Quote of the Day

He wonders: will he become a regular person? Something has gone wrong; his vaccination didn’t take; at the Boy-Scout initiation campfire he only pretended to be deeply moved, as he pretends to this hour that it is not so bad after all in the funhouse, and that he has a little limp. How long will it last? He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet ut­terly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place him­self, wiring and all, and he’s only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multivarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this fellow’s way, complicate that’s, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was.

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

—John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

Flash Gordon and the time machine

I remember the day my father came home from the neighbors’ in 1949 and said they had a radio with talking pictures. It was his way of explaining television to us in terms of what he knew: radio. Several years later I would sit on the rug with half a dozen neighborhood kids at the house down the block, watching Flash Gordon and advertisements for Buster Brown shoes.

Such early space-travel films may have marked my first encounter with the idea of time machines, those phone booths with the capacity to transpose one into encounters with Napoleon or to propel one ahead into dilemmas on distant planets. I was six or seven years old and already leading a double life as an imagined horse disguised as a young girl…

Flash Gordon never became a horse by stepping into a time machine, but he could choose any one of countless masquerades at crucial moments in history or in the futures he hoped to outsmart. This whole idea of past or future being accessible at the push of a button seemed so natural to me as a child that I have been waiting for science to catch up to the idea ever since.

—Tess Gallagher, “The Poem as Time Machine”

The personality of style

Style is the property of a poem that expresses the poet’s personality. Either his real personality or his invented personality; or, most likely, a combination of the two…Style consists of factors so minutely constituted and so obscurely combined that they simply are not separable and not measurable, except in the grossest ways. Yet we know a style when we see it, we recognize it and are attracted or repelled by it. One reason for this is the fact that style is a continuing element in a poet’s work, it remains consistently itself from one poem to another, even though the poems in other respects are notably dissimilar. We speak of the “growth” and “maturity” of a poet’s style in the same way that we speak of the growth and maturity of a person. This is an interesting fact; it may even sometimes be a crucial fact, as when we are attempting to explain the incidence of poetic genius. But it can also be a dangerous fact, for it leads to the state of mind in which style seems to be abstract from the poem, abstract from form itself.

—Hayden Carruth, “The Question of Poetic Form”

The writing in the dust

Note: I’m taking some time off for the holidays, so I’m republishing a few pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on November 22, 2017. 

About a year ago, I found myself thinking at length about what might well be the most moving passage in the entire Bible. It’s the scene in the Gospel of John in which the Pharisees, hoping to trap Jesus, bring forward a woman taken in adultery and ask him if she should be stoned according to the law, only to hear him respond: “Whoever is sinless in this crowd should go ahead and throw the first stone.” After the other onlookers drift off one by one, embarrassed, leaving just the woman behind, Jesus asks if anyone has condemned her. When she answers no, he says: “I don’t condemn you either. You’re free to go, but from now on, no more sinning.” (The story was memorably, if freely, adapted as one of the most powerful scenes in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.) In The Acts of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar writes of the passage:

The earliest ancient manuscripts of John do not have it, and modern scholars are virtually unanimous in concluding that it was not an original part of the Fourth Gospel…An impartial evaluation of the story has been impeded by its preservation as part of the Gospel of John…The fundamental question is whether this anecdote is a fragment that survived from an otherwise unknown gospel. Had it been discovered as a separate piece of papyrus, it would have attracted serious scholarly attention in its own right.

In the end, the seminar endorses it mildly, less as a real incident than as a reflection of what we know about Jesus himself, and the companion volume The Five Gospels includes the remarkable line: “While the Fellows agreed that the words did not originate in their present form with Jesus, they nevertheless assigned the words and story to a special category of things they wish Jesus had said and done.”

I feel the same way. But I haven’t even mentioned the one detail that has always struck me—and many other readers—the most. When the Pharisees first pose their question, Jesus doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he stoops down and silently draws on the ground with his finger. He responds only after they insist on a reply, and then he bends down to write in the dust again. It’s impossible to read this without wondering what he might have been writing, and nearly three centuries ago, the biblical commentator Matthew Henry did as good a job of summarizing the possibilities as anyone could:

It is impossible to tell, and therefore needless to ask, what he wrote; but this is the only mention made in the gospels of Christ’s writing…Some think they have a liberty of conjecture as to what he wrote here. Grotius says, It was some grave weighty saying, and that it was usual for wise men, when they were very thoughtful concerning any thing, to do so. Jerome and Ambrose suppose he wrote, Let the names of these wicked men be written in the dust. Others this, The earth accuses the earth, but the judgment is mine. Christ by this teaches us to be slow to speak when difficult cases are proposed to us, not quickly to shoot our bolt; and when provocations are given us, or we are bantered, to pause and consider before we reply; think twice before we speak once.

