Numbers, Anglo-Saxons, the Supreme Court, Ulysses S. Grant, and More Not Small Talk

The Figure 5 in Gold, by Charles Demuth
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On Monday, June 2, I have been scheduled -- with the kind of procedural regularity that has become a touchstone of our modern medical culture -- to become a father once again.

The likely result is that I will not be submitting any blog entries in the near future for you, my loyal reader, to consume conspicuously at your leisure. ("My loyal reader" -- you are not so hypothetical; I think I know all three of you.)

But there are so many Not Small Talk items out there to be addressed. Let me summarize a few of them, briefly -- some ideas that have been scattershot through my mind lately. I leave you to draw your own conclusions on these and many other topics.

* Numbers: Do they exist? I mean, do they exist in any sort of transcendental or platonic fashion? Does the number five, for instance, exist somewhere in the universe independently of things that are five in number? Put another way, does the notion of fiveness exist independently of consciousness?

About once a year, I have this discussion with the calculus teacher at school, and he always responds instantly by saying that he doesn't think it could be any other way. If it is the case that numbers exist transcendentally, is number identity comparable to the law of gravity or some other physical reality--a fundamental force of the universe? In what dimension do numbers exist? If they exist, it seems to me, then mathematics would have to be a branch of physics because it relates to the study of physical properties of the universe. Something to think about--and for my former student Shiv Subramaniam, majoring in comparative lit and mathematics, to tackle before he graduates from the University of Chicago. (You have three years, Shiv.)

* "The saddest thing about any man is that he is ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows." -- Alfred the Great

Of course, it would be a mistake to romanticize the Anglo-Saxons too much, but they are one of my favorite historical groups of people ever, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tolkien's assertion that the Norman invasion was the greatest disaster in English history. Combined with Henry VIII's closing of the monasteries (and the subsequent destruction of already-aged Anglo-Saxon manuscripts), the result is that we are left with precious few insights into their collective life and mind, but what we have shows a people with a powerful culture that was in some ways vibrant and progressive beyond what you could find anywhere else in Europe at the time. Here are some of the highlights of Anglo-Saxon culture and society as I see them:

1. An emphasis on localized self-rule that differed from that of other emerging European kingdoms. This factor is likely due to the preservation of tribal traditions enabled by the geographical isolation of the British Isles. (This theory might owe a little bit to British historian Robert Conquest but also to the kind of geographic determinism favored by Jared Diamond.) Because most greater Anglo-Saxon borders were defined by coastline (Pictish and Celtic adversaries on dry-land borders notwithstanding), the pressure to centralize authority was not the same as it was on the continent. Gaul, for instance, surrounded by emerging kingdoms on most sides, had to centralize authority much earlier than England in order to protect its continued existence as a politically independent entity; a strong monarchy was necessary to keep the neighbors at bay. The Vikings who constantly raided England's shores seemed to have been content with settling in the Danelaw; they didn't until Canute the Great present a critical threat on a national level. This left the Anglo-Saxons free to develop political traditions in a more gradual and deliberate manner. Even after the Norman invasion, some of this tradition remained; it was built into the economy and even the geographical divisions/township structures of England by that time. It resurfaced most notably in the Magna Carta and in the formation of Parliament.

2. King Alfred's progressive attitude toward literacy and education. Granted, he understood that poetry could be great propaganda, but that consideration doesn't diminish the empowering aspect of literacy for those who possess it. The fact that the Vikings, the Normans, and the Protestants essentially demolished the archival remnants of this literary tradition is unfortunate. There is something about Alfred's policies that speaks of a proto-democratic tradition that had repercussions beyond the literary; Alfred was the uncommon king who didn't sell his people short. The English have also been superlative at producing and preserving the documents of bureaucracy: wills; deeds ("indentures"); birth, marriage, and death records, etc. These items speak in their own way of a vibrant tradition of literacy.

