Readings: of The Ghost in the Machine

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from the fourth essay, “Thinking Again,”of Marilyn Robinson’s book, Absence of Mind – the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self:

As Bertrand Russell pointed out decades before Gilbert Ryle coined this potent phrase [i.e “the Ghost in the Machine”], the old, confident distinction between materiality and nonmateriality is not a thing modern science can endorse. Physicists say a change in a split photon occurs simultaneously in its severed half, at any theoretical distance. As if there were no time or space, this information of change passes instantly from one to the other. Is an event that defies any understanding we have of causality a physical event? Yes. Can the seeming timelessness and spacelessness that mediate this change also be called physical? Presumably, since they have unambiguous physical consequences. Then perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical, and perhaps we ought not to be so confident in opposing it to a real or imagined nonphysical. These terms, as conventionally used, are not identical with the terms “real” and “unreal,” though the belief that they are is the oldest tenet of positivism. The old notion of dualism should be put aside, now that we know a little about the uncanny properties of the finer textures of the physical.

This consideration, which has long lingered on the periphery of my knowledge base—as an uninvited squatter of sorts—has indeed (now that Ms. Robinson has so forcefully rubbed my nose in it) caused me, of necessity, to put aside my old notion of dualism.

I have not been a positivist. But I have been a dualist of the type: Spirit Good / Matter Bad. As such distinctions become ambiguous, however, so must that species of dualistic assumption. The only sort of dualism left standing would be that of the Good as opposed to the Evil. But if, as we are sometimes told, the Evil has no real existence, but is only an absence of the Good, then what? It’s all Good?

You tell me. I’m stumped…
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Readings: Are You Positive About That?

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I am currently about one-third of the way through Marilynne Robinson’s interesting book of essays, Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Specifically, I am on the second essay, entitled “The Strange History of Altruism.” In this chapter, Robinson briefly recalls the history and cultural influence of positivism, and offers her thoughts on the pernicious effects positivism has had on the concept of the self, in science as well as in art and literature.

Since Darwin, Comte, Freud, et al. and the advent of what she labels “parascientific thought,” the notion of persons acting to benefit others at a real cost to themselves has been discredited, she argues, at a huge cost to the idea of an essential human nature.

I shall post an excerpt from this chapter below, and ask that my readers—particularly the writers and poets among you—to contemplate the significance of this kind of parascientific thought on your creative life project:

…[evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey] Miller states, ‘Evolution cannot favor altruistic information-sharing any more than it can favor altruistic food-sharing. Therefore, most animals’ signals must have evolved to manipulate the behavior of another animal for the signaler’s own benefit.’ And other animals have evolved to ignore them, because it didn’t pay to listen to manipulators. Ergo, it seems, we, alone among the animals, have language. Why the complexity of language and our adeptness in the use of it? Gazzaniga says, “Considering this conundrum, Miller proposes that language’s complexities evolved for verbal courtship. This solves the altruism problem by providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and female.”

Is it true? Are the astonishing sonnets of Shakespeare and the elegant word-play of a Dylan Thomas or a Sandra Agricola (plug!), nothing more than grand elaborations on such classic pickup lines as “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your name Martha?”

Is a poet essentially of a kind with the short-lived and behaviorally hard-wired moth on its herky-jerky flight towards an artificial light?
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Religion: Fuse It, or Lose It

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The following excerpt is taken from Marilynne Robinson’s* preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics volume, John Calvin, Steward of God’s Covenant, Selected Writings. Robinson’s preface serves not only to introduce Calvin to the reader, but also as a brief apologia for Protestantism and the Reformation.

