— Photo by Christopher Payne
Patient ward mural at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York.
There’s a cruel dictum attributed to Ernest Hemingway about a person’s worth when measured against the eternal flow of time; it says, “Every man has two deaths: When he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name.”
It’s not because I’m turning 84 next month (and on my way out) that I’m thinking about post-mortem anonymity because my philosophical self has entertained such thoughts since first reading the work of my favorite Roman poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, commonly known as Horace.
To some extent he scooped Hemingway by two-thousand years in his oft-quoted Ode 30 in Book 3 of his “Odes” which appeared in 23 B.C.
The first line of the poem reads, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” which translates to, “I have made a monument that will last longer than brass.” Of course, Horace is speaking about his work.
Then he gets bolder, “regalique situ pyramidum altius.” Which means, “And that work will have more staying power than the pyramids of kings.”
In lines six and seven he boasts even more, “Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam” which is “I will not fully die; a big part of me will escape Death.”
Add 23 B.C. to 2024 A.D. and, 2047 years later, we see Horace was right. On the Internet there’s an endless parade of pictures of pyramids — built two-thousand years before Horace was born — but here we are still talking about Horace, which puts him right up there with the pyramid-making kings of Egypt. Mirabile dictu.
And, for all the propaganda religionists spout about people not dying because of the eternal joy they will receive through the resurrection of the body — see “The Treatise on the Resurrection” found at Nag Hammadi — what Hemingway said is true: There is no resurrection, there is no eternal life for someone fallen from memory, when not a single soul has incorporated you.
The ideas of being forgotten and bodily resurrection were reignited yesterday during a conversation I had with a clerk in the vital records office of Smithtown, New York about an official document.
It was the death certificate of a member of my family — a Sullivan who died in 1944 — and I think I’m safe in saying that the Sullivans of my generation have all but forgotten her. Her monumentum has had the staying power of wilting lettuce.
I’m here today to unwilt that lettuce, if you will, through a resurrection of my own, hoping to bring that Sullivan back from the grave so she can say with Horace, “Non omnis moriar.”
The name of the Sullivan on the certificate is Elizabeth Lillian, my father’s older sister by five years and called by the family Lilly or Lill. I used to ask the adults when I was growing up why we heard so little of Lill.
A short eight-page memoir my aunt Catherine (Cass), put together during our Bicentennial year, provides an answer that in some way brings Lill back to life. (Cass was Lill’s younger sister by six years.)
She says the family got multi-socked by Sorrow. First, there was the death of a sister, “Baby Barbara,” who died at seven months. Then in 1926, the backbone of the family, her mother, Barbara — after a two-year illness — left this world, leaving the family in disarray.
Lill had been the caretaker of her mother while she was sick and after she died, Lill became the mother of the house — which seems to have been too much to handle.
That is, Cass says: “Either because of the strain of my mother’s two years’ illness and death or the responsibility afterwards or for some other unknown reason, [Lill] suffered a complete nervous breakdown about 1927.”
Thus, the Sullivans were now Sorrow’s favored friend: They lost Baby Barbara, then Barbara the mother died, then Lill went to pieces.
I do not know who decided where Lill should go to patch herself together but she wound up in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, a massive, other-worldly panopticon complex Oliver Twist wouldn’t be caught dead in.
The family did everything to keep Lill’s soul alive. Cass says, “My father and even my stepmother were very faithful to her and visited her often. I did occasionally as did my brothers Neal and John … It was a very traumatic experience for me every time I went to see her because I saw the pretty young girl in such dreadful surroundings.”
During the 1930s and early 1940s Creedmoor was Lill’s home, though listed as an “inmate.”
I was talking to the clerk at Smithtown because Lill did not die at Creedmoor in Queens (New York City) but in Suffolk County; between April 1940 and her death four years later, she was moved to Kings Park Psychiatric Center located in Smithtown, Suffolk County — and the vital records officer in the town had information about how Lill died.
When my mother was about the age I am now, I asked her to tell me the “Lill story” one last time — and she did, and added something new.
She said Lill was a pious soul and had a “close” relationship with — and this is the new part — Father John B. Snyder the priest in the parish where Lill went to Mass, confessed her sins, and sought pastoral counseling.
Father Snyder died in January 1934, ten years before Lill; The Herald Statesman of Yonkers for Monday, Jan. 22, 1934 revealed he “had been seriously ill with a nervous breakdown for a long time and several months ago had been relieved of his duties as assistant to the Rev. Michael, J. Tighe at the Staten Island [St. Mary’s] church.”
Two nervous breakdowns, though in the priest’s case, the Statesman added: “Secrecy was thrown about the circumstances attending death by members of the family.”
But a headline in The New York Times the following day (the Jan. 23 edition) uncovered the secret: “Rev. J. B. Snyder of Staten Island Hangs Self While Visiting Brother.”
Cass, too, said Lill was pious; my mother said she was “close” to the parish priest, and the paper said he too had a breakdown to which he added a suicide.
By saying my mother used the word “close” I am in no way implying something was “going on.” That generation of Sullivans — Cass, my father, their brother Neal, and both their parents were straight-laced — personable people but imbued, like many Irish, with a deep sense of modesty.
I see Lill and Father John as Pyramus and Thisbe whom Ovid and Shakespeare wrote about: The couple, forbidden to marry — even to see each other — were forced to speak through a chink in the wall between their houses.
But the walls at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center had no chinks. And we have no idea if the priest ever saw his parishioner in confinement.
Stymied by Fate, Pyramus and Thisbe decide not to have breakdowns but to elope, agreeing to meet at a mulberry tree with white berries.
While waiting for her lover, Thisbe is accosted by a lion and flees, leaving her cloak spread across the ground.
When Pyramus arrives and sees the empty cloak, he thinks a lion has eaten his bride-to-be and in despair takes his life, his blood turning the berries of the mulberry tree red.
Thisbe, returning to the meeting spot after escaping the lion, sees her lover’s body spread across the ground and, overcome by despair, takes her life as well.
To commemorate the blood the dear-hearts shed for love, the fruit of mulberry trees remains red to this day.
Eighty years ago this month — July 16, 1944 — Lill died and I cannot shake her. Is that what is meant by resurrection of the body?
As long as I live, Lill will have, like Horace, the staying power of a pyramid; deep down I hear a voice saying “Non omnis moriar.”
— From Getty Museum Collection
In this 1300s manuscript, the Master of Jean de Mandeville, an anonymous French illuminator, shows Cain, at left, offering a sheaf of wheat to God while Abel sacrifices his first-born lamb. The figure of God is repeated in the arc of heaven, showing God, at left, smiling down diagonally on Abel, depicted with a smooth brow, while the figure of God to the right covers his face in displeasure as Cain, with furrowed brow, vainly looks up for approval.
For Fred Boehrer
It’s easy to look upon the story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis as a cute little morality play where the blackguard Cain gets his comeuppance: He is exiled to the Land of Nod, cut off from his past — his mother and father, the mother and father of the universe — while watching his chances of getting into heaven when he dies wither by the day.
Probably his most remembered line is: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” sassing a god whose blood he already made boil.
But a deeper look at the text — beginning with the brothers offering their gifts to God — reveals the tale of Cain and Abel to be a lesson on how to — paradoxically — prevent murder and, on a macro scale, civil strife.
As we know, Cain was a farmer and Abel a herdsman and the original archetypes for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s line in “Oklahoma”: “Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.”
