Hildegarde

I once saw a television interview with George  Burns.  I think it may have been on 60  Minutes, but I’m not sure.   The reporter and the cameras followed him around for the day, and in the course of it they went to the cemetary in Los  Angeles where Gracie Allen is interred.  I can’t say buried, because she was cremated.  What’s there of her is a marble plaque in a wall, with her names and dates on it.

“Do you still talk to her?”  the reporter wanted to know.

“Of course I still talk to her,” Burns said.  “i talk to her every day.”

I’d like to say I had an odd day yesterday, but I didn’t.   It was a perfectly ordinary day, if a little on the depressing side.  The last class I teach before the week-end starts is my most remedial one, which means not only facing a lot of students with no writing skills at all, but students almost entirely hostile to the educational process.  What’s worse, it’s also my longest class, fully an hour longer than any other I teach.  I not only have to face the hostility, I have to do it in overtime.

It was, however, the beginning of the week-end, because I  don’t teach on Fridays.  And it was the beginning of a long week-end, because Columbus Day is Monday,  and the place I teach is closed.  So by the time I arrived at my younger son’s school to pick him up, I was in a fairly hopeful mood.

Then my son got into the car, and he looked depressed.  He’d just been out for two days with a cold, and I was worried the coming back had been a little rough.  He goes to a very traditional, “rigorous” school.  They don’t cut anybody a lot of slack.

“So what happened?”  I said.  “Were you too far behind?”

“It was okay ,” he said.  “i was just, you know, a little depressed.”

“Because you were out of school for a couple of days?”

He gave me the most comprehensively disbelieving look.  “No,” he said  patiently.  “Because it’s October ninth.”

And it was, of course, October ninth.

Twelve years to the day since Bill died.

I wish  I could said I’d spent the day with the nagging feeling that I’d forgotten something, but I hadn’t.  It was an ordinary day, and I’d forgotten, and that’s it.  

II don’t even know why I’m so upset that I forgot.  My older son forgot, too, and for him that was probably the defining day of his life.  And it’s not that I’ve been brooding all this time, and only rcently given it up.  i don’t brood about most things, and I’ve “moved on,” as they like to put it, in almost every way.   i have close friends that Bill did not live long enough to meet.   I do things–the teaching, some volunteer work, some kinds of writing–that Bill did not lving long enough to see.  I’ve fallen in love again, if that’s what you want to call it, and I haven’t felt guilty about it.

Maybe the problem is the part of me that hasn’t moved on, the part of me that does, indeed, talk to Bill every day.  Most of the time I’m not even aware of doing it.  There are just things that nobody else gets, that nobody else ever has and that I expect nobody else ever will.  It’s not that he never made any mistakes about who and what I am–in one case he made a doozy that I’m still capable of feeling hurt about to this day–but I made a few mistakes about him, too.

It’s just that he was the one person I ever knew who could see me for what I am.  The mistakes he made were not the usual kind of mistakes.   I hope I was the same for him.  He said I was.  It’s hard to know.

Sometimes I talk to him because I know he would get it, and  I’m not sure anybody else would.  Sometimes I talk to him because I know that, if he were here, he would talk me out of the obsessional self-criticism I’m prone to when things don’t go entirely well.  Sometimes I talk to him because I just do, because he’s here with me, all the time, somewhere inside my head.  

They say that when people die you forget what they looked like, you forget the sounds of their voices.  It hasn’t been true for me.  My younger son was fooling around in my office one day and accidentally turned on a small tape recorder with  Bill on it, interviewing somebody for what was supposed to be his last book.   I was a room and a half away, and I didn’t know what was going on, but as soon as I heard that voice I found it instantaneously recogniable.

None of this makes any difference, I suppose, to anybody but me, and it isn’t what you come to this blog for.  But I’m taking a day.

I’m going to drive out to Barnes and Noble and buy all the political magazines of every persuasion and then sit down in the cafe and have a frappucino.  Bill would have loved Barnes and Noble cafes, he always read all the magazines, and if he’d ever had a chance to get on the Internet he’d have been a world class blogger.

But mostly it’s just one of those days  we all have when there’s just something we have to do.

For George Burns it was talking to Gracie.

For me, it’s talking to Bill.

So it’s Thursday, and I’m back here in the lab where the grammar students come, but I’m early, and they’re not here yet.  I figure I’ve got about twenty minutes before the tidal wave arrives.  In the meantime, I’m actually in a pretty good position to think.

Except that I haven’t had any sleep, and the other cat–the one that doesn’t hide shoes–is now becoming enamored of stealing and wearing underwear.  Women’s underwear, to be specific.  I’ll be sitting in the living room popping the remote in the vain hope that one of the news channels will have something on it besides blither, and in will come Creamsicle, wearing something nylon and lacy over his head as if he’s about to be married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  And looking incredibly proud of himself, too.

There must be a reason for this.  I mean, they’re very strange cats.  They like odd food, like Honey Bunches of Oats and rice and green Manzanilla (sp?) olives.  They’re always trying to mark my older son, as if he were a piece of territory they both want exclusivity rights to.  The smart one–that would be Creamsicle–also knows how to open doors and get the faucet in the kitchen sink to produce water.

Which is sort of a way to segue into the thing I mentioned last time, the idea–espoused passionately by a lot of people, including people I like to read, like Richard Dawkins–that human beings should not get too full of themselves.  That we’re “just another animals.”

Yesterday, I said that all moral codes begin in the way in which their makers define what it means to be “human.”  And some of those definitions are very restrictive.  Early, or earlyish, literate societies have a real tendency to define human as ‘beloning to US” and anybody not belonging to us–anybody of a different tribe or religion or race or whatever–as not actually human at all.

It can be quite a shock to see the way the word “race” and its translations are used in, say, classical Greece and Rome, or imperially ascendant Babylon, or even Shakespearean England.  A lot of times, these societies used “race”–and assumed an innate, inborn difference of being–for what we would call ethnicity, or nationality, or religion.  Even Dickens, writing well into the Victorian period, used “race” to designate professions, as in the “race of lawyers” or the “race of bookkeepers,” both of which show up in Bleak House.

