Pilgrims on the Street

Why does it say Salt Rising Bread on the package if it is already risen? Why do they call it Cream of Wheat when there is no cream in it? Why is it spelled sal-mon and pronounced sammon? If it is Norfolk & Western and Baltimore & Ohio, why is it just Burlington Northern? Why is there no sand in a sandwich? And why do they call them green beans when the beans are white and just the little sleeves are green? Why is there a part of the Mass that sounds like “Minnie Mouse”? And why are there no fathers and mothers in Walt Disney cartoons, just uncles and aunts? Why are we Catholics and everybody else is a Protestant?

With these and a thousand other questions that sprouted in my brain by the second I tormented my parents in meal time discussions, which were often shut down by fiat. In this irritating behavior I was probably not unlike many bright young minds scheduled to become neurotics or criminals, but as I think back on those days, I marvel at what I did not marvel at. In the face of dozens of astounding realities, my mind tended to be stupefied with wonder. Those things were there, too large or too outrageous to even question. They were just there. And so was I, dumb flatfooted in front of them.

Come to think of it, that was the way it was with a lot of things. Things of one kind were there and questionable, things of another kind were in a separate world and perfectly consistent, beyond question, and absolute. Even though I could not be said to understand it, Transubstantiation was one of these, why nuns and priests were nuns and priests was another. They had been there since the beginning and were as immutable and absolute as the rock ridges on the mountains and the thunderous locomotives on the railroad. And as fearful.

Somehow the street things were beyond question too, though completely dissociated in my mind from the church things and the movie things and the railroad and mining things. The street was a world in which I lived with my dad, outside Church and somewhere in history where stories from McGuffey’s readers and newsreels and the Reader’s Digest and his life on the road and the rails mingled with the strange creatures we met on our daily walks through town. About these I did not ask why, I simply beheld.

They may as well have been fabulous creatures like the ones I occasionally met in juvenile versions of Bulfinch’s mythology. They were all humans, and that I did not question; I suppose I didn’t even raise that question. When we would see one of these creatures, I would look at my dad and he would look at me and grin and shake his head to indicate he was as puzzled as I, and we would pass on.

Take Wes. Wes was an aging, lumbering fellow whose hat looked as if it had been chewed up by dogs and his baggy clothes as if they had been wallowed in, though he always wore a tie. He rolled rather than walked, his bag of newspapers balanced on his left hip, his right hand always extended to offer passersby a copy of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph or the Sunset News. Well, not offer, exactly; he would thrust the paper into the reading space of each face he saw. Of particular importance to him were the photos on the front page which he would point to with his thumb and say, “purty pitcher, purty pitcher,” regardless of whether it was a picture of a lady or a train wreck. On the infrequent days when there was no photo, he was known to stomp into the editorial offices of the newspapers and demand to know how he was supposed to sell papers with no pitchers. He was said to have a large number of children in a ramshackle house in the west end of town.

Or the man who stood in front of Monkey Wards, as we called it. We never knew his name. His eyes were like tunnels of darkness and his face carried deep pock marks. The tattered sign he wore on a chain around his neck explained that he had been injured in a mine explosion and had received no compensation. He carried a tin cup in one hand and a cane in the other. I never saw him move from his place, but he was said to be picked up and deposited there daily by family “in a big fancy car,” some liked to say. He never moved except to shake his head each time someone walked near him, when he would say, always with the same pleading request, “please don’t do that, please don’t do that.”

Mr. Comer was another victim of the mines. He had lost both legs in a mine accident when a slate roof sheared them off and left him with a family to support. He had somehow built the cart in which he sat and had rigged it with a bicycle chain he could turn with his strong arm, moving it on the sidewalk each day from spot to spot where he sold newspapers, pencils, chewing gum, and so on. Also wearing a tie, Mr. Comer was a cheery man who loved to talk, and he usually had a cluster of folk around him throughout the day.

Though many boys like me also sold newspapers, neither he nor Wes ever complained that we were cutting into their businesses, which we were. There was a kind of code on the streets, a fellowship we might call it. Beyond that I would not try to say what spiritual bond kept us from the kind of greed and backstabbing that ran up and down our streets like cholera. When this disease showed itself in obvious or subtle ways, my dad (and my mom too) had a few words, “big shots . . . Republicans.” The good guys were miners, railroaders, working men, small shop owners, and the honest poor. We watched, and identified with, The Grapes of Wrath and Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

