TRUST ME: CREATIVE MEMORY

Igor Morsk

Because -- answered the foreigner, staring through half-closed eyes at the sky, against which black birds, anticipating the evening cool, were silently silhouetted -- because Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place  ~ Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

How do great writers create such compelling scenes and characters? Their secret is vivid details (Gustave Flaubert:“Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” -- “God is in the details”) Anton Chekhov put it this way: “Don't tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Why does Bulgakov’s passage seem so “real”? Because of what one is tempted to dismiss as “irrelevant details”: the half-closed eyes, the sky, the silhouettes of blackbirds, the anticipated coolness of the evening. These serve not only to delay the humorous passage that follows, making it all the more funny, but also to ground it in the world -- or maybe to create a world we can see in our minds and believe in. 

Anna Goryacheva, Bulgakov’s communal apartment neighbor, alleged to have inspired the character of Annushka

*

In “Entrance,” Rilke shows that it takes very few details to create the world!

ENTRANCE

Whoever you are: when evening comes,
walk out of your room
where everything is known.

Your house is the last one before the infinite:
whoever you are.


With your eyes, which in their weariness

barely free themselves
from the worn-out threshold,

you lift very slowly one black tree

and place it against the sky: slender, alone.


And you have made the world.
And it is huge

and like a word ripening in silence.

And as you seize its meaning with your will,

tenderly your eyes let go. . . .

~ Rainer Maria Rilke (The Book of Images, trans. by Edward Snow)

Place one slender black tree against the sky -- “and you have made the world.”

(Shameless confession: I’m so reluctant to leave my study that actually I’d like to try Kafka’s advice instead: just sit there and wait for the world to come to me and roll in ecstasy in my feet.)

THESE TRUTHS AND CONFESSIONS

Typically, though, poets and writers aren’t as minimalist as Rilke in their creation of the world. Most like to bestow on the reader a proverbial “wealth of details.” Let’s take a look at how Philip Levine uses details to create:

THE TWO

When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, We keep you clean
Muscatine, on the woman emptying
his waste basket.
. . .
“And the lovers?” you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?

~ Philip Levine

I love the sudden switch to F. Scott Fitzgerald and "no second acts in America." Bringing in a real person, a famous writer, a colorful and tragic figure, lends further reality to the poem.

I also love

The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.

These are exactly the “irrelevant details” (but note how charged with symbolism; note “heaven” rather than “sky”) that create a sense of reality.

The ending feels inevitable (I mean this as a high compliment): these two are now more real than you or me. Anna Karenina is certainly more real, Gatsby is more real, Huck Finn is more real, Jean Valjean is more real . . . the list could go on.

It's done with details. And by letting us into someone else’s mind. In this case, Levine lets us into the woman’s mind. He tells us what she thinks, and we are hooked: she becomes real. She’s now more real, this “second act” Norma Jean (let’s name her after a glamorous, tragic actress; why not) than Levine himself.

CRYPTOMNESIA: A BREW OF HIDDEN MEMORIES

Demanding Reader, do I hear you protest, But Oriana, you still haven’t told us where those “vivid details” come from.

I think the best answer was given by Carl Gustav Jung over a century ago, during a time when most mental illness was labeled “hysteria” and mental patients were treated with cold baths, an improvement on the cruelties of the past. (Those who saw “The Dangerous Method” may remember that the special cold-water bathtub had straps so the patient couldn’t escape.) Amazingly, Jung explained hidden, appropriated, false and fragmentary memories in a way that makes sense in the light of modern neuroscience. His explanation also accords with Freud’s position, now validated, that cognitive processing is unconscious.

Let me quote from one of my own blog post, a great favorite of mine: what pleasure it was to research the material and write it!

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/jung-in-land-of-dead.html

In 1902, Jung published his doctoral dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.” He diagnosed his cousin Helly (disguised as “S.W”) as suffering from hysteria, a broad term used to explain a great variety of unusual symptoms -- in this case trances, fainting spells, and changes of voice and personality meant to represent different spirits. The medium, however, was not an actress consciously putting on a performance. The “spirits” emerged from her unconscious, which had absorbed and transformed material found in books, but no longer consciously remembered.

Jung cited an analogous case described by Théodore Fluornoy. Fluornoy’s medium described her past lives on earth as a member of a noble family in India, as well as her past lives on Mars. She even spoke “Martian,” which Fluornoy recognized as glossolalia (“speaking in tongues” -- ululations which do not correspond to any known language). The French psychiatrist was able to demonstrate that his medium’s tales could be traced to what she’d read, but later apparently forgot.

In 1905, Jung wrote an essay on cryptomnesia as a source of creativity. Works of art did not arise out of nothing; they were novel transformations of previously absorbed information or memories of actual events. In Richard Noll’s words, “new combinations of memories . . . or previously learned material are the wellspring of creativity.”

IDEAS ARE A COLLECTIVE CREATION

Cryptomnesia also accounts for cases of unconscious plagiarism. Jung found Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra to be strikingly similar in places to passages by Justinius Kerner. Jung contacted Nietzsche’s sister to find out if the philosopher had read Kerner; she confirmed that Nietzsche had read Kerner in his youth. I don’t suppose anyone really cares if a giant like Nietzsche unconsciously (or even consciously) plagiarized an obscure spiritualist author, but I was pretty stunned when I read about it. True, ideas do not arise out of nowhere, but are a collective creation more than we like to admit. We may stand on the shoulders of giants, but those giants may have stood on the shoulders of dwarfs. 

