2. After the concert, we went to a birthday party for a friend, a mezzo-soprano named Maria, and during a lull, she and I talked about the artists I had seen. It seems to me that singing opera is also a synesthetic experience. There is the libretto (the text of the story) and the musical score and there is the drama which the singers bring to life. Maria gave my reflection another turn of the screw by suggesting operas in which parts portray artists acting within operas. There is Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter). Tosca’s lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is a painter. And Berlioz based an opera on the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini.

3. I drank too much wine, then went home and fell asleep. The next day, around noon, I noticed that my hand was missing. When I looked away, it was there, and when I stared at it directly, it disappeared. This could mean only one thing: I was getting a classic migraine. Soon, I saw squiggling lights in front of my eyes. Typically, this stage of the migraine lasts only five or ten minutes. The curious thing about the squiggling lines is that they respond to sound. If someone shouts or slams a door, the lights fly up in sudden peaks before they resume their squiggling patterns.

Synesthesia happens when input from one sense stimulates another sense. The classic example, often cited in the literature, is composer Olivier Messiaen, who saw colours when he heard music. I experience an associated phenomenon, known officially as ordinal linguistic personification—the perception of gender and personality in ordinal numbers and letters. I wrote about it here. Sometimes there’s more than that. Sometimes powerful images stimulate sounds—the opposite of what Messiaen reported. One of the most striking instances of this happened to me while driving through Alberta last fall. We came upon a decapitated buck. It looked like a headless buck was rising out of the asphalt. As we approached, a roar mounted in my head. By the time we reached it, the roar was a wall of white noise as loud as Niagara Falls.

I have a hypothesis. I think all people are synesthetes. At the very least, all people have synesthetic experiences. I think most people don’t notice because they desensitize themselves to this experience. This seems like a natural response. Too much sensory input would be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I believe most of our modes of expression have synesthetic roots.

Here are some illustrations, beginning close to home, then moving outward to modes of expression that are less familiar (to me).

My Blog. Even though my blog concerns itself mostly with the power of words, I adhere to a simple rule: each post must include something of visual interest. If it’s a book review, then an image of the cover. If it’s a story, then a photo of something thematically related to the story. I’m not unique in this. Most online content strives to integrate different media and appeal to more than one sense.

Poetry. Perhaps the oldest form of human expression, poetry attends not only to the content of the words, but also to their musicality, their rhythm and timbre. What’s more, we agree (perhaps by some tacit contract) that one of the measures of a poem’s merit is the extent to which its words stimulate images in our minds. Hence the word imagination. Good poetry is imaginative poetry.

Spectacle. We love spectacle. We love to assault our senses with sights and sounds. We get it in our living rooms with Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Glee, Smash. We get it in big tents when we go to Cirque du Soleil, and on big screens when we watch Titanic in Imax 3D. Add to it the smell of popcorn and the tack of our shoes on the floor and our experience is complete. We go to Glastonbury and Burning Man and, if we’re rich, we try to get a shot into outer space.

Aldous Huxley suggested the reason we do these things is that they give us an intimation of a transcendent reality. I’m more inclined to think they awaken in us the memory of synesthetic experience which we knew in infancy but have suppressed because survival requires it.

I don’t know if my speculations are true. Sometimes it’s nice to retreat to a dark and silent place, and then, to re-enter the world as if I’m being born to light and sound.

The sun rises like a bomb and roars overhead until, come nightfall, it whispers again.

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Well, the doctor said, bread for one. Anything with wheat in it. No pasta. No pizza. No beer.

No beer? But I’m Canadian. I can’t live without beer. I mean, there’s Molsons and Labatts, but there’s all those craft breweries too. There’s Upper Canada Lager, Sleeman’s, Creemore, Mill Street. What the hell am I gonna do? I almost cried.

The doctor shrugged. He had no idea. His only suggestion was to stick to hard liquor. Never in a million years would I have expected a doctor to recommend that I drink Scotch. But there it was. I should have asked for it on a prescription pad. I should have billed my Laphraoig to my health plan.

I’m not an egregious drinker. Sometimes—like now for instance—I like to sit in front of my computer monitor and plunk away at my keyboard while enjoying a can of Nickel Brook Gluten Free Beer brewed just down the road in Burlington. It loosens my fingers. It relaxes my brain.

Do you think I exaggerate the effects of a good drink? Does it sound like I’m trying to rationalize a bad habit? Lately I’ve noticed a number of online snippets that seem to confirm my view: a drink helps things along.

For example, I noticed a tweet from a writer I follow on twitter. On April 22^nd, he said: “I enjoy poetry most when I’m drunk.” Admittedly, he’s talking about the appreciation of poetry rather than its creation. But that’s a fine distinction.

A week later, another person on twitter posted this twitpic. It’s an image of a P.P.S. from a letter by Ernest Hemingway which reads as follows:

P.P.S. Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Let me know if my books make any money and I will come to Moscow and we will find somebody that drinks and drink my royalties up to end the mechanical oppression.

Hemingway, of course, was an egregious drinker. To be fair, he doesn’t appear to say that you should drink while writing, but should drink all around your writing.

It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan, who sometimes drank himself into oblivion with Hemingway when the two were working together in Toronto. Dorothy Parker is famous for saying: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” And since we’ve mentioned Hemingway, it seems only fair we mention his ex, the inimitable Martha Gellhorn. In his introduction to her Travels With Myself And Another, Bill Buford calls her a “boozy reporter of wars” and says that she tutored him “on matters of the heart, and on drinking (you could never drink enough).” She had a cottage in north Wales “where she lived alone, drank booze, read mystery novels, and wrote.” Despite her questionable habits, she lived to the ripe age of eighty-nine.

Not everyone thinks alcohol is conducive to good writing. Take, for example, Katha Pollitt’s eulogy of Christopher Hitchens in The Nation. She invites readers to remove their rose-coloured glasses and take a more honest look at the man:

His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying … Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.

But a recent study from the University of Illinois and published in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition, suggests that alcohol may improve creative problem solving. In a study, subjects who had two drinks performed better than people who had nothing to drink. As one would expect, subjects who were “sozzled” couldn’t perform at all. The conclusion: a moderate amount of alcohol may enhance certain tasks involving creative thinking.

It may be that the disinhibiting effect of alcohol encourages what Edward de Bono would describe as lateral thinking. This is precisely the kind of thinking that is the stock-in-trade of a good writer.

The problem, of course, is that alcohol is an addictive substance and a CNS depressant. There may be a strong correlation between Hemingway’s alcohol consumption, his good writing, and the fact that he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out.

As I stated above, I’m not an egregious drinker; I’m not even a modest drinker, so I can’t say from personal experience whether there is a connection between alcohol and creative output. But I do have an analogous experience—severe depression. Years ago, I ended up in a heated debate with my then psychiatrist. I had been in rough shape. I remember sitting in his office a few weeks after discharge from a hospital and he said something like: “Your writing is fine and all that, but trust me, your writing would be so much better if you could achieve some measure of happiness in your life.” I didn’t believe him. Even now, I think he was dead wrong.

Although severe depression (and its treatments, like meds and ECTs) can cause cognitive impairment, the experience has a disinhibiting effect that is a lot like being drunk. Your judgment is impaired. You’re overcome by feelings of dysphoria. You can hardly tell what’s real anymore. Being suicidal can liberate your writing. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you and your ego have pretty much parted company. You feel you have nothing to lose. You no longer care what other people think of you. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you’re willing to take other kinds of risks too. Applied to writing, you’re willing to take the kinds of risks that make your words crackle with a detached honesty.

Although I disagreed with him, my psychiatrist was right in the ultimate sense. Your writing isn’t very good if you’re dead. Hemingway’s output was severely curtailed by his suicide, as it was for Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Yukio Mishima, Arthur Koestler, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, and countless others.

Is there a way writers can enjoy the disinhibiting effect of alcohol or the detachment of severe depression without the adverse consequences?

One possibility is play.

Treat writing as play.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the best writing comes from people who never grow up. It’s not simply that play offers a fantasy world that generates good stories; but also that it happens in an unselfconscious state of mind. When we play, we don’t care what other people think of us. Play lets us take the kinds of risks that make our writing better.

How do we, as grown-ups, recover the world of play? I have no answer for that question. Maybe it starts by cracking open a fresh bottle …

Related posts:

1. Writer’s Digest posts advice from Jerry Jenkins

Yet there are hints of violence lurking within the collection. There is the 1991 massacre at Vukovar which is only a two hour drive from Daruvar where Novakovich grew up. His sister is hit by shrapnel in the same year. But Novakovich is determined to leave political divisions and resentments out of his reflections. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Two Croatias” when he confronts both extremes of Croatian lore—its flirtations with fascism and its gorgeous tourist destinations. With characteristic succinctness, he concludes: ” It is a complex country deserving of no reductionism.” His answer, it seems, is silence. Or perhaps more accurately: his answer is hidden in the details of ordinary people getting on with their lives.

Novakovich’s writing exemplifies the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. The world can get on very well without nationalism. As for patriotism, I suspect that, like trust, it must be earned. The U.S. has no more entitlement to a citizen’s patriotism than any other country. And that country’s transformation following 9/11 pretty much strips Western critics of any right to judge conditions in Croatia. So the determining question for a patriot seems to be: does a country’s conditions allow ordinary people to get on with their lives.

