Makoto Fujimura Ash Wednesday Poetry Contest Closes

John Powell and JH Hanson are the co-winners of the Makoto Fujimura poetry contest. They will each receive copies of the lovely new book Refractions, from Navpress (copies graciously provided by the press itself).

I had first heard of Fujimura just after 9/11 when reading in First Things (the journal of now dearly departed editor John Neuhaus). Fujimura provided a stunning example of how art is worthwhile, and how the Bible in a sense countenances beauty when the former prostitute pours perfume over Christ's feet. The perfume was outrageously expensive apparently (one pastor I spoke with said the cost of it might have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). It is this kind of precious beauty that belongs at the feet of Christ, and that gives us a precedent for the artistic endeavor.

The new book has about twenty new essays, most of which attempt to reconcile art and Christianity. He takes us back into the Christian tradition with Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Angelico, as well as back into a hallowed Japanese tradition with names that are less familiar (Kayama-sensei). What's special about it is that he does this from a Japanese-American viewpoint. He is thus a well-placed multicultural (fun to punish the Marxists with these), and also a member of the distinguished traditions of both cultures. He lives in New York City, and his studio narrowly missed being hit by the World Trade Centers when they came down.

This sense of emergency, or of an impending threat, seems to hover over all his writings. It's something like the threat or promise that the early Christians felt. That we hang suspended between two worlds, and that the one to come is much more real than this one.

I encourage all readers who are interested in the blend of the avant-garde and Christianity to look to Fujimura as a distinguished example of a blue-chip artist who is acting as a kind of signal flare to others.

Our winners (Brett Swanson entered five minutes too late and was summarily disqualified) will receive these books as compensation for their wonderful poems. Thanks to all who entered, and to Navpress! Makoto Fujimura is a name that we should all be familiar with at LS: he's the spark that has leapt between two worlds, and dares us to do the same.

Aesthetics as the Foundation of the Good Life

1.

The humanities might once have been a place to not think about utility.

Aesthetics isn't at least immediately useful.

The Marxists have indeed colonized the field, and tried to turn it to their advantage. Their success however has come at the cost of destroying the field's prestige.

When we look for friends we don't necessarily think first of utility.

We think about friendship, which I don't think is 100% about utility.

It's about love.

And the humanities should be about that, again. In the broadest sense of the term.

But you can't convince the Marxists of this, or the other utilitarians.

A few people do marry for utility, or choose their friends on the basis of utility, but it's a dumb way to do it, as it destroys the quality of life.

The humanities should be about quality of life, same as friendship, and marriage, and religious faith.

But it's very hard to make this argument in a country where utility is a central criterion, and perhaps the only criterion, from Obama on down to the gas station manager.

I'm a humanities teacher, but am not a Marxist. Marxism's the most utilitarian paradigm imaginable. It turns everyone into a tool of the state, and frequently forbids any private existence (declaring that even the personal is political).

The utility of the humanities should be precisely to make us think about the value of the useless, the things that are ends in themselves: friendship, love, beauty, laughter, the marvelous, prayer, etc.

2.

Certain Lutherans including Soren Kierkegaard have argued that aesthetics is a lower value than the ethical or the religious. Abraham Maslow, a secularist, places aesthetics as the highest, but also the least needed, in his hierarchy of needs.

I can't understand either placement.

Aesthetics is not just a foundation. It is life itself. If life is meaningless, it is ugly. If you have turned yourself or your art into a tool for advancement, you have deliberately cheapened yourself, and ruined your authenticity, in order to become a mere commodity, like any other.

What Christianity argues is that it is another coinage, and that the heads of state that are stamped on our coins have little or nothing to do with our values. Whether it was Tiberius or Nero stamped on the coins of the Roman state, whether it was Caligula or Heliogabalus, the Christian saw his or her soul stamped in Christ, and thus in love, and authenticity.

Our own money still has on it, In God We Trust, even though the head of state is also on it. But at least one of our political figures, Lincoln, was a poet. He had a soul. When we exchange this money, we can do so without trembling as to our inauthenticity. Lincoln is not God, but he looks like God in his monument in Washington DC, and he is probably as close as we will ever come in a secular leader.

The utilitarian argument -- that every moment should be useful, and that we should spend our whole life getting ahead, was critiqued by the hippies as a "rat race." I liked this critique of the hippies and is one of the things that turned me toward them in the early 70s.

But they replaced the rat race with cheap highs having to do with drugs and sexual promiscuity. I thought these things were disgusting.

Having children, being with them, laughing with them, gardening, going for a walk, watching snow fall, watching a woodchuck make its way around the yard, all these beat sexual promiscuity or drug use.

Having a friend, laughing for a few minutes with one, all these things are ends in themselves, like prayer. For me, prayer isn't asking for something. It's just wanting to spend time with God.

Beauty is eternal, and is shot through everything, but we have to leave the utilitarian madness (of which Marxism is by far the worst) in order to notice this.

The economy will right itself.

Our job is to stay alert to other dimensions of life that have to do with the soul, the soul that science cannot measure so will not countenance, the soul that cannot be bought, and so remains forever outside the lucrative. The soul which is not exchangeable, and which is eternal.

THE TRIP TO NEW YORK

The kids had the week off, and I have this week off (spring break) so we spent the weekend in NYC. On the way down, a noise began in the engine. It sounds like a rocket taking off at first, and then like a motorcycle revving up, and then like rocks in a blender. I stopped at a gas station in Paramus New Jersey. A squat Hispanic male attendant told me, "My friend, you have trouble."

I needed to know what kind. I stopped at another gas station, and a Pakistani man said, "It's your alternator. I tell you, my friend, there is trouble with your bearings."

"Do I have to get it fixed right away?" I asked.

"No, this thing is loud, but you can drive for a few days," he said.

We went into the city, and found a parking spot on the street at 78th and Broadway. My one real skill as a driver is reverse parking. I slipped into the slot, just big enough for the van, no worries. Parking lots charge a minimum of thirty dollars for ten hours, so I always park on the street in New York City. I paid the Muni-meter 4 dollars with the credit card. An Asian doorman watched me pay for the meter, and take the slip to put on the dashboard.

He then said, "You are stupit. You don't have to pay if you're on that side of the sign. You are fucking stupit."

He said this without apparent rancor, or an attempt to get on my nerves. New York has its own feeling, and it's hard to put your finger on.

I looked at a blue sign amidst five other signs, and I thought that perhaps he was right. The arrow on the sign pointed the other way.

So I lost four dollars, and we walked over to the Natural History Museum. It was only two blocks, but the blocks are long. So it was a twenty minute walk. The kids hate museums, but I love them, so in we went. I couldn't interest the children in the pygmy owl, or the lemurs, or the dinosaur bones, or the twilight displays of wolves in the Canadian north, or the cascade of butterflies that showed evolution in color and morphology between butterfly species. A life-size blue whale did catch their eye but only momentarily. Riikka snapped many pictures.

