Author: Mark Tiedemann

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A Walk Along the Highway of Life: Morning, 12-5-09

Some people have traditions a bit different.  Today, Saturday, December 5th, 2009, Donna indulged one of hers’ along with me and Coffey.  Highway 40 has been in the process of being rebuilt between Kingshighway and 270 for the last few years.  Fears and fretting about much disruption this was likely to cause proved exaggerated, though it has made for a lot of grumbling.  But the highway department has come in pretty on or before schedule and within budget and Monday, the 7th, it the whole thing is about to reopen for traffic.

So we went down to one part of it this morning to walk the highway.  Tomorrow there’s supposed to be a big to do, lots of people, a party.  Uh uh.  This was for us.  This is a tradition Donna brought with her.  Way way back in our childhoods, Highway 44 was built through South St. Louis and they all walked it before it officially opened.  I remember riding my bike on it once with a couple of buddies but it never registered as something to make a tradition from.  But this is cool.

highway-40-12-5-09.jpg

So here, on a much too cold December morning, is the place-keeper of the memory.  Behind her is the Skinker overpass, which won’t mean much to people who don’t live here, but you can see, partly hidden by trees, a great big Amoco sign.  Now, Amoco doesn’t exist anymore—it was bought up by BP—but that sign is a St. Louis landmark and received special dispensation to remain.  It’s huge.  At night, with the spotlights on it, you could probably navigate a plane by it.  To the right of it is Clayton Ave, to the left, completely hidden, is the Hi-Pointe Theater, our last standalone art movie theater surviving from the heyday of such things.  Far, far to the right is Forest Park and eventually Washington University.  Far, far to the left is Dogtown.  (Don’t ask.  But if you ever saw the film White Palace with Susan Sarandon and James Spader, Dogtown is made famous by being Susan Sarandon’s character’s place of residence.)

Famous, trivia-inspiring stuff.

But it was for us a fun walk.

Art

How Do I Bio, Let Me Count The Ways…

I have to write a new bio.  I’ve been needing to do this for some time.  I had a few prepared bios for conventions and such, tailored depending on who I sent them to.  Magazine bios, con bios, conference bios…they all required a bit of tweaking.  But they’re all pretty much out of date.

I’m going to do this during the coming week.  Cull through all the details that would seem to make me an important person, someone people might wish to come listen to or see.  I have a difficult time with these, which is why I write most all of them in third person.  I have to put myself in a frame of mind that I’m writing about Someone Else.

Apropos to that, this past weekend I received my copy of the new documentary The Polymath: or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany.  In the course of watching it Saturday and Sunday, we heard him say that he considers himself a rather uninteresting person.  I found that resonant.

When I’m writing a new story, I tend to put myself in the character of the protagonist.  I see myself as That Person.  And almost always, when I start on the subsequent rewrites, one of the problems I have to fix is that the main characters of my stories are uniformly weak compared to the secondary characters.  A couple of years ago I had a revelation about why that is.  Mainly, because I don’t see myself as a particularly interesting person.  So that translates into the protagonist, who is generally interested in the other characters, who then become relatively more imbued by interesting characteristics.  I have to then go back and add in all the missing stuff the main character requires.

Which brings me to the writing of a personal bio.

What is it about me that  is interesting to other people?

Now, I’d like to be interesting and sometimes I think I am.  But in the course of the day, I don’t even think about myself much less what it is about me that makes me worth note.  This is perfectly sane behavior, as far as I’m concerned.  Who does go through the day cataloging their specialness besides narcissists, obsessives, terminally vain, or profoundly insecure people?  I stipulate that I’m vain, but it limits itself to personal grooming, physical fitness, and an attempt at erudition, none of which controls my life, and all of which are practices I think more people should embrace if for no other reason than a sense of public politeness.

But I’m always a bit dismayed when people actually pay attention to me or think I have something worth saying.  (I stress again, I want to be someone like that, I just don’t happen to “feel” it.)

So the personal bio usually becomes a list of things I’ve done.  It seems a common way to deal with the self-conscious aspects of a productive life, to place your credentials, as it were, Over There In That Box.  You can point to the file and say, well, if you want to know about me, look in there.  And in that file you’ll find my publications, my award nominations, and the work I’ve done, etc etc., and, oh year, I live in St. Louis, I have a dog, I’m in love with Donna and so forth—which are still components, in a way, rather than actual revelations.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this approach and I certainly don’t think strangers have a right to expect more, but it’s not exactly a biography, is it?  It’s more like a resume.

It doesn’t say anything about the fact that for me different music produces different kinds of writing, that if I’m trying to get inside the head of someone tormented I often listen to Ligeti and when I’m creating landscapes, I want Vangelis or Sibelius and when I need action, I find Last Fast or Joe Satriani or Bartok really helps.  It doesn’t cover the fact that I use much of my music to unlock a feeling I can’t quite identify just for myself.

