Tambourine Man

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March 1966

Playboy:  “you’ve said you think message songs are vulgar.  Why?“

Dylan:  “Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song.  I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message.  . . .you’ve got to respect other people’s right to also have a message themselves.”

Bob Dylan went to the University of Minnesota for less than a year.  He read Immanuel Kant’s  A Critique of Pure Reason and then quit.  Kant talked of the ‘understanding’ as opposed to the ‘reason’.  By the ‘understanding’, he meant the a priori – the instinctual knowing that a human is born to have without being taught.  His deep belief is that art, any art, that is true, speaks to the ‘understanding’, and not to the ‘reason’. He tries to convey this to Playboy, without success.  In the process he reveals – and it is startling to see it now in retrospect – that he had this conviction about art and his intention to honor it in his work, at a very young age, after barely growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, after just a short time in college.

In this interview he continually rejects categories, particularly political categories, and intentions or plans for his artistic direction.  The interviewer just doesn’t get it, and Bob is forced to give diversionary answers to questions he has already answered.

“I’m not an IBM computer any more than I’m an ashtray.  I mean its obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m just not a schoolteacher.”

Dylan is trying to say that he will follow his muse, here and now, using his medium.  He won’t describe its meaning or its effect on others.  It is not about descriptive words, he is saying, or that is what it would be – descriptive words.  The song art will either grab you or it won’t.

“Colleges are like old age homes” – anything that blocks one’s access to the ‘understanding’ is deadening, a form of suicide.  “Protest” music – “topical” music – is dead music because it is applies reason to the artistic process.  What is reasoned cannot communicate with the understanding.

“Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me” – this is his plan – to follow his artistic intuition and communicate to those who will hear it.  That is all an artist can do.

“I don’t know about other people’s sympathy but my sympathy runs to the lame and crippled and beautiful things.  I have a feeling of loss of power – something like a reincarnation feeling”. His urge is to Surrender to an inner sense.

He seems to know there is a price.  People want explanation, they want certainty, they want to belong. They will seek to believe in order to belong.

Dylan is willing to be disappointing.  He is willing to pay the price.  He has paid the price.

“I wouldn’t think twice about giving a starving man a cigarette.  But I’m not a shepherd.“

The Girl with Tattoo and Fire

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It may be significant that a young Swedish author’s books are about evil, revenge, and justice.  The Sweden we all know is egalitarian, humane, rational, and kind.  The people are understanding and generous, and they abhor violence.  They were neutral in World War II.  Life in Sweden is neat, careful, sensible, and compassionate.  Emotions are peculiarities, sex is hygienic, punishment is rehabilitation.  The only problems are  boredom and suicide.

Not so in the Stieg Larrson books.  Here, Swedish men are sadistic murderers, molesters, and neo-nazi rapists.  Our heroine is a victim who won’t accept victimhood, and she uses her digital talents to endure and survive.  She rescues the Swedish journalist – a quintessential good guy who seeks to uncover ‘corruption’ in Swedish society – from near murder.  This guy thinks the man who nearly murdered him ‘must be very sick’, but she will have none of that.  She watches the would-be murderer (who has committed other serial murders) burn alive, when she could have saved him, and this bothers her not at all.  She finds herself having to explain the obvious:  “He knowingly tortured and murdered innocent people, and he enjoyed it”.  Hello.

To those who have always been safe and comfortable, justice comes to be seen as an immature emotional need, like revenge, a juvenile anger.   Compassion is always proper, the way to break the ‘cycle of violence’.   War is never the answer, punishment ‘doesn’t work’.

Perhaps in homogeneous societies, like Sweden up until recently, consensus is easy, trust is high, others are understandable, empathy is natural, good will is a default.  Such a society, however, eventually provides rich opportunity for exploitation by the cunning, the selfish, the deceptive, and the mean.  Such a society can become, like Larsson’s Swedish journalist, naive.

Our heroine’s abusive father is an evil Russian.  She is only half Swedish.

Compassion over justice may need a reset, unfortunately.  In a tolerant and cosmopolitan world, justice may be more necessary.  These novels may be trying to say so.

John F. Kennedy famously said:  “Don’t hate your enemies but never forget their names”.

It is the weak who suffer the most from the emphasis on compassion over justice, and it is the powerful who suffer less from the failure of justice.  Yet, ironically, it is the powerful who are most readily advocating compassion.

Serving Justice, it gets forgotten, isn’t so much about punishing the guilty  as it is about preventing future injustice.

