Mozart’s Last Joke
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Spirituality, Where I Am, Where I've Been on February 17, 2012
Mozart’s Last Joke
Learning Mozart’s Requiem — the centerpiece of the University of Arizona Community Chorus spring concert, April 29, 3 pm, FYI – is an intense and wonderful experience. I know the piece well, and have said on previous occasion that its Kyrie is the cry of a desperate dying man for mercy for his sins, and for sure in its intensity it evokes that response. But learned from inside, it’s beginning to feel like a vast, lightning-fast joke – the flittery dancing up and down the scale, the octave jump where you least expect it (and often right where any reasonable vocalist would be out of breath), the melodrama of the sharps and flats inserted and held at just the – well, melodramatic moment – it’s a delight, a cornball thumbing of the nose at the Grim Reaper. When this is over I just might rank it above Fauré’s Requiem, which would be an inversion of my previous order. Fauré is sweet and tender; Mozart’s is blunt and no-nonsense: — Help me, I’m fucked! with the expletive appropriate to the man and the music; and comes the response — There is no help, God save you.
A chorister has no choice but to memorize the music – no way to get through the Kyrie without diving off the cliff and praying. One glance down at the page and you’re left behind and you’ll never catch up, no point in trying, everything is moving so fast, the roller coaster has disappeared over the next climb and plunge. Written by and for drama queens – I’m having to decide, and quickly, whether I have the theatrical flair required to sing it well. Fortunately, one of the salubrious experiences of singing in a chorus is that I always feel self-conscious – ohmygod, everybody heard me sing that flat note. But then I listen to recordings, and – short of an entrance ahead of schedule – any single voice is lost in the overall wall of sound (Mozart had this idea long before Phil Spector), which is both a relief (thank God nobody heard that flat note) and a humbling (I’m not as important as I think I am).
Locals and visitors, take note: University of Arizona Community Chorus and Orchestra, Dr. Elizabeth Schauer, conductor, Blair Buffinton, assistant conductor, performs Schubert’s “Intende voci” and Mozart’s “Requiem,” Sunday, April 29, 3 p.m., Crowder Hall, University of Arizona campus. Box office 520-621-1162.
Medicine and the Humanities: A Collaboration
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving, Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Spirituality on December 4, 2011
Discussant remarks, First Friday presentations, Department of English, University of Arizona
12/2/11
Introduction: Dr. Tilly Warnock, professor emerita, University of Arizona
Speakers: Dr. Ron Grant, director, University of Arizona Medical Humanities Program
Dr. Rishi Goyal, Ph.D.
Professor Fenton Johnson, discussant
Recent years have witnessed the rise of scientists writing as Renaissance men – I choose the gender deliberately, since I know of no women entrants in this field. If this is true, I suspect it’s because women come intuitively to a more complex understanding of reality than one based solely in empiricism. These great scientists, having achieved prominence in their chosen disciplines – e.g., Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, or cognitive scientist Steven Pinker – write about issues rooted in the arts and humanities with little or no serious study of these disciplines. In Consilience, for example, Dr. Wilson claims that science will someday reveal the precise combination of chemicals and synapse firings that produced Milton’s Paradise Lost. “When we have unified enough certain knowledge,” he writes – that is to say, enough facts – “we will understand who we are and why we are here.” In his current bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker claims that civilization – which we are to understand means “Western civilization” – has reduced violence, even as he never mentions the bloody record of European colonizers against Native peoples or the unhappy fact that fascism and Nazism arose in what was arguably the most civilized European nation.
We who teach in the arts and humanities know the problem here. It’s rooted not in empiricism, a noble way of encountering reality, but in sloppy critical thinking. These brilliant men of reason have not cultivated the discipline required to negotiate what William Faulkner called “the problems of the human hawt in conflict with itself.” They bring a chronometer and a measuring rod to the timeless, infinite territories of the soul, when an evening spent in the company of Shakespeare or George Eliot or Toni Morrison or W.H. Auden or Sor Juana Inez or Matisse or Mozart or Scott Momaday would offer more appropriate and revelatory access.
