The Anti-Yale

* JoePa, King of Football

2012-01-22T20:02:00.004-05:00

You have all seen Oedipus the King … overwhelmed by a tidal wave of disasters that will sweep him to his grave . . . Judge no man’s life until he is dead . . . Call no man fortunate or safe from pain till he lies in his last, everlasting bed, and the earth covers his head.

The Chorus

Oedipus Rex

* Thornton Wilder and The Magical Land of the Quinnipiac

2012-01-21T19:36:00.083-05:00

The Original People

Thornton Wilder, playing the Stage Manager in his
Our Town.

Above and Below: Thornton Wilder's response to Donald Hall's poem on The Sleeping Giant: A hill in Hamden, Connecticut. Mr. Wilder and Donald Hall lived in Hamden (actually, Mt. Carmel, Centerville, and Hamden), where I was born and raised.

I like the poem better than Mr. Wilder does,

apparently.

Poet Donald Hall, native of Centerville, Conn., is honored by the Hon. Scott D. Jackson, Mayor of Hamden ,Conn., 2011, a town which decades ago gobbled up the villagette, Centerville, and erased its name.

BETTER POEMS?

In 1974, when I was thirty, I was sitting in New Haven’s Olde Heidelberg one night, with a friend, and I said, "They say Thornton Wilder frequents this place, but I’ve never seen him.”

The next moment, as if summoned by a genie, Thornton Wilder, portly septuagenarian, wearing a trench-coat, with newspaper in hand, bustled through the door and shot toward the circular booth in the corner by the bar immediately under one of the sidewalk windows. A waitress later told me that Wilder would pace up and down outside that window until that booth was empty and then make a bee-line for it. It was "Thornton Wilder's booth", she declared.

( If you want to read about my encounter and the beginning of a 20-year friendship with his sister, Miss Isabel Wilder, click here.)

Suffice it to say, before we knew what had happened we were at Thornton Wilder's table chatting away, a bit awe-struck, while he ate dinner.

My agenda here is not to rehearse that encounter; it is to point out the difference between childhood and adulthood in appreciation of a poem.

Thornton Wilder lived on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut for fifty years, in "the house The Bridge built," the home he built with the profits from his first literary success The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

The Wilder home, Hamden. Conn.

Hamden is the town contiguous with New Haven, connected by Whitney Avenue and leading to villages (or villagettes) Centerville and Mt. Carmel, the latter my birthplace and site of the Sleeping Giant,

The Sleeping Giant is a mountain which Quinnipiac Indians thought was an actual slumbering titan who awakened, arose, and walked about on days when the fog made him disappear from their vantage point on East Rock in New Haven.

I was raised at the foot of the Sleeping Giant, Mt. Carmel, Connecticut. The poet, Donald Hall was raised in Centerville, one villagette farther away from the Giant, but Hamdenite Thornton Wilder had NOT been raised in the land of the Sleeping Giant at all ------except metaphorically, since he was raised in China for part of his childhood, a formerly fabled economic 'sleeping giant'.

This is my circuitous way of saying that I sent Mr. Wilder a copy of Donald Hall’s poem entitled The Sleeping Giant after our meeting at the Olde Heidelberg.

He didn’t like it (see above and below).

Sanibel, Fla. Jan. 30, 1975

Dear Mr.Keane:

Thanks for your note

with Donald Hall's poem.

I met Mr. Hall over 20

years ago in Cambridge and I

think I remember his saying

he was brought up in

Mt. Carmel. He has written

many better poems than

that one.

Thanks again,

Sincerely,

Thornton Wilder

But then, he never grew up in the magical land of the Quinnipiac.

I did.

And, so did Donald Hall, now 83, who wrote of Hamden in his New Yorker article "Out My Window" this week. (Jan. 23, 2012, p. 40)

Our Giant walked.

43 Norwood Avenue, Mt. Carmel: My birthplace, with the magical hills leading up to the Giant, in the background.

____________________________________________________________

The Sleeping Giant

A hill in Hamden, Connecticut

Donald Hall

The whole day long under the walking sun

That poised an eye on me from its high floor,

Holding my toy beside the clapboard house

I looked at him, the summer I was four.

I was afraid the waking arm would break

From the loose earth and rub against his eyes

A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble

In the exultant labor of his rise;

Then he with giant steps in the small streets

Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize

The roofs from house and home because we had

Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;

And then kneel down and rip with fingernails

A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic

Into our basin, and the water rush,

With streets full and all the voices frantic.

That was the summer I expected him.

Later the high and watchful sun instead

Waked low behind the house, and school began,

And winter pulled a sheet over his head.

* When a Yale Student Disappears . . .

2012-01-21T00:37:00.010-05:00

Sam Todd would be 53 years old this year, 2012. It is still possible that he is alive.

"The Man with a Thousand Faces"

New York City Police

Yale Divinity student Sam Todd left a party in the early morning of New Year's Day, 1984 ---and has never been seen or heard from since. Perhaps, suggests the author, who here offers fresh insights into the case, Sam had some very good reasons for disappearing.

Connecticut Magazine
May, 1985

Paul Keane, a 1980 graduate of Yale Divinity School, is a New Haven-based free-lance writer. This article is excerpted from a longer report submitted to the President of Yale University, the Dean of the Divinity School and the parents of Sam Todd.

Many of his acquaintances and friends at Yale Divinity School agree that Sam Todd was a shy young man. Some say “painfully shy”, others say “socially awkward”, some say “a loner.” His friend Phil Olmstead, who walked guard duty with him on two nights a week, calls Sam a “supernumerary person--- an outsider looking for his place.” Sam was very quiet, looked down a lot, and often expected you to understand what he was thinking with by a hand gesture. His favorite was a revolutionary first thrust in the air; another was a drum rim, the final flourish with drumsticks in a drum performance. Sam was an accomplished jazz drummer, but no one at YDS knew it until he happened to mention the fact one day in his second year at school. One of Sam’s teachers at YDS, who also knew him socially outside of the classroom, says he “found Sam to be spacey and scattered”. But most of Sam’s friends describe him as “particularly solid and stable” ---not someone who would suddenly run off and go into hiding.

Friends and family acknowledge that Sam was probably drunk at the Mulberry Street New Year’s Eve party that night. It was his and his younger brother Adam’s third stop on a party hop, and Sam had been drinking beer and vodka. He went downstairs from the Mulberry Street loft to get some air. Adam went down with him and joshed him a bit about his condition as he tripped on the stairs on the way out. Sam was dressed entirely in blue: jeans, running shoes and a sweatshirt with the emblem and the school name “Ecolint Geneve.” Though the temperature had vacillated between 17 and 37 degrees that first day of 1984, he had left his coat with his wallet and identification back at the party. Sam broke into a mock jog to prove to Adam that he was OK as he headed up Mulberry toward Houston Street. Adam went back into the party, had second thoughts five minutes later, and went to look for Sam.

No one able to identify him has seen Sam since he turned onto Houston Street around 1:30 that morning. He was the first missing person report of New York’s new year, a year in which the city was to receive over 16,000 such reports.

Adam called his oldest brother John, then a law student who lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, at about 4:30 A.M.. John drove into New York and the two brothers began calling hospitals and friends of Sam’s around the city. They also went to their Aunt Doris Todd’s apartment in the Village, thinking that Sam might have stopped there, as he often did when he stayed in town. At around 11:00 A.M., they went to the police and filed a missing person’s report.

By the weekend, about 20 of Sam’s friends from Vassar (his undergraduate school) were involved in the search, joined by another 29 friends from YDS. A week later, Adam and John had set up a “command headquarters” with five telephones in a Greenwich Village church and coordinated nearly 200 student volunteers from Yale Divinity School, Vassar, Princeton and elsewhere to distribute 20,000 “Missing” posters around Manhattan. Sam’s childhood friend, David Marcus, a staff writer for the Miami Herald, joined the search and wrote an article about Sam’s disappearance on the front page of the Herald on January 10. The next day, a quarter page article on the disappearance and search appeared in The New York Times, with photos of Sam’s father and two brothers at the Greenwich Village “headquarters.” The national television and radio media picked up the story of the search, and the baffling case was the lead-off in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column on February 13. Within the next nine months, the family had organized among friends and contacts a “Sam Search” committee in every state in the country. If Sam Todd had disappeared intentionally January 1 and was having second thoughts, soon thereafter, that maybe he should quietly resurface, the clout of this publicity may have sent him underground by January 11.

No one could believe he ran away, at first. His on-and-off girlfriend from his days at Vassar, Jill Tonelli, was quoted in the Times as saying “He loves his family too much for that.” The fact sheet his family circulated about him says, “It seems clear his disappearance was not deliberate or premeditated.” But seven months later, his parents’ thank-you letter to the divinity school volunteers modifies that position: “Is he pursuing an agenda of his own which no one can guess?” it asks.

If Sam Todd did run away, where could he have hidden against the odds of 20,000 posters with photographs, national news coverage, and a couple of hundred volunteers scouring the soup kitchens, shelters, bus, train and subway stations, and hospitals of Manhattan? Had he secured a new passport and spirited himself back to Geneva, Switzerland, where his family had lived from 1973 – 1977? Or to Zimbabwe, where, in 1980, he had worked in a school with revolutionaries who had laid down their guns?

If he stayed stateside, even temporarily, where could he go where no one would ask questions about his past or think it strange that he did not volunteer such information or even give a full name? Where could he go where people would be reluctant to cooperate with the police in a humane undertaking like a missing person search?

Sam disappeared at Mulberry and Houston Streets, within short walking distance of Greenwich Village’s Christopher Street, the gay Main Street of the East. New York is the site of hundreds of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings every week at all hours of the day and night. Sam could have successfully traveled in any or all of these circles unfound. No one would ask him for more than a first name, no one would think it odd that he did not want to talk about his past, and no one would cooperate with police inquiries about their membership. Indeed, even if persons in such places thought they were talking to a runaway, their allegiance would be to the group, not to the police or family on the hunt. After all, it is not a crime to run away. It is a private matter. Sam need merely have said, “Leave me alone.” Moreover, the 20, 000 posters distributed by his parents would not have helped much. One poster has six photographs of Sam, and he looks like an entirely different person in each photograph. The New York police refer to Sam as “the man with a thousand faces"

Sam's aunt, Doris Todd, who had lent money to Sam while his parents were living abroad, had sent her nephew a $2,000 check for a six-credit summer Hebrew course at YDS about May 15, 1983. The course cost $800. On July 15, Sam paid the Yale bursar’s office $2,330 he owed for the previous year’s tuition. Perhaps he saved the difference of $330 from his earnings at the Connecticut Food Bank, where he worked 20 to 30 hours a week. Clearly, he didn’t have money stashed away for a secret purpose when he returned to YDS in the fall. That semester, he was living entirely off a $2,400 grant from the school and an eight-hour-a-week job on the security patrol. His tuition was $3,150 for the first semester ’83-’84 and, as of October, 1983, Sam still owed Yale $750. Apparently, the entire grant went toward tuition. Sam was probably feeding and sheltering himself solely on funds from his $4-an-hour job. According to Sam’s classmate, Beau Weston, and his wife Sue, who rented Sam a room in their Orange street apartment, that was not enough to meet his payments to them, and early in December, the Westons had to sit down and have a talk with Sam concerning his late rent and grocery payments.

Aunt Doris had also paid for Sam’s first year at Yale when he lived in Hopkins, a dormitory in the divinity school’s Sterling Memorial Quadrangle. She couldn’t understand why Sam didn’t ask her for money for his second year, when he also lived in Hopkins: “I was here with the money,” she says.

Was pride involved in Sam’s reluctance to ask for help? Or did he want to live a more Spartan life? Many seminarians feel guilt (or at least what Sam’s security patrol partner Phil Olmstead calls “a cognitive dissonance”) about the comfort afforded them in the Edwardian drawing-room environment of Yale Divinity School, five blocks from the poverty of New Haven’s ghetto. Sam’s friend of 2 ½ years at YDS, Shep Parsons, says bluntly of Sam, “I definitely think he thought capitalism evil.” Paid for by the donations of the Rockefeller and Sterling families, Yale Divinity School’s campus could certainly be construed as a monument to capitalism.

For the last 20 years, YDS has had a casual system of grading. At one point there were no grades at all. As one professor said, “There are three grades at the divinity school: Honors, High Pass and Pass. High Pass is what everyone gets.” The clear impression was that the screening process of the admissions committee was the major hurdle at YDS. If you got in, it was assumed you could do the work. Whether you would do it was another matter, hence the chronic abuse of unfinished course work by many students.

The folklore had it that these relaxed characteristics of the school reflected the faculty’s awareness that, unlike other academic departments of the university, the divinity school requires students to deal on a daily basis, with questions of ultimate meaning in life and that they therefore need some of the pressures of grading and the academic calendar relieved. Carlton Erickson, president of Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home, which received suicide cases from Yale during the 1960’s and 70’s, recalls that a higher proportion of the suicides came from the divinity school than from other schools at the university. He offers as a layman’s analysis that the divinity school attracts the type of person who believes there are answers in an answerless world. Attitude toward the questions, not the questioning itself, causes the stress, in Erickson’s opinion.

Beau Weston uses a quote from the Quaker leader Geroge Fox to describe Sam Todd’s attitude: “He was not a light and chaffy man.” Corrie Dinnean, Sam’s study-break conversation companion in the library in 1982, says Sam had “that driven quality in him another person would name anxious . . . He was in the process of becoming a radical Christian who was going to get at the core of things. He wanted to be more than a liberal Christian who was going to do Band Aid work. If he committed suicide, jumped in the water, it’s weird that the body hasn’t turned up.”

When Todd began the fall semester, a notice was circulated to students from the director of studies, professor R. Lansing Hicks, that sent a chill through the student body. The catalogue for 1983-85 had included the possibility of “Failure” as a grade at YDS, but now, Hicks’ memo specified the faculty decision that “Incomplete” would automatically
become “Failure” on the transcript if course work wasn’t finished according to YDS regulations and deadlines. (Prior to this, “Incomplete” remained permanently on the transcript if course work was not made up.) This was the first time in 20 years at YDS that the spectre of “Failure” hovered over a student’s official transcript if the student didn’t complete course work. Things were tightening up at YDS ----and many students panicked.

When Sam left for Christmas break two weeks before he disappeared, he may have thought he was headed for academic probation in his final semester at YDS. Of the four courses he took first semester, his transcript indicates he had two “Incompletes” and a “Pass.” He surely knew he had the incompletes when he left for his break because he hadn’t finished the course work. But he may have feared that he had failed the course that he squeaked by with, with a “Pass,” for professors’ grades were not due in the registrar’s office until February 6. He had pre-registered for a extra –a fifth –course for his final semester, a heavy load even for someone who is not a procrastinator. Sam may have felt he couldn’t finish his two incompletes and keep up with five courses spring semester.

Sam had another problem too: He couldn’t have completed the 72 credits needed for graduation in May on time. A previous “Fail”, an “Incomplete” and a “Dropped” left Sam six credits short of the 72 credits necessary to graduate., even if he had passed all of the five courses he had pre-registered for, for spring semester, and made up the two incompletes he had when he left for Christmas break.

The matter of ordination was another question. When Sam first came to the divinity school, “there was no talk of ordination”, Joan Forsberg, Associate Dean of Students at YDS, recalls Even in his second year, ’82-’83, classmate Corrie Dinnean recalls that Sam was talking about doing “ Ph.D, work”. It was “where he was headed in the Religious Studies Department.” (The Divinity School does not offer a doctorate; the Religious Studies Department does.) By the end of his second year, however, Sam’s own transcript must have told him that while he was capable of Ph.D. work, he wasn’t motivated enough to produce the kind of record that would lead to it: “Incomplete”, “Dropped” and “Fail” don’t augur well for entrance into any doctoral program. He evidently had decided to try for ordination by the summer of ’83 ---one doesn’t usually take six credits of Hebrew in summer school for fun. By the end of fall semester, just before he disappeared, even that plan was shaking at the foundations: his Greek professor told his New Testament professor before final exams that “if Sam doesn’t get his act together, he isn’t going to pass Greek.” Sam squeaked through, but he may not have known he had at the time he disappeared.

Joan Forsberg had come aboard YDS in the early ‘70’s. She had been a classmate of Sam’s father George at the divinity school in the late 40’s and early 50’s and had kept in touch with George after he married and, later, when he and his wife, Kathy, moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where George sat on the desk of the Urban/Industrial Mission of the World Council of Churches. She recalls sitting around the grand piano in the YDS Common Room after dinners in the refectory, George Todd at the keyboard and a small group singing hymns. They are warm memories of a good era in the divinity school’s august history.

