Cibola 5
Beginnings (cont’d)
I’ve been to the desert southwest,
I know how it’s pictured, & I swear
this is that light. What so many
sun-starved souls travel the breadth
of the continent for: that blood-
drenched gold. While down below
in the shadow, all around me
the dooryard birds–Carolina
wren, white-throated sparrow,
cardinal, titmouse, chickadee, junco,
goldfinch & mourning dove–
are wagering every note they have.
The pileated woodpecker uses
the whole cove for a resonator,
a fast rattle of dice on the bone of
a locust. As the light spreads,
every bush & tree on the ridgeside
stands distinct, singing in the dawn wind.
I see roots from underground, shining
tips of feathers. The blue down here
is the color of an ordinary horizon,
a thinness, a spreading of rhizomes
under my skin–the globe-encircling
miles of veins–grown feathery
like the feelers of a night-flying moth.
I can hear what shrews
are up to in their tunnels
& the newborn bears in their dens,
blindly sucking the blue milk
of a huge & dreamless sleep.
My breath tastes like the wood smoke
from my chimney, oak & cherry–now
rising, now running along the ground,
blue, blue . . .
Nineveh
I made baked fish for supper last night – thick thawed steaks of mahi-mahi, the gift of an acquaintance who had caught them herself in a fishing trip off North Carolina. I soaked them in lemon juice and smothered them under a thick blanket of whole wheat bread crumbs that had been sauteed in olive oil with cumin, coriander and plenty of basil and garlic. It was delicious, but too plentiful; I ate too much. Exhausted as I was when I finally went to bed, I woke after several hours, feeling the fish in my stomach and listening to the downpour on the roof.
This is our first major winter storm here in central Pennsylvania. All night and into the morning – continuing even as I type at 8:30 – hard rain has been falling and freezing, falling and dripping and freezing. As the small hours crawled by, I could hear the muffled cracks and crashes of trees giving way under the weight of ice. Twice when I got up, the digital clock at the foot of the stairs was flashing, but miraculously, the electricity stayed on. The second time, I stayed up to read for a little while. The book I grabbed was Carolyn Forché’s The Angel of History, where I found the following line:
Nuit blanche, your nights awake and the white window winter-locked.
I poked my head outside at one point around 4:30 and noticed a light in the far window of the main house. My father, too, was awake. Sometimes I think of insomnia as the family curse. Every family needs a good curse, don’t you agree?
At quarter after six, following a brief hour of sleep, I rise for the final time, anxious to brew my coffee and take a shower before the power goes. I’m out on the porch by 6:35, cradling my mug and listening to the fuselage. If you’ve never been through a major ice storm, let me tell you, it sounds like war. The difference with this one is the sheer volume of water in the stream, whose roaring drowns out most smaller breaks. What I hear are the sharp rendings of limbs, the explosive cracks of trunks snapped halfway up, and the thunderous crashes of full-sized trees giving way at the roots.
There are hundreds of acres of woods in all directions, and a high percentage of canopy-height trees are weedy, first-succession species such as black locust, black cherry and scarlet oak, many of them near the end of their natural life span of 80-120 years. The only thing preventing me from accepting this damage with complete equanimity is the knowledge that many parts of the forest may never successfully regenerate, beset as it is by a triple threat of white-tailed deer, invasive trees and shrubs, and acid precipitation. Usually one thinks of the effects of acid rain in terms of damage to the soil and water, but during ice storms, the trees and shrubs are encased in acidic armor that may last for days at a time. I can’t believe this doesn’t do a lot of damage, especially to evergreens like hemlocks and mountain laurel.
One thing I don’t have to worry about, however, is direct damage to the houses. Those farmers knew what they were doing when they planted their houses in the middle of large clearings, out of reach of any but a few ornamental trees. Usually I resent this distance between my house and the woods, but this morning I’m grateful for it.