How are artists and humanists to respond? One means of addressing that question lies, I think, in medicine, because the healing arts inevitably bring reason into an intimate encounter with the heart. Medicine brings science into direct engagement with the most profound issues of the human condition. Genentech may develop tests to predict my unborn child’s sexual identity or the likelihood of Down’s syndrome, but I am most likely to have these tests administered in my doctor’s office. Science can develop drugs to treat HIV, but I will have them prescribed by a doctor, with whom – at least in the ideal – I will discuss the behavior that led to their prescription.
In The Courage to Be, published in 1952, the great theologian Paul Tillich anticipated this development. In the passage that, significantly, incorporates the title of his book, he writes,
This is why, more and more, representatives of medicine generally and psychotherapy specifically ask to cooperate with philosophers and theologians. . . . The medical faculty needs a doctrine of man in order to fulfill its theoretical task; and it cannot have a doctrine of man without the permanent cooperation of all those faculties whose central object is man. . . . Both the help given to man and the doctrines about man are a matter of cooperation from many points of view. Only in this way is it possible to understand and to actualize man’s power of being, his essential self-affirmation, his courage to be.
It should be a source of pride for us that integrative medicine, a manifestation of the collaboration Tillich describes, has a primary base at the University of Arizona, where the medical school has seen fit to cultivate collaboration between the disciplines through its Medical Humanities Program. I’m honored to have had Dr. Grant among my first students at the U of A, to have been invited to participate in this discussion, to join the chorus welcoming Dr. Goyal to the Department, and to seed our discussion by posing the first question:
The humanities notably concern themselves with death as much as life – the Roman poet Cicero famously said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die. And yet contemporary medicine is preoccupied with life to the exclusion of dying. What is the proper place of the study of dying in a discipline whose goal is to preserve and enhance life?
Signs and Wondering
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Spirituality, Uncategorized, Where I Am, Where I've Been on July 8, 2011
June 2011
The second afternoon of an eight-day silent Zen Buddhist retreat on an island in Puget Sound, I was dive-bombed by a bald eagle.
Here are the facts: The retreat center (a rented Christian summer camp, more about that later) has a labyrinth, where the meditator must walk every pathway to reach the center, to which all paths finally lead. While there are twists and turns, finally the pilgrim can make no mistake.
So in silence I walked the labyrinth. I’d like to write that my heart was filled with thoughts of gratitude and love to match the grandeur of the setting, but in fact I was obsessing about being alone in midlife and the possibility of being poor as a church mouse in my dotage and whether my head has the courage to embrace the hard paths my heart has chosen.
I completed the journey amid these grousing thoughts and stepped away from the labyrinth to hear a whoosh and a whistling literally at my ear, close enough that I executed a little leap of alarm. I had binoculars around my neck and it is an abject illustration of how poorly I dwell in the present that I took so long to raise them to the sky, but when I did I spotted the eagle – unmistakable with its broad wingspan and white head and flying at its side a dark-headed juvenile.
Why the dive-bombing? Eagles are not skilled hunters like hawks, who hunt on the wing with great dexterity and precision. If hawks are the fighter pilots of the avian world, eagles are C-150 transports, big and lumbering. They use their size to intimidate smaller, more successful hunters into dropping or abandoning their catch, and it is perhaps unhappy evidence of the interconnectedness of all things that the forebears of the American Empire chose for our national symbol a bully and a thief. (“An opportunist,” chides an older, wiser sister.)
Barn swallows populated the camp, building their mud nests under its eaves, with four or five gaping baby mouths emerging whenever mama or papa returned with food. Walking through the grass must scare up chiggers or mites, because the swallows swooped and dove around my feet, their mouths open to catch bits of flying protein. Perhaps, I thought later, my dive-bombing eagle was using me as a blind, hoping to sneak from behind and use its bulk to knock a swallow to the ground – the only way I could imagine this feathered behemoth catching the deft and agile swallow. And in fact the next morning I found a partially disemboweled swallow on the steps of the meditation hall. Impossible to consign such a graceful creature to a garbage can, so I placed it under the bushes with a bow and a prayer.
