God Commands

The newspapers are full of stories of youthful Muslims from European countries who have gone to join jihad in Syria and other war torn spots.  They are as depressing as accounts of various knee jerk reactions among the evangelicals in our own country toward behaviors that their version of God and the Bible will not tolerate even for other people let alone themselves.  And I list in the same category the believers in a newly created religion, couldn't be more than a hundred and fifty years old, who are convinced of the sort of unverifiable mythological nonsense that in the ancient religions is let by because long time spans make everything fuzzy.  Maybe a human really could walk on water thousands of years ago.  And then there are countries dictated by one variant of a religion while all others walk on borrowed territory, so to speak.  When I was sixteen I left the Christian faith because their authority figures insisted that they had the proof that I was an enemy of their god for being gay.  Hey, I won't stay where I am not wanted.  And the distance thereby obtained gave me the chance to study the atrocities committed by various Christian sects over the centuries and still continuing.  I felt glad to be out of it.  So it is,  I do not understand how modern day moderate Muslims can remain within a faith system that produces such violence and terrorism the world over.  Disaffected youth is not an answer; if the same disaffected youth had grown up on "Mary Poppins" and "Ivanhoe" there orientation would be entirely different.  I think of the complicity of the Christian churches with the Holocaust and I don't want to be part of Christian churches anymore, even if down the block is the sweetest dearest old rector, his bald pate shining in the morning sun as he welcomes parishioners.  In the same way if I were a Muslim I would not want to be part a religious system that has created the inferno in the Middle East.  The only thing to say for Orthodox Jews is they keep their mishigas to themselves and if Israel is willing to tolerate their growth to the point that they bankrupt the state with their welfare needs, so be it.  To all of these intolerant and rigid religious people, let me say firmly I don't believe in any kind of god that you are espousing nor in any of the dictates that your god seems to be demanding.  I pass on all of this.

The Homosexual

We have just seen the story of Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game," and I am still seething with rage.  At the very end the story of Turing's life is tied up in a series of on-screen statements about what happened to all the principals.  In the course of the film we are treated to the investigation of Turing as a practicing homosexual and his accepting "chemical castration," as they called it in England, instead of a two year prison sentence, when he is found out as having been involved with a male.  However, we learn in the final statements that he committed suicide one year into this treatment, and also the information that 49,000 men were convicted of sodomy under the law of gross indecency from the mid-nineteenth century until the law was changed in the twentieth, and that Queen Elizabeth II a few years ago publicly pardoned Turing.  My rage was that she did not publicly and officially repudiate the beastly legal attacks on these other 48,999 homosexuals (what about Oscar Wilde, for starters?).  It's as if one person spared from Auschwitz makes it alright--  grotesque!  The English hatred of homosexuals fueled by those hideous strictures in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions is tragic, bad enough with the Christians but now they have the Muslims, too.  On another level, the film was especially amusing and ironic, since the man was obviously a total nutter, misfit, and weirdo, not to mention narcissist par excellence, but what was entirely mundane about him, seen from the perspective of the twenty first century, was taking some guy's cock into the mouth or up the bum, acts so routine and commonplace that the idea of his being hunted and destroyed for it was amusing in a wry, ironic tragic way, when all along he was in fact seriously hated by almost everyone who came into contact with him, despised, really by everyone because he was a totally hateful person, arrogant, self-involved, anti-social, out of contact, incapable of human relationships. I guess we could murmur Asberger's nowadays and let him off the hook.  Amusing, I thought, and altogether a beautiful story.  Great filming, too.

The Nicene Creed

Reading the daily accounts of the conflicts among the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, added to commotion generated by the various competing sects of aggressive Christians and Jews, one grows nostalgic for Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in the third century CE.  The emperor convened a council to settle on Christian faith that would cut through the competing doctrines afloat in his empire which were making for trouble, dissension, all the things a busy emperor does not need.  The consensus of belief established at that Council was finally the product of Emperor Constantine himself, who like every aggressive manager was quickly tired of the nit picking of doctrine that persons of religious faith always produce and were producing at the Council.  He cobbled together what we call today The Nicene Creed or its variant The Apostles Creed and imposed it upon the mass of his imperial subjects to give everyone an imperial identity, with the aim of making everyone 'orthodox'; it was the passport into participation political or otherwise in the empire.  I used to know it by heart, having recited it every Sunday in the early years of my life, as well as sung it in amateur choruses in some pieces such as Schubert's "Mass In G." On the odd occasion I am attending a Christian service, weddings, funerals, and what not, I find myself enthusiastically mouthing the words of the Creed without the slightest sense of what I mean by doing so.  Constantine is venerated for having converted to the Christian faith, indeed he and his mother have achieved the status of saints in the Byzantine Christian Church, only getting the appellation "great," bestowed by Rome.  The motive for his conversion is tied up with a great story, maybe entirely apocryphal.  On the night before the battle for the Milvian Bridge on the north side of Rome he had a dream in which a cross appeared with someone saying or it was written in Greek, the Latin translation of which has become famous "In Hoc Signo Vinces," in this sign you will conquer [the Latin version even made it onto the Pall Mall cigarette package].   I have a suspicion that he saw conversion as a great way to rein in the crazies, placate his mother Helena, renowned for her devotion to Christianity, and give himself an identity that would make his imperial subjects sit up and take notice.  I doubt that the Emperor was too deeply imbued with the faith.  Someone who punishes a lying wife by having her boiled alive, not to mention killing his son on the suspicion (later proved false) of having slept with the lady does not, to my mind, qualify as having studied the doctrines of Jesus too carefully.  I omit his many other acts of imperial murder; maybe that was why Rome never made him a saint.  One of the sadder features of his legacy is that citizenship or a person's national identity remained tied to a Christian faith, as evidenced by the creed.  For a time citizenship in Greece was tied to belief in Orthodoxy.  Throughout Europe over the centuries Jewish persons were denied their legitimate place simply for their presumed failure of faith, making it all too easy to try to eliminate them, as essentially non-persons.  God rest your soul, Constantine.  You have a lot to answer for.

