A Few Days on the Coast

After the extended Christmas hubbub, full of early darkness and general good cheer, Hilary and I almost invariably head for the fresh air, stunning beauty, silence, and solitude of the coast—the north coast, that is. Lake Superior.

It’s long since become a tradition.

We try to mix things up a bit from year to year, of course. Theme and variations. But the drive up is often punctuated by a visit to the Sax-Zim Bog. The following days are likely to include a few cross-country skiing excursions, pasties and fresh fish on the menu—not on the same night!—with herring, Jarlsberg cheese, Aunt Nellie’s red cabbage, and Ingebretsen’s liver pâté prominently featured on the lunch-time smorgasbord. Gooseberry Falls State Park. Two Harbors, and Shovel Point are all near at hand.

Our cabin is right on the shore, a half mile from Highway 61. It has a gas fireplace which generates a lot of heat and is easy to flip on. We’re always eager to relish the call of the coyotes (or wolves) and the startling brilliance of the night sky—especially the Quadrantid Meteor Shower on January 3.

And then there are the books.

What was that remark by Kierkegaard? “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

Operating on that principal, as usual, I limited myself to eight or nine books. That might seem like a lot, but you never know what mood you’re going to be in. Among my choices were a small early paperback of Milosz’s selected poems, a book about the Old Testament called People of the Book by A. N. Wilson, and a wide-ranging collection of essays about literature and art by Clive James called As of This Writing. Add to that a slim hardcover by a once-famous Columbia University prof, Sterling Lamprecht, called Freedom and Nature, an obscure (but handsome) paperback by Neal Atcherson called The Black Sea, and a fat hardcover collection of nature writings by Barry Lopez with a cool blue cover called Horizon. I was set. And if none of these books struck my fancy, too bad for me. I’ll have no choice but to read at least one of them, anyway. (Though in a pinch, the discard shop at the Two Harbors library is usually full of pleasant surprises!)  

But as we walked into the Wilbert Café in Cotton my mind was engaged in deeper issues: the burger or the pasty or the BLT? It’s a small but spacious room with pale green walls; several groups of people (with binoculars) are usually sitting in the booths along the window that looks out across the snow-packed parking lot and the four-lanes of highway 53, an expanse that’s uniformly flat and dreary. But the talk is lively. And during our recent visit Sparky Stennsaw, one of the moving forces behind the bog, happened to be eating there. As he was leaving, I heard him say to the group in the next booth, “Head for Two Harbors and on up the shore to Grand Marais. Look for that mountain bluebird. Look out beyond the harbor for long-tailed ducks.”

A man sitting alone a few tables to my right tried to catch my eye once or twice. I learned why a few minutes later, when he engaged another customer in conversation, telling the man about the ten acres he was developing near Cherry, and the two cabins he already had for rent. He gave the man a card.

Our own sightings in the bog were modest: a Canada jay near the visitors’ center, a boreal chickadee in the midst of a flock of black-capped chickadees at the Admiralty Road feeders, and a flock of pine grosbeaks at a platform feeder on Auggie’s Bogwalk  No hawks. No owls. Not even a siskin.

The bog had gotten a bit of snow, and the black spruce forest was stunning with the late afternoon sun coming in low and bright through the frigid air.

Rather than head back to Duluth and up the shore, we decided to cut cross-country through a chunk of the north woods we didn’t know well. I had never been to Forbes before. A few years ago we skied some sketchy trails near Brimson, a town better known for the New Years Eve bashes at Hugo’s, the local bar, which seems to be almost the only building in town. 

But the setting sun was behind us and the sky to the east was tending toward peach near the horizon. It had a scintillating dreamy quality that reminded me of childhood summers in Oklahoma. Quite a contrast to the street-light glare of the strip malls and body shops of the highway into Duluth.

It was still light when we arrived at the resort in Castle Danger. We drove to our cabin (#8) to find that it was already occupied! Hmm. I’d printed out the reservation. There was no mistaking the number. We stopped in at the office. “No, you’re in #11,” Jamie said, looking slightly confused. “The key’s on the kitchen counter.” End of problem.

There followed three or four days of reading, hiking, skiing, cooking, and staring out the window. Bright moon through the clouds, but very few stars. A few passing ore boats.

I won’t bore you with all the notes I took during our afternoon reading sessions, but one remark by Lamprecht is truly golden: “Despite the admirable character of the kindly Kant himself, the Kantian influence, in practice, has been as deleterious as in theory it has been incoherent.”

Bravo!

A second trenchant observation won’t hurt. “Nature is a lush welter of teleological profusion. Man faces the moral task of organizing as best he can what nature offers with total disregard of centrality.”

And while we're at it, how about this one? “Scorn of matter is a mark of arrogance of spirit. People of healthy spirituality never lose capacity for enjoyment of material goods.”  

We enjoyed our frozen walleye “from Canada,” breaded, fried, then baked, while listening to some poundy, youthful piano sonatas by Beethoven, then watched the gentle waves outside the window reflect a shimmering moon. 