And now I come to the point of my labyrinthine story. Maybe the eagle was on the hunt, or maybe I was buzzed by the juvenile who was being dare-devilish and experimenting with its flying chops, or maybe I was being handed a sign. Or maybe all three.
Through page or pixel I sense a grimace among the empiricists but I assure you, I am one of yours; hear me out. Cutting-edge physics announces daily more evidence of the truth at the heart of all our great religious traditions: No duality (Buddhism), we are all one, in Atman (Hinduism), or God (Judaism), or Beauty (Platonism), or Christ Jesus (Christianity). There is no separation between self and other.
Every year we understand more how the mind constructs our reality (the only word, wrote the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, that ought always to be enclosed in quotation marks). Its single-minded goal is to enable us to perform essential tasks in the world and yes, to experience its beauty. But the molecules of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen that make up my body have no precise boundaries; the very margin of my skin, so clearly and cunningly defined by the neural pathways of my brain, is in “reality” porous and permeable. Every moment of our lives we breathe in the world and in the next moment exhale gases of our own making. We are of the world as it is of us.
All matter influences in more and less infinitesimal ways all other matter. The universe is one great organism, as the biologist Lynn Margulis has eloquently observed, in which there is no death – death is an illusion – but only transition from one form of life to another. How like Western thinkers, stuck on Thomas Aquinas’s pyramid of being with guess who at its peak, to define consciousness and then arrogate it to ourselves! For all we know – for all we really know – what we call consciousness is our particular human experience of a universal awareness shared by every plant or creature or even object, with its origins in what for lack of a better word we call God.
In meditation, it is not consciousness (a blessing) but self-consciousness (a burden) from which we seek to liberate ourselves.
In this universe in which interdependent forms are continuously arising and evolving, is it not possible to understand the eagle’s descent as connected in some integral way to my walking the labyrinth? Is it not possible to imagine that human beings possess not a higher but a similar form of consciousness as our brethren among the so-called lower creatures? And that our fit and proper evolution is toward letting go – an experience and embrace of the universe as it is, rather than the universe as the comprehensible, controllable place that we want it to be? Just wondering.
***
In the family tree of religions, surely few are farther apart than Buddhism and Mormonism – think “Lhasa” and “Salt Lake City,” or “Dalai Lama” and the scrubbed young proselytizers in starched white shirts and polyester ties who show up at my door.
© Kevin Fitzpatrick 2011
And yet here we were, a group of American Buddhists, many of us clad in black robes from the traditions of medieval Japan, chanting litanies in Anglicized Japanese and ringing gongs and doing our deep, day-long meditations at a camp run by the Community of Christ, a breakaway sect of Mormonism. No question but that this is a bona fide church camp, as evidenced by those awful metal folding chairs designed to induce hemorrhoids and back spasms, and bunk beds in tiny cabins with mattresses the length of an average ten-year-old, and chest-high shower heads, and yellowing photographs of people working hard to have a good time.
Across almost twenty years these two disparate traditions have developed a mutual respect that verges into love. Our Buddhist priest reports that though at their first visit, years earlier, the Buddhists felt suspicion and unease, today all the Mormon staff (most of them volunteers) are friendly and open-hearted. Some bow and place their hands in gasshō, the traditional Buddhist gesture of greeting.
At the week’s end we install a ceramic Buddhist prayer wheel, a steel-blue urn decorated with leaping salmon and glazed with rainbow iridescence, that the Buddhists are donating to the camp in honor of its 50th anniversary. Using old-growth red cedar, the Community of Christ caretaker has been working late into the night to complete a small temple to house it, using drawings of similar structures from medieval Japan.
On the last night of our retreat we gather, Buddhists and Community of Christ Mormons, to dedicate it, and I am honored to say that I played the tiniest role in its construction and installation, a little bit of me left behind in this spectacular setting. We chant the greatest of Buddhist prayers, the Metta Sutta (“may all beings be happy . . . let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world”) and join the caretaker in singing an old campfire song about opening our hearts.
Would our hosts be so accepting if, instead of ordinary looking prosperous suburbanites, the visiting Buddhist sangha included men and women with nose piercings and tattoos and dreadlocks? Good question, but for one moment at least, under the eagles’ watchful eyes on this island taken over a hundred years ago from the native Samish people, there is no separation, no duality, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, we are all one in Beauty, in Atman, in Christ Jesus, in God.