The idea that all men were united in a common humanity appears first in Greek philosophy, and that in and of itself was an important breakthrough in ethical philosophy, and in ethical practice.  The idea that all men and women and foreigners and religions and social classes are united in a common humanity appears first in Christianity, in the famous quate from St. Paul:  You are neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.  You are all one in Christ Jesus.  You are all sons of God.

Okay, I did that from memory, and I might have gotten the order of the clauses wrong.  But the important thing here is to notice just how incredibly radical this statement is.  A certain kind of “feminist scholar” likes to protest this quote and declare that “sons of God” is sexist.  A movement to use “inclusive language” has raged through various Biblical translations and renders this quote “children of God” instead.

It’s the kind of boneheaded assininity that makes me completely crazy.  And no, I don’t know if “assininity” is a word, and I have no idea if I’ve spelled it right even if it is one.  This computer is lovely in a lot of ways, but I don’t know how to get the type big enough so that I can actually see it.

I’m getting old.

Here’s the thing, though–St. Paul was not saying that all people were “children” of God for a very good reason.  In the ancient world, and especially in Rome, all children were  not created equal.  Boys could inherit their father’s estates.  Girls could not.

What Paul is saying here is that even women have now become heirs.  They are fully and equally entitled to their Father’s estate.  Had he said “children of God,” he would have been implying nothing more than that women would have the same second-class status they already did have in the Roman Empire, and everywhere else. 

This is not a minor thing.  It is the first instance anywhere, in anly literate society, even hinting at the possibility that women deserved, or could be granted, full moral and social equality with men. 

And yes, I do know that early Christianity did not actually practice the ideal Paul set out, and that even Paul himself didn’t practice it, but that doesn’t really matter.  Change takes a long time.  It took longer in the days when communication was difficult and intermittant.

The fact is that ideas have consequences, and that idea had huge consequences for the development of Western Civilization.  Aristotle didn’t think of it–hell, he didn’t even get far enough to consider male slaves the moral equals of freemen–and neither did Cicero.  There is no non-Western civilization that managed to come up with it, either.  Anywhere you find the assumption that women are the moral and social equals of men, what you’re looking at is either a Western society, or a society that has somehow come into contact with a Western society. 

And this idea is still considered self-evidently wrong by quite a few non-Western societies.  We’re all publicly indignant at the practice, in China, of resorting to abortion when the babies to be born are going to be girls, but China is hardly the only society in the world where that particular choice is common.  When I was living in the UK, maternity hospitals and ob/gyns refused to give the results of amniocentesis to anybody but the mother herself, fearing that if husbands or mothers in law or other relatives heard that the fetus was female, they’d pressure the mother into aborting it.  Women wanting abortions in Britian must go before a board, make a case, and have their decision okayed by a panel of doctors.  That is supposed to guard against just this kind of thing.  In practice, it didn’t quite work.

This is not just “prejudice,” it’s a full blown disavowal of the full humanity of women.  Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek novelist who wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, growing up in a society still under control of the Muslim Turks, was never able to shake the assumptions that society taught him.  In the middle of his autobiography, talking about his time spent in Paris, he said, “I have never gotten used to the Western notion that women have souls.”   Souls. 

Christianity did not have to be taught that women had souls.  It assumed it from the beginning, and for all the long years it took for this idea to reach its logical conclusions, the fact is that without this idea nobody does reach that particular conclusion.  It’s one of the two or three most significant ideas in the history of the world, and it changes everything.

And not just because it means that Sarah Palin can run for President.

Moral codes derive from their definitions of what it means to be a human being.  All Western moral codes from the establishment of the Christian Church in Rome assume the moral equality of men and women and of people of different classes and social statuses and of people of different nationalities.

And this decision–this inclusiveness in the definition of “human”–is advocated just as strongly by secular thinkers who sincerely and passionately believe that “nothing good” ever came out of religion.

Or, as Christopher Hitchens put it, “Religion destorys everything.”

I’d better point out something here, before I get a little waterfall of mail welcoming me to the fold–I’m an atheist.  I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember.  I came a family that consisted of atheists and people who didn’t care.  I do not believe in God.

I do, however, believe in ideas, and I especially believe in this idea.  The world would be a much worse place without it, just as it would be a much uglier place without Hildegarde’s music and Michaelangelo’s paintings.

The Greeks believed that men were halfway between animals and Gods.  St. Paul believed that men and women could and should aspire to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Let’s start there, and somehow end up with Miss Jane Marple.

I’m sitting here in a gorgeaou room at a gorgeous computer in a brand new technology center, and there’s a fan in the heating center that sounds likeit’s about to explode.  I was born on Friday the 13th.  Sometimes I start to think it might matter.

Anyway, I feel rather odd writing about what I’m writing about right this minute, because the last time we had a “golden age of mystery fiction,” we had it right in the middle of the Great Depression.  Which isn’t to say that I’m expecting a new Great Depression–although if we won’t get one, it won’t be because the stock markets and the governments that enable them aren’t trying–but I do think that a lot of what made a certain kind of mystery novel (my kind, the kind I read, and I hope the kind I write) so popular at the time was that it was a form that answered to the deepest anxieties of the reading public.

At least, of the reading public in the “Anglophone sphere,” as people like to call it these days.  By and large, mystery fiction of the classic sort is a product of cultures allied with England.  Maybe there’s something about the Magna Carta that makes people interested in following the prograess of those little grey cells.  Or maybe it’s just something in the water, and wein the colonieskeep importing it.

To be a little more specific here:  there are basically three kinds of detective fiction:  hard boiled, soft boiled, and classic.

Hard boiled is at least suposed to be gritty and “realistic”–the works of Raymond Chandler are about as realistic as Barbie’s Fairytopia–and its focus is on the character of the detective.