It was the last days of what has come to be called the “golden era” at YDS. when faculty names like Niebuhr, Macintosh, Bainton, Weigle, Brown and Calhoun still rang through the halls and recollections were still vivid of the work of the Revised standard Version Committee, which sat for years at YDS making 5,000 emendations in the King James version of the Bible. Joan Forsberg and her husband visited the Todds in Geneva when Sam and his brothers were in their teens in the early ‘70’s. She recalls that when they stopped in, the Todds were waiting for a Philippine national from the church who was four days overdue and presumed missing. She recalls later hearing stories from the Todds about “refugees vanishing in Latin America.” The Todds themselves refer to this unique experience of persons vanishing, in their thank-you letter to the divinity students of August 1, 1984:

As we keenly miss Sam and are baffled by the mystery of his disappearance, we are filled with a sense of the unpredictability of life and the absurdity of the way things can happen. We think about the tragic disappearances and separations occurring all over the world ---the many “disappeared” people (some of them known to us) in Latin America and other places. We think of the thousands of people whose lives are suddenly cut off by wars, natural disasters, accidents, illness and crime. From our place of relative comfort and security, we have a sharper sense of the suffering of those whose family members and friends are missing in much more dire circumstances.

The reaction of Sam’s parents to those disappearances cannot have gone unnoticed by the sensitive young man Sam was becoming in Geneva. Sam saw firsthand exactly how much anguish such disappearances caused his parents, and he saw , too, that they did not shatter his parents’ theology. They coped, they carried on ---just as they have carried on since Sam’s disappearance.

Sam Todd was born in 1959 in New York City and was moved the same year to Taiwan: in ’63 back to New York City; in ’70 he moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in ’77 he entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.;and in ’81 he entered Yale Divinity School in New Haven. His summer jobs from ’78 to ’80 moved him from Martha’s Vineyard to Atlanta, Georgia, to Zimbabwe to San Francisco to Providence, R.I., to New Haven. In short, Sam himself may have felt like a homeless person, someone without roots. It is interesting in this regard that Shep Parsons, Sam’s friend in Bushnell dorm at YDS, recalls that when Sam lived in Hopkins, “he never bothered to unpack.”

If Sam felt rootless or homeless geographically, he may not have felt so in terms of his identity in the world. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Samuel Franklin, a social activist, and watched his father’s own career as a social activist grow from the urban problems of a ministry in Harlem to the global problems of urban centers at the World Council of Churches. Sam played the piano as a child, a talent his father displayed at after-dinner hymn sings at Yale Divinity School. And, ultimately, he would choose to attend his father’s alma mater with an interest in his father’s vocational interests: urban ministry and the problem of third-world countries. Indeed, Sue Weston remembers that Sam had a plan to get married and have “an inner-city urban ministry in Newark, N.J.” Sam was not only walking in his father’s footsteps, but remaining in his father’s shadow. And the shadow cast from a desk on the World Council of Churches was a long shadow indeed.

Sam is the third of four Todd sons, each spaced about two to three years apart. Even if the Todds had a full time governess, the realities of being a third born of four males so spaced apart cannot be denied: just as the first two are getting on their feet and demanding more attention, a fourth baby enters the picture making disproportionate demands. The third born in such a dynamic has a tendency to get lost in the shuffle.

David Marcus, the Miami Herald reporter who grew up with the Todd boys, recalls that “when peace groups organized a candlelight vigil to protest the war in Vietnam, Kathy [Sam’s mother] shepherded us down to Broadway at night, treating us to buttons and bumper stickers and answering our non-stop questions about the moratorium. She took us to the first Earth Day rally, and to Rockefeller Center at Christmas.” Sam may not only have been vying with his brothers for his parents’ attention, but also vying with his parents’ social concerns for his parents’ attention.

It may be significant, sadly, that when Sam first began planning to attend and actually matriculated at Yale Divinity School, one of his brothers began to develop debilitating emotional problems. Could it be that having pushed magic buttons for his parents’ attention (following in his father’s footsteps) Sam suddenly upset the equilibrium of the brothers’ vying process? Can it have escaped Sam’s notice subconsciously that the developing severity of his brother’s emotional problems coincided with his own journey toward and through Yale Divinity School? Could his refusal to complete that journey, by disappearing, have been a subconscious attempt to restore the equilibrium of that vying process, and perhaps thereby restore his brother’s emotional health? The central axiom of Tom Brown’s “Psychoanalysis, Parents and God” course at YDS is, “There are no accidents in the life of the mind.”

Or, could the opposite have been the case, subconsciously: “Here I am pushing every magic button I know to get my parents’ attention and approval by following in my father’s footsteps, and my brother gets sick and commands the attention I want”? Evidence is that Sam’s cultivated altruism would never have permitted him to think such thoughts consciously. But the conscious life of the mind is a life which lets us 'but slenderly know' ourselves. Sam’s Aunt Doris believes that Sam would never have caused this hurt to his weakened brother. Jill Tonelli agrees that Sam “loves his family too much” to have just run off.

Plaster saints sometimes crack.

Everyone agrees on one thing: Sam cared about the poor and disadvantaged. “Poverty and destitution haunted him,” Corrie Dinnean says. “He wasn’t a person in narcissistic crisis ---‘will anyone love me, will I make enough money, will my children love me?’” He “didn’t grind at the core of his being about individualistic stuff.” Franklin Salisbury, a friend in Hopkins, remembers that Sam was “taken with political issues ---his studies seemed secondary. He went to Groton [to participate in the nuclear submarine protests for which Yale Divinity students have made a name for themselves in Connecticut]. The January 20 Miami Herald article by David Marcus reports that “nearly half of Yale’s 400 divinity students have helped the Todds since January 1, and more are joining every day . . ." "My sense is that there is something in Sam’s selflessness that causes people to do something for him when he’s in trouble,” Dean Forsberg said.

Perhaps Sam’s selflessness had something to do with it, but the divinity students’ own selflessness wasn’t their only motivation. Shep Parsons, a third year M. Div. candidate, had made a deal with Dean Keck for those persons participating in the search to be relieved of their deadlines for unfinished course work. Is that what burgeoned the divinity searchers to 200 persons? “It’s what got me down there,” Parsons admits. Ian Straker, a second year M.Div. candidate at the time, agrees. Ironically, relief from one of the pressures that could have caused Sam to run away in the first place may also have ballooned the very search which kept Sam from reappearing quietly if he had so desired. The national media attention was riveted as much on the magnitude and quality of the search as a story as it was on Sam’s disappearance.

News reports cited Sam’s concern for others as manifest in his work at local soup kitchens and the food bank. Indeed, Sam did do paid work at the Connecticut Food bank the summer of ’83. Only one staff member at the Columbus House, a shelter for the homeless in New Haven, can remember Sam at all ----and then only as a volunteer one weekend for three days. Sam’s friend at YDS, Serene Jones, suggests that Sam volunteered at the Columbus House the one night a month that the divinity school students agreed to sponsor a meal for the Columbus House residents. Cynthia DeLouise, director of the Columbus House since its creation in 1981, doesn’t recollect Sam at all and can’t find his name on any records in the house’s files.

In their thank-you letter to the divinity school, Sam’s parents refer to the Columbus House as “the shelter and soup kitchen Sam helped to found.” The divinity school graduating class of 1983 gave a gift in Sam’s name to the Columbus House at the time of graduation ---a graduation that Sam Todd had at one time planned to participate in. De Louise was "surprised and pleased” by the gift and purposely perused Columbus House records to find out who Sam Todd was. She found nothing. Staff currently at the Christ Church and Fairhaven soup kitchens also do not recall Sam, but acknowledged that staff turnover in the last few years may be partially responsible for their ignorance. Could it be that a post-disappearance mythology about Sam as a volunteer for the poor has expanded Sam’s selflessness beyond the data?

Sam may have been selfless in a different way. Having grown up in a family of social activists, the language of selflessness may simply have been the only vernacular familiar to Sam, or available to express the unfolding personality and its overwhelming feelings during adolescence. This is not to denigrate the quality of Sam’s sincerity, but merely to observe that most of us sleepwalk out of our childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Some of us awake gradually, others with a start or a fall.

The vernacular was intense ---“the very core of his being” as Corrie Dinnean describes it. She would meet Sam often in the library “at the dictionary.” Sam and Corrie had a “meeting of the minds” on The Wretched of the Earth, black psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s 1961 psychoanalytic interpretation of the dynamics of colonialism in underdeveloped countries. Sam told Corrie, “We have to read this book,” and she remembers that after they did so, Sam’s copy was generously underlined in red, especially the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. “If you want to understand Sam Todd,” Dinnean says, “read that book.” Sartre’s preface directs readers’ attention to Fannon’s rallying cry, “Natives of all underprivileged countries, unite! . . .Europe has her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers until she lets go.” Sam’s fascination with this book may have as much to do with his past proximity to the World Council of Churches as it did with any radical Christian identity he might have been trying on for size at Yale Divinity School: last year, CBS News’ 60 Minutes reported accusations that the World Council of Churches had knowingly permitted its charity funds to wind up in the hands of third-world revolutionaries for the purpose of purchasing weapons.

Sue Weston remembers that “Sam was someone who was impressed with the possibilities for revolution.” She acknowledges, too, that Sam was “ a brooder . . . someone who returns often to the same problem.” What problem? “South Africa, the collapse of the U.S., nuclear war,” Weston says. Sam’s heroes, she says, were Karl Barth, the back-to-fundamentals Protestant theologian of this century who began his career in Geneva, and the Rev. Charles Bannana, a Zimbabwean revolutionary who had laid down his arms. “Sam admired him because he was working for the right thing but wasn’t a revolutionary,” she says. Beau Weston recalls that the “political arguments” he and Sam would have always boil down to one thing ---“national politics vs. individual action ---the question was what was the level needed to get things done.”

Shep Parsons tells of the “community art project” he had in his apartment the fall semester before Sam disappeared. It was a mural of sorts; each visitor to the apartment was asked to trace his or her hand on the wall. When Sam visited Shep, he traced his hand in the form of an upraised fist. It is the only upraised fist in the mural. Shep has thought about that off and on since Sam disappeared.

Sam expressed “concerns about his psychological health” To Jill Tonelli at least once, according to Shep Parsons. This is nothing unusual, especially for someone who had seen emotional illness firsthand in his own family. Corrie Dinnean cautions that “the spiritual journey is very different from the psychological journey.” Using Christian terminology, she says, if you’re “in the dying and haven’t got to the resurrecting part yet, if you’re in that place, it’s very hard.”

By the middle of fall semester there is evidence that a new feeling was creeping into Sam Todd’s personality, previously so grounded in the selflessness of global concerns for the oppressed. This feeling might be called the legitimacy of self. By November, when students were pre-registering for spring semester’s courses, Sam summoned the courage to try to share that new feeling with a professor on the YDS faculty. He had not had Professor North (a pseudonym) for any class, but a friend of Sam’s, knowing his troubled state of mind, recommended that he go see him. When Professor North unexpectedly introduced himself to Sam at coffee hour one morning, the ice seemed broken and Sam felt comfortable enough to later ask him for an appointment. (Sam didn’t know that Professor North had introduced himself intentionally, having heard from Sam’s friend that Sam was a “really troubled” young man.)

When Sam arrived at Professor North’s office, late in the afternoon, he "looked like someone threatening to become ill” ---pale and emaciated. (Corrie Dinnean says Sam always looked this way ----“skinny as a rail, utterly white, like a disaster area.”) Sam’s manner was “diffident, not pushy.” Was he “spacey and scattered”,” as one of his classroom professors called him? “I had the impression he was not in full control,” says North. “It troubled me that he was not able to put his thoughts together on his own behalf . . . He was not suicidal or I would have pursued him.”

They talked for over an hour. Sam was fumbling for words, so North began the conversation, “Let me tell you how it is for a lot of us . . . We have difficulty putting religion together in the context of the world we live in . . .This isn’t unusual. It’s what some of the great teachers are about.” Professor North cited Kierkegaard’s putting himself together at 25.” Sam liked this.

North was bothered that Sam seemed to have “no firsthand acquaintance with anything religious,” something from his own life, not that he’d “read in books.” He told Sam this, and Sam “didn’t react very well” to it. “I told him Christianity is a way of making sense of your life . . .He listened respectfully, thanked me, but didn’t respond.”

Did Sam feel that his own altruism was phony? “yes,” thinks North. He wasn’t sure at all about the kind of religion he was caught up in, this social action bit. He thought it was as ‘flakey’ as other kinds of piety he’d been involved in, and that bothered him. " I had the impression he was quarreling with his father’s kind of ministry.” At times during the meeting, North had the feeling that Sam was “on the verge of cracking,” on the verge of tears. As they parted, Professor North assured Sam that it was not a bother for Sam to come to him this way. “I am a teacher, this is my job . . .We should meet again.”

They did not meet again before Sam disappeared. North was not surprised by the disappearance. “Alcohol and running away fit into the picture,” as Professor North sees it. When Sam’s parents came to campus to speak to student groups helping in the search, Professor North was surprised by how upset they were by the disappearance. “”I wanted to tell them to cool it,” he says, but he didn’t. North did speak with Mrs. Todd, but told her only in the palest terms the nature of his meeting with Sam. It didn’t seem the correct moment to say more.

Sam seemed relieved at one point during his meeting with Professor North: We were talking about the disciplined life and I told him that after Wittgenstein had read Kierkegaard, he commented, "If I am supposed to give up my whole life I can’t become a Christian, because I’ve never been able to give up a cup of coffee.” Sam brightened.

Beau Weston points out that at the time he disappeared, Sam had just completed an exegesis paper for the New Testament on Luke 14, a passage which includes, among other verses, these two: “Go out quickly to the lanes of the city and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame” (14:21); and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”(14:26). Professor North recalls that Sam “did say negative things about the church, but not his parents” in their meeting.

A popular theory at the Yale Divinity School is that Sam is just off “seeing how the other half lives,” as Corrie Dinnean puts it , or doing research on the disadvantaged . “I like to think he’s traveling on trains and taking an inventory,” Dinnean adds. An interesting sidelight to this theory, and one which has not been previously noted, is the cover story of the February 21, 1983 New York magazine. Published eight months before Sam disappeared , the cover photo shows a handsome bum, in striking chiaroscuro, under the title, “Diary of a Homeless Man.” On the first page of the article we learn that the “bum” is John R. Coleman, the former president of Haverford College, now president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a philanthropy which aids the severely needy. The article begins with the “bum’s” first day journal entry on his experiment of living as a homeless person:

Somehow 12 degrees at 6 A.M. was colder than I had counted on. I think of myself as relatively immune to the cold, but standing on a deserted sidewalk outside Penn Station with the thought of ten days ahead of me as a homeless man, the immunity vanished. When I pulled my collar closer and my watch cap lower, it wasn’t to look the part of a street person; it was to keep the wind out. My wardrobe wasn’t much help. I had bought my “new” clothes ---flannel shirt, baggy sweater, torn trousers, and cap and coat ---the day before on Houston Street for $9.

Doris Todd had New York magazine in her home the months of the January – May semester,1983. Sam visited her once during that time for a weekend, and may have seen the February issue in question. Or he may have stumbled across it in New Haven or in Providence, where he visited occasionally. Could Sam have toyed with the idea of turning Coleman’s 10-day experiment into a book of his own adventures as a homeless man? It is a thought.—one Sam might have had himself on Houston Street that mild New Year’s morn as he jogged, tipsy, away from his brother Adam, and perhaps from his family’s God, country and Yale.

Did anything happen at the New Year’s party which could have made Sam run away? Was there an argument, say, between Sam and his girlfriend, Jill Tonelli? Quite the opposite, Beau Weston says; Jill had given Sam vibrations that the relationship was on again if he wanted it. Beau acknowledges this to be Jill’s interpretation after the disappearance. He says Sam had broken it off with Jill earlier in the year because “she didn’t want to be a minister’s wife.” Sam’s aunt reinforces Beau’s story. Sam, she says, had invited Jill to get together over vacation.