It doesn’t say anything about how much I like late evening sunlight shafting through miniblinds (or how the same effect, late at night, from streetlamps, really turns me on); or how the late afternoon sunlight across open fields in September strikes a kind of heroic melancholy in my mind, like the atmosphere of final days or impending loss or the denouement after a mighty adventure; or the fact that I’ve never read a book that has made me weep, but there are certain films that do it to me almost every time…

In other words, bios like this don’t say much about me.

But my stories do, if you remember that they are not and never have been biographical.

A paradox?  Not really.  You put what you feel into a story.  How that feeling is evoked is unimportant as long as it’s true, and you don’t need personal revelation in terms of history to do it.   Everyone has these feelings, and they own them, and they were all evoked differently, so fiction that talks about the personal need not be about the author to work.

But you still ought to be able to say something in a bio about yourself that makes you at least seem interesting to total strangers.

I’m still working on all this.

Art

Misty Mountains

One of the trips we don’t make anymore is south to Atlanta.  When our good friends Kelley and Nicola lived there, we went down a few times, most notably for their wedding.  That trip was an adventure.  We often make long drives at night.  Donna is good at the wheel in the dark (I fall asleep, no matter how much caffeine or hours of napping beforehand) and it chews up mileage during a period when not much else is happening.  It also afford us sunrises on the road, which can often be spectacular…or just profound.

The trip down for their wedding took us through a storm.  It was raining when we left.  As we drove up into the mountains, we literally drove into the storm cloud.  Visibility was probably no worse than if we’d been driving in the daytime.  Lightening sheared across the sky seemingly fifty feet in front of us.  It was a tense trip.

But on the other side, as the rain abated, and the sun rose, we got to see this.

mountain-mist.jpg

Going through a stack of old prints, I found it.  I have hundreds of images I did not, at the time, pay enough attention to.  I have a huge job ahead of me converting these to digital and bringing them  up to the level of quality they should have.

Thought I’d share this one now.

Safe journey, all, no matter where you go, and may the far side of wherever you are give you something memorable.

culture

A Little Bragging

It’s my blog, I get to be self-indulgent.  I want to brag a little.  I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this up, but for now it feels good to be able to make these claims.

I’m 55.  I am amazed at that fact when I stop to think about it.  I don’t feel 55.  But having never been it before, I’m not exactly sure how it’s supposed to feel.  In any event, I am, as I say, 55.

This morning I went to the gym.

I went to the gym after walking the dog—about a mile, that’s what we usually do—during which hegira I had to run a full block twice to avoid loose dogs.  (Coffey will not back down, no matter what, and the last thing I need is to have fighting dogs at my feet.)  I’ve never been a great runner, but I can run a city block full out and not have to sit down.

At the gym, I went through my new routine, briefly as follows:

Crunches, curls, tricep extensions, leg curls, extensions, calf raises, bench press, dips, shrugs, straight bar curls, cross-overs, legs press, flies, rows, pectoral flies, shoulder raises, latimus pull-downs, and a few assorted other motions totaling 19 separate exercises.  It took about an hour and twenty minutes.

I’m benching 205 (which is down from my best, but still), the bar curls run from 45 lbs up to 90 lbs, lats at 180 lbs.  Everything else falls within those parameters.

I weigh about 170 to 175.  I’d like to drop ten pounds, but I really have little to complain about.  Bit of a spare tire, but overall I’m pretty solid.

I’ve started doing aerobics on the mornings I don’t do the gym.

What, do I want to live forever?  No, not really, but I while I am alive I want to be able to physically do what I want.

I am tired often, but it’s more mental than physical.  My knees bother me a bit and occasionally my left elbow complains, but nothing incapacitating, just annoying.

I know men half my age who are incapable of a quarter of what I do.

To an extent, this is an unfair comparison, because as we all know the United States is in the throes of an epidemic of obesity and lack of exercise.  Couch Potato Syndrome had taken root.  True, a lot of it has to do with the nature of work—more and more of it is behind a desk, at a computer, and even the work that does require some physical activity has far more machine assistance than ever before.  But a lot of the problem is self-inflicted.

Anyway, I wanted to take a few minutes, on my own blog, to do a little bragging.  One of these days it’s going to fall apart on me.  Things fail.  But until then…

culture

Prophets, Providence, and Problems: An Observation

This is one of those notions I stumble on from time to time while daydreaming or free associating.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion of late—as how could many people not be, what with the state of the world (he says with tongue in his other cheek, being both ironic and absurd)?—and trying to come up with some theory of it that might bleed off the poisons that seem to bubble up from it from time to time.

