by Debra Morris

Until my grandmother—whose 100^th birthday we celebrated this year—took up residence first with my parents and then at the care center where three of her sisters also spent their last years, she lived independently and, in many ways, unconventionally. (Whereas she is content to describe her long life as “good,” my grandmother deviated from the norms of small-town Texas just enough, and in enough domains of her life, for that life to seem quite remarkable to me. That nearly everyone calls the lady “Morris”—a long story, but it originated when I was very young and couldn't replicate my mother's polite “Mrs. Morris,” so I shortened it and the name stuck—is only the first of many odd details that I'd need to explain to anyone meeting her for the first time.) When her husband suffered a fatal heart attack after a morning spent plowing, she inherited a prosperous family farm and kept it that way for four decades more. She hosted retired teacher banquets, a duty (though certainly not a grim one, my grandmother was the type to understand it as a duty nonetheless) born of a storied 40-year career as teacher and principal in the Quail Rural Consolidated School District (the largest such district in the country at the time). To this day, she is my family's only elected official, having served a term as the County Superintendent of Education. For many years she split her leisure time between a full slate of daytime TV dramas—what she called her “stories”—and virtually any televised sporting event. Whenever I asked, she could catch me up on the tangled relationships and intrigues of any given soap opera, somehow managing to dignify the most idiotic plot or one-dimensional character. She could conjure the same remarkable effect with sports; normally oblivious, I would suddenly understand the beauty and depth of a sport (who knew golf could be anything but tedious?), envying her effortless command of baseball stats and NFL playoff hopes, and sharing her quiet marvel at a beautiful swing.

And, on top of all this, every two years or so she would vote a straight Democratic ticket. This, at least, is how her only son, my father, tells it. About ten years ago—or it could have been fifteen, or five; it hardly matters because this stunning revelation came when Morris was already quite old, and long after Texas had turned solidly Republican—my father referred to my very proper grandmother as a “yellow dog Democrat” (meaning, to any Southerner, someone who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican). He said it with what seemed like mild exasperation, as if he couldn't make sense of, or fully commend, this irrational allegiance to a political party. But I remember being secretly thrilled (I think he could have told me that Morris was an avid day-trader and I would have been less surprised). Maybe I felt vindicated, too; apparently the Democratic gene can skip a generation, but obviously it was there, deep in me, ensuring that a family's rich history would continue to bind, and instruct. Perhaps most surprising of all, I discovered that I was proud—suddenly proud of a party that could have earned my dear grandmother's life-long support.

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by Mara Jebsen

While I do not like the phrase, “at the height of her powers,” it comes to mind when I think of Taymor directing this comedy. I don't like the phrase because it seems to anoint the critic with a false sense of her own fortune-telling powers, and has an undue emphasis on the importance of being urgent–as if I were saying, “run, don't walk” to this play. But perhaps you should run–or, more accurately, sit. I had to sit in the stand-by line for a long time, because the play, now running at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center is officially sold out. Sit, and wait, for a long time for this production, because the images it gives you will delight at first, and then, over time, will resolve themselves into a sort of important pastiche that helps you think about love, madness, and Shakespeare.

I had to go because my mother made me. She was a theatre student, a mime, a theatre-director, and a folklorist before she became the director of a k-12 school in West Africa, where she finds an outlet for her enormous creative energy by putting on plays. This year it is Midsummer Night's Dream. “I can't get a feel for it, yet,'' she said. “But Julie Taymor directed it, and I love her, and they're putting it on in a theatre six blocks from your house. I read all about her troubles with Spider-man and had been following her before I had the idea to do Midsummer.It means something. Go. Find out what she's up to.”

I had no idea that my mother loved Julie Taymor. Or that she 'followed” anything that had anything to do with the internet. I promised to do it, but procrastinated, and when I saw that the tickets were sold out, I nearly panicked.

Anyway, here is the gist: initially, even if you are not compiling a list of directorial choices for your mother's use, you will be startled and awed by the choices Taymor makes. There is a stunning mixture of expensive technology and simple stagecraft, and a viewer feels safe the whole while–safe because they are in the hands of a person who will not bore them, who seems to have an exact sense of rhythm, scale and color scheme-and who presents recognizable character 'types' that amuse without degrading the people who make that type.

