History of My Reading: Living Paradox

In early 1965--the second half of the 1964-5 school year--Frederick Delano Newman was approaching 30, and in his third year as a professor of philosophy at Knox College.  Born in the Bronx, he worked as an apprentice machinist and in other jobs after his father died and left the family destitute.  At 18 or 19 he joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea just after the Korean war officially ceased.  Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he graduated from the City College of New York, which (according to its web site) was known as "Harvard of the Proletariat" and "the poor man's Harvard" because of its "academic excellence and status as a working-class school."

Newman got his PhD from Stanford University, the self-styled Ivy League college of the West, just before he began teaching at Knox, which at the time liked to call itself the Harvard of the Midwest (complete with Harvard's purple and gold.)

At Knox he was friends with Douglas Wilson and William V. Spanos of the English Department (among others), and so I probably knew of him from Wilson (my academic advisor) in my first semester.  Newman and Wilson were principals in a folk music ensemble, famous that year for their satirical song about "the rug," which--if memory serves-- told the story of Knox buying the world's largest carpet and building a Fine Arts Center around it.  The CFA had just opened.

But I'm pretty sure my first direct experience of Fred Newman was in the intro philosophy course (Philosophy 115) I took that second semester.  I probably knew that--like my fiction-writing course with Harold Grutzmacher--it would be my last chance to take one of his courses, because it was to be his last semester at Knox.  But I'm not entirely sure about the timing, since Newman himself was not told until January that his contract wasn't going to be renewed after this semester (so late in the year that it was itself a violation of rules established by the American Association of University Professors.)

A disturbing number of young and favorite faculty members were leaving Knox that year, as others had the year before and more would the year after. Newman's abrupt and mostly forced departure was the most dramatic example of the Knox brain drain, and that drama played out all semester, culminating in a Student Senate resolution and a protest march at graduation.

But while this drama slowly built to its climax, my ongoing and intensive experience was this philosophy course, the first I'd taken.  It was not, we were emphatically warned, about a "philosophy of life," or even the Great Thoughts and schools of philosophy through history.  Newman had studied analytic philosophy with the charismatic Donald Davidson at Stanford. Its general areas of interest were logic and language (which happens to be the title of what I believe was one of our texts: Logic and Language, an anthology of essays by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, John Wisdom and G.E. Moore.)  Logic and language also happened to be areas of my intense interest and aptitude.

As I was to learn later, this brand of analytic philosophy emerged from Oxbridge--the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England-- beginning in the early twentieth century.  One emphasis among several was dubbed Ordinary Language Philosophy, which questioned academic reliance on specialized or technical terms (especially jargon) and instead analyzed the meaning of words and expressions in everyday use, and their relationship to philosophical questions.

A.J. Ayer

(There was also a reductionist version of analytic philosophy called Logical Positivism, championed by Oxford's A.J. Ayer.  It was the subject of many a debate at Knox and elsewhere before collapsing under its own weight.  Playwright Tom Stoppard mentioned in his Paris Review interview that he'd seen Ayer on television responding to the question of what were the main defects of logical positivism.  "I suppose its main defect," Ayer said, "was that it wasn't true." Nevertheless, it still managed to rise from the dead in various late 20th century movements.)

Beyond the Fringe: Oxbridge Quartet

This analytic/ordinary language philosophy was so ingrained in those English universities that it became a basis for the characteristic humor of an age, first through the Oxbridge quartet (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett) who devised and performed Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s (most directly in the sketches called "Oxbridge Philosophy" and "Portrait from Memory" which was about Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.)

That style of language and logic play also inspired the likes of David Frost (That Was the Week That Was),  the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)--most of them Oxbridgers.  It also influenced the work of several English playwrights--notably Tom Stoppard, who wrote a play about academic philosophers (Jumpers), and Michael Frayn, who wrote a long book of philosophy, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

This is not to imply that this philosophy course was a joke (though Quine's writing and Newman's talk could be playful and witty.)  On the contrary, it was among the richest, most consequential and most intellectually mind-opening courses I took at Knox.

I remember the class as being huge.  I believe we met for lectures in the Fine Art Center, perhaps the main theatre or the music theatre.  The lectures were supplemented by tutorials, with either Newman or the only other member of the philosophy department, Donald Milton. Perhaps Milton lectured as well, but Newman was definitely the main attraction, a mesmerizing and theatrical performer.

I'm not sure what books we were required to buy for this course, if any, but I'm sure of several books that were central to the course (we may have been given handouts from various chapters):  Mind and the World Order: Outline of A Theory of Knowledge by C. I. Lewis (a book originally published in 1929) and Word and Object by Willard Van Orman Quine, a contemporary Harvard philosopher.  If I didn't acquire those books during the course, I did shortly afterward.  We also intensively studied at least one essay ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism") from Quine's essay collection, From a Logical Point of View.

We were definitely given handouts, including texts of Newman's lectures (double-spaced mimeographed purple ink copies.)  I also have a long article by Warner A. Wick from the Philosophical Review that looks like it came from this course.  We wrote frequent short papers, some perhaps based on articles like this, which were the subject of our tutorials.

The tutorials were held in the philosophy office where Newman and Milton would hold them simultaneously in different parts of the room. Each would be sitting in one chair, with an chair for the student opposite. We filed through, one after another. It reminded me of two priests hearing confessions, except we didn't kneel.

Philosophy 115 was not a standard introductory course that presented a range of material, organized by historical chronology or types, which students were expected to learn to identify.  We were introduced instead to philosophy as an activity.  We were dropped in the middle of philosophical undertakings--into what seemed like live discoveries and debates.  We weren't learning about philosophy; we were learning to do philosophy.

Along the way there were new ideas and a new language, and our heads were swimming among the given and interpretive, analytic and synthetic, a priori and empirical, not to mention relativistic ontological relativism.  But we learned most of the terms and ideas on the fly, inside the analyses being done. This was an electric combination.

The books and essays we read were making actual arguments to advance knowledge, as were Newman's lectures, or at least some of them.  As students we were focused on Newman's preoccupations and his brand of philosophy (which I realize now in paging through two of his subsequent books, Explanation By Description and The Myth of Psychology, had American roots in the pragmatism of William James as well as certain Oxbridge figures.)  But a semester is not a long time, and this approach to an introduction seems as least as valid as the more standard one.

 In one sense it could be said that instead of learning the history of swimming and the various methods, we were thrown into the pool to learn how to swim. More than that, I felt it as a model completely new to me: a course in which students witness and share in the ongoing work of the teacher in their field.  What could be more exciting than that?

That impression was augmented by Newman's availability.  He was on campus a lot, in the Gizmo even at night, and although discussions could be wide-ranging (and funny), the kind of analytical approach we were learning in the course was always present, if not predominant.  (For some reason I recall one specific day when Newman sat in the Gizmo with his back against the heat register or radiator.  He talked for hours, even though he had a cold.  Then he got up, declared that he'd sweated out the cold and felt better, and left.)