Someone said something to me that triggered this idea and it’s probably not original.  But we were discussing Roman Catholicism and the observation was made that in its long history it has absorbed more than it has suppressed.

“Of course it has,” I responded.  “That’s how it began, after all, as a congeries of pagan beliefs subsumed beneath an orthodox umbrella.  It is the perfect example of an assembled religion.”

Regardless where the initial push came from, whatever its core ideology, the fact is that Roman Catholicism came to fruition as a political entity and it was a model of almost democratic universalism.  The holidays (holy days) are mostly borrowings from other disciplines, retrofitted to make people comfortable with the new paradigm.  Its rituals and mysteries are all adaptations of older religious ideas and practices, including a marvelous transplantation from Egyptian mythology of the entire Jesus myth (Horus—almost all of it is duplicated, including certain names, such as Lazarus, and the whole virgin birth motif, which itself is nothing particularly new).  The architects of Roman Catholicism, let us assume to be more gracious than not, recognized a core set of beliefs that did not of themselves require the trappings of a religion or its concomitant institutions, but also saw that most people would prefer (or require) all that such physical and cultural manifestations afford.  Romans above all understood in their bones the function of public architecture and ceremony.  They seemed instinctively attuned to the idea that to get people to behave a certain way they should live within the physical representations of the philosophies behind such behavior.  Romans were Romans as much because of their cities and roads as because of any political philosophy.  The two supported each other.  The church borrowed that big time.

But as an assembled religion, it had a problem, which was the necessity to obscure all the past manifestations, cut the ties to all the pagan practices they’d taken over, and embark on a long-term campaign to evoke cultural amnesia in order to represent themselves as The Truth.  The problem with this is two-fold:  there are always going to be those who know the facts (because you can’t destroy all the evidence, if nothing else) and you have to be very careful about how you present and protect your core ideas, lest people start interpreting them any old way they please.

Along comes the Protestant Reformation, which was at base a movement to return to the Church to its original principles and free it from the “corruptions” that had crept in over the centuries.

The reformers, smart as they may have been, labored under a handicap, namely the overwhelming success the Roman Catholic Church had enjoyed in obliterating and subsuming all those borrowed elements.  The reformers at base believed many if not most of the trappings, which were largely secondary to the core principles, which amount to a set of principles quite separate from the “miracle faith” cult it had become.

So when the Protestant movement began, they took as their goal the idea that the adaptations were the principle elements of their faith, and tried to return themselves to that basis as if it had had no predecessors.  The Catholic Church itself couldn’t just come out and say “Hey, you don’t understand, the whole idea is to adapt and absorb, not build a wall around a few iconic aspects and throw out everything that looks a little different.”

Roman Catholicism had largely succeeded by being adaptable to local beliefs.  Look at the bizarre nature of Latin American Catholicism as ample proof of this.  Even to this day, the Catholic Church “compromises” its apparent principles to bring others into the fold—look at the recent attempt to retroactively reabsorb Anglicans.

Protestantism began as a take-no-prisoners response to what some people saw as corruption—the willingness to concede and adapt.  But it assumed that the Church had been based on something originally “pure” and uncorrupted, a set of ideas that stood apart from everything else.  (To a degree, this was true, but not what the Protestants thought identified it as a priori “Christian” orthodoxy.)  They rejected the malleability of Catholicism, drew a line in the philosophical sand, and argued that the essential element of Christianity was the death and resurrection of a prophet they believed had no antecedents.  What that prophet said and what Christianity embodied as a set of principles for living took second place to the mysteries, and they shut their eyes to the possibility of truth in various guises.

Which is why Protestants burned more witches and killed more Jews than did Catholics, why Protestant treatment of natives wherever encountered has been harsher and in many instances more fatal than Catholic treatment of the same or similar groups, and why fundamentalism is far more a Protestant problem than it is Catholic.

We arrive at the 21st Century and see many Protestant denominations “maturing” to the point where they recognize that Fortress Christianity is counterproductive and ultimately a wrong-headed approach—but we also see splinter groups from these major denominations more and more that cling ever more fiercely to the notion that the edifice is the message and the heathens must be stamped out, producing virulent strains of anti-rational lunacy.  (Certainly there are Catholic fundamentalists, but they seem to be a disfocussed, almost inarticulate collection of mystic loonies instead of militant dogmatists.)

The very adaptability that made Roman Catholicism so successful for so long is based on the fact that they started off as a Rube Goldberg assemblage of beliefs and practices that recognized an idea that truth is a thread running through many fabrics, whereas Protestantism had its birth in the idea that there was only one true suit.

Hence we find that the Catholic Church, for all its other irrationalities, is able to embrace Darwinism, Galileo, and admit it was wrong about the Jews, while the staunchest Creationists and, often, bigots come out of the Protestant movement.  White Supremacist groups are protestant.  The sputtering fear and hatred of Difference is protestant.  The clinging to Milleniallism and hopes for Armageddon are protestant aesthetics.

