"A Little Vessel of Sadness ..."

Unfortunately, the image accompanying this post has been blocked. Someone does not like John Banville, or Irish people maybe. It couldn't be me they don't like. Ya think?

Sunday in the city. The streets of Manhattan become absurdly crowded with tourists at this time of the year. The sidewalks are filled with gawkers, staring up at the tall buildings, or at the windows on Fifth Avenue, at the beautiful women walking and carrying shopping bags.

Admiring beautiful women may be a sin in the political correctness church where we are all forced to worship this "holiday" season. Don't say "holiday"! That's too benevolent to religions. Say this "special-wellness-time-for-collective-healing."

Children are a special delight at Christmas. They are often dressed in color-coordinated outfits, as though they stepped out of a catalogue. As a child, my clothes rarely managed to achieve any intended chromatic relationship to each other, except a highly abstract one. Until I discovered girls, I thought of a bath as a form of oppression and an outrageous imposition, to be endured only when the crust in my hair became a menace to others. (The foregoing statement is an example of humor and not literal communication.) Today, children seem to arrive wrapped in plastic and designer clothes.

Whatever happened to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer? Perhaps they were insensitive to women's issues. Holiday season strolling in Manhattan also reminds me of trips to Lincoln Center, which I can no longer afford, to attend performances of La Boheme, or The Nutcracker at ABT. In 1982, I rewarded myself for completing a number of tests to receive my undergraduate degree and begin law school by viewing a performance of Puccini's masterpiece of young starving artists in a production that was filmed at the MET.

Jose Carreras was a honey-voiced, melodic and oh-so lyrical "Rudolfo," Teresa Stratas was alluring and fragile, while belting out the necessary B flats as "Mimi," and their performance of the first act love duet ("O 'soave fanciulla ...") will stay with me forever. It was the debut of Zefirelli's legendary sets too. For some reason, MET audiences love to applaud the scenery. Villazon is less good than Carreras; Netrebko is better than Stratas. (I can only hope that all names are spelled correctly.)

Boheme is a love-song to youth and the indestructible need to make art, to create and live with beauty, but also a celebration of the yearning to love one another, even in the shadow of an early death -- which was far from uncommon in the tenements of Paris, in the nineteenth century, before antibiotics, when Tuberculosis was as lethal as AIDS is today. Both AIDS and T.B. are still diseases of poverty.

We know that 20 million people, in Africa alone, will succumb to our century's horrendous plague in the next ten years. Yet our greatest resources continue to be devoted to war and to the acquisition of more fossil fuels, leading to the further destruction of the earth's ecology. Range Rovers are more popular than ever in the United States, even in cities where they are nothing but grotesque and obscene displays of American hubris. You do not need a Range Rover in Manhattan. I see lots of them parked on the street, even in my neighborhood. It is madness.

This Puccini Opera is considered the most popular work in the repertoire, a "bread-and-butter" role, in the words of the great Leontyne Price. It brings together the Romantic (and Freudian) themes of eros and thanatos, love and death. Puccini was an exponent of "Verismo" (realism), his early work being a departure from the obsessive concern in nineteenth century Opera with kings and heros of mythology in the great "Belcanto" roles.

Boheme was also a trip down memory lane for the composer, recalling his own "starving artist" days in Paris, before getting to make Operas out of plays by Sardou or a novel by Prevost. To have written the music of "Musetta's Waltz" is sufficient achievement for a lifetime, even for the creator of Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Manon Lescaut and Turandot.

The movie version of the downtown musical "Rent" is O.K. (Hackers have inserted "errors" in my last sentence. How curious?) It will introduce young people to the story of La Boheme, and may lead some of them to venture out to the MET, so as to experience Puccini's genius. Seeing the film with my daughter was an "experience" (to use her word), allowing us to discuss some of the themes in the show.

Boheme is the one Opera that I know with a character who is a philosopher, who gets to sing a love song, to his coat, which he has sold to get money for the ailing Mimi. Fortunately, it is Spring, so that his sacrifice is not so great. The movie of "Rent" avoids these issues by turning the philosopher into a more ... well, "philosophical" character. "I am thwarted by a metaphysical puzzle ..." he sings. Welcome to the club.

In "Rent," the philosopher's one song contains a revealing reference to Heidegger, whose theory is concerned with death as the poignant reminder of Dasein's meaning. At the funeral for "Angel" we sense both an hommage to Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the significance of the character's name, as the one "angelic" figure in the plot.

The music tends to become indistinguishable, after a while, and the lower East Side depicted in the film is a relic of the pre-Giuliani era, but the concern to live, intensely, lives that will be cut off long before they should be is ... timeless, as is the artists' "Bohemia," which exists in every great city and always will. The landscape of this film is recognizable for New Yorkers, but the emotional landscape is familiar to the young at heart and hopeful, to creative people, always and everywhere.

Bravos to all, especially Rosario Dawson. An added bonus, by the way, is being mooned by an attractive young woman in the cast during the course of this opus. That's the sort of thing that never happens to me in real life. I wonder whether I can get a still photo of that great scene?

In Sunday's New York Times, in the "Book Review Section," an intelligent assessment (finally) of Banville's The Sea, contains this paragraph:

His descriptive passages are dense and almost numingly gorgeous. ("The mud shone blue as a new bruise," for example, then a sentence later: "the water racing in over the flats swift and shiny as mercury, stopping at nothing.") And he's adept too, at deploying the mind-clouding aphorisms the English-style memory-novel cannot, apparently, do without. "So much of life was stillness then, when we were young," he writes, "or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilence." And another: "Happiness was different in childhood." Another: "But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?" And one more (my favorite): "What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark."

Banville has provided me with the perfect assessment of Mimi's story, in any version, with this single final line that will now serve as my title. And in the process, he has confirmed my opinion of his literary gifts.

The Midnight Hour ...

The image accompanying this essay has been blocked by hackers. Google "Kierkegaard" and copy his portrait.

Consider this text by Thomas Merton:

This power of self-surrender is not gained except through the experience of that dread which afflicts us when we taste the awful dereliction of the soul closed in upon itself.

The full maturity of the spiritual life cannot be reached unless we first pass through the dread, [angst,] anguish, trouble and fear that necessarily accompany the inner crisis of 'spiritual death' in which we finally abandon our attachment to our exterior self ...

Enlightenment or maturity can only arrive when we pass through the flames of despair. We must see the utter nothingness of death as a looming possibility, so as to confront all of the falsehood or artificiality in our lives. In order really to live our lives -- while we still can -- we must say goodbye to all that is already dead inside of us. We have to let go of everything that weighs us down.

It is as though you were holding on to a life-line of some kind, suspended over a precipice and looking down. Suddenly, you lose your fear and no longer care about hitting the ground. So you let go. There is a delightful feeling of floating, falling through infinite space, like John Napper sailing through the universe. ("John Napper" is a character in a story by John Gardner.)

I close my eyes now and see someone who looks like me, sort of, except he is much heavier. There is a gold and silver Rolex on his wrist, and there are others, very much like him, in a plush conference room. All are white, male, in early middle age. Everyone is speaking in heavy, measured and grave tones; everyone is in suits from Brooks Brothers and silk ties; there are tickets to the Opera in my jacket pocket; my shoes are polished; I have a new "leased" (80% deductible, if used as part of my business) German car parked outside. The other participants in this "conference" have similar cars parked outside.

I wonder if one of those men gets to park inside? If so, everyone else will be envious and a hierarchy may be established. Some of those men are criminals; some are government officials. Some are government officials, who are (probably) also criminals. Everyone has an impressive title. Everyone is impressed with how impressive he is.

We are all important, especially in our own minds. We discuss cigars. We laugh a bit more loudly than is necessary. If there is no woman in the room, then someone will make an off-color joke, without fear of being "misunderstood." An attractive young woman enters periodically with coffee and asks whether there is "anything else that we would like." We smile.

This is the sort of setting I rarely visit. I made the most of it when I finally got there. Yet when I got there, all I could think about was getting out. It is, primarily, such men who run this society, mostly for their own benefit, from such offices. I do not desire their company. They don't want mine. I don't want their cars or offices. I don't want the fawning attention of women half my age. I have no interest in the wonderful things that they have. If the person that I am today were to wander into that room, then he would certainly be thrown out of it. This pleases me a great deal. If I were to meet and talk to that earlier self, I'm afraid that he wouldn't think very highly of me. I doubt that I'd think too highly of him. I am optimistic enough to believe that we would manage a polite conversation and walk away muttering "asshole."

The receptionist in this office is a woman who is a former model. She smiles at each "important" man who enters this "important" office. Her eyes are not smiling. She does not smile at the women who sometimes accompany the men. It is not necessary to smile at them. Everyone feels entitled to use her first name. I don't. She looks at me a little differently. I will always remember that look. It says thank you for saying "Ms."

One way that you know you are visting an important suburban law firm specializing in "billing," is that an exceptionally attractive woman is employed as a receptionist. It is rarely or never a man in that position. I have never seen a woman in that job who looked happy. No, such women are not engaged in a form of prostitution. Many have children to feed and the money is good. Many of the men who are partners in such firms are better thought of as prostitutes of a different sort.

