Any friend whose age is more than three score years and who has been out of touch for more than two score years has a way of capturing life’s evanescent characteristics in chillingly Lincolnesque terminology; it is even more sobering to realize that one has actually lived long enough to make it possible to have college classmates who could reappear after an absence of four decades, especially when one acknowledges that implicit in that realization is an unpleasant, if not grisly, observation that one has even fewer years remaining in one’s own life.  One is tempted to make the claim that youth measures time in units of infinity–a minute can explode into an eternity– and that prudence is the helpmeet of maturity; however, it is more likely that the young are arbitrary in the selection of whatever standard they apply; that life is both carousel and kaleidoscope, static and changing, rising from one turn and dissolving into another.  One generation becomes its own antecedent when age transforms its dreams into memories.

It is incorrect to assume that whenever we pause–to watch the wheels go round and round–that we have become immobile or even detrimentally idle when, in fact, our detachment has permitted us to regain a fresher perspective, equipped and enabled us to venture into the treacherous domain beneath the surface of the shell we call the self.  Of course the aim and hope, should we survive this episodic psychic spelunking, is that we will discover a world revived with its own light, a light to which we were once blind, and which retains an arcane potency to illuminate both literally and figuratively.  The eye is a gatekeeper of knowledge; the world we peruse is our lexicon, the cipher that corresponds to the landscape of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first wife died only two years after they were married; a little more than a year subsequent to her burial Emerson opened her coffin.  His reaction to death paralleled the Apostle Thomas‘ response reported in the Gospel of John to the resurrected Jesus; Emerson’s drive toward self-reliance was irrepressible and he had to see through his own eyes the remnants of death’s efficacy, the nail points of finality, the ineffable remains of love lost.  Whatever else he gleaned from his macabre gesture–doubt or proof–death was irrevocable; and, while he would afterward remarry and raise a family, Emerson’s love for his first wife, Ellen, remained intact; his life, however, the source of his vitality, would always be centered in the present.

While my given name is an eponym for doubt–paradoxically, it may also be considered an eponym for a type of belief–my own curiosity or need to know stops short of plunging into a loved one’s coffin to satisfy scientific inquiry.  On the other hand Emerson’s action is understandable.  Most of us do not awaken daily entertaining the possibilities that may await us.  Few of us confront the most sobering and irreversible of fates; and, fewer still are capable of the skill and grace of articulating our encounter as Keats demonstrated in his sonnet, When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be.  The boundary that death inscribes around one’s life seems implausible at first.  Whatever unit with which one reckons time, it does not prepare one for the sheer otherness of death and its satellites.  Who or what once was is no more.  A sentence trailing off as interest or expression loses its focus is hardly an instructive paradigm to prepare one for the loss of a loved one.   Experience prepares one for the enterprise of collecting the abstractions, the words cut loose from life, the rigid surrogates that attempt to imitate vitality, but its hospitality is a vain comfort for the bereaved, failing both love and reason.

It should not come as a surprise that one may tend to be more introspective whenever one encounters death–especially when the local newspaper seems to contain an inordinate number of obituaries of people who are one’s age or younger–or when one is confronted with injury or issues related to health, specifically those which have the chilling characteristics of being sudden, progressive, and without apparent origin.  Contemplating any person’s illness is daunting enough; however, when it involves one’s self, the mind can become overwhelmed by a legion of opinion and fear.  Most of us tend to brace ourselves with scenarios in which we are alternately healed or abandoned although neither may prove very likely once we commit our care to qualified professionals.

The mind needs the torque provided by some encounter with the natural world to keep it agile, vigorous and engaged–this is applicable, as well, to the constructs which derive from the mind’s activity such as the manifold forms of society, religions, governments, and the rich variety of cultures; however, death and illness are just two of the many powerful stimuli–the yeast to which Emerson referred–capable of attracting a process of the mind to its corresponding and edifying analog in nature.  The concern about my knee or the knowledge of my friend’s similar predicament, taken individually, is an insignificant event which bobs briefly before it sinks beneath the sea of consciousness; but, it is precisely this kind of abstraction and dismissive generality that severs the bond of intimacy that connects all that is.

I am unnerved from time to time when it occurs to me that, barring miraculous scientific discoveries in gerontology and depending on which life expectancy charts I adopt, I have consumed approximately 75% of that luscious apple pie my mother baked for me at my birth.  Although in one respect what remains of my life is a matter of simple addition or subtraction depending on one’s point of view–and truthfully that has always been the case regardless of one’s starting point on one’s continuum of aging–there remains a lifetime to complete.  While a sense of urgency has merit, becoming frenzied or harried as one re-calibrates the balance beam is inefficient and downright counterproductive.  The sun has risen far too high for me to be rescued by Herrick’s cavalier admonition To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time, although living every moment to its fullest is certainly applicable at any time of life.  Of course for Emerson the living present was the source of our sustenance; the living now, the creative process was rooted in self-knowledge and grounds for discovery.

