Post-Gay

I got yelled at this year for saying that "we" (whatever that means - me and Kitty maybe) were post-feminist. But we are. I TA for classes of 150 that have 15 males in them. This is common in the Arts (my we), perhaps feminism hasn't yet penetrated engineering though. You know, I wouldn't mind a bit more vaginal centred architecture. Penis centered buildings are hard. Vagina centred buildings are soft, and perhaps a bit bloody. There is some gender-essentialism for you (yes you)

Anyway, Persky (some journalist) says that we are now post-gay in Canada and I find my self whole heartedly shaking my head in affirmation. This assertion is brought on by the latest defeat of the anti-gay marriage vote in parliament in early Dec. Persky claims that counties can be pre-gay (Korea), where gay is still under the radar, gay, (US) where gay is aesthetically and rhetorically militant, or post-gay, (Can, Netherlands) where the gay parade has passed and 20% of us have wet stains on our pants, but no one really cares. Though Persky claims that we still care, just not in the pre-orgasmic way that a gay culture cares. We're already lighting our smokes.

How do I feel about this? I feel a bit used. A bit wham bam and thank you maam. Ridden hard and put away wet. All this rhetoric, what is a poor evangelical boy to do. I mean I've been trained to meditate on texts for years - holding them up high in the sky. Now the texts are gone. Rhetoric has passed like last spring's fashions. And here we are - post-gay.

Nowadays (nou adaise)

Nowadays is a word that I think should be retired. I used to tell my students in Korea that no native english speaker would ever use the word "nowadays". I suspected that they were getting it from some stupid old oxford publication on english grammar. But, and this will continue my persecution of C.Taylor, I've found him using it (p. 9 of the article mentioned below).

I should pondure on this a bit more. Nowadays...no one ever says nowaday. Why is it always plural (why are days countable and milks not?). Why always now. My dad is fond of a similar phrase: "in this day and age". Admittedly, nowadays is a bit more efficient then Dad's archaism. But will this save it from the chopping block?

The Oxford English Dictionary never ceases to amaze me. Chaucer is the first to write this phrase (surely that has some redeeming value - Chaucer was a bit of a dude):

2. now-a-days: At the present day, during the present time.
c1386 CHAUCER Can. Yeom. T. 425 Ffor any wit {th}at men han now a dayes [Camb. MS. on dayes]. a1420 HOCCLEVE De Reg. Princ. 1415 Adayes now, my sone, as men may see, O chirche to o man may nat suffise. c1449 PECOCK Repr. II. xiii. 227 Peple now adaies ben not to be blamed. 1590 SHAKES. Mids. N. III. i. 148 Reason and loue keepe little company together, now-adayes. 1651 WITTIE Primrose's Pop. Err. I. ii. 4 But now adayes great is the neglect herein. 1711 GREENWOOD Eng. Gram. 227 One ought not promiscuously to write every Noun with a great Letter, as is the Fashion of some now adaies. 1856 E. B. DENISON Church Bldg. iv. 150 What would nowadays be talked of as a very fine spire.

and then the OED contradicts itself (though perhaps it has something to do with the previous def being on the adverb, and this next one including the noun):

