Second Terrace

Boys will be not be boys, today

Dr. Anthony Esolen, to whom I am indebted enough for his translation of the Divine Comedy, has this neat story about Teddy Roosevelt over at Touchstone:

From a children's encyclopedia (first printing, 1914), on a man whom the writer justly calls our most popular President, Teddy Roosevelt:

     "While at college he taught a Sunday School class.  One day one of his students came to class with a black eye.  He owned up that he had got it in a fight and on a Sunday at that.  He confessed to his teacher that during the morning service a boy, sitting next to his sister, had pricked her all through the hour, so after church he waited outside and they had a good 'stand-up fight,' and he 'punched him good,' although he got a black eye in exchange.  'You did exactly right,' said his teacher and gave the lad a dollar.  To the class it was ideal justice, but when the church authorities heard of it they were scandalized.  Young Roosevelt was dismissed and took himself and his ideals to another Sunday School.

     "Many years later he gave this bit of advice to his Boy Scout friends: 'What we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man.  Now, the chances are strong that he won't turn out to be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy.  He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig.  He must work hard and play hard.  He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers.  It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of a man of whom America can be really proud.  In life, as in a football game, the principle is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard.'"

I read this in the fine essay from Esolen just this morning (after returning from a Diocesan priests' convocation where Archpriest Patrick Reardon was the main presenter).

Just after I got back to Pittsburgh last night, these events unfolded:

While waiting for my wife at the mall, I chanced upon a scuffle played out on the asphalt, under the facade of Barnes and Nobles.

But this was no honorable duel, rewarded by the better Roosevelt. This scuffle was a tête-à-tête between mall security (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and two shirtless pubescents, stomping on their skateboards.

The partners couldn't believe they were being asked, politely, to curtail their thrill quest (and, perhaps, prurient peacock dance). They were even more offended that they were required to amend their shirtless attire, by -- I suppose -- shirtting on themselves.

Up to this point, Teddy might not have found much to disavow. Skateboarding is distantly related to sport, in the sense that the Huns and Greeks both could be described as societies. And TR may not have found shirtlessness offensive. He probably swam naked, but there were no women around the pool. Waist-up nakedness was still naked when the nicer, softer gender were about -- and there were some perambulators of this sort in the parking lot.

No, where the Big Stick would have bristled was at the moment the boys engaged in that peculiar modernist habit of "hostile wailing." They actually wept -- hot salt water streaking dirt tracks down their pockmarked, jejeune-bristled cheeks. They stuttered, inarticulate, their grievances at being charged to cease and clothe.

At the same time, oddly, they grimaced in rage, clenching fists, planning even at the moment to wage revenge, that night, when it was safe, of course. After all, the clenched fists and the rhetoric were impotent, unfortunately unlike the more biological appurtenances that had seen too much service.

But tonight was different: a little time jumping the curbs, certainly, then to work on scattering trash from the dumpsters, slashing a few tires, breaking a little glass. "We'll show them who rules the night."

All under the facade of Barnes and Nobles, where the biographies of TR are for sale, but not his stories of Sunday School, or the Boy Scouts.

Momma, Don't Let Your Sons Grow Up to be Poets

Some time ago, I lectured at my daughter's humanities class. I met there a student whose type is known well across the pedagogical landscape: the overly earnest, self-consciously sincere, socially handicapped and semi-bright intellect who has adopted a Bohemian identity, who feels, thus, that he should be reading and writing poetry.

I am nothing but a dilettante when it comes to enjoying poetry. But I do like to talk about it whenever I can, so when I heard this young man announce himself as a poet, I made my way to his spot and tried to strike up a friendly, “poet-to-poet” conversation. It turns out that my attempt was feeble, replete with clichés and conversation-starters that shriveled in the air: "What kind of poetry do you like? ... Who is your favorite poet? ... What do you like about free verse?"

These questions were feeble mainly because they were predicated on the assumption that this young poet must have read poetry by other people. It turns out that he lay claim to Erato's sponsorship solely because he wrote stuff -- and much of it -- that he liberally called "poetry."