Whether it was just my anxiety over a bum knee or commiserating with the plight of an old friend, it seems fittingly appropriate that now I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round, after all, Ezekiel said: the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

Among a host of other strengths, President Obama offers a thoughtful, measured approach to governance and coalition building among allies as well as pragmatic diplomatic overtures to those nations with which there are pronounced and substantive political difference.  It is precisely because of this characteristic of thoughtfulness that I find the decision to escalate the role of the US in Afghanistan as so out of sync with the other aspects of Obama’s administration.  I did not support either the US’s incursion into Afghanistan or its subsequent war with Iraq.  In both instances the measures were acts of retribution to absolve the government of failed political policies that short-sightedly treated symptoms instead of pursuing a more holistic approach to diagnose the cause of the ailment first and then to attempt to provide an appropriate remedy.  The necessity of war is always justified with the fallacy of spontaneous generation:  an assumption  which fails to acknowledge the inseparable connection of causality and time.  The conditions for war have never been immediate but rather developed over time due to acts of commission or omission and negligence; therefore, a specific outcome is not automatically mandated.  Alternatives depend on our imagination and industry, whereas war relies on our ability to sanctify killing as a pre-eminently divine right of retaliation–we see our enemies in a context similar to the one portrayed in Jonathan Edwards notorious sermon: Sinners in The Hands Of An Angry God.   George Bush rode the wave of anger and retaliation into the backwater of Talibani fundamentalism and repression–ironically a form of extremism that shares the same fervor and rigidity as fundamentalists of any religion, including a plethora of organizations in the US–for the expressed purpose of apprehending or killing Osama bin Laden, the Saudi mastermind of the brutal September 11 attacks.  He accomplished neither and abandoned Afghanistan after implanting a rag-tag government which, while not as violent as the previous political regime, has become feckless and corrupt.  The wound inflicted on the Afghani people as a result of our seeking retribution for the deaths and the dishonor the nation suffered in the attacks on September 11 festered and became infected with a different and more resistant strand of hatred because the leaders in the Bush administration were less than honest about their purpose or objectives.  Afghanistan was abandoned for all intents and purposes while Bush pursued his true agenda which was born out of that righteous indignation common to all fundamentalism.  In the vacuum created by our indifference, dissidents increasingly gained strength until just as in Iraq radical elements have re-established themselves and have begun to flourish.

As cliched as it is, the phrase, Mighty Satan, has never lost its meaning nor has its referent changed:  the US remains an evil villain which, to the twisted thinking of those who subscribe to such a theory, provides them with ample reason to continue to wage a war against all who oppose them or those who don’t support their cause.  As the US continues to increase its presence in Afghanistan by sending in more troops and supporting civilian personnel, it exacerbates an already tenuous situation.  Hamid Karzai has failed to rise above the tribalism and nepotism that dominates a culture which remains largely hidden to us and obscured by the excesses occasionally documented in press reports.  In a democracy the disaffected generally seek nonviolent and legal resolution to their grievances; however, the history of Afghanistan suggests that its version of town hall meetings is more likely to be conducted with scimitars and kalashnikovs than debates on ideology or points of order.  The inertia gripping Afghanistan has been compounded by decades of war, the colonial ambitions of foreign powers, poverty, and religious extremism.  As the number of American troops grows, the inertia will become more profound and irreversible.

Unfortunately, the withdrawal of troops will not automatically guarantee a cessation of the woes plaguing the people of Afghanistan; however, such an action is a prerequisite to achieve a larger, more inclusive strategy in the region.  Meanwhile, the state of the US economy dictates a re-evaluation of the nation’s overall military objectives in addition to those in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The black hole of war consumes the nation’s resources instead of being applied to rebuilding the crumbling and outdated infrastructure of the US and providing much needed assistance to the downward spiral of American businesses and the havoc unleashed on citizens of this country as a result of these failures.  Amid the gloom there are points of light but our policy in Afghanistan is not one of them nor can we ignore the foreboding implicit in our failure to develop a constructive relationship with two counties that border Afghanistan: Iran and Pakistan.  While Obama’s pragmatism is a welcome change from the Shock and Awe of the previous administration and will certainly promote a much different atmosphere among nations which will be more conducive to fruitful dialog and conflict mediation, it will also court failure if it does not avoid the perils implicit in escalating military activity if the opposition remains entrenched and its resistence becomes more violent.  Victory has always really been a calculus of the degree of pain one combattant inflicts on another; even the finality of death does not guarantee defeat of one’s enemy, it only inflames the hunger of his allies for retribution.  The hand extended in friendship and reconciliation is an empty gesture if it remains unclasped; profound religious and ideological questions remain with regard to Islamic nations which can only be addressed internally.  If the citizens of these nations have neither the will nor the inclination to engage in serious self-examination, the region will continue to suffer through political, social, and economic instability and increasing violence.  And even if we have a respite of sanity in the middle east, North Korea casts a growing shadow from the far east.  I suggest that Barack Obama add William James‘ The Moral Equivalent of War to his Lincoln reading list and compare the earlier pragmatism of James with his own and update the former with contemporary thinking, and perhaps, just perhaps, forge a way to help improve the outlook for all people the world over and seek an end to the nihilistic scourge of war.

