IT AIN'T SCIENCE FICTION NO MORE: PART ONE

The Mad Hermit was interrupted in his musings by Al Jabar Jabar, a professor of Islamic philosophy at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. He came by to check on our hermit friend from time to time to discuss issues of the day though, as he always said, the issues of the day are always the same. This time he brought the news of the Penn State sexual child abuse scandal, and wondered about the Hermit’s thoughts.

“An evil,” the hermit said, “always a great evil. But what is new about that?”

“Yes, I believe you are sincere in this, Hermit friend, but I wonder at the sincerity of the horror expressed by most people in your country. Why are they so horrified by something that their culture is also busy endorsing?”

“Eh, what’s that, Jabar?”

“Everything is always upside down in your culture. Your people are always busy denouncing the very thing that they really support. Now that the Internet god allows everyone in the world to see what’s going on in your so-called culture, we know you are frauds pure and simple.”

“Explain, please.” The Hermit idly poked a stick at a hermit crab.

“How many clothing ads do I see in your media that show very young people dressing provocatively? How many discussions do I see among parents that agree that even pre-teens should be dating and going to dances? It would appear that you are encouraging young people to enter the sexual phase of their development at the first possible opportunity, and not for the sake of starting families, but for its own sake, as an end in itself, which is, of course a good definition of sterility as well as of perversion.”

“But Muhammad and his child brides, Jabar, don’t forget that.”

“Yes, Hermit friend, all true, but that was for marriage and children, not for the encouragement of promiscuous behavior as what you call a life-style. Do not confuse the sacred and the profane.”

“But I don’t see how . . .”

“The connection with really promoting sexual child abuse while condemning it? I also understand that the seculars and the liberals in your culture—the very ones who are calling for errant football coaches to be hanged and emasculated—ordinarily take their daughters to the doctor and have them outfitted for birth control at the first sign of puberty. What kind of message is your culture sending thirteen-year old boys and girls? Not only with this kind of behavior but with an entire media—yes, I have seen your movies—blasting away daily to encourage children to think of their sexual lives. Worse, remember the little girl in Colorado? Jon Benét Ramsay? The one who was murdered? Her parents routinely dressed her like a prostitute and displayed her in public as a sexual object.”

“And your point is . . .”

“I’m not through. One more element of my evidence. I see that there are Man-Boy sex organizations in your country, and yes, I know they represent a small minority, but what interests me is the conflict of values among your liberal middle class. When they have to think about this, they experience what you call a brain freeze.

“On the one hand it seems they are outraged at the idea of grown men exploiting young boys for sex, but almost immediately . . . yes, imagine how the levers in their brains operate. . . ‘I am certainly against that, but wait, those men are homosexuals and I must not be a homophobe . . . and they have equal rights. . .perhaps the boys are consenting… but then, what, after all, is consent? . . .. .I don’t want to be like the Boy Scouts . . .that would be fascist and I must be for freedom . . .but some of the members of the Man-Boy-Love thingy are Catholic priests, and that is an outrage …but don’t they have equal sexual rights too that are being frustrated by not being allowed to be married by the guilt-ridden Catholic fascist homophobes?’

“Interesting to see how moral ambivalence operates, isn’t it? Especially on your networks and National Public Radio. Perhaps that is one reason, other than football dollars, that there was no great revulsion and stampede to inform the authorities. Before you ask, my point is that there is no clarity in your culture about what it calls 'values.' How can there be when the culture is simultaneously pretending to be horrified at the sexual abuse of children while doing everything it can to turn children into promiscuous adults? And things for use?”

“I see what you mean, Jabar. I guess I have been in this country for so long that I have lost any sense of the western attitudes toward children and how to dress them and teach them. I guess I am so upset by it that even when I see it—as I sometime do on the televisions in the hotel lobbies in Oman—I write it off to a small minority in our culture—how strange, after all this time, to say those words, ‘our western culture,’ because it isn’t any more and hasn’t been for at least a century, and now it seems that the young ladies I had in my classrooms at SQU, all dressed modestly in black, are more a laudable norm than what I see in glimpses on television—girls nearly naked, in tattoos and facial jewelry—and yes, I have caught glimpses of them in the tourist hotels here . . .why do you think I have become a hermit fleeing to the desert?”

“Welcome to the desert, my friend, the home of the birth of prophecy and religion. But I am sure you know we are developing some of the same problems in Islam? The Internet, the DVDs, everything you have is creeping into our world. Why do you think there are such things as Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood? And more such things form by the hour in the streets of Yemen and Iran and now, the back streets of Egypt again. Because from the time of Sayid Qutb’s visit to the United States, when he saw the West for what it is now, there has fermented a widespread rebellion against the notion that one can mix cultures like cuisines or have a fruitful relationship with the enemy culture. As he put it, the choice of a culture is absolute: it must live in accordance with a system of morality and law that corresponds to the nature of reality. If it does not, it is a society of jahiliyya, that is, ignorance of religious truth. The West, he said, which became great on the strength of its religious values, has turned against its very roots. Your Dostoevsky would agree. And as Kipling put it . . .”

“Yes, The Gods of the Copybook Headings are unforgiving . . .”

“The purpose of all culture is to teach the virtuous life. That is what your culture has forgotten, and why you are dying of your own internal contradictions.

“I visited your country recently. Out of curiosity I visited various places including a suburban Catholic church where I saw altar girls smacking chewing gum and trying to look sultry in makeup. The young women and girls in the pews were also following the sick culture of the day, their skirts and shorts and tattoos and way of walking . . .”

“Please, do not help me to imagine it. I am here to burn out such things.”

“So where is your culture now, including your Catholic culture?"

“I am afraid since the wrong turn of Vatican II—the idea that the way to save the world is to become like the world— it has been driven into tiny enclaves. The Society of Pius X, small traditionalist parishes barely allowed but definitely not encouraged to exist by the Vatican, and the small parishes of Byzantine Catholics still keeping to Orthodox ways and Orthodox theology. So yes, there is a parallel here with Islam, except that in Islam those faithful to Islamic roots are winning, while in the West . . . I recall hearing of one parish where a traditional Latin Mass was permitted, and the modernists joked about the traditionalists as dressing like Mennonites.”

“Your thoughts?”

“Perhaps the Mennonites and their offshoots the Amish saw what was coming from the so-called Renaissance . . . but let’s not get into all that, Jabar. I know you have deeper things on your mind with all this talk about sex and culture.”

“Indeed. These minor conflagrations of false or diluted conscience over the Penn State scandal point to deeper ambivalences and contradictions in your culture. The lie about sex is paralleled and underwritten by the lie about the value placed on life itself.”

“Before we get to that, would you suggest that those in the West would be wise to be friends with those in Islam who call for a return to the roots of Islam?”

“Quite the contrary, dear hermit friend. Since you are a devout Chestertonian and a lover of paradox, I would suggest that the best way we can be friends is by being enemies. The best service an enemy provides for me is by showing me what I must fight against, and what I must return to. The enemies of true Islam were the modernizers in the Nasser era. The enemies of true Christianity are those who want to compromise with the devils of secularism.”

“But Jaber, I saw the face of the Islamic radicals when I taught in Kuwait, and I must say I did not like them very much.”

“Excellent, Hermit friend, a very just and honest response. You should continue not to like them, even to hate them, and ask yourself, what is it in your modern culture that they hate so much, and to what extent have you yourself bought in to it?”

There was a long silence from the Hermit. He remembered wondering what message the burning towers of the World Trade Center really carried for the West.

“Every time I talk to you, Jaber, you turn me back to my task. You are like the followers of Muhammad raging in the marketplaces of Mecca.”

“Thank you, my enemy and friend, and tomorrow I will rage again, here, if you will have me.”

“Come, and come armed. It is what I need. It is so easy to forget truths, and so hard to remember them. And that, after all, is what a hermit is supposed to be for.”

“Tomorrow, in sh’Allah, if Allah permits.”

WHISTLING IN THE DARK AND CALLING IT DAWN

Note: the Mad Hermit does not usually take on a Vatican document and it is unlikely he will do so again. Somewhere in Catholic land “liberals” are chortling and cheering over the latest Vatican document, which calls for the creation of a world banking authority; in other places, “conservatives” and “orthodox” writers are twisting in agony and biting their nails as they struggle to endorse the proposal and square it with right thinking. Well, you get neither from the Mad Hermit for, after all, he is mad. Very mad.

