The World-Weary Eyes

 

Here is another tragic heroine of modern poetry, our Sappho, Anne Sexton.  She died October 4, 1974, a suicide.

I think of the great Peter Gabriel song, “Mercy Street,” based on her poem.  It is a dreamscape of horror and melancholy.

Of what do we dream today?  What follows across the blue-black night sky?  Owls and peacocks, and multi-lateral corruption of the soul.  The night whispers the future, a story, one more to tell.

* * * * *

This is the only thing that matters, this pen scratching across the page.  Others have written about this across the years, the fear, the danger, the loneliness.  Here, there is nothing new.  It’s just the banality of evil.  Why are we surprised that the world is corrupt and dark?  The world mirrors the human soul.  We are the things we build.

We dream of the goodness of human beings, but is that who we are?  We are a selfish animal.  How do we rise from this muck?  How do we climb out of the fetid hole?  It will take a man and woman to bear witness.  It will take bonding in action to create a better world.  Then this good virus has to spread; we must become infected with the divine spirit of Earth and sky, tree and bird.  We must feel the surge of the Earth.  Breathe.

There is a life mysticism, the coincidental confluence of divine light and air.  Look back into the persistence of memory.  There is the human story waiting for us to pick up words like autumn leaves.  Tell us, the world says; tell us again.

We take nothing for granted because evil is nothing if not resilient.  We are living through a reckoning of American life; we are poised on the precipice.  Do we fall into the abyss or experience a renaissance?

There is so much to read, so much to experience, so many stories to tell. 

* * * * *

Anton Chekhov stares out from a photograph taken of him by his brother, slightly colorized.  Arresting.  Mesmerizing.  Note the world-weary eyes.  He is such an astute observer of human life, human foibles, human misery.  I cannot stop looking at those eyes.  All the Russian 19^th century novelists and playwrights offer stories that cut to the bone.

What is it about the 19^th century?  The world became aware of Man’s inhumanity, his propensity for violence, his bloody intentions, his avarice, and deceit.  It is as if the sin of Eden finally came to its ultimate, evil fruition, and was followed by the descent into bloody desecration in the great wars of mammoth machines and bombs and waves of bloodshed in the 20^th century.  Welcome to hell on Earth.

As a traveler, I would like to make it a regular stop on the time-line railroad to see that 19^th century world.  The morale of America must have been at the same level, or lower, than it is now.  The world must have been in just as much jeopardy.  The human animal must have been just as much of a threat.  Man has always been a threat.  In the 19^th century, he was redeemed, at least in part, by Emerson, Thoreau, the great poets and seers of an age.  We need such an age again.

History should be taught that way:  put on the virtual reality goggles and walk the streets of America; see Yosemite Valley as the Indigenous People did, before white men and industry tried to ransom it off into development hell.  Walk the Civil War battlefields then and now.  Compare.  Never again.

So much history takes place in a single area.  What if we could see it all at once, like some high-tech diorama.  Questions:  why is America such a violent place, and where does this violence originate?  William Blake would argue human violence and cruelty originate not in nature, but in the human brain.

The 19^th century feels like a watershed moment, a confluence of everything:  philosophy, reason, religion, nature, human endeavor, art, literature, and culture.  We cannot discount evil; human treachery is always with us.

Chekhov’s eyes tell us he knew this; he saw it.  That is what makes him so compelling to read.  He bore witness to an age, and his stories live.

Anne Sexton:  “In my dream, / drilling into the marrow / of my entire bone, / my real dream, / I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill / searching for a street sign— / namely MERCY STREET. / Not there.”

 

We Are All The Catcher In The Rye Now

 

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

 Holden Caufield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye

 

Are we telling a story or are we careening downhill hellbent on sailing off a cliff?  Is the death march to destruction a kind of nihilistic event lacking coherence?

I really don’t know anymore.

Stories have plots and characters, heroes, and villains.  Our current story has one, incoherent sociopath who defies all logic.  He is the villain without conscience.  He is the priest who worships himself and chaos.

His chief acolyte bleeds from his eyes and has flies in his hair.  What a spectacle!  What a great, villainous sidekick to evil incarnate.

The plot, however, makes no sense.

These evil-doers don’t measure up.  They are not smart enough to be coherent.  The garage-sale Mussolini and his stuffed shirt fly-boy cannot even get on the same page.