The theater was alive with the sounds of ghosts–no sign of Julie Andrews; no trace of Demi Moore or Patrick Swayze hovering translucently to the Righteous Brothers‘ Unchained Melody.   Even before the play commenced the audience was treated to unctuous cooing sounds emanating, it seemed, from a collage of blurred images projected on a part of the set at one end of the stage.  For a few surrealistic moments, I expected a cadre of inebriated old men clad only in raincoats and sneakers to wander in and settle surreptitiously into the back rows of the theater while the canned orgasms of a porn flick droned in the background.  Is it really possible to confuse Damiano and Ibsen?

Almost every time an actor mentioned either the word ghost or ghosts the sound effects guy perfunctorily pushed the slider on his control panel labeled Cue Dumb Rumbling Sound To Insult The Intelligence Of The Audience.  I became so distracted after the first rumble or two that I found myself trying to anticipate which utterance of ghost would trigger the wrath of the theater thunder god.  There are times when Preston Lane is unable to refrain from the superfluous, and Ghosts was one of those occasions.  And more’s the pity since Ibsen’s play provides ample content and opportunity to challenge any actor, director, or audience.  All five actors gave very creditable performances:  Jeffery West and Gloria Biegler were simply exceptional; Blake DeLong and David McCann gave solid portrayals although I felt Pastor Manders was just a little wooden even at the moments when his inner struggle should have been more conspicuous; Rebecca Nertz’s interpretation of Regina was rather forced and uneven at times but I must confess to a tainted perspective that lingers insuperably since seeing Tobacco Road.  Despite some media endorsements to the contrary, I thought the play was an appalling failure–certainly not a production that would encourage continued support.

Although syphilis was ostensibly the unnamed subject of Ghosts and Ibsen transgressed social taboos by simply including references to the disease in public, his work  should not be mistaken as merely one dimensional; he demanded that we scrutinize the role (perhaps plight would not be too strong a word) of women in society as well as the toxic effect that organized religion (in this instance, Christianity) could have when it lost its vitality and became ossified and shut off from the simple compassion of its eponymous inspiration.  Ibsen ventured even further onto darker terrain as Regina and her father’s interplay at the beginning of the play suggests that there is a forbidden element in their relationship; however, as the characters are developed the maze of the play’s complexity is amplified and revealed.  Osvald’s syphilitic seizure in the last scene was protracted and melodramatic; the young man’s anguish and pain were onerous enough and did not require the deus ex machina conclusion (actually, both a confusing and an annoying distraction) whipped up by the fever-pitched rumbling of sound effects and the single shaft of light illuminating the morphine pills clutched in his mother’s outstretched hand; his misery was as complete and ironic as certain aspects of his character were innocent.  Yet, pleasure is never a solitary traveler, pain is its companion.  Ibsen and the Alvings knew this, and, when we are not distracted by the subterfuge of reality shows, sound effects, or our own armory of defenses, we know it too.

Of course there is a certain enchantment about Charleston regardless of the climate, with the notable exception of hurricanes.  Hugo was the most recent reminder of the potential jeopardy which threatens the port city.  The ambiance and architecture of Charleston is about as near as one can get to the old world charm of European cities in the new world.  While one could never confuse the antebellum mansions and abundant churches of Charleston with the antiquity of Rome’s magnificent buildings and cathedrals, the number, size, and continued interest in preserving the structures are impressive.

Charleston’s storied past is seductive, especially when it is related in the context of artifacts that have survived such as the fine mansions and houses with their peculiar application of stucco over brickwork, a technique used to enhance the status of the owner because it gave the appearance of quarried stone which, in turn was a tangible indicator of greater wealth.  The restored mansions evoke a certain charm, a gentility to the curious tourist now that they are cleansed of the blood and toil of their antebellum birthright.  History holds irony dear as an integral part of selective recall, memories are bland remonstrances cooled by the breezes off the Battery which whisk away the sweat of real people who labored in the tepid air of slavery.  Here, too,  is where we began the slaughter of 600, 000 of our own countrymen so that the dark status quo might be preserved and the stately mansions and plantations could continue to prosper from the scar of human bondage; and, those that survive today, in a less cruel irony, do so as engines of a different kind of commerce, yet commerce nonetheless.

Beyond the picturesque scenery, the horse-drawn carriages and tours, the harbor cruises, the US Park Service’s ritual of the meaning of flags at Ft. Sumter, the innumerable restaurants and variety of cuisines, the accounts of natural catastrophes, the allure of pervasive promotional timeshare schemes, remains a disquieting irony that the hundreds of churches which stand proudly as testaments to the glory of God were unable to lead their congregations to kneel with humility and compassion in their prayers to guide them to an understanding of the biblical imperatives contained in the example of Israel’s  bondage to Pharaoh; their eyes and ears were staunched with sights and sounds of profit and greed, which made them conveniently blind and deaf to the suffering of their human chattel.  As the world economy collapses, politicians continue to cling to ineffectual methods, and genuflect to tired, outdated ideas and philosophies; meanwhile, the innocent and not-so-innocent continue to suffer in not unsurprising proportions which history teaches us generally prevails when calamity is afoot.