"Let's eat!" The children cried, like wolves, or like some kind of animals, wanting to be stuffed.

The A train going south wasn't working so we had to go up to 125th and then go back down, since the track was being repaired. A Peruvian man complained to us about his fat Dominican girlfriend, and he kept saying, "Your wife is thin! My girlfriend is fat! I have smashed holes in her kitchen telling her to stop eating so much, but then she eats even more! She's a f... b..." I considered reminding him that there were children present, but thought he might have an anger management issue.

The New York subway underground is so beautiful, so glamorous. You could see rats down on the platform, nosing around for scraps. You feel as if you are in Hel, amongst the Plutonic engineers. But as dirty as it is, with old gum spots on the floor, you sense a basically good humor.

Times Square has so many lights. Apparently it's possible thanks to Niagara Falls. All the electricity there turns into electrons that they glide through the grid and it lights up entire buildings with Burma Shave ads and red triangles that advertise non-essentials over forty stories. My 5-year old said, "This is my favorite town! Why isn't the whole world lit up like this?"

Toys R Us is noisy and has a Ferris Wheel in the lobby, which you can watch from the second floor. It's right on Times Square. There's a life-size T-Rex replica which moves and growls, out of Jurassic Park. I said to my two-year old: "Is it alive?"

"Nope. It's a toy monster," she said.

We went back up on the metro, but had to wait a long time, eating candy from the Toys R Us on the platform. Four E trains went past before the A train finally came, and then it was so packed we couldn't get on. Finally another A train came. We had to get my friend Paul who was flying into LaGuardia. We got back up to 81st, and then walked to the car and I shot across the Queensborough Bridge and was in Queens, expecting to see signs to LaGuardia. I stopped and a Hispanic man at a gas station told me to ask his wife in the van how to get there. "She works there," he said.

I went around to her side, it was 9 pm. She looked away.

"Your wife is afraid," I told the man.

"Answer him," the man said into the cab.

I was supposed to go to the end of 21st, she said, and then duck down on Hoyt Ave., for six blocks, and then I'd be on the highway -- the Van Wyck -- and would whip into LaGuardia. Excellent directions, and twenty minutes later I pulled into the Delta-Northwest terminal arrivals and Paul hopped in the car, from whence we went north, the engine still grumbling, screaming at times, and then settling down, up to New Rochelle's Marriott, where we settled into two adjoining rooms overlooking the town, which in turn overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.

My friend looked in my car's engine, and he said, "It's the Idler Pulley that's making all the noise. They're a real pain to change. I'd need a big wrench to change it."

"Will it still drive?" I asked.

"Sure, for a couple of days," he said.

Breakfast had a big choice: no bagels, but there were sausages, oatmeal, juices, muffins, waffles, and we ate too much (I had oatmeal with a strawberry topping, and nine glasses of grapefruit juice), and then went down to Columbia University in Morningside Heights to meet my friend's daughter, who let us go up into her dorm room. It was about fifteen feet by eight feet overlooking the quad. She had posters and other designs on her walls, but I can't remember them. Obscure musical groups, I think. Dave Matthews was the only band I recognized.

We then ate at Tom's Restaurant at 112th and Broadway, which is where Seinfield's group hangs out in the show. Hamburgers were 4.50 without fries. At the table next to us, a white man was saying to his friends,

"Anyone who doesn't agree with Obama should be killed. The right should just shut up. Anyone who takes money from the bailout but doesn't believe in it should be put to death."

One of the other students (they were young) said, "The left has been picking on Bush for eight years, and now you're going to kill anybody from the right who says a peep?"

"That's right," the young man said. "I'm just so sick of the right. They should all be killed."

The guy was eating a vegetarian hamburger, and dipping it in ketchup, wetting the corner of it, like it was right-wing blood.

Across the street on 112th is the old Labyrinth Books which is now Book Culture, because the original Labyrinth Books moved to Princeton, taking its name with it. I bought the following books:

Introducing Kant, by Christoper Kul-Want and Andrzej Klimowksi, which claims on page 1 that Kant is post-religious, and that he "embraces change and human fallibility."

Fermat's Last Theorem, by Amir Aczel, which is an account of Andrew Wiles' breakthrough in terms of solving the obscure theory x to the nth power + y to the nth power = z to the nth has no whole number solution when n is greater than 2. I've read now about 20 pages of it, and it's engrossing, taking us back to mathematical developments in Babylon that help to explain the action in Princeton on June 23, 1993, when Wiles wrote out the answers for several hours explaining how he had finally solved the theorem which no one had been able to solve for three hundred years.

On Liberal Revolution, by Piero Gobetti, which are the writings of an Italian revolutionary theorist who died at age 25. This book argues that the Soviet Marxists had a liberal side,

"Trotsky counters the abstractions of the Slavic intelligentsia, from Radischev to Tolstoy, by proclaiming a liberal vision of history for the first time in Russia" (page 1). This I've gotta read, even if it's with a grain of salt. Trotsky's suppression of the Cromstadt revolt shows where his liberal theory (if any) led: a revoltingly autocratic, and genocidal tyranny toward dissent.

Dialectical Urbanism, by Andy Merrifield: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City. Merrifield is a Marxist geography professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. I hope the book will help me place surrealist and other modernist poetic struggles within a liberal urbanism. It's not clear to me that that will happen, but that's the hope.

My daughter, who's nine years old, wanted to buy a book called "A Girl's Guide to the Nightlife of New York," but I explained that "girl" was a fairly loose term, and in this case it meant "young adult" so she put it back.

"In a few years," the man behind the counter said tenderly.

Lola has decided she wants to attend Columbia University.

"You have to get straight As," her mother reminded her. "School is important."

We then walked into the enormous St. John the Divine cathedral on Paul's suggestion at the corner of Morningside and 112th. It seems to me to be as big and as beautiful as Notre Dame de Paris. Lovely high stained glass windows, choir practice, vaulted ceilings.

Riikka said, "I can believe in God again."

My child Julian said, "It's creepy. Let's get outta here!"

He and his even smaller sister held hands and looked up the eighty feet or so at the blackened ceiling.

We drove home the Palisades Parkway route up through Harriman, the bypass of the toll booths at the juncture with Route 17, the Idler Pulley still grumbling, and got over the Downsville Mountain just as a snowstorm began which left three inches on the driveway this morning.

If X = Modernism, Then What is Postmodernism?

Let's say that X equals modernism. It's a pretty simple equation until we ask what modernism is. One way to look at it is through the Freudian notion that made its way into surrealism that it is about breaking every taboo. Recently on the internet a documentary by Bertrand Tavernier surfaced. It is a lengthy interview with the famous surrealist Philippe Soupault. Part of the interview can be found through the famous magazine Exquisite Corpse, run by Romanian-American novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu:

http://www.corpse.org/

Scroll down a bit, it's on the front page, to the left. I wrote the introduction to it.