Howard, too, a blind man who became my friend, earned his living on the streets by begging in a dignified way. He had a few pencils in his cup, he said, to keep the cops from calling him a beggar, and he wore a suit and tie, always a white shirt with fraying collars, a Stetson hat, and he kept clean and trim from his tiny room in one of the cheap hotels that catered to the less classy railroad traffic. There stacks and stacks of 78 records circled his always-made bed, mostly jazz, but also the recordings for the blind sent him each month from Louisville. When he had lost his sight in an accident with a car battery as a boy, he had been sent to a school for the blind by the State, but, he complained, “they never taught me anything I could use to make a living.” So he stood on the street, running his business from eight to five, taking a lunch break at Tom’s or Jimmy’s or Harry’s restaurant, where I would sometimes sit and say, “peas at four o’clock, potatoes at ten, burger at six.” Back on the street he would hum or whistle jazz tunes, bob his head, and tap his cane. When it rained, he stood under awnings or theater marquees.

There were others on the street who could not even pretend to make a living. Some were crippled (a word we are no longer allowed to use) from various causes, some were harmless people who were later rounded up and sent to asylums to keep our city beautiful for tourists and customers. Yes, by those same respectable big shots and Republicans. Part of the “other America” as they were later called by Michael Harrington in a book that John F. Kennedy cited when he campaigned in West Virginia. In later days, it sometimes seemed to me that half the city consisted of this other America. Then, they were just the people on the street.

Two such people, extremely different from each other, were June and Glenn. Their only resemblance was that, according to the fancified experts, they were twelve-year-old minds in their twenty-something bodies. They lived on the street, occasionally being fetched up by their families, sometimes taken in by the Union Mission or the Salvation Army, sometimes (June especially) corralled by my mom for a “sanrich,” as June called them, and a rigorous cleansing.

My dad and I were attractive to them because we worked in the movie theaters, a glamorous world where there were not only movies but stage shows (Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, the Three Stooges, even a production of Tobacco Road). And my dad and I handled the popcorn concession. In a room behind the stage, we popped endless kettles of popcorn which were stored and moved to rooms near the concession stands of two theaters. The popcorn came in fifty- or one-hundred pound bags, the coconut oil in fifty-gallon drums. The popped corn was stored in five-gallon cans and moved on a wooden cart. Unlike Tom Sawyer, we did not have to do anything to attract people who wanted to help. Glenn and June always knew they could make a quarter, bum some cigarettes, and eat as much popcorn as they wanted.

Back then street people had no label, and we did not deal much in labels in those days, at least not for the people my dad and I knew in our rambles. They were what could be called the walking wounded of our culture, the least of these as Jesus called them. There was Sy, who talked to no one but movie stars on the posters outside the theaters, chatting as with old friends and occasionally frowning and giving the villains what-for. And mute Edgar, whose business it was to clean the streets, picking up pieces of paper and cigarette butts and storing them all in cloth bundles he tied around his neck with string until, coming at you, he resembled a department store on the hoof. And Clarence, who had seen his father shoot himself with a shotgun and had from then on called himself Clark Gable and spoke only of the movies he had made and would soon make.

As I remember these people and the way I saw them then, I don’t think I am amiss in referring to them as “creatures,” for they were God’s creatures, and my way of knowing them must be something that I learned from my father. I don’t think I felt pity or compassion for any of them. Rarely, I believe, did we feel impelled to "help" them. More, I felt something less easy to characterize, beyond anything a sociologist could classify. In some distant way, they were fellow creatures on the way, and my regard for them was something like the fellowship of pilgrims. Thus, my education from my father, who then asked me one day as we walked home from the theaters, “do you think I could be a Catholic?” But that is another chapter.

Mole # 4

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #4

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 4 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

In which the Mole turns Distributist and reveals his darker purpose.

The Mole worketh within the bureaucracy, but not always. On Thursdays he flees the maze and hitchhikes to Cookeville, where he joins his fellows in the Chesterton Society of Middle Tennessee, a small but hardy band of fellows currently reading G. K. Chesterton’s An Outline of Sanity and attempting to plumb the meaning of GKC’s “Distributism” or Distributivism,” as it is sometimes called. We have tossed (note the mole tie-in!) the topic about for several years and lately have been trying to understand it in depth and ask the question, is it feasible? Or as some critics suggest, is it merely a romantic fantasy, of no application in the world of Wal-Mart and Obama socialism?

When Chesterton and Belloc first talked of Distributism almost a hundred years ago, England had already been wracked and transformed by the evils of modern industrialism, and the Servile State (as Belloc called it) already seemed to have won. To us moles, hammered by tractors and under siege from new poisons, traps, and incessant attacks by the new industrial farming, so it seemed. Besides, Karl Grundsow Marx, who holed up in the British Museum and wrote cloudy words that plunged millions into a new slavery, had determined that all was determined in history, so what’s the point of chattering about it like nutty squirrels?