The day dawns on an eerie and beautiful landscape. Ice storms of this severity have occurred with increasing frequency over the past thirty years – now they come as often as once every three to four years – but this is the first I can remember when the ground was completely bare of snow. The effect therefore is of pure, unmitigated crystal, white from a distance only in the way that cut glass appears white. If I had a camera and put a picture up here for you to look at, you’d probably imagine that every surface would answer a curious tap with a resonant ding. But such beauty weighs heavily on the real world. Even just reading about it, you might picture sleek, transparent body suits for every branch. But all the twigs droop with closely spaced, finger-long icicles, racks and racks of little knives – and that’s where the extra, fatal bit of load comes from. The 20-foot-tall red cedar tree in my herb garden is bent completely over, its head to the ground. In desperation, I get the broom from the kitchen and give it a few nudges to see if I can shake any of the ice loose. All I manage to do is roust out a couple of terrified sparrows.
I take my umbrella and go for a walk around the field – the woods are too dangerous. Now I can watch as well as listen to the limbs and trees crash down, at the rate of several a minute. When the big ones go over, they send up a brief splash of ice fragments. They also trim limbs and branches from their neighbors, which may not be entirely unwelcome. Any time I see a branch or limb breaking loose, I wonder if it isn’t just the radical amputation the parent tree needs to take the weight off the main trunk. It’s all in the architecture, of course. Trees that are built for the long haul, such as tulip poplars and white oaks, are masters at dropping the odd limb and quickly healing over the wound before infections can enter. You’d think hemlocks and white pines, with the tremendous weight of ice on their needles, would – like my red cedar – be the first to go. But as I survey the line of hundred year-old white pines along the driveway, I can see how easily each ice-laden limb rests its weight on the limb below. Hemlocks and spruce are even better at this, folding up like umbrellas under a heavy layer of snow or ice. Hence their tendency to eventually dominate northern forests, given a few centuries of winter storms to weed out the competition.
I approach as close as I dare to the woods on the northeast side of the field, above Margaret’s old house. Five large, downed trees – black cherries and locusts – stretch out into the field. Beyond, it looks as if at least a quarter of the trees have been felled or badly dismembered by the ice.
Dramatic and beautiful as this all may seem, I’m keenly hoping for a rapid rise in temperature. I don’t believe in petitionary prayer, but do try to picture, as hard as I can, ice falling off the trees: big frozen swordfish-size chunks dropping from the limbs, schools of ice-minnows slipping from the crowns. I visualize Marianne Moore’s “Octopus of Ice” dissolving into harmless calamari. But really, these things that are wreaking havoc now are more like giant squid with their sinister, cigar-shaped heads anchored upside-down to the boles of trees and their tentacles poised, terrible and still. To them, perhaps, the forest is a sideshow, and they are waiting for some properly monstrous prey – as if the fish I ate for supper had grown into a whale in my belly and I was soon to deliver it on the never-never shoreline of Nineveh, that great city. The rain shows no sign of letting up.
Words on the street
Cibola 4
Beginnings (cont’d)
Winter is the driest season: a fast for the land.
The last quarter of the year, dressed
like a Sabbath bride. And though
we’ve foresworn the salt cod
of old Europe, most of us, coddle
ourselves with all-beef patties or
expensive wines & huddle around
televisions, the desert still comes.
The wilderness of John & Jesus,
of Moses & Elijah & Mohammed
still comes to the door,
makes the windows rattle with
her stark visions,
her disabling prescriptions.
Come snow, & the low sun
leaves a bit of night in the sky at noon,
teases from the old, old ridges
their longest dawns. This morning
as I stand by the roadside facing west,
still scrutinizing the line of trees
where the year’s fattest moon–the one
that heralds hunger–has just
gone down, the ridge turns vermilion.
__________
“salt cod”: traditional Lenten food for most of Western Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (This church-mandated market for the nearly tasteless but long-storing fish of the north Atlantic, incidentally, led to the “discovery” of Newfoundland by anonymous fishermen out of Bristol, England several years before John Cabot, and thus quite possibly before 1492, according to the geographer Carl Sauer.)
“the year’s fattest moon”: I.e., the moon at perigee when perigee occurs near perihelion. “Extreme values for perigee and apogee distance occur when perigee or apogee passage occurs close to new or full Moon, and long-term extremes are in the months near to Earth’s perihelion passage (closest approach to the Sun, when the Sun’s tidal effects are strongest) in the first few days of January.” These differences are visible both in size and intensity of light. The year I wrote this, 2002, the largest moon was right at the end of February/beginning of March.
“the one that heralds hunger”: The full moon in March was referred to as the Hunger Moon by many Eastern Woodland tribes, since food stocks were at their lowest point of the year then, both for people and for many species of wildlife.
