Bumper Sticker: Real Men Pray

The older I get the more troubled I become over the idea of prayer.  Apart from the likelihood that we are merely talking to ourselves, there's the question of why people do it at all.  Why does anyone want to have a one-way "conversation" with an all-powerful Creator who apparently has nothing better to do than listen to petitioners?  And what on earth does anyone say--besides the recital of memorized words?  The worst possible excuse for praying is to ask for favors, the supreme gesture of pure selfishness, whether one prays for himself or his friends and relatives--or even large classes and groups of people.  And judging from His total indifference to the prayers for it, God clearly doesn’t think much about world peace.

About the only reason I can think of to pray is to say thank you.  If there's a Creator, He or She will be pleased to hear a thank you once in a while.  That much I'm sure of.  But so many people have such a litany of suffering—chronic diseases, death of children and parents, no jobs, no education, drug dependencies, the list of horrors never ends—that I often wonder what on earth they could be thanking God for.  Sometimes it seems people should be cursing Him for what He’s done to them, which makes more sense than thanking Him for their suffering.  Maybe real men don’t pray:  If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

Divided I Stand

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but I always aim higher, for some combination of wit, sarcasm, and vulgarity (which always amuses me).  And I like a straight-faced delivery that often confuses people who aren’t completely sure what they heard was a joke.  Sometimes they are sure it isn’t—and that I’m a total jerk.  I’m sorry when a joke or witticism falls flat, but I can’t resist them.  I just fire away and hope I can bring it off; I do have a lifetime of delivery practice.  This drive to see the humorous hidden away in every day events and conversation is hard-wired into my DNA. It’s who I am, for better and worse.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that particular variety of schizophrenic.

Divided I Stand, Part II

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I was born and raised in an Italian ghetto of parents born in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and of grandparents born in south-central Italy. In my blood there is a hot-headedness that drives me to outbursts that flash for a moment and then go out forever.  But I am also an American, the product of a cool-headed, Anglo-influenced school system: my excitability is thus neutralized by patient, even-tempered  problem solving.  And so it is that, in another sense, I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part III

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am so thoroughly conditioned by my Puritan work ethic that a friend once observed that I must have descended from John Milton when he lived in Italy.  The remark passed as a cleverness because I spent many years studying American Puritanism and because Italians, he thought, were incapable of such dedicated, Milton-like study.  Putting the defamation in the second part of the equation aside, it is thus, in a related (though perhaps disputed) sense, that I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part IV

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am a Catholic non-believer, an atheist for all practical purposes, but one who is nonetheless committed to the calming qualities of silent prayer.  I can sometimes talk myself into believing in a Creator, but one  who has nothing to do with the Bible or with Jesus or with any church or faith.  I think of myself as a cultural Catholic (akin to those who comfortably refer to themselves as cultural Jews)--that is, I am one born to the faith but educated to know better.  I like the machinery of the Church, the hierarchy, the pomp and ceremony, the smells of incense and candles, the Stations of the Cross, the sacraments, and so on—but I like it all for cultural reasons that tie me to my Italian-American roots, not spiritual ones that I long ago outgrew.  And yet I often return to the calming quality of prayers like the silent Hail Mary, even the Act of Contrition.  And nothing settles my nerves like the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, / I shall not want,” empty words I’m certain, but ones that nonetheless add a quieting benefit to my days.  I’m a non-believing man of prayer—once again, a man divided.

That's why I write.

          It’s pretty common, after all, for grieving survivors to imagine what their dearly departed would have wanted.  “Dad would have wanted me to play in the big game,” we hear young athletes say.  Sometimes, to go on despite their loss, the grieving survivor dedicates his performance to his or her dead father—or mother or grandparent.   Maybe an entire team will wear a black armband, a remembrance and a motivator.  It’s all very touching.  And insincere.

Survivors, after all, have no alternative but to press on, but assuming the dead person would have happily and forgivingly given his blessing about your decision to suck up your grief and go on your camping trip anyway has always seemed bad form to me.  I wince when I hear the familiar refrain:  “Dad would have wanted me to go.”  Have the decency to admit that you are acting selfishly, I want to tell them, that your father’s death matters less to you than losing a chance to do something you have been looking forward to.  And don’t forgive yourself by imagining, in the most self-serving sort of way, that your dead dad would have wanted it that way.  If he still had feelings, they would be hurt.    

The truth of the matter is that at the moment of death, no one has a voice in anything ever again.  Survivors can imagine whatever they want the dead person to have thought or said, but the reality is that survivors from that point forward are safe from the reproaches of the dearly departed, who can no longer manage their own finances, state their most deeply felt opinions, defend themselves against enemies and misunderstanding, explain what they really meant, or ask humbly for forgiveness.  They have entered their time of eternal silence.

            That’s why I write. 

Substance Over Style?