Over the years, I’ve met more than a thousand criminologists but cannot recall a single one ever taking up the case of Cain and Abel or the crime-prevention message contained in Genesis 4:3-7.
If you’re up on your Old Testament, you know how the story goes. Genesis [4:3] says, “In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord.”
The next verse goes: “But Abel brought fat portions from some of the first born of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering; but on Cain and his offering” [4:5] “he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.”
Of course, the key words are “fat portions from the first-born of his flock”; an enormous archive exists describing how peoples across the globe have dealt with “first fruits,” whether it be grain, lambs, olive oil, or some other part of the harvest.
“Fat portions” can be translated as the best of the best — of which there is no better, an ethic of giving Abel lived by.
And we must keep in mind that Cain sinned twice: The most glaring is the murder of course but he also refused to follow the rules that insure a community’s future — he chintzed on his gift to his God, which he got as a gift from God’s soil.
Kenneth Mathews, in his extraordinary commentary on the early books of Genesis, asks whether the problem with Cain’s transgression is the nature of his gift or a personality flaw he couldn’t control.
The issue is worthy of discussion but it’s hair-splitting; the crux of the matter is the great importance communities assign(ed) to the “first fruits” of a harvest.
On one level the practice smacks of superstition but it’s the way civilizations guided their lives — in some religions the practice persists — and seemed happy with the results.
The great ethnologist, J. G. Frazer, with a multitude of examples, has documented how communities regarded the “corn-spirit,” that is, the spirit or god inherent in a crop.
They believed the new fruits were animated with a divine spirit and the way to keep that spirit alive was to ingest it sacramentally. By eating the body and blood of the corn-spirit — the body and blood of the god — the community was assured a future and its people renewed life.
Christians eat the god to this day; when the priest holds up a host at Mass he does not say, “Here is a piece of bread”; he says, “This is the body of Jesus Christ.”
And, when he holds up a chalice of wine, he does not call it wine but says: “Here is the blood of Jesus. Eat and drink this god and you will live forever.”
Jesus, as the first and only begotten son of God, was himself a first fruit.
Tracing the practice of ingesting the god, Frazer in the second volume of “Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild” says, “Sometimes the first-fruits are presented to the king, perhaps in his character as a god; very often they are made over to the spirits of the human dead, who are sometimes thought to have it in their power to give or withhold the crops.”
But the rules are always the same, until “the first-fruits have been offered to the deity, the dead, or the king, people are not at liberty to eat the new crops.”
The first fruits belonged to those with power over nature, over the processes (rain, sun) that insure a bountiful crop and thus a community’s future. Cain’s offering was OK but it violated the ethic of offering your best for the common good.
But somewhere along the line people no longer saw themselves as ingesting a god as a sacrament but as offering a sacrifice. Early on, the community ate “the new fruits sacramentally because they suppose them to be instinct with the divine spirit or life.”
But then, Frazer adds, “The fruits of the earth are conceived as created rather than as animated by a divinity.”
When this happens, “the new fruits are no longer partaken of sacramentally as the body and blood of the god; but a portion of them is offered to the divine beings who are believed to have produced them.” Whether sacrament or offering, the rules remain the same.
In New Caledonia, the first yams dug from the ground were eaten sacramentally. Then the chief got up and reminded everybody they were eating to their hearts’ delight because they had adhered to the rules of their ancestors; he then urged the young to continue the tradition (if they knew what was good for them). Not an LOL.
In classical antiquity, the people of Athens sacrificed the first fruits of wheat and barley to Demeter (the goddess of their harvest) and to her daughter, Persephone (also a vegetation goddess), in the city of Eleusis.
And in Rome, the first ears of corn were sacrificed to Ceres (the Roman god of agriculture) and the first new wine to Liber (the god of wine) and “until the priests had offered the sacrifices,” the rules said, “the people might not eat the new corn nor drink the new wine.”
Then the New Testament came along and turned things upside down. Jesus said there are two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, thereby putting the community on the same level as God. From then on, the first fruits were to be offered to the community, especially the poor who live within.
And it was John the Baptist who set the standard, “If you have extra clothes, you should share with those who have none. And if you have extra food, do the same.” The message is: Don’t be possessive; don’t be a Cain.
Augustine of Hippo in Chapter 15 of his “City of God,” says, “Cain means ownership,” which centuries later Karl Marx translated as “class struggle.”
The gospel writer Matthew (19:22) says, when people find out they have to give their first fruits to the poor they go away sorrowful — like the proverbial rich man — knowing it requires a re-evaluation of their wealth in relation to what others have — and why Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
For years now, in all parts of our country, there’s been considerable talk about “economic equality” but, when the blueprint arrives showing the structural changes you/me/we need to make to make that happen, you/me/we head to the Land of Nod to percolate civil strife.
And yet there are data that show, when someone adopts the blueprint of offering first fruits to those with less, he starts flushing his Xanax down the toilet.
Art by Elisabeth Vines
Dear graduates in our towns and villages hereabouts:
When my older grandson was about to be born, my son and daughter-in-law asked family and friends to send the boy — they knew beforehand — their favorite childhood story so that, when they were read to him, he could incorporate their values as a source of strength for the future.
I did not buy a book but wrote a story called “Grandfather Dream for Gus.” A name had not yet been assigned to the child and, because he was slated to be born in August, in utero we called him “Gus.”
On the cover of my storybook is a photo of myself (at my brother John’s graduation from grammar school) along with my father and grandfather, so the Sullivan-to-be — little Gus — would be aware of five generations of Sullivans: himself; his father (my son); his grandfather (me); my father; and my grandfather. I was hoping the historical continuity of our family could offer help should things go awry.
Gus is a fine young man today with a deep sense of purpose, headed to New Zealand in September for a semester abroad to study the marine life of the waters down under. He’s a scholar in the making, which brings joy to an old man who vowed to be a scholar for life at the age the boy is now. Had he incorporated something of me?
For many years, I’ve wondered what other grandparents hope their grandkids will incorporate of them. When Pablo Picasso’s son Claude was departing after a visit with his father, the painter would hold back a piece of the boy’s clothing such as a necktie or pair of pajamas.
Speaking of this ritual, the boy’s mother, Françoise Gilot, says in her memoir, “Pablo hoped by this method that some of Claude’s youth would enter into his own body. It was a metaphorical way of appropriating someone else’s substances, and in that way … prolong his own life.” Incorporation flipped on its head: a father borrowing from his son!
I “teach” a course at the Voorheesville Public Library called “Writing Personal History for Family, Friends, and Posterity.” It’s the second time around; last time, for five years the “students” brought in every two weeks pieces of memory-generated literature they wanted the world to see.
The new cohort — seven adults ranging from their 40s to 90s — also bring in every two weeks a dream-story that as a mother, father, grandmother, grandfather they wrote for the Gus in their life.
Several weeks ago, one of the students brought in a story about the year his sister, Rosie, was entering first grade and he, not wanting to stay home, got dressed and went along. But he was too young so the teachers told him, “Don’t come back.”
The written text of the story includes a photo of the author and his sister on their first day heading to first grade. They are dressed in sharp but simple new clothes carrying now-hip-retro school bags. You look and are drawn into their life.