These days we are aware of the related phenomenon of “false memories.” In a sense, most of our memories are false, if they were to be compared to a videotape recording. No one is shocked anymore if a psychologist states that most things we remember never really happened, or at least they didn’t happen the way we say they did. Memories are only partly based on actual events and partly on what we have absorbed from books and movies and the stories told to us by others. The unreliability of court witnesses is legendary. Human memory is continually constructed rather than recorded in an unchanging form. We don’t necessarily consciously lie about our past; we select, embellish, and “confabulate,” according to the meaning that particular events have for us now.

(end of quotation from Jung in the Land of the Dead)

Memory is excitingly corrupt in its effort to make a coherent story. ~ Patricia Hampl

 

“YOU COME FROM ANOTHER CULTURE”

But let me get back to the critical importance of DETAILS. When I was a beginning poet, a late bloomer at 26, I gave a sheaf of poems to a young man I was dating. The next time he saw me, he said, “Those poems were a revelation to me: you come from another culture.”

I glory in the fact that I didn’t say what seemed obvious: “I thought you already knew that.” I was beginning to grasp the reason why those who knew me still didn’t quite “get it” that I came from another culture. People tended to assume that my childhood was just like theirs, complete with Mr. Rogers and the Howdy-Doody and the rest of the alien (to me) universe of the American popular culture. My poems supplied the missing details of a different childhood. Now that other world from which I came could become more real.

But another smart young man at the Beyond Baroque workshop took me to task for those “magical Polish poems.” “You present an unreal, folkloric country,” he said. John Guzlowski later called this a “golden memory,” citing his mother’s tales of the woods near Lvov as a lost paradise, their purity a contrast to the fallenness of America.

Compassionate Reader, please imagine several pages of response to this which I ended up deleting. Let me just say that there are many reasons why recall is selective, and recall after a great loss is particularly so. Childhood memories are bittersweet at best, and we keep that diffuse gold of forest sunlight just in order to survive. And details that get repeated become easier and easier to access.

Eric Kandel
 
Forgetting does not mean that the brain erases memories. It means that the access to them is difficult, sometimes impossible. For instance, I never manged to recall the name of an abandoned village in Mazuria, a name that I vowed to remember all my life, a magic word would allow me to enter the imagined past.

FORGETTING
Mazury region, former East Prussia

In the forest near the lake we found,
half-buried in white sand,
a weather-scarred plaque
with the name of a German village.

We stared at the steep fence
of the Gothic alphabet.
Around, like a prayer for the dead,
the long shush of wind in the pines.


I repeated the name of the vanished
village like a spell. 

I thought we’d always find

that greenest of all the lakes,


crowned with the tallest pine
where we sheltered from rain.
He put his jacket around me.

The needles shone with drops,


a forest of crystal. But I forgot
the spell – the lake nameless 

among a thousand lakes,

the evenings hyphenated


with golden dashes of the fireflies.
The village weathered into silence – 

a memory of a forgetting

I would remember all my life.

The name started with an A,

as in always, and ended
with an N, as in never.
In between, forest and wind –

the dead keening for the dead
in the amber forgetting of pines.

~ Oriana, April Snow, © 2011

Yes, the motorcycle rider existed, and the lake, the pines, the plaque, the rain. Not that they had to exist. Nor can I name that place, but that doesn’t matter either. It turned out that I didn’t need that password. Out of the great nowhere of the trillions of bits of information in my brain, one day I thought about that Mazurian summer. I remembered the rain, the bleached wooden plaque, the whiteness of the fine sand in a ribbon of beach (isn’t it mysterious how memories, like  thoughts, arise?). Detail by detail, I created a world. 

Vladimir Kush, The Walnut of Eden
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Special thanks to Mikhail Iossel for the opening quotations.

FALSE MEMORY: DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. ~ Mark Twain

Last week I had a close encounter with false memory. I was in the process of working on a new essay. One morning I opened the file and was shocked to see there was only one page. Yet I remembered several sections, and the order in which they followed! My first assumption was that I accidentally deleted the rest. Gradually I realized that I wrote the whole complex post only in my mind, so vividly that my brain had assumed the work had already been done.

Writers understand that they must not talk about work in progress: the risk is that they will lose the motivation to put it on paper, the brain somehow assuming the work has already been completed. So you don’t “talk out” the piece. “If I tell you, I will never write it down.” Bars are full of people who tell fascinating life stories full of colorful details. “You must write a book about it,” the listeners invariably say. But the book never gets written. It got “talked out.” As far as the brain is concerned, the work has already been done.

Now I see that even thinking out a story or an essay vividly enough can lead to the same illusion. If you are a writer, you may even come to believe that you did write the piece -- but where is it? It’s part of the larger phenomenon that includes the false memory syndrome, false confessions, dubious childhood stories told in therapy, confusion of something experienced in a dream with reality (I experienced this myself a couple of times; fortunately there were others to correct me), or being so affected by something you read or saw in a movie that you incorporate it as part of the story of your life. When Hillary Clinton told the story of running under gunfire after she landed in Sarajevo, she sincerely believed it -- but others revealed it to be a false memory.

