the circled word

Robert Frost’s poem Death of the Hired Man presents a sentimental, capitalist view of human worth. Its subject is a dying laborer who appears in his final hours at the farm of his former employers, a husband and wife, through whose conversation the case is put. The laborer, tempted away last summer to a different farm by an offer of wages in addition to room and board, returns “home,” ostensibly to resume his services. He is taken in out of compassion by the wife, who sets about to persuade her husband to shelter the man in his infirmity.

The laborer is described as “worthless,” having “one accomplishment” (knowing how to build a load of hay), and “nothing to look back on with pride.” He is judged by a pair whose unquestioned right to pass sentence is based on property ownership and marriage. In the spare tones of evening, Frost presents through others’ eyes an extraordinary portrait of a man who, though anti-intellectual, is yet a thinking man, a man who cares for others, and who is proud of the skill of his labor. The laborer, Silas, has a banker brother, but never speaks of him. The wife explains, “Silas is what he is–we wouldn’t mind him–/But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide./ He never did a thing so very bad./ He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good / As anybody. Worthless though he is, / he won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.” “I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone,” her husband replies. Si’s thought in returning to the farm, told through the wife, was to teach a certain young college man, “the fool of books” but yet a “likely lad,” who had worked on the farm a previous summer, to build a load of hay.

Silas’s predicament is more universal than it first appears. As soon as we are set upon by the ability to consider ourselves, we are bound to create a myth of our own significance. The impossibility of rationally establishing our personal significance, or even the significance of our species, results in all manner of nonsense, but to fail in this endeavor is devastating. We come each to hide behind the curtain, substituting a false image (or alternately an image of our progeny) as a wonderful wizard, or at least the worthy servant of one. Most of us being more or less embedded in a group made up of significant numbers of persons who more or less share a myth of significance obscures the easy realization of this human condition, but it exists nevertheless.

To fail to develop or subscribe to a measure that, like Mary Poppins’ tape, putatively demonstrates empirically that we are “practically perfect” in at least a fair number of significant dimensions, is psychologically disastrous. This is not to promote modesty or self-loathing, which are practiced to such bizarre self-aggrandizement. It is only to say that to assert the relative worth of one’s own life in a competitive world of finite resources is necessary, and that to fail in the task is tantamount to suicide.

The children’s classics referred to above play gently with measures of worth, showing that they are sometimes arbitrary, always heavily dependent on context, and usually self-serving. These stories are more subtle and convincing than the recent and absurd self-promotional stunt of a group of billionaires, persons having wealth so vast as to be infinite within the context of an individual life, who committed to give half their wealth to charity before or after their death as an example and encouragement of generosity.

They do remind us that evaluation is at its root an imaginative function. As such, may we not assess creatively or intuitively, for no good reason at all? I find this persuasive, and, in fact, the only tenable approach to valuing life. However, I find that my fellows generally would rather be hated than to be loved for no good reason, and feel deprecated when loved for reasons other than their own. I wonder why this is so, and grieve for the lost opportunity to more universally affirm when not compelled by others’ nonsense. Perhaps they are wise and know, as John Kenneth Galbraith said, “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

Consider the idea that wine signifies sacredness, or theories about correspondences between external characteristics and intangible qualities, or the story of the hero’s miraculous birth.  How marvelous that such ideas, theories, and stories travel to us through eons!  Each one’s itinerary is a unique sequence of routes through and stopovers in cultures, locations, people, and institutions.  These itineraries fascinate me.  Sometimes the itinerary includes points of transfer from one genre to another, as when a poem becomes a play, or a sermon becomes a scripture.

Whether play or scripture or whatnot, each such tradition encloses its past.  It has not always been what it is now; in earlier manifestations its appearance, sound, or meaning to earlier audiences was quite another thing.  An item’s transmission through time becomes part of its essence.  Whenever it crosses our path, it harbors the complexity of its time travel.

This fact about how time and human lore interact is sometimes easy to overlook, especially when something has been around a long time.  Shakespeare’s plays or Goethe’s masterpieces become so well known that their iterations of Antony and Cleopatra or Faust become standards, become enshrined.  An even more telling instance presents itself in the collection of texts known as the Bible.  The New Testament has been in its current form since around 400 C.E. (A.D.), and although people are vaguely aware that there have been versions and translations, they tend to think of it as an established, static, understood object.  While overlooking the past in such cases is easy and natural, it nevertheless involves us in peril.

When we overlook our heritage’s transmission to us through time, with all its changes in view, we abdicate our responsibility to interpret.  As we all know, the human condition involves from infancy onward the absolute necessity of interpreting our experience.  If in certain instances adults delegate interpretation to others, they must accept the risks this entails.

To my mind, ignoring the rich itineraries of cultural artifacts is tantamount to submitting to the imprisonment of the mind.  There are in our world abundant dogma-based authoritarians ready and eager to imprison and manipulate minds.  When one walks through their gates of intellectual arrogance, one leaves behind the pains and the joys of interpretation.

On the other hand, to attend to the wondrous journeys of humanity’s stories, with their twistings and turnings through additions, omissions, and contradictions, is to reject dogma and to take up the burden of making meaning.  Further, it is to walk carrying that burden on the messy, rocky paths of history.  On an adventure through a landscape of actual transformations of fact, we encounter the marvels of time-bound interpretation.  We tell stories.