© Kevin Fitzpatrick 2011
###
Love and Sex in the Time of AIDS
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving, Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Spirituality on June 5, 2011
Here’s a link to my latest op-ed, this in the Los Angeles Times of 5 June 2011. I have preserved the original title. In the editing — possibly a telling comment in itself? — “love” was dropped.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson-aids-20110605,0,4195576.story
The Destiny of Us
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Spirituality, Uncategorized on April 14, 2011
The Destiny of Us
Fenton Johnson / April 2011
Oyez, oyez! Rise and hail!
Bush wren, emu, crake and rail,
Moa, parakeet, and chat,
Puffleg, chiffchaff, after that
An aged passenger is sat.
With the dodo, twelve’s complete,
Ivory bill may take his seat
In jurisprudent black.
In the docket, insolent,
Man and woman, unrepent.
Smooth-skinned bags of blood and sass –
What fool would defend our past?
Only pigeon’s left at hand
To justify the ways of man.
Objection raised –“rock dove” requested,
As “pigeon” is contempt-invested.
Hoots and trills until the Wood
Accepts the change, as well he should,
Knocks his bill against the daïs,
Calls the witnesses to places.
Evidence is scrutinized,
Gathered by the airborne spies,
Sparrows, starlings, grackles too –
They’ve been taking notes on you.
All that noise you thought was fuss?
Clandestine warblers watching us.
Every action marked and rated,
All injustice tabulated.
Condor prosecutor bows,
Raising high her wrinkled brows.
Life divides in homelands three,
Terra firma, sky and sea.
For Earth it once had been so planned
To be the paradise of man.
And yet man would not be content
With that for which they had been sent
And must begin to throw their shit
On fowl and fellow resident.
For this they should not be forgiven
Nor now, nor ever once be shriven
But left to wallow in their waste,
The gall of their own filth to taste.
Ignorance makes no amends.
Consider this, my feathered friends –
That justice may in fact be done.
For those who gave no quarter
Should be receiving none.
The turning earth, a window bright,
Illuminates the rock dove’s flight.
From far remove the sun’s long reach
Spotlights the gray defender’s speech.
For now the courtroom is aglow,
The rock dove struts – her feathers show
The question’s iridescent heart.
Heart-breaking, Condor, from the beak
Of one who knows whereof she speaks.
But some among us understand
That man is part of some big plan.
Who said it all had to make sense?
Life is its only recompense,
An order that o’er all presides,
In which it’s foolish to take sides.
Covetous of friend and neighbor,
For all we’re given, they must labor,
Even joy, so freely had –
They must practice to be glad.
Their compensation for this pain?
Too much capacity of brain.
One wonders at the Mighty’s plan
In making such a thing as man.
But condemnation’s a mistake
Judgment is not ours to make.
Mercy is not strain’d to fall
But comes like grace to one and all.
If they were each judged by their flaws
They’d all be bound for hellish maws.
Fellow prisoners of travail
And wonder, too – we shall prevail
Only if we learn to shrive
In hopes that they will learn to live.
Divorce themselves from price and wealth
Live only for the sake of health.
Begin each morning with a bow
Grateful for the here and now.
No need to puzzle or predict
The feathered courtroom’s wise verdict,
Or what their sentence was about –
Our time is here. We live it out.
###
Lessons from the Quake: Giving Up Illusions
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Spirituality on March 16, 2011
The following ran as an opinion essay in the Los Angeles Times of 16 March 2011:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson-earthquake-20110316,0,2960695.story
Violence in the Desert, Violence in Our Hearts
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Here and Now: On Politics and Culture, Where I Am, Where I've Been on January 14, 2011
12 January 2011 — Tucson, Arizona
The mainstream consensus is that Jared Loughner was deranged, and the Tucson tragedy, however regrettable, is just another of those things that happen in a crowded, complicated, difficult world. What comes to mind: the Cuyahoga River of Ohio, at one point so polluted it burst into flames. One might have said then that the pollution was just one of those things, the product of a crowded, complicated, difficult world, and yet today, because we collectively agreed to prioritize clean water, anglers are fishing from its banks.