Shep Parsons tells a different story of what he believes happened at the party. His story is based on things Sam’s brothers Adam and John told him after the disappearance, things which mesh with his personal knowledge of the difficulty Sam was having breaking up with Jill. Shep’s personal knowledge is that Sam was “trying to get rid of Jill” and was “glad it was over with,” but that she was “hanging on tenaciously.” Sam “felt so guilty . . . here was this woman who really loved him . . . he didn’t have it together enough to end it.” Shep recounts what Adam and John told him about the Mulberry Street party. “Sam was blown away because Jill was there and he didn’t expect it. Sam was trying to get out from under her.”

Work and love: Freud says that a man who has conflicts in either or both of these areas can’t be happy. Sam appears to have had conflicts in both, conflicts between what he thought he ought to do, and what he actually wanted to do.

The streets were filled with revelers on New Year’s morn. Could some of those revelers have been solicitors for a cult, entrance to which would have been an easy exit from society, if one wished to disappear? Saul Levine, in the article “Radical departures” (August 1984, Psychology Today), summarizing 15 years of his study of cults, says the type of person who joins a cult usually comes “right off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.” One of Levine’s happier observations is that “more than 90 percent of these departures end in a return to home within two years, and virtually all joiners eventually abandon their groups.” Levine spells out his thesis: “In short, they use their radical departures to grow up.” In the town of Rajneeshpuram in Wasco, Oregon, the Rajneesh cult last winter was importing thousands of homeless men from around the country to bolster their membership and, some suggest, to influence local elections.

Another current theory, given the proximity of Houston Street to Greenwich Village’s gay community, is that some homophobic roughnecks, out for a joy ride on New Year’s Eve, spotted a lone walker on the street and decided to teach him a lesson, a fatal lesson, presuming that he must be gay. In repeating this theory which she heard at YDS graduation last year, Corrie Dinnean says she believes it is unlikely. She subscribes to the Police assertions that they’re usually pretty good at finding bodies –“Why wouldn’t they have found his body by now?” she asks.

Another theory, one the police detectives have questioned Beau and Sue Weston about, is that Sam may have been gay and just decided to stop living a lie any longer by vanishing into the gay underworld. This theory would explain Sam’s apparent renunciation of ordination, and would supply a conflict of sufficient intensity to make running away understandable. It would also provide his parents an opportunity to make a safe harbor for his return by spreading the word that they are neutral or even hospitable to such a lifestyle choice and would welcome Sam back, regardless.

But Shep Parsons says of Sam, I know he was not bisexual or gay,” and virtually all of Sam’s other friends agree. Of course, a person can lead a secret life or conceal his true feelings. And Sam’s propensity to take late night jogs (sometimes at 2:30 A.M.) provides a possibility for a clandestine life. But one would suspect that such a person would want to throw people off the track by avoiding gay persons in his everyday life, or perhaps even by acting outright homophobic. Sam did neither. He was benign on the gay issue and friendly with openly gay persons at YDS, even voicing his support to one of the gay leaders of YDS’s Gay/Straight Coalition, a support consistent with his interest in the oppressed.

What about the mental breakdown theory? Sam’s parents apparently consider this a possibility; their search includes alerting mental hospitals. There is the matter of emotional illness in the family, and Sue Weston remembers Sam once talking about “the difficulty of talking to troubled people,” referring to the painful situation in his family. One would have to believe that by now ---16 months later ---such a person wandering the streets or occupying a bed in a mental hospital would have been identified, given the extraordinary nature of the publicity surrounding this search. But America is an enormous land, as anyone who has traversed it knows, and one more “space cadet” wandering the streets or hitchhiking across the highways could go unidentified for years. How many people can you describe accurately after walking down a pedestrian-filled street? And if one were an expert on the homeless, and on how they survive via soup kitchens and shelters, one might be able to so survive ad infinitum even in a state of mental disrepair.

What about loose ends? Sam’s aunt says he had invited friends to visit at his parents’ Chicago home over Christmas break and was planning on hosting them. Beau Weston talked by phone to Sam twice on New Year’s Eve, trying to get him to come to his own family’s home that evening. There was no indication of an emotional problem. Sue Weston says, “I know Sam was coming back. He promised he’d wash the dishes before he left, and he left the casserole dish soaking.”

Sam Todd is still missing; that is the disturbing reality. If he was driven underground in terror of return after the sudden magnitude and rapidity of the search for him, has anything changed, to make his return easier? With the search lights so bright in the harbor, how could anyone slip quietly back?

Sam’s file is still very active with the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Missing Persons, and his description appears on the FBI’s nationwide computer network. The Bureau has received hundreds of “sightings” of Sam from around the country ---each has been tracked down, checked out, so far to no avail. The most promising lead to date, a sighting by YDS student Marlene Gill, who believes she saw Sam near the Columbia School for Social Work in Manhattan in late September, is still being investigated. In recent weeks the Department has also been reviewing passport applications, in case Sam has decided to leave the country.May, 1985

finis

The original article:

* Three Fathers; Three Sons; Three Killings: Oedipus, Isaac, Jesus

2012-01-17T19:05:00.007-05:00

Sculptor George Segal and his sculpture in memory of students slain and wounded at Kent State by Ohio National Guardsmen, entitled In Memory of May 4, 1970:Kent State---Abraham and Isaac.

The sculpture was commissioned by Kent State University circa 1977 which then promptly rejected it in 1979, inexplicably giving as a reason that it "depicted violence".

The public was left to wonder if Kent State's administration was still in denial, nine years after the shootings, or merely kowtowing to its funding source, the State of Ohio, whose Guardsmen committed the slayings.

This is a funding source which prefers to ignore the horrible event or refer to the slayings with bloodless euphemisms such as the "Kent State incident" or "Kent State tragedy".

Sadly, this strategy of euphemizing the butchery that day, has succeeded, and by this writing nearly forty years later (September, 2009) the Kent State slayings are merely a paragraph or two in history books and the slain are erroneously lumped together as "anti-war demonstrators," when in fact two of the slain were onlookers; one a male ROTC student (Bill Schroeder), the other a female student (Sandy Scheuer) walking to class.

Princeton University accepted the sculpture the same year that Kent State rejected it and displays it prominently outside its Chapel today. This writer attended the dedication ceremonies at the President's House at Princeton University in 1979, which included as honored guests, (along with many of the nine wounded students) the parents of the four slain students.

Isaac sacrificing Isaac

on
the

Asphalt Altar

Kent State University, May 4, 1970

George Segal
RFD 4 Box 323
North Brunswick, N.J. 08902
March 5, 1979

Dear Mr. Keane,

Thanks for sending me a copy of your brilliant paper.
I value greatly your sensitive and profound response
to a difficult subject.

For your interest and curiosity,there is a painting
by Hieronymus Bosch in the Prado Museum,
ADORATION OF THE MAGI, in which there is a
sculptured representation of the Abraham-Isaac story
offered as a gift to the Infant. Then look closely at
the embroidered images on the cloaks of the Kings.

Essentially, you've cracked my code, which delights me.
On my trip to Kent State last spring, I was appalled
at the blind cliche of radical left vs radical right
that was delivered to me. My decision to picture the
May 4 situation more as I understood it caused a large
uproar, as you well know, but I felt stubbornly it was
necessary to deal with the ambiguity and conflict of
modern psychaitry, and its swirlinq agreement with
classical myth and religious dogma. Which is precisely
what your paper is about.

I like exceedingly your hungry search for unifying threads
connecting these diverse and packed fields.

July 10, 79, 1:30pm I'll be on a panel with Jane Dillenberger and others at the Aubern Theological Seminary, 120 St and Broadway, NYC. One of the topics we plan to talk about involves Jesus's embracing of death in contrast with the Abraham-Isaac story and its implications about stubborn physical life survival.

Hope you can attend.

It will be a pleasure to meet you.

With best regards,

Georqe Segal
__________________________________________________

George Segal created a series of sculptures throughout his career based on biblical works. These sculptures contained important biblical figures from the Old Testament, dressed in modern-day clothing and set in a realistic environment. One of these works, In Memory of May 4, 1970:Kent State-Abraham and Isaac, was created in response to the shooting of anti-war demonstrators by the National Guard, on the Kent State campus during the Vietnam War [INCORRECT: Two of the fatalities were not demonstrators; one, a boy, was a ROTC student observing the protest, and the other, a girl, was walking to class.] Segal used the idea of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac in order to complete God's will, to represent the National Guard's willingness to sacrifice American people to make a point. The sculpture shows Isaac on his knees in front of Abraham, seemingly begging for his life. This work was considered to be politically controversial and rejected by its comissioner Kent State for being "unpatriotic". (Berman)

THE BOUND AND THE UNBOUND:

Oedipus, Isaac, and Jesus

Paul D. Keane
New Testament Tutorial (Prof. R.A. Greer)
Yale Divinity School
1978

Transcribed by PDK , 09/27/2009

(Note: For thirty years this paper has gathered dust in Sterling Memorial Library Manuscripts and Archives' "Kent State Collection" at Yale University. After a brush with death myself last year, I read it again and decided to exhume it and put it on line. Here it is.)

GENESIS 22: 1-19
After these things God tested Abraham, and said
to him, "Abraham! " And he said, "Here am I. " He said
"Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. "
So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. " And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife.
So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, "My father." And he said, "Here am I, my son." He said, "Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God will
provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham" And he said, "Here am I. " He said, "Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place The LORD will provide; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided." And the angel of the LORD called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, "By myself I have sworn, says the LORD, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore. And your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice." So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.

BACKGROUND

Laius and Oedipus, Abraham and Isaac, God and Jesus: Three fathers, three sons, three killings -- killings which loom like great pyramids on the flat landscape of 3000 years of human carnage.

What is it about these killings which, epoch after epoch, 'thrills through us'(to pluralize Oedipus' first words of recognition)?

Perhaps the Abraham/Isaac motif illuminates this question. It has been used throughout the ages as a powerful and ambivalent symbol. "The Index of Christian Art at Princeton gives no less than 1450 entries for Genesis 22: 1-19". (Spiegel, p. xi)

Indeed this very paper is prompted by my encounter with the latest artistic rendering of the theme, George Segal's sculpture "In Memory of May 4, 1970 Kent State: Abraham and Isaac" at New York's Janis Gallery.

My exploration of the Abraham/Isaac theme here will be more than a seminarian's obligatory term project however; for, I witnessed the Kent State killings and I can testify that God did not call for human sacrifice at Kent State, nor did He stay the hands of the Abrahams wearing Ohio National Guardsman uniforms that bloody May 4, nine year ago [1970].

Mr. Segal's comment that his sculpture deals with "the moral underpinning of everyone's belief -- as Abraham moves to do violence with his right hand, his compassion and love for his son are expressed in the gesture made by his left" doesn't help me much either; for, there has been no compassion or love expressed by those responsible for the killings at Kent State, but rather an unrelenting "truculence with which Ohio officialdom [has] responded time and again to the anger and anguish of the victims' families." (New York Times editorial January 8,1979).

Indeed Segal's portrayal of the theme left me angry: Isaac is on bended knees in front of his knife-wielding father, trustingly searching Abraham's eyes for some explanation of the act which is about to be performed - - "No man, not even a father, should be worshipped; and Isaac worships Abraham here", was my reaction.

Perhaps a brief consideration of how the Abraham/Isaac motif has been used in history and literature will make Mr. Segal's choice of theme more understandable. In The Last Trial, Professor Shalom Spiegel's exhaustive work on 'the Akedah [the binding] of Isaac' legend, we find a grisly account of one instance of the theme's manipulation to meet the needs of history, viz. when Jews slaughtered each other by the hundred rather than surrender to the nightmare of the Crusades in the 11th Century:

Solomon bar Samson records 'on the testimony of the elders' who were eye and ear witnesses of the events of 1096.

And Zion's precious sons, the people of Mainz, were put through the ten trials like Father Abraham. They too offered their sons, exactly as Abraham offered up his son Isaac. . . . There were 1,100 victims in one day, every one of them like the Akedah of Isaac son of Abraham.
(Spiegel, p. 25)

And again,

Thus: In the community of Worms, some eight hundred souls were killed in the course of two days at the end of the month Iyyar 1096. Among those were some who "offered up sacrifices of righteousness, who with whole heart took their sons and slew them for the Unification of His Glorious and Awesome Name. . . . Now there was a unique person there whose name was R. Meshullam bar Isaac, and in a loud voice he called out to all those standing by and to his lifelong companion, Mistress Zipporah: 'All ye great and small, hearken unto me. Here is my son whom God gave me and to whom my wife Zipporah gave birth in her old age. Isaac is the child's name. And now I shall offer him up as Father Abraham offered his son Isaac'

Whereupon Zipporah besought him: ' 0' my Lord, my lord, do not yet lay thy hand upon the lad whom I raised and brought up after having given birth to him in my old age. Slay me first so that I shall not have to behold the death of the child. But he replied, saying: 'Not even for a moment shall I delay, for He who gave him to us will take him away to his own portion and. . . Lay him to rest in Father Abraham's bosom. 'And he bound his son Isaac, and picked up the knife to slay his son, and recited the blessing appropriate for slaughter. And the lad replied 'Amen. ' And the father slew the lad. Then he ,took his shrieking wife and both of them together left the room; and the vagabonds murdered them. Over such as these wilt Thou hold Thy peace, 0 Lord?
(Spiegel, pp. 24-25)

In our own crusade -- the American Civil War -- a song written by James Sloan Gibbons to help raise volunteers for the Union Army entitled "Three Hundred Thousand More" employs the political/theological double entendre "Father Abraham", evoking in the Biblically astute ear of the 19th Century American an image tantamount to a call to glorious death:

"We are coming Father Abraham
Three hundred thousand more."

And while the allusion suggests the irony that it is to Father Abraham's bosom they are going, the very notion of Father Abraham suggests the son whom God had requested in sacrifice those many centuries before, a suggestion which compounds the irony as thousands of sons prepare to become the blood sacrifice of the American Abraham.

Wilfred Owen manipulates the sacrifice theme more directly in his World War I poem, "The Parable of the Old Men and the Young".

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went
And took the fire with him, and a knife,
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering ?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth knife, to slay his son.
When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son, --
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
(Blunden, p. 57)

And there is Soren Kierkegaard who, in Fear and Trembling, has focused on the angst of the father faced with his dilemma. (I will want to focus on the angst of the son, but more of that later.)

Even the contemporary folk singer,poet Bob Dylan, has employed the Abraham / Isaac motif in his song, "Highway 61":

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son",
Abe said "Man you must be puttin me on",
God said "No",
Abe said "What! "
God said "You can do what you want man
but the next time you see me comin
you better run"
Abe says, "Where you want this killin done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61".

One can't help but notice the complete contradiction of Scripture in these examples, since as we all know, Abraham did NOT slay Isaac.

That distortion cost many sons their lives at Mainz and Worms, and is used in the literary examples as a device to comment on the disobedience of man who has continued to slay his sons one way or another through the ages. Even the Segal sculpture reflects this contradiction, for as Peter Davies, author of The Truth About Kent State, told me after viewing it: "Abraham looks as if he's going to do it, as if he's . . . actually going to go through with it."

The literary irony seems didactic since the Abraham/Isaac motif has traditionally been seen by theologians as an instruction to man that God is not favorably impressed by human sacrifice. Indeed the substitute of a ram for Isaac on Mt. Moriah in the Genesis account has been understood as God's call for man to replace human sacrifice with animal sacrifice.

Professor Spiegel is straightforward about this: "It may well be that in the narrative of the ram which Abraham sacrificed as a burnt offering in place of his son,there is historical remembrance of the transition to animal sacrifice from human sacrifice -- a religious and moral achievement which in the folk memory was associated with Abraham's name, the father of the faith and the first of the upright in the Lord's way". (p. 64)

But I suspect this didactic irony points to something buried deep in the human psyche which enables an actual father at Mainz to slay his son, something which enables a nation's fathers to send their children into son-slaying ventures like the Civil War, World War I, and to turn a blind eye to son-slaying on American highways and perhaps even at Kent State.

