Art by Elisabeth Vines
How ironic that, as the tides of our nation’s identity have taken on a darker hue, those with an interest in living in a society, in communities, neighborhoods, and families where people support each other through mutual aid and needs-meeting practices, find themselves searching for spiritual leaders and rituals that are light-producing, hoping to find relief from the political, social, and economic institutions of darkness that hack away at our communal life, especially the lives of citizens with less, and even more so of those with nothing at all.
The late George Harrison — the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and writer of religious texts — addressed issues of darkness and light nearly 50 years ago in a song — it’s really a sutra — called “Beware of Darkness,” as if he wrote it for the people of the United States today.
Speaking poetically, he names types or categories of people who eat away at human happiness by hacking away at the foundations of convivial community, that is, communities where people have a sense of a common good, a collective identity, where they look out for each other rather than trash-talk those who are different as enemy agents.
The first group to be avoided, Harrison says, are grifters, con men he calls “soft shoe shufflers,” people who skim communally-produced wealth — social and economic capital — for their personal portfolios.
A second group to beware of, Harrison says, are “greedy leaders,” public officials who, like the soft-shoe hustlers, cultivate their personal fortunes rather than nurture and care for the structures and resources that keep communities thriving.
And, when large numbers of happy communities coalesce for a common good, we find a nation that produces happy citizens. There are inventories to measure such things, that is, how well a society or institution fares with respect to meeting the needs of all — they’re essentially a happiness index.
Harrison says watch out for yakers as well, those whose words lack substance so they wind up twisting and confusing the minds of fellow citizens.
They are the seed “The Parable of the Sower” talks about who, when the seed sprouts up, have roots so shallow the sun scorches them; some of the seed gets tangled in briar thorns and, also lacking depth, wither and die as well. Harrison calls them “falling swingers.”
What makes the British songster a man of distinction is that “Beware of Darkness” reminds the community at large that there are some among us who have no idea what “common good” means.
They live lives that prey on the voiceless and filch from the powerless poor, without concern that they are draining communal resources that neighborhoods, families, as well as individuals need to flourish.
And it does seem that those who’ve experienced life in a needs-based arrangement, have a better chance of standing up against the forces of social and political darkness but always aware that dissenters get picked off — like Alexei Navalny — one at a time.
The idea is — when darkness comes — not to get bent out of shape about every neurotic symptom that appears, thus the second stanza of “Beware of Darkness” goes:
Watch out now, take care
Beware of the thoughts that linger
Winding up inside your head
The hopelessness around you
In the dead of night.
From our very first day on Earth, we homo sapiens have devised ways to withstand the forces of darkness — especially during change of seasons — by creating songs and dances to celebrate light and light-bearing institutions that keep people back from the brink of despair.
Celebrations of “winter solstice” — the darkest time of year — say new light can be found inside the womb of winter’s darkness, that a sun god will emerge and dispel worry, the savior called Sol Invictus, the “invincible sun,” the “unconquerable sun.”
Celebrants of a new light emerged when Christians came along and baptized what belonged to the community as a whole, since day one, calling their season of new light “Christmas,” celebrating the birth of, not an invincible sUn but an invincible sOn.
Thus, it’s no surprise how many Christmas carols speak of a light that brings joy to the world while confronting darkness. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” with roots going back to the Middle Ages, proclaims: “Dispel the shadows of the night, and turn darkness into light.”
And the much-beloved “The First Noel” sings of a star, shining in the east, that gives “the earth … great light/And so it continue[s] . . . day and night.”
Continues day and night? That means the Sol Invictus of Christmas will not leave people and their communities, neighborhoods, and families high and dry; the underlying message is: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
A powerful claim to be sure but the gospel-writer John ups the ante by having Jesus say, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
However much one is inclined to believe such an assertion, the gospel-writer Luke says it dates back to the very first day of the man on Earth, when his light shone inside a stable; that when angels saw it, they flew into the cold winter night to let everyone know a child had just been born destined to dispel the darkness of humankind; and when shepherds watching their sheep heard the news “the glory of the Lord shone around and they were terrified.”
They felt compelled to go to Bethlehem to see the light for themselves and, after seeing the child, went around spreading “the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.”
The Christmas message of new light — described as a new testament — is about developing methods, strategies, structures, and institutions designed to enhance the common good through communities that take into account the needs of all through measures of cooperation and mutual aid with violence to no one.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis — a method devised to find light within darkness — which he called repression — speaks of the continuing battle between light and darkness in his “Civilization and Its Discontents,” which first appeared in German in 1930.
