Two Haiku

Point towards the deep source
Of mind of things of starlight
There is no thing there

Handwriting in smoke Invisible evidence Wind on the water

One Thing Leads to Another

I was flipping through a poetry book over the weekend and landed by chance on “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” If you read any poetry in high school or college, you probably encountered this piece by Lord Byron. I don’t remember studying or discussing the contents of the poem at all, but I do remember talking about its anapestic rhythm (ba-ba-BA, ba-ba-BA), which can feel like the galloping of horses:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Re-reading that poem made me think about another poem that made martial use of rhythm--Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

Poetry pedants will know that Tennyson gets a galloping effect by using the opposite rhythm of Bryon’s poem. He uses a dactyl (BA-ba-ba, BA-ba-ba) instead of an anapest. But that’s not why I thought about the Tennyson poem. I actually thought about a piece of music first, the title of which I thought was “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” but which turned out to be the “Light Cavalry Overture.” If you don’t know the piece, you can listen to it here. At about 2:10, you’ll know why the Byron poem made me think of it, because it uses the same anapestic rhythm to make one think of horses galloping.

So: one poem I re-encounter after many years makes me think of a piece of music lodged in my memory, which leads me (by mistaken identity) to another poem I remember from long ago. And so goes our thinking, bouncing like a pinball (if you’re old enough for that simile to be meaningful) from memory to memory. We don’t think linearly and rationally; we think in webs of association. One thing leads to another.

And here we go again: I write the words, “one thing leads to another,” and immediately I think of the song of the same title by The Fixx, which came out when I was in college and was played incessantly at the bar where we used to celebrate and dance after performances of our comedy sketch troupe. And if I choose to linger and daydream, I can let that chain of associations roll out from one thing to another, all day.

What we think about depends on what we know—and who we are, as human beings, depends on what we think about. The self-story that each of us tells is built up of a million discrete events in memory, and how those memories connect to each other. Who I am is not simply the things I’ve done or the things that have been done to me—it also includes the things I’ve read, and heard, and seen, and touched, and how all of those things connect with each other and with my life experiences. I am who I am, in part, because of how those poems and pieces of music connect with each other in my mind, and why one thing suggests the other. All of those things are the pieces of furniture of my mind, and that’s why the room I live in, in my mind, is uniquely mine.

Think about what this means for us as educators. We are introducing students to information about literature, and science, and history, and mathematics, and art—not simply so that they can regurgitate that information on tests, but because we are helping them furnish the rooms of their minds. We are giving them a place to live, intellectually. We are giving them things to think about for the rest of their lives—bits of memory that can float to the surface and attach themselves to new experiences and new information. And how they process those new experiences will depend, to some degree, on the associations and connections that are made between the new and the old. That means the furniture we bequeath to them--the things of the mind that we bring to our students and our own children--matter greatly. 

The first time I drove across the country, I thought about Walt Whitman and the words that open his “Song of the Open Road.”

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, 

Healthy, free, the world before me, 

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, 

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, 

Strong and content I travel the open road. 

Because of that association, I had a very particular feeling about driving across the country, and a feeling about the country I was driving across. I was connected to the history of my nation, and the history of exploration, and the American-to-the-point-of-cliché idea of self-re-invention. I was connected—enmeshed in my country in a variety of ways that were important and meaningful. My life was mine, but not mine alone. I was part of something vast, and part of something deep. Without those associations, I was just some guy, driving West across some rocks, hoping I could get to my hotel before the sun slanted into my eyes.

Was I attuned enough to other associations that would have made me think differently about the land I was driving across, and who had lived there before the "history of my nation?" I was not. I had learned things in school; I was not ignorant. But those other associations were not (yet) part of who I was and how I saw--and responded to--the world around me.

When my children encounter a beautiful sunset, I would like them to be able to connect it not only to memories of past sunsets, but also, perhaps, to a Van Gogh painting they’ve seen, and to happy memories of going to museums with their parents. When they hear an old, sad song as adults, I want them to be able to be able to think about what that song meant to them at a time of youthful heartbreak, and how that heartbreak has cooled in the ensuing years to a wistful memory, and how past loves and losses have taught them to be better people. The more things we put into their brains, the more things they can think about and connect to their present experiences. That isn’t elitism or snobbery; it’s just what makes life rich and full.

A world bereft of association is a thin and sad world. X = x = x = x. Everything is just itself. A world of limited association is just as impoverished. This is why arguments about the literary canon do matter. Are the "dead white males" still important to our culture? Obviously I think so, since I just made reference to some of them. But are they the only singers of songs and painters of pictures whose thoughts and ideas should be rattling around in our minds? Hardly.

The power of association is not always a happy and positive thing, but it’s always an important thing. When I encounter horror or injustice today, it connects and resonates with what I already know—about world history, about American history, about what we have solved, and about we have failed to fix. If every story in the news is simply itself—isolated and disconnected from any context or precedent—then it’s easy to avoid accountability. “Oh,” we can say, when someone shoots up a synagogue full of children and old people. “It’s just some guy who has a mental illness.” But it’s not just “some guy,” and it’s not simply mental illness. The actions are connected to a centuries-long history of Antisemitism and conspiracy-mongering, and are also connected to a decades-long history of anger, among some, at American Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights and other progressive movements. If we don’t know these things, and think about these things, then every day of horror can be dismissed as a simple and solitary event, and we cannot grow and make progress.

Everything we teach our children is a simile. Nothing is just itself; it’s powerful and worth learning because of its associations. How is it like this other thing? How is it not like this other thing? What caused and led to it? What did it, in turn, cause and lead to? What does it make you think about?

My love is like a red, red, rose…why? Because it is beautiful? Yes, perhaps. But also, perhaps, because it is delicate, and can easily be injured. Because it requires tending and care in order to thrive. Because, no matter how carefully I tend it, the fact is that the rose, and my love, are living things, and will wither and die someday. There is nothing I can to do stop that, and it makes things matter all the more.

So yes, I will love thee still, my dear, “till a’ the seas gang dry…and the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” But that day is coming, for thee and for me. And knowing it should make every moment with my love—and every moment along the open road we’re traveling—precious. Which brings me back to my old friend, Walt Whitman, for whom I always have a chair waiting in the room of my mind. He sings out to me across the years, and to all my fellow countrymen and women...if anyone has ears to hear.

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me? 

