Des mots qui ne vont pas tres bien ensemble

Faith, hope, charity (love); liberty, equality, fraternity.  Blah, blah, blah.  We've heard these formulas so often that we simply assume a kind of complementarity within each triad, viz.:  faith reinforces hope; hope reinforces love, etc.; all elements work together happily in order to achieve some ideal.

But, if we examine each formula carefully, we see that, in fact, it just ain't so.  Au contraire.  Far from being cozy collaborators in a common enterprise, the elements are, in fact, frequently as hostile to each other as were, well, Gilbert and Sullivan.

Let's start with St. Paul's trio.  Remember the old Sunday School hymn?  "Ya gotta have faith, hope and charity/ That's the way to live successfully/ How do I know?/ The Bible tells me so."  Trouble is, faith and hope seem to be frequently at odds--and too much of either of them seems to threaten love.

Faith means "giving it all to Jesus"--trusting that everything that "is" is for the best, in spite of the cruelty, violence and insanity of what God has apparently ordained.  This kind of submission is, in fact, a form of hopelessness--"it's God's will" is merely fatalism disguised as piety.  So the faithful are often not very hopeful (except with regard to anticipated rewards in the afterlife).

Hope means "confidence that things can be fixed, worked out, improved."  It's a belief in progress and free will.  Hopeful people generally don't have much need for faith in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah to reward them in an afterlife.  Things are OK right now--and there's nothing to prevent matters from getting even better.

So the hopers don't have much need for faith, and the faithers don't have very much hope.

Some historical examples?  Since I'm a French major, let's take two Frenchies:  Calvin and Robespierre. Calvin had great faith, but not much hope in humankind.  His omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God had predestined everything from the beginning of time.  Not much likelihood that human effort could "fix" things.

So Calvin had very little love for anyone.  Why bother?  God takes care of that stuff.  All we have to do is burn the heretics. It's God's will.

Robespierre, on the other hand, had great "hope" for humankind.  Human beings could perfect themselves, without any need for God.  They could become "incorruptible," like Robespierre himself.  Needless to say, he didn't worry too much about love.  If you're going to fix things, you might have to terrorize some folks and chop off a few heads.  But it's for everyone's good.

Let's summarize:  strong faith = little hope = no love; strong hope = little faith = no love.

And yet, St. Paul says, "but the greatest of these is love."  Is he contradicting himself?  Does he really mean that we should do everything we can to GET BEYOND faith and hope--so that, once we've dumped those two contradictory and inhuman emotions, we can finally achieve some kind of truly meaningful state:  love?

Or is love some kind of "synthesis" of faith and hope--not too much of either, or an equilibrium between the two?

Well, how about "liberty, equality, fraternity"?  Just as faith and hope seem mutually contradictory, so too do liberty and equality.  The more freedom humans have, the less likely they are to be equal.  My right-wing friends (yes, I have some) agitate vociferously in favor of more freedom (to do what?  to get ahead at the expense of others?).  My left-wing friends (I have lots of those) assert that unrestrained freedom simply fosters inequality and injustice (so limits must be imposed on individual conduct).

Examples?  Let's take Americans this time.  How about the tea partiers vs. moveon.org.  Tea-party tenets:  if individuals can do whatever they like, without restraint; if no one is his brother's keeper; if social Darwinism should prevail (even though most tea-partiers detest Darwin), then we will have a lot of liberty, but little justice.

If, on the other hand, the moveon folks get their way, laws will be implemented whereby all citizens will receive similar protections and benefits from society--a grave restriction of the freedom of tea partiers who want to "git" whatever they want to "git" from life, and to hell with the whiners and complainers.

In neither case, does fraternity or fellow-feeling matter very much.  The tea partiers despise the whiners and the moveon folks have absolutely no sense of brotherhood with the exploitative tea-partiers.  Hate your enemy, as cable TV news preaches.

Summary:  liberty = limited equality = no fraternity; equality = limited liberty = no fraternity.  Left-wingers and right-wingers alike simply don't much like other people (except, of course, members of their immediate "tribe").

So once again, I ask:  is FRATERNITY, like LOVE, a kind of super-emotion?  A more meaningful state than either freedom or equality?  Is it what we should be striving to achieve BEYOND those other, less humane sentiments?

