Towards a More Living Word

As we all know - at least when we think and pray about it - all human words have immense power in relation to the things they designate. Including those creatures they describe, or despise; listen to, or lord over. So perhaps it would be truer to say that our words have many, and divers, powers. And even opposite powers. It may, for instance, be a power to enhance a creature's being or life - as if the thing in question had somehow become (to the heedful reader or listener), not just more vivid, more alive than before, but more grateful for and delighting in being alive. It may be a power to stifle and and stultify, to deride and mock and minimize, so that the thing becomes almost ashamed of being here, or of being what it is. Or it may be a power so draining of life, so bland and neutralizing and attenuating, it's as if the thing barely had any importance or even existence at all. Or certainly none apart from our proactive utilities and agendas. 

No surprise, then, if our Twenty-first Century conception of our uses of words, and of their uses of things, tends towards the harshly functional. Or even the rigidly hierarchical. No wonder that we expect and regard it as our right to command our words, as if we ourselves had just invented them; as if they had no intrinsic or ancient life of their own, seeded and nursed and cultured over countless generations; or that we expect our words to command our things as if they had no intrinsic or primordial, in short, no prehuman life at all. And so it's hardly surprising, that we hypermoderns should think of our words as largely arbitrary in their relation to the things they designate. And expect them to be, as it were, not in the least ashamed or embarrassed by this bold, untethered power of arbitration. But if anything that much prouder towards, that much more defiant of the things they presume to define.

Yet even now, I don't think that's the whole story. How many of us, I wonder, if we could for once be honest with our own emotions, would deny that we have at times experienced words that are very different. Words so alive to, so imbued with, so dyed in the presence of the things they describe, that the latter seemed somehow less complete - or in any case far less vivid - apart from these words' company, and companionship. Almost as if these same things had somehow lost tongues we never knew they possessed. And yet there we were, glad and relieved beyond words at their having found those tongues and those voices again. 

So much, then, for the things our words describe. But now imagine on the other side, if you can, words - not of the "take-charge" kind - but rather of a kind so humble, and humbly devoted to the things of which they've been given charge, they're almost like poor shriveled orphans without them. And yet still so much the richer, the more savory and intoxicating for that parentage, and that dependence. And not just the most carefully chosen words of, say, Shakespeare, or Keats, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or Walter de la Mare.

God help us, then, when we become so unable to enjoy the living flow of words, that we become more and more unable to discern, and delight in, the living flow of things. God help us, in short, when poetry ceases to speak to us at all. Not even, say, as a minor hindrance, or encumbrance, to words and sentences we might otherwise easily grasp. Yes, even where we find that poetry seemingly buried in prose (in whose folds its most resonant nuggets are so often tucked away).

Nor is it just convention-driven dullness that can blind us to the livingness of both words and things. What may often stanch and dry up this flow of our words is our attempts to channel and constrict, not just our writing, or our actions, but even things themselves into certain supposedly guaranteed outcomes. Which are of course assumed to be utterly good for them. Almost as if these things - and people - had no purpose or meaning, or even right to exist (any more than our words and actions have any right to exist), apart from the fixed place they occupy in our most desired results.

As an example, consider someone in your life who, however much you may be in denial of the fact, has no more ultimate value to you than a successfully moved chesspiece. Imagine a woman whom you think you love more than anything in the world, and so presumably would do almost anything for. Except that, in fact, your real interest in her extends no farther than her becoming, say, your wife or mistress, or girlfriend, or other instrument of your pleasure, or ornament to your success. And now repeat the same exercise, as applicable, with the ideal man or even pet of your choice. Notice your preoccupation in each case with use, and functionality, and ornamentality. As if everything good that happens in the world were somehow a matter of the right control. And in particular, of your right to control.

And so God save us, too, from becoming so enclosed in the bubbles of our own anxieties and agendas, our own ambitions and frustrations, that we could hardly recognize real surprise, real wonder, real miracle, if it surrounded us on every side. Or, if you'd like to vary the metaphor, God deliver us from being so intent on, so bound to the internal track of our mission, our martyrdom, that we become oblivious to external movements of any kind. Even those of nature, even those of God. Above all, God save us from becoming so fortressed in the grandeur of our own misery that we couldn't discern real need if it knocked on our kitchen-doors. Including the needs, and secret desires, of those we profess (often most vehemently) to love.

