At Dawn I Have Birds

Walton Ford
"Visitation"
2004
Six color hardground and softground etching, aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, drypoint on Somerset Satin paper
44 x 30 7/8 inches

"Often, lately, the night is a cold maw
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods,
which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds,
clearly divine messengers that I don't understand
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions."

— from "Age Sixty-nine," by Jim Harrison

Image credit: ripped from the Paul Kasmin Gallery website

Coasts

Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion."

Elizabeth and I devoted the afternoon of my thirty-first birthday to striding down (and then huffing back up) the aptly named Steep Ravine Trail in Mount Tamalpais State Park. During our descent, we paused for a few minutes on a stocky wood footbridge spanning a shallow gully stream. I leaned against the bridge's handrail and appreciated the subtle play of sunlight on the forest's understory, then tilted my head far back to admire the towering canopy. A bird call punctuated the stream's casual susurration.

The impressive montane forest brought to mind a quotation I copied into one of my commonplace books some years ago. In his account of an interview with a Venezuelan native, the celebrated 19th century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt claims that the Indian critiqued the Christian God of the European explorers and conquerors, observing, "Your god keeps himself shut up in a house as if he were old and infirm. Ours is in the forest and in the fields and on the mountains when the rain comes." Although no rain graced Mount Tamalpais this December 29th, the Indian's god was also mine.


Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

Mount Tamalpais is located in southern Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. The lush Douglas fir and redwood forests of the region are magical places. They served as inspiration for George Lucas's forested moon Endor and they call to mind the epic majesty of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. (In fact, some "Star Wars" fans reasonably suggest that Lucas named his verdant moon in homage to Tolkien. Tolkien, a celebrated linguist and scholar, invented languages for his fantasy fiction and in the Quenya tongue, one of the elvish languages he created, the word for Middle-earth is Endor.)

Of all Tolkien's creatures, the elegant and noble elves of Lothlorien especially appealed to me when I first read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." The elves are wise, fair and gracious beings, but also wild, intimately attached to the world of the hunter and to Nature's ambivalent magic. Twenty years after my first reading of Tolkien's fantasy epic, I still proudly characterize myself as a Nature worshiper.

The economist and sociologist Max Weber famously said that the secularization of society and increasing specialization of methodological inquiry had led to a "disenchantment of the world." Indeed, they have, but Baruch Spinoza's brand of naturalistic pantheism allows for a happy marriage of the material and metaphysical worlds. The two spheres, like the taijitu's yin and yang, are complementary parts of a whole. Necessarily, then, exclusion or disparagement of one of these two realms is limiting.

Although the Enlightenment's separation of reason and imagination, and of science and religion, has yielded exemplary human achievements, it also alienates us from the integrated aggregate. We no longer conceive of the universe (or our experience of it) as coherent or unified; since at least the 17th century, the prevailing philosophical current is Cartesian, depicting the universe as a random assemblage of disparate parts. As a result, those individuals who, like the brilliant 19th century critic John Ruskin, strive to reconcile "the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith" are considered naive or fey. Even Gershom Scholem, the renowned historian of Jewish mysticism, described his philosopher friend Walter Benjamin's work as "an often puzzling juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological and the materialistic." I align myself with the philosophical dissidents because, like Ruskin and Benjamin, I feel that the material and metaphysical realms are locked in a harmonious, reciprocal relationship. Framed another way, I believe that the mundane is the sacred; I deny the divisive "and."

"My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity."

Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

That December evening, Elizabeth and I motored along Grizzly Peak's ridge line and, as the Pacific horizon took the sun, we admired the colorful strata deposited over San Francisco's hills, city lights and bay. Later, after a lovely dinner in Berkeley, we returned to Elizabeth's home and relaxed with her parents and brothers. It was a superlative day. Yet because I'm accustomed to spending my birthday in brooding solitude, it was also an exceptional one, and therefore I wasn't surprised when, driving to Grizzly Peak, I felt a twinge of regret.

To be sure, the day was nearly perfect, but I had to ignore the call issued by the deep blues and purples of twilight, an invitation to submerge myself in the gathering darkness. I remarked to Elizabeth that it felt very strange to observe my birthday without making space for rumination. We turned onto Grizzly Peak Boulevard. I watched the car's headlights rake across a stand of trees, frightening back the dark.