Soft boiled is less gritty and, presumably  less realistic, but its focus is still on the character of the detecive.

Both hard boiled and soft boiled novels tend to be written in the first person.

Classic mysteries, however, tend to be written in the third person, because their focus is not on the detective, but on the suspects. 

And, I know, I said this before a couple of posts ago, or I think I did, but it’s worth repeating.  Because the classic mystery, although a messiah narrative, isa messiagh narrative of a particular kind.

Think of all fiction, of all art, really, as having one overwhelming purpose in human society:  to bring order out of chaos.  For most of human history, we’ve been mired in chaos.  Civilizaitions arose in the attempt to acquire some kind of control over the random forces that seemed to intervene without warning whether we were trying to prepare for them or not.

The nature of that chaso, however, has changed over time.  Even our perception of the existence of that chaos has changed, so that there are some of us who feel so completely ordered and controlled we crave a “wildness” and “naturalness” we don’t really know anything about.

For the men and women of even the high Middle Ages, that chaos was denomic, literally.  The devil was alive on earth and prowling.  Medieval stories tend to have a lot of magic in them, and miracles, not because the men and women of the time were superstitious and ignorant, but because a supernatural enemy required a superntural opponent.

For the Victorians, and to an extenf for the Enlightenment thinkers who were their spiritual ancestors, the chaos came in the form of animality.  There were two parts to our nature, we were half best and half God (as the Greeks would have said), and our danger came from inside us, from the part of us always threatening to give way to the “merely natural.”

That some people did so give way was not an issue.  There have been psychopaths in every era.  Jack the Ripper wandered through the streets of the same London that produced Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley and a riot of scientific societies promising to investigate, analyze, and solve every human problem according to the best modern standards of logic and efficiency.

Jack the Ripper, though, wasn’t really the problem.  In a way, he wasn’t really dangerous to Victorian society, any more than Ted Bundy or Charles Manson is dangerous to ours.  He was a nuisance, yes, and he ruined the lives of several young women, but that’s what we have police forces for, and jails.  Jack got away, but conveniently also stopped working.  Ted Bundy was captured and executed. Charles Manson is safely locked up in California.

Classic detective fiction doesn’t deal with people like these because that is not where it locates the real danger to human society.  Instead, it deals with the secretly depraved, the closeted anarchists, the people who appear to be just like us, but who have, inside themselves, broken ranks with the human community.

What’s more, the detective in a classic detective novel discovers the impostor and brings him (or her) to justice, by thinking. 

It is logic and the force of intellect that keeps us safe in the world of Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple, and Lord Peter Wimsey.  At its base, the detective novel is a story of thinking vs. emotions, of logic vs. passion, where thinking and logic are what qualify us as human.

In the end, every moral system begins by defining what it means to be a human being.  Whether you see man as halfway between God and beast, or a wretched worm so corrupted by original sin he has no justification for existing, or an animal who shouldn’t pretend to be anything more than that–where your definition is, there will the rest of your system.

For the classic detective story, the answer is always clear:  human beings are the beings who think.

Okay, I hven’t had much sleep, and I’m falling over.

So, it’s Tuesday, and I’m in that situation where the only computer I have access to  is in this big computer lab where people come to do computer generated grammar exercises. 

It’s a long story.  But the bottom line is, I find it almost impossible to think in here.

So instead of thinking, I’m going to spew for a bit, and then I’ll get back to mythic archetypes and narratives and the rise of the Great Detective tomorrow.

Although I will say–and this will come up later, too–that when I’m upset or rattled or in that state when what we are all supposed to want is comfort food, I head straight for the Agatha Christie.  Miss Marple.  Definitely.

But that should probably be for later.  Miss Marple as a mythic archetype.  I could go on all day, if I could think at all.

But I can’t think, and the reason I can’t think is that the whole damned election thing is making me nuts.

In the first place, I do not give a flying damn about what a candidate’s pastor/wife/brother-in-law/colleague in a charitable enterprise/pet rabbit thinks, or thought. 

I heartily despise the tendency to insist that candidates for public office, and especially for the Presidency, lead antiseptic lives in which they’re not even allowed to acknowledge people in their world who are less than perfect.

I don’t care what Bill Ayres, or Jeremiah Wright think, or thought.  I care what Barack Obama thinks.  I have, in my life, two people I see a fair amount of who are felons–one of them is a murderer.  What they did was long before I know them.  As far as I can tell, neither is repentant.  All of it happened a long time ago.  I don’t really know the circumstances.  One of them works with me at a food pantry I volunteer at.  They may be the devil himself, split in two, but I think it’s fairly normal for people to know other people who have done things they themselves wouldn’t necessarily do.

What’s more, I think there’s something not only highly unnatural but rather dishonorable in ditching a good friend who has strayed from the beaten path, no matter WHAT he’s done. Most of us would stand by and support our friends and family even when they’d done something we knew was wrong and completely condemned.

But if I’m not interested in Ayres and Wright, I’m also not interested in the Keating Five.  Yes, thirty years ago John McCain was mixed up with a very unsavory man and in a way that even has direct implications for the present financial crisis.

But that was thirty years ago.  I’m not being asked to vote for John McCain thirty years ago.  I’m being asked to vote for him now.  Tell me what he thinks now.  Tell me what he wants now.  Tell me something.

Because, right now, if I had to choose between these two characters on the issues, I couldn’t actually choose McCain, because he doesn’t seem to be saying anything beyond “Barack Obama is a bad man and probably dangerous.”

And the running mate–I mean, for God’s sake. Sarah Palin gives every indication of being in reality what the left has always insisted George W. Bush is.  Now that they’ve seen the real thing, maybe they’ll understand why I never tghought W. was either stupid or ignorant. 

i would very much like to be able to vote for a person like myself for President.  I am not interested in voting for a person like that side of my family that thinks I’m being ‘stuck up’ because, when they come to my house, there’s Lionel Trilling in the bookcase and Scarlatti and Back on the CD shelf. 