One time I made several conspicuous notes to remind myself to refill a prescription from a mail-in pharmacy. Two weeks later, the order still had not arrived. I called the pharmacy, only to be told that the order had never been received. My guess is that every time I wrote one of my several reminder notes, I performed the action of ordering a refill in my mind, until eventually I was convinced that I had already done so. Instead of writing all those notes I should have gone straight to the phone.

I remember reading an article that warned about using “creative visualization.” It can lead the brain to assume that the action has already been done when in fact nothing has been done except in imagination, and now the motivation to do it is weak at best. I experienced something related  to this drain of motivation when I wrote a lot of poetry. If I knew exactly what I wanted to say, the poem already fully born in my mind, I had to force myself to write it down. It seemed just so much tedious scribbling, the adventure of creation already over.

And I remember endless times during readings or in poetry workshops when the poet’s introduction -- or afterword -- was more riveting by far than the poem. “Oh, you must include that,” we’d urge the poet. Nothing came of it; the telling pre-empted the writing.

We all know people who “only talk about it, but never do it.” We accuse them of laziness and other “character defects.” But their lack of action may simply be the effect of talking about something too much. My principle (alas, I don't always stick to it) is to “talk on the page.” Now I see I must even “think on the page” -- “writing in my head” may lead me to believe the actual writing has already been done.

*

I posted my recent “close encounter with false memory” on Facebook, and John Minczeski sent me this story:

Once, while working with a class of Kindergartners, I asked how many of them remember being born. One or two raised their hands. Then others, the more they thought about it, could remember. Soon, almost the entire class “remembered” being born. What was it like, I asked. Weird, one of them answered. There were all these babies there.
 
Gwyn Henry responded with this wonderful story:

My younger brother, as a 3-4 year old, always said he remembered being in a big pen in heaven, where God kept all the babies. When it was his turn to leave, he was "let out" and came to us. In my brother's story, it is interesting to remember that in our small town, surrounded by rural communities with crops & farm animals, it was common to see animals in a “pen”... chickens, horses, cattle, pigs, etc.

This reminded me how one time in fourth grade I swayed not only the whole class but even the teacher by passionately claiming to have seen something -- I no longer remember what :) After a few minutes, once my excitement passed, I realized that it never happened; I only wished it had happened. This was also the first time when I realized I had what I call my "voice of power"; it carries great conviction. I only hope I didn't tell too many falsehoods, of course never intending to lie. 

And think of the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. They appear extremely sincere.
(By the way, where have all the UFO abduction stories gone? Nowadays, it’s the near-death experiences. Again, I am not saying that people who relate those experiences are lying. They did see those things in their mind, just as drug users really do go on a “trip.”)

And of course there are the notorious cases of people who tell a deliberate lie and over the course of time come to believe it. It’s a rare prison inmate who admits to having committed the crime for which he was convicted. I conducted some writing workshops in prisons and met only one such man; the rest claimed to be the victims of a judicial error. I could not help but be struck by what appeared to be passionate sincerity of those pleas of innocence. After all, it’s only normal that we start believing our lies (the well-tested theory of cognitive dissonance is one way to explain the phenomenon). It’s normal to believe our false memories.

There is also the phenomenon of “source amnesia.” Deborah Digges, one of six daughters, wrote somewhere that when it came to childhood memories, she could never be quite sure if something really happened to her, or to one of her sisters. 


John Minczeski concluded: Memory is so damned interesting -- false memories, elaborated memories, siblings remembering the same event with wholly different details. I can completely understand how people with active imaginations can “invent” a memory without meaning to, or even appropriate someone else’s memory.

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The stories about babies kept in a pen in heaven are charming. But back in the eighties I had a friend who told me, with great conviction, that when she was a toddler her parents sexually abused her as part of the “ritual child abuse” practiced during the Satanic “black mass.” I was skeptical. Her grandparents were Orthodox Jews; her parents went to the temple now and then to honor tradition. “You actually remember that they did those things to you?” I asked. “I repressed those memories,” she said, “but I am slowly recovering more and more details.”

She seemed completely convinced that even though she didn’t quite remember it (“I repressed the memories”), her parents were Satanists who had taken part in rites that included violating children. I continued to be skeptical,  which angered her. This wasn’t the main reason why we eventually parted ways, but it did bother me that she would make this horrific accusation against her parents. Why would a middle-class, middle-aged, educated Jewish woman suddenly want to believe that her parents were sadistic Satanists? Why would anyone?

(The reason I bring up the Jewish angle is that for many centuries the Jews were accused of kidnapping, torturing and killing Christian children as part of their religious practices -- the so-called “blood libel.” The sudden cropping up of “Satanists” practicing “ritual child abuse” was a strong echo of that.)

