…the more they stay the same. It’s as if we did a Rip Van Winkle during the past six months, awakening to the Sturm und Drang of the banker’s bonus controversy, listening to the same blather from CNBC about our stalwart bankers’ right to riches as they have paid back their TARP money, the consequences of a capitalist system at work. Six months ago I noted the absurdity of Citibank’s salary increases, their logic being they were “needed” to retain the best talent. Today’s news is record bank bonuses, even surpassing those paid out in 2007 at the top of the market: “top 38 firms on pace to award $145 billion for ’09, up 18%” per the Wall Street Journal.
We’ve become a Corporatocracy – this is not capitalism, which is supposed to reward success, not underwrite failure -- and the bonuses are just another piece of evidence that the Obama administration, while talking up change, has been conned. TARP repayments is a smoke screen, masking the myriad other ways the taxpayer is subsidizing bank profits, be it AIG back door payments, federal government guarantees, or the zero interest rate environment which gives banks access to free money (buy a 6 month CD today and see what YOU get as lender). $145 billion in bonuses while unemployment is well over 10% (if you count people who are no longer part of the labor force as they’ve given up looking for jobs)? One would think banks would grasp the PR downside of the issue, or do they live in their own amoral world?
And as brilliantly noted in a piece in Naked Capitalism, Obama’s “Get Tough on Banks” Again Tries to Play the Public for Fools, Obama’s proposed tax on banks is merely a slap on the wrist, nice political fodder to appease the masses, but it clearly falls short of the reforms that are needed in the industry. Naked Capitalism contrasts Obama’s weak stance to the soaring rhetoric of FDR when he took office: “….the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.”
However, all of this pales in importance to the tragedy in Haiti. Here is the site of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a nonprofit charity watchdog and information service, giving their highest rated charities that are active in Haiti.
.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Aegean Adventure Redux
I left the Aegean Adventure post in the middle of our trip, with a promise to cover our remaining days in the Greek Islands, Dubrovnik, and, finally, Athens. Today, southern Florida is in its 10th day of temperatures near freezing at night, a record, and, so, what better time to recall the warmth of the Aegean Sea?
The Greek Islands in particular were stunning in their beauty, the timelessness of its towns meeting the sea, the ubiquity of its churches juxtaposed to medieval walls, evidence of conflicts of previous civilizations. In Croatia, the walled city of Dubrovnik shows not only the mark of ancient wars, but the recent flack scars of the Serbian siege of 1991 as well. And Athens, understandably mobbed with tourists such as us, majestically marks the foundation of Greek civilization. Searching for a leitmotif in this experience, I cannot help think of the scores of generations that have come and gone on these ancient lands, the lives, and the births and deaths of an endless parade of now anonymous individuals as well as the notables marked by stone monuments.
I mentioned that while we were touring, I was reading John Updike’s Self Consciousness, the closest he ever came to writing an autobiography. There are so many passages that I underscored in the book, ones I will want to return to, I ended up noting as much as I failed to note. But some of his writings on religion and mortality as well as the craft of writing, struck a particularly sensitive cord with me while visiting these places, the evidence of civilizations we saw, so I am going to defer to Updike and allow his words to resonate at the end of this post, while some of my photographs offer their own viewpoint.
Delos Panorama
Mykonos is one of those picture post card islands whose Cycladic architecture and narrow streets makes every turn a photo-op. A young woman even wanted to show off how she filled out her bathing suit in a doorway, and was eager to pose.
Santorini on the Edge of the Caldera
Santorini Blue Dome at Oia
Olympia, the site of the ancient Greek Games, is a sanctuary associated with the games and the worship of the Greek Gods. To stand on the remaining site of the stadium where the events were held, is awe-inspiring.
Olympia Temple of Hera
Dubrovnik
In Crete we bused to the Lassithi Plateau and toured its ancient windmills, returning to the city of Aghios Nikolaos on the islands eastern side.
Athens Parthenon
.
