* Rocking-horse winner, pass by!

Endlessly Rocking in the Teleological Tide. . .



Sitting across a restaurant table from Thornton Wilder in The Old Heidelburg in New Haven was like sitting across from Halley's Comet, chained to a chair. (see http://wilder1985.blogspot.com/)

And that was when he was 78, only months before his death in 1975. Imagine what he was like when he was young!

Now that I am pushing the years further and further and have looked death straight in the eye myself, I understand what Thornton Wilder was doing, not only for himself, but for those around him: He was defying oblivion, "out of the cradle endlessly rocking". (He once said, "It is the duty of the old to lie to the young.")

In case you have any doubt that the author of Our Town believed in personal -- indeed humanity's --oblivion, consider these words about his attraction (at 78) to the writing of Claude Levi-Strauss:words from The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by Gilbert Harrison:

". . . he continued writing hours each day, and with faltering eyesight reread Goethe's converstaions with Eckermann, Madame de Sevigne's letters, Trollope's Barchester Chronicles, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle('spledid'), Boswell's London Journal ('a little Scotch puppy and how he grew') and, most stimulating, the social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss whose thought in The Naked Man paralleled his own. "Man has to live and struggle,think, believe and above all preserve his courage,' wrote Levi-Strauss ' although he can never at any moment lose sight of the opposite certainty that he was not present on earth in former times, that he will not always be here in the future and that, with his inevitable disappearance from the surface of the planet which is itself doomed to die, his sorrows, his joys, his hopes, his works will be as if they never existed'" (Harrison, p.373)

Four years earlier, at age 74, Wilder had written an aging, ill friend:

"I -- and Goethe -- acknowledge a God but we don't anthropomorphize him. We call him die Natur and we know He, She, It embraces this vast process and has fashioned it with a million marvelous smaller processes which betray an intense concern for how the whole thing works --- a concern that much resembles love. All Nature strives to bring every detail to its truest expression of its function. All Nature is working for you. Rise above immediate things and feel that. Float in the teleological tide." (Harrison, p. 371)

How can the "teleological tide" be reconciled with the planet and humanity's "inevitable disappearance"?

It can't.

But as Bertrand Russell says (somewhere): Just because the human mind is structured to search for cause-and-effect, does not mean that the universe operates in cause-and-effect.

Just as Nature may make quantum leaps, so too may the human mind.

Wilder's, floating in the teleological tide as opposed to swimming with it
(Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"?) or against it (Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night") may actually be the ultimate religious adjustment to the certain uncertainty of extinction (to crudely reword Hamlet).


Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Rocking-horse winner, pass by!

* Empty Manger; Empty Tomb

Christmas Eve, 2009



I was named after my parents' youth minister, Douglas Clyde Macintosh*. My parents came from the "poor section" of New Haven, Connecticut. Macintosh was a professor in that city at Yale Divinity School for 40 years. One of his books (Social Religion) had a preposterous proposition: Even if the Jesus of history never existed, the validity of Christianity would remain intact.

Pretty radical: Christianity without Jesus; Christmas without a manger; Easter without a cross; death without a Resurrection.

My own average citizen interpretation of this is, that if you susbstituted the word Forgiveness with a capital "F" for the word Christ, the religion would mean exactly the same: Forgiveness is my personal Savior(saves me from the hell of Self); Forgiveness promises me victory over death (saves me from fear of Eternal Judgment; because every time I refuse to judge --indeed I forgive --others, I build faith in a judgement-free Eternity); Forgiveness cleanses my soul (where resentment and fear were, there shall serenity be).

Admittedly, this is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Christianity; but, then, I believe all religion is an imagistic, metaphoric form of primitive psychiatry emerging from the collective unconscious.

Our difficulty as inheritors of this primitive psychiatry is that we have turned the images and metaphors ( Father, virgin, manger, savior, king, crucifixion, resurrection, eternal life, eternal damnation, etc.) into literalities instead of the cathartic symbols they are intended to be. We have made them ends, rather than means (or meanings).