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Pesach 2018

It's hard to stand up against Pharaoh and demand your physical and spiritual freedom. But we tell the story every year, because it can be done and it must be done.

It's hard to pack up your things and leave a place where you have been abused and despised. It's hard to remember that you are valuable and important, when all your life you've been told you're not. But we tell the story every year, because it can be done and it must be done.

It's hard to cross the opened Red Sea and leave slavery behind, knowing that when the waters close behind you, you can never go back. It's hard to embrace real freedom, when all your life you've been dependent on authority figures telling you what to do and what to believe--and rewarding your obedience with food, shelter, and protection. It's hard to take full ownership of your life, your beliefs, and your decisions, and know that, whatever comes, it's all on you. But we tell the story every year, because it can be done and it must be done.

May we all be brave enough in the coming year to tell off our personal Pharaohs, get out of whatever situations or mindsets we have enslaved ourselves to, and wander through whatever wilderness is required to get us to our promised lands.

Pass through it, pass under it, or Passover it. Let's just keep moving.

We Are Unhinged

We have become unhinged.

I don’t mean “crazy,” though perhaps we are crazy. We certainly think other people are crazy. Them. The other side. And it’s the other-side-ness I’m talking about when I say we are unhinged. Un-hinged.

We’ve always taken sides in political arguments, right from Day One, but the two sides used to be joined in the middle. There was a thing that held us together and connected us, that touched both sides but belonged to neither—a thing that formed a core or center around which the rest of us could freely swing, this way and that way. It allowed the two sides to function together to perform tasks that neither side, alone, could accomplish. A simple bolt can make two flaps of metal into a hinge. And something made separate people and conflicting ideas into a nation.

Was it the Constitution? The Declaration? The First Amendment? The flag? Was it a sense of shared history, or shared destiny? It wasn’t a shared ethnic identity, no matter what the screamers like Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan want to believe. It wasn’t just white-ness, or WASP-ness, or even male-ness. We overcame substantial parts of those biases, and allowed outsiders to take part and feel ownership (albeit grudgingly). We may not have been ready to welcome this minority group or that one, but weirdly, maybe even perversely, they insisted on welcoming us. They demanded ownership in the country. They wanted the words to belong to them, as much as they belonged to us. They wanted to believe in the words, even when we didn’t seem to.

The power of the Civil Rights movement came, in part, from the demand that Thomas Jefferson’s words apply to all Americans, regardless of what Mister Tom himself might have wanted or intended. Throughout our years, groups of people of have read the words, “All men are created equal” and have said, “Make that real for me.” The work is far from finished—but that doesn’t mean it never began. A black man has been our president. A gay woman hosts a hugely popular daytime talk-show. A Latino man and his cast of black, white, Asian, gay, and straight actors has made the entire country fall in love with and sing about “the ten-dollar founding father.” Every generation, some new group of people reaches for the bolt that has held the hinge together, and has said, “I want to be part of that.”

But now…what is the “that?”  What is the bolt around which we cling, today, to form the hinge around which we can swing? We use freedom of speech to broadcast contempt of each other; freedom of religion to excuse bigotry against each other; the right to bear arms to protect us against the existential threat of each other. These things were meant to hold us together. Instead, they keep us apart. We birthed ourselves as a nation by saying that the pursuit of happiness was one of our inalienable rights, and that governments were formed—by us—to protect those rights. And yet, today, when people struggle because laws or behaviors hinder them from the free pursuit enjoyed by their neighbors, we sneer at them, call their pleas for equity and justice “special pleading,” and mouth off about the self-reliance and independence of our forefathers…our forefathers who would have perished a thousand times over if their neighbors had not been there to help them in times of trouble.

Why are the people next to us no longer our neighbors? Why doesn’t their pursuit of happiness deserve our sympathy and support? Is it because we are white and they are black? Is it because we are straight and they are gay? Is it because we are Christians and they are Moslems? Did our forefathers run through a checklist of acceptable beliefs and behaviors before offering a helping hand to someone whose crops had failed, or whose barn had burned down? 

No, of course not. They didn’t have to. The checklist was already assumed—pre-checked before the neighbors ever put down roots. If someone were living next door, it was because he had already passed muster as Acceptable. And anyone outside of that definition….lived elsewhere.

Is that what we want to go back to? And if so...how far do we need to take it, in order to feel safe? Will it be enough for white people to hide themselves away from black people—even more than they already do? But so many white people despise each other these days. Maybe that’s not enough. Would it be enough for Democrats and Republicans to live in separate neighborhoods—even more than they already do? But the moderates and extremists within each party hate each other almost as much as they hate the opposition. Should devout believers of various religions be protected from having to come in contact with or provide commercial services to people whose beliefs or behaviors contradict their own? Should we have special districts where only white, straight, conservative Christians live and operate businesses? And if we build such things, will we need some kind of guarded entry gate to keep the wrong sort from being able to go shopping in their stores?

Must every nut be separated from every bolt? Every screw removed from every hole? Every piece of wood separated and stored with similar pieces of wood, and all metals arranged by type and color? Has the wonderful, awful, maddening, glorious house we have built become so difficult to maintain that we have to tear it to the ground and return all of its parts to the store for safe-keeping?

Preparing the Ground for Learning Something New

“Behold, a sower went forth to sow…” (Matthew 13:3)

We all know the parable: a man sows seeds; some of them grow, some of them don’t. The seeds that fall on stone have no topsoil to accept the roots. The seeds that fall in the weeds are choked before they can reach the sun. The seeds that fall on fertile ground grow tall and strong. We learn that words of wisdom and enlightenment are not heard equally by all who are within earshot. Some people are ready for the hearing and some are not. Some are in mired in environments or circumstances that simply will not allow the “seed” of wisdom to sprout and change their lives. The question I find interesting is: Whose responsibility is it to make sure the ground is ready to receive the seeds? Is it the ground’s fault for not being hospitable, or is it the sower’s fault for not tending his garden?  

When we school people use the idea of “garden” metaphorically, we’re usually talking about our children. Perhaps I’ll get to that in a separate blog post. Today, though, I want to talk about us—the adults in the building.

Most of us recognize that real and sustainable change is gradual, organic, and evolutionary, but we’re often too impatient to act on what we know. We want our change instant. We want the silver bullet. We want something that promises, “Just plug it in and it works.” We don’t want to have to deal with some pesky seeds that need careful tending over a long period of time; we want magic beans—you know, the kind that create beanstalks and lead to gold. To some extent, we are the ground on which the seed is sown, and we are often very rocky.