After words
Es war Erde in ihnen, und
sie gruben. . . .
Es kam eine Stille, es kam auch ein Sturm,
es kamen die Meere alle.
Ich grabe, du grí¤bst, und es grí¤bt auch der Wurm,
und das Singende dort sagt: Sie graben.
O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du:
Wohin gings, da’s nirgendhin ging?
O du grí¤bst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu,
und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring.
(Paul Celan)
There was earth inside them, and
they dug. . . .
There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.
O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.
(Michael Hamburger, tr., Poems of Paul Celan)
*
Say the near past and the far past if you want, picturing a journey there on foot, or excavations of varying depth and complexity. But in our technological civilization, travel has become so fast, so easy, so painless, and our contacts with the dead so infrequent and unreal, it’s easy to forget the perils. “What charming folklore!” exclaims the modern reader of Amos Tutuola’s strange stories. In The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he warns: “DO NOT FOLLOW UNKNOWN MAN’S BEAUTY”:
But when they had travelled about twelve miles away from that market, they left the road on which they were traveling and started to travel inside an endless forest in which only all the terrible creatures were living….
[T]hen the complete gentleman in the market that the lady was following, began to return the hired parts of his body to the owners…
– and by then it was too late to turn back.
Recent news reports describe former fishermen in Sri Lanka not only putting as much distance between themselves and the ocean as possible, but refusing to eat seafood. The president of Sri Lanka is being urged to help revitalize the fishing industry by publicly consuming one, symbolic fish. It’s not hard to imagine the viceral revulsion survivors must feel, their antipathy toward the ocean that had been like a nurturing parent.
A strangely prescient meditation by Sarah Hinkley Wilson in the Christian Century, published on December 28 but doubtless written well before, reflects on Psalm 29 (“The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters….The LORD sitteth upon the flood.”) Wilson reminds us that, in the world of the Hebrew Scriptures, the waters are associated with the forces of chaos and destruction from the Creation story, through the Flood, through the Exodus myth where the waters of the Red Sea destroy the Egyptian army, and the waters of the Jordan present an inviolable barrier for an entire generation, condemned to die in the wilderness for their lack of faith.
In the Bible, wild nature is not something to be trifled with. Wilson concludes:
[W]hatever the voice of the Lord is saying under the circumstances detailed in the psalm, no one can hear it and live. If this is the voice that produced the succession of devastating hurricanes in the Gulf last fall, the only sensible solution is not to worship, but to evacuate. You can’t ride this storm. You must, as Luther said, “flee from God to God,” from the God who drives you out to the same God who welcomes you home.
This God, who is over many waters and sits enthroned over the flood, has himself been swept overboard, immersed and engulfed in the river Jordan [Matthew 3:13-17]. Baptism with water is not enough, for God also flashes forth flames of fire: he baptizes with fire and the Holy Spirit. Water and fire on their own are words of God that are encoded and indecipherable. To worship God in unmediated nature is to risk ruination. But to drown in the waters of baptism in which the Lord himself was drowned, to receive the pentecostal fire of the Spirit which the Lord himself sent – in this way we creatures of nature can worship our God in nature, and live. [Italics added.]
Fierce as this seems, it strikes me as possibly a little too timid, a little too pat in its implied moral that, after all, it’s best to worship indoors. Are Christians not called upon to imitate Christ, and Jews to imitate Elijah, Moses and Miriam, all of whom were severly tested in the wilderness? I am aware, however, that many readers of this passage are likely to have the exact opposite reaction, recoiling in horror from the thought of having to partake of such a strange fish as this God or Christ who appears so capricious – who may even seem to derive telluric power from feeding on the untimely dead. How can a God who is supposed to be [insert favorite adjective here] perpetrate or permit [insert name of catastrophe]?
*
The problem with trying to worship God “outside protective church walls, in the wilds of Creation,” notes Wilson, is that “you might not like what you hear.” The implication is that many believers choose to confine their religiosity to pleasant-sounding things, half-truths that make them feel safe and snug as they warm their hands in front of the burnt offerings. It would be nice to imagine that such narrow-mindedness is the special provenance of fanatics and fundamentalists, like the woman Susan of A line cast, a hope followed sat next to recently on a plane:
At the point where she tried to draw some connection between the earthquake and tidal wave and some divine vengeance God wanted to wreak on all Muslims for following a faith that celebrating killing, I cut her off in anger, then buried myself in a book. I could have explained to her that there were many thousands of non-Muslims in those areas, patiently dealt with her massive misperceptions like I had with the other statements of prejudice, but it was obvious that this woman was permanently lost in a sea of ignorance.