At root, Distributism visualizes a society in which individuals possess spiritual and economic freedom through the ownership of private property, preferably land. Its vision is akin to Jeffersonian agrarianism, and that is why Chesterton and Belloc wrote for The American Review in the 1930’s, along with the Southern Agrarians. Down deep, this is a radical vision of what society ought to be, and we moles, relishers of roots and radishes and radicals, understand. We also know that radix malorum est cupiditas, for where real freedom exists for the right thing to be done, the freedom exists for the seven deadlies to flourish like weeds.

Critics of the Distributist vision complain that it is impractical, unrealistic, romantic, etc. In The Outline of Sanity, Chesterton takes those criticism head on. First, he says, there is a vast illusion in society that the freedom talked of by Distributists already exists in society and that it is threatened by Socialism and Capitalism. People really believe, he says, that private enterprise is really in our lives and in the society around us. People who speak this way—“those people are so blind and deaf to all the realities of their own daily existence.” “We have already accepted everything that anybody of intelligence ever disliked in socialism. . . .Capitalism has done all that Socialism threatened to do.”

Here, the Mole applauds his webby paws and chortles like a whistle pig. What did I tell you in the last missive? That bureaucracy works by expansion, that its genetic goal is to include more and more within its power, which is a blinding, controlling power, a bit like chemical fertilizer. Bluntly, the bureaucracy of the society in which you live now has already absorbed and enlisted you as “a servant of the State.” For such as person, “from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep again, his life is run in grooves made for him by other people, and often other people he will never even know. He lives in a house, that he did not make, that he does not want. He moves everywhere in ruts; he always goes up to his work on rails. He has forgotten what his fathers, the hunters and the pilgrims and the wandering minstrels meant, by finding their way to a place. He thinks in terms of wages, he has forgotten the real meaning of wealth. His highest ambition is concerned with getting this or that subordinate post in a business that is already a bureaucracy.”

That world exists, says GKC, and it is this world. Distributism is a philosophy that challenges it by insisting that a person should be more than a function of the State. So our first task is to rid ourselves of the enormous illusion that we are free and independent persons gaily living our lives outside the 9-to-5 grind. The grind is everywhere we are and we are slaves to it now. A mole already in a trap raving about Socialism encroaching on his freedom is a bit of a, well, fool?

So, a frustrated Chestertonian asked in our Cookeville enclave, what are we to do to re-establish the right proportions in the State? A fair question. If we are blind, how shall we see? And what things can we do? I will explore this question more in Missive # 5.

I think GKC is urging us, first, to take off our blinders and peep, at least like us moles, at the light above. We are already slaves of the State, and each day we become more and more unfree. Second, stop talking tommyrot about Socialism. We are already imprisoned by global Capitalism and its offspring, a socialist State created by regulations and governed by a bureaucracy. The question right now is, not IF we shall have a Socialist Healthcare system, but HOW MUCH MORE of one than we already have?

The relentless expansion of bureaucracy I talked about last time has included us in the most radical way: as diminishing persons. Not only unfree, but blind to what is happening to us. Here in the bureaucracy I burrow in at the moment, no one knows quite what I am and what I am for. I am asked to perform tasks that could be given to a sixth-grader. Performing such tasks is not the problem; I am happy to follow in the humble tracks of saints and servants. The problem is that we do not call things by their names and delude ourselves into believing that the purpose of a bureaucratic society is to help persons be free and fully human.

It is not. It is exactly the opposite. Any opossum or concentration camp prisoner could tell you that. Check the tatooed ID on your arm or cellphone..

Mole # 3

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 3

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 3 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

The roots get all tangled down here. I’m used to that in unweeded gardens; fie upon them, as my friend Hamletish Mouldywarp mought say. What I mean is, things get crowded and it’s hard to see what’s what. The whole point of gardening and making good lawns is to keep things separate-like, and not all muddled up so they can fruit and flower as they might serve the needs of moles and men. Here at the Department of Human Resurfacing, the point is, if I can find a point in it, is to take the radicals and either strangle them or distort them beyond recognition.

As I said in # 2, my first job here was to learn how to be an un-mole by not asking any questions that start with why? Whenever I see an A that looks as if it might connect with a B, scotch that, strangle that, stuff it down a deadend hole right now before it leads somewhere. If a mole could scream so human ears could hear, my existence down here would sound like one long Dostoevskyan howl. Now, you may say, if it’s all that godawful, why do people want it? Why do they feed and fertilize it with unnatural chemicals to keep it going?