Our heroine seems to know that trying to understand evil may feel comfortable, but it doesn’t do much for the next victims.

Sweden may be trying to tell us something.

J.R.R. Tolkien

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J. R. R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey, Houghton Mifflin Company 2000.

“The oldest and deepest desire satisfied by fairy tales is to tell tales of the great escape: the escape from Death.”

There is a sublime sadness in the eyes of the hero, Aragorn, within the triumph of resilience that is the story of The Lord of the Rings.  J.R.R. Tolkien suffered loss of his father to rheumatic fever, when he was four, and loss of his mother to diabetes when he was twelve.  He was raised by Catholic priests. He was gravely sickened with trench fever in World War I.

“By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

He eventually married – a long and good marriage – and became an Oxford professor of old english, the literature before Shakespeare.  He taught in the years when Britain lost its confidence, Orwell wrote of the corruption of language, society abandoned religion, and Hitler rose to power.

For Tolkien, the great legends, such as Beowulf, speak eternal truths, the truths known before writing, known before civilization, truths that even the authors themselves do not realize they are telling, truths from God.

For Tolkien, God tells a legend story that He makes to actually happen:  the story of  Jesus Christ.

Modern times chose to turn away from the old stories and their truths.  For them, the past was not wisdom, it was superstition, Mythology doesn’t teach, it is artifact.

And for Tolkien, the price paid was ghastly wars.

The Lord of the Rings is a re-telling, for the modern ears that will hear, the old knowledge.  Tolkien re-tells the ancient lore for the modern reader, he re-presents the immemorial truths.

The Lord of the Rings is a story of common people and the power of common loyalty, of the universal temptation of power and the sure corruption by power, of the dangers of disbelief and the meaning in mortality, of the journey of living and courage in the face of despair, of the necessity of resisting evil and of staring annihilation in the face, of looking to one’s own sin and resisting the of sin of others, of facing insurmountable odds and of holding fast, of the power of simple friendship and the king restored to his throne.

“Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat” – although it contains glimpses of final victory.”

History is not progressive, it is the perennial story, the recurring struggle with sin and death.

There is deliverance.  There is the Evangelium – joy beyond the veil of the world, the truth of the living God.


Revolution Misremembered

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Oh posterity, you will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom.  I hope that you will make a good use of it.  It you do not, I will repent in heaven that I took half the pains to preserve it.

So speaks John Adams in the last line of the HBO mini-series inspired by David McCullough’s biography.  Adams knew that our American revolution was precarious, and that its principles were vulnerable to misinterpretation.

The mini-series juxtaposes Adams and Jefferson. We see Adams as a prudent, calculating revolutionary.  For the cause of independence, he leads the Continental Congress with the temperament of a radical.  His revolutionary convictions were shrewd, and genuine.  But as a President he was conservative. Once the revolution was achieved, he was solely determined to preserve the government.  Meanwhile, Jefferson envisioned a perennial revolution, with each generation overthrowing the institutions of the last.

McCullough shows that Adams was uniquely aware of the fragility of the new government and the principles it affirmed.  As he transformed from a revolutionary to a conservative, his reputation faltered.  His efforts in office to protect the delicate union, his preoccupation with its infant weaknesses, lead many in his time to question his true commitment to the revolution—as though revolution, itself, was always virtuous.  He lost the legacy battle to Jefferson, and witnessed firsthand the cold unfairness of history.

Though mocked and unpopular, Adams commented before vacating the Presidency, “Mr. Jefferson is fortunate that I have left him a county at all over which to preside.”

It is probably true that part of Adams’ pessimism was partly due to offended disgruntlement.  He clearly resented Jefferson’s popularity.  But there was also something worrying to Adams about the way history embraced Jefferson.  Adams believed completely in the principles of the revolution, and the institutions of the new government, and he knew of their profound importance to the world.  To him, the revolution was real, necessary, and genuine.  To Jefferson, and to many Americans of the time, it was abstract and romantic.  Adams seemed to know that there would be something lost if the realness of the American principles was not appreciated.

In a later scene, the mini-series shows an old, ornery Adams surveying John Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Adams tells Trumbull:

Do not let our posterity be diluted with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical licenses…It is a very common observation in Europe that nothing is so false as modern history.  Well I would hasten to add that nothing is so false as modern European history, except modern American history.  In plain English, I consider the true history of the American Revolution to be lost…forever.

