Day after Moslem attack on Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt:
http://www.clipsyndicate.com/video/play/2084172?wpid=10121
http://www.clipsyndicate.com/video/play/2084172?wpid=10121
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
David Wojnarowitz, "Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell," excerpt
APROPOS OF THE RECENT REMOVAL OF A WORK IN THIS VEIN FROM A SMITHSONIAN EXHIBITION:
"I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar’s death on November 26, 1987 and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It’s like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it. All my notions of the machinations of the world have been built throughout my life on odd cannibalizations of different lost cultures and on intuitive mythologies. I gained comfort from the idea that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes. But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain; it’s like tipping a bottle over on its side and watching the liquid contents drain out in slow motion. I suddenly resist comfort, from myself and especially from others. There is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state. And this need comes from my sense of mortality. There is a relief in having this sense of mortality. At least I won’t arrive one day at my 80th birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the pre-invented world – do you understand what I’m saying here? I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I’m trying to lift off the weight of the pre-invented world so I can see what’s underneath it all. I’m hungry and the pre-invented world won’t satisfy my hunger. I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our pre-invented world."
"I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar’s death on November 26, 1987 and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort. It’s like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure. I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it. All my notions of the machinations of the world have been built throughout my life on odd cannibalizations of different lost cultures and on intuitive mythologies. I gained comfort from the idea that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes. But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain; it’s like tipping a bottle over on its side and watching the liquid contents drain out in slow motion. I suddenly resist comfort, from myself and especially from others. There is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state. And this need comes from my sense of mortality. There is a relief in having this sense of mortality. At least I won’t arrive one day at my 80th birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the pre-invented world – do you understand what I’m saying here? I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find. I’m trying to lift off the weight of the pre-invented world so I can see what’s underneath it all. I’m hungry and the pre-invented world won’t satisfy my hunger. I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing. Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our pre-invented world."
Friday, December 10, 2010
Essay by Ptolemy's daughter
The Road by Which the Writer Perishes
By Alexandra Subramanian
The publishing industry is currently undergoing technologically- induced transformations that provide terrific challenges and opportunities both for writers and people within the industry. One can read about the evolution of these changes within the publishing world daily in articles and blogs, if one chooses to keep up with this sort of thing. I subscribe to the Shatzkin Files, a blog about publishing, as well as to Publishers Marketplace, which keeps its members up to date on every book that is sold to a publisher or any news happening in the publishing world, for that matter. I can’t say that it’s a cheery pastime, and I often choose not to read these updates, but my consciousness about what is happening in the world of publishing prompts me to contemplate some of the challenges for the solitary writer in all of this. What are the implications for the individual authors who are serious about their craft and wish to get published? Should there be some signposts for writers? Some “writer beware” signs erected in some key spots in online universe where thoughtful people roam?
It is difficult to imagine during these times a writer living quietly, unmolested by the outside world, as Eudora Welty did for years in her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Throughout her long career, Eudora Welty never once tailored her writing to suit the demands of publishers; rather, she was protected from the ever-increasing commercialism of the literary marketplace by her beloved agent, Diarmuid Russell, who understood his role to be that of “intermediary or buffer between the artist and the marketplace” (see Micheal Kreyling’s Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell).
Likewise, we can look back with nostalgia upon the life of an eccentric genius like William Faulkner, who drank too much, fell off horses, and depended upon his publishers at Random House to nurse him through love affairs and hangovers, to fill his pockets when needed, and to keep his books in print when nobody wanted to buy them. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House indulged Faulkner’s unruly habits and whims for years before their firm eventually profited from his novels because Faulkner was a genius, of course, and his publishers were willing to empty their own pockets to support him without any insurance whatsoever that he would become the profitable backlist author that he eventually became.
We cannot begin to count the number of hours that the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins spent pruning Thomas Wolfe’s prose to prepare books like Look Homeward, Angel for publication. And let’s not forget the hours the editor spent with his client over drinks, incorporating the young man into his life in such a way that the writer became nothing less than the son Perkins never had.
A new era in publishing has dawned, and what writers confront more than ever is the business of publishing, the business of authorship. The commercialism of the literary marketplace that Eudora Welty’s agent resisted has arrived with a vengeance, and there is no going back.
How many editors at major publishing houses today have the time or the leeway to take the kinds of risks that the editors and publishers of old considered to be part of their job description? Thankfully, there are numerous editors who do consider quality of writing as paramount and who will give first-time authors a try, but it is difficult to believe this as an aspiring writer.
The online universe is flooded with information about how to find and agent and how to get published. The prescriptions are daunting and apt to leave the most sensitive and self-effacing of writers (often the most talented) with terrible case of the jitters, as if aspiring writers really need anything more than their own over-charged imaginations to contribute to their feelings of failure, anxiety, and insecurity.
But just how is a person supposed to react when informed, oh so casually, that a writer, especially of a book of non-fiction (to get published by a commercial press) must either be a celebrity already or make oneself into one in a jiffy? An aspiring writer could go insane even contemplating the requirements necessary to get on the bandwagon of self-promotion.
How not to fall into a depression at the thought of having to merely sell one’s soul?
Recently, I read a book about how authors can build an online platform, only to discover that all the authors interviewed were using writing as means of growing their businesses. One of the authors interviewed put it succinctly. “In short,” he said, “I view books as an advertising media.” Gulp.
On another occasion, I sat at my computer dutifully listening to one agent’s prescriptions for writers who, to his mind, undoubtedly needed to become wise to the realities of the commercialized marketplace. One audience member had the temerity to bring the word art, or the desire to be an artist, into the discussion, at which point she was abruptly silenced and told that she should have no illusions. Thinking about oneself as an artist is quaint and sentimental, she was told, but really now. How might she expect to find an agent with those kinds of outdated notions milling around in her head?
I’m embarrassed to say now that after listening to that lecture I spent some time weeping in the bathtub. Honestly, though, it was demoralizing and a depressing sign of the times, and I did not miss the opportunity to indulge in a cathartic moment.
I realize now that there is a way to distance all of this, to treat it with a grain of salt. What helps me the most is my interest in literary history. We can learn from the artists who have preceded us. We can read their fiction and their rich correspondence, if it has been published, and we can read literary biographies.
We can remember that we do not have to be seduced or misled by all the information floating about somewhere “out there” in the online universe. Indeed, what are the consequences of succumbing to the hype, to the pressure to transform oneself into what we are not? It is worth contemplating.
People who are truly driven to write will do so quietly, in their own time and in their own way, because they are propelled by an inner determination and direction that has set them on a path that they must follow, for better or for worse. These are our artists, those people without whom our world would be impoverished.
These artists face enormous challenges, and contemplating their fate inspires me to invoke the wisdom of one of my favorite writers, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), who won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter in 1964, and who published a bestselling novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962, after thirty years of trying to write a full length novel.
There is something simultaneously inspiring and comforting about invoking the wisdom of a literary master who lived well before the age of platforms and brands. She is one of the writers who can help us to get back to the nuts and bolts of thinking about what it means to be a writer.
Throughout writing life, Porter proclaimed her pure, unadulterated dedication to art and literature, and her words put this business of reducing writers to creators of advertising media into perspective.
In a letter to her sister penned in 1949, Porter summed up her dedication to craft this way:
“I know well that if I were not a writer, if I did not have that profound solid ground of life-long love and interest to stand on, I would not take the trouble to live another day. But that gives meaning and hope to everything, it is quite literally WHY I have lived and what I live FOR.”
Art for Porter, quite simply, meant life.