Would living a life of forgiveness and sacrifice without a historical Jesus bullying us to do so, bring life everlasting, i.e. life undeterred, life uninterrupted ("EVER-lasting") by anxiety, fear,and the burden of self?

Is that all there is?

No Emerald City in the Sky?

Just, Peace?

Just?


Paul D.M. Keane
M.Div.'80
Yale Divinity School

* See September 11 post: "Macintosh Chalice donated to Yale Law School"

* "People were meant to go through life two by two."

So, what are we going to do about the problem of Thornton Wilder's sexuality?

Nothing.

It's his business, not ours. And besides, he's dead.

He can't comment and nothing anyone else says can be verified.

The one thing we can say for sure is that he once asked the actress Ruth Gordon to marry him. At least that's what she said in her eulogy for Thornton Wilder at Yale's Battell Chapel in 1976. She had been spurned by a suitor, she revealed, and Wilder felt so bad for her that he asked her to marry him instead. She said, "Thornton thought somebody ought to marry me," if I recall the text correctly.

Thornton Wilder and his sister Isabel never married. They were lifelong companions and housemates. He died at 78 in 1975; she at 95 in 1995. In fact, one Yale Ph.D. in literature, John D. Ogden, told me that "Not since Dorothy and William Wordsworth has there been a brother /sister literary team like Isabel and Thornton Wilder."

For a man who never went through a wedding ceremony, he choreographed a wedding which may have been staged a million times over the last 71 years, if you count high school performances of Our Town. And since Thornton Wilder often took the Stagemanager part himself (and therefore the minister's part) he has performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of wedding ceremonies too.

I am interested in Wilder's technique of 'elevating to the universal' as I call it, in Our Town.

Instead of having Mrs. Gibbs consent to George and Emily's marriage by saying, Yes . . . people are meant to go through life as husband and wife" Wilder has her say "Yes . . . people are meant to go through life two by two" (Act II) and later instead of having the minister aver the sanctity of the heterosexual couplet he has him echo Mrs. Gibbs again after establishing his credentials (and doubts):

"In this wedding I play the minister. That gives me the right to say a few more things about it. Y'see, some churches say that marriage is a sacrament . I don't quite know what that means but I can guess [heretical uncertainty for sure]. Like Mrs. Gibbs said a few minutes ago: People were made to live two by two." (Act II)

In other words, Wilder elevates marriage from the realm of gender identity (male/female; husband/wife) to the universal realm of "couples".

It could be ANY couples.

It is decidedly ambiguous. And my guess is that ambiguity is for a reason----and that reason AIN'T to validate gay marriage, a word and a concept unthought of in 1938 when Wilder wrote Our Town.

Let us for a moment violate our own opening declaration that Wilder's sexuality is none of our business, and assume that Gilbert Harrison is correct in his biography The Enthusiaist: A Life of Thornton Wilder that Wilder was homosexual but that his liaisons were brief and uncomfortable. Let us even assume further that as the child of strict 19th century parents and the brother of a Harvard theologian, Wilder felt it impossible to to discuss 'the love that dare not speak its name.' And let us also assume that Wilder's answer to his sister, Isabel, about her doubts about never having married, is true for himself: "It is good enough to be human."

Now, if we also assume regrettably the fashionable belief that Wilder was a secret or repressed homosexual, his elevation of marriage from a male/female realtionship to a "two by two" relationship becomes not only a subversive, egalitarian validation of all couplehood (including his own lifelong friendship and creative literary partnership with his sister) but a way for a man whose romantic interests might be those that "dare not" be spoken, to fully participate in the human drama.

Thus Wilder's theatrical needs and his human needs might both be satisfied by this elevation to the universal.

This interpretation will not satisfy the radical politically correct idealogues of our time who want to "out" the closet gay celebrities, including (they contend) Thornton Wilder.