By the way, that word would not have been out of place on some days as a description of me. I destroyed a witness on the stand. I did what I was supposed to do, but I wonder now: Was she telling the truth? Maybe that wasn't for me to decide.

It occurs to me that every person in that conference room was only a performance, something unreal, a shadow, and the performances were close to taking over what was still alive and genuine in those men. It is not simply that they were acting, but that they were acting badly. In some cases, they have been taken over; whatever was real in them is gone for good. In others, there are still signs of life. A homunculus peers out at the world from inside the eyes of a few participants in those chats.

This small portion of the self is kept alive, secretly, is permitted to walk outside and breathe fresh air only on the weekends, when no one is around. The part of the self that was a child once, that loves the law, that cares about people, floats around inside the psyche. I see him inside some of those men sometimes. I try to let him know that it's O.K., I won't tell anyone about him. I will pretend not to see him.

I see men like those all the time on subway trains or walking around downtown. Boy, do I feel sorry for them. If it comes to a choice between him -- the child inside -- and the important man in the suit, always go with the child inside. Fight to remain human.

I see many men who know this and want to do just that, to "choose themselves" (Kierkegaard), but they are afraid. All that they are missing is their real lives. Authenticity. (See my earlier comment "Norman Mailer and the Spooky Art.") Worst of all, they know this, but don't know what to do to escape their life-sentences. Go to any sports bar on a Friday night and look at the men in suits, talking sports, or just drinking ... silently. Notice the lawyers, especially, nursing wounds to the ego and repressed anger at the shit they've taken from judges or senior partners. If you ever need to define the word "resentment," visit a bar frequented by lawyers on a Friday night, you'll see it there.

At least 50% of lawyers are ready to explode with seething rage that gets expressed in patient, methodical destruction of other people's lives. I could not play that game today, even if I am more intelligent and better read than most of them. It's just not in me. My opinions and thoughts are not for sale. I'm not for sale. Sometimes women who achieve power in this society become like one of those men. I am sorry for them. They are mistaken about what constitutes "success." Eventually, maybe when it is too late, they will realize this. In 1836, Kierkegaard wrote in his journals ...

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me -- but I went away -- and the dash that follows should be as long as the earth's orbit -- and wanted to shoot myself. ...

And ten years later, he asked:

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? ...

I once met a woman who tortured people. There is no other word for what she did -- and probably still does. She likes power over others. Maybe this is a way of convincing herself that she is still alive and human, that a vital part of herself was not been lost -- lost to the version of herself seen by the world, the part of herself that hurts other people, then steals from them or does worse. Diana became that frightening role, until there was nothing left of herself beyond the mask. Most persons with power, including all judges, wear masks. They forget Oscar Wilde's warning: "Those who wear a mask will come to resemble it." Leave the mask in your chambers when you go home. The actor who fails to leave the character on stage is in trouble.

The sight of Diana and the sound of her name are still repulsive to me. I wonder how many other men and women like her exist in this society, and are out there doing what she does, secretly. I wonder where she is now. Wherever she is, I hope it is far away from me. I only wish to speak to her once, face-to-face, then I will be happy to leave her to her fate.

The people she tortured and hurt were all herself, of course. She does not know that. She may never know it. She is in flight from herself. She is hoping not to be recognized by herself. But she has an appointment in Samara. One day she will see herself, really see herself in the mirror, and then the little house of cards that she has built for herself will crumble, and she will crumble too. She deserves and receives my pity.

How many people do you know who are in flight from themselves? Are you? Do you believe that the title on the door to your office will protect you from the truth about your life? How about the new apartment or the nice car? Or the black robes? The new portrait? Will you die for those things? Do they mean that much to you? Do you need people to humble themselves before you? Do you "wield" power? Or do you relish dominating others? Do you have status, money, power? Or do those things have you? How do you define "success"? What is it in yourself that you avoid facing every day? What are you choosing not to say about your life that you know is true? Do you believe that others do not see and say those things about your life?

"Philosophy," Kierkegaard insists, "is not about making things easier, but it is about making things difficult."

Thanksgiving.

I almost went to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade yesterday. I have seen it before, once from the "V.I.P." seats (no thanks to me), but I am now delighted that I didn't. A large balloon, in the shape of an "M.&M.," crashed into a lamp post, causing injuries to two young women. That horrible fate might have been mine. To be crippled for life, is tragic enough. To have to explain that one was injured by a large M.&M. (yellow, chocolate-covered and peanut-like in appearance) is even more humiliating. One should be permitted to eat the gigantic peanut before expiring.

I took a "Turkey Dinner for Four" -- purchased at "Whole Foods" -- which was more like "Turkey Breast for Two-and-a-Half" ($34.00, plus tax!) -- to my mother, who is in her mid-eighties and always insists on doing what people "should" do during holidays. At Easter, I have to dress like a rabbit and bury eggs in the backyard.

My mother is convinced that, in America, there is a "behavior police" to report any failures to celebrate holidays in accordance with the wishes of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Perhaps there really is a "Holiday Observance Authority" or soon will be. It would not surprise me.

I have just provided the Bush Administration with an idea for the next cabinet meeting, a way of identifying Al Quaida's "deep cover" agents, who are bound to be clueless about things like cranberry sauce. In this country, we have an unlimited number of clueless political leaders who know all about cranberry sauce, but not much else. We are fortunate in this regard.

So we ate dinner, laughed and allowed some bonding to take place between grandmother and grandaughter. My mother's life has not been an easy one. These late years have brought a serenity that I did not see before, a peacefulness and acceptance of her fate. She has found some measure of reconciliation with the misfortunes and injustices of her life, even finding her faith again.

I avoid any discussion of genuine difficulties and pains in my life. I do my best to entertain and make her happy. The sight of her grandchildren alone seems to do that. Most of the old people in her building have come to terms with their sufferings. They have accepted their lives -- and in some cases, these are very difficult lives -- and are now concerned to enrich others. They are grateful for one's interest in them. In a youth-obsessed and future-oriented society, most of them have been relegated by their families to the trash heap of forgetfulness.

Many were alone yesterday, not receiving visits from family members. Why should they? After all, we're a very practical people now. What practical "advantage" might there be in visiting poor old people? None. Forget them, let's go to the mall.

In most instances, money and material considerations (except as insurance against becoming a burden to others) interests them very little. So does the business and idle chatter of the world. The bullshit remains the same, they tell me, the names of politicians and crooks (mostly a redundancy in New Jersey), celebrities and athletes change, but that's about it. People continue to do what they've always done -- and will always continue to do. The consensus is that, as you get older, you get more tired of the bullshit.

I spent my time missing someone on Thanksgiving Day, and not allowing it to show. I hope soon to see her again. I saw some moronic television shows. Luckily, my mother's sense of duty does not extend to making me sit through football games. I read a lot and thought about all that I should be grateful for, beginning with my health and the persons in my life. I reflect on where the pain is for me. No surprises there.

As you look in the mirror and imagine your face in old age, think of what that old person that you will become (soon enough!) would wish to say to the younger man or woman that you are today. What warnings will this older version of you wish to communicate to you (or others) now? What explanations will you offer to that person that you will soon turn into for the choices that you made, and are making, that will affect that old person's life? Still smoking? Still drinking? How will you justify your actions to yourself someday?

Your assignment is to see two movies: It's a Wonderful Life, of course, and Somewhere in Time. Also, read the short story "For Esme, With Love and Squalor" by J.D. Salinger (who is the child in that story?). I may as well throw in Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince," and take another look at Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech from As You Like It.

How do you define childhood and old age? Does learning enter into your definitions? If so, how? What kind of learning? How would you define the term "cultivation of the feelings" or "emotional maturity"? What persons in your life will you wish to speak to or hear from in old age, as you lay dying? What name will be on your lips as draw your final breath in life? What does "Rosebud" mean in Citizen Kane? Why is "feeling" prohibited in the society depicted in Equilibrium?

From Macquarrie's treatise on Existentialism:

If our account of feelings is, up to this point, correct, so that it can be acknowledged that they "attune" us to the world and that at least the more sophisticated feelings are close to reason, then the possibility that feeling may yield some genuine insights having philosophical interest cannot be dismissed out of hand. It could even be the case that this intimate relation to the world through feeling could disclose to us truths concerning the world such as would be quite inaccessible through that mere beholding which characterizes our observation of the world through the senses.

Norman Mailer on the "Spooky Art."

Norman Mailer, Of Women and Their Elegance (New York: Tom Doherty, 1980).
Norman Mailer, The Fight (New York: Vintage, 1975).


When everyone is sleeping in my apartment, I sometimes look in on the women who share my daily life -- not all of whom are physically present in that life -- so as to have a sense of their safety before I try to rest.

I kiss someone special (who is always with me in spirit, at least, even if she's not here in any other way). I whisper "good night." I picture her sleeping. Brushing back the hair from her forehead with my finger tips, I make sure that she has enough covers. Then I close the door to her room in my mind. I do the same for the two women who are, materially and empirically, very much present.

