Newt Monk: Thus, do not listen to what I say or seem to say, but try to get a glimpse of what I say I saw in some book written by either Boethius or Machiavelli from long ago, particularly in regard to contemporary politics.[1] In those books I once found what used to be called “maxims” or “rules of thumb,” though better metaphors might now be needed. I therefore sometimes think of them as seeds, as pods, as starting points, as springboards, as tent stakes, as prefabricated political truths, as carbon-composite cookie-cutter constants, as givens, as groundings, as grounds keeping, hence the term “tent stakes” I keep returning to.
Oak Boat: Right, the important thing is that these things-once-called-maxims are not ends in themselves but means (methods, applications) to help scoot one along toward some distant end that will likely never actually be reached but, nonetheless, as an end personified, stares down and scowls at the stooped traveler across her whole journey.
Newt Monk: And as I can’t prove that any of my findings from Boethius and Machiavelli are in common use (particularly in central Texas), I must follow R. B. Y. Scott’s introduction to his 1965 translation of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII to say that what I found were not maxims but artifacts, like finding arrowheads in a field:
Strictly speaking, an epigram, an aphorism, or a maxim does not [p. 4] qualify as proverbial unless it has passed into common use. An epigram like Lord John Russell’s is a perceptive observation wittily expressed, but no one would quote it unless he were discussing the present subject. An aphorism like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is philosophical in tone and lacks the common touch. A maxim is an axiom or rule of conduct which may or may not gain widespread acceptance, such as “Knowledge is power.” The homeliness of the truth expressed and the simplicity, conciseness, and picturesqueness of its expression characterize the anonymous familiar popular saying. “Dead men tell no tales.” [“]A new broom sweeps clean.” “Chickens come home to roost.”[2]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims, these words, observations by dead authors. Rhetorically, one could say what you want is somewhat equal to eidolopoeia: presenting a dead person as speaking, or assigning words to the dead. Yet what you want is also somewhat equal to ethopoeia: putting oneself in the place of another to then understand, express that person’s feelings better.[3]
Newt Monk: Yes, this whittling down of terms, of finding which one is the sharpest, does help. I think what I found in Boethius and Machiavelli sometimes involves the usage of a kind of catena, which Old Oxford has defined as “a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine.” Plus, the idea of a literary catena was once envisioned by the great bookman Andrew Lang as being “a golden chain of bibliophiles,” that is, as in a chain of quotations from the best books on the best topics found by the best readers, the best lovers of books, etcetera.[4]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims––these words, observations by dead authors––but you might call them catenas…. Hmm. Rhetorically, one would say that what you ask for sometimes involves epicrisis: the quoting of a passage followed by commenting on it. Still, what you ask for appears to be more than mere antithesis: the attempt to conjoin contrasting ideas.[5]
Newt Monk: Indeed, I think at the end of the day I can only call this thing an adynata—a term that in medieval rhetoric meant something akin to stringing together impossibilities, as an attempted confession that all words eventually fail us. And so calling them “tent stakes” is as good a vivid metaphor for the abstract term adynata as any other I suppose.[6]
A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation….
To the philosopher as well this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share.
(Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewessten,(Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1928), trans. by R. F. C. Hull as “Relations between ego and unconscious,” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 105)
And let me add from Walter Kaufmann:
Another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.
(Critique of Religion and Philosophy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1958), pp. 72–73)
[2] R. B. Y. Scott, “General Introduction,” The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 3–4.
[3] See Richard A. Lanham (ed.), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991).
[4] Andrew Lang, “Bibliomania in France,” Books and Bookmen, (London: Longman, Green, and Co; Second Edition, 1887), p. 105.
[5] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
[6] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
The Elgonyi, natives of the Elgon forests, of central Africa, explained to me that there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man, and the ‘big vision’ that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine-man or chief. Little dreams are of no account, but if a man has a ‘big dream’ he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody.
––Carl Jung, “Relations between Ego & Unconscious†(1928)[1]
I don’t know. But I don’t vote anymore. I’m now a radical nonvoter (I think). I feel utterly powerless, ever since the snow storm last year. It was like a revelation, an epiphany, an awakening.