Yet Porter, like most writers, had to struggle with financial strains and pressures, and she had to promote her writing when her publishers would not. She gave many public readings during her lifetime, and she brought a sense of flair and style to her public appearances that few today could hope to replicate. She presented herself to her audiences with hair beautifully coiffed, wearing robes long and swinging, and she read in her raspy, melodic, southern voice, seducing the audience with her charm. She promoted her work because she needed the money. But she knew well what most writers need, herself included, which is long unbroken hours of solitude and isolation, without distractions.
Porter thus cultivated a public persona, but this did not change her fundamental notion that, as an artist, she was a hardworking, humble craftsperson and not a self-promoting careerist.
In “My First Speech” (1934, see The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter), Porter explains: “Craftsmanship is a homely, workaday thing. It is a little like making shoes, or weaving cloth. A writer may be inspired occasionally: that’s his good luck; but he doesn’t learn to write by inspiration: he works at it. In that sense the writer is a worker, a workingman, a workingwoman. Writing is not an elegant pastime, it is a sober and hardworked trade, which gives great joy to the worker. The artist is first a worker. He must role up his sleeves and get to work like a bricklayer . . . [Writing] is not a career, it is a vocation; it is not a means to fame and glory—it is a discipline of living—and unless you think this, it is better not to take it up. It is not the sort of thing one “takes up” as one might take up knitting and put it down again.”
Writing is not the sort of thing one takes up, in short, as a road to fame and fortune, although of course, in the world of celebrity authors, one might begin to imagine that this is what it’s all about. Choose a genre that has some appeal—romance, chick lit, horror, how to make a million bucks and lose four hundred pounds in three weeks, you get the picture. Do the numbers on one’s potential audience and competition and start building that platform (meaning, begin the transformation of self into celebrity, if you have the misfortune of not being one already). Then, target an agent who will be interested in selling what you have to sell (I mean, write). Voila! You’re on your way.
Needless to say, this is all very discouraging for people who actually wish to write seriously.
Porter believed that a writer must be free, radically free, from worrying about what any outside party might have to say about her writing. The minute a writer begins to take the temperature of those in her midst in order to please, she has begun a journey down the road by which the artist in her will surely perish. In 1939, when asked if she thought of herself as writing for a definite audience, Porter said this:
“It is true that I place great value on certain kinds of perceptive criticism but neither praise nor blame affects my actual work, for I am under a compulsion to write as I do; when I am working I forget who approved and who dispraised and why. The worker in an art is dyed in his own color, it is useless to ask him to change his faults or his virtues; he must, rather more literally than most men, work out his own salvation. No novelist or poet could possibly ask himself, while working: “What will a certain critic think of this? Will this be acceptable to my publisher? Will this do for a certain magazine? Will my family and friends approve of this?” Imagine what that would lead to. . . . And how much worse, if he must be thinking, “What will my political cell block think of this? Am I hewing to the party line? Do I stand to lose my job, or head, on this? This is really the road by which the artist perishes.”
Writing, according to Porter, is thus a discipline, one that brings joy to the writer, as well as great discomfort, as painful, say, as “attempting to tap one’s spinal fluid.” An artist will take her own material and shape it into art: “No one else,” Porter advises, “can tell him what life is like to him, in what colors he sees the world . . . He cannot even worry about whether the publishers are going to accept his work or not; if he does, he is as good as done for: he may as well never have begun.”
Porter’s words, written or spoken not so very long ago, offer an implicit critique of today’s commercialized, technologically and profit-driven marketplace. Her wisdom is worth contemplating. It forces one to step back from reading all about what it takes to become a published author, and it commands one to investigate what kind of writer one aspires to become.
In April of 2010, I sat on a panel of biographers at the LA Times festival of books, and I listened to authors who had given over many years of their lives to writing the lives of their subjects. Through hard work and great perseverance, these authors had produced biographies that illuminated their subjects and that had the power to transform and educate their readers.
To write a full- length biography of a writer’s life requires years of work and sacrifice (from ten to twenty years is not unusual); it is a labor of love, one that brings the author a large measure of anguish, as well as pleasure, satisfaction and deep fulfillment. Biographers, unless they are very well known (or telling the lives of celebrities), are not motivated by fame or fortune, for that would be sheer folly.
In the same non-commercial vein, on the eve of World War II in 1940, Porter had this to say about the reprinting of her first, brilliant collection of short stories, Flowering Judas: “They were done with intention and in firm faith, though I had no plan for their future and no notion of what their meaning might be to such readers as they would find.” She had written the stories included in this slim book in between two world wars, during a period of “grotesque dislocations in a whole society when the world was heaving in the sickness of millennial change.” She celebrates their survival through “this crowded and slowly darkening decade.”
Everything in Porter’s being would have revolted at the idea of putting the individual artist in the same category as persons who view authorship as a vehicle for short-term gain, as an advertising media. I think we can all agree that the books that have changed our lives have nothing in common with the phenomenon of celebrities masquerading as writers. To my mind, aspiring writers with the bold intention of contributing something meaningful to the world, however humble the offering, should be true to themselves and block out the media noise.
Porter would have despaired if she could have seen how much of our written culture has been reduced to the level of quick entertainment and advertising. For Porter found stability and permanence in art, and her dedication to vocation was what gave her life meaning and made her life worth living:
“In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune,” she wrote in her introduction to Flowering Judas and Other Stories, “the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass; but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”
As early as the 1930s, Porter was already issuing warnings to her fellow writers about the pitfalls of writing to please others, about the dangers of selling one’s artistic soul in order to achieve the short-term goal of finding a publisher and gaining approval and recognition. Now more than ever we are barraged with prescriptions and advice on how to make our writing popular and salable.
But at what cost? Surely, this is “the road by which the artist perishes.”
By Alexandra Subramanian
The publishing industry is currently undergoing technologically- induced transformations that provide terrific challenges and opportunities both for writers and people within the industry. One can read about the evolution of these changes within the publishing world daily in articles and blogs, if one chooses to keep up with this sort of thing. I subscribe to the Shatzkin Files, a blog about publishing, as well as to Publishers Marketplace, which keeps its members up to date on every book that is sold to a publisher or any news happening in the publishing world, for that matter. I can’t say that it’s a cheery pastime, and I often choose not to read these updates, but my consciousness about what is happening in the world of publishing prompts me to contemplate some of the challenges for the solitary writer in all of this. What are the implications for the individual authors who are serious about their craft and wish to get published? Should there be some signposts for writers? Some “writer beware” signs erected in some key spots in online universe where thoughtful people roam?
It is difficult to imagine during these times a writer living quietly, unmolested by the outside world, as Eudora Welty did for years in her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Throughout her long career, Eudora Welty never once tailored her writing to suit the demands of publishers; rather, she was protected from the ever-increasing commercialism of the literary marketplace by her beloved agent, Diarmuid Russell, who understood his role to be that of “intermediary or buffer between the artist and the marketplace” (see Micheal Kreyling’s Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell).
Likewise, we can look back with nostalgia upon the life of an eccentric genius like William Faulkner, who drank too much, fell off horses, and depended upon his publishers at Random House to nurse him through love affairs and hangovers, to fill his pockets when needed, and to keep his books in print when nobody wanted to buy them. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House indulged Faulkner’s unruly habits and whims for years before their firm eventually profited from his novels because Faulkner was a genius, of course, and his publishers were willing to empty their own pockets to support him without any insurance whatsoever that he would become the profitable backlist author that he eventually became.
We cannot begin to count the number of hours that the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins spent pruning Thomas Wolfe’s prose to prepare books like Look Homeward, Angel for publication. And let’s not forget the hours the editor spent with his client over drinks, incorporating the young man into his life in such a way that the writer became nothing less than the son Perkins never had.
