Say Something Obvious

The geometry of moonlight is triangular
Its pallid glow is whole, homogeneous and crisp,
never granular. Moon, mating with Sun
cries out like a bell, her rings are ecstatic and annular

Under a condensing cloud you’ll be singing in the rain
if you carry a tune while following your bliss
If it falls upon the skin of lovers it will hiss

We had a Harley once, too small to ride
to Champaign from N J, but we went anyway
Later, not even a kiss

The forearm muscles of the young,
their Palmaris Longus and Carpis Ulnaris,
are means to an end
they’re not there for show, but to work
In the old they sometimes give sharp hints
of what’s left to spend

Behind a blower in the snow
if the wind whips the plume just so
(colder bitter cheeks with every flake)
you may as well have been with Scott’s expedition
in Antarctica freezing in determination
dying from mistake

There’s good to be said for caution
and brashness too
…………………………….. reticence or passion
—you’ll only know which one was called for
when the day is through

.
by Jim Culleny
12/22/13

by Brooks Riley

It is difficult to talk about metaphors without talking in metaphors: Metaphors are birds, around us all the time, but unnoticed unless we take the time to look at them. Or, metaphors are apples on the tree of life, the fruits of our search for meaning. You get the idea.

Here’s a riddle: What can a human being see that no other creature on earth can see? A metaphor. We and the creatures all see the same objects, in the literal sense. But humans are able to see those objects as providers of meaning, a tree as a symbol for family or immutability. a puddle as a small inconvenience on the path of life. A pothole? Life is full of them in the metaphoric sense.

What are metaphors anyway except a parallel way of looking at things—like stepping into a second life to explain the first one.

Some people are happy just to beat a dead metaphor: ‘Life is a bowl of cherries’, ‘All the world’s a stage’, ‘No man is an island’ (not true!) or Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s exquisite ‘. . . life is a dream, and the dreams are dreams.‘ La vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. Others look for unexpected analogous connections in unusual places or events.

Some metaphors are so parasitic, they kill the host–so deeply imbedded into the language of certain events that they have lost their role as metaphor. In America we don’t ‘stand’ for office, we ‘run a race’ for it, hence the image of two candidates at the starting line, Obama in his track suit, Romney in a body stocking, in the distance a tiny White House. When you pry the metaphor out of the electoral process, there are not enough words to describe it.

For reasons having nothing to do with literary endeavor, I have been searching for metaphors. Unlike Brad Leithauser’s metaphor (in his recent, lovely piece in the New Yorker ‘Meet my metaphor’), which simply came to him while he waited in an airport, mine are the result of an active search.

Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

“… a lying tongue is a man's destruction.” – The Wisdom of Solomon, 1.11

When I was ten years old, I happily discovered that I could say whatever I wanted in response to a question without lying. If my mother asked me if I had cleaned my room, I could say, “Yes, mother” – because she didn't ask whether I had cleaned it today. Or even if she had thought to ask whether I had cleaned my room today, I could still say “Yes, mother” – because she didn't ask if I had cleaned all of my room today (and surely I had managed to put at least one little thing away). And so on. To the extent I had any theory about it, I thought that I couldn't be accused of lying if other people hadn't taken the trouble to ask specific enough questions. At the same time, of course, I knew it was an unreasonable request, and I was in fact being a weasel.

Now imagine my delight in discovering that this golden evasion ticket is not merely a young brat's subterfuge; it is in fact remembered in history as a codified policy of some early Jesuits. Their own need for the policy and their application of it is seen best through an example.

A Jesuit in England in the early 1600s (according to Mario Praz) reportedly swore never to have been a priest, never to have been overseas, and never to have known or even seen a certain William Hawkesworth, who was a suspect in the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate the king. Later, after he had been found out, the priest explained that he had meant that “he had never been a priest of Apollo, he had never been across the Indian sea, never known the said Hawkesworth scientia scientifica [that is, with scientific knowledge], and never seen him in visione beatifica [in a beatific vision]”. The priest's mind had been racing – as we can well imagine – and it was not his problem that the minds of his interlocutors simply had not kept up.

This is an example of what has been known as mental reservation, or honest dissimulation, or (even more colorlessly) non-mendacious linguistic deception, which the philosopher Jonathan Adler defines as “asserting what one believes to be true, inviting the drawing of a conclusion that one believes to be false”.

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

Winnie Mandela's tribute to the cause, to Nelson Mandela and to her own life is expressed in “Part of My Soul Went With Him.” (here). I read this back in 1986 and the title of the book says much about her: a remarkable, courageous and steadfast person. Tender and tough and above all loyal. I consider her story compelling.

Winnie Mandela was and is a hero to millions. Winnie Mandela kept Nelson Mandela present and amongst his people throughout his almost three decades of imprisonment. The mighty machinery of the Apartheid regime, sought to erase Nelson Mandela but she, Winnie Mandela, defeated them. In all those years, when even a photograph of him was unavailable to the people she kept his image vivid and present and vital. Nelson Mandela, prior to the West's and its media's embrace of him, was what he was to his people in a large part because of what Winnie Mandela presented him to be. She defined him. She carried out his principles. He did not renounce struggle by all means and she was his General in the battlefield carrying out his command. Body and soul. Other Generals. always men in other battles are decorated for their deeds of violence. Their excesses are forgiven and even lauded as part of the trauma and fog of war. There are others who are forgiven their transgressions given the context and go on to be Pope, Prime Minister or President.