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by Tom Jacobs

Years ago an earnest young student entered his professor’s office for a brief chat about a paper topic he had been turning around in his head. The professor was esteemed and well-dressed and famous for being a cool and political yet accessible writer about cool and political things. The student was spangly mediocre, wildly intimidated by his professor because he knew that he (the professor) was indifferent to this object/student before him that/who didn’t know enough about the world or the past or theory to challenge him on any level that he might recognize.

They shook hands limply and then sat down across from each other, the power differential radiating out in all directions, but it was mainly felt by the beleaguered student. The student fumblingly explained that the paper was to be about the nature of emergent electronic communities (this was the mid-nineties). He babbled and referenced a few novels and sociological and philosophical works that seemed to him potentially useful.

The professor, un-noddingly and somewhat socially autistically stared at him from across his desk with a mixture of curiosity, interest, and pity, giving the student neither quarter or shelter. After a few moments of squirming awfulness he asked a depth-charge question: “What do we mean when we say “’community?’” The question exploded in the student’s mind, and the shockwaves resonated well into the future. To this very day, this very moment, to speak truthfully.

It’s not necessary to go into the student’s flummoxed response. What’s important is the question: what the fuck do we mean when we say “community?” Because we say it all the time, the media says it all the time, politicians say it all the time, and it does an enormous amount of work for us even if none of us know quite what we mean when we say it.

I know, I know, there are many sociologists and philosophers and so forth who have considered this very question, and I will refer to some of them below. But the feeling precedes the concept, and that’s what makes it so interesting. We all know that there is such a thing as a community, even if we can’t put our finger on it. In that regard it’s a bit like pornography or (as has been said, I’m told) the clitoris. So what’s important is to figure out how really smart people who have thought long and hard about what “community” means maps on to what it means to the rest of us. How might we make these two disparate worlds sing in harmony?

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by Omar Ali

Polio is an ancient scourge that spreads only within human populations and can cause paralysis, most frequently of the lower extremities, but can also be fatal when the paralysis extends to the muscles of breathing. For reasons that are not completely clear, the disease erupted in huge epidemics from the late 19^th century onwards, causing millions of victims to die or become paralyzed for life. Once a virus had been identified as the cause, the race was on to develop a vaccine. Finally, in 1952, Jonas Salk and his colleagues developed the first effective inactivated vaccine for this disease. Within a few years, mass vaccination decreased the number of victims in developed countries from hundreds of thousands to just a few hundred per year. In the mid-fifties, Albert Sabin and colleagues developed an effective live vaccine that was cheaper, easier to adminster and provided better immunity and that was then adopted by the WHO as the main vaccine for use in endemic areas. Thanks to mass immunization campaigns, the number of victims dropped precipitously and by 1988 the WHO was ready to launch a well-coordinated international initiative to completely wipe out wild polio from the planet. Like smallpox, polio does not have an animal reservoir, so if human to human transmission is completely blocked by mass vaccination the disease can be effectively wiped out.

Initially, the campaign proceeded well, with the Americas being declared polio-free in 1994 and Europe in 2002. Today, there are only 3 countries where polio still remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Unfortunately, the reason in all three is the same; the moronic wing of the international Jihadist movement has somehow picked up bits and pieces of chatter about risks from oral polio vaccine, combined it with pre-existing paranoia about modern international institutions, and created a robust anti-vaccine meme that is able to draw upon the ruthless killing power of Jihadi militias to effectively stop polio eradication campaigns in their area of influence.
I would like to clarify this a bit further:

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by Dave Maier

Last month in this space I discussed physicist Lawrence Krauss's suggestion that in advancing certain cosmological theories (concerning the early universe, dark matter, dark energy, and so on) he had thereby put to rest the age-old philosophical question “why is there something rather than nothing?”. I agreed for the most part with those who think Krauss misunderstands the question if he thinks a physical theory – any physical theory – can answer or dispel it. There were a lot of interesting comments on the post (go read them), but I think people were sometimes talking past each other. Some of the confusion and/or disagreement concerns the concept of metaphysics, so that's today's topic.