Recently I started reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys (2019) and, in a particular passage, recognized a shared sense of powerlessness:
It was hard to miss the smile that tugged at Jaimie’s mouth from time to time. Turner wasn’t angry that Jaimie lied to their faces. He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one’s powerlessness before other people.[2]
Yes, once upon a time I possessed the capacity to admire politicians who “kept on lying even though their lies were obviousâ€â€”James Traficant (1941–2014) for example, whom I gather, was sort of low-rent version of Huey Long (1893–1935).
But now I’m stuck in a bog of disenchantment. And when you’re stuck, you feel mediocre. The Roman historian Livy tells readers that “men of mediocre ability escape envy, it generally aims its shafts at the highestâ€[3]––after the ice storm of 2021, I feel I am the very measure of a mediocre man.
But even though one is stuck, one is going to have to suck it up. For no one envies a person in pain (especially the pain of powerlessness in politics), for “nothing makes itself more unpopular quite so quickly,†wrote the Roman stoic Seneca, “as a person’s grief.†[4]
In more modern times, Professor Wittgenstein has taught that: “you learned the concept ‘pain’ in learning languageâ€[5]––such as the pain of feeling powerless when being lied to––as with the character of Elwood in The Nickel Boys, as in Texas politics etcetera….
All I know is, I will no longer sacrifice anything upon the altar of admiration for political leadership, particularly at the local level. Those who look to leadership for answers are no different than those who look at pornography for partnership.
But, whether in novels or the minds of mediocre book-bloggers have those who have become disenchanted from such dreams of realpolitik now awakened? Do they now rise and walk in a brand-new life?
*****
One reads in The Nickel Boys that
[Thus said Dr. King]: Throw us in jail, and we will still love you…. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.
The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity…. Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing…. No, he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.[6]
That passage dimly resembles the Revelation in the second partition of the first volume of Proust when:
… at the hour when there awakened in me that anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of love, and may even become its inseparable companion…. since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them.[7]
Then again, the passage by Whitehead reminds me also of one by Professor Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (2015) when he explains that, “The question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.â€[8]
But now emerges the question of whether or not waking life and dreaming (or nightmaring) are interchangeable, something that can be exchanged for something else, like at the back-counter at Wal-Mart. For all dreams are ideologies; all ideologies are dreams. As the Czech playwright-politician Václav Havel (1936–2011) says in his essay “The Power of the Powerlessâ€(1978):
Ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.[9]
There are times when I just can’t stop questioning. I find virtue in it as a ritual. Questions like:
Is The Nickel Boys more about doubting the possibility of loving one’s harm-makers rather than having become disenchanted by their capabilities?
Must readers interpret Whitehead’s character of Elwood to interpret King’s words literally?
Or must readers investigate the historical context of the speech to see if King was speaking literally, metaphorically, poetically, spiritually, subculturally, bureaucratically, democratically, and/or theologically?
Or does the character within the book possess no need for adjectives in order to possess disbelief in King’s admonition?
After all, who needs specifics when the generality is already within one’s grasp?
Is political dreaming just a form of quackery (just as philosophy is a form of medicine)?[10]
And if Jung was not a quack but someone who studied dreams––the way a political scientist studies various ideologies––can readers accept his realization-as-remedy? Would Carl Jung and Colson Whitehead agree that dreaming is primitive, and waking life (in political as well as physiological ways) a more evolved, more enlightened mode of consciousness? For Jung reminds readers that dreams cannot be unbound from the paleolithic past out of whence they came:
Fantasies always have a highly original and ‘creative’ character. They are like new creations; obviously they derive from the creative activity of the brain and not simply from its mnemonic activity….[11]
The symbol-producing function of our dreams is an attempt to bring our original mind back to consciousness, where it has never been before, and where it has never known it. We got rid of it before understanding it…. Dreams and old primitive things from which the mind freed itself in the course of its evolution: illusions, childish fantasies, archaic thought-forms, primitive instincts.[12]
More to come (maybe).