View of Berkeley and San Francisco Bay, December 29th, 2009

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton described his contemplative practice as "death for the sake of life." Merton may be guilty of rhetorical flourish, but one of contemplation's principal goals is the erasure of self or the death, if you will, of the self-conscious individual. I consider myself lucky; I once experienced release from the first-person, a rare gift in our culture of consumption and distraction. I consider those exceptional moments an ecstatic opening to The All, a glimpse of the integrated, infinite universe.

The word ecstasy is derived from the Greek word for "to stand out of place." On the dike at Heron's Foot, my conscious being was literally outside (or at least without) the self. For a time, the atoms, molecules, cells and organs that comprise "me" were undifferentiated from the greater web. Religious mystics usually refer to this variety of fundamental experience as "seeing God." That name bothers me less than it did in my militantly atheistic adolescence, but I prefer The All (or an apophatic counterpart, The Nothing) because the name possesses majesty and mystery but none of the unfortunate authoritarian baggage. Furthermore, the rituals of institutionalized religion and its "under God" subjects are no more or less valuable than the rituals of the heathen mystic. John Dewey's "live animal" might just as easily be awakened in the gropings of sex as in penitential prayer, and God is just as easily found in the forests of Mount Tamalpais as in the acolyte's cathedral. After all, there is nothing supernatural about ecstasy; it is only a mode of hyper awareness, a more immediate connection to the universe, or at least as much of one as our limited vessels can perceive.

Now, January already half gone, I sit at my day-job desk and look out on Manhattan's East River. The late afternoon sun's angled glow paints the 59th Street Bridge in peach-yellow and refracts off the west face of Citibank's glass obelisk in Queens. A herring gull flaps over Roosevelt Island and the river runs slack as it awaits the pull of outgoing tide. In "Rewriting Nature," an essay published in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote "[Charles] Darwin disenchanted believers in Heaven, but he reenchanted lovers of Earth."

I concur.

"What we have to be is what we are."

Office window view; East River, Roosevelt Island and Queens, January 2008

Note: all indented quotations, Thomas Merton

Photo credits: all images, Hungry Hyaena, 2008

Rothko's Darkness

Interior photograph of Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas
Completed 1971

"It is at once a reduction of the whole of the universe to the infinitesimal point of the anxious self and an absorption of the self in the eternal calm of the sea of being." 

-Rabbi Jacob B. Agus

In the September 26th edition of The Guardian Weekly, the opinionated British art critic Jonathan Jones describes his visit to Mark Rothko's chapel in Houston, Texas, as "a pilgrimage to the greatest marriage of art and architecture in the US." Jones worries, though, if the chapel is misunderstood, or even misused, by American visitors.

For the British critic, the Rothko chapel is "one of America's greatest and strangest monuments: a chapel created by a modern artist who had no religious beliefs." Jones is dismayed, then, to find that many visitors to the chapel are anything but irreligious.

Inside Rothko's master work, a fellow chapel-goer asks the critic if he sees in one of the over-sized paintings "the figure of Jesus Christ our Lord on the Cross?" Jones writes, "I look into the gigantic abstract work. It contains no images, Christian or otherwise."

Jones is clearly bemused that the chapel is today regarded by so many as a sacred space, and he chalks this interpretation up to our American religiosity.

"Locals use this place. They love it. They come not as tourists but to meditate, pray and talk sombrely. They see it as a religious place and the art as spiritual. It is called a chapel, and most Americans believe in God."

Jones feels Rothko would be similarly befuddled by the religious interpretation. The critic explains that Rothko designed the chapel to take "his pursuit of...the 'tragic' to its ultimate extreme" and that the artist "believed that all serious art was about death." Undoubtedly, Rothko had a fatalistic, deeply melancholic streak - he killed himself in 1970, one year before the chapel opened - but I'm not sure that the artist would, like Jones, bemoan the religious significance of his chapel.

A Russian Jewish immigrant, Rothko (originally named Marcus Rothkowitz) certainly didn't intend visitors to see Jesus Christ in his large canvases, but he was not, as Jones contends, a man "who had no religious beliefs." In fact, Rothko's father was an Orthodox Jew and the young Rothko spent time in Russian cheders before his 1913 emigration to the United States. After his family settled in Portland, Oregon, Rothko became active in the local Jewish community. Whether the future artist's connection to Judaism was principally cultural or spiritual, I do not know, but later in life he frequently described the making of his paintings as a religious experience.