How are the condition which we face today different than those in the 1860’s?  There is of course the exquisite irony that the man who now holds the highest office in the land, who is saddled with the burden of reviving an inherited, imploding economy, ending a war which has depleted our resources at the rate of 10 billion dollars a month for the last six years and was commenced on the basis of lies, distortion, and the arrogant perfidy of trivial men, is the first multiracial candidate to be elected President of the United States.  It is also clear that greed is alive and well among us–synonyms are added daily to our language–; that demagoguery has not perished; that inflammatory speech, hate-mongering, and hypocrisy remain the dishonorable implements of men such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage; and, that the success of this administration depends ultimately on the broad shoulders of our citizens.  George W Bush and his minions failed the country they pledged to protect and defend; however, we should not delude ourselves with false piety or absolve ourselves of our own complicity.  We elected them to office, not I personally.  I’m sorry but I must make the disclaimer that I did NOT vote for George W Bush categorical and so I offer a line from E.E. Cummings‘ poem, I Sing of Olaf Glad And Big:  there is some shit I will not eat.

If we are indeed successful in weathering the ominous storm clouds which stretch far beyond any horizon the most perspicacious among us can imagine, history will record the character of our people along with the epitaphs of many may not live to see the task completed.  I hope that what remains will not be sundry buildings or restorations closeting family secrets but a vital community of towns, cities, states, countries ebullient with hope, uplifted with success, and committed to a future which does not depend upon the distortion of the past.

At some point during my walking, after the early effort of reaching and sustaining a brisk but manageable pace, I find that I am able to lapse into a more contemplative state–not the regimented rigor of a monastic but an open-ended dialog where topics present themselves without fanfare or introduction: a fallen leaf or a bit of refracted sunlight edges from the periphery into focus, the wind calms, my breathing and heartbeat syncopate and I can hear only the skeletal groaning of the poplar and pine.

 Perhaps the combination of mistletoe and oak leaves set off a chain reaction of associations which forced open the shuttered repositories of memories.  I can’t say what triggered my introspection; however, as I continued to walk, the fragments of recollection from the fall of 1967 wove themselves into my consciousness.  As near as I can describe it, the fall of that year marked the closest that I’ve come to having a mystical experience; it was a seminal moment in decision making for me; and, it was as highly unorthodox as it was out of character for a person as analytical as I am.

I’ve described that eventful night in October of 1967 in detail in an unpublished memoir that may one day see the light of day; however, my mention of that occasion here will be cursory, an overview at best.  One night as I walked to philosophy seminar held at Carroll Feagins’ house that lay nestled in the woods behind the small pond on the Guilford College campus known at the time as Guilford College lake, my thoughts were preoccupied with current events and especially the impact these events would have on my life.  The war in Vietnam and its coverage was ubiquitous; its carnage was served as frame of reference for nightly news reports.  From my enrollment in Guilford down to that very moment in October I was opposed to the war and gradually the maturation of my own thought and personal beliefs had extended that opposition to include all war.  Beliefs and ideals have little relevance when they are convenient, intellectual affectations held in isolation; they matter when one’s life is lived and tempered by them, when the quality of one’s life and the manner of one’s death depend upon the practice those principles define.  So in the crisp night air with the moon’s autumn light illuminating the silent landscape like a preface to a Poe short story, I paused in the road as my internal dialog suddenly ceased.  Before me stood a small section of oak trees which shouldered either side of the road and reached their limbs toward each other to form a canopy over the road.  As I looked into the shadows, the dilemma that had dominated my thoughts came rushing back.

While I was still the same blue collar kid of recent immigrant origins, my approach to  life had matured from a small town context to one which was now informed by the rich complexity of ideas I had encountered as a philosophy major; and, there was the lure of an intoxicating promise of open-ended potential to which James had referred.  I had also discovered an “ism” in Quakerism that was so unencumbered yet impeccably profound that it defied  glib compartmentalization.  And I had fallen in love.  My dilemma peered back at me in the darkness:  Did I have the courage to live the ideals that I professed?  Was the life of the mind antithetical to the life of the body?  And what of love?  My life had become inextricably bound to another; I knew the risk in Emerson’s advice –Give all to love…when the half-gods go, the gods arrive– but I was powerless not to heed it.

Shadows motioned to me.  The moon was silent, a breeze stirred in the treetops, leaves shook loose from fingers of limbs that rattled as the wind steadied itself, then began to twirl and dance as they descended, plunging randomly, moving in a reel to the commands of an invisible caller.  Although the quiet was mesmerizing, it did not ease the feeling of uncertainty that held me captive.  I would graduate soon and be thrust from the elegant edifice erected by academia and be forced to face the “real world”.  I had thought my way to pacifism while at Guilford and was confronting the prospects of what that choice meant for me; I had examined the destructive habits of my childhood and quelled the rage that often led to unexpected outbursts of violence.  I was not squeamish and as a matter of fact I was less afraid of violence than I was of the ease with which I could behave so violently myself.  Rationalization can be a powerful sedative; it can provide one with an armament of excuses to justify the prosecution of the most egregious acts: and retribution is its twin.      

