Afterlife of Pi

Again, spoiler spoiler spoilers will probably appear in what follows.

After writing the previous post I allowed myself to read some reviews of Life of Pi.  One of the best I found was Tasha Robinson's at the Onion AV Club.

A central plot point in Life Of Pi—the film adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling book—centers on the philosophical question of whether animals have souls. The title character, a self-possessed Indian boy, believes they do, and that people can tell by looking deep into their eyes. His zookeeper father feels differently; in his opinion, any depth in an animal’s eyes is just human emotion reflected back at the viewer. This conundrum—essentially, the question of whether to interpret the world spiritually or cynically—becomes the backbone of the plot. But it also works into a choice that the characters present directly to the viewers, about whether they want to take that plot literally or metaphorically, whether to focus on the film’s body, or accept its soul.

The choice is harder than it was in Martel’s book, because here, the body is more compelling by far.

By "the body" Robinson means the glorious visuals of the movie's main story, Pi's voyage across the Pacific in a lifeboat accompanied only by an adult Bengal tiger.  The second story, the one Pi tells from his hospital bed to the Japanese investigators, doesn't get the full CGI treatment but simply Pi's talking head against a white background.  As Robinson argues in Spoiler Space, "the real story (if that’s what it is) only gets a flat verbal retelling ... It seems to be a conscious distancing effect, with Lee strongly stacking the deck in favor of the fantasy by making it so much more cinematically compelling."  Many people believe that the audience is expected to take this second story as the "true" one -- what actually happened after the freighter sank -- and that the story we've been watching for nearly two hours is a fantasy or hallucination.  Maybe so.  It's often a toss-up when one is expected to decide which of two fictional alternatives is "real," since neither of them is, yet both are.  In this case, there's a revealing bias involved in the assumption that the less edifying story is the "real" one, and the more colorful one the myth, except that it's supposed to be the true real one because reality is a drag.

Robinson's framing of the movie's central question shows just how inadequate that question is.  Is the second story, which involves a sociopathic ship's cook who kills and kills again before guiltily surrendering to Pi's justice, "cynical"?  It could be interpreted in "spiritual" terms just as easily.  Think of great religious stories like Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, which take a dark view of human beings yet still find meaning in them.  "Spiritual" doesn't mean only cotton-candy primary-colors happy endings, but I suspect that's what many people who made Life of Pi a bestseller think it should mean.  As with the book of Job, being deprived of everything and then physically tortured isn't given meaning by having one's belongings and health restored -- even if Job had more children, that doesn't mean his first batch of children wasn't slaughtered unjustly with Yahweh's permission.  (The reviewer of Life of Pi for the Guardian does a terrible job, one example being his reference to "Pi, howling like Job into stormy skies."  The guy ought to try reading what Job said; he didn't howl, he eloquently read his god the Riot Act.  Pi howls, but unlike Job's, his god doesn't talk back.)

One commenter, I think on the remarks by Samuel Delany that I quoted in the previous post, lamented that we don't have a good spiritual writer like C. S. Lewis around.  Lewis was an interesting writer in many ways, but he nearly always let his thinking be hobbled by dogma.  But this might be a good time to recall some of his comments on suffering, from his 1940 book The Problem of Pain:

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [96-98].

Those who think only of the Narnia books when they hear Lewis's name must ignore his specifically Christian writings, which it must be remembered were intended as defenses of Christianity.  Lewis's justification of torture of the creature by its creator should be borne in mind when contemplating Life of Pi.  At least Lewis engaged the problem, however inadequately, instead of smiling benignly at it as the movie does.

Most modern Christians seem determined to ignore the less cutesy parts of the New Testament; many brush aside the Hebrew Bible as the domain of an "Old Testament God of wrath," but that's evasion since both Testaments are about the same god, and there's no shortage of wrath in the New Testament in any case.  (Those who do, like the people who made and liked The Passion of the Christ, with its CGI-enhanced torture scenes, are another can of worms.)  Many of the positive interpretations of Life of Pi try to turn it into a feel-good fable.  To its limited credit, the movie never anthropomorphizes the tiger.  If it has a soul, it's not a human soul but a tiger's; not Milne / Disney'sTigger nor Bill Watterson's Hobbes, but a tiger's.  What exactly is answered by claiming that animals have souls?  What is a soul, anyway?
 
