{"id":235231,"date":"2023-05-15T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=235231"},"modified":"2023-05-11T05:34:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T04:34:44","slug":"there-is-no-escape-from-telling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/there-is-no-escape-from-telling\/","title":{"rendered":"There Is No Escape from Telling"},"content":{"rendered":"

10 May 2023 – <\/em>By the lake\u2019s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as they tumbled, wrestling in the green morning breeze above our heads.\u00a0 They perched upon a branch and sang a morning hymn, an ode to joy and the spring\u2019s morning glory.\u00a0 Their black and orange throats vibrated amid the green quaking aspen\u2019s leaves as the lake\u2019s low lapping sounds lent counterpoint. \u00a0They were sublime.<\/p>\n

I too felt a quake, a shiver down my spine as associations tumbled through my mind.\u00a0 Poems, songs, memories of other early morning walks in spring.\u00a0 Intoxication, elation, the horripilation that accompanies spring\u2019s rising, the sexual excitement.\u00a0 Hope, and the loose feeling of being forever young.\u00a0 No solution to anything, just reverence for existence.\u00a0 Nothing changed, except a few years.<\/p>\n

In quickly putting into words what I felt a half-hour ago, I drew on a vast store of personal and cultural memories that came to me with little thought as I was walking home.\u00a0 Words strung together without thinking.\u00a0 You have just read them.\u00a0 I felt impelled to tell them.<\/p>\n

Now as I sit and contemplate, I think about culture and what it might mean.\u00a0 In my case, I was gifted by my parents and schools with the love of poetry and art from a young age.\u00a0 I know well that everyone is not so lucky and that, in any case, culture has many meanings.\u00a0 \u201cCulture,\u201d writes Raymond Williams, \u201cis one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.\u201d\u00a0 From its original verbal meaning to cultivate the land to high, low, and middlebrow culture onto so many other meanings and conflicts that are often tied up with social class issues. There are cultures and culture.<\/p>\n

When I say cultural memories, I mean my memories, no one else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

I learned early on that the music of verse, the sound of birds in the trees, the rush of a creek murmuring over rocks, the lilt of words spoken passionately, the placement of a certain blue paint on a canvas, a singer\u2019s voice flying with a tune of joy or sadness, and a instrument\u2019s vibrations were all connected to the reverence I felt as an altar boy tolling the bells and repeating Latin responses, whose full meaning I couldn\u2019t grasp amid the incense and candle smoke: Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem<\/em> mea \u2013 \u201cAnd I go to the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the sound of the bells that entranced me, and that I was allowed to ring them. \u00a0To sound in, to participate in the ancient ritual that created a musical enclave from the beyond. I knew then, as I know now, that God has many altars, and that reverence before them and their mysteries is the right refrain. \u00a0 Bob Dylan singing \u201cRing Those Bells\u201d<\/a> comes to mind:<\/p>\n

Ring them bells, ye heathen
\nFrom the city that dreams
\nRing them bells from the sanctuaries
\n\u2019Cross the valleys and streams
\nFor they\u2019re deep and they\u2019re wide
\nAnd the world\u2019s on its side
\nAnd time is running backwards
\nAnd so is the bride<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So while it is not necessary to draw on stored cultural memories to appreciate the birds in the trees on nature\u2019s altar on a beautiful spring morning, for me it enriched the experience.\u00a0 You may have heard echoes of Yeats, Van Morrison, and others in my words, but the reality of the world I described would be the same for those who never heard of these artists, who find their inspiration in the terrible beauty of nature and have other associations.<\/p>\n

Are we really at home in our interpreted world, a poet once asked?\u00a0 It is a good question.\u00a0 This poet was Rilke, who wrote in the Duino Elegies<\/em> :<\/p>\n

For beauty is nothing\/but the beginning of terror\/which we are still just able to endure\/and we are so awed because it serenely\/disdains to annihilate us\/Every angel is terrifying\/And so I hold myself back and swallow the call note of my dark sobbing\/Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whom can we ever turn to in our need?<\/p>\n

Everyone carries different associations that come to us when we are not thinking but are only immersed in our experiences.\u00a0 Snatches of trace memories, images, words, sounds, smells, the look of light, etc. that usually occur slightly after the first encounter with natural phenomena. \u00a0One doesn\u2019t have to know Shakespeare or William Wordsworth to experience nature\u2019s beauty.\u00a0 Nor it\u2019s terrors. Yet I must admit I am partial to words like these from Wordsworth:<\/p>\n