3. Dynamic and progressive trade practices that allowed society to flourish. English democracy, even in its infancy, has always relied on prosperity. The English have been a prosperous people. My socialist sympathies notwithstanding, I have to admit that there is a common ground between free trade and political (and therefore personal) freedoms.

* "Bush's appointment of Roberts and Alito may prove to be among the worst of the many disasters of his mistaken administration." --Donald Dworkin

Dworkin writes for the New York Review of Books on the Supreme Court. This line sums up pretty much everything there is to say about the Supreme Court and about what is at stake in that regard in the next Presidential election.

* "The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion." --Article II of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797

A useful quotation to have around when discussing the issue of separation of church and state. Jefferson's "Notes Concerning the State of Virginia" is also handy, as are Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages" (containing a scathing satire of the reputed purpose of religion) and excerpts from the latter sections of book two of his Autobiography. While not outrightly condemning religious practice, Franklin approaches it pragmatically, and it is pretty clear that his idea of a divine being is not so different from Aristotle's Prime Mover. That is, Franklin, scientist that he was, believed that something must have set everything in motion, but that whatever it was doesn't much bother with what we're doing day-to-day in the here-and-now. Franklin believed that the purpose of religion was to instill values in people so that they could be productive members of society. He was not, as some evangelical Christians have outrageously claimed, a Christian himself in terms of any beliefs he may have held. The calculating and arch-ironic attitude he displays in his discussion of the virtue of humility in the Autobiography is proof of his lack of genuine spiritual conviction.

* Henry V: Machiavellian bastard or paragon of princely virtue? I can't decide. I can't even decide what Shakespeare wants us to think of him. For years, I've been on the side of judging him a Machiavellian bastard, but I'm planning to reread the entire Henry IV/Henry V cycle and reassess. Perhaps I'll let you know what I think at a later date.

"Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." Harry does, Harry will. Jack Falstaff is human weakness and vice but also human wit--and perhaps even humanness itself writ large (very large). Does Henry give up his own humanity when he denies Falstaff? Or is he just doing what he must do to accept the mantle of responsibility?

And that whole bit about invading France on weak pretenses. (Not even weapons of mass destruction -- they're just tennis balls.) Reminds me of a certain contemporary political leader of whom 29% of the population still somehow bafflingly approves.

* Ulysses S. Grant: One of my favorite presidents, not so much because of what he did during his presidency but because of what he did before it. As a general, he was a pragmatist who could have been profiled alongside William James and Oliver Wendall Holmes in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. An unustly maligned character in part because he rarely spoke up against his detractors. A kind of Washington-like humility emanates from his reticence. His Personal Memoirs sets the record straight, partly; I've only read a few bits and pieces, but when I have time (someday) I'm going to read the whole book--it's as long as Ulysses, which took me a year to read.

* Joan Didion. If I don't get a chance to reread any of her essays in the coming days, I'm at least going to be thinking of her. I need that kind of open-eyed clarity right now. I won't bother trying to convince myself that I know what I'm getting myself into, but I'd at least like to admit to myself what I don't know, which is in the end what her essays always seem to me to be about, and which is a non-negligible kind of self-knowledge.

Wish me luck.

JFK and political authorship

Ted Sorenson (from the New York Times Book Review)

Theodore Sorenson, speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, recently published a memoir (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Rosenthal-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin) and in doing so has dredged up a perenially favorite topic for those in the business of writing about such things: who wrote Kennedy's most famous lines?

That Kennedy had a gift for rhetoric is undeniable. A sizeable part of that gift was in the delivery, but regardless he had a flair for a good line. As Louis Menand pointed out a few years ago in an article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108crbo_books?currentPage=all), Kennedy improvised at thirty-two different points during his one and only famous inaugural address. He went over draft after draft with Sorenson, who saw it as his job to help Kennedy articulate his own ideas in the most effective way possible. To this day, at a point when most people who bother to think about it just assume that someone else is writing every word that comes from a politician's mouth, Sorenson insists that Kennedy's words are Kennedy's words and not his own. It would be fair to say that the two were co-authors; Kennedy was not minimally involved.