The Grandchildren

Here it is, another Christmas season, and our mailbox is stuffed with Christmas cards, well, stuffed is a relative term, let's say we get quite a few, actually more Christmas cards than circular and other junk mail.  There used to be quite a few persons who composed Christmas letters which I glanced at in a desultory fashion, just to note the emphases and omissions.  Now, when they are far fewer, I would welcome them, just because I don't get around much anymore, as the song goes, and see a smaller and smaller number of those whom I think of as friends, not to mention, their ranks having been much diminished by death and dementia.  The Christmas letters are far fewer, the cards with photos are fewer; it's the influence of Facebook where family news is broadcast far and wide, leaving the non-subscriber outside the pale of family or friends.  There have always been those who send on photos, but there is a new and disturbing trend of sending on as surrogates photos of the grandchildren.  In many instances persons of whom I have the most affectionate memory from forty or so years ago include only representations of their grandchildren.  Forget that I have not even met their children often since they were teeny tots, but the grandchildren are no more to me than the family pet.  I want photos of my friends, now beyond the hope of serious facial surgery, just as they are, just for the fun of trying to decipher their faces of yesteryear in today's lineaments. My own grandchildren are indifferent to the sending of cards, as indifferent to life beyond Facebook as their parents, my children.  I recognize that there is something more involved than Facebook, however. My children from an early age were encouraged to develop themselves independently of each other and their parents, and they have done so.  My wife came from a family she did not much care to spend time with with whom she however spent almost all major holidays, and summer visits, bringing us all along in tow.  I came from a large family that dissolved more or less in the years of moving about in the Second World War, the impetus to reunite having been lost in the death of our mother.  We had a wonderful Sunday dinner in 1940 when the oldest two went east to college; we six siblings met again in 1954 at our mother's funeral (father had died in an accident in the thirties), and in 1973 worried that we would never meet again I invited all five to my home in Brookline MA for a weekend.  And that has been it.  Three of them are now dead so the next family reunion will have to be in Heaven.  My wife and I divorced when the children were in their teens, so  they no longer sensed any place as "home" except for their grandparents' (their mother's parents) ancestral farm in New Hampshire.  Unfortunately the grandparents were not grandparently so it was not an emotional and spiritual refuge.  They all married into secure strong families which gave them the attachment they needed, but deprived me more or less of any position of meaningful focus in their lives.  Funny to have four children and six grandchildren, delightful people; whenever I get together with one or all of them we truly have nonestop fun,  but none of whom would consider initiating a meeting, and I have more or less accepted disappearing from their lives.  I guess Christmas brings out these thoughts.

Nostalgia

We were recently with friends of my husbands at a restaurant in New York when the woman of the other couple said to me in amazement: "You're really quite nostalgic.  I wouldn't have thought you went in for nostalgia, thought you would always be looking to the future."  How strange, I thought.  First of all, when you are in your mid-eighties the future does not seem like so large and inviting a subject to explore. Ever since I have been examining my attitudes.  Yes, I am very much a person who lives with nostalgia.  I guess growing up in a house  with a mother who looked back with nostalgia to the days of her Edwardian girlhood, to the courtship of her husband who died in the First World War, of the fun and games she had with her second husband, my father, who died when he was just fifty in a car crash, a woman who looked back to the world of servants and money and genial ease.  Well, none of that inspired me to look to the future.  Here I am at eighty five, and as I sit in my chair reading all the literary periodicals, I am always fascinated with news about Gerald and Sarah Murphy on Cap d'Antibe, about Marcel Proust and the boulevards of Paris where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas entertained the artists of the day, about everything that made the twenties and thirties so fascinating and repellent.  I look back with horror and fascination at the events unfolding throughout Europe in the thirties, that peculiar ardor, that lassitude.  And then I can not stop thinking back to peculiar enthusiasm and hope that the Second World War inspired, of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again," of all the GI's in my classes at university, rough, hardy, enthusiastic, optimistic, sprung loose by the GI Bill, embarked on an entirely new road.  Oh, the wonderful simple minded optimism of those years!  I think back to the parties, the dance hops, when I was a teenager, and then I remember the years of my late teens in Manhattan, whoring around, remember so well the marvelous sensation of getting sloshed, not fall down drunk, but not sober either, the movies, the art exhibitions, the strange people I ran into, the refugees, the weird veterans, it was all so much fun, and whether that was true or not, that's the memory of it.  Yes, I want to go back to Bette Davis asking "Why do we need the moon when we have the stars?"  I want things to be corny again, and I want the exquisite thrill of discovery when first I read ancient epic in the original Greek.  I'm tired of canned laughter and recorded applause. Jon Stewart bores me to tears; can't stand that face he puts on.  How awful it is that I must confess I am indeed nostalgic.  I don't seem to notice the here and now of the twenty first century.  My gaze is elsewhere.

