Back to the Present
It was a time when science was respected, literature—especially the big, summer-read novel—was popular, and scholarship and all manner of scientific research abounded. Great libraries were lavishly funded to make available the history, wisdom, and imaginative writing of the known world. Technology proceeded at a dizzying pace, some of it so advanced, there was not yet any practical use for it. Great, largely self-governing cities dotted the shores of the Mediterranean and its interior: sophisticated metropolises where genius of every kind abounded.
We call it the Hellenistic Age, the period from the conquests of Alexander the Great in the early 300s BCE into the first half of the new millennium. It stretched from the Indus River to Gibraltar and from the Caucasus Mountains to modern Sudan. Its common tongue was Greek—a simplified version of the language of Pericles and Plato. It was a cosmopolitan world, at least for those who could read and write and travel, which was a larger proportion of the population than had ever existed before. Spaniards in the remote west, Parthians in the cold north, Persians, Judeans, Libyans, and of course, Greeks themselves and Romans… all spoke the same tongue, at least as a second language.
An entire city, Alexandria, was constructed at the mouth of the Nile to house hundreds of scholars and a great depository of texts from all over the world. Seventy of them were commissioned to translate the Torah into Greek so that Jews, who could no longer read Hebrew, might have access to their holy writ along with the rest of the world. Other scholars pored over the sacred texts of other cultures, especially the Homeric and other classics of ancient Greece. They invented a new device, the footnote, to help with the task.
The plots of Hellenistic novels, products of Syrians, Egyptians, North Africans, and other non-ethnic Greeks, were identical with the ones we are familiar with in our own novels and movies: boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl and true love. I say, “boy,” but the authors, who usually wrote under pseudonyms, were also women, and it shows in the prominence women play in their narratives. Novels then, as now, were mostly read by middle-class women….Read the rest of the essay at Eclectica.org.
The Burden of Memory
He stood at the intersection, peering down the avenue through fierce morning sunlight. The light stung like a cold wind, like ice cream too quickly swallowed. He closed his eyes, but the brilliance scarcely diminished and the pain continued, making him wish he had worn his sunglasses. The glasses were the self-adjusting kind, getting darker as the light increased. He had let the optician talk him into ordering a pair, not realizing how annoying it would be to have the world always dimming or growing lighter when it was actually doing just the opposite. A hat with a bill would also have done the trick, but he looked ridiculous in a baseball cap, an old man in boy’s clothing.
Just as he decided it was safe to cross, the high brow of an oil delivery truck materialized out of the blinding light. He shaded his eyes with his hand, his mouth stretched into a grimace wide as a clown’s painted grin, cheeks pushed so high that his eyes were all but sealed, his teeth exposed as if some sort of surgical device had been applied to his mouth: her face, he realized with a shock, his first wife’s. What was he doing imitating the expression of a woman he hadn’t seen in ten years and hadn’t lived with for more than two and a half decades? It was a look that had always seemed especially grotesque for a woman whose normal expression was placid as the surface of a still pond, who when she slept took on a look of such serenity he could contemplate her profile as he might a statue or classical portrait. Their son assumed the same look when he slept, lips closed, chin slightly elevated, his breathing deep, regular, and silent….
History 2.0
We have the notion, taken for granted, that despite its faults, our modern political system is the best human experience has come up with, the hard-won product of an 18th-century movement that freed us from the tyrannical rule of king and church. But the society I live in suffers high levels of depression, drug use (legal and illegal), violence, obesity, suicide, and other pathologies at a rate a so-called primitive society would find unacceptable.
Most of us are wealthy beyond the dreams of even our recent ancestors. We are also deeply unsatisfied. But we accept our miseries as if they were individual pathologies, not the inevitable consequence of our social and political environments. It’s as if each of us had a unique disease, the result of personal individual experience rather than caused by pathogens we absorb from the society we live in as readily as from the air we breathe and the water we drink. We identify each pathology (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has more than a thousand such diagnoses) and apply treatment on a case-by-case basis. Even our fiction writers, who used to consider what today we regard as mental illness to be appropriate subject matter for their novels, have ceded that territory to psychiatry. There are no more Dostoevskys or Thoreaus saying out loud, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and what we are today encouraged to see as maturity—successful coping with the real world, “mental health”—is in fact just “resignation to desperation….”