As a Protestant who is wont to visit Catholic blogs, both to observe how the “other side” lives, and to defend the Christian brand under the aegis of which I was baptized and made my Confirmation, my positions have frequently been subject to the very criticism against which Robinson here defends Luther and Calvin:

To assume that objectivity can be looked for in matters of religion, as critics of the Reformers often do, when it is not naïve, is a pure statement of faith. Tradition is simply the accumulated subjectivities of individuals—Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi. That these are authoritative figures only underscores the fact that subjectivity is in itself nothing to be dismissed out of hand. If tradition sets these men apart on the grounds that God, so to speak, acted upon them directly, those who revere Luther and Calvin feel that they also were instruments of God. The Reformers’ sola Scriptura is often treated as literalism or bibliomancy, in either case as an evasion of discipline and reason. But such a view is by no means consistent with the acute critical attention both of them, but Calvin especially, brought to bear on the text.

This all seems so patently obvious that one is tempted simply to go, “Well, d’uh!” and move on to more challenging subjects. Ah, would that it were that easy. Would that Christian disunity--in an age when the Jihadists are off the rez and streaming across every Western frontier, bearing a law so harsh, yet so stark, that Father Abraham would have found little fault in it--did not render the decadent West so vulnerable in its collective hubris.

The potential site of that crucially-needed healing is an open Communion.
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*Marilynne Robinson is the author of the award-winning novels Housekeeping and Gilead, both of which I have read and recommend without reservation, and of The Death of Adam, a nonfiction book which I have also read and likewise recommend.


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Readings: Homeless

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I have finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s excellent novel, Home. I have returned it to the library—gotten it out of the house. It was, to me, a devastatingly sad book. It is hard to write about.

As in her previous novel, Gilead, of which Home is a sequel, various theological threads of Robinson’s Calvinist faith are woven throughout the plot. Of these Protestant doctrines, the question of Predestination figures largely in Home, as do the dynamics of sin vs. grace, justification vs. damnation, and knowledge vs. faith. These questions are largely examined through the tensions of the relationship of Jack Boughton, prodigal son and black sheep, and his moribund father, a retired Presbyterian preacher.

What one first notices in reading Home is Marilynne Robinson’s perfect ear. She knows how a young boy talks; how an old man on the brink of death talks; how a spinster English teacher, and how an American working-class woman in a rural setting talk. We recognize such types, as we have known them, in the words of Home.

The one character who stands out against this perfectly articulated backdrop is the novel’s deeply flawed, perpetually anguished, anti-hero, Jack. His speech is unique, non-typical, out of the ordinary.

Jack is a man with a troubled background, who has lived most of his adult life away from “home.” The mysteries of his past are revealed slowly, bit by bit, in his conversations with his younger sister, Glory, who has also returned home after a less than satisfactory fling at life-in-the-world to care for their aged father, a widower.

Jack is a study in alienation. He is a man who feels himself displaced in any setting. He is an idealist with high principles which he is repeatedly unable to enact; an essentially kind and serious man of learning who self-medicates with alcohol to kill the pain of his inability to be good. For Jack, there is no home.

The last thing we see of Jack in the novel is this:

She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.

Some of us are, perhaps, unfortunate enough in our own lives also to recognize—even to know—Jack.
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Readings: Connecting Some Dots

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In an afterword to Jane Kenyon’s posthumously published book of poems, Otherwise, her husband, poet Donald Hall, wrote of her poetic development:

During junior high school she began to write poems. Witter Bynner’s translations from the Chinese were an early model.

A bit further on, Hall writes:

Her poetry gathered resonance and beauty as she studied the art of the luminous particular. “The natural object”—she liked to quote Pound—“is always the adequate symbol.”

It is no coincidence that Ezra Pound, like Witter Bynner, did translations of Chinese poetry. It is the craft of the gifted, but hard-working, poet that adds to the natural object that “luminous” quality, transforming it into a universally received symbol. This is analogous to T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative. It is also that which is the Zen essence of the art of Japanese haiku, of which I have written previously. And this is precisely the quality that has inspired my new-found love of the poetry of Jane Kenyon.

