The next thing you know, you are driving again, and you no longer recall stopping the car, or getting out. Perhaps you have lost time, or seen animals you were not expecting. Maybe this is a little confusing, but you don’t think about it much.

In fact, it isn’t until much later that the memories come back to you in stark clarity, perhaps after an intense experience, or as a result from hypnosis. You recall not only getting out of the car, but actually floating up into the air, or being approached by beings that are not human. Maybe they are tall, blonde men-like creatures reminiscent of Nordic gods. Or, perhaps they are the small grays with wide oblong voids for eyes (popularized recently in our culture). Maybe they take you somewhere, experiment on your body with various probes, insert objects into your skin or up your nose, give you information, show you hallucinatory visions, or have you hang out with various other homo sapiens as you wait to board a ship. Maybe you find that you know them, have known them since childhood. Perhaps they tell you that you are pregnant, or that some baby they let you hold is your own; or perhaps you were pregnant, and suddenly you are not. Maybe they leave scars, or take you into oblong shaped crafts, or even steal some of your Christmas cookies. Maybe one of them is wearing a Stetson hat.

The Conference
In June, 1992 a conference met at M.I.T. in order to discuss the widely reported phenomena of abductions as reported by thousands of often reluctant and reticent ‘experiencers’. Present at the conference were a wide range of ‘experts’ who have studied the experiences for years, such as the journalist Linda Moulton Howe, Budd Hopkins, John Mack, Eddie Bullard, and several people who believe they have been victims of abduction by otherwordly, unknown beings. The conference lasted for five days, and author (as well as skeptic) C.D.B Bryan took copious, day by day notes. A newcomer to this field of study, and known for totally unrelated work, Bryan’s investigation is fairly objective, and his report of the Conference comes across in style that resembles gonzo journalism.

The first two hundred pages of this volume are taken up with a chronological, day by day report on what happened at the Conference, who spoke and what they said, and Bryan’s own personal thoughts and reflections on the subject matter. He takes notes during the lectures (and even admits it when he is bored and his mind strays), and tries to talk to various attendees during coffee breaks, lunch and dinner. He is an honest but open skeptic, and admits it when he thinks that others come across as totally nuts, as well as when he is impressed by the evidence. The style of writing is personal and engaging. At the end of Day Three at the Conference, Mack sits in his motel room, watching the news, which is reporting Dan Quayle’s misspelling of the word “potato”, when he starts to reflect on what he has heard so far:

“I think about the abductees I have spoken with: that as off-the-wall as the young Massachusetts housewife with her stories of ‘Zar’ and of groups of worlds working together may have seemed, Pat, the midwestern dentist’s wife who wrestled with an alien’s arm, semed dead-on. I think of Carol and Alice and their image of trying to locate a parking meter in space; I am moved by their obvious confusion and distress, the terror of Carol’s flashback that drove her to seek refuge in a closet….I think of Linda Moulton Howe. She is a respected journalist and documentary filmmaker, and yet she seems to believe in a government cover-up…Linda started up as skeptical as I am about this phenomenon….I realize I don’t know what to believe! How does one explain the similarities in the abductee’s stories–the consistency of detail, structure, scenario? What would prompt a woman to make up a story about an extraterrestrial creature trying on her high-heeled shoes? How does one explains Budd Hopkins’s story of Linda Cortile being ‘floated’ out of her twelth-floor apartment building before two cars of witnesses who confirm her account? How does one explain John Carpenter’s story of the two women abducted in Kansas who, separately and unrehearsed, tell such matching stories?”

The next 249 pages of the book deal with Bryan’s post-conference interviews, particularly with Carol and Alice, two women who run a horse farm and have had numerous experiences. This is perhaps an even more stimulating read than the first half of the book, as Bryan attends a few hypnosis sessions, watches to see if those under hypnosis are “lead” to conclusions, and delves into more details of particulars stories of abduction.

Maintaining his skepticism throughout the girth of the book, Bryan nevertheless is impressed by the evidence that something is happening to these people, but he doesn’t know what; in most cases, he doesn’t doubt the sincereity of belief in the experiences that the experiencers have. Moreover, he offers a few guesses at describing the phenomenon, without coming to any strong or leading conclusions.

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it;…whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both…hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy. –Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or

With these words the humble thinker from Denmark refutes the philosophy of his teacher, Hegel, whom, he believed had made a terrible philosophical error in his own rejection of traditional Aristotelian logic.

Don Palmer writes that according to Kierkegaard, Hegel’s error had not only “dissolved all distinctions and thereby turned his metaphysics into that night in which ‘all cows are black,’ but that he had also removed the possibility of decisiveness, and thereby, of freedom. That is to say, Hegel had declared war on that which is human, subjectivity. If there is no “either/or,” then there is nothing human.” The result of this is our modern malaise and anomie which arises from alienation from the self. When we have no choice, no freedom, no self, then we have no human.

In Kierkegaard for Beginners Palmer eloquently and concisely lays out the basic arguements for Kierkegaard’s complex body of work, presenting the reader with an accessible introduction to one of the West’s most original, brilliant and eventually influential minds, a progentior of what would later be known as “Existentialism”.

This book (Volume 74) is in the popular series of books of various figures and movements published by “Writers and Readers,” and is a well-done presentation. It works as an index of Kierkegaard’s thought and argument.

We begin with a biography of Kierkegaard’s relatively short life (he lived to be forty-two, yet wrote twenty-five books), his odd and difficult childhood, his tragic love affair, then move quickly into his thought.

Palmer briefs the reader on the concept of “indirect communication” (which Kierkegaard eventually abandoned), the difference between Objective and Subjective truth, the problem of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s definition of dread and despair, and concludes with the three forms of existence: the asethetic, ethical and religious spheres.

