Devil at the price of being the devil’s sport on earth – hence the term redemption, which means “buying back,” and specifically the purchase price to free a slave. Anselm however removed the Devil from the equation, and made God have to buy us back from himself – from his own notions of justice which demanded punishment. This is actually a profound reconciliation of justice and mercy in one individual – you yourself offer mercy, while taking the penalty the rule requires – but it is not necessary to believe in Adam and Eve for this, and it is not necessarily an exhaustive description of the meaning of the Crucifixion either. The Crucifixion to me makes even more sense as an image of nature – the destruction and regeneration of nature is crucifixion and resurrection in other form.
Sullivan notes how stuck the Catholic Church is on this issue, seeing that it has authoritative pronouncements which peg it to a historical interpretation of Adam and Eve. This is really only a problem for a small class of Catholic theologians who believe – against all evidence – that the Church is really incapable of error. Very few Catholics believe this. And even the serious conservatives, when challenged, are required to whittle down the notion to absurd paltriness. When I recently asked a conservative Catholic about various contradictions in the Church pronouncements, he quickly backpedaled: from “the magisterium consists of the ecumenical councils and the encyclicals and declarations of the popes pertaining to faith and morals,” he quickly had to eliminate certain councils which were merely “pastoral” and not dogmatic – then also certain teachings, such as the ban on usury, did not pertain to “morals,” nor did the fact that the Catholic Church in its councils established slavery as a punishment mean that it was morally acceptable or authoritative – it was just prescribed by dogmatic councils, that’s all. That the hierarchy of the Church would make a lousy moral authority is clear enough to anyone who bothers to look at the evidence – which is, admittedly, only a fraction of the populace. There is a reason why the Church does not put all its “authoritative pronouncements” into a book or up on its website to be read by all – because they are embarrassing and contradictory. Indeed, the Magisterium isn’t even really sure which pronouncements really are authoritative, and what authoritative really means. It all depends on who you ask.
But this science and religion stuff needs to get settled – on the side of science – sometime soon by someone with religious authority. The reason, ultimately, why science must be incorporated into any real theology is that the alternative is a deceptive God. Creationists must defend a God who not only created the world in six days six thousand years ago, but also seeded the world with ubiquitous evidence that He did no such thing – apparently to deceive people. He made the world six thousand years ago, but then put stars more than six thousand light years away from us, as simple geometry via parallax can prove; he then wrote on the earth in streambeds histories of earthquakes from hundreds of thousands of years ago, and put chemicals on earth which seem to have started their decaying into other chemicals millions of years ago, and also created genetic distributions, mutations, and combinations impossible in a few thousand years. What good explanation can there be for this thoroughgoing scheme of deception? What does it say about the God of the Creationists that He is the most thoroughgoing liar that can be imagined, who demands that humans accept evidence from a book undistinguished by obvious divine signs, and ignore the evidence written in the stars and stones and even on their own flesh?
I know a parallel problem from my own spiritual development: believing in a moralistic God, I found it incomprehensible that this God could really love the despicable human beings I saw, who if nothing else did not live up to his Law; but some of those people, for various personal reasons, I loved as dearly as I loved anything in the universe, my father for example; and so I was trapped into an incoherent theology, where I worshipped a Being less merciful, less generous, and less loving than I was. You cannot have as your image of wholeness and greatness and beauty something less whole and great and beautiful than yourself: this is putting an oak into a thimble. This is the Creator of the Creationists: his work on the earth is to construct a deceptive framework of evidence all around us to ensnare anyone who uses their brain. He is less noble than the vast majority of us. If this is God, then let us not worry much about him, for we are better than he is – it is better to be a human being under nature than the servant of such a petty liar.
But in the meantime, how such a concept of God perverts the Creationists! All that we can hope for from them are system-preserving lies, or ignorance, which alone are in keeping with the principles of their theology. The inquisitive ones eventually – probably with some suffering – must abandon the thimble or renounce their nature as oaks.
Just a few months ago I stopped off at FDR’s “Little White House,” the modest country cabin in Georgia where he took his vacations and where he died. Its simplicity – it is one storey, and only a few rooms, perhaps fifteen hundred square feet – mocks our modern mores, and shows more starkly the incredible accomplishments of the man.
I find it hard to argue against the thesis that he was the greatest American president – he was president for twelve years, and during those years the country he governed went from weakness and imbecillity to the conqueror of Europe and the Pacific – a military feat he completed within four years. Certainly no other president faced such monumental, world-wide tasks, and it is hard to imagine how they could have been more competently achieved. With this achievement is his restoration of the middle class in America, which reached its apogee in the period after Roosevelt’s wars, and programs such as Social Security which solved one of the side-effects of modern medicine, namely old age.