Other parts of the documentary can be found here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Philippe%2BSoupault/video/x3b6ys_soupault-le-surrealisme-partie-1_creation

For those who can't understand French, the basic idea is that Soupault, who was 85 at the time of the interview (he's now been dead for close to twenty years), is being interviewed by Jean Aurenche, who is a screenwriter with sixty years of film credits in French film-making. Aurenche opens the interview by asking Soupault, what was Surrealism?

Soupault responds that after 4 years of butchery in the trenches of WWI they demanded to know what mankind is at bottom, and wanted to unravel every taboo in order to find out. This in essence was one aspect of the modernist investigation. "Pour voir ce qui est au fond de l'homme" it was necessary to break every taboo. Part of this comes out of Rimbaud and Lautreamont, but the surrealists found other precursors in Sade, and Freud. Freud's Totem and Taboo investigated the notion of taboo in so-called primitive societies.

The surrealists didn't in fact rupture all taboos. So far as I know, only one of them (Rene Crevel) was a homosexual. None of them broke the incest taboo (again, insofar as I know). And when Andre Breton met Freud, Freud told him that taboos were the basis of civilization itself, and that to break them was not the best idea, and he told Breton that he had misread his work.

Breton ignored this, and continued to break taboos. Part of this meant that they came to honor criminals, even serial killers, as proto-surrealists. Some of the surrealists experimented with mind-altering drugs.

If modernism is therefore about the breaking of taboos, is modernism merely Satanism?

Can we make this equation? Modernism = Satanism?

If that's the case, what is postmodernism? Could it be considered a return to Christianity?

At the end of his life, Andre Breton argues that they had succeeded in breaking all the taboos, and now there was nothing left to break, so he thought it was necessary to begin to restore order, but he never said on what basis that could be done. It's a lot easier to tear down, than it is to build up.

Meanwhile, modernism had gone out in many different directions. Under Marxism the idea was to destroy the upper classes, which had acted as an obstacle to the desires of the masses.

This then spread so that feminists under Simone de Beauvoir decided that men had acted as an obstacle to women, so it was necessary to destroy the stranglehold that men had had on society's resources. We still see this simple call to action everywhere within feminism, including now the notion that it is a good idea to commit adultery, and for women to rid themselves of children (Simone de Beauvoir had no children), as well as in more positive instances like Title IX.

The idea spread further such that it was necessary for minorities to break the stranglehold that whites had had on culture. The NAACP was one form of this, the Black Panthers another. Theorists of post-colonialism jumped in. Some of them want reparations for their centuries of oppression.

Then there was Queer Theory, which meant that gays had to break the stranglehold that straight men and women had had on culture.

The American Indian Movement, Chicanas, and many others jumped in. The notion was the same: break the stranglehold that so and so had on the culture, and destroy any and all taboos.

In the Soupault video, we see him walking around Paris, now in his mid-80s, talking about the heroic early days of the surrealists, in which they experimented with dream states, and discovered the Gustave Moreau museum (we see Soupault actually inside the Moreau museum!). Moreau had been an academic painter who secretly painted wild lush fantasies of bizarre orgies and fights on enormous canvases, releasing the libido to every last incarnation.

To some extent, one can see all this destruction of oppression as a good thing. It's good for the arts to be able to explore what is at the bottom of humanity. Victorian Society had been somewhat oppressive. Certainly white society had been repressive. And no doubt the superego of Freud's day could have used a holiday.

Early in my career as a writer, I was totally involved in the destruction of every last taboo. Andrei Codrescu's journal Exquisite Corpse was my first big collaboration, and it was almost a pirate ship. I wrote for almost every issue in the first decade or so of its appearance, and later published a book on Codrescu's work (the only book thus far, but I hope it will inspire the efforts of further investigators, as it's a fascinating body of work, torn as it is, and as I am, between the need for taboos, and the need for freedom).

But what if the modernist notion of destroying all taboos has been accomplished? What if, now, we wish to put a few LAWS back into place? What if for example we decide that at the very least child molesting is a bad idea, and incest is not best? What if we even think that certain words, such as the n word, should be banned, and what if we wish the f word was less used in public space? What if we think that people shouldn't expose themselves where children might see them. What if we believe that murder is basically wrong, and stealing is wrong, and telling lies about people are wrong? What if we want in fact the return of the Ten Commandments as a return to some basic norms that will allow societies to cohere rather than to be torn apart by rampart desire? What if we believe that the police are necessary, and that moms and dads are necessary, and that rules are necessary?

Then what do we do?

Perhaps we start a blog called Lutheran Surrealism, and explore this idea with as many intelligent people as we can get aboard.

And what if we bring up certain schisms within the practice of the left, to show how aberrant it's all become, and yet are not quite ready to march arm in arm with the far right of evangelical Calvinism?

The topic of the day that we are fascinated with is the recent law case of Jonathan Lopez versus Professor John Matteson at the Los Angeles City College. Lopez is apparently an evangelical who in a public speech class cited the Bible twice in his opposition to gay marriage. The professor, John Matteson, exploded in fury, calling the student a "fascist bastard" and tried to have him expelled from the college. There is more here, in the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-speech16-2009feb16,0,6896300.story

Is a "fascist bastard" anyone who attempts to use the Bible to explore things we shouldn't do? Are we then, by Matteson's standards, "fascist bastards"? Homosexuality isn't mentioned in the Ten Commandments. It's mentioned more than once (in a negative sense) by St. Paul, and is also on a list of shalt-nots in Leviticus. But incest also isn't mentioned in the Ten Commandments, and child molesting isn't. Does that make them right? Where do we look for a source of moral authority?

If modernism was Satanism, we really can't look there.

We could look to Marxism, and to its freeing of previously oppressed populations, but then criminals, too, could argue that they have been oppressed. And isn't Marxism an aspect of modernism?

The left-handed could argue that they've been repressed, and ask for driving on all the streets to be reversed, at least for them (I'm left-handed!). Modernism is a gas. It was a gas. But the term gas apparently originally stemmed from chaos.

To a great degree we like chaos and thrive on it, and we do think there is such a thing as too much order. Perhaps the notion of freedom of speech at the very minimum should be respected so that all parties can be heard and we can keep these issues open as long as possible until we come to a consensus in law. That's at least the ongoing basis of Lutheran Surrealism. Let's talk. Let's try not to have the last word.

Right now, I see some fascinating ramifications of the Los Angeles City College case. One is that Lopez is a conservative Christian, which pits him against the Marxist elite who are now running most college humanities programs. But Lopez (guessing from the last name) is also likely to be a Hispanic. This means that two kinds of oppression must duke it out for bottom-dog status (this is what's often been used to determine who is right in PC cases).

In addition, with Proposition 8 looming in the background to the case, and with black America voting Democrat but against gay marriage, a rift as big as the San Andreas Fault appears to be opening in the left. Will big portions of the left surge to the right? Will new parties be formed? How will this play out?