The following year, while visiting Cambridge, MA, I more or less stumbled into a lecture on “ritual child abuse.” The large auditorium was packed. The woman lecturer had a PhD in psychology, and there were probably many PhD’s in the audience (this was close to Harvard Square). The lecturer said that only now do we realize the extent of the problem: thousands of children raped as part of Satanic rites. She presented case after case in explicit detail. Sickened by this pornography of bizarre sexual violence, I left, but kept wondering. It just did not seem probable. 
 

An 1895 etching purporting to show a Satanic "black mass," complete with child sacrifice.

Later it turned out that some people “remembered” those Satanic rites -- and other kinds of abuse -- only when their therapists used leading questions, hypnosis, and visualization techniques designed to “retrieve repressed memories.” Legal suits and counter-suits resulted. The idea of false memory implanted by the therapist prevailed. Not very long ago I read an article about a woman who falsely accused her father, and how she later asked for his forgiveness. Realizing the monstrous nature of her previous accusations and the suffering they caused, she wasn’t sure if her father would forgive her. The loving man that he was, he did. She was left with the searing question, “Why was I so ready to believe that my father had abused me, and dismiss all the evidence I had over the years that he loved me?”

This reminded me of another article I read, about a rape victim who mistakenly accused a man she picked out with complete certainty from the police line-up. The man was later released due to DNA evidence, and the woman felt horrible. She tearfully begged the man to forgive her. He did, but she knew she would have to live with the knowledge of having caused so much suffering -- all because human memory is far from being a videotape, and the brain is not a computer. (By the way, the stories of ritual child abuse became mostly discredited during the nineties; Elizabeth Loftus is credited with having done ground-breaking research on false memory.)


And what about memoirs filled with false Holocaust memories? We have at least two cases on record where the author was found to have invented the whole saga. I too met a woman who told me how she spent the war years in hiding (in a city park, of all places). What didn’t fit is that she looked much too young to have been born before the WWII. Still, maybe her plastic surgeon was a genius . . . 

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We have always known that young children are very suggestible and easily confuse fantasy and reality; that’s why the legal system tries to avoid using child witnesses. But adult witnesses have also proved to be unreliable; that’s why the need for corroboration and physical evidence. Now that we have DNA testing, some of those convicted on the basis of witness testimony have been freed (as for those got exonerated only after their execution . . . I don’t have the strength to finish this thought).
 
Yet those witnesses were not deliberately lying; they were convinced that they were telling the truth and testified to it under oath. True, we’ve always known that human memory is fallible, but as fallible as that?

Mark Twain famously said, “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” We nod and chuckle. But I wonder, with some apprehension, how many times tribes or nations went to war because someone had a convincing-sounding false memory (or simply a dream, for that matter).

I've also met intelligent-sounding adults who entirely believe that we remember our birth in every detail, but later repress those “traumatic birth memories” (think of the New Age "re-birthing movement" that started in the seventies; adults sitting in a tub of water meant to simulate the womb until the “memory” of how they were born, everything they experienced during the process, came to them; in fact they had pre-natal memories as well, down to remembering being a just-fertilized egg cell. Simply hyperventilating for a sufficient length of time is also said to lead to those “memories.”) If you google it, most entries are from “true believers” in the validity of birth and pre-natal memories.

Oh well . . . back when I was in the pen with all the babies, I said, “I want my parents to be scientists. I want my mommy to be in brain research, so she can explain all about the brain to me.” And that wish was granted . . . but that didn't protect me from forming some false memories, since apparently the problem is universal.

*

John Guzlowski:

I had a friend in grad school who had a terrible accident. He was in a coma for two months. When he finally got out of it, he asked his wife for his dissertation.  She said, "You haven't started writing it yet. You just had the topic approved before the accident." He had written the whole thing out in his coma.

Oriana:

I think Freud was typical of intellectual geniuses: he was either terribly wrong or luminously correct and a century ahead of his time. He turned out to be right in postulating (my spell-checker just suggested "postal") that all cognitive activity is unconscious; some of it is then communicated to the consciousness (what I call "email from the other self"). How often do we say, "Writing comes from the unconscious" without pondering what it means? Yes, you may say, but in a coma? Isn't cortical activity absolutely necessary? We don't really know. Dreams apparently originate in subcortical structures. And there are various degrees of coma, with different types of brain function still present. I know a ghoulish-sounding story of a man coming out of coma while already in the hospital morgue! (google “waking up in the morgue,” and you will be amazed.)

Back to the starting point: what I find fascinating is that if you “visualize” and/or otherwise have a lot of mental activity about something, you may create a false memory of having done it. I love what Mark Twain said: The secret of getting started is getting started. It's not “visualizing getting started.” Or, as Zig Ziglar said, “Do it, and you will feel motivated to do it.” Tush to the cush, fingers on the keyboard. A real writer is one who really writes. ~ Marge Piercy.

You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. ~ Zig Ziglar

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For a post on cryptomnesia, a related phenomenon, please see http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/jung-in-land-of-dead.html

For more on the work of Elizabeth Loftus on false memory, click on this dramatic talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory.html?_

Michael:

Interesting post, Oriana.

I've found the notion of the seven sins of memory helpful. Here's an introduction to the idea.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200105/the-seven-sins-memory

Oriana:

Thank you for the link. I am planning a sequel on “creative memory.” Among other things, I will discuss encoding, storage, and retrieval. 


