Month: November 2013

Rubén Martínez reviews Richard Rodriguez’s new book Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography and studies its place in the author’s work on race, religion and assimilation in America:

Darling offers variations on all these themes, at the same time that it takes a leap onto the post-9/11 global stage. It is also a book about the desert. To an extent about place, its more profound preoccupation is the metaphysical and mystical desert, the cradle of the spiritual trinity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “My faith in a desert God makes me kin to the Jew and to the Muslim,” he writes at the outset.

But to prepare himself and his readers for the journey to Jerusalem, he first makes an inventory of the Orientalist imaginaries of his mid-20th century youth. In Sacramento’s Alhambra Theatre he sees Otto Preminger’s rendition of Palestine (Exodus, 1960) through Paul Newman’s blues: “I became a Zionist at the Alhambra Theatre.” He reads Sir Richard Burton (not the actor but the British explorer), who goes native to smuggle himself into Mecca. In his adolescence there are more substantive encounters. He apprehends the momentous transformation of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, is moved by Malcolm X’s journey from Harlem to Mecca. …

Nothing can quite prepare you for what is to come, even if you’re familiar with Richard’s work. Since Days of Obligation and especially with Brown, he began to develop a lyrical yet radically digressive style that combines a syntactical elegance with narrative and referential leaps not just between chapters but within them as well. One second we are with the Catholic popes of the mid-20th century, a couple of paragraphs later Mark Twain makes it into the conversation, and in short order so do Fellini, Pasolini, and Bergman. From Jerusalem we head to Las Vegas; both deserts of course, but the initial wipe of the frame induces vertigo before he massages the material into thematic coherence. Or not. Sometimes the digression is just a digression, and sometimes a murky erudition remains just that.

Richard and I had a public conversation about his book a couple of weeks ago. It’s a dense, difficult read at times … but it rewards patience. Sometimes, he expresses something as simply and magnificently as the miraculous Pope Francis. To wit:

My brother is no less a good man for not believing in God; and I am no better a man because I believe. It is simply that religion gives me a sense – no, not a sense, a reason – why everyone matters.

The congregation does not believe one thing; we believe a multitude of hazy, crazy things. Some among us are smart; some serene; some feeble, poor, practical guilt-ridden; some are lazy; some arrogant, rich, pious, prurient, bitter, injured, sad. We gather in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow. We all matter. No one can matter unless all matter. We call that matter God and we are drawn to it every Sunday.

In an interview with Harper‘s, Richard describes the relationship between his religion and his writing:

I agree with Thomas Aquinas who describes the act of writing as a kind of prayer. Certainly as a person who writes every day it does seem to me that the energy, the inspiration, comes from outside of myself. Yesterday I struggled with this paragraph and nothing came. Today, the words come freely and almost seem to write themselves . . . so, like other writers, I come up with metaphors like grace and the muse and inspiration to explain how it seems that something outside my own efforts had produced the line I could not write by myself.

I don’t mean to become such a— I’ve never liked the word “piety.” And I don’t even like it when people say about me that I am a good man. I just, it makes me nervous — there’s a kind of domestication about such praise. For myself, I prefer the raggedness of my life of faith. I like to consider Andy Warhol a saint, one of the great saints of my lifetime. And I look for God in places like, you know, gay bars, where maybe no one else expects to find Him, in the dark.

Jonathan S. Tobin is troubled by the recent Pew survey showing how secular American Jews have become:

Increasingly, secular Jews have come to see any effort to define group identity in ways that include some but exclude others as distasteful and even hateful. This helps explain the most shocking of the Pew findings: More than a third of those Jews polled said belief in Jesus—the one point that all Jews had once been able to agree was something that put you outside the Jewish tent—should not be deemed a disqualifier. How can this be? Simple: It is just an extreme manifestation of the logic governing the inclusion doctrine.

The very idea that Jewish identity involves drawing lines—lines as seemingly insignificant as who may be a voting member of a synagogue and who may receive honors during services—is itself the problem for many Jews. The non-observant American Jewish mind-set is increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of drawing any boundaries around Jewish identity. And that mind-set has been ironically justified by the organized Jewish community’s breathless pursuit of those [intermarried Jews] who have already chosen to place themselves outside the lines.