In retrospect there is a logic to the role chance played that October night.  I wagered that my passage beneath the canopy of oaks would determine my fate.  If I were able to walk through the glade of oaks untouched by a single leaf, no harm would come to me as a conscientious objector.  As I entered the grove of oaks, the breeze intensified and leaves cascaded from overhead.  The mind is a master magician, misdirection is its hallmark.  By the time I was half way through the gallery of trees not a single leaf had touched me.  I thought to myself that if this were a fitting test, an equally worthy sign was in order.  So I stopped walking, looked skyward to watch the leaves descend, and risked the hubris my behavior might have elicited.  More than affirmation, I sought a clear response, one without nuance:  yes or no; right or wrong; good or evil; courage or cowardice; passive or aggressive; love or hate.  I knew all too well that our lives were color wheels spinning so that the sharpest contrasts were often grayscale not black and white.  The leaves floated toward me time after time and each one spun wildly away before it could touch me as if some hidden hand reached out to push it away or a breath deflected it.  I don’t recall how long I stood there watching leaves fall in the enchanted moon mist.  Time paused.  I became aware of my breathing once again after I had resumed walking and made my way out of the hall of oaks.  Not a single leaf had touched me.

I can state with reasonable certainty that in the fall of 1967 I had not yet read The Golden Bough, in fact, I knew nothing of James Frazier or his epic work on anthropology involving myth, folklore, and primitive religions despite my fondness for some of T. S. Eliot’s poetry.  While it is possible to reconstruct events of the past, not even those charged with the eternal drama of life and death can survive completely intact, free from the prejudices of later speculation and the interpretation of hindsight.  I have been unable to duplicate the emotional content of that night, nor have I experienced another like it.  When I finally got around to reading The Golden Bough, I was forced to reconsider the notion that my experience was just another example of life’s randomness.  Had my epiphany occurred amongst a bucolic setting of maples, it might have been filed away as an interesting coincidence or a good party story to entertain friends.

The Golden Bough:  The Roots of Religion and Folklore by Sir James George Frazier was an opus of modest origin:  Frazier’s initial intent in writing the book was to provide an explanation of an ancient Italian folk custom.  It was believed that a runaway slave who could successfully pull down a bough from a special golden tree would win the right to fight to the death the king of the sacred forest grove at Nemi and perhaps become the next king of the woods.  However, Frazier was intrigued by the similarity of the golden bough of Nemi and the golden bough mentioned in Virgil’s poem the Aeneid, which, allowed Aeneas to enter the underworld and gave him access to its secrets.  By exploring the correspondence of the two stories, Frazier eventually opened up a whole new world of myth and ritual from the legends of the distant past to the practices of the primitive peoples of his day.  Frazier’s work in anthropology suggested that the behavior and practices of primitive people were comprehensible, and could even be accorded rational in their own right; however, the most revolutionary notion that astonished Frazier’s readers was that through the study of primitive institutions we might gain insight into the workings of our own society.  As Frazier elaborated on his initial studies, they became unwieldy with illustration and masked the thread of his original argument although these words of his appropriately summarize his views:  

When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers.

While Frazier cites accounts of myth and ritual on nearly every page of his book, the section devoted to Oak-Worship was particularly compelling in light of my own personal experience.  The trees that I walked beneath were oaks and the leaves which tumbled down around me were not just any leaves, they were oak leaves.  Frazier mentions that  

Amongst the ancient Italians, according to Preller, the oak was sacred above all other trees.  The image of Jupiter on the Capitol at Rome seems to have been originally nothing but a natural oak-tree.   At Dodona, perhaps the oldest of all Greek sanctuaries, Zeus was worshipped as immanent in the sacred oak, and the rustling of its leaves in the wind was his voice. 

The oak ranked first among the holy trees of the Germans and was their chief god.  In fact the oak, Frazier adds,

was not only the sacred tree, but the principal object of worship of both Celts and Slavs.  

My genealogical research traces my ancestral roots to an essentially European source divided among Italian, Irish, and German antecedents, which mixes elements of superstition, religion, folklore, and an heritage transmitted through primeval bloodlines.  Perhaps my actions that night were merely a part of a twentieth century re-enactment of a sacred ceremony in which my ancestors might have participated, or a biological memory that was triggered by circumstance and flooded my consciousness with images imprinted on the body’s circuitry from the dawn of creation.  My wager may have been addressed to more than empty air; it may have been an appeal to plead my case before the rustling leaves, the voice of god, the genetic codex of ancestors transmitted through millennia of evolution.

My foot race with age has brought me a considerable distance from that wooded encounter some 40 years ago.  I’ve retraced the path I took that night a number of times and have never experienced anything more than a pleasant walk in the woods.  The oaks stand unremarkably quiet, stoic guardsmen, bound by some arboreal honor code to watch over passers-by, and if, by chance, they are privy to secrets, they remain the epitome of discretion.  I made a choice that night under a canopy of somber oaks shedding their leaves, their naked limbs dusted with the moon’s silvery light elongated  into shadows diffused in the cold air of October, a month fit for Poe and his dark imagination; however, the shivers that ran down my spine were caused less by fear than expectation.  I entered that glade of oaks seeking a sign.  Like Socrates before me, I was certain I already knew the answer, the trick was finding the appropriate question to ask; and, myth, may be our only means to comprehend, that which eludes articulation.