As of this writing, my daughter is fifteen years-old. It requires all of my calculation and no small talent for inducement to persuade her to do the right things: get enough sleep, study, but not so much that she forgets to have fun with her friends, feel confident about herself, as a talented and strong young woman, assert her independence. This is my fondest wish for all of the people that I love. Find a way to be free, or just to "be."

There are so many forces at work to harm her: making her feel guilty about eating normally, making her suffer for not resembling some impossible sexist ideal, burdening her with values and opinions that are not her own which fashion or oppressive power dictates must be hers, denying her the opportunity to form her own beliefs and values, to make her own choices, leaving her to develop a mature unique identity, informed by the love and encourgement we give her, but which is entirely her own.

Her mother is my best friend, among other things. I find myself offering her the same kind of moral support all the time. In some ways, she needs it more than her daughter. In sleep, both of them acquire an ease and relaxation in facial expressions that is only possible for those who are untouched by the evil in the world. Neither of them has any capacity for malice or hatred, nor much experience with such things. Thank goodness. "Goodness" is the right word for both of them. I make no such claim for myself.

At about 2:00 A.M., last night, I was sure that both mother and child slept soundly. I was surfing t.v. channels, when I came upon the National Book Awards ceremony on c-span 3. Toni Morrison introduced Norman Mailer, recipient of a "Lifetime Contribution to Literature" award. Mailer moves a bit more slowly now, but was fiercely articulate and elegant in his comments, having lost none of his acuity and talent for rabble rousing. He is Muhammad Ali in his final years as champ. Mailer now makes up in poise and class, in other words, for any loss of quickness. Never take him lightly.

Mailer's favorite fighter and one of the most admired artists of the twentieth century must be Muhammad Ali. Mailer (me too!) would like nothing better than to be a literary Ali, "roping the dopes" of the literary establishment. In fact, Mailer is more like Rocky Marciano or Joe Frazier: committed to a work ethic, pounding away at the body of his manuscripts, so as to bring them to submission.

Gore Vidal is more like Ali, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee -- and what a bee! In both Vidal and Ali, one experiences the pleasure of seeing a creator who is also creating himself, where form is substance, both in the work and persona. After one sentence, you know it is Vidal's prose; after the first few seconds of Ali dancing in the ring, you know whether he will win the fight and how he'll do it, through the imposition of will. Part of what's great about those two men, Vidal and Ali, is that their genius is so obvious that it cannot be missed, as is their delight in being who they are.

Part of the fascination in Mailer's persona comes from the dialectic of master and slave, in himself, the struggle of a man of great gifts who is also burdened with powerful talents for self-destruction, the tensions between his enormous capacity for love and creativity, against his powerful, often justified rage and energy. With Mailer -- and most men of stormy and uncompromising natures -- the love wins ... provided that he finds a form of creative expression that is satisfactory to him. Picasso, Mailer, Hemingway, Beethoven, Foucault, Robert Downey, Jr., and some others, are men of genius whose lives amount to a walk on the edge of a precipice. There are women I place in the same category: Silvia Plath, Germaine Greer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone Weil, Melanie Griffith, maybe Kate Winslet. There is a woman I love very much that should be included in this list.

There is a metaphor that is at the center of much of Mailer's thinking about writing ("the spooky art," he calls it) and about the challenge of getting at the truth in oneself by finding the right words. It is the idea of a confrontation with one's "fundament." In other words, the notion of passing through a wall of flame -- like Siegfried in search of his love -- to find the ultimate mysteries at the core of one's identity. At the conclusion of his essay on the first Ali/Frazier fight, Mailer writes:

Ali got up, Ali came sliding through the last two minutes and thirty-five seconds of this heathen holocaust in some last exercise of the will, some iron fundament of the ego not to be knocked out, and it was then as if the spirit of Harlem finally spoke out and came to rescue and the ghost of the dead in Vietnam, something held him up before arm-weary triumphant near-crazy Frazier who had just hit him the hardest punch ever thrown in his life and they went down to the last few seconds of a great fight, Ali still standing and Frazier had won. ...

Whatever you may say about Mailer, I think it's only fair to recognize that he has done this more than once: achieving a face-to-face encounter with his true self and paying the price for it.

"Self," the "I," most of all, "ego" ... these are the words that are essential to Mailer's thinking. Mailer needs to assert himself against an indifferent and even hostile universe. He needs to win recognition, a place among his best contemporaries -- Roth, Bellow, Vidal, Styron, Updike, Baldwin, Morrison, Mary McCarthy and maybe a few others -- while remaining gentle and protective towards those who are weaker and more helpless than himself. This is Mailer's conception of the writer's task. Maybe this idea is important to all of his ethical thinking. See Cannibals and Christians (New York: Pinnacle, 1966), pp. 183-193 (reviewing The Group).

This is to make the writer, as a literary adventurer, a kind of knight-errant in quest of damsels in distress to rescue and dragons to slay. Vidal suggests that, as we live in a jaded age, it may be best to slay the damsels and rescue the dragons. Consider this revealing paragraph from Mailer's masterpiece on the Ali/Frazier epic:

There was one way in which boxing was still like a street fight and that was in the need to be confident that you would win. A man walking out of a bar to fight with another man is seeking to compose his head into the confidence that he will certainly triumph -- it is the most mysterious faculty of the ego. For that confidence is a sedative against the pain of punches and yet is the sanction to punch your own best. The logic of the spirit would suggest that you win only if you deserve to win: the logic of the ego lays down the axiom that if you don't think you will win, you don't deserve to. And, in fact, usually don't; it is as if not believing you will win opens you to the guilt that perhaps you have not the right, you are too guilty. ...

Now apply the insight in this paragraph to literary creation, to writing. You must believe that you will write that novel as you sit down to do so.

Forget the politically correct bullshit. "Isn't he celebrating violence?" No, Mailer is celebrating what violence or any other great challenge demands of human beings, which is also what few of us are capable of providing easily: authenticity of response. This is a celebration and value which is found in Christianity, by the way, and is not gender-specific. The philosopher whose ideas are most illuminating on this subject is Hegel, as evidenced by Charles Taylor's recent work and some of the writings of Drucilla Cornell concerning legal interpretation.

Mailer is saying that some of us, on rare occasions, facing great threats to ourselves or even death, achieve a measure of grace and peace by centering ourselves in our indestructible capacity for love and in the compassion that we feel for others, thereby becoming or achieving our best selves, our full humanity -- however briefly -- as we protest against and resist an inevitable final destruction. "A man [or person] can be destroyed," Hemingway says, "but not defeated."

Authenticity is meaning. Selfhood is what endures and prevails because it is undefeatable. Here is Sylvia Plath, struggling against madness and writing in her journals, Boston 1958-1959:

Monday, July 7. I am evidently going through a stage in beginning writing similar to my two months of hysteria in beginning teaching last Fall. A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything but myself ... . I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis and ruinous brooding and daydreaming. If I want to write, this is hardly the way -- in horror of it, frozen by it. The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusa-head. ...

If you do not understand that the "demon" Plath sometimes speaks of in her journals and that she faced, fought, and to whom she ultimately lost her life, so as to produce her work -- that this demon is exactly what a man faces before going into battle, or into a courtroom where he is in great peril, or facing someone physically bigger and stronger in a fight, then you should not regard yourself as any kind of literary critic. This demon exists for all of us and is only incidentally associated with the loathsome or despicable individuals we may encounter in our lives, since few of us will actually experience ultimate evil. I have had such an experience of evil and do not wish it on anyone. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Plath is Ali. Her typerwriter is Joe Frazier. She knows what parts of herself she must face to produce her best work as well as the cost to her psyche of doing so. She did it anyway. And now we have her work. I call that genius. Or was she just being typically "macho"?

Do not allow the moronic, "femi-Nazis" and man-haters, in search of something to hit men with, wielding Plath's books like clubs, to fool you: Sylvia Plath is a great poet. And she was as brave as any man who ever walked the earth. A fierce custodian of her talent, she paid the ultimate price to produce her wonderful books. She deserves the honors that she receives for the greatness of her human achievement. I will make certain that my daughter knows her work. I urge any man who has the balls to do so, to read Silvia Plath, then try to do your best work.

Do not allow the idiots who are sometimes loudest in expounding the feminist cause to fool you about the truth of feminism. They're usually right on the merits of social issues, feminist gal-pals, but you must never admit to it, so you'll piss them off. They're so dumb and one-dimensional that they fail to recognize that they're preaching to the converted and (like the French in World War I) shooting at their own troops. Maybe a great way to get them angry is to compare and demonstrate the parallels between Mailer and Plath. Hey, guess what I've just done?

Justice William Brennan's Vision of the Constitution.

Justice Brennan's picture has been blocked as part of the censorship effort emanating from New Jersey's courts and political officials.

William J. Brennan, Jr., "The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification," in Sanford Levinson and Steven Mailloux, eds., Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 13.

Among the greatest legal thinkers appointed to the United States Supreme Court, I include the late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., a Jersey boy, who made it to the Court by way of Harvard University after a stint on the Superior Court in Jersey City.