Let’s face it; we’re not great at long-term thinking. We’re wired to be on the lookout for the lion hiding in the grass, not the slow but steady uptick in the overall lion population in our region. And the charlatans among us, whether political or commercial, are happy to profit from our impatience and short-sightedness. Thus do we educators find ourselves in endless cycles of change—latching on to something new, plunging into the chaos and disruption of adoption,  withdrawing our commitment when we don’t see instant results, and then investing our time and money in the Next New Thing. On and on it goes—more and more seed being tossed onto sterile stone. And when we get angry at the waste, we blame each new crop of seeds for being ineffective.

Whose responsibility is it to make sure that the adults in an organization are prepared for a change—that they understand and accept the need for it, that they understand the steps of the process and the expected length of the process, and that they understand their role in making the change happen? That’s obviously the job of leadership—and yet, I’ve seen so many change initiatives embarked upon with no real attempt to “prepare the ground” for the new thing being planted. There are leaders out there who feel that their authority is all anyone needs: “If I say it, it will be so.” But in practice, it is not so, is it? In many schools across the country, teachers outlast their principals and superintendents—sometimes by decades. They know how to wait until the Next New Thing passes by.

How can we make sure the seeds fall where they will sprout? Well, tending a garden is a complex occupation. It requires healthy soil and healthy seeds, enriching food and fertilizer, growing conditions that meet the needs of the different plants in the garden, and also constant vigilance to keep the weeds at bay and keep the pathway towards growth unobstructed.  Let’s take them one at a time.

Healthy soil. When we’re talking about organizational change, healthy soil means a healthy school culture—a culture where people have some level of autonomy, where dialogue is open and respectful, and where people work toward a common purpose.

Healthy seeds. Obviously, the content of the proposed change, whatever it is, should be intelligent, backed by research, well constructed, and so on.  We shouldn’t be bringing garbage into our schools. I’m not talking about programs that have a political slant that we do or don’t agree with, or that our parents do or don’t have a problem with—that’s a whole other issue. I’m simply talking about Bad Stuff—trendy new approaches that haven’t been tested or proven, with materials that are filled with factual errors. Products that talk down to students (and sometimes teachers). Curriculum that lets teachers aim for the low middle instead of giving them the tools to aim higher. That kind of thing. Now, I happen to believe that actual “bad seeds” show up pretty rarely in our world. They’re out there, but they’re rare. I think the Great Library of Dead Curriculum, up in heaven, has shelves filled with perfectly decent programs, and ideas, most of which were just implemented poorly and left to die on the vine. Our parable assumes that the seeds being sown are good, and I think that holds, in most cases, in our little school metaphor, as well.

Enriching food and fertilizer. These are two interesting items. Once the seed has been planted, what do you have to do to keep the plant growing? A young plant is tender and vulnerable. It needs careful tending to grow strong. Any new program in its infancy is similarly tender and vulnerable. Any hiccup can be devastating. Anything that looks too difficult or too challenging can threaten the viability of the whole enterprise. This is exactly the stage at which so many change initiatives or new programs are abandoned. Why bother? It’s too hard. It doesn’t work. So how can leadership nurture the program and give it a shot of vitamins along the way? Well, one way is to acknowledge—publically—that this stage is always challenging, and to help and support the team as they slog their way through the process. Another way is to celebrate—publically—whatever little successes occur along the way.

Growing conditions. Some plants need direct sunlight. Some need shade. Some need a little of both. And yet, when dealing with people, who are so much more complex, we often forget that not everyone responds in the same way to the same treatment. Some people need very little encouragement, and in fact resent it if they’re over-nurtured. Some people need a lot of ego-stroking. Some people need just a little hint or push, now and then. Do we know what the different people in our organization need? And do we respect their differences enough to honor them?

Constant vigilance. Weeds will grow to choke the growing plants. Some of them are external: the day to day administrivia that consume people’s attention; the various mandates coming down from higher authorities;  the new materials or processes that may be confusing; even snow days can wreck an implementation. Some of the weeds are internal: anger at having to learn something new; fear of failing and being humiliated; anxiety that the change requires something of people that they may not have. Tending this garden requires more than saying, “Don’t worry about that stuff.” These weeds need to get caught while they’re still small, and yanked out by the roots.

Of course, this whole metaphor is very old fashioned and out of date in educational circles. We don’t believe that leadership is solely defined as the principal as the Great Gardener of the school—our second mother or father, taking care of us and telling us what to do. We believe in distributed leadership. We believe that the actions that make up school leadership should be shared among staff, at least to some degree.

But this actually makes our parable really interesting. Because now, if the actions are not defined by set roles—if “leadership” is owned beyond the job description of “leader”--then everyone gets to participate in everything. We all have to be responsible for both “sowing” and “growing.” We all have to be the nurturing gardeners of our schools…and we are all, at the same time, the vulnerable young seedlings, requiring care and nurturing from each other.

In Defense of Poetry…or: Metaphors Be With You

(originally published at www.catapultlearning.com)

We’ve seen countless news stories and blog posts about the importance of improving science and mathematics instruction in our country. We’ve argued about the emphasis within the Common Core State Standards on complex, informational text.  Everywhere you look, people are up in arms about our need to prepare students better for a complex, technological world.

I have no argument with any of this. I think it’s all correct, all on-target, and all necessary. And yet…

And yet, I think we’re missing something. We definitely need to help our students handle a wealth of concepts and content across all subject areas.  But the place where many students have trouble is the grey area where facts are contradictory or confusing—where meaning isn’t quite clear, or shifts from moment to moment—where the truth of the matter lies not in “this or that,” but in “both things at the same time.”   

Why do we have so much trouble with this? Because we don’t teach enough poetry.

I know, it’s a radical proposition. It’s ridiculous. Poetry barely makes an appearance in the Common Core standards. It’s laughable—it’s esoteric—it’s a relic of an earlier, gently humanistic world. You don’t need poetry to get an MBA, write a legal brief, develop the next generation of massively-multi-player games, or design a higher-capacity car battery. So who needs it?

We do.

Why Poetry Matters

Poetry lives and thrives in the grey area of ambiguity—the place of always becoming but never quite being. That’s what it does best. It hints; it suggests; it insinuates, often without resolving into anything concrete. Whether it rhymes or scans or just dumps words onto a page, what makes poetry poetry is its ability to hover in a place where things can be and not-be, both at the same time.