Ironically, in their blind intolerance of Wilder's desire (need?) for the privacy of his own thoughts, the idealogues have overlooked the tremendous opportunity his line "two by two" has given them. In this genderless axiom is nothing less than a validation of all marriage, regardless of gender affinities.

Pity the radicals among the PC's.

They can't see their opportunity for their opportunism.

* Bart's Homeys

"All literature is about getting home" A. Bartlett Giamatti is reputed to have said, either as President of Yale, which he quit for a jock-job, or ,then, as Baseball Commissioner, which he died doing.

I supppose, if "home" means a "psychological state of ease (as opposed to dis-ease)", or "the void from which we emanated" he's right. Otherwise, Miller's Death of a Salesman and Whitman's "Oh Captain! My Captain!" are not about getting home. Well, maybe parts of them are and aren't simultaneously: a neat literary technique called paradox.

What about Emerson's Address to the Harvard Divinity Students or his American Scholar? Both are about rejecting the "home" of tradition and the past (Hebraic/Christian and the European influences) and creating a home anew. This isn't "getting" home, it is about "losing" home in order to find it: a premonitory Freudian theme.

And Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, 200 pages of drug induced, masturbatory imagery? That's more about "getting off" than "getting home", unless "home" means relief from reality by self induced hedonistic ecstacy.

I don't know. It's a nice phrase Bart, and it fits your baseball cap swell, but it ain't accurate.

It's more precise to say "All literature is about losing home," and that would fit baseball too, Bart. And maybe that's what you really meant: "All literature is about NOT getting home."

Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.


PS: And oh, by the way: Your prediction about the "athletization of life" has come true and is about to be institutionalized in our schools by the Jock of all Jocks, Arne Duncan, U.S. Commissioner of Education, who has decided that all U.S. schools should compete in a "race to the top". This is very interesting from a man who in a recent speech televised on C-Span, was unable to distingusih between "infer" and "imply", a distinction I learned in 11th grade. See post "The 4T's: Ignoring Yale Presidents and Savaging American Childhood" October 31st, this blog.

* Thornton Wilder's Empty Stage : Bye, Bye, American Pie[ty]

It is worth noting that I once asked Arthur Miller at a talk at Yale (circa 1979) "Why are the writings of Thornton Wilder ignored on college reading lists?" Miller thought for a moment and replied, "I think it is because in Wilder there is an insufficient sense of the tragic." That may have more to do with the projective needs of audiences than with Wilder , who admittedly, has been universally saccharinized (nutri-sweeted). Ironically, Wilder himself called for the American stage to celebrate "window-breaking ideas."














It intrigues me that literary critics and audiences ignore the heretical implications of a single line in the most performed play in the American theatre: "And what's left when memory 's gone and your identity, Mrs Smith?"

No--this is not a question about Altzheimer's disease posed kindly and reassuringly by her doctor to a newly diagnosed Mrs. Smith.

Mrs. Smith should be read: "average church-goer," or "average believer." And the questioner is not a kindly internist, but the Stagemanager in Our Town in the guise of the minister who has just delivered his long, eloquent discourse on "There's something way down deep that's eternal in every human being" with a crescendo of aint's: "It ain't" this and "it ain't" that -----until there's almost nothing left to be "ain'ted."

Now, when Hal Holbrook as the Stagemanager in the televised version of Our Town delivers the final line( "And what's left when memory's gone and your identity, Mrs. Smith") the medium of television permits him to make an actor's choice which would be totally lost on stage: Holbrook lifts his right eyebrow and stares into the camera in a moment of pregnant silence. Then, true to Wilder's concern that nothing in the cemetery scene be lugubrious, Holbrook smiles knowingly, even reassuringly, and moves on to introduce us to some "living people" at the Grover's Corners cemetery.

What is the import of that single line and single raised Holbrookian eyebrow?