Now, I see no way to address this problem unless Roman Catholicism is willing to come clean.  When a pope (not this one!) comes out and says  “Hey, people, you’re missing the point, and it’s our fault that you do” then we might start to see something ameliorative from within the whole Christian community.  But they can’t really do that.  After all this time, the “point” of Catholicism is its continual attempt to absorb.

Which is better than some Protestant notions of slash and burn.

Absurdity

The Paradox of Popularity

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a “Bono Moment” in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2’s lead singer.  Check it out and come back here.

Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation.  he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind.  The female is being…a groupie, I guess.  Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it.  In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things.  The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion.  Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant.  You can see the same thing in politics.  To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.

I’ve never had this happen to me.  I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing.  But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over.  I know I would not find it very attractive now.  When I was twenty-five?  You betcha.  Bring ’em on.

But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly.  I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after.  (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)

But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art.  The two are inextricably linked.  Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating.  The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true.  Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work.  There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being.  To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising.  For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.

But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner.  A prisoner of other people’s expectations.  Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.

Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female.  No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk.  Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong.  Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real.  If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.

Some—perhaps most—of us grow up to a point where, although our respect and admiration for certain artists is immense to the point of feeling like we have nothing meaningful to say to these people (and after all beyond “I really enjoyed your work” what do we have to say to someone we just don’t know?) we realize that they are human beings doing a job of work.  To idolize them is really a selfish act and blinds us to the possibilities in people who do not happen to occupy that slot in our pantheon of significance.

I was fortunate.  Way back when I was possibly susceptible to becoming a kind of mindless acolyte, I had an opportunity to meet a couple of musical superstars under circumstances that allowed for the human element to dominate.

The first was a chance encounter with Martin Barre, guitarist of Jethro Tull.  I worked at a camera shop and he came in when the band was in town.  He’d heard that the owner of the shop had a big camera collection, museum quality, and he was interested in buying all or part of it.  I had some of my own photographs hanging in the shop at the time and we ended up talking about photography.  Barre was a collector.  We had a ground upon which we could meet as rough equals and had a good conversation about it.  It lanced the boil of idolization for me (and resulted a couple years later in my being able to go backstage and talk to Ian Anderson and a couple of others, and because of the basis of my albeit small relationship with Barre, the interaction was satisfyingly ordinary in many ways).  Here was just a bloke who liked cameras and was a hobbyist and his talent, while I respected it enormously, didn’t get in the way of actually talking to him.

The other was with Rick Wakeman and was amusing in the extreme and I’ll save that story for later.  But in both instances, I was able to just talk to these men in a way that standing in an autograph line would never have permitted, and consequently gave me—I suppose I could say “inoculated” me against the mindlessness of fan adulation.

Make no mistake, I treasure both those encounters as peak experiences.  But I’ve never forgot that such people are gifted but ordinary.

Ordinary in the way that we all are and few of us are without special qualities and talents.  The circumstances that lead to “stardom” are just that—circumstances.  (Stephen King, for all his gifts as a narrative writer, benefited immensely from a publishing environment that simply does not exist anymore.  Not that he wouldn’t have been significant anyway, but his stature would have taken much longer to achieve and might not have become what it is today without that initial synchrony.)

(In an argument several years ago involving the president, my opponent kept pushing the position that criticizing the president was the same as insulting the country, to which I finally said “Damnit, the president is not the country—he’s an employee!  Well-paid, highly-placed, enormously powerful, but the son-of-a-bitch works for me!”  It was not a view my opponent had ever seemed to consider before.  It was for him a humanizing moment.)

I’m not sure what, if anything, to do about fan adulation.  As I said, you can see in this exactly what happens in religious conversion.  The mindlessness, the abandonment of intellect, the handing-over, as it were, of the Self to the momentary care of someone who is seen as Other Than Ordinary.  I think anything that robs people of their self-possession is a bad thing, which is why I generally dislike being in large crowds—there is something about that many people being synced emotionally by a single event that disturbs me deeply.  But it seems to be a human characteristic.

Which may be why I’m so very bad at determining the demographics of my own potential audience.  I can’t say who will want to read my books, not as a definable group to which marketing might be targeted.  I don’t buy books as part of a group, and if I did and I found out, I’d seriously re-examine my habits.  I’m not a commodity.  Either as an artist or as a fan.  And yet, to make a living at art, there’s a degree of having to cater to that kind of thinking.

Another paradox, I suppose.