The memoir student said he read the story to Rosie over the phone and she broke down in tears. What a treasure awaits his son and granddaughter and all the people in Rosie’s life who now have the dreams of ancestors to incorporate into their lives; as Prospero says in “The Tempest,” “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
“Among the Lapps,” the great ethnologist J. G. Frazer points out, “when a woman was with child and near the time of her delivery, a deceased ancestor or relation used to appear to her in a dream and inform her what dead person was to be born again in her infant, and whose name the child was therefore to bear.” That’s why I’m named Dennis after my grandfather.
Beloved children’s stories have been handed down for generations across the globe as collectively-shared dreams, though sometimes they appear as a portent or omen.
Consider the case of “The Wonderful Story of Henny-Penny” which we know in the States as “The Story of Chicken Little.” My version comes from Joseph Cundall’s artfully-illustrated “A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children,” which came out in 1850.
The story begins with a hen, Henny-Penny, who was picking peas in the farmyard when all of a sudden a pea fell on her head with a thump so hard she thought a cloud had fallen from the sky.
Thunderstruck, if you will, by this freak of nature, she decides to report the incident to the king thinking it a matter of national security — and off she heads to the palace.
On the way, she runs into a rooster she tells about the “clouds” falling on her — she’s now using the plural, and why Chicken Little says “the sky” is falling.
The rooster tells Henny-Penny he’d love to come along to bring the news to the king.
A ways down the road, they come upon a duck, a goose, and a turkey one after the other to whom Henny-Penny tells her story and they all join the brigade.
A little farther down the road, the five see a fox who, when he hears the story, says he’d be delighted to show them the way: “Come with me,” he says, “and I will show you the road to the king’s house.” They were delighted with the offer.
But soon they saw the fox was a trickster as he ushered them into his hole where he and his kids ate them up.
There are untold news stories on TV these days, and in the papers, and on social media about the number of young people suffering from loneliness, disabling anxiety, and depression, severe enough in some cases to require daily doses of drugs to help them fashion a morrow.
Some of the news stories imply the young sufferers are too weak to handle life’s load — in effect blaming the victim — “They just don’t got the goods.”
But what historical continuity do they have that offers succor during distressing times? Their purpose-in-life is blurred.
They live in a world filled with tornados and hurricanes blowing America’s heartland apart — The New York Times says expect 26 hotter days next year — and are deeply rent by the ideological civil war going on; add Russia’s imperialistic blowing apart Ukrainian children to satisfy the whim of Rasputin; and then Israel’s leveling of Gaza producing millions of forsaken nomads hoping to find a rock to lay their head upon to sleep without a bomb whizzing by.
The dreams we’ve created for the Gusses in our lives are now collective nightmares; they offer the strength of a whittled-down tooth pick.
America, your sky is falling, as a rabid fox is ushering your people into a hole so he and his kin can eat them up. Or is that too Henny-Penny?
This time of year, schools all over the country will grace their commencement ceremony with the familiar song: Gaudeamus igitur; Juvenes dum sumus; Gaudeamus igitur; Juvenes dum sumus. In English it means: Let us celebrate the flower of our youth, let us live out the dreams we’re made for.
The final verse goes: Pereat tristitia; Pereant osores; Pereat diabolus; Quivis Antibacchius; Atque irrisores. The English is: As we go along on our journey, let us not give into sadness; let us resist the lies of haters; let us dismiss the devils who envy and mock our democratic ideals as the great majority of us strive to insure that the dreams of all are fulfilled.
That deserves a gaudeamus. And a big one at that.
The Prodigal Son by Pompeo Batoni
For John Dominic Crossan
If we take the words of the New Testament at face value, we are led to believe that Jesus could not only draw large crowds but had inventive ways of handling them once they came.
The gospel writer Mark (4:1) says, “A crowd that had gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat on the lake and sat down [to speak] while the crowd arranged itself along the shore.”
Once settled down, Jesus began to tell them stories called parables for, as Mark adds, “He did not say anything to [the crowds] without using a parable.”
And parables ought not be confused with fables, which the sixth-century B.C. Greek seanchaí, Aesop, made famous, where animals do the talking; in parables, only people speak — and always about some ethical predicament in which they find themselves.
Jesus adopted the parable as his métier because he thought it the most accessible way listeners could grasp his lessons about what they must do to be a good human being. Mark says, “He taught them many things in parables.”
New Testament scholars have counted as many as 50 different such stories — though undergirding them all is the same mandate: “Meet the needs of your neighbor as much as you do your own.”
There’s no way to know if Jesus composed his stories off the cuff or got them from somewhere else, but he could have known Psalm 78: “Attend, my people, to my teaching; listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable, and unfold the puzzling events of the past.”
And the power of the parable is not just that it’s a mirror to see oneself in but a door to walk through and enter a world of deep self-reflection.
It’s pretty well agreed that the two best parables Jesus ever told were the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son, also known as the parable of “The Lost Son” or the “Forgiving Father” or “Two Brothers.”
Both parables reflect the deep radical economics of personal responsibility for one’s neighbor that Jesus included in all his talks but the Prodigal Son goes a step further by laying out the ideological choices available to a person as to how he will treat someone in need, a view of economics as deep as Marx’s “Das Kapital.”
The story is about a father and his two sons who wind up in an ethical fix. Luke (15:11-32) says the younger of the two boys had grown unhappy with his life on the farm and decided to strike out on his own.
To subsidize the dream, he asks his father for his portion of the family estate — what would come his way once the father died.
The father, not wanting to stand in his son’s way, divvies up the family’s assets: He gives half to his younger son and puts the rest aside for the older brother who has dedicated his life to the farm.
The peregrinator, Luke says, “gathers up all that is his and takes off for a far-off land” to live the life of a sport. But he parties so hard he “squanders everything he had in reckless ways.” One translation says he engaged in “living riotously.” The vulgate is: “dissipavit substantiam suam vivendo luxuriose.”
To make matters worse, the country where the penniless soul was living gets hit with a famine and he is reduced to starvation. Scrounging for work, he lands a job on a pig farm, which every Jew was forbidden to do by law: no pigs!
After pouring foul-smelling slops into pigsties day after day, the prodigal starts to think: “This is crazy; the people working for my father are better off than me. I’ve made a terrible mistake, I’m going home to tell my father I sinned and beg his forgiveness; maybe he’d take me on as a hired hand.”
The gospel says that, when he got close to the house, the father saw him coming down the road and “felt compassion for him and ran out to embrace him offering a kiss of reconciliation.” The boy confesses his sin.
But the father, overjoyed at seeing his son alive, tells his servants, “Go get the best robe in my closet and put it on the boy; get a ring for his finger, put decent shoes on his feet, then go out and butcher the fattened calf we’ve been saving for a grand occasion.”
A celebration ensues while the older boy is still out in the field working. Hearing the hullabaloo, he asks one of the servants what’s going on. The servant says, “Your brother’s back! Your father is butchering the fattened calf in his honor!”
The father goes out to the field and asks his son to come in and join the party but, feeling dissed, the son snaps back [my translation] “Are you nuts? I’ve been working my ass off all this time; I did everything you asked of me and you never so much as roasted a goat for me and my friends. And that ne’er-do-well who pissed away the family fortune with whores and harlots — he gets a party with our prized calf? Is that all I’ve meant to you?”
The father, understanding his son’s hurt, says with a heavy heart, “My boy, my boy, you are part of all I am; everything I have is yours but today we must celebrate, your brother who was dead has come back to life; he was lost and now he’s found.” Thus ends Luke’s story.
