Whiplash: Move Over 50 Shades of Grey

Everything about the movie, “Whiplash,” including its title, suggests to me that its main supporting character, Terrence Fletcher (played by J.K. Simmons, who won Oscar for best supporting actor) should be dressed throughout the flick in black leather and chains, jackboots and crotch-less chaps. There’s a name for this genre, but it’s one that Hollywood doesn’t typically honor on Oscar night. 

The positive critical response to this appalling movie is bewildering. I have seen a lot of forgettable movies; this one is unforgettably bad. I mean that—the more I think about it, the more I dislike it, the more it arouses my hostility toward its pretense, toward the smug way it assumes to have achieved a statement—about what it takes to be excellent in a demanding field; about the value of being excellent, per se, above all other values associated with the effort to excel—that the story doesn’t support, a story that is dominated and obscured in any case by the repellent figure at its center. 

It is ostensibly a story about an aspiring jazz drummer (Andrew Neyman, played by Miles Teller) who is accepted into an elite music conservatory and falls under the tutelage of one of those mercilessly demanding mentors who pushes you beyond what you think you can do because of (we are supposed to assume) his great love and respect for the elite field you are entering. It’s a stereotype, but it’s one that repays revisiting for a lot of reasons—because the relationship between mentor and student is one that is, in some form, almost universally experienced; because the relationship is one that is almost always fraught, a power struggle very often invoking courage, determination and love; and because it is a vehicle for re-telling what is perhaps the most ennobling of human stories, the story of a character who achieves excellence. Consider a film, “Bull Durham,” very far removed in content and intent from Whiplash, but one that is also essentially about a mentor-student relationship; what makes it work—and what makes it, despite its antic humor, a serious movie—is the unashamed love the movie and its characters evince toward the art form that is the movie’s subject, the art of baseball.

It is just this—any real demonstrated love or passion for music, jazz, jazz musicians, jazz clubs, the history of jazz, the entire ethos of jazz that is for some people (I’m not one of them) a way of life —that is missing from Whiplash. On Andrew’s part his passion for the music is suggested in a few cut-away shots of him as a little boy at a drum set, and by gazing dreamily at his posters of Buddy Rich (I am no kind of aficionado of jazz—at all—but even I knew enough to doubt that Buddy Rich is any kind of real inspiration; I seem to recall he got famous briefly in the 60s or early 70s by appearing on the Ed Sullivan show as a guy who could hit the drums really fast). But Fletcher himself appears to be positively bored by the music; in the first scene where he appears to rehearse his elite band he walks to the conductor’s stand, reads a sheet of music to himself and mutters, “Cute.” He’s bored, it seems, by everything except his own cruelty, which really fires him up. Fletcher humiliates Andrew and his other student musicians with ethnic slurs, taunts about their sexual orientation, and aspersions on the size and functionality of their genitals.  

I wouldn’t begrudge J.K. Simmons his Oscar—it could be that the strength of his performance so outshines that of the others that it unbalances the entire story, drawing all the attention to Fletcher (and his wretchedness). But quite apart from Fletcher, the story is poorly told, weakly supported, or just plain not credible in so many places. The love interest: Andrew scuttles a relationship with a sweet, unpretentious girl before it has begun (yes, that’s the point, it’s supposed to demonstrate Andrew’s single-minded dedication to being the best drummer he can be—but the problem is that it’s scuttled before the viewer has seen enough to even care about the relationship). The girl’s intelligent, incredulous retort sounds like snarky subterfuge from a late-hired editor aimed at the director, or the primary screen writer, or whoever it was that was responsible for this silly, transparent set-up. “What’s wrong with you?” she hurls at him before stalking off.

There’s a curious scene somewhere in the middle of the movie of a dinner table conversation in which we are meant to see that Andrew’s talents are not appreciated by others than his father. But who are these people who show up with Andrew and Dad at the dinner table? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Oh, well, no matter, the scene is over quickly and they don’t show up again. 

Fletcher evinces no convincing feeling for the music, but he does care about winning competitions and about his reputation. There is a bar scene dialogue between Andrew and Fletcher after Andrew has testified to authorities about Fletcher’s abuse, resulting in the teacher being canned (we are supposed to believe that Fletcher isn’t aware that it is Andrew who betrayed him, and we are supposed to be surprised later when we learn that he was aware, but in fact this felt intuitively unbelievable when I watched it)—in this bar scene Fletcher announces his doctrine of Achievement Uber Alles. He bases it on a story about Charlie Parker being terrorized by a mentor. (This story is disputed by Richard Brody in his New Yorker review of Whiplash; Brody cites Stanley Crouch’s biography of Parker for a very different version). Whether the story is apocryphal or not, the doctrine (the greatest tragedy would be not to have pushed, by any means necessary, Charlie Parker to become Charlie Parker) is transparent bullshit; or, rather, what is bullshit is the tone of moral superiority in which it is announced and the implicit assumption that Fletcher’s notion is unassailable, unquestionable. In fact, it is I think a fairly serviceable definition of fascism. (Not at all incidentally, Bull Durham, mentioned above, manages to assert the dignity of not achieving elite status, of being a dedicated journeyman in the middle grades or minor leagues of a difficult meritocracy. Fletcher, I imagine, would have only contempt for this assertion, although I think Crash Davis could probably beat him up in a bar fight.)

This movie’s insistent awfulness makes me wonder what in the world its creator might have been thinking. And in fact there is a story buried in this movie, one that might have been meant to be told. For there is, I believe, an idea in the popular imagination (that is, in the minds of people like me who may like jazz when they hear it, but not really be wise in any sense to what it is about or how it gets made). This idea is a product, in part, of the art of improvisation, which I take to be a singular stroke of genius of jazz music; but it is probably also a result of some stories, apocryphal or not, that get told about how certain jazz greats seemed to take to their instruments without even trying. The idea is this—that jazz music does not require practice, diligence, hard work, sweat, tears or blood on their instruments; that jazz musicians just do their thing because they were born with that “jazz thing” that the rest of us were born without. 

It is an idea that certainly needs a well-made movie to kick to the curb, violently if necessary. But that story would have required the movie and its characters to really engage with the music, to show us—so, how do jazz musicians learn to do that magical thing they do? 

What’s left instead is a story not about Andrew Neyman, aspiring drummer, but about Terrence Fletcher, sadist and fascist with a personality disorder. As I say, there is a name for this genre, every major motif of which “Whiplash” manages to score—the waif-like hero who wanders into the lair of a cruel, dominating figure; the submission of the waif to punishment and humiliation; the effort by the waif to escape but his eventual return for more abuse; and the ultimate scene (this is supposed to offer catharsis) when the submissive waif upends the dominant figure. Aficionados will recognize this last move as “topping from the bottom” and the genre they love and adore as—move over Fifty Shades of Grey—S&M.