I’m not writing about handgun controls, though the killings present a textbook case, to be interpreted pro or con as you see fit. I’m writing about my country’s constant choice of war over peace, violence over diplomacy, anger over love.
***
I first met Gabrielle Giffords early in 2001, when I co-hosted the founding of a Tucson chapter of the Stonewall Democratic Club. I’m a rangy, six-foot, two-hundred pound guy and I dwarfed her, a small, fine-boned woman. And yet from that meeting I recall not her diminutiveness but her large presence – radiant and self-confident. I encountered her many times over the coming decade, to the point where I consider her, if not a friend at least a dear acquaintance.
Around Tucson that’s no particularly remarkable claim. She is a politician’s politician – she works hard at meet-and-greet, she has a remarkable memory for names and faces, without prompting she knows my name and my concerns and has been completely present to both. In the face of rising invective from right and left – and plenty of left-wingers grumbled at her fence-balancing, most notably at her staunch support for easy access to guns – she kept her cool. In contrast to her opponents, Giffords thrives on diversity – as a woman and a Jew she is close to being the Other, with a gay Hispanic among her principal aides.
In the district she became known for her unshakeable stance regarding two hot-button issues: She argued that the nation and its business community need some form of national health care, and that – though she supported tighter border controls – all people, regardless of citizenship, must be treated with dignity and respect. Founded in compassion, those stances made her a target for the escalating vitriol of our national politics. Her district juxtaposes the dark-skinned funny-talking Otherness of Mexico with the in-migration of political conservatives who buy up the beautiful land, ignorant or indifferent or hostile to the fact that Spanish-speaking people arrived here first, in 1540, when the region already hosted a substantial Native population. Amid this volatile mix, using charm, political acumen, beauty, and good cheer, she reached across political boundaries and borders so successfully that she fended off repeated challenges from the Republican right.
We may never know Jared Loughner’s deepest motivations. What we do know is that they were formed in a country where violence is considered an acceptable response to an encounter with otherness.
***
Irrespective of laws governing their possession, handguns are intended to inspire fear. Mess with me and I’ll blow your head off, they say, with the shooter determining what constitutes messing and questions asked later.
We duplicate that philosophy in our national politics. As a means of cultivating fear, our leaders fabricate conspiracies (“the Axis of Evil,” “weapons of mass destruction”) where none exist. Politicians and pundits demonize those who speak a different language or use different names for God, inviting their followers to do the dirty work. Not that our elected officials are solely responsible. Our biggest-budget movies (e.g., Avatar) enshrine the notion that white men must take up guns to save hapless dark-skinned people from horrors other white men perpetrate. Violent language directed at gays remains acceptable in Congress and in the media. Violence against women is dismissed as another unfortunate but inevitable aspect of a crowded, complicated, difficult world.
We want to believe that Jared Loughner is a monster, but he is a human being. We wring our hands over his monstrosity, absolving ourselves of responsibility, instead of acknowledging that the murders might have been averted, because that would require us to engage in some serious soul-searching.
In Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a mass murderer is about to kill his last victim, an elderly grandmother. Just before he shoots, she achieves redemption – she reaches out her hand and says, “You’re one of my babies.” Or, as St. Paul would have it, “ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” or, as the Buddhists would have it, “no duality” — no separation between us and the other, even when the other is guilty of the most heinous crimes.
As recently as Vietnam, pacifists were included, albeit on the fringe, in our national conversations. Now no one wants to hear the hard truth that we are responsible for our actions – that those in power, among whom I include myself, are enabling if not condoning this slide to a place where we shrug our shoulders at violence.
Our climate of violence, in word or in deed, is no accident but the result of decisions made by voters and leaders and even certain clergy. This was the world in which Jared Loughner came of age, the air he breathed and in which he chose to take up the gun.
***
In this great country, courtesy of the First Amendment, we are free to say what we wish without fear of government reprisal. But because we can do something, must we do it? Because we have power, must we use it? How may we nurture an environment not of fear but of civility, in which we acknowledge that words have power as the first step toward restraining ourselves in their use?