Charles:

My favorite and most  thought-provoking sentence is this, “I wonder, with some apprehension, how many times tribes or nations went to war because someone had a convincing-sounding false memory (or simply a dream, for that matter).”

Picasso said, "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." This beautiful essay is composed of the lies of memory that makes us realize the truth.

Oriana:

Thanks for commenting. Yes, false memories can have terrible consequences. I only speculate about the possible wars, but we do know that some people were imprisoned and even executed mainly because of the false memory of a witness who was fully convinced s/he was telling the truth. (Imagine someone imprisoned merely on the uncorroborated evidence of a single witness!)

I wonder how many times we don’t even begin to suspect that our memory of a particular event may be false, especially in our age, when we are bombarded with an excess of stories and images. No wonder the brain sometimes appropriates those stories as our own. No wonder, either, that whole mythologies spring into being and then evolve according to the new meaning people see in those ancient legends.

In the upcoming blog, I will use the idea of the “ground of meaning” that Joseph Campbell introduces in relation to mythology:

http://www.context.org/iclib/ic12/campbell/

Gwyn:

I had to smile when I saw the picture of the sheep that accompanied my brother's story in your blog. It brought so sweetly to mind the concept of babies as “lambs,” and there they were, the "lambs" in the pen, waiting to be born!

Interesting too, that since my bro inherited our family's "farm," he has begun to keep sheep to keep the pasture "mowed," and they are multiplying like rabbits. So his association with sheep has survived into his 50's to become a great pleasure for him, much of his time spent with their care, feeding, birthing, building pens to keep them out of his garden & his wife's flowers, etc. Perhaps that early myth that he created for himself was a self-fulfilling prophecy. :)

Oriana:

This is a wonderful story -- thanks for making us smile. Yes, he obviously had an affinity for lambs already in his early childhood. Lambs and calves look so totally innocent and non-aggressive, how can we not love them. Now, if we learned to “grant innocence” to humans as well . . . I think we’re slowly progressing in that direction. I don’t hear much anymore about “being born in sin” and being such dreadful sinners we require a blood sacrifice (indeed “being rinsed in the blood of the Lamb) to “make us clean.” Let’s hope that in the future lambs will be enjoyed just for their “gamboling.” 

Hyacinth sends us a comment in the form of a poem:

Sunday Mornings

The vast sadness of my family
falls with a sigh as if I threw the fabric
of our lives into the air, and as it’s falling
each of us catches a different corner.

Over pancakes with blueberries, scraps
of memory are sorted and pieced
to fit a quilt of truths. No agreement,
no confrontation, each astonished
that no one remembers the way they do.

My mother said I couldn’t have remembered
the day my father put his fists through
all the windows of the house. She said
I wasn’t home from school so why do I see
his white shirt sleeves rolled above the elbows,
bloodied hands, hear his primal howl.
*

Oriana:

“So why do I see . . .”  Why indeed? Where did that “memory” come from? The speaker probably heard an account of that day of father’s rage. She may have read a novel that described a similar incident. And finally, it’s not so difficult simply to imagine this emotion-charged scene. Everyone agrees that young children can’t quite tell fantasy from reality. But older children and even adults can still easily confuse the two. Something vividly imagined becomes quite real. It can be encoded (encoding is the first crucial step in memory formation) just as strongly as an actual event. It’s not just liars who come to believe their own lies; we all come to believe our confabulations.

Memory constantly evolves, is constructed with each telling or revery. But the really wonderful thing is that it has no past tense -- it arises like a resurrection or a dream, and we may well ask, “Did that really happen?” No, not the way we remember it, since the present constantly changes the past according to what is important to us now. New images and new meanings are superimposed, the blanks filled in. As Una’s poem hints at, collective memory enters into it too -- and that includes literature.

Some of you know that my "second mother" was my grandmother Veronika, a survivor of Auschwitz. She and I slept in the same room. Didn't I hear her gasp and moan and scream in a nightmare at least once -- maybe several times? Don't I remember her waking, crossing herself, and putting some valerian drops in a glass? Didn't she sigh an enormous sigh, the collective sigh of all inmates, before settling down to sleep again, her head on the pale pillow already funereal?

I can't be sure. I've read too many books, seen too many movies. It may be a false memory. But it seems so real . . . And false memory, too, can profoundly affect our lives.

Scott:

You bring up an interesting topic; as an old sailor I recall sea stories of adventures in ports and seas where perhaps my memory is foggier or I incorporate others's stories into mine. My last year in the Navy I kept a journal of my cruise to the Mediterranean and looking through it I am amazed at what events I forgot and what events I recall vividly but did not write down; and I kept this log daily updated. Some details I left totally out of the log; either I have embellished them in my mind and they did not happen as I recall or maybe they did and I just didn't record them. There's a great story about the English poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry who also was a terrible alcoholic. He flew into New York City once and a customs officer asked him what was in the large suitcase he had, he is reported to have said, 'I don't know, let's find out.' Upon opening, all it contained was a lone football boot...and a copy of Moby Dick. I don't know if it's true but I would like it to be!
Oriana:

That’s my own experience reading my own journals -- of sorts, since I never kept a journal in the classic sense of the word. All those details I entirely forgot! And things I never wrote down, that turned out to be the most vivid memory. Up close, we don’t even know what’s important -- or which detail will keep haunting us.