It was a supermoon, in fact, and it also happened to be at perihelion. The last time than happened, in 1912, the extra gravitational pull set one or two icebergs loose, and the Titanic sank!

 

Homage to Mercury

There’s moisture in the air again. I'm sure you've noticed. It's raining. It’s still dark at 6:45, but on a clear day, Jupiter is bright and high in the western sky, and the sun is brilliant on the ungainly heaps of snow. On a clear day, it also streams in above the piano on a lower plane than at any other time of the year, shoots across the room, and comes to rest on the light switch in the hall. 

Mercury is the god of quick changes, I think. They say you can see it just before sunrise in the southeast these days. I haven't made the effort, but I can see its influence everywhere.

It all began with a dreadful cold snap. During that bitter spell, we sat in the den by the warmth of the Jøtul stove, though we might just as well have been up on the North Shore. As usual in such situations, I had a stack of books by my side on the couch, including Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, a biography of Erik Satie, a slim book about aesthetics by Bence Nanay (part of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series), and a collection of essays by John MacQuarrie called Studies in Christian Existentialism.

Also near at hand was my journal, into which I occasionally jotted a few notes. For example:

“Nanay rejects both beauty and pleasure as foundations or standards for aesthetic judgment. In fact, he rejects judgment itself, preferring the term “analysis.” He quotes Susan Sontag, who characterizes aesthetic experiences as ‘detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation or approval.’ Evidently Sontag didn’t go to the movies much.”

The weather turned that night, and the next morning we went on a spectacular ski, following Tornado Alley south in bright sun through the woods, under Highway 55, across Bassett Creek, and around a loop through the white pines just north of Glenwood Avenue. We've walked these grounds many times, but had never skied them before. The freshness in the air was genuinely intoxicating. 

In order to make the most of it, I shoveled two feet of snow off the deck and oiled the track on the garage door, which was squeaking something terrible. (Alas! It still is.) Then I split a few pieces of the firewood stacked in the garage  into narrow strips for kindling, which will come in handy sooner or later. It won’t stay this warm for long.

The next morning the air was just the same, but the snow had crystalized during the thaw, and we left the skis at home during our morning ramble down alongside the creek.

Last night the rain arrived, slightly weird, but still atmospheric. 

This morning I was cleaning up some emails from Earth/Sky News and was cheered to learn that the universe, like me, is slowing down. The theory had been that it was not only expanding, but accelerating. New research offers a more reasonable view. In findings published November 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers argued that “the universe is in a phase of decelerated expansion.” 

Here's the gist: Early arguments for accelerated expansion were based on measurements of distance to faraway galaxies using Type 1a supernovas. These supernovas were regarded as the universe’s “standard candles,” but new research suggests that their brightness is related not only to distance, but also to the age of the stars that created them. Once you factor that information in, the data suggests that the universe expands and contracts like an accordion, rather than expanding and thinning out with relentless and ever-increasing speed.

I like that idea, and Empedocles would have liked it, too, I think.  

Advent Meditations

The Pope in Nicaea.

The new Pope. A wonderful man by all accounts, and better yet, he’s from Chicago!

A few weeks ago he paid a visit to Nicaea, in Turkey, in honor of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Bishops from many nations gathered there in 325—hundreds if not thousands of them—to deliberate a wide variety of issues. (Who paid for the lodging, the food, the enormous travel expenses? The Roman state.) 

At the top of the agenda was the question of whether Jesus existed before his birth in the manger in Bethlehem. The Arians said NO. At the council this position was ruled a heresy. It was deemed imperative to underscore the position (we can hardly call it a “fact”) that Jesus was of “one substance with the father” since the beginning of time, and perhaps well before.

To most people who were raised in Christian traditions the issue isn’t that important. For many, the most enduring result of the council was the introduction of a new prayer—the Nicaean Creed— alongside the somewhat shorter Apostle’s Creed. Most people find the Apostle’s Creed easy to remember. The Nicaean Creed? Not so much.  

At any rate, I never got the hang of it. Yet the rhetoric did sink in, to the extent that I began to wonder what a “substance” actually was, from the metaphysical point of view. I’m still wondering.

It’s a good question. But at Christmas time another question perhaps looms larger: Was Jesus ever really a baby? Would he be “of one substance” with the Father during that rudimentary phase in his earthly ontogeny?

It might seem like a frivolous question, if not a blasphemous one, but it cuts to the heart of the Christmas event. Aside from the lights, the music, the gatherings and the food, it seems to me that people are often moved by what I might call the rural simplicity and innocence of the event.

Let me suggest that Christmas is the most evocative time of the liturgical year, in part, because it's the least didactic. The gold, frankincense, and myrrh are dazzling and exotic; we don’t really care what they symbolize. The Star in the East could be any star, if it’s bright enough to attract our attention. (Stars are cool and mysterious, especially in the deep winter night.) We can forget, for the time being, the sometimes dour, gnomic, and prescriptive episodes in Jesus’s adulthood, and enjoy the aroma of balsam, the sweet buttery taste of a spritz, or the slightly edgy bite of a home-made pepper kaka, hot out of the oven. And also, perhaps, a vaguely delirious sense of cheer and hope.  