Here the Tea Partiers are right: We cannot rely on the government, whose intervention worsens the problem by requiring security measures that threaten important freedoms. We must police ourselves. We must relearn and teach anew the small courtesies of daily language. We must share power, knowing that what seems like an individual sacrifice is our collective gain. We must enshrine diplomacy as our first response to violence – local, national or international.
***
Where does one find the courage required to not fight back, whether in word or deed? As the world’s most powerful nation we have never much bothered to ask the question, which is why we are endlessly stuck in the cycle of violence, see our response to September 11.
We remember Dr. King for his civil rights victories. We forget or misplace the commitment to nonviolence in which they took place.
. . . hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. . . . Somewhere somebody must have a little sense and that’s the strong person. . . . Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil, and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love.
How do I, who find handguns to be an invitation to violence, make and sustain peace with those – some of them my closest relatives and friends – who feel the need to carry them? In engaging this koan, I look to Gabby Giffords’ masterful diplomacy. Handguns are not going away any faster than their owners’ fears, and so we who love peace must figure out how to acknowledge and address those fears, because the way forward lies not in confrontation but in embrace. By example – the most powerful method of teaching – we must persuade people to lay down their guns.
This is not going to happen overnight, or in my lifetime, but Jared Loughner has handed each of us a terrible opportunity: Mercy is by definition a virtue of the powerful. Those of us who have power can create an example of peace built on the foundation of the victims’ suffering. We can clean up our rivers of words. We can create a world in which our children grow up understanding civility as the norm. We can beat our guns into plowshares and brave the Creator’s world unarmed. We can turn the other cheek.
###
Madame Bovary: Desire, Grace, God
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Spirituality, What I'm Reading and Why on August 12, 2010
Even in loquacious, verbose English — elegantly performed in my audio version by Simon Vance, in a translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling — the precision of Gustave Flaubert’s French comes through. We are all searchers and Emma Bovary is the distillation of our longing. She marries dull, devoted Charles to escape the routines of her childhood home. Dissatisfied with their small village of Tostes, she occasions their move to nearby Yonville, though the latter is merely the former village reconfigured. From boredom with Charles she takes up an affair with the wealthy roué Rodolphe — hers is a painfully easy seduction. The affair runs its course and Rodolphe dumps her, sending a Dear Jane letter whose composition Flaubert describes in terms that will make anyone squirm who has written or contemplated such an act. In her distress Emma falls ill and turns to religion, last refuge of saints and scoundrels, but with her slow recovery her devotions slack off. She reencounters the young student Léon, her earliest obsession, at whom she throws herself anew.
If Emma were merely flighty we would tire of her more quickly than Rodolphe or Léon, but her caprices evoke a deeper, more profound longing that anyone shares who has been touched by music or fiction or painting or any of our infinite manifestations of the imagination. It is, I think, the longing for God.
In using the word I realize for the first time which, of chicken or egg, came first: Desire preceded God. With its rules of grammar and syntax, human speech must necessarily be the servant of reason, but desire is the enemy of reason; and so every language demands – requires — a placeholder, a word to set limits on our boundless capacity for desire. And so out of our own invention we invented God.
Let us cross-examine the logic here. By definition “infinity” is beyond logic, outside reason, beyond the capacity of human speech to describe or encompass. And yet all mythologies agree that God is infinite. How, then, may we know God, the Infinite, the Unknowable? Surely only through that feature of the human condition that knows no limits: through our desire, or maybe better put, through our longing. In our hypersexed age “desire” inevitably invokes sex, whereas throughout Madame Bovary Flaubert makes clear that sex is only a symptom of Emma’s larger, deeper, infinite, lifelong longing.
Thus only through the infinitude of desire may we understand the infinitude of God.
Sometimes I think that God is desire, and that desire is God.
This idea, which strikes our cynical, jaded, prudish, early 21st century ears as bizarre, was commonplace in the Middle Ages and lay close to the heart of the writings of some of its most famous preachers and mystics — Bernard of Clairvaux, Abélard, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich. Some conceived of angels as pure desire, an idea that has sadly fallen by the wayside (along with the notion that in the hierarchy of being, angels are inferior to human beings, since they are given heaven as a matter of course whereas we have to earn it).