A shocking, horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests teach as they wish; yet my people will have it so; what will you do when the end comes? --Jeremiah 5: 30-31.

The document in question, “Note on financial reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace,” has created a stir by calling for a central world banking authority of some sort. Such an entity would have the absolute authority to set everything right in terms of money. As usual these days (i.e., post Vatican II), the major appeals of the writers are to Pacem in Terris and Populorum Progressio, as well as to statements by Blessed John Paul II and the present Holy Father’s Caritas in Veritate. As one could have easily predicted, the document does not concern itself with the saving of souls nor does it refer to any Papal Encyclical such as Pope Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis that does so.

On a promise to some friends, I have actually read this latest document, just as I read the encyclicals above. When I was an undergraduate we read all the major encyclicals of the 19th and 20th century, many of which had real and practical social implications, such as the endorsing of the labor movement and the right of people to organize themselves into unions for the sake of justice. While recognizing the palpable reality of the political movements of the times, the Vatican called out specific injustices (such as the Nazis and Communists) and pointed to the need for resistance to them. If I am not mistaken, prior to Vatican II, the Popes and the Vatican did not take on the remaking of human society under a single secular global authority. True, St. Thomas Aquinas seemed to want such a thing in the 13th century, but then his globe was much smaller than ours.

I will, however, leave to others the task of chasing the documents and confine myself to my reaction to this one. As I write, I see that the Obama administration has sent soldiers to yet another African country, proceeding unilaterally and unconstitutionally toward that very world authority our president seems to ardently desire as long as we are in charge of it and as long as the leftist newspapers will like it.

Meanwhile, Wall Street and the streets of cities from Nashville to Nome are crowded with thousands of (mostly young) people holding signs calling for the ending of greed and selfishness and pollution and capitalism. If a thousand of these people are questioned about their aims and goals, they will give a thousand answers ranging from “I am hurting” to “somebody’s got to do something about this.” Like Bill Clinton, I feel their pain; I hurt too, hobbling along on low income; and even if I could join them (no car, no money), I am not sure I could add much rationality to their grief and rage, other than to point out that their major cheerleader—opportunista Obama—is largely responsible for the particular nadir we find ourselves in. His chief solution, absurd on the face of it to any Swiftian or Orwellian or Twainist, has been to fire money like shotgun pellets in all directions, money we do not have, money which he is, like the archons of the Weimar Republic in Germany, printing with mad abandon. One might observe that these same left-wing archons passed the eugenics and euthanasia laws which allowed the succeeding Nazi government to murder the weak, the Jews, and the Christians, for the surest way to eliminate social problems in a society is, well, to eliminate them.

Ay, there’s the rub, which is the central point of my response to the Vatican document. In addition to sounding like a commencement address that urges the graduates of today to go forth and serve justice and peace and nice stuff, it ignores the fact that no matter how often you overturn the tables of the moneychangers—something, indeed, that does need to be done on a regular basis—the money changers will not as a class be deterred until the Roman Legions come in and destroy the temple where they do their business. That, indeed, was a world central authority straightening things out. Most of the graduates listening to the commencement address will stampede out of the auditorium bent on the usual economic rape and pillage. Who, besides a totalitarian government, will stop them? Is that what the Vatican wants?

The document refers frequently to the United Nations and its importance in pointing the economic directions the Vatican itself espouses—a central world authority with the power to end abuses. Pardon, but are the writers of such documents insane or only wilfully ignorant? The one non-religious central authority the planet has at present is dedicated more than anything else to, among many other evil things, universal abortion and euthanasia. The various appeals by the Holy Father and the limp protests of the American Catholic Bishops have had no effect upon this tendency other than to strengthen it. From the time of H.G. Wells, the utopians of our culture have been able to see no solution to human problems other than the elimination of most humans.

The Nazis call for the elimination of useless life on the basis of economics.


The “world political authority” called for by Pope John Paul XXIII is, for the writers of this document “the road that must be taken,” regardless of whether it will lead to a sane society. It will be “a new model of more cohesion, polyarchic international society that respects each people’s identity with the multifaceted riches of a single humanity.” (Good grief, who can write such abominable prose?) The writers go on: “It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good.”

Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple (Giorda)



And what is that common good? The whole principle of the Gospel is that there are common goods in God’s universal laws. Nowhere in the Gospel, as Dostoevsky saw clearly, is there any room for misty-eyed statism that delivers justice with a fist or a Comintern. Whether justice is delivered by a fist or a massive mind control, as in Brave New World or 1984 or We, it is still a false justice based on a central socialist authority that knows what’s good for us. Dostoevsky, by the way, predicted the marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and international socialism.

The “institutions with universal competence,” which the Vatican writers imagine to be the guardians of the new world bank against corruption—where are they? All the evidence is that the world is racing madly toward an anti-life totalitarianism, a “brave new world” of eugenics, abortion, infanticide, mind control, and a political correctness that outlaws all dissent as well as all common sense and individual expression. The solution to this apocalyptic nightmare is not a new world government, calling for which is like sending gasoline trucks to put out a fire, but the one offered in A Canticle for Leibowitz—building small Benedictine communities as the centers for sanity and holiness and continuing in the virtue of hope while resisting anti-life evils.

St. Thomas Aquinas, despite his fantasy about world government, said that a society with few but necessary laws would be the best; for this reason, he agreed—much to the shock of modern day Jansenists and Puritans-with Ron Paul that laws against prostitution and drugs will only make matters worse and take our eyes off our need for conversion and individual charity.

Of course capitalism stinks; global capitalism stinks even more—the gift the Protestants gave the world (R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) does, in fact, rage over the surface of the earth like a genetically re-engineered plague virus. Tamed occasionally by individual state governments, it does not respond dutifully to law (remember Prohibition?). But a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper will give us, precisely, that: a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper.

The writers’ appeals to subsidiarity—a basic ethical and social doctrine of the Catholic Church—are fatuous and, on the face of it, absurdly contradictory. Genuine subsidiarity calls for authority to be exercised at the lowest possible social level, only moving to the next level when that is impractical or ineffective. Calling for a world economic authority seems more an act of despair. Like some of the most vicious critics of the Catholic Church today, I would call for the Church to follow its own doctrines, to mend its seminaries and parishes and families, before holding itself up to scorn with documents of this kind which, as a Catholic, I know that I am permitted to ignore.

When I was in high school our parish priest (R.I.P.), a good man and a good priest in most respects, preached that the parish needed more money to build a new gymnasium and a new convent for the nuns. To effect this fund-raising, he announced that each year his office would print and distribute a record of what each family gave by week and year. I was scandalized and angered, for each year thereafter, my father’s donations (those cursed little numbered envelopes) never exceeded a dollar a week, the amount he earned for an hour at union wages. Meanwhile the big wigs of the parish outshone all the working families who cursed the meat and went without the bread. The gymnasium now stands empty, the nuns are gone, the school closed, and the bell tower—which really does need to be fixed—leans dangerously, a good symbol of what wrongheaded solutions can bring.

I’d say—but no one asks—empty the Vatican of committees and idle priests. Send them out to preach the Gospel and live on the charity of those in the pews. I think there is something about this in the New Testament.

STARTING OUT

There is a place before the use of words, a place of smoke and mist and fog. It is the place of starting out.

People talk about what is universal to humans but they miss this point: even if you have no formal religion and baptism or initiation or whatever, you know what starting out means. I know.

Starting out—there is nothing like it. The southern West Virginia winter morning is a fog bank of low cloud smothering the world in secret.

It hangs over the rail yards down past Sacred Heart Church and school and the smoke of the trains roll up into it and the whole white and brown brume covers me. I breathe it in, icy and stale and sour at the same time. And that is the world, the whole world.

When I step out on the porch at five it is still murky dark; the street light just opposite is like a dying punk that can barely light itself. Our house, like most houses in the town, hangs on to a steep bank on the hillside. I can barely make out a few more streetlights, big bulbs with tin saucers over them, muffled and bluish yellow, down by the convent. And out past that, darkness and more fog, but I have to guess at that.