 Take a look at this stanza from E.E. Cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

Look at lines 2, 3, and 4. Notice how they suggest two sentences without quite settling down into one or the other. If this were prose, it would say, “Who pays any attention to the syntax of things?” Or it would say, “The syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Cummings jams the two sentences together, with “the syntax of things” as the pivot of the seesaw. It’s both ideas at once; it’s neither idea absolutely. It lives in a weird limbo of thought that you can’t quite pin down. That’s what poetry can do.

If you don’t grow up with a facility for understanding how words can do this, you may find poetry irritating—as my 9^th grade students did, years ago, when I tried to teach this poem. My students were maddeningly literal—and not just about poetry. No matter what we were discussing, they wanted to know: What does it mean? Is it this or that? It must be this or that! Everything had one meaning—one answer—only. And it was my job to hand it to them.

The inability to handle ambiguity carries over into prose, of course. Poetry is a great place to learn it, but great writers make use of it everywhere. I remember teaching a Ray Bradbury story called “The Dragon,” in which two knights in armor prepare to battle a terrible dragon. The dragon they describe breathes fire, has one horrible, yellow eye, is impervious to knives or spears, and travels the same path between two towns every night, mowing down anything in its path. In the final moment of the story (spoiler alert), as the knights attack the monster, the scene switches perspective, and we see two engineers on a train, mystified at the apparition they’ve just seen. Two knights in armor! They came out of nowhere. It happens every night. So weird.

“Ahhhh,” good readers say. The dragon is a train. The train is a dragon. Cool! But my students did not say, “Cool!” They didn’t get it. 

I read the story to them again. They still didn’t get it.

I listed the attributes of the dragon and the attributes of a train, side by side, on the board. Now they kind-of got it. But they wanted to know: “Was it really a dragon or was it really a train?”

My answer was, “Yes.” They were not amused.

They weren’t stupid kids; they just couldn’t process the idea that a thing could be two things at once—that it could exist in a strange netherworld of sort-of-being where both things (and neither thing) were true.  There may be different perspectives, different points of view, but one of them always had to be “true.”

I think that’s a very limiting way to see the world. And it’s not just a Humanities issue. Our inability to hold two contradictory ideas in our minds keeps us from grappling with the world in all of its confusing, ambiguous mess. Our belief that all things have clear explanations and definitions that are absolute and exclude all other explanations or definitions makes us partisans on every topic of discussion, from education to climate change to religion to science.  There are always two sides, and your side is always the right side, and the other side is always the enemy. It’s a terribly reductive and simple-minded way to see the world, which is infinitely complex and strange.

The push to bring more primary source text into our science and social studies classes—to rely less on textbook syntheses and summaries—is motivated by exactly this understanding that students need to analyze competing and contradictory points of view, to learn how to compare, assess, and, ultimately, deal with areas where a single, simple solution is not reachable. But if we, as their teachers, do not have a facility for dealing with ambiguity—if we are not comfortable living in the grey areas—then we are going to be ill-equipped to help our students navigate these texts. They will be saying, “But what’s the answer?” And we will feel compelled to give them one.

Against a Flat World

Of course, poetry and metaphor deal with much more than just contradiction or ambiguity. Metaphor is about association and resonance and connectivity. The snow is a blanket upon the earth. The blanket keeps me toasty warm. Toast is…well, maybe toast is just toast. But you get my point: metaphor creates connections and resonances among the things of the world. It catches us up in a net of relationships.  It makes the world vibrate: touch one string, and another hums along. Where there is no metaphor, though, nothing is like anything else, and nothing reverberates. The world just is—a jumble of discrete objects on a lonely plane of thing-ness.

When the world is reduced to discrete things, the only logical response to imagery is to accept it as factually true or reject it as nonsense.  Either the thing is a dragon, or it’s a train. End of story. And sorry, Ferdinand, those are not pearls that were his eyes. They’re just eyes. The “sea change into something rich and strange” is…not.

On the plane of thing-ness, this approach makes sense. But the third option, beyond true and false, is vitally important. There is truth in poetry that’s very different—of a completely different nature—than the factual truth of journalism or history. When we see the snow as a blanket upon the earth, we think of winter differently: we catch the importance of that period of the growing cycle; we feel what it means to slumber, to hibernate, to wait in the warm, dark place for spring to come. We know something that’s beyond mere facts.

Our inability to understand imagery and metaphor makes it difficult for us to use imagery and metaphor to construct meaning.  We risk losing the power of the stories that form the foundation of our culture. Modern monotheists will lose a lot if they simply dismiss ancient Greek mythology as nonsense.  You don’t have to believe in the literal truth of the pantheon of gods to learn something vital and true about the forces that drive human behavior.  Atheists and agnostics will lose a lot if they throw out the Bible as being “un-true.” There is profound truth and wisdom in the Exodus story, whether it happened historically or not. In fact, if you spend your days arguing about whether or not the Red Sea could have parted, you miss the whole point of the story.

To become free, the Israelites must cross a threshold that cannot be re-crossed. When the sea closes behind them, they are forever severed from Egypt. They can only move forward. Why is that important? Because almost immediately, the Israelites start whining about how hard it is to be free, and how much they’d like to go back. In fact, the entire slave generation has to wander in the desert and die out before their children can be considered “free” and worthy of entering the Promised Land.  There is wisdom in this imagery—wisdom that our political scientists and pundits could learn, whether they believed in the literal truth of the story of not. What might they discover? That overthrowing or escaping a despot does not, by itself, make a people free. That without time and safe distance to learn freedom, people return to despotism. That in all times of profound change, people yearn for the old things they knew and understood—even if they didn’t like them very much.  You can say all of that factually, but the image of the sea closing behind the Israelites and the desert opening before them says it so much more powerfully.

Sometimes poetry tells us that there is no answer. And that’s fine, too. Sometimes, describing the mess accurately is the best thing we can do.  “Describing the mess,” is how Samuel Beckett once defined his job, when asked what his strange plays were all about. But he described the mess in ways no one before or since has managed. There are moments in “Waiting for Godot” that speak truth to me far more profoundly than what I’ve found in philosophy books.

