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Over-reaching authoritarian powers dislike puns and other figurative language; they prefer language to be literal and thereby easier for them to monitor and control. A literary critic said something like this once in reference to post-colonial writers using the English language in a figurative or subversive manner (can’t remember his name right now).

It came to mind this week with the decision by Facebook to censor remarks by President Trump regarding the small likelihood of children contracting Covid-19. I think Facebook (and Twitter, but I don’t use or follow that) fell for a straw-man argument. Trump never said children were entirely immune, as the media have paraphrased him incorrectly. He said “almost immune.” Here are the reasons I think the censorship of his remarks was wrong:

— Credible authorities have found children are much less likely to get Covid-19 than adults and especially the elderly. If children have serious pre-existing conditions or compromised immune systems, they may want to stay home or in a hospital for a number of reasons, not just Covid-19.

— Trump speaks in hyperbole; everyone knows this. He calls it “truthful hyperbole.” Be that as it may, if you start censoring hyperbole, what is next? Irony? Puns? Metaphors? Most of my Facebook posts would be censored if that were the case. My FB acquaintances might appreciate that. Haha.

— Trump’s remarks, however hyperbolic, are consistent with the findings of a thoroughly researched and sourced CDC report from July 23 that concludes: “The best available evidence from countries that have opened schools indicates that COVID-19 poses low risks to school-aged children, at least in areas with low community transmission, and suggests that children are unlikely to be major drivers of the spread of the virus.  Reopening schools creates opportunity to invest in the education, well-being, and future of one of America’s greatest assets—our children—while taking every precaution to protect students, teachers, staff and all their families.”

— Censoring the president’s remarks ironically drew more attention to them than they would have otherwise had. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” I think his remarks were mundane; it’s the censorship that drew attention to them.

I have personal experience with FB censorship. A few months ago, just after setting up a professional FB account for my book and research, a hacker began repeatedly posting angry memes showing an overweight person’s posterior. I said something like, “we can agree that you’re an ass.” I soon got a censorship notice about this, warning that I may be expelled if further instances happen. As far as I know, FB took no action against the hacker.

But heck, it’s Friday. As James Joyce put it in Finnegans Wake, “All moanday, tearday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.” Or as The Cure put it, “Friday I’m in Love.” Or as the French say, “bon weekend.” Or as Louis Armstrong put it, “C’est si bon.”

“If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of [five hypothetical Jesuits’] mouths would most likely be finding God in all things…Ignatian spirituality considers everything an important element in your life. That includes religious services, sacred Scriptures, prayer, and charitable works, to be sure, but it also includes friends, family, work, relationships, sex, suffering, and joy, as well as nature, music, and pop culture.”

So writes James Martin, S.J., in his The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life. This excerpt gels with recent remarks I heard about rejecting dualism because it is a heresy of true faith. Dualism is defined here as the belief that the world is divided starkly into good and evil, mind/soul and body, the godly and the entirely ungodly. Zoroastrianism, as I understand it, seems to promote such a dualistic cosmology.

Friedrich Nietzsche, whose previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra ironically name-checked the founder of Zoroastrianism, argued in Beyond Good and Evil that traditional moralities had crudely and misleadingly set the good man in direct opposition to the evil man. While Catholic theologians would strongly object to many of Nietzsche’s other ideas, they might concur with his opposition to the dualism of Zoroastrianism and Christian heresy.

This is the crude armchair theology of a lazy religious person, but to me the Catholic approach to elements of life that seem at first blush to be evil and ungodly might follow upon the ancient Greeks’ belief in the goddess Eris (Discordia from the Latin), the deity of strife or discord, who finds herself in opposition to the goddess Harmonia (Concordia from the Latin).  Spiteful Eris sparked the Trojan war by presenting Paris with the golden apple and the choice of who among three goddesses was the most beautiful.

The idea is that God is present in discord and strife, but divine presence is less obvious and more mysterious there than it is in the harmonious. It might even be argued that the discordant and strife-ridden are more fertile subjects for the study of divine presence because of their complexity, possibly falling under the topic of theodicy. As Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, put it in the first line of the novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Or as the apparently atheistic narrator of Graham Greene’s the novel The End of the Affair puts it, “The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”

Update: The preponderance of media stories about Ellen DeGeneres being a “mean boss” has me pining for those halcyon days of yore when Covid-19 was the only thing in the headlines.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So reads Ezra Pound’s 1913 Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro,” based on his experience of the Paris subway system. This is a verb-less Imagist poem, which Pound said should equate rather than directly describe. (An aside: when teaching colons and semicolons to my college freshman students, I said colons should suggest A equals B in a sentence, while semicolons should suggest B somehow qualifies or elaborates on A.)