I stop for a moment on our high porch which leans out over the street below like the quarter deck on a sailing ship in Two Years Before the Mast or Treasure Island. I go in the basement below the porch—I told you the house is on a hill side—and rattle the grates under the coal fire, then shovel in coal and punch it with a poker, then take out the “clinkers” (coal burned into a hard, shiny rock) with a tool like a claw, and pile them into a rusty can for the garbage man. I stand for a moment with the furnace door open and watch the new coal catch and feel the heat on my face. Then, it’s time to go back out: icy cold razor wind sharp up the nose and chill trickling down the back of my neck. Everyone inside asleep above me, everyone down the hill asleep too, including Father and the nuns. If anyone is awake it’s a few engineers and switchmen, maybe a few coal miners in vans on the way to the shafts down south, but I don’t think about that yet. I just want this, the quiet emptiness. It’s just me, I think, me and the world, and the world hasn’t started up.

The empty canvas newspaper sack rides my shoulder. Like the cassock and surplice at Mass, it makes me official, but this is different: I am in charge. I get to decide to go or not go, to go the way I want, I can even start from the other end of the route and come back if I want to, I can even skip a house and lie and say sorry I missed it, I can go fast or slow, I can stand anywhere I want along the way and listen to hissing and ding-dong of the switch engine bells in the yards. For at this moment no one is looking at me. No one is watching me, no one is seeing if I make a mistake or make faces or drag along or peek in windows or dawdle or dance or waste time or throw rocks or dream or stop and swing on the butt-cold swings or not pay attention or go off somewhere in my head or daydream or think about something I’m not supposed to think about or ain’t allowed to think about (or say, like “ain’t”) or didn’t ask permission for or have to account for. No, I can stop right in the middle of the street—it is dizzying to walk right down the middle of all the streets, swinging my newspaper bag—“like a fool,” Mom would surely say—and think about something that often comes to me, that there is somewhere in the hills and mountains a place where no one but me has ever been, where there is a cold spring pouring out of the rocks and ferns and I can kneel down, cup my hands, and drink the pure stream all I want to. Thinking about it, I swing the paper sack madly around my head. “In the beginning,” I recited from Genesis in a school program, “God created . . . .” “What a rush,” the druggies would say in later days. He could do whatever He wanted. Perfect freedom. I stand on the porch and step out into the fog of the world unfettered and unafraid, to taste that freedom for the first time, and I love it beyond all hope and all reason.

Or, I think about old Stony Ridge on the other side of the tracks, where the torrents of fog come rolling down its long slopes, and where the mortar shells land just where I put them when I squeeze the steely in my pocket. I may fire off a few before I start down the stairs, just to scare the gooks, even if I can’t see the bursts. Watch out, I say with grim determination, we have the power, we will beat you in the end. Squeeze, fire, silent wait, whoomp.

Down past the school, the convent, the rectory, the church, wisps of fog swirl under the street light at the corner. I turn down past the filling station to the bridge. This is the gem, the downtown morning route I earned after slogging through two crummy afternoon routes. Yes, that’s right, turn left at the church where all that black murmuring is sleeping inside with the single red sanctuary lamp hanging by its chain over the cold stone floor. He’s there in the closed tabernacle watching me, flits across my mind; no, He’s asleep. There’s a tiny chill as I dare to wonder if it’s true, and I am down Monroe Street through the neighborhood of decaying houses built by the railroad for its bosses. The railroad people are mostly gone except for an older couple slumbering in the house with the grand white columns; their daughter, a blond lady gym teacher, is sleeping too. Later, she will walk her two Irish setters, Pat and Mike, wearing her horsey jodhpurs. Let her sleep, let her walk them in her sleep. Let Mrs. Keen in the apartment house next door sleep before she teaches steel-clad grammar without ever a smile on her heavy face. Let everyone sleep. I am awake and walking down the middle of the street.

Then I come to the downtown. I can go one of three ways now, my choice. Left over the hump and past the colored Catholic church where I serve Mass sometimes and down past the movie theatres where my Dad works, straight past the auto showrooms and garages, right and down the main street by the railroad. I can feel my feet twist in the fun of making up my mind. There is a moment of grinding, like when the big Mallet engines drop sand on the tracks to keep from sliding; so I go that way, where the steam and coal smoke rise up brown and orange into the fog cloud, and I can hear the big engines breathing hard as if they are waiting for something. Above the wall that separates the street and the yards, I can see the smokestacks and the top of the boilers, hear a switch engine pushing an extra sleeping car down the siding for when the morning passenger train comes in from Norfolk. I don’t see anyone on the street except a few brakemen coming off their shift like tired ghosts, their lunch pails dangling empty. Then an engine lets out a long sigh of steam as if it’s tired and old and I can smell the coal smoke warm and brown settling down over the street and dropping hot cinders on my face. Somehow I feel I am part of all this, that I with my canvas sack on a mission to get and deliver the newspaper am part of something much bigger than myself, that I am the brakemen and the engineers and the silent dark buildings with the coal smoke from their chimneys, all moving toward something called the dawn.

But I don’t want to hurry it. I saunter some, looking in the windows of Woolworth’s and the movie posters at the Colonial. That movie will run today, but right now Clark Gable is frozen on the poster, grinning serious and thoughtful, one gun pointed skyward. But I will bring the news to the sleeping town. At the newsstand across from the passenger station I see the wired bale of newspapers sitting in the doorway and think, no, I will beat you, I will have the papers all over the downtown before you open your doors, Mrs. Goulasch.

A police car sails smoothly past. A warning. Get on before this is all lost and changed and there are people on the streets, lights coming on. At the newspaper building, I come up the back where the trucks are loading more newspaper bales for out in the county. Here they come, the morning papers rolling down the conveyor belt and I’m in line waiting for mine. Crawfish counts them out with his huge ink-stained thumb, ten at a time, but I count them over, I am tired of being shorted. Back out of the shouts and the grumbly motors rumbling, I am in the silence again, carrying the words. At the corner I stop a second and look at the front page, the news I will take from office to office and house to house, what the people are waiting for, Panmunjom and the 38th parallel and the Choisin reservoir and President Eisenhower and the communists in our government. At school, I will know all these things as if I had lived a life earlier than everyone else. I will be old and wise and secret. I will know.

The silence is an ocean of waiting, despite the train noises and the occasional shout or starting car. I float back into it, the bag of papers on my hip, the bill of my earmuff hat over my eyes. Monday let’s say, a light load today, the paper slim and serious after the weekend, and this a school morning again. I have not said any prayers and don’t even think about it. I will hear about all that later, that is part of the day that hasn’t started yet though Mass will start in about an hour now. I don’t really think about this as I breathe in the fresh day of fog and smoke but I do think about words, especially strange words I don’t know the meaning of. They are like the box cars on the railroad, the freight train racketing along with its announcements: Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Rock Island Line, C&O, B&O, New York Central, Chicago and Northwestern, Virginian, Chessie. Peace Talks, Dogma, Arbitration, price controls, OPA, liquor, sex, extreme unction, brain washing, salamander, permanents, icebergs, blizzards, persecution, displaced persons, divorce, atom bombs, salt rising bread, girdles, griddles, grits, bump and grind, boogey woogy. I say them out loud and watch my breath make more fog with the words. Hic Est Meus Corpus Meum. But if I say it nothing happens. Why?

I am in why, which is better. The answers I get when I ask questions never satisfy me, so I am better in why. While it is still dark and foggy with the great smoke clouds rolling up off the yards, the billows—there’s a word!— rolling in on themselves and trailing away behind as the engine moves down the tracks, the thunder of the wheels on the track pounding the earth below like a mighty hammer, and the long whistle of death as the coal train announces the sorrowful news of the long lonesome valleys that stretch forever in both directions. I stop to listen. I can feel it as the rumbling of the Mallet wheels rolls under the street and passes up into my legs. The only other time I feel like this is when I’m reading and I hit something that shakes me inside, a terror or a wonder. But the trains make reading better because you can look up from the book and know the words have that kind of power and loneliness. I wouldn’t want to read up in our attic if I could not see and hear the trains.

Which is another place and time where you have that freedom, the toasty warm attic at the top of the two storey-house (all the heat goes up there) down by the rail yards, just you and a stack of Life or Look magazines and some old books and some things your uncles brought back from the last war, a sharp shell fragment, an ash tray made of an ammo casing. The engineers of the switch engines wave, even sometimes the engineers or conductors of the coal trains. You don’t know them and they don’t know you but there is a kind of friendship there that makes me feel good. Best is when a caboose is heading off west and the conductor in his red kerchief waves with his lantern at you leaning out the cupola window and waving like you know him, especially at night or in the early morning, like something great and important is happening that you cannot begin to understand and it will never happen again the same way.