Palmer has been a college teacher of introductory philosophy, and this volume is well-suited to that level, written with easily-understandable explanations, multitudinous quotes from sources, finely wrought illustrations and artwork, and with intelligent humor throughout.

At the same time, this work is not an adequate substitute for source material, but should serve rather as a primer, which is its intention. This is Palmer’s take and understanding of a complicated writer and thinker, whose various pseudonymns and subtle levels of meaning deserves a serious undertaking (whether one “feels sorry” for him or not). Kierkegaard for Beginners is just that, a place for beginning, and possibly a conceptual reference point that is useful for someone engaging in Kierkegaard’s writing for the first time.

I love reading this book, and have gone through it slowly several times. There is a lot there to take in, even though it is a slim volume (150 pages) and filled with sometimes funny, and sometimes useful illustrations, quotes and charts. Palmer does an exquisite job of getting across the basics of Kierkegaardian thought, as well as engaging and even cleverly entertaining the reader.

Here is a video from another contemporary philosopher, the late Rick Roderick, on his take regarding “Kierkegaard and the Contemporary Spirit”:

“You ask me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you,” Kafka writes to his father, beginning a long letter that attempts to supply an answer.

The answer is illustrated through Kafka’s own reflections on his childhood, living with a domineering, over-powering and verbally-abusive dad, in whose shadows Kafka, in his own memory, trembled.

One feels a bit intrusive reading this piece because it is obvious that Kafka never intended it for publication. In fact, according to Max Brod, Franz gave it to his mother to deliver to his dad, but after a few days, his mom handed the letter, typewritten and forty-five pages, back to him. One might suspect that she read it herself, and deemed it unwise to deliver.

Kafka reconstructs his own childhood and relationship to his dad in order to address the breach that exists in their tumultuous adult relationship. There are intonations of pain and anger underlying Kafka’s address, including, perhaps, a subtler reflective thread that considers the creation of his own identity.

The letter contains accusations, of cruelty, of “abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter” and self-pity, of being too opinionated and not willing to listen to anyone else, of injustice, of boorishness, of hypocrisy, but these are also tempered with an eloquent plea to lay all blame down at their feet, and seek some sort of rapproachment that might make their “living and dying a little easier”.

Some of the most resonant passages of the letter, however, are not merely the concrete descriptions of Franz comparing his thin child’s body to his father’s mass as they change to go swimming, but the couple of times when Franz, touchingly, acknowledges his father’s own capacity for gentleness and even love:

“Fortunately, there were exceptions to all this, mostly when you suffered in silence, and affection and kindliness by their own strength overcame all obstacles, and moved me immediately. Rare as it was, it was wonderful. For instance, in earlier years, in hot summers, when you were tired after lunch, I saw you having a nap at the office, your elbow on the desk; or you joined us in the country, in the summer holidays, on Sundays, worn out from work; or the time Mother was gravely ill, and you stood holding on to the bookcase, shaking with sobs; or when, during my last illness, you came tiptoeing to Ottla’s room to see me, stopping in the doorway, craning your neck to see me, and out of consideration only waved to me with your hand. At such times one would lie back and weep for happiness, and one weeps again now, writing it down.”

Kafka, writing in his late 30s, also addresses his father’s penchant for disapproving of all his friends, and of the woman whom he has recently wanted to marry, which provokes this epistle.

Possibly the most poignant and illuminating section of the letter comes near its end. Kafka mentions how his father seems to have a disdain or even uncaring attitude toward Kafka’s literary output, and writes, astonishingly, that his father’s disinterest in his work did not free him from the unhealthy relationship they had with each other:

“My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.”

What is the nature of human consciousness? How is perception related to experience, meaning and art? What constitutes the substance of thought, or of feeling? How does memory, intellect, the power of imagination and the capacity for social acclimation inform one’s sense of identity? What, essentially, does it mean to be a human person?

These are some of the questions underlying Oliver Sacks’s cogent, literate and compassionate investigation of seven people who have experienced various kinds of neurological mishaps, thereby dramatically influencing their behavior and relation to the external and social cosmos.

Sacks is a neurologist with a heart, his often poignant and moving prose exploring not only technical cases of neurological disorder, but also bringing to surface the basic dignity, beauty and value of those whom he discusses. Along the way, he manages to engage our intelligence, provokes us to wonder, and casually alludes to the worlds of art, music, literature and the classics. But his primarily realm of interest is the interior world of human consciousness, the physicality of “malfunctions” in the nervous system, and the insights into human personality and being that come from careful, observant and empathic study.

Sacks’s crisp, popular style is a joy to read. One feels in capable literary hands, free from having to struggle through copious medical verbiage on the one-hand, but also free from the distraction of overly simplified and explanatory, dumbed-down prose that badly inhabits much of the present offerings in popular non-fiction publications. Sacks is obviously well-informed on the neurological side of things, which he explains easily, but his gist is more philosophical (in the true sense of the word); the fire of loving wisdom and celebrating the awe of human personality and being suffuses the text.

Sacks begins with the story of an abstract artist who, after suffering a concussion, completely loses his ability not only to see color, but even to conceptualize it. The trauma of such a loss spins him into a depressed state momentarily, but as the world of black-and-white comes into focus with all its implicit mysteries (unknown to the color-bound), finds he in many ways prefers his new orientation. “Although Mr. I does not deny his loss,” Sacks writes, “and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become ‘highly refined’, privileged, that he sees a world of pure form, uncluttered by color…He feels he has been given ‘a whole new world’, which the rest of us, distracted by color, are insensitive to.”