What were we learning? Especially what transferred beyond the discipline into other areas of knowledge and life?  Of course that varied for each student.  But at this remove, two areas occur to me as prominently in the mix for many.

 First of all, to question, beyond what we may already have learned to question.  Not just the accuracy of facts, the legitimacy of sources, the faulty arguments (by authority, for example) or illogic.  But the meaning of every statement, every word--its logic and implications.  Philosophy analyzed the internal logic--the hidden assumptions, the unquestioned contradictions--of entire fields of endeavor, such as science (including social science.)  It wasn't a stretch to ask similar questions about politics or literary studies, or relationships.

Second, the defining role of the mind in our reality.  In effect, this philosophical approach stated that the world as we know it is as much a product of the mind as the mind is of the world.  In a meaningful way, we are the medium in which the apprehensible and comprehensible universe exits; our abstractions, analogies and stories construct a universe.  We couldn't exist without the given world, but the world we knew couldn't exist without our mental participation.  This is a paradox, and the paradox is us.

This single insight of the mind's active relationship to reality becomes crucial to approaching such disparate subjects as quantum physics, the Tao and Zen meditation, modern literature (Wallace Stevens, for instance), Vietnam and Yellow Submarine ("It's all in the mind, ya know.")

G.E. Moore

It's a heady moment when the stability of the world is shattered, and you can no longer see yourself as simply a receiver or observer of it.  The first temptation is to go immediately to the extreme.  There is a philosophy student rite of passage when you're convinced by the argument that you can't prove anything actually exists outside of your mind.  Fred Newman said that G.E. Moore's argument for the existence of physical objects was to wave his big meaty fist in your face, and ask if you wanted to test its reality.

The philosophy we studied--of Quine and Lewis particularly, but with roots in Kant etc.--posits a given world, but humans define it in the most basic and subtle ways.  Moreover, we don't often do this individually.  Reality and its elements are a product of social agreement.

This is the subject of the one paragraph of Quine I've always remembered.  He points out that calling an object "red" is a product of learning and agreement--we don't really know that everybody sees exactly the same color, and that indeed there are differences in the light that create slightly different colors, but we still call it red.  Here's the paragraph (from the first chapter of Word and Object):

"Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants.  The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall results are alike."   

There was a certain shared euphoria among students in this course.  I remember a long conversation with an older student named Barbara Johnson about the course that was exhilarating (and not just because she was.)  This course fulfilled dreams of what college could be.

And the college was about to take it away.

Paul Shepard

The year before, Knox lost pioneer ecologist Paul Shepard; if there are future historians, they will recognize him as one of the geniuses of the 20th century. Jerome Schiller also left. He was hired a year before Newman, and together with him, began to built an academic philosophy department where none had been before.

At the end of the 1964-5 school year, Gabriel Jackson, widely viewed as a brilliant historian and teacher, was leaving.  Student Patricia Perry wrote: "Dr. Jackson is a tremendous human being, enormously talented, interested in almost everything, with a reverence for life.  He is a first-rate scholar with a concern for the humanities, for social justice, for rational and compassionate solutions to human problems.  In his classes, one gets the impression of his true concern for problems that matter."

Writing professor Harold Grutzmacher was leaving, depleting the writing faculty by half. Also leaving was Rowland K. Chase, chair of the theatre department, who not only directed a stellar production of Hamlet this school year, but wrote a lecture/ essay about his approach to the production published in Dialogue--the only such occasion in my time at Knox.  Kim Chase had also revolutionized the Studio Theatre program to be more student-oriented, and revitalized theatre at Knox in the process.

Some 18 faculty members were not coming back in the fall.  There is always some turnover, and people have individual reasons for moving on that students of my generation were probably not equipped to understand, such as career advancement, money to raise a family, escape from Galesburg, family preferences and relationships, for example.

But some faculty exits had troubling factors in common, having to do with the college's uneven commitment to academic excellence, and conflict with the administration over policies, especially over the onerous student codes (chiefly women's "hours" or curfew, but other issues as well) that were becoming serious causes of campus conflict.  Most troubling was the quality of several of the teachers who were leaving.  Having experienced excellent teaching, Knox students were not happy about losing these opportunities.  Many felt betrayed.

A charismatic teacher like Fred Newman would probably have been the focal point of student anger anyway, but the nature of his situation ensured it.  Unlike the others leaving (who weren't on one year contracts), he had been fired--in a brutal way, halfway through the school year.  Knox avoided national censure by offering him a one year terminal contract, which he refused.

The reasons for his firing were the sources of rumors all semester.  In April, the editor of the Knox Student, Ed Rust, interviewed Newman, and got his version.  Newman talked about the achievements of the philosophy department in a sudden array of classes and--for the first time--philosophy majors, but also disappointments and difficulties of a two-person philosophy department--requests to expand it were denied.

Then he talked about the reasons he thought he was fired.  Newman was part of a group of young faculty members who worked within established channels to increase institutional opportunities for student participation in college decisions, and especially to modify women's hours, with the aim of eliminating them with a simple sign-out system for juniors and seniors.

That seemed close to success the previous spring (of 1963-64), he said, but a sudden reversal of the Student Affairs Committee vote led to alarm that the administration was closing the door on considering changes.  Classes were over for the year, but students still on campus wanted to talk about this, and discuss active responses, including a demonstration at the last remaining event of the year, graduation.  One of those meetings was held at Newman's home.

According to Newman, the college president (Sharvey Umbeck) accused Newman of leading or instigating this putative revolt, using a figure of speech I hadn't heard since a particular nun employed it in my fifth grade: "heads will roll."  (Newman said he had opposed a demonstration at graduation, and in the end students didn't demonstrate anyway.)

Rust's interview ended with the information that the other philosophy teacher, Donald Milton, was offered a contract to stay at Knox but declined.  Also that the one philosophy teacher Knox had hired to replace them had changed his mind and wasn't coming.  As of April, Knox had philosophy majors and philosophy students, but no philosophy department for the following school year.

Rumors again circulated--spread by at least one administrator I heard them from--that there was more to Newman's dismissal: something so dark and sinister that it couldn't be specified. Meanwhile,  the senior class "by a substantial margin" selected Fred Newman as their Senior Convocation speaker.

In May, a resolution crafted by an ad hoc student committee passed the Student Senate 26.5 votes to 4.  The resolution asserted that "a valuable member of the Knox faculty has been dismissed for reasons other than his academic competence.  Specifically, he is being dismissed for taking a position with respect to the social structure of Knox College, a position differing with the official administration policy."  The resolution called a dismissal on such grounds "irresponsible" and "a threat to the intellectual welfare of the entire student body."

