Umberto Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913; bronze, cast in 1931*
ON THIS VERY STREET IN BELGRADE
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
~ Charles Simic
“Our [American] poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.” ~ Charles Simic, “Poetry and Experience”
And this is what Simic is doing in this personal narrative — rediscovering the truth
. . . years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
A street in Belgrade*
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” ~ W. F. Hegel
Simic takes a dark view of history. I remember him saying, “I started to read a volume on world history — but in what kind of place can one read such an obscene text?” Obviously, an acute awareness of evil argues against a benevolent deity. Here is another short poem by Simic in which he imagines the kind of deity that condones any kind of evil. Note that this god is blind — an idea first presented in those of Thomas Hardy’s poems that likewise try to account for the relentless misery present in life and god’s inaction.
PUPPET-MAKER
In his fear of solitude, he made us.
Fearing eternity, he gave us time.
I hear his white cane thumping
Up and down the hall.
I expect neighbors to complain, but no.
The little girl who sobbed
When her daddy crawled into her bed
Is quiet now.
It's quarter to two.
On this street of darkened pawnshops,
Welfare hotels and tenements,
One or two ragged puppets are awake.
~ Charles Simic
Indeed poets in general tend on comment on the dark side of history — not surprising in “poetry after Auschwitz” and the two world wars — and the recent upsurge in terrorism, whether coming from militant Islam or white supremacists. A fundamentalist religion or an extreme ideology — it doesn’t seem to matter. The outcome is still slaughter, and we are all potential targets.
I’m a soft target, you’re a soft target
and the city has a hundred hundred thousand softs;
the pervious skin, the softness of the face
the wrist inners, the hips, the lips, the tongue,
the global body,
its infinite permutable softnesses —
~ Deborah Landau, Soft Targets
**
“You, young woman, who are going to cross this threshold, do you know what awaits you?”
"I know.”
“Cold, hunger, hostility, contempt, irony, shame, prison, disease, and death.”
“I know, I am ready to endure all this.”
“Even if all this were to come not only from your enemies but also from your relatives and friends."
“Yes, even then.”
“Are you ready to commit a crime.”
“I am ready for that too.”
“Have you considered that you might be subject to a delusion, that you might find you have sacrificed your young life in vain”
“I have considered this too.”
“Enter then.”
“Imbecile,” said someone.
“Saint,” answered the echo.
~ Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve, a novel about young revolutionaries
If we didn’t know about religious fanaticism, we’d probably never understand the heroic dedication of the “true-believer” communists before the Bolshevik Revolution — and afterwards, in countries outside the Soviet Union.
Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Geroge Orwell of course — those were “anti-totalitarians” who strongly opposed the blind obedience to party line and “revolutionary violence.” They knew that a revolution devours its own children, and turns into an oppressive dictatorship.
“Every revolutionary ends up either as an oppressor or a heretic.” ~ Albert Camus
“Freedom always for the one who thinks differently,” Rosa Luxemburg replied to Lenin’s “Freedom for whom? To do what?” But Lenin wouldn’t hear of it. Freedom is exactly what a dictatorship cannot tolerate, especially the freedom of thought, freedom of the press. Thus, no freedom for writers, poets, playwrights, movie-makers, visual artists — from now on, they must produce “for the people,” i.e. as they are told.
Mary:
Interesting that Turgenev's young revolutionary, in her absolute dedication to accomplish her goals, is called both "imbecile" and "saint." This is an accurate representation of the kind of blinders one must wear in either complete commitment to religious dogma or an equally complete commitment to political dogma. Both demand the sacrifice of reason and freedom of thought. Revolution has its dogmas and its saints, requiring strict adherence to the catechism, performance of rituals (think of criticism/self criticism — public confessions and public penances/corrections). There is no room for freedom of thought or expression — certainly not for the artist, who is almost always seen as a potential dissident/traitor/enemy of the people.