The poem comes to mind sometimes when I am in a crowd. It has taken on a somewhat bitter irony with almost everyone wearing masks in public now. My joke is it makes you wonder whether people are going to look like the hospital staff from The Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” when they take off their Covid-19 masks (and if you haven’t seen that episode, you should). Some people like covering their faces; I have heard some women in the Middle East actually prefer to wear veils and burqas because they prevent the “male gaze.”

Watched the new sci-fi mind-bender Elizabeth Harvest last night on Netflix. It’s by the Venezuelan writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez, who also wrote Gothika some time back. I thought this new one was pretty good. Wouldn’t want to watch it again anytime soon.

Without giving away the plot, the acting is good. Ciaran Hinds, the lead male actor, has an expressive quality that can convey either world-weary heroism or amoral villainy (Alan Rickman had a similar “aura”). Hinds plays a renowned scientist with questionable morals; he speaks dubious aphorisms like “the measure of an action is its consequences” and “you’re either a torturer or tortured in life–be a torturer.” The lead actress, Abbey Lee, is lithe almost to the point of consumption. Her appearance may be meant as a sign of the effects of the doting but also controlling attention she gets from her newlywed husband.

The movie reminded me of two works of literature. First is Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “My Last Duchess.” In the poem, Browning offers a dramatic monologue spoken by an aristocrat, based on a real Italian duke, whose wife has died and who is courting another woman. The duke shows his new romantic interest a portrait of the deceased wife remarking, “She had/A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.” Then ominously he adds, “This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands/As if alive.” Gutierrez’s film similarly deals with a jealous serial monogamist.

But the film also addresses desire for recapturing an idealized past, what Hinds’ character calls the “euphoria” he felt with his first wife. In that, it is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby where the narrator Nick Carraway warns Gatsby about his obsession with Daisy Buchanan, “I wouldn’t ask too much of her: You can’t repeat the past,” and Gatsby replies, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can! I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before. She’ll see.”

You know how that turned out.

Thoughts today on what is left out in the process of selection for analysis and writing. There’s the old saying, “the victors write the histories.” Eavan Boland, the recently deceased poet/teacher whom is mentioned in my book and in past blogs, made a point of saying there is an important difference between history and the past.

Of course, I chose material for my book that supported its thesis, but there was other writing that was very important in the history of comedic Irish literature that was left out. For one, Oliver Goldsmith. His She Stoops to Conquer is considered a comic masterpiece and one of the 18th-century plays that has travelled best in the following centuries.

One of the funniest scenes is when the character Marlow–who is very shy around wealthy, refined women but boldly flirtatious around working-class ladies–tries to speak to Miss Kate Hardcastle. Kate is well-to-do, but Marlow had previously mistook  her for a barmaid (she had affected a working-class accent to tease him) and made a lewd pass at her. Here they meet with Kate acting as her normal self and a timid Marlow stammering so much that she has to finish his thoughts for him:

MISS HARDCASTLE. (after a pause). But you have not been wholly an observer, I presume, sir: the ladies, I should hope, have employed some part of your addresses.

MARLOW. (Relapsing into timidity.) Pardon me, madam, I—I—I—as yet have studied—only—to—deserve them.

MISS HARDCASTLE. And that, some say, is the very worst way to obtain them.

MARLOW. Perhaps so, madam. But I love to converse only with the more grave and sensible part of the sex. But I’m afraid I grow tiresome.

MISS HARDCASTLE. Not at all, sir; there is nothing I like so much as grave conversation myself; I could hear it for ever. Indeed, I have often been surprised how a man of sentiment could ever admire those light airy pleasures, where nothing reaches the heart.

MARLOW. It’s——a disease——of the mind, madam. In the variety of tastes there must be some who, wanting a relish——for——um—a—um.

MISS HARDCASTLE. I understand you, sir. There must be some, who, wanting a relish for refined pleasures, pretend to despise what they are incapable of tasting.

MARLOW. My meaning, madam, but infinitely better expressed. And I can’t help observing——a——

MISS HARDCASTLE. (Aside.) Who could ever suppose this fellow impudent upon some occasions? (To him.) You were going to observe, sir——

MARLOW. I was observing, madam—I protest, madam, I forget what I was going to observe.