          Or is it the other way around?  Everyone always wants to believe that what they have to say counts more than the way they say it.  That what they write is more important than their spelling.  But the simple and observable truth of the matter is, that if a person writes badly, or perhaps merely blandly, his writing will be lost forever.  No one will be engaged by the ideas if he can’t get by the sentences, which is exactly what Oscar Wilde meant when he wrote:  "The truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style."

            I used to ask poetry students if the poem gives the theme its force, or if the theme gives the poem its force?  It’s the same question, after all, substance vs. style—and it has the same answer.  It is the poem, with its charged language and rhythmic backbone, that gives the theme its force.  No poem is ever remembered for its message if that message happens to be clouded in sloppy, sappy verse.  In other words, it doesn’t matter if the poem is about God, motherhood, or Superman’s crusade against evil—if the poem is so badly put together that readers uniformly hate it, the poem will not be read.  And there goes the message—the substance—right down the drain.

            And so in that sense, what you have to say is less important than how you say it.  And those who figure out how to phrase their ideas will get them into print, while those who never figure it out, are fated to wonder all through their lives why their superior ideas never can find a publisher (except of course in the world of blogs and self-publishing).  It’s really not that complicated:  it’s style over substance every time.

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but most of the time they are on target and either wittily or sarcastically or vulgarly perfect.  At least I believe they are.  Furthermore, because I apparently need to be recklessly and ruthlessly funny, I long ago concluded that the condition is hard-wired into my DNA.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that variety of schizophrenic.

Pairs of Opposites

         So much in life runs in pairs of opposites, or seems to, like good and evil, matter and anti-matter, love and hate.  I've been thinking that this phenomenon runs right to God, who both is and isn't at the same time.  He seems to exist when we pray to Him and ask His forgiveness, but then He seems not to exist when we observe so-called "natural disasters," like the tsunami that killed some 300,000 on the day after Christmas, 2004.  Or are there perhaps two Gods, a good one and a bad one?  A pair of opposites.
         This line of thought, when applied to the axiom that "nothing is permanent--everything changes" leads to the conclusion, using the Theory of Opposites, that something must therefore be permanent, that not everything changes.
          Maybe, if we look hard enough, we can find God hiding somewhere in this construction. 

Crybabies

            Our current speaker of the House of Representatives is a fellow named John Boehner (pronounced Bayner, not Boner), a Republican from Ohio, who has turned out to be a crybaby.  Literally.  He gets misty and falls into tears at the drop of a hat—and sometimes without even that much provocation. 

Back in January the New York Times ran a story about Boehner and his teary-eyed tendencies, “Big Boys Don’t Cry, Do They?” by a Mr. John Schwartz, who is himself a crybaby, he confessed in the article, falling recently into tears over a movie, a song, and his child’s eighth-grade graduation.  Schwartz got some psychologist to confirm that tears are indeed “normal” and that it’s okay to cry when one is “overcome by bittersweet blends like nostalgia.”  Tears are “part of the emotional vocabulary of being alive,” according to another one of the crybabies, Robert Krulwich of NPR.  One-time network newscaster Dan Rather, still another crybaby, is quoted as saying crying’s okay because it’s an “authentic” response, and that there’s “no apologizing for grief.” 

The whole idea of middle-aged men sobbing away is also the storyline of a $200 million 1999 comedy, Analyze This, with Robert De Nero and Billy Crystal as a bawling mobster and his unwilling shrink.  The movie shifts back and forth between hysterical laughter and hysterical weeping.

All this coverage of men misting up is no doubt a psychologically telling reflection of our times (very possibly journalistic money in the bank too), but none of it helps me in the least with my own tears, which are embarrassing, maddening, and humiliating.   Not in the least funny.

            I always get furious with myself over the tears, feel mortified that I can’t control them, and turn my head in shame when they overcome me—but, and here’s the cruelest rub:  there’s something else about them that just as powerfully makes me feel more alive, “more in tune with my feelings,” and more intensely human than I am at any other moments in my life.  In other words, I hate the tears and love them at the same time, the very definition of ambivalence.

            I remember when the high tide of feelings and tears first washed over me.  Up to that time, I was pretty much like every other man who sneered with superiority at wusses who shed sentimental tears; I had a manly contempt for women who broke down over romantic movies or ones with dogs and babies.  I knew my role.  But in 1979, when I was 37, my ten-year-old daughter was selected to play one of the children in the Newton High School production of The King and I, and I have never been the same since.

            When I saw the opening night performance, I was merely doing my fatherly duty, never something I resisted when it came to my children, but the sort of thing I had long since by then come to see as a lifelong series of tiresome obligations.  One bites the bullet and does the right thing, after all.