A new era in publishing has dawned, and what writers confront more than ever is the business of publishing, the business of authorship. The commercialism of the literary marketplace that Eudora Welty’s agent resisted has arrived with a vengeance, and there is no going back.
How many editors at major publishing houses today have the time or the leeway to take the kinds of risks that the editors and publishers of old considered to be part of their job description? Thankfully, there are numerous editors who do consider quality of writing as paramount and who will give first-time authors a try, but it is difficult to believe this as an aspiring writer.
The online universe is flooded with information about how to find and agent and how to get published. The prescriptions are daunting and apt to leave the most sensitive and self-effacing of writers (often the most talented) with terrible case of the jitters, as if aspiring writers really need anything more than their own over-charged imaginations to contribute to their feelings of failure, anxiety, and insecurity.
But just how is a person supposed to react when informed, oh so casually, that a writer, especially of a book of non-fiction (to get published by a commercial press) must either be a celebrity already or make oneself into one in a jiffy? An aspiring writer could go insane even contemplating the requirements necessary to get on the bandwagon of self-promotion.
How not to fall into a depression at the thought of having to merely sell one’s soul?
Recently, I read a book about how authors can build an online platform, only to discover that all the authors interviewed were using writing as means of growing their businesses. One of the authors interviewed put it succinctly. “In short,” he said, “I view books as an advertising media.” Gulp.
On another occasion, I sat at my computer dutifully listening to one agent’s prescriptions for writers who, to his mind, undoubtedly needed to become wise to the realities of the commercialized marketplace. One audience member had the temerity to bring the word art, or the desire to be an artist, into the discussion, at which point she was abruptly silenced and told that she should have no illusions. Thinking about oneself as an artist is quaint and sentimental, she was told, but really now. How might she expect to find an agent with those kinds of outdated notions milling around in her head?
I’m embarrassed to say now that after listening to that lecture I spent some time weeping in the bathtub. Honestly, though, it was demoralizing and a depressing sign of the times, and I did not miss the opportunity to indulge in a cathartic moment.
I realize now that there is a way to distance all of this, to treat it with a grain of salt. What helps me the most is my interest in literary history. We can learn from the artists who have preceded us. We can read their fiction and their rich correspondence, if it has been published, and we can read literary biographies.
We can remember that we do not have to be seduced or misled by all the information floating about somewhere “out there” in the online universe. Indeed, what are the consequences of succumbing to the hype, to the pressure to transform oneself into what we are not? It is worth contemplating.
People who are truly driven to write will do so quietly, in their own time and in their own way, because they are propelled by an inner determination and direction that has set them on a path that they must follow, for better or for worse. These are our artists, those people without whom our world would be impoverished.
These artists face enormous challenges, and contemplating their fate inspires me to invoke the wisdom of one of my favorite writers, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), who won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter in 1964, and who published a bestselling novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962, after thirty years of trying to write a full length novel.
There is something simultaneously inspiring and comforting about invoking the wisdom of a literary master who lived well before the age of platforms and brands. She is one of the writers who can help us to get back to the nuts and bolts of thinking about what it means to be a writer.
Throughout writing life, Porter proclaimed her pure, unadulterated dedication to art and literature, and her words put this business of reducing writers to creators of advertising media into perspective.
In a letter to her sister penned in 1949, Porter summed up her dedication to craft this way:
“I know well that if I were not a writer, if I did not have that profound solid ground of life-long love and interest to stand on, I would not take the trouble to live another day. But that gives meaning and hope to everything, it is quite literally WHY I have lived and what I live FOR.”
Art for Porter, quite simply, meant life.
Yet Porter, like most writers, had to struggle with financial strains and pressures, and she had to promote her writing when her publishers would not. She gave many public readings during her lifetime, and she brought a sense of flair and style to her public appearances that few today could hope to replicate. She presented herself to her audiences with hair beautifully coiffed, wearing robes long and swinging, and she read in her raspy, melodic, southern voice, seducing the audience with her charm. She promoted her work because she needed the money. But she knew well what most writers need, herself included, which is long unbroken hours of solitude and isolation, without distractions.
Porter thus cultivated a public persona, but this did not change her fundamental notion that, as an artist, she was a hardworking, humble craftsperson and not a self-promoting careerist.
In “My First Speech” (1934, see The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter), Porter explains: “Craftsmanship is a homely, workaday thing. It is a little like making shoes, or weaving cloth. A writer may be inspired occasionally: that’s his good luck; but he doesn’t learn to write by inspiration: he works at it. In that sense the writer is a worker, a workingman, a workingwoman. Writing is not an elegant pastime, it is a sober and hardworked trade, which gives great joy to the worker. The artist is first a worker. He must role up his sleeves and get to work like a bricklayer . . . [Writing] is not a career, it is a vocation; it is not a means to fame and glory—it is a discipline of living—and unless you think this, it is better not to take it up. It is not the sort of thing one “takes up” as one might take up knitting and put it down again.”
Writing is not the sort of thing one takes up, in short, as a road to fame and fortune, although of course, in the world of celebrity authors, one might begin to imagine that this is what it’s all about. Choose a genre that has some appeal—romance, chick lit, horror, how to make a million bucks and lose four hundred pounds in three weeks, you get the picture. Do the numbers on one’s potential audience and competition and start building that platform (meaning, begin the transformation of self into celebrity, if you have the misfortune of not being one already). Then, target an agent who will be interested in selling what you have to sell (I mean, write). Voila! You’re on your way.
Needless to say, this is all very discouraging for people who actually wish to write seriously.
Porter believed that a writer must be free, radically free, from worrying about what any outside party might have to say about her writing. The minute a writer begins to take the temperature of those in her midst in order to please, she has begun a journey down the road by which the artist in her will surely perish. In 1939, when asked if she thought of herself as writing for a definite audience, Porter said this:
“It is true that I place great value on certain kinds of perceptive criticism but neither praise nor blame affects my actual work, for I am under a compulsion to write as I do; when I am working I forget who approved and who dispraised and why. The worker in an art is dyed in his own color, it is useless to ask him to change his faults or his virtues; he must, rather more literally than most men, work out his own salvation. No novelist or poet could possibly ask himself, while working: “What will a certain critic think of this? Will this be acceptable to my publisher? Will this do for a certain magazine? Will my family and friends approve of this?” Imagine what that would lead to. . . . And how much worse, if he must be thinking, “What will my political cell block think of this? Am I hewing to the party line? Do I stand to lose my job, or head, on this? This is really the road by which the artist perishes.”
Writing, according to Porter, is thus a discipline, one that brings joy to the writer, as well as great discomfort, as painful, say, as “attempting to tap one’s spinal fluid.” An artist will take her own material and shape it into art: “No one else,” Porter advises, “can tell him what life is like to him, in what colors he sees the world . . . He cannot even worry about whether the publishers are going to accept his work or not; if he does, he is as good as done for: he may as well never have begun.”
Porter’s words, written or spoken not so very long ago, offer an implicit critique of today’s commercialized, technologically and profit-driven marketplace. Her wisdom is worth contemplating. It forces one to step back from reading all about what it takes to become a published author, and it commands one to investigate what kind of writer one aspires to become.
In April of 2010, I sat on a panel of biographers at the LA Times festival of books, and I listened to authors who had given over many years of their lives to writing the lives of their subjects. Through hard work and great perseverance, these authors had produced biographies that illuminated their subjects and that had the power to transform and educate their readers.