Seduced by the dark side?  That denotes consideration and movement.  No, they are a discordant cacophony of emptiness.  They know no other dance except the single-dimension danse macabre.  They strut and preen and bluster through the hall to peals of laughter and pungent ridicule.  They have their impotent, flaccid henchmen, stiff-arming their allegiance to their own hollow-king.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.  These are men without a country; these are rebels without a cause trapped in their own befouled gene pool.  Separate them.  Challenge them.  They fall down.  They cannot hold up.  They are afraid of their own shadows.  They think strength in numbers will save them.  A white hood will keep their identities safe.  Their masculinity needs a prop:  a long gun or a big knife.  Like their leader, size is everything.

History has seen these self-serving crybabies before.  It never ends well for them.  They are the waste kings on the dump of a larger, better, and more worthy story, a tale of hope and human achievement.  They are the hollow-king’s hollow men.

Take your shiny boots and unearned military medals and go home.  Practice your salute and your cowardice from the safety of your secret gardens.  Your time has come to get off the stage.  Your day, so short and murderous, is done.

We have lost so much—hundreds of thousands of dead; millions infected; millions, going back through history, enslaved, maltreated, brutalized, and killed.  American innocence is dead.

But it is not too late to seek a better world, Tennyson reminds us.  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Mov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are: / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Let us gather in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, a silent army of the righteous, to profess our faith in the future, to dream our dreams of love and redemption, and to save ourselves from the fall.  We hold in our hands a flock of white birds.  Release them to the promise of the sky to consort with the angels.  Believe. 

 

Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

I spent a good part of last week reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know (Little, Brown and Company, 2019).  His work draws heavily on facts and data to come to his astute conclusions about human behavior.  The book is insightful and engaging.  He explores coincidences, and he mines the connections that coalesce into sociological events and their consequences.  “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining the social dysfunction in the United States,” he writes.  That is an accurate assessment in light of recent events.

Throughout the book, Gladwell follows a line of inquiry that can be best summed up:  why do human beings behave the way they do, especially in their interaction and communication?  He examines lying, specifically, “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”  He looks at specific cases, delving into spies and dictators who create their reality and believe their own lies.  Fidel Castro and Cuban agents played the U.S. diplomatic and espionage communities.  The former Soviet Union did as well.  But, we also played them in return.  Agents became double agents; spies in the upper echelon of the CIA were tasked with finding the identity of a highly placed mole in their midst, which in many cases turned out to be the lead investigator.  A spy in search of a spy who was, in fact, that spy.

Hitler pulled the wool over the eyes of diplomats all over Europe.  He fooled many British aristocrats who advocated for appeasement, much to the detriment and near collapse of their country.  The Brits assumed they had a personal relationship with Hitler, and that he would honor that relationship by not invading the rest of Europe.  Of course, he did precisely the opposite.  All the information these diplomats and spies gathered on Hitler did not tip them off to his intent; instead, they turned a blind eye to his encroachment into other countries until it was almost too late to save themselves.  He concludes with a powerful statement:  “We have…CIA officers who cannot make sense of their spies, judges who cannot make sense of their defendants, and prime ministers who cannot make sense of their adversaries.”

In this study of how we read people, Gladwell says, one of our problems is default to truth.  Despite blatant or subtle evidence, we assume the person we are dealing with is honest and trustworthy.  That is never a safe assumption.  Instead of applying scientific principles to our study of other human beings—gathering evidence and evaluating behaviors until we reach a conclusion—we “start by believing.  And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”  To discard objectivity is ludicrous and dangerous.  Trust no one should be our motto until they have earned our trust.

Gladwell examines a multitude of cases to support his conclusions.  He begins with Sandra Bland, a young Black woman whose arrest for a minor traffic infraction in Texas explodes into a murder.  He follows up with the Jerry Sandusky molestation case, an analysis of the plot of an episode of the NBC sitcom, Friends, the Amanda Knox trial, the Stanford rape case, and the interrogation and subsequent breaking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the most senior Al Qaeda members who masterminded the September 11^th attacks and planned several more attacks around the world.  Then, in the conclusion, he circles back to Sandra Bland to thoroughly analyze the transcription of how a failure to communicate and deescalate the situation led to murder.

The attempt to comprehend the Other misses the nuances, or in some cases, the outright message the person sends in words and behavior.  A person might say one thing, but behavior and speech reveal another intention.  Transparency is key.  Our facial expressions give us away and reveal our attempts at manipulation.  People often display mismatched behaviors—Amanda Knox displayed the characteristics of guilt when she was not.  Bernie Madoff exhibited confidence and steadiness with his clients while his pyramid scheme was collapsing all around him.  Mismatching is another way we fail to pick up on the message conveyed.  The last third of the book, Gladwell devotes to the brain and perception, and how our ability to pick up on specific cues can be altered by alcohol, drugs, and preconceived beliefs.