Seeing the high schoolers and grade schoolers working their tails off, however, seeing their all-in commitment to the production, filled me with unfamiliar feelings.  This wasn’t just another of the numberless high school productions of The King and I, I realized, this was a group of youngsters performing a play—rising, that is, to the demands of art—and somehow asserting their humanity in the process.  These were actors, emblems of human possibility.  They were defiantly facing down death by putting their peculiar, terribly young, life-affirming mark on the universe.  These children made me proud to be human.  I know, of course, that it doesn’t do to put these wild thoughts into such over-the-top words, such over-stimulated language—but that is what I experienced at the opening night performance of the Newton High School production of The King and I, that and a horrifying stream of tears that I had to fight down as best I could.  These were feelings way out of proportion to the stimulus.

            We are surely—and who would care to argue the point?—a self-destructive species, but we are also a life-affirming one, a people hell-bent on asking and answering the Big Questions and leaving a brave, if quavering, statement about our time on planet Earth, which is itself the merest speck in the corner of one galaxy in a universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies.  Despite our tininess, or perhaps because of it, the Newton High School production of The King and I put me in mind of the unruly, sprawling universe and our own very small place in it, and it made me proud to be human—and yes, it moved me to tears.  It all links up in my mind and in my heart. 

            Of course, The King and I made me think further about the root reason for my tears.  How is it that I can watch a high school musical and see the death spiral of a supernova?  One part of the reason is that I’ve always had a keener sense of death than most other people seem to.  I can’t prove that, of course—it merely seems that way to me because I can’t imagine anyone else being more morbidly sensitive to the transience of life than I am.  As a very young child, I had nightmares of dying, and as a youngster in school, I recall becoming frightened by the lesson on life spans.  I was deeply shaken when I learned that trees too, the universal symbols of permanence and time-defying majesty and mystery, also had life spans.  It was devastating to think that they too die.

            And then, moments later, the rest of it became frighteningly clear:  everything, my teacher said, had a life span, even mountain chains, rivers, and the planet itself.  Even our own star, the sun, will eventually burn itself out.  I remember this coming as paralyzingly painful news.  Nothing was permanent—except perhaps something called “infinity,” which I learned in Sunday School was the cost of sin—everlasting punishment.  More bad news.  This was especially bad, it seemed to me, because eternal happiness in Heaven didn’t seem as likely as eternal damnation in Hell.  It was bad news/bad news:  you have to die, and then you go to Hell.  Forever.

            Through the intervening years, between ages eight and sixty-eight, I was able to shed most (not all, mind you) of my fear of eternal punishment, but my sense of loss—the loss of time and most of all, of loved ones—has never stopped tormenting me.  And so when I see things that I love very much, I simultaneously mourn their inevitable loss, their passing into history.  Their death.  I have grieved and cried about all that through the years, although having now passed through Middle Age, I think I may be through the worst of the sobbing.  There is a certain contented agreement I have these days with the Roman poet Horace, who wrote in the first century B. C.:  “Not even Heaven upon the past has power;  /  What has been, has been, and I have had my hour.”      

For all those many middle years, however, and occasionally even now, I was moved to tears by all sorts of  life-affirming assertions of human will and imagination and intelligence and dignity; by the painful idea of life spans; by the sense that everything is dying daily before my very eyes; and by the losses I encounter every day in my personal universe as well as in the larger one we live in.  I cried over athletes at the peak of their performance; at characters on stage, especially when they are enabled by brilliant words from talented playwrights, and I still cry when people in every walk of life prevail over great odds to achieve something they had no business thinking they could do.  It is the human species and spirit, replete with genetically predetermined limitations and infinitely grand aspirations that make me proud enough to cry over. 

Unfortunately, however, I can still be moved to tears by less worthy examples, like sentimental movies, Hallmark greeting cards, and television commercials that feature old people talking on the telephone to their grandchildren—just to take three random examples.  They all seem to trigger the same embarrassing, maddening, and humiliating tears that make me grab a tissue and duck for cover.  I can deal with my tears better than I used to, no doubt because in my Old Age they come less frequently, and no doubt too because I am convinced by now that tears really are, after all, “part of the emotional vocabulary of being alive,” but I always like it better when no one sees me sniveling, when I don’t have to suffer, that is, the indignities of other people’s contempt.  It’s so much easier that way.  Sob.

 Addendum.  From a reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace a year after writing the essay above.  Here the beautiful and recently-come-of-age Natasha is playing the clavichord and singing, and Prince Andrew, listening in a corner of the room, catches a sob deep in his throat:

Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her.  In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him.  He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul.  He felt happy and at the same time sad.  He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep.  What about?  His former love? [He was a widower.]  The little princess?  His disillusionments? . . .  His hopes for the future? . . .  Yes and no.  The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was.  This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.  (Vol. I,  Part 6, Chapter 19)

 Tolstoy's power of perception is matched only by the elegance of his language.  Bravo.