Modernism's simple prescription of breaking all taboos has now created as many problems as it solved. All those problems are now coming to a head.

To me, the professor himself is a "fascist bastard" for not letting the student speak. In a multicultural society, we have to listen to one another, especially across deeply held positions. It's difficult, and is frightening. But I think placing taboos on freedom of speech is still wrong, and it's one way in which I am still a modernist, though a modernist with qualms. Basically, I follow the law. You can speak, but you can't threaten. You can speak, but it's better not to use swear words (I put my kids in their rooms if they use bad words). I don't even want my kids to say, "Oh my God!" I want them to say, "Oh my gosh!" Because I think they should be well away from breaking any norms.

Personally, I don't think any learning can happen on campuses unless students are free to express their opinions, even if they don't match that of the professor. However, I am appalled if someone says a word like "sh--" in my class, or says something, like the "b" word. But I try to be gentle rather than ferocious about it. In the Lopez case, the professor might be seen as oppressive, insofar as he has more power than the student in his particular classroom, and he tried to have the student expelled from the college for expressing his opinion. That would set an extremely poor precedent.

The whole notion of authority and freedom (and the ways in which they compete) are on trial in this case.

What Does Equality Mean?

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was 270 words in length. It opens with some fancy wording about how long it's been since the Founding, and then it says what this nation is about. Lincoln says that this is "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

I love how clear the language is. And yet, what does he mean exactly by equal?

Does it mean that everybody in a classroom should receive the same grade? Does it mean that everybody should have the same job, and work the same hours? Does it mean that everybody's mathematical skills should be equal? Does it mean that it's unfair that I can't sing like Sinatra, play baseball like A-Rod, box like Mike Tyson, tell jokes like Steven Wright, write novels like Jane Austen, or be as wealthy as Paris Hilton?

If equality means "the same as," then it should mean that everyone should be identical in every way, and have the exact same quality of life.

Darwin, who was born on Lincoln's birthday, tells us instead that it is incremental advantages (in-equality) that are the driving force in evolution. That evolutionary success (ability to successfully mate and pass on genes) is due to very slight advantages which confer success. Perhaps it's slightly better looks, or slightly better social skills, or perhaps the ability to make a partner laugh, or perhaps it's just simply rudimentary health (depending on the context, whether one is a lumberjack, or whether one is in a Parisian drawing room, different skills would amount to different advantages), or perhaps it's the ability to understand and follow mathematics.

Are Darwin and Lincoln polar opposites: one believing that life is fundamentally a matter of equality, and the other, believing that life is fundamentally a matter of inequality?

Is there some way to reconcile the two?

In the most recent issue of Reader's Digest, there is an article about Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's published a recent book entitled: OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS (Little, Brown). Gladwell argues that it isn't IQ as much as experience in a field that gives an advantage. He says that Bill Gates spent thousands of hours computing at a time when no one else had that experience. The Beatles spent thousands of hours playing in Hamburg when no one else had that kind of time spent in live performance. "Success is the steady accumulation of advantages."

Moreover, success can come late. He notes that Paul Cezanne had his first one-man show at 56.

Hard work, finding meaning in your work, and having a lot of experience in an area from childhood on up, can give a kid a slight advantage that might eventuate in a Tiger Woods, or an Alfred Hitchcock.

Should everyone be equal to a Paul Cezanne or a Tiger Woods? Part of the fun of sports or arts is that some are so spectacular, while most aren't. Should everyone nevertheless be the same? Is that the kind of equality we want?

It seems to me that a growing number of people think that that's what equality means.

I've been reading a book called Women in Mathematics (MIT Press, 1975), by Lynn Osen. In the last chapter she makes such an argument.

Osen is dismayed that in the aftermath of the Sputnik scare in which the Russians threatened to gain an incremental advantage on the US in space, that the huge push toward mathematics and science did not eventuate in more female scientists. But she laments, "the resulting curricula changes have appealed more to males than to females. It is a problem that was not caused by educators and educators by themselves cannot solve it. But if the ideological goal of achieving TRUE EQUALITY [my emphasis] is to be realized, then women and interested educators must discuss and define concrete programs aimed at effecting change at all levels of education, attracting more women to this field of study, researching and understanding the psychological dynamics underlying the difficulties women encounter in this field, and offering compensatory training where necessary" (168).

Osen however also notes that there are of course important women mathematicians, and always have been. But there is a single advantage that these women almost invariably had. "For many of the women mentioned in these biographies, it was the early support of an intelligent and mathematically educated father that made the crucial difference in the socialization process" (165).

Certainly the state cannot afford to provide a substitute parent for all of us who lacked a "mathematically educated father" in order to produce pure equality in the creation of math genius.

Math genius, sports genius, computer genius, dance genius, athletic genius generally, literary genius, is often a matter of slight incremental advantages, probably largely caused by an influential and talented parent. Communities full of one-parent homes, or homes with stressed out fathers and mothers barely scraping by, with little or no education, and next to no higher abilities, certainly confer a disadvantage upon the children.

What's to be done about it?

One answer might be to kill all talented parents, or else take the children from such homes and place them in poor environments, and seclude them as much as possible from any kind of mental stimulation, so that other kids from disadvantaged homes will not be left behind. One could forbid the children from ever seeing their parents, and perhaps even place them in blinders, and scream at them a lot every time they go near a book.

On the other hand, schools can be built for the disadvantaged, teaching salaries raised, money can be thrown at the problem, but it seems to come down to parents, which is an evolutionary issue, in which each parent is always trying to confer an advantage on their own offspring. I admit I'm somewhat behind in math. And yet there may be time to run back through life and pick up the topic, and spring forward, algebra textbook in hand, so as to inspire my children with the fun and beauty of it, and thus give my own kids a fighting chance.

All men may be created equal, in Lincoln's wording, but there will always be various kinds of inequality as we compare across families. Some parents are more devoted than others. Some better educated, some better financed, some revealing a harder work ethic, some a less. Lincoln had part of the equation right. Darwin had another part.

Sophie Germain was a Frenchwoman "best known for her work in the theory of numbers. Here she demonstrated the impossibility of solving Fermat's last theorem if x, y, and z are not divisible by an odd prime n" (91). She was wealthy and her early childhood was spent during the years of the French terror, in which Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were the cries of the people, and people like Sophie often went to the guillotine. She spent years hiding, with nothing to do but work on mathematics. Her father had an enormous library of mathematical volumes, with which she had total liberty of accesss. She later corresponded with Gauss, and others, but her education was stymied by a system that didn't admit women. She did most of her mathematical work all alone, sometimes corresponding under male pseudonyms. She lacked the formal education to tackle the most difficult problems, and yet managed to overcome many hurdles. She had some advantages in terms of her status, and the fact of her father's library. What if she had been given better circumstances? Would she have been equal to Gauss?

NEGATIVE DIVISION: AN ANALOGY

Dividing two negatives equals a positive.