To write a full- length biography of a writer’s life requires years of work and sacrifice (from ten to twenty years is not unusual); it is a labor of love, one that brings the author a large measure of anguish, as well as pleasure, satisfaction and deep fulfillment. Biographers, unless they are very well known (or telling the lives of celebrities), are not motivated by fame or fortune, for that would be sheer folly.
In the same non-commercial vein, on the eve of World War II in 1940, Porter had this to say about the reprinting of her first, brilliant collection of short stories, Flowering Judas: “They were done with intention and in firm faith, though I had no plan for their future and no notion of what their meaning might be to such readers as they would find.” She had written the stories included in this slim book in between two world wars, during a period of “grotesque dislocations in a whole society when the world was heaving in the sickness of millennial change.” She celebrates their survival through “this crowded and slowly darkening decade.”
Everything in Porter’s being would have revolted at the idea of putting the individual artist in the same category as persons who view authorship as a vehicle for short-term gain, as an advertising media. I think we can all agree that the books that have changed our lives have nothing in common with the phenomenon of celebrities masquerading as writers. To my mind, aspiring writers with the bold intention of contributing something meaningful to the world, however humble the offering, should be true to themselves and block out the media noise.
Porter would have despaired if she could have seen how much of our written culture has been reduced to the level of quick entertainment and advertising. For Porter found stability and permanence in art, and her dedication to vocation was what gave her life meaning and made her life worth living:
“In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune,” she wrote in her introduction to Flowering Judas and Other Stories, “the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass; but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”
As early as the 1930s, Porter was already issuing warnings to her fellow writers about the pitfalls of writing to please others, about the dangers of selling one’s artistic soul in order to achieve the short-term goal of finding a publisher and gaining approval and recognition. Now more than ever we are barraged with prescriptions and advice on how to make our writing popular and salable.
But at what cost? Surely, this is “the road by which the artist perishes.”
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Public Narrative from the Pulpit, Grace Cathedral. September 19, 2010
Public Narrative Message for 8:30 service, Grace Cathedral (Episcopal), San Francisco, September 19, 2010 – unexpurgated version
Themis Michos
Why you should make an annual pledge to Grace Cathedral:
1932: I was baptized as an infant in the Greek Orthodox Church at age three months. The place was Marion, Indiana, in the large meeting room of the Victorian, red-brick building of the Odd Fellows Lodge on Third Street . The priest had to travel 100 miles south from South Bend for the ceremony because we had no Orthodox church in our small town. The font was a washtub, which undoubtedly my mother had decorated with her elaborate crochet work, and I was immersed up to my eyeballs together with my infant friend, Jimmy Thrapsimis. I believe I was told that Jimmy and I were naked, bobbing in the washtub together. I know you will cherish this image forever.
Jimmy and I were different from the start. Our mothers were Greek immigrants from Eastern Thrace, part of the Ottoman Empire. Our mothers had been born into a Christian minority in a Moslem land. Believe me, when you are in the minority as a Christian, you don’t take your religion lightly. Your religion defines you.
1935: My mother made sure that I could recite the Nicene Creed in the original Greek at the age of three. She bragged about that for years as one of her proudest achievements. (No, it wasn't child abuse.) I was a hard-wired Christian from the start, with no possibility of drift or escape.
1941: All the local Greek kids in town were installed in the local Episcopal church. I enjoyed immensely dedicated priests and Sunday school teachers, and I still have a crucifix at home given to me as a prize for not missing Sunday school for four consecutive years. When I was twelve years old I was scheduling the acolytes for all of the parish services.
1950: Like many people church fell off sharply between the ages of 18 and 40. It was called the Ivy League, the Army, Europe and practicing law, none of which proved to be conducive to the religious life.
1978: In the midst of my first mid-life crises, I decided that my mother had been right about everything. I came back full time to the Episcopal church at the parish of Christ Church, Portola Valley. That led to what was expected of me – Vestry, Stewardship chairman, acolyting, Bible study. It was hard but rewarding work and fabulous.
1998: We moved to the City, to loft living south of South of Market. My wife and I retired from an active parish life. I told myself that we had earned passive observance. We came to the 7:30 service at Grace for over ten years - anonymously and aloofly - basking in the glorous 17th century English of the Prayer Book and walking briskly out of the Cathedral as soon as the service was over. If you stuck around you might have to talk with someone you didn’t know. We had fallen into one of the traps of the urban church - the illusion that one can lead a full Christian life and be anonymous. I reduced my annual pledge, satisfying myself that it was up to the younger people to carry the financial load. Little by little, however, we realized that that wasn’t working.
2009: A call to this senior Samuel to join the Trustees of Grace. I was in turmoil. Why come out of retirement? It was time. We were running but not hiding. I became a Congregational Trustee of the Cathedral. The unexpected awakening spurred us to increase our stewardship pledge.
2010: As a congregation we have no choice but to support this Cathedral as much and as hard as we can. I am here to testify that St. Paul was right. Our faith is a marathon, and we all have to run as hard and long as we can. There is no retirement for a Christian. If you've been a passive observer, I invite you, too, to come out of retirement and make a pledge or do your best to increase your pledge. Continuing the great work of this Cathedral depends on you, and it’s never too late to come back. Please join me in making the strongest financial commitment to Grace Cathedral that you can make.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Berlin as of July 3, 2010: Art show and a club scene
Report from Berlin, July 3, 2010:
We arrived in Berlin on the evening of June 29 and were immediately immersed in an uncharacteristic heat wave. Everyone on the street has been is various stages of incomplete dress, except the young businessmen-looking types, all of whom are always disgustingly tall and thin and have either been sporting ties or sharply creased open collar shirts. The street tempo is Berlin is always a bit slower, say, than London or New York, but it has been a bit more syrupy this week. Languor becomes most people at least some of the time, and the Berliners this week have been no exception.
Thursday evening saw a major opening of a show designed and curated by John Bock, an artist whom we have known and collected since 1998. The show is called “FischGrätenMelkStand” (herringbone milking parlor), not an unusual name given John’s exotic, odd-ball practice. John is originally a rural fellow from the environs of Hamburg, where the English form of names are used. It’s pronounced “Yohn,” with a long “o.” John designed and built a rickety-looking three story structure made entirely from scaffolding, with open exterior walls and partially open interior walls, some made of strung together used tires, long bandoliers of tied-together stuffed sweat-socks, odd, splintering planks of various dimensions and everything else other than duct tape. One room had two walls of rows of 12 inch burned pizzas, which were special ordered at reduced prices by the producer of the show, the lovely Agnes, who is the significant other of Franz Ackermann, a great Berlin-based artist and a good friend of fifteen or so years. Once inside the structure, in many cases you go from room to room and up stairs on narrow, perforated steel tracks in the sky with the distinct feeling of crossing a gorge on a rope bridge. Nothing collapsed the first night, and nobody slipped and fell on the obstacle-course floors.
This Swiss-cheese structure is entirely enclosed within the Temporary Kunsthalle building. According to a review in Artdaily.org, John “has developed a masterful meta-structure within which he installs works by 63 artists, architects, and composers. Besides installations, films, models, and sculptures, there are also historical film props, music scores, books, and fan items.” The included artists are mostly unknown or barely emerging. The best piece in the show, however, upon our very preliminary viewing is by Matt Mullican, an artist we have known and collected since 1986.