The examples are numerous — Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, Ai WeiWei, and so on. In my early days with a group of academic self styled "Marxist-Leninist" would-be revolutionaries I experienced condemnation of my own visual art as subjective, decadent and ambiguous — not dedicated to the service of the people and the people's revolution. Luckily, by that time I was on my way out and back to my already familiar seat at the apostate's table.
Oriana:
Thank you, Mary, for these excellent observations. I especially treasure your candid sharing of your experience, in this case those academic Marxist-Leninist would-be revolutionaries (it’s hard not to LOL at the term — but then I too knew young people who casually tossed statements like, “Come the revolution . . . “ — and even “Up against the wall!”)
Dostoyevsky still remains a powerful guide to the evils of revolutionary fanaticism. What dooms it from the start is the assumption of infallibility and invincibility — ours is the absolute truth, and the only truth. Freedom of thought, freedom of expression? Forget it. We want to establish a dictatorship, and we mean OUR dictatorship, though we call it the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Another guide is of course Orwell. And we do have Solzhenitsyn and others — eyewitness accounts to how the revolution devours its own children, and destroys millions of lives of ordinary citizens.
Gino Severini: Armored Train in Action, 1915
*
FUTURISM AND FASCISM
~ “Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic, combative. Italian Futurists were obsessed with cars and airplanes; they emphasized youth over experience; they believed that the only way to live was by pushing forward and never looking back. The first tenant in the manifesto reads, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”
Does any of this sound familiar? Disruption? Moving fast (and perhaps breaking things)? The rejection of history? Today’s most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they’re often saying the same kinds of things. Here’s a quote from Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Waymo, about the value of history: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” Here’s a quote from the 1909 manifesto: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” Where Marinetti declares “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!” today’s technology moguls say “the future is now.” Where the Italian Futurists were hypnotized by cars and planes, today’s technologists are drooling over rocket ships and space travel. Where Marinetti believed that women were too effeminate to bring about the kind of speedy progress he desired, former Google employee James Damore writes about how the gender gap in tech exists because men and women "biologically differ”.
Not only was Marinetti instrumental in the Futurist movement, he was also one of the artists who pushed the idea of artists as a brand. “Marinetti’s public braggadocio—and his manipulation of and engagement with the mass media—changed the way artists conceived of their relationship to the art world and popular culture,” writes Jon Mann at Artsy. Marinetti believed in the power of the manifesto, and in the idea that artists should be personas, and that they should push their narrative into the world. If Marinetti could have lived to see Elon Musk launch a red Tesla to space, he would likely have been beside himself with joy.
But Musk and his colleagues should heed the warning that the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and progress at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some call a “a church of speed and violence.” They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and his movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. “Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombardment in the history of the world, and thus a major technological innovation,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky. Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. “Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically,” writes Gabriel T. Rubin. Again, sound familiar? In their never-ending quest for progress at any cost, today’s companies are flirting with fascism themselves.
Brian Merchant at Gizmodo recently wrote about all the ways big tech companies are contributing to the current climate crisis. This is before we get into the ways that YouTube is contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and fascism.
Today’s technologists love to eschew history for the same reason the Italian Futurists did, but if they ignore the lessons contained in that movement, they’re bound to repeat it. And I’ll leave it to you to guess who said this, Marinetti or Musk: “Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the Stars!”
https://www.wired.com/story/italy-futurist-movement-techno-utopians/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Giacomo Balla: Abstract Speed and Sound, 1914
*
STAN AND OLLIE: A SAD COMEDY
This is perhaps the saddest comedy I’ve seen, dealing with last years of the two world-famous comedians, now reduced to playing their old “greatest hits” in second-rate theaters. This situation changes toward the very end of the movie, where they finally get to play at the Savoy — but Stan’s heart attack is the death knell for the team, even though Stan heroically manages to finish the tour.
(Stan got to be over 300 lbs, and that had a lot to do with his congestive heart condition. In spite of his obesity, in his younger years he was the best celebrity golfer in Hollywood.)