Art

Remembering the Future: Why Science Fiction Matters

Recently, I was asked to write a short piece about what science fiction means to me for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  I did and they published it the weekend of Archon 33, October 4th.  Not that anything was wrong with what I wrote, but as this is a topic I think about on and off all the time, I came up with a somewhat different version and, in some respects, a better version, which I couldn’t get in on time.  So here it is.
************************************************************************

We seldom realize what an amazing time we live in. Every time I see someone flip open a cell phone, I get a little thrill, and for a moment I feel the way I did at age 12, huddled in my room, reading Doc Smith’s Lensmen novels with their instantaneous communications. We are on the brink of building cars that do the driving for us—they already work with more computing power than an 80s vintage computer.

Going through the day reminds me of scenes from the works of Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, scores of others. In many ways we have built the world envisioned in the pages of science fiction magazines of the 50s and 60s. The only exception appears to be space travel—it’s the 21st Century and we still do not have a colony on the moon or Mars. Space exploration is happening, just not in the way we expected, so it’s a minor quibble.

I grew up at a time when reading novels and magazines adorned by the garish and outre paintings of artists like Ed Emshwiller, Kelley Freas, Paul Lehr, or Richard Powers could earn you ridicule from peers or lectures from adults about wasting time with nonsense. I, and many others, stuck with it because something about it clicked and nothing else came close to providing the same thrill. For many, devotion lapsed with adulthood, but some of us came back, and today we feel a bit vindicated—the images of science fiction are everywhere.

It is, however, a mistake to value science fiction for its presumed predictions. While we have certainly arrived in The Future, the fact is that if a writer of the 40s or 50s or 60s has turned out to be correct in an extrapolation, it is purely serendipity. These are stories, not blueprints, and casting fortunes is for the tea leaf and horoscope crowd, not science fiction writers.

If utility in art must be found, then the benefit many of us derived from science fiction is simply this: it taught us not to fear change. Tomorrow is just another place to visit, and next year a new city or country. It shows us that things happen for reasons, that the best tool we have with which to face the world is our mind and the effectiveness of that tool is composed of the two most indispensable things—knowledge and imagination.

Things have gotten a bit darker in science fiction, as in the world at large. In some ways we’ve forgotten the 12-year-old to whom these tales should first speak. But at the core of the genre is an optimism and confidence difficult to find in any other literature. After all, most science fiction begins with the assumption that there will be a tomorrow.

For my part, I’ve never been frightened by the prospect of change. In fact, I’ve always looked forward to it. Every now and then, I see something new on the street, in science, on tv, in the world and I look at it and say “Oh, yeah, I remember that.” I can thank all those crazy stories that took delight in the infinite variety of the universe and showed me how to greet the future. For me, that’s why science fiction matters—and always will.

Art

Celebration 2009

Here’s a picture from our just past Celebration of the Book, at Stephens College, Columbia, MO, October 10th.  Shown is our special guest, Margaret Sayers Peden, who lives in Columbia and is a Spanish language translator.  If you are a fan of Isabelle Allende or Arturo Perez-Reverte, you may have read some of her work.  She’s something of a phenom and we were pleased to present her with a special award honoring her literature contributions.  Missouri First Lady Georgann Nixon presented it on our and the state’s behalf.  It was all very emotional and wonderful.

Also pictured, to the right, is Tom Dillingham, estimable member of the board, designer and Atlas of the Celebration (having in many ways lifted it onto his own shoulders and held it up).  The guy in the middle in the hat is me.

celebration-photo-1.JPG

photo by Eric Watkins

Absurdity

Rude Behavior Redux

What follows is an old post from my original website, back in 2005.  I’m reposting it because of a revisitation.  Yesterday I had a knock on the door and there were a couple of people from some small church, spreading the good news.

Now, there is irony here, because I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  I didn’t read it when it first came out because it received so much attention and there was an enormous quantity of posturing, both pro and con, regarding it, that I decided to wait till the furor died down.  Besides, it’s not like I needed convincing on this point.  But I appreciate well-reasoned arguments and in the last couple of years I’ve become acquainted with Bart Ehrman’s work on textual criticism, so last month I spotted both the new paperback edition of The God Delusion as well as Dawkins’ new hardcover on evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth.

So 150 pages into The God Delusion, my Saturday is briefly interrupted by two well-meaning folks wanting to save my soul.  I did not let them linger.  “I’m an atheist,” I said.  Their faces fell and I smiled.  “Don’t worry, it’s not catching.  Unless you have a functioning brain with more than a smidgen of education.”

The man frowned, the woman continued to look alarmed.

“I have one question,” I said.  “I see you have a Bible with you.  Have either of you actually read it?”

“Of course,” the man said.

“Really?  The whole thing?  All the way through?”

“Well…” she waffled.

“In that case would you please tell me why Jesus has two contradictory genealogies?”

They both looked baffled.