A. adv. At the present time, in contrast with the past.
?1387 R. WIMBLEDON Serm. (Corpus Cambr.) 83 O Lord God, what abusioun is {th}er among officeres of here bo{th}e lawes nowadayes. a1393 GOWER Confessio Amantis (Fairf.) V. 4884 As men mai finde nou adaies. c1395 CHAUCER Clerk's Tale E 1164 It were ful hard to fynde now a dayes In al a toun Grisildis thre or two. c1400 (a1376) LANGLAND Piers Plowman (Trin. Cambr.) A. XI. 37 Leccherie & losengerie..{th}ise arn games nowadayes. ?c1450 tr. Bk. Knight of La Tour Landry 53 Men of these maners there be now a dayes to mani. 1474 CAXTON tr. Game & Play of Chess 30 The lawes nowadayes ben not executed but vpon the poure peple. a1533 LD. BERNERS tr. Huon lxxxi. 252 Now a dayes can not be founde trew frendes as were wont to be. 1583 P. STUBBES Anat. Abuses II. sig. D3, I cannot but lament the small preferment now adaies that learning getteth in the world. 1611 Bible (A.V.): 1 Sam. xxv. 10 There bee many seruants now a daies that breake away. 1658 W. JOHNSON tr. F. Würtz Surgeons Guid II. Introd. 43 Yet have I not related all the abuses which are practised and committed now adayes. 1712 J. ADDISON Spectator No. 481 ¶4 Lacqueys were never so saucy and pragmatical, as they are now-a-days. 1747 R. CAMPBELL London Tradesman iii. 39 Their Patients received more Ease from their rude Conjectures, than may now a-days be received from the elaborate Systems of a College. 1766 J. FORDYCE Serm. Young Women (1767) I. vi. 226 We speak of good housewifery now a days. 1833 H. MARTINEAU Berkeley the Banker I. i. 21 Guineas are scarce now-a-days. 1893 Law Times 95 248/1 The Crown has certain privileges which appear somewhat anomalous nowadays. 1918 V. WOOLF Diary (1979) I. 163 We had a great bout of people yesterday, as we tend to do nowadays. 1939 L. M. MONTGOMERY Anne of Ingleside xiii. 86 We never seem to have old-fashioned winters nowadays. 1988 M. HOCKING Irrelevant Woman (1989) vi. 77 Kids are spoiled nowadays. They are brought up to think the world revolves around them.

B. n. Present times.
?c1425 tr. G. de Chauliac Grande Chirurgie (Paris) 568 Wirchers of now a dayes [?a1425 N.Y. Acad. Med. {th}at ar nowe; L. moderni] maken hem noght but after {th}e dyuysioun of 8 membres folowed in {th}is tretys. 1645 MILTON Tetrachordon 26 Not partly right and partly wrong,..as Divines of now adaies dare censure them. 1647 tr. Maloezzi Pourtract 94 The Phisitians of now a dayes. 1852 N. HAWTHORNE Wonder-bk. (1879) 121 In the orchards of nowadays. 1904 M. M. DODGE Miss Flip at Exposition in Poems & Verses 117 Because we girls of nowadays... We learn so much we really feel as if we ought n't to. 1991 K. K. DYSON tr. R. Tagore I won't let you Go 199 There are likenesses between the dreams of yore and the dreams of nowadays.

C. adj. (attrib.). Of or belonging to the present day. rare.
1609 J. RAWLINSON Fishermen 32 Such indeed..is our now-adaies religion. 1897 Westm. Gaz. 2 Mar. 2/1 These nowadays parsons are just a set of fussing insurance agents. 1967 P. J. KAVANAGH Satire I in Coll. Poems 59 Why did I leave my rich place at the court, or the nowadays version of it.



Then again, Chaucer did die, why can't his word? Though, if we still spelled it like Gower did in the 15th century - nou adaise - I think I would excuse it. Nou adaise, we don't spell "nowadays" as we did thenadays, but we should return to the beforethenadays. I'm in adaise. Leave me by myselfe blogge!!!

Bottoms up!! (and why not enjoy a bit of fornication while at it)

Here is an intriguing New Years thought provided by Charles Taylor: "in the united states in the 1820s liqueur consumption was 4 times per capita what it is today" (2006: 288). We've got some catching up to do America (Steve Colbert would love this insight).

Oh blog, I stopped reading too soon! Haste, the death of me. Taylor continues (I think he was there): "Along with drink (also aiding and abetting it) were other favored activities: cruel sports, gambling, sexual promiscuity (otherwise know as fornication - one of my favourite words in existence)". Yes, that last comment was also Taylor's. In case anyone should desire to read this article it is titled "Religious Mobilizations" and was published in Public Culture 18:2, with a few other essays on secularization (and fornication).

Slaughter of the Innocents (is this part of the 12 days?)

