Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Rousseau on the Arts.

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Video on TED.com

Progress and children's rights

Itard's "...The Young Savage", and Rousseau's "Politics and the Arts."

Fascinating class. First there was Itard. We began by watching some clips from Truffault's film "The Wild Child" which I, as I always have, found very moving. Truffault found such empathy for the young boy, and he was played so brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Cargol, not, as I said in class, Jean-Pierre Leaud, although the film is dedicated to him.

What was interesting about showing the movie is not that we saw the film and could comment on the story, but rather that we saw another interpretation of the story of the Wild Child, one which understood him as being alone and scared in the world, and facing " institutionalization, a big theme for Truffault. In comparison to Itard's book, which attempts to be a more philosophical/scientific view of the boy, it underlines the one problem of the subject: the boy could not express himself in our context and so was left to be "used" towards the ends of the interpreters.

Itard's project, to examine "man in his natural, primitive state", was quickly shot down in class as having no scientific footing to stand on. The boy is now thought to have been abused and autistic, and his sample size of one hardly allows extrapolation to a general concept.

In spite of Michael's attempts to get us to focus on Itard's project, we couldn't. But perhaps it is not Itard's project that matters. What matters is our fascination with the figure of the social outcast, the child thrown out of our midst to fend for himself. Whether it is Truffault, Itard, or us reading the book, we couldn't help but feel a fundamental empathy for him, lining up our sympathies so clearly in defense of his nature and situation. We felt pity for his "alone-ness", his disadvantage. We took responsibility for it: he was abused and cast out, he was autistic, learning impaired. It wasn't his fault. Somehow, we innately feel that being in civilization is the only possible way to survive and be happy and feel anxiety about those who are left out.

So Itard may very well be right: "that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization, which raises him above other animals by a great and powerful stimulus" (Itard, p.144) Our pity for him was raised by our sense of empathy for his isolation. It's how we would feel if we were cast out of society, man's natural state.

Rousseau was fun. Such a flawed and powerful document. The big questions it raised were: "how do we create good citizens," and "if family is no longer the core of society, then what is (can be)?"

The problem, to me, is how do you "create" a citizen without a totalitarian government? The failed communist states whose demise bred the faction-ism Rousseau apparently feared, is example enough of the problem of trying to accomplish this task.

The only remaining example is the USA, which poses another set of problems. I think that advertising is the very thing that Rousseau was arguing against in this text. Without foreseeing it, he imagines that any medium so connected to pleasing the audience and citizenry could never instruct. Society would be too consumed with vanity and desire for the "spectacle-makers" to risk offense. The US, and indeed the rest of the western world, although Europe's long histories help galvanize people in their identities to an extent not found in North America, is driven by the consumer culture, which is fueled by the control of desire and stimulation of growth by advertising. But what growth? I think that we've seen in recent events that this growth was false, a balloon of wants built on borrowed money. A pyramid scheme that ran out of time. And so what kind of citizens are we? Are our core values based on our relations to each other and our society? Or are they related to our possessions and ambitions?

I rather detest much of Rousseau's "Solution", but can't help to recognize the problem he outlined as being alive and well and living 250 years later, undoubtedly on a scale not even he would have anticipated. Although I'm sure I sell his imagination short.

But what to do? The Conservative government would like to legislate taste, but the idea is abhorrent to me, mainly because their taste is a throwback to a time that can't survive out of the enclaves that this particular government comes from. They want our culture to reflect the world of the straight, married family. A world I don't see thriving around me anymore. And one which excludes very good people from having, what?, franchise or agency in the world simply because they differ from the "norm".

Moreover, there's a challenge brewing in court over polygamy. The government tried unsuccessfully to prosecute on the grounds of Canada's anti-polygamy laws. The case was struck down as being un-prosecutable. The lawyer representing the government in the case told me the problem, as he saw it, is that there are more people living in what could be seen as poly-amorous relationships in Vancouver than there are in Bountiful, B.C. Cluny's story is case in point. If her boyfriend were to move in, or even stay there three nights a week with her, her ex-husband and children, the government would then have grounds to investigate, going firmly against Trudeau's famous dictate that "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But this is the power that the government seeks! The case has since been refered to the BC Supreme court for a ruling on the constitutionality of the anti-poligamy laws. If they are struck down, the only legal recourse would be to prosecute on behalf of the young girls co-opted into marriages and sex before the age of 16 (this is the preferred course of my lawyer-acquaintance).

The family as the core of our legal and moral structure is on its last legs.