Family memories resurface. Some of them are “magical,” while others may remind us, painfully, of how naïve and self-centered we used to be—and probably still are. 

But there is no need to dwell on such things during these celebratory days of darkness and light. Better simply to relish the color, warmth, and togetherness that are pleasantly adrift on a mysterious something. Is it time? Or substance?

A Wild Week for Music

It wasn’t really that wild. I’m just trying to get your attention. But music arrives in many forms, and last week Hilary and I had the pleasure of listening to good deal of it.

It all started on Friday night. The moon was out, tinted by smoke from the forest fires raging in Manitoba. We were out, too, listening to rock-and-roll on the rooftop terrace of Brookview Community Center in Golden Valley. The event was a repeat of the Hopkins Class Reunion we attended last year, but for a different class. Hilary’s brother, David, was playing in the band again, and he’d gotten us complimentary tickets. 

Lively and distinguished?

The venue was classier, the food was slightly better, and the attendees seemed less frenzied, perhaps because of the larger venue and the more ample tables.

Most of the guests stayed inside, where the air was cleaner and it was easier to talk, but we sat out under the stars (only one of which was visible) listening to the music and chatting with spouses and friends of the band members. The band seemed slightly mellower, but also inspired by two new female vocalists. It was a memorable evening all around.

A few nights later Hilary’s other two brothers stopped over for “jazz night.” We’ve been doing this on a roughly monthly basis for at least twenty years. Everyone brings a few cuts, we take turns playing them, listening politely, commenting occasionally. It’s a great way to socialize and also to learn about new artists and forms of music.

Every month we wrap up the evening with pie. Hilary makes them, following in the footsteps of her mother, who made the pies and attended faithfully to the end, though she didn’t much like jazz. “I like the commentary,” she told us. She died a year ago at 97.

We keep track of the pieces we’re playing, and I type up a list later and send it around, sometimes manufacturing a “theme” after the fact. As you can see from our most recent gathering, our devotion to jazz is sincere but not exclusive:

July 2025: Jazz beyond borders

 Jeff / “Tin Roof Blues” / Herb Ellis (guitar) Roy Eldridge (trumpet), Getz (tenor) in straight-ahead 1957 performance

 John /  “Remember”  / Hank Mobley (tenor)  in1959 update of often recorded 1925 Irving Berlin tune, corny and sweet. To wit:

"Remember we found a lonely spot

And after I learned to care a lot;

You promised that you’d forget me not

 

But you forgot to remember"

 Hilary / “Fly with the Wind” (1964) mellow Lucky Thompson (tenor) with nice Hank Jones piano solo

 Paul / “Fuzzy” / Laura Jurd (Scotish composer / trumpet) in an upbeat, party-like New Orleans work w accordion & guitar             

 Jeff  /  “Seattle” Avishnu Cohen / young Jewish pianist in trio piece from album “Gently Disturbed”

 John / “Ka Ju Mot” / Albanian “folk” vocalist Elina Duli in slow, haunting piece with Colin Vollan (Swiss pianist) on ECM

 Hilary / “Reminiscence”/ a quieter side of Lucky Thompson from album “Lucky Strikes”

 Paul / “Little Opener” /Laura Jurd,  fun explosive arrangement with guitar and button accordion                       

 Jeff / “Ashé” /  Aaron Parks (piano)   Lyric and emotive jazz

 John / “After You’re Gone”/ rich modern harmonies and cookin’ solos on Nicolas Payton ensemble remake of 1915 tune

 Hilary / ”Siboney” / Cuban crooner/ballad from Los Super Seven album “Canto”

 Paul  / “Bonito Y Sabroso” / Cuban pianist Harold Lopez Nossa in live performance

A few days later we drove down to the West End theaters to see a matinee “encore” screening of the Met’s controversial production of Donizetti’s “Lucia de Lammermoor,” set in a nameless American Rust Belt slum rather than a 17^th century Scottish court. Donizetti’s music is very fine, but it didn’t jibe very well with the garish, seedy milieu, and several important elements in the plot were all but obliterated in the process of modernizing the story.

I didn’t like it … until I started to like it. The performance was lively, and slightly “cool,” all the ugly tattoos notwithstanding, and the singers were outstanding. Soprano Nadine Serra was spectacular in the title role, even with a bucket of blood splashed across her wedding dress. (She’d just murdered her newly wed husband with a fire extinguisher in a motel room.)

The next morning we headed downtown to see an exhibit of graphic art by Many Sully, a Sioux artist whose work dates mostly from the 30s and 40s. I’m including it in the lineup here because all art is in some sense musical, and because Sully’s work in particular draws upon repeated colors, patterns, and rhythms to achieve it effects. 