As for Kennedy's two most memorable lines, one was a paraphrase. Menand also pointed out that Kennedy's Headmaster at Choate was fond of telling students that it's "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate." Thus a call for alumni giving became a political catchphrase that defined an era. This is fitting: JFK was in many ways the ultimate prep school boy to the end: popular, aloof, smart, cool, ambitious, more than just a bit cynical in his approach to power and leadership, and he brought all of this with him to the White House. I say this not to degrade Kennedy; I understand the reasons why so many bowed down to the alter, but at the same time no one believes anymore that the man was a perfect savior. Sorenson, by the way, still gives Kennedy the credit for the "ask not" line. As for the other line--"Ich bin ein Berliner"--Sorenson takes credit for the blunder. Though seemingly grammatically correct, the use of the article "ein" renders this an idiom declaring, "I am a jelly doughnut." Nevertheless, we know what Kennedy meant, and this is a powerful line that complements the other from the inaugural two years before. One line asks us to give to others through service to our country. The other asks us to look beyond nationalism and see ourselves as global citizens of the free world. In the end, what matters is how the words were used, and Kennedy certainly used them to good effect at a time when American identity was challenged by the threats--internal and external--of Cold War policy.

What Kennedy and Sorenson both understood is that rhetoric matters, that a meaningful political reality can be crafted out of genuine sentiment well expressed. That explains why Sorenson is an Obama supporter (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-Q4-t.html?scp=7&sq=Deborah+Solomon&st=nyt). It also explains why so many think that Obama has a shot at creating a new kind of political landscape, like the one that Kennedy, for all his faults, started to shape before his assassination.

Will Obama change things? We can hope. The less one pays attention to the current media spectacle--where each candidate is forced situationally into disingenuous and sometimes ludicrous remarks--the better. What we can say about Obama is that he has a flair for rhetoric on par with--perhaps better than--Kennedy's. Let's hope furthermore that Obama, when given the chance, has the audacity to say what he really means. He certainly has the skill to do so. I haven't read The Audacity of Hope and I've only read parts of Dreams from My Father, but what I have read seems to prove that Obama can turn a good sentence, that he is a thoughtful composer of words, that he is--Joe Biden's gaff notwithstanding--indeed very articulate. I am assuming, of course, that Obama and not Ted Sorenson wrote these books.

On The Road

For a while when I was in my early twenties, Cormac McCarthy was pretty much the only writer who mattered to me. There was something about his prose--the visceral and lyrical qualities both at once on the page, the contrasting tautness and then flow of the lines--that took hold of me. His writing displayed the control of language that I admired in Faulkner and Joyce and Hemingway, but in a context that brought new dimensions of meaning. McCarthy possessed what seemed to me a new kind of authenticity, a way of looking at the world without flinching. That was what I wanted to do in my writing.

I squandered a graduate career in creative writing laboring under his shadow. No one has suffered the anxiety of influence greater than I did in those days. At a certain point, I knew that I had to get out.

This was just after the publication of Cities of the Plain, a novel that seemed to exaggerate the worst qualities of McCarthy's prose--the way his lyricism tended to the overwritten and the overwrought. I cut out McCarthy cold turkey, and I never looked back.

Until now.

Used bookstore, April 27, 2008: a copy of The Road sitting on the new arrivals shelf. I pick it up out of curiosity. I read the first line. I'm hooked.

* * *

It's not that McCarthy was ever a bad writer, but he did stagnate more and more as the Border Trilogy wore on. The work that I never lost respect for was Blood Meridian, which portrays human beings--men, really--at their absolute worst: depraved, violent, thoughtless. No book ever rattled me as much as this one.