Interior photograph of Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas
Completed 1971

So what was Rothko thinking when he undertook the chapel project, and what did he intend the space to be? We can only speculate.

For his part, Jones asserts that the paintings act as doorways or portals. I agree, but the British critic insists that they are "portals of death." Jones sees the blackness of Rothko's chapel paintings as "utter desolation," blackness that shatters "any illusion of paradise." The chapel overall Jones describes as a "theatre of emptiness, death's antechamber, the self-expression of a suicide." He dismisses other interpretations, claiming that, if the Texas oil barons who commissioned the project understood more fully Rothko's deathly intentions, the chapel would not have been built.

But the blackness in Rothko's late works can also be understood as nothingness. Negative theology, more commonly referred to by the Latin via negativa, breaks down the word "nothingness" into "no-thing-ness." God, according to negative theology, is ineffable; literally, It, that is to say, God, is No Thing. As Lao tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote in that essential text, "The unnamable is the eternally real...Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding."

This mystical conception of God or Being would be familiar to an educated Jew like Rothko. The Jewish Kabbalist notion of Ein Sof springs from a medieval Spanish Jew's exposure to Eastern philosophy. (Most historians agree that Moses de Leon, a prominent Spanish rabbi, composed the Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah, in the late 13th century. Some of these scholars argue that de Leon's work is a syncretic project, injecting tantra and other Eastern thought into the ever-evolving Jewish tradition.) Ein Sof, translated from Hebrew to English, literally means "there is no end." It is the unquantifiable, ambivalent and infinite energy that exists before, within and after the more mundane conception of God. The kabbalists, though, take their negative theology one step further. Ein Sof is the ineffable All, but Ayin, or "nothingness," is Ein Sof rendered finite. Some Jews consider Ayin the cosmic potential extant prior to the Big Bang.

Daniel Matt, a leading scholar of Kabbalah, writes in "God and the Big Bang":

"The paradox is that ayin embraces 'nothing' and 'everything.' This nothingness is oneness: undifferentiated, overwhelming the distinctions between things....This mystical nothingness is neither empty nor barren; it is fertile and overflowing, engendering the myriad forms of life. Medieval philosophers - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - had taught that God created the world 'out of nothing.' The mystics turn this formula on its head, reinterpreting it to mean that the universe emanated from divine nothingness."

For some religious individuals, concepts like Ayin and Ein Sof allow a point of entry. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, a Jewish scholar and writer, speaks of God "as the Holy Nothingness." Detailing his turn from secularism to faith, he writes, I "replaced my atheistic nihilism with a mystical nihilism. To be all that there is, as God was in the beginning and will be in the end, is equivalent to being, so to speak, absolutely nothing. In the beginning, God dwelt in the womb of his own omnipotent nothingness." I love the contradictory nature of such a God!

Likewise, religious mystics of all persuasions believe that individuals must embrace darkness in order to find spiritual integrity. They must, as the prominent Rabbi Arthur A. Cohen put it, "...[surrender] to unknowing, [enter] the 'dark night' of which all mystics speak - a metaphor for the condition of desperate ignorance - and there [identify] a frail connection between the emptying of the self of all knowledge, the abandonment of knowledge, the perfect unknowing which enables the process of knowing to be renewed and the being whose existence renews. It is the passion of thought and the desire to know which presses us to the limit where thought cannibalizes itself in despair, where knowing ceases, where the emptying of the self is undergone and the fullness of God may commence."

Those chapel-goers who claim to see in Rothko's paintings Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Buddha, or any other religious hero are guilty of unimaginative literalism but, if their experiences are real, they are "seeing" through darkness into spirit. I believe that Rothko, an artist much invested in mythology and mysticism, would respect and even commend that.

Jones writes in The Guardian, "[The chapel] is not an austere, dead, modernist monument. It's a living chapel. People sing and play music. But maybe they should look around a bit more - because this is one of the most compelling rooms I have ever been in."

But why should these religious visitors have to stop worshipping, singing or otherwise participating in the work to take (what Jones considers) due notice of the room's quality? Given the power of the space, might not the room compel their behavior? Rothko insisted that he was no mere maker of abstract paintings. "If you are moved only by their color," the artist said of his mature works, "then you miss the point."