So how do we structure our society if not on the family? I think the beginning of the answer lies as much in the last case as it does in the Wild Boy of Aveyron: children's rights. We're now seeing a global movement to enshrine the rights of children. Not only are they entitled to human rights as all are, but they entitled now to special rights: the right to a level of care that supersedes the parents individual authority. These rights are interesting because they do two things: they grant rights without a demand of responsibility from the rights-holder, and they legislate duty. Perhaps it's in these two poles that the beginning of a new understanding of citizenship can begin.

Government

I think our guest lecturer hit it on the head when, after talking about Confucius, said, ".. and we're only barely reaching out to scratch the surface".

In brief, my feelings about Locke are this: it's not a very deep look into the true nature of human society and nature. It felt, to me, like a political tract, as though it were using the frame of a narrative about the nature of man and civilization to justify an argument for private property and its' legal and violent defense.

Unlike Freud or Darwin, I don't think he was trying to answer a big question so much as he was trying to build a case for an idea, or belief.

I'm much more prone toward Rousseau's assessment of private property from his Discourse on Inequality:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

In other words, private property is not a product of labour and an extension of Man in Nature, but a cynical product of civilization, built on the shoulders of bullying and imbalance of power.

I am fighting with my neighbor over a fence line, determined not to allow him one inch of what I think is mine. He, likewise, is determined to expand his reach to the last possible inch. Fucker. He's wrapping his property in chicken wire, built a locked gate, and has parked an ugly RV in his backyard. I don't want to see it. I hate the chicken wire. He brought in a backhoe and tore out the natural hill in front of his house (which is actually municipal property, not his), and replaced it with a horrific stone wall that bears no aesthetic connection to our surrounding landscape. He wants to cut the tops off the hundred or so trees in front of his place that denies him a view of the ocean (guiltily, I admit that most of the trees blocking my view were taken down many years ago.) Doesn't matter, he has no taste. That is, he doesn't share mine. In my opinion, he's ruining what is lovely about our rugged pieces of land on our little island.

But it's his property. He can do with it what he will.

I hate private property. But, even if we held all land in common, we would still have to deal with people who would lay claim to things and try to form an advantage over others, or just basically ruin the party for everybody. This, I think, is man's true 'State of Nature'.

There's a development on the other side of the island where all the lots have been created to make the least impact on the natural lay of the land. All owners must adhere to a strict building and use code. All amenities are shared and paid for by the strata. And no fences are allowed to be built. I want to live there. Of course, it's extremely expensive. So I'm stuck here with my RV-and-Chicken-wire loving neighbor, and absolutely no recourse but to try and get along with him.

I'm going to build a fence. As tall and long as I can, and blot him out of my life. This is the true nature of the social contract: not that we must agree to get along, but that we can't kill each other, so we're best to build walls and stay separate.

This is the legacy of Locke.

I wish we had more of Confucius in us. I wish virtue was defined by our conduct toward each other and not by our possessions. I wish the social contract governed our feelings about living together on a crowded planet, rather than our right to build fences to protect that which is ours from the use of others. I wish we had a society built on humility rather than aggressive acquisition.

Of course, I'm only scratching the surface. I know.

Violence

The readings this week were wonderful and challenging for me. I had read All Quiet before but had never read Arendt. In fact, I've never read any political theory before this year and have found it a fascinating challenge. Along with philosphy, I didn't anticipate an interest as deep as I have for them.

Unfortunately, I missed the class on this topic, but I got some of the notes. It seems like the class, an interesting phenomenon this semester, veered into the personal on this topic as well. Like dislocation, many people in the class have had experiences with war and violence in their lives that I have escaped in mine.

But I can see where "All Quiet..." would provoke that response, however. I found it such a deeply personal, deeply felt, account of soldiering that it was impossible not to respond personally. What was of great interest, of course, where the dynamics of rage that accompanied the violence. Firstly, as Arendt makes very clear, the implements of war had already begun to outstrip and outsize the human scale, reducing the soldiers to the size and vulnerability of bugs on the battlefield. While they still went into hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to view their enemy with a certain bureaucratic distance. The only thing that really provoked anger was when an enemy was "unfair", and used "cruel" weaponry like a jagged bayonnet. Otherwise, they charged and killed each other out of a certain dumb, autonomic response, winning and losing small patches of meaningless ground, and only after being rendered senseless by artillery. Violence is possible only with implements, and emerges from rage, which can only be triggered by a sense of injustice. But since there is no injustice in an imperialistic impulse, one must be created by the commanders and channeled toward an un-characterized enemy.