Justice Brennan will always remain an important Constitutional theorist and philosopher of law, despite his deceptive humility, who articulated a vision and understanding of the Constitution for our times that merits further study. Brennan's theory is often compared with former Attorney General Edwin Meese's contemporaneous comments concerning the "intent" of the framers and "original understandings" of key phrases in the Constitution. In my opinion, Justice Brennan's theory of Constitutional interpretation was far more profound and richer than Mr. Meese's rival theory.

Mr. Meese's position has led to a Conservative "originalist" theory of Constitutional interpretation that is associated with Justice Antonin Scalia's able defense of the Supreme Court's task as deciding on the meaning of "what the framers actually wrote and managed to say, regardless of their subjective intentions." Justice Brennan begins his remarks with a crucial observation:

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights solemnly committed the United States to be a country where the dignity and rights of all persons were equal before all authority. In all candor we must admit that part of this egalitarianism in America has been more pretension than realized fact. But we are an aspiring people, a people with faith in progress. Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations [hopes?]. ...

Justice Brennan recognizes the analogies between judicial responsibility for reading laws and interpretation in the humanities, which mostly concerns the study of literary and philosophical works. He was aware of recent European and American theory of language, philosophical "hermeneutics," along with jurisprudential writings by Lon Fuller, John Hart Ely and Alexander Bickel (who is specifically mentioned in this essay). All of these sources can be detected as influences on the justice's thinking, in addition to the great precedents handed down by the Court. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Among the justices most admired by Justice Brennan, whether in agreement or the opposite, I include Chief Justice Marshall, the first Justice Harlan, Justice Brandeis, Justice Frankfurter (though less so), and no Constitutional thinker in the twentieth century can escape the influence of Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the "great dissenter." Justice Cardozo -- though clearly endowed with a great legal mind -- was more of a common law judge and not a great public law thinker.

Public law involves relations between the individual and the State in its unique functions; private law is concerned with litigation or other actions between or among entities in civil matters where the State is only one more litigant. Criminal actions are public law; commercial litigation is private law.

Knowledge of the real world, which is impossible to miss in urban America, appears in Justice Brennan's work. Justice Brennan is far from "starry-eyed" about majorities or human nature. He recognizes that part of the judicial task in America is the protection of minority rights against the majority, however unpopular this may be. Justice Brennan discharged that responsibility with great courage. For example, in his fearless commitment to the protection of the franchise and of other hard-won minority rights during the turbulent years when he served on the Court. One wonders what he would make of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence dealing with federal presidential elections, i.e., Bush v. Gore.

There is both intellectual ambition and a becoming modesty about Justice Brennan's understanding of his role and importance: " ... the Constitution cannot be for me a contemplative haven for private moral reflection. My relation to this great text is inescapably public." (emphasis added)

Unlike humanistic scholars interpreting great texts in the history of Western civilization, in other words, a jurist construing the U.S. Constitution's general principles faces some important constraints. Three are listed: 1) the public nature of the task of deciding legal controversies; 2) the obligatory and binding character of the Court's decisions; and 3) the consequentialist aspect, which may involve the entire coercive machinery of the State. This burden of responsiblity gives a jurist pause and appropriate grounds for caution.

When justices interpret the Constitution they speak for their community, not for themselves alone. The act of intrepretation must be undertaken with full consciousness that it is, in a very real sense, the community's interpretation that is sought. ... our commitment to self-governance in a representative democracy must be reconciled with vesting in electorally unaccountable justices the power to invalidate the expressed desires of representative bodies on the ground of inconsistency with higher law. [The natural law roots of the Constitution are unmistakable in such phrases.] Because the judicial power resides in the authority to give meaning to the Constitution, the debate is really about how to read the text, about constraints on what is legitimate interpretation.

The analogies to the interpretive challenge in determining the meaning of Scriptures is unmistakable. The Constitution is America's secular scripture, as James Madison was the first to emphasize. I call it America's Talmud. It is the locus of a people's egalitarian aspirations. It is where one finds our hopes for freedom and equality, with due process of law, containing -- I believe at the most fundamental level -- a vision of the worth of persons as primary, over and above government and other concentrations of power in the State.

I still find this idea of human dignity inspiring and brave, worthy of any sacrifice. It is not for government to tell us what is spiritually or morally true nor how to live our lives. ("What is Law?")

We are self-determining beings whose freedom and equality must remain inviolable. It is individual rights-bearers, persons, that the Constitution enshrines and not a person's representatives, nor the judges appointed to serve the community's jurisprudential needs in their official roles.

The specific intentions of the framers and what they believed to be required by this overarching vision of human dignity and rights is reflective of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and was both a product of (and a reaction to) historical circumstances at the end of the eighteenth century, but the core principles of the document were set in place, as foundation stones for a society meant to last, not only politically but morally. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison" then "America's Holocaust" and, again, "Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution" then "What is Enlightenment?")

The broad intention of the framers of this glorious text was that those called upon to interpret its meaning not be limited to the understanding of key phrases linked to "live" issues at the time of the ratification of the document. Justice Brennan explains:

What do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. ... Interpretation must account for the transformative purpose of the text. Our Constitution was not intended to preserve a preexisting society but to make a new one, to put in place new principles that the prior political community had not sufficiently recognized.

Notice where this reasoning leads Justice Brennan as he comes to terms with the challenge faced by the contemporary Supreme Court:

As augmented by the Bill of Rights and Civil War amendments, this text is a sparkling vision of the supremacy of the human dignity of every individual. This vision is reflected in the very choice of democratic self-governance: the supreme value of a democracy is the presumed worth of each individual. ...

Again:

As government acts ever more deeply upon those areas of our lives once marked Private, there is an even greater need to see that individual rights are not curtailed or cheapened in the interest of what may temporarily appear to be the "public good."

In light of this language, it is not difficult to figure out what Justice Brennan would conclude about the denial of habeas corpus to persons in the custody of the U.S. government, torture, or concerning psychologists lending themselves to the interrogation of impaired persons, using their training to assist in the extraction of information from manipulated victims denied the right to remain silent or any representation, even assaulted or raped, including some (allegedly) very similar "secret" practices taking place today in his own home state, together with the cover-ups of what is done. Men and women serving as judges, with the sort of courage displayed by Justice Brennan, are rarer today than ever before in American history. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "Is there a gay marriage right?")

The ideal emerging from the "penumbra" (a useful word) of the Constitution and its tradition of interpretation, is a ...

... vision of human dignity [which] rejects the possibility of political orthodoxy imposed from above; it respects the right of each individual to form and express political judgments, however far they may deviate from the mainstream and however unsettling they might be to the powerful or the elite. Recognition of these rights of expression and conscience also frees up the private space for both intellectual and spiritual development free from government dominance, either blatant or subtle. Justice Brandeis put it so well years ago when he wrote, "Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men [and women] free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. ..."

Justice Brennan recognized that the task of giving meaning to this ideal of human dignity under the vision of the Constitution is an "eternal one," that will always make the American experiment an unfinished revolution:

"[W]e are still striving towards that goal, and doubtless it will be an eternal quest. For if the interaction of ... justice and the constitutional text over the years confirms any single proposition, it is that the demands of human dignity will never cease to evolve." (See, again, my longer and more formal essay "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" then "Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation.")

As Judge Samuel Alito prepares for confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate, I wonder whether he agrees with Justice Brennan about the dignity of all persons that is protected by the Constitution. If he does not, then I wonder what alternative vision of the Constitution he offers to us now?

Morning in Brooklyn.

My daughter, Silvia, went to the new Harry Potter movie yesterday evening ("it's great, dad!"), then slept over at her friend's home in "Carrol Gardens," Brooklyn. I don't know Brooklyn from Bora, Bora. Evidently my daughter (a Manhattan apartment person) was duly impressed. "They have so much space!"

So this morning I set off at 6:30 A.M. to pick her up at the agreed-upon hour. Given the chaos on Manhattan's subway lines during weekends, it would take me two hours to get to Brooklyn from my neighborhood.

I searched my mind for information about Brooklyn and came up with these gems: First, a Danny Kaye movie I liked when I was in sixth grade, which involved a frantic search for "Prospect Park" and the ghost of Danny's dead twin brother, "Buster," played by himself; Second, something about a big bridge and Walt Whitman; Third, people with funny accents, like one of my college professors who said something that sounded like "Sacratees" to refer to the Gadfly of Athens.

True, Brooklyn is the land where William Shakespeare was born, according to my theory, and it was in this borough that his bar mitzvah took place.

I must say that I was favorably impressed. There is a soothing calm in the sections of Brooklyn that I saw: pleasant brownstones, occasional trees, friendly people and pretty good coffee in street corner Delis. I did not see either Danny Kaye or Prospect Park. I did see the famous bridge on my way back to Manhattan, from a cab, and have now looked up Whitman's poem.