It ended with this: "We, the students of Knox College, will express our concern on Friday, May 21, 1965."  That was the date of the Senior Convocation.  The demonstration the administration apparently feared the previous spring was happening one year later.

The last Knox Student of the school year, also dated May 21, contained Ed Rust's editorial, stating that while claims were made that Newman was lying about why he was fired, no one offered contrary evidence.  There was a long essay by student Gordon Benkler and several pages of letters to the editor, many in support of Newman as well as other departing faculty, especially Gabe Jackson.

Probably the most significant letter was from Jackson himself.  He countered the charges that Newman's interview was "full of lies."  There were "omissions, a few errors of detail, and some distortions of motive which understandably hurt a great many peoples' feelings--my own included.  However, the interview is, on the whole, highly factual..."

Jackson's letter ended with two sentences that would reverberate for years to come:  "I do not know the extent to which the administration and trustees are determined to create a great liberal arts college at Knox.  I do feel that I know that a truly excellent faculty and excellent student body cannot be maintained within the present codes."

This issue of the Student also contained the text of Newman's speech to the Senior Convocation, entitled "Rules and Games."  It was reprinted a year later in Dialogue. Reading it today, it remains well-cadenced, eloquent, heartfelt and insightful.  It is personal and at the same time creates a thoughtful context for the 1960s but also for our densely computerized age.

It continued themes of our course as well as a theme of the year for me--the defense of individualism.  Individualists, he said, are aware that in "acting in accordance with existing norms" they are choosing to endorse these norms, and are "sensitive to the fact that these norms are, in part, a result" of their choices.  Norms or rules cannot become moral crutches.

"Individualism needs defending," he said.  People can "dehumanize" themselves.

Aspects of the address are also very interesting in light of Newman's own later career.  At the time, with its evocations of Wittgenstein, it continued and--for those of us who were his students--completed our course in philosophy.

I don't remember much about the actual demonstration that spring.  In memory I thought it happened after the graduation ceremony.  I seem to recall being in Seymour Union to get my picket sign, waiting for it to start.  I remember it as being silent--a long line, single and double file--more of a funeral procession than a raucous demo.  Or maybe that's what I felt--that it was a funeral for my Knox College hopes, for the possibilities I saw in the course I'd just experienced, that seemed to be taken away in the next instant.

Effects of this philosophy course and the events of that spring--personally and at Knox more generally-- continued into the next year. I intend to pick up the story in a future post.

 As for Fred Newman, by that late spring I'd established something like a personal relationship with him. He volunteered to drive me and my boxes and suitcases of stuff to the Q train station to send home for the summer, in exchange for my babysitting for an evening so that he and his wife could go to what amounted to a farewell party.

We exchanged a few letters (though none survive), and I saw him occasionally over the next three years. He seemed to come back to Galesburg at about this time every spring, including 1968, when the last students who'd had him as a teacher were about to leave.  It was perhaps the year before that he arrived a little later, when Galesburg was already gripped in its solid block of summer heat. Probably my last memory of him was outside the apartment where I was staying on West Berrien.  He'd been in a mood, almost hostile at times, alternating with gloom.  I saw him sitting on the hood of a car, looking into the sunset.

CCNY today

After Knox, Newman taught at his alma mater, the City College of New York.  There was some talk of Antioch, but he wound up at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.  His official biography says that he was forced out of his positions at both schools when he insisted on giving his male students As, to ensure they kept their 2-S deferments from the draft and weren't shipped off to Vietnam.

Once when he returned to Galesburg he was promoting his new idea, an independent program called the Robin Hood Relearning Corps.  He also mentioned a summer experiment, in which he and three other philosophers and their spouses lived in the same house, so they could do philosophy full time.  The only result, he said, was that all four marriages broke up, including his own.

By the 1970s he was out of academia, and those two anecdotes suggest directions his life would take.  I remember him once cursing psychologists as "failed physicists," an offhand remark that continued to seem apt in many ways.  Just as his philosophical mentors claimed that reality is socially obtained, he decided that psychology required a social practice.  He and others developed a new kind of therapy, at least partially based on some of the theories that got attention in the late 60s, such as the work of R.D. Laing in the UK.  He became a therapist, with highly controversial methods.  Some of his work on personal and social development was with underclass black and Latino youth.

Newman also became a player in New York politics (he ran for Mayor at least once), and a playwright with his own theatre.  I have no personal knowledge of any of this, so I'll just quote his New York Times obituary:

"Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description. He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states.

He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.

He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot."

When I heard about his death after a long illness at the age of 76 in 2011, I looked up this dizzying information: he's got a wikipedia page as well as his own website and material on the East Side Institute site.  He's got his own Vimeo page and C-Span page of videos.  I can't comment on the insights he had on psychology and politics, or dramaturgy for that matter, since I haven't really perused them.  But I did see that he continued to have enthusiastic followers whichever way he turned.

I began to see Newman not as a phony or a charlatan, as he has been called over the years, but as a charismatic personality, and as much a captive of it as others were captivated.

I've known other people since with similar traits: that brilliance that focuses with complete belief, together with an insistent persuasion and cultivation of complicity--until they drop it and pick up something else with the same conviction.

This is not necessarily bad but can be dangerous.  Generosity is accompanied by a need for the emotional connivance of others, and at worst there is a blindness to consequences and disparagement of non-believers.

The first effect of that charismatic energy, to quote a multi-year student of Fred's, was a kind of ecstasy: "I fell completely under his spell."  But also: "Fred left quite a trail of victims, and quite a trail of followers."  This former student detached himself from Newman's orbit when he began to see destructive consequences, long after he left Knox.  In similar circumstances, others apparently either overlook or rationalize such consequences, or believe they are not primarily consequences of what the charismatic figure said or did. Or they remain so convinced or just overwhelmed by the brilliance and the vision that nothing else matters as much.

  His complexities, it seems to me, don't require condemnation, just wariness.  Specific actions or ideas can be evaluated on their own. The charismatic personality is hard to resist but can become stifling as well as exhausting, so sometimes--or maybe inevitably-- you eventually just have to move on.  But the words are still there to be read and considered.

The Newman I knew introduced me to Quine and Wittgenstein, and to seeing the world in a different way.  In "Rules and Games" he quoted Wittgenstein about what games had in common--don't think or assume you know, but really look.  Newman also said of his speech that he wished he'd been asked "to hear for you rather than talk to you."  Those two statements remained guides for me and my work from then until now.

The 1965 Fred Newman ended his Senior Convocation Address by returning to Wittgenstein, and his last words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

"Even those who never understood were to be thanked for allowing him to rant and rave and to be his individualistic brilliant self," Newman said.  "I am surely no Wittgenstein and I do not believe I am about to die.  But I feel compelled to conclude by saying to all my friends who have understood as well as to those who gave me the opportunity to persuade, 'Thank you.'"