What might this unconscious something be? Professor Spiegel alludes to it I think:

The paschal offering ritual in the Torah is
based on a rejection of the primitive practices
of paganism, or at least on their transfiguration.
And yet, in the sources and in their
customs there survives something of the dread
of the ancient festival of the first-born. The
night of the full moon, in the first month of
the Spring season and according to the archaic
calendar the first of the months of the year was
a time of attack and atonement for members of
the tribe. It was the time to appease higher
powers, and it was a time to battle against the
forces of evil which station themselves on the
threshold of the new year in order to harass
and hurt man and everything he possesses. It
may be, however, that the gods will be placated
and for the price of a small gift of first fruits
and first born they will show favor and spare
the rest of earth's produce and the cattle litter
and the fruit of the womb. By paying a ransom
to his gods from the yield of the field and the
firstlings, and, from whatever he plants for
food, the primitive hopes to obtain the favor
that they shall neither hurt nor destroy the field
and orchard, cattle and property, wives and
children. As with the first fruits of the field,
so he delivers to the gods their share of his
newborn, the first issue of every animal and
human womb, lest the other cattle and children
be destroyed. This is the soil out of which
grows the offering of the first born, human and
animal, in the Spring festival of ancient shepherds
and herdsmen -- all for the purpose of protecting
and guarding the tribe and its livestock.
Scripture forbade the sacrifice of the human
first born, and for the practice substituted that
of the redemption of sons -- but the primitive
demand of "You shall give me the firstborn among
your sons" was based on the ancient principle of
the sanctity of all first born, "the first issue of
every womb among the children of Israel". (Exod.
13:1 and 22:28, Num. 3:12 and 1 Kings 8:14ff . . . )
The biblical paschal sacrifice also came to put an
end to the heathenish practices of the Spring festival,
to abolish human sacrifice and in its place to substitute
animal sacrifice. Nevertheless, here and
there vestiges of the age-old heritage did survive,
from strata of the religion of archaic times, before
the ancients had yet learned how to propitiate the
gods without resorting to blood sacrifice. (Speigel, p. 53)

Yes, it is the power of unconscious atavistic choreographies to 'thrill through us' which these contradictory uses of the Abraham/Isaac motif point to. Those of us in the modern world see the power of such atavistic choreographies in the everyday example of the domesticated dog which dances a small circle with its body before lying down. This circular motion is a kind of vestigial behaviour, a remembrance of the need of its canine ancestors to mat into a nest the grass of
pastures in the antique world.

So too with the human heart.

And in fact in early Jewish lore and exegesis (haggadah and midrash) the power
of this atavism effects the Abraham/Isaac motif: For legend exists that Abraham actually went all the way, that he slaughtered his son on Mt. Moriah. Indeed, "the blood of Isaac's Akedah" is a troubling phrase which persisted in haggadah to such an extent that Spiegel speculates,

In the Haggadah of the talmudic Sages the
attempt to defy Scripture and ignore its signals
was made and succeeded. Or perhaps the
Haggadah recovered for Judaism something of
that legacy the Torah wished to renounce or at
least subdue. Out of its longing -to provide atonement
for the sins of Israel (N. B. "there is no
atonement without blood ! ") the Haggadah brought
to completion the deed of the father, the first in
a long line of those who were to bind for the altar,
and made full the righteous piety of the son, the
first in a long line of those who were to be bound
on an altar; and of the blood of the Akedah made
an offering on high where it might serve as protection
and guardian of Israel until the end came
nigh.
Again, therefore, what do we find? That it was
not in the Middle Ages that this haggadah was invented.
Passover and the Akedah go hand in hand
on the New Year of the ancient calendar and festival
of the first born in the pastoral society of antiquity.
Who knows? Maybe in the blood of Isaac's Akedah,
as in the sacrifice in the first month of the Spring,
there is a speck of a hint that the roots of that
haggadah on the slaughter of Isaac reach back to
- - a remote past of the world of idolatry, possibly
before biblical religion came into being.
(Speigel, pp. 58-59)

Thus, the need to defy Scripture with a contradictory legend that Isaac was actually slaughtered is but a slight indication of the hold this ritual of human sacrifice atavistically retained over the human heart. The historical and literary manipulations of the Abraham/Isaac motif cited above refer to horrors of actual human,sacrifice which I suspect more accurately reflect the power which this
atavistic choreography retains in man even today.Indeed, it can hardly be a coincidence that majority of those slain in the Civil War, World War I, on American highways and at Kent State have been young people or, figuratively speaking, Isaacs.

But what of this legend that Isaac was actually slain? It must be a solitary and exceptional legend indeed!

Not at all. In fact,Spiegel's The Last Trial is a 158-page examination of the appearances of this legend in haggadah and midrash, an examination which considers such derivative legends as these: That Abraham drew a quarter of Isaac's blood for sacrifice; that God stayed Abraham's hand,but too late, for the altar fire consumed him and reduced him to ashes; that God breathed life back into Isaac so he could father the nation Israel.

All of these variations stem from a structural ambiguity in the Genesis account of the sacrifice: viz. after God stays the hand of Abraham, Isaac disappears! ("So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose together and went to Beersheeba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheeba": Where is Isaac? Still on the mountain top? Why are not father and son depicted as rejoicing hand in hand at God's mercy in calling off the sacrifice? Why does Abraham descend the mountain alone?)

Some early Jewish scholars cope with this problem by hypothesizing that God took Isaac into Paradise to instruct him, or to heal him from the wound Abraham inflicted; but the fact is that Isaac is not seen again until two chapters have elapsed (Genesis 24:69) when he meets the woman he will marry, Rebekah.

If the modern ear, sensitive to New Testament motifs, hears certain parallel motifs in all this, it does so with justification. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church reports thusly in its entry for "Isaac":

In the NT Isaac appears in Gal. 3.16 and
4.21-31 as a type of Christ and of the Church.
He is both the son of promise and the father of
the faithful. In Heb. the sacrifice of Isaac is
brought into connexion with the sacrifice of
Christ (11. 17-19). This theme was developed
in the Fathers, who regard his intended immolation
as a type of the sacrifice of Golgotha. Thus
Tertullian sees Isaac carrying the wood the type
of Christ carrying His Cross. St. Cyril of
Alexandria elaborates in detail the similarities
between the two sacrifices, and St. Augustine
compares the ram substituted for Isaac with
Christ crucified. In the Middle Ages, the
sacrifice of Isaac as a prefiguration of the
Passion was a favourite topic of theologians.
The important part which this conception has
played in Christian art is shown by the paintings
of the Catacombs, where the representation of
the scene is used as a figure of the Eucharist.
(pp. 714-15)

Significantly, the author of our work of departure, Shalom Spiegel, (Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America) exacts this conclusion from the resonances in the two Testaments:

To put it briefly: Both differentiae and
parallels in the two traditions on the one
bound and the one crucified seem to point
rather to a common source in the ancient
pagan world. What survived from the
heritage of idolatry which in Judaism remained
peripheral grew to become dominant
in the Christian world, which sought to shape
and clarify the Golgotha [Calvary] Event in
the Akedah image and likeness. And when
Christianity placed at the center of its
religion belief in the atoning power of the
blood of its messiah, in Israel a need was
increasingly felt to blur more and more the
remnants of similar ancient beliefs from
pagan times, leaving behind therefore only
faint traces in our sources. Withal, however,
it is possible to find support for every one of
the details of the Haggadah on the slaughter
and resurrection of Isaac in the documents of
talmudic-midrashic literature itself, independently
of ideas or sources from the realm of Christianity.
(pp. 117-18)

Thus, it is not only the power of atavistic choreographies that keeps the sacrifice-fulfilled legend alive, it is theological politics.

For Scripture can "triumph" in evolving man from human to animal sacrifice, while the existence of this contradictory legend will ensure, in Professor Speigel's eyes, that Judaism will escape the criticism heard "in many countries, particularly in Christian kingdoms, in the Middle Ages, when the taunt was frequently directed against Israel that the Akedah was no sacrifice in truth, but only a hint of what was to come, the completed act in the days of Jesus." (p. 129)

INTERPRETATION

So much for the rivalry of first century Middle Eastern religions as they sought to consolidate their positions.

Although this raises the question that the present shape of sacred literature in the Judeo-Christian tradition may have been determined more by theological politics than by Divine inspiration, there is still considerable value in viewing the Bible as the highest expression of the collective unconscious recorded during the emergence of civilization.

And, in such a light, I suggest, these two great father/son killing motifs stand out as archetypes of primitive man's attempt to cope with the anxiety caused by man's ambivalence not only toward his natural father, but toward the Author of life he worships as Father.

For what is often overlooked, if not smoothed over, is the terrifying notion behind both of these stories: God choreographs human sacrifice.

Let me repeat these words, GOD CHOREOGRAPHS HUMAN SACRIFICE.

The very idea evokes anxieties which 'thrill through'the deepest regions of the soul of every son. It kindles in some dark atavistic corner of the human heart a remembrance of that ancient pagan ritual of the sacrifice of the first-born,a ritual which must have filled all sons with suspicion and dread.
And what (we might rightly ask) is the value of evoking such a vestigial anxiety in the depths of the human heart? After all, it would only distance fathers from sons.

Precisely!

For as every son approaches manhood what can be more terrifying for him than the recognition that his allegiance to his Self is greater than his allegiance to his father? This recognition brings with it not only anxiety but suspicion that one's own father might similarly be capable of an allegiance greater than the parental
contract, as Abraham with Isaac, and God with Jesus.

But those anxieties 'thrill through' our heart in a more pervasive way. For
what better description can there be for the human predicament itself than those very words: "GOD CHOREOGRAPHS HUMAN SACRIFICE": The Father who breathes life into man is also the Father who takes it away: We are born to die.

Most of life is an elaborate attempt to escape anxiety over feeling both anger and gratitude for the gift of being imprisoned in that choreography. Indeed, psychiatry tells us that repression of our ambivalent feelings toward those who gave us our lives can bind our minds in the most crippling manner.

The third great father/son killing motif from the ancient world alludes to that binding.

In Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex two significant variations occur in the theme: The SON has killed the father; and he has done so UNWITTINGLY. Fate, not God, choreographs this killing.

Further, the concommitant of this killing is the son's binding to the family in the most intimate and inextricable of ways -- incest: Oedipus unwittingly has married his mother.

This is quite different from Isaac who appears released from his father's literal binding on Moriah and from binding to the family. For, as we noted before, Abraham leaves the scene of the aborted sacrifice WITHOUT Isaac, who disappears from the narrative until two chapters and three years later, when he returns (at the age of 40!) to assume the role of manhood, i. e. to marry Rebekah and perpetuate the race: (Genesis 24:67+) "Then Isaac brought her into the tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife. And he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death." Note that Isaac's absence from the narrative after his release from the binding encompasses even his mother's death, (Genesis 23. 1) a significant fact in terms of our concern with the transition to manhood and release from binding to the family.

But what of the binding on Calvary?

We have already noted the inescapable parallels between, and pagan precedents for the sacrifices of Moriah and Calvary. We have also recorded Spiegel's assertion that what became central to Christianity was assigned a peripheral position in Judaism(Moriah takes up one chapter in Genesis: Calvary is the very underpinning of the entire New Testament).

If we are correct that the Oedipus, Isaac and Jesus stories represent a kind of primitive psychiatry emerging from the collective unconscious of the ancient world, we would expect the most extensive elaboration of that father/son killing motif to provide us with significantly more clues from which to deduce the intent of that primitive psychiatry.

I believe it does.

It is almost as if the agenda implicit in Isaac's ordeal (his release from family binding) had not been understood by ancient man, and therefore had to be made explicit in the words of one whose crucifixion would break that binding 'once for all'.

Listen for example to how remarkably un-bound Jesus is:

. . . call no man your father on
earth, for you have one Father
who is in heaven . . . (Matt. 23. 9)

What iconoclastic words these are in a world where the word 'father' commanded a respect tantamount to worship! Indeed, Young's Analytic Concordance to the Bible records no less than 2500 entries for 'father'.

Consider then another short entry from the first century biography of Jesus:

Then his mother and his brothers came
to him, but they could not reach him for
the crowd. And he was told, "Your mother
and your brothers are standing outside
desiring to see you." But he said to them,
"My mother and my brothers are those
who hear the word of God and do it."
(Luke 8. 19)

And what is the greatest imperative of that word: As we might have already inferred, a commandment which (significantly) omits any notion of family obeisance:

"Which commandment is the first of all? "
Jesus answered, "The first is this, 'Hear,
0 Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one;
and you shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your mind, and with all your strength.
The second is this, 'You shall love your
neighbor as yourself. ' There is no other
commandment greater than these.
(Mark 12. 28-32)

It is possible to postulate at this point that these three great motifs are concerned to facilitate in Every-son a process which modern psychiatry calls "separation and individuation" from the family of origin. In the Greek version, this facilitation occurs through catharsis, the purging of binding-emotions through pity and fear.

In the biblical version, it occurs through paradox, the use of fear to create courage.

For the atavistic angst of Every-son as he hears that the ultimate father
(God) choreographs the blood sacrifice of sons (Isaac,Jesus) creates in him a fear of his own father, a fear which, paradoxically, gives him the courage -- the psychological distance -- necessary to launchout on the process of separation and individuation.

And this may be what the literature means by "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son": God so loves his worldly children that He choreographs sacrifices which will initiate them into the ambivalent feelings of manhood.

Hence Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for a higher allegiance, and God's willingness to sacrifice His son for a higher allegiance suddenly sound remarkably like the ambivalence described by sculptor Segal, in which "the moral underpinning of everyone's belief" is embodied in the hands of Abraham :"as Abraham moves to do violence with his right hand, his compassion and love for his son are expressed in the gesture made by his lefthand. " (N.Y. Times, Nov. 18, 1978 or January 8, 1979)

John Zinner and Roger Shapiro in their article "Projective Identification as a Mode of Perception and Behaviour in Families of Adolescents" allude to the powerful ambivalence associated with the process of freeing ourselves from the binding of family scenarios; their insight further clarifies Segal's use of the Abraham/Isaac theme for his Kent State sculpture:

We view the family as such a small group [Bion's Small Group Behavior Model] and, more metaphorically, as the cast of a drama, the themes of which are some combination of adaptive and functional family 'work' tasks and a variety of generally unconscious fantasies, or covert assumptions, often conceived of as if they were a 'hidden agenda'. Families with adolescent children have as a primary task to facilitate the development of ego autonomy and individuation in the offspring . . . This task, whose successful outcome implies a significant restructuring of the family group, is endangered by demands placed upon the child to collude with the unconscious assumptions of family life which are implicitly striving to maintain the status quo ante in family relationships. From the very formation of a new family, unconscious assumptions exert an important influence on behaviour. Marital choice is motivated by a desire to find an object who will complement and reinforce unconscious fantasies . . . Prior to their birth, children are introduced into the covert assumptions of family life in their parents' fantasies, and from birth onward, a variety of parental coercions interact with the child's own instinctual requirements to fix him as a collusive participant in the family's hidden agenda . . . This re-enactment of the parents' own early object relations within the context in which he himself is a parent may assume the form of highly fluid role attributions in which the adolescent may be perceived at one time as the parent's parent, and at other times as the child who his parent once was. Thus, in the same family a child can be both parentified and infantalized . . The variables relevant to the development of psychopathology in the offspring seem to involve the content of the projected material, the capacity of the parent to differentiate himself from the child, and the intensity of the parental defensive requirements.
Depending on the nature of the interaction of these factors, projective identification can endow a relationship with salutary empathetic qualities or, to the contrary, generate binding attributions in which the child remains a creature of parental defensive economy.
(pp. 523-530)

This ambivalence of the family both seeking to facilitate development of ego autonomy in the offspring while simultaneously seeking to maintain the status quo ante of family relationships further explains the phenomenon of contradictory legends accompanying both the Moriah and Calvary events; for, if -- as we are postulating -- both of these stories are primitive psychiatric initiation rites designed to facilitate growth into manhood, then the culture's attempts to undermine those initiation rites with tales that Isaac was actually killed and Jesus never resurrected are nothing less than the ambivalence of the family raised to the societal level, i. e. the collective unconscious' attempt to maintain the status quo ante in which the fantasy of Establishment authority does not give way to the new generation, while at the same time recognizing that it must give way if the new generation is to be un-bound or free to carry on the race.

And it is precisely here that Segal's sculpture and the Kent State incident become pertinent: The students who gathered on the Kent State Commons that May 4th 1970, to protest the occupation of their campus by National Guardsmen were more than 'students' or 'protestors' to those Guardsmen; they were terrifying
symbols of the Guardsmen's own ambivalence and anxiety over the process of separation and individuation.

For those students represented a growing activism in youth across the country during the 1960's whose goal was nothing less than the smashing of family fantasy on a national scale -- the fantasy that in the perpetuation of the Viet Nam War the Establishment-fathers knew best, that they had the best interests of their country's sons at heart.