Photo credits: images ripped from HASTAC on Ning

Nightwalks

"This is thy hour O Soul,
thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art,
the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing,
pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars."

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892), "A Clear Midnight"
(from "Leaves of Grass")

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2007

Hungry Hyaena updates aren't appearing regularly of late. This lull in posting can be attributed, in part, to my renewed efforts in the studio - preparation for September shows - but I've also found myself with little to say or, at least, little desire to say anything.

As I've observed before, my more productive painting periods are usually marked by a turn from prose to poetry. As I drift into the more abstract, emotional medium, I also become relatively inarticulate. In this mode, I more closely resemble the hackneyed artist stereotype, a dreamy, emotionally guided beast.

Perhaps I'm more sensitive, too. In fact, I fear I'm a little afraid. I'm afraid of squandered potential, of what a forgotten writer once described as "the long, melancholy roar" that is a life devoid of hope. I'm not afraid for myself, really; I've been blessed with a steady disposition and the ability to adapt, happily enough, to almost any circumstance. I'm afraid for us, the global populace. What incentive do we have to strive for betterment if we lack faith and hope, which are inextricably bound to one another?

In Cat Power's lovely cover of the Velvet Underground song, "I Found A Reason," she sings, "Oh, I do believe in all the things you say. What comes is better than what came before." The song is included in the Wachowski's brothers' recent movie, "V For Vendetta." Hunched over his jukebox, listening to the song, the film's protagonist, V, a silver-tongued, impassioned terrorist (cough, freedom fighter) who lives alone in an underground bunker cum library of antiquities, comments that he has listened through his music collection hundreds of times, but has never danced to it. This seemingly straightforward observation betrays V's waning faith in the moral superiority of his cause.(1) It also indicates how much life experience V has sacrificed to pursue his ostensibly noble, if murderous ambition. An idea remains just that, a notion, until it is made manifest through action. Similarly, listening to music is merely appreciation, an intellectual activity. To fully experience the songs, V will need to move with the music.

The filmmakers' choice of "I Found A Reason" interests me. The lyrics suggest that a lover has provided the speaker/singer with a reason to go on and, indeed, the romantic subplot of "V For Vendetta" echoes this theme, but the title of the song could just as easily be "I Found Reason." Reason itself represents a sort of intellectual romance; she is the bedmate of most idealism and revolution. Humanity has repeatedly emerged from dark and troubled times by placing faith in Enlightenment values, then striving to implement them. Reason, in essence, is hope which is, as I said above, bound to faith. This is why so many religious fundamentalists shrink from science and why so many moral, rational idealists - Galileo, Spinoza and their ilk - are excommunicated or persecuted. The moral and ethical considerations are relevant, to be sure, but modern man's faith in progress is viewed as competing with his faith in God (even though the two are not mutually exclusive). Through reason, we gather the conviction to believe that what comes can be better than what came before.

As my own paintings, themselves responses to our curious, unsettling times, turn more to magic realism, to the realm between natural and supernatural, I ask myself, if we're to right the myriad wrongs of our day, should we not be turning in the other direction? There is, of course, no simple answer...certainly not a satisfying one, anyway. In the meantime, I'll continue to turn over the issue in my work. I've included images of two recent pieces. The painting, "This Now, Like The Beginning, Again And Again," is currently on display in Cleveland, Ohio, at exit (a gallery space). It will also be included in my solo show, "Mongrel Truth," at AG Gallery next month. This show will feature a number of drawings, too, one of which is pictured here.


Christopher Reiger
"this now, like the beginning, again and again"
2006
Watercolor, gouache and marker on stretched Arches paper
25 x 25 inches


Christopher Reiger
"Ursus americanus (American bear)"
2006
Sumi ink on Arches paper
7 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches

I hope everyone is doing well and perhaps, sometime soon, I'll enter again into a mode where writing is more central to my practice.

(1) The film manages to raise some pertinent questions about progress and morality despite the Wachowskis' stubborn devotion to a red pill-blue pill, good guy-bad guy approach.