Roosevelt was quoted in a recent Times piece about Barack Obama, and it is worth listening to his words and pondering them – how he realized that greed is a vice, that suffering is its wage, that money is not an adequate measure of worth or accomplishment, that government must be run for humanity, and economy is only a route to such an end. The language is saturatedly Christian as well, and its inspiration probably Christian – though it also has its antecedents in the Greek demarchs and Roman tribunes like the Gracchi. That he thus created a prosperity beyond the reach of the economists is part of the contradiction of all things, much as you cannot become happy unless you have a goal other than happiness.
“Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government – with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent to humanity.”
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob! Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today: they are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred!”
The problems are much the same today, and the need for another FDR to dial the clock back on the work of destruction money will do to our civilization is much the same.
The Roman word for their government was the Res Publica, the public property. At every stage of the decline of the Republic the conflict can be interpreted as a desire on the part of the most powerful to privatize what was public, and to convert it into res privatae, private possessions, and so it happened until the Empire, in which the entire Mediterranean became one man’s estate: the ultimate small government, which of course by the contradictory logic of the universe meant unlimited tyranny.
Jack Goldstone never mentions the Romans, but in his excellent little piece on the recent debt crisis he (I think very accurately) interprets Republican actions as being consonant with cultural decline. The Republicans are becoming more and more Orwellian in name: they are convinced that the only way to a strong res publica is by turning it into res privatae. I doubt the term Resprivatans will catch on, though.
An excerpt from Goldstone:
It is quite astonishing the degree to which the United States today is, in respect of state finances and its elites’ attitudes, following the path that led early modern states to
crises. As in the past, inability to sustain international influence is merely symptomatic of deeper internal decay.For example, lack of consensus among U.S. elites has virtually immobilized efforts to deal with a persistent federal budget deficit, and has hamstrung state action in many foreign policy theaters and in much domestic policy planning. The only consensus that has prevailed in the last decade is precisely that which history tells us is the most disastrous, namely, the consensus that private consumption should take precedence over all public expenses, and that raising taxes to realistic levels to meet state obligations should be fiercely resisted. Hence the U.S. has been running a growing debt, sustained only by foreign borrowing.
The result has been just what the history of earlier states who have been denied adequate taxation and relied on debt would lead us to expect: private individuals among the elite have become enormously richer, while basic public services that support the economy as a whole—primary and secondary education, airports, trains, roads, and bridges—are neglected, overburdened, and deteriorating.
The United States thus enters the 1990s with several evident problems: factional divisions among elites that undercut policy consensus, widespread resistance to realistic taxes, an overreliance on debt and a polarization of private incomes while public services … are grossly underfunded and losing their ability to support the economy. … It is certain that the long-term results, which now only slightly apparent but will accumulate rapidly in the coming decades, will be a relative decline in the living standards freedom of decision, and international position of the United States as compared with
other industrialized nations.
I had an interesting visit to the Met last Saturday. Hoping to take advantage of the 9 p.m. closing, I went with a friend around 8 – a bit late, admittedly, because we had lingered a bit on our way – only to find the line out the Great Hall and down almost all the way to 84th street – two blocks long, and what’s more, it was coiled up threefold like a snake for much of that length. I had never seen it like this in all my born days, and this was August, when there are lots of tourists of course but a large percentage of the New Yorkers are on vacation – not high season for a Saturday night at the Met. I asked an attractive woman waiting on the line what was happening. She told me this line was for the Alexander McQueen exhibit, which I had indeed heard some buzz about somewhere or other. “But doesn’t the museum close in an hour?” “They’ve extended the hours until midnight.” This was good news to us – we thought we’d be rushed to see something, but now we had an entire evening ahead of us in the museum. The line was moving, so we decided to wait on it.
And I was fairly excited, because from the look of the crowd, the galleries of the museum would be all our own. You could tell this was not the Met crowd – it was the Fashion crowd instead. It was probably eighty-five percent women, almost all under thirty and almost all attractive and well-dressed. I would presume that the men on the line were disproportionately gay as well. I am only occasionally in such a crowd, and I quite enjoyed interacting with everyone around me, including one guy ahead of us who had an ingenious umbrella which had a built-in watercatcher, obviating the need for an umbrella bag (I think this is the product – who would have thought there were still major improvements which could be made to an umbrella?).
It turned out I was correct that this crowd was not there for the galleries, because once we had made our way to the Great Hall and paid our $1 for two buttons (suggested admission for two is now $50), a security guard told us to go to a particular place for the exhibit. “We’re not that interested in the exhibit, really, we want to see the galleries.” “But the galleries are closed!” she replied. And so it was. Everything was closed except this one exhibit, though in fact there were so many people there the exhibit space could not hold them, and the lines stretched through large portions of the inside of the museum as well (we were told it was a three-hour wait once you had your buttons – in other words, we probably wouldn’t have seen it if we tried, as arriving at 8 p.m. was too late to see it by midnight).