History of My Reading: For Love

At our first meeting during registration for my first college classes, Professor Sam Moon offered to read anything I wrote that I wanted to show him.  I must have shown him my first paper--the result of a semester-long class project--because he was the one who suggested I submit it to Dialogue, the new faculty-student publication preparing its first issue.

I remember for certain that I showed him the first short story I wrote at Knox.  I'd read somewhere--probably in Writing Fiction by writer and veteran teacher R.V. Cassill (the only such book I owned)--that stories are told in either the first or third person.  Almost no one had adopted the second (or "you") person.  So naturally, for my very first college story, I chose to try it.

It was an interesting exercise but it's clear why it's so rare.  It did create a certain impersonal tone, suggesting a narrator trying to keep a distance from the emotions evoked by the events in the story, while enabling stark expression of those emotions.  Though I doubt I was aware of this at the time.

The subject was leaving home for college (it became a source for details I included in a previous post about that first trip to Knox.)  Mr. Moon honored the feeling, the importance of the feelings in the story, while gently and sometimes bluntly pointing out its many flaws and especially the worn-out expression which I had absorbed from the Reader's Digest and another popular sources, which I was just learning to disdain.

Sam Moon taught poetry writing and play writing (he himself was a poet published in the most respected journals, and edited a book of classic one-act plays.)  The professor who taught fiction was Harold Grutzmacher.  Everyone said he was leaving Knox at the end of the 1964-65 school year, and his second semester fiction workshop would be the last opportunity to have a class with him.

"Grutz" was young, glib, charming and somewhat glamorous. Seldom without a lit cigarette, he exuded the writerly blend of sardonic wit and surprising gentleness. At some point towards the end of first semester I ambushed him outside Old Main and asked to be in his upcoming class.  He refused at first--it was oversubscribed already.  We were interrupted but I stuck around and finally he relented a bit, and told me to drop off a story I'd written, and we'd see.

I may have actually written a story for this purpose, but in any case I provided ten pages of fiction that must have shown enough promise for him to accept me in the workshop.

Looking at that manuscript now, it does have some surprisingly apt turns of phrase and, for a story in which nothing much actually happens, a narrative flow.  I recall that he picked out a single detail he liked: the protagonist reads a letter he's just received, and notices the point at which the handwriting switches from black ink to blue.

My emphasis on physical detail came in part from Cassill's instruction, as well as a bit from the example of John Updike's stories.  But mostly it came from J.D. Salinger, who--especially in his stories--was the poet of clothes and postures, and where cigarettes and ash trays were placed.  In Salinger, that description was more than description; it was substance, and it was style. The switching from black to blue ink was a Salinger-like move (though not literally a steal.)

Moreover, so was the letter.  In the story it functioned as offering a different point of view, a clarifying judgment, on the protagonist's self-absorption.  But the fact of it and the tone of it came from the big brother letters and phone calls in Salinger's Glass family stories and novels, or even the Hollywood big brother D.B. in Catcher in the Rye. I'd recently been missing a big brother's point of view (hard to get when you're the oldest and the only boy.) In my senior year of high school I'd actually invented a big brother for myself in letters to a young woman in nursing school who'd graduated the previous year, as a kind of running joke, and so I would have someone more interesting than me to write about.

The only surviving manuscript or fragment I'm sure was for this course is a memorable one for me: it is my first story analyzed for an hour by other students in the workshop class, presided over by Mr. Grutzmacher.  In fact, it is the very copy, because it contains my marginal notes on what they said about it.  (There are a lot of them on the first page, but they grow sparser--not because there were fewer comments and criticisms, but because there were too many.)

I've always remembered this story as a failure, even as something of an embarrassment because of that workshop, but reading it again now, I can see some interesting features. The opening was criticized for the generality of description.  Fair enough, but the tone of the opening announced that it wasn't strictly speaking a naturalistic story, at least in terms of mood.

 Titled "A Little Less Than the Angels," it was an account of a walk along a wooded fringe of a golf course, taken by two Catholic high school students the summer before college, Ted and Jeanne.  In Ted's pocket is a letter he'd just received from another student they both knew, Lois.  She and Ted had something like a romance that seemed to die out before being unexpectedly revived just a few months before.  In between, he'd been dating Jeanne.  So he couldn't tell her about the letter.

Near the end of the story the letter is excerpted: Lois tells him she had to make a choice, between him and God.  Her choice was to enter a convent.  Summed up like this it seems funny if not cringeworthy, and perhaps the chief accomplishment of the story is that it does not seem so in its context.  It's a crisis for Ted, which among other things, affects his relationship with Jeanne. That part of the story is largely true, compressed in time.

I noted in the margins several times the class critique that the shifts from "realism to romanticism" were confusing. Also "shifts in point of view," a regular criticism of student stories. Certain passages were rightly flagged for being trite in expression.

But the class also discovered possibilities I hadn't seen, or consciously intended. Ted keeps interrupting the conversation with Jeanne by claiming to see a light in the fir trees that she always just missed seeing.  To me, this was just his way of distracting her from places in the conversation he didn't want to go, or just out of boredom with their mundane talk and life.  But others linked it to the larger philosophical issues on Ted's mind, like destiny and faith.  I wrote down one striking comment by an anonymous classmate: "Lois is never going to find God--but Ted will, in a pantheistic way."

There was a lot of discussion about the title and what it could mean beyond what was said--that all humans have some divinity, just a little less than the angels.  I note that Mr. Moon thought Ted sees irony in this when he mentions the phrase, responding to Jeanne's observation of players in a sandlot football game they pass as "animals."  (Was Mr. Moon at the workshop?  Or did he read the story at another time?)

Grutzmacher commented that the story's principal faults were lack of proportion--Ted and Lois are strong, Jeanne is not--and the shifting point of view.  Today I think the story's principal fault (apart from trite expressions) is that it is too long.  Cleaned up and compressed and a third shorter, it might be a decent story.  But that process was probably beyond my capabilities at the time.  I wrote it so instinctively, and the feelings in it were being worked out on the page. I had no real distance.

After this workshop session, I took a real walk with Judy Dugan, who'd become a friend as well as sometime debate partner.  As we re-entered campus, Mr. Grutzmacher saw us and smiled his approval.  It's good to get some consolation after a workshop session, he said, for they can be brutal.  

 I wrote several stories for this course (according to a letter home), and at the end of the semester Mr. Grutzmacher told me he thought I had a writing future and should continue working at it, and to keep taking writing courses.

 Now these many years--and many workshop and writing courses later--I have mixed feelings about writing classes and workshops, and doubts about the nature of their value. (This is no reflection on Grutzmacher, who remains a pleasant memory.) In any event, these days they've become more assembly-line and credentialing for my tastes.