It’s a small exhibit, tucked into a room at the far end of MIA, but I’m glad we saw it. Most of the pieces consist of three-tiered panels with which Sully “depicted” famous personalities of her era and transformed them into native symbols.

Sully was raised in an aristocratic Sioux family, and she spent much of her adult life in New York City. I was interested to learn that she was related to the scholar Vine deLoria, Jr. When we got home I downloaded deLoria’s book, Spirit and Reason, in which he ridicules the Western philosophical establishment, pokes fun at his publisher, and tries to draw parallels between the Messiah and the Trickster figure who plays such a prominent role in Native American folklore. I can’t say that I fully caught the drift, but it’s definitely a subject worth investigating.

The next afternoon we returned downtown to attend a recital given by the vocal students at the annual Source Song Festival. The young performers had drawn their pieces from the standard romantic repertoire—Schubert, Wolf, Rachmaninov, Debussy, etc.­—and I shouldn’t have been surprised to see how many of the lyrics were of the “twittering birds,” “forest glen,” “lost love” variety.

No doubt, the pianists were as skilled as the singers. And if the lyrics sometimes teetering on the edge of schmaltz, one of the baritones redressed the balance by shaking the hall with a boisterous rendition of Charles Ives' "General William Booth Enters into Heaven."  

I'll spare you a blow-by-blow of the documentary we watched the next night, devoted to the career of eighteenth-century French composer Jean-Phillippe Rameau. Suffice it to say that music is often in the air-- 

or on the wall-- 

Or on the dining room table!

The Trouble with Transcendence

It was a fine weekend, cool and sunny, and gardening was on our minds. I sometimes file such thoughts under the heading “futile gestures,” based on decades of experience, but it did seem to be worthwhile addressing the large bald spot in the front yard, brought on by laziness, neglect, and two years of drought. And it’s hard to resist the urge to head down to the north-side downtown farmers’ market when the sun is low and bright and the neighborhood great-crested flycatcher is shrieking.

We arrived before eight only to discover that construction work has obliterated our favorite parking spots, and we ended up under the freeway overpass, happy to have found a slot but slightly worried if we’ll be able to get out of it later.

But these are fleeting anxieties when there’s life and color everywhere and your heart is swelling with the joy of the morning. We wandered the three long aisles, where the stalls often spread out into the street. Ignoring the vegetables, we focused on herbs, tomatoes, and those ever-illusive annuals that will grow well in shade yet offer bright summer-long color. Such plants don’t really exist.

Hilary had already planted some impatiens. We rejected the begonias and the torenia, and arrived back home with tomato plants and herbs. (I’d forgotten about browallias—my favorites—entirely!)

The wonderful smell of grilling bratwurst was everywhere, but we prudently returned home to a perfect late-spring lunch of bruschetta and grapes, after which we set to work planting. I prepared the soil in our little vegetable garden alongside the driveway, pouring on half-empty bags of manure and “soil enrichment” and then working them into the bed. Then Hilary got to work planting while I went out back to dig up some of the lily-of-the-valley that’s slowly creeping toward to deck, year by year.

At one point I noticed that Brendan, our neighbor across the street, was loading his canoe into the back of his pick-up, and I went over to chat.

“It’s such a nice day,” he said. “Sara and I are going out in the canoe. Have you heard of a place called the East Mississippi River Flats? It sounds like it would have lots of backwaters to explore.”

“Yes, I have heard of it,” I said. “I used to run a parking lot down there. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a launching place. It’s just a straight shot down the river from there. And how would you get back to your car?”       

We kicked around a few other ideas. “How about the Rice Lake Chain of Lakes? Or a simple paddle on Wirth Lake, which is practically right down the street?” Then we got to discussing what to do with our lawns. His looks pretty good. “You’ve got so many trees,” he said. “No wonder your lawn is struggling,”

“Yours is pretty good,” I said. “And Chad’s looks great. But he has full sun, and Sean told me the fertilizer company has already done four applications.”

We were soon on the neighborhood news—“Did you hear that Elfie’s furnace went out last winter?” By that time Brenden’s wife, Sara, had come around the house, and she and Hilary were already deep in conversation.

I realize there’s nothing extraordinary in all of this. On the other hand, maybe it’s a vision of perfect harmony, peace, and light, albeit on a very small scale.

While I was turning over the soil in our garden strip, I was reminded of a scene from Woody Allen's great early film Love and Death. One of the characters, I don’t remember who, says with great enthusiasm: “I have a piece of land…and I plan to build on it someday.” He’s holding a small piece of sod in outstretched hands.

On a loftier scale, I’m just now reminded of a few lines from T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets. that I became acquainted with at about the same time.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Even way back then, those lines irked me. Why not start knowing the place right now?