Dreher draws a lesson for his fellow Christians:

While we certainly have incomparably more cultural cushion, as Tobin notes, our people are being assimilated too by secularism, via religious indifferentism. Fifty years ago, there was a lot more cultural pressure to affiliate with a church. You felt that you should, that it was the right thing to do. That’s long gone. In a free society in which there is no serious penalty, social or otherwise, for not being Christian, you have to give people a reason to want to be a Christian. As we’ve observed in this space, no church has found the solution to waning Christianity (see Pew’s study on the “Rise Of The Nones”), though the Jewish experience seems to confirm the idea that a religion that does not offer something meaningfully distinctive from the mainstream will not endure. If you fling open the windows of the Church to the world as it is today, you run the real risk of the winds blowing your house down.

Or bringing in the fresh air that makes it inhabitable. It’s a difficult line to tread, but Pope Francis seems to be doing just fine with it.

In 2006, students at Xavier High School in New York City wrote to Kurt Vonnegut as part of an assignment from their English teacher, Ms. Lockwood. The literary legend wrote back:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it:

Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

In an interview with Christianity Today, Rowan Williams, who recently wrote a book about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, ponders the enduring popularity of the scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist. One reason he offers? Lewis was “very good at depicting something about joy”:

If you look at an extraordinary episode in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy finds herself reading a story in a magical book, when she puts the book down she can’t remember the details of the story. She just knows that it’s the best thing she’s ever read, the most enriching and beautiful thing she’s ever encountered. As she’s talking to Aslan afterward she says, “Will you tell me that story again?” Aslan says, “One day I shall tell it to you forever.” It’s that kind of moment where you realize that Lewis has got hold of something that very few writers do manage to crystallize, a sense of absolute immersion in the richness of the moment.

It comes across in The Screwtape Letters, which still read very well, when the one, old devil says to the younger devil that God’s great secret is that he’s a pleasure lover at heart. At the heart of it is joy. That’s Lewis all over.

Williams describes Lewis’s emphasis on joy as anything but naive:

A good deal of Lewis’s life, of course, was marked by enormous stress and great suffering. It’s not as if he had an unchallenged life. Some of the emotional force of his writing does come from his being a motherless child, looking back to that sort of magical world before the suffering broke in—and we all have a little bit of that in us.

But what he does with it then, instead of making it a cozy, backward-looking thing, he unites it to all of these great moral challenges, the challenge of facing up to yourself, the challenge of going on being faithful in prosaic ways day by day. It’s really only by doing the next thing—being faithful in small particulars—that you come to this joy. It’s not magic; it’s not nostalgia. It’s a very fine balance that he deals with remarkably.

So when he comes to write about his wife’s death in A Grief Observed, which is, for many people, the most extraordinary and challenging of all his books, it’s as if you know anything he says about joy or hope is hard won. It’s really something that’s come to him not by glib formulations or easy answers. He really has fought for it.

Previous Dish on C.S. Lewis here and here.

Reviewing Gary Borjesson’s Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters, Diana Schaub suggests it’s possible. Reaching back to ancient philosophy, she points to one reason why – the “spiritedness of dogs”:

This spiritedness, which the Greeks called thumos, is the key to their higher capacities. According to Plato, spiritedness figures in our souls as well, situated between appetite and reason. In the well-ordered human soul, spiritedness allies itself with reason in order to govern desire (as when you muster your willpower to keep to your wise New Year’s resolutions). Aristotle says that spiritedness “is the capacity of soul by which we feel affection,” and also anger, for spiritedness is quick to defend what it loves against attack or injustice. Spiritedness can lift the self out of its narrow confines, expanding the boundaries of “one’s own.”

Thumotic individuals will risk their self-preservation for the sake of larger goods:

one’s property or territory, one’s family, one’s fellows, even intangibles like dignity and honor that have become integral to one’s self-conception. Spiritedness is precisely the dog-like part of the soul: loving, loyal, and fiercely protective. Because spiritedness is only fully itself when “it stands in a twofold relation, above appetite and below reason,” Borjesson concludes that wolves and higher primates are at best “proto-spirited.” Of the brute creation, only dogs — by virtue of their alliance with us — can experience the spiritedness that listens to reason and rises above the promptings of pleasure and pain. Dogs become ethical beings through their capacity to pay attention, to care about praise and blame, and to obey. While not themselves rational, they are willing to follow our lead. Man and dog together instantiate the tripartite soul.

Recent Dish on friendship here, here, and here.