The right teacher at the right time can be crucial to a writer's development and success.  But whatever there is to learn from teachers and workshops, the primary lessons for how to write come from reading.  Absorption, imitation and variation have always been the basis for learning any craft or art, but you don't learn much from watching somebody write (except maybe tenacity.)  You learn from reading what they wrote.  It doesn't surprise me that until very recently, no Nobel Prize winning writer had ever taken a writing workshop.

Like its immediate predecessor, "A Little Less Than The Angels" shows me a continuing J.D. Salinger influence, particularly in the dialogue.  (Not in the letter--it's almost exactly from the real one.)  Even the name Ted was probably suggested by Salinger's story "Teddy." (Or by Ted next door in Anderson House.)

Jeanne's one-dimensional character was in sympathy with Salinger's characteristic over-sensitive male among carefully mundane females, who are still intrigued and attracted. Salinger also dealt with questions of faith and value, even in religious terms, which was a vocabulary familiar to me from Catholic schools.  Salinger's main characters gravitated towards mystical traditions, towards Eastern philosophy and Stoicism, all of which were more appealing alternatives. But this would be my last story in which these issues were overt concerns--except destiny.  That keeps coming up.

Grutz left Knox at the end of that semester, as did several other young teachers--a topic to be taken up next time.  The 1965 yearbook included a snarky comment implying--as I'd also heard at the time-- that he was leaving for Parsons College, widely known as a "party school," for the money.

 In his exit interview in the Knox Student, Grutzmacher did not dispute this--his salary would be doubled, with additional benefits.  But his job would also offer a fresh challenge--administering other teachers in the freshman writing program as well as teaching.

He also noted the uncertainty of the writing program's future at Knox, and the college's commitment to it.  Indeed, he would not be replaced with a full time faculty member until my senior year.

At that point he'd published one book of poetry, titled A Giant of My World (which referred to his young son, Stephen.)  I bought a copy at the Knox Bookstore, and he autographed it for me "with pleasant memories of a hectic year."  I still have it.

Harold Grutzmacher went on to chair the Parsons College English Department, and after an administrative stint at the University of Tampa, returned to the Midwest to become Dean of Students at his alma mater, Beloit College in Wisconsin, another Midwest Conference school along with Knox.

There he was "Hal" and became "an influential member of the Door County community."  In addition to his administrative work, his book reviews and columns, and eventually owning a bookstore, he wrote more poetry.  His second book was a collaboration with his son Stephen, to whom his first book was dedicated.

He continued to teach writing at several schools in Wisconsin, even teaching freshman writing as a Dean.  He helped several writers edit their books. There is still a series of annual awards in writing and other arts in Door County, known collectively as the Hal Prize.  

Harold Grutzmacher died in 1998.  A story about him, along with one of his poems, is here.

There's a corollary to my theory about the college experience--that all of history is experienced Now. The problems sometimes come when something seems Now but isn't. For example, in college we read Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and read about their milieu (Paris as a paradise of the arts, their dedicated editor Maxwell Perkins, etc.)  It all seemed very Now, but most of it was long past, as some of us eventually learned the hard way. This was a more general problem in that the literature we studied stopped years before, mostly years before we were born. There were similar situations in other fields.

When it came to literature and related arts, the Knox counteractive to this absence of the contemporary was Sam Moon and the living writers and other active artists he enticed to campus. My first remembered experience of this was during that second semester spring.  Every year a writer was brought in to judge student writing competitions, and for several days of talks and readings. That year it was the poet Robert Creeley.

Creeley as a writer and a presence electrified a good portion of the Knox student body--certainly all the writers. He seemed to change everything overnight. His late April reading in the Common Room was the first of several memorable moments I experienced there (and it was memoralized by a photo of Creeley taken by Knox student photographer Jim Bronson, which graced the back cover of a Creeley book published later.)

Creeley read poems from his collection For Love: Poems 1950-1960.  It was the way he read them that mesmerized, and remains memorable.  Reading certain lines in the title poem today, I hear Creeley's voice saying the words before I read them.

This in a sense was not a coincidence.  Creeley talked about his poetics, based on William Carlos Williams and especially Charles Olson, with whom he'd worked at the fabled Black Mountain College.  We got a mimeographed handout of Olson's Statement on Poetics (which he developed as a result of correspondence with Creeley), emphasizing the poet's breath as fundamental to the form of the poem.  So Creeley's reading was a key to the form of his poems, with their short, tremulous, fragmented lines.  (In marked contrast to Olson's own full-throated, arm-waving, histrionic style, as preserved in this video.)

Creeley also said that "form is never more than an extension of content."  Olson wrote of "field composition" in which the poet "can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares..."  He also referred to poems as energy discharges, and it was that tremulous energy, trying desperately to find expression, that gave Creeley's reading such presence and drama.

Looking back, I see that I hadn't had a real literature course yet, so in a sense these discussions on contemporary poetics was the first such instance in my college education.

Every student involved in writing or reading contemporary poetry was reading For Love that spring, and the following year's issues of the literary magazine (then called the Siwasher) showed Creeley's continuing influence on Knox poets.  That possibly also derived from Creeley as the romantic figure of a contemporary poet: lean, dark-haired, with one eye missing, he looked like he'd stepped out of a western movie (rather than Harvard, where he'd been an undergrad.)  His voice belied his New England background for those with a more experienced ear than most of us, and there was a certain rugged Puritan rigor (and guilt) in his writing and persona, if not necessarily in his behavior.

My copy of For Love has several poems marked, and a note on the page with the poem "After Lorca" which indicates that Creeley said the lines really were Lorca's, but no Lorca scholar could locate them.  But it would be a few years later, though still before I left Knox, that I settled on the poem in it that still means a great deal to me.  I felt then and now that it's somehow emblematic, though of what I can't quite explain.  It's called "The Innocence:"

Looking to the sea, it is a line
of unbroken mountains.

It is the sky.
It is the ground.  There
we live, on it.

It is a mist
now tangent to another
quiet.  Here the leaves
come, there
is the rock in evidence

or evidence.
What I come to do
is partial, partially kept.

Bobbie and Robert Creeley

 Some years later, Creeley would reenter my life.  In early 1970 I found myself in Buffalo, New York, with my visit to Steve Meyers (fellow former Knox student) prolonged beyond my original intention.  He was then a grad student at SUNY Buffalo, so I spent a lot of time on campus, and in the English building--then a kind of glorified long trailer.

  Many things happened in those months, but one of them was spending time with Robert Creeley, on the teaching staff there.  I remember in particular a party at which Bob was holding court at one end of the house, and his wife Bobbie at the other end.  Bobbie read palms, and she loved the maze of lines in mine.

Creeley was instrumental in getting me admitted to the graduate writing program for the following year.  He felt that the small college was no longer adequate preparation for the literary life, and that something more urban like Buffalo would help.  Eventually I decided not to stick around.  The last time I saw him was a year or two later at a reading at Boston College, and I spoke briefly with him afterwards, essentially to let him know that I was there in the Boston area, and doing okay.