Ah, what a conundrum!  I can't really figure it all out, but I DO know that, in the long run, I agree with St. Paul--that love is greater than faith or hope.  And I also feel that fraternity--much neglected by the French and the Americans alike--is a way to get beyond obsessions with principles of freedom and justice.

Can love and fraternity prevail? First, perhaps, we have to ditch faith, hope, liberty and equality.

Not there, or, As imperceptibly as grief, our summer slipped away.

Everyone knows Gertrude Stein's mot about Oakland:  "There is no there there."  She had been living in Paris and perhaps felt that there WAS some "there" in Paris.  I love Paris, but it no longer seems like home to me.  Ditto for Los Angeles.  And ditto for my current so-called home--Winona, MN.  Old age is beginning to teach me that, in the end (or, at least, in the almost end), there isn't very much "there" anywhere.

We keep looking for thereness throughout our lives and I think, when we are in our early productive years, we often feel that we have arrived at such a place or state. What is thereness?  A sense of belonging, a sense of being embraced by familiar and unchanging structures, a comfortable stability (both physical and psychological) where everything just "is" and where nothing will ever be anything else.

There.

But there always slips away into not there.  When we say that something is "neither here nor there," we suggest that this particular topic is, in fact, irrelevant, meaningless, beside the point.

I guess that's what I mean when I say that, in my old age, I can't find much "there" in anything.  I am neither here nor there.  Every yearned-for certitude seems to elude me; every destination fails to satisfy--take a picture, buy a souvenir, but then move on to the next "there."

I'm conflicted, of course.  I'd like to feel that I'm a body at rest--in a genuine "there."  But I guess the ultimate "there" is the cemetery--where one is truly at rest.  And, all things considered, at the present time, I'd rather be in Oakland.

No there there?  Maybe that's a good thing.

Dark and Stormy Nights

Recently, a former student reminded me of a wonderfully funny contest sponsored by the English department at San Jose State.  It's the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest which, according to its website "challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."


When I was teaching at Mater Dei High School, oh so long ago (1976-84), the faculty had a similar contest each year.  I dug around in my files and found a bunch of the entries.  They were hilarious.  Following are two which I wrote (I wrote several more, but these two are probably the best??? of my efforts.)  I'd love to share some of the material written by my former colleagues--exquisite descriptions of Louis XVI clocks, noisome vaults beneath turbid domes, death by guacamole--but who knows? maybe some of this stuff has already been published!  Don't want to break any copyright laws.  OK, here goes. 


I won a "cheap and tacky prize" with this one (apologies to former students who admired my high-mindedness):


Slowly he inserted three fingers, paused briefly to caress the dusky, firmly-rounded surface which presented itself so submissively to his touch, and then, mustering all his considerable force, thrust his entire manhood forward toward the long-contemplated goal, muttering almost incoherently as he reached the moment of ultimate release, "God damn, I really need to make this spare!"

This one is a bit long, but it gave me the chance to introduce one of my favorite "imaginary friends" to the world--Axel:


The bird feeder was empty again, a vaguely ominous and increasingly frequent occurrence which the befuddled and fretful Graziella found not a little vexatious in the midst of this, the most debilitating crisis she had traversed since that dolorous day two years before in New York when the elastic in her pantyhose had snapped apart like an over-fried onion ring just as she was leaving the Bronx Zoo Aviary on the cashmere-sheathed arm of her beloved Axel--a charming but, as it turned out, neurasthenic pre-Raphaelite who in mortal anguish at the sheer unseemliness of the sagging, rapidly-fraying nylon ensnaring his companion's hitherto unhobbled ankles, had spun about and fled precipitously toward the parakeet pavilion, abandoning her to the pitiless mockery of the milling crowd and inducing in her an emotional trauma from which she had not yet quite recovered (despite the therapeutic ornithology prescribed by Dr. Toucan) and which, she now rather biliously perceived, almost certainly lay at the root of her present insatiable cravings for breadcrumbs, beef tallow and cracked sunflower seeds.


Check out SJSU's winners at www.bulwer-lytton.com

Testosterone Circuses

It's said that the Roman upper classes controlled the masses by keeping the plebes well-supplied with bread and circuses.  The idea must have been sound, since it seems to work in 21st Century America too.  Give us a bunch of publicly-funded stadiums and a whole lot of football.  