Take this, for instance: my co-worker Candace Mouldywarp, a cousin, slams down the phone the other day and says, “people get so nasty when they’re getting everything for free.” See, a good root system is meant to nourish things, not choke them to death. Here, in the Department of Human Refamishing, things appear to be what they aren’t, and when that happens, all is lost. Consider: in this and a thousand places like it, lies festoon the walls. Love that word, festoon, a string of flowers (yummy!), but these are all fake flowers, pictures of flowers and natural scenes with messages attached about DESTINY and SUCCESS and MOTIVATION and THE ESSENCE OF TODAY and such. Like the poison literary candies artificed by the Soviet Writers Union in Stalin’s (and Obama’s?) times, they are meant to lie, lie, lie.

The overwhelming message is that we are here to help you! Why if Great Grandfather Benedictus T (T for terrafirm) Mouldywarp could see these verbal atrocities tacked onto sentimental scenes, he would erupt above the surface and cry out plagues! Dig deeper and hide from the surface lies! We can smell lies, you know, we moles, they smell like strychnine laced with cyanide and sweetened with almondine syrup. Gophers go for them every time, but moles know better, and that is why I am here with these missives, dear readers, to sniff out the lies.

The fact is that the Human Refashioning workers are not here to help people but to process them. And the processors are eaten up by the process. End and means are muddled to the point that one worker exclaimed just the other day, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” Caution, love, we’re not supposed to know that. Verge on vertiginous truths such as that and you will be in danger of becoming human again.

Wait, wait, you cry. How can you confuse evil bureaucratic systems such as the GULAG and the Nazi concentration camps with the benign, beneficent human servicing agencies of our beloved system, which feed and clothe and employ people? The answer is that there is no confusion here, the confusion is structured into the system itself through two means: distancing and expansion. The law of love left by the Divine Yeshua is the opposite of a bureaucratic system which is designed to distance the deed from the doer. When I respond to a needy or beggar mole, I give to that fellow mole and I join him in a recognition of our total and mutual dependence on . . . well, you know Who I mean. Bureaucracy distances the hand and the gift more and more until I and love and gift and giver become root-jumbled. A lie: that the State is God and on him do the poor depend exclusively.

And expansion: the lesson of Communism and Hitler’s National Socialism is that the secret to mass murder is expanding the bureaucracy to include more and more people as murderers. The Hitler jugend and the Communist Young Pioneers both enlarged the state machine to include youth and children who were taught the lies and committed to telling them. When everyone is part of the bureaucracy, everyone is a slave and everyone becomes a liar. When denouncing your parents becomes a patriotic duty, then the State has become God. And from what I hear from the mole network, denouncing ones parents for racism, sexism, and non-political correctness has become daily fare (not tasty) for the educational bureaucracy.

You see, the rootlet of the great bureaucracy I work in is only a tiny offshoot of the main tree. Even the Congress itself is an offshoot. The main tree is the educational system, and to find out about that, I listen at night to the tales of fellow mole Woody Mouldywarp, named for a president who brought in the federal income tax and the concept that the people is a dumb mob to be led—sort of like landless peasants—which they were rapidly becoming. Woody works underground in the school system

Woody says that all you need to do to know the secret lies that power the culture is listen to the students and the teachers in the schools. Nearly every standard phrase they use is a betrayal of something good. Of course the chief nutrient fed to the roots is relativism, which appears in nearly everything they say. The ritual of relativism that teaches the students is conducted as follows: a controversial topic—say abortion—is introduced for discussion. All the students are invited to express their feelings and opinions. Arguments based on reason are immediately dismissed as “ideological” (Bill O’Reilly, former high school teacher, you learned your lesson so well!) The teacher carefully guides the class to the overwhelming conclusion: no-one has the answer, all opinions are equal in value, there is no truth, and school is a place where you are turned into a slave. “Don’t go there” is the new motto of anti-reason.

So as I shuffle the papers and do the intake forms, I ask clients (as they are called) to sign sway their rights, their views, their human inheritance, the last shreds of their southern culture, pretty much the way they sign away their right to farm rationally at the Department of Agriculture Office a block away. “What is to constitute good behavior? For that question obviously carries its own answer on its head. Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behavior.”—Woodrow Wilson

As a mole, I watch and wonder. In the 1930’s it was a matter of taking over farms. Now, in the Department of Human Re-organ-izing, it’s a matter of taking over souls.

Mole # 2

Underground Missive # 2

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #2 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

. . . take time to marvel at his adaptations. Most transfixing are his front paws -- large, powerful things with claws perfectly designed for digging. That's one shown at the left. After the mole's paws, the most interesting adaptations are those you don't see. For example, underground animals wouldn't want dirt clogging their ears, so mole ears, while present, aren't to be seen. And in the tunnels' perpetual darkness, of what use are eyes? Moles do have eyes, but they're tiny slits covered with thin skin. Moles also have nostrils, but they open sideways, not forward, so dirt doesn't plug them as the mole tunnels forward.