MISS HARDCASTLE. (Aside.) I vow and so do I. (To him.) You were observing, sir, that in this age of hypocrisy—something about hypocrisy, sir.

MARLOW. Yes, madam. In this age of hypocrisy there are few who upon strict inquiry do not—a—a—a—

MISS HARDCASTLE. I understand you perfectly, sir.

MARLOW. (Aside.) Egad! and that’s more than I do myself.

MISS HARDCASTLE. You mean that in this hypocritical age there are few that do not condemn in public what they practise in private, and think they pay every debt to virtue when they praise it.

MARLOW. True, madam; those who have most virtue in their mouths, have least of it in their bosoms. But I’m sure I tire you, madam.

MISS HARDCASTLE. Not in the least, sir; there’s something so agreeable and spirited in your manner, such life and force—pray, sir, go on.

MARLOW. Yes, madam. I was saying——that there are some occasions, when a total want of courage, madam, destroys all the——and puts us——upon a—a—a—

MISS HARDCASTLE. I agree with you entirely; a want of courage upon some occasions assumes the appearance of ignorance, and betrays us when we most want to excel. I beg you’ll proceed.

MARLOW. Yes, madam. Morally speaking, madam—But I see Miss Neville expecting us in the next room. I would not intrude for the world.

MISS HARDCASTLE. I protest, sir, I never was more agreeably entertained in all my life. Pray go on.

MARLOW. Yes, madam, I was——But she beckons us to join her. Madam, shall I do myself the honour to attend you?

MISS HARDCASTLE. Well, then, I’ll follow.

MARLOW. (Aside.) This pretty smooth dialogue has done for me. [Exit.]

MISS HARDCASTLE. (Alone.) Ha! ha! ha! Was there ever such a sober, sentimental interview? I’m certain he scarce looked in my face the whole time. Yet the fellow, but for his unaccountable bashfulness, is pretty well too. He has good sense, but then so buried in his fears, that it fatigues one more than ignorance. If I could teach him a little confidence, it would be doing somebody that I know of a piece of service. But who is that somebody?—That, faith, is a question I can scarce answer. [Exit.]

A few years before Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, in his famous comedic novel The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, penned another “battle of the sexes” scene as the widow Wadman tries to find out whether the object of her affection, Tristram’s Uncle Toby, has a groin injury from military battle that would prevent him fathering a child. After futile attempts to find an answer to her question subtly, she bluntly asks Toby “whereabouts” his injury occurred. Toby, who keeps miniature battlefield replicas as a hobby, points to the geographical location rather than the spot on his body.

In the oral defense of my dissertation, I was asked how I selected my material about Irish bulls and whether there could be additional analyses to support the dissertation’s thesis. Goldsmith and Sterne are two authors who could have provided more grist for the mill. I included a passage on James Joyce’s Ulysses but probably could have said more about Joyce, especially if I had the fortitude to read Finnegan’s Wake.  Flann O’Brien is another writer who gets no mention in my book. Possibly, I could have considered J.P. Donleavy. But Joyce, O’Brien, and Donleavy are mainly known as novelists. Brian Friel was a monumental playwright of the 20th century, but I find his plays more Realist than Absurdist.

I am familiar with contemporary comedic Irish playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, and Frank McGuinness. But use of bulls for humor isn’t immediately apparent to me in their work. (McGuinness remarked at a seminar that he doesn’t find Samuel Beckett funny at all, suggesting to me a possible generational gap in what writers consider humorous.) My book stops with Beckett, and the literary scholar Declan Kiberd takes him as a point of departure for his recent analysis (After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present) of Irish writers in a more globalized world.

Perhaps contemporary writers want to move on thematically. As Kiberd puts it, “many of Beckett’s jokes are epitaphs on discarded hope. They  project the condition of a people who had looked backward on frustration and forward to liberation, with no intervening period of fulfillment.”

Indeed, Act II of Waiting for Godot begins with Vladimir trying to sing a ditty about a canine epitaph:

VLADIMIR:

A dog came in–
(Having begun too high he stops, clears his throat, resumes: )
A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb–
(He stops, broods, resumes:)
Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb
And wrote upon the tombstone
For the eyes of dogs to come:

A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a crust of bread.
Then cook up with a ladle
And beat him till he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb–

Vladimir’s lyrics have been described as “a post-modern post mortem,” and it might be said that more recent writers, living in a post-modern world, aren’t dealing with the same inherited cultural structures, histories, and linguistic standards as Beckett and writers before him. Perhaps bulls are less vital or at least less obvious now.