We move on to discover that the effects of a frontal lobe tumor has depleted “the last hippie’s” capacity for memory or expectation, so that he lives entirely in the present, his memory having stopped short of 1973, and is only usually aroused by external stimuli. In the moving climax of this tale, Sacks is able to bring him to a Grateful Dead concert, where he hears their later stuff as “weird futuristic” sounds. Sacks writes of his patient, “Though as a neurologist I had to speak of Greg’s ‘syndrome’, his ‘deficits’, I did not feel this was adequate to describe him. I felt, one felt, that he had become another ‘kind’ of person; that though his frontal lobe damage had taken away his identity in a way, it had also given him a sort of identity or personality….But was there a deeper Greg beneath his illness, beneath the shallowing effect of his frontal lobe loss and amnesia?” Such provocative questions subsist throughout the span of the book.

Sacks climbs into a small aircraft with a man who unwillfully seeks geometric symmetry in all things, who impulsively jerks and twitches due to a case of Tourette’s Syndrome, needing to touch things around him in a ritualistic type of compulsion, who is not only a successful pilot of his own plane, but also a well-liked and popular surgeon.

We follow with Sacks the case of Virgil, who was unable to see for forty-plus years, who discovers making the transition to light and color is a difficult territory to traverse, and that seeing is a function of mind and interpretation as much as it is conveyed through the eyes, who at times takes comfort in the familiar vision of his lifelong blindness.

In San Francisco, Sacks visits the artist Franco Magnani, whose childhood village (now mostly abandoned and lost) of Pontito, Italy is a personal obsession, partly due to frontal lobe epilepsy (the Dostoevsky syndrome), a city long gone which comes to him in holographic, three-dimensional memories.

In his last two studies, Sacks delves into the world of the autistic, those who are disabled socially on a developmental level, finding abstract and language-bound thought difficult or impossible, as well as, in the case of British artist Stephen Wiltshire, the apprehension of meaning. The external gate to the interior self is, apparently, blocked off, yet Wiltshire is able to draw, at age seven, without training, more mature reproductions of various scenes after momentarily glancing at them, immediately apprehending then imitating various styles.

Finally, Sacks visits the well-known autistic, Dr. Temple Grandin, who finds the interplay, intricacies and subtleties of human interaction totally incomprehensible (she feels, when it comes to human communication and its cultural contextualizations, like “an anthropologist on Mars”), but is able to understand animals (especially bovines) on a powerfully emotive level.

Oliver Sacks’s discourse rarely ever hits a sour note, is reflective, penetrating and well-rendered. The clinical and “objective” ethos of more traditional medical and behavioral science is mercifully absent in his presentation, allowing rather for the dignity and humanity of his subjects, even when sadly and tragically impacted behaviorally and psychologically by their disorders, to be meaningfully affirmed.

Every time I tell someone about the six years I spent as a member of the People’s Temple, I am faced with an unanswerable question: ‘If the church was so bad, why did you and your family stay in for so long?’…–Jeannie Mills, Berkeley CA, 1979

Six Years With God is a book that has been around for thirty-one years, but its message is no less poignant today. A subjective and qualified introduction into life under the spiritual direction of Jim Jones, this isn’t a beautifully written book, but one that spills from the pen with urgency, grief and anger.

The subject of mind-control, faith versus gullibility, various spiritual hungers, and the nature of belief and epistemology have all been of severe interest to me. There are plenty of books on the market describing with abstract terminology the dynamics of cult behavior and mind-control, which are valuable, but I wanted to hear from Jeannie Mills herself, to listen in on her own human voice as she tells the bitter story of her hopes, her motivations, and her suffering under the rubric of her pastor’s capacity to inflict harm. After reading this, it’s easier to identify with people who join cults, to see them not as glassy-eyed non-thinking zombies, but as real and often intelligent, articulate people, some with misled integrity, but human beings who are worthy of our compassion.

Basic History

Jim Jones set the standard for mind-control cults in the mid-70s, dominating his 3,000 member church mostly through fear, and through appeals to his self-proclaimed status as God, which was evidenced through a series of contrived miracles he cleverly performed in order to gain trust. The greater Cause of Jones’s ministry, such as racial equality in his integrated church, as well as salvation from impending fascism and atomic destruction, also held an appeal for many of the members who continued to support him despite the obvious physical and emotional and spiritual abuses that occurred, the sexual misconduct, and the outright theft of money and property.

Jeannie Mills tells her story of involvement with the People’s Temple in northern California. Along with her husband, she and her children fell prey to Jones, and for six years struggled with criticisms, doubts, fear, financial loss and the stripping away of everything not connected to the People’s Temple. Defecting before the mass exodus of People’s Temple members to Jonestown, Guyana, Mills’s family suffered various threats from Jones as they courageously decided to try to expose the inhumane activity going behind the closed doors of a church gaining wide and popular political community acceptance. (The mayor of San Francisco — Moscone, columnist Herb Caen, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks, Governor Jerry Brown, Ralph Nader, and many other political and public figures often praised Jim Jones at his behest.)

Given the well-known and horrendous conclusion of the People’s Temple as a movement in Jonestown (more than 900 dead, including many children), there is a mixture in Mills’s literary tone between relief and grieved anger: the relief emanates from a sense of finality and personal safety, the grief lives in her heart-felt descriptions of people whom she loved who died, and the anger is directed both toward the monstrous figure of Jones himself–a true personification of self-gratifying egoistic evil–and towards a public and press that would not listen until it was too late. As if that were not enough outside information to haunt the text, halfway through the book I discovered from a net search that Jeannie Mills and her husband and daughter were all found murdered thirteen months after the book was published, in 1980.

Insights

Six Years With God is an emotionally disturbing and stimulating read, and though it is a subjective take on the events that led to Jonestown in the People’s Temple, it also provides many insights into the psychological dynamics of group mind-control.