I have another 8 or so of Creeley's books: poems, interviews and essays, short stories, his only novel.  One of the poetry collections, Pieces, was an unexpected best seller due to being sent to American troops, though he was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.  Creeley thought it was a mistake--somebody thought it was about guns, he surmised, or "pieces."  It's one of his best anyway.

As fragile and self-subverting as he sometimes seemed, Creeley had a long career, publishing some 60 books and becoming an eminent and award-winning poet and teacher.  He helped a lot of young writers along the way.  He died in 2005--forty years after that April week in Galesburg.

Next time: Philosophy, Fred Newman and the exodus of dreams, as the second semester 1965 concludes.

R.I. P. Mary Oliver

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

R.I.P poet Mary Oliver

"I made a world out of words.  And it has been my salvation."

History of My Reading: When It Was '65

Shortly after the year 1965 began, I was back at college in Galesburg, Illinois to complete my freshman year.  I'd returned home for the first time for Christmas break.  I visited my old high school (and yes, everything seemed smaller there, including the nuns), reunited with family and saw close relatives.  Someone asked me what I'd missed most being away from western Pennsylvania, and I said the hills, and the blue outlines of the wooded mountains in the distance. The unrelieved Midwestern flatness had started getting to me.

 Nobody seemed to quite understand that or much else I said (which wasn't a lot) about Galesburg or college, or even asked questions.  Few went very far from home, and certainly not to the Midwest, and few seemed curious.  But my godfather, who drove long distance trucks, understood what I meant, and felt the same.

I saw close friends, particularly Mike and Clayton.  Sometime in probably my second year of high school, I began playing with the reel-to-reel tape recorder my father had become bored with.  I wrote scripts--an update of Wells' War of the Worlds, and brief satires inspired by Stan Freberg and That Was the Week That Was on TV.  I enlisted friends to play the parts, do sound effects and music.  Soon we were a core of four, and one summer we worked up a stage act of comedy and music as The Four Frauds.  This collided with the folk music boom, so in our senior year, Clayton (an actual musician), Mike (otherwise my debate partner) and I formed a folk trio called the Crosscurrents.  So at Christmas we got out the guitars, refined the old songs and learned new ones, including some originals.

Among the tapered StayPrest shirts and whatever, this Christmas I probably received a copy of Robert Frost's latest (and last) collection, In the Clearing, which was a national best seller.  Frost was still the main contemporary poet I knew, though I was fascinated by e.e. cummings (who'd died in 1962) and was much moved by several poems by Theodore Roethke I'd read in a magazine in the Knox Library (he'd died in 1963, and his last book was published posthumously.)

Back at Knox, I first faced the unfinished business of the first semester: mostly final exams and papers.  I then spent semester break in Berwyn, Illinois with Jim Miller and his family (as described in a previous post here), who was about to be my new roommate. When we returned, my first semester roommate John Heyer had moved out of Anderson House, and Jim moved from across the third floor to my room (actually two small rooms) at the top of the stairs, the one with the crazy angle walls and the turret facing Tompkins Street.

I can tell you many things about this second semester, partly from a fair but incomplete set of student newspapers and a scattering of other documents, but largely from letters to and from home.  Letters were primary communications in those days. We did not have phones in our rooms, let alone in our pockets.  Long distance calls were relatively expensive, and otherwise problematic.  At Anderson House we had exactly one telephone, which sat on the landing between the first and second floors.  If it rang, someone might or might not answer it and find whoever the call was for.  If you were on the phone, your half of the conversation was audible to anyone in the living room on the first floor.  And it was largely a campus phone, that--if memory serves-- went through a campus switchboard.  As a result, a lot of communications still exist in what today we'd call hard copies, formerly known as letters.

So I can tell you what the weather was like at certain times: Snow in early February, for example, and tornadoes in the Quad Cities in early April. I remained on campus for Easter weekend, and joined a small motley crew on a muggy day filling gopher holes in the levees somewhere within shouting distance (though not visual range) of the river.  This day culminated with one of the best meals of my life--probably sandwiches and coffee--from a roving Red Cross pickup truck.

With more rain in late April there was substantial flooding in the Quad Cities. Illinois was declared a disaster area. Bob Misiorowski reported on Rock Island for the Knox Student. I went out with a large group filling sandbags on a rainy day in Oquawka. The river crested below predicted level, the town was safe, and we celebrated with underage beers at the Blue Parrot.

Second semester began in February, but March letters were already about my upcoming second trip home for semester break.  My friend Mike got excited because my return coincided with several events in which the Crosscurrents might participate.  The folk music craze was in full swing.  I don't recall if we actually did any of those gigs.  (I had however performed solo at the Knox hootenanny in mid-March.)

Mike was day-hopping to St. Vincent College--he'd been personally recruited for their debate team.  But it wasn't until second semester that I got back into the debate game, participating in an intramural tournament--the topic had to do with "individualism" so I suppose I consulted John Stuart Mill and David Reisman books (Individualism Reconsidered, The Lonely Crowd.)  Classmate and fellow third-floor Andy House resident Tim Zijewski was my partner. We won all four preliminary debates but came in second in the finals.

But that was enough to get me on the official Knox debate team, and on a tour of Iowa colleges just before spring break in late March.  Second year Judy Dugan was my partner, and in combined silliness we concocted the alternate identities of Tracy and Margaret Steele, by which names we were identified in a photo taken in the new Grinnell College student union, published in an Iowa newspaper.  Later in the term, I was Judy's guest for a party on a Mississipi riverboat.  We spent most of it on deck--my only time on the big river.

In reviewing campus events of that semester--plays, concerts, lectures, movies-- I was surprised how many stand out in my memory.  So maybe this is the place to outline my theory of the college experience.  We were young, we had little personal history and I for one had no sense of things happening over time.  Almost anything before the 1950s was in that murky territory of "the past."  In college, we were being presented with the past--its literature, philosophy, science as well as its music etc.  We were experiencing quite a lot of it for the first time.  So in college, everything is Now.

That came home to me in later college years a couple of times.  I noticed for example a fellow student who always wore long greatcoats, and a long beard.  He was a Russian major I believe, but in any case he lived in a Dostoevsky universe. That universe coexisted with all the other little universes other students were living in at the same time, including me.

Or this: I was in the Gizmo one evening when I watched a group of students I knew trickle in, looking particularly grim.  They sat together in that dark semi-enclosed area just to the left as you entered from Seymour, in silence.  I asked someone what was wrong.  They'd come from the final Hemingway seminar class, in which Hemingway's suicide was discussed.  Hemingway had killed himself in 1961--but for those students, it had just happened.