Then comes the time when the sun begins to burn off the fog and the street lights switch off and the grey noises and people begin. The last paper has been plopped on a porch where they probably won’t pay up, some of the people standing out waiting for it and looking at their watches. They irritate me, I don’t even count them, they are day people, part of the world ending my time alone. Traffic is picking up, the first busses stop at the bank and rumble black exhaust, waiting to fill up. Delivery trucks bring the milk and bread to the restaurants, which turn on their neon signs to lure the railroad men and the passengers from off the first train, soldiers and sailors from Norfolk, salesmen, big shots followed by redcaps and hopeful winos cadging for dimes. Sometimes, before heading home, I cross over the avenue and walk through the train station, hoping to sell the extra paper I have left over.

For no reasons except my own, I stand on the platform and look at the Pullman cars and the dining car that pull in under the sparsely lighted steel canopy next to the ticket window. Red caps, some of them with baggage wagons, hurry around, ready to sing out to the people getting off. Here it comes. The passenger train eases in magnificently, stops with bursts of steam that flood the platform; I wait until it will start out again with an occasional slipping of the big wheels on the steamed tracks. Inside the dining car there is another world, a bright lighted world I am outside, will never be a part of. Big men with cigars reading newspapers and finishing breakfast, fancy ladies in furs primping and looking out cold at me, a sad, hopeless being who can never bother them. Watching the cars move slowly out with important, staring conductors standing at the doors makes me feel I am dying and alone. The cars rock over the rails, couplings squeak and groan. Slowly, slowly, the world of the train floats out and I get the sensation that two worlds are moving, mine and theirs, but then, no, the morning news is this: I am stuck here and they are gone, the rickety- rickety-rick fading down the line. And the whistle sounds, one blast long and slow, a few short, as if the train is saying something I can’t grasp.

It’s all grey now, my sack is empty, the day has started, no one cares what I have done but me, but I don’t know for sure if that’s bad or good. It’s like when you start to tell somebody of something great that happened to you and you can see in their eyes they are a thousand miles away, just waiting for you to stop talking and you wish you hadn’t started. I cross the street back where the newsstand and the restaurants are coming alive with sailors and soldiers and whores. I walk back up the hill to our house and creep in to read the newspaper by myself before anyone else gets up. Years later, I miss the feeling of those mornings and want it back. I want the smell of my socks dried out on the hot radiator or hung on a chair by the coal fire grate when I get ready to go out in the morning. My socks, warm for my feet.

Starting out. It’s what I want again. It’s what we all want.

Copyright 2011 R. Kenton Craven

Confessions of a Redneck English Teacher

In a previous life, the Mad Hermit was what is called “an English Teacher.” From his perch on the head of the sperm whale skeleton on Masirah Island in the Indian Ocean, he muses on that long chapter of his life.

The classroom today



When I think about it, I, too, am a bit taken aback. While skimming the internet recently I could see that many of my former colleagues, those still alive, retired from careers at a single institution in a single place where, presumably, they were rooted and loved, or at the least, rooted. Some of their careers seem unremarkable, but perhaps like Mr. Chips, some were revered by several generations of students, and God bless them, had I not been such a difficult man, such could have been my fate. If a man casts himself as a chip on the waves, he cannot complain of storms and tides.

When I reflect on my classroom career, I count the states in which I have taught, nine in all, one of them twice: West Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas. In addition, the territory of Puerto Rico, and two foreign countries (The Emirate of Kuwait and the Sultanate of Oman). That is not the full story, since in these places I have managed to teach (full- or part-time) in a total of sixteen colleges and universities: Marshall University, West Virginia University, the University of Kansas, Southeastern Missouri State University, Muskingum College, Universidad InterAmericana, Wartburg College, Our Lady of Corpus Christi (now defunct), the University of Louisville, Bellarmine College, Spalding College, Jefferson Community College, Nashville State Community College, Tennessee Technological University, Kuwait University, and (trumpets!) the Sultan Qaboos University of Oman. It is tiring just to type these out. I will not add all the addresses I had during these years—I lost count at thirty-five.

One may ask why, and I will not answer. Those are stories, mostly personal, for another time, if at all. I will say I was never fired or dismissed and was several times asked to stay on, though the decidedly frosty exit I was given from Tennessee Technological University—after five rewarding years teaching as a full-time part-timer (adjunct)—strongly resembled a deconstructed bum’s rush. And my exit from Our Lady of Corpus Christi where I was a happy volunteer with delightful students was, as is said in a certain kind of place, by strong mutual agreement. Students helped me load my possibles into my pickup truck, and a kind Catholic family lent me their cabin in the hills to recuperate from the charade.

The regrets I have about this career are now several and odd. After my experiences in the Middle East, I wish I had stayed longer in Oman (I still miss that boundlessly strange country and have recurring memories of Indian roller birds diving at my head, strolling through the markets in Muttrah, and the sense of the first day in walking the tops of glistening dunes in the early dawn).

I do wish the medieval Charles University of Prague had offered me a position, if for no other reason than the possibility of living in the very medieval Prague. The interview in 1991, was Kafkaesque: the mini-skirted policewoman who arranged the interview at my side, the Chair a gaunt gentleman who appeared not to have had a solid meal for the entire Soviet occupation. As I looked up at the huge oil painting on the 18-feet-high wall, I recognized with a shock the Scots poet Edwin Muir. Idiot! Muir was the subject of my Master’s thesis at Marshall University and, as I had forgotten, he had been the chair of the ancient Charles University English department for some years before WW II. Despite that credit on my cv and the pleasant reminiscences with the Chair, I was told my best bet for a position was a Fulbright, Prague just then being overrun with subsidized Americans happy in a new Paris. Not a tenured or published professor, I had slim chance of that.

The poet Edwin Muir


And I wish I had had the opportunity of teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea, Goroka campus (in the mountainous interior), despite the rude and exhausting four-hour interview—more like a tribal roasting—that I had there [sample question: “do you really know these things, or do you just say you know these things?”]. Imagine teaching Shakespeare there! In fact, had I my druthers, I would have started my overseas experience long before I was over fifty, and would have taught in many more out-of-the-way places, such as Brunei, or at the cheery American University of Bulgaria, where I was also interviewed with much kindness and ceremony. Though I found many things to like in most places I taught in America, I found somewhat too late that the Midwest stifled me and that I needed the stimulants of travel and the unexpected—such as hearing Arab students puzzle over the guilt of the Ancient Mariner, pushing a department putsch in Kuwait, or being shot at by Arabs as I rode my bicycle in the desert of Oman.

A sing-sing in Papua New Guinea









In this itinerant career, I also came to understand, by way of circumstance and my own adventurous fecklessness, the queer desirability of teaching as an “adjunct professor,” a curious institution that came into its own after the Vietnam years. During my protests of that unconstitutional war, and in the cultural havoc of the 1960’s, I left the tenure track and set out on the academic hobo road, much as my Dad had ridden the rails in the 1930’s. In those unsettled days, thousands of teachers, especially PhDs in the Humanities, found their only option in university teaching was as part-timers, which brought about economic conditions similar to those Jack London found in London’s East End in 1902. The new scenario created the outrage of teachers contracting at two to four institutions at the same time, wearing out cars and minds by teaching as many as eighteen, even twenty-one, credit hours a term to earn a pitiful income, all the while dreaming of that big break into tenuredom.

At the University of Louisville, I happily taught English, Humanities, and Philosophy while also teaching courses in philosophy at Bellarmine and Spalding colleges and at (lamentably) Jefferson Community College, where I started an Introduction to Philosophy class with 50 students and ended with three. Much later in Tennessee, I had the great pleasure of teaching mostly Honors sections of World and British literature, as well as special seminars, in courses of my own make and choosing. The value of being an adjunct, despite the constant uncertainty, is that one is not “in” a department, is not involved in any aspect of filthy academic politics or even incestuous academic society but is, in fact, an exile in one’s profession with no greater hazard than an occasional nasty department secretary. For those who have done such teaching, one knows that the adjunct professor is the lowliest person on any campus, something akin to perpetual novice monks or to Orwell’s hop pickers, lucky to have a part-time desk and (sometimes) parking privileges, if that. Perhaps, I have thought in my rambles, all professors should be in this situation. We might have more pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, more love of learning, less ideological correctness, and more enthusiastic teaching, as if we were all Abelards in the snowy fields.