NOTES
[1] Jung, “Relations between ego and unconscious†(1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012) 126.
[2] Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 129.
[3] Livy, The History of Rome Vol. VI – books xl–xlv, trans. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1924) XLV, xxxv, 282.
[4] Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1969), Letter LXIII, p. 116.
[5] Wittgenstein, “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,†Philosophical Review, 77 (July 1968): 275–320 at 295–96; Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009) I. no. 384.
[8] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015)11–12.
[9] Havel, “Moc bezmocných†(“The Power of the Powerless,â€) (1978), trans. Paul Wilson, The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane, (Armonk, NY: Palach Press, 1985) V, 32.
[10] Livy has some old Roman named Appius Claudius cry out: “Ye gods, they are like quack physicians looking for work, who always want the state to be suffering some affliction that you will call them in to cure. Are you tribunes the champions or the enemies of the plebs?†(The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP) (V, iii), p. 284).
Marcus Aurelius says that philosophy is supposed to be a medicine, not an entertainment (V, ix); for “philosophy is a modest profession, all simplicity and plain dealing. Never try to seduce me into solemn pretentiousness,†(IX, xxix). See Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962).
[11] Jung, “The role of the unconscious†(1918), The Jung Reader 66.
[12] Jung, “Healing the split†(1961), The Jung Reader 359.
Gracy Olmstead wrote the other day about rebuilding post-industrial towns and concluded:
There are other ways we can consider saving America’s towns. One I have been mulling over lately is the role wealthy individuals can play by boosting local commerce via their patronage (providing microloans, sponsoring vocational programs, providing grants and endowments, et cetera).
Recently, I’ve been reading New Harmony, Indiana: Like a River, Not a Lake (2015), a memoir by the late philanthropist Jane Blaffer Owen (1915–2010), someone whom I think somewhat fits the criteria Olmstead has been mulling over.
Like the famous architect, in terms of landscape planning, urban design, and cultural influence, Mrs. Blaffer Owen might very well be considered the Frederick Law Olmsted of New Harmony. Originally from Houston and the daughter of two oil heirs—her maternal family included founders of Texaco, her paternal, Exxon––Jane Blaffer studied under Paul Tillich and later married one of the great-great grandsons of utopist Robert Owen (1771–1858). They then moved to Owen’s home in New Harmony which she helped revitalize and preserve by starting things like the Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation, whose mission continues “to preserve, promote and support, financially, and otherwise, the various historic and educational attributes of New Harmony.â€
Mrs. Blaffer Owen also oversaw building a Roofless Church for her adopted Indiana community as well as commissioning various sculptures around town which can be seen in the photographs and illustrations on nearly every other page of New Harmony––one of the most beautifully crafted modern books I’ve ever handled––right up there with Jung’s Red Book and Umberto Eco’s Book of Legendary Lands (2013).
So, for its aesthetics, Indiana University Press should be commended. Yet the text, at times, lacks organization. If readers prior to opening this book have never heard of New Harmony, Indiana or its founder––the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen––they might feel as I did: like they’ve eavesdropped upon the middle of an ongoing conversation without ever having been invited.
But I read New Harmony because it was a gift from my grandmother after its editor Nancy Mangum McCaslin came to a reading and signing in Lampasas, Texas, the hometown of Mrs. Blaffer Owen’s mother. And I too spent the first seventeen years of life in this small central Texas town of nearly 7,000. (The second seventeen years have been spent sixty miles south in wyrd Austin.) I too still have family back home and maintain minimum ties and tabs there—just as Rod Dreher now roves between Starhill and Baton Rouge.
Lampasas is a land of springs lying on the edge of a desert. Once dubbed “the Saratoga of the South,†it has withstood Comanche attacks, biblical floods, and even a visit from gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. And in 2016 the town seems to still be striving––yet still surviving––with or without buckets of philanthropic oil money. Since I left in 1999, the population remains about the same. Its public school population, however, has gone down. The sports teams used to compete with the bigger city schools from Waco, Killeen, and Austin, but now the schools they play against are mostly smaller, rural, and geographically closer.