I am not mean-spirited ... at least, I am trying not to be. I understand that in today's education culture, "poetry" is defined as anything that is not arranged on the printed page as "prose" -- that is, in block paragraph form, where the lines of the paragraph body stretch continuously from left margin to right.

That culture also leads students, especially in the “creative writing” idiom, to believe that poetry is even better if one goes about a lot of intimate disclosure of feelings. Anger, ennui (you expected this word, didn’t you?), despondency, bravado and, mostly, fear populated his thick, furry stack of bulging spiral-ring notebooks, chock full of free verse.

So the boy really thought he was writing poetry -- good poetry, even, and I witnessed the teacher of the class in question ladling out generous portions of praise for his efforts. Here is a boy, in her view, who is “processing” his emotions and ought to be reinforced. Never mind the relatively unimportant matter of his being misled about the matter of “good poetry,” it is more important, thinks the teacher, to pursue the psychotherapeutic issue of assisting this self-absorbed misfit in the attainment of self-esteem ("salvation," in today's world of meanings).

I am not opposed to free verse, but free verse is exploited as a screen for the absence of hard work, talent, and vision. Free verse is thus abused much as abstraction is abused in the visual arts. One might not be able to draw, but that doesn’t matter, because drawing is unimportant in abstract painting and sculpture. Likewise, one cannot rhyme or rhythm, but that, too, doesn’t matter, because free verse doesn’t require these things.

Of course, that last point is weak, as the other notions are also open to attack. The ability to draw is crucial in visual art, even abstract art. The presence or absence of craftsmanship is plain even in the modern idioms. That is one of many reasons why I will never be a visual artist. I cannot draw. I haven’t got the genes or the fine motor skills. I appreciate, however, the abilities and vision of others to do what I cannot – but that sort of appreciation is not shared by many contemporary critics. I am sure that my works will never reach the MOMA or the Guggenheim for many reasons. That itself is not the tragedy. The tragedy is that my dearth of craftsmanship is not one of those reasons.

There was definitely the presence of dearth in these shabby notebooks. There were stuttering attempts at crude metaphor and, of course, “stream-of-consciousness” (thank you very much, Dujardin). There was structure, but dictated only by the horizontal blue lines and the vertical pink one running down the left margin. The meaning of the poems, their sound and sense, had little to do with their structure. Worse, the poetry had little cohesive meaning. Under the rubric of “stream of consciousness,” this poet straggled through a series of blurred images, ambiguous mutterings, and stillborn motifs.

Why, you might ask, am I being so mordant? Why am I picking on such a harmless, untalented struggling youth and his well-meaning teacher?

For starters, I do not doubt that the teacher means well, but the fact remains that she does ill. What is more, I am not sure that this boy poet is so harmless. He and his alma mater have colluded – meaning well, I’m sure, as is usually true of American education, but wreaking damage unawares – in the tiresome “How do you like it? … Oh, Biffy, it’s simply mah-va-lous!” nitwit pas de deux.

The damage done is the production of one more overly self-conscious post-modern feral child, hell-bent on sturm und drang. He has thoughts, some of them intense, but no efficient means to express them. Worse, he has no intention to modify them into something that can be understood, into something that is worthy of being said in the first place.

When he graduates from creative writing, he will be practiced at complaining about everything, but building nothing on nothing. He will rail against the old and dishonor the dead, simply because these mediating structures delay his gratifications.

This would-be poet is untalented because he is an uneducated youth, to be sure. But the melancholy fact is that he will remain uneducated in this anti-traditionalist milieu. Who is teaching him that his inner life needs relating to the life outside, for love, and the life beyond, for meaning? Who is teaching him the craftsman tricks of putting one’s best foot forward? Of rhyming and time? Of sound echoing sense? Of a prophet masquerading as harlequin and jongleur?

No one. For the art business has decayed into the Balkans of equally valid quanta of self-expression, and thus are all equally dismissed.

I happen to think that while the boy is harmful, he is not untalented. Better yet, he is not without vocation. It takes a call to poetry to recognize that poetry must be read, and poetry must be said. This boy knows, feral that he is, that poetry is his way to grasp the other side of appearances. He is called for Beauty. He must learn the ways of myth, and the formulae that invokes it.