The Greek Islands in particular were stunning in their beauty, the timelessness of its towns meeting the sea, the ubiquity of its churches juxtaposed to medieval walls, evidence of conflicts of previous civilizations. In Croatia, the walled city of Dubrovnik shows not only the mark of ancient wars, but the recent flack scars of the Serbian siege of 1991 as well. And Athens, understandably mobbed with tourists such as us, majestically marks the foundation of Greek civilization. Searching for a leitmotif in this experience, I cannot help think of the scores of generations that have come and gone on these ancient lands, the lives, and the births and deaths of an endless parade of now anonymous individuals as well as the notables marked by stone monuments.
I mentioned that while we were touring, I was reading John Updike’s Self Consciousness, the closest he ever came to writing an autobiography. There are so many passages that I underscored in the book, ones I will want to return to, I ended up noting as much as I failed to note. But some of his writings on religion and mortality as well as the craft of writing, struck a particularly sensitive cord with me while visiting these places, the evidence of civilizations we saw, so I am going to defer to Updike and allow his words to resonate at the end of this post, while some of my photographs offer their own viewpoint.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus of Rhodes, once bestrode the harbor of Rhodes. We visited the old town that is contained within its medieval walls.
Rhodes Palace Archway
Rhodes Street of the Knights
Delos, a small rocky island, but to the Greeks a sacred place as Apollo and Artermis were said to be born there.
Delos PanoramaMykonos is one of those picture post card islands whose Cycladic architecture and narrow streets makes every turn a photo-op. A young woman even wanted to show off how she filled out her bathing suit in a doorway, and was eager to pose.
Mykonos Harbor
Mykonos Church of the Panagia
Mykonos Doorway
Santorini is another such island, built on the ring of a volcanic crater, the main town of Oia rising dramatically from the sea
Santorini on the Edge of the Caldera
Santorini Blue Dome at Oia
Olympia, the site of the ancient Greek Games, is a sanctuary associated with the games and the worship of the Greek Gods. To stand on the remaining site of the stadium where the events were held, is awe-inspiring.
Olympia Temple of HeraCorfu is one of the largest Ionian Islands and we spent the day in the old town
Corfu Old Town
We loved Dubrovnik, Croatia. Our wine steward aboard the ship was Croatian so we had already felt a deep affection for the long suffering of the Croatian people and their city, which has been a focal point of conflict and conquering forces.
DubrovnikIn Crete we bused to the Lassithi Plateau and toured its ancient windmills, returning to the city of Aghios Nikolaos on the islands eastern side.
Crete Ancient Windmills
Walking up the steps to the Acropolis with thousands of other tourists, the city of Athens below, made me think of the march of civilization and the inconsequentiality of our own steps in this procession.
Athens Parthenon
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Athens and Temple of Thission
From John Updike’s Self Consciousness; A Memoir (Knopf; 1989)
On Religion and Mortality…
“…The idea that we sleep for centuries and centuries without a flicker of dream, while our bodies rot and turn to dust and the very stone marking our graves crumbles to nothing, is virtually as terrifying as annihilation. Every attempt to be specific about the afterlife, to conceive of it in even the most general detail, appalls us.”
“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self – skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school – strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.”
“For many men, work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved. Unamuno: ‘Work is the only practical consolation for having been born.’ My own chosen career – its dispersal and multiplication of the self through publication, its daily excretion of yet more words, the eventual reifying of those words into books – certainly is a practical consolation, a kind of bicycle which, if I were ever to stop pedaling, would dump me flat on my side. Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
“Karl Barth…responding in an interview late in his life to the question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity – the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance.”
On writing…
“My success was based, I felt, on a certain calculated modesty, on my cultivated fondness for exploring corners – the space beneath the Shillington dining table, where the nap of the rug
was still thick; the back stairs, where the vacuum cleaner and rubber galoshes lived; the cave the wicker armchairs made when turned upside down against the rain on the porch. I had left heavily trafficked literary turfs to others and stayed in my corner of New England to give its domestic news.”
“Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. “
“I envision my paternal grandfather as having been, like me, bookish and keen to stay out of harm’s way; we aspired to the clerisy, and the price that we pay, we Americans who shyly wish to live by our eyes and wits, at our desks, away from the frightening tussle of human strength and appetite and intimidation and persuasiveness, is marginality: we live chancily, on society’s crumbs in a sense, as an exchange for our exemption from the broad brawl of, to give it a name, salesmanship.”
“So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world – it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light – in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it – approaches blasphemy.”
On Religion and Mortality…
“…The idea that we sleep for centuries and centuries without a flicker of dream, while our bodies rot and turn to dust and the very stone marking our graves crumbles to nothing, is virtually as terrifying as annihilation. Every attempt to be specific about the afterlife, to conceive of it in even the most general detail, appalls us.”
“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self – skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school – strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.”
“For many men, work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved. Unamuno: ‘Work is the only practical consolation for having been born.’ My own chosen career – its dispersal and multiplication of the self through publication, its daily excretion of yet more words, the eventual reifying of those words into books – certainly is a practical consolation, a kind of bicycle which, if I were ever to stop pedaling, would dump me flat on my side. Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
“Karl Barth…responding in an interview late in his life to the question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity – the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance.”
On writing…
“My success was based, I felt, on a certain calculated modesty, on my cultivated fondness for exploring corners – the space beneath the Shillington dining table, where the nap of the rug
was still thick; the back stairs, where the vacuum cleaner and rubber galoshes lived; the cave the wicker armchairs made when turned upside down against the rain on the porch. I had left heavily trafficked literary turfs to others and stayed in my corner of New England to give its domestic news.”“Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. “
“I envision my paternal grandfather as having been, like me, bookish and keen to stay out of harm’s way; we aspired to the clerisy, and the price that we pay, we Americans who shyly wish to live by our eyes and wits, at our desks, away from the frightening tussle of human strength and appetite and intimidation and persuasiveness, is marginality: we live chancily, on society’s crumbs in a sense, as an exchange for our exemption from the broad brawl of, to give it a name, salesmanship.”
“So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world – it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light – in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it – approaches blasphemy.”
.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Well Worth Noting…
Two interesting articles, one an interview with Richard Koo, a former economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now chief economist of Nomura Research Institute, which appeared in this week’s Barron’s Magazine, A Japanese Rx for the West: Keep Spending and the weekly commentary of the economist and mutual fund manager John Hussman, Timothy Geithner Meets Vladimir Lenin
Koo’s views might seem to be counterintuitive – government needs to increase deficit spending on a three to five year plan while the private sector is repairing its balance sheet. Japan failed to recognize the dangers of “a balance sheet recession” and the USA could make the same mistake. I would agree, provided spending is focused on our infrastructure or alternative energy, or on myriad other public projects that resonate in our economy, creating jobs while fixing our roads and public transportation, encouraging energy independence, reducing greenhouse gases, and improving our educational system. Such investments are aimed at Main Street, not Wall Street. I would imagine Koo would be the first to note that bailouts of irresponsible investment bankers do not constitute the kind of government borrowing he means.
Koo contends that while the private sector repairs its balance sheet, writing down debt on devalued assets, it is imperative for the Federal government to borrow because even if interest rates are zero, the public sector cannot be induced to borrow: “The only way the government can turn this economy around is to do the opposite of the private sector -- borrow the money the private sector saved and spend it, which means fiscal stimulus. That's what saved Japan from entering a Great Depression.”
In effect we can’t make businesses borrow by giving capital to the banking system which only encourages more reckless economic behavior – it has to be spent elsewhere, and what better place than our infrastructure and energy independence?