Image credit: "V For Vendetta" image ripped from DC Comics website

Riding The Waves

My nights were preoccupied by plumb-bobs and lines last week. The bobs that appeared in my dreams were not put to practical use, however. They were "primitive" constructions, fashioned from carved wood, rope, animal skin, and stretched intestine, artifacts of the sort one admires at the American Museum of Natural History. These crude bobs were hung as ornaments from the ceiling of a low-lit room and, sleeping, I walked among them approvingly.

But the strange tools soon preoccupied my waking hours, too. At work, I daydreamed of them. On the subway, I pondered their construction. After a few days of this obsessive thinking, I realized that I would not be rid of the bobs until they were fabricated. Nevertheless, I put off the inevitable, stubbornly continuing to work on the paintings already in progress. If, while in the studio, my thoughts returned to the plumb lines, I stopped working and went for a long run.

I was determined to fight off (or to ignore) the vagrant inspiration. Where were these bobs coming from, I wondered? By the end of the week, sketches littered my day job desk, only partially obscured by legitimate paperwork. But what do they mean? I began to feel like Richard Dreyfuss's character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," frantically impelled to work at some odd creation.

Finally, I heeded the call; I could hold out no longer. I departed work on Monday evening and headed directly to Home Depot. One hour later, I was a hundred dollars poorer, but bob ready.



Such bouts of inspiration, particularly those that require a dramatic shift in medium or concept, are equal parts giddy delirium and raw self-doubt. Most worrisome to me was the fact that these inspired sparks usually mark the beginning of what I call the artist's trough phase. The sparks are the creative burst that precedes the violent thrust under. (See Point B in the above wave diagram).

The creative process has much in common with a wave. When the artist finds herself atop a crest (Points A and F), life is grand. This peak is short-lived, however, and plateaus are rare; the bow of the artist's little boat begins to nose downward soon enough. Heading downslope is not all bad; during the descent, the artist is generally content, busy producing work associated with her last creative crest. But as the boat's bow nears the base line, she begins to fret...about everything.

I'd been idling in this fretful stage for the last two months but, sometime last week, I was pulled under, troughward.

Generally, I'm an upbeat individual. Despite some seemingly pessimistic attitudes regarding long-term ecological health, not a day goes by that I don't appreciate being here. The world is an amusement park of ideas and discoveries, and I simply can't understand how anyone could be bored or uninspired. That said, the creative troughs do pull me very low. I become self-absorbed, distracted, pessimistic, and argumentative. In short, I'm not a pleasant person to be around.

There are two ways for an artist to ride out a creative slump. I might opt to stop producing work for a spell, hoping that a break will sort things out. Alternatively, I can work wildly, embracing whatever inspiration compels me. More often than not, the latter, active approach is the one I choose. Something useful may come of the mess.



The current trough, though, caught me unawares. I was so focused on the plumb-bob dreams that I didn't take notice when my little boat plunged into the wave's trough. Last night, I quite suddenly (and quite horribly) realized that I was soaked. Red-faced and ashamed, I stood in the center of my studio and felt as though my little world was collapsing. Now, I can only hang on and ride out the trough.

Sometimes they last months, sometimes weeks, sometimes days. The short ones aren't so bad. My last trough was pretty rough, but I used exercise and reading to carry on. I feared, then, that the dip was merely a preview of the next, and so now I hope that the current trough is the "Big One," the 9.5. I'd like to get it over with!

Curiously, I remain enamored of the plumb-bobs. Although I smashed the sculptures last night and returned the unused Home Depot purchases this morning, I'm still convinced that the bobs are significant. Why did I start dreaming of plumb lines? Excepting the many pages of scribbled construction plans and hasty notes, it seems as though the plumb lines I dreamed of will never be made. Too bad. I could use one now. I'd like to know how deep this trough is!

Photo credits: "The Lord's Daily Way" Bible Study at keyway.com, "The Physics Classroom" Wave Tutorial, The U.S. Navy Science & Technology Focus

Random Quotes and Stuff: Installment #3

"Last summer, the F.D.A. approved the leech for use as a medical device, making this only the second time that the agency has authorized such a use for a live animal. (Maggots, which can be applied to wounds to consume infected tissue, were approved in January, 2004.)"