It’s also a complex love story. Laurel says, “I loved the two of us.” Hardy replies, “But you never loved me.” They quarrel over what Laurel sees as a betrayal in the past. Hardy says, “You loved the movies we made . . . But I have real friends.” But Laurel does prove to be a real friend, someone who does love his movie partner also as a person. True, the two are stuck in their own gags, but that’s what they do best.
And Laurel keeps on writing scenes for a movie that he knows is not going to be produced — “Because what else can we do?” In fact — this may sound like mental illness to some, but I think I understand it — Laurel keeps on writing scenes for Laurel and Hardy movies even after Hardy’s death. Because what else can he do? That used to be the best part of his life, the part he loved, and he can’t simply quit — that would be death itself.
This movie gives us extra comedy in the form of the duo’s wives. Lucille Hardy is petite and overprotective; Ida Laurel is a big, burly Russian and former dancer. Both are verbally aggressive, each in her way: Lucille rants in her squeaky voice, while Ida favors laconic sarcasm. But even then become part of the main love story thanks to their genuine dedication to their husbands. The movie becomes downright tender. Strongly recommended.
*
THE AFTERMATH: THE AWKWARDNESS OF GRIEF
Critics on the whole hate this movie as mediocre and riddled with clichés. The interesting part is historical. While most people know about the bombing of Dresden, if not from history lessons than perhaps from Vonnegut’s classic, Slaughterhouse Five. (I also saw a Polish movie about it, with the unforgettable scene where a young Pole tries to justify the atrocity: “You bombed our beautiful cities. You too didn’t care if you were destroying cultural heritage. Why shouldn’t you be bombed in return?” The older man he addresses, a German professor, replies, “You are a barbarian.”)
Here the city in ruins is Hamburg just months after the end of the war, divided into “zones” administered by the Allies. The people of Hamburg are starved and full of hate for the invaders — but keep on cleaning up the rubble. An extremist group tries to commit acts of rebellion in the name of honoring Hitler, even if it means sacrificing young lives.
I think that overall it’s the ruins of Hamburg that are most likely to remain in the minds of those who see this otherwise forgettable movie.
Aerial view of the ruins of Hamburg, 1945
I disagree with the critics’ negative view of Rachel’s husband. True, except at the very end, he fails to respond to Rachel’s suffering and seems emotionally crippled in that regard. But his compassion and nobility are shown right in the beginning — and ultimately it’s no surprise that Rachel chooses him over the German architect (who, among his other faults, fails to see that Rachel could not possibly be happy as a British immigrant in Germany, especially with the war being barely over; he also seems challenged when it comes to making pragmatic plans. “How will we travel? You have no papers,” Rachel asks. He gives an evasive answer.)
One of the interesting scenes was a hostile interview to which Stefan is subjected by the British. “You designed houses for the Nazi officials, no?” Stefan replies, “After 1933, we built what we were told to build.” He is a Bauhaus enthusiast, and his main fantasy is not Rachel, but rather being able to realize his vision of architecture.
Another interesting theme is how people feel when an invader makes them lose their home. Because thanks to the Lewis Morgan’s generosity, Stefan and Freda are not forced to live in a camp. However, told to keep to their “zone,” they can’t help but try to sneak into their former domicile. The grief over the loss of their former life is expressed more acutely by Freda. Perhaps I was especially affected by this scene because of my mother’s experience of being expelled, along with her parents, from her house by the Germans — she kept bringing up that memory, a wound that never healed, even though arguably worse things happened before and after.
This grief was hardly a movie cliché — I found it very well portrayed. But the main grief the audience is expected to react to is Rachel’s and Lewis’s grief over the death of their son in a German bombing raid on London. Unfortunately, Rachel’s grief in particular seems awkward rather than moving. It’s too wordy and direct. Lewis’s silence is more eloquent once we understand what he’s in fact going through. His final breakthrough to genuine mourning is believable. Alas, it is at this point a literary and movie cliché — an emotionally repressed man is finally able to cry.