Pointing Beyond Absence: Mark Strand, Poetry, and the Voice You Are Waiting to Hear

When I was 25, no great or avid reader of poetry, I read in a magazine the following poem, entitled, “Itself Now,” by Mark Strand and was so struck by it that I cut it out and taped it to the wall over my bed-stand.

They will say it is feeling or mood, or the world, or the sound
The world makes on summer nights while everyone sleeps—
Trees awash with wind, something like that, something
As imprecise. But don’t be fooled. The world
Is only a mirror returning its image. They will say
It is about particulars, making a case for this or that,
But it tries only to be itself. The low hills, the freshets,
The long dresses, even the lyre and dulcimer mean nothing,
The music it makes is mainly its own. So far
From what it might be, it always turns into longing,
Spinning itself out for desire’s sake, desire for its own end,
One word after another erasing the world and leaving instead
The invisible lines of its calling: Out there, out there. 

 Just recently, many years later and just three months after Strand’s death at the age of 80, I read that he was an avowed atheist. Although I think I could have guessed that he might not have been any kind of conventional, orthodox believer, nevertheless this surprised me—a little bit anyway. I don’t suppose anyone would call “Itself Now” a “devotional” poem, but is it not very obvious that the poet feels creation to be animated by something so elusive as to defy the categories of prose? Call it an emptiness that always turns into a longing to be filled—with knowing, with relationship, with whatever might be the opposite of emptiness—but which resists it also, for to be filled would profane the purity of its own emptiness. And so it exists always as a desire unfulfilled, a possibility, a future leaving only the invisible lines of its calling—which is to be always out there, still to come, yet to be attained, an eternal tomorrow.

A most pensively abstract poem, it might be said, though when I read it as a younger man it spoke to me as of something quite real, concrete and close at hand. Now, consider this poem by Strand called “The Continuous Life,” which I came across after I began to look for his work, a poem that (in my reading) comes to the same place but seemingly from an opposite direction.


What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender, 
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty, 
Have run their course? Oh, parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name, 
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave and wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.    

I met Mark Strand once, twenty years ago. I was on a date with the woman who would become my wife and we had gone to a reading by him—not a poetry reading, per se, but his reading of a lyric book he had written about the painter Edward Hopper. Wine was served before the reading and guests could chat casually with the poet; my wife-to-be and I perceived that he was, perhaps, slightly tipsy in an entirely endearing way. He was teaching at the time at a certain esteemed east coast institution of higher learning, and when we asked him about it, he had this to say, which I have never forgotten, about his colleagues in academia: “They’re smart but they’re barbarians.”

Poetry is sorely afflicted with the aura that hangs about it of preciousness and solecism and academia—such that many who might actually be sustained and buoyed by poetry run from it as from a plague; others roll their eyes and smirk. Some of this is due, no doubt, to the way poetry is generally taught in high school and college, but it is also probably a result of certain trends in modernism, or in modernist poetry, which reached their apogee, I think, with T.S. Elliott. I am not a reader of Elliott, but I think I have read that his declared intention was to create a poetry that was loosed of all traces of aural ornament, of the musicality of lyric. John Updike recalled that in the 50s Elliott could fill a college auditorium with reverent fans, but he went on to wonder if, in 50 or 100 years, anyone who read, say, “The Waste Land,” would even recognize it as poetry. And it does seem that if your intention is to drain poetry of lyricism, then what you are doing is draining the poetry from poems.

It wasn’t always like this. Poetry began as storytelling, to be declaimed, read out loud. (And even when one is alone in a room with a book, the “reader” of a poem must be a listener if he or she is to hear what’s being said.) Bards and troubadours of early English poetry were something, sort of, kind of like our popular music artists today. (I, for one, do absolutely count Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and many other masters of popular music as poets. And if someone were to then insist that I must include rap and hip-hop artists as well, so be it. Dare I suggest that poetry is a large mansion of many rooms, and that what happens in poetry is something so exclusively between the poet and the listener, that you may find your room, close the door and ignore what you consider to be noise and foolishness coming from other quarters of the house?)

Nearly 30 years after I came across Strands’ poem and taped it to my bedroom wall, I still cannot say that I am today a great or avid reader of poetry. But it has come to be important to me, as a reader and as a writer, and I can say I value it as a form of expression more than I did then. I do write poetry, too, have done so off and on (mostly off) since I was a child; as a teenager I had a teacher who was himself a fine poet—published and all of that—who taught me and some others a few fundamentals of how to do it. Some time I ago I resolved (and wrote somewhere in a journal) that to write mediocre or bad poetry was no great crime, as long as you didn’t flaunt it. And to try to do something that is difficult is always a worthwhile thing. I work professionally as a writer of a certain kind of journalism, what’s called a “niche” for a fairly specialized audience, and it is as far from poetry as one can possibly get on the printed page, but I find that writing poetry has aided me even in that far backwater of writing. For something I find that writing poetry does is to compel one to concision—to take an image, or an emotion engendered by an event or occurrence, in either of which is embedded a story you want to tell, and get to the point. Poetry, like diamonds, is created by an enormous force of compression; it is almost as if the force of that compression is the very force of the emotion a poem creates. Doing this well, I can testify, is very, very difficult.

With great compression of detail and emotion, the two poems by Mark Strand point beyond themselves –to the alternating sense of emptiness and urgency that characterizes human life. Is it possible that what we are looking for when we talk about looking for god is embedded in the very randomness and emptiness—pointlessness, it may feel like in our worse moments—that haunts our lives? You could write a theological dissertation about this conundrum—someone probably has—but while some people may read such a thing, who would really care to love it, let alone memorize it? But people do love poetry, memorize it, recite it aloud or to themselves in their darkest moments, in times of triumph and celebration.