Whereever did they find this person, and why?  Did the RNC really think John McCain had so little to offer the American people that he needed this…I don’t know what.  Gimmick, I guess. 

I am siting here nearly four weeks to the day from the election and I have no idea what John McCain is trying to say.  Even the first debate didn’t help.  He just kept repeating catch phrases–I’m a maverick!–when there was any dead air.  What does it mean to be a maverick?  Why should I care?  What’s the man going to DO if he gets into office. 

I’ll watch the debate tonight, or tape it and watch it over the week end when I’ve got time, but at this precise moment I think McCain’s entire campaign has been one long train wreck.  It’s got no theme, it’s got no momentum–

And, for God’s sake (okay, there I go again, with God), what the hell is it with tax cuts?  I mean, okay, we should have tax cuts. So we elect the guy–whatever guy it is–and he gets in and presumably he gets taxes cut, but they must get raised when none of us are looking, because next election cycle he’s back, and the taxes need cutting again.

If taxes had actually been cut as many times as we’ve elected people who say they’re going to cut our taxes, the US government should be paying us by now. 

Somewhere out there, there has got to be some content.  I just haven’t been able to find it.

And now, the cat has hidden my shoe, again.

Back to mystery novels tomorrow.

A little political interlude:

     Today is the last day, in most states, when you can register to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. I’ll probably go into the who and why of what I’m voting for eventually, but for today I’d just like to say that it would be a good idea, if you’re not registered, to go do it.  One way or another, this election is going to make history.  I think you should go make history with it.  

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So, back to detective novels, and mythic archetypes, and all the rest of it.

I said yesterday that narratives did not require mythic archetypes, or any kind of “real” characters at all.  Mythic archetypes, on the other hand, almost always need narratives.  And unlike narrative, which seem to last in their most basic forms from one millennia to the next without any but cosmetic changes, there are real changes in mythic archetypes.  There are even new ones.

Well, at least, there are quasi-new ones.  This gets complicated, precisely because it isn’t, really.  The DSM-II lists dozens and dozens of forms of “mental illness”–the scare quotes are deliberate–but even those are mostly embellishments on a few old themes. 

So, why is it, anyway, that mythic archetypes change so much, and narratives change so little?  Part of it has to do with the fact that man is only partially his genetics.  The rest of him is created when his environment acts on those genetics. 

And the human environment has changed, drastically, since the eighteenth century.  It has of course changed politically–with the rise of democracy, for instance, and the growing separation of church and state–but it has also changed physically, and in ways it is hard for those of us now alive in Western countries to understand.

Consider the fact that almost every person reading this blog thinks that he will live at least into his seventies, and probably into his eighties.  What’s more, every one of us also feels that somebody who has died before his seventies–especially before his late seventies–has somehow died “too young.”  What’s more, we react instinctively against the idea that someone could die “young” without somehow being at fault for his own death.  I had an aunt who died of lung cancer at seventy-eight, and the entire family clucked along with, “If she hadn’t been such a smoker, she’d still be alive today!”

The days of a man’s life are three score and ten, the Bible says, but in the days when those words were written most people didn’t make it all the way to seventy, and the fact that they didn’t was considered nothing if not normal.  Consider a world without antibiotics, without a clear understanding of the way germs cause disease (or even the knowledge that germs exist), without modern technqiues of surgery.  Consider a world in which most women who died “before their time” died in childbirth, and a lot of them died in childbirrth.  Consider a world without effective refrigeration, so that meat was constantly going bad and E-coli poisoning was a daily possibility.  Consider a world where there was nothing special about dying suddenly and dying young.

Modern people cannot understand, on any gut level, the way people of the Elizabethan period thought about death and dying.   When I teach more advanced classes, I assign a fair amount of John Donne.  he’s a good poet to illustrate the sonnet form, and his use of language is complex and nuanced.  Every time I do assign him, however, I have to get past the instinctive reaction of students:  why is this guy so obsessed with death?  Most of my students have come to Donne knowing little or nothing about death on a personal level.  Most of their grandparents are still alive.  Most of them have never known anyone who died young except from something that could be considered ” their own fault.”

Not only do most of us assume that we’re just supposed to be alive until our late seventies, if not longer.  Most of us further assume that if we do not make it, it will be because somebody, somewhere, did something wrong.  And it goes further than that.  We’re not just supposed to survive.  We’re supposed to survive intact.  Disability of any kind is egregious on every level, and just not fair.

The oddness that these assumptions create are truly remarkable.  I was married for thirteen years to a man named Bill DeAndrea.  He wrote books, too, and I met him in a bookstore.  He won three Edgars, the only person ever to do that for three adult books.  He was a nice man, and he died at forty-six of a form of cancer so rare, there are no known risk factors for it.

Now, think of that.  There are no known risk factors for it.  It’s not known to be genetic.  It doesn’t seem to run in families.  Fat people and thin people get it.  Old eople and young people get it.  It’s not known to be connected to smoking, exercise or diet.   That’s what “no known risk factors” means.

And yet, all through Bill’s illness, and the years sense, the most common response I’ve had of people to his disease has been to cast around desperately for the “why.”  What did he do, exactly, that caused him to die so young.  He must have been a smoker!   Nope, Bill never smoked anything in his life.   It must have been his weight, then!   He was a heavy man.

In the beginning,  feeling indignant on his behalf, I used to try to counter this nonsense.  Weight is not a risk factor for this cancer.  Most people who get it are not overweight.

I gave up, eventually, because being overweight is one of those things we know consider to be self-evidently “bad,” and since Bill had been guilty of a self-evidently “bad” thing, that had to explain his cancer.  We never give up trying to find the “bad” things dying patients have done that will explain why they are dying.  Even children with cancer are subject to speculation by the adults around them–obviously they couldn’t have done something “bad,” so their parents must have.  They must have been brought up around “bad” behavior, and that must explain their cancer.