Although it took me seven years to earn a bachelor’s degree, perhaps, because I remained in Austin after attending university, I too am modestly guilty for some of the “brain drain†from Lampasas. And I often wonder if the town compensated for these changes by making itself a more accommodating place for people to retire to, or tour through, rather than grow up in.
But the citizens of Lampasas are bettering the cultural health of their community, with neither my aid nor that of an oil baroness like Mrs. Blaffer Owen. For example, the Perception Creative Art School was founded in March of 2009. In 2005 an unused lot of land owned by the city was transformed into the Hanna Springs Sculpture Garden. Since 2008, Vision Lampasas has commissioned nine murals on what were once blank walls scattered around town.
One mural, “Small Town…. Big Sound,†displays a panorama of local musicians spanning generations and genres, including songwriters, gospel groups (both black and white), rock bands, country artists and their Tejano counterparts. I’ve known some of these musicians or their relatives, some now dead, others still alive. The conservative in me loves this mural for its community-memory-building capabilities; and the liberal in me loves the true diversity of musical talent acknowledged and celebrated in a single work of art.
Yet confirming patriotic imagery is not the same as affirming actual patriotism, and while Oscar Wilde got it right when he said, “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,†I still try to remember that the perfect must not be made the enemy of the good.
Part of any spiritual discipline, however, is discovering—repeatedly—that one had it all wrong. You both knew and did not know.
––Gregory Bateson [1]
The anthropologist Bateson, an avowed atheist, was fond for chiding that supernatural things and miracles are but “a materialist’s attempt to escape from his materialism.” [2] I’m not sophisticated enough to argue for or against that last statement, but the above quotation gives the book reviewer an apt starting point because one can apply Bateson’s words to the act of reading. Let us ask, for each of the five books under review: as a reader what did I get wrong––what did I wrongly assume to be true going into the initial reading?
What did Bookbread originally get wrong about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming? I assumed there would be some everyday-life sentimentality––I did not expect to encounter mysticism—and when I did I found it difficult to hold my attention. I struggled to empathize with experiences of the numinous recounted in this book, such as dreaming of conversing with ghosts. For I’ve never had a mystical moment—as occurs sometimes in this and in Dreher’s other work How Dante as well as (in passing) in the angelology and demonology of Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. Even when I was a regular churchgoer, neither in the loud churches nor quiet churches, neither in the black churches, white churches, or Latin American churches I visited—some of which were full of people with spasms, the shakes, speaking in tongues, shouting out loud like Paul Stanley, some bellowing with Bach from an organ, some full of smoke from incense and candles, I never experienced the coincidence-that-wasn’t-really-a-coincidence like Dreher relates:
Despite these very different approaches to faith, we had independently developed interest in the patterns that God uses when He communicates to us. We both believed strongly in meaningful coincidences, which the psychiatrist Carl Jung called “synchronicities.†Ruthie called them “seven-oh-nines,†after a remarkable set of coincidences that happened to her after [her husband] Mike went off to war an event that tested Ruthie faith. [3]
Yes, I am usually interested in what Jung, the godfather of Neognosticism, has to say, and I’ve listened to the Sting and the Police and still dig that tune, but on the other hand, I cannot ignore Emerson’s words:
Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false…. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one … And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. [4]
I can confess to experiencing moments where I felt like was in the right place doing the right thing at the right time, but there was nothing transcendental about it—and I certainly feel I’d be lying if I labeled those experiences as mystical.
What did Bookbread originally get wrong about How Dante Can Save Your Life? While not quite anticipating Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (1922) or C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost (1941), I mistakenly expected to encounter the same kind of rigorous writing style I’ve found on Dreher’s blog these past few years. There were no berserking blitzkrieg of quotations accompanied by Rod’s infamous “read the whole thing†blurb. Instead, I found in How Dante a restrained and simplified style––one not dumbed down, but distilled.