According to Harold Bloom, Walt Whitman is America's leading national poet. As they say in the Supreme Court, "I concur in part and dissent in part": Emerson, Longfellow and Dickinson are the challengers for the title. By the way, I love the poetry of Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, and always recommend their writings to people. Oh, and before I am burned in effigy, I am required to mention Sylvia Plath, who was indeed a very fine poet. While I am at it, I will throw in Amiri Baraka, for when you're pissed off about social injustice.

If you are a "regular guy," concerned to be "regular" about all things and not to be seen reading poetry, don't worry, just say it's homework (which it is, in a way), and then it'll be O.K. That's what I used to do.

This Brooklyn Bridge is certainly one of the most beautiful bridges that I have seen and it testifies to the optimism and confidence of the people who built it concerning technology's power to better human life. Every bridge is a symbol of unity, a reflection of the universal hope that distances can be ... well, "bridged," so that what is outside of us becomes a part of what we are and we become part of it, part of all that is "Other."

Brooklyn to Manhattan is the journey from immigrant blue collar neighborhoods, through education and high culture, to achievement and affluence. You'll have plenty of company on your journey: Philip Roth will sit next to you, even though he's from Jersey, and Harold Bloom will recite poetry all the way to your destination.

Bridges are also expressions of the universal wish for order and rationality. Charles Reich said of another bridge what I would say of this beautiful and grand "embrace of steel and iron." Was steel used in the late nineteenth century? I'm not sure.

... to me it is a monument to another age -- an age of belief, order, faith. Perhaps the deepest human need is to live in an explainable world, a universe where our place can be seen, our purpose understood. The bridge is a testament, not merely to a particular belief, but to the condition of belief, which we seek anew. ...

It was Walt Whitman who asked us all to be the poets of American Democracy:

... This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful or uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. ...

These are not the words associated with the U.S. by people in the world today. They should be. Maybe they will be again. Soon.

Finding a Path Between Science and Philosophy.

Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: 2001).
Julian Roberts, German Philosophy: An Introduction (Humanities Press: 1988).
Andrew Bowie, German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (Polity: 2003).
Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: 1987).



If there is a central theme in Western philosophy during the modern period, then it is probably the question of the nature and status of scientific rationality. The manner in which we come to terms with science and how we define the scope and limits of the scientific enterprise will determine our conceptions of persons, reason and rationality, politics and law, ethics and aesthetics, the status and importance of religious and mythical beliefs, and just about the whole of the intellectual and cultural lives of persons.

Is the scientific understanding of persons as nothing but animals who are genetically determined in interaction with an environment "totalitarian," because it seeks to exclude all alternatives? Or does it do so only within the restricted territory of the "factual"? What is the factual realm? And can we know what is "factual" factually? Is science the sole means by which to acquire knowledge of the "real" world of facts? Is there such a place? If so, then what happens to the wisdom (as distinct from knowledge) which science cannot give us, which we so desperately need?

Suppose that, in addition to facts, what we really need is truth. Is science the only means to truth? For instance, what are we to make of such momentous questions as those which we have just raised, but which are not scientific nor amenable to resolution by the scientific method? Does this make the best answers that we can provide to such questions irrational or arbitrary? I don't think so. Here is Simon Critchley's statement of the issue:

... in the face of the disenchantment of nature brought about by the scientific revolution, we experience a gap between knowledge and wisdom that has the consequence of divesting our lives of meaning. The question is: can nature or indeed human selves become RE-ENCHANTED in such a way that reduces or even eliminates the meaning gap and produces some plausible conception of the good life? The dilemma seems to be intractable: on the one hand, the philosophical cost of scientific truth seems to be scientism, in which case we become beasts. On the other hand, the rejection of scientism through a new humanization of the cosmos seems to lead to obscurantism, in which case we become lunatics. Neither side of this alternative is particularly attractive. ...

This schism has a lot to do with the misperception and miscommunication between educated Americans and their counterparts in Latin America, Africa and the Middle east as well as Europe. Science has "won" in the U.S. to an extent that seems insane to people from other places. Thus, being a rational and/or an educated person in America means adopting a "scientific attitude" or an objective and dispassionate "neutral perspective" on all things. This leads to a perception of Americans as "cold." They're not. The same is said of British people by my Latin American friends, but I am usually able to persuade them of their error by listing all of the great sex scandals in British politics. In Latin America, political scandals are always (boringly) only about the theft of public funds, like in New Jersey.

To appreciate Brits, you have to enjoy chatting with a local vicar or Mrs. Tatcher and one of the Monty Python troupe or, say, Hugh Grant, then realize that all of them exist within one person or identity that is Britain. That's why I insist on Shakespeare as the source to consult if you hope to understand the people of those islands -- or maybe just to understand people. The British psyche is a sort of huge play by Shakespeare. Maybe that's also true of the human psyche.

This much-celebrated neutrality and objectivity is great when we are doing science, but it can be crazy when other aspects of life become central to our concerns. I am thinking especially of social and political concerns. At such times, a neutral and instrumentalist conception of rationality becomes highly irrational.

A recent t.v. commercial pictures a young man and woman in a restaurant, the young man sets up a chart showing market studies and other data indicating why it would be "wise" for the young lady to marry him. "I like what you've done here, Bob ..." says the lovely young woman.

This caricature is not very distant from the way things are now: prenuptial agreements, computer matching, "life-coaches" who arrange meetings between "compatible" couples are routine aspects of the madness of this huge asylum (which I love) known as the United States of America.

Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy were not "compatible," of course, neither were Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy -- but they were passionately in love. "But that's not practical!" says the American law or business school graduate, while science geeks -- regardless of gender --hope to mate by way of frozen embryos, without having met their "biological counterparts," between sessions of lab work and while insisting on 2.5 "offspring," a six-cylinder station wagon, and a ranch home in suburbia. Am I guilty of stereotyping? If so, then it is only "for their own good" that I say these things.

I remember an interview with Sofia Loren in which the movie star explained that, in Italy, "when you are hungry, you eat ... in America, soon, there is only pills ..." I shudder to think of what she might have said if she were asked about sex.

In America, in fact, passionate romantic love is in danger of being forbidden to us on the grounds that there may be adverse tax consequences from too many sexual escapades or reciting love sonnets while standing on the roof of a car in Manhattan at 3:00 A.M., something which I have done and plan to do again. I hope. True, I have Latin ancestry. But I think such experiences have been known to occur, even among strange Norwegians. In New Jersey, sex is only legal if partners wear helmets -- presumably on their heads -- and other safety equipment, such as a catcher's mask to avoid injury. No safety belts?

Only accountants, regardless of ethnicity or race, should be forbidden to love since romantic relationships only produce more debits and losses than gains, more liabilities than profits, and so they must be written off. That's just the bottom line. Nothing personal.

The over-rationalization of life (no matter how scientific the method adopted) creates a straight-jacket that contemporaries find uncomfortable, yet it keeps therapists and gurus busy. At the level of theory, Professor Bowie explains:

The opposition just described has sometimes been characterized in terms of an opposition between 'Romanticism' and 'Positivism.' ... The opposition is often understood as between conceptions which concentrate on the subjective and expressive dimensions of human experience [Captain Kirk] and conceptions which concentrate on the objective ways in which we can find out about the world and ourselves [Mr. Spock]. In its most well-known guise in the English-speaking world the opposition was seen by C.P. Snow in the 1950s as involving 'two cultures,' the artistic and the scientific. The resulting debate affected major aspects of British culture, and continues to do so. If the issue seems too abstract, think of arguments over the fact that the arts make more money for the British economy than the car industry, [Sherlock Holmes alone generates millions for the British treasury,] or look at the relative spending in university departments on the arts and sciences. Another way of looking at this issue is to contrast the description of a human being by an evolutionary biologist, who sees us in terms of how we are determined by genes and by the need to adapt to an environment, and a novelist, who might see us in terms of our ability to be both self-determining and yet prone to give way to baser determining impulses. ...

The challenge for our generation of intellectuals (including scientists) and artists is to retain our humanity in an increasingly inhuman setting that threatens to deprive us of it, where science suggests that we lack importance or significance in the universe. Science, after all, with all of its successes and the wonders of technology that it makes possible, is also a human achievement.

While we require more scientific knowledge -- cures for diseases, an ever greater understanding of ourselves and of our universe -- we must not lose hope in the possiblity of human wisdom nor our appreciation of goodness and beauty, since these things are crucial to the mysterious natures of those creatures who both invent "superstring theories" as well as adventures for Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. It may help to remember that those advanced theories in physics and great stories come from the same human imagination, which we celebrate.

My autonomy and dignity are not negotiable. They are not the property of the state, things to be discarded if some clerk in a government office (or a shrink) decides that it is better for me to do without them. My humanity is not something to be taken from me by anyone. All attempts to understand persons ignoring subjective and spiritual aspects of the self will fail. They should. Wisdom in understanding persons comes only with the appreciation of the paradox that is human being-in-the-world. I am a freedom, just like you, not a thing for you to control based on what you think is "for my own good" and certainly not because you enjoy wielding power over others. Science is not enough to understand people.

Can you lobotomize the soul?