Reader, I Am that Writer
Charlotte Brontë’s biographer, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell*, wrote, “Sometimes weeks or even months elapsed before she [Charlotte Bronte] felt that she had anything to add to that portion of the story which was already written.” When she couldn’t write, she couldn’t write. She didn’t make excuses or feel any remorse. She waited until inspiration returned. As Charlotte herself put it in a letter: “When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to awaken in them, which
(1850, chalk on paper)
becomes their master — which will have its own way — putting out of you all behest but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-molding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones.” And, “When the mood leaves me (it has left me now, without vouchsafing so much as a word or a message when it will return) I put by the MS. and wait till it comes back again.”
Contrast this with Anthony Trollope who, having a servant call him at five a.m. each morning and fortifying himself with a pot of coffee, wrote exactly 2,500 words before heading off to an executive position in the British postal service. He knocked off close to a hundred books with this routine, leaving some unpublished in his desk drawer for his progeny to earn money from.
Tubercular Charlotte, on the other hand, had a big house to run, full of sisters, a nogoodnick brother and a clerical widowed father who left the daily management of everything to his oldest child Charlotte, who buried all of her sisters and brother, though the reverend Brontë (ne´ Brunty) outlived her by many years. He
denied her the right to marry until she was in her mid-thirties, and her husband finished her off by promptly getting her pregnant and not looking after her generally.
What’s the moral of this comparison? I’d say it’s that there is no right way to write. There’s something to be said for sitting down every day and churning out X number of words. You will at least get something done. If you have to make a living by your writing, that’s probably the best, really the only way, to go. Some of the pulp fiction writers of the early twentieth century could turn out as many as 10,000 words a day, sometimes working on different stories at the same time on different typewriters. John O’Hara, a very successful commercial non-genre writer, produced a single novel each year like clockwork which he mailed, without making a carbon copy, to his publisher by regular post, trusting its delivery to the fates.
But who makes a living by writing anymore, especially fiction writers? Kurt Vonnegut said he was the last of that breed, though I think he had in mind the short story market, places like the Saturday Evening Post which paid handsomely and published several stories in each issue. In those days the New York Daily News published a short story in each issue, and smalltown weeklies did the same. Pulp-fiction novels did a brisk business off newsstands and the books racks at bus and airline terminals. I made some money myself writing such, back before those publishers went bankrupt or were gobbled up by bigger publishers, their product gussied up for bookstore and library sales. My idea was that I could write schlock most days to pay the rent and continue to write literary short stories as well. It beat sitting at a desk in an office building from nine to five.
Unfortunately – or perhaps not – those mass-market publishers of second-tier novels all went under. “Unfortunately” because they constituted a kind of minor league for the more respectable outfits on publishers row, a place where a new writer could exercise their talent, such as it be, and make some money doing so. Not many newspapers were publishing any kind of fiction in those days, unlike in the 19th century when all them did, serializing the work of long-forgotten authors alongside that of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. I got paid $900 advance against royalties for my first science fiction book by a publisher that turned out more than 300 titles a year out of its office on Park Avenue. I received $1000 for my second by another, somewhat classier outfit just up the avenue. That was good money at the time, three or four months rent. With a roommate, I figured I could turn out four of those a year and still have time to write short stories, which I had just begun to publish.
There was also the heady experience of being published in book form. There’s nothing like walking into a bookstore and seeing your work sitting on a shelf alongside that of famous authors (Heinlein, Hubert, Hubschman). I knew what I was churning out at the rate of 2,000 words a day was not “literature”or even genre fiction of the same order as those established authors. I had done freelance copy-editing for both of my publishers before I decided I could produce material at least as good as those read-and-toss diversions for long bus rides that they were turning out. And my two novels did do well. A successful sale at one of those houses was 30,000 copies, and I was offered a contract for a second book based on the sales on my first. The second novel must have done pretty well too because it was published in the UK and Australia without my being informed and without my ever seeing another penny in royalties.
By the time I completed a third science fiction book the fun was over. One publisher decided to concentrate on pornography (always its principle product, though not in the division that published my books) and the other was bought out and began concentrating on romance fiction. I was writing well enough at that point to get a well-established literary agent to flog my novel for me, but the responses he received from the mainline publishers were negative, sometimes citing that they were in the market for more high-tech stuff. Mine was definitely not high-tech.