Great poetry need not concern itself with matters so identifiably spiritual or esoteric to point beyond itself, to lift people out of their reverie or the torpor that befalls us when the world seems devoid of music. I have read a memorable poem about taking rubbish to a landfill with one’s children; there is delightful religious devotional poetry, there are exceptional patriotic poems; and of course there is a great surfeit of startling poetry about human love—sexual, filial, and altruistic. And there is poetry that speaks to grave historical events. I think it is fair to say there are at least some lovers of poetry who would venture that one of the greatest, if not the single finest, poem ever written in the 20th century was the 99 lines inscribed by a young man who was at the time of his creation a devoted follower of international socialism; he set his masterpiece in a Manhattan dive bar, where he contemplated with his fellows in uncertainty and fear the Nazi invasion of Poland. “September 1, 1939” is as tense and terse and grave a proclamation as you can ever hope to hear; it captures with great concision not just a moment in history, when people everywhere were obsessed by the waves of anger of fear then circulating over the bright and darkened lands of the earth; it seems to capture also in that moment the story of our western world—the enlightenment, and the enlightenment driven away. W.H. Auden later, so I have read, after he left behind Europe and international socialism, came to dislike his poem very much—but that is the prerogative of genius, which snubs its nose at things the rest of us can spend the rest of our lives trying to imitate. Auden’s poem speaks to me and to many others in our own deeply troubled time. I have always thought it said something encouraging about our American culture that “September 1, 1939” appeared on billboards in New York City and made the rounds of email in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks in September 2001. 

Surely, poetry has the virtue of being varied enough in its forms that anyone who hunts around long enough will surely find something that speaks to them—and speak to them in a very specific way so that the reader (the listener) can imagine the poem was written for them, or else that it says something they have been trying to say all their lives, or in some voice that sounds like their own, or a voice they wish they had. When I pinned that poem by Mark Strand above my bed stand more than 25 years ago it wasn’t because of any tortured conceptualization about God or lack of God, presence or absence. It was because something about the voice of the poet sounded exactly like a voice I thought I knew or had been waiting to hear; or perhaps it was the way I thought I sounded myself, when I heard my voice in my own head, or how I imagined it would sound if my voice were so elegantly organized in cadence and imagery—slightly abstracted but trying amiably to connect to the real felt world around me. If it were a painting in a museum, I would stare it at for a long time and finally be able to say only, “Gosh, that’s beautiful.” And if someone had demanded to know what it meant I would have thought a long while and finally been able to come up only with a shrug. “What it means, maybe,” I might venture to say, “is that I have one more reason to be glad I’m alive.”

Let Us Now Praise Andrew Sullivan

Against the dreadful, spirit-lowering acid rain of what we call our politics, and the leaden grey dross of what passes for political commentary, two things have stood out for me as hopeful in the past distressed decade-and-a-half since 9/11—the popularity of Christopher Hitchens, and the success of Andrew Sullivan’s blog “The Daily Dish.” Hitchens left us three years ago, having given everyone the experience of a seriously radical thinker and political pugilist who might just as convincingly have forged a reputation as a literary critic. The nominally “intellectual” political writers he leaves behind are, with an exception or two, little better than cheerleaders (Go left wing! Go right wing!).
   And now Andrew Sullivan—Sully—is closing up shop.  My first reaction, I confess, was confusion—Andrew told us he was worn out from blogging and no one could blame him, particularly the way he blogged, at a high pitch of serious concern. But why did the blog itself have to go, especially now that The Dish had grown into a lot more than a one-man show? Well, appears a lot of other readers have the same thought, and hope, that The Dish should continue.
   So perhaps the Dish will live on, Sully-less. But in the meantime let us now praise him for creating something entirely new in the blogosphere. What The Dish is today is something like a variety magazine: politics, poetry, humor, religion and spirituality, art and artists, photography, whimsy, sexuality, literature, beards. I wonder what I am leaving out. And when he began offering the full text of his blog to subscribers who could choose their own subscription rate, he opened up a new business model for writers.
   I think his eclecticism accounts for what attracted me to Sullivan in the first place. Sullivan is a political junkie who seems to know that politics is secondary (this used to be a conservative theme)--subordinate to literature, poetry, manners, fun, faith and spirituality, sex, family and marriage. Like Hitchens (with whom he was bosom friends) he is not a team player—and in Sullivan’s case the team he spurns day-after-day is contemporary American conservativism. An admirer of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan, Sullivan is a conservative who insists that it is American conservativism that has gone off the grid. In The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How We Can Get It Back, he lays out his case—but I'm bound to say that its not as good a read as his blog. The immediacy of blogging—sometimes I think you could hear him hyperventilating through the page—is an animating force for Sullivan.
   The mainstream conservative thinkers, writers and media outlets have mostly ignored him, it seems. One could point to his militancy about gay rights, or to his tendency to emotionality bordering on hysteria, or to the fact that he has recently taken up criticizing the Israelis. But the real reason I think is that he doesn’t play the game, he won’t be a cheerleader—so they don’t know what to make of him.
   A gay rights activist, yet a devout Catholic who writes seriously and thoughtfully about atheism and skepticism, a conservative critical of American conservatives, a writer and thinker who is not afraid to publish sharp criticism from his readers, a political junkie who can think and write about something other politics—Sullivan plays for no team, but the team of true writers and thinkers who make us think. Whether The Dish continues or not, I'm going to miss Andrew Sullivan and I think American politics and culture will be the poorer for his leaving.

Charlie Hebdo: On Political Correctness, Speaking Freely, and the Need to Lighten Up

Recent events have demonstrated, as events have many times in the past, how controversies that barely reach room temperature in our colossal country surrounded by unthreatening neighbors and two huge oceans and cushioned by a gargantuan economic margin for error, in Europe frequently turn deadly.

   The tense boundaries between free speech, good taste, and regard for religious and ethnic sensibilities in a fraught religious and racial society erupted this month in Paris in the massacre of cartoonists and staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here in America, the same volatile controversies are played out most noticeably, when they are noticed at all, in the coddled atmosphere of the nation’s college campuses— defused, emulsified and distilled for our contemporary culture wars as the tepid little cocktail called “political correctness.”

   Beyond the general disgust at the killings, there was in the reaction of many here in America a certain amount of politically correct hypocrisy and/or operatic dramatization that actually revealed (while pretending otherwise) the dynamics of consensus-driven speech, of “saying the right thing” at the expense of more complicated nuances.
   The hypocrisy was largely on the side of the left, noted by David Brooks in his article, “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo,” which pointed out that here in the land of the first amendment, Charlie Hebdo would likely never be allowed to be published, certainly if it was attempted on a college campus.

Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.

  
In the 1990s when “political correctness” began to be taken up by the conservative right as a talking point (or shouting point), I tried to believe that the whole thing was a fabrication, something ginned up by talk radio. I don’t believe so anymore. On college campuses, liberal left political correctness of the sort described by Brooks is commonplace. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an extremely interesting woman, exceptionally bright (also very prickly and difficult, I have read) who escaped from an oppressive Islamic upbringing in Somalia to pursue a startling career as a legislator in Holland, then as an intellectual here in the United States. But she now writes and thinks for conservative think tanks, is an extreme hawk in the war on terror, has spoken out against not only the most heinous practices of radical Islam, such as genital mutilation, but also against Islam generally, has ridiculed “multiculturalism” (one of these days I’m going to have to find out what that actually means) and is generally a darling of the American right—so college campuses prohibit her from speaking.
   None of this is good for free speech or for education; nor is it good for the left, I think. Don’t like what someone is saying? Say something smarter, better, more persuasive.
   But Brooks also went on to say that outrageous satire and ridicule, of the sort that Charlie Hebdo engages in, is a kind of commentary that, while occasionally useful and revelatory, grown-ups generally outgrow.