Rural eastern North Carolina is rife with its own brand of fervent religious fundamentalism; its old time preaching radiates from small community churches and conjures up flushed images of an angry God and a bloody cross that permeate the style of worship as well as the lyrics and melodies of the hymns that are sung.  As the power of songs rattles the rough-hewn walls and vibrates their tinned exterior propelled by the magnificent voice of one of the cousins, the night air becomes superheated; the pronouncements of mankind’s essential sinfulness resound as harshly as they are palpable to those uninitiated in the cultural traditions of this regional esotericism; and yet, to some, the surgical surety of Ockham’s razor offers them solace and provides an escape from the turmoil and tragedy of daily life.

After hymns and hot dogs, photographs and laughter, hugs and goodbyes, the crowd of folks drifted off one by one like the glowing embers in the bonfire outside aged slowly, growing graying beards of ash.  My father-in-law had prearranged for us to spend the night at his brother’s home so when the gathering dissipated we followed our host in our car to his house.  Although it was dark as pitch when we left the pack house there was still plenty of time for us to chat and reminisce before turning in.  During our conversation I noticed how my wife’s uncle talked about his children, grand children, great grand children, and his siblings.  Whenever either of us inquired into the whereabouts of a member of his family he used the verb “stay” instead of the verb “live“.  One of his daughters stayed at the old home place or his sister stayed about 11 miles from here.  Or he stayed with sister until she died before he came to stay here.  Wherever they were they stayed there; never did they live there even if they owned the place where they stayed–a transitoriness seemed to lay hidden beneath the surface as if the solidity of the family might suddenly crumble.  I’m not certain if this usage was a characteristic of the family in this region or merely an idiosyncratic betrayal of the hardships my wife’s uncle had endured in his own life.  We all have our demons.  What distinguishes us is how we confront them.

As I tried to find a comfortable niche in a strange bed and an unfamiliar place, the vernacular used by the denizens of the south Jersey town where I was born invaded my attempts at sleep.  Like counted sheep a peculiar assortment of words announced themselves with the familiar but forgotten twang of pronunciations bleating for recognition as I tossed earnestly searching for a comfortable spot.

Time often blurs distinctions, softens the hardships we encountered, dulls the senses to things which in the moment were most acute.  So the fantasy of accents, phrases, interjections leaping into words can reconstruct elements of the past, touch off flashes of memory, even associate sounds with events; however, the unadulterated color of living images remains only as vivid as any reproduction satisfies the artist’s original creative impulse.

As a kid, I used to chuckle at the way many adults around me pronounced certain words.  Inexplicably vowels would vanish from some words: the “i” in tire got stuck in tar and far was where one wished to be when sirens sounded the fire alarm.  An added syllable mutated into a most oriental curiosity as soy emerged as suey–soy beans were a staple crop on the truck farms of south Jersey.   The refrain from the old cowboy song, Cool Water, water, water, cool clear water, was often rendered less poetically as wooder, wooder, cool, clear wooder and our fascination with the cowboy and the west would have had an uncerimonious ending.  One persistent regionalistic quirk or malapropism of which  I am still occasionally guilty howls its windy protestation each time hairricane season commences in September and the national weather service announces its baptismal list of new born hurricanes.  My birthplace, the tiny town of Salem, NJ is nearly surrounded by water.  During my childhood many people made a living hunting, trapping, and feeshing.  The fish that inhabited the estuaries of south Jersey apparently had a peculiar fascination for long vowels sounds whenever it involved them.  Every place has its placeholder word or phrase for use in common parlance.  As I recall, “right” is invoked as a form of punctuation, instead of a value judgment or acknowledgment:  I told her just what I thought.  Right!  Then I asked her what business it was of hers.  Right!  You get the picture?  Right! One might get a crick in one’s neck by being exposed to a cold draft from an open window or pitching a baseball on lazy summer days for hours on end; however, we south Jersey-ites more often than not went down to the crick to do some feeshing; perhaps, one’s success at angling was directly related to the way one held one’s head.  One of my all time favorites was the word “ignorant“.  Although its common usage drew upon its ascribed definition in some degree, it had evolved into a pejorative term signifying a certain tactlessness or a valuation of one’s character, which may have originally stemmed from a lack of knowledge, though I cannot recall its usage in such a context.  A variety of situations evoked the interjection of “That’s just ignorant!” or “She’s ignorant!”   There was generally no clarification of what particular knowledge was lacking or upon what basis a behavior became silly or foolish.  Upon reflection, I suppose I was just plain ignorant a lot of the time I lived in Salem.  I had earned the answers the hard way but only later did I learn to ask the right questions.  Right.

Until recently genealogy has commandeered most of my spare time in the last year.  As is usually the case with my kaleidoscope of interests, once a particular subject comes into focus I tend to devote myself exclusively to its study. While genealogy research remains an important activity, I have concluded that it was better for me to control my enthusiasm or else risk alienating family and friends forever. Casting about for something to read that didn’t involve genealogy, I happened upon a book that I had purchased ten or fifteen years ago. As categories go, I am attracted to a variety of genres; however, I have found myself engaged on more than one occasion with science fiction, new age philosophy/religion/psychology, fantasy or fantastic realism as authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier referred to their book, The Morning of the Magicians–it remains a favorite of mine. I had just finished the last of Frank Herbert’s sagas about Dune and was curious about some of the other books that he had written. A trilogy that Herbert had coauthored with poet Bill Ransom with its intriguing titles caught my eye: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor–all obvious allusions to Christian mythology or were they? By the time I decided to read the trilogy it was out of print; however, I was able to locate paperback editions in a local used bookstore where one of the three books was actually an unused copy.