So, if you take 800 billion dollars spent (a bad thing), and divide it by 200 pork projects (bad), can it equal four good things?

The salt marsh harvest mouse thinks so.

According to the Washington Times, Nancy Pelosi's pet project of defending the salt marsh harvest mouse will get 30 million dollars in the stimulus package that Congress is trying to pass.

The salt marsh harvest mouse is one of the only mammals that can drink salt water. It is tiny, about the size of your thumb, and weighs about as much as a nickel. They live underground a lot, mostly in Nancy Pelosi's legislative district, so they are calm, as they know they have a champion in Congress. They are in danger of disappearing, as their land is encroached upon by human development, but they have moved from endangered to vulnerable.

The Republicans have questioned how the salt marsh harvest mouse protection will stimulate the human business environment. Pelosi has been saying she knows nothing about this provision in the stimulus package, and has never heard of it. Never even heard of this mouse!

Maybe! But I'm just sitting around trying to make an analogy of it.

30 million dollars.

That's a bad thing, to spend that much money!

Then you divide into three further bad things, which will ultimately equal ten positive things.

Hmmm, here are three bad things that the money could be divided into:

1. You are trying to stop human development (bad) even though you claim you are providing a stimulus for development (development is bad, growth is good, a question of semantics?, but let's just stick with human development as a bad).

2. You are trying to keep the salt marsh harvest mouse from disappearing (because that would be bad, even though 99.9% of species do ultimately disappear).

3. You are trying to keep the bay from getting any uglier than it already is (ugliness is bad).

Therefore, you have ten good things that come out of this (dividing negatives equals a positive).

1. Eco-tourism in SF bay way up.

2. Pelosi can sleep at night: her mouse is saved.

3. The Republicans have something concrete to attack: Pelosi snuck a pet project into what was supposed to be a stimulus package.

4. It gives me something to blog about, and for all of us to get partisan about.

5. We can think about the problems of the Democrats, divided as they are between a Darwinian framework (survival of the fittest), and a Marxist framework (to each, including the salt marsh harvest mouse, according to their need).

6. We learn a bit more about the biodiversity of this country! In spite of the fact that 99.9 % of species ultimately disappear, there is still almost endless biodiversity, which shows that even the smallest fraction of infinity, is still an enormity.

7. Saving the salt marsh harvest mouse will probably put more than one biologist to work.

8. The biologists will then spend money in SF, which stimulates the economy.

9. Understanding how the salt marsh harvest mouse drinks salt water will ultimately provide us with an analogy for how we can drink salt water. When the fresh water runs out, we can turn to the oceans, and drink them all up like a bunch of salt marsh harvest mice (say it fast nine times).

10. Nine good things equals a tenth good, which is the sum of the previous nine good things.

I'm not sure my logic here holds (good and bad are relative, and difficult to get at, and a question of perspective), but I did my best!

The mouse is a rodent. That's bad. But it is cute. That's good. Which quality we invoke when we deal with something determines its relationship to zero, or nothingness. The salt marsh harvest mouse is certainly something. Whether it's a negative or a positive depends on your viewpoint. If it's a rodent, it's bad. If it's cute, and a quality of life indicator, then it's good.

Science and Math & Other Confusions

It wasn't that I was terrible at math or science in high school. I got A's, usually.

I just never understood what it was for. Like, who cared if 3x = 12, and therefore x = 4? I mean, what real world relevance did this have to me?

But I have been reading up on math just the same. I got through a pre-algebra book, and learned a lot from it. Now I'm into a book called Painless Algebra, by Lynette Long. I had no idea that you are not allowed to divide anything by zero, because the results don't make sense. I'm on p. 65 and am learning that an equation means that you have to have an equals sign. It doesn't just mean, some crazy math formula. So I'm thinking I can get to the end of this book in about a month, since I am doing about 60 pages a week.

I've learned how to multiply coefficients. Mostly it's a matter of remembering what I learned in high school. It's all coming back, including my not being able to understand why multiplying two negatives equals a positive, or why dividing two negatives equals a positive. But once I'm through with this book, I'm going to try to track down a book that explains why that is the case.

Meanwhile, I am also reading about science. The key is to find books that have a large humor quotient. Natalie Angier's The Canon mentioned in passing that the moon was thought to have been blasted out of a part of the earth by a meteor. I don't think she mentioned that this theory was first proposed in 1974 (the year I graduated from high school), and was only made into the consensus theory in 1984, at a conference in Hawaii.

I learned that last night on the science channel.

Now I'm about half-way through another book by Angier entitled, "The Beauty of the Beastly." A lot of this book is about insects but some of it is about testicles. The bigger the testicles on the creature, the more likely it is to cheat on its mate.

She claims humans have pretty small testicles, and therefore are generally monogamous. I guess this would give you a gauge as you're traipsing around the zoo with a slide rule and nothing better to do.

I'm learning new things every day. One of the things I learned this morning on the History channel is that it is now thought that St. Paul only wrote two of the epistles that are attributed to him. One is Romans. I couldn't catch the other one, because I had to go get my son from pre-school. Does anybody know what it is? I remember the show said that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy, and Colossians were almost certainly NOT by St. Paul. This was good to know, because for years I've been wondering why Ephesians was so badly written compared to Romans. Romans burns a hole in your head. Ephesians is almost a freshman composition, by comparison. There's no structure to it, and the phraseology is second rate. Romans is up close and personal, burning with lyricism. Ephesians has a kind of distance to it, and describes things that I doubt if anybody actually saw, such as the part about Paul going after the makers of idols for the goddess Diana.

And so I continue to go along -- wondering how it is that my areas of inquiry get further and further apart. Paul is talking about the soul: which has no attributes and therefore cannot be studied by science, since it is immaterial.

On the other side, you have all these empirical programs.

I am not worried about it. These are two separate kingdoms. Only hilarity connects them.

And last night while jogging in place trying to burn off some of the box of cookies I ate with a sudden abnormal and devilish momentum which consisted in devouring the entire box within the space of about thirty seconds like some kind of Tasmanian She-wolf, I saw Drew Carey chatting on TV with William Shatner. Drew was supposedly raised as a Lutheran and is on all the lists of Lutherans. I never knew who he was, so thought I would tune in and watched for an hour. He is a kind of lame humorist, I think. They showed excerpts from the Drew Carey show, and I thought, this stuff is very mild. But suddenly he started talking about his religious faith, and how he had already forgiven everybody for anything they could do to him. Cut him off in traffic, chop off his leg, whatever. It's all forgiven! And then he started talking about reincarnation, and souls, and how he hardly ever thinks about committing suicide any more, and he no longer looks into the mirror and says, Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who's the funniest of them all? I started to worry about him a little. He said he was going to get married soon, but looked completely diffident.

Anyways, back to my Middle School math book, PAINLESS ALGEBRA, where I'm about to dive into the third chapter. The title: SOLVING EQUATIONS WITH ONE VARIABLE. It opens:

"3 + 5 = 8 is an equation.