Part of the reason we do this is simple fear.  Dying is a frightening thing.  In the generations before us, and especially before the eighteenth century, people tended to deal with the fear by contemplating it.  That was why Donne was “so obsessed with death.”  In a world where anybody could go at any time, where “dying young” was not an abberration but a certainty for a good segment of the population, where women had ten children in order to make sure three of them survived, it made little sense to stick your head in the sand and pretend that death didn’t exist.   It was all around you, all the time.

We expect to live, not to die:  that’s a change.    We are further sure that we can do that because there is something called Science, which involves thinking rationally about things and then applying those thoughts to the real world.  Most of us don’t really understand Science, mind you.  We couldn’t do a scientific experiment to save our lives, we can’t read experimental protocols and evaluate them, and our understanding of statistics resembles a two-year-old’s understanding of quantum mechanics.

Still, we’re sure that there’s something called Science, and that it can do anything.  There is no reason why anybody should be sick, or disabled, or even unhappy.   There’s no reason why anybody should be saddled with bad habits.  They’re not habits, really, they’re “addictions,” and there’s a science called Psychology that can fix them.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that, at a certain level, science is indistinguishable from magic.  I think for most people, science is magic. It’s just magic with a much better success rate than the old kind.  “Abracadabra” didn’t work all that well.  It failed more than it succeeded.  “Science” works much better.  In fact, it works almost all the time.  That means that when it fails, it must be because scientists are refusing to give us what we want, need and deserve.  

It takes a twentieth century man to file a ‘wrongful life” suit, to sue the obstetrician that brought him into this world because in being so brought he had cerebral palsy.  The doctor should have known and counseled the mother to have an abortion.  Nobody should be required to live with a birth defect.  To require the plaintiff to do so is contrary to all modern morality, and somebody has to pay for it.

Okay,  I’m sort of blithering here, but my point remains:  modern people have a different relationship to death and dying than any people that came before us.  And because we do–because we do not expect death to come at any moment, without warning–we have assumptions about the world that are different than all those that came before us, too.

We assume that the world must be a rational place, where problems can be worked out by thinking them through and acting on what we discover and decide.  We assume that logic and reason are the right way to go, almost all the time, and that the seemingly inexplicable can be explained if we put our minds to it.  We assume that death is an anomaly.

And it is only with all those assumptions that we could have invented the detective story, and the almost-new mythic archetype–the Great Detective–who came along with it.

So, I got home yesterday to find my e-mail full of messages all pretty much on the same topic:  how can you say all detective stories are messiah narratives?  Think of all those “crime novels!”  And what about  Gregor Demarkian?  That’s a Messiah figure?  Sometimes he seems like he’s barely paying attention.

So, okay, let’s go back a bit.

First, narratives do NOT require mythic archetypes.  In fact, plenty of narratives have main characters who are not really characters at all.   Go back to Adam and Eve.   The Faust narrative is there, clear as day, but  Adam and  Eve are not.  The only reason I even think I know anything about them is that I’ve read Mark  Twain’s little humorous piece meant to give us  Adam’s diary.

In the narrative itself, in any version or edition of Genesis that you want to consult, Adam and Eve are mere place markers to indicate “human beings of both sexes.”  We do not know what they look like.  We do not know  the particulars of any of their emotions.  Adam may be hesitant and afraid when Eve offers him the apple, but we don’t know what any of that means.  We feel none of that emotion.  And–to clinch the fact that neither he nor Eve is actually a character–we cannot predict any of his future behavior from what we know. 

A lot of early literature is like this.   Pandora is just as much a blank as a character as Adam and  Eve, and she appears in a Faust narrative, too.   Greek myth, Babylonian myth, Norse myth, even Hindu myth are all more interested in what than in who.  The individual person is not of primary concern, the nature of the story is.  For many cultures for long periods of time, the individual person doesn’t even exist.  To the extent that “characters” appear in stories at all, they’re either place markers (like Adam and Eve) or stereotypes.  

The entire idea of individuality, of the uniqueness of the single person and the  importance of understanding who he really is, is not only a late development in civilizaitons, it’s almost entirely a Western one, and it never appears full blown–to the point where we expect the characters in our stories to be “fleshed out” like real people–except in cultures that are either Western or influenced by the West.

What’s more, the practice of creating such characters preceeded the public demand for it, and the philosophical command for it, by centuries.   It’s what makes all of Sophocles so peculiarly modern.   Go to the library some time and take out a great big stack of Greek plays from the classical period, tragic and comic both.  You’ll find a few plays that resonate in a see of stuff that seems flat and sort of stupid, on about the level of bad television.   Look again and you’ll see that the difference is in character. 

It was still possible in the classical period in Athens for Greek playwrights to produce stories with stock characters and still win prizes.   Character was not an imperative.  But Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannus is not a stock character.  Most of the other characters aroung him are, but he is not, and we glide right over the chanting stale pieties of the Chorus–the Chorus is always the means of delivering stale pieties, that’s why it’s there–in order to focus our attention on the one real person on the stage.

Not only was character not particularly important for most of our cultural history, after the fall of Rome it receded for another several centuries.  Early Christian culture was as heavy on narrative and as flat on character as any Greek myth, and sometimes even flatter.  While you’re looking at the Greek plays, you might want to check out a few Medieval morality plays.   The most famous one is Everyman, but there are dozens of others, even dozens of others originally written in English.

These plays were written to be performed in churches and town squares by traveling troupes of actors, and every single one of them was meant to deliver a message about morality or religion.  In the most religious versions, what you had was stories from the Bible.  In an age when most people were illiterate, plays and paintings were the way they learned the narratives of their religion.  Characters had what names and aspects they were given in the Bible, and giving them more, making them more fully human, would have only gummed up the works and confused the audience.