For Novakovich, that means returning to Croatia to visit his ailing mother and, in the end, to bury her. It means finding cello teachers for his son. It means getting a decent night’s sleep when you have sleep apnea. It means finding a job, which for Novakovich, means going abroad to teach writing courses. And in a piece reminiscent of Geoff Dyer, it means visiting a jazz club in New York City. Patriotism is emphatically not about finding a place to realize grandiose ambitions or to become a very important person.

While we’re mentioning Geoff Dyer … Novakovich compares favourably with one of his peers, Pico Iyer. I say this for two reasons. First is his meditation upon his father (or absence of a father, since his father died when he was a boy). He observes that when he gets together with others whose fathers died when they were young, it feels like children playing without supervision. While Iyer’s father did not die when he was young, Iyer most definitely played without supervision. His latest book, The Man Within My Head, is devoted entirely to his quest for a father surrogate, which he finds in Graham Greene. For Novakovich, his father’s absence is like the superego gone AWOL. He needs a substitute and muses that perhaps that is God’s job. He doesn’t resolve the question of a substitute, although he does conclude that writing is his patrimony, which isn’t quite the same thing as a substitute. Maybe the substitute is country, patria.

The second reason for the comparison to Iyer has to do with The Global Soul. Like Iyer, Novakovich feels at ease in different environments. Borders are porous. He travels a lot. When I first thought of the comparison, I looked for evidence to confirm my intuition, but it wasn’t apparent. Iyer writes about McAirports and McHotels, generic convention centres, a nowhereness that pervades contemporary global culture. Novakovich seems to write against that grain. His world is grittier, more concerned with local details and personal encounters. And yet, as I proceed through the essays, I note a recurring transaction that draws attention away from whatever concern is at hand. It starts innocuously enough with a visit to Croatia and the worry that guards at a checkpoint might be Serbs. It continues in another piece with an absurd conversation amongst self important guards who are stuck in the habits of the old Soviet regime. It culminates in an airport encounter at Moscow when his son’s cello (purchased in America) is confiscated because it might be a Russian artifact. Finally, Novakovich makes it explicit. In an essay called “Vukovar” (which is not really about the massacre but about passing checkpoints, bureaucracy, and police), he writes:

I don’t prosper around police. In a way I believe that Police is one nation, bigger than Poland. How many cops are there in the world? Well, their jobs are similar, and they are interchangeable.

Iyer’s The Global Soul was published a year before 9/11. Standing on the other side of that great divide, Novakovich has added to Iyer’s list. Like airports and hotels, policing has become a generic commodity in our global culture.

One would think that frequent encounters with police at checkpoints and border patrols might wear a man down. But Novakovich carries it off with gentle humour and a keen eye for the absurd. And now he has settled in Montreal. His sense of the absurd will not atrophy there.

Shop for Shopping For A Better Country

Read an interview in The Rumpus

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3. Review: How They Were Found, by Matt Bell

I met the world’s ugliest woman while walking with my camera along a path through environmentally sensitive lands. She was there on a commemorative plaque beside her husband. The plaque said they were the original owners of the land and the woman had donated it to an environmental organization after her husband’s death. The husband was a fierce-looking gent with full beard that reminded me of King Edward VII. As for the wife, she looked like she howled at the moon and licked herself clean each night after a lope through the forest. It would be an understatement to say that she was hirsute. To put it delicately: she did not photograph well.

I took a photo of the plaque and wanted to do a speculative piece, imagining their life together. I wondered if maybe the wife was a man in drag. Maybe they were pioneers of the gay marriage, one dressing up in business suits to pose as a man’s man while the other put on Victorian dresses and presented as a proper lady. But I held off on writing the piece.

Google can be a bitch. The last time I wrote something about somebody long dead, the deceased’s great-great-great-grand-nephew found it and posted a longish comment taking me to task for it. Fortunately, he was good-humoured about the whole thing and could see well enough that I was winking and nodding as I wrote. But what if I wrote a speculative post about this couple and it turned out that they had children? (Yeah, I know, gay couples can have children. But we’re talking about a couple more than a hundred years ago.) What if some great-granddaughter sprung from the loins of the world’s ugliest woman hunted me down and appeared on my doorstep with a meat cleaver raised above her head?

I did a google search and discovered that the Edwardian husband and his hairy wife did, indeed, have children and so it is entirely possible that, if I wrote a speculative piece about a man/woman prancing in Victorian dress, one of countless indignant descendants would descend upon me and publicly give me proper hell. Although one can’t libel the dead, the possibility that I might be contacted by enraged descendants has caused me to self-censor. I won’t be posting the photo. I won’t be identifying them by name. And I won’t be writing any story about gay marriage pioneers in the old west.

The tendency to self-censor infects book reviewing too. The FTC has some rule that if you review stuff on your blog and the stuff you review has been given to you for free, then you need to say so. According to the FTC, getting an ARC for free from the publisher will somehow bias your opinion. That’s bullshit, of course. What biases your opinion is the fear that you’ll wake up one night with an author pressing the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun to your temple because he was insulted by your review of his latest limerick collection.

To avoid the shotgun scenario, there is a strong incentive for reviewers to say nothing but nice things. It’s the kindergarten rule of reviewing: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. It isn’t all that helpful to readers, since they have no indication what books to avoid, but it does ensure that reviewers keep all their fingers and other important body parts. When I first started doing book reviews, I made the mistake of writing exactly what I thought of an acutely bad self-published novel. Sometimes I can’t help myself. And bad writing makes for entertaining reviewing. When the author read my review, he was apoplectic. He emailed photos of lions fucking. He wrote a note suggesting that I deserved to be raped in the same manner as the beasts on the receiving end of these leonine fuckfests. I wasn’t worried. I knew it was an idle threat. He lived on the east coast where they don’t have easy access to lions.

I don’t really care about FTC requirements since I’m a Canadian writing from what I consider to be a Canadian perspective (whatever that is) and am not subject to American laws. But since many of the books I review are from American publishers, I think it’s important to understand what the FTC is on about. I think they lump books together with electronics and cars and household appliances. And yes, if Apple sent me an iPad to review, I would be sorely tempted to gush. But a book? Does a book have enough intrinsic value that it could influence my opinion? What about an eARC—a digital copy of a book that isn’t even in its final form? If I tried to sell it on the open market, what price could I get for it? To be honest, its value is probably less than zero. It’s a liability. Reading it takes valuable time from doing other things. And if it’s putrid writing, then it takes even more valuable time because I have to find inventive ways to clear the toxins from my head.

What the FTC rules don’t capture in my experience is the fact that after I post a book review, the author and/or publisher typically contacts me on the same day to acknowledge the review. More often than not, reviewing is a form of relationship building. That kind of immediacy, through google and facebook and twitter, is unprecedented. And that is a far more powerful influence on the way I present my opinion than any advance copy could be.

For one thing, I don’t offer ratings. That’s a hollow system anyways. As Amazon’s reviewing system demonstrates, the ratings business is easily gamed to improve sales. For another thing, I avoid simplistic evaluations—oh, this is good, that is bad. Instead, I’d rather draw the writing into conversation. What is it saying? How does it say what it is saying? Is it in conversation with other writing? How does it fit within larger narratives? If writing can support this kind of reflection, then the FTC’s (infantile) concern for bias becomes irrelevant.

Afterthought: the genre of book probably also influences the manner of review. Non-fiction is easier to review objectively because I critique the ideas and worry less about ego (both mine and the author’s). But because I review mostly literary fiction and poetry, I usually find the process murkier. My sense is that literary writers invest more of their selves in their words and, as a result, make themselves more vulnerable when they submit those words to the opinion of others. Maybe.

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So why those two lines?

If 99.71% of the lines in Measured Extravagance are deliberate and careful, then I assume that the other 0.29% are as well. It’s a puzzle. Bear with me while I try to figure it out.

The first clue to solving the puzzle is the first poem, “Jump Shots with William Shakespeare.” We imagine Duthie playing a game of one-on-one with the bard himself, a man for whom inverted constructions no big deal were. “The bounce and clunk of the balls/supply a rhythm—DAH-dah, DAH-dah-dah,/dah, dah-DAH, dah-DAH-dah-dah-DAH—” Then “he lobs a beautiful iamb my way”. It’s as if she’s having it out with the traditional ways of doing things, but can never quite get free of it. Not surprising, then, that we encounter the odd sonnet, sestina and villanelle along the way.

The second clue is the title, Measured Extravagance, which (unlike most collections) is not borrowed from the title of a poem within the collection, but, instead, offers a description of what we find inside. The title appears to be an oxymoron. How can something measured be extravagant? We can ask that question of poetry itself. Taking it to the bard as we shoot hoops, we might ask how it’s possible to seize something as tight and as structured as a sonnet and stuff it full to bursting. The answer … well, the whole book is an answer to that question.

We might just as easily ask the same question of life, with its well-defined form and obvious boundaries. How can we live extravagantly within our measured years? In “As She’s Dying”, we meet a mother intent on not living while she was alive: “she/who regarded my writing as a squandering/of time and ovaries.” And in its companion poem, “A Stack of Cards”, we imagine a quiet moment after the funeral, going through the mother’s things, “this mourning of a life you wouldn’t have lived/even if you’d had the heart for it.” Both poems are 13 lines, not rondeaus, sort of deformed sonnets if you like, a bit clipped like the mother they contemplate.