According to Mills, she and her husband (and many others) were not in fact blind to the extravagant behavior of Jim Jones, even though they were “brainwashed”. When he severely beat people during services in order to punish them for breaking church rules, or when he had sex with both men and women (publically bragging about his divinely-inspired machismo and the subsequently extraordinary size of his member), or when he forced members of the Planning Commision to publically perform deviant sex acts in order to humiliate them, or when he drugged children and made one six year old boy eat his own vomit three times, or when he took all the money and property of everyone devoted to him and spent it on himself, they did not think it was “right,” per se…rather, they made excuses for him, and rationalized his behavior.

After all, Jim Jones performed miracles–no one ever saw any God in heaven respond to prayer like Jones did. He knew what was going on in people’s lives (but secretly sent spies to go through their trash cans), he took cancers out of those who didn’t even know they had cancer(!), when guns fired he let his own head absorb the bullets from a great distance so no one else would get hurt, and he helped people escape drug-addictions and poverty, as well as created, on a superficial level, a climate of racial integration. Moreover, he promised salvation from fascists and atomic bombs, as well as a true socialist utopia. This Cause, Mills and other cult members figured, predicated on the cultural heels of undefined hippie values and the popularity of writers like Marcuse, was greater than any individual “quirk” Jones might have had as a person, greater even, seemingly, than each individual church member’s own basic human dignity. The end, in other words, justified the means, and the face of ideological pragmatism revealed its toothless grin.

Given Jones’s position and claims about himself, he was beyond criticism or questioning, and those who did would suffer painful consequences.

Quality of Writing and Structure

Structurally, Six Years With God has one major flaw: Mills spends 86 pages telling what happened after her family left the church, then starts from the beginning, at the point where they first visit the church. I suggest a more logical reading. Start on page 87, then go to the beginning and read to page 86. This is obviously how the book was originally written, and the first few chapters are a bit confusing, dropping names of people whom we haven’t met yet, and so on.

Mills isn’t always rational, even in her post-Jones prose, but she is honest. Her honesty and urgency make up for the lack of poetry and erudition in this testimonial. There are better books in print regarding Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, but this one gives a raw, first person glimpse into the manipulative tactics of Jones, and into the psychology of those whom he blinded and finally led to their own deaths.

There is unfortunately no happy ending to this book, not even for Mills. However, it does provide a voice that can speak to us now, and is worth reading for that reason, even though it may bring on a touch of melancholy and grief, as it did for me.

Natalie Goldberg is known for her books about writing and zen, though her actual bibliography is sparse. Publication, of course, isn’t the point, and in terms of demonstrating the importance of writing in relation to “waking up”, this book is exquisite.

Goldberg grew up in a pragmatic athiest/Jewish family uninterested in the humanities, graduated from university as a feminist, taught school, and then one day after visiting a palm reader discovered that her heart had opened up and “become the garden of Eden”.

Not long after, she moved into a tipi on Lama Mountain, where she sat under the teaching of various religious figures, including an Indian sadhu, Catholic monks, a rabbi, and others. Later, she sought instruction from Allen Ginsberg, Rinpoche, Jack Kornfield and finally the Zen teacher Katagiri Roshi, who sought to escape the San Francisco hippies by accepting a relocation to Minnesota. This book is basically Goldberg’s account of “waking up” to spiritual perception under the direction of the various teachers she has had (she begins with her elementary and high school teachers, one of whom turned out the lights one day to listen to the rain), and how this relates to the discipline of writing. It is also a concise and impacted autobiography.

Goldberg’s book is exquisitely written and filled with beautiful passages about her childhood and her search for meaning. She also makes several valid points about how we experience existence and what it means to wake up, or to have some sense of spiritual illumination.

In terms of writing, Goldberg wants us to be “dumb” about the world, which I suppose means not to impose an abstract metaphysic upon our perceptions or experience. Yet, the only thing lacking in her tale is any sense of discernment for the possibility of delusion. She accepts the wonder of enlightenment in the same breath as she accepts the visions of her friend, an architect who was allegedly visited by seven supernatural wizards with the designs for “earthhouses”. She accepts rational ways of communicating through writing (which is obvious in this well-written book) while simultaneously, somewhat proudly, including some very bad poetry that she wrote amid her first leg of ‘enlightenment’. (cf. “Eight Nude Women on Sunday in the Mountains”).

The notes on Zen and meditation were interesting, but the more practical and useful element of this book was Goldberg’s remarks about writing. She mentions Buddhist monks in Japan whose meditation is running; they run, she says, eighteen to twenty-five miles a night, all year round, along Mt Hiei. If they falter they are supposed to kill themselves. Once they have finished running, they fast for nine days. Goldberg writes, “At the end of the nine days, they are at the edge of death. Completely emptied, they become extremely sensitive…Their sight is vivid and clear, and after the fast they come back into life radiant with a vision of ultimate existence” (ix). Goldberg turns this into a metaphor for writing because she sees writing not as a means of therapy, nor as merely a means of communication, but as a way of “waking up”, in the same way that the running monks penetrate their thickness in order to have an immediate experience of existence. For Goldberg, writing is thus a path of illumination and enlightenment. “Believe me,” she says, “if you take on writing, it is as hard as being a marathon monk.” She also suggests, figuratively, that the next time one goes to a cafe to write, she ought to bring along a gun just in case she falters.

Goldberg’s book is filled with practical motivations to write, and pragmatic ways of approaching the art. While I do not share her view of the world as ontologically impersonal or pantheistic, nor her somewhat indiscriminate notion of what it means to “wake up” (she tends to not take into account the possibilities for deception, though she does mention the self-deception of Rajneesh in Oregon), nor that “waking up” is all that is needful, I did find her accounts of learning Zen meditation thoughtful and intriguing, and her specific remarks about writing instructive, especially in regard to journaling.