So reads some website or other. And I am sure by now you have done your own googling or yahooing and found that my name, i.e., Mouldywarp, is the ancient English name for the common mole. Also called a “dirt-tosser,” which is an apt description of what we burrowers do. We dig tunnels underground and are not particularly particular about what we do with the soil. We are perfectly suited to the task of burrowing into the bureaucracy. From our appearance, we look like useful drudges that can serve the purposes of a being that depends upon endless systems of tunnels, and that cannot see or hear much of what is going on inside the bowels of the bureaucrat beast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! In fact, when we are not suspected of seeing and hearing and sniffing about, regarded merely as a dumb species, that is when we know the most of what is happening around us. How think thee we have survived nearly everywhere on the planet, friend, when gardeners and farmers spin out endless methods and theories for gassing us, trapping us, grinding us, choking us to death?

So let this be a warning, bureaucracies. There will always be moles. There will always be Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs and outraged citizens using their wise claws and snouts to see what you really are and what you are really about in your GULAGS. Respect us, dear reader, remember that we are not the species killing our own young or undermining our own existence with debt and taxes.

Take, for instance, a minor moment in the office where I burrow about. I appear bored and stupid during a conference call of excruciating mindlessness when suddenly I hear this from a county supervisor of something or other: “It has come down from Obama [always here spoken with a tone of hushed reverence] that there will not be a single corner in the nation that is not served by free or cheap public transportation.” This stunning piece of news was followed by an announcement of opening new routes of public busses that will network across the state and even connect with Amtrak. Drivers are to be hired. Routes are to be GPS-ed. Computer programs will be “enhanced.”

Now I ask you, have you learned of this from any other source? A major policy slipping down through the bureaucratic system, unnoticed even by the Foxes of the earth. A fait accompli, no less. A tentacled extension of the fabled Stimulus monster. Ah, you see, there is much going on underground that only moles can detect. A shiver in the earth’s crust, a seismic quake, a tectonic shift. Something is going on: realities are coming into existence of which the country is not aware until it sees them already operating.

When no one is looking at work, I read and ponder the new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, now uncensored and published in a new translation. If you want to know how bureaucracy worked in Soviet Russia, read this book. If you want to know how the same kind of bureaucracy is coming to this country, become a mole in the system Obama is creating. What you will learn is that what most people take as reality is being redefined daily. The Soviets did that so successfully for seventy years that the unwary simply no longer knew anything.

You object, and rightly so. The mole writing this works in a pleasant office with (mostly) pleasant people, mostly women. Like all bureaucrats they process endless stacks of paper, write down information, and file it in folders or computer programs. What could be sinister here? The secret is that in a bureaucratic universe nothing looks sinister: the maidens who filed index cards on the concentration camps looked sweet and talked of their weekends. On the surface it seems benign enough. But moles know that “on the surface” is a very incomplete picture of the garden. What is distinctive about bureaucracies—from ancient Sumeria on—is that they are non-teleological. The one question one never asks in here is “why?” If one (foolish as this writer) does, he meets with shrugged shoulders, sighs, uncomprehending stares, or censorious looks.

We will come back to this in Missive # 3. But permit me a digression. In my humble view, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century were Sigrid Undset and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They are now mostly unknown and dismissed in the American university, passed over for third-world and minority-culture scribblers no mole would allow in the garden. In 2005, I talked about Solzhenitsyn for an hour in my Utopia/Dystopia class and then asked if any of the 35 students had ever heard of him. No. I returned to my office which I shared with other part-timers and expressed my astonishment, only to have four teachers, ranging in age from 25 to 55, say “who?”

Undset, a Catholic who opposed the Nazis with her life, and Solzhenitsyn, who opposed the Communists with his life, are both great writers whose works . . . well, no need for panegyrics. Read them yourself. In 1985 Solzhenitsyn was one of the most well-known people in the world. His works were read and taught from high school to graduate school and his life was well known. What happened? He was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. In it he said, in a nutshell, that though the Communist world was intolerable, the West was no model to follow—corruption, moral decadence, homosexuality, pornography, hatred of religion. The next morning the New York Times and the Washington Post flushed Solzhenitsyn into the lowest sewers of history, and he became an unperson. No one taught him any longer—what are you, a fascist reactionary? One still finds his works at the Good Will, but not in the university.

Here, read his speech for yourself: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html


I’ll be back,

Mole Series # 1

Note: the following four entries are from the Mole series posted on my former truewest blog. The fifth mole piece was posted on May 20 (see list).