A life lived within the measure of its confines is no life at all, but a life lived with extravagance becomes more than the sum of its years. So we have, in “Extravagance”, another mother, like the clipped mother we already met, but she surprises us:

And yet, on the Fourth of July,
the flashiest, wickedest rockets
arrive in a wrinkled paper bag:

as they soar, whistle, and burn,
flinging sparks across the night,
Mrs. Dianna stands in the yard,
her face alight. Such a feast.

Just as fresh insight can burst from the traditional forms of poetry, so life can burst its limits with moments of wonder and delight that suspend us in time.

Another way life defies its constraints is with circularity, the cycle of the seasons and of crops and of food that comes from the crops. There’s a lot of food in Measured Extravagance. In “Deep and Crisp and Even”, with its obvious allusion to the Christmas carol, the imagery of seasons and food intertwine. We have snow in Nashville which usually falls as “a dusting or a glaze/like you’d find on a coffeecake”. In “The Sharpshooter Assembles a Relish Tray”, we meet another (possibly) clipped woman, a sharpshooter, who lays out food on a relish tray. “She scoops a spare olive into her mouth, savoring its slide across her tongue: salt. flesh. seed.” We feel an extravagance in the sensuality of the act, and of the words. It seems at odds with the outward image of a woman whose life is defined by control. “At Persephone’s Café” sets the title’s mythical allusion against the modern world’s capacity to defy the changing seasons. At our grocery stores, we can buy produce at any time of year, living with an extravagance that only royalty could enjoy in earlier ages:

The seeds of a hundred winters taste
like the yield of a thousand summers—
so piercing, so radiant that fumbling for the words
to tell how lovingly it stings my tongue
is near to nailing those seeds to a wall.

“Proportions” continues the cyclical meditation with the paradoxical image of a compost heap: “a mélange of garbage/and triumphant blooms”.

We may find a third clue in the poetry of science. A survey of Duthie’s output reveals a fondness for speculative poetry. Some of that appears in this collection (note the Erlenmeyer flask on the cover). She wonders what Werner Heisenberg said to Niels Bohr in 1941. Given that we’re talking about Heisenberg, the answer is: it’s uncertain (naturally). The uncertainty principle, like the measured extravagance, has about it a whiff of oxymoron. Isn’t the whole point of a principle to help make things more certain? Science is supposed to work within and help us describe the structure of our reality. The rules aren’t supposed to have exceptions, especially not when we’re talking about laws of science.

Circling back to the inversions: traces of archaic expression feel like the breach of a natural law. All poets born in the 20^th century are supposed to cast aside formal structures and rhyming schemes. Aren’t they? But then I return to “Proportions” which opens with a grown-up and a child thinning seedlings in a garden and tossing them onto a compost. Pricks me, the image does. It’s as if Duthie has planted in a composted soil and seedlings from an earlier season have sprouted unexpectedly in between her more deliberate efforts. I end up encountering these two puzzling lines as a little extravagance in her measured rows.

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Peg Duthie’s web site

Peg Duthie’s blog

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Guest blog post about “Proportions”

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When I learned to read, my universe expanded and shrank all at once. My universe expanded because literacy gave me access to worlds of information, and to new ways of thinking and being. My universe shrank because my dad’s peculiar Ouija board method taught me that there is no It, no ghosts and spirit-beings. It was me and my dad spending time together and playing a game.

In her second book, Amen, Gretta Vosper documents a similar expansion and contraction. In the 21^st century, with instantaneous access to information and the dwindling authority of those who keep that information, ordinary people with a spiritual sense of things, what Vosper calls “adherents on the street”, can develop a spiritual literacy as never before. However, as with my Ouija board literacy, this new spiritual literacy shrinks one universe as it reveals another. It has been all too easy for spiritual people to focus upon the losses and then to despair. If there is no It, if there is no God as a being separate from myself who lives out there, then why bother with religion of any sort? Vosper’s Amen continues her effort to shift our focus to the spiritual universe which is expanding and to the opportunities such an expansion affords.

Before I go further, I must offer a couple caveats:

1. Bigger Than A Book

It is dangerous for a writer to review a friend’s book. There is the obvious concern that if I get too contentious, I might alienate a friend. But my concern has more to do with the word “book”. The book arises from an ongoing exploration. Books must have an end. But when the book concerns an ongoing exploration, the end seems artificial—as does the act of reviewing the book. It might be better to think of Amen as a travelogue. Rather than a review, think of what I write here as comments dropped by a fellow traveller as he tries to follow the same sign posts.

2. Audience

I do not belong to Vosper’s audience. She is quite clear about who this book is for. She writes as the pastor of a North American middle-class suburban congregation of a mainline Protestant denomination. She tells a particular narrative of the liberal church, one in which there is a gap nearly three generations wide between academic theologians who teach in seminaries and the average person sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning. Modern scholarship has unseated our traditional sources of authority—Biblical and institutional—while ordinary worshippers continue to think about and practice their faith as if they lived a hundred years ago. The church has committed a betrayal and Vosper lays the blame at the feet of clergy who should have the guts to communicate what they’ve learned at seminary. Vosper feels duty-bound to undertake that task. As a result, her book is conversational in tone. Although she is careful to cite sources, Amen is not an academic work. It is addressed to ordinary people, and most especially to those who feel that sense of betrayal. However, I have a theological education and so must take care not to use that as an excuse to distance myself from the need her work addresses. I invite other readers and reviewers who do not belong to Vosper’s audience to take similar care. Complaining that it isn’t academic enough or theological enough is a bit like buying tickets to Wicked and complaining about the lead singer’s coloratura. Amen deserves to be read on its own terms.

And so on to my comments:

1. Theological non-realism

This is about as technical as Vosper gets. She identifies herself as a theological non-realist i.e. somebody who does not believe in a god named God who exists out there in the great blue yonder as a separate entity from us. This was the subject matter of her previous book, With Or Without God. Amen answers an obvious question arising from the previous book: if there is no god named God out there, then who are we addressing when we pray? Although Amen could be considered a sequel, it stands on its own. Vosper offers enough background that we don’t have to return to her previous book to understand what she’s talking about.

2. The Straw Man

Vosper answers a criticism that has been leveled at her elsewhere and continues to haunt her: that much of her work is directed at a straw man. For example, every Tuesday morning, she participates in the radio show, The Culture War, squaring off against Charles McVety, a straw man if ever there was one. His pompous Christian fundamentalism is a parody of religion and it produces a straw man god convenient for all occasions. Vosper devotes a good deal of energy keeping fundamental nonsense at bay, and continues to do so in Amen. And yet, say the critics, it would be more fruitful for her to seek out the best expressions of realist theology. It would improve the quality of the conversation. Vosper responds by surveying a number of liberal theologians on their conceptions of god (aka God) and analyzing the language they use. She finds that, while they offer expansive notions of god, once the metaphors and poetry are stripped away, they “find themselves trussed by the language.” What remains is still a theistic account. God is external to the self and, for that reason, indistinguishable from the straw god of the fundamentalist crackpots. It is time for liberal theologians to set aside the fancy language and to be honest (both with themselves and with those whom they serve) about what they mean when they speak of god.

3. An Untrussed Language

Vosper wants to rescue prayer from religion. At the outset of Amen, she reveals how she conceptualizes of prayer as it is traditionally practiced. There is an essential component to prayer, something beneficial, like the sap inside a tree. But there are detrimental elements as well and these need to be stripped from the practice of prayer. Vosper’s is a universalizing narrative: “The model we create of [prayer] or put in its place could unite us—all of us—because it would be devoid of any particular doctrine, dogma, ritual, or formula. It would exclude no one. It would move us beyond the beliefs that divide into vital, dynamic community.” Her proposal for prayer is a logical extension of her proposal for religious language generally. As with prayer, so with metaphor. Underneath everything we say and write, there is a bare unmediated (essential) language which allows us to say exactly what we mean. Metaphor and other linguistic tropes are accidental features which arise from the particularity of the context in which they are spoken. Strip them away and it is possible to speak of universal things.

Intentionally or otherwise, Vosper adopts a literalist theory of language that has powerful proponents, most notably Noam Chomsky. However, as linguistic anthropologist, Marcel Danesi, points out, it is a debatable account of how words convey meaning. But Vosper isn’t having any of it. Words must yield no ambiguity. They must be deployed in ways that cause no confusion. And putting her money where her mouth is, she goes so far as to define good and evil. She takes her cue from Sam Harris when she observes that “[l]ike prayer, philosophical exercises and scientific experiments that do not move toward or positively affect the experience of well-being by sentient life are just so much academic masturbation, and we have little time for that. We need to develop solid definitions of good and solid definitions of evil, and then bring each of our decisions down squarely upon one or the other … ” I leave you to read the book yourself for the definitions. Clear demarcations. Absolutist terms. The sheer ballsiness of the endeavor leaves my jaw on the floor.

