Mindfulness Monday: A Separate Peace

Sunday I caught the tail end of a segment on Book TV, a rant given by an author of a couple of books on my "most beloved" shelves, Chris Hedges.  I've enjoyed them all, but his best two books, in my opinion, are  War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America.  I suspect that these two will last when the others are long out of print.


His two most recent books are Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and Death of the Liberal Class.  At the end of his talk, he fielded questions from the audience.  People wanted to know, What's to be done?

Chris Hedges wisely refused to take a stand on many things, said that he was simply an investigative journalist who had diagnosed the illness, not knowing a cure for the disease.  He said that he was anti-authoritarian by nature, but not one to start or join causes.


Indeed.  Liberals have no cause to join anyway.  The only cause in American life left to attract true believers, in the Eric Hoffer sense, is the Tea Party.  Initially manufactured by Fox News with the help of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other demagogues in the fold of the Super Rich, it has now grown to a formidable force.  The main doctrine of the Tea Party is that laissez-faire capitalism is the American Way and should be fully implemented.  True believers, looking for a cause to join, flock to their side.  It's like Orwell's 1984, in that the ruling rich have thus created their own underground.

What's to be done?  There's no stopping them now, and the hard lessons of history will have to be learned all over again.  The Supreme Court may have sealed the new U. S. Plutocracy forever by recently decreeing that corporations were equal to citizens and that corporations might sponsor political candidates with unlimited funds.  Rule by the rich--that's what it amounts to.  It could be argued that we have always been ruled by the rich, but never before to such an official degree.

Hemingway Award-winning author Sean Murphy, in his satirical novel entitled The Time of New Weather (2005), envisioned a corporation buying out the United States Government.  Stands to reason, that if private enterprise is as efficient and government is as inefficient as Rush Limbaugh claims, then the government should naturally be run by private enterprise.

So what's to be done?  Nothing.  Just let it be.  You can still speak out against it, flamboyantly as Chris Hedges does in Death of the Liberal Class, or more quietly as Wendell Berry does in The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays.  But in the meantime, I recommend that you make a separate peace with the world as it is, and simply do what you can on a personal level to make the world a better place.

Like Wendell Berry (and Chris Hedges too), I'm not one for causes.  All causes eventually give rise to an anti-cause in opposition, and it becomes true believer vs. true believer, ditto heads vs. ditto heads.  You need to step out of the duality; and you do that with the realization that these people who seem malicious are merely ignorant, caught up in the duality of competing immortality projects--blindly giving lip service to freedom though it is not freedom they seek, it is substance to fill their emptiness, and control over death.

And it is both sides of the duality that seek this control, under the delusion that they are pursuing freedom and justice.  We should forgive our debtors, but the justice-seeking duality will not permit it.  It wants to even the score, and not only that, it demands payback and a pound of flesh besides.  Justice is not what we need; compassion is what we need.  Compassion and forgiveness.  You should read Margaret Atwood's masterful work on debt(pictured at left).

The first time I read Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I was very much with Yossarian, butting heads with the military/industrial establishment.  But the last time I read it, I was with Orr and no longer with Yossarian until the end of the novel, when he realizes that he had it wrong all along.  That his buddy, the laid-back Orr, had it right.  That the only way to deal with the duality of war was to step out of it and to make a separate peace.

The first time I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I was with McMurphy, bucking against the totalitarian Nurse Ratchet and the bureaucracy of the establishment.  But the last time I read the novel, I was with Chief Broom, the big Indian, who escaped and made a separate peace with the world.

The line containing "a separate peace" in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (where Henry escapes from the madness of World War I by going to Switzerland) was the source of the title of John Knowles' 1959 coming of age novel,  A Separate Peace (in which peace is finally achieved through forgiveness).

Guns Over Fireplaces: Wendell Berry's WATCH WITH ME

I love good first sentences, opening lines, opening images, opening paragraphs.  Ones that, after you have finished the book, you can look back on and see the entire work foreshadowed there, the spirit of the novel distilled and divined.

We tire of cliched or hackneyed opening lines, the "if only I had known" or "if this small thing hadn't happened, the whole thing would have been different" openings.  Although some otherwise very good books, exceptions, open that way.  Whatever the opening approach, I try to keep an open mind and listen as if the author were telling the story in person.

Stop me if you've heard this one, they'll say.  But we're conscious of the need of the teller to tell this story, and so we listen yet again.