Richard Bauer, Halo Wines

So in the second semester of 1964-65, I heard for the first time Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" played live, when the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Lukas Foss, visited Galesburg.  I saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in January, performed by the National Players out of Washington, D.C. Two members of the cast--Richard Bauer and Halo Wines--would marry and go on to distinguished stage acting careers in New York and particularly at the Arena Stage in Washington.

In March I saw a memorable touring version of the Broadway hit Spoon River, made all the more haunting because Edgar Lee Masters, who attended the college affiliated Knox Academy in 1889, wrote his poetic Spoon River Anthology about small town Illinois (with even a reference to a "Professor Moon" of Knox College.)  In the cast was Gil Turner, prominent in the Village scene and Civil Rights movement, who a few years before had been the first person to perform Bob Dylan's song, "Blowin' in the Wind."  Dylan played at his wedding.

But some of the most memorable plays were Knox productions.  We'd had the unforgettable Hamlet.  The main stage production in April was Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth, and this remains the only live production of this play I've ever seen.  It's an intriguing play in form and content, particularly relevant to today, but seldom produced.  William Clark directed.  I was most impressed by the actress playing the maid Sabina, Peggy Miller.

The real revelations were the Studio Theatre productions--produced, directed and acted by (mostly) students.  In perhaps his last gift to Knox, Kim Chase revamped and opened up the process to allow more participation and productions, and there was an immediate payoff in creative energy that winter and spring.

Again, I saw plays there I would not have the opportunity to see again, or at least, very rarely, including Edward Albee's  The American Dream (directed by Richard Newman),  Pinter's "The Room," (directed by Joan Dillenback), Noel Coward's "Fumed Oak" (directed by David Axlerod, featuring Wendy Saul).

 Jim Eichelberger's production of Genet's Maids was the most memorable, for the stylized (I would later learn to call it "expressionistic") acting and makeup.  Joelle Nelson was mesmerizing.  Otherwise, I didn't understand a word of it.

  I took particular note of a new play by a Knox student--Skip Peterson's Last of the Harries, directed by Kevern Cameron.  I saw that a student play could actually make it to the stage.

I  had attended Cinema Club films, fascinated but without much comprehension.  The film vocabulary was so different from the Hollywood movies I knew.  At some point however it all clicked.
So this semester I saw Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Kurosawa's Rashomon for the first time. There were also the Social Board weekend flicks that included the British New Wave film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

This was a time, by the way, several years before Knox offered anything like a film or filmmaking class. Student and head of the Cinema Club David Axlerod was our unofficial film department.  His Student preview of Jules and Jim referred to what he called the "lively fatalism" of the French New Wave, a fine description.

These plays and movies in particular inspired new reading: of the plays themselves, and others by the same authors (Pinter and Albee were especially popular at the time, and in Knox theatre for the next few years, along with Ionesco and Beckett).

 I also read the novels by Alan Sillitoe that were the basis for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and a film I liked even better that the Cinema Club would eventually present, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.  Their protagonists were British working class young men but they were familiar enough as a version of my future that I had escaped, or perhaps only modified.

As for the French New Wave, I not only saw many of the films repeatedly over the years but I eventually collected at least 20 books on the subject, including illustrated scripts of  a number of the films, especially Truffaut and Godard.  I interviewed Truffaut for Rolling Stone in 1979, and in 2002 I reviewed a book on the French New Wave for the San Francisco Chronicle.  It all started at Cinema Club 1965--which I mentioned in the first paragraph of that review.

The college literary magazine, the Siwasher, published two issues this semester, in February and May.  Jay Matson was the editor.  The February issue contained fiction by Vicky Jones and Gayle Waag, a literary essay by Jim McCurry, poems by Gordon Benkler, J.R. Lewis, Jim McCurry, Robert Misiorowski, Virginia Myers, Mary Lou Primozich and Judy Varland, with photos of art works by John Bohan, Mary Lou Primozich, and Donald Waddell, and Gary Sweatman's actual photographs.  The Knox Student reviewer noted a trend towards more poetry rather than the fiction that had dominated past issues.

The May issue contained poetry by Benkler, McCurry, Matson and Misiorowski, and also Nancy Burton, G. Locklin, Skip Peterson, Gerald Roe and Dennis Stepanek.  There was a play by Maria Gerrard, and stories by James Campbell and Glenn Schiffman.  Art work was by Dorrie Campbell, James Campbell, Keith Davis, Donald Waddell and Neva Willard, as well as Sweatman and Bohan.  John Bohan's cover reminds me of the painting that used to hang high on the wall in Sam Moon's office, but probably it isn't the same one.  Sam was the magazine's adviser.

This semester saw the dawning awareness of the Vietnam War.  Contrary to his campaign promises, LBJ greatly expanded the number of American troops and in March, began the bombing of North Vietnam.  In May, a debate between administration officials and a group of professors was seen via video in the Recital Hall.  It was, the Student story noted, dubbed a "teach-in."  More would soon follow.

For the amusement of our tech saturated era, the Student also published a story that spring about a digital computer constructed by two students (junior Phil Petit and senior Bill Weiher) to tabulate results of the Student Senate elections.  In May, a Student story by Barbara Cottral revealed that President Umbeck and several faculty members would view the operation of a $10,000 video tape recorder.  "The list of possibilities for the new recorder is unlimited," she wrote.

Of course, that semester I also took classes. I subjected myself to the second part of my Spanish inquisition language lab course, but couldn't also continue math and remain sane.  Speaking of which, after my successful experience with intro to sociology, I thought I'd try psychology.  But after a couple of classes I found the brand of academic behavioral psychology on offer to be coldly arrogant, mechanistic and small.  I dropped the course.  It would be decades before I discovered (through James Hillman, in Jung and related psychology) what I had been looking for in 1965.

I quickly substituted a political science intro course.  I don't remember much about it, or what we read (probably a text.)  I don't even recall the professor, but I do remember there were a lot of students in the class, and it was the only course I had at Knox with a teaching assistant, or "tutor." Her name was Ginny Radatz, who late that spring received the first annual John Quincy Adams Prize from the Political Science department.  I remember her as tough, smart, engaging and funny.

I did a brief paper on a new edition of Neustadt's Presidential Power. The only other element of this course I recall is the mock U.S. Senate that was part of it, though held on a Saturday and theoretically open to the public.  I was Senator Robert Kennedy of New York.

My other two courses would be of particular importance to me, so I will indulge myself in two more posts on this second semester of my first year--with maybe more about my reading than this post directly discusses.   Next time: my first writing course and Harold Grutzmacher, plus Sam Moon and the Robert Creeley experience.  Then my first philosophy course, and the controversy over Fred Newman that consumed the campus.

The Nothing New Year

Information theory talks about signal and noise.  Real information--relevant, important, effective--has to be distinguished from the noise around it.  In terms of the future of civilization, 2019 is very likely to be dominated by noise.