 

Christmas Moods

Scanning the shelves to find just the right book before heading off to the waiting room of a dentist, barbershop, or doctor's office can be a challenge. The one you select must be small enough to stick in a pocket, yet engaging enough to hold your interest, while also being dull enough so that you can let it go at a moment's notice, and perhaps forever. I can attest from experience that such a deliberation often takes place at the last minute

On a a recent trip to the doctor's office I selected a mid-sized trade paperback I hadn't thought about in decades: Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. (I'm tempted to admit that I had never thought about it at all, except that when I began to read it, I came upon passages I underlined decades ago, even a good ways into the book.)

Gellner divides human activities into three categories—the productive, the coercive, and the cognitive—hence the title: plough, sword, book. And he has a lot of insightful things to say about the follies of modern economists, atavistic hippies, and tendentious anthropologists. For example, he typifies Marx as the "ultimate bourgeois," and offers sound reasons for doing so. He pokes holes in the then-fashionable theories of Marshall Sahlins concerning the lifestyles of the Hadza people.

Where Hayek damns early man for his gregarious social morality, Sahlins praises him for his freedom from greed and, even more perhaps, for his freedom from the work ethic. Where nineteenth-century populists idealize the peasant, Sahlins' neolithic populism goes much further back and idealizes the hunter/gatherer. The rot had set in not with the first bourgeois, but with the first peasant.

 Here we catch a whiff of Gellner's wit, which can often be heard gurgling just beneath the surface of his prose. All the same, large sections of the book remain a bit abstract, because Gellner is writing a typology of cultural and social forms, not a history of civilization. For example, at one point Gellner asks: "How can it happen not merely that the weak, the swordless, overcome  the swordsmen, but that the whole organization and ethos of society changes, that Production replaces Predation as the central theme and value of life? Everything in the standard condition of agrarian life militates against such a miracle. Yet it did happen."

Gellner lists as many as fifteen factors that might have made such a transformation possible. He analyzes them, rejecting some, accepting others as possible, others still as even probable.

It strikes me that Gellner's analysis of the cognitive aspects of human life, while riddled with insights, also suffers somewhat from a failure to clearly distinguish between concepts, categories, and ideas. On the other hand, he's adept at ferreting out the contradictions inherent in nostalgic and utopian attitudes toward the past, for example:

The tendency of societies, especially small and simple societies, to have reasonably coherent visions of the world, to inhabit such a cosmos, has often been noted. The passing away of such coherent visions in complex and unstable societies, and its replacement by an impersonal, law-abiding, indifferent Nature, is a source of much recent romantic regret, poignantly expressed. The coherence of the world we have lost was thematic or stylistic rather than strictly logical. A fairly coherent picture was sustained by devices which evaded or ignored logic.  

This remark highlights Gellner's appreciation of patterns of social organization that "work" fairly well even though they don't really "make sense." He returns to the same theme at one point late in the book:

A man following traditional ideas is at least deploying something unlikely to be wholly false, and will at least fall in with the social proprieties of his culture. By contrast, given the infinity of possible truths, a man experimenting with new ideas is unlikely to be successful ... and at the same time is likely to be socially offensive.

We live in an age when the scientific method is strangely under attack by paranoid and often aggressive nay-sayers.

But Gellner's analysis, multifaceted and brilliant though it may be, inadvertently offers a clue as to why this might be so. In his treatment of cognition—concepts, categories, ideas, and empirical information and analysis—he has nothing to say about the important realm of images, imagination, and vision. That realm continues to be important, and available to us. Many people find both solace and meaning in the material that religions offer along those lines.

*   *   *

It being Christmas time, the current of my thought naturally drifts in that direction. One scholar who can supply the perspective to flesh out this dimension is the English philosopher and critic Terry Eagleton.

To call Eagleton merely a critic is to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him we’re reminded of philosophers and social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counter-puncher. He feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others. (I’m so out of touch, I thought  Spivak and Žižek were the same person!)

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009) It was written largely in response to the then-popular works of Hitchen and Dawkins trashing religious sentiment. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by Eagleton's grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers today are, that we live in the midst of several different "categories of being" and often partake of several simultaneously without contradicting any of them. Gellner would have agreed, I'm sure.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to the an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

He goes on:

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumbing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But once again, do we really have to choose between the two in every case?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romantics (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerrilla fighter.

Excesses of energy about, and Eagleton's insights and combativeness are both ever-present.

At this holy time, I'm not much in the combative mood. I enjoy seeing a pine tree covered in lights and colorful glass balls, tiny ceramic statues of the Holy Family sitting on top of the stereo, from which  the sweet, mellow harmonies of Dufay, Victoria, Palestrina and others waft across the room.

It's a different zone of thought, of being. Cookies get made, friends stop by, we take a walk in the pre-dawn snow. And a poem by Thomas Hardy drifts into view that I haven't thought about in years. I think you know it. Hardy spends a few stanzas describing a manger scene in which the oxen kneel before the infant Jesus. He concludes:

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

 

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.     