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1
Note: The following sad piece of cultural detritus washed up on my leaf-strewn lawn in the mouldy, mouldy month of October. Soaked through with tears and small rice beer, it was encircled by Chinese rubber bands, and apparently tossed onto my premises by unseasonably heavy rains occasioned, no doubt, by global seething.

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

By which title you are to understand, dear happenstance reader, that I am a mole of the burrowing, semi-blind kind, a group of which is called by common tradition a labor, which is an apt description of what we do: we labor blindly. Our particular clan, the Mouldywarps of Yorkshire, once migrated to White County, Tennessee, and there let that matter rest.

Here, fallen upon hard times, I labor in a bureaucracy of the State, for vole crumbs and roots. My great great something Grimm-Molus, Viscount, said it all: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself."

Not any more. As my cousin the philologist, Warpus Root-Searcher, informed me, a bureau is a French desk covered with baize (yum!), and a –cracy means power. A bureaucracy is a power desk that seeks to dominate everything through rules, and a bureaucrat, no matter how mild in appearance, is nothing put a power addict seeking to devour. Satan, my grandfather Luminous Mouldywarp declared, is the supreme bureaucrat (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).

These missives from a mole are meant to deepen and understand exactly what it means to live in a State dominated and constituted by bureaucracy. Max Weber, the supposedly great (but very important) founder of sociology, said several prophetic things about a society under bureaucracy. One, he lauded a supremely efficient system based on hierarchy and rules that would supplant the traditional hierarchies composed of highly individualized (and therefore unpliable) human beings; two, he realized that bureaucracies could become inefficient when they tried to deal with individual persons and cases, which tend to become troublesome, have elbows and other odd characteristics, and often rebel against those who are only trying to serve their greater good.

Though only a semi-blind mole, I was once able to stay behind after closing hours in the Smithsonian and view an extraordinary exhibit of 19th century photographs of West African chiefs. I was, simply, stunned, and at first I did not know why. Then it came to me as I stood staring at photo after photo of chieftains staring directly at the camera: these men know exactly who they are, without self-doubt or irony or insecurity. Take any lineup from modern times, prisoners or welfare seekers or employees or students, and one can immediately see the contrast. Right away there is the fear that “I don’t really stand in my own shoes, I am waiting for definition from the system which I inhabit or clues from the passing scene of opinion; in fact I am a walking hunger for identity and what I am about, what so many of us are all about, is that desperate hunger, that erasure of the fear that my entire life—if I dare to think of all that in one moment—might amount to nothing after all.”

I am sure that there are other lineups that would yield the same impression as those African chiefs: saints, for instance; and occasional persons in our world who do in fact have complete affirmation down to their toes. One sees them occasionally, even from down here in the grass and roots where true moles dwell. Even a mole can be secure in moleness, as can that wretched cat that comes hunting me. But even being hunted can be wholly authentic because the fear is real, not neurotic.

But now, dear reader of this desperate missive, I am, as the poet said, losing myself, piece by piece, or so I fear. What I try to hold onto just now is my very moleness, which I have brought from the garden and am trying to reprise in the bureaucratic office to which I am confined many hours a week.

More to come.

The Rambler

Note: as promised, here is my childhood narrative. As I brainstormed and fretted--the work of all writers--I found that what I had intended to do at the first required a kind of introduction, which follows below. Perhaps the subject I started with in my brainstorming will appear in another piece. --RKC

The Rambler

When I think of my father, I think of him next to me, walking the streets in the morning mists and fog that rolled down from East River Mountain into the deep cut where the railroad ruled everything in our miniature metropolis. Bluefield, West Virginia, was indeed a small city then, distant from nearly everywhere but close to New York and Chicago because of the peoples on its streets: Greeks, Italians, Russians, Spaniards, Hungarians, Poles, Chinese, Germans. The railroad brought them all into this high Allegheny country at the edge of the Blue Ridge and here, together with the colored people, as we called them then, and the mountain people who lived in the hollows and mountain fastnesses of Virginia, they made up the rich America I knew. It was the kind of knowing we all enjoy are when we are young, the knowing of wonderer with constant questions about the cosmos and its colorful tribes. It was the knowing people can have when they walk everywhere, which is what we did then. My father never owned a car—“every time you turn the wheel, they cost you money”—and his very existence for me was that of a man ambling through the streets of a wondrous city.