Thanks for that precious story about Malcolm Lowry. Alcoholics and memory -- that’s another topic that should be explored, since you never know what they’ll encode and remember. But to some extent, that’s true of all of us -- we just can’t know. I remember having said, “I’ll remember this all my life” -- and years later, all I remembered is that I said I would always remember. Never underestimate the power of forgetting. 

And of unexpected recall: Lowry, who took up drinking at 14, reminded me of someone I knew who also began drinking at 14 -- something I'd rather forget. But we don't get to choose. Well, to some extent: we can choose to go over pleasant memories, which then become stronger -- never mind the inaccuracy . . .  And that reminds me that during depression the access to positive memories is blocked. Memory is so amazing . . .

APHRODITE AND THE JOY OF THE BODY

Aphrodite of Rhodes, 3rd Century BCE
 
APHRODITE

Beauty is more profound than truth.   ~ Oscar Wilde

“All men will disappoint you,”
said a man I loved madly,
the way you can love only once.
“This will lead you to God.”

His words branded me like lightning.
I knew he was right. 
The Prince turns into a frog,
the dream house burns down.

But God also disappoints,
senile mumbler in the sky.

If only my prophet said:
to beauty. To Aphrodite –
quivering drops of light
startled with delay, delight.

Faith is the opposite of fate –
luxurious, lavish, arguably right.
But my lovers were as ruthless
as Zen masters. The youngest,

God’s severe critic,
the one who committed suicide,
shouted, “Why should we hide
our private parts? Let’s expose
 
ourselves every chance we get.
Confront him with the mess
he made! Asshole!”
He shook his impotent 

fist toward the sky. “At least
you’re on talking terms,”
I enviously sighed.
But not with Aphrodite, no. 

Kallipygos,
“of the beautiful behind.”


~ Oriana © 2013

*

I admit I was startled to hear my beloved call god an asshole (he actually did it multiple times that day, each time bringing up yet another problem with “intelligent design”). In retrospect I think it’s common to feel angry at god, and even to hate god (I imagine only too clearly how different childhood would have been if I were allowed to hate god . . . or at least not trying to force myself to love him.) 

It's easy to feel a burning anger at god, a bitter rage and resentment, especially if you still semi-believe in an omnipotent being who did a poor job creating the world, with all its built-in problems. He's either an actively evil Godzilla or a passive deity who couldn't care less, who remains silent and inactive, not lifting a finger to prevent tsunamis or genocide, much less help with one’s personal problems. Hence the Yiddish proverb: “If god lived on earth, people would break his windows.”

It’s only when atheism becomes complete that the anger (sometimes even vehement rage: asked to meditate on divine love, one woman cried out, “Where was divine love when I was raped?”) disappears. After all, non-existence is the perfect excuse. 

Another man not on good terms with Aphrodite

There has been much talk about the “culture wars.” Conservatives sense that they have lost: the nineteenth century really is over. But it’s the second half of the nineteenth century that introduced the idea that Western culture is a difficult fusion of the ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek values (Hebraism and Hellenism, as Matthew Arnold put it in his famous essay). It was easy to guess that Hellenism -- beauty and intellectual freedom -- held more appeal to the educated.

Later a bolder formulation was born: the quarrel between Jerusalem (faith, obedience) and Athens (reason, beauty). At this point, hellenistic values seem to be winning. Can you imagine “Follow your bliss” as the motto of the Victorians, much less during the Middle Ages?

I am not sure about the Protestant churches (though it’s common knowledge that old-time Calvinism was extra-grim, with its doctrines of Total Depravity and Limited Election). Thanks in part to my grandmother, I do know that old-time Catholicism glorified suffering. Suffering was good for you: “God sends suffering to those he loves.” Suffering here on earth meant fewer centuries in the fires of Purgatory. Even minor suffering, a headache, say, was an occasion for NOT taking aspirin. Suffer now so you can suffer a bit less in the afterlife: what's a headache next to a century of purgatorial fire? Catholic chic was to suffer NOW.


Goya: A procession of flagellants, 1812

Getting back to “Jerusalem versus Athens,” I need to clarify that it means not so much ancient Jerusalem as Christianity, especially its Puritan or fundamentalist version, including what I call “old-time Catholicism.”

(Shameless digression: I always thought that Matthew Arnold was in love with Hellenism and its pursuit of intellectual and aesthetic delight, “seeing things in their beauty and essence.” Then he’d catch himself and assert that Hebraism gave us ethics -- as if morality existed only within Hebraism, and the ancient Stoics, for instance, did not have a stern ideal of conduct.)

But let us focus on the triumph of Hellenism. In what ways have the hellenistic values won? Here is the pronouncement of an eminent Polish historian of Ancient Greece:

I bring joyful news: the gods are back! Let me summarize it in four major points:

1. the joy of the body, games, sports.

2. the joy of sex between consenting adults. In the eyes of the immortal gods, sex is good; it’s not a sin.