Read more »

by Ben Schreckinger

Christmas is Wednesday, and as the recent (and absurd) controversy over the color of Santa’s skin indirectly reminds us, the holiday is an amalgam of various pagan and Christian traditions drawn from a diversity of times and places. In addition to the Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, they include the hagiography of the 4th century Lycian bishop St. Nicholas, Roman Saturnalia, and the Scandinavian-Pagan Yule. It is remarkable that like a time capsule, this Christian holiday serves as a vessel in which parts of various pre-Christian belief systems, otherwise long-ago lost, stand preserved.

Their preservation is testament to the tenacity of human spiritual beliefs and traditions, which often manage to outlive the environments that first produced them. Far more fragile than beliefs are human institutions, whose shelf-lives only very rarely exceed a few centuries. The birth of Jesus represents the turning point Western history between its pagan and Christian periods, which are embodied by the institutions of the Oracle at Delphi and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively. The real Christmas miracle is that between them, these two institutions represent a continuity that spans the history of Western civilization, from about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus right up to the present day.

To examine the two side-by-side tells us something about how Western civilization has evolved: from an individualistic, agonistic world into an organized, hierarchical one. It also teaches us about how human institutions live and die, giving us reason to suspect that the church will outlive every national government currently in existence.

The Oracle at Delphi was the product of an agonistic, individualistic world. Of those that sought its prophecies it made only one demand: “Know thyself.” The guidance it offered was ambiguous and could be a double-edged sword. In perhaps the most famous myth attached to the oracle (or the most famous moment in its history, if you believe Herodotus), the 6^th century Lydian King Croesus sought guidance on whether to pursue an invasion of Persia. “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed,” came the prophecy. Croesus attacked, but it was Lydia, not Persia that was destroyed.

The story epitomizes the Greek relationship to the divine, at the intersection of which sat the oracle. The gods were not benign protectors of humanity, but powerful supernatural beings with all the flaws and complex motivations of people. Their word was not meant to be taken at face value. They were just another force in the cosmos that a person had to contend with, sometimes friend, sometimes foe, sometimes something in between.

Compare that to the paternalistic embrace of the Roman Catholic Church. By the time the institution had matured in the early medieval period, there were few things it wanted less than for all the members of its flock to know themselves. The parish priest was their father, and the clergy claimed the exclusive right of exegesis — no one else was permitted to interpret holy texts. It called for obedience, rather than self-knowledge. This difference, too, of course reflects the orthodox Christian relationship between humanity and the divine, in which God is a benign father.

Read more »

by Mara Naselli

Narrative omniscience in storytelling has often been described as God's point of view, but we can hardly take for granted God's existence anymore, let alone what we know of God's scope of vision. If we cannot imagine God's all-seeing, all-knowing perspective, then what becomes of the nature of omniscience in storytelling? There is a reason it has become an increasingly rare point of view in contemporary literature.

What can an author know of her characters? James Wood notes Muriel Spark raises this very question in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a short novel about a schoolmistress and her young charges, published in 1961. The story is set in the 1930s. Fascism is taking hold in Europe. Spark's superb control in the storytelling reflects the tyrannical authority of Miss Brodie herself. Miss Brodie is “a fascist and a Scottish Calvinist . . . , predestining the lives of her pupils, forcing them into artificial shapes. Is that what the novelist does too?” writes Wood. “That is the question that interests Spark. The novelist adopts Godlike powers of omniscience but what can she really know of her creations? Surely only God, the ultimate author of our lives, can know our comings and our going. And surely only God has the moral right to decide such things.”

There is much we don't see in Spark's novel except through the slow reveal of the characters' own blindnesses. Think of works like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Endgame. These characters are drawn sparely, but are still affecting and evocative. The austerity of context has become a hallmark of modernist literature. Its close narrative distance erodes the omniscient view. As a counterexample many have pointed to George Eliot's Middlemarch, published in 1872. This study of provincial life, as it was called, set in the 1830s amidst significant political and cultural change, is so richly drawn that no hillock, no hovel, no character's position or innermost aspiration goes unnoticed. The novel is chockfull.

Indeed, the narrator in Middlemarch speaks with a certain omniscience, but it is not distant and removed. It is not Godlike, in the usual sense. Zadie Smith calls Middlemarch a riot of subjectivity. The narrator in Middlemarch speaks as if she is there, moving from within one character's consciousness to another. And though we see the characters with a certain kind of fullness—access to their most inner thoughts and blindnesses—there is a lot we don't know about them, too. Perhaps there are different kinds of omniscience. And perhaps God, or at least our culturally and historically shaped notion of who God is and where God is, has something to do with it.

Read more »

by Michael Lopresto

Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to “dear, kind God”!

–Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

How is belief in God possible? Is it coherent to acknowledge the immense suffering of a child, on the one hand, and to believe in God on the other? The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga compares God creating a world in which some people suffer to a mother insisting her child “take piano lessons or go to church or school,” to help make sense of a moral justification for God creating a world in which evil exists. A mother can justifiably insist that her child does something that he doesn't enjoy, like go to school, because the mother is in a better position to know what is in the best interests of her child. But the speed with which theists like Plantinga extend the routine acceptability of making a child go to school, to the horrendous evil we find in the actual world simply defies belief.

Theodicy is the project of giving a moral justification for the evil that God has created or has allowed to occur. Will God be acquitted in the tribunal of morality? This project was founded in its modern from by the great German philosopher G. W. Leibniz, and continues today with philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen. The typical justifications given are that free will is valuable and therefore justifies the suffering we inflict upon one another, and that various evils are logically necessary means to get to greater goods. It is often thought that to save belief in God from being positively irrational, an intellectually satisfying answer must be given to the problem of evil. When posed with the question of why it is that God would allow someone to murder an innocent person, the theist might say that free will is an intrinsic good, and that giving humans free will means that they may freely choose to do the wrong thing; or that transgressions such as murder make possible higher goods, such as forgiveness and compassion.

Read more »