But the way I see it, we are almost all swimming in similar waters. Isn’t it human nature to believe things that are comforting and easy, and to reject whatever challenges us? Rabbi Michael Lerner’s response to this age-old problem of theodicy (“to justify the ways of God to man,” as Milton put it) started out strong.
Two weeks ago the United Nations issued a report detailing the deaths of more than 29,000 children every single day as a result of avoidable diseases and malnutrition. Over ten million children a year!! The difference between the almost non-existent coverage of this on-going human-created disaster and the huge focus on the terrible tsunami-generated suffering in South East Asia reveals some deep and ugly truths about our collective self-deceptions.
Say it, Rabbi! He was a guest on a call-in radio program shortly after the disaster took place, he writes, and he marveled
how many people responded to the question [“Where was God During the Tsunami?”]…by calling in to give messages that were roughly of the following sort: I am really angry at God, and this is precisely why I don’t believe in Him.
I don’t know any other non-existing being who gets such a bad rap. It’s as if people need to invent God in order to blame Him for something about which they are justifiably in despair.
He goes on to remind readers that the notion of God as Prime Mover (or totalitarian ruler, for that matter) comes from the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, and is not an original or even a desirable component of Judeo-Christian thinking.
Instead, understand God as THE FORCE OF HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNIVERSE, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being as it moves the being of the universe toward greater and greater levels of love and connection and consciousness, and makes possible the transcending of that which is toward that which ought to be. Seen this way, God is not the all-powerful being that determines every moment of creation, but rather the part of creation aspiring toward love, kindness, generosity, peace, and social justice which is evolving toward greater power to shape our common destiny to the extent that we choose to embody it more fully. Or in more traditional theological language, God is a Creator, and the creation is still taking place as the God energy of the universe develops and manifests more and more through the universe, shaping it to be more fully in accord with God’s aspiration for a world of love, compassion, justice, peace and generosity.
This sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Especially since it allows human beings of their own free will to participate in the work of world-healing. I’m down with that, I guess. Except that already this notion of evolving and developing makes me nervous; both usages are popular distortions of what I consider to be the true meanings of these words. (“Evolution” is simply change; no progress is implied. And “develop,” etymologically, means not to build up but to strip down, to uncover the essence of something.) Trying to think of God – any god – as “a force” makes me queasy. And the essay goes downhill from there, with a consideration of a strand of thinking Lerner calls “The Ethical Biosphere”: that “the living planet, the gaia energy of our planet, cannot reach a state of being settled and calm until the moral and spiritual realms are more centered and connected with the universe’s ultimate moral design.”
In this view, the physical world will be unable to function in a peaceful and gentle way until the moral/spiritual dimension manifest in the behavior of God’s creatures coheres with God’s will: that is, is filled with justice, peace, generosity, love and kindness. Till then, gaia will be restless, its tectonic plates shifting, its weathers unpredictable, its diseases finding new ways to reproduce.
Imagine having to share a plane ride with someone who thought like that!
This is an example of the Grand Narrative theory of human or planetary history, and there’s no denying that various versions of it have played a central role in the shaping of most Jewish and Christian worldviews. To this day, most of us find it hard to think of history apart from the modern myth of progress, which is a direct descendent of Biblical eschatology. The ancient inhabitants of the tiny kingdom of Judah, beset by one national disaster after another, invented the Grand Narrative theory of historiography, which says: “My little life makes sense, because it is all part of a huge, almost unimaginable Plan – which will eventually end happily ever after.”
In other words, life makes sense because someday it will all end.
*
The poet Rodger Kammenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elijah, also has an essay on the Tikkun website. Disasters don’t have to make sense, he maintains.