3. the joy of knowledge, meaning freedom of inquiry and the true cult of science. We have finally dropped the idea that the ultimate truth comes from revelation. We use our limited mind, the faint lantern of our reason, to light up the surrounding darkness. For fifteen centuries Christianity managed to prevent the progress of science. Since truth is contained in revelation, what’s the point of seeking it? Religion is not just irrational; it's anti-rational. But slowly, slowly, since the Renaissance we’ve been returning to the idea that all we have is our reason. And we are discovering the magnificence of the Universe.

4. the joy of democracy. It was created in ancient Greece and grafted onto Rome, which remained a republic for several centuries. Now we claim that democracy is the best political system, and it should be adopted everywhere --  including the Catholic church. But it will be most difficult to democratize the church, since the church is anti-democratic; it stands for theocracy and feudalism, left over from the Middle Ages.

~ Aleksander Krawczuk, interview in Pantheleon, December 29, 2009; translated by Oriana

Yes, that’s the main the subversive idea of hellenistic values: that life should be a joy, that we should be happy here, on earth, rather than focused on suffering and doing penance for sins (e.g. the contemplation of the five wounds of Christ; see the Brigidine Sisters). Furthermore, the anti-rational and anti-democratic (hierarchal) attitudes of organized religion seem more and more out of touch with the reality of the modern world.

I wouldn’t go as far as agreeing that “the black is worse than the red,” the slogan of the Polish anti-clerical liberals, the black standing for Catholic clergy and the stranglehold of the Catholic church over the nation. True, the intrusive power of the church is the prime reason I could no longer live in Poland, but if by “the red” we mean communism rather than democratic socialism, then the crimes of Moscow-controlled dictatorships cannot be so easily forgotten. Nor can the crimes of the church.

The chief crime of the church, as I’ve come to see it, has been the manipulation of the believers through the fear of hell. If you make a child believe that s/he is a terrible sinner and needs redemption to avoid being punished in hell for eternity, you paint god as a cruel tyrant. When a Methodist told me, “I was taught that god loved me and would help me if I needed help,” I was totally envious. As a child I had some hope that Mary might help me -- only Mary seemed to be a true figure of mercy -- but Mary’s power was limited by the monstrous god of wrath, the Old Testament Godzilla.

True, the church has relaxed its doctrines so as to allow non-Catholics to enter heaven, for instance. There isn’t quite the old emphasis on sin and hell, and the radical idea, “God loves you,” can be heard from a priest. I don’t remember ever hearing it in my childhood, but I did hear it from one American priest (and no doubt many others say it too; I suspect it’s one way the church wants to become like the Protestant churches it would like to absorb). And the infallible new definition of hell stresses that it’s a state of mind rather than an actual place with fire and brimstone and devils with pitchforks pushing the damned deeper into the huge cauldrons. And yet, for all the progress, I just came across a long comment from a Christian who cited “fire insurance” as the main reason to believe.

(Shameless digression: in my brain, everything connects with everything else, so I suddenly remember St. Paul’s “It’s better to marry than to burn” -- a sad reason for getting married.)

On the whole, the church is still a reactionary institution, anti-life, anti-sex, anti-woman, pro-blind obedience and anti-free inquiry. It’s just that, as Milosz observed, it’s not really possible to tell a modern person that real life begins only after death. As in antiquity, we have come to value THIS life rather than a vague afterlife, “doing nothing for ever and ever.” We have also come to see the body and sexuality as good and natural (how did THAT happen? It’s silly to point to Freud, who himself was quite repressed and by no means in favor of a liberated libido), rather than as evil and sinful. Yes, the gods have returned.

**

SAINTS? OR ANOREXICS AND SELF-MUTILATORS?

It’s almost too much fun writing about sin, the concept which poisoned my childhood. What strikes me now is that sin was not defined as hurting someone, but as offending god. Thus, not going to church on Sunday was a sin; falling asleep during prayers was a sin. Not feeling love for god -- worse, doubting his existence -- was a sin so profound that it called up images of the desert hermits “mortifying the flesh” in the hope of attaining grace: beating their breasts with a rock, whipping themselves with very nasty “disciplines,” depriving themselves of sleep, wearing itchy hair-shirts and belts woven of thorns, fasting. They were the ultimate, I think, in their obsession with sin and self-punishment. 

Why the cruelty to the self? Aside from the church’s constant preaching about sin and the call to penance, what we see here is probably the phenomenon of internalization. The times were cruel, and child-rearing was harsh. A child who experiences a lot of punishment is likely to start punishing himself.

Today these self-mortifying saints would be classified as suffering from a variety of mental disorders, but centuries ago they were considered holy men and women. It’s not clear what sins they were trying to atone for -- most likely the original sin of being human. Again, we see a terrific change in attitudes across the centuries, though it is only recent decades that made “follow your bliss,” “live in the moment” and “enjoy” into mottos that eclipsed skulls, whips, and rocks for mea-culpa breast beating (or, if you were a Protestant, enduring three-hour sermons on falling into the hands of an angry god).

Only in our times could this poem about Saint Jerome be written:

Jerome in Solitude

To see the lizard there,
I was amazed I did not have to beat
My breast with a stone.

If a lion lounged nearby,
He must have curled in a shadow of a cypress,
For nobody shook a snarled mane and stretched out
To lie at my feet.