2x + 7x + 1 is not an equation. It does not have an equals sign."

I still don't know if I'm going to get anything out of math on a personal level. But I plan to teach this junk to my kids, and am enjoying it a little.

Idea for a Saturday Night Live Skit

Democratic Congress with hips thrusting forward in giant Conga line:

"America, we want to screw you with our stimulus package!"

Obama comes in.

"It's mine, too!"

Conga line continues, with all hips thrusting forward.

"If we could only get the Republicans to join us!" Pelosi shouts.

"Come on, Amerikkka! Bite my stimulus package! I don't want to have to force it down your throat!" Obama says.

At any rate, I think comedians could be doing more with that phrase, "Stimulus package."

It's somewhat aggressively suggestive, even if it is not downright lewd.

NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ON DELHI, NY

Friday I was surprised to see an entire page of the New York Times consecrated to Delhi, NY. Delhi is my town. It has about 6000 residents, plus about 3000 students at its college. The college itself is depicted in the photograph, with Zoey Gardepe (a friend of my son's in second grade). On the front lawn of the college is a hill that many kids use for sledding. We have a better hill in my back yard, so we have never used the college's slope.

As you look down off the sloping hill you look toward Main St. I live about two miles down Main St., on a street that nobody can find as it has a few curlicues.

Most of my poems are set in Delhi, and I have a new novel manuscript set here. It is picturesque as heck. But do you really want to move here? The only employers of any note are the college, the hospital, the school district, and a pharmaceutical company that does a very very thorough background check. Many writers and oddballs live in the hills here, and try to make it doing odd jobs. Some of the more talented ones can actually subsist. But there is only one movie theatre in the entire county (a county bigger than Rhode Island). The radio stations (there are two) tend toward Christian banjo music. The one good used bookstore is a little overpriced, and is only open three days a week. There's another EXCELLENT one about ten mniutes down the road called the Bibliobarn. Open all week, in all weather, and stocked with everything on earth.

We're about a two hour drive from New York City, and are thus a prime area for second home buyers, especially those who are afraid that Al Qaida will blast the city to kingdom come.

Winter here is very tough. You get snowed in sometimes for days. The streets are plowed, but the snow just keeps coming. I feel like I'm inside a paperweight that somebody is always turning upside down.

I like it here, honestly, but I was still surprised by the article, as it painted this town as PARADISE. I didn't know there were woodchucks in paradise.

Should you decide to read the article, don't neglect to flip through the seven extra photographs that are only available in the online edition. The first one presents one of our local churches (not ours). It's the Catholic church on "Cross" Street. The cross in the name is due to the street connecting Franklin and Clinton Streets, not because it boasts a pretty little street for the Catholic mavens of crucifixionality. (There are lots and lots of crosses in that church.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/greathomesanddestinations/06havens.html

Makota Fujimura Ash Wednesday Poetry Contest

This contest will close on February 25th, the first day of Lent, at midnight, on Ash Wednesday. You can submit up to three unpublished poems (less than 25 lines each). The idea of the contest is to write a poem set in the every day vernacular, in which the notion of gifting the other, is in some way addressed. Whether or not to give, and on what basis, especially to the poor, but to anyone at all, for any reason. Even listening to someone, truly listening, can be a gift. Not just giving someone a corned beef sandwich, not just praying for them, but perhaps really listening to a joke someone is telling, or paying close attention when someone describes a dream, or whatever. Rules: anyone can submit up to three poems. On the closing date, you can vote once for one other poem, if you have yourself entered the contest, or are a regular reader of the blog, and thus a known entity (this prevents poets from stuffing the ballot box under assumed names). The winner receives a brand new copy of Makota Fujimura's new book REFRACTIONS, with its exquisite reproductions of paintings, and discussions of art as a gift (he discusses Leonardo da Vinci, the campus visit as performance art event, and the Lower East side's pedestrian saviour Jane Jacobs, among others).

Part of the idea here is to continue the notion of talking about the book of James, and the Lutheran rejection of salvation through good works, as expressed here from the Wikipedia page on Lutheranism:

"Lutherans teach that sinners are not capable of doing any good works that can satisfy God's justice.^[13] Every human thought and deed is colored by sin and sinful motives.^[14] Because of this, all humanity deserves eternal damnation in hell.^[15] God has intervened in this world because he loves all people and does not want anyone to be eternally damned.^[16] By God's grace, made known and effective in the person and work of Jesus Christ, a person is forgiven, adopted as a child and heir of God, and given eternal salvation.^[17] For this reason, Lutherans teach that salvation is possible only because of the grace of God made manifest in the birth, life, suffering, death, and resurrection, and continuing presence by the power of the Holy Spirit, of Jesus Christ ^[18]."

Simultaneously, I want the contest to celebrate Ash Wednesday, because it reminds us that we are dust, and all Christian denominations celebrate the door to Easter with the exception of the Greek Orthodox (their reasons are obscure, and since we don't have any of them on board, we can discriminate against them without fear of reprisal). Before we become ashes again, what are we to do? How do we encounter others? What is our role? Lutheran surrealism's claim is that we encounter them, as we encounter them, we can do no other. But what of beauty? Must not beauty be authentic? We can't fake our relationship to others. Our relationship to others is in a sense determined by our relationship to God, which in turn is determined by God's relationship to us (rather than the reverse). We can only do our best.

The following poem is meant as an illustration of the kind of poem I am hoping to get, but it itself is not an entrant in the contest. It was already published in an excellent journal called The Wolf, published in London, in 2007. Published poems are not eligible, and thus this serves only as an illustration, and hopefully as a bit of inspiration.

SUNDAY MAY 4, 2003

Mr. Stewart gives our kids harmonicas,
he talks about his store.
The counters are a 100 yrs old,
“nothing works right”
& all the fixtures are broken.
Tristan wants out and stands by the door,
Lola wants up in mom’s arms.
Riikka thinks the shop historical
as I gaze at compasses
& maps.

Now I’m at the corner of Main & Elm St. in Oneonta,
outside the original Mama Nina’s Pizzeria.
The Blazers are leading the Mavs by two,
cars go by in a dream of motors,

I dream & I think & I think:
Mr. Stewart has never married – he has no family;
the dept. store is grandfathered,
no one will take over when he closes it.
He’s now in his late 80’s and wants to talk about the past,
a good listen if you’re in no hurry.

WAS JESUS AN IDIOT?

I'm kind of dismayed by Jesus. He rolls into Jerusalem on a donkey and proceeds to upset the whole apple-cart of Jewish society. He was an upstart. He came in dirty clothes and thought everybody should just accept that he was GOD ALMIGHTY. Maybe he was. But why couldn't he have proved it by dancing on water in front of the Pharisees? Why didn't he show that he could fly right off the cross, and dazzle everybody? Why didn't this guy have a shred of tactical sense if he was so smart? Why did he have to show up in Mary's womb? I mean, the woman was TAKEN! If he showed up in my wife's womb, I can tell you I would not have been impressed.