Would Trollope have written better if he had written less? Could Brontë have written more Jane Eyres if she had been more “disciplined” (and had healthy lungs)? It’s a moot point. Anthony Trollope was his mother’s, the author Francis Trollope’s, son. Writing for him was a job to be approached like any other endeavor, with regularity and assiduousness. He applied the same industry and routine to his fiction writing as he did to his high-level position in the civil service. He was not the sort to wait for “inspiration.” A novel was a task. You set a goal and you got on with it. And if you had the talent and the imagination he had that approach worked. His unconscious mind must have been working out the plots of those novels even as he slept or reading reports on the state of rural post offices in the wilds of Scotland. My guess is he would have written a different kind of novel had he taken more time, maybe better, maybe not. But Charlotte Brontë’s observation that “an influence seems to awaken in [an author], which becomes their master — which will have its own way — putting out of you all behest but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-molding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones,” is universal. At least that’s how it works for the best authors, even when they are writing just to please an audience and make some money.
* To read my full review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, go to Gowanus Books.
Theologies of Ignorance
Religion, along with the object of its worship, is supposed to have died at the hands of the New Scientists and philosophes of the 17th and 18th centuries. Gone, at least for thinking men and women, were the twin authorities of church and king, both of which claimed their truths from the mouth of God. But it turns out, magical thinking is alive and well. It lives on in the minds and hearts of all shades of the political spectrum, sometimes in the name of Science itself.
A few years ago, 200,000 people, characterized in the media as “ultra-Orthodox” Jews, climbed a tall hill in Israel to commemorate a rabbi of sacred memory. On their way back down, almost 50 of them died in the crush that occurred on the narrow slippery path. There are and always have been numerous Christian communities with similar beliefs about their own leaders and their unique, divinely inspired mission. When they are short-lived like the Branch Davidians, immolated in 1993, or the Jim Jones group who willingly drank poisoned Cool Aid in 1978 so as to enter the gates of paradise without having to wait for a natural death, we call them cults. If they have a history longer than a couple decades, they become sects or denominations. If they catch on in a big way, they qualify as religions.
The last time I checked, the calendar said 2023. An intellectual revolution was waged 300 years ago to liberate humankind from a thousand years of what those revolutionaries saw as superstition and primitive, non-critical thinking. We moderns live in houses equipped with high-speed Internet and flush toilets thanks to the Newtons, Voltaires, Mendelssohns, Humes, Diderots, Leibnitzes, and their intellectual colleagues throughout Europe. We have them to thank for a nation run not by kings and clerics but, on paper at least, by ordinary citizens. They encouraged us to use our minds without preconditions or limitation. They achieved what they did by dint of a courageous passion for the truth. They were not, like many of today’s atheists, brought up in free-thinking environments, smugly scratching their heads at the folly of religious believers. The men and women of the Enlightenment largely came out of strict religious families and attended religious schools. Many of them had nuns and priests as close relatives. The father of the Jewish version of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, was the son of a Torah scribe. Without him, the phrase “Orthodox Jew” would have no meaning today because there would be no Reform or Conservative—never mind “secular”—but only Orthodox Jews.
Yet in our time the word “science” has become a suspect, if not downright pernicious practice for a large part of a nation founded by some of those 18th-century revolutionaries. Tens of millions of Americans believe Evolution is just a “theory,” not a well-founded, rigorously-tested explanation for life on earth. Millions believe the universe was created 5,000 years ago, and the fossils we find in rocks are not the remains of life forms that existed hundreds of millions of years ago, but were put there by God to test our faith in his sacred Word….
The Giraffe’s Long Neck, or Why Margaret Still Grieves
“Our persistent urge to care for and about each other may have begun as a device to keep the evolutionary ball rolling. But in humans and in other species too it has taken on a life of its own that holds creation to account for its own lack of compassion.”
Unless you’re a fish, the nerve that controls the muscles in your larynx and allows you to go on breathing without choking when you eat travels a roundabout route from your brain to down under your heart before heading up again into your throat. Why doesn’t the nerve go straight from brain to throat as it does in a flounder or a guppie? Because fish have no necks. When necks evolved, evolution didn’t bother to redesign the connection, so it just kept getting longer and longer. In a giraffe the impulse from brain to larynx can travel a dozen feet. In humans it extends several extra inches more than necessary (at least it does so after a fetus develops a neck).
What kind of way is that to run an evolution? In a world where so much seems so elegantly put together, how could clumsy good-enoughs like the route of the vagus nerve occur? Evolution had hundreds of millions of years to get it right. Why did it settle for work-arounds like the laryngeal nerve and other gerry-rigged operations?