Herr Doktor, an Austrian Jew, implies he could feel in the unconscious bones of his Jewishness, an emerging darkness called Hitler and Nazi extermination.
Thus, the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” reads: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent … [our] cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of … [our] communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”
And because we, “have gained control over the forces of nature … [we] would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.”
It’s no surprise then that our country suffers from “unrest … unhappiness and … [a] mood of anxiety.”
Freud called the force of light Eros — love — and the force of darkness Thanatos or death.
Trying to predict the outcome of the contest of wills between those two forces in 1930, he hedges his bets; the final words of “Civilization and its Discontents” read therefore: “the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers,’ eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary [death]. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”
He was not a fortune-teller but we know what took place.
On Christmas day 1863 — as the people of the United States were engaged in war on the opposing sides of light and darkness — the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned his famed “Christmas Bells” which I translate as:
I hear bells this Christmas Day
Calling to mind the carols
We sung when we were one
Alive and filled with tenderness
Repeating over and over:
Peace on Earth, everybody!
Peace on Earth to one and all!
Good will to every soul among us!
Hoping each and everyone of us
Will become the light of Christmas.
“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell, cover photo.
As regular readers of “Field Notes” in The Enterprise know, on occasion I have alluded to a personality test I was developing that I now call the Personality Assessment Inventory, the PAI.
It’s unique in that it includes questions about a person’s social life, his ongoing relationships within the community — his social environment — to find out about not only the work a person does but also about his involvement in groups like the food pantry, the local public library, or a community sports team — to see if he’s a coach interested in just one player.
And part of such service — or more correctly the apex of it — is doing things for others without seeking anything in return — no ax to grind, no ulterior motive — just doing things, helping out, to make the community a better place — making it feel more like home (for everyone).
Understandably there’s considerable complexity in such issues and, to help people unravel their neurons, if you will, the PAI’s questions are structured to encourage respondents to speak freely.
The first question of the PAI is: “Are you selfless?” That is: Are you someone people refer to as a “selfless person”?
Of course our research team starts jotting down notes right away because — sociologically-speaking — the answers are gold, never mind the gift they give to psychology.
Question 2 is: “Do you know anybody who is selfless: maybe personally; maybe someone you met along the way; maybe you worked with such a soul?”
And there are two sub-questions to that; the first is: “Have you ever read about anyone who was and/or is selfless?”
And the second is: “Can you recall a situation when someone treated you selflessly? That is, you were given something, or somebody did something for you without asking for anything in return so you never felt put in debt.”
And you saw that the person you mentioned treated other people the same way, so he seemed selfless to the core.
Which leads us to: “In your family growing up, was there anyone who was selfless? Is there anyone in your family now who is so?”
And all answers, at each stage of the way, require naming names.
And the obverse of such questioning must be posed as well, that is: “Was there anybody in your family growing up — or among those you live with now — you regard as ‘selfish,’ as in ‘ish’”?
Epexegetically-speaking, it’s the person who — after you’ve had a few beers — you start referring to as “the selfish pig.”
Remember, there’s a wide spectrum of values in the PAI so there are no wrong answers. We note everything.
And with respect to those you said were, or are, selfless: Rate their selflessness from one to ten: a zero being someone like Donald Trump and a ten Mother Teresa.
And you must say how you came to your scores, must delineate the measuring stick you use to assess another’s ethics.
The combined answers to all the PAI’s questions, of course, are essentially a CT scan of your soul, the value- and belief-system that’s determined how giving a person you are.
Which brings us back to question 1: “Are you a selfless person?” And those who say “No,” must also say: “What happened?” “What went wrong?” “Why did you give up on humanity?” “And on yourself?”
Questions like these of course are ideologically-loaded, but it’s a road that must be gone down today because so many Americans are jaundiced through and through, whining like Woody Allen in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”: “Life is dog eat dog; worse than that, the dogs don’t even return your phone calls.”
Years ago, when I was editor-in-chief of a progressive justice journal out of the UK called “Contemporary Justice Review,” I put out a call for papers for a special issue dealing with the kinds of issues just mentioned.
Potential respondents — in or outside the university, there was no education requirement — had to say how their ethical system came to be, what beliefs helped shape the code of conduct by which they lived, and where their sense of justice came from.