John Hussman, meanwhile, writes about the very kind of borrowing we must eschew, especially as it is being done without our elected constituency’s input: the Treasury’s recent announcement that it would provide Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac UNLIMITED financial support for the next three years, reminding us that it was Vladimir Lenin who said: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”
As Hussman notes, “in a single, coordinated stroke, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have encroached on spending powers that are enumerated for the Congress alone.” And perhaps worse, “…homeowners who have been diligently making their payments will keep their homes, and homeowners who took out mortgages they couldn't afford will keep their homes as well with no adverse consequence to the lenders – since the underlying loans are now owned largely by the Fed, and the Treasury has pledged its unlimited support. Why pay one's debts if it becomes optional, and the Treasury stands to absorb unlimited losses at public expense?”
.
Koo’s views might seem to be counterintuitive – government needs to increase deficit spending on a three to five year plan while the private sector is repairing its balance sheet. Japan failed to recognize the dangers of “a balance sheet recession” and the USA could make the same mistake. I would agree, provided spending is focused on our infrastructure or alternative energy, or on myriad other public projects that resonate in our economy, creating jobs while fixing our roads and public transportation, encouraging energy independence, reducing greenhouse gases, and improving our educational system. Such investments are aimed at Main Street, not Wall Street. I would imagine Koo would be the first to note that bailouts of irresponsible investment bankers do not constitute the kind of government borrowing he means.
Koo contends that while the private sector repairs its balance sheet, writing down debt on devalued assets, it is imperative for the Federal government to borrow because even if interest rates are zero, the public sector cannot be induced to borrow: “The only way the government can turn this economy around is to do the opposite of the private sector -- borrow the money the private sector saved and spend it, which means fiscal stimulus. That's what saved Japan from entering a Great Depression.”
In effect we can’t make businesses borrow by giving capital to the banking system which only encourages more reckless economic behavior – it has to be spent elsewhere, and what better place than our infrastructure and energy independence?
John Hussman, meanwhile, writes about the very kind of borrowing we must eschew, especially as it is being done without our elected constituency’s input: the Treasury’s recent announcement that it would provide Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac UNLIMITED financial support for the next three years, reminding us that it was Vladimir Lenin who said: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”
As Hussman notes, “in a single, coordinated stroke, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve have encroached on spending powers that are enumerated for the Congress alone.” And perhaps worse, “…homeowners who have been diligently making their payments will keep their homes, and homeowners who took out mortgages they couldn't afford will keep their homes as well with no adverse consequence to the lenders – since the underlying loans are now owned largely by the Fed, and the Treasury has pledged its unlimited support. Why pay one's debts if it becomes optional, and the Treasury stands to absorb unlimited losses at public expense?”
.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Ghost of New Year’s Future?
If you read only forecast for 2010, let it be this one by James Howard Kunstler who writes a blog, Clusterfuck Nation. While I hope things will not evolve as badly as he speculates, he may have the direction right, the ephemerality of the “recovery” from our duct-tapped economy, government’s complicity, and our lack of moral fiber as a nation to do the right thing. “We're a nation of thugs and louts with flames tattooed on our necks, who call each other ‘motherfucker’ and are skilled only in playing video games based on mass murder.”
Amen to that.
.
Amen to that.
.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
And to All a Good-Night!
How many times does one have to see a version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to say “enough?” Never, I say, as every generation can find it’s own version, just as Hollywood always seems to find another way to rework the story. Today, the tale could be a morality play about our financial times, Scrooge being played by a Wall Street Banker du jour, Tiny Tim by a child lacking health insurance, Bob Cratchit by someone in foreclosure, while the unemployed gather beneath the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present. Past or present Chairmen of the Federal Reserve could play the ghosts. I pick Paul Volcker for the Ghost of Christmas Present, as he seems to see things the clearest. Naturally, Bernie Madoff must play the part of Jacob Marley wearing his chains forged of Ponzi links.