Of course, it's politicians who are greasing our palms with stadium "pork," whereas it's the beer and insurance companies who are buying our favor with the Super Bowl.  Maybe we can lump all the donors together under the umbrella term used in Brave New World--the "Alphas."


Alphas need to stay on top--and they are convinced that we Betas and Deltas and Gammas "need" this as well. So, if my reasoning is sound, here's something that both the lobbyists and the politicos can agree on:  bread (chicken wings and beer) and circuses (televised bowl games) are good for America.  Super Bowl Sunday is a sacrament of fattening, dulling food and rapid, but largely harmless, testosterone release.


Ok, Ok.  I know that this Marxist interpretation is pretty far-fetched.  I don't really believe that the Super Bowl is some monstrous conspiracy perpetrated by the Evil Capitalist Establishment.  (Too bad Glenn Beck is such a demented right-winger; if he were a leftie, he could really make a touchdown with my little conceit.)


So I know, intellectually, that football is not actually a plot against the masses.  "Plots" require premeditation and careful thought.  Clearly, no such thinking ever went into the creation of this inane sport.  Instead, football, I fear, just growed, from the grass (or Astroturf) roots of our evolutionary make-up.  Human beings, especially males, have a built-in need to kill others.  It's as simple as that.  And the human brain has evolved to appreciate "creative" ways of killing.  Hence, football:  a creative enterprise (game) that resembles killing, but substitutes making points for taking scalps.



Winners get the cheerleaders.


As you can guess, I loathe (and fear) this game.  Fat lot of good that does me.  I grew up in a football-obsessed family--a father who was a football coach, a brother who was the star high-school quarterback, a sister who, even today (at age 62) wears Viking jerseys and flies Golden Gopher flags from the window of her Rav-4.


Why?  Why do I WANT to believe that football is a plot and that I am a victim?  I suppose it's a matter of self-defense and self-esteem.  For instance:  I can write blogs like this one suggesting to readers (if there are any) that those of us who despise football are, actually, a kind of more highly-evolved race--a group of the Elect--Ubermenschen, sorta--people whose descendants will inherit our felicitously altered genes...


Of course, I don't have any children... Fail!

Freedom Burkas

Yesterday, I went shopping in La Crosse (a necessary trip for pretentious people seeking to avoid Target or Wal-Mart, the only stores in Winona).  Browsing around in Macy's, I found myself briefly in one of the many women's sections.  I think I was in a kind of no-woman's land between lingerie and long dresses (they may have been nightgowns).  Wow:  the tyranny of fashion.  So much padded, elastic, stringy uncomfortable-looking stuff in the lingerie.  But the dresses seemed cool.

I have never been very fond of trousers.  Someone once told me that it was the ancient Gauls who introduced the custom of wearing pants to the Roman Empire.  That's another black mark for the French, since pants are simply NOT as comfortable as tunics or kilts or robes.  Can you even get a wedgie if you're wearing a robe? (Wikipedia, that fount of wisdom, says that the ancient Greeks--whose men wore skirts--thought that trouser-wearing Persian men were effeminate.)

Well, anyway, I think dresses are just fine--for both men and women.  In fact, the mall in La Crosse is frequented by a rather hirsute dude who always wears a kilt.  Nobody points or anything.  (I do wonder a bit about the guy, though:  he seems to have no other occupation.  Can skirt-wearing be someone's profession?)  Well, anyway, to pursue my thought...  I like the idea of men wearing dresses.

Only I would never do it, except as a gag (in a French Camp skit, for instance).  The maternity dress in the photo was, for many years, a staple costume in such skits.  I had great fun playing Catherine de Medicis attired in this atrocity.  I think a lot of men feel as I do.  They love the idea of wearing a dress, but, of course, they simply CAN'T--unless there's some socially-sanctioned occasion justifying the seeming perversion (a skit, a Halloween party, or--admittedly a special case--a Gay Pride parade).

Women, on the other hand, feel free to wear almost anything they might see on the shelves of the Men's Department--though beneath it all, I fear, they still don their stringy, clingy, elasticized and padded undies.

My modest proposal is that we stop all this fashion foolishness.  Wouldn't the burka work for everybody?  A lot of looseness for men--no more need to buy clothing three sizes too big in order to give your "junk" room to breathe.  And no more padding and squeezing for women--since shape would be irrelevant.