What did Bookbread originally get wrong about La Divina Comedia? If you start to read commentary on Dante you’ll soon get engulfed by diagrams and charts and maps of the Afterlife. So what surprised me on first read was the dreamy ease of it. Much like Proust, the places and transitions from one place to another did not feel to this reader like the rigid levels, the strict layers, the definite hierarchies and inked schemata from centuries of scholars. Nor did reading the Comedia and imagining the visuals the poet supplies feel like playing a video game with stringent leveling of worlds and platforms, nor the way the audience encounters the station stopping “blocks†in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real(1953) (a fellow Louisianian author of Dreher’s), even if Dante has rendered a systematized thought behind it all.
La Divina Comedia is, however, the first epic I’m aware of to be told entirely as a dream, which was a common medium for storytelling and poetry in the Middle Ages. In Dante there are seemless fade ins and fade outs from one place to another, but these moments are not quite as lacking in transitions as, say, Yellow Submarine (1968), or even the radical, random juxtaposition found in the work of David Lynch––Dante was certainly not a Dadaist.
Structurally, I see Dicken’s Christmas Carol (1843) as an inverted Divine Comedy: the Ghost of Christmas Past represents Paradiso, the Ghost of the Christmas Present represents Purgatorio, The Ghost of Christmas Future, Inferno—a Christian theme, a Christian dream, all told in one night.
What did Bookbread originally get wrong about Why Place Matters? I expected more references to contemporary politics as well as the application of specific and emerging technologies. Overall this anthology is very studied and astute—but it contains no author imagining or proposing radical change, no deeply inspiring vision like a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley might expect to be pitched. In that sense, the book is very conservative. Most of Why Place Matters involves case histories and diagnoses for the increasing lack of relevance of place in American culture, but few (if any) prescriptions are proposed. This remains a banal charge against many modern nonfiction books. Probably the most blatant example in Why Place Matters of this pattern of theory overriding practice can be found in Mark T. Mitchell’s essay “Marking Places: The Cosmopolitan Temptation.â€
What did Bookbread originally get wrong about Elmer Gantry? I got two things wrong: (1) I was mistaken that Gantry has no adversaries when his co-minister Sharon Falconer does in fact function somewhat as his antagonist. He doesn’t know what motivates her. He seems to shake off or ignore her proclamations about being Joan of Arc reincarnated because he stays prostrate, in ardent awe of her. So Sharon is Elmer’s Beatrice: “Always, in every high-colored mood, she was his religion and his reason for being.â€[5]
(2) I thought Elmer Gantry, as the character of the evangelical minister, wanted––as he does in the 1960 movie based on the book––a rock-n-roll lifestyle of women and whisky, but Elmer only wants the attention and influence that comes from making people feel good.
Finally, I really identified how he can’t wrap his mind around the necessity in Christian ministry for a minimal amount of mysticism. After Elmer had successfully lay-preached, and is soon to graduate from seminary, he is informed that he still needs a Call:
He saw himself as a white-browed and star-eyed young evangel, wearing a new frock coat, standing up in a pulpit and causing hundreds of beautiful women to weep with conviction and rush down to clasp his hand.
But there was one barrier, extremely serious. They all informed him that select though he was as sacred material, before he decided he must have a mystic experience known as a Call. God himself must appear and call him to service, and conscious though Elmer was now of his own powers and the excellence of the church, he saw no more of God about the place than in his worst days of unregeneracy.
He asked the president and the dean if they had had a Call. Oh, yes, certainly; but they were vague about practical tips as to how to invite a Call and recognize it when it came. He was reluctant to ask Eddie––Eddie would be only too profuse with tips, and want to kneel down and pray with him, and generally be rather damp and excitable and messy.
The Call did not come, not for weeks, with Easter past and no decision as to what he was going to do next year. [6]
Later in the chapter, Elmer has deacons and elders circle around and pray for him to have the Call. But nothing happens. So Elmer sneaks off and gets “only a very little bit drunk†before deciding himself that he’s been called to the ministry.
 To be continued….
NOTES
[1] Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson.Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc. 2005. 105–06
[2] Nachmanovitch Stephen. “Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers.†Leonardo, Vol. 17. No. 2. (1984.) 113–118 at 117.
[3] Dreher, Rod. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2013. 72.
[4] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.†Essays – Second Series. 1844.