And so the personal rage was directed at their superiors and the army, the "Tyranny of none", as Arendt calls it. Most likely this happens because they are the only identifiable, personal target for rage available to the soldiers. But it fits perfectly with Arendt definitions of power and violence. And they also had only one outlet for feelings of love and bonding in the face of death, which were with each other. Their past life had been relegated to sentiment, which Arendt refers to as "the perversion of feeling" (p. 64).

And this is the interesting thing, for me. This junction between death and the political is a fork in the road. Arendt describes it clearly as a differentiation between the Greek quality and the modern one: To the Greeks, "it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and that prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal" (p.68). But to us in the Western world, it seems that "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is." (p. 67)

We're watching this play out right now in "The War on Terror". We have an enemy that has created a pantheon of heroes who find immortality in death and have created an immortal order to rule on earth, versus us, who or not so political, but who fear death to the point that we will band together to fight them, focussing more on our own common bond and desire to survive. "Support the Troops", even if you hate the war.

This last point was also of interest to me in terms of Freud. Freud's theory that man has a natural destructive instinct, which even he had trouble supporting wholeheartedly, is given life by Arendt with her definition of violence begetting from rage which begets from a sense of correctable injustice. Rather than a primal urge, it is one now engaged in a specific circumstance. Rage becomes a tool for change, rather than just an impulse.

Relativity

I loved the Persian Letters. It made great bed-side reading. Every night, I read a few letters and fell asleep. I don't mean to dismiss the book. I genuinely did enjoy it. It wasn't a complex or dense argument, but the structure allows it to create an argument in a simple, effective way. Irony and humour are great tools. So is fiction. I kept thinking of the resent movie "Borat" as being a step-child of this book. I'm not sure that any film could have outlined the problems and contradictions of America and the "American Dream" in so concise a form as that movie, and perhaps the same can be said of "Letters" in it's time.

I loved the biting analysis of French culture and politics at the time. Letters 26 and 27 are my favorite in this regard. 26 tells of a visit to the theater where the best performances are the wordless ones from the actors in the boxes who "are visible only to the waist, and as a rule, their arms are modestly concealed in a muff." As for the real actors, they are seen to simply exchange insults with the people on the floor. In the end, he receives a letter from an Opera singer he has met, begging him to take her to Persia so she can escape the shame of her rape and illegitimate pregnancy and make a living better than the one she foresees as an aging actress.

In one short letter, he undermines French culture and high society, and underscores the deep hypocrisies faced by the lower classes and women. It reminds me of the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, which accomplishes the same thing in a heroic tale. But that is the question here, is he really condemning French society? It was discussed in class that the whole storyline of Usbek's problems with his Seraglio were a cautionary tale about effect of the vacuum of leadership and repression of the classes that characterized Louis IV reign. But is it also a reminder of the freedoms available to people, especially women, in French society that don't exist elsewhere. In many letters, like 25, he comments through Usbek in a seemingly derisive tone that the women of France have neither modesty or virtue, but he describes an enviable level of freedom compared to the indentured slavery of the women of the harem. Are they truly lacking in virtue? Like much of this book, the definition of virtue lies squarely in the cultural perspective. With these men as our narrators, we develop a sympathy with their point-of-view, especially when they brilliantly and humorously critique the institutions they are witnessing, like the theater of the the church, or even the intellectuals of cafe society. But is their perspective right?

I suppose this is where the idea of relativity comes in... and it's a very Humean idea too: how do we negotiate the differences between cultures? How do we describe virtues, morality and ethics when we are faced with large cultural divides? It's where Hume fails in some respect in that he describes moral agreement among homogeneous cultures. But how do you describe the rights of women, or argue the moral quality of slavery in the gulf between two cultures as different as the Paris of Usbek's mind and the Persia of Montesquieu's imagination? Religion fails us, the law falls short because if it's necessarily local quality.

Perhaps humor is the only way to describe the differences and to undermine authority. As Arendt writes in "On Violence": "The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (p. 45).ot

Dislocation

So here's the confession: I didn't read Ali's "Brick Lane".

But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.

What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.

The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.

I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.

And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.

My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.

In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.

In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.

My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.

This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.

It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.

Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.

Repression

I'm afraid my journal will reveal all too plainly the paucity of time I've had to do the readings. But, I'll continue as best I can. Who knew that two 10 lb babies could absorb so much time and energy? That being said, I'm no longer sleep deprived, only reading-time-deprived and even that is getting better.

I enjoyed the readings in this weeks' theme. Especially Freud. I'd never read him and of course had many of the cliches about his work in my head, but was deeply impressed with what was more than just - although to say "just" about this is a little trite - a theorization of the human psyche. What I saw instead was a "system" for understanding the development of man and civilization. Unlike, say, Rousseau, who's philosophy was based on a romantic notion of the development of man, Freud builds a logical understanding not just of our minds and or social structures, but more importantly of the deep tensions that do and must exist between individual man and the society that he must live in.