 So listen. I’m all for better math and science education. I’m all for historical literacy. But we live in a world that can be oppressively fact-filled. Knowing the structure and architecture of a thing is not fully knowing it. There are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, not just one. There is more to life than “the syntax of things,” as Cummings called it. It’s important to gather ye rosebuds while ye may. It’s important to hear your being dance from ear to ear. We’re not here for all that long, and there is so much—so much—to learn.

 

After all, as Cummings says at the end of his poem, “Life's not a paragraph / And death i think is no parenthesis.”

 

 

Laws for Thee But Not for Me

I’ve been renting a room here in the DC area while looking for a larger place for the family, who will join me this summer. The woman from whom I’m renting has been unemployed and out of luck for a long time, and cannot pay her own rent without filling up all of the beds in the apartment. So she rents out my little room, and she rents out the master bedroom, and she sleeps on the sofa. It’s not an ideal arrangement for me, God knows, but it allows me to rent month-to-month without living someplace truly horrifying.

Right now, my roommate/landlady is sleeping in the master bedroom, because once again, one of her tenants has walked out on her. I’ve seen it happen twice; apparently, it’s happened six or seven times. They come in—kids, mostly, but not exclusively—needing a place but not being able to put up a month’s rent as security along with a month’s rent to start. So she allows them to pay half a month in security. She lets them move in without signing a lease, because it takes her a while to get her act together. They stay three weeks, four weeks, long enough to accrue some debt. And when she starts asking for them to pay, and she finally gets a lease put together, they disappear. They string things along as far as they can, then they get in a screaming match with her, telling her she’s a bitch for daring to ask them for money. Then they bolt.

So it’s hard to get too upset, or to take it too personally, when I face intense scrutiny in my own home search. Fair credit equals poor credit these days, and my situation over the past eight months has left me with only fair credit. Property managers are looking for any excuse to say No to me when I file an application, and they can always find an excuse, because there are a lot of people out there looking to rent. Whatever I might say about myself, whatever pleas I might make, whatever assurances I offer or recommendations I gather…none of it matters. There is no trust.
It’s Passover this week. I remember staging a play, back in college, which featured a musical re-enactment of the Exodus which culminated with the giving of the 10 Commandments. The chair of the theatre department was watching a rehearsal with me one day, and he guffawed (in a very jowly, middle-aged, Irish Catholic kind of way) about how only a Jew would stage a scene where a bunch of people sing “Freedom! Freedom!” while being handed a set of laws.

Among the political so-called conservatives, it’s been fashionable for at least a generation to talk—or scream—about how government is the enemy. We hate regulation. We hate laws. Government is intrusive. Just leave us alone. They act as though Congress passes laws for their own amusement, or creates regulations out of a love of bureaucracy. They see no connection between their actions—our actions—and the actions of the people placed in positions of authority. In this, they are no different than school children who don’t do their work and then ask their teacher, “Why’d you give me an F?” And they’re no more mature.

Law doesn’t just happen. It happens in reaction to behavior. Regulations are not birthed with a business. They are created in reaction to a business’ lack of ethical behavior.

It’s Passover this week. We celebrate the escape from oppressive slavery and begin a countdown that will take us, eventually, to a celebration of the Giving of the Law. Ten laws: ten commandments. Have you taken a look at them, lately? You should. And you should ponder this question: if we—all of us—could live by those laws—just those laws, but really live by them—how many others would we need? Not many, I think.
But can we live by them? Do we live by them? There are only 10 commandments, but the Torah actually contains over 600 laws, rules, and regulations that help define, explain, and enforce those original 10. So I guess our inability to live by the 10 became evident pretty quickly.

We need laws and regulations to protect us from each other, and that’s the plan and ugly truth of it. And we need protection from each other because we will not behave. The industries that beg to have regulations rolled back? They do terrible things, almost instantly.

Why will we not behave? Because we no longer—most of us—live in abject fear, cowering in the shadows. We are not afraid of retribution from the gods. We are not afraid of the secret police knocking down our door. We are not afraid of what will happen when the local priest hears about our behavior. We are free.

Free from what? All of the above. Free to do what? Whatever we please.

The density of our laws does not depend on the political party we vote into office. It depends entirely on how we, as a society, define “free to do what?” The more constraints we place upon our own freedom, as individuals within a culture, the fewer constraints must be placed on us from without. We can constrain ourselves out of fear of heavenly punishment, or we can constrain ourselves because of a social contract and an ethic of working together and helping each other. We can make up all kinds of systems and structures to teach our children to hold back, to limit themselves, to constrain themselves, for a greater good. That’s what civilization is all about.

So the cop is in the head or the cop is on the beat. The cop is not absent; that’s anarchy, and as attractive as anarchy may sound to college students, it never lasts. Never. People can’t stomach it for long. The cop will return. He always does. If you haven’t internalized him, expect him at your door. Control yourself or you will be controlled, eventually. Because while we love our own freedom, yours scares the hell out of us.

As long as our culture holds Absolute Appetite to be its greatest good, and teaches its children to Want and to Take without limit or consideration, we will have a net of laws and regulations thrown over us. Because, like I said, we trust ourselves but not our neighbors. We’re not completely insane; we know, deep down, where Absolute Appetite will lead us. And even if we didn’t care about that, we know that there are finite resources, and that all people cannot have all things. So unless we want to live in Hobbes’ jungle, where the strong take and the weak hide, we need laws.
Laws for other people, of course. For them. Not for us. We’re fine.

The Narrow Place

Apologies to the 3.5 people who read this. I haven't posted anything here in a long time. Blame other social networking media, and grad school. And life.

Anyway, here it is, Passover. And as usual, I get irritated by the literalists--both the historical literalists who insist on believeing that the Exodus must have happened, as written, in historical time, for it to have any meaning, and the ritual literalists, who insist on leading the seder as though every page must be read out loud, in order, as is, for the evening to have any meaning. I reject both points of view.

I've participated in discussions, at my congregation, about the historical truth of the story, and everyone at the table got completely hung up on the topic. To them, the idea that maybe, just maybe, there were no Israelites enslaved in Egypt--the fact that no archeological evidence had turned up yet to confirm this--was terribly threatening to them. Like the story had no meaning unless it was literally, historically true.

And this is a Reform congregation.

To me, the story might actually have MORE meaning if it's not true. I mean, think about it--why would our ancestors have chosen, on purpose, to make this story of enslavement and redemption their founding myth? Who does that? Every other ancient culture that I know of saw itself as descended from gods or heroes. The Jews saw themselves as descended from slaves. Why? What does that say about us, as a people?