But that’s not all Jesus had to say. He wanted listeners to know that the older brother’s thinking reflects an ideology of deserving, asserting that people who do wrong deserve nothing; punishment and exclusion should be their reward.
But the father says, “Son, this is not a matter of deserving and reward; it’s about needs. Your brother needs forgiveness, food, a place to stay, and to be part of a family again — and our family needs him to be whole.”
Luke also mentions that, while Jesus was telling the story, he saw a number of Pharisees dispersed among the crowd and reinforced to them that meeting needs transcended their legalistic rights-based thinking as well. The Hebrew scriptures forbade Jews from having anything to do with sinners: “Let not a man associate with the wicked; not even when it involves taking them to court for justice.”
In looking for a moral to the story, the scripture scholar, Howard Marshall — in his scholarly 928-page commentary on the gospel of Luke — feels compelled to bring God in as a deus ex machina saying the father is “meant to illustrate the pardoning love of God who cares for the outcast.” But the story has nothing to do with God.
As an egalitarian humanist Jew, Jesus was talking about a human father who does not treat people in terms of what they deserve, saying — as he does elsewhere in the gospel — that meeting needs is healthful for soul and community alike — a concept Marx and capitalists never grasp.
But Pope Francis does; in April 2015 he told the world he was calling for a year of deep reflection on “Misericordia,” the practice of responding to those in need with compassion as opposed to treating them like a piece of their résumé.
For those who wished to take up the Pope’s invite, he opened the doors of cathedrals and churches throughout the world, even the Great Door of St. Peter’s. He called them “Doors of Mercy,” passages through which a person could go and reflect on how much he takes Jesus’s mandate at face value: “attend to the needs of your neighbor as much as your own, especially when the neighbor needs loving forgiveness.”
The Blind Oedipus Commending his Children to the Gods by Bénigne Gagneraux
Because I studied ancient Greek and Latin for many years, I developed a love for the Greek language — its unadorned sophistication — as well as for the great tragedians of fifth-century-before-Christ Greece. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were its Murderers’ Row.
And though their plays appeared two-thousand years before the great Bard of Avon wrote, their work is as good as his and better than or equal to the tragedies of Dante, Arthur Miller, Spielberg, Tarantino, Scorsese, and others of that ilk.
Sometimes in my mind’s eye I see my younger self sitting in Greek class poring over the text of the “Antigone” of Sophocles, line by line, giving the text what the recently deceased poetry critic Helen Vendler called “a close read.”
I remain grateful to this day that I was able to read the very same language the Bard of Athens used with his wife and friends.
“Antigone” is about a woman who defies a king’s command in order to honor her brother’s death but the stress of the conflict leads to her death and the deaths of those she loved. (Sophocles is pure poet so young scholars are advised to carry their Liddell & Scott as a vademecum.)
There’s no need here to go into what Aristotle says about “tragedy” in his “Poetics,” written two-hundred years after the trio wrote, except to say he draws attention to an ailment called hamartia — the Greek is ἁμαρτία — which is the blind spot a person has about who he really is and how his acts affect others; such loss of vision brings unhappiness and ultimately a person’s demise and is why Aristotle says ἁμαρτία is key to tragedy.
The Greek dictionary defines hamartia as “missing the mark” (maybe with a bow and arrow), or being off course (as in the case of a floundering ship), which in people causes mental anguish. The ailment derives from ignorance in some cases but in others because the tragic soul lacks the tools — to mix metaphors — to keep his psychological boat afloat. He has no overview, no sense of the long-haul, which always morphs into a suspicion of others.
It’s easy to see why some writers define hamartia as “tragic flaw”; you look at the afflicted person and wonder how someone can be so blind, live so crazily as to harm himself and the people he loves, affecting even the health of his society.
With respect to being off course, Aeschylus in his “Oedipus Rex” — considered to be the greatest ancient Greek tragedy — tells of a man, Oedipus, who learns of a prophecy that says some day he will kill his father and then marry his mother — the kind of sex “Playboy” never covered.
Unable to accept such a reality, Oedipus takes it upon himself to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice — Sergio Leone style — all the while unaware that it is he, Oedipus, who is the killer, fulfilling part one of the prophecy.
Because of a mix-up at birth, Oedipus never got to know his “real” parents; then one day on a trip he crosses paths with a man on the road who gets sassy with him; to make short shrift of the nuisance Oedipus kills the man — who turns out to be not only the King of Thebes but his father!
Once back in the city, the patricide meets a woman he likes and then marries her — has sex with her — only to find out that the woman is his mother! Part two of the prophecy is fulfilled.
When the facts about the killing and incestual sex come out, the queen — Oedipus’ wife — is unable to withstand the grief and takes her life, thus Oedipus loses not just a wife but his mother. His guilt is so unredeemable he punishes himself by gouging his eyes out.
When I think of great literary tragedies, what comes to mind are: Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” and Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” even Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca.”
But one title I never see ranked among the best is Woody Allen’s 1989 “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Some critics say it’s not even Woody’s best, while “Empire” magazine, in its “The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time,” slots it at 267. And yet, when we look at the structure of the film and its continuous flow of primary-category ideas, we are forced to sit Woody aside Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
From beginning to end “Crimes and Misdemeanors” keeps asking: Is there a moral structure to the universe? What about in the case of a society, a community, a neighborhood, even a person’s psyche? Is there a “force” that governs bad behavior while encouraging people to be good?
Allen also wants to know whether, when someone commits a dastardly deed, a society, a family, a person, has the ability to set the ship aright — through punishment or forgiveness — to deal with the harm-done without someone having to gouge his eyes out in reparation.
The protagonist in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” is Doctor Judah Rosenthal, a highly-successful ophthalmologist, who’s had an affair with a stewardess who now threatens to tell his wife unless she can have all of him. She reminds him that she knows about the shady business deals he was involved in and, if she can’t have him, the police will. The doctor turns into a sheet of frozen panic.
When we see Rosenthal for the first time, he’s telling family and friends at a gathering what his father used to tell him, “The eyes of God are on us always”; that is, Omnipresence is the moral governor of the universe.
But when threatened, the doctor discovers that God, and the moral values he grew up with, are unable to assuage his pain; he hires a hitman who kills the woman thereby ending the menace to his upper-middle-class psychological, social, and economic well-being.
While his dark night of the soul was going on, the doctor plied his imagination to see what his elders taught him growing up. Should a person prefer God to Truth? What happens when someone deflects the eyes of God? Can such a person get away with murder? The voice of his Aunt May always seemed to prevail, “Six million Jews burnt to death and [Hitler] got away with it!”
During an office visit with one of his patients, a rabbi who’s going blind, the doctor bares his soul. The teacher tells the killer-to-be, “I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with all my heart a moral structure with real meaning and forgiveness, and some kind of higher power. Otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live.”
Throughout the movie, we hear similar thoughts from a wise Jewish philosopher, Professor Louis Levy, who serves as the traditional Greek chorus. In one of his forays he says, “We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices … [and] We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices.”
And yet, he says, we all need, “a great deal of love, in order to persuade us to stay in life … the universe is a pretty cold place. It’s we who invested with our feelings and, under certain conditions, we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.”
He then commits suicide. The eyes of God failed again.
The curtain comes down in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” at the wedding reception of the esteemed doctor’s daughter; in attendance is the now fully-blind rabbi who inquires of his host, “Tell me, if I’m not prying, did you ever resolve your personal difficulties?”