It’s no doubt very difficult to portray the parents’ grief over the loss of their child in a manner that could be described as “subtle.” But what we have here is an awkward and cliché presentation of this grief. It’s not the only thing that’s wrong with this movie, but it’s a sufficiently glaring flaw to make me almost wish I didn’t see this movie. “Almost” because the part that deals with the history of the first months after the war is the human drama that we need to know more about.
*
THE CALM JOY OF COMPETENCE
~ “Once or twice over the course of my childhood, my father said in passing something that has stuck with me. It was more confessional than him imparting fatherly wisdom.
He said nothing satisfied him more sustainably than competence — far more than popularity, fame, status, wealth, power, love or sex or anything.
Now, 62, I’ve found that to be true. Competence makes me self-contented, at peace with myself, relieved from the questions that nagged me in my early years, always wondering how I was doing or whether I should be doing something else.
Sometimes my competence makes me proud to be me, but rarely. The sustainable satisfaction is in having a groove to dwell in, a groove so deep and snug that I’m not rattling around or peering out, envious of other people’s success, wondering if there are better grooves elsewhere or if my groove is going to turn into a rut.
It's called flow but that’s not very descriptive. I’d call it calmpetence. The calm self-unawareness that comes of competence, getting lost in one’s crafts. We know calmpetence by its absence. When we experience our incompetence we’re rattled, self-conscious, self-doubting.
Spiritualists sometimes urge us to counter self-consciousness by becoming egoless, a different kind of losing yourself. The only way I’ve ever been able to get my self-conscious ego to calm down was through the distraction of calmpetence. My ego doesn’t get smaller or go away; it recedes, out of sight out of mind. I get lost in my craft. The pursuit of calmpetence is obsessive-compulsive without being a disorder. Paradoxically, having some craft to fuss over makes us less fussy.
With calmpetence, I don't care about what I'm doing so long as I keep doing it competently, meeting or exceeding my own expectations, as the poet, Sharon Olds put it, like a runner, "a single body alone in the universe against its own best time."
If we could afford to add more human rights to the ones we’re not honoring now, the pursuit of calmpetence would be a good one. Every human deserves a crack at it. Nothing breeds contentment quite like it.
Calmpetence is as desirable as the romantic unions we crave, a marriage of you and your craft, with you affirmed by your competence at it. Perhaps the calm we aspire to in a happy marriage is, in part, the calm that comes of being good at the craft of relationship. Since relationship is so important to us growing up we seek competency at that craft. Looking back on my breakups I remember my grief as flooded with a sense of my relationship incompetence.
I recently asked a 92-year-old man why he still walks to temple every day. Was it to ensure a place in heaven?
“No,” he said, “It’s because I know how.” He knows the prayers and rituals. It’s his craft. He’s an accomplished, competent congregant. Maybe calmpetence is a large part of what people get out of religion too. They’ve got the rituals down. In Hebrew school growing up, the students would “daven” rocking forward and back, speed-buzzing, or mumbling the prayers like we were old hands at it. Devotion to God? In our, case, rarely. It was more devotion to the impression of religious competence.
But calmpetence can come from any craft, whatever makes your motor hum: knitting, cooking, video games, dance, art, wine connoisseurship, athletics, cosplay, collecting, computing, cleaning, accounting, driving, music, or some particular idea, some article of faith you know inside and out and can defend competently.
As with finding the best spouse, embracing ideas may be less about finding the right one and more about the calming relief of no longer searching because you’re calmpetent defending the one you’ve already got. People often cling to their ideas but maybe they’re mostly clinging to their competence at defending them against, their bubble as shelter, their rut as groove. We often swell with pride when defending what we believe. Maybe it’s our ability to defend them that makes them proud, and not the ideas. In choosing their ideas, maybe people pay as much attention to substance and character, as horny teens pay to substance or character when choosing mates.