He could be reciting Dante and Shakespeare, Cervantes, Blake, Herbert and Marlowe. He could be pondering Eliot and Auden, Hopkins and even Wilbur.

And for some reason, he is being kept from this knowledge, and is being utterly mystified, his mind tussled and brains disheveled. I’d like to know why.

Perhaps, I suspect, it is one way to make us forget about Easter.

Modern Education and Research

I came across two cranky quotes about education. The first is from Kingsley Amis, about the ridiculous offerings of the usual fare in modern research. The second is from Evelyn Waugh, about the declining quality of education in the modern age.

First, Kingsley Amis from Lucky Jim:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.

The protagonist (Dixon), who never even approaches heroic status, is trying to be ever so successful at everything, but finds himself usually unlucky. He is not interested in his research, but has landed -- one can only assume -- accidentally upon an obscure, lackluster topic. He suspects, with reason, that the topic itself is incidental to his real aim of being successful.

How many titles, in the modern research engine that drives so much academic welfare, are so very perfect, which throw so much pseudo-light upon non-problems?

Then there is Evelyn Waugh, who has a Roman Catholic priest indict modern education. The priest overworks himself trying to catechize someone who wants to become Catholic. He finds that this someone is quite the ideal citizen of the new world of commerce and industry -- a captain of the new order that has come to replace old Christendom. This wealthy capitalist (who hails significantly from the New World) wants to become Catholic, and has no conscious obstacle to belief.

The only problem is that this person (Rex Mottram) has no problem with any belief ... which is to be expected, since such an open-minded person really does not believe in belief. At best, belief to him is a business of intellectual assent. But more likely, there is nothing intellectual about such assent. In fact, there is nothing that distinguishes such assent (even "religious assent") from the enthusiasm of entering into a new fashion.

Here, without further ado, are the exasperated words of a tired old Father Mowbray, after having beat his head against the  gelatin of Mottram's religious insouciance:

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

Waugh wrote this in 1944, when such a crust existed. Now, there isn't anything that even passes for the intelligent and the knowledgeable, except for mercenary knowledge that will help the Lucky Jim's of the world get successful.

Meanwhile, we, the unlucky priests of the world, are faced with the catechetical problem of people who will not argue logic or resist rhetoric, and will politely nod to any religious eccentricity. But they will not be convinced, nor will they believe. They will give that 21st century shrug of contingent assent, and you are certain that their religion is all a lark and an entertainment. Why not sample the religious smorgasbord and be exotic as you wish? Why not assemble yourself a new identity, a new persona, from all the array of the obscure and haute cuisine of cult, medium and prophet?

But it is all still a crust ... and we unlucky catechists try to teach belief to people who no longer have any place for belief. Belief is not admitted in the modern doctrine of man. Opinion is, fad is, personal whim is, but certainly not a belief that informs emotion and behavior.

The Lucky Jim's of today want knowledge, but only "knowledge as power," as Alvin Toffler liked to say. I suspect that this knowledge really does not relate to a larger, objective reality. But instead, it is a knowledge that is subjective and power-oriented. It is a knowledge that is geared, essentially, for the advantage of the knower ... and if knowledge does not contribute toward this advantage, then this knowledge is dismissed, as "good for nothing."

Knowledge as power is the epistemological doctrine of industrialism. But knowledge as power leads to the corrosion of human knowledge. It is the deconstruction of epistemology.

Those who subscribe to this deconstruction of knowledge are in no way able to believe. They can talk about belief. They can even write about belief.

But they have become so self-conscious of themselves as "knower" that they are inured to knowledge as truth.

Those who cannot get beyond the "knowing" of the "knower" cannot perceive the logos of anything, much less the Creator. To become conscious of anything less than the "One Who Is" is to become -- sooner or later -- skeptical of that anything, for no entity or phenomenon can bear being the object of an attention that refuses to admit its creaturely aspect.

Thus, they who are self-conscious of believing no longer find it possible to believe. Such are the Lucky Jim's, who have graduated with honors from the modern education of this world.