This sanctifying of desire horrifies the institutionalized Church, which like all institutions exists to contain and regulate passion. But when Flaubert famously cried, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” (“Madame Bovary, she is I!”), he was speaking for all of us. In that universality, more than in its scandal, lies the source of the novel’s immediate and enduring popularity.
Emma is dissatisfaction personified and epitomized. Her successive obsessions — with Rodolphe, with God, with Léon — act out a reality that Flaubert grimly summarizes as “the eternal monotony of passion.” All three affairs follow the unvarying pattern: Meeting, obsession, consummation, boredom, recrimination, death.
[Emma] was not happy, and never had been. How was it, then, that there was this emptiness in life? How was it that whatever she leaned against straightway began to crumble into dust? Oh, but if somewhere there breathed a being brave and handsome, a man of power and resolution, one whose nature was wrought of sweetness and strength, a man with the heart of a poet and the form of an angel, a lyre with brazen strings, sounding his bridal songs of triumph and of pain beneath the echoing vault of heaven, why, peradventure, should she not meet him? What a hopeless dream! Wherefore should she seek the undiscoverable? Everything rang false, everything was a lie, every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse. Nor was there any pleasure but brought satiety in its train, and every kiss, were it never so sweet, never so passionate, would but leave upon the lips a longing for some bliss that should be greater still.
Or, as Buddhists say, with more efficiency but less grace, “Life is dissatisfaction.”
As for me, I side with grace, which is why I believe. For this is the remarkable fact of Madame Bovary: No bleaker portrayal of the human condition exists. Emma’s affairs come to naught, less because she is trapped by marriage — more than once she makes clear her willingness to throw it over — than because she is trapped, as we are all trapped, in longing. Her husband Charles’s one attempt at immortality — he undertakes an operation to correct a boy’s club foot — ends disastrously. Emma eats arsenic in hopes of a swift and painless death; instead she endures prolonged agony that Flaubert, a surgeon’s son, renders in excruciating detail. Her extravagance ruins her husband and consigns their daughter, who has committed no sin other than to be their offspring, to a life of factory labor. Charles mercifully dies sitting in his garden — suggesting that, indeed, life’s only dependable mercy is death. In the novel’s last sentence the cowardly self-promoting fraud Monsieur Homais is awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
And yet the music of the prose contradicts the message. Through this most abstract of media – squiggly black lines on a white page, read, in my case, in translation — Flaubert evokes the pathos and beauty and tragedy of the human condition. In perhaps the novel’s most famous passage, Flaubert deprecates the power of language in any form:
. . . the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings — as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.
In its beauty and its truth the passage transcends its bleak message. The passion of the prose proves greater than its logic. I finish Madame Bovary not weeping or morose but bowing my head in awe, which as a response to the human condition serves handsomely as an alternative to despair.
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What I Saw In California
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Where I Am, Where I've Been on August 9, 2010
8/9/10, a nice sequential date.
From Salt Lake City I cross the vast high sagebrush-dotted desert of Nevada, with the only variant in 400 miles a roadkill ruffed grouse. As I approach California thunderheads mass over the high Sierra. I pass through Reno and, after 2000-plus miles of effortless open road, precisely as I cross the state line traffic slows to a crawl — I-80 is being resurfaced across Donner Pass. Indifferent to the stop-and-start traffic my innards recall the two cups of coffee I had for breakfast but all the rest stops are closed and finally I resort to slipping behind a Douglas fir at a place where the emergency lane widens to accommodate winter chain removal. Welcome to California.
That evening I stop in Sacramento to give my road-weary dogs a rest. Here in the heart of an ever- deepening financial crisis my host’s partner speaks of remodeling his kitchen which as it stands might be featured in Architectural Digest but he will tear out the counters, replacing the dark granite countertop with a gray granite countertop and elevating the whole from prosperity to luxury.