When one keeps a journal, she says, one shouldn’t care whether the writing is good or bad. The editor-inside who wants all the words to be beautiful and clear as they line up on the page, instead clogs up the flow. Meditation and discipline makes writing more immediate, and Natalie Goldberg shows several ways to begin to walk this path.

In terms of quality of writing itself, Johnson’s Intellectuals makes for entertaining historical reverie. The British author’s intent is to put to test several of the ‘intellectuals’ who exerted cultural and social influence during the Enlightenment period forward to our own time. Johnson writes,

“One of the most marked characteristics of the new secular intellectuals was the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny. How far had they benefited or harmed humanity, these great systems of faith? To what extent had these popes and pastors lived up to their precepts, of purity and truthfulness, of charity and benevolence? The verdicts on both churches and clergy were harsh. Now, after two centuries during which the influence of religion has continued to decline, and secular intellectuals have played an ever-growing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions, it is time to examine their record, both public and personal. In particular, I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself.”

Paul Johnson

In this endeavor to put the critics of religious morality to the acid test, Johnson begins with Rousseau, highlighting his egoism, sexual perversity (“liked to be spanked” and was a public exhibitionist of his “bottom”), his ironic abandonment of his own children at birth, and his naive political statism.

Moving onward, we find moral failure in the life of the poet Shelly, who emphasized imagination for the transformation of society, but did not possess the imagination to put himself in the place of another on a personal level, and hence was a great debtor and thief, adulterer, and truly without compassion.

Marx, we discover, was purely philosophical and academic, disliking the working proletariat, and an exploiter of others. Johnson fills us in on Tolstoy and Hemingway’s sexual infidelities and emotional abuses of their respective spouses, the shaky foundations of Bertrand Russell, and Sartre’s life of sexual and profligate excess.

In short, much like the Protestant Reformers who preceded and indirectly encouraged the devaluation of all external sources of authority that came later, Johnson engages in a swift, eloquent and admittedly biased ad hominem attack on the newly crowned “popes” and “priests” of the Enlightenment. The premise is that if moral and cultural existence can be rooted within the span of the faculties of the human spirit, rejecting for the most part the claims of revelatory guides, how has this panned out practically in the lives of those who lead the charge? What has humanism, based principally on the autonomous use of reason, to say for itself pragmatically? Has it worked?

Johnson’s point is a good one, though I think his methodology is flawed.

Reading Intellectuals is a bit like listening to gossip, which is both unnecessary and necessary. To put the Enlightenment emphasis on the intellect to the test through challenging the moral lives of those thinkers who have had a historical influence is valid; however, Johnson risks a subtle fallacy of concluding that one’s immorality stems directly from the realm of ideas (an “Enlightened” notion itself). He therefore stumbles in the same way he would criticize his intellectuals for stumbling. The ad hominem attack upon intellectuals no more refutes their ideas than their attacks are efficacious in refuting the claims of the Christian Church in the West.

Yet, the gossip also serves a necessary function if one adheres to the notion, as I do, that the separation between one’s ideas and one’s life is an unfortunate gap, and that the best moral teachers have brought the two into dynamic union. From that basis, which is more of an Eastern view of moral authority, Johnson’s well-paced diatribe serves a useful purpose.

Johnson’s choice of intellects is also seemingly arbitrary, but perhaps reflects Johnson’s bias, which contorts the thesis of the book in his favor. Why Rousseau and not Voltaire or Turgot? Why Shelly but not Byron or Keats? Why Tolstoy but not Dickens or Turgenev or Dostoevsky?

Lastly, given Johnson’s methodology, it’s interesting that Johnson’s own life has come under scrutiny in the paparazzi press and popular yellow journals, allegations of “immorality” not unlike Rousseau’s which can be found easily enough online. (See, for instance, Hitchens, The Rise and Fall of Paul “Spanker” Johnson).A continuous dynamic of ironic folly makes it’s appearance at this point, beginning, perhaps, with the error of the original Enlightenment thinkers, an error repeated by Johnson, then re-repeated by those who attempt to discredit Johnson for his own immorality. What is the Enlightenment base for judgment? What is Johnson’s base? What is the base of his critics?

No clear lines of distinction between ideas and moral life have been made. Could it be than even the greatest of intellects might also be found, at one time or another, as moral failures? Are not most people, at their worst, riddled with both bad ideas as well as moments of hypocrisy? Here I think lies Johnson’s most fatal flaw, his own apparent lack of compassion for those under the lens of his moralizing pronouncements.

On a more superficial level, Intellectuals is a pleasure to read, filled with interesting details from the lives not only of Rousseau, Shelly, Marx, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Tolstoy, but there are also chapters dedicated to Ibsen, Brecht, Wilson, Gollancz and Helman. The last summary chapter touches on twentieth century madness, and includes brief discussions of several various contemporary intellects.

John Gardner’s collection of essays, On Writer’s and Writing, is a tour de force of criticism that not only dares to skewer, at times, popular luminaries such as Updike, Roth, Barth, Cheever and Percy, but also attempts to lay down the boundaries between what makes for good writing and what does not.

Gardner was an exquisite novelist himself, known for works as varied as a re-telling of “Beowulf”, Grendel, from the point of view of the beast, to novels of Dostoevskian proportions such as Mikkellson’s Ghosts and The Sunlight Dialogues. He’s also well-known, by some, as the college professor at Chico State in California, who lent Raymond Carver his office during the weekends so the latter author could have the space and quietude to write. Very different stylistically than Carver, Gardner’s fiction is eloquent, sometimes difficult, flowing in deeply-entrenched rhythm (Gardner also had a musical background, and wrote operas), poetic and firmly attached to the idea of meaning in literature (as against the popularity of post-modern spasms that pass for good fiction).