“Yes, actually. It resolved itself. The woman listened to reason.”
“Did she? That’s wonderful!” the rabbi says, “So, you got a break. Sometimes to have a little good luck is the most brilliant plan.”
In reparation for his sin Judah Rosenthal does not gouge his eyes out like a maniacal Oedipus. He welcomes the future scot-free, proving what Ivan Karamazov says in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”: “If God does not exist, then all things are permissible.”
People who read are constantly asking other people who read what they’re reading — unless they're part of a book club, then everyone knows.
Speaking of book clubs, the Voorheesville Public Library has had one since 1996 when Suzanne Fisher invited the community to share her love of literature at monthly meetings.
Suzanne was among a small group of librarians The New York Times picked as the best librarians in the United States in 2005. A plaque recognizing her honor hangs in the foyer of the Voorheesville Library.
And from one who’s interviewed Voorheesville librarians from the earliest days, I’d say Suzanne’s recognition is no small thing.
I remain amazed at the enthusiasm of book-clubbers; kudos to them and every other soul who views books as an integral part of life.
Book-lovers can speak intelligently about the classics (Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” James Joyce, and the like) as well as appreciate the book as an object of art. Their interest is not just first editions but the feel of a book’s paper, its dust jacket, the width of its margins, the typeface, even the quality of its index.
When I’ve had a say in how a book would look, I pushed for margins wide enough for the reader to open up a lounge chair to sit and enjoy the show of life — which is what all literature is about.
Book clubs or not, what every American in the country should be reading right now is some insightful work on the life of Julius Caesar — the Rubicon guy, the Gaius who brought the Roman Republic down, the man who destroyed Rome’s democracy to set himself up as king.
And because the republics of Rome and the United States are so often compared, Americans would do well to study how that man managed to destroy a nation’s centuries-old political structure — because a sizeable portion of Americans today are working hard to bring the American republic down.
If he were here right now, General Julius would say he was just the last straw in a bale of politico-fascist generals — like Cornelius Sulla and Lucius Cornelius Cinna (Caesar’s father-in-law) — who already had Rome on her knees.
The latter two butchered the human flesh of any soul who differed politically; Sulla slaughtered thousands and then hung the heads of the dead on pikes stretched across the Forum.
And Caesar had the gall to give a blow-by-blow description — in Commentarii de Bello Civili — of him slaughtering fellow citizens to become top dog in the ancient world.
It must ne’er be forgotten that it was he, not Augustus, who was Rome’s first emperor/king. (He had a little Richard Nixon in him.)
TRIGGER ALERT! Or maybe the correct phrase is caveat lector, which means “let the reader beware of a con,” because last spring a book of mine came out on none other than Julius Caesar. My colleague at The Enterprise, Sean Mulkerrin, introduced it to our readers.
The title of the book is “Veni, Vidi, Trucidavi: Caesar the Killer, The Man Who Destroyed Nations So He Might Be King.”
The first part is a play on Caesar’s oft-quoted slogan Veni Vidi Vici — which the people of Rome first saw on a placard on a float in a parade down Rome’s main street to honor the general’s victory over King Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela in 47.
The three fricative v’s of Veni, Vidi, Vici sound like the badda-bing of a TV commercial. Remember, Caesar was Italian. Badda-boom.
And scholars are still unsure if Caesar or one of his minions created the text but it did reflect his view of power.
Years ago, every student in any accredited academic high school in America — they didn’t even have to take Latin — knew Veni, Vidi, Vici — maybe not its political implications but had heard it said.
And yet, when I talked to people after my book came out — I conducted a little survey — my subjects said they never heard the phrase and, when I translated it into English, one or two said it sounded vaguely familiar.
By veni Caesar was letting the Senate know he got to the place they had assigned him — for the purpose of waging war. The veni of course is Latin and means “I arrived.”
The vidi means “I saw,” by which Caesar was saying that, when he arrived at the front, he saw a way Rome could exterminate the blood-poisoning vermin enemy bar-bar without making a dent in the city’s coffers.
And vici is, “Once I got the Roman war machine going, the bar-bars were done faster than a soft-boiled egg.” (An accurate translation.)
The viewers of Caesar’s parade that day — which the Romans called a triumph — were stunned at the hubris; he was saying, “See how fast I brought a king down, step out of line and you’re next.”
The title of my book is a play on the three V’s except, instead of vici, I use trucidavi — the Latin verb to slaughter — thus “I came, I saw, I slaughtered.” By the time of the parade, Caesar was already Rome’s slaughterer-in-chief having destroyed untold tribes (sovereign nations!) in Gaul for nine consecutive years. In my book, I call Caesar carnifex Gallorum, the butcher of the peoples of France.
He carnifexed as well tribes in Germany, Spain, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.
In the 25th chapter of Book Seven of his “Natural History,” Pliny the Elder says, “I would not myself count it to his [Caesar’s] glory that in addition to conquering his fellow-citizens [in a civil war] he killed in his battles 1,192,000 human beings, a prodigious even if unavoidable wrong inflicted on the human race, as he himself confessed it to be by not publishing the casualties of the civil wars.”
That million number puts the general in the league of Mao, Stalin, and even Hitler.
And for all the light the ancient documents still shine on the man, it’s hard to get hold of a personality that’s rife with such complexity of thought; the scholar who’s gotten closest is the Swiss-German classical historian Matthias Gelzer (1886-1974) in his “Caesar, der Politiker und Staatsmann” which appeared in German in 1921. How embarrassing it took until 1968 before the English “Caesar: Politician and Statesman” came out.
Toward the end of this classic (page 290), Gelzer says that, once the general had the commonweal under his thumb, “the number of decrees which he [Caesar] issued was so great that there was not enough time to keep to the usual complicated procedure … he often shortened the transactions of the Senate by simply informing the senior members of what he was going to do and, if he called a meeting of the whole body, he simply announced his decisions and without any discussion, they were entered in the archives as senatorial decrees.”
Caesar didn’t care if you were a red state or blue state, he wanted control of your Roman body a là Michel Foucault.
He decreed that no one could travel outside of Rome but, if it did happen, how long the traveler could stay; then he started telling his fellow Romans the kinds of clothes they could wear.
The great historian Suetonius (Div 43.1-2) says he outlawed “litters [taxi cabs] and the wearing of scarlet robes or pearls to all except those of a designated position and age, and on set days.”
He moved in for the kill when he made decrees “against extravagance, [which included] stationing watchmen in various parts of the market, to seize and bring to him dainties which were exposed for sale in violation of the law … sometimes he sent … soldiers to take from a dining-room any articles which had escaped the vigilance of his watchmen, even after they had been served.”
Imagine sitting at home eating dinner and a soldier barges in and rips from your mouth the piece of pork you’re chewing on; you can see why Brutus and Cassius planned a surprise party for the fascist on the Ides of March.
How sad that, in the United States of America today, two-thousand years later, we have Julius Caesar Redux in our midst; it’s just as Yogi predicted, “déjà vu all over again.”
— Photo by Dennis Sullivan
The clerk at the Civil Registration Office in Killarney copies the name of Dennis Sullivan’s grandmother, Barbara Sullivan, from the public records.
For Patrick Damien McAnany
Every St. Patrick’s Day, as soon as the sun is up, I go to the front yard and hang a large Irish flag from our magnolia tree closest to the road — it’s my sláinte to the world. The flag measures five by seven feet.