“Let’s not go there.” One of my professors used to say this with an embarrassed chuckle when an especially sensitive issue came up in class discussion.

I thought of his remark reading this July 31st opinion column in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-literature-can-mirror-our-complicated-desires/2020/07/31/624c4798-d14a-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-f-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans  The author, a reader and writer of erotic literature, argues, “Power is often a natural aphrodisiac, of course, yet sometimes it has less to do with a man’s status in the real world (in the form of wealth, say, or fame) and more to do with a woman’s subconscious wish to be abject, to surrender her inner force to a man who will tell her what to do. Paradoxically, the issue of who is controlling whom becomes an increasingly murky one: Is it the one who dominates or the one who submits?”

The author, Daphne Merkin, is a woman, and I defer to her on this subject, being largely ignorant of it myself. But the issue of subordination to power brings to mind Sartre on the subject of “bad faith,” the problematic pull that people feel toward “being-in-itself” (or etre-en-soi). Borrowing this term from Heidegger, Sartre contrasts it with “being-for-itself” (or etre-pour-soi) and “being-for-others” (or l’etre-pour-autrui).

According to Darren Guiles of Quora, “the for-itself is a nothingness between every in-itself we have been and are right now; consciousness of being a being which has the possibility to become another being. The being we become is the choice we make in flight from the in-itself we are just now towards the in-itself we attempt to become. ” As Wikipedia puts it, being-in-itself “is relevant to inanimate objects, but not to humans, who Sartre says must always make a choice,” what he describes as being-for-itself. A literary critic might call this agency. 

Whether the situation is erotic or not, people in general often feel a powerful attraction to being-in-itself, namely to giving up their agency to a romantic partner, to an authority figure, to an ideology, to a drug. It seems similar to Freudian death wish, and erotic submission seems like an odd amalgam of eros/life and thanatos/death. Of course, the cycle can be broken through conscious behavioral choices. To cite Will Durant’s paraphrasing of Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

I think what most women really want from men is confidence, not domination. Of course confident people can also be abusive, narcissistic jerks.

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

So says Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Kundera remarks on his native Czechoslovakia under the communists that politicians who had fallen out of favor with the party would be air-brushed out of history, their images literally removed from official photographs of political events. This kind of sinister “forgetting” can work at different levels, political and personal. How many times have people told you to forget about your past problems because they don’t matter or are too awkward? Well at some point they often do matter.

I think it is an issue that has come to the fore with the emergence of cancel culture and the attempts to demolish any memorials to historical figures who were in any way objectionable. There seems to be an “air-brushing out of history” in the works.

Here are two interesting essays in this regard. The first was written in March 2019, before the violent protests over George Floyd et al. happened, but it is prescient: https://quillette.com/2019/03/31/historical-amnesia-and-kunderas-resistance/  The second was published just yesterday and begins with the disturbing visual image of a recently vandalized statue of President George Washington: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-captive-mind-and-americas-resegregation-11596222112?mod=hp_opin_pos_1  Milan Kundera is still alive at 91, and I wonder what he would have to say about what is going on now in the US.

In his short story “The Destructors,” Graham Greene showed the way callow youths bent on demolishing for sport a centuries-old house that survived the Blitz in World War II ridicule the home’s elderly proprietor, Mr. Thomas. The story ends with a lorry driver who had helped destroy the house responding to the old man’s cries for help from a nearby outhouse where the youths imprisoned him:

The driver again became aware of somebody shouting. It came from the wooden erection which was the nearest thing to a house in that desolation of broken brick. The driver climbed the smashed wall and unlocked the door. Mr Thomas came out of the loo. He was wearing a grey blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. ‘My house,’ he said. ‘Where’s my house?’

‘Search me,’ the driver said. His eye lit on the remains of a bath and what had once been a dresser and he began to laugh. There wasn’t anything left anywhere.

‘How dare you laugh,’ Mr Thomas said. ‘It was my house. My house.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the driver said, making heroic efforts, but when he remembered the sudden check of his lorry, the crash of bricks falling, he became convulsed again. One moment the house had stood there with such dignity between the bomb-sites like a man in a top hat, and then, bang, crash, there wasn’t anything left – not anything. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help it, Mr Thomas. There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.’

Update: Another bad joke: Have you heard the latest newsflash from the CDC? “An estimated 95% of Covid-19 masks contain asbestos. But by all means continue wearing them whenever in public. And await further instructions.”

VLADIMIR:
What do you do when you fall far from help?
POZZO:
We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!