We often see “metaphysics” or “metaphysical” used as a term of abuse. (I myself use it this way sometimes.) But not all such abuse amounts to the same thing. What exactly is metaphysics “in the bad sense”? And why is there also a “good” (or at least not necessarily bad) sense of the term as well? How does the latter devolve into the former, and how can we avoid such a thing? Or must we part ways with “metaphysics” entirely, leaving only a “bad” sense of the term?

A good place to start is the entry on “Metaphysics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its author might give us critics pause, since if there is such a thing as metaphysical Kool-aid, Peter van Inwagen has drunk as deeply of that toxic draught as any philosopher alive. However, except for the perfunctoriness of its final section, which grudingly examines (or at least mentions) the question “Is Metaphysics Possible?”, most of the article is perfectly uncontroversial, as is appropriate given the venue (really, check it out for a good introduction). Metaphysics has always been part of philosophy, whether in the ancient form of a “science of being as such”, or the modern welter of rather more specific questions about causation, modality, personal identity, mind and body, space and time, and so on.

Naturally this does not mean that such things must be unobjectionable. Maybe philosophy first barked wrongly up a single ancient tree (The Tree of Being?), turning in the modern period to bark equally wrongly up a number of related trees, and maybe what we should do now is cut out such barking altogether. But as van Inwagen points out, to say that the ancient “science” (as pursued, for example, in Aristotle's Metaphysics) was wrong-headed because there are no things that do not change is itself a “metaphysical” assertion in the modern sense; and the same is often true of contemporary dismissals of “metaphysics” broadly construed.

On the other hand, the Catch-22 nature of this defense of metaphysics, if that's what it is, should arouse our suspicions. It sounds like a “gotcha,” like the blithe, infuriating assertion that “it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.” Indeed, it's the broader cultural spat between science and religion which provides a lot of the heat and lack of light (dark energy?) for most discussions of “metaphysics.” We have to detach, or at least locate, the latter discussion to see it properly – if not to resolve it, at least to see who the players are.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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by Fausto Ribeiro

Let us imagine for a moment the following story: a man is sitting at the edge of a cliff, marveling at the immensity below and all of its beauty – a resplendent lake, enormous mountains, a vast field covered with trees, maybe a small village with a few lovely houses whose chimneys release a white, innocent smoke. There is a notebook on the man's lap; in it, with a worn-out pencil, he registers in the form of poetry his impressions about that which he has the good fortune of witnessing. A beautiful woman then approaches from a nearby trail and sees him; upon realizing what this stranger is doing, she is immediately overcome with a great emotion, an expectation so ravishing that her hands start to tremble slightly: here is a man who writes poems about nature's enchantment, about it's mesmerizing beauty! Instantly the woman conceives in her mind a whole image of who this man is, of his values, of his rich inner universe. She passionately contemplates, above all, the possibility of a real connection between the two of them. Nervous, she walks slowly in his direction and touches him gently on the shoulder, in the hope of initiating a conversation that would confirm her expectations. When he turns to face her, however, she suffers a shocking disappointment: the man is ugly; his features clearly violate the universal principles of beauty neurologists affirm exist.

Automatically, in a snap, before any words are said, the whole mental edifice built by the woman crumbles, and while flushing awkwardly, she pronounces a few random sentences about the amazing view, about the lake, about the low probability of rain for that afternoon. The man answers with some other banalities, courteous but tense in light of the unexpected encounter with a woman so much more beautiful than him, so out of his usual reach. A brief silence imposes itself, and the woman glances furtively at the man's notebook. She reflects for a few seconds. When the silence becomes unbearably uncomfortable, she – already taking a few steps backwards – mumbles as a goodbye a prefab phrase about how nice it was to have met him, to which he responds politely, struggling in vain not to show how disappointed he is with the abrupt end of a conversation that had already provoked in him, so soon, the beginnings of an embarrassing arousal.

The woman then walks away in quick steps, unconscious that her brain is already working to set up the mechanism of defense that will prevent her from making the unfortunate meeting the object of any posterior rumination. In a few minutes, maybe a few hours, she will have forgotten about the man's existence. Nevertheless, the ruins of the hope that had illuminated those brief moments before she saw the man's face will remain dammed up in the grey area between her conscious and her unconscious self, being yet one more grain of sand in the mountain of repressed anguish to which, throughout her life, she will give many different names and prescribe many tentative solutions.

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