But not just the needs of others, I want to say: maybe even more so our own? But especially, I think, those most secret needs of all, that dwell in the remotest deeps of you and me, and in their most forgotten, Eden-haunted recesses. Those primordial needs which often, in their very humility, have the strangest way of proving, not just of more absorbing interest, but far more full of wonder and delight, than all our most exalted ambitions, or all our most visionary dreams.

Those needs, in short, which best embody all the things we humans have ever anciently desired. Or indeed, could ever want. At least, so far as we actually let God meet them.

What the Unworldly Need Now

I'll admit, since the breakup of my friend's marriage, I haven't stopped probing the supposedly immutable dynamics of male-female relationships in our time. And worst of it, all my efforts accompanied by the dubious blessings, wisdom and counsel of YouTube. Talk about absorbing far more heat than light. 

What most disturbs me is what seems to be the entire ethos of the current dating market. And in particular, how demands for a certain narrow and ungenerous - if not un-Christian - kind of perfection have never been more strident. Especially in determining criteria for one's choice of life-partners. Or even bed-partners. As if each one of us, male and female and everything purportedly in between, were now free as ever before (or rather, obliged as never before), not just to have it all, but to be it all. Imagine feeling obliged to be everything that a certain graphic-comic sensibility says you are capable of being. Including a good many things that - as expectations continue to rise - very likely you're NOT capable of being. Like, say, some darker, edgier, quasi-vampiric Marvel superhero. Everything except, of course, for being yourself. Let alone anything warmly and companionably (much less compassionately) human.

In short, it never fails to amaze me the creatures we make ourselves to be, in order to be attractively, desirably strong. As if we were acting on the premise that the most inexcusable quality - or at any rate the biggest turn-off - in any human being was vulnerability. Think of the superhumans - if not pagan demigods? - we pose as, and the postures we maintain! And all for the sake of projecting a certain air: an air of power and control, of dauntingness and intimidatingness, of steely self-composure and unstoppable will. Plus a host of kindred traits that might best be summarized by that venerable American word (and tradition) we call "coolness." 

So just what is it, do you suppose, that drives us to pretend that this set of "strengths" - so vital, supposedly, in dating-partners - is somehow going to equip them for lifelong marriage? Or even marriage of a decade or two? Much less the rearing of children? "Oh, but he'll (she'll) change eventually. He's got to." Really? And just how can we be sure of switching gears - whether our own or our spouse's? And with the right measure? And the right timing? And what if, even then, we somehow find ourselves totally "turned off" by the end product?

That's surely the central problem with what passes for courtship these days. We make ourselves so short-term enticing, and so long-term unendurable, not only is it a miracle anyone should want to see us day in day out, much less live with us: it's almost the height of presumption, on our part, to expect that they should want to.

And yes, I know marriage has often been described as the triumph of hope over experience. I just never thought I'd see the day when it would become something more like the triumph of self-importance, and baseless vanity, over any rational hope.

And think of it: All because two people, in the courtship and formative years of their marital project, had succeeded in something at which all of us, always, should be only too happy to fail. They had succeeded in making themselves, and maybe even each other?, so formidably, dauntingly attractive - they had, between the two of them, created such a surplus of dramatic tension, and CONtention - that any "cooling off" period, any relaxing into a routine normality of life was all but sure to prove the most insipid anticlimax. Not, mind you, that even the most savagely attracted couples have any choice but to relax, or be domesticated, sooner or later. For who can live at fever-pitch levels of "romantic" tension all the time?

So what do people - even marriage- and dating-partners - most urgently need from each other? And today more than ever? I would begin by saying they need permission to be themselves. And in particular those aspects of themselves that they're least sure of. Or maybe even - for a variety of complicated and largely unreasonable reasons - least proud of. In short, they need permission to be themselves in their entirety. And not just to the extent that they're "self-confident": i.e., NOT just insofar as they stand up for, and assert, and exert, and even impose themselves upon others, and against others. As if this latter Self were somehow the only kind worth having. Or worth respecting and cultivating. By anyone. Especially when you consider that it is precisely this arrogance in us - precisely this Self whose weight we most like to "throw around" - which is the most unnatural, most de-Edenized, most un-souled part of us: the part that bears not most, but least resemblance to the creature we were created by God. Or rather (and to put it, I think, still more Scripturally), it is that side of us which is most ashamed, not of having sinned, but of having any regrets at having sinned. And so is least humbled by what others (or, indeed, any rational outside observer) would call its mistakes. Including some very ancient, and ancestral mistakes. If not primordial ones. Like eating a certain forbidden fruit, for instance. It is, in a word, that most radically corrupted Self in us which feels most justified, most emboldened, not only not to look back, not to regret that we were once expelled from a certain paradise. It feels even prouder - to say nothing of relieved - at having lost all hope of that garden's intimacy, its delight, its peace, ever being restored.