Hume's writings come to mind in that he describes in very similar fashion the necessities of civil society and the benefits of their structure, but he doesn't explain the conflicts that arise inside them in a satisfactory way, most likely because he describes a fairly homogenous social grouping. Freud's notion that we must invariably be in conflict with ourselves and with society in order to stay within social structures, families, tribes, towns and cities, is more appealing to me.

Even his description of The Pleasure Principle describes the need for conflict:

"We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things". (p.25)

This idea of living in a state of tension between opposing forces, the personal and the public, will come up again with Kant in a later entry. I quite like the more complex idea of how we must each individually negotiate the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the whole of our societies.

"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." (p.34)

This pertains to Kant as well, but it seems that freedom lies not in the unfettered pursuit of individual happiness, but the choices we make in negotiating the space between personal desire and public necessity. Love and Necessity, the two poles of Freud's dialectic of civilization. However, Freud is very clear that this balance can be dangerously precarious.

"It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive and instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue." (p.52)

There is, of course, more to be said... And I should talk about Conrad, as well. I liked Conrad. But really, it's up there with 1984 and Atlas Shrugged as "books that have been read too deeply by high-school students". But I don't dismiss it. Conrad's imagery and language is quite extraordinary and lush... part of the reason it has lasted so long as a masterwork. But I'd rather leave it alone for two reasons: firstly because I'm so far behind with everything else that I have to become more efficient if I'm going to catch up let alone get ahead; and secondly because like Freud, the book has so deeply informed me in unconscious ways, that reading them both seemed repetitive. Freud, Darwin... we still live in the world that they revolutionized and I have a harder time understanding myself outside the context they provide than inside.

Perhaps that's the best reason of all to be taking this degree: to see the forces that have built me, and possibly allow me to question the things that I presently assume as given. As my old therapist would have said, "awareness is the first step".

Hubris

I had the fortunate/unfortunate task of giving the first presentation on the subject of Hubris. This semester differs from the last (and by way of apology, I didn't finish my journaling last semester due to the birth of my twins) in that rather than follow the long line of Reason v. Passion through a series of old books, we're looking to address smaller themes as they relate to man's struggle to define himself... through a series of old and some new books.

My subject was hubris and the texts were Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus", and Euripides' "The Bacchae". The idea for both was man challenging the power of the gods, and being punished for doing so.

The seminar was led off by Michael who described his experience as an anthropologist in West Africa and a similar myth in the regions depicting man's downfall at the hands of the gods when he challenges them. What was interesting was the notion that this myth permeates many cultures and traditions of story-telling. We seemed, as a species, very concerned about our limits in the face of God.


We also discussed the idea of Prometheus, the god who gave man fire and was punished for doing so. We spoke about him in relation to Robert Oppenheim's quote "Now I am become Death". Truthfully, we didn't discuss the text of the Bacchae much at all, except to note that it was a poor (read old) translation, and that the plot concerned corrections to the excesses of human power; the relationship between kings and gods.

For this entry, I'm going to focus mostly on Faustus, because it's a theme that will come up again and again as we read the later texts.

The first thing that caught my eye was the notion of Faustus as a renaissance man, or rather, a man of the renaissance. This notion, new to the age, of the emergence of the individual, is actually a tough one to pick out on it's own, because it's still so prevalent today. The notion of the world centered around man, and of the internal world of man himself, is hard to separate from my understanding of man and the world. It's hard to imagine that other ideas exist. But here, in this nascent period, were very new, very radical ideas.

And Faustus is a very modern character. He's obsessed with his inner life and his accomplishments. He is driven by ambition and self-gratification. His relationship to the gods is also new in that he can negotiate it, rather than have it handed down in absolute terms.... or at least he thinks he can. Even other people are there for his pleasure and whim.

Where he seems to depart the philosophers of the past, is in his blindness, willful blindness it should be said, to morality, to good and evil.

When Mephistopheles first appears, he is so hideous and distasteful, Faustus demands the he change his shape and "return an old Franciscan Friar." These surfaces are important to Faustus. That Meph appear to be good is all Faustus requires. It makes you question his ability to discern true knowledge from trivia as the play progresses.

And indeed, this happens, for it seems that Faustus believes that true knowledge lies in magic: "'tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me". Why magic, over law, medicine, philosophy or religion? Is the ability to conjure Helen of Troy as an object of beauty and desire a real power? or does the act's requisite skill construe true knowledge? But I think that that is the point: what is our goal here? what makes us happy? Well, certainly, lovely women, outsmarting kings and knaves, gaining riches and power and fame are "fun", but is this all the point of our lives? Is it worth our souls to achieve some or all of these things?