For me, as a writer and a former English major and English teacher, the fact that something may be poetry does not mean that it isn't true. There is truth in poetry--sometimes greater truth than we find in history.

What does the poetry of Exodus tell us?

Let's start with crossing the Red Sea, or Sea of Reeds, or whatever it was. Does it matter whether the sea was really parted? Not to me. What matters to me is the imagery of something enormous being crossed by the Israelites, and then being closed behind them. It means that true freedom requies a boundary-crossing in a way that does not allow for backsliding and return. We know the Israelites bicker and complain constantly--that they are terrified of freedom and, in the face of each crisis, beg to return to Egypt. It's important that the door behind them has been closed, and that the only way forward for them is forward. If the oppressed peoples we've known of had been able to truly close the door on old chapters of their history, they might have been more able to move forward into freedom, rather than backsliding into tyranny, as so many of them have.

How about 40 years in the desert? What does it mean that the slave generation had to live out in the wilderness and die there, and that only their children--the ones born in the open spaces of freedom--were ready not only to understand the commandments given unto them, but also to live them, and make a new nation for themselves? How many peoples throughout history have had the benefit of "40 years in the desert" between tyranny and freedom? How many have had the luxury of not having a new potential tyrant, in their nation or in a neighboring country, breathing down their necks and waiting for them to fail? We, in America, had that luxury, only because most of the rest of the world was separated from us by two oceans that took a long time to cross. In fact, we had worked out quite a lot of what it meant to self-govern long before our revolution took place. Who else has been so lucky?

What about the giving of the law and the building of the calf? Huge. Someone once made what he thought was a nasty joke about Jews, saying, "Only the Jews would come up with the idea that laws = freedom." But I didn't find it nasty. I said, "You're damned right. Because laws DO equal freedom. Without law, all you have is chaos, and chaos leads straight to tyranny. If you don't have some laws or principels that allow you to self-govern, it won't take long for you to turn to some strong man and say, 'govern us.'"

None of these issues ever seem to get talked about by the literalists. Nothing that could teach us how to live, how to understand ourselves. Just facts.

And the literalist seders don't help us learn from our story, either. Instead, we get page after page of psalms extolling the power of God. And that's fine, to some extent. Maybe, for some people, that's fine in its entirety. That's the only lesson to be drawn.

But not for me. That's all I'm saying. To me, the Torah--the Bible--is not a book that you are simply supposed to swallow, whole, without reflection, and say, "I believe." From where I sit, my heritage and culture teach me to wrestle with the book, to argue with it, and to learn from it--constantly. And the only way to do that is to let the words and images resonate with you--to let them bounce around and reflect off things and work on you in different ways.

Like a poem.

Shana Tovah, Baby

I have accepted an invitation from my local congregation to serve on its board. I have accepted the invitation, because I'm a sucker. But it's a terrible idea, on a number of fronts.

In the first place, I have no time. None. I have scrupulously ignored every email and entreaty and request from the board and other members, ever since signing on. With my work schedule, and travel schedule, and gradual school work, and house- and child-keeping, it's just not something that's high on my priority list. It should be. I accepted the responsibility. But it's my Bridge Too Far.

Also, I'm already over my limit of dysfunctional organizations (limit = 1, and that's the company I work for).

Also...well, I hate to say it, but I have very ambivalent feelings about the whole Temple thing. I always have. My religious life always moved back and forth along a continuum between Attraction and Repulsion, my whole life.

When I was twelve, deep in the bowels of Bar Mitzvah training, moving slowly along the track and preparing myself for eventual expulsion out into the world, I told my father that the temple we belonged to was a Bar Mitzvah mill, and that I wanted out. It was the mid-1970s, and the traditional position of the Reform Jewish family towards its congregation was that it was a place where one slowed down to about 20 miles per hour in order to eject the kid for Sunday School, before zooming off to do more interesting things. And, of course, it was that place you went for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in order to keep the guilt at bay. But that was about it. So when I told my father that our temple was a god-awful place that processed kids more than educating them, it wasn't like he was going to know whether I was telling the truth or not. So he hauled me down to the place to confront the rabbi (which is more than most fathers would have done, back in the day), and said, "The kid says this place is nothing more than a Bar Mtizvah mill." To which the rabbi replied, with a traditional, rabbinic shrug, "He's right."

And that was the end of that.

I started taking private lessons with one of my father's students, who was Orthodox, and going to Saturday morning services with him at a tiny, store-front schul a few miles from my home (for which the rabbi gave me special dispensation to ride my bicycle). This was a revelation to me. The congregation was no more than a dozen families. I understood, for the first time, the role of community in the shabbat service. I understood why the Bar Mitzvah was important--they needed people to do things. And I understood the role of study--because every weekend, we didn't just listen to a Torah portion and then a sermon--we studied the Torah portion and then argued about it. Argued! Fiercely, sometimes. Long before college or grad school, I learned what a seminar was. And I understood why our religion placed such an emphasis on study, and on analysis, and on argument--because you were expected to hold your own, to speak up--to say your piece--to help the group work through a thorny and complex story. THIS is why they trained you to read the Torah and give a speech about it, for your Bar Mitzvah.

I loved it.

But, of course, I wasn't Orthodox, and my family wasn't particularly interested, and I had not one to talk to about it, or do ti with, and...well...it was a long bike ride, and winter did eventually arrive. And I was 13.

And that was the end of that.

When I got to college, I did not join Hillel. I did not find a congregation. I did not even go to temple for the high holy days. Well, I went once. I sat in the back row and felt terribly out of place and wrong. I no longer remembered any Hebrew. The whole service felt like something I was supposed to know, but didn't know, so I felt out of place and foolish. I didn't stay long, and I didn't return.

But I felt bad about not observing anything. I mean, I went home to do Passover with my parents. I exchanged presents at Chanukah. But what about the high holy days? What about Yom Kippur? The whole idea of atoning for your rotten deeds and committing to do better--that was important stuff. And yet, going to temple did nothing to help me feel those things or think about those things.

Eventually, I started going out of town for Yom Kippur, to some national park or other Awe-Inspiring Location. I went alone and spent the day in silence--hiking for a while and coming to rest at some beautiful spot, where I could sit and think and...pray. I would say the shema, which was the only prayer I remembered, and then I would talk through the year that had passed--what had gone well, and what had gone badly. I apologized--to myself and Whoever was out there--and I promised to do better. And then I hiked down to whatever passed for civilization and had a big dinner.