The curious relationship of the adjunct to the regular tenure-track professor may be illustrated by an incident in the Washington, DC, area. While working in the corporate world (more on this below) in the 1980’s, I hungered to keep my mind on something besides hacking out government documents and proposals. I applied to the prestigious George Mason University in Fairfax, rated as one of the best in the country sub specie Ivy League. Here I received the offer of teaching two sections of World Literature for, I think, $1200 a course per semester, not much more than I had received at the University of Louisville several decades earlier (adjuncts are usually paid about as well as janitors and prison guards). Now, as I could see from the posted schedule, I would be teaching the same literature course as a visiting Nobel Laureate just down the hall, who would be making well in excess of $80,000 a year for teaching two courses a term. Mind, the student signing up for such a course would see my name and the laureate in the same catalog column and choose one, probably in the blissful ignorance students usually enjoy. I would have liked to think that the students who would choose me would have the best teaching, but, alas, the unwillingness of the chair to schedule me for evening sections prevented my taking the assignment. On the way out, I also learned that (sorry!) the post carried no parking privileges, which would have required my walking at least a mile to get to classes. O tempora! O mores!

You may well ask, why and how on earth did you get into this business in the first place? And why stay in, despite the money and the madness? As for getting in, I had the reading disease from the time of cereal boxes and comic books, plus Huck Finn and the other classics on our home bookshelf. I had four excellent English professors as an undergraduate when I never had a serious thought about the morrow but was living in the pleasures of reading, reading, reading; dialogues on walks and in beer halls; and hearing my teachers speak hours of interesting stuff about literature. Tough Jesuit (pre-Vatican-II) sequences of philosophy, history, and the arts added to the ratio studiorum mix. I wrote a Bachelor’s thesis (imagine that these days) on The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and along the way I was introduced to the best current thinking in literary criticism from Cleanth Brooks to William Empson. One day my wife-to-be asked what I was going to do when I was graduated (notice the correct verb usage). Blank. “You have to go to graduate school,” she said, many, many, times. This required a great stretch in my thinking, just as great a stretch as when I was in grammar school and tried to imagine being in high school. My professors were as gods, high above my plebian, West Virginia imagination. Be one of those? But, poor as a scrawny alley cat, with small Latin and no Greek, I went, first for a Master’s in West Virginia, then for a doctorate at the University of Kansas, known popularly as “the Harvard on the Kaw.” It was still the post WW II heyday of graduate study in English, and the state universities were churning out doctorates like Fords and Chevrolets. The race, I soon found, was not to the swift but to those willing to conceal their giggles and true nature.

Graduate school from the beginning was a constant experience of having the wind knocked out of me. Fresh from a traditional Thomistic education, I was nothing if not logical and questioning. In every class and conversation, I heard absurdity, contradiction, nonsense, from professors as well as students. At first, I assumed that much of what I was hearing was a coded language to which I lacked the key, that the wily Jesuits had somehow neglected to give me the whole story. Queer, supercilious questions were asked for which I had no answer. Superior smiles and ironic comments made me feel like a backwoodsman in a Parisian salon. Gradually, however, I began to perceive that I had not entered the seminary of higher learning but an increasingly byzantine game of catch and get caught out. Poor old souls on the tail end of 19th century attitudes—that, for instance, as Dr. Samuel Johnson would have it, biography is the most important part of literary criticism, or that historical accuracy was a necessary perquisite to literary scholarship—were being crowded out by the sleek, the prissy, and the unnatural. While the sometimes worthwhile “New Criticism” was all the rage when I entered graduate school, day by day the goose-step ideologies were on the march. After the backwash of Freudianism and Jungianism came, like creatures leaping out of Satan’s head in Paradise Lost, the dull, perverse parade of Feminism, Marxism, Maoism, Multiculturalism, Levi-Straussism, Deconstructionism, and what-have-you: all nasty machines through which poetry is ground to produce academic sausage.

During these years after I had scooted across the finish line with a doctorate, I began to meet teachers of literature who seemed to have no idea of what literature is. Fortunately for me, I had not lost the philosophical habit of mind the Jesuits gave me, nor the traditional legacy of the band of brothers (Shulenberger, Nelick, Quinn, Senior) I was fortunate to have met along the way [see the entries for August 10, 2011, and March 31, 2010, as well as www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/alo127.htm]. Also, during graduate student days, I was also blessed to meet others equally inspired by the KU traditionalists who were excited to enter the classroom with nothing more than fundamental questions, a 3x5 card, a fellow teacher with whom to dialogue, and a good or great book. And, I might add, a sense of wonder arising from the perennial questions about the nature of reality, best expressed in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and other writings, wherein sticks, stars, riddles, walks, fire places, tales, and friends are the panes through to view the madness of the world.

Something else, something very important, gradually entered my awareness of what was happening in the academic world. Literature teachers who had no personal history outside academe—hothouse plants raised on thin, watery foods—were more cloistered than any monk ever was. Just as Orwell recognized of his middle class world, I became more aware of who these ideologues were that dominated Humanities departments in the latter half of the 20th century. Imagine a teacher shaped through twelve years of public school—that first nursery of Huxley and Orwell’s imaginations—then rolled through the dark satanic mills of graduate school and thrust upon the classroom stage, sans sweat, sans labor, sans calloused hands, sans everything. If literature is about life and the teacher has hardly a wisp of that, he can only do what the academics do from the Sophists to the French perverts: fall back upon systems,
-isms, and –ologies.

In the coal fields of West Virginia, I had dozens of jobs and occupations before I ever got to graduate school from carrying newspapers, hawking on the street and at ball games, shining shoes, washing dishes, short order-cooking, janitoring, and all the rest of the growing-up jobs of the blue collar family. Those roots served me well when I read the great books and poems, and helped me find more kinship with the real-world literary criticism of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the natural wisdom of Ernest Hemingway, and the earthy writings of the Russian writers than with the effete poets of France. “’Sophisticated?’ Professor Arvid Shulenberger, a rough-and-ready World War II aviator, asked, and answered, ‘more complicated than it needs to be.’” After I left the academic track in 1970, I spent years as a social worker, mental health and family therapist, night clerk, editor-writer, writer-editor, technical writer, magazine editor (twice),cashier, bureaucrat, and, again, janitor. Like George Orwell, I saw society from the underside and the backside. When I re-entered the academic world for the third time in 2003, I did so with zest and the old delight. A classroom is a classroom, after all, and once inside those doors, it’s back to the great and good books and the fundamental questions, which have always made good teaching from Socrates to Thoreau to Senior and Shulenberger.

Dr. John Senior

Dr. Arvid Shulenberger


Or so I thought when I signed on last year to teach courses at a community college here in Tennessee. Besides the now universal replacement of blackboards and chalk (O Chesterton!) with white boards and stinking Chinese markers, the other changes that had been arriving while my back was turned had reached demonic proportions. In sum, there are no teachers now, only programmed processors using ideologically correct texts chosen by ideologically correct committees backed by eternally present and vigilant computers. Soon, they will videotape all classes, and the censors will come, if they have not already. The idea of Socrates in the street or “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and me on the other,” or Thoreau bothering his neighbors with real questions we have—what? The Nanny State and the Nanny Teacher. The students, God help them, are ready: they’ve been playing the game since first grade. They speak a different language, if it is a language at all. Maybe one in fifty has doubted the sophistical doctrines of the day, and that one usually has enough redneck or hillbilly left in him (or her) to be open to something other than the poisonous pabulums of the time.

Over the years I have met retired university English teachers who confess that they no longer read. In some cases, I wonder if they have ever read, really read, a poem without a crib or a study guide. Even at 73, I devour books, new and old, from Homer to Coetzee. And my summary conviction? Abolish English and Humanities departments altogether; teach languages only; and let the young discover literature on their own terms with the secret libertarian delight of thieves and prisoners. But then, I also believe in the abolition of public schools altogether. They only feed the growing tendency toward the Absolute Nanny State.