There is no explanation and I do not accept the answer suggested by the Buddhist idea of group karma, that whatever happens to a group is somehow the result of a previous action of that group. In this life or a previous life. You can believe that if you wish, but I don’t believe it in this case. I don’t believe it because this happened to children. They didn’t have enough time in this life to deserve this death. And in a previous life? No, that is too abstract for me. The explanation lacks specificity and I already lack too much specificity when I am dealing with a number of deaths so huge, and at such a great distance. I need to feel more, not less. One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said – these aren’t his exact words – that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination. He called the child a “dear one.” And he said, “You must know that your ‘dear one’ does not want you to suffer, to feel so much grief.” It was a meditation I found wholly beautiful. He added that for a Buddhist, suffering is in the nature of things and so he would try to remind a Buddhist to reflect on that. But he said, for a Westerner, there would arise the question of meaning, which boils down to the question of Job, why would a just God allow the innocent to suffer? The question is just as profound for an individual loss as for a mass disaster: it doesn’t get more profound, just more inescapable. I don’t believe that a mass disaster, in and of itself, tells us anything about God. I don’t believe in a God who punishes through disaster. The disaster is. That is exactly the way I would understand it, without adding my own interpretation, without supplying a meaning or completing the sentence. The disaster is. The tragedy is. And I need to abide with it, and feel it, instead of seeking an answer, because the answers just make me complacent and take me away from the children on the beach, and the father with the dead child in his arms.
As the psycholinguist Walter J. Ong observed (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word), the invention of writing systems causes a sea-change in human consciousness. “Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface.” A story unfolds as a scroll that we can return to at any point, with an end we can always skip ahead to, ignoring or perhaps skimming quickly through the many devil-haunted details that come before. The spoken word, along with the silences that surround it, is gradually devalued. It takes events of great horror and magnitude to stun us into silence, and to make us feel the weight of each word in our hearts.
We dig, we dig, we dig. We journey into the past so easily in a literate civilization, taking our pick of this history or that memoir, living perhaps with the works of long-dead authors in a kind of cohabitation so intimate that we are liable to forget entirely that these are the words of the dead. We practice very few of the numerous precautions – call them taboos if you like – that people in oral societies tend to observe in the telling or embellishing of stories. For example, for native peoples in a huge swath of North America, ordinary stories – stories told outside a ritual context – traditionally could never be recounted during the half of the year between the spring and autumn equinoxes. The (to us) puzzling explanation for this is that summer is when the snakes are active, and snakes have complete intolerance for narrative embroidery! Only when the ground is hard and frozen, here in the north, can tales be told. (Though in fact this prohibition extended far south, into lands where frosts are unknown).
In the Bible, too, the serpent is the cleverest of creatures. In the original telling of the Garden of Eden story – before centuries of interpretations changed the way we read it – the serpent is not at all evil, much less a stand-in for Satan. He is simply a smooth talker. Here in the “Laupe” portion of the blogosphere, I think most of us are quite adept at second-guessing ourselves and questioning our motives for always wanting to explain, to embroider, to talk smoothly and draw meaning from every event. Thus the past two weeks have seen a number of quite compelling pleas for silence or extreme circumspection, for example at Nomen est Numen, alembic, The Middlewesterner and Hoarded Ordinaries.
But humans are storytelling creatures perhaps above all else. The vernacular body presented “A story” based on elck’s own experiences in India these past few weeks.
Civic disorder seems a natural state for a country whose philosophy is more ethereal than that of those Greeks who sought to impose rational design on the world’s fearsome Kaos. Here, chaos is embraced for the elemental truth that it is.
The main action unfolds on the plane ride home.
In my seat, I catch up on the news. The Times of the India gives the latest death toll from the earthquake as a hundred and twenty thousand. A smaller front page article says “352 thousand babies will be born today”; the article discusses the daily birth rate, and the daily death rate (150,000). An attempt to set the horror of catastrophic death in context. Inside, there is a quotation from the Vedas about tranquility in the midst of sorrow. The grand arithmetic and the spiritual verities are helpful, but it is weird and discomfiting to confront the photographs of the watery disaster, to read some of the human stories behind the news. Flying away from the region of the catastrophe, the story begins to become real. Or rather: the story was real before, but it now becomes tainted by sentimentality (this problem worsens after I return to the US).
I fold away the newspapers and begin reading a book I picked up in a bookshop in Bandra the previous day, The Undiscovered Country by Eknath Easwaran. It is a book about death, about “exploring the promise of death.”