This conundrum trips up a number of earnest reviewers.  Roger Ebert, for instance, writes that "wild animals are indeed wild and indeed animals," but human beings are also animals, and religions don't necessarily treat us as all nice inside, even if we do have "souls."  The Bible depicts bloodthirsty humans who will be justified by their bloodthirsty lord of armies.  The film shows young Pi grappling with the doctrine that Yahweh killed his own son for the sins of the world, but he only had to do it because his own "justice" required blood sacrifice to atone for sin.  If Pi had been stuck in the lifeboat with a herbivore, his voyage would have been a lot less fraught, and let's not forget the importance of cattle in Hinduism.  Yet a few sentences later Ebert writes:

The writer W.G. Sebold once wrote, "Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension." This is the case here, but during the course of 227 days, they come to a form of recognition. The tiger, in particular, becomes aware that he sees the boy not merely as victim or prey, or even as master, but as another being.

That's highly debatable even within the world of the movie.  Once safely onshore, the tiger disappears into the forest without looking back, and Pi cries disconsolately in the arms of his rescuers because the great cat did not grant him any "recognition."  Why should it have done?  I don't see any basis for Ebert's fine rhetoric about the tiger seeing the boy "not merely as victim or prey, or even as master, but as another being."  In the end the movie accepts the warning of Pi's father, that you may think you're seeing recognition in a tiger's eyes, but you're really only seeing your own reflection.  But it looks like many viewers will ignore this, trying to turn it into a parable of interspecies communication and love.  If so, the love is unrequited, but I don't consider that tragic, let alone "spiritual."

I agree with A. O. Scott, the New York Times reviewer:

The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle. Perhaps they are, but insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that “Life of Pi” does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion.

But I repeat: there's nothing in "spirituality" itself -- which can be quite morbid, misanthropic, and even "cynical" -- which entails vagueness or repressing of the darker implications of life.  It's this underlying assumption of the movie that made it hard to watch despite its visual beauty and great performances.  And as an atheist, I believe that any worldview which claims to make sense of the world has to grapple with questions like those of suffering and evil.  Here again I part company somewhat with Samuel Delany when he wrote that the filmmakers "couldn't have come up with a better script promoting atheism if they had gotten Christopher Hitchens to write it."  Atheism isn't itself an answer or a solution to the problem of suffering.  I prefer the witch Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies:

"I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble."

"But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

"That's no call to go believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another!

The other night I went to see Terence Malick's new film The Tree of Life, which was being shown at the new campus cinema. I ought to see it again before I write about it, but I'm not sure I want to see it again very soon, and anyway its run is over now. So here goes. If you haven't yet seen the movie and want to approach it with a minimum of foreknowledge, you should stop reading now. The Tree of Life doesn't have a plot, so there aren't really any surprises -- it's not The Crying Game -- but even so, it can be good to understand what you're seeing for yourself, rather than go by someone else's interpretation of the flow of images.

The Tree of Life begins with a title slide quoting the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? ... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Then a handsome red-haired woman is handed a telegram at the front door of her home. She cries out in shock and horror and grief, so it's easy to guess the kind of bad news she's received: someone has died, and from her cries it appears that the deceased is her son. The woman appears almost ageless, so it's hard to tell whether her son was a child when he died, or an adolescent, or a grown man. Next a crew-cut man of indeterminate age, in some sort of industrial plant, is given the same bad news: he crumples up wordlessly. I had trouble figuring out the time frame for this sequence. The Fifties? The Sixties?

The film jumps to the present, a twenty-first century cityscape of skyscrapers and Sean Penn in a suit, evidently an architect, looking distinguished (gray at the temples) but unhappy. (Since I've now identified one of the stars, I should add that the father is played by Brad Pitt and the mother by Jessica Chastain.) In voiceover he tells us that his brother died at the age of nineteen, so evidently it happened some time ago; we are not told how his brother died. His work environment is all-white, sterile, like the surface of the moon or a polar icecap. He talks briefly on the phone to someone who, from the strained tone of the conversation, is his father. He is married (notice the wedding ring) but he and his wife seem to keep a distance from each other, and they never speak. It almost seems in their scene together that they are getting ready to go to a funeral. It can't be his brother's, though, because that would have been decades in the past.