I have a smaller Irish flag — three by five feet — that flies on the hill behind the house atop a tall steel pole encased in cement and stays out all year long. I raised the pole right after I became an Irish citizen to remind me of the duties to my new home.
My grandfather Denis and my grandmother Barbara were Sullivans from County Kerry — Sneem and Kenmare — and when an American has a grandparent who comes from Ireland, he can apply to become a citizen by heritage.
But the Irish do not hand out such things lightly.
I had to get a copy of my grandmother’s birth certificate and then track down her marriage certificate in New York City — and the documents had to be the so-called “long form” with the raised seal of the government. No exceptions.
Then I had to get my father’s birth certificate to prove that the aforementioned woman was his mother — my grandmother — followed by his marriage certificate to prove he was married to the woman who gave me birth — then a certificate of my birth saying I was John Sullivan’s son.
People who buy and sell property engage in this process all the time; it’s called “chaining,” tracing every transfer back to the original source so nobody gets stuck with a pig in a poke.
I got my grandmother’s birth certificate in person at the Civil Registration Office in Killarney where, at one point, the clerk started talking to me like an Irish Catholic nun.
I also contacted state and local officials in different jurisdictions in the States, saying I needed papers to prove my line. Everyone was eager to help — though in the National Archives in Dublin an office genealogist started talking to me like an Irish Catholic priest.
If attention has to be paid to Willie Loman, it certainly needs to be paid to the chaining process. Two people I know said that, after sending all their papers in, they got rejected; a letter came back saying they’d made a mistake. They didn’t have to start over, but were put on hold until they sent the right papers in.
I listened to how they described their mistakes so my application flew through with flying colors. Then one day a large white envelope appeared with “Irish Government” as the return address; it contained a small certificate, shaded in green, with a number signifying my new birth; it said sláinte, you’re now one of us.
It was one of my greatest possessions ever; I say “was” because, after enclosing it in a beautiful frame, I gave it to my son as a gift, letting him know what it meant to me.
Though I did then, and still do, cherish my new family, I must admit I’m not such a big fan of the Irish, qua Irish. I find part of their socio-genetic make-up a heavy lift, they ask a lot before they’ll leave their shell — though I think the younger folk are dodging the complex.
The Brits I’ve met, on the other hand, always seemed to be “just there.”
For many years, I served as editor-in-chief of an academic journal out of the UK called Contemporary Justice Review — published by the esteemed Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis — so at least once a year I was in meetings with Brits who came to discuss the health of our enterprise.
I also did a book with the company (with a colleague/friend) and, because of the journal and the book, the British editors used to take me out to dinner when we met at conferences, the fare paid with the Taylor & Francis American Express Card.
And though I fully enjoyed the gastronomical outings with my over-the-pond British colleagues, I felt uneasy about my meal being paid for from the corporate till; it seemed like payola. More than once I offered to pick up the tab next time.
Maybe the Brits I worked with were London’s cream of the crop but I always felt they were there for their editor-in-chief. Plus, their sense of humor was more akin to mine than what I’d seen in the Irish.
I went to Ireland seven out of eight years to size up things for myself. In an essay I wrote when I got back, I explained, “When I first went to Ireland seven years ago I went not to see the place but to find out who the Irish were, a much more formidable task.”
And I warned that the Irish are tricky: “It is possible to walk away after an hour’s conversation with the most personable Irishman to be found, only to shake your head a few moments later realizing that person told you nothing of himself.”
I’m not an ethnographer — I speak cum grano salis — but I sensed that the/many/some Irish have a passive-aggressive, minimalist, irony-ridden, almost cynical, take on things. More than one Irishman and Irishwoman I met had a story to tell but seemed unable to get it out so they spoke in a sideways tongue of wistful mirth.
But in my relations with the two nations, I found the Irish — I was with them often outside of business — to be extraordinarily hospitable; even though their B&B’s are a business, the hoteliers treat guests with the kindness of a friend.
With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, I’ve been thinking of all the Patrick’s in my life. I have a grandson named Patrick; we used to have a cat Patrick. Years ago, I taught in a Catholic high school in Newburgh called St. Patrick’s; and because I lived eight or nine doors away from the church associated with the school, St. Patrick’s Church became my parish.
Also, my grandparents, the Denis and Barbara mentioned above, were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York — and my favorite Irish poet is Patrick Kavanagh.
Then there’s my old friend, Patrick McAnany, who died a week or two ago, a man who cherished his Irish line. He and his wife, Charlaine, are two of the best Christians I ever met, having spent their lives treating the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned as one of their own.
All these things are floating around my mind as I prepare to hang out my flag next week. The flag on the hill, a symbol of love for my second home, will easily take care of itself.
Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona duit!
— Photo from 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee
The crowd at President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, above, was sparse compared to the crowd at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, estimated at 1.8 million, which filled all of the white rectangular spaces, flowing into the treed areas on either side.
One of the most celebrated research experiments in the field of social psychology is a series of studies the Polish-born Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch began conducting in 1951 with 50 male students at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college 10 miles southwest of Philly.
The published results of the experiment and various responses to its findings make up a literature that is referred to as the “Asch conformity experiments” or “the Asch paradigm.”
A lot of psychologists — even people on the street — were interested in the “conformity” aspect of the research because a Cold War was going on at the time and there was considerable talk about brainwashing as a way to control people’s minds.
Asch wanted to know what takes place in the psyche of a person who sees something, is asked to say what he just saw, and then says the exact opposite of what his eyes described — the eyes physical entities that ground us in reality — in other words, why would a person lie about something he knows to be true?
If Asch used the parlance of today he would say “the liar” was not only treasonous but a generator of “alternative facts,” alternative facts being a gateway drug to fascism.
Asch first shared what he did at Swarthmore in a journal article called “Effects of group pressure on the modification and distortion of judgments.” He describes how the experiment took place in an ordinary conference room where, around a large rectangular table, he situated eight men who had agreed to participate in a psychology “vision test.”
The subjects were told they would be shown pictures on a placard — Picture One to the left and Picture Two beside it — and, after viewing both, were to say what in Picture Two was exactly the same as what was in Picture One. And the content of Picture One was nothing more than a black vertical line against a blank background.
Picture Two had three lines: one was shorter than the line in Picture One, one was longer, and the third exactly the same. The subjects had to call out A, B, or C; it was not a heavy lift.
At Swarthmore, the subjects saw 18 trials, that is, were shown 18 cards one after the other where the length of the line in Picture One varied as well as two of the lines in Picture Two but the third always matched the line in Picture One.
And since eight subjects made a judgment for 18 trials, 144 judgments were made in all. Plus, Asch had the study going on at three other universities in addition to the one at Swarthmore.
But here is the first wrinkle in the story: Before the eight students went into the experiment room, Asch secretly took seven aside and told them — hush-hush — they were going to be part of the research team; they were told what the experiment was all about, that the “vision test” would be rigged, and it was they who were going to rig it by picking a line in Picture Two that did not match the line in Picture One — they were told to speak their choice with confidence and no hesitation.
The purpose of the project was to see whether the eighth subject whom they would meet in the experiment room shortly — a foil or dupe — would go along with their crazy choices and deny the veracity of his own eyes.
All the dupe knew was that he would take part in an experiment with seven other students, that the group would be shown pictures — Picture One and Picture Two — and after scanning them, would make a judgment about their contents.