“Matthew and Luke,” I said.  “You have read them?  Matthew One has a genealogy and Luke Three has a genealogy, tracing Jesus’ lineage back to David.  They contradict.  I was wondering why.”

“No, they don’t,” he said, flipping open his Bible.  This was too good to be true.  He found the one in Matthew and skimmed it.  “Okay.  Luke…?”

“Three.”

He flipped to that.  Found it.  Read it.  Looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

“They aren’t the same.  How come?  I mean, if this is supposed to be inerrant—I assume you believe it is?—then how come they don’t match?  Just curious.  And one other thing, while we’re on that point.  If Jesus was supposed to be the son of god, how come both genealogies trace him back through Joseph?  Because Joseph is only his step-dad.  How come they don’t go through Mary?  I’m just curious, I’ve never heard a good answer to that.”

The man started to look angry, but the woman actually asked, “What do you think that means?”

“Well,” I said, “it means someone got something wrong.  Either that book is not inerrant like you think it is, or it’s just a bunch of bullshit.  Have a nice day.”

I shut the door.  Rude?  Perhaps.  But as I explained in the following essay, I feel the rudeness is first manifest on their part.  So without further ado, I will proceed to my thoughts on the occasion of a visit from some Jehovah’s Witnesses back in 2005…

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The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door.  This was, in fact, their third visit.  On the previous two, they had spoken with Donna, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here.  They had left literature and apparently decided to return.  This time, they got me.

I don’t like proselytes.  I don’t like telemarketers either.  I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying.  I don’t like aggressive salesmen.  If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay?  My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…”  That’s fine.  If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask.  If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave.  He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned.  Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.

Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan.  In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.

If I walk into a church to hear the services, maybe some of this assumption has some basis–if I weren’t looking for something, I wouldn’t have walked into the church.  But I’m in my home, minding my own business, and there comes a knock on the door.  They have come to find me, to tell me I should be in church–theirs–and that they have brought with them the Good News.  They have interrupted my time, intruded on my day, and have insulted me besides.

I realize most people may not feel this way–the insulted part.  For most people, such visits are just an annoyance.  Something about it bothers them, maybe, but it’s an ill-defined unease, and they’d just as soon forget about it after the missionaries leave.  If they had wanted to ponder the ultimate questions, they’d be doing it somewhere else–like a library or, even, a church.

Proselytes, however, never assume you have done this.  And if you have, and your conclusions are other than what they have to offer, why, then, you have slid into error.  You must be saved.

When they showed up, I recognized them from their two prior visits.  Donna was napping, so I decided to deal with them.  I really didn’t want them coming back, and neither did Donna, so I decided to take the time to convince them they weren’t going to find receptive minds here–in fact, they would find active minds that had already dismissed their message as more of the same old rubbish.

Rubbish.  Dare I call it that?  Why be polite?  It’s rubbish.

In specific, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in 1878 by Congregationalist minister Charles T. Russell announced that Christ had already returned–invisibly, four years earlier–and that the world would end in 1914, when the Final Battle of Armageddon will occur, after which only 144,000 people of all those who have ever lived with reappear in heaven.  (In 1884 he started the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to spread this message.)  Russell died in 1916.  He might have thought Armageddon was taking a long time to be fought, as Europe had turned into the bloodiest battle ground in memory.  He was succeeded by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who officially called the movement Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, in 1931, declared in a fit of prophecy that “millions now alive will never die.”

The original date of Armageddon and the End of the World passed 17 years earlier, but the difficulty of getting the date wrong has never bothered proselytes of apocalyptic faiths.  They just move the date forward, with each new prophet, each new error.

The whole emphasis of apocalyptic groups is on death and destruction.  Everything is about to go up in flames, come crashing down, blow up, dissolve, melt, disappear, perish with requisite rivers of blood and torment.  All this comes from the Book of Revelation, which is the centerpiece of such movements.  I guess they really like all that metaphysically and symbolically bizarre imagery.  The rest of Scripture seems so tame in comparison.

So while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a specific example, in general there are dozens if not hundreds of these little sects, all preaching that the end time is nigh and we’ve got to get right with the lord.  Rubbish?

Indeed.

But I wanted to make a larger observation about insult here.  They come to your door and insult you.  You should be insulted.  You should take offence.  Because at base they are flat out telling you that your life has no meaning.  Never did, never will–unless you accept their version of reality.  Even then, everything you’ve done up to that point is irrelevant and error-filled.  Empty.  Devoid of meaning, pointless.

It’s insulting.

They asked me if I had ever been a church-goer, and I explained that, yes, one time I was a Lutheran, but that had been dissatisfying, so I went on a search for a different faith.  I went through a short list of all the different religions I’d visited or given a try–Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahai, Krishna, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal–after which I came away satisfied that they were all incomplete, wrong, or, more fundamentally, based on the same misapprehension of the universe.