The plays that concentrated on teaching moral lessons often didn’t bother to give actual names to their character at all.  Instead, actors would appear as “Lust” or “Profilgacy” or “Prudence,”  literally mere place-holders for moral ideas.   Think of Everyman himself, wandering through his play as a cipher standing in for all the rest of us.  If he was too much of an individual character, the audience would have been much too prone to decide that they were nothing like him and could therefore do all the things that messed  him up with impunity.

So narratives do not have to employ mythic archetypes.  They certainly don’t have to further develop those archetypes in order to remain the narratives they are.

A Messiah narrative goes like this:  your town/world/planet/village/household/whatever is threatened.  It could be threatened by something outside it (invading aliens, say) or by something inside it (a murderer, political corruption).  The hero comes in from the outside and fixes the problem, whatever it might be.   He then leaves you and your fellow citizens/family/whatever to your own devices.

That’s it.  And, as I said yesterday, almost every detective story ever written follows this narrative.   I didn’t say crime novels, mind you.  I’m more than aware that there are novels out there dealing with murders or crimes of other kinds that are not Messiah narratives.  I specifically said detective novels for a reason.

But the first thing I want to stress is that it is unnecessary for the hero to fix the entire world forever in order for a narrative to be a Messiah narrative.  Of course, the actual Messiah from whom the term here is taken is supposed to have done just that, and early  Messiah narratives do indeed often give us the redemption of the entire world, or something close to it.  Star Wars is a Messiah narrative, and Lucas was so anxious to make sure we didn’t miss it that he gave us a virgin birth and then redeemed the devil.

But a Messiah narrative does not have to be this all-encompassing to be a Messiah narrative.   Of course, it’s a bonus if it is.   The world may have moved on a lot in the last six thousand years, but we still like our conflicts apocalyptic and our victories unambiguous.  The Lord of the Rings is a Messiah narrative.  So is the Harry Potter series.  But so is Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and all Matilda saves is a single elementary school.

When the world moves on, things get complicated, as they should.  Judging by the box office receipts, lots of us are still happy to take our Messiah narratives plain,   A lot of us like them better plain than we do developed, and a lot of us would rather see a straightforward Messiah narrative with characters hardly more “real” than the ones in Everyman than sit through two hours or two hundred pages of something more complicated.   That explains the enduring popularity of all things Die Hard. 

So a Messiah narrative does not depend on the character of the hero who takes the part of the Messiah.  But the character of that hero, and the fate of mythic archetypes in a complicated and complicating world, comes nest.

I’ll even defend the character and record of Gregor Demarkian.

For hours after I wrote that last post,  I was unhappy with it.  I was especially unhappy with the word “goddesses,” which does not mean, any more, what I wanted it to mean.  We call any really impressive woman a “goddess” these days, and a lot of not very impressive ones, too.  We mean that they’re good looking or that they carry themselves well.  I was thinking of “goddess” in the classical sense, of a deity who controls faite, or even one who demands destruction.  There’s a lot of demanding destruction going on in the situation we’re in.

That said, I think the other problem with that last post is in its concentration on good and evil, when we don’t even have definitions for the terms.  At least, we don’t in the context of this blog.   I’m sure most of you at least think you know what good and evil are.  You know it instinctively even if you haven’t thought it through.

That instinctive thing–that underlying conviction that we just know right from wrong and good from evil–is a bad guide for behavior, but it’s also a universal human experience.  Both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had it wrong, I think.  The human being is not born with an inner compass, what Aquinas would have and we do call a conscience, that is somehow in touch with a cosmic and univeral moral code that lies at the basis of all the working moral codes that human beings attempt to construct.

What we do have,  I think, is an inborn and innate conviction that there is such a distinction, that good and evil are real and that we need to know what they are.  We’re born, I think, with a conscience, but that conscience has very little in the way of content.  That’s why there are so many different and conflicting moral codes.  We know that good and evil are out there.  It just takes us both experience and the application of right reason to figure out exactly what they are.

This is not to say that I agree with those people who declare that morality is entirely subjective, just something we make up with no more validity than our taste for chocolate.  I think morality is objective and something we discover, not something we invent–but we do have to discover it.  The hope of centuries of Western civilization, that we are all born just knowing and have only to consult our own best instincts, is just not going to cut it.

All of the brings us back not only to the goddesses, classically defined, but to Cheating at Solitaire, and why I wrote it.

Before I get there, I want to look at the entire idea of Literature, and the place of Genre Literature in it, and the place of stories, period in our lives.

Back when  I was in graduate school, we learned this:  man is a narrative animal.  We think in narrative.  We  perceive in narrative.  And we have the terribly tendency to judge the truth or falsity of what we experience by whether not it fits a narrative.  

And the contents of morality may not be innate, but the contents of narrative certainly seem to be.  I suppose there’s no way to test for that, no way to find out by disection or chemical trial whether the story of Forbidden Knowledge or of Patient Griselda is hardwired into us, but it certainly seems to be.  There are basic narratives that occur in every culture we have been able to investigate.

In fact, I’m willing to guess that there hasn’t been a new narrative invented in a thousand years, if not more.  What look to us like “new” stories are really reconfigurations of old ones.  Think of what was called in my youth the Faust narrative–the story of the man (or woman, or man and woman) who wants knowledge so badly that he doesn’t care who or what he has to destroy to get it.  In Western Civ, the granddaddy of all Faust narratives is, of course, the story of Adam and Eve, with the serpent holding out the old promise that, if they only acquire this knowledge, they will be “as God.”

These days, the Faust narrative tends to come in its apocalyptic mode–the Faust character, the man or woman who wants knowledge he or she shouldn’t have, is in danger not of losing his own soul and thereby destroying himself, but of blowing up the world and destroying the rest of us.   Think of the giant ants in Them, punishment for our fiddling with the structure of atoms, or the new ice age of The Day After Tomorrow, brought on because we just couldn’t stop inventing things and messing with global warming.

It would be nice to be able to say that narratives exist and survive because they express something true about the human experience, but that isn’t exactly the case.  Certainly some narratives do this, and some versions of some narratives do it even better.  