In the present volume, edited by Stewart O’Nan, we are introduced to Gardner’s aesthetic on “Art and Social Commitment” and “An Invective Against Mere Fiction”, then we flow easily into his diatribe, “More Smog from the Dark Satanic Mills”.

“One of the inconveniences of one’s own time,” writes Gardner, “is that the filtering has not yet been done: you have to hunt down the occasional first-rate contemporary book through great gray heaps of trash.” And what is this trash, this smog generated in the sark satanic mills of popular publishers, polluting public consumption with its poisonous pennings? Gardner begins be cleaving in half the moral indecisiveness of John Knowles, claiming the acclaimed author misses “the force of his symbolism” because he is too busy ranting. Fiction such as can be found in Knowles’s novel, Indian Summer “lacks the total compassion and clearheadedness of art.”

Throughout the rest of the book, Gardner uplifts his notion of true art, an incisive aesthetic that doesn’t accept sacharrine substitutes, though also doesn’t wholly condemn them. For Gardner, there seems to be a place for mediocre novels, writing that suffices to entertain, but true art is on a higher level, and it is this level that interest and, he admits, often evades him.

In On Writers and Writing Gardner eloquently explores the fiction of Cheever, Roth, Woiwode, Percy, Calvino, Fowles, Malamud, Updike, Styron, Oates and others, not merely lauding each one, but also performing a kind of surgery, exposing the flaws, the unintentional cartoons, wooden hands and fixed faces, that sometimes populate even the novels of these luminous literary figures.

“Fiction,” writes Gardner, “at its best, is a means of discovery, a philosophical method.” In his critique of Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot, whom he also elsewhere respects as a novelist, Gardner writes,

“Walker Percy is not a very good novelist; in fact, Lancelot, for all its dramatic and philosophical intensity, is bad art, and what’s worse, typical bad art. Like Tom Stoppard’s plays, it fools around with philosophy, only in this case not for laughs but for fashionable groans. Art, it seems to me, should be a little less pompous, a lot more serious. It should stop sniveling and go for answers or else shut up.”

And so, in these exquisite essays, Gardner appeals to a higher standard, skewering the pyrotechnics of postmodernists while simultaneously uplifting the work that he values, such as can be found in John Fowles, Roth, Updike, William Gass (with whom he has slight disagreements), Joyce Carol Oates, and others, whom, ostensibly, do not “fool around”, nor cater to the dark satanic mills.

Whether one agrees with him or not, Gardner’s own body of work is estimable and impressive, so he has the fortitude to back up his critical evaluations (unlike most literary critics), and this book is an enjoyable, informative and compelling read, one that often elicits laughter and provokes thought as well.

On Writers and Writing

I turn to the back flap of the book and see a photograph of the man the cover depicts, and in real life his mouth is turned down, his sad eyes heavy and serious, his jaw set. So this is Stephen Dixon, I tell myself. There is something both ironic and sad in his eyes, contrasted with a hint of acceptance in the way his lips are pressed together.

Later, after consuming a ton or more of his words, I return to the photograph often, then to the painting on the cover, and think, so this is the man. This is Dixon. This is the literary progenitor of a massive and glorious collection of sixty short stories, written in a thirty year period, generating well more than a few hundred thousand words in 600+ pages, words that force you to slow down, kiss each one, submit to the full length of each curving sentence, and give obeyance to the supple meaning implicit in the tension of–somehow, simultaneously–taut and expanding paragraphs. This is one of the most original writers living today. This is the insane genius.

Style

The first thing any reader, experienced or not, will notice about the writing of Stephen Dixon is that his style does not conform with convention. He possesses a gift for portraying the nuances of interior thought realistically, but must be read slowly.

Looking through his other work, one will notice few paragraph breaks. Some of his novels, such as Interstate or Frog or his latest, 30: Pieces of a Novel, look as if Dixon simply forgot that paragraph breaks exist; some paragraphs continue in his novels for eight to twelve pages. Despite their length, however, Dixon’s paragraphs remain unified in theme and thought.

This is part of the genius of his writing: it actually works if you are patient. Dixon is meditating on the page, not vomitting or letting everything spill out in the tradition of Thomas Wolfe. His long paragraphs are subtly polished, and as taut as poetry, with hidden rhythms and carefully chosen words, usually bringing to the surface the dramatic tension of an extremely emotionally difficult situation in terms of conflict and plot.

In The Stories of Stephen Dixon, this tension remains without as many long paragraphs–these are short stories, after all, yet contain the same characteristic style, demonstrating Dixon’s sure ability to convey himself uniquely and with power. When one works to enter into the meditation of Dixon’s writing, familiar themes gradually take shape and form–such as the trauma of violence, the pain of lost love and remaining desire, freedom versus bondage–with a startling freshness and clarity of vision.

The second thing that the reader will notice is that most of the stories are written in the present tense, which emphasizes the action and imagery of the plot. The words, despite the complexity of the writing itself, are simple ones, and every story begins with a strong hook, sometimes explained with the illusion of hurriedness, as if Dixon is in a hurry. That is the focus of the dramatic tension: the plot urges us forward, but the structure forces us to slow down and appreciate the scenery, not to mention the interior scenery of his often emotionally-explosive characters.

What Dixon Cares About

Many of the stories in this volume revolve around relationships between men and women. Many of them contain an underlying humor, some do not. The stories about men and women are often beautifully conveyed and moving, whether the character winds up in despair or not. Love is a difficult thing to achieve, and in only one or two stories, Dixon portrays authentic love beautifully, which left me breathless and cursing at him for being so damn good. Yet, most of them are about love’s failures, the emotional vagabonds of romance.