 

Twin City Book Fest: David Shields

The Saturday morning of the Twin Cities Book Festival marks the high point of the publishing year, at least for me. Sponsored by Rain Taxi, it's been held annually for almost a quarter of a century. I can remember the first one I attended, way back in 2002. It was held on one of the upper floors of the International Design Center, across Lyndale Avenue from the farmers' market on the Near North Side. The space was large but dark, the floors concrete, columns everywhere. My first book of essays, Mountain Upside Down, had just been published by Nodin Press, and I was naively enthusiastic about it. (It's now long out-of-print. I have two unopened cases in the basement. Let me know if you want a copy.)

That morning I traded a copy of the most recent print edition of MACARONI with Scott King, a letterpress printer who ran Red Dragonfly Books, for a copy of a fourteen-page, hand-tied, limited edition of Horace's Poem on Anger translated by Robert Bly.

But I'm suddenly reminded that I attended a book event a year or two earlier held in the Butler Building on the edge of the Minneapolis warehouse district, then still in its infancy as a district. Maybe not a Rain Taxi event, but very exciting stuff all the same. I was on the verge of buying a fine small-press edition of Patricia Hampl's poetry collection Resort but opted in the end for a smaller (and more affordable) eight-page chapbook containing Ronsard's poem "The Salad" translated by Wendell Berry.

The Rain Taxi event later moved down to the atrium of the Minneapolis Technical College, near Loring Park, and it was often lively to the point of frenzy in that bright yet modest space. One year I heard Stephen Pinker speak about the history of violence. With his thick, silver mane he looked like an eighteenth-century philosophe, and come to think of it, some of his controversial theories could have been lifted straight from Condorcet. Later I listened in as New Yorker staff-writer Larry Welschler told us all about "uncanny valley" and eight or nine other random but fascinating topics.

The festival's current location on the state fairgrounds is just fine with me: well-illuminated, food trucks outside, plenty of parking nearby. The event would be stimulating under any conditions, but for me, it offers an opportunity to reconnect with old pals from Bookmen days, writers I've gotten to know through the writer's union, and authors whose books I've editor and/or designed, a few of which I worked with recently but had never met face-to-face.

On top of that, there are the forums, the guest speakers, the used book sale, and the rows and rows of tables where small presses and self-published authors display their books.

Before the event last Saturday I took a look at the line-up and spotted one or two speakers that sounded interesting, including the translator Damion Searls. I also noticed that a few old friends (Cary Griffith, Theresa Wanta) would be there signing books at various times of the day. I drew up a schedule, but it was shot to hell the moment I arrived and noticed the author David Shields sitting alone in front of a camera at a table near the door. I sat down in the chair opposite and said hello.

"What's going on here?" I asked.

"I'm interviewing people. Would you care to answer a few questions?"

"Why not?"

I mentioned that I owned a copy of his book Reality Hunger, though I referred to it as Reality Bites, and added that I liked the aphoristic style. I told him it was the kind of book I liked to take up north; you could read a passage or two and ponder them for the rest of the day. I had found it to contain a much higher percentage of "winners" than the aphorisms of Novalis or Chamfort, for example.

There followed a lively conversation centered around some very interesting questions. Here are a few exchanges, cherry-picked, condensed, edited for length, and essentially fictionalized:

David: "What is the difference between 'nonfiction' and 'fiction'?"

Me: "Have you ever noticed that when we meet the author of a novel, the first thing we want to know is 'Did this really happen?'"

David: "I've written a few novels myself, and yes, I have found this to be true."

We arrived finally at the notion that a novel can't be said to be "true," but a good novel has the contours of truth.

Me: "Any interest in Peter Handke?"

David: "Not really. Though I did like Goalie's Anxiety at Penalty Kick."

Me: "That's one of the few of his works I haven't read. So you don't read much fiction. Name an author."

David: "I like certain novels by J.M. Coetzee. Elizabeth Costello. The title character goes around giving speeches about various things."

Me: "That reminds me of one of my favorite books: Julio Cortázar's Diary of Andrés Fava. It consists of a number of essays and fragments Cortázar deleted from a previous novel."

David: "I might like that."

 From time to time Shields took another look at his list of questions.

David: "What is the difference between truth and belief?"

Me: "Well, Ortega y Gasset says that we rely on our beliefs but we don't really think about them. When we think about something, we're trying it out, so to speak, to see if it offers a reliable concept or explanation."

David: "Does truth really exist?"

Me: "Certainly. But it would be a mistake to imagine we can ever know the truth fully."

At this point there ensued a lengthy discussion of historicism, during which I inexplicably failed to mention Vico's principle of verum factum; We can understand the things we've made ourselves.

David: "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Me: "I saw a ghost once in Cimarron, New Mexico. Something slightly uncanny. But if that realm exists, it doesn't seem to play much of a part in the larger scheme of things."

David: "Are you superstitious?"

Me: "Well, I have a glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary on my bedside table. But I don't think about it much. I got it at a party, a gift from a friend who had been raised Catholic and subsequently rejected everything about organized religion. The glow is fading. I need to put it out in the sun more before winter sets in."