The special issue of my journal never came off; the academic community didn’t bite. I was more puzzled than displeased.
As editor of the journal, I had had good luck with calls for papers — the response at times was flooding — but the academics wanted no part of: “Are you selfish?” “Are you just?” “What rules do you live by?” “Have you given up on humanity?” “Are people better off after spending time with you?”
My error in thinking was that I labored under the illusion that every university person interested in “justice” would want to write his own “On the Genealogy of Morality” and out-Nietzsche Nietzsche.
One person who did do that — and at every stage of his life — was the great 20th Century British writer, George Orwell.
People who know him know him from “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm,” two pieces of brilliant artistry that are ranked among the best stories ever told during the twentieth century, many folks having come upon the writer in their summer reading list in high school.
Orwell answers all the questions posed above in a 1946 essay called “Why I Write,” which appeared the year after “Animal Farm” came out.
He was trying to disentangle his neurons to see where next to go in life to be true to a sense of justice kindled in him in 1936.
Toward the end of that year, as an official reporter for “The New Leader,” the weekly paper of the Independent Labour Party in England, he was sent to Spain to survey what was going on in the “Spanish Civil War” and report back home.
As we know from history, the war began when Francisco Franco Bahamonde, aka “Franco,” the commander-in-chief of bands of fascist forces, crushed the democratic republic of Spain and declared himself dictator (king), a position he held onto from 1939 to 1975. He was known as “Caudillo” which some Spanish dictionaries translate as “Mussolini.”
After surveying the landscape of “the Spanish Civil War” for just a few days, Orwell the reporter, laid down his writing pad, picked up a gun, and headed to the front to join the democratic forces pushing against the fascist muscle of Franco.
Everything that happened day by day while he was there — for example, what it was like being a soldier in a “socialist” army — Orwell included in his brilliant memoir “Homage to Catalonia,” which is ranked one of the top three or four nonfiction books written during the 20th Century.
But after only a short time at the front, Orwell got shot in the throat — the bullet went all the way through — and had to leave the war to heal, then later the country to escape with his life.
Historically, “Homage to Catalonia” has been disrespected by indifference even though the war story far surpasses in suspense and intrigue anything portrayed in M.A.S.H. on TV and even in Altman’s movie of the same name.
And because of how Orwell conducted himself in Spain and in his writing, there are many who still refer to him as a “secular saint.”
In “Why I Write,” Orwell explains that in his life the war in Spain “turned the scale and thereafter [every] line of serious work … I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.”
It was a vow he never reneged on. He never gave up on humanity, or himself.
With a new kind of totalitarianism knocking on America’s door these days — and with so many Americans holding that door widely ajar — I can hear Mr. Orwell whisper with the hoarse throat he was shot in Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Illustration by Mary Hamilton Frye, 1907, for “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.”
When I started teaching many years ago, one of the maxims I kept primed in my pedagogical kit bag was “repetitio est mater studiorum” which translates to “repetition is the mother of learning.”
Many teachers share the same view but express it in a kind of syllogistic trifecta: “Tell ’em what you’re going to say; say it; then tell ’em what you said.”
Repetitio is a fitting salve for America today because so many Americans are not good listeners; indeed some have closed their ears entirely, which is one of the reasons the American philosopher Allan Bloom penned “The Closing of the American Mind” a dozen years ago.
The spirit of my maxim offers an opportunity to revisit something I wrote a while back about the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), in particular what he had to say about the kind of vision poets have, the unique way they see. After all, they are called “seers.”
Those familiar with Milosz know that in 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — a very big deal. During a week-long celebration in Stockholm, he was presented with a diploma and a medal, and was then invited to give a talk about how he came to be, that is, about the work he was being honored for.
During his Nobel Lecture on Dec. 8, he described to the audience the nature of his poetic soul.
He started by calling attention to Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish writer he loved as a child — who happened to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, the first woman to be so honored.
Milosz said, when he first read Lagerlöf’s “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils,” he was drawn into the world of a boy, Nils Holgersson, whose “chief delight,” she says, “was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief.”
Because of the mischief, Nils gets shrunken to the size of a human thumb and then finds himself flying on the back of a goose — the family pet, Martin — surveying the lakes and mountains and cities of Sweden from high up above. They soon merge with a pack of wild geese, and Nils’s consciousness spirals.