Lots and lots of noise.  But that's not new.  What would be new is focusing on what will matter most: the signal issue of our time.

Not that everything even out of Washington lacks meaning or doesn't affect lives. But in terms of priority, it's just more and more noise.  Seductive at times, but deafening.  What is the media buzzing about at this moment?  The Wall, which is utter nonsense on so many levels, and will be forgotten.  But even the ins and outs, ups and downs, of investigations and indictments, ever closer to the Oval Office. Even the ups and downs, ins and outs of who will run for President...Really, in the end, it's noise.  Noise that distracts everyone from the most important, the most consequential issue: the survival of human civilization and the natural world as we know it.

People have needs that must be met every day.  But so much that we focus on, win or lose, will be meaningless in contrast to the threats of climate and extinctions. Instead we will be angered, amused, frightened, entertained and above all distracted, by the noise.

The now former Governor of California Jerry Brown has it right in an interview with Politico:

During an interview with POLITICO at the governor’s mansion here in late December, Brown was indeed serious. He is not full of warm words about the native wisdom of the people: They strike him as scared, easily prone to distraction and cynical manipulation. He is not more optimistic than ever: He is worried the planet is hurtling toward catastrophe.

And yet, as he sees it, America’s entire political culture—elected officials, the news media, intellectuals—seems blithely disengaged from the magnitude of the peril, endlessly distracted by trivia. On climate change, nuclear proliferation and the new awareness that technology can be an instrument of oppression as well as individual empowerment, he continued: “The threat is huge; the response is puny; and the consciousness, the awareness is pathetically small.”

The start of the year is also traditionally the time when attention is given in the media and in conversations to the expression of optimism.  But if optimism is the belief or confidence that things will work out for the best, and if that "best" includes a robust and advanced civilization say a century from now, that optimism is getting harder to defend.

It's not just that the effects of global heating are accelerating, and are widely predicted to threaten millions of humans, including by endangered animal and plant species, and the water, soil, forests and climate that sustain us. Or even that our continuing failure to reign in greenhouse gases emissions threatens all of that to a much greater extent in the farther future.

It isn't even that our still babyish awareness, and incremental efforts to address the climate crisis is likely to be insufficient and too late to forestall these greater consequences, that will change the planet for thousands of years to a condition inhospitable to human life and most of the life we know.

It is that we are increasingly ill-equipped to address any of it, including the effects.  Which may well bring self-destruction that much sooner.

Two examples come to mind.  In the US, we have learned the hard way that our political system is increasingly incapable of sustaining efforts to address these large-scale and complex needs.  In less than two years, the current administration has not only reversed the beginning policies of the Obama administration to address climate crisis causes over 8 years, but environmental policies that grew through administrations of both parties that, insufficiently but at least incrementally, helped sustain a healthy ecology of wildlife, clean water, restorative land and forests.  It's happening elsewhere as well, even more dramatically in Brazil, where the previously protected fragments of rain forests are endangered.

Without the foundation of deep understanding and attitudes, an election victory means next to nothing when nascent efforts can be so quickly reversed.

In the world, we see the rise of significant political factions--and changes in government--that are increasingly xenophobic and nationalistic.  This at precisely the time when global cooperation and action are most necessary.

The first effects of the climate crisis, including droughts and sea-level rise, can lead to secondary threats at least as dangerous, such as warfare over resources or because of desperate migration.  These climate factors are already implicated (though largely ignored as such) in recent wars in the Third World, from Somalia to Syria.

It is this aspect that the Pentagon worries about, when it considers the climate crisis the greatest global threat (or it did, before the current administration banned the word.)  A world of factions or "tribes" suspicious and hostile towards others is a retrenchment that makes warfare more likely, increasing migration pressures even more and creating more likelihood of diseases spreading.

 If these conflicts involve nations with nuclear weapons, destruction obviously could be greater and more widespread, leading to global chaos. This factionalism and nationalism is happening at a moment when virtually everyone is dependent on the smooth operation of a global economy.  Disruptions could bring rapid chaos, even to countries not directly involved in war.

2019 also begins with some positive possibilities.  The new Speaker of the House began her tenure asserting that the climate crisis is the "existential threat of our time."  (The same wording as President Obama used.  Unfortunately, "existential" as a word is too abstract and vague to most people; its meaning as a threat to existence is not the usual way this word has been used.)

On the other hand, some assert that the new climate crisis committee in the House is weaker that the one the Democrats created the last time they were in power.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, running for Democratic presidential
nomination with climate crisis as his main focus

There is also the possibility that the climate crisis will at last be a major issue in a presidential campaign.  One announced candidate says it will be his main issue, and another possible candidate (Michael Bloomberg) is likely to do the same.  But other "issues"--most of them made up by the opposition--seem to inevitably create so much noise that anything this serious and complex is apt to be drowned out.

The dynamic new Member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is initially focused on the Green New Deal proposals that link green energy with job creation (although her first appearance on Rachel Maddow was devoted to responding to the latest presidential noisemaking on the invented crisis at the southern US border) and her proposals--not unrelated to addressing the climate crisis--of returning to a sensible tax rate for the wealthy have met with somewhat surprising approval amidst the predictable opposition.  (See Nathan Robinson,  Eric Levitz and Paul Krugman.)

But these are baby steps, and we're still years from even taking them.  We are still in the infancy of awareness.  The latest projections suggest we need to be far more advanced in our understanding, and in our actions, or we will be too late to save even the future that narrowly focused futurists are predicting this January.

If a recent Meet the Press devoted entirely to the climate crisis is any indication, our media leaders as well as political leaders are just beginning to think about what the climate crisis is, let alone how to address it.  This makes it less likely that they will know how to cover it, or to hold leaders accountable for inaction.  Instead they will be drawn into the frenzy of the familiar noise.

Add this to the question that follows from our recent national and global politics, as well as the cultural implications of new technologies: are we even still capable of dealing with something at least as complex as World War II?  The climate crisis was always going to be a test of whether humanity had advanced or evolved enough to address this mortal threat to the planet.  As 2019, we are still flunking that test.  Badly.

None of this is a basis for optimism.  Any degree of success will necessitate urgency.  While individuals who feel there is little they can do may well need to defensively maintain a sort of faith that they call optimism (or adopt a more cosmic view about the consequences of failure) this does not justify an optimistic judgement that assumes we'll figure it out and do the right thing in time.  We're not necessarily on that path, let alone going fast enough.

But all of this has nothing to do with hope.  As Speaker Pelosi rightly said last week, looking to her Catholic background, hope is where it always has been, in between faith and love (which for Catholics are the three theological virtues.)

Hope, like faith and love, aren't judgments about the likelihood of anything.  They are commitments.  Hope is what you do.  Hope is becoming informed, deeply and widely.  Hope is choosing what you can do, and doing it.