Accompanying this post is the image of a Holocaust survivor holding the photo of Dr. Josef Mengele, who is the symbol of the physician torturer for all victims of psychological torture throughout the world. (See "A Letter From a Condemned Man" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

This essay is "for" Terry and Diana.













http://www.nyu.edu/gas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

The short answer to this question is "yes." It is possible to lobotomize the soul, and in more ways than one. For example, by becoming an adherent of "scientism" (which is a kind of ideology and not science at all) and/or a much-dreaded "behaviorist." Anyway, the soul does not exist according to many scientists, so there is no need to worry. I like to think of believers in scientism as the "flat earth society" of the scientific community.

One may abandon one's humanity and see others only as animals in an environment. This will make it easier to do terrible things to them "for their own good." The category mistake involved in searching for the mind (as distinct from the brain) and seeking to repair it, in strictly anatomical ways and without bothering to consult the persons involved, results from a failure to appreciate what the mind is and the ways in which it differs -- both conceptually and necessarily -- from the brain to which it is linked. The mind exists "in society," linguistically and culturally, not just neurochemically, "in the brain."

Wishes, fears, desires do not have a physical location in the brain -- although cerebral processes linked to such subjective states do have locations and can be mapped -- because desires and fantasies, wishes and hopes are "conceptual entities." By the same token, melancholy, sadness, yearning, emotional suffering and many other subjective states emerge only socially, from our relations with other people and are defined culturally, only then do they become amenable to objective analysis and examination. Any real meaning or recovery from emotional suffering will have to be social too. Colin McGinn summarizes the point better than I can:

Even to ask for [the mind's] spatial properties is to commit some sort of category mistake, analogous to asking for the spatial properties of numbers. [Consciousness] seems not to be the kind of thing that falls under spatial predicates. It falls under temporal predicates and it can obviously be described in other ways -- by specifying its owner, its intentional content, its phenomenal character -- but it resists being cast as a regular inhabitant of the space we see around us and within which the material world has its existence. Spatial occupancy is not (at least on the face of it) the mind's preferred mode of being.

I know that this is difficult because we are accustomed to thinking atomistically and reductively. So let us try another approach.

Emotions cannot be removed surgically with the extraction of a portion of the brain, unless we simply erase the person as a subject entirely, by eradicating the organic basis of consciousness. If you anesthetize someone, then you may be sure that the person will not suffer from depression while unconscious. Murder also works in this regard. A dead person tends to have few emotional problems or unpleasant memories. To the extent that a person is capable of human subjectivity or experience at all, emotional states or "conditions of affect" (feeling states) will arise, which are connected to "being-in-the-world-with-others." (Heidegger, Sartre, Laing.)

Writing in the New York Times, November 16, 2005, at p. E5, Charles McGrath comments on the popularity of lobotomy as a treatment for mental illness up to the mid-sixties:

Dr. Walter J. Freeman, a central figure in "My Lobotomy," a radio documentary that will be broadcast this afternoon on the National Public Radio Program "All Things Considered," believed that the source of many mental disturbances was the Thalamus, in which overabundant emotions tended to congregate. The solution, in his view, was simply to sever that part of the brain from the frontal lobes. ...

Well, for Descartes, it was the pineal gland that we had to worry about. The error is similar in both men's thinking: it is the assumption that mental realities, "qualia," have physical locations, like the cerebral functions which make them possible, which do have physical locations.

For medieval theologians, similarly, madness was the result of demons invading the mind and could be removed by exorcism. Incidentally, their success rate was about the same, probably, and maybe better than that of American lobotomists in the twentieth century, who were mystified by the dearth of long term "fortunate outcomes."

In many instances, tragically, patients who underwent a lobotomy emerged as human vegetables. Today, chemical lobotomy is on roughly the same level of incompetence and absurdity. No medication will alleviate my existential worries. Thank goodness. Behaviorist methods that seek to impose emotional states or outcomes upon persons, externally, often against their will, are also forms of legalized torture, with equally horrendous results. Often the tortures are illegal and done secretly, or not reported in institutions or in society, where persons are selected for such horrors based on how "interesting" they are to state torturers. These crimes are then covered-up by judges and politicians.

In one society that classified homosexuality as a form of "insanity," behaviorist psychologists developed a method of treatment in institutions that involved showing gay men films of desirable naked women, but the practice was halted when the gay men (the "patients") were found having sex while the lights were out. The scientists regarded the experiment as only a "partial success." (See the film "Improper Conduct.") The gay men thought much more highly of it and were quite willing to continue the experiment. You cannot "condition" happiness into people based on values external to them.

... lobotomy now seems like a medically sanctioned form of torture. The main theory behind it was that anxiety and agitation could be quelled by severing the emotional center of the brain from the part that controls the intellect, but the evidence to support this idea was [and remains] meager. ...

Allison Xantha Miller, "Better Living Through Lobotomy," Stay Free (Psychology Issue), Fall, 2003, at pp. 13-14.

In his book Great and Desperate Cures; The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness (Basic Books, 1986), Professor Elliot S. Valentstein states: "Even a surgeon who seldom obtained good results rarely gave up lobotomy." It is difficult for scientists and physicians to recognize their philosophical errors in the absence of any philosophical education that would allow them to do so, with the consequence that patients suffered and sometimes died. They still do. Here is Colin McGinn again:

Considered in themselves, intrinsically, we do not regard mental events as having location. The imprecision of our locational judgments here is a mark of this. Second, to allow that consciousness can be roughly located is not to grant it the full panoply of spatial predications. We still do not get predications of shape, size, dimensionality and so on. And this shows that such spatiality as we do allow to mental matters is of a second-class and derivative nature.

One would think that a person claiming expertise in the understanding of human subjectivity would take some interest in the products of that subjectivity -- like philosophy, literature, music and the other arts, but many scientists are too busy playing with rats in their laboratories to be bothered with such trivia. One psychoanalyst-torturer asked me, in all seriousness: "Kierkegaard, who's that?"

As for humility and a willingness to admit errors, these things are lost by doctors before their third year in medical school. Humility training should be available to physicians, lawyers, judges and politicians (maybe to all of us) for life. Perhaps we might be shown films of attractive naked people. It couldn't hurt. Here is what genius in the understanding of people looks like:

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which "our" world will die with us although "the" world will go on without us. Only existential thought has attempted to match the original experience of oneself in relationship to others in one's world by a term that adequately reflects this totality. Thus, existentially, the concretum is seen as man's EXISTENCE, his BEING-IN-THE-WORLD. Unless we begin with the concept of man in relation to other men and from the beginning "in" a world, and unless we realize that man does not exist without "his" world nor can his world exist without him, we are condemned to start our study of schizoid and schizophrenic people with a verbal and conceptual splitting that matches the split up of the totality of the schizoid being-in-the-world.

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960), p. 19. Do not, Laing insists, neglect to see the impact that you (as a therapist) are having on the dynamics of the subject's relations and relating capacity. Above all, Laing cautions, do not seek to serve two masters and do no harm.

If you wish to understand or communicate with another human being, then do not turn that person, man or woman, into a reified category, into a "patient," "subject," or "file number 4768." Do not reduce him or her to the contents of a police report or to your professional jargon or some trendy jargon, but open yourself up to the subjectivity of another experiencing agent, who is in pain and mortal just as you are. If you succeed in seeing, really seeing him or her, then you will also be seeing yourself. Is that possibility of seeing yourself, in all of your comical ludicrousness and mediocrity, as a therapist, what frightens therapists? ("Errors" were inserted in this last sentence since my last reading of it, which are not found in my printed copy of this work.)

Actors and all artists are the "master intelligencers" (George Steiner) in this regard. They teach us to see ourselves by "enacting" for us, the sometimes tragic comedies (think of the etymology of the word "comedy") in which we are all players. In our century, God is a Samuel Beckett-like ironist, savoring ambiguity. The goal of genuine actors is to allow us, through their performances, to see ourselves. This art requires great talent, but it also demands enormous courage from its best practioners. Actors and all artists demand that we look at ourselves, by showing us the truths of what we are. Every great actor is a magnificent therapist.

Maybe, it is this "seeing" -- taking a good look at ourselves -- that is the most frightening possibility of all for physicians ... or for any of us.

Why Terry Eagleton Hates Americans.

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), $18.95. (This is one of the best, though also one of most difficult books dealing with aesthetics that I have come accross.)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), $12.95.

Christopher Hitchens, "England Made Them," in Vanity Fair, January, 2008, at p. 118. (Christopher Hitchens, who is known as the epitome of normality, writes of English oddballs.)

I like Terry Eagleton. He does not like me because I am one of those frightful, uncouth Americans, who are destroying the planet with their hamburgers and action movies. Maybe it's Roger Scruton who feels that way about us. Probably both of them do, since disdain for Americans is one of the few things on which everyone agrees in Britain.

We like Brits who remind us that we are morons because they do it in such lovely accents. Plus, they may be right. In any case, we are happy to contribute to unity in Britain on the basis of a strong dislike for Americans, though not necessarily for our tourist dollars or our support of the British film industry. ("Hey, there's a new English movie and they're all wearing those great clothes from the nineteenth century and having tea!")