I'm often bugged by how dumb Jesus is. It's like he was asking for it.

He even says this is the way it had to be. Why is that again? This is a guy who could supposedly do anything. He was God. And yet, it seems there was an authority above him, something like Fate? I'm sorry, but the logic of this is faulty.

Jesus permanently undermined authority itself, and respect for the law. Hippies thought that if Jesus didn't behave himself, then why should they? Thoreau thought there should be such a thing as civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a terrible idea. But Jesus got that ball rolling. Was he really thinking, or just having a bit of fun down here and goofing everything up?

In comparison to Jesus, St. Paul was fairly sharp. First of all he admitted that he was sinful. Jesus never did that. If he was a man, then he should have been sinful. But Jesus was such a pious prick. He says that if you ever feel lust, you should pluck out your eyeball. This proves that no one really listens to Jesus. We just pretend to listen to him. No one's really a Christian except those who have self-inflicted eye injuries.

St. Paul is on the road to Damascus, or on the road to being reasonable. A little more reasonable than St. Paul is Augustine, and finally there's Luther, who actually had a functioning brain. Luther believed in laws, and tried to make the laws reasonable. We don't have to give all our money to the poor. The idea is instead to get everyone to be financially functional, and well-educated. Luther wanted bakeries, for instance, to work on a sound financial basis.

Luther got rid of the pyramid scheme of the Catholic church with its Pontificating Pontiffs, and its lazybone redfaced monks who never worked and were all randy from the lack of anything to think about.

Jesus is such a clown that he just multiplies loaves like some sort of mad mathematician gone Harry Potter.

I don't really like Jesus.

He was not a reasonable person. At 12, he argued with rabbis. He had a weird tendency toward putting himself into hot spots and lording it over others. I think he was kind of a drama queen.

He also had a masochistic side. If he was God, why didn't he get out of the scourging at least? Like, why was that necessary again? I'm sorry, I can't watch it. I can barely handle a paper cut. And yet I'm supposed to deal with that?

Nothing about him makes any sense. I can't bear Jesus.

Thank God for St. Paul, and Luther, and the gradual domestication of Christianity. Now, it almost makes some sense. The part that makes the most sense is the Ten Commandments. Those are pretty good ideas, especially after Luther threw out the stricture against graven images, which is more or less against art of any kind, which is something that only a Philistine could tolerate.

Jesus seems to me to be anti-sports and anti-arts. Why wasn't he at least throwing a Frisbee with the disciples? When did they ever get to have any fun? Why didn't they get to do watercolors, or take up modern dance? It was all just, let's go help this person, now let's walk through a desert and get all hot, now let's not eat anything, oh wait, here's a bunch of food that I will multiply because I forget about LOGISTICS again, oops! So it's one bailout after another for this guy, one magical incident after another, from above. Doesn't he realize how this would influence our Congress?

There are a few places where Jesus does make sense. He says for instance at one point that you shouldn't try to get rid of all your sin, that it would be like getting all the weeds out of a wheat field. Good call, Jesus! You functioned. But then he says to pluck out your eyeball if you like a little too much what you see. Isn't that just about the worst advice you've ever heard? Was the man off his rocker?

The attempt by St. Augustine to establish two kingdoms within Christ's discourse is the beginning of an attempt to make Jesus make some sense. Then Luther really completed that task.

But it's one that must be ongoing. Life has to make some kind of sense. We need laws, we need to limit things like altruism (a dangerous idea if it goes too far), we need to think in terms of long-term sustainability.

On the face of it, Jesus was just a jerk, almost as crazy as Marx.

Thank goodness for Martin Luther.

Neo

If you're a neo-Nazi, you're just a young Nazi, I guess. It just means you want to kill the Jews, and slaughter everybody who isn't an Aryan, but you weren't able to pal around with Goebbels, because you were born too late. Essentially, you want a one-party state, with all other parties banned.

If you're a neo-Marxist, you're just a young Marxist, I guess. It just means you want to destroy the entreprenurial class, and slaughter everybody who is vaguely functional, but you weren't able to pal around with Mao or Stalin, because you were born too late. Essentially, you want a one-party state, with all other parties banned.

If you're a neo-con, you're just a young James Madison I guess. It just means you think the entreprenurial class is the real backbone of the economy, and that you believe with John Locke and Martin Luther that there should be a separation between church and state. Essentially, you want a multi-party state, and believe in the freedom of speech, and that there should be freedom of inquiry. And why is that so much worse than the first two again?

I HATE DOGS, DON'T YOU?

A dog is supposed to be man's best friend, but I hate them. I was once a paper boy, and I remember the terror I felt as some little pooch barreled out of the darkness of 4 am aiming its teeth at my ankles as I desperately peddled to escape. I've never forgiven dogs, but I usually manage to keep this to myself. So when people have some crummy dog that they consider their personal companion, I generally manage to pet the varmint, cooing its name, while secretly thinking I would like to bang its head on something sharp.

I never do that, of course. I don't want dogs to suffer, in spite of the years of suffering they caused me personally. But part of me really hates dogs.

So when I want to get a good laugh I turn on Animal Planet channel and watch a dog beauty contest. I consider all dogs to be ugly, and it's amazing to see people who love them, and actually rank them in terms of beauty.

This weekend, I watched a Sealyham Terrier contest. All breeds of dog descend from wolves. A wolf is something I respect. It has survival value, and they are genuinely mysterious, and have their dignity.

A guy named Captain Edwards set about to create the Sealyham breed in Wales, England. He must have had something in mind. The way the fur falls appealed to him for some reason. They are pretty good at catching varmints so at least they have some utility. The better ones at the contest trotted along as if there was nothing really wrong with them and it seems that if they remained focused and their trot was graceful they got extra points. Captain Edwards shot the ones that didn't come out according to his Frankensteinian conception.

At a dog contest, the judges are enamored. The crowds clap. The winners get to be studs. The travesty continues.

I have tried to be empathetic. But down deep, dogs make me tremble. I've almost fainted when one trots up to me wagging its tail and waiting to be adored. Don't you know you're a wolf? I want to ask. The fact is that the dog doesn't know! I imagine the dog thinks it is pretty much a person like me. It wants to be liked, it has irrational hatreds, and thinks instinctively about its property. Unlike me, it can't read the newspaper, or appreciate that what you're throwing at its master's porch is something that the master actually wants. It probably thinks it's a grenade. And so, it doesn't act in a civilized way. It acts like a wolf!

Beauty in a wolf has to do with a strong sense of smell, good eyesight, strong sharp teeth, and enough intelligence to kill. Dogs are wolves. But the Sealyham looks a little like a sheep. Why has this been done?