At several points in our conversation, Shields directed my attention to his new book, How We Got Here, a slim shiny red volume with a quasi-mathematical formula on the cover: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Zizek (squared) equals Bannon.

I liked the bizarre string of associations, and I'm sure there's some insight to be drawn from its logic, but I was leery of wandering too deeply into politics, and I was pretty sure Shields wasn't at the festival to make a video of himself describing his own book to a stranger who hadn't read it. In fact, I've never read Melville. Nietzsche strikes me as mostly a shallow, confused, and hysterical thinker. More of a gadfly and social critic that a philosopher. I have trouble keeping Spivak and Zizek straight—I haven't read either of them—and I have had difficulty finding any book worth reading from the past half century of "literary theory," though as I looked at the cover David was holding in his hands, an image of Terry Eagleton's essay collection, Figures of Dissent, did flash through my mind.

The formula he drew my attention to seemed to be fleshing out a harrowing descent into chaos—the negative moment of a dialectic, rather than its developmental synthesis.

David's final question was: "Why are you here and not canvassing for Kamala Harris?"

My answer, in brief: "I'm a lifelong Democrat, I give money to the party. But I'm not really a grass-roots-movement kind of guy. And Minnesota is a reliably blue state."  It sounded a little lame.

I might have added, "On a day like today, I'd rather be here talking to you, looking at books, and hanging out with friends." 

Daylilies and the Spectre of Idealism

Every plant has its problems. For example, daylily blossoms only last for a single day. We've got a couple of clumps of Mary Todds in our front yard that are well established and currently at their peak. The blooms are staggered, which is nice, but the deer love to nip off not only the blossoms but also the buds. That's a second problem.

This year I put some green plastic fencing around one clump, and Hilary suggested we put some old netting that had been idling in the garage for decades around the other. This has preserved the blossoms ... but blooming daylilies don't look all that hot when seen through such fabrics. This morning I removed the netting from the clump under the piano window. The flowers look great! Will I remember to replace the net in position tonight. Who knows?

Wandering out back, I loaded some decaying leaves from the compost pile into a galvanized bucket and spread them around on the floor of our "cherry orchard," where I recently planted a turtlehead and Hilary transplanted some groundcover. That might sound like a grandiose name— "cherry orchard"— for a strip of land where, a few years ago,  I discovered two volunteer cheery trees amid the underbrush. But what better place to be grandiose, and playful, and a little imaginative, than in one's own back yard?  

I was enjoying the morning, unalloyed by the nagging thought that I wasn't doing anything productive, because I'd already done a few things. I sent a file to a client in Massachusetts to be proofed. I'd looked up some royalty figures for Norton. I emptied the dishwasher. I uploaded some files to SpeedPro to be made into posters.

One of them was for a rock band called Seth that will be playing at the Hopkins High School 50th reunion in a few weeks. My brother-in-law, David, was in that band, back in the mid-seventies. Will we "crash" the reunion just to see David up on stage? It's hard to say.

Settling down to a recent issue of the New Yorker, I spotted an essay by Adam Gopnick about the historian Charles Taylor. I was reminded of one of Taylor's earlier books, A secular Age, that I bought decades ago. I didn't think much of it at the time—it seems to be arguing for a utopian return to medieval guilds and  faith communities. To judge from Gopnik's critique, the new volume, which carries the vaguely portentous title Cosmic Connections, is cut from the same cloth.

Yet when I fetched my copy of A Secular Age from the basement. and opened it, my eyes immediately came to rest on a passage brilliantly exposing the poverty of materialist explanations of history, while underscoring the role played not only by concepts in general, but by ideals specifically, in historical development.

"In general, a new practice will have both “material” and “ideal” conditions; which of them we try to explain may depend on which is problematic. Why did a democratic revolution occur just then, and not before? The answer may be: because people hadn’t suffered from monarchical rule as much as they came to on the eve of the turn-over; or it may be because they began to see from some striking example that democracy brings prosperity (the draw of Europe?). But it might also because at that moment they had developed the repertory which allowed for a self sustaining democracy, as against just a revolt which changed one mode of despotism for another. And it may also be because democratic forms of rule came to seem right, and in keeping with their dignity, around that time. There is no good empirically-based reason to think that the second kind of explanation must always give way to the first. The weighting between the two can’t be determined a priori, but will be different from case to case."

But there is really no need to choose between the two. Material and conceptual (or spiritual, if you will) elements are at work at every moment of our lives.

At this point Taylor feels the need to explain in some detail what the interaction between ideas and conditions looks like, by considering the question of "how the new idea of moral order came to acquire the strength which eventually allows it to shape the social imaginaries of modernity." Good question.

He begins by mentioning the "discursive practices" of thinkers reacting to the devastations of the Wars of Religion, who felt the need to identify a basis of legitimacy unsullied by religious differences. Reaching further back in time, he draws our attention to the "domestication of the feudal nobility" between the 14th and 16th cen­turies.