Then there's the brother's funeral, and it's surprisingly bleak. The mother refuses comfort. When her priest tells her gently, "He's in God's hands now," she snaps back that he was in God's hands all along. Good for you, I thought. An older woman with an Irish accent, evidently her mother, explains with a weak smile that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away -- it's what he does. Evidently she doesn't think much of God either. Good for you too, I thought.

Next comes the part that infuriated many viewers when The Tree of Life premiered at Cannes (though it still won the Palme D'Or): a long special-effects sequence depicting the origin of the universe and the earth, with volcanic eruptions, CGI dinosaurs, and other cool stuff. There are occasional words, mostly whispered by the cast, and a lot of churchy choral and orchestral music. It was fun to watch, and I thought it was there to echo both the opening quotation from Job and the grandmother's dry dismissal of God's justice. But this sort of thing is always double-edged. On one hand, it means that there's no reason why human beings shouldn't suffer and die, since living things (like the stranded diplodocus in one scene) have suffered and died just on the earth for hundreds of millions of years. If there are other worlds, it's a safe bet that the same thing has happened there. I took this scene as providing context for the human suffering: though we build skyscrapers, wear suits and dresses, build churches, write masses and make movies and shake our fists at the sky, we are not different from other organisms in the end, and they are not different from us. The opening chapter of Ecclesiastes is a more relevant text for that sermon.

On the other hand, by the nature of narrative (even a fragmented one like Malick's here), such a story gives the illusion of linearity if not directed movement, up the Great Chain of Being from the primitive one-celled creatures to Man, and especially to modern Christian man. I suspect that one reason some people have found The Tree of Life confusing is that they tried to impose this progressive story on the material, though I don't think it was what Malick had in mind.

In any case, the film then moves back to the family we met in the opening scenes. Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt's three sons are born in sequence, and we watch them grow until the oldest, Jack, is about ten years old. There the film settles for most of the rest of its length. Mother O'Brien whispers in voiceover that there are two ways: one is the way of Nature, which thinks only of itself, and the other is the way of Grace, which is the way of Love. Father O'Brien lectures his boys constantly on the necessity of working hard, competing, climbing to success over the bodies of your competitors; he loves them and is probably more affectionate with them than most fathers of his generation and class, but he believes he has to be hard with them, since it's a hard world and you have to learn to fight if you're going to survive. He doesn't hit them for misbehavior that I noticed, just sends them out of the room when he's angry -- which puts him a step or two above many parents of his generation and class. I imagine he's supposed to embody the way of Nature, though he probably wouldn't see it that way: he's the way of Law and Intellect, if not the way of Grace. Nature would mean sitting in your own dirt and letting the smart guys leave you behind.

Mother, of course, is Grace and Love; she stands between the boys and their father when he blows his stack, and she's firm and stern when she catches them in certain misconduct. In one shot she dances in the air near a tree (held up by wirework a la The Matrix); in another a butterfly lands on her hand as she frolics with her sons. She does good works, like giving water to manacled prisoners being led to jail by the police. And Nature wins out in the end when her son dies: she wants her own way then and won't forgive God. Good for her, though it doesn't make any difference.

Primarily, though, we see the parents through the eyes of their sons, especially Jack. Jack is willful, just like his father, so there's friction between them, and some blowups. Malick does a very good job of depicting the small-town life of kids in the 1950s; The Tree of Life stirred up a lot of old memories in me, though I grew up in Indiana rather than Waco Texas, and my family wasn't as well-to-do as the O'Briens. Jack drifts into the orbit of some wilder boys, breaks a few windows and (a much noticed scene) ties a frog to a toy rocket, sneaks into a neighbor's empty house (bigger and a bit richer than the O'Briens') and steals a woman's slip from a dresser drawer. He indulges in some gratuitous cruelty: teases his younger brother, the Good One, into putting his finger over the barrel of Jack's airgun -- no permanent damage, happily. He's stunned into doubt about God by the drowning of a boy his own age in a canal that serves as the community swimming pool. Then he draws back and becomes more loving, befriends a neighbor boy whose head is burn-scarred.