So my newly birthed blog took a Christmas break. Let's say I had to flee to Egypt. The slaughter of the innocents was imminent. In fact, it has been rescheduled. It will be held in a small, hideous room, filled with molded chairs and old rusty computers. It will be held on January 5th, and it is going by the name of (lightening flash) General Comprehensive Exam (dun dun dun dun - done like dinner).

I'm going to practice on you blog, so be prepared. You'll be getting a healthy, or (eyebrows tilted) should we say unhealthy dose of diaspora later this afternoon. This message will self destruct in 4000 years. Until then blog!!!

Secularization

So, I've been reading all fall for my first comprehensive exam. I have somewhere near 40 texts on this exam and it is held on Jan 5th. I'll be glad to get it finished.

Secularization is one of the key issues that many texts address. In it's barbaric form. Secularization theory says that society develops in three stages from the religious, to the metaphysical, and on to the scientific society. This is August Comte's theory, who attempted to factor out all faith based claims from his worldview, establishing a positivist system of knowledge. He was not successful. After Comte, Weber came waddling along and devised a little theory known as the protestant work ethic. He blamed Calvinists and their gosh darn anxiety for producing capitalism. His rational follows: Calvinists (read Puritans) weren't sure if they were elected to heaven or hell. They needed to prove this in a way that medieval Christians hadn't (after all they were moderns - which means empiricism people!). So they utilized journals. They wanted to chart the good works that God was doing in their lives and thus prove that they were of the elect. What is the American way to prove grace? You guessed it: Money! How do you get money? By working hard. Did Calvinists put two and two together? No. This is why Calvinism is called a vanishing mediator by Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson. Calvinism (this-worldly aestheticism) is the mediator between medieval Catholicism (other worldly aestheticism) and capitalism (this-worldly indulgence). After Calvinism brings about capitalism it is supposed that it is polite enough to blow away with the wind. This is secularism from an economic stand point. What does Weber leave us with? The iron cage of modernity, trapped in rationality.

Now many people have refuted this for good reason. One: Capitalism emerges in Catholic Italian city states before Calvin was a glimmer in his father's eye. Two: Weber reads history with a sort of providence devoid of a prime mover (God). Causality isn't as clear cut as Weber would have us believe. Still, Weber's theories were smoking hot and the fire burned through out the 20th century (that's right BJoel, he started it). Christiano's diagram shows you several popular theories of secularization by sociological superstars.


As it happens, Sociologists are fond of crib notes. Steve Bruce, master of subtlety and author of God is Dead, has produced his own image/theory, which, if you look below, you will notice is a amalgam of most of the theories above.


Since these images need no explanation (he hum) I will say that Jose Casanova has refuted them (well at least Bruce). Bruce makes these claims about secularization:
1. It leads to structural differentiation of spheres (economic, political, religious);
2. This differentiation undermines the socio-cultural authority of religious leaders;
3. Which leads to the decline of practices, beliefs, and any other conduct associated with belief (this is the dry up and blow away part).

Casanova says no. He's not dry (drinks wine one would suppose)nor blowing away (...not dead yet). He says that yes structural differentiation has occurred, but belief hasn't diminished. Why? Well, he says, the idea that belief would diminish is linked with a Kantian myth of the enlightenment, that claims the public will become religion-less because religion will be privatized. Casanova claims that privatization isn't a necessity, and that the privatization that has already occurred has been sustained because the elite has pressured, hacked and chased the religious villagers into interior realms.

Casanova isn't for the return of the villagers without a change, however. In a democracy, Casanova claims, freedom of conscience must be privileged. This is what necessitates the differentiation of religion from political and economic realms. He then says that "good" modern religions, like the Baptists, will allow for freedom of conscience (or the inner testimony of the spirit), while "bad" traditional religions like the Catholics will hold on to Church authority, in an attempt to reshape the political through their influence. These bad traditions will not prosper in modernity, Casanova claims, because they don't obey the rules. They will attract negative attention. Thus, Catholicism should not order it's parishioners to vote one way or the other, and instead work for cultural change in the civil sphere. Religion should become public, so it can free up the private.