In contemplating these ideas, I was reminded of Walter Pater’s ideal of the “hard, gem like flame,” which has been characterized as “his pursuit of the "highest quality" in "moments as they pass." This state of mind, born of attention, is simultaneously a mode of existence and a mode of expression. Pater, like Donald Hall, was known as an indefatiguable revisionist. The apparent stark simplicity of Jane Kenyon’s poetry is likewise the result of many drafts and revisions. While the idea may come out of nowhere—facilitated by what Kenyon favorite, John Keats, called “negative capability”—in a flash of inspiration, the poem that is finally constructed as a vehicle for that gift of the muse (or Holy Ghost) is the result of hard-earned craft.

Once the mind begins to contemplate such things as “the luminous particular” and the “objective correlative,” examples begin to pop up like mushrooms. Yesterday, for instance, I read Paul Auster’s short novel, Man In the Dark. In this novel there is a character who is (as was often the case with Jane Kenyon) trapped in deep psychological depression. As a coping mechanism she has begun watching movies for hours at a time on DVD. While it is noted by her grandfather that she is using film to self-medicate, he also realizes that she has made a valid observation concerning cinema as an art form when she says:

Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but Renoir, De Sica, and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?

There we have “it” as related to film.

Just this morning I drove to the public library to return a book. While there, I was able to borrow Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, which I had been waiting for the opportunity to read. On only the second page of the narrative [p.4], I found this excellent example of the natural object as luminous particular:

And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung it imponderable branches out over the raod and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.

Beautiful. Such writing kinda puts Marilynne Robinson in the same league with Keats, Pound, Eliot, De Sica—and Jane Kenyon—doesn’t it?
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NOTE: In googling “luminous particular” among the first hits were this and this.
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Readings: And Here's to You, Marilynne Robinson

I was pleased to find in the September 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker Magazine, this review by James Wood of a new novel by Marilynne Robinson. I discovered and read Robinson's first two novels, Housekeeping and Gilead, prior to launching this blog. I subsequently also read with great pleasure a collection of her essays, entitled The Death of Adam.

Reviewer Wood seems to be less enthusiastic about Robinson's oeuvre than I am, but I encourage all bibliophiles to read the entire review and not just the lengthy excerpt below.

Robinson is a religious writer and a Calvinist. She pulls no punches in her exposition of the fallen nature of man as manifested in contemporary society, and the lukewarm approach taken to organized religion by many "mainstream" congregants. Wood, I believe, fairly states Robinson's positions in the following:

Robinson describes herself as a liberal Protestant believer and churchgoer, but her religious sensibility is really far more uncompromising and archaic than this allows. … In a way that many Americans, and certainly her liberal readers, would find palatable, her Protestantism seems born of a love of religious silence—the mystic, quietly at prayer in an unadorned place, indifferent to ecclesiastical mediation. But Robinson is illiberal and unfashionably fierce in her devotion to this Protestant tradition; she is voluble in defense of silence. She loathes the complacent idleness whereby contemporary Americans dismiss Puritanism and turn John Calvin, its great proponent, into an obscure, moralizing bigot: “We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf—it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.” We flinch from Puritanism because it placed sin at the center of life, but then, as she tartly reminds us, “Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset.” Calvin believed in our “total depravity,” our utter fallenness, but this was not necessarily a cruel condemnation. “The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain,” Robinson writes in her essay “Puritans and Prigs.” Nowadays, she argues, educated Americans are prigs, not Puritans, quick to pour judgment on anyone who fails to toe the right political line. Soft moralizing has replaced hard moralizing, but at least those old hard moralists admitted to being moralists.

Prigs, not Puritans. Ain't that a bitch? I'm pretty sure that all of this has something relevant to say about the current presidential election campaign, the role of religion in it, and perhaps even the anointing of Sarah Palin as a kind of political saint.

Robinson's new novel is entitled Home. It reintroduces and makes protagonists of characters from her previous and, in my estimation, great, novel Gilead. I look forward to the opportunity of reading it.