Over the course of his short life my father cultivated calmpetence at many things – taxidermy, gymnastics, business, classical piano, oboe, conversation, oratory, raising orchids and birds, Judaism, literature, music theory, child-rearing, social activism, history, and bagpipes, which were as dazzling to him in his youth as rock music was in mine.
Once, in my teens, I visited my parents at the end of the summer. By this time my dad was retired and attending the Edinburgh police academy’s Master’s program in bagpiping. He proudly reported that he had spent the summer perfecting two bagpipe tunes.
In my youthful insolence, I said, “is that all?” He was furious and right to be. His two refined bagpipe tunes were benign. Loud as that instrument is, those tunes were a mere peep in this overwhelming world. My dad had been a captain of industry, and an activist of some renown. Guided by what he called “the courage of his insignificance” he chose for a quiet life in trivial pursuit of calmpetence. I admire his non-insistence, born of his recognition that competence is the thing, not status.
Ours is not to go around floodlighting the relative insignificance of other people’s calmpetencies. Those two tunes were my dad’s “a single body alone in the universe against its own best time.” It’s tacky to trivialize the sources of people’s calmpetence, flattening their groove and leaving them rattled.
And yet some people’s calmpetence comes from doing just that.
Still, I do not want to credit them with more strategic thinking than they actually do. Perhaps being a total jerk is just their groove. Their calmpetence comes from deploying a bag of easy tricks for disrespecting other people’s calmpetence, the way I disrespected my father’s two bagpipe tunes. Maybe they’re total jerks because they know how to remain unrattled in their groove by rattling other people in their grooves.
It’s tacky to rattle people ensconced in their calmpetencies however trivial, but we do need to rattle those whose calmpetency comes from doing just that. We must rattle the total jerks whose self-flattering groove is flattening other people’s grooves.
There will be cults that draw followers impressed primarily by the leader’s skill at just that kind of calmpetence, leaders who show no competence other than a dazzling ability to disparage all competences but their own and followers as dazzled by it as my father was by bagpipers or I was by rock stars.
Whatever floats your boat so long as you’re not a destroyer whose calmpetence comes of sinking other people’s boats. Whatever makes your motor hum so long as it isn’t a Sawzall or buzz saw cutting down others to carve out your cozy, rattle-free groove.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201904/calmpetence-the-self-calming-effect-competence?fbclid=IwAR2KkaMOsucmEE6VXES-LHckkgQSvcEBsF3t3gHkWkYm4CWmLSv9FVefuac
Scottish antarctic expedition, 1904Oriana:
This is something creative people know well. I used to ascribe the calm, contentment, the almost instant improvement in mood simply to creative work and its "external focus" -- the focus on craft rather than self (introspection often leads to a depressed mood, according to studies and my personal experience -- depressed persons used the first-person pronouns significantly more often than the non-depressed).
The anecdote about the temple-going nonagenarian is a priceless eye-opener.
~ “The anecdote about the nonagenarian who keeps going to the temple is priceless: ~ I recently asked a 92-year-old man why he still walks to temple every day. Was it to ensure a place in heaven?
“No,” he said, “It’s because I know how.” He knows the prayers and rituals. It’s his craft. He’s an accomplished, competent congregant. Maybe calmpetence is a large part of what people get out of religion too. They’ve got the rituals down. In Hebrew school growing up, the students would “daven” rocking forward and back, speed-buzzing, or mumbling the prayers like we were old hands at it. Devotion to God? In our, case, rarely. It was more devotion to the impression of religious competence.” ~
Of course! Once you get good at the ritual, of course it can become your craft, your source of mood-lifting competence. In fact quite a few of the “faithful” admit that they don’t care about the doctrine — they go to church because they enjoy the liturgy. And still others go for the sake of socializing — socializing after church is their craft, their “calmpetence.”