The Temporary Kunsthalle (of art exhibition space, non-collecting) was initially funded and sustained for two years by a redoubtable, older figure of the Berlin art world, Mr. Dieter Rosekrans. Rosekrans is best known for having donated a large, red, neon sign that hangs in the front of the classical columns of the Altes Museum on Museum Island in the middle of Berlin, the venue for Berlin’s vast collection of ancient artworks, and which proclaims “All art has been contemporary.” In typical philanthropic manner Rosekrans funded the building of the temporary structure and paid for operations for two years. That magnificent gift made possible several outstanding exhibitions, but he had stipulated that someone else would have to take over after two years. Alas, the City is now broke, and no more philanthropy has been found, so this superlative cultural effort is closing down. At the outdoor party outside the building in the very warm dusk, the young art crowd was drinking, chatting, listening to the obligatory speeches thanking sponsors and staff and generally chilling. We chatted amiably with 25 or so locals. No one seemed concerned that in this new era of a straitened economic situation we would see more and more cultural institutions closing down, as government aid ends and no tradition of philanthropy or private funding is there to replace the greatest sugar-daddy of all, The State.
Last evening we were privileged to be invited to a small dinner honoring John Bock given by his Berlin dealer, Martin Klosterfelde. Old friend Matt Mullican and his wife Valerie attended, and that was the occasion for a lot of reminiscing about the obviously superior old days in the New York art world when Matt’s studio was at Grand and Mulberry in downtown Manhattan. (Matt and Valerie were introduced to each other by none other than Jeff Koons, long ago.) After a good dinner in the seventh floor restaurant of something called The Soho Club, near Alexanderplatz (avocado salad, swordfish and a yummy banana éclair) , we walked upstairs to the eighth floor, which features an outdoor bar and the open-to-the sky swimming pool of this ostensibly private club. There we were confronted with forty or so young ladies, crowded together mostly in very short skirts with very high heels , very bleached hair and very high energy, all arrayed around a couple of bars or tactically splayed on divans, with a slightly lesser number of unshaven young men hanging about. All in all, we guessed, the typical club scene these days. Wimbledon was playing on two or three monitors, and, typical of the prevailing world situation, both players had Slavic names. We had a couple of drinks, and then started to fade as the witching hour approached.
The denouement came as we were riding down on the elevator and noticed by the numbers for each floor that the sixth floor was the situs of “Bedrooms” one through five, the fifth floor was the situs of “Bedrooms” six through ten, and on down the various floors. We began to wonder just what kind of club this is. In the lobby we skirted around something that looked like a check-in counter and noted that a young man we know from the art world was standing there, chatting with a clerk, a woman at his side we knew was not his wife, who we think is pregnant. We avoided eye contact.
We then started asking: (1) What’s this world coming to? and (2) have we been hanging around in Berlin too long? and (3) is it time to leave all of this to younger people who can handle it better?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Mark Dion's "The Library for the Birds of New York"
The following entry pertains to an artwork owned by Mr and Mrs Ptolemy and recently sold to a buyer in Germany. The sale was necessary, as it was time, but wrenching nonetheless:
Mark Dion’s “The Library for the Birds of New York”
We purchased the “tree” at American Fine Arts, the historic gallery owned and operated by the legendary Colin DeLand, in February, 1996. “Everyone” in the New York art world came to see the tree. On the day we bought it, Roberta Smith, the critic, Dennis Adams the conceptual sculptor and Mrs. Brice Marden, a painter, had come to the gallery to see the work.
At the time, Dion’s work was not widely known, especially in the United States. Dion’s work at that time was said to be made with a purpose not known in the art world. Dion had the goal of explaining the environment, science and the history of science to the general public, and he believed that much of such knowledge was better and more understandably transmitted by a knowledgeable artist in the form of artworks than by scientific discourse transmitted by technical people. The work is in this sense educational, even didactic.
Dion’s primary artistic innovation was to apply organizational techniques of science to the creation of artworks. The simple thesis is that all art is the organization by an artist according to aesthetic criteria to raw data and materials found in the world. In a painting, the artist takes ordinary materials like paint and canvas and arranges them on the surface of the canvas. Dion would walk through the fish markets of Chinatown in lower Manhattan, buy the fish, sort them by species, put them in jars and display them in a configuration that would be like that of a marine biologist had the latter arranged the jars. The rigorous method of organization would almost always result in a superior work of art.
In the case of the “Library,” Dion undertook to organize the collective knowledge, opinions, sentiments and mythology of the Western civilizations concerning birds. In short the work is an artist’s replication of what Michel Foucault might have called the episteme of the Western World about birds. Most of this is embodied in the books about birds, all meticulously chosen to mark the development and present state of the episteme. The work is organized according to categories, for example, the philosophy of nature shelf (on a separate limb of the three) at the top, because our culture privileges philosophy, which includes Foucault’s seminal work, “The Order of Things,” and other shelves devoted to history, mythology and ornithology. Other shelves are devoted to Rachel Carson, the first popular environmentalist, while others include works by authors such as Paul Ehrlich, an early alarmist about the growth of world population.
The work includes the physical accouterments of the bird culture, such as the bird cages, the English naturalist’s collection bag, for which Mark searched London shops for three years until he could find the “right” one, the shotgun shells, pictures depicting Audubon (who had a terrible reputation as a destroyer of many birds in the course of collecting specimens) and Alfred Hitchcock of the popular culture. The tree displays a snake and rat that have been tarred and feathered, an old punishment from the American frontier that preceded banishment. The snake and the rat are being punished for their destruction of birds, but the irony is that while human beings rarely harm birds directly we are responsible for moving rats and snakes into positions where they can harm birds – an aspect of unintended consequences. For example, there were no rats in the Western Hemisphere until they were brought over by European ships. The net bag of vegetable are there to remind us that there is nothing more environmentally destructive than vegetarianism because of the chemicals required to grow vegetables.
The tree itself is a cedar. It was felled and dragged out of a forest in northeast Pennsylvania near the farm where Mark lived at the time. The trunk was split vertically, and the entire tree was then soaked in fiberglass to strengthen it and to kill the remaining bugs. The books were collected over a five-year period.
As in the ending of “The Order of Things,” where Foucault looks forward to the death of “man,” Dion’s tree follows the Heideggerian principle that man’s Cartesian reckoning of himself as an “I” separate from nature outside is not only wrong but ultimately responsible for an unjustifiable exploitation, and often destruction, of nature. The bird episteme depicted in the tree is predicted by Dion ultimately to collapse and fail when man becomes sufficiently enlightened to see himself as one with nature and not separate. Just as the tree once lived but is now dead, so is the culture depicted on the tree destined to collapse. This is shown by the pile of secondary and simple books about nature and birds, all culled from college and high school libraries, scattered meaninglessly at the bottom of the tree.
In any event, the owner of this grand work must be prepared to allow birds flying overhead to alight on the tree, to rest and to read about what people think about them. The owner’s relishing of this irony is the prime benefit from owning it.
Mark Dion’s “The Library for the Birds of New York”
We purchased the “tree” at American Fine Arts, the historic gallery owned and operated by the legendary Colin DeLand, in February, 1996. “Everyone” in the New York art world came to see the tree. On the day we bought it, Roberta Smith, the critic, Dennis Adams the conceptual sculptor and Mrs. Brice Marden, a painter, had come to the gallery to see the work.
At the time, Dion’s work was not widely known, especially in the United States. Dion’s work at that time was said to be made with a purpose not known in the art world. Dion had the goal of explaining the environment, science and the history of science to the general public, and he believed that much of such knowledge was better and more understandably transmitted by a knowledgeable artist in the form of artworks than by scientific discourse transmitted by technical people. The work is in this sense educational, even didactic.