I remember fighting with some people in college who thought of fashion as high art (I did not). Now I don’t care much one way or another what you call it, but that there is a difference I still don’t doubt. Fashion is much more temporary, which is of course why great artists often like the nude, which dispenses with this problem. Like everyone else I appreciate the fashions of our time and find them generally appealing, but find those of other periods – even periods I have lived through – utterly silly. A beautiful person tends to be beautiful in all ages, unless they are too fashionable, because the fashion of one age is ridiculous in another. And I have never much cared for the “woman as coat rack” ideal. In looking at McQueen’s works (online) I am struck by how necessary a vapid model is for their effectiveness: any real personality would conflict with clothes so extravagant. In general such clothes are best on mannequins. But they are nice to look at anyway. If the waits had not been so exorbitant I would have taken a peek for sure. And it was nice to see people lined up just to get into the Met, and impressive to see how many people were willing to wait in the rain just for a taste of McQueen’s work. It made it clear just how vast the fashion industry is – “many, so many, I had not thought beauty had done up so many.”
Having some friends in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn, I have driven Atlantic Avenue fairly often, the road which connects that part of Brooklyn with Richmond Hill in Queens. One day there was some work being done on the road, and I was detoured onto the streets of East New York, where I drove past an astonishing church, a little piece of Rome dropped onto a New York streetcorner: it had a perfect Renaissance facade, with an impressive Latin inscription (D O M ET B M V LAVRETANAE) and it was crumbling away as if it had been there for five hundred years. I was late for my appointment and kept rolling. I went back to look for it, but I had misremembered the routing of the detour – I was looking on the north side of Atlantic Avenue. This past weekend when driving to Grand Army Plaza my eyes wandered as I passed along a section of Atlantic on a viaduct and I saw it again in the distance. I was late again, but on my return trip I stopped off to take a look.
It is surely one of the best Renaissance-style churches in America, and I haven’t found any photos online that do it justice. The purity of the proportions of the facade have to be appreciated on-site relative to its narrow street, but there is furthermore in the place an affecting atmosphere of neglect there. The windows are gone, weeds are growing on the steps, and all is silent. The church has been abandoned, and the diocese of Brooklyn has made plans to destroy it. The school and rectory are already gone. But I read that the New York Landmarks Conservancy is on the case, working to avert its demolition. If money is involved, what a bishop says is writ in water, but there really isn’t another building quite like this in New York. And if it’s torn down, Lord knows it won’t be replaced with anything nearly as excellent.
Peaking right now.
Two years ago I gathered seeds from a butterfly-weed, Asclepias tuberosa, a plant in the milkweed genus, though generally not called a milkweed because it lacks white sap. I have found the seedlings slow growing – this is their second year and they still have not flowered – but today I found the harvest was coming in, in its own way. Today I saw the first monarch-butterfly caterpillar on my property (in the picture at right). There were no Asclepias species on my property before, and the monarch caterpillar, which must have the leaves of Asclepias as food, was hence absent from my property. Asclepias plants are not always considered ornamental, and more are pulled as weeds than planted. It’s nice to know that this is at least one property where Monarchs have more habitat rather than less.
This is precisely the kind of gardening I want to do, and have written about before: one that is generative of life, not a picture-gallery of prettiness, but one that nourishes and sustains life. My butterfly-weeds will, in consequence of the presence of these caterpillars, be pockmarked with holes and damaged – but it will be a nourishing kind of damage, the kind I want to see in my garden. It’s exciting to see it actually happen, and ripen from seed carefully gathered and stored up and sown and tended to this purpose.
As I thought more about this caterpillar, now just an inch long, I realized he – or his body, or his maker, or his nature – intended, after being born here on Wildcat Mountain, to spend the winter in Mexico. He is part of the last generation of summer, which follows the aster and goldenrod blooms 2,500 miles down to the Sierra Madre. He’s not likely to make it, of course – he may well become bird food or be smashed by some car long before – but that’s his plan.
Since my return from West Virginia, where I enjoyed the comforts of modern life, the physical challenges of my cabin life I have felt more as a burden than a pleasure. Summer is no time for physical labor or being overly responsible. Just yesterday I brought in groceries – bread and milk and ice – and after putting the milk and ice in my cooler, I went into the garden and gathered some greens for my dinner. While there I inspected everything with all the satisfaction proper to a proprietor. When I had returned I found an unusually large and confused chipmunk by my backdoor. In a few seconds I understood his hesitation: he had found a fabulous trove of food and was loathe to leave it. He kept trying to determine if I was really a threat, and making feints toward his discovery. This trove was my loaf of bread, a couple of inches of which he had gnawed off in just a few minutes. In other circumstances I might have admired his industriousness, but in my curmudgeonly mood I was just annoyed that I couldn’t even put down a loaf of bread for a few minutes without it becoming part of an ecosystem.