(You might ask, have I not just insulted them by suggesting that what they do is pointless?  No, because I don’t go door to door trying to convince people they’re wrong.  There is more than one reason to practice a religion, more to faith than doctrinal purity, and who am I to judge someone else’s method for coping with the world?  I may write my opinion down and even publish it, but no one is forced to read it.  My conclusion is all mine and if someone asks, I’ll express it.  The insult is in the intrusion.)

One of the ladies asked “Don’t you think you were searching for something?  Why else would you have gone looking like that?”

Good question.  And at the time I was searching.  But I don’t believe I failed to find it.  I did find it.  I found an answer.  But the impulse to search is more mundane.  “We’re raised that way,” I said.  “We live in a culture where not to believe in something is unacceptable.  From the time we’re old enough to understand English, we’re told about Jesus and that it’s a good thing to go to church.  Just to fit in, one feels the need to belong to some kind of congregation.”

I don’t think they expected that answer, because they had no come back.  Besides, it has the virtue of being true.  Most people, I think, attend a religion for social reasons.  They were raised that way, and really, what harm does it do?  You can see this when Big Issues shake up a congregation, like over the question of ministering to gays or something, and the less doctrinaire manage to accommodate the change while the real fire breathers pick up their toys and go somewhere else.

This is not to say that all those people don’t really believe in god–but you don’t need an organized framework to have faith.  You can believe in all manner of thing without attending a church based on it.  The church part is social.

We got into the specifics of biblical prophecy.  They showed me passages they thought referred to present days.  Of course, they were so vague they could refer to any period at any time in history.  I pointed this out repeatedly.  I asked why they thought these passages meant now rather than a thousand years ago.  “Today, it is a global civilization.  Then, it was just one small area of the world.”  Well, that was a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of.

But “The World” is an adaptable phrase, and for each generation has a slightly different meaning.  Back when the bible’s books were being written, “the World” was that local slice.

The vagueness of the passages did not impress them.  When I told them that the battle of Armageddon had been fought long ago, at a place in the Levant called Megiddo, they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I explained that the infamous battle took place in 609 B.C.E. between King Josiah of Judah and the Egyptian King Necho II.  It was said to have been the bloodiest battle ever fought up to that time.

(Now, the British under Allenby starting their final offensive in 1918 at Tel Megiddo against elements of a retreating and regrouping Turkish army.  It hardly qualifies as the Last Battle–the British took 36,000 prisoners at a loss of only 853 dead.)

Armageddon, then, was already a historical event when Revelations was written.  It was in the past, not something yet to come.  Now, King Josiah had been one of the last great reforming kings of Judah–his death at this battle was symbolic of ultimate calamity among the Hebrew.  It is difficult to explain to people who don’t bother to learn about biblical history that Time is fluid in prophetic literature–the past and future easily swap ends, what happened will happen, and just referring to an event that has happened in the past is intended as part and parcel of an æsthetic tradition (rather like quoting an old piece of music in a new composition to underscore a connection, make a point).  What the writer of Revelation was talking about was the fall of Rome, which was at that time very much The Beast, and the calamity to befall Rome was on a scale with the calamity of Josiah’s death.  Of course, this being a Hebrew prophecy, Israel would come out on top–not unscathed, though, as only 144,000 Jews would survive to inhabit what was left.  We can assume the number is so low because of the cabalistic tradition of assigning mystic significance to numbers.  Twelve is such a number.  There are 12 tribes of Israel, 12 X 12,000 = 144,000.  What always seems forgotten by contemporary christian sects like the Witnesses is that this refers to Hebrew survivors, nothing else.  The number is low in real terms, probably as a nasty judgement on the part of John of Patmos that only 144,000 of the Chosen were doctrinally fit to be saved.  In any case, its significance is probably lost to the current politics of the days in which it was written.

To take Revelations as anything other than the political and mystical polemic of a dissatisfied Hebrew living under Roman rule (specifically under Nero) is to assign it importance all out of bounds with its original intention.

Neither of these ladies knew or accepted that John the Divine, composer of Revelations, was not John the Apostle, putative brother of Jesus.  Neither of them had the least grasp of biblical scholarship, nor did they care.

They continued showing me passages.  They asked what I relied on.  “Reason,” I replied.

“And what does that give you?”

“It gives me a basis for understanding what I can control and what I can’t.”

More passages.  I wasn’t giving them answers to which they had set responses.  I dismissed each passage and finally the older of the two asked, “We’ve shown you our proof.  Show us yours.”

“Certainly.  What kind of proof would you accept?”

“Nothing you have can possibly contradict the word of god.”

“Then why should I bring it out?  You’ve already made up your mind.”

And so it went.