At about this point, Father O'Brien loses his job when his plant is shut down. Humbled by discovering his own powerlessness, he becomes gentler with his wife and children, and apologizes for his pride and wrath. They have to move away from their nice little house and neighborhood, though we don't learn where they go.

Next we're back with middle-aged Jack in his sterile life. There were a few shots earlier in the film of him walking through a rocky desert, and we return to that. He emerges on a beach where he meets the living and the dead: his parents, his brothers, and his younger self. Everyone rejoices, quietly, embracing and wiping away tears. Two women caress and comfort Mother O'Brien, echoing a key scene of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, then finally present her with the boyhood incarnation of her dead son. Reunion. Happiness. Salvation? I'm not sure how to take this section of the film. Does it vindicate the ways of God? If he gives and takes and then gives back, does that somehow make everything all right? At best, it's meaningless, and there's no guarantee that more suffering wouldn't come later; but that is where The Tree of Life comes to an end.

One of the keys to The Tree of Life is presumably the Book of Job, as shown not only by the opening title but by the main character's name. (Jack O'Brien, J. O'B., get it?) But Jack himself is no Job, and indeed no one in the film is. The biblical Job, you'll recall, was a fabulously righteous man who enjoyed happiness and prosperity until Satan and Yahweh made a bet to see what Job would do if his social safety net was removed. The merry pranksters then killed off his children and livestock, burned down his house and destroyed all his property, and finally inflicted him with boils. Job then cursed the day of his birth and denounced Yahweh for his injustice. Job's friends, who'd come to commiserate, told him that he must have done something wrong or God wouldn't have done this to him. Job denied the accusation steadfastly, and then Yahweh spoke to them all out of a whirlwind, pointing out that the world makes no sense, that there is no justice, and that he is the baddest god on the block so don't get in his face, okay? Job cowered, acknowledging Yahweh's power, whereupon Yahweh informed the friends that he was angry with them but would accept Job's prayers on their behalf. He then restored Job's wealth and gave him a whole litter of new children, and Job lived happily ever after.

Job would have been happy to get off as lightly as the O'Brien family did. For all that, I'm not sure what to make of the adult Jack's malaise. Despite his change of heart before the family moved, he seems to have drifted into an empty life, though a well-compensated and comfortable one. Of course well-off professionals have problems too, but we never find out what Jack's problems are -- let alone how a vision (?) of joyous reunion would make them all better. I've seen numerous references to Malick's philosophical studies at Oxford, but they haven't borne much fruit in The Tree of Life. I realize I've quoted Wittgenstein on this before, but as I watched Malick's finale I couldn't help wondering again: "Is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?"

None of which means that I regret having seen The Tree of Life. It's gorgeous to look at, the performances are wonderful, it rewards the concentration it demands in watching it. It's a remarkable piece of work for big-budget commercial studio cinema. I wish I'd been able to see what I could learn from a second viewing. But for deep, philosophical filmmaking, I prefer the work of Hirokazu Koreeda, who grapples with some of the same issues in Maborosi, After Life, Distance, Still Walking, and Hana. Unfortunately they're not easy to find in the US. Andrew O'Hehir, whose review of The Tree of Life at Cannes made me aware it was a film I wanted to see, has written about another Japanese director, Naomi Kawase, whose latest film he compares to The Tree of Life, and I'm going to look for her work too. But even the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona is about as deep as The Tree of Life, while wearing its meanings more lightly.

Remembering the Bone House

Nancy Mairs isn't the most prolific writer, and it would be easy for me to lose sight of her. It helps that a few of her books sit on my shelves near the door at about eye level, so I notice them now and then. She doesn't write bestsellers, so I am less likely to find her latest books prominently displayed in the bookstores. And as I get older, time goes by quickly, so it only recently occurred to me that I should check to see if she had published anything lately -- or even if she's still alive, since she's in her late 60s now. Even if she didn't have multiple sclerosis, that's an age where people start falling by the wayside if you don't watch them closely.