This seems related to Alfred Adler's idea that our major drive is not sex drive but the drive for mastery. This was a major heresy that Freud could not tolerate, and Adler got expelled from Freud's circle. Adler was the one who developed the concept of an “inferiority complex.” Part of our motivation to become competent is to overcome our feelings of inferiority.
But the sense of competence is its own reward, and need not be perceived as any kind of “compensation.”
Note that Jeremy Sherman doesn’t just say the same things as Adler. He points out the mood-lifting benefit of performing any activity at which we are competent — the joy of it. Adler was more into overcoming inferiority, which may be true in some cases, but doesn't strike me as the primary motivator for most people. Competence is definitely its own reward. Learning something to the level of competence and beyond (which would be artistry) is intrinsically satisfying. For some people it's music, for others — plumbing. Vive la difference.
For some people, the pursuit of usefulness is more important. And of course the two are not mutually exclusive: who doesn't enjoy being both competent and useful ("I have something to contribute") at the same time?
Freud said that the two most important things in life are love and work. True, but it must be the kind of work at which you feel competent — the more so, the better. Performing competent work is a source of calm joy. And arguably it’s the most reliable source of self-esteem.
I believe competence is not only its own reward, and a reliable source of joy, it is also something that can rescue and restore the integrity of the self when it is threatened or damaged. Sometimes in grief, in desperation, in the dead world of depression, allowing the hands to do work they know well and can perform reliably becomes a way to move out from under the shadows and into a world where you are not a passive victim, but an active force creating your own life and the world you inhabit. This may come in making something new, a song, a painting, a loaf of bread, or in making order in your space, cleaning a room, planting a garden, doing any small thing you know how to do well. In these things you are not a victim but an effector of creative change. Yes, competence brings calm, and joy, and satisfaction — it would be hard to find any better medicine for a heartsick soul.
Oriana:
Yes, I have experienced this. My motto is “work works.” The answer doesn’t lie within — in endless depression-inducing introspection. The answer lies outside us, in work, in engagement with the world. If it’s the kind of work that we are especially good at, that’s all the better. But even cleaning the house helps heal the soul.
Boccioni: Dynamism of a soccer player *
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose.”
~ Nelson Algren
Oriana:
I wouldn't know about playing cards with a man named Doc, or what loving Chicago feels like, but I can confirm that being involved with someone with more troubles than you have will quickly turn into hell — and the kind that it’s very difficult to get out of. People with a lot of pathology tend to cling to you. You may have to change your phone number. A friend reported that even moving out of town didn’t work (eventually it did, but imagine . . . )
*
Politeness, civility, don’t criticize.
But that’s exactly how bad’s normalized.
~ Jeremy Sherman
*
ABRAHAM? NEVER EXISTED; EXODUS NEVER HAPPENED — THE BIBLE AS MYTHOLOGY
~ “Christians accept certain things as true that are demonstrably false, and it does no one any good to tiptoe around these beliefs as if they are sacrosanct merely because people take the discussion so personally.
And I’m not talking about things we cannot entirely disprove like miracles, or the afterlife, or the power of prayer. We could argue about these things until we are blue in the face, and in the end very few people would ever change their minds. The church has had two thousand years to develop excuses for why these things fail to materialize (they usually involve faulting the believer rather than the beliefs themselves).
No, I’m talking about clearly demonstrable historical facts—facts for which we can apply reliable tools of scientific inquiry in order to ascertain what is real and what is not, what is fact and what is fiction.
This Never Happened
The Hebrew people did not exist before Canaan. They gradually and peacefully emerged as a subset of Canaanite culture somewhere around the 1200s B.C.E.,which is roughly the time we were told they invaded the land. Before that time they simply. didn’t. exist.
The violent conquest of Canaan never actually happened. We know this for certain. We’ve gone to the places that was supposed to have happened and we dug our way down to the bottom. Didn’t happen.