The old man in the blue sweater finally gets up from his seat, three rows in front of mine, and shuffles past us and goes to the bathroom to take his leak.
I won’t spoil the ending, for those who haven’t read it yet. Suffice it to say that this is a model of the storytelling art, and that the ending takes one completely by surprise with its wrongness, which at the same time seems somehow right – or at least unavoidable – and thus tragic. For tragedy is, above all, a human construct.
“Death should never be faceless,” elck intones; “death is always personal.”
*
“What is the possible response,” asks Beth at the cassandra pages, “other than tears, and an attempt to help?” (I like it that she says “possible” instead of the expected “proper.”)
But, of course, help can take many different forms: gifts of money or labor, concrete efforts toward preventing a repetition of the disaster, or more intangible gestures aimed at world healing and transformation (tikkun). My favorite response to this disaster so far comes from Beth W. and her husband Buck, as recounted in Switched at Birth. A couple hundred trees at a time, they are replanting their forest, devastated last fall by Hurricane Ivan. Only the day before, Beth had written that
The hurricane rearranged my own personal walking woods, and I’ve been damn put out about it. That’s the blind, self-seeking, pride-filled truth of it. My meditation walks became distracted ramblings which I had begun to eschew for the bland indoor treadmill.
But this morning, it’s as though some fog of depression or grief had lifted, bouyed by nature’s insistence on reasserting itself.
“The joy is back,” she writes, but significantly, for her, that’s just the beginning – not an end in itself.
Setting a line, I plant a seedling, walk four steps, look around for volunteer plants, dodge thick prickly briars, and plant another one. The late afternoon mix of glare and shadow makes it difficult to distinguish brown from green.
I think of the children, the mothers, the fathers, and how their ocean swallowed or crushed them. Pausing over my orange metal dibble, one foot resting on its metal edge, I draw my left hand across my eyes and wonder for a moment if I can complete the task.
Continuing, I whisper a name as each seedling goes into the damp soil. . . “for you, Jayanga. . . for you, Raj . . . for you, Harmiel. . . . for you, Rasheed. . . for you, Sunil. . . for you, Mahindra. . . for you, Sando . . . for you, Crishan. . . for you, Jaseem” — for you all, for you all, and water them with tears, with love.
Love: an age-old answer, perhaps the finest our civilization has to offer. Or is it really just another question, raised to a higher pitch? As the piece at The Middlewesterner says (rearranging Tom’s originally italicized words into the poem that they refused to be):
Which is the dancer,
which the dance?
Who is eater,
who gets eaten?
Who takes?
Who gives back?
And on our finger the ring awakes.
Words on the street
Cibola 3
I’m serializing my book-length poem. See Section 1 for details.
Beginnings (cont’d)
I awake in the dark and shake free
of sheets & blankets, of down-filled
quilt. The rituals of waking–
the long, hot shower, the coffee–give
my mind the chance to keep drifting,
let memory make what it will
of the contours of sleep.
Oddest of all are the dreams in which
one awakes, forgetting all rituals.
And it seems normal to go out naked,
for instance, in the middle of winter.
The snow’s alive, remember?
It ripples, blue flames slip
through the trees like fish.
I feel fur sprouting all along my spine.
Compulsive blessings and the silence beyond words: quotes from Ivan Illich
The libertarian website LewRockwell.com has a nice retrospective on Ivan Illich – well worth reading for anyone unfamiliar with his ideas. Illich is one of my favorite thinkers. Whether or not you agree with all his positions – and I certainly don’t – I think there’s no denying he is one the most consistently challenging social philosophers of the second half of the 20th century.
Reading this retrospective, which included the first quote below, prompted me to dig out my own copy of Illich’s 1969 classic, Celebration of Awareness. Here’s a brief garland of quotes from two of the most striking essays included in that work.
From “Violence: A Mirror for Americans“:
“The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.”
“Eight years ago I told the late Bishop Manuel Larrain, the president of the Conference of Latin American Bishops, that I was prepared if necessary to stop the coming of missionaries to Latin America. His answer still rings in my ears: ‘They may be useless to us in Latin America, but they are the only North Americans whom we will have an opportunity to educate. We owe them that much.'”