In fact Mairs has published two books in the past decade: A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories (Beacon, 2001) and A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith (Beacon, 2007). That's not bad for someone who's clinically depressed and needs a powered wheelchair to get around. I doubt I'd be as productive in Mairs' seat. But she's one of the writers I turn to, ambivalently, for a truthful account of what it's like to be waist-high in the world (the title of another one of her books), to be dependent on others, to be confined.

Oh I hate the limitations. There are specific parts of limitations that I especially hate. I was always a walker, and I just miss being able to get up and take off and walk somewhere. Probably the greatest source of pain has been that I can't be with my grandchildren the way I want to be. You know, I can sit and look at them, but I can't pick them up, I can't cuddle them, I can't run around after them, I can't take care of them.

May Sarton was another writer I looked to for the same kind of reporting. In her later years and especially after her first stroke, Sarton had to learn to accept help from other people; she wrote about her experiences with considerable honesty. Some young, able-bodied people prefer not to think about what they will face as they get older. Forewarned is forearmed: I at least wanted to hear from people who'd been there before me. Sarton was one of the first I discovered; Mairs has stayed with me longer. Her body may be failing, but her mind is still vigorous, and she writes a stark prose that I admire and envy. You can get a taste of it just from the title of her memoir, Remembering the Bone House, "bone house" (from the Anglo-Saxon banhus, Mairs says) being a metaphor for the human body.

A Troubled Guest turns out to be essays on death and the experience of mortality -- knowing, with varying degrees of certainty, that one's body is not going to last forever, and especially beginning to feel (as opposed to mere intellectual knowing) that its days are numbered. Thankfully, Mairs's Catholicism (she converted as an adult) isn't too intrusive, and she's a heterodox Catholic indeed: in bygone days she'd have been severely punished and possibly excommunicated for the kinds of opinions she expresses here. It appears from what she writes in A Troubled Guest that she was drawn to Catholicism by the liturgy and by the fellowship she found in the particular assembly she joined and still belongs to. She has little respect for hierarchical authority and considers it her duty as a Christian to work through important issues herself, rather than let the Church or anyone else tell her what to think about them. Of course, she is pretty sure that God agrees with her. I think that's why I'm not likely ever to become a religious believer: I don't want that kind of egoistic certainty.

As I say, though, her religion mostly isn't intrusive. I'm bothered more by some wild generalizations she makes in A Troubled Guest about "modern" times. For example, on page 70 she writes that she likes living in a house that shows signs of having been lived in by others before her. I agree, but:

One of the consequences of the modern habit of constructing the cosmos in relation to the personal self is that we too readily believe that entities spring into being for our use, exist as long as we need them, and vanish at our departure. The [sketch of an] owl [tacked to a bulletin board by her back door] reminds me that my house is indifferent to my occupancy, having harbored one tenant after another for sixty-five years.

I don't see anything "modern" in "constructing the cosmos in relation to the personal self" -- what would Mairs call the ancient (but still current) habit of seeing the earth as the center of the universe, with all celestial bodies revolving around it, and the first human beings just coincidentally being the ancestors of one's own tribe? How about the New Testament belief that the universe was created and all history directed to achieve its climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus, so that his followers could be glorified and judge the angels? What would arguably qualify as "modern" is the modern scientific view of a universe vaster and older than we can grasp, with no special status attached to our planet and us. But many people (including many scientists) still believe in a developmental timeline culminating in themselves.

On the very first page, she writes:

Although suffering is a state often considered scandalous in modern society, a mark of illness to be cured or a moral deviance to be cured or a moral deviance to be corrected, from a spiritual perspective it is simply an element in the human condition, to be neither courted nor combated.