The wandering in the wilderness for forty years? Also never happened. That story was made up. We know this for certain. We canvassed that entire region a hundred times now and not so much as a coin or a piece of pottery or anything at all that would signify they were ever there.
The dramatic exodus of millions of Hebrews from Egyptian captivity? We know for a fact that never happened. It’s not even a debate anymore, not among scholars, historians, or archaeologists. The story was undeniably made up. That means that the Passover never happened. Nothing even remotely like it.
There wasn’t even a group of Hebrews in Egypt in the first place. There never was. That whole bit about 400+ years in captivity, with a dozen tribes growing into a large but enslaved nation? Made up out of thin air. We know this for a fact now.
Think about what this means for a second. It means there was no Moses. No Aaron. There was no Abraham, no Isaac, and no Jacob. There was no Sarah, no Rachel, no Leah, no Rebekah, etc. All fascinating stories, yes. And could there have been real life analogues many centuries later that got cobbled together into an origin story for the nation of Israel? That’s certainly possible.
But basically every story and every person which appears prior to Israel’s presence in Canaan around the 12th century B.C.E. is a product of pure fiction. After that, much smaller versions of the stories appear to have happened in real life: for example there probably was a King David, only his “kingdom” was more like a small insular group of technologically challenged herdsmen. But never anything like the geopolitical giant the Bible paints him, or them, to be.
Everything that happened in the first five books of the Bible is pure fiction. And the next few books don’t get much better. They are stories made up to teach lessons and to provide some kind of political basis for competing factions of ancient Israel, quarrels which no longer mean anything to us today but leave us with the mistaken impression that this people group existed many centuries before it actually did.
The Dirt Doesn’t Lie
Back before World War II, biblical historians had a more limited number of resources to draw from in order to ascertain fact from fiction. They had to rummage through the annals of Egyptian and Sumerian and Babylonian historical accounts to see if this divinely favored nation ever got mentioned, but they kept coming up empty handed.
Sometimes they would come across something that sounded enough like a Bible name that they would count that as confirmation and move on. For most of them the standard of verification was very, very low. Quite frankly, in retrospect, they were wearing their desperation on their sleeves.
But instead of finding evidence of a mighty kingdom spreading across a large geographical region governed by legendary kings with hundreds of wives and concubines, all anyone could turn up was an occasional reference to a small confederation of tribal heads inhabiting negligible territories sandwiched between much more powerful kingdoms which were constantly taking them over. And nothing at all prior to their supposedly forceful conquest of the Promised Land.
Over the next couple of decades after WW2, archaeologists carried their students and volunteers on hundreds of excavation trips to every biblical place you could imagine, digging down as far as they could go in order, quite literally, to get to the bottom of what happened. What they discovered was disappointing to say the least.
There were no Hebrews prior to their gradual and peaceful emergence within Canaanite culture in the 1200s B.C.E. None of that stuff in the Bible prior to Canaan appears to have ever happened. And even when they did begin to slowly emerge as a people group, they looked and acted almost exactly like their surrounding neighbors, but with a couple of notable quirks: they left behind no pig bones, and they seemed disproportionately fond of one particular member of the Canaanite pantheon, Yahweh, the god of war.
At first, Yahweh (aka “Elohim,” which also may have referred to a whole group of gods) appears to have had a wife named Asherah. We know that the worship of the goddess still continued for centuries into Israel’s history despite many leaders’ attempts to cleanse the land of her memory (like ISIS style, physically destroying monuments and disposing of her corresponding cultus). But subsequent versions of the Israelite religion became increasingly monotheistic, vehemently disavowing all of its polytheistic precursors. Occasionally you will still find remnants of this culture war preserved for us in the biblical texts.