….When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to “épater la bourgeoisie,” to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs.

   But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. (Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.) Most of us do try to show a modicum of respect for people of different creeds and faiths. We do try to open conversations with listening rather than insult.
  
(He went on further to posit a “grown-ups” table where the commentators of Le Monde and presumably, though he didn’t say so, The New York Times, sit, while the satirists and court jesters of Charlie Hebdo, and those of the more tepid American variety, sit at the kiddie table. A tad arrogant, you might say, but how delicious is it that he placed Ann Coulter at the kiddie table?)
   The operatic dramatization was on the side of the cartoon right, which suddenly seized on socialist leaning France, so uncooperative in our misadventure in Iraq, as standard-bearer in the fight against terrorism. “For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory,” wrote Adam Gopnik, who placed the cartoonists in a long tradition of French irreverent satire dating to the 19^th century. The magazine, whose motto was “Nothing Sacred,” was regularly savage toward French Catholics and Catholicism, and caricatured Christ in ways that Sarah Palin might in another context have found to be one more objectionable instance of liberal-left sacrilege.
   On both sides there was a “right thing to say” and the right thing to say was, along with Twitter tweeters everywhere, Je’ suis Charlie. Less common, or at least less audible over the chorus of the righteous, was the voice of one such as Stephen Litt, who pointed out in an exceptional Cleveland Plain Dealer column that the cartoons of Islamic figures in Charlie Hebdo play heavily on exaggerated physical features—uncomfortably echoing anti-semitic Nazi caricatures of Jews. Litt also cited Gopnik’s column and argued in retort, that the satirists of revolutionary France had aimed their slings and arrows at kings and priests and the landed powerful, whereas the modern-day satirists of Charlie Hebdo were lampooning a segment of French society that appears to be hopelessly on the bottom, with no way up. That’s another important factor in understanding what happened in Paris on January 7 and another reason why it was weird to see the American right becoming all Frenchy: France’s vast social insurance structure has provided its people an unprecedented cushion of benefits—a very high level of healthcare accessible to all French-born citizens from birth to death (in a system in which no one ever asks the patient if they have insurance), extensive sick leave, extravagant maternity-leave benefits, paid vacation of the sort unheard of in America, a very generous retirement fund—while also making upward mobility virtually impossible. Adam Gopnik himself (the New Yorker’s expert on all things French) wrote in an entirely different context, the following: “Every Frenchman who is not outright destitute sits…within a domain of private benefits that he enjoys by virtue of his place in civil society. The triumph of the Fifth Republic was to have expanded that domain so that it included nearly everybody. The people who are left outside now seem to be left outside for good. The North African immigrants…are not just a minority; they are without any entrée at all. They are called, simply, the excluded.”

 

**********

“It is not enough to have free speech,” Christopher Hitchens wrote once in a withering column on the subject of political correctness. “People must learn to speak freely.”

   In that essay written during his days at The Nation, Hitchens made the point that political correctness was by no means confined to the left, or to college campuses, or to the sometimes innocuous or silly issues with which the campus left occupies itself (“empowerment etiquette,” Hitchens called it). Rather, he said, “the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics.” It is the “culture of euphemism” by which everyone learns to repeat certain phrases—say, “peace process”—that may cover a multitude of sins everyone agrees to overlook, “a public language by which almost nobody employs plain speech.” For palpable evidence of what Hitchens is talking about, spend some time watching the Sunday political talk shows where cabinet officials and other dignitaries are supposed to answer questions posed by journalists. After several hours and a torrent of words, you will realize that no one has answered anything, or told you anything you don't already know--that's the point, and even the journalists seem to be in on the game.
 People must learn to speak freely. It’s harder to do, I believe, than many people may think. The hand of the social censor works its way into many a text. You get riled up about something; you sit at the laptop and produce a masterpiece of savage wit and brutally insurmountable logic and reason. You sit back and think—my god, people will never be the same after they read this. You are just about to hit the “send” button when a vision of this thing as it will actually look in print appears in your mind and the thought occurs to you unbidden: I wonder what my friends at church will think. You contemplate this for a moment, feeling a little less triumphant, and then you think again: I wonder what my daughter’s friends’ parents will think (they have all the wrong opinions, you are sure) or what her teachers will think. And what if, having been routed by your brilliance, they start to subtly take out their angry bias against your pride and joy?
   So you go back to the masterpiece to soften it here and there, toss a bone to the other side, round down the edges of your angriest rhetoric—and before you know it what you send to the local rag is just a slight variation on the conventional wisdom. That’s a caricature perhaps, but David Brooks is right—we are social beings and we strive, if we are grown-ups, to be polite and even-handed. But in just such microcosmic ways does wisdom risk becoming conventional, then trite, then meaningless.
   Sometimes the language of political correctness is not so passive, but employs certain phrases that no one (or not everyone) can really define, but which are widely agreed—with little or no examination—to be either very good or very bad, and hence can be used as a weapon to intimidate anyone who might dare to examine the subject further. My favorite candidate in this category is the phrase “socialized medicine,” which has been employed for more than 80 years by the American right to strangle any rational discussion about a publicly funded healthcare system that might finance a basic level of healthcare services for all. This phrase gets applied in all kinds of ways—it has been used to describe the Affordable Care Act, which preserves and enriches the private insurance industry and which was supported by the major for-profit, stockholder-driven private insurance companies—and although I think many people who use the term most promiscuously could not actually describe what a socialized healthcare system looks like (or just as important, what it doesn't look like), everyone it seems knows that it is a very, very, very bad thing.  
      Speaking freely does require a certain amount of reckless courage to break through the miasma of passively acquired non-speech, as well as the coerciveness of accepted but unexamined platitudes. Which is why we honor, or at least tolerate, the satirists at the kiddie table, whether they are the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo or our own Ann Coulter, and why we are right to be outraged when they are prohibited, let alone massacred. But if our aim is to be something more than outrageous, if our aim is the truth—so evasive in this vale of misinformation, misunderstanding, mediocrity and bullshit—then speaking freely will also require intelligence, discernment, and an wide-eyed awareness of the possibility that we might just possibly be wrong.
   Would we risk our college campuses being bombed and shot up if Ayaan Hirsi Ali were allowed to say what she says? Well, we have risked—and we have reaped—a great deal of murderous mayhem at our nation’s schools and elsewhere in our zeal to protect the right of people to own guns and assault rifles. And if thoughtful Muslims and non-Muslims can organize themselves they can talk back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and say something better, smarter, and more persuasive.