Poor Mr. Blair may have been too closely associated with Americans, notably Crawford's "man of the hour," George W. Bush, resulting in his departure from number 10 Downing Street. I think he's going to work for "Virgin" megastores in the DVD Department where a section is reserved for "fun-filled classics."

Terry Eagleton is a "good guy," who is proudly working class (except that he went to Cambridge and teaches or taught at Oxford), a Marxist, who is into the whole "Lit-Crit" thing. I have recently learned of the association of the term "guy" (an Americanism meaning roughly the same as "bloke") with "Guy Fawkes" and the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, which sounds like fun. We have our own Daniel Shays in U.S. history and a noble tradition of proletarian dissent which is often not appreciated in Europe.

I believe that the world famous independence and wit of the British working class can be found in Shakespeare's grave digger in Hamlet, or even earlier in literary history. We tend to forget that British aristocrats are not the only people living in those islands who have ancestors. From Shakespeare's grave digger to John Lennon and Julie Burchill (who is always welcome to have her way with me!), there is a direct line.

Terry is not averse to an occasional beer at a local pub, along with philosophical chats afterwards -- as we urinate on the sidewalk -- while standing shoulder-to-shoulder, as it were, awaiting the arrival of the vanguard of the revolution or the police, whoever gets there first. Come to think of it, Terry may be the vanguard of the revolution. So he claims anyway.

When the revolution reaches Notting Hill and the Upper West Side, it is Terry who will be leading it. And I may join him. Terry is also brilliant, insightful and adept as a critic and theorist. I have read several of his books, including his guide to literary theory, his treatise on aesthetics (possibly the best in English) and the recent After Theory. He is amazingly prolific, churning out dense volumes of theory as well as a novel, and a memoir during his lunch breaks.

Although Terry's familiarity with Continental theory is impressive, he is also a superb writer, who makes himself understood, even by ignorant students (like me), sometimes surprising the reader with an arresting image that fixes a philosophical insight in the mind. What I especially admire about Terry -- you can't refer to him as "Professor" or "Mr.," not after reading a lot of his work, because he becomes a friend -- is his refusal to abandon common sense in order to get tenure. My familiarity in speaking of him should be understood as not only a further indication of my American crudeness, but as an expression of genuine friendship for a Marxist thinker whose work I admire even in disagreement.

Terry is quite certain that there is a real world which contains such items as bathrooms and evil Americans. He is also certain that some things are right and others wrong. There is no lack of clarity and no bullshit with Terry. The reader must admit that, among philosophers and professors, these are rare qualities. Consider the following paragraph:

People who see truth as dogmatic, and so want no truck with it, are rather like people who call themselves immoralists because they believe that morality just means forbidding people to go to bed with each other. Such people are inverted puritans. Like the puritan, they equate morality with repression; to live a moral life is to have a terrible time. But whereas the puritan thinks that having a terrible time is an excellent thing, and remarkably character-building to boot, these people do not, and so reject morality altogether. Similarly, those who do not believe in truth are quite often inverted dogmatists. They reject an idea of truth that no reasonable person would defend in the first place.

I spent months saying exactly this to a fairly typical pack of Internet morons in a discussion group. These (mostly) liberal imbeciles were incapable of grasping this point and still are. Many are probably in the U.S. Congress or Senate, right Mr. Menendez?

That [ethical] truths of this kind are absolute is of no great moment. It simply means that if a statement is true, then the opposite of it can't be true at the same time, or true from another point of view. It can't be the case that the fish is both a bit off and not a bit off. It can't be fresh for you and putrid for me, even if putrid is the way I like it. This does not rule out the possibility of doubt or ambiguity. Maybe I am not sure whether the fish is off or not. But if I am not sure, it is absolutely true that I am not sure. I can't be sure and not sure at the same time. It can't be that I am sure from my point of view but not from yours. Maybe the fish was fine two hours ago and is now distinctly dubious. In that case, what was absolutely true two hours ago is no longer true now. And the fact that it is not true now is just as absolute.

As we say in America, here's "the bottom line":

If it is true that racism is an evil, then it is not just true for those who happen to be its victims. They are not just expressing how they feel; they are making a statement about how things are.

I concur, with the proviso that "how they feel" is also a question of fact as to which there is both truth and falsehood.

Now, as for Terry's anti-Americanism, we must remember that he is British. There is a long and honorable tradition of British eccentricity and anti-Americanism. This is because Americans are seen, by our British cousins, as similar to that embarassing member of the family who likes to keep an eye out for UFO attack vessels, votes for Conservatives in every election, and invariably displays urine stains on his trousers, refusing to read any books because he has figured everything out ("it's all the fault of the Rockerfellers!"), and who is always getting into fist fights. Unfortunately, since he is a family member, this often means that one must come to the rescue and prevent strange, shaven-headed hoodlums in a tavern from beating his brains out.

I appreciate the genuine concerns expressed by Terry about American foreign policy. Along with many of my fellow citizens, I share those concerns. I also share in a sense of outrage and anger at the people who have placed bombs in London, KILLING many civilians. I felt sad and pained at the murder of London commuters in July of this year, just as I did for the victims on 9/11. I feel the same frustration and sadness for people dying in Iraq and Lebanon now. Murder is not how we like to resolve philosophical and political disagreements in the English-speaking world. This is not because we are all "homosexual Communists." Violence is not a very efficient means of distinguishing better from worse philosophical theories or political opinions.

Brits and Americans often disagree about many things. Let's be honest about some of the things that we happen to agree on. We all know that there are people in this country who see Americans and Brits as roughly the same, except that they "talk funny." There are people in the U.S. (I am one of them) who feel a profound affection and gratitude for the residents of those islands -- for their culture, especially their gifts to humanity of political liberty and the greatest literature in the world, by far -- and we feel their pains as if they were our own.

We recognize the values that we share with the British people which, sadly, still makes us part of a small minority on the planet, a minority willing to recognize, at least when their politicians are forced to do so, something called "human rights and dignity," including freedom of speech and the inviolability of the choice to be different.

Any honest person will also admit that terrorists are a real threat in today's world and -- for whatever reasons -- see British and American citizens (and soon, others) -- as legitimate targets, even if we disagree with the policies of our governments, since (strangely enough) we tend to object to being murdered with our families.

If the choice comes down to those who threaten our families and want to kill people to prove that they are right about something, and those of us who welcome the opportunity to read a book by Terry Eagleton -- even if much of it will displease us or be critical of our government -- then, I suspect, the British people will always side with those dreadful Americans, who are willing to agree to disagree.

We ignorant Americans will certainly stand with Britain in a dangerous world, a world that always has a fresh supply of bigots and dictators, terrorists and maniacs, who are more than willing to murder children to get a point across. Killing 73 innocent people on an airplane is not O.K. because you hate Communists. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")

A lesson to be learned from history by "friend and foe alike" is that, peaceful protest or civil disobedience may persuade the British government that it is mistaken (Ghandi) and negotiations will usually win concessions from the U.S. or Britain, but you cannot threaten either the U.S. or U.K. -- or any nation with an ancient and proud history, like Israel -- into doing what you wish or abandoning principles fashioned over centuries. This includes China, Mr. Wieseltier. It ain't gonna happen, folks. And it shouldn't. I suspect that this is also Cuba's position as an independent nation. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

A final anecdote to give a sense of the British character -- and, perhaps, of an important quality shared with Americans -- concerns the first World Cup games that were played after the Second World War. The British played the Germans and lost a close game. The German team captain approached his British counterpart, who offered his hand to the winner. The German refused to shake that hand and said: "We have defeated you in your national game."

In perfect German, the British athlete responded: "Yes, sir. And last year, we defeated you in yours."

An apology followed from the German, who then offered his hand. The British player, graciously, accepted it. You can understand something important about the British people, inherited by their American cousins, from that one episode in sports history.

I know, I know ... friends say my sense of British people comes mostly from literature and films. I've met quite a few Brits in New York, not one was stupid or socially awkward. Maybe my perspective is slanted, but I like the people of those islands. To the extent that there is such a thing as a national character, then I think there is a tendency to self-deprecating irony, wit and understated intelligence -- also firmness of purpose -- in British people that I admire and find attractive. It's Shakespeare's long shadow and all that literature acquired from infancy that is, unfairly, a big part of British culture.

Brits should be required to share their great writers, because they have so many, with the rest of the world. Oh, they have, haven't they? (I'm ending my sentence with a question in a very British way.) Bin Laden is an asshole, isn't he? Why, yes ... he is. Any nation whose government includes a "Ministry of Funny Walks" has earned our loyalty.

Oh, and don't forget to see the new Harry Potter movie. I hear it's awesome. I'm going to the Sherlock Holmes movie with semi-Brit, Robert Downey, Jr.

"Nothingness is the worm at the heart of Being."

November 16, 2005 marks the one year anniversary of my start on a blogging career. As I examine the essays that I have written here and at "Philosopher's Quest," I am able to identify some large themes or issues that obviously interest me and that seem to resurface, often in altered form, from one post to the next.

