Is there no balm in Gilead?

Honey butter. One of a handful of foods that I associated with my paternal grandfather, alongside his signature butterscotch rice krispies and the "pinkies" (pink wintergreen lozenges) he kept in a container in a kitchen cabinet. When I stumbled across a recipe for whipped honey butter while planning a trip to the grocery store, I was briefly caught off balance by the realization that I can't walk into Grandpa Linder's house (the screen door makes a particular sound in my memory, the living room warm, the red barrel-full-of-monkeys from the toy chest still dangle through the floor grate from the second floor to the first), that it has been years since I could do that and find him standing over the sink or playing dominoes at the table. I have lost the pale ring that slowly ate into the blue of his irises late in life; I can only remember the frail hunch of his back and his brown polyester pants--they are beyond vision, except the momentary glimpses in the set of my father's face or the bend to his shoulders that seems to be a familial trait (and one that I have vainly hoped to escape).

A coworker found out yesterday that her grandmother had died. She never met the woman who gave birth to her own mother--Hawaii was too far for family vacations, except one trip that the same mother made a few years back, but by herself. Grandmother was a voice on the telephone, but also a presence, hovering somewhere in the background. How do you comfort someone, when you and they are not even sure of the nature of their grief?

It was the honey butter that reminded me of Grandpa, but I thought perhaps there were some similarities between my startled discovery of his absence and my coworker's news. After all, though I met my grandparents, they lived out in Michigan, and we only saw them on holiday trips or a week every summer when we piled into the car or later into a motorhome and traveled west. When my seven year-old self cried over Grandma's death, she didn't really know what she was mourning, and maybe they were really just the confused tears of a child witnessing her stoic father weep for the first time. Grandpa was a bit different--he was in his late 80s, tired and ready, though by some stroke of familial care and fortune allowed to be home all the way to the end. I had known him a bit better, had even known him well enough to feel uncomfortable about some elements of his worldview, but didn't cry for him. I was relieved for his sake, that he should not be in pain any more. Perhaps if I had felt his absence more keenly, I would have closed the link by cauterization. Instead, it takes an effort to remember that he's not alive, somewhere at the other end of a telephone call or a long day's drive from Pennsylvania to Lapeer. 

We celebrate the uniqueness of the individual, but as Wolterstorff noted in Lament for a Son, so too our every grief has its own unique quality (he ties it to the inscape of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which, in its turn, has its roots in the haecceity of medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus). Perhaps this is simply reflective of the complicated forms that different relationships can take, coupled with our emotional preparedness for the final moment. Sometimes we are even surprised by grief: Sufjan Stevens wrote his recent album Carrie & Lowell as a response to the death of a mother he barely knew, a mother whose schizophrenia and alcoholism left her a remote and difficult figure, but whose passing catalyzed a personal crisis. 

It seems like it's most often the distant ones that catch us off guard. We do not doubt that we have the right to grieve for, say, the grandparent who provided our parents with childcare when we were young. But so many times we find that we have a conceptual grasp of familial roles that have been filled by people who are only vague, shadowy characters in our expanding universe of relational ties. When they die, we grieve for the loss of a might-have-been, and less so for the person we barely knew, for their actual being-in-the-world. And this is a grief that need not solely accompany death: for the most part, I feel as if my mother, with her peculiar blend of aggression and paranoia, is not worthy to be called "mother," even if she is psychologically and physically continuous with the individual who gave birth to me and raised me. In that complicated rendering of a human relationship, I have found poignant and at times piercing traces of the same grief for the might-have-been--and I suspect that when she does die, she will be among my surprises, her death a more painful experience for the alienation and the lack of resolution that surround that connection and its severance.

But now I've ventured into the macabre and uncomfortable territory of positing the death of one who is living, rather than speaking of the death of one who has died, and I am not entirely sure what I'm trying to say. Perhaps no more than that in all the literature on loss and in all the poems in all the world, there will never be one that can capture either that breathless moment that I felt this morning or the mute sympathy of yesterday afternoon. And thus the paradoxical language of the poet Masters, who uses words to ask:

Of what use is language?

A beast of the field moans a few times

When death takes its young.

We are voiceless in the presence of realities--

We cannot speak. 

The Sign, the Vector, and the Fairy Tale

No hapless adventurer I,

Daring to sally forth with no hope

Of a home at last to return to.

The dark forest bid me enter,

An invitation to the intimacy of seeing and knowing

The spruce hollows where all fear dwells;

My feet accepted the hospitality of the labyrinth,

But my hands mistrusted, strew my breadcrumbs:

The word of life and the broken bread

Scattered like my memories

Like footprints behind me

On the path I had never desired.

But this (mis)trust in uncertainty came new and uneasy--

I do not believe in signs

Who so readily lose their way

Absent the wise figure of a concrete referent.

What assurance had I

That a ball of twine made from fragile words

Would not blow away on a breeze or rot

As surely as the doves consumed

Hansel and Gretel's way home?

But the interwoven strands of story

Kept the thoughts together,

Anchored them in the soil of a land I came to know.

And when my frostbitten fingers sought

The rough comfort of their sound

There yet they were, a living vine:

A whispered welcome on the long walk home.