Sure, it didn’t always seem so romantic then, especially as I grew older and callow, but those early journeys were primitive and fabulous, indeed, me at five with long, golden locks tagging along on Odyssean ventures into a strange country, standing in fearful awe next to the tracks of the Norfolk and Western—fabulous, mysterious names: Rock Island Line, Baltimore and Ohio, Burlington Northern, Louisville & Nashville, the Southern, Lackawanna, Union Pacific, names on boxcars as indelible in my memory as the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism: “Why did God make you?”—feeling the thunder of the big wheels as they rolled through the fog, seeing the red glow in the smokestack of the switch engines, and smelling the sour steam and metal sweat of the passenger locomotives, gods from some other world.

Now it seems to me that I cannot separate my walks with my father on those strange streets from my first education about the world. More, I cannot separate my father from his role as Chiron, the teacher and guide of the Greek heroes, or from his constant joy at showing me the things of this world. Now I can confess the juvenile impatience of being shown the same things over and over or hearing the same stories ad nauseam, but when I was five, eight, twelve, the newness was still on the places and people he delighted in showing me. Sitting perched on stools in Harry or Tom’s or Jimmy’s restaurants, hearing the noises of the waiters and kitchens and smelling the rich foods, hearing my father draw out men’s stories of foreign lands and labors, meeting the black-faced miners who worked underground and the conductors and engineers who knew the secrets of trains: I would happily go back to those places and days and be with my Dad, a teller of tales who was always showing me something new. I heard my first Jewish words (schlemiel, mensch, goy) and Jewish jokes from Shari, who ran the pharmacy and talked to my father as “one of those who know,” and my head was filled with the accents and dialects and tones of a hundred cities. Our Spanish landlord showed us how to make wine, our Greek friends asked me if everything was copasetic today, our Mediterranean neighbors gave us ripe olives, the Hungarians downstairs taught my mother cabbage rolls, and I ate pancakes with a Russian family when their son died, just as young Alyosha does in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

He himself, my mythic teacher, had his own tales of journeys. A country boy from the Kentucky bluegrass, at ten already working in stores and restaurants; at twelve packed off to an uncle in Harlan, Kentucky, where he saw gun battles in the mud streets and on swinging bridges and learned to wire houses in the coal camps; at sixteen a rambler on the rails, living and working in Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, DC, where he became a “news butch” in Union Station and met two presidents; and in the Great Depression, riding the rails and living in hobo camps, until he finally landed in this strange city in the mountains with a job he dearly loved. He had started out with movie theaters turning the crank of silent films while his grandmother played the organ. Now he was a union motion picture projectionist in a “first run” theater.

So he had been places, knew things and peoples, and had, as we say nowadays “a lot of mileage.” From the way he talked, I sensed that he missed the road and those days of adventure, but as I entered my teens and worked with him at the theater and on wiring jobs on the side, I also sensed that showing new movies was his way of seeing—and showing—the mysteries of the world. There was always something new to know for him, but what really motivated him in all our times together was showing me something new and suggesting that there were secrets, inside stories that your average schlemiel or hillbilly did not know. There were other knowers, there were powers, there were movers and shakers, there were Edisons and Einsteins and people like Howard Hughes, inventors and entrepreneurs who made the world. They knew things, too, and the point was to become somehow like them.

From his secret place in the projection booth, we could peer through the windows at the latest films, and he could perform the tasks of all true teachers, pointing at things, naming them, sharing them, and in doing those things daily somehow we became partners in something far beyond the mundane tasks we performed. We walked to visit heroes and strange places, we talked of other worlds and of the inside stories of the world we lived in, and when we watched all this together, even when I was impatient and youthfully stupid, we knew a kind of love that is beyond all the books about it.

After the Swamps, the Sacred Caves

Note: An interlude: another re-posting from my old blog, I'll be back with more Sigrid soon.

“This is not a good time to be a Catholic,” I mused aloud over the very small fire where I, a very small fry, cooked my very small fish on that great Chestertonian tool, a very small stick.

“First the Notre Dame mess, then the new Irish scandal, then that monstrous book by Archbishop (retired in disgrace) Rembert Weakland, known among the faithful as ‘archbishop weakmind.’ And him a Benedictine! What would St. Benedict think? Then there’s Father Soft and Father Smooth. . . and all those sniveling so-called orthodox apologists counseling ‘be friends with Obama and he’ll change into a friend’ . . .”

“Enough,” said the gray-bearded hobo who had sat silently while I swatted swamp mosquitoes and tried to stay in the smoke. I had thought he was a mute beggar from a nearby shack town under a bridge, drawn by the sight of the tiny trout I had managed to scoop out of a shallow of the Caney Fork River.

“Enough,” he repeated, and looked me in the eye with eyes that knew suffering and truth, a surefire combination for catching my attention.

“Exactly what does all this scandal you speak of mean for you?” the old man asked. “For you personally, as they say in the sick salons of Antioch?”