Which peace, if I remember correctly, was once shattered by a man and a woman, and at the very genesis of their building a life together. And of course (as no less a moral exemplar than Lady Macbeth would remind us), what's done cannot be undone. Still I can't help wondering: If we their children go on refusing to draw hope from the full memory of our origins - yes, even unto the garden we've lost - just how are we ever supposed to give hope to the children we cultivate?

Our National Non-focus on the Family

Regarding the question of whether, and how far, the American Project is based on truths that are self-evident: 

Here, anyhow, are four seminal paragraphs from an essay that I find contains far more ballasting common sense, and far more weight of historically-grounded truth, than anything else I've read on the subject in quite some time (emphasis in bold face is entirely my own):

"The self-evident truths of the Declaration . . . garner much of their specific political significance for the American Revolution from the evidence offered by the facts of Anglo-American constitutionalism; these measure the [British government's] violations (and later the remedies) as well as moderate the radical potential in the revolutionary language taken by itself. Stripped of this context, the first principles enunciated by Jefferson are not self-evident at all—at least, not to anyone raised in the tradition of Western virtue or in a world formed by Judeo-Christian belief.

"Let me give an example. The 'self-evident truths,' it seems to me, do not give an adequate account of the family, the fundamental institution of social life. First, whatever might be said of the relation of husband and wife, the family is built not around equality, but around the inequality of parent and child. Precisely the most basic meaning of Jefferson’s statement of equality—that no man is the natural ruler or the natural subject of another—is not true of this relation, for the parents are surely the natural rulers of their dependent children. Second, the family is first and foremost not about rights, but about duties; even the right of children to care and education is abstract and vague compared to the duty of parents to provide and instruct and the duty of children to obey and learn. Third, the origin of the family is not exactly consent. In some cultures, including our own, spouses choose for themselves whom to marry, but even then the roles they assume are largely socially defined. Except in cases of adoption, and very rarely then, children do not choose their parents, and (leaving aside brave new technologies and, again, adoption) parents do not choose their children. Fourth, the end of the family is only incidentally the security of rights; it is principally provision and nurture in an environment formed by love. And fifth, when family becomes destructive of its ends, it cannot be altered and abolished without in most instances inflicting further wounds that never heal.

"Now about this counterexample to the self-evident truths of the Declaration, allow me to make two points. First, Jefferson and his fellows were altogether aware that families were not formed upon their principles. Precisely what they objected to in Tory political theory was political patriarchalism, the effort to form the state on analogy to the family. Natural equality meant that the king was not to act as father in relation to his people—not that fathers were not kings in their own homes. Government by consent meant that the commandment to honor one’s father and mother could not be invoked by a political nobility demanding homage. That abusive government can be changed was not seen to undermine the indissolubility of marriage nor the lifelong attachment between parent and child.

"But secondly, there is no denying that, since as long ago as John Locke’s Two Treatises and even Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, liberal philosophers have sought to reconceive the family on liberal terms, and of course in our own day a vast social experiment has been undertaken to remodel the family on egalitarian principles and to reorient authority within it on the basis of consent. Though opinions about the success of this effort are bound to differ, allow me to say for my own part that I am more impressed by the resilience of old patterns against all the force of dominant opinion than I am by evidence that abuses have been diminished and familial happiness more commonly achieved. The fundamental equality of the sexes may be self-evident, but their equality in the sense of their having no relevant differences even from the point of view of the family is not. And unless one is driven by a personal or ideological commitment to nontraditional family forms, I do not see how one can argue that the current regime with regard to the family in Western society is self-evidently the best, at least with respect to children. One might note that almost nowhere in the West today are native populations even reproducing their numbers, and in some countries those populations are on the verge of precipitous decline. It is a matter in which we certainly need, and all have difficulty sorting through, the facts."

In a nutshell - and as usual - I couldn't have put it better.

Wishing you all a most blessed, healthy, moderate and grounded 4th of July weekend.