Illich foresaw something like the rise of radical Islamist ideology way back in 1968:
“I submit that foreign gods (ideals, idols, ideologies, persuasions, values) are more offensive to the ‘poor’ than the military or economic power of the foreigner. It is more irritating to feel seduced to the consumption of over-priced sugar-water called Coca-Cola than to submit helplessly to doing the same job an American does, only at half the pay. It angers a person more to hear a priest preach cleanliness, thrift, resistance to socialism, or obedience to unjust authority, than to accept military rule. If I read present trends correctly, and I am confident I do, during the next few years violence will break out mostly against symbols of foreign ideas and the attempt to sell these. And I fear that this violence, which is fundamentally a healthy though angry and turbulent rejection of alienating symbols, will be exploited and harden into hatred and crime.”
Yes, and be used by anti-Western governments to solidify power, as in Libya under Qaddafi, Iran under the Ayatollahs, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
From “The Eloquence of Silence“:
“The science of linguistics has brought into view new horizons in the understanding of human communications. An objective study of the ways in which meanings are transmitted has shown that much more is relayed from one man to another through and in silence than in words. Words and sentences are composed of silences more meaningful than the sounds. The pregnant pauses between sounds and utterances become luminous points in an incredible void: as electrons in the atom, as planets in the solar system. Language is as a cord of silence with sounds the knots – as nodes in a Peruvian quipu, in which the empty spaces speak….
“To learn a language in a human and mature way, therefore, is to accept the responsibility for its silences and for its sounds. The gift a people gives us in teaching us their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than of its system of sounds. It is an intimate gift for which we are accountable to the people who have entrusted us with their tongue. A language of which I know only the words and not the pauses is a continuous offense. It is as the caricature of a photographic negative….
“It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missioners, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ‘speak with the accents of natives’ they remain forever thousands of miles away.”
This is from a talk Illich gave to prospective missionaries learning Spanish, Catholic priests who wanted to work among the then-newly arrived Puerto Ricans in New York City. Illich goes on to classify linguistic silences into three, broad categories: “the silence of the pure listener”; “the silence of syntony,” of waiting for the right words or Word; and “the silence beyond words,” which is equally “the silence of heaven or of hell,” of love or despair.
“There is still another silence beyond words, the silence of the Pietí . It is not a silence of death but a silence of the mystery of death. It is not the silence of active acceptance of the will of God out of which the Fiat is born nor the silence of manly acceptance of Gethsemane in which obedience has its roots. The silence you as missioners seek to acquire in this Spanish course is the silence beyond bewilderment and questions; it is a silence beyond the possibility of an answer, or even reference to a word which preceded. It is the mysterious silence through which the Lord could descend into the silence of hell, the acceptance without frustration of a life, useless and wasted on Judas, a silence of freely willed powerlessness through which the world was saved. Born to redeem the world, Mary’s Son had died at the hands of His people, abandoned by His friends and betrayed by Judas whom he loved but could not save – silent contemplation of the culminating paradox of the Incarnation which was useless for the redemption of at least one personal friend. The opening of the soul to this ultimate silence of the Pietí is the culmination of the slow maturing of the three previous forms of missionary silence.”
I admit I don’t read nearly as much Christian theology as I should. So perhaps I shouldn’t be as struck as I am by the insight in these last lines, that Jesus’ greatest source of agony was the loss of Judas. (Was this mentioned in The Passion of the Christ?) It seems somewhat at variance with Augustine’s contention that the greatest source of pleasure for the saved in heaven will be to look down on the eternal torments of the damned. It reminds me instead of a line from a poem by Elie Wiesel: “The Silence of God is God.”
For more Illich quotes, scroll down to the end of the aforementioned retrospective. Naturally, the author selects quotes favorable to a conservative libertarian point-of-view. But a lengthy list of links to other online articles by and about Ivan Illich is provided, as well.
Cibola 2
Re-cast in the second person, and slightly expanded, following an e-mailed suggestion from a reader who evidently took what I said yesterday about the Reader’s pivotal role seriously (as well she should). Thanks, Suzanne!
Beginnings
This thing called a fetish embodies
what can never be touched.
Its odd contours–all lump & twist
& rag-end–are best kept out of view.
To see it exposed, you must assume
the burden of its origins, you must
give up some part of what makes you
you. Who now would choose
such displacement? It lives
in a buried season, carboniferous.
It is the solid shadow
we abandoned in the womb.