Dion’s primary artistic innovation was to apply organizational techniques of science to the creation of artworks. The simple thesis is that all art is the organization by an artist according to aesthetic criteria to raw data and materials found in the world. In a painting, the artist takes ordinary materials like paint and canvas and arranges them on the surface of the canvas. Dion would walk through the fish markets of Chinatown in lower Manhattan, buy the fish, sort them by species, put them in jars and display them in a configuration that would be like that of a marine biologist had the latter arranged the jars. The rigorous method of organization would almost always result in a superior work of art.
In the case of the “Library,” Dion undertook to organize the collective knowledge, opinions, sentiments and mythology of the Western civilizations concerning birds. In short the work is an artist’s replication of what Michel Foucault might have called the episteme of the Western World about birds. Most of this is embodied in the books about birds, all meticulously chosen to mark the development and present state of the episteme. The work is organized according to categories, for example, the philosophy of nature shelf (on a separate limb of the three) at the top, because our culture privileges philosophy, which includes Foucault’s seminal work, “The Order of Things,” and other shelves devoted to history, mythology and ornithology. Other shelves are devoted to Rachel Carson, the first popular environmentalist, while others include works by authors such as Paul Ehrlich, an early alarmist about the growth of world population.
The work includes the physical accouterments of the bird culture, such as the bird cages, the English naturalist’s collection bag, for which Mark searched London shops for three years until he could find the “right” one, the shotgun shells, pictures depicting Audubon (who had a terrible reputation as a destroyer of many birds in the course of collecting specimens) and Alfred Hitchcock of the popular culture. The tree displays a snake and rat that have been tarred and feathered, an old punishment from the American frontier that preceded banishment. The snake and the rat are being punished for their destruction of birds, but the irony is that while human beings rarely harm birds directly we are responsible for moving rats and snakes into positions where they can harm birds – an aspect of unintended consequences. For example, there were no rats in the Western Hemisphere until they were brought over by European ships. The net bag of vegetable are there to remind us that there is nothing more environmentally destructive than vegetarianism because of the chemicals required to grow vegetables.
The tree itself is a cedar. It was felled and dragged out of a forest in northeast Pennsylvania near the farm where Mark lived at the time. The trunk was split vertically, and the entire tree was then soaked in fiberglass to strengthen it and to kill the remaining bugs. The books were collected over a five-year period.
As in the ending of “The Order of Things,” where Foucault looks forward to the death of “man,” Dion’s tree follows the Heideggerian principle that man’s Cartesian reckoning of himself as an “I” separate from nature outside is not only wrong but ultimately responsible for an unjustifiable exploitation, and often destruction, of nature. The bird episteme depicted in the tree is predicted by Dion ultimately to collapse and fail when man becomes sufficiently enlightened to see himself as one with nature and not separate. Just as the tree once lived but is now dead, so is the culture depicted on the tree destined to collapse. This is shown by the pile of secondary and simple books about nature and birds, all culled from college and high school libraries, scattered meaninglessly at the bottom of the tree.
In any event, the owner of this grand work must be prepared to allow birds flying overhead to alight on the tree, to rest and to read about what people think about them. The owner’s relishing of this irony is the prime benefit from owning it.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Einstein's Fate
Talk by Ptolemy to be delivered 11 a.m. Saturday, June 26, 2010, at the Hour of Music and Reflection at the Family Farm at Woodside, California:
EINSTEIN'S FATE
FIRST SEGMENT:
INTRODUCTION:
My topic this morning concerns the issue of free will – does mankind have it or not? Are we free men or not? “Let freedom ring?” Maybe? Maybe not. The issue of free will has been debated for uncountable centuries. So where are we today?
Free will is about freedom. It is about personal responsibility. What is freedom, anyway, and why does it matter? How is man impacted by fate? Are his actions predetermined? How does fate, if there is such a thing, affect our individual decision-making? And, what does this mean to us?
DECISIONS:
It has always been important to man that he be able to make decisions rather than have decisions happen to him. We all want to be in control. Having said that, we hardly ever bother to ask these questions. The work-a-day decisions of every day life dominate our lives – What to have for dinner? Should I buy an iPad? Should my wife and I have another child? Common sense tells us that we have the power to make these decisions that will affect the future, and we will either enjoy or suffer the consequences.
There is a nagging issue in all of this, however. We think of ourselves as rational, educated people. We want our thinking to conform to the world in general, and science in particular. And science has been telling us, from the time of the ancient Greeks, through Isaac Newton all the way to quantum physics, that the physical phenomena of the world, and that includes us as physical beings, are subject to causation. If so, then every physical event that happens today is the inevitable result of everything that has happened in the past. And if that is true, then the decisions we think we are making today are illusory. We are automatons.
Let’s go back in time together. Imagine that you are Albert Einstein. The year is 1939. You are famous and pre-eminent in your field. You read the papers. You are aware that militaristic regimes are rising in Europe and Asia. You know what they are doing to people and you are dismayed and frightened. Most of your fellow physicists are imploring you to throw your weight behind the development of a horrific new weapon that will insure defeat of those who will surely be our enemies. President Roosevelt has been on the fence regarding that project. You know that your influence will likely make the difference. But others of your colleagues are afraid and horrified about what science might develop. You are a moral man. As a scientist you are distraught and frightened what might result if atomic fission succeeds. You know that the weapon can cause millions of deaths.
We know that Einstein agonized over his decision for weeks and months and that finally, on August 2, 1939, Einstein wrote the President a fateful letter.
The letter was terse. He said in essence that we are on the verge of being able to convert uranium into a weapon. Mr. President, please support this project. The fate of mankind hangs on it.
Einstein’s decision to send this letter was made with fear and trembling.
Without Einstein’s endorsement, it is believed that Roosevelt would not have ordered the Manhattan Project which led ultimately to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In later years, Einstein described his decision to send the letter as the worst decision he ever made in his life. Was his decision predetermined by the weight of events, or was it his free will deciding? Did Einstein’s letter cause Roosevelt to exercise his free will to pursue the atomic bomb? Free Will or causation? Could either man have acted otherwise than to make these decisions? Is it possible that these decisions were predetermined?
WHY DO WE CARE? WHAT IS AT STAKE?
Everything we consider to be important - in the moral and ethical sphere, the social and legal sphere and in the arts and civilization itself -revolves around the issue of freedom.
Everything we call ethics and morality, and especially our criminal laws, are founded on our belief that an individual has the power to make a decision and to be responsible for the consequences of that decision. Freedom and personal responsibility are the keystones of our laws. If I rob a bank and it turns out that the genes I was born with caused my brain to secrete a “go rob something” hormone, did I commit an immoral and unethical act? Should my robbery be a crime? If I hear voices that tell me to kill someone, did I know right from wrong when I succumbed to those voices? Is that the right test? Who is the “I” that decided, if I decided. How should I be punished?
Finally, creativity – the heart and soul of our Family - creativity of all kinds is at stake. If all were determined in advance, might then art, music, literature, history, everything we call civilization, remain static. Would we have Stravinsky and atonal music, or would we be destined to repeat Mozart and Haydn forever and ever?
I wonder how men of the past would have answered these questions?
SECOND SEGMENT:
OUR ANCESTORS – WHAT DID THEY THINK?
Let us now go back some 3000 years and join up with another fellow who was a pretty smart guy, namely Odysseus of Ithaka, the Homeric hero.
A bit of a review:
When Helen of Troy was abducted to Troy, King Agamemnon summoned the Greeks to attack Troy to avenge the honor of the Greeks and get Helen back. They soon found, however, that the Olympic gods – Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite and a host of others – had their own rivalries and would not hesitate to interfere in the affairs of the human actors.
The entire epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be read as enormously complex demonstrations of human intentionality and how decisions are made and succeed or fail. That the gods could influence, ever supersede, the will of individuals was simply accepted.