Beltway Nationalism

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“Lobbyists need something to buy, and legislators need something to sell.” Milton Friedman

Lobbyists have clients who pay them to purchase advantage from legislators who are writing laws that affect them.  Legislators have lobbyists who pay them – in campaign contributions – to create laws that favor specific individuals and businesses that are represented by lobbyists.  Utilizing taxpayer money, both legislators and lobbyists prosper.  And so, Beltway D.C. neighborhoods have become the wealthiest in our nation, and the average Beltway income is directly correlated with the continually increasing number of pages in the federal tax code.   The business value of H.R. Block, the company people pay to figure out their taxes, also correlates with the continually increasing number of pages in the federal tax code.

The Beltway must create, but also hide, the myriad favors and exceptions to special interests that are placed into our federal laws.  And it does.  Congress has become not unlike the Catholic church before the reformation, it sells indulgences –  special exemptions –  from its taxes and laws.  And our politics is transformed. Freedom becomes not freedom from government, but support from government. Opposing taxation becomes suspect.  Special groups are selectively excluded from taxation, while of course still able to vote – we have growing “representation without taxation”.

To satisfy this ‘market’, Congress must continually expand its role.  More and more social issues and inequalities must be conjured and legislated.  And they are.   In this way the nation’s original federalism gives way to a nationalism, a Beltway nationalism. The original Federalists advocated for a national bank, a national currency, a strong chief executive in time of war, and regulation of interstate commerce, but not much more.  They believed in the sovereign power of the states over their local affairs.  The original anti–federalists, confusingly named Republicans originally, (and later called Democrats), believed the federalists wanted too much power. They sought to limit federal power, and not just to protect slavery – many of them were against slavery – but their knowledge of european history made them wary of government power.

Today, beltway nationalists, who mostly call themselves Democrats, seek more than a strong central power for defense and commerce, they seek national power in local affairs, too.  They have grown from the Progressive movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society.  Confusingly, today’s federalists – neofederalists? – who mostly call themselves Republicans, are more like the original anti-federalists. They seek to limit national power in local affairs and the economy.  The nationalists have been the most successful.  They have essentially nationalized transportation, public education, food production, medical care, and college education, with the recent nationalization of all college loans.

The Federal Register, the compendium of all federal, bureaucratic rules and regulations, is 20,000 pages long. . . . weekly, and it keeps getting longer.

Old World government, centralized bureaucratic government, has come to the United States.

Modal Consciousness

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Zen Mind is described as a state of egolessness, devoid of self consciousness.   One can utilize this state of mind, Zen shows us, in archery, martial arts, and calligraphy.  Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugene Herrigel, is the short classic story of a westerner’s attempt to achieve Zen Mind and become a skilled archer. During the author’s eight years of training he is continuously redirected from trying to hit the target.  The arrow should release itself, you see, like a tree branch that bends to release a load of snow.  One doesn’t aim.  Without ego the arrow finds the target.  Zen Masters blow out candles with their arrows at 80 yards, blindfolded.

The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of LIfe, by Alison Gopnik, reviewed by Michael Greenbergin the New York Review of Books, March 10, 2010, describes what the author has discovered about human consciousness before age 6.  Children this age, she reports, have “lantern” consciousness as opposed to “spotlight” consciousness, which develops soon thereafter.  In “lantern” consciousness one does not have a sense of being a self observer as one is having experience, one is just “taking it all in”, with no intentionally focused attention.  This is likened to what an adult experiences watching a movie, immersed in the unfolding visual and auditory experience, with a suspended sense of self.

In “spotlight” consciousness, after age six, we develop the focused intention of the self-conscious observing self.  We direct our ‘show’.  We have a sense of me looking to see what I seek to see.  We have ego, filtering and directing our experience.

As adults we seem to be able to do both “lantern” and “spotlight” consciousness. This is empowering, and maddening.  Zen shows us that suspending “spotlight” for “lantern” consciousness can take some effort and training – it doesn’t seem natural – but it can be quite beneficial for perceptual and motor tasks.  Having unattached attention, any golf professional will tell you, refines skill and improves ability to perform body kinesthetic and hand-eye movements.

“Lantern” consciousness seems more like animal consciousness.  “Spotlight” consciousness may be uniquely human.  Why did it evolve?   Perhaps “spotlight” consciousness is for social living.  Having me at the center of my perception may be very important for negotiating the interpersonal landscape.  The social environment is every bit as perilous for humans as the predator environment is for animals.  Human survival depends on successful membership in groups.