This is among the repartee of characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It takes place after Vladimir and Estragon try to help the blind and prostrate Pozzo in Act II, only to fall down themselves in an example of knockabout humor the playwright borrowed from Vaudeville.

Some critics consider “on” the key word in Beckett’s works, suggesting endurance and fortitude in bleak conditions. It has been argued many of his works have as a theme the asymptotic qualities of life, the way things often seem to be deteriorating or winding down without ever reaching a complete ending. In a similar way, in geometry the asymptotic curved line keeps approaching the x or y axes  but never touches them. Some readers claim the author’s experience in the French resistance during World War II, which involved continual waiting and what Beckett humbly called “boy scout stuff,” influenced his later writing in this regard. The miscues and distorted communications of the resistance must have required tremendous patience and fortitude.

Waiting for Godot famously ends with a farcical mishap that prevents Vladimir and Estragon from committing suicide. Instead they go “on.” In a similar way, in “Dust of Snow,” Robert Frost used the image of hemlock, a source of poison for suicide, and a crow, traditionally a symbol of death, to demonstrate how small events in the natural world can leaven one’s attitude:

“Beware of old men in a hurry.” I heard this once by a newspaper opinion writer whose name I can’t remember. I’m thinking of it as I grow older and wonder what to do in the remaining time before shuffling “off this mortal coil.” I turn 50 next month; it’s a milestone. Molly Shannon had an SNL skit where she played someone proud of reaching it. “I’M SALLY O’MALLEY, AND I’M 50! BOOK ‘EM DANNO; I’M FIVE-0, 50!”

What am I hurrying to do? Write more. I have two essays in the works: an analysis of realist and naturalist drama that I might pitch to some middle-brow publications and a travel/environmental piece cum memoir that might find a place in on-line publication. I also have initial thoughts about a novel but have had trouble getting started with fiction in the past. My idea is to write a kind of hybrid action thriller and psychological drama. Yes, there are other things I want to do: travel, time with family and friends, etc. But then you have to be careful with “etc.” It’s like “miscellaneous”: it can be the repository of a multitude of sins. I have to watch out, not getting any younger. Haha.

So buyer beware: I am in a hurry but like to think have also earned a semblance of calm and peace. “Baby, slow down./The end is not as fun [or far?] as the start,” according to U2. For a more traditional poet’s take on old age:

Thinking about generational differences today, the way they can be a strong indicator of society’s direction but can also be overdone because of older people’s nostalgia and the “grouchy old man effect.”

When I was teaching composition, I had my students one year listen to excerpts from John Updike’s 2006 speech to the Book Expo America convention on “The End of Authorship,” where he decried the effect of digital communication on literature and learning. The speech (available in full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25updike.html?ex=1153627200&en=6093995dc0ebc1e3&ei=5070 ) ends this way: “The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.” As an end-of-semester, in-class writing assignment, I proposed as one option that my students identify something in their lifetimes that they sensed was similarly in danger of being lost or degraded and proposing what could be done to avoid this. I called it my “grouchy old man prompt.”

This came to mind today because I have been reading bits of Brett Easton Ellis’ recent memoir/essay collection White. Ellis identifies as a member of Generation X and berates the Millennials who followed his generation as “snowflakes” and “Generation Wuss,” arguing that they are hypersensitive to the point of trying to muzzle anyone whom they might simply disagree with or find distasteful. Ellis should know a thing or two about being ostracized after being accused of misogyny and torture porn for his graphically disturbing novel American Psycho.

He has a point. Generation X, which I am part of, was a term popularized by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. To me it describes the way that people born between the early 60s and the early 1980s had diminished expectations in life compared with the Baby Boomers who preceded them, as well as a more wry and ironic world view. By contrast, Millennials stereotypically are more socially sensitive, literal-minded, and expectant of more from life generally than Gen Xers (my own view is much of this shift has to do with rapid technological advances like the Internet). Ellis argues the generational difference can be as simple as increased pain sensitivity and avoidance: “Pain can be useful because it can motivate you, and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art.”

But we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of nostalgic distortion of both past and present. I’m not a Woody Allen fanatic, but I thought he made an interesting point in the film Midnight in Paris that people often tend to think of bygone eras as “golden ages,” when they should concentrate on making the best of their present lives. A newspaper columnist once wrote that the problem with stereotypes like golden ages isn’t that they are untrue but that they aren’t very deep.

I also don’t really like Ellis talking about his personal life as much as he does in this book, but it is partially a memoir. And I have been guilty of over-personalizing occasionally in some of my blogs. It is material, what many writers crave.