I think he might be polishing over some burrs here. How, for instance, is a church supposed to tiptoe around freedom of conscience and preach/teach on the orientation toward the good? Can an idea of sin exist in such a framework, as sin creates situations where certain choices are discouraged. Furthermore, does any institution, club, or group, allow for such liberty if it has an orientation toward the good (which I assure you it does)? I think Casanova, who is a theologian, needs to re-evaluate his theology of sin and church authority.

Economies of Death - Butch Cassidy, Derrida and Updike

Coffee is the bane of my existence. I love the taste. But it eats my belly lining, and it dances through my nerves at 4:30 in the AM. Which makes me get up and watch the ends of movies that my wife has fallen asleep in half way through and we've never got back to. This morning it was Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Two things to rave about: 1) the cinematography in the first five minutes of the film was exceptionally tight - all shadow work in B&W with nice textured shots of a western town; 2) Death! I've never been so excited about death as I was watching BC&TSK. Death follows them around through the desert after a botched train robbery. I loved it, because I've been thinking about being-toward-death. Heidegger used to claim that authenticity emerged from being oriented towards the ultimate end. He was an atheist, so death takes on that sort of finality for him. I also just finished Derrida's The Gift of Death, where he meditates on how death must be met by each of us. He also looks at the death of the other through the Abraham and Isaac story, via Kierkegaard. He tries to problematize the teleological suspension of the ethical (putting God before man when ethics says no : ie.: Abraham and Isaac and murder). Derrida reasons to the point of redefining God (which should be completely problematic from a deconstructive position):

God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior. Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what i call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God - a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from "God calls me," for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret (108-9)

And here is the clincher:

"God is in me, he is the absolute "me" or "self," he is the structure of invisible interiority that is called, in Kierkegaard's sense, subjectivity" (109).

I think that Derrida could have used a bit more tact here, perhaps more homework or research was needed (but that would not suit his polemical end). David Bentley Heart distinquishes between that which is God of God and the space of not-God in God. Which is completely paradoxical, but essential for an understanding of creation within a conception of God as the positive. God is the abyss of being, in which all being has it's being, which is so transcendent that even in being there is space for other being. Thus preserving the distinction between subjectivity and, well, God, and swerving around what Ignatieff calls the idolatry of human rights (the idol of the human).

Now let me link this back to BC&TSDK. Death follows them around, yet they have no trouble killing others for their cause. In fact each of their lives is worth about 12 Bolivian lives if I counted correctly, which is quite an economy of death if you ask me. But death hounds BC&SDK, it just keeps knocking at their door. It gives their life meaning. But, unlike Derrida, they have no subjectivity. Their ends are objectively represented. Death is external, on horse back. The law is death, and neither BC or SDK has any authentic relationship to this end. They just seek to evade it. They don't try to understand it, only anticipate how death will move. I was reminded of Bergman's The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse, with the figure of death playing chess, chasing down main characters. But Bergman is much more playful, much more ironic. With Goldman(?) we have a film that is sincere in its brotherly love, nasty in its romantic love, playful with money, and damn serious about death. Could this be the difference between Europe and America? What a huge leap. Interesting to see that America has no God, while Europe has a comedic God. An old God who has seen too many deaths. If America had a God, it would be young and afraid of death. Neither vision gets to the heart of Christianity, which has a God who sees through death, in suffering.

Perhaps America's God is a God of money. Updike had something to say about this last night in In The Beauty of the Lilies: (Speaking about a Minster- Clarence - who has lost his faith and stepped down from the pulpit)

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates: dollars were the flourishing sigh of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot" (he now sells encyclopedias, door to door). (90)

Updike has a flare for film in this text, perhaps he's talking about BC&TSDK. One Christian thing about the film: The deaths of others (BC&TSDK) provided great wealth for Redford and Newman! Which reminds me, the death they saw on horse back is immanent in my computer chair. I must retreat! Pow Pow.

For the love of Stevphen!

Stephen Colbert (Repubelickan) VS. Steve Carell (Democrap)

Funny stuff.