“Lantern” consciousness may be more effective for acts in the natural world.  Animals hunt, move, and fight very well.

This duality can be maddening.  Our consciousness can shift.  This is not fully manageable.  We choke in sports, freeze on stage, lose our golf swing, suddenly forget what we were going to say.

History of Christianity

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Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek,  and author of American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House, reviews Christianity, the First Three Thousand Years, by Diamond MacCulloch, in the New York Times Book Review, April 4, 2010.

Meacham tells us he is officially sympathetic to christianity.  ” I am an episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously“,  but then, with qualification: “if unemotionally“.   He notes, too, that MacCulloch is also sympathetic to christianity, but also with qualification:   “I would now describe myself as a candid friend of christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human experience and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems” . . yet, “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”

So, Religion is OK, but only unemotionally, and don’t forget it is crazy.

Meacham seems to accept that religious faith is necessarily dogmatic, rigid, opposed to critical thinking, and intolerant.  He doesn’t seem to know that what makes religious faith, faith, is that it is a decision held knowingly in the face of known doubt and uncertainty.  And contrary to his concerns, the history of christianity is full of debate and philosophy and disagreement.

Meacham seems also to equate having religious faith with being ‘literalist’ –  taking the words of the Bible as only factual, without metaphor.  In this thinking, one is all or none – the Bible is all factual truth or all metaphor.   Yet he very likely would not deny that the Bible is great literature, written over thousands of years by numerous authors mostly unknown to each other, truly an authentic compilation of human literary effort.  And he would without doubt affirm that there is great truth in literature.  Not one element of profound literary theme or structure is missing from the Bible.

To the religious, the question of the literal truth of the Bible is not a meaningful, or even valid question.  It seems intended to diminish the sophistication of faith, and deserves no answer.  Is not all knowing, all conceptualization, ultimately metaphorical?  Is not story a powerful way to communicate profound truth?

Meacham approves of MacCulloch’s accusation that the Apostle Paul justified slavery.  But this is a weak point.  Paul wisely advised the very fragile early church to avoid radical opposition to the “existing social distinctions.”  This included slavery, which was, in those times, the ubiquitous norm of all civilizations. Meacham seems unaware of the powerlessness of the early christians, despite having read this history.  Their swift demise would have quickly followed any political stance against Roman power.  This, after all, is precisely what happened to Jesus.  A surviving movement was better than no movement at all.

Meacham also notes, approvingly, another MacCulloch opinion:  “For most of its existence, christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competition, with Judaism a qualified exception”. Huh?  Christianity has had its corruptions, and has been an instrument of political power, but what religion has built more hospitals, schools, and universities?  What religion has most fostered the independence of learning and the pluralistic societies of our day?

Men in Combat

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“Combat fog obscures your fate…and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between men”

In Sebastian Junger’s War, a book about a company of soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, we experience war conceptually, and devoid of the cynicism of most war commentary.  Junger doesn’t speak to whether war is good or bad, but what it is. The book is a case study of men in combat, and it illuminates a wonderful aspect of our humanity.

Survival in combat depends on the precise coordination of individuals in a group.  It is the group that moves, acts, responds, not the man.  Alone in a firefight every man would die.  And so, out of necessity men in combat become a network of acute mutual dependence.  It is more powerful than any bond forged in peace.  Like a parent to a child, a man knows that the group depends on him for its survival, and like a child to a parent, he depends on it for his own.

In war, every part of a man’s life becomes devoted to his participation in the network of dependence.  All his decisions of personal organization and conduct affect the web of mutual protection.  He makes sure his boots are laced, or else he is too slow to his gun.  He monitors his supply of water and nutrients, or else he risks exhaustion while on patrol, slowing the group, exposing them to attack. Every daily act has a meaning as profound as life and death.

What is striking is how immediately men adopt the identity of the team: one gets the sense that we are evolved to coordinate and move as a pack.  But men that experience combat invariably have difficulty adjusting to peaceful society.  They struggle to leave the mindset of battle.  Despite the terror, fear, and death, the men in Junger’s unit miss combat—they crave it.  They have become adrenaline junkies (like the soldier that yells “better than crack!” over the roar of gunfire), but strangely, excitement alone fails to explain the feeling of loss felt by a soldier who leaves combat:

“In these hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not the most alive—that you can get skydiving—but the most utilized.  The most necessary.  The most clear and certain and purposeful.”