As we know from Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Men and the Young"; from the son-sacrifices at Mainz and Worms; from our own son-slaughter in the Civil War; and even from the blood sacrifices offered on the asphalt altars of our national highways to the God of Gross National Product: The old men often have allegiances which require the death of society's sons.

The ambivalence felt by the young about the process of separation and individuation is I suggest nowhere more dramatically revealed in current events than in these Kent State murders.

For it was not Abraham sacrificing Isaac at Kent State, it was Isaac sacrificing Isaac.

As in Zinner and Shapiro's projective identification model, the National Guardsmen-Isaacs had been parentified by the Establishment fathers, and when they killed the Kent State four, they were acting as collusive agents in the societal family's hidden agenda to maintain the status quo ante of societal family relationships.

That those National Guardsmen were the same age as the very persons they killed and maimed, suggests that they were trying to kill the 'son' in themselves, to extinguish the anxiety evoked by the protestors' symbolic separation and individuation ritual, i. e. defiance of the Establishment .

Indeed the Scranton Commission has concluded that the Guardsmen's lives were not in danger at the time of the shooting, and the records show that of the four killed and nine wounded the closest person was 71 feet from the Guardsmen, the farthest 495 feet.

(The four students killed were 265, 343, 382, and 390 feet away,respectively. Not even an Olympic athlete could throw a stick or stone 300 feet with enough accuracy to pose bodily harm, let alone a fatal threat! Nor does the chanting of obscenities and the chasing of Guardsmen around a campus constitute a lethal threat; the Scranton Commission agrees and concludes that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted and unjustifiable".)

Thus, there are data to suggest that the real threat which these Guardsmen felt was the threat of their own unconscious anxiety and ambivalence in the presence of a group of iconoclastic Isaacs and Jesuses who had had enough: Who refused to passively walk up the Moriahs and Calvarys of Viet Nam on the command of their societal fathers; a group of young people who dared to cut the family bindings by holding their allegiance to themselves higher than their allegiance
to their 'fathers' !

In some blind atavistic ritual from the pagan past, these Guardsmen sought to assuage their own anxiety about manhood by taking on the role of 'fathers' killing their 'sons'.

Segal's sculpture therefore takes on the added dimension of defining our own misunderstanding of the biblical father/son killing motifs of Moriah and Calvary.

For society has used these stories to evoke in the reader feelings of gratitude for God's mercy, when in fact their real salvific quality is their capacity to evoke our feelings of ambivalence, in order to release us from the bindings of family fantasies which lead to the terror of Oedipus or the nightmare of Kent State.

Just as Segal's worshipful Isaac should anger us, so too should these words of Jesus: "Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee: remove this cup from me; yet not what I will but what thou wilt. "
(Mark 14.36)

For it is only when we can feel both our anger and our gratitude to the biological, societal, and celestial parents whose wills bind us, that we can transform our ambivalence into the liberating harness of compassion and Love.

Paul D. Keane

____________________________________________________

REFERENCES

Berman, B. "George Segal: Works from the Bible." Exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum. February 1997. 12 October 2000. http://www.jewishculture.org/jewishmuseums/segal.html.(A site with photos of five of Segal's biblically tied works. Great photo of In Memory of May 4, 1970: Kent State-Abraham and Isaac

Blunden, Edmund. The Poems of Wilfred Owen.
London (Chatto and Windus, 1931).

Spiegel, Shalom. The Last Trial :On the Legends and Lore of the
the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: the Akedah.

New York (Random House, 1967).

Zinner, John and Shapiro, Roger. "Projective Identification as a
Mode of Perception and Behaviour in Families of Adolescents."
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1972) 53,523.

* Bravo Wikipedia-Wednesday !

2012-01-17T05:15:00.001-05:00

* The Yellowing of America : MLK Day, 2012

2012-01-16T19:44:00.012-05:00

What it took:

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 (Thurgood Marshall)

President Eisenhower

Little Rock High School, Arkansas desegregation with Federal troops, 1957

480,000 yellow buses

* Dignity v. Digitry, Beached in Vermont

2012-01-14T14:38:00.042-05:00

Dr. Dignity

Chocolate and "Don't worry about anything you can't change."

Those are Beach Conger's two secrets to a long life, stolen, he will gladly tell you, from the longest lived person in human record keeping, 122 years and five months, Madame Jeanne Louise Calment, of Arles (yes, the Van Gogh Arles of sunflowers and starry nights).

Beach Conger, who is two years older than I am (he's 69), is my MD.

He's written three books as a doctor: Bag Balm and Duct Tape: Adventures of a Country Doctor (which is now out of print); It's Not My Fault: Tales of a Vermont Doctor; and his latest book (which I am currently reading ) IT'S PROBABLY NOTHING: More Adventures of a Vermont Country Doctor.

Here's a sample:

"The longer I have practiced, the more I have realized that this whole business of taking healthy people and giving them pills that make them miserable, in order to treat conditions that never bothered them , may not always be the best policy." (p. 115)

"These days, when we want to know what someone has, the first thing we do is order tests. Then we see what shows up. It's an excellent approach, obviating, as it does, the need to think, thinking being, in my line of work, an unrewarding activity, uncompensated as it is, by any remuneration. Tests, however, are very good for business." (p. 143)

God. I hope this man outlives me. I need a doctor with his country-common-sense ------to usher me off the planet without reducing me to a pin-cushion for medical experimentation.

Please, Dr. Conger:

Take good care of yourself !

NB:

Lest you think this Vermont contrarian doctor is a rube, be aware that in addition to his Harvard MD and his position at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Dr Conger devotes the first few chapters of his latest book to three citified patients in his work at a Philadelphia hospital: A crack addict with HIV known as Eastern Queen; a 525 lb. patient who wishes to lose no more than 26 lbs. because his weight makes him "somebody"; and a transgender patient who declines out of dignity to reveal his gender surgery to the good doctor who is left to infer it.

In his prose and in his practice, Dr. Conger embraces them with a consummate respect for their individuality, a respect characteristic of Vermonters in general.

* Beyond Despicable

2012-01-13T16:06:00.009-05:00

"We certainly send our military mixed messages. It's OK to waterboard live people but don't pee on dead ones."

Ron Richo

* "Bless you, Dahling!": Toughened by Talullah

2012-01-12T10:59:00.044-05:00

DRAMA AT YALE

James Franco, actor/Yale student.

Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady

Henry Winkler, Fonzie

Teachers and students of drama at Yale have been in the limelight since "drama" became its own department /school at the University: Monty Wooley, who was fired and then rehired and then fired again as a drama teacher before becoming a famous Hollywood star; Thornton Wilder, a graduate and later teacher, whose writings sought out "window-breaking ideas"; Jodi Foster, a Drama School student stalked on the streets of Yale by the star-crazed John Hinckley who later shot President Reagan: Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler, now famous Drama School alumni; and currently a heart-throb actor and Yale student named James Franco, who brings attention and his own Twittered-graffiti (see above) to Yale and The Yale Daily News.

Monty Wooley in The Man Who Came to Dinner

Thornton Wilder, Yale Graduation

Tallulah circa 1963

Tallulah in her prime.

When I was 17, half a century ago, my English teacher at Hamden High in the shadow of Yale, groomed me to be a gate-crasher.

I had made somewhat of a name for myself in that category on my own by hanging out on the 79th Street Boat Basin in Manhattan for three days when I was 16 until I got to see 86-year-old Sir Winston Churchill debark Aristotle Onassis's yacht, the Christina---during which adventure I met his nurse who gave me one of his iconic cigars and a note signed by him on House of Commons stationery.

Divining a nascent paparazzo in his 11th grade student, my English teacher, Mr. Neil Topitzer, suggested I take-on the Shubert Theatre next, and he directed me, like a bank robber planning a heist, to a plain white door under the first balcony box to the right of the stage (Stage Left for the actors) of New Haven's dilapidated Shubert, famous for making or breaking sought-after Broadway tours.

That door was so innocuous, it looked like it might be a broom closet , he told me. In fact, it led immediately ( 2 feet maximum) onto the star's dressing room, and Mr. Topitzer primed me: If I knocked, someone would open it and I could speak with the star of the show and get their autograph.

My first conquest ---or disaster --- depending on your point of view , was the aging Tallulah Bankhead.

It may have been in a trial run of Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop here Anymore. If it was 1962 or 1963, Tallulah would have been 60 or 61. She looked younger on stage, but when I knocked on the door and was given entry to a small bathroom-sized enclosure, she looked like a male W. H. Auden, with facial skin etched in crevaces not creases, as if by a sculptor's putty knife.

I uttered some inconsequentiality about her acting and she boomed like a muted trombone, "Bless you, dahling!" I was dressed in a suit and tie and he next remark, took me by surprise in my naive 17 years:

"Do you got go Yale, dahling?" she drawled.

"No, Hamden High," I stammered. "Would you be kind enough to autograph my program"?

She took the program and demanded, "How do you spell your name, dahling?"

I said "Paul Keane, K-e-a---".

She cut me off with "I cahn't be BOTHERED with the LAST name, dahling," scribbling across the program as I was gently edged out of the actor's closet.

Twenty years later, when I had become friends with Miss Isabel Wilder, the sister of another Yale graduate who had made a name for himself in drama, Thornton Wilder, I learned that neighbors on their Hamden street, Deepwood Drive, used to complain at the loudness of Miss Bankhead's voice and laugh, on summer evenings when she would be a guest at Wilder parties, her emboozed guffaw echoing up and down the wooded drive.

I tried Mr. Topitzer's plan twice more at the Shubert before I went off to college. The highlight of the three adventures was the comedienne Carol Burnett, who graciously kissed me, with the hottest, softest lips I had ever touched----even to this day !

Later, Mr. Topitzer's apprentice paparazzo would find the daring practiced on that little white door at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, very useful indeed, in barging through, not a white door, but, the White House itself, after the Kent State shootings in 1970, and into the inner sanctum sanctorum of CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1984 when AIDS was ignorantly believed to be a male-transmitted disease only, after proof of the opposite was staring Yale in the face.

Tallulah and Mr. Topitzer taught me not to be intimidated by closed white doors, be they big or small, old or new.

Thanks you, my eleventh grade English teacher. Thanks Tallulah!

From your carefully prepared paparazzo,

Paul Keane
HHS '63

* The Mayor of Camel's Hump: A Vermonter's Life

2012-01-11T05:20:00.012-05:00

The Mayor of Camel’s Hump

A poem in memory of

Albert Meade

raised on a farm

near the 200-foot-deep

Quechee Gorge

Vermont

Gulf Bridge at Quechee Gorge
The oldest surviving steel-arch bridge spans a scenic location over the Ottauquechee River at Quechee Gorge in Hartford, Vermont. Constructed in 1911 for the Woodstock Railroad, this deck arch bridge spans 285 feet high above the gorge.
Image courtesy of Robert McCullough

ADAGIO

It is January and snow is falling.

A letter from your niece tells me

you have been in the ground since

August, after 86 years above it.

An authentic Yankee, pitchfork and cow pail,

growing up tending the earth;

now its dark harvest.

BARN

Once when grown you saw a barn

burst aflame from hay stacked too

green, in vernal combustion.

House - - woodshed - - hen house - - barn,

hitched together, perpendicular to the

road , pulled out like an accordion;

they stopped the barn from taking the house

by tying ropes around the hen house and

pulling it down with a Model-T Ford.

RAILROAD

The railroad was your spaceship. Its gleaming face

would shake your house as it roared by the front

of the farm. Such speed and power and majesty

were wonder to a boy who four miles to and four

miles from school, would walk, sun or snow.

Boys once greased the tracks on the hill outside

your farm, and that Black Behemoth slid back down

the slope a several times before it made its way

on through to town. Old men now admit they were those

boys, and though you know their names and speak them

with a smile, no admission comes from your mouth.

GORGE

A mile from home that track bridged a gorge

200 feet deep. The track was one mile shorter to town than

the only road, and you obeyed your father’s command:

Never walk across that gorge. At least in daytime you

obeyed, when others could see. And, besides, walk across

that gorge you could not: there were no railings on that

bridge, just rails.

NIGHT

But crawl you could on hands and knees, and did;

holding the rails for dear life, edging out across

the gorge with river so far below. And so it was

one black night halfway across the bridge, crawling

on hands and knees; you came up against another - -

head-to-head coming from the other direction,

crawling and holding those rails tight - - -

your own father.

Was he come looking for you late to home, or just

taking, in reckless shortcut, the route to town

he’d forbid his boy to take, knowing all that

gravity and impulse can do to flesh?

MOUNTAIN

You grew up and never married those 86 years and

said to the younger listener once, “Don’t make

my mistake and wait too long” about choosing a wife.

There was no sermon or self-pity in that sentence,

just saying how it was with you.

When you were 82, twenty times in one season you climbed

a mountain, sixty miles upcountry, till other climbers

dubbed you the Mayor of Camel’s Hump.

Then,
without

warning,
strength waned and slight confusion set in.

And so,
the nursing home.

But later a reprieve - - -

when strength returned - - - to a kind of dormitory for

the infirm, where you could walk outside your mile

each day, whittled cane, tentative steps now.

Then the river gorging through your veins came

head-to-head with some blockade: Paralysis.

And, like Lincoln, a night of labored breathing:

The feet that made you mayor of the mountain stopped

now, halfway across the bridge.

HARVEST

The other side wanted you more than this one

And so, stepless, you stepped over, not crawling

This Span.

Once you told me calmly about assisted death, “The

Bible forbids taking a life.” You never quoted

Scripture and didn’t then, just a simple The Bible

Says, kind of statement.

You would wait calmly for Nature to do her work.

But you did not fear to say the wait had grown

lonely and monotonous. It was a hard wait, like

watching grass grow into hay.

Paul D. Keane

1/12/99

I met Albert while volunteering at a local nursing home. We became friends.

* "A Thundering Host"

2012-01-11T00:26:00.017-05:00

All Formats

Paperback

The First Vermont Cavalry in the Civil War: A History

Paperback: $45.00

December 23, 2009

(3)

Expand See Book D

________________

"A Thundering Host"

a review

Paul Keane

In commenting about The First Vermont Cavalry in the Civil War: A History, by Joseph D. Collea, Jr., I need to make two full disclosures before you, dear reader, read on : First, Mr. Collea is Principal at a Vermont high school where I teach and therefore everything I say can be suspect of attempting to curry favor with him! (lol); and, second, although I attended the Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College for a week every summer from 1998 – 2003, my interest in the Civil War is primarily poetic and anecdotal, not military and strategic: To wit, I ignored all of the maps in the book handsomely prepared by the author’s son, and riveted my attention to passages about the human heart in conflict with itself (a famous definition of literature by William Faulkner, I think).

Talk about stick-to-it-iveness: This Fulbright Scholar took fifteen years to research his topic. In the meantime, he retired as principal of an Ilion, New York high school and as mayor of that town, and began a second career as principal of a Vermont high school six years ago.

Scholars and military strategists will find something on every page to satisfy their needs. The bibliography has 417 entries, 167 of which are original manuscripts. The chapters are compact and focused, twenty-nine in 285 pages, plus a preface and epilogue. Citations abound: If there is a Vermont soldier whose diary or letters Mr. Collea has not scoured, I’d like to know his name. I picture the author behind his desk with mountains of notes arranged in chronological order by chapter title, just praying that an inadvertent sneeze by a visitor or spontaneous pounce of the cat doesn’t scatter them - - - and his chronology - - - to kingdom-come.

I ignored the maps (all 22 of them), but I was transfixed by the photographs and drawings of individual soldiers --- especially the “dashing” Dartmouth student Oliver Cushman before-and-after, “dramatically aged by war and disfigured by a bullet taken in the face,"(p.179+) by photos of campsites, battle sites (many of which I have visited with the CWI), etc., and drawings of troops.

Captain Oliver Cushman as Dartmouth student and after his facial wound in the Civil War.

After all, those soldiers lived in the mountains I have called home for the last 25 years, and 1861 isn’t that long ago: I can hear their faint footsteps even now. And Oliver Cushman’s Dartmouth is but six miles from me, a campus I traverse every week.

Neither a militant nor a pacifist, Collea lets the reader see both extremes of war (the glory and the gory) and come to a decision him/herself about such matters. My own conclusion is a question. Was war really necessary?