More importantly, why did evolution or creation or God or whatever you want to call the forces driving not just biology but everything in the cosmos from star nurseries to starlings have to include pain and suffering? Unless you believe in Original Sin or subscribe to some other way of blaming the victim for their misery, there seems to be no reason why something as well-organized as life has to be beset by the miseries to which the flesh is heir. Life is precarious and fraught from start to finish, thanks to miscarriage, disease, predation and a host of other calamities….
Draining the Swamp: The Passion and (political) Death (maybe) of Donald J. Trump
Jesus came to drain the swamp. His mission, laid on him by the Almighty as a descendant of King David, was to save the Jewish people from the tyranny of the corrupt Pharisees and Sadducees as well from their Roman oppressors and inaugurate a new age of peace and justice. The “swamp” was the religious cabal in the capital city which dictated what the people should think and do and controlled most of the nation’s wealth. The Roman interest was largely in the income they gathered through heavy taxes that mostly fell on ordinary folk.
The land of the prophets was sore beset and ripe for revolution. There had already been several would-be messiahs in the century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, or as he was actually known, Jehoshua bar Josef (Joshua, son of Joseph). They had all come to bad ends, as Jesus himself would, along with his plan for replacing the rule of sinful men with the will of a righteous and loving God.
Donald Trump came on the scene in 2016 after his own version of forty years in the desert, mostly spent making and losing money. Rather than a call from the deity, he was summoned by the collapse of legitimate leadership in a disillusioned nation. Bernie Sanders was his unwitting John the Baptist, the long-suffering chosen one called to finally lead his people out of the wilderness. But Bernie was beheaded by the Democratic party, leaving Trump (original family name, Drumpf), Bernie’s amusement-park mirror-image, to assume the messianic mantle.
It takes a lot of chutzpah to think you are a messiah. But there never seems to be any lack of candidates. To this day they crop up regularly in various religious sects. In most cases they die natural deaths like Menachem Schneerson, late leader of the Jewish Lubavitcher community, but sometimes they succumb violently like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, immolated by the FBI, or Jim Jones of Kool Aid mass-suicide fame. Paul of Tarsus, another man with a mission, said he had experienced a number of exclusive interviews with the Almighty before coming up with his own version of salvation out of which, with a little help from a Roman emperor, we got something called Christianity.
Politics produces even more would-be saviors per capita than religions do, though they are rarely as genuine as a Bernie Sanders or a Jehoshua bar Josef. The contenders for president who appear like spring mushrooms every four years almost always come out of the swamp themselves. False prophets, the ancient Israelites would have called them.
Trump’s initial assessment of the political morass was true enough, if not original. His gospel for righting it may even have been sincere. But he was vilified by the powers-that-be of both parties and scourged daily in the mass media (though Rush Limbaugh & Co. did a complete about-turn after it
became likely Trump would get the Republican nomination). All of which only made him more popular with the beset millions who ended up voting for him after Bernie was taken down. Like Jesus, Trump not only presented himself as a savior, he created a movement: Make America Great Again (think, Make Israel Great Again).
Jesus was reckless, ended up betting everything on a dramatic last stand against the religious establishment and the Romans. For his efforts he was rewarded with crucifixion. Trump was worn down and then narrowly defeated by four years of constant cries for his head and his own gross incompetence. Jesus was reckless but strong. Trump was feckless and weak. Instead of immolating himself for the sake of his loyal band he watched them storm the Capitol on his wide-screen, munching fast food, and ended his days in the White House a whiny sore-loser.
2016 was a unique moment in American politics. It was a year that should have offered the American people two, or at least one and a half, real change-makers, if not literal messiahs (it’s always dangerous to put one’s faith in a redeemer). One of them made it to the White House. But it was the also-ran, Sanders, who ended up having the greater impact on the national agenda, while Trump continues to nurse his political wounds like an overweight Achilles in his golden tent in Mara Largo. He just won’t die, and his disciples, the diminishing legion who refuse to deny him, are neglected and vilified like the Jews of the Jesus movement who were left to hang out to dry by the gentile but not gentle juggernaut of Paul of Tarsus.
A House Divided: Why We Need a New National Narrative
A new social contract should have replaced the First Constitution in our national consciousness as the recognized source of our most sacred freedoms. But we continue to insist on arguing about the “original intent” of the 1787 document instead of acknowledging the “rebirth of the nation” Lincoln proclaimed at Gettysburg. Ignoring that new, Second Constitution and sticking to a national narrative out of date since the days of the Civil War is tearing the nation apart.