Loyalty is a quality that through the years has transformed within my mind and heart, like the sky changes its colors.  Previously, it seemed a primitive reactionary behavior in which emotion and self-interest combined to suppress reason and ethics, a mindless purchase of protection or belonging that traded closed eyes for the comforts of stability.  In contrast, it has come to indicate a most intimate, holistic expression of ethical behavior.  I would now think of loyalty as a determined act to honor the good in a thing, however mixed, however imperfect, at some cost to self.  In this sense, loyalty eschews redemption and disdains justification or rehabilitation.   It does all this with open eyes.

In our world, nothing is easier than to shift allegiances or deny complexity.  We change our team to one that wins, mostly regardless of secondary qualities.  We change sources for our material needs based on a few penny’s difference in price, mostly regardless of other qualities.  We change life partners or friends based on their marginal return in pleasure or social status. Constancy is rewarded in one dimension only–the ideology that defines our stripes.  Here, learning or growth is seen as flip-flopping, insincerity.  Studied, qualified appreciation is viewed as moral timidness.  Better that we use the amplification of new technologies to blast away at the subtlety of a character, once admired,  that has come to be seen as impure.   Now closed eyes are on the side of change.

Literature often enacts loyalty answered by redemption or disappointment, loyalty existing in relief on the way to the supposedly eye-opening conclusion.  An example I recently experienced is the movie Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (I’ve Loved You So Long).  In this 2008 movie the viewer is presented with the case of a woman just released after fifteen years in prison for the murder of her child, and the loyalty of a sister, who, forbidden by her parents as a teenager to speak of or write to her sister, wrote every day in her secret diary her sister’s name and the number of days she had been away.  The movie is haunted until the last moments by a complete absence of explanation, justification, or even narration of the long-ago event that defines the tale.

Beautifully, the movie’s everyday content, deliberative pacing, and the reflective performance of Kristin Scott Thomas as the ex-convict, dissolve the viewers expectation of or need for the facts of the case.  This does not occur as a seduction or a sentimental forgetting.  The putatively horrible act that precedes the narrative is never forgotten, never minimized.  The murderer is not reformed, never seeks forgiveness, never explains.  The absence of determinative information, rather, functions to open a view to the whole, to a truth that would be obscured by fact.

Justification and redemption come at last, however, and, as is so often the case, weaken the whole.  In literature of all times, a closing gesture of allegiance to conventional morality often subverts an otherwise radical examination of existence.  One sees examples of this ultimate weakness at the end of scientific research articles as well, which present compelling and original research only to reach some weakly argued and reproductive conclusion.  In this light, loyalty might be seen as a willful deferral of judgment, the willful refusal to put a neat and defining bow on an unfathomable complexity, while yet having the courage to present or receive all possible conclusions.

I mean to say more, however, than that loyalty is a sort of wisdom.  Rather, it represents to me one of the ways in which relationships and regard, in contrast to the too often evident effects of tribal interest or prejudice, may elevate knowing and ennoble behavior.  Affection, it seems, can also open eyes.

How do we humans best understand impartiality or disinterestedness? The cumbersome German word Unvoreingenommenheit* provides a possible analogy for the inherent convolution of the concept.

Let’s say two children are arguing. A wise adult can indeed listen impartially and sort things out for the best of both. Neither of the children’s stakes in the matter is identical to the adult’s. Yet, on the other hand, the adult does not act from pure disinterestedness. He or she may be invested in the children’s well-being, appearance, or behavior, or may strive to reinforce a self-image of urbanity or prudence. It seems that impartiality proves at best partial.

Or, let’s say we want to make an inquiry into something important to us, perhaps the cause of a conflict or the character of an opponent. We invest time, strength, effort, and resources in hopes of finding a solution, remedy, or explanation. To a certain extent, with skill and patience, we put aside our most glaring prejudices.

Do we ever, however, get outside of our basic involvement in the question? The question is posed from inside our own general perspective, our Weltanschauung. It seems that each individual inquiry or intervention at some point reveals itself to be de facto limited; only one window opens onto the scene. Built-in blind spots preclude a total view.

Is a pursuit or a claim of disinterestedness, then, a dead end? Many serious people value highly and hold sincerely to its pursuit. My view is that the impossibility of disinterestedness is also always partial. That is, the balance, or dance, between bias and detachment appears ever in flux.

To expect and embrace complexity tends to produce a richness of results not easily co-opted or manipulated into jargon or propaganda. Perhaps, a path opens on which one out of two footfalls echoes with disinterestedness. My own inclination is to say that such a path is the path of the most useful and beautiful endeavors — whether in business, scholarship, care-taking, or art.

* Helpful hint: parsed Un-vor-ein-ge-nommen-heit

Persimmon orange washes blankly across my waking field of vision to where it weakens and dissolves in turquoise.  A white tower on a nearby rooftop blinks out time in tomato red, the tiny light on top sticking up for development amidst all this passive sky, tomato, tomato . . . .

Below, long rows of portable toilets like green teeth stand in well-ordered service within the snaking crowd control barrier.  “Celebrate St. Louis” brings “quality entertainment” through “excellent corporate sponsorship.”  Bud and hot dogs leave their scent on the paper and plastic that dances listlessly about the empty streets in remembrance of this.

Bums, gloved and hooded in the stifling damp heat of the park, seem always to be sleeping.  Did they wake to the amplified beat? Did it invade their dreams with the necessity, the predestination of corporate recreation?

Now the sun shines brightly on a world of still-drowsy people, bums and marketers alike.  Only the birds have been industrious here in the waking hours.  They cross the sky with energy and purpose, perhaps joy.

This post carries the scent of eggs and vegetables sizzling on the stove.  The pleasures of the urban weekend are many.  No lawn waits to be mowed, but insects still buzz in the mind . . .

Welcome to the circled word.