Necessary or not, this volume is a Herculean undertaking to record every aspect of one Cavalry unit in that War: The Vermont First, which the author’s great uncle, Sgt. Mark Rogers of Company B, proudly served along with “fellow trooper,” the author’s great, great grandfather, Sgt. William Rogers. (p.1)

For the glory, hear the words of General William Armstrong Custer addressed to the men who he commanded (including the First Vermont) in the decisive Tom’s Brook and Cedar Creek battles six months before the end of the four-year long War in 1864: ‘You have surrounded the name of the 3rd. Cav. Div. with a halo of glory as enduring as time.” (p. 268); or of Abraham Lincoln to General Sheridan under whose command the First Vermont routed the enemy in those engagements: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army, the thanks of the Nation, and my own personal admiration and gratitude, for the month’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley, and especially for the work of October 19, 1864.”(p.268) Or hear the poetic words of the preacher at Ludlow, Vermont, thirty miles down-road from me, as he conducted the funeral for Sergeant Charles Bishop in 1863: “ It is nevertheless true that another Green Mountain Boy, as gentle as a lamb in peace, but as fierce as a tiger in battle, has passed away. Although his years were few, yet his life was long, for it answered life’s great end.” (p.248). As the author remarks, the preacher “effectively characterized a generation of citizen soldiers.”(p. 248)

Corporal John Chase’s dying words in 1862 Mt. Jackson endeavor were “I took my man, Captain. I took my man. Tell them I tried to do my duty. I believe that it is a just cause. I have tried to do my duty.” (p.48)

Thus the glory of the tiger.

Yet the gore.

The details of the tiger’s fight are subjects from which this author does not shield the reader with the perfume of generalities and euphemisms. A bullet does not merely hit a soldier in the arm in this volume; instead, “The lead projectile struck his arm halfway between his elbow and his shoulder, shattering the bone, tearing up the muscles, and severing the medial nerve as it plowed through the extremity,”(p.176) descriptive details which are repeated dozens of times in these pages, conjuring an image of the author pouring over endless medical and military records and discharge papers.

When Alexis Snow’s horse (all 1000 pounds of it) falls on him, Collea does not shy away from the details and lets the soldier’s own words speak them plain: “‘The horse which I rode was shot and killed by the rebels’ and ‘when he fell, he fell upon me and I was partly under him as I could not release myself and fell in such a way as to severely injure one of my testicles’ ”. Two Confederates took him prisoner: “‘. . . instead of raising the horse . . . took hold of and dragged me from under the horse and that pulled the cords in my testicles all apart.’ ” (p.214)

Something addressed in these pages is an issue I had never pondered: What about the horses ?(approximately 900 Morgans) From my CWI days I knew that between three and five thousand horses were killed at Gettysburg and had to be burned after the battle, creating a scene from Dante’s Inferno as wounded soldiers still moaned in the bushes and a drizzle fell on them and the smoldering carcasses.

We learn in these pages from one soldier’s account that “ ‘three days frequently pass without unsaddling the horses, and the backs of the poor emaciated brutes are first sore, then burst rotten; still they are kept at work.’ ” (p.87) and that on one march at the time of Gettysburg, “sadly the route of march became easy to follow by the trail of expired horses by the roadside.” (p.156) Further in another instance of animal cruelty, General Kirkpatrick “Tossing abandon to the wind . . . covered the mile [ to Hanover ] with such speed that he rode his horse to death.”(p.160) In April of 1865 in the pursuit of Lee’s army by Sheridan’s forces, we learn from William Rogers (the author’s great great grandfather) sharing with his father, “‘You ‘haint know [sic] idea what marching it was, a raining most of the time. Mud is the name for it. You can judge something about it if it was [as] it would be through Fairfax [VT] to have 15 thousand cavalry march over the road. There was any number of horses left mired in the mud. What don’t drop dead by riding are shot by the rear guard.’ ” (p.278)

Another soldier tells us that in effecting the Kirkpatrick-Dahlgren raid, the men rode “‘all day and all of the night in the rain pouring all of time . . . and we hadn’t had a wink of sleep, only what we got on our horses in that time and it was mighty hard work to keep our eyes open I tell you.’ ” (p.215) We learn too that a cavalry traveling blindly in darkness found that “Often ‘the sound of hoofs in front was the only guide as to the direction to be taken.’” (p.213)

There is one heartwarming story about a horse in these pages: Abe, aka “The First Vermont Straggler” (p.180). Shot in the neck, the horse had to be left behind by his rider, Bugler Joe Allen, because he could not arise from weakness due to loss of blood at 4:00 AM when soldiers began their march. From that day on, soldiers could be heard cheering and shouting when Abe (now Old Abe) would straggle into their latest camp a day late as he made his way alone to rejoin his comrades. Ultimately, when stronger, he and Bugler Allen rode together again until the end of the war in 1865.

The Morgan Horse of Vermont used in the Civil War.

It is interesting that Col. John Singleton Mosby personally pardoned Captain John Woodward, from the Vermont 1^st, after he was captured; even “though Confederate policy forbade paroling officers, Mosby was so impressed with Woodward’s heroism in the face of overwhelming odds that he had come personally to release him.”(p.121) That was 1863 and the contest sounded more like a sport of honor among gentlemen than a war. Woodward’s father, a minister and chaplain, was known as “the fighting preacher,” and “at fifty-two . . . was one of the regiment’s elders. But this man of the cloth never looked at age as an impediment, for he was often found in the thick of action” (p.42). One of the author’s virtues is that he often telescopes time and reflects on our epoch: “In a later era, the constrictions of the Geneva Convention would have frowned upon men of the cloth actively trying to save souls clad in blue one moment while in the next just as passionately trying to take those dressed in gray.” (p. 42).

Later in the War, the gentlemanly honor of Col. Mosby pardoning the young Woodward had given way to “The Burning” (p.255) of the Shenandoah Valley by Yankees under General Sheridan and accusations of Yankee plundering of household goods, even the family silver, instead of foraging for food for horse and man. And when young Woodward was killed his father, the “‘fighting preacher’ lost heart for war. Eleven days after the engagement, he resigned his commission and returned home to Westford and his congregation.” (p.190)

One of the endearing traits of this history, is that it moves into the present, often visiting the gravesite of a fallen Vermonter and describing the scenic impact of the tombstone against the mountains. Further, it delves into non-military biographical information, and so we learn that Captain Woodward, who had not served a full year when he was killed, had been grieving the death of his 18-year old fiancée, Hattie Chadwick, when he engaged in his last battle, and that “his body was later recovered and interred next to Hattie’s ‘These two fondly united in life are not divided in death’ was the poignant inscription on their common tombstone, proclaiming for future generations that here lay star-crossed lovers.” (p.190) One can imagine the author at the cemetery transcribing the epitaph, to add to the thousands of footnotes piled on his desk.

Sometimes we hear of the infidelity of a wife after her soldier-husband had returned home maimed (p.215), or the surviving children of a soldier, two of whom had “clubbed feet” (p.143) or of the virtues of “Trask’s Magnetic Ointment” for soldier ailments ( p.76) or a soldier writing home about washing his clothes and “ a snot-rag” (p. 207) in a stream near camp. Another soldier, captured, escapes by “shinnying down a lightning rod.” (p.202) We learn too of the “infernal machines, buried in the roadway (predecessors to our modern IED’s) and how rebel “prisoners were forced to crawl ahead of the column, searching the roadway for additional booby-traps.” (p.230) We hear of strange sounding southern landmarks, Gooney Manor Run (p. 254) and Goochland. (p. 213) We learn that fourteen Yankees became separated from their Company D comrades in Hagerstown, put on civilian clothing and “came and talked with the Rebel Army which was passing through. Antipas Curtis even saluted General Lee.” (p. 187)

When Captain Hiram Hall was killed in the Wilson-Kautz raid, Collea tells us, ‘Given that the raid was in progress, the best that could be done with the body, for the sake of Hall’s family, was to bury it in a clearly marked site. This was accomplished by carving his name and regiment on a walnut tree near the grave. . .”(p.243).

Here are sentences from the book I wish I had written myself, as an admirer of words:

Only a bugle call separated this motionless column from a thundering host. (p.216)
The sound of pounding hoofs on the roadway, the gritty taste of dust in the air, the feel of a muscled mount beneath, and the smell of gunsmoke, combined to fill his brain with a profuse sensory montage that was intermixed with loud gunshots, buzzing bullets, wild yelling and parched throats.” (p. 38)
What should have been the “Gordonsville Raid” was reduced to nothing more than the “Gordonsville Ride.”(p. 84)
That is how sacrifices become legacies, and soldiers do not die in vain. (p.108)
One of those occasions when dash gave way to drudgery was picket duty. (p. 125)
Next, a willingness must be embraced to move beyond the mindset* that an effort, falling short of success, is unworthy of recognition.(p.170)
Before the first anniversary had come to pass, the young bride had traded her wedding whites for widow's weeds. (p.234)
After absorbing the best blows Lee could deliver, the Army of the Potomac stood back up, dusted itself off, and continued side-stepping to the right. (p.239)
Conversely, in the world beyond the army, voids created by death are not so easily filled. No one can step forward and become a replacement son or brother.(p.242)

Soldiers wait outside Appomatox Courthouse.

General Lee signs surrender at Appomatox Courthouse, ending the Civil War, as General Grant looks on.

The final words of the book tell us that “upon leaving Appomatox Court House

. . . Every mile that was ridden henceforth [by the Vermont First Cavalry] was a step away from living their generation’s war and a step closer to reading it in the history books.” (p. 287)

Thanks to Joe Collea, that history can now be read fully and, at times, eloquently.

Genral Lee followed by General Grant leave Appomatox Courthouse.

Paul D. Keane

M.A., M.Div., M.Ed.

White River Junction, Vermont

July 18, 2011

PS: As a teacher for 25 years, I have accumulated grade-books with nearly 3000 names in them. Here are first names from Mr. Collea’s book which I have never had in class. Note: (f) stands for female and (C) stands for Confederate. Otherwise all names are male and from Vermont.

Ptolemy, Zadock, Flavil, Avirett, Selah, Zabina, Conceader, Luvia (f), Smilie(f) {they were sisters!}, Lorento, Brittania, Eusabe, Sorel, Alvah, Perley, Mayo, Carlastan, Amasa, Eliab, Eber, Job, Loring, Fount, Azio, Elon, Evander (C), Lensey, Lovica, Antipas, Lafayette, Hannibal, Monroe, Eri, Morte, Roone, Asa, Almer.

*Note: One critic dislikes Collea’s use of “anachronisms.” I believe the reference is to modern colloquialisms like “mindset,” “dad,” “the real skinny”, etc. I find this author’s choice to speak from a modern mind, attractive. Just when my eyes are about to glaze over with the details of a military maneuver, Collea pulls me back with a "copasetic" phrase.

* Maestro Vergiu Cornea Dies at 99.

2012-01-10T19:40:00.011-05:00

Vergiu Cornea in the Ithaca College Theatre performing his original choreography, Pavane Triste, 1969, to Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess

Link to: Prince of the Dance

Note: Maestro Cornea died December 2, 2011 at the age of 99.

When Vergiu Cornea emigrated to America's Ithaca, New York, from Roumania in 1956 he had lived under two tyrannies:

As Premier Danseur of the Berlin Opéra Comique and Balletmeister of the Hamburg Statsopera, he had been given a personal armed Nazi military escort to the theatre every night at the order of Goebbels during Hitler's reign, an armed guard to stave off the actual wolves which roamed the streets at the time;

as a Roumanian citizen, he had fled post- World War II communist rule in that Iron Curtain country, where he had performed in trio as dancer with ballerina Iris Barbura and pianist Sergiu Celibidache, later an internationally acclaimed conductor.

When he arrived in Ithaca in 1956, where his partner, Iris Barbura had preceded him, America's anti-communist xenophobia prevailed and he wound up being, not a celebrated artist but, a janitor in the Ithaca YMCA, "cleaning toilets" as he liked to remind listeners.

A lucky break landed him a job as ballroom dancing instructor at Cornell, and then the pioneering presidency of Howard Dillingham, who would build an all new Ithaca College campus from scratch on South Hill, provided opportunity for Cornea to become Instructor of Drama and Dance in Ithaca College's nationally known Drama Department.

He retired at 65 in 1978 having risen to Associate Professor of Drama and Dance, and still lives in Ithaca on the eve of his 98th year.

Twenty-three years of students have felt his exacting artistic influence, including this writer, who had him as an Acting 101 teacher in 1964 in what was left of the downtown Ithaca College campus, the theatre and speech buildings.

After several years of lobbying beginning in 2003 as Cornea was about to turn 90, I persuaded the Ithaca College alumni magazine to do a feature article about the maestro in 2006, which they entitled Prince of the Dance.

It was worth the wait:

That excellent article by Barbara Adams can be read by clicking on the link above. After it was published alumni, who had been Cornea's students, banded together and nominated him for the Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award, which he received the following year.

* Seminal Semonin

2012-01-09T21:02:00.050-05:00

The Quixotic paintings
of
Manhattan artist,
and Cornell graduate,

Douglas Semonin

Mural by Semonin,
Prof. Ogden's Dining Room, E. Upland Rd.

Semonin copy of Rubens'
Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus,
with the heads of Prof. Ogden, his wife, son and daughter, substituted for the Rubens' heads.

The Rubens source.

Prof. Ogden seated in front of Semonin hybrid of two eighteenth century artists:

Joshua Reynolds and B. Wilson,

A Seated Man with a Dog,

( again with Professor Ogden's face inserted ).

The closest Reynolds I can find.

Another similar Reynolds

A Seated Man with a Dog by B. Wilson, 1722-1789

Semonin mural in Prof. Ogden's dining room,
with son-in-law's head under the warrior's helmet.

Paintings look out on Prof. Ogden's gold fish pool and back yard.

Prof. Ogden's back yard.

Semonin portrait of
John D. Ogden in his Yale Doctor's Robes,
ca. 1959 graduation
(I inherited this portrait upon Prof. Ogden's death in 1998 at age 84.)

Semonin Adam and Eve [as Hippies], 1969.
(Originally part of a window display at Tiffany's, they were removed after a few days because of protests from prudish clientele. They hung in Prof. Ogden's office at Ithaca College for 20 years . He gave them to me upon his retirement.)

(Barbara Streisand and John Lennon, 1969 ?)

Adam and Eve, [not as Hippies] Albrecht Durer

* Fifty Years

2012-01-09T19:31:00.019-05:00

. . . I Was Sixteen Going On Seventeen . . .

Can nearly half a century have gone by since this naive 16-year old dared to tackle New York City on his own?

( I should mention that I was 6'2" tall and wore a black suit on this three day venture, so I looked older and more poised than I was.)

I could clean up the prose of the following description I wrote at my father's request immediately after the event at age 16, but I won't.

Here it is (after being filed away for 48 years) : naivete , superlatives , fragments , run-ons , missing apostrophes , hyperbole , stuffy prose , gushing earnestness , incorrect spellings and all*.

I cringe.

* I will not indulge in using "[sic]" to let you know I know better. I didn't know better then, and that's that.

NB: My parents must have been crazy (thank heavens) to let a 16-year-old country boy go to New York alone. (Especially when you consider another of my blogs http://yaledisappearance.blogspot.com/ "Sam Todd:Fugitive from God, Country and Yale?" about the disappearance of a Yale Divinity student in New York New Year's eve 1983/4, twenty-three years after my New York adventure!)

_______________________________________

Churchill being assisted to his seat on the Christina

Muriel Thompson, nurse, and Sir. Winston

The Christina steams up the Hudson

Maria Callas and Onassis debark

Churchill and Onassis depart in limousine

Churchill and Bernard Baruch in Manhattan

A Boy's Adventure in New York: 1961

(For my friend, Jane Ridgway Littlemoon, who requested it.)
(And for my friend Michele McCarthy and her late father, Mac, who told this story for years)

About seventeen weeks ago I started to watch the Winston Churchill series [The Valiant Years, narrated by Richard Burton] on television. I was impressed with this man; his brilliance, wit, and agility. So, naturally, when we were assigned a term paper in Hamden High history class on a man of the last century I chose Churchill.

Two weeks ago when I heard the 'old man' was in Florida I devised a plan to get down there to see him. I called the press to find out where he was, how long he’d be there, and how I could get there. I looked in the personal ads for someone who wanted to share expenses on a journey to Fla. I was then pleasantly surprised by the Associated press who informed me that Churchill would come from Fla. and dock in New York Wednesday the 12th and fly to England the same day.

The weekend of the 8th I worked avidly around the neighborhood to earn train fare and expenses to New York.