Even now, years later, having belonged to congregations in Brooklyn and Tucson, raising children in them and sending them off to Sunday School (even teaching in the Sunday School for a couple of years in Brooklyn), I often feel as though I am missing out on the Real Deal when I sit through services and mouth the litanies. Yes, I am part of a community now. Yes, I am saying the words that my ancestors said, and participating in the rituals of my people. And often it's nice.

But it's never more than nice. It's never awe-inspiring. It's never difficult. I never really take the time to find some silence and really think about the choices and actions I've taken in the past year...and atone for the ones that have fallen short of my hopes for myself. Even when they give you time for silent reflection in temple, it's only about 30 seconds. And I have two fidgety boys to keep an eye on.

But those boys adore the rabbi and the cantor, and feel connected and at home in the congregation--and that's a hell of a lot more than I ever had, growing up. So...good for them.

And for their sakes, I care about the place. And for their sakes, I sit on the board.

But I'd much rather be sitting under a tree.

And so this is Christmas...

O, Holy Crap, this is good.

The Gates of Repentence

In my twenties, I used to go off into the woods somewhere at Yom Kippur and try to reflect in some place of awe and wonder on the year that had just passed--a waterfall or a mountaintop, or something like that. I didn't belong to any temple, and was pretty disaffected from organized religion in general. I had gone back once or twice out of feelings of guilt and responsibility, only to sit in the very back, among strangers, not knowing any of the Hebrew and wishing that I could have a Genuine Experience of...something.

So...the woods. I would drive up into the North Georgia mountains (I was living in Atlanta at the time), the base of the Appalachians. It was terrain that reminded me of what passed, in my life, for sacred space--the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where I had spent the summers of my childhood. I would stay overnight in a bed and breakfast near a state park, and set out, early in the morning, for a hike. The isolation of the drive and the night was a nice break from the chaos and noise of my life back in town, full of the usual twenty-something drama and angst. By morning, I would be used to the quiet. And I would set out for a walk, breathing in the mountain air, watching the light filtering through the leaves, and hearing nothing human anywhere near me.

When I got to wherever I was going, I would stop, and sit, and recite the shema quietly to myself. And then I would talk--quietly, under my breath, but audibly. Having had the time and space to think through the past year, I was ready. So I talked through all of the mistakes and screw-ups and near-misses I could remember, and vowed to do better in the coming year. And then I would head back to my car, and back to the city.

I haven't done that for many years. Now, with a wife and two children, I belong to a temple and I go to services. I know the Hebrew better than I did in my twenties, and I know enough people in the congregation not to feel a stranger. But still, I wait for a moment of genuine religious feeling. And still, I find it missing.

At our congregation's Kol Nidre service, the evening service that begins Yom Kipuur, two cellos play the central tune as a duet, separating the two singings of the prayer. It is beautiful and haunting--and it is the one truly evocative and emotional moment of the holiday for me.

I am a Reform Jew, and it is a 100+ year old tradition that was started as a reaction against mysticism and mumbo-jumbo and outdated rituals. But in far too many cases, it left us with dry, lifeless services, where we say the same thing three times (spoken in Hebrew, then spoken in English, then sung in Hebrew). Why so much repetition? Well, probably because my grandparents' generation banished Hebrew, and my parents' generation brought it back, but without bothering to ensure that my generation learned it. So we do the Hebrew because we think it's right, and we do the English so that we can understand it. And then the cantor sings it, so that...well, I guess so that the cantor can keep his or her job.

And in the cause of pluralism and progressive politics, the words have too often been stripped of any power. We recite a prayer called al chet, to enumerate our wrongdoings as a community. But instead of saying "we," (as in "we have lied,") our prayerbook now says "some of us." Because, you know, maybe I didn't, or maybe you didn't, and why should we blame everyone?

Well, because that's the point. We're confessing as a community.

And one of the Rotten Things in this prayer, according to our prayerbook, is something like (I don't have the book in front of me) "some of us engaged in xenophobia." What's next? "Some of us were not as tolerant of the differently abled and the weight-challenged as we should have been, to encourage self-esteem"? I don't know what the original Hebrew was, but I'm betting it was something like, "We have hated the stranger in our midst." Now that's something with some real meat--something to feel bad about and try to remedy.
I mean, seriously, people, what is ritual without a little poetry?

I have sacrificed religion for churchiness, and it's a shame. I would like to find my way back to the religion. I've tried, half-heartedly, once or twice in recent years. But going for a quick walk in the park, while still embedded in one's crazy life, doesn't quite do it. It's hard to find the time and the space, in a life smothered in obligation.

But maybe next year. For now, there are, at least, the cellos.

And the Lion Will Lie Down With the Beach Ball

From an issue of The Watchtower:

I can't do it justice. Just go over to TBogg and read the commentary provided by him and his readers.

Craven Images

Yes, friends, it's the Talking Jesus Doll, complete with "course robe" and traditional sandals.

"The Talking Jesus Doll is a religious treasure that recites key verses from the Bible aloud. Just press the button and the Talking Jesus Doll speaks to your child. It’s a great way to create a personal connection between God’s word and your child."

And just in case you’re worried about that pesky Commandment about idolatry…

"You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

Not to worry! You'll notice it says nothing about molded plastic. So go ahead. Buy two. Buy three. Nothing says deep spirituality like mass-produced action figures.

Strange Encounter

The drunk on the plane is on his fourth vodka tonic, telling the beleagured flight attendent to go easy on the tonic next time. He is harranguing his across-the-aisle neighbor about mutual funds and cost bases and other such things, and has told him at least three times that he went to Princeton and that he's only dressed as he is (t-shirt, jeans, sandals) because he's coming back from visiting his dying father in the hospital.

When he boarded the plane, stone cold sober, he tried to engage me in conversation, but his opening gambit freaked me out enough that I shut down. His first question to me was, "Are you a religious man?" Later, I found out it was because of the New Yorker article title he saw in front of me, "Faith and Doubt." But as a member of a minority religion, I get wary and defensive around conversational ice-breakers like that one. I've had too many people try to introduce me to Jesus and save my soul. When I feel it coming, I tend to duck.