   Much homage has been paid to free speech by many of us who don’t know how hard it is to speak freely, or how easily we all fall into repeating things that obscure a great many nuances. But there is finally also this to be said: that all of us who hold our deities and ideals so dear—everywhere, but certainly here in America where we have so great a margin for error—need, for God’s sake, to lighten up. It is not possible that anyone’s God can be so thin-skinned and quick to take offence as we in our age have become about almost everything.

   I am reminded of the remarks by a notable writer recalling his teenage years when he went through what he called a “crisis of faith”; he felt he no longer believed in God. He went to his rabbi to tell him the troubling news. The rabbi has likely long since left us but he is, I believe, on the short list of humankind’s lasting friends. And though his response may have stunned or shocked the teenage atheist, I believe it must have also been received as oddly comforting. For what he told his young unbeliever was this: “Do you think God really cares?”

We Were Here: Remembering the North American AIDS Epidemic

 

The title of We Were Here, the 2011 documentary about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco tells you why it was made: a nearly cataclysmic event that changed the social and cultural landscape is about to tip into the mists of barely remembered history (at least as an event that made itself felt in North America); but a cohort of men and women were there in the eye of this vortex of sickness and death, and are here to remind you. A little like “Shoah,“ the Holocaust history by Claude Lanzmann, We Were Here takes an epic historical event and recreates it from the bits and pieces of it that were experienced by individual men and women. With the exception of Shoah, it is the best piece of oral history rendered on the screen that I know of.    

A lot, let’s face it, has happened since 1981 when the epidemic first surfaced, and some people may be inclined to think of the crisis—as many did at the time—as something that affected a small, isolated cohort of the population. In this they would be missing, and misreading, quite a lot. The most acute phase of the AIDS crisis in North America (it is still very acute in the Third World) was a hinge event, with a distinct “before” and “after.” We Were Here tells a story that straddles both sides of the hinge.

It is told through the stories of five San Franciscans, four gay men and a female nurse who worked the AIDS ward in San Francisco General Hospital. They are all now in their fifties and beyond, and carry with them the weathered wisdom of survivors. And they are all distinct personalities; together they round out a portrait of a community. They are Paul Boneberg, a political activist; Daniel Goldstein, a highly accomplished artist; Ed Wolfe, a shy and awkward volunteer at the Shanti Project, which linked the sick and dying with healthcare services, their families (where it was possible) and with home and community-based services; Guy Clark, a flower salesman who for 28 years commandeered a post at a corner in the Mission District; and Eilleen Glutzer, a bedside nurse.

Each in their own way is perfect—perfectly themselves, and telling their own story their own way, a story without which the rest would not be whole. Paul arrived in San Francisco in the mid-70s, bearded and lanky-haired (“We were just crazy dreamers,” he says over a photo of himself meditating bare-footed on the beach), but later is seen in suit and tie, clean cut (in the wide-lapelled, big-haired way of the period) being interviewed on television and demanding action from the federal government. Daniel came to the City to be an artist and because, he says, “I always wanted to meet a cute, blonde surfer.” Gregarious, big-hearted and social, he is the only one of the four men who was infected; he has seen a lot of death. “None of my friends are around from the beginning,” he said. In the earliest days, before scientists or doctors even knew what they were fighting, he participated in an experimental trial of a drug (Surinam) whose side effects were so vicious it killed a number of subjects before the trial was halted; Daniel dropped out early enough to be spared. Eilleen has a clinical view of the illness (“One of the infectious disease guys said, `why don’t you put on gloves Eilleen, we don’t know what this is,’” she recalls being told when the tide of illness was just beginning to swell) but she is loveable and warm and human (“I love bedside nursing.”) And she displays a genuine fellow-feeling for her dying patients with whom she used to go clubbing and dancing. “I think a lot of us came to San Francisco because we didn’t quite fit where we were,” she said. Guy has a street-level view of the illness from the days before and the days after. Of those days before, he recalls, “If you had a bus ticket it had better be saying San Francisco, because that was the place to be.” Ed is a most inspired inclusion; shy and awkward—and yet oddly self-possessed in his awkwardness—he didn’t fit into the high-speed, fast-lane lifestyle of the period. “I was terrible at anonymous sex,” he says, rolling his eyes.

We Were Here brings the period alive, and vividly renders the social context in which thousands of young gay men descended on the Castro, as they did in gay ghettos in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, in the 1970s, seeking “liberation” in the only way it was understood at the time—in a vigorous pursuit of sex, presumed to be without consequence. The abandon with which young men felt free to indulge this pursuit can scarcely be imagined today; in flight from homes and communities that did not sanction anything like “normal” courtship, romance, and commitment between men, what was to be expected of them when they arrived, together by the thousands, in cities of relative tolerance and told to finally be who they were? “ “You get a whole lot of young men in their twenties and early thirties together and tell them to have as much sex as they can,” Paul says. “How much sex are they are going to have?.....A lot of sex.”

(The bathhouses, treated censoriously by Randy Shilts in The Band Played On, are given a slightly softer touch here. They were not always, or only, venues for lonely, soul-less, anonymous sexual encounters, but a kind of community gathering joint. “A big group of us, all my friends, would go together,” Daniel recalls. “We called it `going to church.’….It was fun.” In time, though, the baths were closed when evidence became irrefutable that they were vectors of deadly infection. The “controversy” that surrounded the closure—some argued along what might be considered standard conservative lines that it amounted to a state intrusion into private lives; others claimed it was a threat to gay identity, perilously founded on sexual freedom—is viewed in the documentary in the context of really more ominous efforts, such as an initiative that received serious consideration to quarantine the infected.)

It was in the summer of 1981 that the Centers for Disease Control published, in its jauntily titled “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” an article describing cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, in five young, previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles. All the men had other unusual infections as well, indicating that their immune systems were not working; two were already dead by the time the report was published. In short order, reports came in of similar cases from around the country; some of these reports included cases of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, believed to be primarily a disease of aging Jewish men, now appearing among young gay men.