Nothing less than a smiling recognition that Wilder is about to make the audience unwittingly swallow the biggest fish in the American theatre without even realizing they have been hooked: Emily is living in the afterlife (how reassuring to those of us who have been taught that afterlife means "survival of the personality"!) and is about to learn that her destiny in the afterlife is to be purged of her her-ness, her Mrs. Smith-ness, while she waits "for the eternal part in her to come out clear."

In other words, Emily is about to begin to be eradicated of identity--to become a Form like Plato's famous "Chair", a Form perhaps evoked by the folding chairs Wilder has directed in the current scene must serve as tombstones on stage.

This sweet little moment, staged now hundreds of thousands of times in the last 71 years, is thus nothing less than an assault on the notion of pie-in-the-sky afterlife, where angels reunite with loved ones and share old recollections of a geographical autobiography, located in a "person" who once lived in a "place" on a "planet ", perhaps a deceased Jane Crofut of "The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire;United States of America; . . .Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere;the Earth the Solar System;the Universe; the Mind of God".

That speck in the universe identified (and located) on the envelope addressed to Jane Crofut which Rebecca describes to her brother George Gibbs at end the of Act One of Our Town; that speck of personhood,whether living or dead, is ultimately in the Mind of God, not the mind of its own personality i.e. all of that chronologically accumulated artfice and claptrap which burns away until "the eternal part comes out clear".

Has not Thornton Wilder (himself the brother of a Harvard theologian), just pulled the rug out from under popular piety and left us all---actors and audience alike ---gazing at an empty stage?

The empty stage of the 20th Century in which "God is dead" (at least the anthropomorphic, omniscient,omnipotent, interventionist, score-keeper, God of the previous centuries)?

Or perhaps the empty stage of human existence itself (now that that michaelangeloic Deity reigning over a triple-decker-universe has been killed off by science)?

Oh no! Wilder is telling us how wonderful the afterlife is going to be!

Cut me a large slice of Denial Pie[ty], please.


Paul D. Keane






NB: Note too the final line of Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

" The ONLY survival [my emphasis]" can, similarly, certainly be read as nothing less than rejection of pie-in-the-skyism's 'survival of the personality'./em>>

FOR MORE on "survival of the personality" see December 12 post "Heavenly HTML..."

see also http://wilder1985.blogspot.com/

* A Dickens of a Holiday to You

* Tiger Woulds: The Ten Mirrors

Tiger Woulds


The Tiger Would or Tiger Wouldn't fall-from-grace-due-to-adultery drama , like the Governor Sanford drama, the Governor Spitzer drama, the President Clinton or the Vice President Rockefeller dramas, ad nauseum, reminds me that the Ten Commandments are not commandments because people OBEY them; they are commandments because people do NOT obey them.

Otherwise they'd be the Ten Suggestions or the Ten Training Exercises or maybe the Ten Rules to Stress - Free Living.

In fact, if you want a mirror (or ten mirrors) to hold up to actual human nature, read the Ten Commandments and invert them.

Instead of Thou shalt not kill (or murder) read the angry message behind the command: Thou dost kill!

Now go on from there and take your pick (below) of your favorite religion's version of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) and invert the commands to find out what's really going on in the world:





Exodus 20





Which Ten Commandments?

Protestant
Catholic
Hebrew

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

1. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.

1. I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.


2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

2. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

2. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; And showing mercy unto the thousandth generation of them that love Me and keep My commandments.


3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

3. Remember thou keep the Sabbath Day.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.


4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

4. Honor thy Father and thy Mother.

4. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath in honour of the Lord thy God; on it thou shalt not do any work, neither thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.


5. Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

5. Thou shalt not kill.

5. Honour thy father and thy mother; in order that thy days may be prolonged upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.


6. Thou shalt not kill.

6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

6. Thou shalt not kill.


7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

7. Thou shalt not steal.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.


8. Thou shalt not steal.

8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

8. Thou shalt not steal.


9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.


10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.