All you have to know about the Greek gods is that they are just like people, with all of the desires, sensibilities and good and bad traits – mostly bad – that afflict humankind. They can come in and out of human guise, and they can affect and literally move human beings. But they are immortal.
So we have Odysseus fighting in Troy for nine years and ultimately crafting the victory of the Greeks through his infamous Trojan horse strategy. He then “decides” to return to his home and his wife, Penelope, on the island of Ithaka.
Arriving in Ithaka, Odysseus finds his house occupied by dozens of greedy suitors, who are dining and drinking every night on his fare. Odysseus vows to kill them all. He soon discovers that the goddess Athena will assist him, just as she did during the siege of Troy.
At the beginning of the battle with the suitors, the odds turn against Odysseus’ greatly outnumbered small band. Odysseus loses heart. Athena, in the form of a friend of Odysseus, Mentor, a disguise that Odysseus has seen through the but suitors have not, sees Odysseus buckling under the taunts of the suitors and blisters him with this speech:
“Where’s it gone, Odysseus – your power, your fighting heart?
That great soldier who fought for the famous white-armed Helen,
battling Trojans nine long years – nonstop, no mercy,
mowing their armies down in grueling battle –
you who seized the broad streets of Troy
with your fine strategic stroke! How can you -
now you’ve returned to your own house, your own wealth –
bewail the loss of your combat strength in a war with suitors?”
A curious example of free will not thwarted but strengthened. Shamed into action, Odysseus rallies and counterattacks. As the suitors throw six javelins to kill Odysseus, all of them right on the mark, Athena deflects all of them, and the javelins fall harmlessly. So much for the free will of the dastardly suitors.
FREE WILL FROM THE THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Theology tells us Man is created perfect at the outset, but retains the ability either to “persevere” in obedience to God, or to choose to distance himself from God through disobedience. John Milton, in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” determined that God demands praise from human beings, but the praise is meaningless unless freely given, so man must have free will to give genuine praise.
This theology, then, is replete with reference it man’s free will. We see this, for example, in Saint Augustine’s "Confessions." On the eve of his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine addresses God as follows:
“And all that you asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours.”
The upshot, of course, is that if God asked Augustine to suppress his own will, he must have had one. The phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done”, means, please over-ride my will.
Of course, when things don’t go well, we follow the ancient Greeks in praying to God to intervene, to set things straight. I make the wrong decision with my free will and hope for mercy to be saved from my own folly. Free will with a “mulligan”.
THIRD SEGMENT:
SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM – OR NOT
So what does science tell us about free will?
In oversimplified terms, we can say that the passage through time of any object, including a human being, is described in classical physics as a “trajectory.” You’re born, you grow, you thrive, you die. Your whole life, let alone what you do today, is describable as a trajectory. Einstein and Roosevelt were on individual trajectories until those fateful days in 1939, when their trajectories collided – I think most of us would say purposely, freely and meaningfully, and the course of world history was changed forever.
Please accept for a moment the good news that in the minds of many scientists, this view of a world plodding along, with events causing new events ad infinitum, all as if written in a script, is changing. Newer sciences, such as “non-equilibrium physics” and chaos theory, have established the existence of phenomena that are irreversible processes. In other words these events have a beginning and an end. That is time in its essence as we experience it in our common sense world. OK so far, but dominating causation is still possible. In addition, however, we are told that in unstable systems, for example, gases heated to a high temperature or what goes on inside a star that is decaying, so-called “singular moments’ can occur. When this happens, change happens and the relentless chain of causation is broken, but it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take. But be of good cheer, for the physical world is renewing and randomly re-creating itself as it goes along. Are we getting warm?
I have, however, come to the conclusion, that the scientists who are telling us that the world is making things up as it goes along are mostly throwing curve balls at us. What some scientists call free or random phenomena can’t necessarily be translated to the possibility of personal freedom in our terms.
It turns out that when a scientist looks inside a large container of hot gas or inside a star, individual trajectories of particles or molecules are not visible. The overall behavior of the container of gas or the star, or the behavior of an electron inside an atom, must be described in terms of probabilities. Now, probability is a mode of thinking about “populations” and not individuals. The “trajectory” of a particular molecule or individual might still be free or might still be “predetermined” even if the general population appears to be acting freely. So do probability theories get us any nearer to an answer to the free will problem? I think not.
CONCLUSION
It appears to me that we are left with just a binary choice on how to view the problem of our freedom. If we decide we have free will and say the heck with science, that puts us with most normal people who don’t go looking for trouble, and I believe society works better. If we decide that the world is pre-determined, then, even if it isn’t, we must remember that acting as though it is can stifle thought and action and leave us paralyzed. Imagine Roosevelt not making any decision in 1939, which in itself of course would have been a momentous decision.
My personal preference is to go with the traditional view from our religious heritage – that God made us beings with inherent powers of determining our own destinies – and then hope like heck that we either do right or we get forgiven if we don’t.
That may not be your preference. You can pursue another course. You can decide that the matter hasn’t really advanced much since the Greeks sat around with their wine goblets listening to bards recite the Iliad and the Odyssey. You could ally yourself with Odysseus and try your best, hoping that the gods are on your side. Or, instead, you could just go with the flow. And free will or not, we can hope like heck that our choices resolve favorably, and that we, like Odysseus, will get home safely.
EINSTEIN'S FATE
FIRST SEGMENT:
INTRODUCTION:
My topic this morning concerns the issue of free will – does mankind have it or not? Are we free men or not? “Let freedom ring?” Maybe? Maybe not. The issue of free will has been debated for uncountable centuries. So where are we today?
Free will is about freedom. It is about personal responsibility. What is freedom, anyway, and why does it matter? How is man impacted by fate? Are his actions predetermined? How does fate, if there is such a thing, affect our individual decision-making? And, what does this mean to us?
DECISIONS:
It has always been important to man that he be able to make decisions rather than have decisions happen to him. We all want to be in control. Having said that, we hardly ever bother to ask these questions. The work-a-day decisions of every day life dominate our lives – What to have for dinner? Should I buy an iPad? Should my wife and I have another child? Common sense tells us that we have the power to make these decisions that will affect the future, and we will either enjoy or suffer the consequences.
There is a nagging issue in all of this, however. We think of ourselves as rational, educated people. We want our thinking to conform to the world in general, and science in particular. And science has been telling us, from the time of the ancient Greeks, through Isaac Newton all the way to quantum physics, that the physical phenomena of the world, and that includes us as physical beings, are subject to causation. If so, then every physical event that happens today is the inevitable result of everything that has happened in the past. And if that is true, then the decisions we think we are making today are illusory. We are automatons.
Let’s go back in time together. Imagine that you are Albert Einstein. The year is 1939. You are famous and pre-eminent in your field. You read the papers. You are aware that militaristic regimes are rising in Europe and Asia. You know what they are doing to people and you are dismayed and frightened. Most of your fellow physicists are imploring you to throw your weight behind the development of a horrific new weapon that will insure defeat of those who will surely be our enemies. President Roosevelt has been on the fence regarding that project. You know that your influence will likely make the difference. But others of your colleagues are afraid and horrified about what science might develop. You are a moral man. As a scientist you are distraught and frightened what might result if atomic fission succeeds. You know that the weapon can cause millions of deaths.
We know that Einstein agonized over his decision for weeks and months and that finally, on August 2, 1939, Einstein wrote the President a fateful letter.
The letter was terse. He said in essence that we are on the verge of being able to convert uranium into a weapon. Mr. President, please support this project. The fate of mankind hangs on it.