Lagerlöf says the boy “had grown so giddy that it was a long time before he came to himself. The winds howled and beat against him, and the rustle of feathers and swaying of wings sounded like a great storm. Thirteen geese flew around him, flapping their wings and honking. They danced before his eyes and they buzzed in his ears. He didn’t know whether they were flying high or low or in what direction they were traveling.”
That kind of poetry is as good as Joyce in the opening paragraphs of “Araby.”
The dust jacket of the 1947 edition of Nils’s escapades by Pantheon shows the boy sitting on Martin soaring through the air with his left arm raised high like a soldier in victory.
He looks like Slim Pickens riding the “Noo-ku-lar” bomb in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” the air filled with the resounding chorus of “Wha-hoos! Wha-haas!”
But the point Milosz is making is that Nils “flies about the Earth and looks at it from above, but at the same time sees it in every detail.” That is, Nils has double vision.
On the back of Martin, high above the world, he sees all clearly with an overview and on the ground sees clearly each particular thing — but he sees both ways simultaneously.
And that is how poets see, Milosz says; they see clearly what’s right before the eyes but at the same time see clearly from high above, sub specie aeternitatis, which means seeing things in context, seeing with the eyes of eternity if you will.
This is not the time or place to develop a typology of personalities according to how a person sees — comparing those who see things clearly up close with those who see things clearly from high up — and of course those who see clearly both ways simultaneously, the poets.
Clinicians, who have studied the cognitive function of personality development, associate seeing things from up above, as Nils does, with a person’s ability to conceptualize, to engage in what they call “abstract thinking.”
Equipped with an overview, a person is able to grasp notions like “freedom” and “democracy” and to understand the language of metaphor and irony and things that do not readily reveal themselves.
In laying out the stages of human personality development, the great Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget says kids start developing abstract thinking powers when they become teens but that some never get there.
That is, limited to the data the sense world offers, they experience great difficulty contextualizing what their eyes report; their world is the world of here-and-now, of right-and-wrong framed in black and white.
Clinical social worker Eileen Devine in a wonderful essay called “How to Help Your Concrete-thinking Child Navigate an Abstract World” describes how her daughter, beset with “brain differences,” had a hard time maneuvering in the world of abstract thought. She could not see conceptually, could not grasp an idea like “ownership.”
The issue there, Devine says, is “when a wallet is sitting on a table without anyone around, comprehending that it still belongs to someone who is not present at that moment (and therefore is not available for you to take).”
Without that level of reasoning, a person finds himself in a psychological hole because, as Devine says, “We live in a world filled with abstraction, required to understand concepts that are real, but not tied to concrete physical objects or experiences.”
She says abstract thinking allows a person “to absorb information from our senses and then make connections to the wider world based on that information.”
And without being able to do so, we lose out on a psychological steering mechanism that helps us develop a balanced personality. And without that, we are prone to let others take charge of our abstract thinking to compensate for our failure.
Thus, we see people of all sorts become fodder for preachers, ministers, and hucksters who peddle a salvific overview of life designed to heal the identity of an aggrieved-victimized self — and the veracity of that self is only as good as the veracity of the person selling the salvation.
You can understand why then I — who embraced the abstract world’s concepts of justice and freedom and non-violent social change eons ago — am still having a hard time digesting the riot on Jan. 6 three years ago, when Americans, armed with American flags, busted into the United States Capitol and beat fellow Americans — policemen with flag-patches on their arms — to death — with the very same flag my father held high as he walked proudly around the kitchen in our house on the Fourth of July when I was growing up chanting “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
You can understand as well why I — a devoted student of representative government — am appalled by any huckster peddling violence to take over an election.
My O’Sullivan grandfather, Denis, and my O’Sullivan grandmother, Barbara, immigrants from Ireland, cherished the vote. In a family memoir, my Aunt Cass says my grandparents “took their citizenship in the United States seriously … Come election day they were both up early and dressed in their Sunday clothes to be the first people to the polls to vote. There was a certain honor for them to be the first ones to vote.”
And their son was the guy who marched around my childhood kitchen with the American flag held high chanting his love of democracy.
We do not need a sociological wizard versed in cognitive personality development to tell us there are now generations of Americans — inveterately-aggrieved victims — who will never see reality again.
The more worrisome part is that many of them, unable to see the world in its multi-colored complexity, are now fodder for ideologies like fascism that promise to make every victim a “new man.”
Is there a poet in the house who can help explain all this?
— 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!