At 6:50 Wednesday morning my mother dropped me at the New Haven Train Station. I was late and missed the 6:50 train to Grand Central Station. This turned out to be an advantage as a 7:05 train to Penn Station would get there half an hour earlier and would be closer to my destination.

At 8:30 I arrived in New York. I called radio station W.M.G.M. and asked for Dick Defrietas. He told me where Churchill’s boat would dock. I was told to go to the 79 th street Boat Basin. I hopped a cab with a Portuguese driver who had been driving for ten years. He said he didn’t know where the Boat Basin was so he shut his meter off for a couple of blocks until I found out from another cabby that the Basin was by Riverside Drive. I asked my cabby how much the fare would be and he said “. . . it’s forty blocks so it won’t be more than a buck.”. We drove for 30 blocks, no 28, and the meter hit $1.00. Quietly, the meter was shut off by my overly generous and kind cabby. I’ll never forget this. It was exceptionally kind of him and I gave him a 50[cent] tip.

From 79th street I walked across Riverside Drive to a wall. To the right of the wall, which overlooked the pier, I saw two men putting up a street sign. It read ‘Winston Churchill Drive’. I walked down the long curved steps and sat down on a bench facing the pier with a 125 ft. yacht, the Eda, tied up along side it. I asked two ladies sitting along side of me if Churchill had come ashore yet. The reply was no. When I told them I had come from New Haven to see Churchill, they were quite impressed. (to my surprise) One a widow in her fifties gave me a tangerine. Lucille the other widow of the same age gave me handful of candy.

For two hours we talked and became quite friendly. Twice I saw a heavy set bald man appear at the helm of the Eda. The second time I remarked to my new acquaintances that it looked like Churchill. Lucille laughed and agreed. So then astonished me by telling me that this wasn’t Aristotle Onassis yacht and consequently Churchill couldn’t be aboard it. I nearly fell over. Kitty then told me that Mr. “O’s” yacht the ‘Christina’ would steam up the Hudson.

In 45 minutes the police began to congregate around the pier. After I had bid farewell to my lady friends I stationed my self at the entrance to the pier at the street side. Only cameramen, reporters, and officials could venture to the end of the pier. Soon a fireboat came up the Hudson with a huge spray going. The 325 ft. yacht of shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis, the Christina, followed 10,000 yards behind.

Unfortunately Churchill was asleep below and missed the official New York City welcome. Police launches took the reporters out to the middle of the Hudson where the Christina was anchored. They were not allowed aboard but just circled the ship to take pictures. Churchill, aided by nurses, came on board the deck and was seated. He posed for pictures with his famous V for Victory sign and then went below.

As I waited on pier, a lady came up to me with a 22 year old daughter and whispered “I don’t want to say anything but I have the official word that he’s coming ashore at this spot.” I asked the cop to corroborate her story but he said that Sir Winston would not come ashore until tomorrow (Thursday) morning. My heart sank. I had only enough money to, I thought, stay one day. I had already bought my round trip ticket. At that moment my mind began to form a counter plan.

Later another lady came up to the dock. She was a 70 year old spinster with plenty of time on her hands. She talked to everyone. As an important name came up she ‘knew him, had met him, was a friend of him, was related to him.’ Although I’m not an expert on these things it seems to me that 70 years wouldn’t have been long enough for her to meet all the people she said she had met.

We talked and she said she was a native of New Haven. I told her I was from there and she was astonished and delighted. She thought it was a shame I had come all this way to be disappointed. I mentioned to her that my late Uncle, Harold G. Stagg, Editor of the Army, Navy Airforce Times, was a friend of [U.N. Ambassador Adlai E.] Stevenson. She suggested that I call his office and mention my relation and predicament and see if he couldn’t do anything toward getting me aboard to see Churchill. I tried this and while I was on the phone Stevenson came on board the ship. The lady had kindly mentioned my Uncle and my situation but before Stevenson could reply he was engulfed in a circle of reporters.

I came back to the pier and it was 1 p.m. I waited for three hours. Stevenson came ashore, recorded for the reporters and came toward me. I shook hands with him, mentioned my Uncles name, and my situation. He spoke hurriedly to me and nothing concrete resulted. We parted.

(U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson returning from visit with Churchill on the Christina, before the gale blew in)

I went over to the mobile unit and listened to the interview Stevenson had given.

Speaking to my eccentric lady friend, after that, I told her of my plan to stand by the pier all night, with the intent of seeing Churchill the next day as he debarked. She told me it was supposed to pour all that night and that I’d die of pneumonia. Later I called my mother and told her there was a boat house by the pier that I’d sleep in all night. (That was abit of a white lie) She very hesitantly agreed and before she could retract her decision I bid her farewell.

I went up Broadway, had dinner, bought a two dollar rain coat, and went back to the pier. I waited by the pier and became acquainted with Onassis American representative [ J. Peter Grace] who sympathized with my cause.

About eight o’clock Bernard Baruch came on board the ship. I was immensely impressed with his stature. At 90 he was standing straight as a board, was sure footed, and patient with reporters.

At 9 oclock one of Sir Winstons nurses came ashore. I rescued her from a reporter who was nagging her about an autographed picture of Sir Winston.

I told her of my own situation and she sympathized. She went on board one of the crisscraft and in 5 minutes came ashore. She gave me a special Churchill cigar, a note Sir Winston had written [on House of Commons stationery], and some matches from the ship Christina. I will never forget her generosity. She said she hoped this would make up for some of the time I had spent. She then went back on the Christina.

[ Forty years later I read that Churchill prepared and carried such notes with him precisely for such instances, because as a child his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had refused to sign autographs for Churchill’s own school chums. The note in his handwriting read: "Thank you so much for your kind message. It gave me much pleasure. Winston S. Churchill" Artfully ambiguous for all occasions!]

It was pouring now. I got to talking with the Greek pilot of the ship who could speak English. He invited me aboard the crisscraft while it rained. At 945 he and I went up on the pier. A telegraph messenger handed me a telegram from the President of the United States to Sir Winston. I gave it to Johnny who signed for it. It was then taken to the ship.

At 11 oclock Baruch came ashore. I shook his hand and we talked cordially. I asked him how the old man was and he said “He’s still a teenager in my book.” [Churchill was 86 in 1961; Baruch 90]

At 12 oclock the nurse, Muriel Thompson, and Onassis Am. Agent, and Churchill Private Secretary, Antony Montigue Brown came ashore. Montigue Brown left. The agent and his wife gave Muriel and me a lift (in a Cadillac limousine) up Broadway for coffee. [I later learned the “agent” was J. Peter Grace, president of W.R. Grace Steamship Lines]

We talked for about two hours about her life with Churchill and other aspects of her career. I must say it was a thrill to be so close to someone who was so close to greatness. Churchills handkerchief was given to me by her at this time. In England Churchills laundry mark is no. 20. [Miss Thompson showed me hypodermic needles she carried with her at all times which she injected directly into Churchill’s heart in a cardiac crisis. I did not feel I could reveal this information when I was 16 years old. Oh, the days when privacy reigned!]

We walked down Broadway in pouring rain and 70 m.p.h. winds[youthful exaggeration?] for 15 minutes looking for a police car. Finally we hailed one. I told them it was Sir Winstons nurse and we’d like to get back to the ship. We were immediately brought there.

We looked for a crisscraft to take us to the yacht. Only one was there and it was waiting for Onassis and couldn’t leave. The rain was to[o] hard to wait. So we woke up the men in a police launch and they took us out. As we approached the side of the Christina a quick current caught the launch and our mast smas[h]ed in to the Christinas flag pole. Then one of the engines conked out. The current carried us and half of Onassis flagpole down the Hudson. $250 worth of damage was done. Finally we got Muriel aboard.

All the way back the men grumbled and cursed ‘…this what happens when you try to do someone a favor.” I told them apologetically that I threw no weight around here but that I would intercede with Muriel in the hopes that she had some influence over Mr. “O”. After all he pays $4400 a day to keep his ship running so what’s a mere $250 to a man like that? [What gall I had. I didn’t have a chance in hell of interceding with Muriel Thompson!]

I walked up to Broadway in a pouring rain coupled with gale force winds. I had no idea where I’d go or what I’d do. Finally I went to a subway station and took a jaunt. I went from 108th street to Brooklyn at least 15 times that night. At 5:30 I went to Pennsylvania Station and tried unsuccessfully to get a couple of hours sleep.

At seven I walked down Broadway in 70 m.p.h. winds [this is the second time I wrote this: maybe it is accurate!] and a combination of every type of precipitation known to man. With my last 12 [cents] I had a cup of hot chocolate and then went to the pier.

I stayed with the reporters until noon and watched tugboats and crisscraft make several attempts to get near the Christina. At last they gave up and Montigue-Brown announced the delay of Sir Winston’s disembarkment by 24 hours.

I was disgusted and exhausted and I went home. I ate dinner and talked to my Uncle, Charles Crook a Hamden pharmacist, who agreed to refinance my return trip to New York.

I was overjoyed. I took a hot bath and went to bed at eight oclock that night.

However, if it hadn’t been for my mother I never would have returned to New York. Something awoke her at three that morning. Then she woke me from a VanWinkle slumber at five. If she hadn’t I would have missed the train. I took the 6:05 and was in New York at 7:30. I hopped a cab and payed $1.50 fare to the boat basin. I ran down to the pier and nearly had triple heart attacks. The yacht was no where in sight.

I ran up Riverside Drive and tried to hale a taxi for ten minutes. When I finally got one who knew where the boat was and took me there. I gave the cabby a buck for a 65 cent fare and asked for the change. He said no so I let it go.

I nonchalantly walked by the security guards right up to the gangplank. I waved to my Greek sailor friends and saw Aristotle Onassis.

In 15 minutes Churchill was assisted off. Everyone cheered and I was within a foot of him. He got in the limousine and I talked to the nurse. She had asked him to shake hands with me but she was so far behind him she couldn’t point me out. I bid her a fond farewell.

I ran up to the Churchill limousine, pushed my head through the bulwark of police, and with a beaming smile gave the ‘Old Man’ his famous V for Victory sign. With a nod and a chuckle he flashed it right back to me.

Right then and there all my efforts were rewarded. It was the crowning joy of my sixteen years on this earth.

TEXT of HAMDEN HIGH SCHOOL SCROLL presented to Sir Winston Churchill by the U.S. Ambassador to Britain:

This, Mr. Churchill, is a manifestation of the sentiment of a representative segment of the youth of America. This document, in recognition of your American citizenship, should not grant to us the opportunity to beam with foresight, but rather to capture for ourselves the spirit of freedom which you have indeed perpetuated with such valor and dignity. Accept, fellow citizen, our congratulations. Prosper then, with the ideals you have sustained and vitalized.

(Note: Scroll on parchment rendered in script by Crimilda Pontes, scribe for Yale University Press.
Text of scroll composed by student Raul Ponce de Leon, Class of 1963, Hamden High School.)
____________________________________________________________________________________/ >

* Thirty-five Years

2012-01-09T19:17:00.009-05:00

Are we all agreed then: Psychology was a mistake?

In November 1977, my friend, and fellow Yale Divinity School student, Carol Brock Hartman (M. Div. '80) invited me to see the one-man performance at The Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, of Quentin Crisp, the famous British transvestite, entitled The Naked Civil Servant, after the title of his autobiography. We both were so enthusiastic about the performance of this then 71 year old actor/author that we decided to shake up the over-starched Divines at YDS a bit by inviting Quentin Crisp to speak at the Divinity School.

To our surprise, he accepted.

He delivered his talk with coiffed purple hair beneath his trademark wide brimmed hat, and with brightly polished fingernails. The Divines boycotted the event but about fifty people attended, including, several psychology faculty. The psychology invited him to participate in an interview on the nature of transvestitism.

He agreed.
A most obliging gentleman was he.
Here are some of the quotes from that talk.

"CRISPERANTO"

He began his talk with this non-sequitur which drew a big laugh from the audience:

Are we all agreed then: Psychology was a mistake?
Someone may be a homosexual for part of his life, or have homosexual feelings for only one person in his life. Fifty years ago if someone asked me, Are you a homosexual? I would say passionately, "Oh yes! YES!" Now I say, "Not today, thank you."
I have never known what it is not to be laughed at. My brothers and sisters laughed at me when I was a child and so on. There comes a point in one's life when you find out what it is that causes their laughter and then you take it into yourself and exaggerate it, thereby making the joke your own, not others'.
I never wanted to leave home. When my brothers were wishing to be great things like ships' captains, I wanted to be a chronic invalid. And I was good at it!
I never wanted to play boy's games. And the primary reason is that i simply didn't want to get hurt.
I have accepted the eternal disgrace of being someone who does not have an intimate relationship.
I am married to the world . . . When I go out in public it requires so much of my energy and self that when I come home I need to be alone. people ask, "What do you do when you're home?" and I say,"Nothing." "Oh, but surely you read," they say. "No, I do nothing. Sometimes I just sit for an hour without moving. I cannot even recall my thoughts during that hour."
There was no 'choice' involved. My deformity required that I be the way I am. I have never really known what it was to be a person. I have always felt I was someone imitating a person.
I did it for my self, first of all, not for others. I wanted to give total expression to the feminine part of my personality.
It is the feminine part of my personality, not homosexuality, that is important to me. If I had to make a choice I could have easily been celibate rather than give up expressing the feminine in myself.
Even now I don't have 'conversations' with people: I give 'interviews!' The taxi driver doesn't talk about the weather with me, he says, "I know YOU!"
For years I was a total outcast. Now I am a fashion. I have never been just a person. Perhaps when this passes, I will be just an old man nobody remembers.
If by"God" you mean the organizing principle of the universe, then yes I accept that. But I cannot believe in a God susceptible to prayer, to petition: A God concerned with Western nations, white races and primarily among them 'men.'
"You-Know-Who" [Mr. Crisp's euphemism for God]

______________________________________________________________
OBITUARY

Photo: AP

* Twenty-five Years

2012-01-08T19:24:00.011-05:00

Irene O’Malley, Mother
1949-1987

I don’t know what to do with your death, Irene. It would be easy to stay in the anger: A young mother of four, wiped-out by a drunk driver, himself twenty-five and killed.

You and I used to debate the rules of life when we shared Carol’s 200-year-old, red farmhouse in South Royalton with your kids, Carol and her little boy. We both knew those rules are unfair, or, at best, random.

You, more than most people, knew who you were, Irene. You knew your power: Motherhood; creation ; nurturing. Your whole graceful body swayed gently with the message of your twinkling eyes: “All is well, Earth Mother is at work.”

And your work itself was motherhood. Nurse at the birthing center of a small hospital two towns over, you smiled calmly at the mystery of pain and blood by which Nature makes one into two, makes us each into the legacy of motherhood.

From that red farmhouse, and then from your own house on Windsor hill, you made your own children the special beneficiaries of that brimming motherliness with which Nature flooded you. Your little station-wagon, with baby-seat, was crammed with fishing rods, balls and bats and gloves, sled, skates and skis, depending on the season; a dozen bags of groceries and junk food, depending on the day; and some, or all, of your frolicking, boisterous brood (Patrick, Jonah, Jessica, Sarah), depending on the mother’s mission.
That little buggy seemed to wheel so gently, so naturally over the winding roads of our breasty Vermont. When I would see you drive past I would feel something special was Right in our little town: That Mother, that Nature, was at work.

You were not a silk and satin mother, Irene, even though you were softness and grace itself. You got under the car and changed the oil. You hauled bales of children’s clothes to the washer and bales of hay to the barn. In winter you thwarted frozen trough by hauling water in gallon jugs to the horses every day. If the electricity went out, you lit candles and made a game of coping with ten dark rooms and three staircases. You stoked a wood fire with the best of them, and all this with a smile and those twinkling eyes. Even in moments of exasperation your severest epithet loosed upon the world came out “Fiddlesticks!”

If dinner dishes didn’t get done it was because you knew what was more important: Cuddling on the couch with Patrick; fishing for Jonah; a drive to a friend’s for Jessica; or ice-cream down-street for everyone! Let’s go!

Dishes could wait till the kids went to bed. Dishes didn’t need a mother.

You’d sleep for an hour or so after the kids went to bed before you headed for the hospital a 10:30. You’d drive home in the morning at seven, get the kids fed and dressed and off to school and day-care, then –dog tired –you’d do your errands at the Post Office and bank, bidding the tellers good morning by announcing, “Good night, ladies, I’m going home to bed.”