The history of a nation is its national myth, the story it tells itself about who it is and why. The role of historians is to create and reinforce that myth.
This isn’t to say the myth or story is a complete fabrication. But history is not a science; it cannot run experiments to verify its conclusions. Historians, the best of them, do rely on facts and an empirical approach. Even so, a professional consensus is maintained about what the national story is, the biography of a nation, people, or civilization. That narrative is true to the extent any biography may be, even those we fashion for ourselves individually, editing and enhancing as we go along. We pass on that autobiographical narrative to people in our lives in bits and pieces until they have what seems a plausible story about who we are. We do so for various reasons, any one of which may be more important than the truth of the narrative itself, which even we may stop doubting after enough repetitions.
Historians are supposed to be more careful than we are about our individual life stories, but they are no less prejudiced. They may have no official constraints on the content of their work, but an inclination to tell the most flattering and edifying tale is built in to the profession. But the historian’s job is to make sure not just that the young but everyone in a society is exposed to the approved version without too much variation. Founding myths about a nation are necessarily created after the fact. First you cobble together a political entity by force and clever political maneuvering. Then you declare it a nation and provide it with a history demonstrating the people who live within its boundaries have a common identity based on deep ancestry and mutual consent. You can spin the myth in various ways at different times to suit the changing requirements of the times. France is a social contract that includes all its citizens of all origins on an equal basis; America is a land of immigrants based on the idea of God-given equality of natural rights. In 21st-century America there are competing national myths: America was founded as a Christian nation vs. America is the brain-child of the 18th-century secular Enlightenment; America is a people that wants all human beings to be free like them vs. America is an empire that engages in the same atrocious behavior as all other empires.
Differing versions of what happened on January 6th, 2021, and why it occurred have exposed the contradictions in the narrative our history textbooks used to be so confident about. Millions of Americans view the acts of that day as sedition, an attempt to subvert by intimidation and violence the constitutional process of electing a president. Other millions insist it was an attempt to put to rights a criminal disregard of the people’s will. For the former, the then-sitting president’s refusal to accept the outcome of the November 2020 election and the violent protest that occurred on January 6th, 2021, were violations of its most sacred law. For the latter, that cold winter day was an act of supreme patriotism grounded in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
Not by accident, some of the protesters on January 6th carried Confederate flags. The Confederacy from the South’s point of view was of a piece with the spirit of the Revolution: a people’s right to take up arms against a tyrannical government. The rebelling states in 1860-61 also claimed justification from a Constitution favoring the rights of states over the central government and guaranteeing the sanctity of private property (slaves).
The debate over slavery and states rights in mid-19th-century America was decided by a war, which cost the lives of three quarters of a million men. And then, before the nation could be fully reunited, the divide between North and South reopened thanks to the Union’s failure to remain an occupying power in the South long enough to rid it of the power structure that had detached the rebelling states from the rest of the nation. It was as if after the second world war the Allies, instead of installing new democratic institutions, had occupied Europe only for a year or two and left without dismantling the political structures of fascism….
Read the rest of the essay at Eclectica.org.
Sarah’s Laugh, Donald Duck, and Jesus’ Other Woman
I learned the Bible, the first two books of it at least, if not at my mother’s knee, then up close on our old maroon sofa a couple years before I started Catholic school. That sofa was also where she read me the story of Little Black Sambo, who started out as a boy but ended up as a pancake; “Water Babies,” of which I have no memory but the strange title; “Tom Thumb,” as well as dozens of nursery rimes, all out of a set of handsome faux-leather red volumes called Journeys through Bookland.
The Bible stories came from another place, probably an abridged version for children. I have no memory of the book itself. What I do recall after all these years like old sepia family portraits are images of Noah’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for disobeying God’s command not to look back on the destruction of Sodom; the great flood Noah escaped by building an ark to save two of every living creature; the mugging of Benjamin by his brothers for his beautiful coat; and of course the bondage and rescue of the Israelites from Egypt. I was especially impressed by the plagues God inflicted on the Egyptians until the pharaoh relented—the frogs, the duel between the Jewish and Egyptian magicians that ended with the Jews’ team turning their staffs into snakes that ate up the Egyptians’, and of course the slaughter of all non-Jewish first-borns by the Angel of Death.
Then I turned five and my mother enrolled me in the parish school, where I never heard any of those Bible stories again….
The Writer's Treehut 