Regarding opening images, Chekhov's Gun Theory  is often cited, the notion that if a gun on a fireplace is described in the opening, someone in the story should later be thinking about firing that gun.  A generic rule with many exceptions, but a good one.

The little known masterpiece that immediately comes to mind is Wendell Berry's pastoral epic in the form of a novella, Watch with Me.  But the gun is not shown in the opening paragraph.  Instead we see what's really important to the story at hand, and what's really important to humanity in a mythic and universal context.

The opening paragraph is a description of a farmer's workshop, with forge and anvil and vise, where he mends things, harness or shoes or whatever needs mending.  Sometimes he goes there to putter, sometimes just to sit and think.  The concluding sentence of the opening paragraph says that the double doors of the shop admit "a fine flow of light."  It seems mundane, and you won't see the significance in the opening until you reflect back on it.


Berry's farmer protagonist becomes alarmed at the threat that an otherwise harmless cow snake poses to his hatching chickens.  He goes to the house and returns with his shotgun, now loaded.

Chekhov's gun theory now comes into play.  A neighbor stops by to talk, a well-known eccentric commonly known as Nightlife, whose impaired vision through thick glasses sometimes confused nighttime with day.  Nightlife unexpectedly grabs the loaded gun and walks off with it. 

This character is afflicted with what we today call autism or Tourette Syndrome, and his marginalism is described in tolerant 1916 terms, long before there was such a diagnosis:

"Nightlife was an oddity, and no one could quite account for him.  His mind, which contained the lighted countryside, had a leak in it somewhere, some little hole through which now and again would pour the whole darkness of the darkest night--so that instead of walking in the country he knew and among his kinfolks and neighbors, he would be afoot in a limitless and undivided universe, completely dark, inhabited only by himself."

"From there he would want to call out for rescue, and that was when nobody could tell what he was going to do next, and perhaps he could not tell either."

Berry's protagonist, with a mixture of alarm and responsibility, then sets out after Nightlife, trying to find a way to get the gun from him without making him angry enough to shoot himself or somebody else.  Thus begins this epic novella, epic because it begs to be read slowly and because it is so much larger than the sum of its parts.

The story is set in 1916, and the book was first published in 1994--but the story is a timeless masterpiece.

Off And Running Monday: The Role of Sex in the Trinity

Body, mind, and spirit.

The father, the son, and the holy ghost.

All are one.

Mystery novelist and religious author Dorothy L. Sayers, writing of the trinity as a literary device in The Mind of the Maker, said that some books are mind or spirit dominated and neglect the body, while others are body or spirit dominated and neglect the mind.  She shows how "some books are Father-dominated, some Son-dominated, and some Spirit-dominated."  She calls for a balance in fiction between body, mind, and spirit--and as she further unpacks the concept, "as Idea, Energy, and Power."

In life as in art, we should not neglect one part of the trinity for another.  Living the life of the mind, we should not neglect the body.  The body contains the sensuous and the sexual, and unfortunately, the sexual too often becomes dominant, neglecting the mind and spirit.  Camile Paglia, in her mammoth study, Sexual Personae (1990), argued that "Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges."

In this work, Paglia argues in favor of the Marquis de Sade and says that Freud's Oedipal Theory dominates our sexuality and our lives.  Her arguments are worth reading, but the book consists mostly of interesting inferences drawn from false premises.  Sexual desires are indeed repressed (more so in puritanical times than in the United States today), but by far the most significant thing that is repressed is our knowledge and fear of nothingness and our own inevitable personal deaths.

Paglia is well versed in Freud's writings, but she writes like she hasn't considered nor even read the writings of those brilliant psychologists who came later such as Eric Fromm, Otto Rank, and, most importantly, Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant study, The Denial of Death.

Yet the body is the temple of being, and sex is a part of life.  Buddhist David Guy, author of Autobiography of my Body (pictured above), tries to sort out the role of sex versus spirituality in The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex.  Wendell Berry, in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays, like Dorothy Sayers, argues for a balance.

Wendell Berry says, "The breath of God is only one of the divine gifts that make us living souls; the other is the dust.  Most of our modern troubles come from our misunderstanding and misvaluation of this dust....This madness constitutes the norm of humanity and of modern Christianity."

The problem of unbalance exists at all levels, personal relationships, community, society, ecology.  To mistreat the body for the sake of the soul "is not just to burn one's house for the sake of the insurance," nor is it just self-hatred of the most deep and dangerous sort.  The problem is that we so often value the material over the spiritual and the life of the mind over the life of the body.  What we need is balance.