-John Colapinto, "Blood Suckers," The New Yorker, July 25, 2005

I find this news exciting. When I first read about the maggots-as-medicine approval last year, I was elated. I hoped that more people would realize how interconnected everything is if doctors dumped maggots into their festering wounds. Unfortunately, most people feel very differently about composter species and the idea of squirming, white grubs eating their flesh - even dead, dying or inflamed flesh - will likely disturb them. Whatever...I'll just go sit in the corner and play with my leeches.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way….It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them."

-Judge Holden speaking in Cormac McCarthy's novel, Blood Meridian

In the early nineties, Operation Desert Storm was featured prominently on network television and in department stores. My Virginian neighbors proudly wore T-shirts emblazoned with the mission name, as though it was a World Series commemorative; to be without one was unusual or, worse, unpatriotic.

I was thirteen years old in 1991. I remember watching the green-tinted, "night vision" films of Baghdad air raids as I lay on the floor of my parents' living room, drawing pictures. I wondered, naively, why we still fought wars. After World War II, after the horror of the atomic bomb, I thought, we should know better.

And yet, five quick years later, I seriously considered military service. Being a good patriot requires some service to the country, I told myself, and, more importantly, I would not be "truly alive" until I had charged into harms way, guns blazing. I'm no longer so naive or bloodthirsty, but I think Judge Holden's answer accurate, no matter how damned distressing it may be.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Children need the dark materials of fairy tales because they need to make sense - in a symbolic, displaced way - of their own feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Children also benefit from learning about violence and brutishness in fairy tales, Bettelheim writes, for it counters the 'widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in our life is due to our natures - the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly.'"

-Margaret Talbot, 'The Candy Man," The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2005

I recently met a young girl - I believe she was six or seven years of age - whom I found especially intriguing. At a Long Island dinner party, the several children present announced that they intended to "put on a show" for the adults, mostly Long Island married couples and a few odd men and women out, myself among them. A few minutes later, this particular girl emerged with a wand, a vaguely ethereal tutu bottom and a wide, toothy grin to announce the name of her segment. "Evil Always Wins," she said, proudly. She proceeded to make her way around the room, lightly touching the heads of all in attendance with her wand, announcing, "Now you have been made evil."

I took an instant liking to the precocious girl and found myself pondering her performance for much of the party. I believe she intended to protect the adults from the cruel realities of the world. Because "evil always wins," she magically transformed each of us into evil beings, thereby saving us from future defeat.

Examining this logic from an adult perspective, it stinks of "selling out," an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude, but children don't necessarily view the world in this way. For example, when I was ten or eleven, I once longed to be a werewolf or vampire, not so I could surf down Main Street on the roof of a van, but so I could "infect" people I liked, creating an eternal community of kindred spirits. Sure, at twenty-seven this scenario seems dangerously cultish, but I also used to fantasize about tearing away the throats of my "enemies," and if I'm not going to condemn my childhood wants and desires for their violent content, I certainly won't do so for their lack of philosophical foresight. Besides, there are worse fates than lycanthropy or vampirism.

When I later recounted the story of this "evil," little girl, most listeners shook their head and said things like, "Wow, something is sure wrong with her" or "That's disturbing. She's a troubled kid, huh?" I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is something amiss in the child's life, but most children wrestle with real world nightmares. It's a vital part of growing up. Scars, mental and physical, stay with us, an important part of who we are. An increasingly protective approach to child rearing, though, has taken hold. Disney, as far as I'm concerned, is the embodiment of popular parenting, making formulaic movies to entertain unimaginative children and adults alike. The animation is spectacular, certainly, but the plots are hollow and repetitive alongside those found in, say, Grimms' Fairy Tales.

I brought this up with a parent I know and she told me she would never give Grimms' to her daughter "because they are too frightening." But I agree with G.K. Chesterton, author of "The Ethic of Elfland," who writes that fairytales inspire in children a sense that life "is not only a pleasure but an eccentric privilege." What a marvelous way of putting it!

The General

Friday night, in a dream, I was told by another man - an authoritarian type who, if I recall correctly, was dressed as a general - that there is but one sure way to determine what you really believe in. I thought I knew what he would tell me. In the course of more than one alcohol-fueled conversation, I have stated that I would willingly go to war and risk an untimely death for a cause that I considered righteous. This military man must have read my thoughts, however, for he dismissed my conviction as silliness, the product of apprehensive ambition. Putting yourself at risk, he explained, is selfish. It is the path of the martyr and, while you may die feeling virtuous, you will accomplish little in death. No, he explained to me, a willingness to fight for a cherished ideal doesn’t mean that you truly believe in it. "Would you send other youths into battle for the cause in question?," he asked me. "That is the only way to know if you truly believe." Then he was gone and I was awake, staring at my bedroom wall, trying to figure out if what the general had said made sense and, if so, how my mind had come to present the idea to me.