Anyway, I had a lot of work to do. I had intended to catch up on my gradual school reading during the first and longer leg of my flight, but had instead succombed to watching the free movie, which I never got to finish due to technical difficulties (and even though it was kind of crappy, I'm now enraged that I missed the end of it).

Fortunately, he discovered that his across-the-aisle neighbor was in the financial business, and latched onto him for at least an hour. Eventually, though, the neighbor must have tired of him and cut him off, because I felt a sharp finger jabbing at my arm.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" he said, his voice a bit slurred from the multiple vodkas. "Maybe it's a cultural thing, I don't know. I'm just a dumb redneck from Alabama, so I don't know. And you can tell me to shut up if you want to--I won't take it personally. But I would think, you know, you're on the plane, you're next to a guy...maybe he has something to share, maybe he has stories to tell and things you could learn from. But you don't want to talk."

I apologized--told him I was heading to a very brief vacation and needed to get this work done before I met up with the rest of my family. In his solopsistic drunkenness, he didn't hear or didn't care, or both. And so, regardless of what I wanted or needed, I ended up in conversation with him.

He turned out to be a decent guy, and even an interesting guy. His wife had died years ago, leaving him with two small children to raise alone. He had left his high-paying job to be around the kids more, coaching teams and so on. He had a teenaged son with learning difficulties, who had only been diagnosed in 10th grade. Of course, it's hard to have an actual conversation with a drunk. What we had was him talking, occasionally jabbing me in the arm for emphasis, and me nodding, smiling, and throwing in the occasional comment to let him know I was listening.

But I'm glad I listened. Because he was a good man, working hard to be a good father in difficult circumstances and trying to help a teenaged son in need--a son who didn't fit into the neat little boxes arrayed before him by the public schools. "Categories!" he yelled at one point. "Why is it so important for them to figure out what category he's in? Why can't they just deal with who he is and teach him the way he needs to learn? I mean, I'm just a dumb redneck from Alabama, but I don't understand why it took so long to figure out what was getting in his way, and why it's still taking so long to help him."

Which was, coincidentally (or not), exactly what I was trying to read about for gradual school.

I've been here before. I'm basically a shy and introverted person--someone who keeps to himself and would rather watch and listen than talk, when among strangers...the boy with the beard in the corner, as my wife likes to misquote The Roches (I think it's really "the boy with the beer in the corner," and anyway, for me, it was usually a bourbon, not beer). And this makes me an easy target for blowhards, sad-sacks, and alcoholics looking for a sympathetic ear. I always find myself torn between the part of me that feels caught in a web and wants nothing more than to escape and be left alone and the part of me that knows I should be Open To New Experience and Open To New People. When I've pulled away from people, I've always regretted it later, and when I've engaged with strangers with stories to tell, I have never regretted it. So it's clear which side of me I should be listening to.

And yet, I really did have work to do, and I really didn't want to have to do it once I join up with the Wife and Things 1 and 2. And don't I have the right to make that choice? Or am I obligated to listen to every loon who want to bend my ear?

Answer--obviously: Of course you have the right to make that choice. Just be sure you're making the right choice. Because a stranger, even a loony one (maybe especially a loony one) can be an angel in disguise, with a message you were meant to hear--a message you need--a message which, if you miss it, if you walk away from it without hearing it, you will be diminished.

"Are you a religious man?" he asked.

Trick question.

Any Ending is a Happy Ending

Ian McEwen has an interesting essay on apocalyptic religion and why it's important for us to pay close attention to it. In the article he refers to this book, which, if you haven't ever read it, you should (I read it as research for a play I once wrote about end-times thinking, and it's great).

McEwen:

We should add to the mix more recent secular apocalyptic beliefs - the certainty that the world is inevitably doomed through nuclear exchange, viral epidemics, meteorites, population growth or environmental degradation. Where these calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot consider them as apocalyptic. They are minatory, they are calls to action. But when they are presented as unavoidable outcomes driven by ineluctable forces of history or innate human failings, they share much with their religious counterparts - though they lack the demonising, cleansing, redemptive aspects, and are without the kind of supervision of a supernatural entity that might give benign meaning and purpose to a mass extinction.

The boy can write.

I think the essay is worth reading and pondering, because we really shouldn't dismiss such thinking as merely "wacko." It's important to face our various crises and challenges as "mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency." If you don't approach things this way, then everything--everything--becomes a sign and signifier of The End. And if The End means a return to God, or a return of God to earth, or whatever the case may be, why fight it? In fact, it's heresy to fight it--we should be doing all we can to hasten it. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And if that's the way you see the world, gentle reader, then it's certainly your right to do so. But I do not. I do not believe that some intelligent force placed me upon this earth and set a timer running, with certain moral and ethical and spiritual expectations I had to meet before the timer ran out, in order to merit the Big Prize of heaven. That's not life; that's a game show.

And here's the problem. Game shows are fun. Can our favorite contestant make it through the obstacle course, fill the water buckets, swing over the muddy pond, and ring the bell before the timer buzzes? It's suspenseful! We love it. And I have no problem enjoying that set of rules in my entertainment. I like action and adventure movies too. That doesn't mean I'm going to feel unfulfilled as a human being unless I can get chased through the jungle by Cate Blanchett (well, hold on a minute...if it's Cate Blanchett...).

Storytelling was supposed to be a diverting and momentary escape from life, not a substitute for it. Life itself was not supposed to be a story--everything leading to a climax, a denouement, and a happy ending. Life is just life.

But for some people, a life that is not plot-able on a grid that leads inexorably towards a happy ending is a Bad Life. Sugar-Candy Mountain is not simply the childlike Happy Place we hope for; it becomes the sole reason for living . If we aren't going to make it to Sugar-Candy Mountain--or, worse, if there is no Sugar-Candy Mountain, then what's the point of anything? Why wake up? Why go to work? Why love your wife? Why raise your children? None of these things has any value or joy in themselves unless they are steps along the way to Glory.

And what makes all of this dangerous today, in ways that were never truly dangerous before, is that people now have the ability to force the climax--to impose the ending. If they can't stand the day-to-day, for-it's-own-sake living, if they don't like the storytelling in their lives, or the lack thereof, they can damned well make the ending come and retroactively justify the drudgery of their days.

Because, to people who must have some kind of cosmic and explosive resolution to justify their little and limited works and days, any ending becomes a happy ending. And those people scare me.