Craig Finn shook my hand

Craig Finn, the lead singer of The Hold Steady, is an unlikely rock star. He wears coke bottle glasses, with big plastic frames, denim shirts - like an Ivy league professor out for a beer. He makes obscure references to John Berryman, Minneapolis, and Kerouac. He talks about Catholicism all the live-long day - and when he is not talking about heading to the 5:30 folk mass, he's talking about being born again (and he is excentuating this with a series of quirky hand gestures a la Gord Downey). Of course, he is doing this through a persona - Holly - Hallelujah (or some omniscient narrator). She's a "hood rat". She tattoos "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" and "Damn right I'll rise again" on her body with some home made kit.

When Finn is not talking about Christianity he's talking about getting high. He thanked the crowd in advance for who ever smoked him up after the show last night. Yet his drug antics - which he claims are all in line with Catholic moderation (I'm tempted to believe him) - seem a bit like some sort of Eucharistic celebration. His most Catholic record was Separation Sunday. I'm expecting Vatican III from him on the next one? Papa Finn? Perhaps. More like the laity taking on the social realm, for the sake of the social realm. I think of him as a bit like Rebelais.

He came down from the Showplace theatre stage (cold, cold Buffalo), visibly exhausted, and shook hands with his little hood rat friends. I was one of them, and proud of it. His band mates are a tad eccentric. There is a bit stylistic difference - we have Finn, his lead guitarist and his drummer, all who seem to appreciate normalcy in fashion. Then we have the piano man, drinking a bottle of wine, dressed in a three piece suit, with a french earwax stiled mustache, and a beret. He likes to do this crazy genuflecting thing with his hands at times, which looks a bit funny beside Finn who is doing this flapping clapping thing - the band can't dance - but they can make me dance. Then we have the bassist, who really goes to town, God-love him. He was dressed like Popeye last night - sailor's cap, red and white striped shirt. He would stand at the edge of the stage and flip out dollar bills to the audience. He repeated that at the end of the show with Camel cigarettes. But listen to the base line to Massive Nights before you judge him.

Great show for Finn and the gang.

The Hold Steady - Massive Nights
Live show in Tallahassee

Hold Steady for The Hold Steady!

I'm going to The Hold Steady concert in Buffalo tonight! It should rock. I just confirmed it last night. If you haven't heard the hold steady yet listen to First Night, this is one of their slower, piano based tunes. It has that kinda slow build at the end - reminds me of positive tension by Bloc Party.

Beatrice, Oh Beatrice...

Here is a thought, a theme even, that has stayed with me for some time. I find it profound, though it is the type of profundity that isn't all that unique. It is the pre-romantic profound (downloadable link for The Shin's Saint Simon, start playing now!).

I am intrigued by the tradition in Christian poetry and literature of representing divine grace, beauty, truth, goodness, in the figure of a female. We have Beatrice, who Dante fell in love with at a glimpse, and who soon died in youth. Beatrice thus becomes a transcendent love object who Dante desires. She is the woman who prompts his rescue when he is lost to the sin of sloth, and later she is the woman who guides him in Paradise. The beautiful idea in Beatrice is that, though she is one woman, Dante's love for her orients him to the love of God, which is reflected in a real state in her. Thus, the particular, the earthy, has an analogical element of God (the Universal) in it.

We see this tradition extended in Petrarch, who has given the sonnet form his name. He loved another woman, Laura. It is said, that though Petrarch was a Catholic author, his version of the desired one demonstrates a deep shift in European thinking. How? Laura doesn't die, and thus, the love of Laura is the love of the immanent. Dante united the immanent and transcendent in Beatrice, whereas Petrarch put the focus on the good that is here and has no "telos", no final end (some would call this a superficial good, or a flat good). The new science is born, empiricism, naturalism, materialism, and its earliest kernel is found in literature.

In English literature we find this tradition in William Lamgland's Piers Plowman. In the prologue the protagonist is overcome by a beautiful woman: "A lady, lovely of looks · in linen clothed, / Came down from a castle · and called me fairly..". Let's just say he listens well, and soon discloses his object of affection as the Church.