Though nothing can bring back the hour
\nOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
\nWe will grieve not, rather find
\nStrength in what remains behind;
\nIn the primal sympathy
\nWhich having been must ever be;
\nIn the soothing thoughts that spring
\nOut of human suffering;
\nIn the faith that looks through death,
\nIn years that bring the philosophic mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But whatever our backgrounds, we are all interpreters of our world and words are our fundamental way of doing so.\u00a0 Words and metaphors that lead us to myth and art, even when its expression is wordless sound or pictures.\u00a0 Words that are often unacknowledged prayers to an unknown God.<\/p>\n

For many years I taught what are called the liberal arts.\u00a0 This was an extension of my own education in the classics, philosophy, theology, and sociology, disciplines divided in name only but married in reality to science, literature, history, languages, etc.\u00a0 It is all one study when rightly understood.\u00a0 But our schools and\u00a0 universities have been abandoning this approach for the sterility of numbers and the cold dead hand of technology and digital dementia. \u00a0For specialization, where professors know nothing outside their limited disciplines.\u00a0 For the study of the parts without any sense of the whole.<\/p>\n

A new Dark Age is closing upon us, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago when he described the people who run our societies and educational institutions as \u201c<\/strong>specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Students are being denied the rich heritage of words, images, and music that form the basis of Western culture.\u00a0 Without such a repository of cultural wisdom, they are left to draw only on popular cultural sources to interpret the world and their lives.\u00a0 More and more of these sources are anemic, if not degrading.\u00a0 It is not that some are not extraordinarily rich and meaningful, as is evident from those I link to in this essay, but a quick look around should convince any fair-minded person that the pickings are quite slim.\u00a0 We are drowning in cultural garbage that is being pumped out through digital media, primarily so-called smart phones, into young people\u2019s minds and souls.\u00a0 It is poison.\u00a0 And the schools have devolved into protection rackets where students are protected from their own thoughts and ideas that might allow them to think and be thought.<\/p>\n

To think, question, and debate have been replaced with censorship and the coddling of young minds.\u00a0 Such censorship, of course, has its counterpart in society at large.\u00a0 Call it propaganda, which is exactly what it is.<\/p>\n

If Rilke is right, we will never be at home on this earth, our interpreted world.\u00a0 As a poet and a man of words, he no doubt knew that there is no alternative to interpretation, to ask why, to use words to describe our experiences and to seek meaning as we travel through the mystery of time and existence.<\/p>\n

I know, however, for those minutes I stood by the lake in rapt silence as the birds sang and the water lapped, I felt at home.<\/p>\n

Home, of course, is a complicated word, for we are time-bound creatures always moving on, travelers who are home one minute and gone the next.\u00a0 Even the word culture derives from an Indo-European root meaning to revolve, tied as it is, as are we, to the idea of a natural cycle, the turning of the seasons.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t a contemporary artist, Joni Mitchell, tell this beautifully with The Circle Game<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

To say we are wayfarers is accurate, always on the way, as my recently departed dear friend Graeme MacQueen, a Buddhist and 9\/11 scholar told me, when he laughingly said to me right before he recently died, that the old folk and Christian gospel song, Wayfaring Stranger<\/em>, was his story too.\u00a0 He was a man of many talents who established the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada, wrote the important book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception<\/em>, and much more, even a children\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

Graeme did all his work with the awareness that we are temporary sojourners on this earth, and that it is through stories and myths and their associations that come to us unbidden that we can connect life with death, the material and spiritual sides of our natures, in the search for peace.\u00a0 He died at home. I imagine him singing along with the words of the song: \u201cI am a poor wayfaring stranger. . . . I\u2019m goin\u2019 home to see my father\/I\u2019m goin\u2019 home, no more to roam\/I am just goin\u2019 over Jordan\/I am just goin\u2019 over home<\/p>\n

And then laughing so hard he couldn\u2019t breathe, just as he did earlier when he told me his doctor\u2019s name was Dr. Sender, as he prepared to hit the road.<\/p>\n

There is no escape from telling.\u00a0 Life is sublime.<\/p>\n

From his album, On the Road<\/em>, Van Morrison takes us out with \u201cThe Beauty of the Days Gone By\u201d<\/p>\n