The Road makes a good counterpoint to Blood Meridian. Both novels are set in waste lands that are partly natural and partly of human design, but ultimately the work of some detached and very distant neoplatonic god that communicates marginally through elemental symbols: blood, stars, desolate and leafless trees, the lay of the landscape and the way the sun sets on it. (Or, in the case of The Road, the way the sun sets behind the clouds that perpetually cover it.) The difference that separates the landscapes of these two novels--one set in the past, the other in the not-so-distant future--is the presence of something in The Road that never shows up in Blood Meridian, and it is something that is evident in the very first line of The Road:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

In the desolation and ash of a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the only things alive seem to be a few ragged, dingy human beings subsisting on what canned goods--or what other human beings--they can find) there persists something that could only be described as a deep and enduring love--though McCarthy himself would never use such a sentimentally laden word for it. Here at the end of the world, though, this is what we have.

The novel that follows is tense, brutal, dismaying at times--and desparate throughout--but it never loses as its focus this core bond between father and son. The protagonist of Blood Meridian, known only as "the kid," never seems to know anything that remotely resembles this kind of bond with anyone. The child present here knows it as the central fact of his life in a place where even insects and fungi seem to be dead.

In general, McCarthy has, by comparison to some of his earlier work, wisely toned down the prose in this novel. Occasionally, a line might make the reader wince as it collapses under its own heavily descriptive syntax, but a few such lines can be tolerated. We get a lot of clipped sentence fragments, most often images of the landscape: "Barren, silent, godless." Or this line, with a Hemingway-esque barrage of nouns and modifiers, lacking a finite verb: "Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." In a field the travelers see "The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible." A stretch of ruined city appears: "Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered." Eventually, the sea washes up: "Cold. Desolate. Birdless." In other instances, the sentences roll on without the hindrance of punctuation.

The overall effect of the description is sometimes stirring: who would have thoughts to describe "hands" of wire, a phrasing that reminds us of a vanished human presence?--and "corrugate" for the fields, which not only enables the reader to see the contours of the fields but also gives off the suggestion of a hard, unyielding quality to a once-fertile landscape? That landscape still bears a trace of human design though the people who once worked the land are well beneath it now. McCarthy's descriptions of landscape depend at once upon specificity (in terms of imagery) and vagueness (never is a particular stretch of road or a ruined city or town ever mentioned by name, though the travelers have with them a tattered roadmap and they themselves know the names of everything). This dynamic between the revealed and the withheld is one that urges on a mythical, legendary quality--this is someplace but it could be any place. The same notion applies with names; just as the kid in Blood Meridian is never identified by name, neither father nor son ever utters the name of the other in these pages.

In all, the style here is typical McCarthy--poetic and sometimes overly poetic, dominated by imagery--and yet the pace of this novel (the plot of which is not much more than typical dystopian/sci-fi fare) is brisk. This book is a quick, compelling, and easy read--what they typically call a "page-turner."

McCarthy resurrects for this novel the motifs that have become typical of his ouvre, and it is a good bet that many of the readers out there who have made this book a bestseller have skipped over the more complicated and esoteric allusions. Religious symbolism figures largely and frequently takes on a gnostic or neoplatonic flair: we get shadows, caves, flickering light, a mysterious God who chooses not to reveal himself in any very direct way. There is a running theatre motif as well that reinforces the notion of an acted-out fiction, a discrepency between appearances and reality. Together these factors develop the epistemological notion that the underlying truths of the world are somewhere inaccessible to anyone who walks this earth. We get a sense of characters who are part of the landscape but can only wonder at their role within it, characters who simultaneously know something and don't know it, "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." The second-person address here implicates us as part of this universe, and it is this quality--this making readers aware that they inhabit the same world that McCarthy's characters do--that separates his work from cheap fantasy and makes reading it such a powerful and affecting experience.