Then had I wonder in my wit · what woman it were
That such wise words · of Holy Writ showed,
And asked her in the high name · ere she thence went,
Who indeed she was · that taught me so fairly?

`Holy Church I am,' quoth she · 'thou oughtest me to know.
I received thee first · and taught thee the faith,
And thou broughtest me sponsors · my bidding to fulfil
And to love me loyally · while thy life lasteth.'

Then I fell on my knees · and cried of her grace,
And prayed her piteously · to pray for my sins,
And to teach me kindly · on Christ to believe,
That I might work his will · that made of me man.
`Show me no treasure · but tell me this only --
How may I save my soul · thou that holy art held?'

Few non-Catholics would depict the church this way now, though the image is there in the New Testament. We rather look to the empirical church, and loose focus on the bride of Christ. This does seem to be an androcentric image of desire (one that is still reflected in our films). But the vision of the divine/beatific woman, be she lady wisdom or Venus, is usually a form of universal beauty, attractive to all. The beauty is almost supra-sexual, so high that one stands in awe, rather then erection.

Certainly Shakespeare plays with the two pronged image of a woman. We have the Juliet on high, in the balcony scene. And then we have the sacrificed Juliet, who has no resurrection. Interestingly, the desire for Juliet falters at death - Dante would have nothing to do with this idea (The death of the two would only signify their eternal bliss in heaven - that is if they died of natural causes. Certainly their suicides complicate the issue. Dante would have them in hell.). This reflects how distant the afterlife was to some in the British Renaissance. If we could add a third prong it would be Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew. She is the image of whit and wisdom in England.

Goethe is also playing with desire for a woman he can't have in The Sorrows of the Young Werther. Lotte is her name, and she is betrothed to another man.

You can find this theme throughout European literature. Lately, I have been interested in its 20th century transformations. I think that one of the most iconic images of Beatrice in the 20th C is Ann Darrow of King Kong. Here Dante is turned into an ape, the image of a proto Adam/proto Christ from the natural world. In Peter Jackson's version we see King Kong's desire very plainly. Clearly he is working in the analogical realm here, comparing man to ape. Man and ape are oriented to the higher good (at the sunset scene) the transcendental beauty, which is incarnate in Ann Darrow (a somewhat messianic figure).

We also have an image of Beatrice in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, as the Vietnamese woman Phuong, who Fowler and Pyle both desire. There is much to mine in this text (cultural travel, how transcendence is evoked, death - of Pyle and not Phuong, secular longing), but now is not the time. Though I will note that perhaps Sarah of The End of the Affair is Greene's true version of Beatrice, and Phuong is his Laura (one suspects Greene had many Lauras).

Two more quick examples before I eat. I'm starving. The band, The Shins, in their song "Saint Simon", speak of a secular search for truth. The protagonist is tired of all the Fairy Tales of his youth, decides to allow himself no further "mock defence(s)" and steps into the night..I think of Zizek/Hegel's "Night of the World" the step beyond the symbolic into the real - which for Zizek is very distrubing, chaotic and violent (ontology of violence). Anyhow, the protagonist doesn't find chaos. We as listeners are swept away into a melodic, parts sung tune, which sounds rather cathedral like. And who do we meet in the night? Lady Mercy:

Mercy's eyes are blue
When she places them in front of you
Nothing holds a roman candle to
The solemn warmth you feel inside

There's no measuring of it
As nothing else is love

I absolutely love it. If you read this and don't know the song please listen to it here.

Last, but certainly not least is Kar Wai Wong's film 2049. There is much to go into here. It will suffice to say that Wong's Dante makes his Laura suffer, on behalf of his Beatrice, who has left him longing. He leaves his Laura, so that he can become her Beatrice, which is also the creative force of all writing. When we get to the end we realize that Beatrice is a fiction in the first place, a trick our minds play on us because of nostalgia, yet a trick we cannot do without. The principle which moves the world, the artist, is a fiction of some prior, unmatchable love.