For me, the classic tale still elicits an emotional response, especially the versions that come closest to Dickens’ original text. So in that spirit, I offer a couple of photos of our Xmas past, in our home in Connecticut where the holiday really felt like Christmas:
For me, the classic tale still elicits an emotional response, especially the versions that come closest to Dickens’ original text. So in that spirit, I offer a couple of photos of our Xmas past, in our home in Connecticut where the holiday really felt like Christmas:
.
.
And this one from Florida Christmas Present, where it will be 80 degrees and one of the high points is the annual Christmas Boat Parade. It’s a Humbug, I say!
.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Book Publishing Roulette
Unfortunately this is not the first time that I’ve said something negative about my industry. I am particularly bewildered as to how some giant trade publishers seem content to play Russian Roulette, thinking they can stem the tide of the migration from print to digital by simply going into a hissy-fit and refusing to issue e-book editions until the hard cover edition has had several months in the market without “competition.” Their failure to recognize that their industry’s economics is of no concern to the marketplace is another nail in their coffin. Strong independent publishers have an opportunity to pick the bones of behemoths such as Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins who, along with Hachette Book Group, have announced their intention to delay the publication of e-book editions until their higher-priced hardcover editions have had several months in the marketplace. “Each publisher voiced concern that the popularity of cheap, $9.99 e-book best sellers available simultaneously with new hardcovers endangers the publishing industry's future.”
Instead they should be embracing the policy of “any-time-any-place” publishing – delivering the goods to the consumer whenever he/she wants it and in any form. There may have to be price disparities for different formats. Certainly the more a title is aimed at the consumer (trade), rather than at someone who needs information to do a job (professional), the digital edition price might undercut the hardcover. But do they really think that they can control the digital tsunami? The only thing endangering “the publishing industry’s future” is the misguided policies of trade publishers themselves.
.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
God, the Ninth, and Nine-Eleven
How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God? As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.” And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”
I’ve been reading John Updike’s last short story collection, My Father’s Tears, interspersing those stories with other things I read, treating them like the little gems they are. Since 9/11 though I’ve made it a point to avoid anything about that horrible day, just because it is so raw in memory. We could see the columns of smoke 50 miles away in Connecticut on that crystal clear day.
So it was some trepidation when I realized that Updike’s story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” (He was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.) To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety. Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, organized religion seems so hypocritical, a crutch or a means of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:
Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegarrd, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?
I could not get the thought of 9/11 out of my mind Sunday when, for the first time in my life,
although I had listened to various recordings in the past, I saw, heard, became immersed in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, a magnificent, ambitious undertaking of the Palm Beach Opera, performed at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.
I’ve been reading John Updike’s last short story collection, My Father’s Tears, interspersing those stories with other things I read, treating them like the little gems they are. Since 9/11 though I’ve made it a point to avoid anything about that horrible day, just because it is so raw in memory. We could see the columns of smoke 50 miles away in Connecticut on that crystal clear day.
So it was some trepidation when I realized that Updike’s story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” (He was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.) To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety. Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, organized religion seems so hypocritical, a crutch or a means of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:
Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegarrd, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?
I could not get the thought of 9/11 out of my mind Sunday when, for the first time in my life,
although I had listened to various recordings in the past, I saw, heard, became immersed in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, a magnificent, ambitious undertaking of the Palm Beach Opera, performed at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. Long ago in a college music history/theory course we reviewed Beethoven’s 9th and I had a copy of the score. It was the most complex piece I had ever seen, the orchestration for different sections being a mystery as to how everything can be brought together in one coherent entity. Four well-known opera soloists and four different choruses joined the Palm Beach Opera Orchestra. There were hundreds of people on stage. If there is a God, he/she/it is embodied in that Symphony, the purest ethereal expression of reverence and joy I have ever witnessed. Could it be that the same species that concocted a 9/11 could create such a masterpiece, and written by just one man who was deaf as well? So, for me, those are the bookends of this first decade of the 21st century, the infamous, wanton destruction of life and normalcy at the beginning, and beholding Beethoven’s intensely spiritual 9th Symphony at the end, contradictory undertakings in the name of “God” and mankind.
.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