Faust does fly into space to see earth from above, which I suppose at its' time must have been quite a thought. As we know that Copernicus had only recently published his theories about the universe, the very challenge to the religious hegemony about the construction of space must have seemed shocking at the time. But what of it? He did nothing of consequence with his knowledge. We figured out how to split the atom... knowledge... but it's what we did with it that makes us question ourselves.

Maybe that's the point of the allegory, like all these allegories about challenging the gods: it's what we do with our knowledge that matters. It's the care we take with our discoveries that will build us an empire or bring us to rubble. Neither Faustus, nor Marlowe for that matter, question what Faustus does with his ill-gained knowledge, only that he bargained with the devil to get it. It's seems like a sign of the immaturity of our species that we're more concerned with parental disapproval than consequence of our actions.

God can't place the world at our feet and then chide us for figuring it out. It must be a question of what we do with it all.

Perhaps the nuclear bomb represented the beginning of man's maturity and separation from his parental figure. Maybe the bomb represented the death of God, and the ascendancy of man to god-hood. "I am become death", Oppenheimer quotes. Perhaps he really meant "I am become God".

As for Faustus, he deserved hell, not because he made a deal with the devil and never repented to god, but because he didn't do anything that smelled of greatness with the power and knowledge he found.

"Hope and Fear; Dialogues on Death and the Immortality of the Soul". End of term essay

I

Mary Wollstonecraft knocked firmly on the door of the lighthouse. She was consumed, inexplicably, she admitted to herself, with anger at the lighthouse keeper who, having undoubtedly seen the pilot light beckoning from the ship, refused to come out and row her to shore. After convincing the captain to depart from the norm and allow the crew to bring her, she immediately set out to expostulate or even scold the keeper.

The old man who opened the door was very glad to see her, the art of hospitality strong as it was in the men and women of the country.

“I go many days and weeks without greeting a body at the door. I would, I wish, have such occasion as to welcome many more!” he said with great cheer.

“Did you not see the pilot light calling to you from our ship?” was her crisp reply.

“Come up into the tower and see with your own eyes, that which I saw, and you will think not that I lie.”

Angry as she was, she followed him up the ladder and into the light tower. And there, plain for any but the blind to see, was her ship's pilot light burning in full view, as the boat churned and rocked in the cold, grey, choppy sea.

“I now have no doubt that you saw the light and so must reason that you chose not to come. How do you defend such selfishness, such recalcitrance of your duty?” she demanded.

He smiled kindly at her. “Is it not sweet to watch from dry land when the storm-winds roil a mighty ocean's waters, and see another's bitter toil – not because you relish someone else's misery – rather, it's sweet to know from what misfortunes you are free.”

The anger she had carried from the boat to shore now rose from her chest to her cheeks in a torrent of heat. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. “Do you mock me?” she heard herself say, although her ability to reason had long since fled and she was in no way certain, when recalling the conversation as she wrote her letters later that night, of what her actual words might have been.

“Your anger at my answer is not anger at me. 'Tis the Dread Of Death, from which your heart must flee! But if instead, we see these things are laughable, mere jokes, why doubt that reason alone can quench this terror with its spark?”

The storm of feelings in her body was thrown into an uproar by his words. How had he seen this in her? This fear of annihilation she had carefully hidden from the view of civilized company – so she thought – that had swelled and swayed in her heart like the very sea they were watching from the tower, now lay bare for examination by any and all.

“You can't possibly know the nature of my feelings in such fleeting a moment as this,” she retorted.

He would not relent. “You feel heaviness upon your mind, it's plain to see, that weighs you down. If you could grasp the cause of this ennui, this heap of misery and care that hunkers on the heart, you would not lead the life you do, not knowing what you want, ever seeking a change of place – as if you could lay down your burden by travelling through space!”

“How fallacious!” she replied. “ This dread of death that you deride, I ask you in turn, what, if not either hope or the fear of annihilation, is to sustain life?”

“There is the answer, in the question you ask. This misery must take you no more to task. For 'tis hope and fear which cause the pain, you see, and their end is the end that you truly must seek.”

For the next hour, Mary sat spellbound as he explained that the body and the soul are made of indestructible atoms, and as life is born, these atoms collide and bond to form bodies which, after death, the bonds dissolving, return to individual atoms. The soul, which he termed as the union of mind and spirit, is formed, too, of atoms of a different nature. And they, like the atoms of the body, at death return to their natural form to be swept out into the infinite sea of atoms.