Needless to say, I do not share Wong's view. However, I do find the film very good. I would say that it is Wong's best work on desire. And now I must eat!

I want to look at Nabokov's Lolita in this light in the future...

Harper's Merry making

Wow. What merriment I will now enjoy because Harper wished it to me and the rest of Canada.

My Favourite Christmas Song

Feist is the best female vocalist I know of. Her voice makes me think of beauty. When she uses her beautiful voice to sing a beautiful song magical things happen. This is why "Lo, how a rose e're blooming" is my favourite song this Christmas, as it was last Christmas. Have a listen.

The Sorrows of Young Gabreel

Goethe. The name sends shivers down my spine. He is one of those figures who represents just how much I still don't know. And it's not that I've been trying not to know. No, I've been trying to know for sometime now, but knowing is not that easy.

I have this picture of my horizon (now seeing the edge of your knowledge is a bit foolish, as we don't know what we don't know, but stay with me). In the picture Grover is running, first to me, giving me the near, and then he runs back, giving me the far. Near - Far, Near - Far. I'm reading Goethe and the template for my mind is populated with Sesame Street. Perhaps I'll forget about Sesame Street in forty years. Then I'll have Goethe, standing before me, looking all Enlightenment-aged, saying something like, "I believe, my dear friend, that this is the closest proximity to yourself that I can stand". Then I'll pause and let him run backwards, "dear soul, this is the extent of your inwardness". Near - Far. I'll be lucky if I can see my shoes. I'm pretty near blind. I'll soon have to tape a white cane on the bumper of my car.

But I'm reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, and I'm telling you about it because, while my horizon isn't too terribly large, I've begun to forget books that I've read. So this is about remembering. I'm quite impressed with Goethe's first novel. I'm excited about it because I think I've worked on another novel, Michael Winter's This All Happened, which used it as an intertext. And it is always fun to compare the rewritten classic, with the classic. Plus Goethe ain't that bad of a writer. Yes he gets a bit gushy at times, but he is able to get you all swept up in his emotional air, in his over-consciousness of unity in the world, in his idyllic descriptions of children, old-Germany, and "the Nature". He does go over the top sometimes though. This is one of his more unfortunate descriptions of nature I've found: "...I am very happy here. The solitude of this heavenly place is sweet balm to my soul, and the youthful time of the year warms with its abundance my often shuddering heart. Every tree, every hedge is a nosegay of blossoms; and one would wish to be turned into a cockchafer, to float about in the sea of fragrance and find in it all the nourishment one needs" (4).

One would like to lay the blame on his translators. I should let you have a few chuckles first. "Nosegay" means bouquet of flowers; "cockchafers" are something like June bugs. But who would think to use such words without a slight grin? Cockchafers ... sounds like our friends in Comparative Literature are participating in a bit of tomfoolery.

But Goethe does have some unspoilt sublime moments. Consider his description of Werther's desire for the future:

It is strange how, when I came here and looked down from the mountain into the lovely valley, everything attracted me. There was the grove! Ah, could I but mingle with its shades! There was the mountaintop! Ah, could I but overlook from there the wide landscape! The interlocked hills and familiar valleys! Ah, could I but lose myself in them! -- I hurried here and there and came back, not having found what I hoped to find. Oh, it is the same with the distance as with the future! A vast, twilit whole lies before our soul; our emotions lose themselves in it as do our eyes, and we long to surrender our entire being and let ourselves sink into one great well of blissful feeling. Alas, when we approach, when There has become Here, everything is as it was before, and we are left with our poverty, our narrowness, while our soul thirsts for comfort that slipped away.
So the most restless vagabond yearns in the end for his native land, and finds in his poor hut, in the arms of his wife, in the circle of his children, and in his labor to support them all, the happiness he searched the wide world for in vain (32-33).

Apparently vagabonds can only be male. Still, Goethe seems the wise soul in this passage. And yes, there are many more passages like this in The Sorrows. And I'll tell you, the book does take a dark turn. So be prepared. Remember, as much as I may kid, Goethe ain't Grover.