That last line seems reasonable enough, and Henry concludes: “He did as it were look another way, to show that he was not willing to take notice of their address, saying, in effect, Who made me a judge or a divider?”

And the passage, authentic or not, is also precious as one of the few everyday actions of Jesus that have been passed down to us. I’ve spoken elsewhere of a gospel of nouns and verbs, but nearly all of it occurs in Jesus’s words, not in descriptions of him preserved by others. Jesus writes on the ground; he falls asleep in a boat; he feels hungry; he breaks bread and pours wine; he weeps. There isn’t much more. Part of this reflects the fact that the gospels emerged from an oral tradition, but it also testifies to its debt to its literary predecessors. In his great book Mimesis, Erich Auerbach writes of the Old Testament story of the binding of Isaac:

In this atmosphere it is unthinkable that an implement, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the servingmen, or the ass, should be described, that their origin or descent or material or appearance or usefulness should be set forth in terms of praise; they do not even admit an adjective: they are serving-men, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet; they are there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects they were, are, or will be, remains in darkness. A journey is made, because God has designated the place where the sacrifice is to be performed; but we are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and even that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham and his followers rose “early in the morning” and “went unto” the place of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. That gesture is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence during the whole journey, of which we are told…It is as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in his followers and himself save only their footfalls.

At first glance, this style might seem primitive compared to that of the Iliad or the Odyssey, but as Auerbach points out, its effect on its audience goes much deeper than what we find in Homer:

The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels…Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.

This is the tradition to which Jesus—a historical person who feels much closer to many of us than the distant, shadowy figure of Abraham—was subordinated by the author of the gospels. As a literary strategy, it was a masterstroke, and it went a long way toward enabling Jesus to strike up an existence in the inner lives of so many. (Which doesn’t mean that its virtues are obvious. Norman Mailer once said of the gospels: “Where you don’t have a wonderful sentence, what you get is some pretty dull prose and a contradictory, almost hopeless way of telling the story.”) It also means, for better or worse, that Jesus can mean all things to all people. We no longer see him clearly, and he’s being used even as I write this to justify all forms of belief and behavior. My version of him is no more legitimate than that of anyone else. But I prefer to believe in the man who drew that line in the sand.

Quote of the Day

The trouble with most who would write poetry is that they are unwilling to throw their lives away.

—Russell Edson, “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man”

Attention and attenuation

Note: I’m taking some time off for the holidays, so I’m republishing a few pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on November 21, 2017.

When you look at the flood of stories that have appeared over the last two years about sexual assault and harassment, one of the first things that leaps out is that most of the cases still fall under one of three broad headings: politics, entertainment and the media, and technology. In each category, a single paradigmatic example—Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and Uber—seems to have catalyzed the conversation as a whole, and you could argue that it was the Access Hollywood tape, for which its offender paid no discernible price, that really motivated this overdue reckoning. Yet there are countless other professions that haven’t received a comparable amount of scrutiny. The restaurant industry has gone through a similar moment of truth, but there are many more that have mostly eluded major coverage, even through the conditions appear to be largely the same. (Gender disparities seem like a pretty good predictor of the prevalence of harassment, and if I were an enterprising investigative reporter, I’d systematically look at professions in which the percentage of women is less than, say, thirty percent. Glancing over recent data from the Department of Labor, you find such fields as environmental science, chiropractics, architecture, security and police, civil engineering, and many manufacturing jobs. There’s no reason to believe that these industries are any worse than the ones that I’ve listed above, but I also can’t imagine why they would be any better. And the same might hold true, for different reasons, of jobs in which women far outnumber men, like kindergarten teaching, speech therapy, and secretarial work.) But it’s worth asking why we tend to focus on three relatively closed worlds that account for only a tiny fraction of all workers in the United States.