So being in Westchester on Saturday, I took the opportunity to complete the katabasis to the City, for there is a reason why I live in the Catskills and not Alaska: namely that I only half-belong here in the mountains. Another half of me belongs in the city. I ate in a restaurant on Saturday night, and then drove down to the Battery, which was throbbing with life – as was the whole seafront, for whatever reason, for it was never so active at night in my memory. The next day I spent the hot part of the afternoon in the air-conditioned theaters of the Film Forum with a friend, and saw The Story of Temple Drake.
This was part of a series devoted to “Pre-Code Hollywood” – the raunchier films made in the 1920s and 1930s before decency standards (the “Code”) were imposed on film companies. The plot of Temple Drake is hence surprisingly ambitious and “modern”: a Southern belle (named Temple Drake) cavorts around with numerous men before being stranded by a car crash in the backwoods of the South, where she is kidnapped and raped. She then stays with the rapist, refusing to be taken home to her father, until in utter moral conflict she kills him. (There is more to the plot, but I will omit the remainder). The Film Forum promotional material quotes a film expert who proclaims that this movie’s lurid atmosphere “almost singlehandedly brought about the Code crackdown,” and another expert calls it “a model of Pre-Code immorality… that a major studio undertook so disreputable an enterprise is an index both of Paramount’s financial straits and the lure of the vice film as a quick fix in the early 1930s.”
The movie was hardly great, but as so often with these Film Forum retrospectives, I felt that I got a great deal more out of seeing this film than seeing a new studio release. First of all, I hardly knew that this era of filmmaking existed, the “Pre-Code” era: I imagined that the innocent behavior of older films was due to real innocence, not legal stricture. Second, the older films really are different, and this is especially apparent when “modern” subject matter such as rape is portrayed. The older films move through plot at a tremendous pace – the movie was scarcely more than an hour long – and they feel far less emotionally manipulative, even though they often have melodramatic acting (in fact, the melodramatic acting, at times, feels like insulation from the emotions of the movie, not amplification; but this may be in part due to the cultural remove). But certainly the major elements of emotional manipulation are absent: images of blood or wounds, long close-ups, long sequences without dialogue, a full orchestral score, etc. Temple Drake has no time for such things, and as such it feels more like a story of Boccaccio or the Arabian Nights; there a story of ten pages would provide plot enough for a trilogy of modern novels. This brevity allows the experience of emotion without the totalitarian apparatus of manipulation which accompanies modern writing and filmmaking.
My Film Forum expeditions started last winter during the Fritz Lang retrospective because I was dating a girl who lived in the Village not far from the Film Forum. We probably went to about a dozen shows that winter – mostly double features, too, which was so much fun that both of us still get indignant at paying full price for only one movie (“What? Ten bucks for just one movie??”). New Yorkers of course get to visit the Film Forum all the time; I can only hope that Jove will give me more such afternoons.
Obama’s “Passion.”
15-Aug-11A very nicely written attack on Obama from the New York Times op-ed page, succinctly summarizing why we need FDR and not Obama in the presidency right now. I agree with this, but I consider it a sign of obtuseness to have believed Obama was a new FDR in the first place: he was, for his intelligence and philosophical depth, a great improvement on the previous president. But to think he was going to battle on behalf of a dying middle class was delusional from the beginning – he would support it in principle, no doubt, but hardly bring his sword or shield to the Oval Office.
As I wrote before, what has been striking from the beginning about Obama is his Hamlet-like antithetical brain, which absolutely refuses to see things from one perspective only. Anyone looking for Fortinbras was bound to be disappointed; and so to talk about Obama’s “passion” dissipating to me only means that you were never really watching in the first place:
He does not show any desire to be hated, a la Roosevelt, or to come to a definite conclusion that “government by organized money” is morally wrong. The review I wrote is full of examples of his almost obsessive tendency to moderation derived from seeing both sides of an issue. This is most assuredly not the way I would govern, but then again, this is why no one would ever put me in charge of the finances of the middle-school Latin Club, much less the treasury of the United States. Obama is somewhat mesmerizing to me because he does not appear to be driven by an internal set of postulates which will not be denied and will retch at all compromise. To me this is the equivalent of being an alien with silicon in his veins.
But perhaps it would be wise for this country to start grooming a Fortinbras to restore the middle class. I presume, given the political landscape, that such a thing can only happen within the Democratic party, but really, I don’t care which side the Delayer comes from, as long as he can beat back the malefactors of great wealth for the time being and give the middle class another generation of hope.