In general, though, narratives seems to have two uses.  First, they are a way of responding to our hopes and fears about the world.  Second, they are a way of organizing the data that go into those hopes and fears.  Human beings have a desperate need to organize everything.   We take in an enormous amount of information.  We need to put it into categories so we can decide what it means.

While we’re doing that, we need to do something else:  we need to organize the data we take in about people.   There are a lot of people in the world, and they’re likely to move around.  we can’t trust in being able to deal only with those we already know well.  We need some way to predict behavior.

The name for the cast of characters that resulted from that need used to be “mythic archetype,” and I suppose it still is.   Not all narratives make use of mythic archetypes–Adam and Eve, for isntance, and pretty much blanks in terms of personality–but every mythic archetype is embedded in a type of narrative,  and neither the archetypes or the narratives ever really change.  Adam and Eve may be ciphers, but Faust himself is not, and neither is Frankenstein, his spirutal great-grandson.   It’s the same story and the same person, and he appears again as the snotty celebrity scientist who nearly destroys the world in The Core.  He’ll appear again next week.  We like Faust narratives.

Right now,  I’d like you to consider another narrative, maybe the most artistically fruitfall of them all.  For want of a better term, we’ll call it the Messiah narrative, the story of how mankind is choking itself into oblivion on its own sins, and one man–and it’s almost always been a man–comes to redeem them.

The story of Christ is, obviously, a Messiah narrative, but it’s hardly the only one.  Almost every Western ever filmed, or written, is a Messiah narrative too, especially Shane.  So is every superhero story, in the movies or out. 

But here’s the thing–so is every detective story.  Whether you’re talking about Hercule Poirot or  Philip Marlowe or the latest gore-obsessed hunter of serial killers, the detective story, the murder mystery, the crime novel is almost always a Messiah narrative.   We are all drowning in a sea of crime, our world is out of joint because the forces of chaos and of evil are walking among us unrestrained, and into this mess comes The Detective who alone can put the world right again.

All detective stories are Messiah narratives, and the only real, fundamental difference among them is the nature of the mythic archetype that forms their core.

I told you this was going to be a blog about reading things.

So, okay. It’s a little too easy, beating up on college students for what they don’t know. It’s especially easy beating up on students at the kind of “colleges” that are really only glorified vocational schools. My kids are not going to Yale, after all, and they’re not majoring in history, philosophy or French. They take “management” courses. They look for “careers” in “criminal justice,” meaning ending up as parole officers and on police forces. Some of them are ‘pre-law,” but none of them understands that the law schools don’t give a damn what your major is. None of them know enough about the world to understand that where they go to college is more important than what they major in there, and that, being where they are, they’re already largely screwed.

On the other hand, they’re not the only kids I teach, and the rest of my students are not much better off in the cultural context area. All those stories you hear about college juniors who can’t place the U.S. Civil War in the nineteenth century–I had a kid who confidently proclaimed that it started on December 7, 1941–are true.

This is a symptom of something important, and it definitely has an effect on what I’m talking about here, but for the moment I want to go a little further than this and talk about the one thing all these kids share, the one thing they’re sure they “know.”

That thing is the nature of morality. Ask any one of these kids, inner city or suburban, A student or flunking out, and they will tell you that morality is relative. Good and evil mean different things to different people. It’s all a matter of opinion.

The one exception to this anthem are the kids from very traditional religious homes, and what they know is that “good and evil are what God says they are.” This is sort of an improvement over what their classmates think, but not by as much as it may seem on the surface.

In the first place, because my kids are lying. They definitely do not think that good and evil are a matter of opinion. You can discover this any time you want by simply saying something in support of one of the many things they abhor, or they think they are supposed to abhor. They feel about racism, child abuse and smoking what the Puritans felt about adultery, heresy and bestiality.

The problem is not that child abuse is a minor issue or that they ought to think better of it, but that they have no idea why it’s supposed to be wrong. And this is why I say that their peers from traditionally religious families aren’t much better off. “God says so” may sound like an explanation of why something is moral or not, but it isn’t really. It’s just another way of saying “shut up and don’t ask questions.”

Of course, “shut up and don’t ask questions” is an approach to morality with a long and detailed history in every civilization on earth, but one of the ways in which Western civilization has differed from many others has been precisely in the fact that we have tried, over and over again, to find an objective, logical and rational foundation for calling something “moral” and something else not.

As Socrates pointed out–in a Socratic dialogue the name of which I’ve completely lost, probably due to the fact that it’s not yet five o’clock in the morning–we really DON’T accept “God says so” as an adequate answer to “why is that wrong?” We don’t accept it as an adequate answer to why something is right, either. For most of us, being told that “God says” that torturing small animals is a good thing is an invitation to give up on God.

Religion has this problem as a matter of course, and Western religion, which posits an all-powerful and all-good God, has it in an acute form. Both Christianity and Judaism managed to get around the problem by saying that if you think God is telling you to torture small animals, you’re wrong, because it is not in the nature of God to tell you something like that.

In fact, there is a vast tradition of Catholic moral theology the entire premise of which is that the moral world, like the physical world, is logical and rational and capable of being understood “by reason alone”–meaning, without the help of revelation. For Thomas Aquinas, knowing that Christ was God and came to earth to redeem mankind from its sins required revelation, but knowing that the slow, painful murder of a child is morally repugnant only required that you be able to think.

The Catholic Church didn’t invent this approach by itself. Both of the major influences on its intellectual history were already pointed in this direction–Judaism through the rabbinic tradition, and moral philosophy of Greece and Rome through its five hundred years of moral philosophy.