Based on the general’s logic, our current president must believe that our military engagement in Iraq is pure and just. Bush certainly insists as much, but I’ve never believed him. But perhaps this has more to do with my general cynicism?

So what do I wholly believe in? Would I send others to wage war in the name of sustainability and conservation? Would I order the slaughter of SUV manufacturers and everyone who eats a McDonald’s hamburger? Would I send out young warriors to vanquish the commercial fishing industry? Would I be comfortable spreading the gospel of E.O. Wilson or Jared Diamond across the world?

Some “bad guys” would be easy to point to, but who should be added to this short list? Take the bushmeat problem in Africa. “Bad.” Must be stopped. But wait. There is no group I can target unless I elect to kill off most of the population, say, of the Republic of the Congo or Ghana. A internationally financed African war on poverty seems like a better idea, but anthropologists and biologists suggest that, in fact, increasing wealth results in a higher demand for bushmeat. Okay, so I’ll also increase habitat protection. But then I’m judged an elitist white man protecting foreign lands from its own inhabitants? Hmmm…. So whom do I target? Who is the enemy, dammit? If I don’t know whom to fight, I can’t reasonably put any "boots on the ground." My mind continues to work in this way until I’m second guessing even the original short list. After all, the manufacturers of SUVs are responding to consumer demand, even if it is a demand they helped foster. Am I to target everyone?

Barring the invention of Edward Hoagland’s “new variety of the neutron bomb, designed to kill people and leave behind not empty buildings but the rest of Creation,” no weapons are suitable for the war that I would wage and, making all of humanity a target, while an alluring option during bleak days, is to extinguish all of our wondrous promise along with all of our faults. Despite any misanthrophic misgivings, I can not ignore the good in Homo sapiens.

Last night, before I dreamed of the general, I watched “I Heart Huckabees,” a recent film written and directed by David O. Russell. The screenplay tries to tackle a lot and the resulting movie is something of a mess, but it is thoughtful, amusing, and pertinent. I subscribe to the “blanket” philosophy Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman) expounds. In a nutshell, Jaffe contends that we’re all part of the same web of life and, therefore, we need to find the common ground and live in the moment. His is a Romantic mode, flirting with a kind of mysticism. But I also find value in the nihilistic philosophy of Bernard’s nemesis, Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert). After all, if we are all part of Jaffe's "blanket," if every rock, tree, human, and galaxy is but a piece of the greater whole, indivisible, then all conceptual hierarchies are wrong-headed, and we come full circle to existential meaninglessness. Such is the stuff of Philosophy 101 and late night dorm room conversations. (Anybody have some microwavable burritos, dude?) David O. Russell, by having Albert Markovski’s (Jason Schwartzman) ultimate existential awakening occur only after he works with both Bernard and Caterine, suggests that the brooding ponderings of those like Albert result in little progress. It is enough to strive to know ourselves and to face our demons; we can’t own the universe and have all the answers.

What about my war then? I’m still sitting here, short-listing all the fat-cat industrialists, fascists, and that high school sophomore who used to kick me in the back of the school bus when I was in seventh grade. Don’t I get to put their heads on pikes? Don’t I get to truly believe in something?

The answer is “No.” I can believe in what I think I believe in, but because I’m me and you’re you, connected but distinct motes of the greater whole, there is no army I can righteously marshal. Some readers will feel that this conclusion stinks of postmodernism, of relativism, but, despite the shrugging defeatism of so many postmodern thinkers, some of the philosophy's fundamental ideas are valuable. I don’t have to turn my back on sustainability or conservation because the general’s rule suggests that I don’t truly believe in them. His question doesn’t allow for the consideration of complex relationships; it is better suited to questions of colonialism and religion than it is to conservation or humanitarian concerns. Progress in these latter fields comes through nuanced policy, education, and a gradual shift in popular worldview. No war can achieve such things.

Photo credit: painting by Dan Nance