On Sunday we go to a gay pool party hosted by an older man. In past lives and at different times my two friends have each been the lover of our host, who now has a sweet-faced younger man filling that role. A pipe filled with pot sits discreetly beside the six-burner gas grill. Twenty gay men straggle in, along with one woman and two nonoperative transsexuals. Everyone gets plastered by the pool except the transsexuals, who slip to a side table to smoke. At some point I slip away to walk a block to the American River, flowing swift and clean, and jump in some real water, a living creature, swimming with full effort upstream I just manage to stay in place.
As we sit to table the host proposes a toast to his sibling, “my dear little sister Donna Rae, formerly my dear little brother Donald Ray.” Donna stands in her lavender halter-top bikini, not a great look for a nonoperative transsexual in her 60s. In Florida she packs a pistol for self-preservation but we are in California and life is good. We are in the capital of the world’s ninth largest economy and the conversation centers on politics, the Senate race, the governor’s race — will Californians return hoary Jerry Brown to the post more recently occupied by the muscleman Arnold Scharzenegger.
On the ride back to my host’s house we have much discussion about the success or failure of the thong in covering Donna Rae’s equipment and of the vexing question of whether one could support an employment protection bill that excluded transsexuals or whether the only possible stance is the pure stance, all-inclusive or nothing. I’m an incrementalist — take the rights when and where you can get them and keep fighting — a point of view not popular in left-wing gay California.
And now I am in socked-in San Francisco but in mid-afternoon the sun peeks through the cool gray. The apartment where I stay is in chaos as workers prepare it for my host’s imminent return so I retire to a neighborhood cafe where the conversation focuses on Twitter and Facebook and textual content and viral advertising. The chief conversant, a young Hindu /Latino/Caucasian mix, features on her arm an oval scar from a tattoo removal. A woman ahead of her time, I think, but we are in California and life is good.
Greetings from the Sunflower State
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Where I Am, Where I've Been on August 4, 2010
The great inclined plain of Kansas is very impressive. The fields are emerald green as if it’s spring, until near Salina I arrive at amber waves of grain that are being harvested, with combines moving back and forth, back and forth, cutting the black earth’s hair. In my rear view mirror I see the long decline to the Missouri; ahead, always up, up, up in a gentle but unmistakeable climb. The cottonwoods are green and tall and beautiful until somewhere after Salina and they abruptly shrink and limit themselves to creek beds.
August, the only month whose name serves us, richly and well, as an adjective. On this hot day Kansas bears out the name, down to the thunderstorm that glowers on the horizon for the last 50 miles and drops a quick shower just as I arrive.
And now greetings from the Vagabond Hotel in Hays, KS, my first stop out of Kansas City. When I asked where I could get a good burger the clerk at the counter looked down at his register and said, “Well, I go to Q Bar — it’s a sports bar downtown.” OK, so I drive downtown to Q (as in “cue,” as in “pool cue”) Bar and sit at the bar, though it’s clear it’s a divey kind of place, but hey, I’m in Hays, Kansas.
The guy next to me is already drunk at 7:30 pm on a Tuesday and starts talking my ear off about Voltaire and Louis L’Amour, which is a promising combination, but he talks on and on until I look bored and he begs off, since he’s obviously hitting on me (“I’m the only one of my brothers and sisters who’s not married”) and I’m just as obviously not interested.
I turn back to my burger and realize — Oh, duh. This is what passes for the gay bar in Hays, which only has about 10,000 people but is the only town of that size for a hundred and more miles in all directions and has a small state university. No, not a gay bar — it’s a pool bar, in fact, but it’s also the place where a person could pick up another person of the same gender and nobody’s going to pull a gun, and in Hays that will have to do. The population of the bar on a Tuesday night at 8 pm is 20 people — 19 men and one very High Plains lesbian looking woman (the bartender). My take on the subject is very possible, I’m thinking. Probable, in fact. The burger is passable — not a chi-chi California burger (nobody bothered to ask me how I like it cooked) but not greasy and with pretty good fries.
As I leave I turn back to my neighbor and reintroduce myself and thank him for being a reader. His is a big mind and it hasn’t the space it needs out here on the plains and I thank the stars again for catapulting me into the big world, not because the big world is better but because I needed its space to grow. May he find the space to grow, I whisper to myself as I leave.
Photo by Jocelyne Rotily.