First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth: Part Two

The Third in a Series of Mad Hermit Visions


GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.
--Herman Melville, Moby Dick


I troubled myself for weeks for a way to render this third vision by the Mad Hermit, but my granddaughter Audrey mentioning Moby Dick and a re-reading of the first chapter of that work of pure genius gave me the plagiaristic clue I needed. Plagiarism: the etymology suggests as snare or net, which I am happy to broadcast to catch, through Ishmael, what I can. But you’ll have to judge the value of my strategy for yourself. One more element in prompting my musings: Tolkien and trees. Night before last I decided to read up on the fifty-foot high American Beech tree in my yard. I found that such trees can grow to eighty feet and live four hundred years. Given its size, this one has already been around, say, since 1811, the year of the first Luddite uprisings and the Great New Madrid earthquake. I also found that the words for beech and book are the same in Old English, German, and the Scandinavian languages, probably since the beech tree was a source for paper pulp. This coalescence of meaning and my memory of Tolkien’s reverence for trees prompted me to wander out at midnight, kerosene lamp in hand, to simply touch this mighty old living thing with a druidic sense of reverence. Reverence, aye, that’s the theme. . .reverence for the things of the earth . . .which point to heaven . . .


Midnight on Masirah Island, Oman, sometime or other, the Mad Hermit speaks aloud (yes, he’s talking to himself again):


Sitting on this sperm whale’s burnished head, and listening to the soft waves of the Indian Ocean (there’s only one ocean on the planet earth really, ain’t it?), I’m remembering what Ishmael said about our mystical reverence for water, and why we sit and stare at it and hunger for water wherever we be. Here in the desert, men seek the small springs in oases or make their way to the sea, an image of eternity. The largest icon we have. And I, sitting on the sperm whale icon, wondering.

What I wonder about is religion and things: air, earth, fire, water. I confess: I love religion, the thing itself. If Christianity is true—which, like Pascal, I wager with my life it is—it must have to do with these things, not just with words. While I was still teaching in Oman, I looked into some things, and in these reveries, they come back to me. Tonight I dug into my little cache and pulled out my stash of frankincense and myrrh. Easy to buy here, piles of it lie in the marketplace, fresh from the trees of Oman.

Let my prayer be set forth as incense before You, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.


So wrote David in his poem-prayer. Hard to imagine that he prayed the words only, a metaphor in words. What of a metaphor in things as well? So I prayed tonight as my clouds of frankincense rose from a clam shell filled with home-made charcoal from acacia wood. So, every night, for morning prayer. In the last year of my teaching days, I poked about in things, thinking about the camels of the magi travelling up the Arabian peninsula, bearing their precious cargo from here, the main source of frankincense and myrrh.

The books say it is a “symbol of prayer”; I say no, it is prayer, prayer in things as we have prayer in words. There is all this confusion about symbols and metaphors, as I have found in my literary studies. People would rather run to those confusions than look at, feel, know things themselves, in which the religions of the earth are replete. Incense—in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Native American religions, Judaism (before the destruction of the Temple)—is a universal in human experience. Does God smell only the incense of one group. Caution! Old hermit, will you veer into heresy?

What set me off on this thread of reflection was reading among the “experts” the view that a religion is a “belief system.” A belief system! That reduces religion to ideology, which is something your neo-Marxist deconstructionists love to do to everything. They ignore the great Romanian Orthodox anthropologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, who understood that all religions from the Australian aborigines to the Hopi seek to “live in a sacralized cosmos” which links heaven and earth, and in which the things of the cosmos—air, water, earth, fire—are involved in the prayer of religion. This is, Eliade wrote, the basis of the “religious nostalgia, [which] expresses the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands.” Through ritual, dance, sacred music, chant, repetition, smell, sound, sacrament, pictures, icons, temples, the peoples of the earth sacralize time and space to enter the religious experience.

Incense brings together air, fire, plants, and ritual offering. Little wonder that it is one of the oldest religious things.

I can hear the yammerings now: paganism! devil worship! catholic ritual! Yammer on, dear gnostics.

Protestantism and semi-gnostic modernist Catholicism cut the Gospel from the earth and brought in a religion of words, words, words—and talkers with endless talking. During the Reformation preachers were known to preach for five hours. Some of the Catholic priests these days . . . well, it seems like five hours.

The Byzantine priest I met . . . never mind where . . .re-minded me in a fundamental truth of religion: we pray with our bodies, our whole bodies. In the West this has become reduced to a reflexive genuflection in which the knee barely brushes the floor, and now the post-modernist Catholics are building churches with no kneelers or space to kneel . . . Upright are they! Righteous and correct! Paying by credit card!—As the architect of Clear Creek said, the best part of a church is the shadows, where the humble pray. When the winds of evil blow through bland, hygienic churches, I fall to the ground like my Muslim brothers, who got it from the early Christians. . . In the East, the old truths hold, with metanies and full prostrations , prayers standing with arms raised, deep bows from the waist, signs of the cross . . . prostrations? Falling on the ground before the Father? If it was good enough for Abraham, Moses, the disciples, and Jesus himself, well . . .Pride was always thought of as the refusal to kneel, bow, or fall on the ground before God . . .when one falls to the ground, forehead to the earth, he knows his true position in the cosmos.

Gnosticism: fear and hatred of the physical world, Manichean pride. And when I hear such things dismissed as “externals,” I hear the old-new pride, Cartesiansism. Or what Walker Percy called “angelism, abstraction of the self from itself . . .envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites.” Or, in short, Jansenism Deluxe.

The one true religion must necessarily reflect and in some way incorporate all the previous ones . . . that is why the one true sacrifice of the Mass completes and supersedes all the sacrifices of all the other religions . . .
Our whole bodies must become prayers . . .
That night in the desert years ago when I went to a student’s village near the mountains. How can I forget that? It was the feast of Eid at the end of Ramadan, and he took me away from the village where I heard the sound of the drums, the men of the village dancing under the light of the new moon. “They don’t want you to know,” Hani the writer told me on a walk in Kuwait (we stayed carefully to the path, all the mines and bombs were still not found), “but look at the mosques, at the crescents, they have always and still worship the moon.” The Lah, the new moon was just up, and the men of the village were chanting and swaying to the drums. Dumfounded, I swayed as well . . . part of me had become Muslim . . . not altogether a bad thing, given the choices nowadays . . .but only because Islam is. as Hilaire Belloc said, the religion of those who have not lost their religion, unlike us, who have . . .I loved them drums . . .

How sad that the Christians after Constantine were consumed with a passion to destroy the shrines and groves of the Roman pagans. Surely if our Gospel is true, it could overcome those things by force of truth, and let people come to us by grace . . .

Now, listening to the surush (new word, coined here and now) of the brownish waves from India and smelling the incense, I return to the water Ishmael spoke of , and his comment on Starbuck: “Uncommonly conscientious for a sea man, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his.” Ah, kinfolk seamen, “all these things,” as Ishmael says elsewhere, “are not without their meaning.”

The meaning of things, including of water, which baptizes and sustains the globe, and prompts our universal “deep natural reverence,” awakens the memory of a priest breathing (hahhhh!) upon the new water of Holy Week, and stirring it with the Paschal candle, or water washing the bodies of the baptized in a baptismal trench in Ephesus . . .

Hear the Russian Orthodox Book of Deeds for the Sanctification of Water:

“Yea, thou didst with clay restore the eyes of the blind, and didst bid him wash, and by a word didst make him see, O thou that breakest the waves of adverse passions, and driest up the salt sea of this life . . .who hast given unto us to be invested with a snow white robe by water and the Spirit . . .send down upon us thy blessing.” I saw another Byzantine priest bless the waters of a creek flowing past our parish church. “How far downstream does the blessing go?” asked a scamp.

Forever and ever and ever.

So, before I fall asleep here, let me say that my religion must be earthy and incarnate, and I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for any religion that isn’t rich in created things . . .

and that if a religion contains all the earthiness of all religions crowned by the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist, Christ Jesus himself, well then, I will be happy to breathe and taste and feel its blessings until the last chrism on my forehead and the last sign of the cross closes my blabbermouth . . . too many words for a hermit.

Boris Kustoviev: Consecration of the Waters at Theophany

First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth: Part One

Photos of Arvid Shulenberger (1919-1964) from his WW II days. Photos published with permission of his son, Dr. Eric Shulenberger.