In the movie, Ed describes a vivid and haunting moment from that summer, stopping at a shop window on Castro Street to peruse a handmade flyer showing photos of the infection sores that covered a man’s throat and tongue. “Watch out guys, there’s something out there,” he recalls the flyer stating. His recollection is heard over a black-and-white photo of young men clustered around the flyer; it’s clear (and Shilts’ history is especially good on this point) that there had already been a mounting apprehension in the community, well before there was anything approaching a public recognition of a health hazard. (As it happens, I was travelling through San Francisco in August the year before—I was 20—taking a bus excursion across the country and staying at youth hostels along my way. At the hostel in Fort Mason on the wharf I somewhat vaguely remember asking at the desk where the Castro neighborhood was and being warned about going there; something was going around. I knew nothing about it at all; but I was in any case far too conflicted and remember strolling past Castro Street curiously, as if I was looking up the street out of the corner of my eye; it was a lazy mid-morning, mid-week, in summer—nothing to see. What, I wonder, did I expect?)

In time, pictures of San Francisco’s dead gay men would fill page after page after page of a special issue of the Bay Area Reporter. Ed Wolfe describes his first encounters with the afflicted, working with the Shanti Project. His job was to make friends, connect them to services in the community they needed, connect them to family when it was possible (“I’d rather have a dead son than a gay one,” one father told him of his vanquished child.)   

It was a kind of leveling for him, an opening for a sweet and human soul to connect to the community around him. In a statement somehow emblematic of what may have been happening between gay men throughout the city, and in stricken neighborhoods in other cities, he said, “Suddenly, my whole way of being with gay men changed.” The Shanti Project was one of the most successful of a number of efforts to deal with the widening plague. The AIDS ward in San Francisco General would be a model—the “San Francisco model,” in fact—of wrapping around the patient not just medical care but a variety of home and community-based services. Those in the know about trends in medicine and health care may know that a current buzz-phrase is “integrated care” or “collaborative care,” or alternately “the patient-centered medical home”—in any case, an endeavor to provide coordinated primary and specialty care (including mental health care). Promoted in various ways by the Affordable Care Act and seized upon by private sector insurance companies as more cost-efficient than the traditional system of ad hoc care—a doctor here for this ailment, a doctor there for that one—it seems to have passed the tipping point of a mere fad and promises something really transformative. What may not be so well known is that the specialists in AIDS care were doing collaborative, patient-centered care 30 years before anyone gave it a name.

We Were Here recreates an era some of us can remember well. For those too young to remember, this documentary may be a revelation: how far and fast things have changed in the space of a few generations, and how much the openness and opportunities enjoyed by young gay men and women is owed to the travails of an earlier generation. That may sound invidious to some, but it seems to me that whether we like it or not, this is the way history works—events and circumstances are born of the circumstances and events that preceded them; the “marriage equality” movement may not have achieved the successes it has, were it not for the changes the AIDS epidemic wrought, especially in the way gay men thought of themselves. The five story-tellers of We Were Here have moved on, found new partners or are otherwise living their lives in middle-age. One wonders, knowing what they endured, whether aging and all the drama the rest of us bring to merely growing old, can even touch them now. “I can begin to envision a future again,” says Daniel, whose art work can be seen in public spaces in major cities around the country. “My spirituality,” says Guy, the flower salesman, when asked what the epidemic gave to him. “It helped me find my spirit.” When the tidal wave of dying finally, in the early and mid-nineties, began to subside with the advent of the antiretroviral “cocktail” drugs, he recounts seeing again on the street one of the many—worse for wear, but now revived—who had previously been in a wheelchair, up and walking around. “He wasn’t quite what he used to be,” Guys says. And he adds, providing a kind of coda to the entire story, “But that’s okay, I’m not what I used to be either.”

Recalling Chestnut Lodge: Seeking the Human Behind the Disease

Photo courtesy of Peerless Rockville.

 

By Mark Moran

(Reprinted from Psychiatric News)

 

As a resident at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Md., “David” was not unlike many with schizophrenia at the famed institution—his illness was chronic and longstanding, he had been treated unsuccessfully with the few medications then available for psychosis, and the Lodge was not the first institution he had been to.

   For Thomas McGlashan, M.D., the young psychiatrist assigned to him, David was a vexation and, in time, an illuminating case study. Trained at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, McGlashan was drawn to the Lodge for its emphasis on intensive psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. “I was told `if you really want to do this kind of work with psychosis, the Lodge was the place to be,’ ” McGlashan recalled.

     So he analyzed unconscious motives and transferences and attempted to engage David in a therapeutic dialogue about his past and its relationship to his present difficulties; silence or evasion in therapy was interpreted as resistance.

   But David’s inability to engage was stubborn and began to seem less like a psychological symptom than a reflection of a neurological deficit. And his delusions were painful—for patient and therapist alike. “His voices were clearly torturing him,” McGlashan said. “After a while I started him on neuroleptics. That really made a difference—he still hallucinated, and the hallucinations were dysphoric, but they weren’t terrifying.”

   The Lodge was psychoanalytically oriented but open to experimentation, and McGlashan began to change his tactics. He let David enjoy the silence between them during therapy and instead concentrated on building the rudiments of an interpersonal relationship of the kind the patient had never had. They took walks together around the grounds of the hospital; later David earned privileges to leave for brief shopping trips in town on which McGlashan would accompany him.

   “Just being able to be with someone—a real person, not an inquiring therapist—was in itself a therapeutic goal,” McGlashan recalled. “I became essentially a companion.”

    It was a case example of how the approach to psychosis at the Lodge would change in coming years. In 1986, McGlashan hired Robert Heinssen, Ph.D., a cognitive-behavioral psychologist, as a research coordinator, and in time Heinssen would help organize an institution-wide treatment strategy for schizophrenia that combined antipsychotic medications with cognitive interventions, social skills training, psychiatric rehabilitation, and supported employment in the community.

   Today, McGlashan and Heinssen remember their experience at Chestnut Lodge as formative, laying the groundwork for an approach to schizophrenia emphasizing psychosocial and rehabilitative services to target what came to be understood as “negative symptoms”—avolition, poor cognitive function, lack of affect, and anhedonia—combined with the use of neuroleptic medication to treat positive symptoms of delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking.

   Most important, the legacy of intensive, one-on-one work with patients at the Lodge would underscore the developmental nature of schizophrenia. And the rich case histories of patients who passed through the institution—nearly always revealing signs of trouble that might have been apparent very early in patients’ lives, well before the onset of acute psychosis—would inform a new movement focused on early identification and intervention in the “prodromal,” or preclinical, stage of the disorder.

    Today, both men are leaders and champions of that movement, which started in Australia and has grown to include research projects in Europe and North America that promise to dramatically alter the trajectory of schizophrenia.