Talking To Strangers is an in-depth analysis of communication—verbal, physical, behavioral—and how we often miss the cues and tics that indicate a lie or deception.  We give ourselves away with our expressions, our language, and our movements.  Malcolm Gladwell offers strong evidence that nothing is as it seems, and coincidences and incongruences are not to be ignored.  They tell the story even when we insist we are telling the truth.

Existential Dread

 

With the late night-early morning announcement of the president’s COVID-19 status, we face many questions.

1.  What other members of the administration are positive and showing symptoms?

We hear that individuals who traveled with the president are positive; others are negative, including family members.  We also know, as of this morning, that Joe Biden tested negative.  The important word from now on is transparency.  We know a number of people are sick among the president’s advisors.  That fact, in and of itself, is alarming.  We need to know all the facts as we face uncertainty about who is running the country.

2.  Is this Trump’s way of getting out of the remaining debates after his poor performance last Tuesday?  Or, is this a way for the president to drop out of a race he knows he is losing?

Anything is possible when the administration is not forthcoming about the extent of this crisis.  But here is the thing:  Trump has locked himself into a losing strategy should the remaining debates take place.  If he comes out and observes the rules agreed upon by both candidates, he looks soft and cowed.  If he comes out with another shrill, hysterical performance where he allows no one to speak, the moderator or Joe Biden, he will lose votes.  His only way out of this mess he created is to get out of the debates altogether.

He is losing the race according to most polls of likely voters.  But I do not think he is ready to throw in the towel yet.  His ego won’t let him.  His plan has been in place for a long time now:  call the results into question and scream that the election was “rigged.”  He wants to foment chaos and violence so he can argue he should remain in power to control the uprisings that will ensue and to ensure his autocracy.

3.  Will he emerge after a short period of time and say COVID-19 is not a threat and more of a hoax?

He has proclaimed this from the start.  It might work to his advantage to declare himself sick only to rise again after a few days, a sort of “Jesus moment.”  He is, reportedly, showing symptoms of the disease.  If he is sick, and his condition worsens, that will disrupt his preferred narrative.  Because he has been so reckless with his rallies, and he rarely wears a mask in public, it would seem true to the nature of the virus and its spread that he would eventually become sick.  Science, something the president has held up for ridicule and scorn, is clear that this is a deadly disease easily spread from human to human.  Again, transparency is key, and if the administration is not forthcoming, then we must rely on journalists to get the story and keep us informed.

4.  Does the president’s illness threaten our national security and our financial stability?

Yes, and this is the most immediate threat.  A president who is in quarantine or the hospital and showing symptoms of a disease that can be fatal to patients in his demographic makes our country weak and vulnerable at the moment.  This is another reason for transparency and a clear signal of who’s in charge.  The Constitution allows for a temporary transfer of power, but Trump has to let go of the reins and allow Mike Pence to assume his responsibilities.  It is unclear if he is predisposed to do this.

The financial impact is clear even in the early morning hours when this story broke.  Stock market futures declined almost immediately.  In the economy, everything is connected.  If this is handled correctly, with clear leadership and factual accounting, that will keep investors on an even keel, but Trump, even as he crows about his economic prowess, has not been a failure with the resulting unemployment and near-depression level decline.  So as we move through this crisis, we can only hope that the market settles down.

5.  Could Trump use this to postpone the election?

The president has said the election should be postponed until “people can vote safely.”  There is no evidence that voting is dangerous as long as we maintain social distancing and wear a mask.  Based on these previous comments, he wants to postpone the election and stay in power.  This is something Rudy Giuliani tried to do as the mayor of New York after 9-11.  Constitutionally, he cannot postpone the election, but that does not mean he won’t try.

Democracy is not a point of perfection.  It is always a work in progress.  Living in a democratic society requires diligence and constant vigilance to maintain the freedoms so often taken for granted.  We are going through a period of intense growth and consequential challenges while also facing a referendum on the mistakes made in the past.  It is our American reckoning for atrocities like slavery, violent racism, war, and destruction of our environment.  We have elected a pathological liar who obfuscates and assigns blame for his atrocious missteps and incompetence.  He is, by all measures, the worst president in American history, and we are left on the very brink of the precipice.