In this and the next installment in the Mad Hermit series, the Mad Hermit remembers some fundamental doctrines (teachings) of the First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth. The heresies of this church are one, which is called Forgetting. Apostasy from the First Primitivist Church is called Postmodernism, which is also a new kind of forgetting. Followers of certain sects of Protestantism, or modernist Catholicism, both of which are known in the desert as Protestantism Enlightened or Gnosticism Lite, as well as all sorts of people who no longer have any idea what they are, are sure to be offended by the Mad Hermit.


The Second in a Series of Mad Hermit Visions


The Mad Hermit can elude much of the world, but he cannot escape memory. He is seeking God in contemplation, but he has lived a life, and he knows he must allow times when he goes back into the memories and wonders what to think now. Here on Masirah Island he climbs on the sperm whale’s skeletal head and stares at the ocean to the south. There are over 8000 miles of uninterrupted ocean between the whalebone head and the icy wall of Antarctica. That is why the Anglo-Saxon poets called it the “hwalrade,” the whale road. It is a kind of blankness, like the blankness of Melville’s white whale, which is what the contemplator needs, but today he has a reckoning with what humans can do in the face of that blankness. The answer, he realizes, is one of the fundamental principles of what he laughingly calls, with some redundancy, the First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth. In this installment and the next, we will listen to his musings. So let us hear from the Mad Hermit as he suns his aches on the whale’s warm bones:


I dozed and woke stretched out on this massive blank cranium. I dreamed that I was in a long and annoying (they all were) discussion in graduate school in English, fifty years ago. The argument among the faculty (the gods who controlled our academic destinies) was over what the Ph.D. program I was in should be called. A Ph.D. in Rhetoric was what the department was leaning toward; another was a Ph.D. in Hermeneutical Phenomenologies. Other names were proposed. A mere graduate student, I suggested a Ph.D. in Poetics, which drew silence. In the ensuing nightmare discussion one professor said (for what reason I cannot recall) that a Muslim once told him that going to the mosque is “a blaze of glory in a dying light.” In my dream a light went on in my own mind and I awoke to the sound of waves and said “that’s what great art is!” I remember, in my exultation of insight, leaning over to taking a cigarette from a scurrying crab . . . and then I awoke before inhaling. But the teacher’s words, slow and deliberate, came back in a blaze of glory:

Art?

Art is making, or if good art is meant, right making. The word poetry derives from the Greek for to make. Law, medicine, bricklaying, teaching are arts. Art (a making) is distinct from science (a knowing), although it presupposes science in the maker (artist).

He was a tall and lanky ex-Air Force radar officer named Arvid Shulenberger, and when he stretched out his long arms, he reminded me of Frost’s image from “A Mending Wall” of an old farmer carrying a small boulder “like an old stone savage armed,” for he was earthy and elemental in his thinking as in his presence. I was terrified of him, for I knew he knew something about life and learning. In the whirl and blur of graduate school nonsense with this prof saying this and that prof saying that, suddenly there was a blaze of glory in the dying light. Shulenberger was a writer who had sought answers to perennial questions, answers he always referred to as the philosophia perennis, a phrase attributable to Leibnitz but also found in substance in St. Augustine and Al Farabi. It was popularized by Aldous Huxley in his book of the same name.

In class after class, Shulenberger talked on as some of us wrote down and drank in every word, which we discussed afterwards over home brewed beer, a particular West Texas version calculated to inspire robust discussion and headaches that would crack granite. Gradually, Shulenberger unfolded all the principles of the Orthodox Poetic, a chief virtue of which was, he said, that not one word or idea in it was original. It was the truth of the ages, carved in stone. Over the semester this seminar in literary criticism aroused anger and prompted notoriety among graduate students and graduate faculty, a few of whom began to slip into the room and take notes for themselves.

We asked questions and we listened. It was as though the man had been to the mountain top and come down with the answers. Something was going on that did not go on in other literature seminars, in which no one ever said anything they considered true or real. It is called teaching. As we sat as his students, we began to learn just how Shulenberger came by this wisdom. Fond of saying that the primary purpose of criticism was pointing, he pointed us to the sources he had used to distil these questions and answers, which he had then put into a slim mimeographed document in the form of brief, concise questions and answers: The Orthodox Poetic: A Literary Catechism. The, not a. As we learned, the sloppy seas of relativism receded and we stood on what we knew was hard, firm rock. I now say a prayer of gratitude for him and his teaching, which then informed my teaching for the next fifty years.

I sigh again, remembering the joy of those days, the joy of reaching an island while exhausted by intellectual storms. Then I sigh yet once more, tears coming to my eyes, for all the failures of my own teaching, of always feeling on the edge of communicating some of the great traditional answers to the great perennial questions and never quite getting there. “You must form your whole person into a question before you can begin to find or understand the answer. You must live in questions,” I would say time and time again. Looking back now, I see that I and Shulenberger and a handful of others were isolatoes in the crowd of post-modernists, who were just then coming into existence—though their next of kin had walked the streets of Athens, Rome, Alexandria, London—

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

The Old Possum—T.S.Eliot—had it pretty well figured, I guess: the towers of the West were collapsing. The time had arrived when all belief has disappeared and when the primal things have been forgotten in the ruined cities. The makers of poems now saw only their own reflections in mirrors of despair, now machines threw pots only for money, now the last cathedrals were crumbling into dust or, worse, into museums and salons des refuses, another variety of consumer junk for ego bolstering.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Shulenberger told us, was Curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Art and yet he believed that museums were unnatural frauds and should be abolished. In Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art and The Transformation of Nature in Art, this great Orientalist argued cogently for the medieval view of art—Christian and Oriental—that art is making for a purpose, and that purpose is truth through beauty—beautiful and useful poems, cathedrals, pots, swords, dresses—for our lives. Otherwise he said, art is merely superstition, even an idolatry. I think of the railways trains full of paintings hoarded by the Nazis in their belief in “kultur.” I think of a thousand inane conversations overheard in art galleries and bookstores: “but is it art, my dear? How do you know?”

Shulenberger, with his grasp of Aristotle, Coomaraswamy, St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the nature of writing itself, blew the academic fogs away. Now, sitting on this desert beach and staring south, I remember what a delight came from the simple statement, art is making, and the consequent understanding that when we spoke of art, we were not talking about the estoterica of museums, salons, and classrooms, or the romantic delusion that art is creation, but of a fundamental human activity Aristotle and other Greeks had defined in the principle, art imitates nature. More, as Shulenberger explained, art as a process of making imitates nature in the process of becoming. A man making a pot ten thousand years ago and a poet in Greenwich Village making a poem last night and a computer brain crafting a new program in Iceland and a gunsmith in Kentucky making a long rifle are all engaged in one fundamental human activity: art imitating nature, which is the foundation of culture. Homo faber we are, art is what we do.

Further, there is no division between the “fine arts” and the “servile arts,” an artificial division fostered by some of the romantics. Works of art have a purpose: a poem should be able to hold water or hit a target. All great art is religious and its purpose is to glorify God or the gods or at least to depict the world in reality and truth. One of Shulenberger’s favorite words was “phony.” “Faulkner is a phony academician” (gasp). His other zingers—like “Northrop Frye[a new critic much admired then] is a poop”-- which he fired in between explaining the doctrines struck the devotees of the academe like thunderbolts. And pissed them off royally. But they inspired thought and discussion that brought fresh air into the university.

I sit here laughing just to think about the uproars he caused. One of his students proposed to write a Master’s Thesis on “the truth of Hemingway’s fiction.” “The truth?” one committee member sputtered. “All his fiction?” another sneered. And, finally, “you, a Master’s degree student, are going to do all this?” The doughty student: “Sir, I thought that was what we were here to do.”

No, no, no, the precious (another Shulenberger curse word, like “queer,” “academic,” and “sophisticated”) committee maintained that the purpose of the study of literature was to analyze, analyze, analyze, never to judge or reach conclusions. Shulenberger taught that the purpose of education was precisely to learn to judge things, even if we made mistakes. Education, like art, had an end, and that end had something to do with becoming fully human in the classical sense.

In his classes, we learned that we were sitting in a vast colloquium with the greats—Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Socrates, Johnson, Cervantes—and that we had a right to be there and participate in the great dialogue.

Ah, the winds blow in off the Indian Ocean. An older dhow rounds the tip of the island and chugs north on its ancient diesel. The night is coming on, in more ways than one. Even Masirah is now being sucked up into the world of phoniness. Back to prayer, before they find I don’t have a current passport or visa and ship me back to the country where mind has lost its moorings.