The research team arranged the seating so the dupe was at the end of the table and the last to voice his opinion.
Here’s the second wrinkle: When the first two sets of pictures were shown, the seven confederates picked the line in Picture Two that was the perfect match for the line in Picture One. They did not lie, so the dupe was led to believe the test a no-brainer.
But, starting with the third set of cards, the seven confederates dissimulated, picking the wrong line in Picture Two trial after trial, and their boldness in saying so rattled the dupe who began questioning his own eyes.
What takes place in a person’s mind who decides to cave to a lie?
And it should be pointed out that none of Asch’s subjects suffered from a visual disability like agnosia, which would radically alter what they saw. (I have in mind a patient of the late great neurologist Oliver Sacks who suffered from agnosia and once, after leaving Sacks’s office, grabbed his wife’s head thinking it was his hat on the hat rack — which Sacks describes in his wonderful book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”)
When Asch examined all his data together, he saw, “One-third of all the estimates in the critical group [the critical group being the dupes] were errors identical with or in the direction of the distorted estimates of the majority [the lies of the confederates].” That is, a third of the time the dupe denied what his eyes were telling him.
But more importantly perhaps was that Asch found “one quarter of the subjects [dupes] were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous judgments of the majority.” They believed what their eyes said and mustered the courage “to recover from doubt and to re-establish their equilibrium … it was their obligation to call the play as they saw it.”
In several of his trials Asch introduced a ringer, a subject who disagreed with the confederates outright — which gave the dupe the courage to speak the truth as well.
And to test whether caving under pressure was the operative variable, Asch assembled a control group of subjects who were told they could write down their responses in private — under these conditions the dupes made a correct judgment 99 percent of the time.
As a social psychologist, Asch had to limit his conclusions to what took place in the experiment room; he never extrapolated to a family, a neighborhood, community, or society where a group or groups of people publicly contradict what people say they’re seeing — and when power’s involved — the contradiction has the force of a command.
On Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States, his side-show man, Sean Spicer, came to the mic and said the president drew the biggest crowd in inauguration history — even though photos taken from the Washington Monument the day before showed Trump’s crowd paled severely in comparison to the president’s before him.
When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked the new president’s other side-show sophist, Kellyanne Conway, why Spicer would lie like that, she said, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving — our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts.”
The man behind the Orwellian lie added, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening” as if a confederate in Asch’s study.
Trump’s crime is not that he stuck a knife in the heart of the American Republic but that he took that knife and slashed the DNA of homo sapiens — a species whose eyes have evolved to near perfection in seeing what sits before them. The dupes threw over the advances of human evolution.
The result, as we know, is half a country that suffers from fascist aphasia aggravated by the fact that so many of the sufferers have nothing to lose.
Some days I wake up and feel like a French existentialist imprisoned in a fifties film noire called “No Exit.”
— Illustration from the cover of Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”
This is the preface to a paper, “The New Scotland Law and Order League and the Case of Elmer Peter’s Hotel: The Temperance Movement in Albany County, N.Y. in 1905,” that Dennis Sullivan, the village historian for Voorheesville, will present on June 6 at the Voorheesville Public Library. Another Enterprise columnist, Jesse Sommer, will hold a whiskey-tasting at the event, serving liquor produced locally by his company, New Scotland Spirits.
While engaged in writing history over the years, I have often wondered if communities have genetic traits they pass on to the generations that come after them, in the same way that people say families do, that is, part of them comes from another world.
In the preface to a book I wrote about the village I live in — Voorheesville, New York — nearly 40 years ago, I alluded to the importance of a community understanding the social DNA it was, if you will, born with.
I called attention to the fact that a lot of people look at history as a series of quaint little artifacts, for example the time the postmaster fell in the creek on the way home from the square dance having quaffed too much of Aunt Trudy’s punch. When the locals are in a group and that story is told, everybody goes, “Ha ha; wasn’t that Bill Finch something!”
In our village history, I wrote that, if that is a community’s approach to history, it makes the past an abstraction by which we simultaneously sever ourselves from the present.
I added, “Community-making becomes impossible or at the very least extremely difficult when people lack a sense of place. Sooner or later life becomes haphazard; anything goes.”
Some people say that that’s what’s going on in the United States today, that Americans no longer have a sense of place because America the Beautiful has disappeared. Thus, in the news we see all sorts of stories about young people struggling with mental-health problems: It’s due to a loss of grounding, a sense of place, the cousin of “having a purpose in life.”
Nearly 25 years ago, Robert Putnam in his American classic “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” said America was in for a rude awakening, that we already were a country whose people bowled on separate alleys with no connection between one and the other.
It’s what American sociologist Mildred Newhall spoke about 100 years ago when she coined the phrase “parallel play.” It’s a 2-year-old madly at play sitting next to another kid madly at play in a common sandbox — the two mentally aware of each other but wanting no further exchange. It’s a stage of youth we all go through but cataclysmic when a nation lives that way.
This booklet is about a town in upstate New York at the turn of the 20th Century. It’s a sad story in a way because it involves a cell — the way Communists use the term — of people in our community who sought to stop friends and neighbors from getting together and having a drink after work, gathering the way the Irish do in pubs to talk over the day’s affairs.
The prohibitionists in our town, mostly from the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, frowned severely on people having a drink, constantly mocking the fool-headed “drunkard.” It was this thinking that fueled the W. C. T. U., the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, one of the most doggedly committed (fanatical) groups ever to go against drink.
On one level, the temperance movement those churches championed is understandable because many men — after working like dogs at heavy machinery jobs during the industrial era — frequented bars on the way home and got “hammered,” after which they went home and hammered the missus, women treated as less than dogs. The women couldn’t even vote.
In our town, the town of New Scotland, a group of church-goers got together when the temperance movement was running high and sought to stop drinking in our bars and hotels, even in our homes. They called themselves the New Scotland Law and Order League and, like vigilantes, went about rendering judgment on, and simultaneously punishing, tipsy souls as they left the local saloon — like a grammar school principal washing out the mouth of a kid with soap for saying something naughty.
Mouth-washing for drinking got serious when the United States forbade the production and use of alcohol through the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The national decree lasted from 1920 to 1933 and, as history says, it was a gargantuan failure. Things got infinitely worse.
One of the leaders of the law-and-order league in our town, say in 1900, was Frank Van Auken, a church-going Methodist whose family was here for generations. He lived at 10 Voorheesville Ave. in the village of Voorheesville — an incorporated village inside the town since 1899. For nearly 50 years, I have lived at 14 Voorheesville Ave. two houses away from Frank’s, though he was long dead when my wife and I came.
I have been inside Frank’s house at #10 many times — it’s been beautifully redone — and, when I give historical walking tours of the village — as part of my job as municipal historian — when we come to Frank’s house, I comment on his involvement in the law-and-order league and shake my head in disbelief. (His granddaughter Gert once had a dance school in the barn out back.)
And as village historian — the town has its own — I’ve been involved in researching and writing about our people and its institutions for 38 years. When I walked down Main Street while writing the history book, I saw people from the past come out of their homes and greet me as if I was Thornton Wilder in “Our Town”; I thought of Voorheesville then as “My Town.” Not hubristically, as those who know me know.