Vosper states: “I want nothing less than a language that honours the reality of the quest for security and doesn’t cover it up with theological constructs that soothe our anxieties but do not call us to the greatness of our own humanity. … Language that reinforces a system of belief that can drive someone back down to his knees, remove his dignity, hold him to a standard he can never meet, and silence his objection to the way things are with the promise of something no one has the right to promise unless she also has the power to bring it about is repugnant. It is especially so if we argue it’s fine for us [liberals] because we’ve revisioned it, reclaimed it, rebeautified it. Face it: if the language you use, whether in prayer, in song, or in simple conversation, is language that forces even one person to his knees, it is wrong.”

And yet it may be the case that the language to which Vosper aspires, along with its precise definitions, is impossible. As proponents of Conceptual Metaphor Theory like Danesi suggest, human brains may not be able to think without the kind of language Vosper condemns. It remains a debatable point, but Vosper should take care not to paint herself into a corner.

A related manoeuvre is to look to the “intention behind the ritual.” This manoeuvre is familiar to lawyers in matters of statutory interpretation. When a statute is ambiguous, one way to figure out what the words really mean is to ask: what was the intention of the legislators at the time they passed the law? Critics view this approach as nonsensical. It forces judges to reify a legislative mind, which is as fictitious as a reified god. Vosper envisions a future without the word “prayer” where its core intention persists, but stripped of its detrimental elements. Legal theorists have never been able to make the manoeuvre work; I’d be surprised if spiritual writers can manage it either.

4. Positivism

Although Vosper does not use the word positivism, nevertheless it is a fair description of how she encounters reality. She relies on her senses and science to position herself in the world she inhabits, and she relies on reason and logic to learn from the data they provide. A thing is a thing and we have a methodology (science) to verify a thing’s existence. If somebody posits a thing and the methodology cannot verify it’s existence, that is because it does not exist. Since no methodology can verify a supernatural deity’s existence, it is reasonable to suppose that no such supernatural deity exists.

Vosper treats prayer as a phenomenon which we can study with our positivist methodology. We can use science to determine its efficacy (it has none) and its benefits (it has many: psychological, social and—yes—spiritual). There is a certain something about prayer which is worth keeping in our daily routine.

The positivist perspective is of a piece with theological non-realism, a literalist approach to meaning, and the universal application of values.  All assume that we can encounter reality in a pared-down essential state, providing us with an experience which is the same across cultures. One might say that the source of all evil in our world is some variation of a single theme: attempts to interfere with our access to that pared-down essential state.

There are many Biblical stories that reinforce this idea—for example the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1-9). But it would be risky to use such a story. Somebody might misinterpret it and then they wouldn’t understand the point I’m trying to make. Best not to tell the story. Instead, I should simply say what I mean.

5. Empact

After surveying prayer in a variety of (mostly Protestant) traditions, and after considering its various functions (ACTS—adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication) within those traditions, Vosper takes us beyond the traditions to a place where prayer is no longer tied to its supernatural moorings. Prayer becomes a matter of personal and communal responsibility. We no longer pray that a reified being somewhere out there help us with our problems. Instead, we use prayer to promote personal well-being and, to the extent that we pray in community, to promote well-being in those around us. But for Vosper the whole point of prayer, as with spiritual living in general, is its ethical dimension. We choose to live as spiritual people, and to engage in spiritual practices like prayer, because we are motivated to make the world a better place. Vosper calls this empact: “the ability to empathically impact others.”

6. Global Wisdom

In at least one respect, Gretta Vosper makes me uneasy. She believes in the potential for a global community that overcomes conflict by scraping away the particularity of its differences and revealing underneath a core of shared values. It is a sandpaper theology that aims to smooth belief to a common sheen. Could this be merely a recasting of the Christian colonialism which sought to evangelize the world? We are already experiencing a kind of cultural erasure at the hands of a global economic ideology. Why add spirituality (even if it is a non-theistic spirituality) to the globalizing pot?

I suppose it depends upon one’s perception of religion’s role in various conflicts around the world. One perception is to suppose that religion is either a cause of conflict or at least throws gasoline on the fire. But another perception is to suppose that religious conflict is a symptom of, or an act of resistance to, colonizing forces. In the latter view, religion is an extension of local culture and a marker of local identity. It is more than simply a set of propositions about the nature of reality and belief in the presence (or absence) of supernatural entities. A sandpaper theology would rid the world of fine-grained distinctions but, as a consequence, might do violence to local culture.

My personal sense of things is to take the opposite tack. Why not an approach to religious difference that embraces it? Instead of demanding of others a moratorium on words like “god” and “prayer”, why not demand of ourselves a moratorium of the impulse to take offense at the particularity of local usages? Yes, I agree with Vosper that the virulent proselytism of fundamentalist believers needs to be curtailed, but her answer to that problem runs the risk of being more a mirror than a solution. Perhaps the problem here is that, at the very end of Amen, the dream of a global wisdom pushes the book’s application beyond its original audience. Perhaps the book serves best to the extent that it addresses its own distinctive local culture.

Related posts:

1. With Or Without God, by Gretta Vosper
2. Review: Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz
3. Review: August Farewell, by David G. Hallman

Set for release on April 10^th from Dzanc Books, My Only Wife is a sneaky book. It guiles the reader with clean prose and apparent simplicity into believing that it’s a novel about the narrator’s only wife. It may be about many things – about absence, emptiness, and loss – but it really isn’t about the narrator’s only wife. It’s more like an empty glass from the cupboard, an abstraction, a form, and it invites us to fill it with particulars from our own experience.

My Only Wife is the account, long after the fact, of a relationship between two nameless people, the narrator and the wife. Now, she is gone, and the narrator tries obsessively to give substance to a memory. If you want to be technical about it, the novel is a tragedy. Even from the outset, we know that the wife will leave. We also know that the narrator’s efforts will fail. Words just don’t work that way. Words are inherently tragic: the more we use them, the more they reinforce our separateness, one from another.

Even by the second page, we get a sense of what Jac Jemc is doing. We learn that the wife is clumsy. We watch her scatter the contents of her purse when she bumps into another girl. From that chance encounter, she connects with the girl in what becomes an impromptu interview: “She would ask questions that might have seemed otherwise uncomfortable coming from anyone else, but in the initial whirlwind that seemed to constitute the large majority of my wife, the girl would offer up her secrets with open palms, and, like that, my wife would be gone.” There we have it: the wife is a whirlwind; we are witnesses to her constitution; she bears other people’s secrets; and she will be gone. In a sense, the remainder of the novel is an elaboration of this one sentence.

The wife does not write out the stories. She keeps them recorded on cassettes which she locks in a closet. She “felt those tales needed to be spoken. She liked being a medium. She thought the stories became fraught with error when she retold them …” The narrator has an insight about his wife’s story-collecting: “These stories were not about anyone other than my wife. That’s what I discovered. I found that when you got to the bottom of them it was my wife that remained the essence, that I could scrape from the sides of the crucible. The rest was filler” Extrapolating from this, we might suppose that this is not at all a story of a wife, but of a narrator. It is “fraught with error” which is to say that it’s written with words, and we should grind away the words to get at an essence of the narrator. Extrapolating further, we might suppose that our reading engages us in precisely the same way. What we read of the narrator is really the story of ourselves in our own moments of emptiness and loss.

We find other instances of this tension between horses and horseness. When the wife learns that her engagement ring has come from a generic mall jewelry store, she insists that her future nameless spouse “return the emptiness of that ring” in favour of a ring from an antique store, “something old and—imperfect” where things “are unapologetically broken and incomplete”. She says: “Give me wood and fiber any day.” When the narrator’s father hears of this, he doesn’t understand: “A ring is a ring.” This engages us in a paradox. The “emptiness” of a generic ring is precisely what makes story-telling possible. It may be impossible to describe a ring with enough specificity, with enough “wood and fiber,” that it can become unique enough to rise from the page and assume an existence in its own right. Instead, its uniqueness comes from the emptiness which summons the reader to fill it.

But Jac Jemc does not shy from paradox. The episode of the wedding ring opens with a brilliant line: “I loved that we could avoid it without talking about it.” As if to suggest that most people avoid things by talking about them. We scratch our heads and wonder: what exactly are words for anyways? Maybe we have to accept the fact that the more we talk about things (constitute them with our words), the more they recede from us.

Writing on htmlgiant, Christopher Higgs has noted a stutter at the end of the novel, a duplicate word that appears to be an error. Higgs has come out swinging in defense of the error, hoping with all his might that it is intentional. The novel seems better for the error.

I note a similar error and make a similar plea. I have already quoted the beginning of a broken sentence. Here it is in full:  “My wife said, ‘Things are unapologetically broken and incomplete in antique stories.’” Antique stories? In the context, we expect the wife to talk about stores. I would like to think this is intentional – part of the brokenness, the wood and fiber. I would like to think this is a crack in the empty glass or crucible or whatever, and it leaks a little of what My Only Wife is really about even though the story claims to be about something else. A sneaky book indeed!

Buy the Book

Jac Jemc’s web site

Follow Jac Jemc on twitter

An interview at htmlgiant

Related posts:

1. Review: How They Were Found, by Matt Bell
2. Review: Shopping for A Better Country, by Josip Novakovich
3. Review: The Certainty Dream, by Kate Hall

Jonathan Franzen

At the sound of the bell, Franzen is out of his corner and makes a quick right jab to the ebook. Franzen delivers a talk at an author’s festival in Columbia and makes remarks at a press conference, and all these comments get conflated (and maybe taken out of context) in news articles posted in The Guardian the The Telegraph. He says that words in ebooks are ephemeral. People crave the permanence of ink on paper. It gives them comfort and a sense of continuity. He says that ebooks are damaging to democracy and freedom. They promote a culture of ephemera when what we need most right now are enduring values. Somehow, he ties this all to capitalism and says the world feels out of control.