   In an interview with Psychiatric News, Heinssen noted that it was another Chestnut Lodge luminary—Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D.—who very early on presaged this direction in a prescient comment in 1927. “The psychiatrist deals with too many end states and deals professionally with too few of the prepsychotic [states]…,” Sullivan wrote in The Onset of Psychosis. “With this in mind it would seem we should lay great stress on the prompt investigation of failing adjustment, rather than, as is so often the case, wait and see what happens…. I feel certain that many incipient cases might be arrested before the efficient contact with reality is completely suspended, and a long stay in institutions made necessary.”

Lodge Begins to Change Course

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Anchor for JumpAnchor for Jump

The cottage where Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, M.D., lived still stands on the grounds of what used to be Chestnut Lodge.

Photo courtesy of Peerless Rockville

When McGlashan arrived at the Lodge in 1975, its renown had been established in part because of the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichman, M.D., a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and one of the émigré analysts who fled Europe during World War II; Fromm-Reichman was the real-life counterpart to the fictional “Dr. Fried” in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the best-selling autobiography by a former patient at the Lodge.

   At the time, the Lodge was a 70- to 80-bed hospital with seven inpatient units and a day hospital. McGlashan recalled that patients were routinely treated without medication (few drugs were available then for psychosis). “It was rationalized that most of the patients had been overmedicated,” he said. “Drugs were viewed as the enemy because they dulled the mind and inhibited feelings that were necessary to access in therapy.”

     But out of the experience of treating David and other patients, a pattern emerged, and McGlashan began to believe that the silences, inability to engage, and apparent lack of motivation were somehow intrinsic to the illness—rather than manifestations of “resistance” to therapy. In the 1980s he launched a long-term follow-up study of patients at the Lodge and in 1986 published a landmark paper that came to a dispiriting conclusion—roughly two-thirds of the schizophrenia patients were functioning marginally or worse at follow-up.

   Heinssen arrived at the Lodge that same year as a research coordinator; trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy, he was “an odd duck” among psychoanalysts at the Lodge, where there was little else in the way of structured therapy. Called to participate in a case conference for a patient whose family was extremely dissatisfied with the progress of treatment, he recalled that an outside consultant had recommended a more structured treatment plan built around social learning theory and a rehabilitative approach that would require the active involvement of nurses and staff as “change agents.”

    Heinssen liked the idea and suggested that a sub-unit of the hospital be dedicated as a behavioral treatment program for schizophrenia, using the consultant’s recommendations, and in 1988 the Lodge initiated a pilot program. The success of the program led the medical director—Dexter Bullard, M.D., whose family had owned the hospital since the turn of the century—to make the behavioral unit permanent, and in 1990 Heinssen was appointed director of behavioral treatment.

   The principles used in the inpatient unit were later adopted as a guiding philosophy for the institution’s approach to treating schizophrenia, and—partly owing to McGlashan’s follow-up findings—Heinssen contributed to the transformation of Chestnut Lodge in its last years of existence from a long-term residential facility devoted to psychoanalysis, to one offering a continuum of services including cognitive therapy, rehabilitation and social-skills training, partial hospitalization, and supported housing and employment in the community.

    At the same time, the seeds of a new movement aimed at early intervention and prevention of acute psychosis began to take root in Australia with the work of Patrick McGorry, M.D., who advocated staged treatment of at-risk individuals in the preclinical phase of the illness.

    It caught the attention of McGlashan who had come to the same conviction, an insight made possible by the psychoanalytic method and the highly individualized treatment approach at the Lodge. “For all of the patients who were admitted to the Lodge, there was this fantastically rich developmental data set that raised the question, `When did the disorder start?’ These records went way back [in each patient’s history] and were very detailed,” McGlashan said. “You could tell that in almost every case something started going wrong three or four years or more before the first psychotic break.”

   And when McGlashan left the Lodge in 1990 he resolved that the “prodrome”—the distinctive and lengthy risk period prior to acute psychosis—would become the focus of his work.

   Heinssen, too, shared this conviction and the imperative to begin looking “upstream” earlier in the developmental narrative of schizophrenia was brought home in a poignant dialogue with the mother of a patient who had been treated at the Lodge. Invited by a local chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill to speak about the innovations he had helped bring about at the Lodge, Heinssen recalled the conversation. “This woman’s son had `graduated’ from the behavioral program, he had started community college, he had a part-time job and was living in an apartment in the community,” Heinssen told Psychiatric News. “I’m thinking to myself, `this is a great outcome.’ But when his mother continued to speak to me, she burst out crying. She told me, `I know I should be grateful, but I can’t help thinking about what might have been.’ ”

Seeking the Human Behind the Disease

Today, Heinssen is the National Institute of Mental Health’s science officer for the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study, a nine-site consortium of clinical research programs dedicated to the early detection and prevention of psychotic disorders and other forms of serious mental illness. McGlashan has been a leading investigator in the ongoing Early Treatment and Intervention in Psychosis (TIPS) study in Scandinavia, and developed the Scale of Prodromal Symptoms, which is used to assess at-risk individuals for inclusion in early-intervention programs.

   The Bullard family sold the Chestnut Lodge property in the 1990s, and the hospital closed in 2001. The property changed hands several times before a developer purchased it with the intention of converting the property into condominiums; but on the morning of June 7, 2007, the main building burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.

    Its ruins—the old cottage where Fromm-Reichman lived still stands—persist as a monument to an extraordinary and heroic effort to understand the individual behind the psychotic disorder, an individual with a history and a human story that might have taken a different turn.

“There were some phenomenal teachers and therapists there,” Heinssen said. “To the uninitiated, people with psychosis can appear alien, and it is no surprise that they get pushed away. There is something extraordinarily unsettling about interacting with someone who experiences a different reality. But at the Lodge there were many heroic doctors and nurses who sought to find the human being behind the disease. They taught me to look beyond psychotic symptoms and to connect with the real person who has a soul and value and worth.”

Lucky you, lucky me

Today I came within a razor’s breath of having a collision with another vehicle on the road. I was at a stop sign waiting to turn right. Yes, there was some waiting involved—you know, how  wrong is it that the traffic coming from the right clears only in time for a bunch of cars to show up from the left? And you have to, you know, wait for god’s sake, for both sides to clear. It’s clearly an imposition on the way things should be. It did finally clear on the right and I was certain that just the instant before there had been no traffic from the left, so I began to pull into my turn. But just as I did so a car sped by from that direction—I would say well over the speed limit—one that must have come into range in that fractional instant I had chosen to glance at the smart phone in my lap for that text or email you sent me and which you know you would not want me to delay in seeing. It was a very close call and I think it would have been rather worse for him—the other guy—as he would have hurtled into the collision front-end first, at high speed and very possibly without a seatbelt.