Junger observes that an act of courage in combat is indistinguishable from an act of love.

It seems we are not meant to live frivolously, leisurely, and lazily, as we do too often when our survival is not threatened.  We have the capacity to live vividly, to experience each personal decision as profoundly important to our survival and the survival of our group.  We seem to move closer to what we are meant to be, when we are forced with every step to consider the well-being of those on whom we mutually depend.

Something or Something else

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“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg.

Science seems to have the unspoken goal of finding explanations that have no arbitrary element.   Nothing can be a certain way, when it could as well be another way.  Why it isn’t always has to be explained.   The result is that scientific explanations require that purely random elements somehow build the non-random world we know.

This is proving difficult.  The great mathematician, Kurt Gødel, proved that all logical systems require a ‘given’, an assumption that is unprovable by the logical system itself.  Reality seems so far to be the same.

Sean Carroll, in “From eternity to here“, 2010, tells us that the most important and baffling ‘given’ in our Universe is the unidirectional nature of time.  He traces the irreversibility of time to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy can only stay the same or increase.  Entropy is the measure of disorder of a system.  All of the other fundamental laws of physics seem to be time reversible.  Somehow, time reversible processes create time that is irreversible.  Carroll ventures to explain this.

Changing low entropy into higher entropy is the dynamic that creates our knowable world, the evolution of life, the existence of stars and planets, and galaxies, the unidirection of time.   And so entropy must have started low, but this is very improbable and therefore it must be explained, why didn’t it start high?

“From eternity to here” gives us a wonderful tour of the advanced science that is grappling with this question.  We are presented the concepts behind  mathematical equations that have been found to predict the behavior of the universe.  In something like a parlor trick, science theory tells that what exists is what is probable. Anything can exist, however, no matter how improbable, given the immense time and space of the universe.  Infinity solves equations, Infinity has happened, yet the universe is only 14 billion years old. Empty space can have virtual particles that improbably, but actually, pop in and out of existence, and nothing can escape a black hole, except, improbably, something does. Probability helps explain reality, except when it doesn’t.  Cause and effect exists, except when it doesn’t.

Mr. Carroll is left engagingly unable to explain how entropy started low, and time is irreversible.  We seem to be left with a given.

Most people can accept many if not most scientific explanations, but most people, unlike Steven Weinberg, can’t really feel that it is all pointless.  There just seems like there is something when there could have been something else.

The Drama of the Gifted

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In the charming movie, Vitus, a young boy is a piano prodigy.  This becomes very important to his parents, so much so that they seem to forget that he is still a young boy.  Too young to understand his gift, he wants to be a young boy.  His parents’ obsession becomes annoying, so he fakes a head injury to seem to lose his talent and free him to do fun things, like learn to fly airplanes with his grandfather.  Eventually he takes flight in a real airplane, and flies to the villa of a famous piano virtuoso, whom he has met before.   She has told him:  “don’t play for them, don’t play for yourself, play for the music“.  He is ready, and he does.

Golf is a ritualized hunt.  The players rendevous with their weapons, then advance, spread out, approach the target, make the kill, and then re-group.   And because success in hunting has been so vital and necessary in our history, hunting skill is highly valued and cultivated.  Skill is doing something with precision, practiced technique, and intelligent efficiency.  Doing more with less.  And so it is also in golf.  The best swing is the most graceful, the most rhythmic, the most simple. The best score is the least number of shots.

We talk about inclusion and equality, but we love competition.  We are driven to seek, promote, and celebrate the best among us.  We create competition to know who is best.  We love sorting out winners and losers, as cruel as it can be for the losers, we are more than willing to tolerate the agony of loss for the losers. We gravitate to excellence, we give it special status, we dislike losers.  We invite winners to feel superior, we encourage them to feel proud, we help them feel entitled.

And then, we call them on it.  They walk the plank.

There is the Drama of the Gifted Child, (Alice Miller 1979).  Over time the gifted are more and more loved for their gift, less and less for themselves as persons. Paradoxically, success becomes more and more diminishing.  The Gift usurps the Self.

Tiger Woods is a prodigy, and a winner.  He has great skill, developed with hard, diligent effort.  Initially, he probably played for his parents, then he played for his fans, and then he played for himself.  Whomever he may have betrayed, he did not betray excellence.  That is a gift for us, and for that he deserves our admiration.

Play for the music.