Christmas Day 2014

According to the Greek historian Plutarch in his essay "The Obsolescence of Oracles,"  during the reign of the emperor Tiberius the news of Pan's death came to one Thamus, a sailor on his way to Italy on a boat out in the Mediterranean. A divine voice hailed him across the salt water, "Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes be sure to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."  Which Thamus did, and the news was greeted from shore with groans and laments.  The adult life of Jesus is conventionally dated in the early decades of the Common Era during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.  So it was that a great religious system came into existence as another collapsed.  As the distinguished classicist Hermann Fraenkel argued in his Sather lectures "Ovid, A Poet Between Two Worlds," it was at this moment in time that the idea of love entered the world.  The pagan poet Ovid hinted at this new sentiment in his poetry, which became incarnate in the person of Jesus whose preaching focused on love more than anything else.  For many it defines Christianity. For all its many virtues classical antiquity never really discovered the idea of love, either romantic or ethical.  The ancient poets sang of men and women burning with desire, that's about as far as they got toward love. And of course they never really got their minds around the idea of heaven or redemption.  Friederich Nietzsche in his long essay "The Birth of Tragedy" identifies what is the salient feature of pagan antiquity, an abiding sense of irony, a deep suspicion of hope, an instinctive understanding of the futility of all things, the calm acceptance of death as the end of life, death that in turn informs everything that is life.  At the same time the ancients had the imagination to quicken everything in their existence, every tree, rock, blade of grass, with the spirit of something beyond the immediately experienced world.  In this way they sensed themselves to be part of a greater whole to which they owed a debt in some way or another.  They peopled this larger world with a community of superior beings, their gods, a group of thoroughly egotistical beings who, like any aristocratic, self-obsessed group, rode roughshod over the feelings and needs of their underlings; they sometimes picked them up and loved them, sometimes it was rape, sometimes more sympathetic, or in a fit of pique slapped them down, or even killed them. The ancients never had to cry out "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" because frankly, my dear, the gods never cared.  No, the humans were happy if they escaped notice, and most of the time their gods left them alone to live their human lives with energy, intelligence, dignity, and grace.  Look at the sculpture, read the writings, they were in love with beauty, with the moment, able to let the shadow of death cross their path and not flinch nor moan, yes, curse, rage, and cry, but never flinch nor moan.

Abraham, Isaac, and the lamb

I have a gay friend who was raised in a strict Southern Baptist family, and consequently had the hardest time coming to grips with his sexuality once he reached adulthood.  It is a common enough sad story, more so for me, because I know him, and am well aware of what repression, the perversion of lying to himself and others, cost him.  The years of his adulthood were first marred by the violently negative reaction of his parents when he told them the truth, and, as time goes by, he has has been blighted by his widowed mother's continuing disapproval, condemnation, really, of a fellow who I can testify from years of acquaintance is the kindest, most gentle, most generous person imaginable. I am not a religious person but I know the stories of the bible.  I think of Abraham and Isaac, how the Lord told Abraham to make of Isaac a human sacrifice.  Two things about this story always fascinate me, one is that the narrator stresses at some length the reaction of Isaac to the circumstance that as he and his father proceed to the location where the sacrifice is to take place the youngster keeps asking his father where the sacrificial lamb is, what is going to happen.  And the father lies to the boy insisting that there will be a lamb at the appointed time.  And, of course, Isaac is readied for sacrifice, and indeed the Lord does substitute the sacrificial animal.  Ever since I was a boy I have been repelled by this story, imagining what must have been the aftermath, how Isaac could never ever have trusted his father again, thinking of how he led him on.  Sure, strong faith and all that, but what must the boy have been thinking in those last few moments?  Happy ending?  Yes, but what was the psychological scar?  The other side of this is of course the substitution of the lamb, and I always read this as a prophecy of what was to come.  Abraham, the stern old Hebrew father, versed in fire and brimstone, of a piece with the harsh god of the Old Testament, whereas the lamb which the Lord found as a substitute for the boy, seems to augur for the coming revelation of divine love brought into the world by the Prince of Peace.  And in that spirit I tell my friend to explain to his mother that she must dismiss Abraham from her thinking and accept the lamb of love into her heart and embrace her son.  Open her heart and let herself be saved.  Even Pope Francis would recommend it, but perhaps telling that to a southern Baptist does not have the hortatory power I imagine.