Mary was shocked. “I cannot bear to think of being no more – of losing myself – though existence is often a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust – ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps!” she argued.

He looked at her sadly, like a doctor giving his patient some bad news. “If the nature of the soul is immortal, and it creeps into the body as we're born, why is it no one keeps a memory of time before? For if the mind has undergone a transformation vast enough to cancel out all the remembrance of things past, that is a state approaching little short of death, I'd say. Therefore you must admit that what it was has passed away.”

“And what of hope?” she asked. “What of God? Is there nothing to desire in life but misery and the sadness of a broken heart?” The sorrow lodged in her throat made no pretense of receding anymore.

“Religion! Superstition!” he hissed, shocking Mary to take a step back. “It is Religion breeds wickedness and that has given rise to wrongful deeds!” His face grew red with fury. “It is the turn of Superstition to lie prone, trod underfoot, while by philosophy's victory we reach the heavens!”

His voice echoed around Mary as she hurried down the ladder and out the door of the lighthouse to the waiting party.

That night, as she wrote her account of the conversation, she struggled again with her feelings. It seemed they would never leave her a moment’s rest.

“Ah, let me be happy whilst I can,” she said aloud to no one. But the tears started as she thought of it. “I must fly from thought, and find refuge from sorrow in a strong imagination – the only solace for a feeling heart”, she wrote. “But surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.”

And she was asleep.



II

Mary stood in a recess of the church in Tonsberg looking at the coffins. The bodies inside she knew to be preserved, an abominable art. Preserved. Is this my fate?, she thought. How futile to term it a preservation when the noblest parts are immediately sacrificed merely to save the muscles, skin and bone from rottenness. It is a treason against humanity, thus to lift up the awful veil which would fain hide its weakness.

She then spoke aloud without taking notice, as she did with growing frequency on this journey of solitude and so little affection. “Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? This I, so much alive?”

“A philosopher, or an actress?” a weak voice behind her hissed. She turned to see a young, pallidly complected minister observing her from the back of the church. He bore the affect of a bookish man who rarely stepped outdoors from his studies.

“Neither,” she replied, embarrassed at being caught speaking in such dramatic tones. “A traveler.” Looking back at the coffins, she asked, “Who lies here, inside the church?”

The young minister coughed hoarsely as he stepped forward. “Those who are close to God. Those who were granted grace in this life. The fortunate few.”

“And those who were not so fortunate? Those who defy God with ambivalence or perhaps unnatural death?” she inquired, trying to seem intellectually curious.

He looked past her out the window at the rear of the church. She followed his eyes to the land in the distance. A rugged and dreary road lined with nothing but bare, grey rocks, leading to a forest that appeared to have been burnt in time past. Desolation and gloom beyond measure.

“How unfortunate” she smiled. Her attempt at humour was ignored. He stared at her, unblinking. She turned back to the coffins. “Do you have an answer to my questions, then? Is this death? Our tissue frozen against time? Our soul lost for eternity?”

“If that is what you choose to believe, then that is what is true.”

Such riddles, she thought. “And if I desire to believe more? How does one find grace? How do I believe in that which I cannot see, know what I cannot know?”

“You are wise to know that you cannot know, but you must at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason compels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

“Does reason compel me to believe?”

“Yes,” he raised his finger to make his point as he moved closer to her, “but if we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. Yet, if we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.”

“You speak in circles,” she laughed. He stopped walking and clasped his hands behind his back, visibly offended by her remark.

“If it is reason you seek, then here it is: God either exists or He doesn't. If you choose to believe and He does exist, you will live in eternity. If He does not and yet you choose to believe, then you will at least be faithful, honest, humble, full of good works, a sincere, true friend. So reason gives but reason to believe.”

“You, sir, appear to be the philosopher of the two of us. Can you answer the question: 'How does one achieve grace if not by reason?' Passion? What of love?”

“Cleopatra's nose!” came the odd reply. “Love is vanity! And passion only leads you further from God. If there were only reason without passion! If there were only passion without reason! But since he has both, man can only be at peace with one when he is at war with the other. Concentrate not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence, but by diminishing your passions, for they are vanity!”

She wondered who between them was the actor. “So neither reason nor passion can bring me closer to happiness? We're left in a wretched place, then, aren't we?”

“Happiness is man with God. Unhappiness is man without God. Man's greatness is in knowing that he is wretched. Our desire for happiness is punishment for our fall from grace.” He smirked at her, as though he had beaten her at chess with one bold move.

“More circles!” she protested. He was wearing thin her patience. “I'm beginning to think you mad!”

“Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.” He laughed for the first time – a human being after all. He continued, his voice growing weaker as his obviously heartfelt conviction rose. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.”

With that last riddle, the minister began coughing uncontrollably. A young woman rushed in from outside. Clearly, she had been listening close by.

“My brother is ill, he cannot be brought to agitation!” She snapped at Mary as she walked him out of the church. “Stay if you will, but question him no more.”

And they were gone, leaving Mary alone to contemplate the strange encounter. How could there be faith without reason, reason without passion, yet faith that could only be found in the heart? She reasoned and reasoned, but her heart was too full to allow her to remain in the church, so she determined to walk the road in the dead forest beyond the church till she was wearied out, to purchase rest – or rather forgetfulness.

She walked through the forest of grey, cobweb-like pines; the fibres whitening as they lost their moisture, imprisoned life seemingly stolen away. “Death” she thought, “under every form appears to me like something getting free – to expand in I-know-not-what element; nay I feel that this conscious being must be as unfettered, have wings of thought, before it can be happy.”

She soon reached a cascade. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent mocked her exploring eye, producing an equal activity in her mind. “Why am I chained to life and its misery?” she lamented aloud, sure this time not to be heard by some unseen observer over the rush of the water. Her deserted heart felt the weight of her sorrow and loneliness, but still, the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited were pleasurable; and viewing it, her soul rose with renewed dignity above its cares. And she stretched her hand to touch the spray of the water – to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.

Thinking of death always made her cling tenderly to her affections.



III

Mary had purposely sought out the town of Larvik, a metropolis, relative to the towns her recent travels had taken her. Her thoughts had flown from the wilderness to the polished circles of the world. She hoped to rub off the rust of thought, and polish the taste which the contemplation of nature had rendered just. Her encounters of late had left her in a state of furious contemplation. As a woman of taste and education, how was she to rationalize the upheaval of passion that pushed her, unwillingly at times, into the deepest of sorrows only then to pull her to the highest of joys? What was she to think of her deep desire to cling to life when some days every step she took felt so heavy and laboured that the very thought of another step reduced her to weeping and made her desirous of an end to her mortal struggles?

A letter of introduction had brought her into the company of a warm and amiable man, a lawyer, and one who clearly passed much time in contemplation on matters of the human mind and soul. He sat with her at his club, a gentlemen's club, her entrance to which, he assured her, would not be questioned under his patronage. She found herself in the midst of a group of lawyers. Her head turned round, her heart grew sick. Regarding the visages of the men sitting nearby, she felt not nearly so welcome as her benefactor insisted.

She recounted to him her previous conversations in the lighthouse and the church in as much detail as she remembered. He listened with great care and interest as she reasoned through the arguments that had been presented to her and, although she tried desperately to refrain from allowing her passions to surface, she could not fully prevent it. Such was the temperature of her soul. She ended her story by posing the question, or rather, lament, which had driven her to this place and this moment: “Considering the question of human happiness, where, oh, where does it reside? Has it taken up its abode with the unconscious ignorance, or with the high-wrought mind?”

The gentleman studied her tortured face for a moment, weighing his reply. He felt compassion, the most natural of human impulses, for her struggle, but insisted to himself that he should answer her as rationally and truthfully as possible.

“The topic of human misery has been insisted on with the most pathetic eloquence that sorrow and melancholy could aspire.” He began. “But in misery, there is no virtue. It has neither utility nor enjoyment to either you or society. And while I commend you for allowing your passions to lead you, for reason can and should only ever be their slave, this misery must end itself either by imagination” he hesitated a moment, “or by force.”

She looked into his eyes. They were warm and filled with the best of human kindness, for he was, she saw, a man with a great portion of common sense, and heart – yes, a warm heart.

She smiled, barely covering the sadness held within her breast. “Here I came to talk of anything but the pangs arising from the discovery of estranged affection, and the lonely sadness of a deserted heart, and yet I cannot stop. My imagination arrests any other subject and forces misery's cruel hands upon my neck, which it holds without mercy or quarter.”

Her hand trembled as she said the next words, their sound echoing in her mind, to be heard again and again forever after. “So then, what of force?”.

He shifted slightly in his chair and looked down for a brief moment. “So great is our horror of death, that when it presents itself under any form besides that to which a man has endeavored to reconcile his imagination, it acquires new terrors, and overcomes his futile courage. But when the passions play, when the judgment dictates, when the limbs obey, this is all the operation of God. Men are entrusted to their own judgment and discretion, and may employ every faculty with which they are endowed, in order to provide for their ease, happiness, or preservation. But what is the meaning of that principle, then, if we say that a man who has tired of life, is hunted by pain and misery, bravely overcomes his terror of death, and makes his escape from this cruel scene? That he has incurred the indignation of his creator and disturbed the order of the universe?”