I suspect that there are two main factors at play, which I’ll describe as attention and attenuation. On one hand, we’re simply more likely to pay attention to a story when it involves a person or company that we recognize, particularly if we feel an existing emotional attachment. Nearly two decades ago, Naomi Klein unforgettably made a case for “brand-based activism” in her book No Logo, pointing out that it’s easier for consumers to care about such issues as labor practices when a famous brand is implicated, and that corporations have made themselves vulnerable to such attacks by relying on emotion as a condition for success. Klein writes:

In a way, these campaigns help us to care about issues not because of their inherent justice or importance but because we have the accessories to go with them: Nike shoes, Pepsi, a sweater from the Gap. If we truly need the glittering presence of celebrity logos to build a sense of shared humanity and collective responsibility for the planet, then maybe brand-based activism is the ultimate achievement of branding. According to Gerard Greenfield, international political solidarity is becoming so dependent on logos that these corporate symbols now threaten to overshadow the actual injustices in question. Talk about government, talk about values, talk about rights—that’s all well and good, but talk about shopping and you really get our attention.

Replace “the planet” with “women’s rights” and “shopping” with “celebrities,” and you’ve got a compelling explanation for why the emphasis has been on politics, entertainment, and Silicon Valley. If these fields have one thing in common, it’s that they depend on creating the simulacrum of an emotional bond where none exists, and we naturally react strongly when it’s disrupted.

On the other hand, there’s the phenomenon of attenuation, which I can explain no more clearly than through an article in the Young People’s Science Encyclopedia by Charles F. Rockey, Jr.:

It would be very nice indeed if all of the information fed into the sending end of a communication channel came out perfectly at the receiving end. But this never happens. Something always happens on the way to spoil things, making the number of bits received always less than the number sent. This “something” is divided into two parts—attenuation and noise. Attenuation is the loss of energy always observed whenever energy is transmitted through any physical system. What we call the signal, the information-bearing energy, is always weaker at the receiver than at the transmitter. This energy loss is the attenuation.

In the case of some of the industries that I’ve mentioned, the distance between the sending and receiving end for news is dauntingly wide—it would take a grueling, potentially unrewarding effort of reporting to uncover instances of harassment in the world of chiropractics, for instance. For many of the fields that have received the most attention, by contrast, the attenuation is essentially zero, because some of the victims are physically, professionally, or personally adjacent to reporters. (In the cases of Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic or Glenn Thrush of the New York Times, not to mention Charlie Rose, many were journalists themselves.) With regard to Silicon Valley, politics, and entertainment, a sizable percentage of the stories that have broken over the last month or so involve men and women within reach of writers who are in a position to get such articles into print, in large part because they’re already there.

This isn’t meant to minimize the enormous achievement and courage of this coverage, and it may well be that some of these fields are truly worse than average. (As Sheelah Kolhatkar put it last year in The New Yorker: “The entertainment business…seems almost uniquely structured to facilitate the exploitation of women, with generations of young actresses trying to climb a career ladder but and controlled by male producers and directors.” The power dynamic within politics can hardly be any less toxic. And I’ve written elsewhere of the phenomenon, far from unique to Silicon Valley but certainly rampant within it, that I’ve called the revenge of the nerds.) But I think it’s important to recognize that what we’re witnessing now is still closer to its beginning than to its end, and that its next big test is how it evolves to tackle less visible and glamorous subjects. What we already have can best be understood as a crucial leading indicator, with stories that benefit from intense reader interest, a high existing concentration of reporters, and victims who in some cases have relatively greater resources—technological, social, financial, racial—to bring their stories to light. Given the immense obstacles of all kinds involved in sharing such accounts, no matter who you are, that’s probably the way it had to be. But there are many others who are voiceless. Telling their stories will require an even greater display of sustained diligence, concentration, and empathy, in industries and communities that may only have a handful of reporters, if any, covering them at any one time, which only makes the barriers of attention and attenuation more daunting. What we’ve witnessed is staggering in its bravery, thoroughness, tenacity, and commitment to the values of journalism at its best. But it’s only going to get harder from here.

Quote of the Day

It was no thought or word that called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect—and so to describe the limits, to say what can be done without damage.

—Wendell Berry, “Damage”