When I came to live with you and Carol and the kids in the winter of ’85 the snow was a foot deep and the temperature below zero in South Royalton. I was recovering from watching life and death pumped into my mother in an Oregon Intensive Care Unit for four months, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was think about hospitals. For me they were places of sickness and death.

You changed that. Birth, birth, birth; bringing forth, issuing into fullness ---these were the offices of your life, these were the beats of your heart.

Once I saw you pluck some lifeless thorns and grasses from the roadside and transform them into an elegant centerpiece for the big, varnished cable-spool we used as a round kitchen table in the red house.

Irene, you have been ripped up on the roadside and I could stay in the anger.

I could.

But anger would poison your legacy: Anger shrinks. Anger dries. Anger shrivels and starves. For you to live now, Irene, we must let you be born of this world’s blood and pain into the message of your new life in us: “All is well, mothering spirit is at work.”

With Love,

Paul

Paul Keane
Master of Divinity
Yale University

Class of 1980

South Royalton, Vermont
November 2, 1987

* Dog Due

2012-01-07T18:48:00.007-05:00

The development of breed standards in the late nineteenth century was an explicit attempt to give dog show judges a basis for awarding places. It was an implicit attempt to create dog fancy as a sort of connoisseurship in which extremely fine points bore great significance to those in the know. There is of course a certain phoniness to any sort of connoisseurship, whether it is in wine tasting or the cultivated admiration of fine painting, but the highly arbitrary nature of dog breed standards --- and their tendency to change every few years --- carried with it the frank implication that this was phonier, or at least more arbitrary, than most.
(p.223)

The Truth About Dogs

by

Stephen Budiansky

* "Violence Against the Past": Baldacchino Barbarism

2012-01-05T05:30:00.005-05:00

The Empire Strikes Back :

Rome and Us

Adam Kirsch

The New Yorker, January 9, 2012

"For Hughes, [Robert Hughes, author of Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History] the most glorious example of such Christian reconstruction came in the seventeenth century, when Gian Lorenzo Bernini was given permission to strip the bronze cladding off the Pantheon's portico, in order to melt it down for the majestic baldacchino in St. Peter's. This, too, was a kind of violence ---a violence against the past, committed in the name of a present that believed itself more authentic, more powerful, even than the Roman Empire." (p.74)

"Indeed, the physical fabric of Rome is perhaps the best example of Walter Benjamin's dictum 'There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.' " (p. 74)

"But today, in a post-9/11, recession-battered country, what transfixes the imagination of American writers is the end of the Empire --- the "decline and fall" --- that Edward Gibbon made the central moral of the whole Roman experience." (p.68)

* Nice doggie.

2012-01-03T20:21:00.004-05:00

"The best advice I ever received for how to react if a predatorily aggressive dog like a pit bull goes after you is just to ram your whole arm down his throat and hope he chokes to death: better that he gets your arm than your throat." ( p. 210)

The Truth About Dogs

by Stephen Budiansky.

* Feline Prostration: The Catican, Rome

2012-01-02T21:21:00.018-05:00

cat,

Solstice,

prostrates herself five times a day

over the dogs' enormous water bowl,

always genuflecting

toward

St. Feline's Basilica,

Catican City,

Rome.

* JAMIE: Yale's "Signor Gonorrhoea," XVII

2012-01-02T12:29:00.102-05:00

Remains of 14th Century Auchinleck Castle

Boswell's family estate, Auchinleck House; edifice replaced, 18th Century

Young James Boswell circa 1760, future 9th Laird of Auchinleck

How the Mighty are Fallen

Fifteen years after James Boswell's death in 1795 from venereal disease and alcoholism at age 55 in London, an American preacher would write a sermon against the sin of dueling, after the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, killed Alexander Hamilton, in an instance of that testosterone-laden barbaric practice of ritualized murder among males who feel their honor to have been damaged: The duel.

He entitled his sermon,

"How are the Mighty Fallen!" 2 Samuel 1:27

The collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library of the papers of James Boswell, author of what is universally acknowledged as the greatest biography of all time, The Life of Samuel Johnson, contains a manuscript which was not discovered until more than a century after Boswell's 1795 death. The previously unknown mansucript London Journal 1762-1763 was not published until 1950, and then courageously by Yale, unsanitized, despite the intervening reign of prudery of the British philanthropist and censor, Dr. Thomas Bowdler ------ a prudery which it fortuitously escaped by being lost for 120 years.

Cutaway of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library

On the first page of this racy two-year journal (1762-1763) the twenty-two year old future Lord of Auchinleck in Scotland, writes from London, where he has escaped the leash of his domineering parents, that he intends to write honestly and frankly in his journal, after his cousin, Andrew Erskine, assures him there is no danger of self-incrimination since "I fancy you will not set down your robberies on the highway, or the murders that you commit." (p.40)

Very soon thereafter, we are treated to proof of Boswell's candor up to Erskine's hypothetical boundary of crimes: "I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into the court with intention to enjoy her in armour [prophylactic sheath]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size and said if I ever had a girl's maidenhead, I would make her squeak." (p. 49+)

Foolishly, he falls in love with an actress, to whom he gives the pseudonym "Louisa"in his journal, and who Lust leads him to believe is a lady.

Indeed, she is sympathetic when he appears to be impotent after failing to "make a triumphal entry" : She philosophizes kindly, albeit euphemistically, "'People cannot always command their spirits.' " (p.116).

At this time in his youthful life in London, he is socializing with the actor Garrick and the writers Sheridan and Goldsmith. He has not yet met Dr. Johnson. He has made a pledge to Sheridan about gambling at cards "not to play for five years" (p 127) betraying one facet of the compulsions which will retire him to what, for us moderns, is an early grave, at 55. He is a man of his word, however, and is often the only member of Lady Northumberland's guests who does not sit at table and play cards, making him a bit socially awkward. Pity he did not make similar pledges about alcohol and promiscuity as he did to Sheriden about gambling.

JAN. 12 1863:

After finally arranging a night alone with Louisa, he writes, "A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times I was fairly lost in supreme rapture . . Thus was this conquest completed to my highest satisfaction." (pp. 139-41) On another occasion soon thereafter, "I strutted up and own, considering myself as a valiant man who could gratify a lady's loving five times in a night . . ." (p. 142)

On his next liaison with Louisa he "felt his passion for Louisa much gone. I felt a degree of coldness for her and I observed an affectation about her which disgusted me. I had a strong proof of my own inconstancy of disposition, and I considered that any woman who married me must be miserable."( p.145)

So much for the vanishing Venus.

Six days after his January 12th victory Boswell writes " I this day began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil: a little heat in the members of my body sacred to Cupid, very like a symptom of that distemper with which Venus, when cross, takes it into her head to plague her votaries."

On January 19th, "I felt the symptoms increase , which was very confounding and very distressing to me." (.153)

That evening " Jamie" (the name his cousin Erskine calls Boswell) attends the theatre and then has a warm supper at Lady Betty's.

" The evening was passed most cheerfully . . . When I got home, though, then came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea." By Thursday, January 20th "I rose, very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. What ! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled? Can corruption lodge beneath so fair a form? Can she who professed delicacy of sentiment and sincere regard for me, use me so very basely and so very cruelly? No, it is impossible. I have just got a gleet by iritating the parts too much with excessive venery. And yet these damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter are the strongest proofs of an infection." (p.155+)

Poor Jamie.

He spends five weeks housebound, as we moderns say, taking the cure. Then, after confronting the good Louisa, his pistress, (freudian typo?), he proceeds in ensuing days to take four or five other street women 'for concubinage.'

On February 20th he reflects "What I am most anxious about is to get it entirely eradicated, that I may recover perfect soundness of constitution and may not bring a race of poor, sickly human beings into the world" (p. 197) He dies 32-years later having brought five legitimate and two illegitimate children into the world.

Wikipedia notes that Boswell, who died of alcoholism and venereal disease, contracted gonnorhea "seventeen times" in his life.

In 1793 at the age of 53, , two years before his death, the, by-then, 9th Laird of Auchinleck writes his close friend, Temple, that he had been drinking and been robbed "The robbery is only a few schillings; but the cut on my head and the bruises on my arms were sad things, and confined me to bed in pain, and fever, and helplessness, as a child, many days . . . This shall be a crisis in my life: I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man indeed, my indulgence in wine has, of late years especially, been excessive . . . " (kindle 140-143) Preface: Boswell and Erskine's Letters

(How the mighty are fallen.)

But to return to the beginning of great things:

On May 16th, 1763 , when Jamie first meets Dr. Johnson, we can be sure from his previous scrupulous self-honesty that we are reading a writer who pens the truth. Here are his first words about the man whose life he was to immortalize over the next three decades:

"Mr. Johnson is a man of most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king's evil. [ That is, bears the scars of scrofula. What Boswell calls palsy was rather a number of convulsive tics] (p. 260+)

Johnson and Boswell would remain friends for the next twenty-one years until 1784.

On December 13 of that year, at the age of 73, Johnson died after "seizing a knife" and stabbing his own leg to relieve swelling.

(How the mighty are fallen.)

"It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes." Samuel Johnson

______________________________________________________________

Bibliography

http://books.google.com/books?id=C6dd3DSM2FYC&dq=isbn:0300093012

* Springtime for Wagner and Israel

2012-01-01T20:06:00.039-05:00

I'm all for sticking to your guns.

For decades Israeli orchestras have refused to play a note of Wagner on Israeli soil on the principled proposition that Wagner was an anti-Semite and that Hitler admired his music and even used it in juicing up his maddened crowds into Sieg Heil allegiance and formation. In 2011 however an ensemble from an Israeli orchestra played a Wagner piece at the Bayreuth Festival, a world celebrated musical venue dedicated to the works of Wagner and run,until recently, by his genetic heirs.

I think the Bayreuth Israelis have got it right: Stick to your guns but stop pointing them at yourselves.

Why ignore the Bible simply because it was composed by writers who didn't blink at those who kept slaves and was, 1500 years later, manipulated to excuse and justify slavery itself?

If Harriet Beecher Stowe had decided to boycott references to the Bible when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the White House might have actual slaves in it today instead of the great-great- grand-daughter of emancipated slaves presiding as First Lady of the Land.

Why deny your ears the beauty of the overture to Tannhäuser or the the entrance of the Gods' into Valhalla in The Ring, simply because the genius who wrote it had despicable prejudices which were broadcast by a megalomaniac to justify the murder of six million Jews?

Better to study the music to see what in it fanned the fires of Hitler's megalomania, than to ignore the embers that might still be burning around the world.

Know thine enemy.

Besides, Anna Russell, below, has made a howling satire out of Wagner's The Ring which no civilized person should pass up.

Said about Tannhäuser

Mark Twain

I saw the last act of "Tannhäuser." I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.

Mark Twain in a Travel letter from Bayreuth

* Happy Hair-Brained New Year 2012

2011-12-31T19:04:00.038-05:00

I have had this little chart from Health magazine entitled "WHAT A BODY'S GOOD FOR" on my refrigerator since 1993, for no particular reason other than it amuses me.

One of its statistics is that a human body in its lifetime will produce 350 miles of hair. Let's assume that 50 million of the current 300 million Americans will live long enough to produce 350 miles of hair. That means that somewhere on the planet there will be 1,750 MILLION MILES of hair some time in the next 100 years.

If the circumference of the earth is about 25,000 miles, then there would be enough hair in a 17,500 million mile glistening strand to wrap the earth into a giant hairball.

I have one question only, about all this hair Nature produces--- and it isn't "Why?"

It's about ultimate destination:

A hundred million miles of hair?

Where?

HAPPY NEW YEAR !

* 2012: THE UNCHANGEABLES

2011-12-30T21:19:00.007-05:00

"He Sits at Home" is my Vermont Identity, not my Name !

2011-12-25T16:24:00.024-05:00

Driving the T-Top Z-28

http://www.theentertainingelf.com/native-american-name

He DOES Sit at Home !

After the Twin Towers' crashes and Sully Sullenberger's miraculous water-ski episode on the Hudson River with a Boeing-747, I decided never to get on a plane again. Besides, the extra- fees for baggage and incidentals are extortion.

I am happy to sit at home as my Native American name declares.

(BTW, my great-great-great grandmother was a Pequot squaw, if that legitimizes my using a Native American name.)

I'm one of the few surviving members of the hippie generation who can say he hitchhiked across country ------- 1971 to be exact -------- from Connecticut to California, and back.

Yes, more than happy to sit at home. And that goes for driving too.

I have a brand new car, and zero desire to drive it any more than just around town. For ten years I commuted two weekends a month between White River Junction and New Haven and White River Junction and Ithaca. I've paid the salaries of a few oil executives and I'm done with it.

(Probably my total lifetime gas expenditures would pay half of ONE HOUR of an oil company CEO's pay, if that much.)

Is it because I'm old that I've given up being peripatetic?

No.

It's because I'm stingy.

PS
I'm not exactly sedentary: I push a lawnmower 6 hours a week and shovel snow 2 hours at a time.

* I'm Old and I'm Proud !

2011-12-25T09:50:00.025-05:00

Heading White

DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS

Don't gimme any of this "You're as old as you feel" stuff.

I feel great, still work 10 hours a day, have my hair and most of my teeth and a gargantuan appetite, but in three days I'll turn 67----and that just seems OLD to me, a lot older than 66 for some reason.

I love the side shots of Judge Judy's botox-enamel face on TV . When she moves her mouth all the folds in that wrinkle-free face suddenly aggegate between her ear and her jaw, like a hand-opened curtain at the Met.

I once read that Marlene Dietrich refused to have plastic surgery. Instead, before she appeared on stage in her late 60's, she would have her hair tied back in excruciatingly tight knots to pull the facial wrinkles smooth, then don her famous golden wig and skin tight, elastic, sequinned gown.

And then there's Donald Trump's hair. What can I say? It's as neat as folded , hundred-dollar bills. And butterscotch too.

Me?

I'm satisfied with the wrinkles and with the graying hair.

I just wish it would hurry up.

This has been a ten-year process. (I used to have chestnut hair with red highlights.) First my beard grayed, then my hair.

I once tried Just for Men on my beard and wound up with a facial rash----to say nothing of looking like a foolish vain man who died (pun intended) his beard.

Let's speed this up.

I'm looking forward to the white.

Christmas, 2011

Chestnut

Graying

* Rudolph the Red

2011-12-24T22:56:00.016-05:00

HAPPY HOLIDAY !

12/25/11

* Away in a castle, no hay for his bed . . .

2011-12-24T02:07:00.048-05:00

The Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California

The Baldacchino, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

Westminster Abbey, London

THE MONARCHY IMPULSE

In having the King of Kings born in a stable, enter Jerusalem on a white ass, and be nailed to a cross wearing a crown of thorns, the myth-makers of the Manger-Religion of the first century were consciously satirizing the very materialism and worldly glory which christian monarchists have themselves come to embody over two millenia, whether they preside under European Baldacchinos or Abbeys or American Crystal Cathedrals.

It is ironic that as the Manger-Religion has poisoned itself with the trappings of the very aristocratic power structures it sought to satirize and critique, the world has in the last hundred years divested itself of over 100 monarchies, leaving two or three as vestigial reminders of an Age gone by. That is not to say that secular tyrants have not rushed in to fill the void which the dwindling forces of the Divine Right of Kings and primogeniture once occupied. From Mugabe to the fallen idols of the Arab Spring, Khadafy and Mubarak, such tyrants have managed to swindle the masses not with royal blood, but with royal rhetoric---and royal bullets.

Had the Manger-Religion remained it bucolic model and not become the grotesquely golden Holy Roman Empire and Anglican British Empire proselytizing behind the missionary mask as it slaughtered those who refused to submit to their powers, perhaps it would not have generated the egalitarian tide which has gradually risen to engulf the monarchies of the world.

Yes, the Manger-Religion, and its grotesque medieval outgrowths, have created a tension between the egalitarian revolution begun in Bethlehem and the monarchical monstrosities in Rome and Britain which sought to smother that revolution. From that tension a new “Purified” religious- freedom revolution in America has devolved into another monstrosity, the monarchy of materialism itself.

And now, in the third millenia of 2012, we watch with caution as this egalitarian impulse, once symbolized in the mythology of a barnyard prince born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago and thrice perverted in Rome, Britain and America, works its way through an Arab Spring, in yet another religion which too may lose its egalitarian way to monarchical fantasies.

Paul D. M. Keane

M. Div. '80, Yale Divinity School

Christmas, 2011