I’d like to send this essay to every municipal historian in Albany County and to every president of every historical association in every village and town within its bounds, inviting each and all to come to Voorheesville and share stories about the temperance movement in their community during the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
The town of Guilderland didn’t take kindly to prohibition in those days; they voted for drink pretty much every chance they got.
If our convivium does take place — and I am there — my first question to the gathered throng will be: Does your town have a life? And to those who say yes, I will ask: Who were the mother and father of that life, who were its grandparents and those who came before them? Has the social DNA of those times affected who we are today?
In my capacity as village historian, I was asked to provide an historical snapshot of our community in days-gone-by for the “Village of Voorheesville Comprehensive Plan,” which village officials adopted on June 26, 2018.
I did, and in it I said that the Voorheesville of 2018 was different from its self in 1910. I wrote, “Of course, [today] the churches maintain sub-communities which are important to the social cohesion of the whole — though there are changes in that sphere as well — but in the second decade of the new millennium, a face-to-face community-wide sense of community remains absent.”
When the plan came out, one of my neighbors called this assessment somber, bordering on depressing. Was I saying Voorheesvillians were bowling alone?
And, if that is true, how would we bowlers know? What are the criteria by which to assess such a thing? And how might such a problem be solved? And if we, at the local level, cannot devise ways to respond to community, how can we expect a nation — bowled over by diversity — to set its ship aright?
What follows is the result of my research into what happened in our town in 1905 and, as you will see, some Voorheesvillians were involved. Is what happened then still with us or did the social genes of that era die with it?
I love Voorheesville and I love our town, despite their disparate selves, and in this love affair I remain perplexed by our law-and-order league of old and by the man who lived two doors down. Are we they? Are they us?
A drawing John Keats rendered of an engraving of the Sosibios Vase circa 1819.
The great English poet John Keats caused a sensation when he ended his much-beloved “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the couplet:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
In the four-and-a-half stanzas preceding those lines, Keats reveals how he reached that conclusion; the couplet is like the QED at the end of a math problem or a riddle from the Sphinx of Thebes.
Whatever exegeses literary enthusiasts have come up with over the years to decode the two-line cipher — and there have been many — one thing that has not changed is that the 18 words are a statement of “cultural literacy,” that is, Keats is telling us what knowledge people need to have in order to live in the world successfully, which involves sharing a language with others so conversations can occur without folks resorting to aggression or violence.
In 1978, the great American poet Adrienne Rich came out with a book of poems titled “The Dream of a Common Language” which reflected her desire that someday there’d be a society where people would understand each other’s language well enough so as to avoid engaging in a continuous war of words: Word A would mean A and Word B would mean B, no more no less, as in 1 and 1 are always 2.
Culturally literate people are able to translate the metaphors others use and through that understanding create and maintain the common bond communities and societies need to stay alive, to evolve successfully — and communities and societies that lack such a bond do in fact fail.
The translating in question is a skill that can be learned but requires considerable practice in the same way that mastering French or Greek requires considerable practice. What is sad about America today is that so many Americans have given up on learning that skill—indeed downgrade its value—and thereby fail to add to the social capital that keeps America e pluribus unum.
In the same way that we call someone literate who can read and write — they know their way around the alphabet — we say someone is culturally literate who has the foundational knowledge of the culture he lives in and is able to respond to the tongues of others without feeling threatened and then compelled to start a war of words; to repeat: the culturally literate person is fluent in his own tongue as well as those of others, even subcultures that are diverse and abrasive and requiring great patience to understand and accept: Rich’s dream of a common language come true.
When the subject of cultural literacy arises, culturally literate people — pardonnez-moi — think right away of the American educator Eric “E. D.” Hirsch and his much-lauded “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know” which came out in 1987. Underscore “What Every American Needs to Know;” it’s a tremendously bold imperative. Every American? And nowhere does Hirsch mention that Keats scooped him 168 years earlier.
Hirsch’s basic premise was/is: (1) “all human communities are founded upon specific shared information;” and (2) “culturally literate [people] possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world,” and by “modern world” he means the world a person is living in at the time. And, because there are so many cultures and subcultures, the culturally literate person is a kind of master linguist.
By using the word “thrive” Hirsch was more than implying that the culturally ill-literate person is ailing in some way — is sick — and needs to immerse himself in the ethical culture he’s living in to save his own soul.
What made Hirsch’s work problematic is that the same year his book came out, there appeared the American classicist and philosopher Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” which is another tremendously bold imperative. Bloom was saying America was slowly losing her mind.
Some readers interested in Bloom’s ideas started taking off the gloves as soon as they got to the subtitle of the book, “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.”
It’s one thing to say someone is failing democracy, it’s quite another to accuse him of demolishing the souls of the young and thereby lessening their chances of getting into heaven.
One wonders what was in the water at the time because, as those two books were making their way to the best-seller list, William Bennett — the Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan (1985-1988) — started accusing American educators of “dumbing down” what they were teaching kids, especially the “underserved.” It’s a form of cultural triage.
The journal “American Speech,” which publishes articles on the origin of words and phrases, says that “dumbing down” was instituted “so as to appeal to those of little education or intelligence” and that it was Hollywood moguls who led the charge by telling script writers and directors during the Great Depression to stop being “too subtle,” that dumbing down “saves time and wearying gestures.” And sells tickets!
Hirsch made a major error by providing at the end of his book a list of the “names, phrases, dates, and concepts every American should know” that ignited a culture war of sorts — some groups claiming that their names, phrases, dates, and concepts were not among the 5,000 Hirsch gave; they felt they were being relegated to the realm of non-American. Hirsch’s list can be viewed as cultural preparation for the SAT exam.
Forgotten, or submerged, for years, “cultural literacy” came to the fore on Oct. 7 when Hamas slaughtered more than a thousand Israeli people and their associates and the Israeli government responded with (still-going-on) vengeful military strikes.
But what sparked a war of words at home was the statement the Graduate Students for Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard, issued on Instagram the day after Hamas’s slaughter; it reads, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” It was co-signed by more than 30 other organizations on the Harvard campus. The statement is like telling a woman who’d just been raped about the concept of “victim-precipitated rape.”
As the reverberations of the statement continue to be felt to this day, on Oct. 17 — nine days after the pro-Palestinian j’accuse appeared — the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, Ezekiel J. Emanuel — came out with an op-ed piece in The New York Times called “The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education.”
He said the pro-Palestinian ideologues at Harvard were able to get away with such a view because their professors — as with professors at American colleges and universities across the board — and by deduction teachers at secondary schools — had dumbed down the required lessons on the ethics and morality of social life.
Emanuel said the American university system had failed, “to give them [the pro-Palestinian students at Harvard and similar-thinking souls] the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity.” He was repeating Bloom’s warning that there were too many ill-literate Americans who could not speak to others without engaging in a war of words.
To pay some degree of homage to Emanuel’s concerns, I suggest that every university in the country require every incoming frosh to take a two-semester Civics 101 course where each student must satisfactorily be able to answer the questions: (1) what does it mean to be a moral person? (2) am I a moral person? (3) what is the payoff for being moral — the psychological and spiritual benefits?; and (4) if such a thing as a moral nation exists, does America fit the profile?
If Keats were alive today he’d say those questions sum up the beauty/truth cultural literacy imperative he laid out, that is, when a person becomes an ethically moral agent, he achieves a psychological and spiritual security that no attack of words or arms can turn him into a machine of revenge and retribution.
¡Les deseo a todos un Día de Acción de Gracias seguro y saludable!