The Sealyham is a wolf! The Sealyham, a wolf, having bitten the ankle of the paper boy, then hops on its owner's lap, and snoozes, like a sprawling child, while the owner reads the newspaper that has been delivered, and on which there might still be a trace of blood left from the actual small boy!

It's a beautiful thing, the dog. Whatever it is.

Dogs aren't people. They may have names as people do, but they're allowed to piss on your front lawn in the snow. The owners think nothing of this! What if I took my child over to piss on their lawn? Why do dogs have all these rights, and no responsibilities?

If when I met you, I climbed up on you, and barked, would you still accept me? I am about to die when a dog does this to me, but I have to hide it, because I am considered the abnormal one. Why don't people just wave their pistol in my face, and ask me to pet it?

There are 800,000 dog bites every year in America, and most of those bites are to the faces of small children. At night people leave their dogs out and they bark all night. Many of us have enough trouble getting to sleep without this added nuisance. If I barked all night out my window I would be considered barking mad. But with dogs, it's just fine.

When I watch dogs on Animal Planet, I ask myself what planet I am on.

What do wolves think about dogs?

Wolves and dogs are still able to procreate as they are part of the same species. But what self-respecting wolf would procreate with a Sealyham Terrier?

Almost everyone loves dogs. My children beg me to get one. I would rather own a gun with a mind of its own. Dogs are just wolves. Would everybody please realize this? Dogs should not be heard, and dogs should not be seen. Dogs should not exist. Can you imagine a Sealyham out in the forest trying to live on its own? A poodle? Even the squirrels would chuckle.

Am I really the only one who feels this way?

What is Identity?

In his surrealist novel, Nadja, Breton opens by asking, "Qui suis-je?"

Who am I?

He answers that it is the people we haunt. Or perhaps that the people we haunt draw an identity from us. Is this accurate? Identity is so odd in a universe in which the light from the Andromeda Galaxy takes 2.3 million years to reach us.

A star is as far as my eye is from me, Corso wrote.

Again, the notion of identity. Who am I? Am I my eye, or am I light years away from my eye?

Marx wanted us to find an identity through class. He argued that we are our class, and that even our aesthetic taste (or lack thereof) is bound to our class. Feminists taking off from Marx argued that our identity is based on our gender (and the common oppression of women around the globe). Race theorists argue that our identity is based on the historical suppression of our race.

Marxist theories of identity are very tightly uniform, and uniformity of opinion is important. If you are an Asian race theorist in America, your arguments must focus on white oppression of your race. You must never bring up any kind of trouble with blacks, or never bring up Asian male repression of gender. There has to be a clear black and white, a clear wrong and right. therefore your identity must be based on your relationship to white male culture (which must always be presented as one of subordination and victimization). Otherwise you risk breaking up the uniformity of opinion, and losing the clarity that a group's indignation can offer. Most importantly, you must never bring up your own group's racism toward either blacks or whites or anyone else. Never mention that your father forbade you to marry outside your race. To do this would be to break ranks, and to lose that overall identity that makes a group into a rugby scrum, and a rugby scrum into a hustle.

Identity in Freud is all that which has been repressed, too. He argues for an unconscious. All the elements that we say are not-I.

The surrealists went big for this, but completely misunderstood Freud to mean that we ought to identify ourselves with our ID. Freud argued in fact that we shouldn't do this, but that civilization rests on our ability to repress the ID (he had gotten this idea from Schopenhauer). The surrealists opened the ID in a Nietzschean celebration, and danced on the shimmering lava that poured out: erotic love, crime, all those things that the ten commandments forbade. Their movement was fabulously revolting.

Jung did something similar in terms of opening up the unconscious, and argued for a universal unconscious. And that we have a shadow that we ought to accept. Jungians see Marxists as denying their own shadows, and displacing this shadow on to another. I'm with the Jungians to the extent of their critique of Marxist identity. but I don't think we ought to simply embrace the shadow.

I don't think identity falls into the clearly defined archetypes of Jungian identity formation. Jean Shinoda Bolen's Gods and Goddesses in Everyman argues that we fall into the types on Mount Olympus. She is a Jungian therapist in San Francisco. There are Zeusian males (she gives the example of Bill Clinton), and Hephaestus type men (she gives the example of Bill Gates), and Ares (she gives the example of George W. Bush). And there are women who are like Athena (Condoleeza Rice), and Hera (Nancy Reagan), and Aphrodite (Paris Hilton).

The enneagram is a nine-pointed system that breaks people into 9 main types. No one knows its origins but it appears to be linked to an Armenian sufi named Gurdjieff. This system is much more articulate than Marxism (it posits a deep and unique motivation for each of the nine types). It has however been rearticulated by a variety of self-styled new age thinkers some of whom are in some sense Jungian (Carlos Naranjo, and Helen Palmer), and even Jesuits (Don Richard Riso), and others of various stripes, mostly to the left of the political spectrum, but a few to the right.

Identity is something that cannot be proven in the way that we can prove that water freezes at 32 degrees. And yet, there are some people who seek out beauty more than others. Some people seek power instead. Or they seek political unity. Or they seek peace. Or they want to help others. The enneagram theorizes these.

In the seventies and eighties there was a notion that the "subject" was something that ought to be studied (the I). And all this study came down to was race, gender, and class. The Marxists won, at least in many areas of academia, and especially in English.

But I've never been willing to give up the thinking that there is a face behind a face behind a face behind a face behind a face. We may present one face forward at work, but what about the faces that emerge in dreams? Who are they? Is that me, too, being chased by a dinosaur, or falling into a well, or lost in a sewer? It's true that if we push one face forward it might help us to succeed. I'm the person who's always on time, and gets their work done efficiently, says the banker. I'm the person who bakes nice cookies, and they are wonderfully crumbly, says the baker. I'm the one who goes fast around the track, says Mario Andretti. I'm the one who will bring change and hope, says Barack Obama.

I can't help but think there is more to a person than you can put into one sentence, or into a single term. Identity is something that can't be proven in the way that we prove a math theorem, or that we can prove a bucket of water will freeze at 32 degrees. Identity is a verb of being, or a verb of action, perhaps. It is something like the soul. It leaps between levels of thought, and yet, it has no attributes. I still think it's St. Paul who has perhaps the most interesting concept of identity. He says I am he who doesn't do what I say I will do. I am always other to myself, caught between my ideals and my sin. I am not I.

Race theory depends on a notion that is scientifically invalid. There is no genetic marker for race. In terms of DNA, all humans are 99.9 % identical. So identity itself appears to be a fiction at least in scientific terms. The notion that there is a radical difference between people, and that we are separate, is a fiction, but it is perhaps this that makes life interesting. How we create fictions, and live out stories based on them, that have no scientific reality. Man is the animal that invents stories about itself, as it lives them out. Man is the animal that is caught in a web of half-truths, odd inklings of what's beautiful: strange values that have no rational foundation, but which are as true to each of us as the fact that water freezes at 32 degrees.