A couple of weeks ago a man whom I never knew, but who was well known in his west side Cleveland neighborhood as the proprietor of one of Cleveland’s happiest casual venues, died young and suddenly, after a tumble down a flight of steps. That’s it—he fell down a flight of steps, a stairwell at the tavern he co-owned, so one that he must have climbed up and down a thousand times. Maybe the steps were wet that night. Maybe he’d had a drink or two. Maybe, for god’s sake, a shoelace was loose.(And actually someone I knew, and who knew the venue, told me those steps were treacherous.) Any way, he fell and must have fallen hard, and fallen in just such a way that his brain needed to darken the lights, permanently.

And last month, very early in the morning, a terrible fire broke out in the house where I lived. It was confined to the unit above me, where my landlady lived, but this was not a small kitchen fire gone a little out of control. The unit upstairs was largely destroyed, and I saw my landlady, whom I know and like as someone fair and friendly, carried out by firemen into the sub-zero night, unconscious and barely breathing. She survived, owing to the firemen and the EMS and the doctors and nurses at the burn unit where she was taken (in fact, she wasn’t burned, but suffered extensive smoke inhalation). But this could not have been confidently predicted when I saw her carried out in the frigid night, as my dog and I, bewildered, loitered amidst the fire trucks and cop cars and cops assembled in the street.

Though I would have to move abruptly, I do not feel in any way “traumatized” by this event, or aggrieved. (I was terrified, yes, at being woken by fire fighters pounding on my doors, storming the building, busting open locks in the house with a thunderous crash; and I was mortified at the sight of my landlady being carried out, something I will not quite forget.). The “event” itself was over rather quickly, owing again to the great skill and courage of the firefighters on the scene. And the truth is that while it was happening I never felt myself to be in personal danger.

However, I know that this could have changed quickly, and might have been—with the altering of a detail or two—a very different story. (It was the couple next door, unable to sleep, who saw the smoke coming from the second story windows and called 911.) And I have carried away from the episode a sense of something profound having passed my way—a sense of how quickly your life can change, of the hairpin turns it can take while you are, literally, asleep. And of the randomness of events. Awareness of randomness, of the absence of order in the universe, of a rational scheme to things, feels like an encompassing theme of middle age—or my middle age, at any rate. Who can fathom the meaning, an “intelligent design” behind a random tumble down a flight of stairs, the near miss at the traffic intersection, a sleepless couple who saved a life (and maybe mine) with a phone call?

In a whimsical, wise and unpretentious book written as a series of alphabetized observations, Laurie Kraus-Rosenthal, in “The Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life,” remarks on the ordinariness of random deaths.

There are so many ways to die at any given moment. Just look, look at all those ambulances in your rearview mirror. There are crashes and wrecks and collisions galore: cars, planes, Amtraks, ferries. You could have a heart attack; it’s not unlikely. A terminal illness you didn’t even know you had could, minutes from now, live up to its defining adjective. Now turn your attention to all the freak accidents lurking in the wings. A massive store display tips over (happened). A soccer goal post unroots itself and crushes a skull (happened). Shelving holding five thousand pounds of sheet metal or lumber at Home Depot collapses (imagined). A top bunk falls onto the bottom bunk (imagined). A strong wind unhinges scaffolding and blows it directly onto a sports car; inside are—were—two twenty-year-olds out shopping (happened). Aneurisms that burst midsentence, ending the life of an advertising executive, a promising playwright, a children's book author (happened, happened, and happened)…. People are just dying everywhere, all the time, every which way. What can the rest of us do but hold on for dear life.

Indeed. Is there anything more ordinary than dying, even when it happens in ways we think are startling or extraordinary? Is it possible that the really extraordinary thing is that we survive so many moments, one after the other? And then there is this scarily reproachful poem entitled “New Year’s Eve,” by Carl Dennis:

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor’s party to her parents’ farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at a body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with your character,
Don’t blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.

Lucky you, lucky me. The providence of luck, of the random, as I’ve grown aware of it has upended the shallower faith of my youth in the providence of a God who would favor me always because of my character—did you know that I’m a pretty good guy with pretty good intentions?—the faith that my good character would be a guarantor of success, an assurance that doors would open for me and lights would turn green. Never mind that, in fact, I have had a fairly blessed passage; I’ve seen enough to know it’s been a crap shoot.

A friend and an Episcopalian priest (who also by the way lived through a house fire when he was a teenager) advised me that he had long ago given up trying to “figure out” how God doles out good and bad fortune. Or why, by our lights, he does such a bad job of it. And it occurred to me later: what kind of allegiance—other than a wary, competitive, adversarial one—could such a god of obscure stratagems summon, even once you had “figured out” the strategy?

Maybe randomness itself is a gift. Because really, how much would we want a god who so intruded upon the course of things that our lives were fixed, as if we were playing craps at a table rigged in our favor to win, forever? Although it seems on the surface to be desirable, I wonder if in fact it wouldn’t come to seem oppressive and intolerable—as intolerable, come to think of it, as a life without death, without dying, in which you wake forever to days, one after the other, drained of salience and urgency. I can’t believe any longer in a God who fixes things if we say the right prayers, go to the right building on Sunday (or Saturday or Friday), but I can believe in one who suffers alongside of us in the randomness of his own creation —Emmanuelle, God-With-Us—a god who might thereby summon in return compassion, solidarity, fellow-feeling, the willingness to suffer with others. 

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, for a couple of weeks, I went about with a little buzz on, a heightened vigilance, and a keen desire to be careful—not just of dangerous things, but of people and their feelings. An instinct to be more mindful, more present. Well…..you can see how long it lasted before it gave way, at a busy intersection, to the siren call of that important text you sent me. Still, I would like to think that this instinct will stay with me, will return to me for practice from time to time.

Great poets may have a more lasting, penetrating and ecstatic sense of it, of the abyss above which we dangle by a thread. And the really enlightened—Jesus, the Bodhisattvas—may couple it with an intuition that what we call the abyss is just a velvet crease in the cupped hand of the universe, of Being itself. Being falling into Being.

Something like that. Meanwhile, the rest of us, sculling for clams in the shallow water, can hope to be a little more awake to each other every now and again, and should make do with some practical lessons--keep a working smoke alarm in your home, buy renters insurance, wear seatbelts and drive the speed limit, and put the goddamn phone away in the glove compartment when you’re driving.

Lucky you, lucky me, that we really do (as I think John Updike pointed out) survive every single moment, except for the very last one.