Einstein’s decision to send this letter was made with fear and trembling.
Without Einstein’s endorsement, it is believed that Roosevelt would not have ordered the Manhattan Project which led ultimately to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In later years, Einstein described his decision to send the letter as the worst decision he ever made in his life. Was his decision predetermined by the weight of events, or was it his free will deciding? Did Einstein’s letter cause Roosevelt to exercise his free will to pursue the atomic bomb? Free Will or causation? Could either man have acted otherwise than to make these decisions? Is it possible that these decisions were predetermined?
WHY DO WE CARE? WHAT IS AT STAKE?
Everything we consider to be important - in the moral and ethical sphere, the social and legal sphere and in the arts and civilization itself -revolves around the issue of freedom.
Everything we call ethics and morality, and especially our criminal laws, are founded on our belief that an individual has the power to make a decision and to be responsible for the consequences of that decision. Freedom and personal responsibility are the keystones of our laws. If I rob a bank and it turns out that the genes I was born with caused my brain to secrete a “go rob something” hormone, did I commit an immoral and unethical act? Should my robbery be a crime? If I hear voices that tell me to kill someone, did I know right from wrong when I succumbed to those voices? Is that the right test? Who is the “I” that decided, if I decided. How should I be punished?
Finally, creativity – the heart and soul of our Family - creativity of all kinds is at stake. If all were determined in advance, might then art, music, literature, history, everything we call civilization, remain static. Would we have Stravinsky and atonal music, or would we be destined to repeat Mozart and Haydn forever and ever?
I wonder how men of the past would have answered these questions?
SECOND SEGMENT:
OUR ANCESTORS – WHAT DID THEY THINK?
Let us now go back some 3000 years and join up with another fellow who was a pretty smart guy, namely Odysseus of Ithaka, the Homeric hero.
A bit of a review:
When Helen of Troy was abducted to Troy, King Agamemnon summoned the Greeks to attack Troy to avenge the honor of the Greeks and get Helen back. They soon found, however, that the Olympic gods – Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite and a host of others – had their own rivalries and would not hesitate to interfere in the affairs of the human actors.
The entire epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be read as enormously complex demonstrations of human intentionality and how decisions are made and succeed or fail. That the gods could influence, ever supersede, the will of individuals was simply accepted.
All you have to know about the Greek gods is that they are just like people, with all of the desires, sensibilities and good and bad traits – mostly bad – that afflict humankind. They can come in and out of human guise, and they can affect and literally move human beings. But they are immortal.
So we have Odysseus fighting in Troy for nine years and ultimately crafting the victory of the Greeks through his infamous Trojan horse strategy. He then “decides” to return to his home and his wife, Penelope, on the island of Ithaka.
Arriving in Ithaka, Odysseus finds his house occupied by dozens of greedy suitors, who are dining and drinking every night on his fare. Odysseus vows to kill them all. He soon discovers that the goddess Athena will assist him, just as she did during the siege of Troy.
At the beginning of the battle with the suitors, the odds turn against Odysseus’ greatly outnumbered small band. Odysseus loses heart. Athena, in the form of a friend of Odysseus, Mentor, a disguise that Odysseus has seen through the but suitors have not, sees Odysseus buckling under the taunts of the suitors and blisters him with this speech:
“Where’s it gone, Odysseus – your power, your fighting heart?
That great soldier who fought for the famous white-armed Helen,
battling Trojans nine long years – nonstop, no mercy,
mowing their armies down in grueling battle –
you who seized the broad streets of Troy
with your fine strategic stroke! How can you -
now you’ve returned to your own house, your own wealth –
bewail the loss of your combat strength in a war with suitors?”
A curious example of free will not thwarted but strengthened. Shamed into action, Odysseus rallies and counterattacks. As the suitors throw six javelins to kill Odysseus, all of them right on the mark, Athena deflects all of them, and the javelins fall harmlessly. So much for the free will of the dastardly suitors.
FREE WILL FROM THE THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Theology tells us Man is created perfect at the outset, but retains the ability either to “persevere” in obedience to God, or to choose to distance himself from God through disobedience. John Milton, in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” determined that God demands praise from human beings, but the praise is meaningless unless freely given, so man must have free will to give genuine praise.
This theology, then, is replete with reference it man’s free will. We see this, for example, in Saint Augustine’s "Confessions." On the eve of his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine addresses God as follows:
“And all that you asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours.”
The upshot, of course, is that if God asked Augustine to suppress his own will, he must have had one. The phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done”, means, please over-ride my will.
Of course, when things don’t go well, we follow the ancient Greeks in praying to God to intervene, to set things straight. I make the wrong decision with my free will and hope for mercy to be saved from my own folly. Free will with a “mulligan”.
THIRD SEGMENT:
SCIENCE AND DETERMINISM – OR NOT
So what does science tell us about free will?
In oversimplified terms, we can say that the passage through time of any object, including a human being, is described in classical physics as a “trajectory.” You’re born, you grow, you thrive, you die. Your whole life, let alone what you do today, is describable as a trajectory. Einstein and Roosevelt were on individual trajectories until those fateful days in 1939, when their trajectories collided – I think most of us would say purposely, freely and meaningfully, and the course of world history was changed forever.
Please accept for a moment the good news that in the minds of many scientists, this view of a world plodding along, with events causing new events ad infinitum, all as if written in a script, is changing. Newer sciences, such as “non-equilibrium physics” and chaos theory, have established the existence of phenomena that are irreversible processes. In other words these events have a beginning and an end. That is time in its essence as we experience it in our common sense world. OK so far, but dominating causation is still possible. In addition, however, we are told that in unstable systems, for example, gases heated to a high temperature or what goes on inside a star that is decaying, so-called “singular moments’ can occur. When this happens, change happens and the relentless chain of causation is broken, but it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take. But be of good cheer, for the physical world is renewing and randomly re-creating itself as it goes along. Are we getting warm?
I have, however, come to the conclusion, that the scientists who are telling us that the world is making things up as it goes along are mostly throwing curve balls at us. What some scientists call free or random phenomena can’t necessarily be translated to the possibility of personal freedom in our terms.
It turns out that when a scientist looks inside a large container of hot gas or inside a star, individual trajectories of particles or molecules are not visible. The overall behavior of the container of gas or the star, or the behavior of an electron inside an atom, must be described in terms of probabilities. Now, probability is a mode of thinking about “populations” and not individuals. The “trajectory” of a particular molecule or individual might still be free or might still be “predetermined” even if the general population appears to be acting freely. So do probability theories get us any nearer to an answer to the free will problem? I think not.
CONCLUSION
It appears to me that we are left with just a binary choice on how to view the problem of our freedom. If we decide we have free will and say the heck with science, that puts us with most normal people who don’t go looking for trouble, and I believe society works better. If we decide that the world is pre-determined, then, even if it isn’t, we must remember that acting as though it is can stifle thought and action and leave us paralyzed. Imagine Roosevelt not making any decision in 1939, which in itself of course would have been a momentous decision.
My personal preference is to go with the traditional view from our religious heritage – that God made us beings with inherent powers of determining our own destinies – and then hope like heck that we either do right or we get forgiven if we don’t.
That may not be your preference. You can pursue another course. You can decide that the matter hasn’t really advanced much since the Greeks sat around with their wine goblets listening to bards recite the Iliad and the Odyssey. You could ally yourself with Odysseus and try your best, hoping that the gods are on your side. Or, instead, you could just go with the flow. And free will or not, we can hope like heck that our choices resolve favorably, and that we, like Odysseus, will get home safely.
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