You see, once again the French have got it wrong.  Instead of banning burkas for women, they should make them obligatory for EVERYBODY.  They could call them "freedom burkas" --or something like that.

If any of the world's governments take up my suggestion and pass such a law, I do have one request though:  please could we have our burkas in at least one or two additional colors?  Black is classy, I know--but it really shows cat hair.

Deer and the Ten Commandments

Old folks have a lot of time to sit staring out their windows, a la Emily Dickinson.  When I do that--provided the slant of light isn't too oppressive--I often find myself watching deer.  There's a little woods behind our house--full of weeds, scrubby trees and, yes, deer.  Our demented neighbors think that these creatures are "cute" and, in consequence, scatter corn and birdseed about (see lower right of photo) in order to entice the varmints into our shared back yard.  Yes, I said "varmints."  In truth, Bambi and his ilk, despite those pleading wet eyes, are voracious predators who, in summer, devour my tomatoes, petunias, hydrangeas and geraniums--and, in winter, munch away mercilessly at my once lovely Japanese ornamental crab tree.  I can't help thinking that they're hateful and villainous enemies of the human race.  They also have neither fear nor shame.  I once tried to frighten off an entire herd by standing on my upper deck banging a two-quart metal pot with a wooden spoon.  I broke the spoon.  The deer didn't budge.

This brings me to the Ten Commandments, and specifically, to number whatever-it-is (depends on whether you're using the Catholic or Protestant version):  "Thou shalt not kill."  Now I realize that when God inscribed that rule on the Sinai Stone, he didn't have deer in mind. In fact, he probably meant only "Thou shalt not kill any pious Jews who haven't broken any of my other rules (enumerated rather thoroughly in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy--for starters)."  But over time, the admonition has come to be applied to a broader swath of Creation.

But just whom or what am I forbidden to kill now in 2010 of the Common Era?  There seems to be some confusion.  I mean, could I borrow my nephew's rifle and shoot that pesky deer in the photo?  Well, the answer to this question, at least, seems obvious:  at the present time in Earth's history, almost all the Authorized Interpreters of God's will--including Pat Robertson, Benedict XVI and the Ayatollah Khamenei--would agree that deerslaying is permitted, though perhaps only seasonally.

But the guidelines for other life-forms are not so clear.  Convicted criminals?  Wartime enemies?  First trimester fetuses?  Carrots (a life-form, after all)?  And PETA would probably like us to extend the Commandment's protection to, at the very least, the "higher" mammals.  (How does PETA stand on rats and mice?)

Still inconclusive.  Here's a final thought.  Maybe "Thou shalt not kill" means merely:  let's protect ourselves by creating a taboo against destroying anything "like us."  So:  is that deer "like me"?  Well, like me, it seems to have a genuine liking for tomatoes, petunias, hydrangeas, geraniums and ornamental Japanese crab trees.  Dang, dang, dang.  Fail again.

Colonic Profiling

Has everybody been getting a lot of e-mails advertising "colonics" "high colonics" "colon irrigation" and "colon therapy"?  Or am I  being singled out because someone has profiled me and placed my name on a widely-circulated "full of shit" list?

Just for fun, I read a couple of the ads.  Apparently my colon is the source of most of my old age troubles--including, but not limited to arthritis, depression and near-sightedness.  According to one article, Dr. Kellogg, inventor of Kellogg Corn Flakes and other crunchy treats, proved the efficacy of colonics by making millions of dollars persuading people that cleansing their nether regions could be the pleasant byproduct of a tasty breakfast.

Well, corn flakes are one thing.  But hoses?

Mostly, I'm curious about the bodily circuitry involved.  I mean, how, exactly, is my colon connected to my cerebrum (where, presumably, depression resides and from which it must be flushed).  In other words, when my  therapist hoses out my entrails, how does the water reach my brain?  And then, even more importantly, how does it drain out?

Various Internet sources claim that both Princess Diana and Mae West were enthusiastic devotees of colon hydrotherapy.  Miss West asserted that her frequent treatments "kept her young."  It's hard to know exactly what such treatments did for Diana.

I freely admit that I am, more often than not, full of shit.  And I DO want to stay young and avoid depression. So should old geezers like me stop buying Prozac and Oil of Olay and instead put our money into our colons?

(OK.  I couldn't resist writing that.  I won't do it again.)