"I mean the transformation of the noble class from semi-independent warrior chieftains, often with extensive followings, who in theory owed allegiance to the King, but in practice were quite capable of using their coercive power for all sorts of ends unsanctioned by royal power, to a nobility of servants of the Crown/nation, who might often serve in a military capacity, but were no longer capable of acting independently in this capacity."

All of this makes perfect sense to me. In fact, it's a fine description of the dialectical process itself, though that specific word, "dialectic," doesn't appear in it. Taylor clearly wants to stick close to events, hoping to avoid even a whiff of Hegelian meta-history or teleology.

A Secular Age is 800 pages long, and I'm suddenly convinced I'll have to get back to it soon.

But maybe not right now.

 

A Note on Marilynne Robinson

During my days on the loading dock, my colleagues and I used to comment wryly on the exaggerations and absurdities that routinely appeared in the promotional copy on the books we were checking in. I was reminded of that the other day when I glanced at the blurbs on the back of Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam. In the first line it's described as a "grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book" that will leave the reader "shaken." That's not the impression I got while reading a few of the essays. To my mind it would more accurate to describe the book as modest, astute, carefully focused, cautiously articulated, thought-provoking, and leavened with only occasional touches of gentle irony. But I suppose such phrases are unlikely to sell many books. Post-modern readers want to be shaken, not stirred.

I heard Marilynne read maybe ten years ago at a book convention. She was soft-spoken, mournful, almost lethargic, yet animated by a smoldering inner fire that kept your attention. I don't remember what she was reading; the passages might have been from her novel Home.

After the event I went up to ask her a question. "You've devoted several essays," I began, "to the connections between Marguerite of Navarre and John Calvin—" Before I had time to come to the point, she said,  in a quiet but strangely troubled and insistent tone of voice, "But why would you be interested in that?" It wasn't a challenge or a put-down, as far as I could tell, but a serious inquiry. To be honest, I wasn't sure what she was driving at. What I might have said in reply was, "I like Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron quite a bit, but have an altogether negative impression of John Calvin. I don't see the connection." I see now that if I had, she might have responded, in a courteous voice tinged with humor, "Well, if you'd actually read the pertinent essays in my collection The Death of Adam, you'd have seen the connection." But there was a line of eager readers forming behind me, and it didn't seem the proper time to elaborate on the sources of my interest.

A few days ago Hilary forwarded to me an article that Marilynne wrote recently about Joe Biden. I liked it so much that I tracked down my copy of The Death of Adam and gave it another look. I read an essay called "Psalm Eight," in which Marilynne describes the role religious feeling played in her childhood.

"I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like "faith" or "belief." I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it."

That's a remarkable passage, I think, To which she adds: "I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest."

From there I turned to a piece titled "Puritans and Prigs." Marilynne likes Puritans, and thinks they've been given a bad rap. She hates prigs, though she sees them nowadays almost everywhere she looks. At one point she writes:

"The way we speak and think about Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective ignorance to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved of." Ouch!

 At another point: 

"For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature—in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag."

These are fine examples, I think, of Marilynne's even-tempered (yet scathing) criticisms of the current state of critical judgment. Meanwhile, she seems to knows a great deal about Puritanism herself, both the Genevan original and the North American offspring. In fact, the thirty-five page essay titled "Marguerite de Navarre" is almost entirely devoted to the career of John Calvin, about which I, for one, knew almost nothing before reading it. It's a long and eloquent narrative, and at its heart lies the notion that divine energy is real and exultation is something valuable to share it. On a more prosaic level, she concludes:

"There are things for which we in this culture are clearly indebted to [Calvin], including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in "the humanities." All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva—in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline."

Her assertion that American culture and institutions owe more to Continental than to English precedents is an intriguing one, and it seems to jibe with other treatments of the subject—for example, Guido de Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism.   

Marilynne's judgments are finely put, rather unlike the hysterical tone so common nowadays, and her prose has a kind of purring density that requires close attention. It reminds me more of Sir Thomas Browne than Hunter Thompson. She doesn't use Bible references to "prove" her points, but rather, offers glosses from afar that may, perhaps, alter our perspectives. For example:

"I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say that opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it."  

But what about Marguerite of Navarre? Marilynne admits in the first paragraph of her essay that the appearance of Marguerite's name in the title is mostly a deception; readers would be unlikely to take up an essay devoted to John Calvin. And she may be right. Yet the association isn't entirely arbitrary. The two almost certainly knew each other, and Marilynne  makes the case, albeit briefly, that Calvin was deeply influenced by Marguerite's religious poetry, though she doesn't reproduce any of it. Meanwhile, she doesn't think much of Margaret's Heptameron, casually lumping that collection of moral tales in with Boccoccio's much less interesting, though far more famous, predecessor, The Decameron. With that judgment I cannot agree.

I requested a copy of The Grammar of Silence: a Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry from the library. It was the only thing they had that might serve. I expect it will be a scholarly slog that I'll dismiss in a few pages as worthless. But who knows?

 I'll let you know how it turns out.