“Is there a principle to be found?” Mary stammered, trying to laugh. “These are perhaps the vapourings of a heart ill at ease – the effusions of a sensibility wounded almost to madness.” She could scarce believe she had revealed her soul so deeply and irrevocably.

He continued, unmoved by her diversion. “Has not every man the free disposal of his own life? It would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. Suppose a malefactor is justly condemned to a shameful death – can any reason be imagined why he may not save himself all the anguish on thinking on its dreadful approaches? He invades the business of Providence no more than the magistrate did who ordered his execution.”

“I know of a similar story,” said Mary, fighting against the powerful reason that spoke so seductively to the darkness in her heart. “A wretch in Portugal who had been imprisoned several years, during which period lamps had been put up, was at last condemned to a cruel death; yet, on his way to execution, he only wished for one night's respite, to see the city lights.”

“Are you possessed of a similar hope?” he inquired.

“I hope for the immorality of my living soul,” she answered. It was yet true.

“I'm afraid in that regard, I must agree with your lighthouse keeper. Reasoning from the common course of nature it must be said that what is incorruptible must also be ingenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed before our birth; and if the former existence noways concerned us, neither will the latter. This is merely the metaphysical argument, which must presume dominance over the argument of the First Cause. We must also examine the moral argument, which would assure you of punishment. But punishment, according to our conception, should bear some proportion to the offence. Why then eternal punishment for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man?”

“How dare I assume to know the quality of Divine moral judgment?” asked Mary.

“Precisely, you cannot!” he replied sternly. “The chief source of moral ideas is the reflection on the interests of human society.” He leaned forward and covered her trembling hand with his. “Death is in the end unavoidable; yet the human species could not be preserved had nature not inspired us with an aversion towards it.”

He caught himself, withdrawing his hand and sitting back in his chair. But it was too late, for the conversation around the room had all but ceased; and every man was looking in their direction. Mary had never been more aware of being a woman in her life. She straightened herself in her chair, imitating his manner, and, controlling her emotions, decided to conclude the conversation and leave the club, which had become for her as objectionable a place as she had ever been. She brazenly returned the stares of the men in the room, who's wits had been sharpened by knavery, who here undermined morality, confounding right and wrong. These locusts will probably diminish, as the people become more enlightened, she thought.

She turned to her companion. “Your reason and compassion are the soundest, most sincere argument I have heard. But my heart, as the young minister proposed, my heart cannot deny its cry to God for mercy upon my soul; for grace,” she said.

He smiled after a moment of reflection, and reached for a cigar. He admired her courage. He leaned forward and spoke quietly, as to ensure that none in the room but her could hear. “Nothing could set in a fuller light the infinite obligations which mankind has to Divine revelation, since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truth.”



IV

The evening was extremely calm and beautiful. Not being able to walk, she requested a boat, her only means of enjoying free air. The view of the town was extremely fine. A huge, rocky mountain stood up behind it, and a vast cliff stretched on each side, forming a semicircle. In the recess of the rocks was a clump of pines, amongst which a steeple rose picturesquely beautiful.

“I should rather choose,” she thought “did it admit to a choice, to sleep in some of the caves of the rocks”. For she had become better reconciled to them since she climbed their craggy sides, listening to the finest echoes she had ever heard. The night air brushed lightly over her face as the sound of the oars passing rhythmically through the water lulled her into a dream. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff, soothing her soul to peace. And to the echoes, she raised her own voice – a song from her heart – dance from cave to cave. She cared not if she were overheard.

Shimmering,
iridescent,
deathless Aphrodite,
child of Zeus, weaver of wiles,
I beg you,
do not crush my spirit with anguish, Lady,
but come to me now, if ever before
you heard my voice in the distance
and leaving your father's golden house
drove your chariot pulled by sparrows
swift and beautiful
over the black earth, their wings a blur
as they streaked down from heaven
across the bright sky –

and then you were with me, a smile
playing about your mortal lips
as you asked,
what is it this time?
Why are you calling again?
And asked what my heart in its lovesick raving
most wanted to happen:

“Whom now
should I persuade to love you?
Who is wronging you, Sappho?
She may run now, but she'll be chasing soon.
She may spurn gifts, but soon she'll be giving.
She may not love now, but soon she will,
willing or not”

Come to me again now, release me
from my agony, fulfill all
that my heart desires, and fight for me,

fight at my side, Goddess.