Once I purchased the books I vaguely recall beginning the opening chapter of The Jesus Incident and just as promptly I put it aside. The books remained untouched and until recently, unread. Perhaps, I am able to exercise more patience now than I did when I was much younger, even then, only Romaine Rolland’s Jean-Christophe was the only novel I can honestly say that I was unable to finish: the descriptive passages seemed interminable at the time! I confess re-reading the opening chapter of The Jesus Incident made me question my selection of these particular books of Herbert, after all titles are little help in navigating either to understanding or enjoyment when the vehicle is as abstruse as the content to be delivered. Edgar Cayce was fond of the admonition found in the Bible from Luke, In patience possess ye your soul, when he warned against a hasty rush to judgment and so I patiently read on until my curiosity was sufficiently piqued, and my soul, well, it was coming along for the journey too. Persistence becomes a virtue when achievement is neither exclusive nor solitary, and if it’s also a possibility, so much the better.

One of the hallmarks of Herbert’s writing is his examination and presentation of a variety of societal issues: racism, religion, politics, genetics, science, technology, ecology, and specific subsets within all of the foregoing areas. The Jesus Incident certainly touches on many themes; it challenges the believer’s notion of God in a narrative terrain inhabited by means of the apparent achievements of artificial intelligence while retaining the element of mystery so many believers attach to the divine and to which they cling regardless of their own environment and circumstances. A clever but not so subtle interplay of words illustrates the evolution of meaning implied in religious, mystical terminology. The ship, a vessel used for space exploration is imbued with consciousness through an artificial intelligence program written by the inhabitants on board becomes, over an undisclosed span of time, Ship and defines Its desire to have a relationship with Its passengers as a ritual aptly called WorShip. Since The Jesus Incident is the first book in the trilogy and was preceded by a prequel, Destination: Void one will have to decide if, as the book’s title suggests, a pivotal incident, is fact, fiction or if either condition is necessary or relevant to a fundamental understanding of who we are, where we are going and how we should conduct ourselves on that journey.

Some of text appears dated and outmoded when juxtaposed to current descriptions of our technological advancements; most of the language and nuances of the concepts alluded to remain quite authentic and do not suffer from the conceptual deprecation so obvious in rebroadcast Star Trek episodes. The Jesus Incident does not approach the sheer elegance of imagination Herbert achieved with Dune but it does offer one a chance to evaluate persistent ideas and attitudes which affect our collective psyche today transposed to a nearly foreign context in a different time: one that is not only conceivable, but eminently plausible in light of current achievements in genetics, the state of health of our planet, the search to control and transform the use and source of energy, the global economic challenges, and the prosecution of war as a constant state of diplomacy.  If we are forunate, there may yet be a Kerro Panille among us, a poet who listens to Vata and sings its truth.

To help satisfy my growing appetite for establishing creditable documentation, I joined a variety of online genealogy forums, subscribed to Ancestry, began visiting LDS Family History Centers regularly, and continued to make a nuisance of myself to any and all relatives who might have a shred of evidence to help me reconstruct the story of our family.  As luck would have it, one of my cousins had stashed away in a lock box a cache of letters written in Italian from my great uncle in Sicily to my grandfather in America spanning the years from 1932 to 1946 that provided an intimate albeit incomplete portrait of family history.  My mother insisted that my first language was Italian; she and I lived with my grandparents until I was two years old while my father was serving in the Pacific Theater on Okinawa courtesy of the US Army near the close of WWII.  Unfortunately whatever language facility my infant tongue possessed was lost shortly thereafter; no trace of its existence remain in the flickering images of my memory.  If I were to make sense of the correspondence between my grandfather and his brother, I would have to make good finally on the promise I made to myself when I entered college to learn Italian so that one day I could converse with my grandmother in her native tongue.  I did not learn Italian in college.  The truth is I did attempt to study Italian; however, the college I attended did not offer a course in Italian, nor did any of the four other colleges and universities nearby.  Armed with an Italian-English dictionary I had purchased in 1990 when my wife and I spent two weeks in Italy, I limped along at translating the three earlier documents I had.  The handwriting was as daunting as the language I was endeavoring to understand, and I soon realized that I was confronted with another obstacle, dialect: the Dragotto’s and the Monte’s from Belmonte Mezzagno were Sicilians and not Florentines–neither Dante nor modern Italian captured precisely the meaning contained in those epistles.

Online societies can be distractions, but properly chosen, they can be immeasurably beneficial.  Fortunately I chanced upon one of the best Italian genealogy sites online.  I submitted the letters page by page to the translators and waited each day with baited breath as the saga of two brothers separated by an ocean and a culture slowly, sadly, lovingly unfolded.  While my experiences in researching my ancestors traversed peaks and valleys, I was introduced to and accompanied by a community of people who were engaged in a similar journey; each of us, in the final analysis, is confronted with the task of finding meaning in everyday existence as Viktor Frankl suggested in Man’s Search For Meaning.