I simply won't let Mairs have this, even if she distinguishes between "spiritual" and "religious." From the spiritual perspective of the New Testament, suffering is a consequence of sin, which will end when sin is conquered or purged. (At the same time, the New Testament also views suffering as a mark of special distinction: God has chosen you to suffer, for whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth. I don't believe that Mairs is unaware of this theme.) What Paul called "this body of death" was a husk to be shed like a snakeskin so that the pure body of spirit could be set free. The people who flocked to Jesus to be healed weren't "modern", and they knew better than to think that suffering was "a neutral element in the human condition," any more than death was. And Jesus healed them, going so far as to tell the paralytic he healed in Mark 2 that his sins were forgiven. Later Christians "courted" suffering, as Jesus himself did according to the gospels, from martyrdom to mortification of the corruptible flesh; whether they were spiritual or not isn't for me to say. The Bible doesn't have a single answer to the question of suffering, any more than "modern society" does. The Buddha, for whom the problem of suffering was central (six centuries or so before Jesus), saw it as a lamentable element in the human condition, a consequence of craving, to be "combated" by the cessation of craving. I don't think atheism has a single account of suffering either, but my own is closer to Mairs's: it's an element of the human condition, not to be either celebrated or derided, probably ineradicable but certainly to be combated.

I feel the same way about death. Some people have talked of achieving a well-rounded life, as though it were a story with a beginning, middle, and end, with suspense and foreshadowing. But like any other story, you only can construct a narrative arc after you know how it ended. There's a tension between the reality that everybody dies and the the reality that we mostly can't know when or how we will die. We only die once, as Stephen Vizinczey wrote, but we are mortal all the time. Different people react to these realities in different ways, but whether we deal with them well or badly, the "story" always ends with death.

When she writes about mourning and grieving, the same difficulty arises. Supposedly in olden times people knew how to mourn, but nowadays we go to grief counselors -- though she describes present-day memorial services involving modern people who seem to be able to grieve and mourn without professional guidance, and I don't believe that people in the past or in 'traditional' societies were any more uniform in their responses to loss than we are now. Prescribed forms -- wailing by the corpse for days, trying to crawl into the coffin or the grave (click on CC for English subtitles) with the deceased, wearing deep mourning for a year, etc. -- work for many people, but probably constrain others and make them feel worse.

Despite these lapses, which don't really have much importance in what she has to say, A Troubled Guest gave me a lot, as all of Mairs's writing has done. (I think it's time for me to begin rereading her previous books.) It's not "spirituality" but materiality that she writes about best: the bodies of human beings and our animal companions in strength and weakness, the bone house and the wooden frame house with the sketch of an owl left there by a previous tenant. This is what we need to come to terms with: ourselves as bodies, living and dying, thriving and failing, generous and selfish, vulnerable and inevitably mortal. Nancy Mairs has helped me engage that enterprise as well as any writer has.

Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother's Back

It's possible -- no one has proven that it's impossible, anyway -- that the universe is a vast booby trap, designed and constructed by a cosmic practical joker waiting for us to make a misstep so he can jump us while holding us responsible for our doom. It's possible that the universe is set up so that it's possible to kill a human being in such a way that it's impossible for them to go to heaven (78); even cremating a cadaver can prevent the spirit from finding its way to peace (91). It's possible that absolute good and absolute evil are at war in the world, and everything bad that happens to us is just collateral damage in that conflict; sorry about that (86). It's possible that we can persuade absolute good or absolute evil, or their many agents, spiritual and material, to do us no harm (or less harm, at least) for the moment through bribery, sweet-talk, flattery, and appeasement, or at least by burning sage (186) for protection. It's possible that what "white doctors call 'being sick' is more like an accident, like the person went off the road and the [molecules] forgot how to be" (190). And it's possible that if you're going to ask a sacred mountain to take care of a dead friend, you should be "careful not to say the name of the dead" (252).

What I find puzzling is that so many religious believers see the universe just this way, though they'll object to the bald way I've described their worldview here. Officially God is good, but when you listen to what believers say about him, "good" is not the word that comes to mind. And I'm not talking only about the Christian god here. The page numbers in the paragraph above refer to a novel I just finished reading, Going Through Ghosts by Mary Sojourner (University of Nevada Press, 2010), based on Native American cosmology and religious practice. (I should mention that it's not at all a bad book, even if its theology annoyed me.) Try this exchange between a living character and the ghost of a murdered one (124):

"What do your cosmic supervisors think about this place?" Maggie asked.
"They are busy with an earthquake about to happen in the Middle East," Sarah said.