The crowd goes wild. Some people throw popcorn from the stands and call him a pussy Luddite for failing to embrace new things. Some call him a hypocrite, since his novels have sold well as ebooks. The guy at the beer concession points out that Franzen is a “literary” writer whose concern for permanence—ascending to the pantheon of the classical canon—betrays either narcissism or a fear of death, or both. Joe, who’s driven down to the cage match from Timmins, says that in the winter, when he’s snowed in and can’t get to the nearest bookstore, he still has his internet connection and can download the latest from his favourite authors. “Fuck him,” he says. “I like my ebooks.”

Others rush to Franzen’s defence. Ewan Morrison says the epublishing business is just another bubble and soon will burst. More people have made money selling ebooks on how to make money selling ebooks than have actually made money selling ebooks. Because the ease of publishing an ebook has removed the barriers to entry, the ebook market is now glutted with piffle. It’s damaging to democracy, not so much because of its impermanence, as because it is the clanging of a noisy gong that drowns out meaningful conversation.

Ursula Franklin

As a pacifist, Franklin doesn’t come out of her corner at all. The referee stops the fight and explains to her that the notion of a cage match is metaphorical and there will be no real fighting. Once she’s satisfied that a fight with Franzen won’t actually hurt him, she enters the ring with fists of fury. She lands her first blow with the observation that Franzen’s is a gendered view of technology. You’re such a man! she says. Technology is not a thing you hold in your hand. It’s a practice. Technology is not a discrete object, like an ereader or an iPhone. It’s a system. Discrete objects are embedded in contexts. Objects and contexts influence the development of each other in ways that are unpredictable and such development may be blind to the human beings who are the “beneficiaries” of the technology.

Franklin lands a body blow with her distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. Holistic technologies are those in which a single person controls every stage of production. Artisans and crafts people often use holistic technologies to manufacture and sell objects, like the pottery and paintings one might see at a craft show. Prescriptive technologies restrict control through division of labour or by removing human labour from the process altogether. The assembly line at an auto plant is a paradigm of prescriptive technology. Individual workers have no view of the entire process and little autonomy within that segment of the process where they work. Franklin observes that “[i]n political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance.”

The way in which we deploy technology is determined by public policy and shared values. Although there is no outcome preordained in any of this, we have come overwhelmingly to favour prescriptive technologies. This is an understandable consequence of the fact that our policy and value choices arise from within the context of capitalism. Prescriptive technologies produce more efficient outcomes. Never mind that such outcomes may also be dehumanizing and unjust. Capitalism removes such considerations from our public debate. In fact, we have so internalized the dominance of prescriptive technologies (this is the way it ought to be done) that we tend to ridicule holistic technologies as backward or hokey.

Although Franklin was writing before the advent of social media and ebooks, her discussion of technology provides a useful framework for considering Franzen’s comments about ebooks. I have an impression of Franzen as a holistic technician railing against the incursion of prescriptive technologies into the domain of his craft. But ink and paper novel-writing has never been an entirely holistic technology. While novelists have traditionally asserted a huge measure of control over the production of their work, they still must relinquish some control to editors, designers, lawyers, marketers, booksellers, reviewers, etc. At the same time, the ebook is not entirely a prescriptive technology. In fact, it is easier now than ever before to engage book production in a holistic fashion. From the first scratches on a pad of paper to processing a credit card payment, I can do it all on my own web site. But such a practice is anomalous. Overwhelmingly, we have chosen to treat the ebook as a prescriptive technology.

We see the consequence of this choice—and it is a choice—in the way large organizations (with access to capital) have deployed the ebook as a design for compliance. Amazon has embedded the ebook in a vertically integrated organization that aims to freeze out every worker in the traditional publishing process except the writer. Even the writer is in jeopardy as titles appear for sale that may have been cobbled together by algorithms. Apple offers authors a take-it-or-leave-it EULA that makes it questionable whether the author owns their own work. Even small players like Smashwords have automated the production process. And DRM prevents people from sharing what they’re read, limits library lending, and provides a solution to that most subversive of anti-capitalist organizations—the used book store.

What would Franklin say to Franzen’s concerns about freedom and democracy? I’m inclined to think that identifying the ebook as the source of the problem is a bit like taking a symptom for the disease. In fact, one could argue the opposite: it is ink and paper books that threaten freedom and democracy, for, as Franklin notes, there is a strong relationship between written text and orthodoxy and fundamentalism. If ebooks are a problem, it is only because they can be manipulated in ways that deliberately curtail freedoms and enforce compliance with capitalist structures. So, for example, while there is nothing necessarily ephemeral about the text of ebooks, it becomes ephemeral if our ability to access it is restricted. What happens when planned obsolescence makes an ereader useless by deprecating its operating system? In this scenario, technology is manipulated to force compliance with the demands of an endless consumption on which our capitalist structures depend.

That is not an ebook problem. That is a problem with unregulated economic systems. Perhaps that is the proper target of Franzen’s criticisms.

Related posts:

1. Cage Match: Spong vs. his (credible) detractors
2. Cage Match – Catholic Mystic vs. Protestant Liberal
3. The ebook piracy experiment

The Global Soul makes for unsettling reading not so much for what is in the book as for what might have been in the book had its publication been delayed for five years. Published in 2000, it provides us with a snapshot of an emerging global culture just before 9/11. I read it with an archaeologist’s relish for a simpler age when people were more trusting and less anxious, when people could pass through airports without having to submit to body scans and pat downs. In 2000, there were cell phones and email and internet technology, but no hint yet of the inaptly named social media. There was no flaming, no comment trolls, none of that ceaseless and polarizing chitter-chatter that has turned much of our public interactions into a barrage of ad hominem attacks.

As that rare creature, the native Torontonian, I find The Global Soul particularly poignant because Iyer’s longest, and perhaps warmest, chapter is an extended meditation on multiculturalism and the way it plays out in Toronto. I think it’s a universal response that when a non-native non-resident tries to understand life in your home town, you prick up your ears. You want to know how you are perceived elsewhere in the world. Iyer’s concern here is to ask whether multiculturalism is real or just some made-up anti-myth which we apply to ourselves to keep the newcomers happy while we natives surreptitiously impose our culture upon them. Iyer wants desperately to believe in the “city as anthology”. He observes: “Toronto … seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland …”

Iyer may be viewing the city through rose-coloured glasses or reading his own needs into the landscape, except that he demonstrates no qualms about writing scathing criticism when he feels so inclined. In the next chapter, he savages Atlanta. It is “a small town’s idea of what a big city should be.” It is global “by virtue of being featureless.” Its buildings are “all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.” Its deepest division is not racial but “between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not.” Given his assessment of Atlanta, one assumes that if Iyer had not liked Toronto, he would have said so.

One of the things Iyer gets about Toronto is the deep sense of irony that pervades local culture. Perhaps this is a defence against being (mis)taken for an American city. This gives rise to an unease “expressed with a good humor I wouldn’t expect to find in England”. The reference to England is curious since ironic humor strikes me as more of a Scottish habit and for precisely the same reason. Like the Scottish, we must steel ourselves any way we can against an overbearing cultural presence south of our borders.

I learned early on that many Americans are deaf to our tone of irony. In high school, I remember music exchanges with American high schools. We would feel inferior when faced with marching bands that performed with military precision. When it came our turn to play, at least a couple of our students would be stoned. We’d play horribly. We’d laugh afterwards and the teacher would accuse us of being apathetic. Maybe we were apathetic. Mostly, the experience made us cringe. We’d rather share half-assed jokes than perform anything with military precision—music, football, or war for that matter. Or consider the Canadian reputation for politeness. It is astonishing how many times I hear my fellow citizens say “I’m sorry.” However, outsiders (or at least those without an ear for irony) may miss that our apologies are often delivered like a knife in the back.

Although Iyer doesn’t make the point, at least not explicitly, he suggests a connection between irony and multiculturalism. His characterization of irony as “a chastened sense of history” anticipates his observation “that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past?” Irony gives us the detachment to entertain a twofold vision. While we can appreciate the optimism of America’s forward-looking gaze, irony gives us imaginative space where we can maintain that part of our identity which lies behind.

Oddly (for someone born here), I share that twofold vision. Recently, I’ve reconnected with friends from high school, many of the same ones who went with me on those music exchanges to American high schools. Now, we share with one another in ways that were impossible as teenagers. In this sharing, I have discovered how I was perceived as one of the few Toronto-born WASPs in my circle of friends: I belonged in a way that none of them did. What is curious (ironic even) is that I perceived myself as an outsider too. I perceived my normal as Iyer’s multiculturalism, a linguistic and cultural soup and me floating in the broth like one more ingredient.