My primary concerns are political, psychological, literary, philosophical, legal and personal or confessional. They are no doubt related, in a metaphysical sense, as I say, but I have not wished to decipher those connections and relationships.

I don't want to figure out exactly how the subjects that interest me "fit" together or what they reveal about me. That's a job for someone else, if anyone is interested. Ideally, someone capable of reading intelligently -- which leaves out Tuchin and Riccioli, along with their fellow conspirators.

Being systematic is not an important goal for me, not in my blogs, because such organic unity as my writings may possess is supplied by my subconscious anyway. I am what holds the essays together. And what I am, as a "freedom in the world," may be invoked or described, it may only be hinted at linguistically. My essence may be thought about, but not captured in thought.

What I mean by this should become clearer later in this essay.

I am certainly aware of dialectical tensions in these writings and perhaps in all of my work. I experience myself as a duality between cynicism and idealism, despair and hope. Think of Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death. It seems to me that these divisions are becoming evident in society too. I don't regret these tensions in my thinking and writing. They are healthy and productive tensions, I am sure, leading to my best insights.

I have been reading a conversation between Duncan Kennedy and Peter Gabel that is now more than twenty years-old, yet it also seems more timely than ever. At one point in that dialogue, Gabel mentions Sartre's phrase that "Nothingness is the worm at the heart of being." And he explains what this means:

The truth that everything is not what it is and is what it is not, in the realm of human reality for people. People are what they are in the mode of not being what they are, so that if you want to understand what it is to be a person, you have to be open to experience the negation that is at the very core of your own being, and of the being of everyone else. ...

At the highest philosophical level, I discern a set of fundamental concerns in my writings: 1) Personally, I struggle to cope with loss and yearning, emotional pain and anger, also uncertainty. 2) Socially, I am troubled by questions about the meaning and relevance of the American experiment today.

Public officials -- of both parties -- seem to have forgotten some of the most important values of the nation, a nation now associated with torture, crimes against humanity on the world stage, while within our borders, corruption has devoured the legal and political systems of some states. Everything I believe about the United States is subject to plausible challenge. Many political leaders fail to understand that this loss of values is a much greater challenge and crisis than any terrorist threat.

I need to believe that it is still possible to proclaim, in good faith, our national adherence to the principles of the Constitution. American Constitutional principles must not become only a "pious myth" (Plato, Leo Strauss), stated for the benefit of the "little" people -- like me, I guess -- on public occasions, as the U.S. government secretly engages in ruthless cruelties, ignoring the rights of citizens, so long as it can do so secretly and with impunity. The very notion of a national identity is subject to doubt in today's world:

... belief in the state is a flight from the immediate alienation of concrete existence into a split-off sphere of people's minds in which they imagine themselves to be part of an imaginary political community -- "citizens of the United States of America." And it's this collective projection and internalization of an imaginary political authority that is the basis of the legitimation of hierarchy. It's the mass-psychological foundation of democratic consent.

If this is true, if national community is a myth, then the United States and its Constitution, even law as a system of valid neutral principles and rules, no longer really exists, if it ever did. I refuse to accept that possibility. I know that for me, anyway, such nihilism about political community is unlivable. I refuse to accept the impossibility of community.

I remember Norman Mailer's comment to an interviewer that we are still angry at injustice, but that our anger is now frustrated by the complexity of the realities that we face. It is doubtful that any institution or faction, or even any set of revolutionaries, can claim absolute virtue or innocence. There are no good guys or gals any more. The court systems of places like New Jersey, for example, seem paralyzed by the poison of money and influence. Politics is adjudication, as the judiciary views -- with seeming indifference -- the horrors that take place before their very eyes and does nothing. The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the detentions at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, while the rest of the world shakes its head. The U.S. Senate passes legislation denying full due process guarantees to these same detainees. The U.S. comes to symbolize, for the rest of the world, everything we are said to be struggling against in this "war on terror."

The sadness that I feel because of these developments is almost unbearable at times.

Both personally and socially, this is a dismal season. I cling to hope in a naive and even childlike way, because I have to, the alternative is a kind of death. The best I can manage is to adopt a tone of cynical idealism. I do my philosophical "Ali-Shuffle," holding on to a "combative spirituality" (Cornel West). I use humor and imagination, sharpening my wits at the politicians' expense, because -- contrary to a recent philosophy forum discussion elsewhere on the Internet -- there can be no "phenomenology of suffering." Most of all, I continue to hope and believe that America will hold on to the values of the Constitution and never lose its identity in a crisis.

Suffering cannot be thought. Our pain cannot be packaged and commodified. Pain cannot be turned into a cultural product -- so that it becomes a cool pose that goes, say, with a particular outfit from the GAP. Such "distancing" tactics fail to ease the pain, even falsifying it. Suffering can only be chosen, then expressed. I miss her -- someone I love -- every second, of every day. I fear for the loss of America's soul with the same regularity. These emotions hurt, boy do they hurt. Yet they are my emotions, they are constitutive of who I am. Thomas Merton says:

When suffering comes to put the question: "Who are you?" we must be able to answer distinctly, and give our own name. By that I mean we must express the very depths of what we are, what we have desired to be, what we have become. All these things are sifted out of us by pain, and they are too often found to be in contradiction with one another. But if we have lived [as free human beings] our name and our work and our personality will fit the pattern stamped in our souls by the sacramental character that we wear.

Suffering demands a "consecration" because it can lead us to the singular moral splendor and peace of true identity, of achieving ourselves. So I wear my pain with jauntiness and pride. I put it on whenever I come before all of you, in my prose. It is not fashionable or pretty. My pain is a transparent garment that allows you to see all of my psychological scars, my burns and deformations, but I hope that (by doing this) I may help others to accept their own pain, while continuing to hope.

Richard and I.

I don't wish to reveal too many secrets of the male brotherhood, but since Kyle Smith in his recent novel Love Monkey, has informed the world that most men, at some point, have a conversation with an important part of their anatomy, I suppose there is no longer any violation of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) involved in my admission that I too have engaged in an occasional philosophical dialogue with my penis.

I am afraid that our most recent chat ended badly, however, so that we were not on speaking terms for a while. I fully expect that we will always resolve our differences, since neither of us is the same without the other.

I admit that my penis is much better educated than I am, having completed the famous Philosophy, Politics and Economics program -- known as PPE, no pun intended -- at Oxford University. He is British, for some reason, sounding exactly like Richard Burton in his prime. In fact, my penis (who insists that I call him "Richard" and will not answer to the obvious abbreviation), claims that he is in his prime right now. If only I could say the same.

It is certainly true that he has never let me down. Perhaps this has to do with his British sense of duty. Thank goodness he is not German. After all, there can be too much of a good thing. Or maybe not?

At the most embarassing moments, Richard is apt to recite -- in a full, rich and theatrical baritone -- Shakespeare's Sonnets or monologues, Tennyson's poetry, or parts of great political speeches having to do with conquest. Fortunately, I am the only one who can hear him. We have different literary tastes. I enjoy a good mystery, whereas Richard likes Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Erica Jong. His favorite biography is My Life, by Frank Harris.

For several weeks now he has been driving me crazy about "pursuing an advantage" with the blond who lives on the sixth floor in my building. Her name is Marilyn. We share the elevator at times and have been very friendly on occasion. Marilyn had a few drinks some days ago, came home late and placed her hand on my shoulder in the hall, as she laughed at something that I said.

Suddenly, Richard's voice boomed in my ear something about "England and St. George" from Henry V. He was furious with me, claiming that I do not take him out often enough. He insisted that, if I had been just a little sharper, we might have prevailed in our skirmish with the blond in the elevator.

The next morning, in the shower, he insisted on singing "La Donna e Mobile" (full voice), sustaining the high C at the end, as an indication of his readiness for battle, I guess. And every time a woman approached my office, I could hear his insinuating, silken intonation of -- "My dear lady, how wonderful to see you again ..."

He is really insufferable, single-minded, impossible to deter from his quests. Anyway, he suggested a brilliant approach to our blond neighbor that I planned to "spring on her," as it were, this Friday. Yesterday, when I came home, she was smiling at me when I took the recycling materials down to the basement. She apologized because she was only in a short, white bathrobe and those furry slippers, with a kind of rabbit on them or something. Her make up was perfect, however, and her perfume was great. Strangely, her casualness seemed almost studied.

Marilyn invited me over to her place to meet her pet Hamster, named "Fifi." I had never met a Hamster wearing a little pink scarf. She (Marilyn, not the hamster) asked whether I wished to stay for dinner. I accepted. One thing led to another, and the evening was -- shall we say -- a complete "success." We both decided to stay home the next day, spending the day with some old movies and inventing all sorts of ways of keeping each other amused.

Richard has been uncharacteristically polite and pleasant ever since. He has purchased a new cravat and a homburg hat, since he is taking a new friend -- she is Marilyn's pet -- to the Opera. He has been singing to himself all day. Marilyn tells me that she has similar troubles with her little friend, who loves Richard, and has acquired a Beret for their outing.

I guess that we're just typical New York pet owners. How banal.