On Driving Manual and Deep Ecology

While driving home from work last night, I was thinking about the difference between driving an automatic car and driving a manual car. There is something in the names themselves that implies the poles of the experience. "Automatic," requiring no particular knowledge or input, only the requisite initial step of depressing the accelerator. The transmission will take care of the rest. "Manual," with its suggestion of "manos," meaning "hands" in Spanish (Spanish being a language I know, but an etymological search says what I expected--that both "manual" and "manos" come from the Latin for "hands"). But when we think of manual labor, we think of involvement in a real, physical way. Working with one's hands is often set at a contrast with intellectual labor, but this is not entirely fair. The better contrast might be to look at the products of the one and the products of the other. Manual labor applies itself to concrete materials, while the average stock broker and university professor are simply playing with abstractions.

I'm not really trying to glorify manual labor. We started with manual transmissions, after all, and there is no true correspondence between the two, and even less so between automatic and abstract.

I'm thinking, rather, of the way that resisting automation gives us a more intimate knowledge of the workings of the world around us. When I drive a manual car, I have to be more involved. Eventually, checking RPMs and shifting up or down may become as habitual as if it were automatic, but still, there is a level of attention and awareness that is absent from the automatic driver's operation.

Attention is a powerful thing. Advertisers vie for it. Friends and lovers get upset when we don't attend to them. It's something that we pay, an interesting twist of language that presupposes a debt owed--or, just as often, something purchased. I pay attention in class, because I want to obtain an education, but also because etiquette demands that I at least outwardly respect someone who has studied deeply in a particular field and presumably has earned authority to speak on the subject. How much you weight the one or the other in a given situation depends entirely upon your personality and values--I can think of friends who are so pragmatic that they would not be impressed into paying attention just by someone's credentials, although they might maintain a semblance of respect for that individual as an intrinsically valuable person.

As I am reading more about deep ecology for my honors thesis, I rather think that this intersection of manual, with its implication of contact and intentional manipulation (another word with the root of "man-" in it), and attention, as something with the dual presuppositions of debt and purchase, has an important place in how we perceive our place in and our duties toward our environment. Perhaps this is embodied by someone like Wendell Berry, whose intelligence and eloquence have been shaped powerfully by his lifelong work as a Kentucky farmer. The farmer may modify the earth to some extent, through irrigation, fertilization, pesticides, and so forth, but beyond a certain point, there can only be accommodation to the nature of that land. Importantly, that point may fall at different places for the one who thinks only of short-term profit and the one who thinks of long-term stewardship (a word that is loaded with an entire worldview, but which at least has the idea of entrusted care for another's potentially divergent interests).

Since the advent of tool-making, mankind has tended toward transcendence of nature's limits. As those tools have become more sophisticated and nature increasingly distant, we begin to believe ourselves superior to it. The aforementioned farmer or others who work to harvest the resources of earth and sea, they are no less prone to this fault than the rest of us. The one who overworks soil and the one who overfishes are both guilty of disrespect for limitation in the service of human ends and economic profits. This, then, is not a glorification of the old days or a trumpet call to return to the soil. Rather, it is a way of saying that if we resist the automation of our lives, if we allow limits to condition our plans and take up the creative task of living within them, we have started to pay attention. And, perhaps, in what begins as a debt owed to a universe of which we are not the center, we have obtained the deep satisfaction of community to the fullest extent of the word.

The Judge and the Other

The casualness of language permits us to be both prosecutor and pardoner of our own wrongs. I recognize in myself the established pattern of poor behavior, and (ever eager to assert my self-awareness) brazenly declare, "I am a horrible person!" A friend might generously protest such a damning pronouncement. It is not, after all, always the case, or they could hardly be called a friend. But perhaps their protest senses the dual deception I have thus perpetrated. First, that the self which is contemporaneously horrible is not MY self. I am a righteous, towering figure, chastising the indwelling Other with its propensity for bad behavior, and thereby separating myself from it by the infinite chasm of alterity. This serves the second deception, which is that in accusing myself, I am also excusing myself. I am not the one who does. But even if I were, I should still be pardoned, because it is not merely that I have done horrible things (probably unavoidably true), but that I am ontologically, that is essentially a person who cannot be otherwise than horrible. My excuse is my own nature, not to be contravened by the selflessness of respect for the wellbeing of others. If I am to be reproached, it is unjust, for I am not responsible for that which I cannot change--though I may, Sisyphus-like, attempt to climb against my natural incline, only to find that it is impossible: the hilltop cannot be taken. Thus absolved, I go about my life unaltered, save for a deepening illusion and the increasing self-divide.

Decompression II

I am a poet, not a philosopher
(At least: one more than the other)
(And now I cannot add,
"Unqualified"
To my self-damnation,
As the qualifier bleakly observes.)
Words being the medium of both,
I thought there might be some blood-shared kinship
Lying between them like an abstract object.
But in fact,
What one makes love to,
The other tortures.
The same object under different tools, different hands, different eyes,
Here permitted to preen, flourish, shine;
There, subjected to mutilations that would make the torture report look tame.
Chesterton's madman was logical,
And his poets sane.
I think I should like that brand of sanity
Which contemplates the earth
And expresses it into that which it is not,
Celebrates it in symbols and daydreams.
Better to be crazed for a bird on the wing
Than agonized over the existence of universals.
My soul sings no nominal melody:
It does not care.