Some of the stories that are not about romantic relationships contain tragic senseless violence as their crux. In one story, we watch a murder from a bystander’s perspective. In another, a woman calls for help from an apartment window, and two elderly sisters hold the responsive man as prisoner for several years.

Dixon is often grim about violence; he portrays it as it exists, without lauding it or trying to explain it. Violence is evil, and Dixon wants us to know, does not want to soften it with rationalizations or the kinds of explanations we might attribute to it in order to live in a world that is, admittedly, more often violent than not.

However, the raw thematic reality of violence imbued in those stories that touch on it also speak to Dixon’s single obsession and the entire argument of nearly every story contained in this collection: conversation, interior speech and the words we use in trying to communicate what we think, or what we think we think, and what we feel, or think we feel. Words define both interior and exterior reality.; they have power, whether they shape the way we feel, or are used to control and manipulate others (or are used by oneself to manipulate even oneself). Moreover, words not only have the potential to bring us together, but more often they separate us from each other and from ourselves.

As if to make this argument plain, Dixon shows us the skeleton of a story’s conflict in “Said,” a more experimental story in which he supplies no dialogue, only the designations, “he said, she said.” It doesn’t matter what they are saying, Dixon is clueing us in, as much as it matters that they are saying and that this is introducing the conflict of two different interpretations of reality, isolation and lack of love.

Another story title comments, “Love has its own action,” and in the most gorgeous and moving story in the book, two lovers are cut short from telling each other that they are in love, the reality of it is obvious.

How we talk to ourselves, how we talk to each other, how this affects us and each other, and how words are as powerful as violent acts–all of these are the core elements that Dixon cares about.

Difficulties

Because of Dixon’s integrity, probably, there are a few stories contained in this volume that leaves one feeling a bit dry.

“The Intruder” is a ghastly, horrible, tense short story about a boyfriend who walks in unexpectedly on his girlfriend as she is being raped. The boyfriend then argues ineffectively with the rapist, who holds a knife to her throat, and forces both of them to humiliate themselves.

This is difficult reading, and Dixon doesn’t play games or introduce any sense of justice: the subtext becomes more important than plot, which may give us a strong theme and may be totally realistic in terms of how sometimes life can incarnate our most evil and terrible nightmares, but isn’t very satisfying as a story, and while it is compelling–certainly without being gratuitous (many other bad writers would create a tension and expectation in the text that prompts the reader to actually want to “see” the rape; Dixon doesn’t) in the least bit, it certainly is not entertaining on its face, especially after the last dismal word.

“The Intruder” was the worst of these types of stories, which are only a small handful of the sixty comprising this book, including the aforementioned tale of the man held captive by two elderly women, and others. The implied nihilism of these stories, however, are offset by his remaining work, so that I might even be willing to say that the too-grim pieces are exceptions to the rule.

To understand the underlying theme of the novel one must consider the cultural and religious world view that influenced Tolstoy, particularly as his beliefs relate to the Russian Orthodox Church. While Tolstoy was at odds with the institutional power structure, as well as with the Christological theology of Russian Orthodoxy, it would be absurd to suggest that he rejected all presuppositional assumptions implicit in Orthodox piety as they relate to issues of life and death.

In our own cultural heritage, western Catholicism and Protestantism has fundamentally defined death as a sort of legal punishment, an expression of God’s wrath. Death is entrenched within a judicial context; it is a sentence for sin. A gross oversimplification and popular caricature of the historical understanding of death in the West paints an ugly and frightening picture for those who take it seriously. Good people or redeemed people who have faith overcome the punishment of death and go to heaven; unrepentant sinners suffer their just punishment and are cast howling into hell for their evil deeds. Death is the legal sentence of all humanity; some overcome it, others do not. Since we live in the West it may be a temptation to succumb to a concept of Christian death that has been truncated into these cartoonish images in our post-Christian, postmodern era.

It is equally easy to misunderstand Tolstoy’s concept of death as we attempt to filter his works through our own cultural and religious misunderstandings, to think that Ivan’s final redemption corresponds to something we once heard Jimmy Swaggart preaching. We may be inclined to assume Tolstoy “cops out” at the end, and grants his suffering, reflective and repentant sinner heaven, much like Dickens’s Scrooge turns to good deeds in “A Christmas Carol” after a few harrowing hallucinations. We do a disservice to Tolstoy, though, if this is our presumption.

Ivan Ilyich’s repentant frame of mind culminates after three days of screaming, a painful period that is ignited immediately after taking the Eucharist, an allusion that resonates with Biblical significance. The prophet Jonah is brought to a similar repentance after three days in the belly of a fish. Christ himself predicts his own death and resurrection when he says, “…as Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt. 12:40).

The three days of screaming experienced by Ivan Ilyich, wherein “time ceased to exist for him” and he “struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape” (131), is a type of purgation. The “black sack” into which he seems to be shoved by an unseen force reverberates with connotations of the grave, the darkening of the ego and its lower passions, the classical death to one’s self promoted by ancient Christian mystics. Within this three-day period, Ivan comes to terms with ultimate concerns which he has successfully eluded his entire life. He is silenced by the question: “What is the real thing?” (132). If his life has been a facade, a mediocre self-justification, where is reality to be found? As he asks the question, there is an implication that Ivan already recognizes that he has not lived his life with any regard for reality, or in reference to the absolute recognition of life’s value and death’s certainty.