Throughout the novel, the word "pilgrim" shows up on a regular basis to remind us that father and son here are not searching merely for material sustenance but for a deeper, more profound meaning as well. The book gives us a glimpse of this kind of meaning, the force that animates the world. Father and son find it in each other: the father "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (It is poignantly worth noting that McCarthy, who seems patently emotionless in the few interviews he has agreed to, dedicated the novel to his young son, John Francis.) The child here bears a crude but ingrained bent for the rhetorical, and by the end of the book we are led to believe that he is, if not the son of God, at least a prophet with a vague resemblance, ready to spread the word.

Ultimately, the future apocalypse of The Road only disguises allegorically the condition of the present: the persistence of evil in the world, the fragility of life, the bond of kin, the mystery of the created world. How McCarthy, who has taken us from the Old West to a future age, will reveal that world to us yet again remains to be seen.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses Revisited

An N.C. Wyeth illustration of a scene from Last of the Mohicans

Why on earth would anyone in the twenty-first century bother to read The Last of the Mohicans?

This is a question that resounded in my mind as I sat in my study slogging through the book. Why on earth was I reading it? In retrospect, I might say morbid curiosity, but that would be somewhat disingenuous, really. When I picked it up, I had some vaguely inspired notion that it might be fun. Some seventh grade memory of enjoying the book--and of being disturbed by the brutal deaths in it--had lingered with me, but as I read through the clunky narrative, all I could think of was Mark Twain's utterly hilarious critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Twain got it right; if for nothing else, you should read this book so that you can appreciate Twain's essay.

There are some entertaining action sequences, but nothing in the book can withstand more than marginal scrutiny. The faster one reads the book, the better it is; you can get a sense of things without getting bogged down in the sometimes nonsensical prose. For a novel that focuses so much on the role of the wilderness landscape, it can be awfully hard to get your bearings straight as you read. When Cooper's characters enter into a cave, watch out--you'll never be able to get the dimensions of the cave right in your mind or be able to figure out how it is that they seem to be able to see in the utter darkness of an unlit space. Somehow they do, though, without so much as stumbling over a single crooked stone.

The primary object of Twain's ridicule is something that plays a key element in the book: the preternaturally keen sensory awareness of the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas. CSI has nothing on these guys. They can detect half of a day-old mocassin print in a dry creek bed and tell you the wearer's weight, height, eye color, and what he had for lunch the day before. From a bent blade of grass they can tell which direction their prey, the wily and unkempt Magua, is going and how fast he is traveling to get there. Hawkeye is always waxing philosophic on the Indian's natural abilities to understand the way of the forest. "Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings," Hawkeye notes, but he is no slouch himself; he knows, too, that moss grows on the north side of a tree. This guy never gets lost. He's what you had before GPS.

To boot, we get a heap of taciturn Indians--some good, some bad--who seem custom made for the cigar store. We get fainting ladies, and it is with one of those damsels--easily more Walter Scott than early American realism--that we nevertheless find one of the more compelling themes, something that not only gives graduate students something to talk about in relation to this book but also makes it very American in a crucial and (if you can get past the patronizing and dimensionally limited tone) surprisingly progressive way. Cora, the older of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, is at least a sixteenth black. It's no secret that noble savage Uncas fancies doomed, sad Cora more than just a little bit, and it's true that he would make a worthy match to her stalwart temper. Had there not been elements of tragedy at the end of the novel we might have seen a for-its-time daring display of racial integration on the frontier of American possibility. We also see a hint of complexity in the principal villain, Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, whose disgrace is in no small part a result of negative peer pressure from whites: "Was it the fault of Le Renard that his head was not made of rock?" he asks rhetorically--rhetoric being one of his specialties. "Who gave him the fire-water? who made him a villain? 'twas the palefaces, the people of your own color."

In fact, the collisions of race and culture in this novel--and the way Cooper embodies the attitudes of his times toward these topics--do make it worthy of study--to graduate students, at least, and to anyone who wants insight into the mindset of early 19th century Americans, or Europeans, for that matter, since Cooper was a bestseller at home and abroad. Unfortunately, that still doesn't make this book any easier to read.