A Valiant Attempt, Thwarted
No one walked through this eye-opening discovery more directly than William Dever, a post-war biblical archaeologist with a Disciples of Christ education who later studied at Harvard and led hundreds of students on dozens of excavations all over Israel. After a lifetime of study and first-hand exploration of the biblical lands, Dever reports:
~ After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible “historical figures.” Virtually the last archaeological word was written by me more than 20 years ago for a basic handbook of biblical studies, Israelite and Judean History. And, as we have seen, archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, the overwhelming archaeological evidence today of largely indigenous origins for early Israel leaves no room for an exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness. ~ William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It? p.98-99
Remember the story of the wall of Jericho? Didn’t happen. Archaeologists like Dever inform us there wasn’t even a wall in existence during the time the Israelites were supposed to have taken the city. And the city, which by the way was likely abandoned before these invaders were supposed to have gotten there, was in its heyday no larger than the size of a couple of baseball fields side-by-side, occupied by no more than maybe 600 people. Can you imagine a nation of over a million adults marching around such a place, waiting for something miraculous to deliver this small town into their hands? They could have just walked right in and eaten their lunch.
~ There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site…Nor is there any other possible candidate for biblical Jericho anywhere nearby in the sparsely settled lower Jordan Valley. Simply put, archaeology tells us that the biblical story of the fall of Jericho…cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth. ~ Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? pp.46-47
Try for a moment to imagine millions of Israelites. According to the Bible, there were 600,000 men who left Egypt on the night of Passover. Given that most adult men counted as heads of households would have been married, and given that the Bible stories show each family punching out at least half a dozen children a piece, we are being told that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million people exited a nation of only about 6 million in one single evening, leaving not a single trace of their presence in that country.
So we are to believe that those 3-4 million people spent 40 years in a deserted wasteland (getting their water from a rock, by the way, with their food just falling from the sky every morning) and yet somehow left not a single trace of their presence anywhere. No evidence of their existing in Egypt, no evidence of their dramatic departure, no evidence of their presence in the wilderness for decades, and zero evidence of their forceful takeover of any territories prior to their gradual emergence among the Canaanites several hundred years after the time they were supposed to have first come to be.
In short, none of this happened. The whole story is just made up. We know this.
I found the above citations in my own very conservative seminary’s library, but you’ll never hear any graduates of that institution telling their congregations what those books contain, if they ever even read them.
What grabs my attention the most in all this isn’t the fact that the Bible got something so important so incredibly wrong. I got over that a long time ago, even if I continue to be impressed with just how much of this book was made up over time. What fascinates me most is the rationalization process that kicks in the moment a true believer is confronted with these realities. The mental contortions are impressive, and I can’t help but recall as I watch them happen how I myself once walked through these steps as well. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be so imprisoned by predetermined conclusions in my search for truth. ~ Neil Carter
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/02/18/none-really-happened/#eFlKUdQrIcrjuzxT.99
Oriana:
Actually, I’ve read that even some Orthodox rabbis acknowledge that the Torah is a collection of myths. Now, myths are not without value — they may impart some life wisdom.
Not in Catholicism, though. The point is that you are not supposed to think. The answer I most remember whenever someone was brave enough to question this or that absurdity was “It’s a mystery. Humans don’t have the mental capacity to understand the mind of god.”
It would be so much easier to accept that we are dealing with mythology rather than history. There is wisdom we can learn from this or that story — or, if nothing else, stories tend to be entertaining, and give us something we can hold onto as a common heritage.
For my generation, that tends to be Star Wars. We all know about Yoda and Darth Vader, the Force and going over to the Dark Side. Of course we also realize that a movie is not reality, but we still enjoy the stories, and still admire courage and goodness even in fiction. And the fans of Yoda are not going to go to war with those whose main hero is Han Solo. That would be like going to war over Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Humans have an insatiable need for stories — fortunately matched with the ability to create stories. Alas, the ability to tell the difference between truth and fiction is not something we can take for granted.
*
“In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a lot better.” ~ Woody Allen
Woody as a high-school senior*
ending on beauty:
All that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
~ Li-Young Lee (about the night sky)
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