Twelve years after The Global Soul first appeared, do Iyer’s claims for multiculturalism in Toronto bear up under scrutiny? Undoubtedly things have changed. 2010 was a benchmark year for us in several ways. In 2010, Toronto ceased to have a dominant ethnicity. We are all minorities now, although I suspect the locus of political and economic power remains with WASPs. Also in 2010, Toronto hosted the G20 summit. Twenty world leaders were whisked into the downtown core for thirty-six hours, then whisked out again at a cost of more than $1bn. Nineteen thousand police and paramilitary personnel secured the event and effected the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history. At the time, something felt different, but I couldn’t characterize it. On reading Iyer, I wonder if the difference lay in an absence of irony. None of this belonged to Toronto. Even the protests seemed out of place. In the grand tradition of colonialism, the protesters came here mostly from elsewhere to do our protesting for us, deploying their globalized Black Bloc brand of tactics without regard for local nuance, which is, well, ironic, given that they described themselves as anti-colonial anarchists.

Finally, in 2010, Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford, a conservative in every sense of the word. Although Ford claims to be motivated solely by economic considerations, his “derail the gravy train” brand of fiscal restraint has harsh consequences for new arrivals and ethnic minorities. For example, Ford has slashed the public library budget and wants to eliminate city-run daycare spaces, two services which are invaluable for people trying to get a foothold in this city. Again, drawing on Iyer, I note that one of the things which distinguishes Ford from his predecessors is tone deafness. He does not hear irony. Or, to switch metaphors, he lacks the twofold vision that would allow him to respect our past even as we move forward. His inability (or is it his refusal?) to hear irony also denies him the capacity to empathize with those who inhabit hybrid identities.

Although Iyer’s perceptions of Toronto still apply, I think it’s fair to say that recent changes indicate an erosion of multiculturalism even as the city becomes more multi-ethnic.

If you find my assessment harsh, I’m sorry.

Related posts:

1. Toronto the Whore and Michael Redhill’s Consolation
2. Toronto-Themed Summer Reads
3. Toronto Elites Sleeping on the Streets

I’ve always been resistant to the idea of cellphones. I blogged about my first cellphone and my disappointment at its failure to live up to the hype. Talk of convergence was premature. Now, with people reading War & Peace on their iPhones and taking photos with their iPads, I wonder if the idea of convergence is just wrong-headed; single-purpose devices have a place after all. I also wrote about what has come to be known as the “digital divide.” Cellular technology draws clear lines around those who are marginalized from the mainstream. And many of those who do use cellphones struggle to maintain their accounts, yet feel they have no choice if they want to stay connected.

Nevertheless, I relented. Like all conscientious middle-class parents, we got a family plan and tied up our children with digital leashes. Call, text, tweet, post to Facebook. Let us know where you are. If we can’t reach you on a Saturday night, know that we cower in the dark, growing more anxious by the minute, certain that you’ve been mugged, or worse. I know you think this is annoying, but we worry because we love you.

On the Wednesday after Christmas day, my wife and I went for a morning coffee at Balzac’s in the Distillery District. We sat in the loft, iPhones propped beside our mugs and catching up on our Facebook and Twitter feeds, sharing with one another whatever we learned. From there, we drove to the St. Lawrence Market, parking (perhaps portentously) in front of the Rogers store on Front Street. While my wife waited for an order at the butcher’s, I called my son to make sure he was awake. We left and, on the way home, stopped at a local grocery store. Once home, I reached to my right hip where I keep my iPhone clipped to my belt and felt nothing. Damn, where was my phone? I checked my coat pocket and, again, nothing. Returning my hand to my hip, I felt a plastic tab slide from under the belt—it was the clip from the holster I used to hold the phone. It had snapped from the case.

I’ve lost it, I said.

I ran back to the grocery store to ask if they’d found anything while my wife called the security office at St. Lawrence Market.

I was astonished at my own reaction. This stuff belongs in a psychology journal. First came paranoia: all my personal info is on that phone; somebody will hack my phone, then steal all my passwords—email accounts, bank accounts, social media sites, Paypal, blog. I spent the next hour and a half changing all my passwords, making sure they were unique and strong, uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation. Next came anger, most of it directed at myself. How could I have been so stupid not to have noticed that I lost my phone? Mostly I was angry at myself for being so hard on my daughter about her lost phone. How could I have been so insensitive? The third and most surprising reaction was anxiety, not a generalized anxiety, but an acute feeling that I imagine would be closely associated with the experience of addiction. Words like withdrawal and cold turkey come to mind. In a single moment of carelessness, I had cut myself off from my social networks, my email, messaging, phone calls, photos, music, ebooks. What was I going to do with myself? I needed a fix.

After lunch, I went to Rogers with my old Motorola flip phone and got a new sim card. At least I would have phone service, and even texting, but when I tried to text, it didn’t feel the same. Although I’ve never been to a methadone clinic, my visit to the Rogers store was probably like to visit a methadone clinic. It gave me enough of a fix to get me over the initial symptoms of withdrawal, but it just wasn’t the same. I told the guy at the counter what had happened and he shook his head. He said: Losing an iPhone is like losing cash; you’re never gonna see it again.

That night, I lay in bed and tried to imagine life without an iPhone. I tried to persuade myself that I could get along just fine with an old Motorola flip phone. I told myself it was an act of resistance. Losing the iPhone was really my subconscious brain forcing me to do what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ll opt out of the mainstream. Social media trivializes communication. It’s just a smokescreen for media conglomerates to monetize social space. Next thing you know, they’ll be putting up billboards between my synapses. I fell asleep with visions of myself as a new media hermit skulking off to my virtual cave.

The next morning I was a wreck. I ate breakfast without knowing what was going on in the world. I tried to walk the dog, but didn’t know what to wear outside because I had no weather app. I threw up my trembling hands and ran to the Rogers store. The guy smiled; he knew I’d be back; he’d seen this sort of thing before. He said it was horrible to see what can happen, even to a grown man.

My name is Dave and I’m an iPhone-a-holic. It’s true. I didn’t last even one day without an iPhone. It would be easy to grow discouraged, to conclude that all my ideals have been lost to a hunk of addictive socio-techno-candy. But not quite; there is an upside to this story.

Exactly one week after I lost my iPhone, I got a call from the Rogers store on Front Street. A passer-by had found an iPhone on the sidewalk and handed it in to the store. Although the phone wouldn’t start or recharge, they used the sim card to trace my account. An honest person. Who would’ve thought?

When I picked up the phone, it was clear that there had been some corrosion on the USB contacts. It had probably seen a bit of weather. I took it to the Apple store, hoping they could clean the contacts. Instead, because the phone was under warranty, they simply replaced it. When I got home, I gave it to my daughter. Isn’t that the way it goes with addiction?

_______________

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Paul Acheson, for posing with his iPhone in the photo above.

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The Libretto

Like dreams, or memory, Darkling is fragmented and non-linear. To the extent that it constitutes a story, it is a Holocaust story. Polish Jews emigrate to New York between the wars, “[a]lways to feel alien, one foot here, the other in the old country”. There is the image of a woman who leaves for America just three weeks after her wedding. In this action, there is a sense of abandonment and a sense, too, of guilt.

Her father: writing from a deep cave of pain:
Why, why did you
Run off so soon after the wedding without saying goodbye?
A morning her brother pleads,
Take me along.
An afternoon his cousin flees
Warsaw for the woods,
The night they fathom unthinkable
sayings said …

We who have the privilege of hindsight know what follows: the rise of Nazism and the invasion of Poland, the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka. Whatever fluke of personality caused the woman to flee can also be credited with her survival.

Meanwhile those who have settled in New York endure a suffering of their own, both psychological (survival seems like an act of betrayal) and physical (Jews are ripe for exploitation since, after all, they can scarcely complain about living conditions when at least they have their lives). For women, there is a twofold suffering, as we witness when the woman exclaims: “but oh, the endless speculation / about why I walked cautiously / inside your footprints“. The woman has no footprints of her own except as she makes them for herself, “racing to become / Native to herself” so that no one can later ask of her: “Woman, why were you not you?” It is a struggle for identity compounded by the fact that America places its own demands on the identities of newcomers. As friends and family in Poland are erased from history, the woman must struggle against a multi-tiered erasure of a different sort.

Alongside the image of a woman fleeing is another image, an image of images really: a girl, Anna, poised over a box of photographs and letters from the old country. The photographs are of people she can barely remember, if at all:

Letters: the shoebox is one-third full of letters;
Photos: a worn leather folder hugs in its
Entrails a small packet:
Friends and relations never named —
Strangers —

Because the friends and relations are never named, they risk the erasure that comes from the failure of memory. “[F]orgetting is a death”. In a sense, forgetting is complicit with genocide. But what if—like a young girl holding a shoebox—you never knew these people in the first instance? or heard their stories but at one or two removes? Then, perhaps, the act of remembering becomes an act of recovery, too. But the challenge is posed like a koan: “how do I quote names I can neither recall nor forget?”

One path to the recovery of forgotten remembrances is to write poems and operas. But as Rabinowitz reminds us, we cannot simply make things up. “[H]istory can be neither / bought,nor stolen, nor faked, / neither borrowed nor slaked—”. The recovery of what has been forgotten must be authentic. History imposes a burden on the poet and the musician to engage imaginatively with what has been forgotten, not to produce fantasy (like the revisionist film, Inglorious Basterds) but to produce places for deep empathy. For Rabinowitz, poems become graves and she laments “I CANNOT MAKE ENOUGH POEMS”. If this were the end of it—to create graves—then Rabinowitz would have left us with a dark poem and a bleak prospect of poetry’s capacity for recovery. However, almost at the end, we find her writing that “each poem is a prayer”.