Sobriety comes to Ivan Ilyich only at the end, an hour before his life’s summation, when he realizes that his entire existence has been spent for nothing, and that his ending will release his family from his own egoistic impulses. Such unselfish thoughts free him, and his repentance is realized. Like the Apostle Paul, who writes, “O death, where is thy sting?” Ivan asks, “And death? Where is it?….he searched for his accustomed fear of death, but could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear because there was no death….Instead of death, there was light” (133). As he finally passes into the light, someone close by echoes the phrase uttered by Christ in his last hours, “it is all over” (134). Rather than thinking, “now my life is over, my life is finished,” Ivan thinks, “Death is over, there is no more death” (134).

We see from this that Ivan Ilyich’s final realization is that his entire existence has been spent in death’s realm. Unlike the scholastic theologians of western Christianity, who emphasize death as the legal consequence of sin, eastern Christianity sees death as an ontological condition and state of existence. For those in the West, death largely connotes inactivity, the cessation of life. This is not the case in the east. For the Orthodox Christian, death is rather the activity of disintegration, the divorce of realities that are meant to be essentially united.

The separation of the spirit and the body at the end of Ivan Ilyich’s life is thus merely the culmination of a long period of smaller separations; his existence is filled with estrangement: his childhood from adulthood, the lack of communion between he and his wife, the neglect of his family in favor of work, the chasm which exists between his heart and mind. At some point after his early childhood, he begins to gradually experience the effects of spiritual corruption that have marked and charted his adulthood, a corruption that distances him from ultimate personal issues.

For the Orthodox, and perhaps theoretically for Tolstoy, death is much more than the cessation of one’s earthly existence, but it is also the source of corruption and spiritual myopia. As Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann writes:

“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything in itself becomes a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse” (17).

This state of continuous disintegration, both material and spiritual, is a central tenet in the contextual world view in which Tolstoy writes. Therefore, when Ivan makes his life “an end in itself,” when he becomes a slave to duty and to that which is socially acceptable, and his own self-promotion and well-being also becomes a final objective, his existence suffers. He is dead before he dies, and his whole person from the time of his early adulthood until the moment he understands his life has been wasted is encapsulated in the anguish of his scream.

His life spent under the rubric of death’s domain, Ivan Ilyich’s scream penetrates into our own secularised era as well, wherein particulars become final objectives, and we are left without any ultimate reference point which might inform and lend substance to everyday life. The “death of Ivan Ilyich” is not only about the moment he stops breathing, but also the death implicit in his living, and therefore it also connotes the death of his significance. We all die, like Ivan, and if we only live to live, to create and carve our own meaning into the universe, then life itself becomes ultimately meaningless and painfully insignificant. We are consumed by our own deaths.

We struggle against such an assertion, much like Ivan Ilyich struggles as he is shoved into the sack of his insignificance. Ivan struggles; he visits various doctors but cannot diagnose his illness. he seeks remedies and cures from alternative sources, but finds only temporary relief. He continues to suffer. Pain awakens Ivan Ilyich to his need, yet his death is amorphous and inscrutable; the source of his illness is as much spiritual as it is physical. Each sought-for cure is a smokescreen that shrouds him from the responsibility that coming to terms with eternal issues would imply. He finds himself “half-believing” in a miracle-working icon, yet quickly shrugs off any transcendent solution to his dilemma. Given Tolstoy’s aura of Christianity, this rejection should not be overlooked. Ivan Ilyich seeks help from human resources but never turns to God for healing, until, perhaps, the very end.

Likewise, in our own era we, like Becket’s bums, wait for divine intervention while simultaneously shirking responsibility or even belief in anything that transcends our own logical constructs of knowledge. If we are insignificant, we are also no longer responsible for the way we live our lives. There is no longer any need for Ivan’s self-justification; a life that merely exists is self-justified; meaninglessness is nicely egalitarian. Ivan Ilyich screams in the abyss of his despair; we revel in our newfound license.

Ivan’s scream, the three-day furnace of purgation, is elicited immediately after he receives the sacrament. For Tolstoy, this also has profound implications. In the West, the Eucharist is denigrated into magical ceremonialism through the scholastic doctrines of Roman Catholics, and is reduced to mere memorialism by Anglicans and Protestants. In Eastern Orthodoxy, however, the Eucharist is viewed very differently. Partaking Christ’s body and blood is the antidote to an existence spent “eating death.” In the Eucharist, the participant willfully eats life. One partakes of spiritual food, bread and wine that has been sanctified and transformed by the life and death of Christ. This transformative action does not end at the altar in church; but all of life, including matter and nature, is also transformed, offered to God in thanksgiving, and sanctified. When Ivan Ilyich receives the Eucharist he, even against his own intuition, expresses an initiative towards that which transcends his own existence and ego.

Ivan’s participation in sacramental communion is the pivot of the entire novel. it has been oddly neglected by western critics, and far too easily dismissed. Tolstoy expresses a belief in the power of the Eucharist; it is Ivan’s expression of faith and thanksgiving which brings him into communion with God. His struggle during the duration of his frantic screaming is redemptive suffering. The final communion he has with light may be contrasted with the disunity and disintegration of his former death. In other words, Ivan Ilyich, who has suffered from the corrupt and dissolute effects of spiritual and physical death, takes communion, and the death of his whole existence is overcome. Communion integrates that which has been disunited; the particulars of his existence are brought into focus in relationship to God, and the sting of death no longer fills him with despair.

Rich with the theology of Tolstoy’s nominal Orthodoxy, at the moment of Ilyich’s physical cessation, death is paradoxically overwhelmed, it is “all over with,” and seeking forgiveness from his family, Ivan enters into light; in fact, death becomes light. Ivan Ilyich dies when he inhales, and we are meant to deduce from this that he exhales again in the dimension of another kingdom, having finally achieved victory over the death of this one.