The patience and generosity extended to me by so many of those who participated in the forum were also people who valued the courage and spirit of their antecedents so I was surprised to find a comment that contained an implied racial innuendo which, stood out sharply from the many positive, congratulatory remarks regarding president elect Barack Obama’s victory.  I responded to the comment in a civil tone as the man who was being disparaged would.  The site moderator reminded forum members that any discourteous or disrespectful posts would be removed.  It was a genealogy site after all and not a political discussion group.  And then another comment followed.  As the commentary continued, a stream of cynicism bubbled up; faint echoes of the racial overtones that were once encoded in the old, all-too-familiar phrases that bludgeoned non-white America with Jim Crow laws or categorized immigrants as spic, wop, kike, chink, mic, or any other epithet designed to tear away one’s humanity and substitute in its stead a septic otherness:  Those of us who have engaged in tracing southern roots have likely encountered the slave schedules of 1850 and 1860 where human beings are listed under their white masters by age, sex, and color but not by name.

As the incoming administration has articulated its hope, vision, and plan for the nation, expectations have soared.  My fear is that we, as a nation and as individuals, will regard those expectations as exterior to ourselves, that we will not embrace the very responsibilities we demand of our leaders, that we will opt to watch one man fail while we fulminate over broken promises and false hope.  If those hopes and expectations were Barack Obama’s alone, we should not have elected him president; if we were so cynical that we’d rather debase ourselves by attributing our failure as his, then we deserve the consequences of our bigotry.  Forty-eight percent of the participating electorate apparently did not share Obama’s hope and certainly had much lower expectations.  The architecture of governance required to house this tenuous majority and this formidable minority can only be designed and constructed with tools of reason and the sweat equity earned through commitment to common values and respect for philosophical differences.  The precarious logic required to create such a synthesis may very well be outlined in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Brahma.

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

In the heat of accusation and recrimination, a torpor of ignorance and callousness enervates the spirit of religious freedom.  Christian values are myopically proclaimed as if they are penultimate criteria for establishing worth; and, while one might suppose that other religions are relegated to subordinate status by our national might, it is we who are diminished, it is our ideals that are tarnished and toppled ignominiously like foreign statuary.  Our republic is unique in its profession of a single constituency;  it hangs together because we are enriched through our differences and not separated by them: One nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all–the source of the brouhaha, the UNDER GOD part that was added to the original Pledge of Allegiance back in 1954 .  Interesting, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance which, was written in 1892 was Frances Bellamy, a Christian Socialist and Baptist minister: it seems unlikely that the omission of  “God” was an oversight.  The slander of godlessness fouls the air.  Not because some monstrous irreligious heresy has been exposed.  No, the culpability of those involved is even more odious because precious time and effort have been wasted on nothing more than foolish conceit, or even worse, a transparent veil of pretense.

Perspective becomes irrelevant, methods are immaterial, the ends don’t justify the means because the means no longer matter.  Friend or foe, ally or enemy are arbitrary and impermanent arrangements by which the world is ordered. The sad irony is that it doesn’t matter with whom we cast our lot because we are plagued with a universal ignorance:

You never ask questions
When God’s on your side.

With God On Our Side
Bob Dylan

W. E. B. DuBois had the benefit of studying with a pantheon of American thinkers; as a student of William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana while he was at Harvard, DuBois was surely prepared for the revolutionary changes in psychology ushered in by the Twentieth Century. 50 years after he published The Souls Of Black Folk, DuBois revisited his work in the preface to the Jubilee Edition of 1953. DuBois resisted changing what he wrote in 1903, with the exception of emendations of a very few words and no substantive alteration in meaning, the original text remains intact. In fact, in a brief revised preface added to the Jubilee Edition, DuBois cites only two trends he did not anticipate in his original work: the influence of Freud on psychology and the impact of Karl Marx on the modern world. DuBois adds:

So perhaps I might end this retrospect simply by saying: I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

We have turned another century since the extraordinary perceptive work and observations by W. E. B. DuBois, and his accuracy and prescience are hauntingly even more applicable as this nation prepares to elect a president who, we hope, will possess the foresight, courage, patience, and resolve to lead a nation and a world threatened by economic and moral conflagration. It is a peculiar irony that this black intellectual educated at Harvard before the Twentieth Century captures the essence of what may be appropriately termed a world wide malady. Ours is a world of unending war, whether or not the Bush-Cheney Doctrine was foisted upon us and the rest of the world; we preside over a battlefield where excess and poverty are ranged as enemies and it is not certain in which camp we may find ourselves once the battle commences.

What seems clear to me is that neither jargon nor flippancy are appropriate responses; maverick, patriot, soccer mom are weak shibboleths to use to call upon the inner strength of the people of this nation. For every personal saga of suffering in one community there is an equally tragic account from another community. War hero or an infant tortured with famine or aids, what inhuman calculus should one employ to determine the higher value of suffering or the greater tragedy of loss? The passion of hatred resolves ultimately into absurdity; the irrevocable toll of pain, injury, and death which we, as gatekeepers of an unsustainable way of life are complicit, will be a fate we can only forestall and not elude. It is time for our adolescent religions and our puerile ideologies to be tilled under as fallow fields in preparation for a new crop. It is time we co-authored a book about the souls of all folk, a book of life!