“Well,” I said as I shifted uneasily and wondered about Antioch, down near Nashville, “for one thing I’m embarrassed in front of my Protestant friends. I’ve been spouting off for a long time about the timeless Rock of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and how we Catholics can depend upon its indefectibility and true teaching in a time of cultural confusion, and now it looks as if . . .”

“As if it really isn’t?”

“Exactly. I feel like a . . . fool.”

The old man laughed softly and drew forth a small pouch of bread and dates, which he offered.

“As if that great indefectible Church is full of heretics and governed by shepherds who have lost the way?”

I let my silence be my answer.

“Probably you will tell me that well over half of the so-called Catholics in those churches don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? That the catechists are teaching a wealth of Arianism and all the other heresies that grow out of it? That the priests are playing patty cake with the Divine Liturgy? That the people fear the priests are doing more than playing patty cake with their children? That the Church Christ founded looks as if it’s foundering?”

“Well. . . I . . .”

“Embarrassed! My friends in the desert up this way say that if you do not weep for your sins, you have no hope of salvation. My dear fellahin, embarrassment about the Church is one of the steps on the road to hell. Do you think my friends in the caves up this road in Thebaid would not laugh you to scorn? If you cannot endure embarrassment for the Faith, then you will be like Peter warming his hands over the brazier in the courtyard and denying Christ for fear a serving maid might think him one of His followers. Embarrassed! You probably don’t like to admit to your urban friends that the altar of the great sacrifice contains the actual bones of martyrs. A bit savage? A bit uncouth? Maybe a bit Catholic?”

“Sir,” I said as we still say in Tennessee, “who are you? Where is Thebaid? And I don’t think there is a desert in Tennessee. Caves , yeah, we got aplenty, but . ."

“My name,” said the old man as he reared up tall and gaunt, and striking his crooked ash staff into the limestone shelf (I thought of Gandalf), “is Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and I have not seen the seat of my diocese for many a year.”

For a moment I thought he was mad, but his manner told me I had better think again.

“But, Sir, Athanasius lived in the fourth century in Africa.”

“No, Sir, Athanasius, and I am he, lives in eternity, or have you bought the teaching of Arius that the Word of God is not Eternal, and that we live only in the relativistic fogs of time?”

“No, Sir,” I cried indignantly, I am one of the faithful, the remnant, the Thomists, the ones trying to hold onto the truth. Like you, I . . . .” and I was about to sound like the traditionalist ranter I sometimes am.

Athanasius laughed softly. “Here, here, man, sit down and listen a moment. I am on my way to the caves up country and I do not have much time. A Roman legion send by the Emperor Julian is thrashing its way through this swamp behind me and they will be here within a few hours. Listen, the True Church is always pushed back into the swamps, the desert, the caves. Peter and Paul found it so, and every time Catholics forget how marginal and tough is the existence of the faithful, it runs into heresy and founders like the boat the apostles feared was sinking.”

“But you are a Doctor of the Church.”

“Yes, and doctors are called to the sick, which you are in danger of being, my friend, if you sit fretting about your pitiful state of embarrassment in front of your Protestant friends who may, after all, be the pre-Catholics we need to save our sinking boat. Heresy comes like a thief in the night and feeds on the rich foods we fancied we needed for our larders in the end times. It is like the mists over the swamps. When I was on the Nile in a small boat escaping from Emperor Julian’s plans to re-paganize the Christian world, an Imperial Galley nearly caught me and my few companions. I told my friends, ‘row toward the galley.’ The soldiers cried out, ‘have you seen the traitor Athanasius?’ My friends called into the fog, ‘he’s close. He went that-a-way,’ and so we escaped."

"Dear friend,” Athanasius chuckled, “I am a shepherd of the Catholic Church but I have been banished five tines and this is my seventeenth year in exile, and just now I am on my way to the caves where the followers of St. Antony dwell, where I will prepare my arguments against Arianism—again—for the next Council, which will come, yes, it will come, for the True Church will always recover. ‘My soul is troubled,’ Our Savior said in a troubled time. Do you think that your troubles are different from the trouble that He suffered in the desert and on the way of the Cross? Troubles, man, how do you think we felt when the Emperor Julian died and his successor revoked our banishment and then his successor—that was back in ought-365—banished all the orthodox bishops all over again? Excuse me, I must hurry, the hermits will be gathering for their weekly Mass.”

I stirred the ashes of the fire and looked downstream at a bird swooping to catch a small trout.

When I looked up he was gone and I, poor fool, was renewed in hope and courage, as we always can be, when we go to the saints, the doctors, the martyrs, and away from the nations furiously raging and the pundits, Catholic and non, telling us how to think.