They finally left, I hope more than a little befuddled.

They had shown up on my doorstep with the best intentions.  They were going to try to save my soul.

Why is this insulting?

Because it makes a whole raft of assumptions about me–or anyone they approach–that they can neither know or have a right to meddle with.  They have to assume that I am ignorant, that my life is empty (or just naggingly incomplete), that I thirst for something I have never tasted before.

I could turn it around and start discussing physics, or biology, or neuroscience.  I’m quite sure they’ve never brushed up against the more intriguing wonders of nature.  On the contrary, they’ve shut themselves up in a room bounded on all sides by a dogged certainty that nothing outside can possibly be of any relevance or interest.  The certainty of the closed mind.

When I showed them the contradictory genealogies in Matthew and Luke, that describe completely different lines of descent for Jesus, they dismissed it as a “Jewish thing, tracing from both lines.”  That didn’t make any sense to me.  I pointed out that both genealogies ended at Joseph and that if taken literally, this meant that Joseph had two fathers.  Would they accept a genealogist’s report that suggested they had two different fathers?  That point seemed to shoot right by them.  I didn’t even bother to make the larger point, that if this was the word of god, and literal, then the lineage should have been traced through Mary, not Joseph.  That would indeed have been revolutionary in its day, running counter to tradition, and leaving future generations to ponder the significance of this one instance where a lineage was traced through the woman.

As I said, closed minds.

The desperation of the proselyte is sad.  There is so much in this world, so many wonderful things, that to turn one’s back on it all in order to hawk a third-class ticket to an afterlife that is doubtless nothing like anything imagined, if there is one at all (which I very much doubt) is pathetic.  We know we have this life.  Why waste it on pursuing the salvation of those who probably don’t need it?  Why waste it on the pretzel logic of religious interpretations that leave you in no position to grow?

But I won’t start knocking on doors to ask this question and offer an alternative.  I believe we all have choices and that they should not be coerced.  I believe the salesman should leave you alone until you have a question.  I believe telemarketers should leave you alone in the evenings.  I believe proselytes should stop assuming we’re all idiots.  They should understand that their seeking me out that way is really offensive.  I would never presume.

But, as they say, this is all preaching to the converted.

At least I didn’t force anyone to hear the sermon.  I may not believe in god, but I’m polite.

culture

Events and Events

Hard to believe it’s mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I’ve talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I’ll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

Turnout was another matter.  It wasn’t embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn’t up where I’d hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next year, which will be—

MISSOURI GENRE.

I sort of grabbed the title out of the air at the last board meeting, just so we could all start thinking about it and working toward it, and to make sure everyone understood that we have a program (even though we don’t, exactly).  I’ve already enlisted three writers to appear.  Katie Estill, who has two novels to her credit, the most recent one, Dahlia’s Gone, is quite a bravura piece of writing.  Not genre, not exactly, although it does involve a murder.  But in a way, mainstream is a genre insofar as it is recognized as distinct from all other “genres” like mystery or romance or science fiction.  John Lutz, a local mystery writer of considerable reputation, who wrote the novel on which the movie Single White Female was based.  And Robin Bailey, talented fantasy author and former president of SFWA.  I figured having them on the bill would be a good, solid foundation on which to construct the rest of the program.

This will be the last Celebration in which I’m directly involved as a member of the board of the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come April of ’11 I shall be leaving the MCB, per the by-laws.  So I hope this one will nail it up good.

I really enjoy being on panels and doing presentations.  I can’t claim to be exactly comfortable in front of an audience, but I like it, and occasionally I even do well.  So in future I hope to be doing more of that and less planning.

Assuming, of course, I also have some new novels to promote.  I’m still waiting to hear.

I’ve got another month or two of regular unemployment, then there seems to be some kind of extra rigomarole to go through to get the extensions.  I have a prospect that won’t come in till January.  We’ll see how that all works out.

I must say that all the presenters we had at this last Celebration were excellent.  The talks were first-rate.  We must solve this attendance problem, because people are missing out on some really great stuff.  Tenacity.  I’ve already put some things in place that I have to follow up on next year in terms of radio presence and such.

Meantime, I have one more major gig for the MCB this year—the book-to-film panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival.  I have obtained a copy of the novel in question—Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell, which is out of print—and I need to read it beforehand and make up my list of questions.  We’ll have Scott Phillips on stage to talk about converting novels to screenplays and a Civil War historian, Louis Gerteis, to do a little commentary on the subject of the novel, which is the Civil War in Missouri (which was particularly nasty).  Ought to be a great event.  The film is Ride With The Devil, of which a new director’s cut is being released in a couple of months.  Early Toby MacGuire work.  This will be on November 15th, probably at Washington University.

Then I will be immersed in my own work for the rest of the winter.

Oh, boy.