The Music

In Darkling (the poem) there are periodic allusions to singing, which is not surprising given all it owes to Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush which “[h]ad chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom”. At first, “[A]lone at night / she will not, / cannot sing”. In America, “I will put a new song in my mouth.” However, as already noted, it is not new singing which is required or demanded of her. It is a singing which will become a prayer, both as an elegy for incomprehensible loss and as a prophetic breath giving life to the dead.  The thrush, the singing, the polyphonic quality of the poetry, all these cry out for a musical setting.

In Darkling (the opera) Stefan Weisman has remained true to the progressions found in the poem. He preserves the fragmented “shoebox” of images through spoken word sections in which a variety of speakers fragment the text. The speakers enhance the effort to recover forgotten remembrances by evoking characters both in the old world and the new. The speakers do not pass the words back and forth like a conversation, but in a more associative style that suggests memory itself, as if we, the listeners, inhabit Anna’s mind. A small ensemble (string quartet and four vocalists) reinforces the sense of intimacy. Keeping things small has the practical benefit that the opera is easier to mount, but it must be small in any event. Something more grandiose, the story, say, of the whole Jewish people, would bury Darkling‘s interior struggle. And so the setting is spare.

In setting the poem to music, one thing which is lost is the acrostic. Its logic lends a structure to the poem, and offers the reader a reassurance that even in this chaotic movement from emigration, to grief, through the struggle to remember, there is an order which lies hidden but no less real for being hidden. Although the acrostic had to be sacrificed, the music itself retains this underlying logic. While it is beyond me to pore over the score, it would not surprise me if Weisman has embedded in the music similar strategies that give structure to the opera although we, the listeners, remain unaware of it.

For the most part, I would describe the music as “fractured” – challenging and without a tonal centre. Personally, this is as it should be. Having recently attended a large-scale “Holocaust oratorio”, I Believe, by Zane Zalis, I must confess that sugar-coated Broadwayish schmaltz leaves me cold. What I take from Darkling is this: remembrance is not the construction of monuments, but a process, a form of engagement; it is morally taxing; it is existentially exhausting. If Darkling were set as a work we could close our eyes and hum along to, it would undermine itself. Here, the music forces us to walk this journey with Anna, to engage as she does.

Although the score is challenging, that does not mean it is inaccessible. In particular, I was moved by the final extended Dayenu. Just as the poem finds rest in prayer, so the opera finds completion in liturgy. Speakers name atrocities, then the people repeat “Dayenu” – “It would have been enough.” The context turns the phrase on its head. Drawn from the Passover Haggadah, it is traditionally offered as an expression of thanks, but here, it almost falls upon God as an accusation, as if to demand: “How could you allow such things to happen to us?”

The opera follows both the poem and Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush by hinting at (without revealing) the possibility of hope. Why should “[a]n aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small” sing into the gloom except for “[s]ome blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware”? Anna has her blessed Hope too: “Now I remember I breathe / a breath of you each / Day” and “she bears / A leaf a pencil some paper she / has found a leaf”. After Anna closes the shoebox and the voices fall silent, we have these words: “And I was unaware.” Although we may not be able to see it, there is hope.

Darkling is a challenging work. Make whatever effort it demands of you. It will reward you well.

Related posts:

1. The Wanton Sublime, by Anna Rabinowitz
2. Review: Present Tense, by Anna Rabinowitz

I paused halfway through and tweeted: “Am halfway thru 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Am undecided whether this might just be the dumbest book I’ve ever read.” Which I followed with: “I think 1Q84 is like eating potato chips. Kind of addictive, but too much gives you gas or something.” Brash statements, I’ll admit, but I have confidence in my take on literary matters. However, it shook my confidence to discover that the reviews in The Millions are not aberrations. The Globe and Mail has listed 1Q84 in its top 100 books of the year. And the Washington Post has gone so far as to place Murakami’s epic at the top of its list.

Am I missing something? I asked myself. Have I lost access to my critical faculties? Could I be suffering some kind of early dementia that affects my taste in books? Thank God for The Guardian, otherwise I might have driven myself mad with self-doubt. The Guardian nominated 1Q84 for a Bad Sex Award and offered extracts to illustrate just how bad the sex can get between the covers (of a book). Although 1Q84 did not win the award, simply to be a nominee is a remarkable achievement.

Even so, bad sex does not necessarily make for a bad novel, does it? It certainly doesn’t warrant claims like “Complete Waste of Brain Cells” and “Dumbest book of the Century” does it? The curious thing about my assessment is that, for the most part, I agree with the favourable reviews. 1Q84 is a well-written book. Murakami writes in a clean prose that carries the reader directly into a carefully structured story and doesn’t release the reader until it’s done whatever Murakami would have it do. Characters emerge into conflict. Ideas find completion. The novel has all the shape and form of a well-built house. And yet, for all that, I still think it’s a stinker of a novel.

Because this is mostly a gut response, I have struggled to find clear reasons why I respond this way. Here are a few thoughts:

1. 1Q84 is written in the wrong medium.

It should have been a screen play. We get this sense from Hartnett’s review which includes the statement: “And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie)…” Exactly. It is heavily and obviously influenced by the sense of realism that cinema produces. That in itself is no great sin. Except. Except.

The novel is chock full of extended dialogue without intervening narration. It’s lazy writing. His characters remind me of the bad guys in James Bond flicks who need to explain exactly why they’re going to kill Bond, which of course gives Bond enough time to find a way to escape. I want to scream at Goldfinger: Shut the fuck up! Forget the death by slow laser and just shoot Bond in the head! Too much dialogue with all its incessant explanation means a) the author thinks his characters are too stupid to exercise powers of inference; b) the author thinks his readers are as stupid as his characters; and c) the author isn’t really writing a novel. Instead, he’s sticking people in rooms or across restaurant tables and letting them explain things to one another while we eavesdrop. That’s called a play or a movie or a noh.

When Murakami writes, I read. When his characters talk, I yawn. Which means I yawn a lot.

2. The sex is frequent and frequently dreadful.

This second thought is related to the incessant dialogue. Not merely because the characters talk too much during sex (which they do) but because the need for explanation which drives the dialogue is the same need that drives the description of sex. It’s one step away from a technical manual. It comes from the demand for visual realism. Remember, Murakami has written a screen play, not a novel, and so it’s important for his readers to interpret it as if they are watching the action in a theatre. Nothing is left to the reader’s imagination. What’s more, the sex exhibits emotional immaturity. It’s the literary equivalent of anime porn.

3. Magical realism is subject to the same rules as science fiction.

The rule is: no more than one outlandish premise from which everything else follows. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, illustrates the rule. Children born closest to midnight on the day of India’s independence are born with special powers. This is a device to explore the meaning of historical events affecting postcolonial India. There is nothing else. No alien visitors. No super-humans with laser beams shooting from their eyes. No time machines. No genetically altered viruses.

Rules have exceptions of course, and I’m not one to insist on rule-following. But rule-breaking needs a reason, and I can’t see any reason here. 1Q84 reads like a novel-by-committee where no one could agree on what outlandish premise should dominate and so each member was allowed to make a contribution. Two moons in the sky. “Little People” who enter our world through the mouth of a dead goat. An air chrysalis. Altered states that turn men into sexual automatons (absolving characters of responsibility for acts which would otherwise pass for incest and statutory rape). Immaculate conception. Extraordinary coincidences. Enough! I cry, and roll my eyes.

This is pulp fiction. This is escapism. A decent enough read (for escapist pulp fiction) but don’t try to sell it to me as something else. Don’t try to persuade me (like the reviews in The Millions) that this is Nobel material. It ain’t. It ain’t even close.

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As you’d expect, death wishing produces social unrest: how can you plan for tomorrow when the world tomorrow may be wished into something radically different? This spawns the Wish Local movement to limit the global impact of poorly thought-out wishes. For example, a diva wishes permanent tacky orange clouds for her hometown, and so it is, but only within the city limits of New Orleans. The practice of death wishing has its dark side, too. People have an incentive to force the dying to make wishes that favour their caregivers, and some are even willing to murder for wishes.

In the midst of this chaos, we have Victor Swaim, our middle-aged, divorced, mid-life crisis-bemoaning, man-boob-sprouting hero. Victor has suffered some come-downs in his time. Once, he was the “info tech director for a major defense contractor” in North Virginia. Now he sews corsets in his son’s clothing shop and makes goo eyes at Pebbles, his son’s girlfriend. Victor would prefer an inconspicuous life blithely free of the wishing foofarah, and while some, like Victor, do not aspire to greatness, they have it thrust upon them anyways. In Victor’s case, the thrusting comes from several different directions at the same time. Pebbles falls into the clutches of a cult leader who is hell bent on killing people for their wishes (Victor gets on their hit list of course); a group of vigilantes buys its capes from Victor (making him an accessory to illegal actions); and in a case of mistaken identity, Victor becomes a local celebrity for (allegedly) foiling a robbery attempt at his son’s store. With so much unwanted attention, Victor finds himself on the run. I say no more on matters of plot lest I spoil the fun.