But here’s the thing. My religious kids, the ones whose only answer to why something is moral is “because God says so,” have more in common with their secular peers than they do with most of the Christianity that preceeded them. Even the New England Puritans, living out in the middle of nowhere in a hostile wilderness, didn’t settle for that and nothing but that. They expected their preachers to be learned men, and to be able to outline and explain the cultural and historical as well as religious roots of everything they considered right and proper. Jonathan Edwards may have thundered on about what happened to sinners at the hands of an angry God, but he did it in the middle of a sermon over an hour long, that referenced not only scripture but Greek and Roman authors, the history of the world as he knew it, and the progress of modern science.

The idea that morality is entirely subjective , that we make it up, that there is no firm ground on which we can judge one moral system to be better or worse than another, is very new. It shows up in force only in the nineteenth century. It really gets going only in the twentieth.

But the issue is not the rise and fall of religion. Moral reasoning began in the West with the Greeks, and they were not inclined to base their morality on the behavior of their gods. Plato and Aristotle saw morality as something inherent in human beings, something about being human that we could discover by reasoning. They did not think that morality was something we made up, something “subjective,” that was different for every person, a matter of opinion.

My secular kids have not be turned into moral relativists. They’ve just been trained not to think about morality. And that’s just as true of my religious kids. Whether the bottom line is “God says so” or “it just IS,” what they’re really saying is: shut down your mind, shut down your judgment, shut up and don’t ask questions.

And the problem with that is, as soon as something comes along to distract you, you suddenly have nothing to stand on at all. Then morality really does become subjective–or, more likely, nonexistent. Just do it? Who says? God says so? Those people over there think God says something else.

It’s what I meant before about nihilism, about a world that has been empty of content, of a world that is meaningless in the sense of being shapeless, random, inchoate.

A lot of my kids live in a world that is empty of everything, just nothing, and void.

The Pop Tarts are its goddesses.

Okay, yesterday’s post was a little…incoherent.  I apologize.  Part of that was the place where I was working.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my only acess to a computer during the day is in a big, really noisy computer lab where classes full of students get together to do “lab work” in grammar–I am not making this up–and they talk a lot while they do it. 

I would too.

But a lot of the reason for the sputtering yesterday is that, faced with this phenomenon, I find myself unable to stop sputtering.  Yes, of course, there has always been porn.   There has always been amateur porn.  Making sex tapes of yourself and your boyfriend that you can use as love aids at a later date–and that he can use to embarrass the hell out of you after you walk out–has practically become an American sport.

But there’s something fundamentally different going on here, with the gratuitous commando flashes on the red carpet and coming out of limousines.  It’s as if something inside these youn women is blank–that they have a hollowed out, uninhabited space where most of us keep our sense of self. 

Mind you,  I’m not talking about self respect.  That’s something none of us get without working at it.  But the thing I’m talking about is where self respect starts, it’s that place that won’t allo most of us to indulge in “self esteem” when we’ve done something to enable our own degradation.

And as far as I can tell, these women, or some of them, seem to lack it.  They’re not rebelling against it.  It just doesn’t exist.  At least, it doesn’t show any evidence of existing to the rest of us here in the outside world.

For many of my students, the problem is a little more complicated.  They’re not blank in the place self-respect starts, but they’re also without much in the way of real-life examples of what self-respect would look like.  Some of them get lucky, and have connections not only to strong church communities, but to strong church communities of a particular type.  They spend their Sundays, and sometimes a couple of other nights a week, in the company of older women whose self-respect has been earned with so much hardship and relentless determination, they make the rock of Gibralter look like Marshmallow Fluff.

Church communities are like anything else, though.  There are good ones and bad ones, and the neighborhoods these kids come from have plenty of weak churches whose communities are stumbling through the morass of the present by pretty much giving up on anything but going along.

A lot of my kids simply grow up around nihilism.   Not atheism, mind you, or Humanism.  Humanism is a full blown philosophy with a strong ethical arm, and most people have to earn their atheism by deliberate choice if not by intellectual inquiry.

What my kids see around them is another kind of blank, a world of nothing at all.  They have a vague sense of “right” and “wrong,” but it doesn’t connect to anything substantive.  They know there are other ways to live than the ones they do live, but they know it only because they’ve been told.  What they see on TV is not another way to live, but the same way they already live, just with more stuff.   After a while, stuff seems to be the point, and the only real issue becomes how to get it.  

Contrary to the kind of thing you hear about these kids from news reports and the more hysterical organs of the right-wing press, most of them don’t want to steal to get what they want, and the girls really don’t want to hit the streets selling it.  And most of them are too smart to take drugs.  Inner city kids weave no romances around drug addiction.  Unlike the suburban idiots who think they’re going to be  Young Werther, with souls too fine to face the ugliness of bourgeois materialism, as soon as they shoot a load of heroin into their veins, my kids know what heroin really means.  They live with it.   It’s in the vomit on the sidewalk in front of their school every morning, and in the corpses in the abandoned buildings down the block.  It’s in the faces of girls of fifteen who already look fifty-five.

Let’s face it. If there was ever a group of people who could use the things I know, who could benefit from an introduction to the Great Tradition, from an acquaintance with Shakespeare and Coleridge and Dickens and Austen (especially Austen)–this is it.   Literature chronicles the range of possiblility in the human condition, both good and bad.  It provides us with models to examine and work with, ways to be, personalities and biographies to measure ourselves against.  Even bad literature does that.

In the end, though, my kids don’t get much in the way of literature, and what they do get they often don’t understand.   Reading is more than being able to decipher words on a page, phonetically.  It requires a lot of cultural context before you even start.  And my kids have a lot of trouble with cultural context.

Let me tell you a story, from yesterday.  It may help to illuminate the problem.

I gave the kids in one of my classes a fifteen-minute free writing assignment:  Congress is or is not going to bail out Wall Street.  What’s that bailout stuff all about anyway? And why should you care?

I was ready to receive silly attempts at deciphering the problem–bail means jail, right?  so Congress is trying to get people out of jail?–and half-understood mishmashes of snatches heard on the news.

What I wasn’t ready for was the plaintive wail of a tiny young woman in the middle of the room:

“What,” she demanded, “is Wall Street?”