"Busy" how? I wondered. Are they busy trying to prevent it, or busy trying to start it? Do earthquakes happen because the spirits are understaffed, or inattentive, or hungover? This sort of thing is supposed to be spiritually superior to the ways of the whites?

Near the end of the book, Sarah the friendly ghost, now happily "all-the-way-dead", is watching the living with her recently dead teacher Minnie (244).

They had been told they were only to watch, and it had been made clear that they were not to intervene in anything. "Sometimes," their teachers had told them, "we might drop something down in front of a human. We see which way they go. There is something else you can give them; we'll show you when you've learned to watch."

Sure, it's possible that the afterlife is like an American elementary-school classroom with the students gathered around an ant farm, or at best a university psychology rat lab. But is that the best of all possible worlds? What entitles the teachers to test the humans they observe with such smug detachment? Their superiority is assumed by the author, but not recognized by this reader.

To repeat: it may be that the world really is an obstacle course designed by a being with obsessive-compulsive disorder, paranoia, and Tourette's syndrome, with a booby-trap at the end. What I don't understand is why so many people, given the opportunity to invent their own higher power, invent such nasty ones. The only comprehensible reason I can imagine is that the universe is a fairly inhospitable place; our lives are too often nasty, brutish, and short; so it makes a kind of sense to believe that if you're really, really, good -- if you bear up patiently and uncomplainingly under the worst suffering the Beings In Charge can inflict on you -- then they'll finally smile and tell you it's okay, you passed the test, you're a good little human and everything is going to be all right now. And maybe that's reality; who knows? But if it is, the Beings in Charge are still sadistic demons who should be defied, not deified.

But yeah, I know, a lot of people don't see it that way. Anyone else remember the Clerk's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

The Clerk's tale is about a marquis of Saluzzo named Walter. Lord Walter of Saluzzo is a bachelor who is asked by his subjects to marry in order to provide an heir. He assents and decides he will marry a peasant, named Griselda. Griselda is a poor girl, used to a life of pain and labor.

After Griselda has borne him a daughter, Walter decides to test her loyalty. He sends an officer to take the baby, pretending to kill her, and convey it secretly to Bologna. Griselda makes no protest at this. When she bears a son several years later, Walter again has him taken from her.

Finally, Walter determines one last test. He has a Papal bull of annulment forged which enables him to leave Griselda, and informs her that he intends to remarry. He requires her to prepare the wedding for his new bride. Secretly, he has the children returned from Bologna, and he presents his daughter as his intended wife. Eventually he informs Griselda of the deceit, and they live happily ever after.

There's always been disagreement among readers about how to understand this story (and Chaucer himself sent mixed signals in the text), but it "was an enormously popular one, included in virtually all of the adaptations of Chaucer done for children and juveniles in the 19th and early 20th centuries". A lot of people evidently get off on this sort of thing; Story of O is considered unwholesome, but not the Clerk's Tale.

I also recall Albert Brooks's movie 1991 Defending Your Life. Brooks, who also wrote and directed, plays a guy who's killed in an auto accident.  His spirit goes to Judgment City, where you must defend your life before a cosmic court, who decide whether to send you back or promote you. He meets and falls in love with the saintly Meryl Streep, but of course the court separates them -- she'll move up, he'll be sent back. Brooks desperately runs after the tram she's on and braves even electroshock to follow her; the cosmic judges beam smugly at this proof of his merit and (as I recall -- it has been years since I saw it) change their verdict in his favor. Incomprehensibly to me, Defending Your Life got good reviews and is still a cult favorite. I prefer Kore-eda Hirokazu's non-sadistic 1998 fantasy After Life myself, but I must recognize that many people like to fantasize about being tested, even cruelly, and coming through the test successfully.

But I know this is a matter of temperament; for me, as I've said before, the universe feels less unpleasant if no one is out there watching all the horrors but doing nothing about them. That's leaving aside the thought that someone is out there making the horrors happen. No doubt my preference is as much wish-fulfillment as the belief that someone is testing us, "sending us the disaster to overcome", but I think the wishes we make reveal a lot about us.

Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’

(The wedding imagery here reminds us that the Church is the Bride of Christ, and if you imagine the third-person pronouns with initial capitals [“Wear your hair just for Him … You won’t get Him thinkin’ and a-prayin’ …] you have quite a kinky little hymn on your hands.)

My text today, dearly beloved, is from H. Allen Orr’s review of Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin, on marketing strategies for atheists:

Too often, the New Atheism forgets to make its humanism humane.

Wow. Where did Orr (or Kitcher) get the idea that religion is humane? One objection I have to Dawkins and the other “New Atheists” (as I’ve said before, I’m always suspicious of talk about “New” anything) is that they are basically secular avatars of the old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone preachers. Orr quotes Kitcher from Living with Darwin:

Often, the voices of reason I hear in contemporary discussions of religion are hectoring, almost exultant that comfort is being stripped away and faith undermined; frequently, they are without charity. And they are always without hope.

Orr agrees with Kitcher in criticizing the New Atheists for the lack of hope in their message, for their apparent glee in, as they imagine, stripping away other people’s illusions; but such has always been the method of revivalist religion, and these boys are revivalists. Theoretically there is hope of salvation for those who heed the Christian message, but the congregation members who reportedly fainted on hearing Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” don’t seem to have been reassured. The gospels’ Jesus taught (Matthew 7:13-14) that only a few would find the narrow path to salvation, so the overwhelming majority of humanity would be damned, and there is no hope for those who die unsaved. The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) is striking in its callousness toward the damned. I think it was the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith who wrote somewhere that the Good News of Christ was, and is, Bad News for most people.

Christianity, the religion I know the most about, has never been concerned with the tender feelings of believers in competing sects. Whether the competition was Jews, pagans, or (ever since the beginnings of the cult, as the New Testament shows) other Christians, the rhetoric has been vitriolic and unforgiving. Hatefulness is endemic to Christianity, though not specific to it, and the New Atheists tend to come across as reincarnations of the ancient Christian heresiarchs, seeking out and denouncing those who wickedly stray from their version of truth, only with the sectarian elements (and learning) stripped away. I see little to choose between Jonathan Edwards and a sodden, bleary-eyed Christopher Hitchens.

Kitcher is evidently trying to play the Good Atheist Cop to Dawkins’s, Harris’s, Dennett’s, and Hitchens’s Bad Atheist Cop. I doubt it will work, since despite his Christian upbringing Kitcher doesn’t seem to understand or really empathize with religious believers any more than the Bad Cops do, nor does he really offer any hope. Maybe he thinks that someday, someone will come up with some from somewhere. Maybe they’ll cook it up in a lab, a newer genetically-modified Enlightenment^TM hope that will enable people to get over the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a painful terminal disease without the troublesome, addictive side effects of the old pre-scientific religious hope.

I’m not saying that I understand religious folk either. I’d think it would be easier for atheists like Kitcher, who were raised in religious families and only later broke away. I had no religious upbringing, and realized fairly early in life that I felt no need to believe in gods. I suspect that some of my attitude is temperamental (meaning that I have no idea where it comes from). Somewhere I read about a movie, Pete’n’Tillie, based on a Peter DeVries novel, in which a married couple (played by Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau) suffer through their child’s death of leukemia. One of the parents says something to the effect that it’s less painful to believe that there is no god, that no one is watching Up There, than to believe that Someone is watching but does nothing. That's exactly what I think, but I know that many other people, perhaps most, would rather believe that Someone is up there, weeping great salt tears over our pain and feeling it with us. (And no, I'm not talking about this guy.)

Yet religion is not synonymous with hope. Many atheists have died without fear, and many theists have died in terror of what might await them. Nor does every religion even offer the hope of an afterlife. Judaism, for one, has never been much concerned with the idea; reincarnation, while it promises some kind of survival, doesn’t offer the happy dream of reunion with one’s loved ones in an eternal Sunday afternoon. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.4312), and again I agree:

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?