I think the novel can be read as a kitschy parable of consumer culture. The key to this reading can be found in the opening pages with an account of the very first death wish: that there really be alien bodies at Roswell. After the wish has come to pass, we have this passage:

Upon dissection, we learned that every detail of alien physiognomy had already been imagined by scientists, artists, writers, etc. It was all very exciting, but ultimately there was nothing to be learned from hundreds of copies of an all too generalized ideal. The aliens didn’t come from anywhere, and they couldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. They were the perfect ambassadors of our limits.

The things we desire come from within and so are no grander than the constraints of our imaginations. Those constraints, it turns out, are pretty much determined by pop culture.

We have the scene at Roswell as one of the novel’s bookends. The other bookend presents Elvis, after a session of shooting up old television sets, taking pot shots at the orange clouds over New Orleans. He keeps it up until they come crashing to the ground. It seems none of this wishing produces anything real; it’s all pop culture kitsch. Almost inevitably, the results of the death wishing fade away and the world goes back to being the world. Yet we can’t help but think that death is a terrible price to pay for something so fleeting and so tacky.

Death Wishing is a fun novel, written in a crisp prose and with keen observations. Like any work that comments on the kitschy side of the pop divide, it skirts dangerously close to the line and risks crossing over into kitschiness itself, but Laura Ellen Scott adroitly negotiates her way along this line.

If you like this book, you might also enjoy Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa.

Be sure to make your own wish. Go to deathwishing.com and use the wish tank to post what you would wish for if you were about to bite the big one.

Related posts:

1. Curio, by Laura Ellen Scott
2. Death in Don Mills – The Gay Suspect
3. Review: Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane

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In the inside lane, we had this line of thought: I was thinking of my own camp experience as a kid. I didn’t go to Camp Couchiching; I went to a rival camp which wasn’t half as cushy as this camp (we slept in tents instead of in cabins). In particular, I was thinking of how oblivious I had been to the contributions that other people made to my camping experience. That’s the way it is for kids. Things seem to happen as if by magic. Meanwhile grownups, many of whom we may never know or meet, are busy working in the background to ensure that children – not necessarily our children – can have the best possible experience. Children, especially when they’re young, live in a kind of pleasant fog. As they get older, they become increasingly aware that their experiences belong to a wider social world. They know there are counselors and program directors and a camp director, but it isn’t until they are much older that they learn about the board of directors and affiliations with the wider world, which includes a large group of volunteers and hangers-on who are simply glad to lend a hand from time to time. There is a sense in which we can say that, as campers age, they experience a demystification of camp. The pleasant fog evaporates and they become aware of themselves as individuals within a larger matrix.

The Wizard’s Levers

We talk a lot about demystification. Although Barthes said it was an outmoded strategy two generations ago, it may well be a necessary stage in the postmodern approach to all our social institutions. I have written about it on this blog in reference to religion, especially (surprise, surprise) when I was studying at a seminary. Certainly atheists love to engage in religious demystification. They’re like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, pulling aside the curtain to reveal that the pyrotechnics aren’t magic, but the manipulations of a burnt-out vaudeville fraud. More recently, I’ve been tracking the demystification of the printed word. The appearance of ereaders and the development of digital formats has accelerated a trend at work in Western culture since the invention of the printing press: the gradual erosion of the printed word as a magical bearer of meaning. Call it the secularization of print. Once, books were the repositories of sacred wisdom. Even as they became profane objects, like novels, texts, and non-fiction discussions of issues in our world, they continued to retain an aura of something numinous. They had about them a sense of authority. If a person quoted a book to support his own position, some of that authority passed from the book to that person’s lips. The rise of the ebook has merely made obvious, like the curtain pulled back from the wizard, that authority does not live in the print; it has nothing to do with the weight of the paper; nor the art of the cover; nor the display in the bookstore. Just as it has been unequivocally demonstrated that the Bible is the result of a highly fallible and utterly human process, so too the revolution in digital publishing has made it clear that books more generally have no magical authority. Books are the accumulation of words from highly fallible people who burp and fart just like you and me. They have become utterly demystified.

The problem, of course, is that we don’t like this state of affairs. We liked it better when we could appeal to the Bible as if it would settle everything for us. We liked it better when we could take up a book and cite it as if an aphorism was all it took to win an argument. We feel nostalgia for the days before demystification, just as I felt nostalgia, while raking leaves, for a time in my childhood when camp magically appeared each year just for me.

The Hostile Tone of Public Conversation

There is another problem, too, and that has to do with tone. I note a common tone in the quality of conversations that play out in both religion and publishing. At best, it is patronizing. More often, it is hostile and divisive. So, for example, a good number of atheists find religious people frustrating. Science, empiricism, rational thought. All of these modern approaches thoroughly skewer religious claims. Religious types don’t live in the real world; they’re ruining it for the rest of us by poisoning public discourse, sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. At the same, early adopters in the digital world look at traditional publishing houses and call them Luddites. People who prefer paper books are fetishists or are too ossified to adapt.

Imagine if the volunteers at the camp work weekend assembled and passed a resolution to adopt such a tone. Be it resolved: campers who refuse to see all that goes on behind the scenes will be ridiculed next summer; they will be taunted and systematically told they lack insight; and they will be forced to spend time doing some of that work instead of swimming with their friends and roasting marshmallows by the fire. But we never make such a resolution, do we? We are happy to stand behind the curtain with the wizard and keep out of sight. The reason, I think, is that nothing hinges on forcing the demystification. There is nothing of our personal identity at stake in what we do. Our egos do not demand of us that we go to the camp next summer and tell all the campers what we did the previous fall, how we require their acknowledgment. On the contrary, the tone of the weekend is one of generousity. We are present for them, whoever they may be, and not for ourselves.

My analogy is inexact. It seems to imply that I think of those who resist demystification as childlike; religious people are intellectually naïve; defenders of traditional publishing are just being overly nostalgaic. This is a limitation of my analogy, not of my argument. I would suggest that the same generousity of tone ought to seep into our more politicized conversations. If we choose to engage the modern with demystifying approaches, we might inquire first as to our own motives. Do we do this because we believe there is some neutral social benefit to be had? Or are we more concerned with private personal interests?

Eliade & Rites of Initiation

This takes me to Eliade. The book I was reading was Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Eliade was a Romanian pioneer of comparative religion who wrote from the 1930′s to the 1960′s. He was interested in the way insights from other disciplines, like sociology, psychology and anthropology, could be leveraged to illuminate religious concerns. He felt it important to study the religious practices of non-Western (especially indigenous) cultures, anticipating an increasingly globalized culture in which the West would be forced into close proximity with the Other. In his view, the West had a choice in how it handled these encounters, but that choice was contingent upon the extent to which it educated itself and empathized with those it viewed as Other. Following the work of anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Eliade gave a great deal of attention to rites of initiation, both into adulthood and into secret societies.

One could argue that summer camp is a Western appropriation of the rites of initiation which appear almost universally in indigenous cultures. A rite of initiation is an inherently demystifying process. It introduces the novitiate into the secrets of the group. He becomes the bearer of a fuller knowledge which he in turn transmits to future novitiates. Campers discover that there are older people who do things in off-season gatherings to help maintain the camp for the following year. In succeeding years, many of these campers, as older people, do things in off-season gatherings, and so it goes. The curious thing is that the precise content of the secrets doesn’t matter (it could be leaf-raking or log-splitting). From the perspective of a scholar in comparative religion, what matters is the discovery that the rite of initiation functions identically across cultures. Its purpose is to establish membership in the group. It’s purpose is to affirm identity, not to affirm a specific knowledge except as that knowledge contributes to identity.

Because I have no great stake in the knowledge of camping, it is easy for me to detach myself from its mysteries. That’s why it is easy for me to use the initiation rite of the summer camp as an illustration. It might not be so easy if I were an atheist. I might be more attached to the particular details of atheism, so much so that I might miss the fact that the ability to recite the particular details of atheism is itself part of a rite of initiation. Similarly, a Republican has her talking points. And a Progressive Christian has his apologetics. And so on. The attachment to content is, in part, an affirmation of social identity. This is my tribe! The irony, at least for the atheist, is that the rite of initiation to establish group membership has a religious provenance.

Death of the Self and Rebirth

Eliade observes the basic schema of the ritual: it involves the death of the old self and the rebirth of the new. An example from Western culture: hazings are rituals designed to destroy the neophyte’s former identity. They are symbolic human sacrifices. Sometimes, the group takes that schema literally, engaging in actual human sacrifice or in ritual killings. For example, some modern gangs demand the commission of a murder as the cost of initiation.

It could be argued that the harsh tone of debate in much of contemporary Western discourse follows the same schema and has acquired its edge precisely because it seeks to fulfill a symbolic sacrifice. The atheist cannot truly claim membership within the tribe unless he emulates the kind of bloodletting that a Christopher Hitchens achieves when he sets upon a hapless Christian or Muslim fundamentalist. We witness the same ferocity in contemporary political exchanges, in debates between copyright law-and-order types and “free culture” advocates, and most recently in the kind of salvos between traditional print publishers and advocates of the self-publishing ebook market. In fact, pick just about any cause that receives play in our media and you are likely to find Eliade’s schema lying below the surface. We daily affirm our group affiliations through the ritual slaying of our opponents or through ordeals in which we die to our old selves and rise again to the new.

Nowadays, our instrument of  choice may be the demystifying power of science and rationalism, but we have never been so religious a people.

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