Some time ago The Mad Hermit made a list of the works any aspiring student of literature or the arts in general should know. The first, of course, is Shulenberger’s:

http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/creative_writing/shulenberger.pdf

If that link does not work for you, try the link here: http://failedhermit.blogspot.com/2010_03_27_archive.html

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art. New Delhi, 1994 (reissue).
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. The Transformation of Nature in Art. New Delhi, 1995 (reissue).
Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. New York, 1934.
Maritain, Jacques. Art and Poetry. London, 1945.
Johnson, Samuel Dr. Preface to Shakespeare (1765) and Lives of the English Poets (1781).
Bate, Walter Jackson. The Achievement of Samuel Johnson. New York, 1961.
Aristotle, Poetics (330 BC).
Plato, The Republic and other dialogues (c380 BC).

Note: Arvid Shulenberger also wrote a novel, Roads From the Fort; a study of James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction; several volumes of poems; and this delightful piece: http://flightjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=The+Magazine&type=PubPagi&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle+Title&mid=13B2F0D0AFA04476A2ACC02ED28A405F&tier=4&id=A0ACE92D17FF40D7ABE80D04D77FDA7B

His son, Dr. Eric Shulenberger, has written a major account of his father’s WW II flight squadron: http://www.amazon.com/Deny-Them-Night-Sky-Squadron/dp/sitb-next/0976735504

Eruptions of the Mad Hermit: Tweeting on Masirah

The above is a photo of the only public cross in the entire Arabian desert. It is located at the northern end of Masirah Island.


A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.' –St. Anthony of the Desert

[Raskolnikov] dreamed that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. In this dream, each thought that he alone had the truth, and each was at war with all the others, slaughtering them in a rage of destruction. -Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment


There are stories of truly mad hermits, even amongst the holiest of the Desert Fathers, though as the Russian peasants know, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between the holy and the mad. As Chesterton pointed out, by any worldly standard, Christ was mad. One might say, a homeless mad vagrant. But, of course, according to Christians Nouveaux, the whole enterprise of the Desert Fathers was mad and best left behind. These disgruntled chaps should have joined a Peace and Justice Group or posted little notes on the parish bulletin board.

Nevertheless, the movement of thousands of people to the deserts of Egypt and Israel was one of the most important convulsions in Christian history. From the third century A.D. until as late as the seventh, a great reaction took place against a worldly Christianity that had lost its bearings in the post-Constantinian relaxation. It gave birth to Christian monasticism, another species of madness the modern Christian fears and despises.

But where did you think Jesus, Elijah, and John the Baptist slept and dreamed? In the Jerusalem Hilton?

There is a Mad Hermit who dwells in the desert zones of this blog. Which kind of madness does he have? Which kind do you have? You be the judge.



The Mad Hermit awoke in the usual desert dawn of Oman, the hottest nation in the world, when the sun finds billions of tiny mirrors to magnify its rage against water. Ah, he thought, the light that burns out the madness of the world. He had come here as a teacher in 1994, seeking a refuge from modernism. And from all
–isms and –ologies of the cities of the world.

Late in 2002, his last two-year contract had expired and there was no promise of another. The University has expelled him from his campus home, and escorted him to the airport for his official exit. He had left the plane at Dubai and re-entered the country by land, slipping past the border guards on an old track he had used for camping. He recovered his aging Land Rover, already loaded with his camping gear, from a friendly Pakistani mechanic, and with sunburned face and a worn kumma on his head, stealthily moved about the country, easily mistaken for an ex-pat oil worker.

In the grim Omani summer he knew no better refuge than one of the thousands of coves on the Arabian Sea, in one of which he pitched his tent and dangled his feet in the waters of the Gulf. [In my original manuscript there follow a great number of other details people who read nowadays, pass over. “Too much information!”] Thinking of his classroom days, the mad hermit remembered this desperate cry of the modern, and watched sardines nibble at his toes.

The world looked different from Oman when he first arrived. It was still one of the least known and frequented countries of the world. He began to enjoy camping in the desert weekend after weekend, where the only sound was silence. And by chance, he began to read books about the Desert Fathers.

At any rate, if the reader is still with me (a 10-90 shot), after two months of Arabian Gulf summer, the hermit had nearly baked out of his head the millions of strands of argument and association that frustrate any attempt at contemplation. The great Cloud of Unknowing was just beginning to form when, drat it, the Mad Hermit discovered that his last tin was gone and his last bottle of water emptied.

At the old suk in Muttrah, he looked about for the least modern shopping center he could find. But as he eased into a ramshackle grocery, past the sign reading “Moslems not Permitted in the Pork Room,” he spotted a sight he had first encountered in 1988. In the center of a spacious area surrounded by shops, there were Arabs in disdashas sipping their espressos and talking on cell phones. They were all facing each other but talking with someone not present. “Checking up on their wives, like as not,” an Aussie muttered.

Then, in the twinkling of a camel’s eye, the world had changed for Arabia Deserta. In the same year a nation that had as yet only three paved highways, had entered cyberspace, via fiber optic cables and cell phones manufactured in Finland. The immemorial desert scene of men gathered around an evening charcoal fire and roasting their goat kebabs was still common after the last Allah Akkbar!prayer call, but the desert night now rang with the sound of cell phones across the dunes and salt wastes.

Gradually, the mad hermit discovered stratagems for living in desert places, in the mountains and on the coast. From time to time he was forced to use visit suks and villages to replenish his stores. Like Father Foucault, he found that it was possible to live on little else but palm dates, which Oman supplied in abundance twice a year. Once a week he slipped into a Catholic church for prayer and the sacraments. He particularly enjoyed Mass (and the sermons) in Marathi, Konkani, Malayalam, Arabic, Tagalog, Sinhala, or Tamil, so that he did not have to listen to the cretin English of the modern church. When he was within reach of a mosque, he knelt on a mat and prayed the Angelus at prayer calls.

Torn by a lust he could not conquer, his visits to the shopping centers continued every few months, and by 2004 he had found himself loitering around a an internet café, where dozens of young men were clattering on the keys and giggling at porn sites. What madness! he thought. As far as he could tell, the planet had been consumed by a huge beast named the Internet. Back in the desert, he prayed to be freed of the demon of curiositas.

By 2010 he had turned seventy years of age, and was as thin as a young date palm. The Land Rover, held together by the wiles of the Pakistani mechanic, now chuffed along like an aging camel, and he himself had become a legend, especially among the Bedouin bands that moved about in Toyota pickup trucks. He thumbed his prayer books, hurled rocks at black scorpions and camel spiders, and fought the demons that pulled him away from God. He prayed that there would be another hermit whom he might meet once a week, as the Desert Fathers did. None came.

A garrulous Filipino priest counseled him in confession to join the parish charismatic community, but he ran from the church and ploughed back into the dunes, screaming “no!” until his throat was too dry to scream any more.

It was time to retreat farther, and he remembered his visit to Masirah Island in 1990. The ferry carried him and the Rover to the ninety-mile long desert island just off the coast of Oman, at the southern tip of which was the sun-bronzed skull of a sperm whale, facing south across the thousands of miles to the Antarctic. Here he pitched his tattered tent, watched the whales swimming south, and blessed them on their journey.

After a year, he drove north on the Masirah road to find a suk where he could stock up on rice and canned hummus. He was astonished to see the night sky lit up with lights from luxury hotels. A ragged beggar boy met him outside the blazing Al Sultan shopping center.

“What?” he burbled in poor Arabic, only to learn that the hundred-year curse on Masirah had recently come to an end and the place was now to become a tourist paradise. A two-mile-long bridge would soon link with the mainland.

In a café inside the center there were a dozen tables, and at each young Arabs were frantically doing something with their thumbs. “What is this?” he burbled again.

“We are tweeting, Sir”

“What?”

“It is sending messages, Sir.”

“What messages?”

The young men laughed. After a chat among themselves, one said with a laugh, “we are all saying ‘I am on Masirah!’”

The horror was dawning on the rattled hermit. The desert itself, that vast emptiness between Muscat and Damascus, was disappearing, and instead of hermits and herds of camels, there were now only thundering herds of solipsists, each frantically tweeting, "I am, I am!"



The interested reader may find more about Masirah Island and the hundred-year curse on this site at http://failedhermit.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html