And, for a moment,
I did not see Christ retching in pain, longing
To clutch his cold abdomen,
Sagging, unable to rise or fall, the human
Flesh torn between air and air.

I was not even
Praying, unless: no,
I was not praying.

A rust branch fell suddenly
Down from a dead cypress
And blazed gold. I leaned close.
The deep place in the lizard’s eye
Looked back into me.

Delicate green sheaths
Folded into one another.
The lizard was alive,
Happy to move.

But he did not move.
Neither did I.
I did not dare to.

~ James Wright

The most telling part of the poem is

I was not even
Praying, unless: no,
I was not praying.

~ it’s the “unless” that turns to a different definition of prayer: paying complete and non-judgmental attention to the moment. That is the modern definition of the state of grace and paradise: seeing the beauty of things right now, in this life; the “eternal moment” of looking into the lizard’s eye -- “delicate green sheaths / folded into one another.” 

Leonardo da Vinci, St. Jerome, 1480 (yes, that is a chest-beating rock that Jerome is holding in his right hand)

**

NOT ONLY SCIENCE, BUT ALSO ART

Most people assume the progress of science is the chief factor undermining religion. But since the Renaissance, there has been another force working in favor of the “joy of the body” and the joy of life: the visual arts.

Since its inception, the Catholic church correctly saw that art could be made to serve religion. What the church failed to foresee was the emergence of secular art that celebrated the human. It’s the kind of art that is an example of “practical atheism” -- it’s not “anti-theist,” but religion is simply absent. At this point we are so used to secular art that we need to go to a museum to be reminded how medieval art was pretty much exclusively religious, and how stiff and awkward the figures were before Leonardo’s and Raphael’s beautiful madonnas.

By banning from churches images other than the cross, Protestantism reinforced the secular trend in art. When Dutch painters painted the sky, they painted wonderful clouds without god or the angels. “Above us, only sky” -- John Lennon’s “Imagine” was prefigured by landscape painters.

As for the objection that those painters were believers, I am tempted to reply that a true artist worships only art, never mind how jealous god might be. But a more interesting issue here is “practical atheism.” Unlike militant atheism, practical atheism is not expressed through debunking the alleged proofs of god’s existence. Rather, it ignores religion. Practical atheism celebrates the world and the human. A milkmaid becomes a fit subject for a painting since she too is beautiful in the light. 

Vermeer: Milkmaid, 1657

But let us leave the most famous (if anonymous) milkmaid in the world to enjoy another such image: Girl Chopping Onions, by Gerrit Dou (1646). Yes, even servants and onions were to be celebrated. The secret was out: life was beautiful and to be enjoyed. 

*

FALSIFYING THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

How come the Catholic church allowed statues and paintings, in blatant violation of the Second Commandment?

You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them [i.e., the graven images]; for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” (Exodus 20:4-6, adapted from the NASV)

Thus, to make a graven image is to “hate” Yahweh. Punishment for doing so will be “visited” not only on the image makers, but also to their descendants, even the fourth generation. The Catholic church had to find a way out of this, so it moved away from the image-less god of Sinai and introduced the Trinity: the anthropomorphic Father and Son, and the Holy Spirit symbolized by the dove (a nice concession to the animal kingdom; never mind that the dove used to be sacred to Aphrodite).

But the text of the Second Commandment remained a problem, so the church simply changed it to “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” The way the nun explained it to us in catechism classes, this was a prohibition of swearing and bad language in general, even if god’s name was not directly invoked.

We were amazed that using swear words was such a bad sin. Whose father didn’t swear multiple times a day? And what about us children, letting a “bad word” escape our lips when we happened to stub a toe, for instance? Were we doomed to hellfire for this? Today it seems silly, but at the age of eight and nine I agonized even over euphemisms. God would not be fooled by euphemisms, I knew that.

But swearing as a sin is a minor issue next to the falsification of the Second Commandment. The church knew that it would be hard for the average Christian to “relate to” an image-less deity, what with the beauty of polytheistic art still around in the early centuries. And art, with its emotional power, could be used to serve the church. In addition, most of the faithful were illiterate, and art could teach them the stories of the Gospels.

What the church did not predict was the Renaissance and the art that followed. Once human beauty was re-discovered and rendered in painting and sculpture, it would become a good thing in itself. When the plate-like solid halos go and the Madonna is presented as a beautiful young woman, it’s not a big step not only to secular portraits of beautiful women, but to Aphrodite. I’ll skip Boticelli’s famous Birth of Venus and the plump fleshpots by Titian and Rubens in favor of the little known Venus by Cranach -- talk about a fashion plate! (1531; Cupid is holding a honeycomb)

My favorite is still the graceful Aphrodite of Rhodes. How could such beauty, once rediscovered, remain non-subversive? Would we not rather look at Aphrodite than contemplate the five wounds of Christ?

Like Krawczuk, I admire the ethical teachings of Christ. What I condemn is the old-time Catholic cult of suffering and rejection of the world and the human body. I’ve added “old-time” because I realize that I speak of the past. The culture wars are not over, but it’s already certain which side is going to win: the pagan joy of life is back. The joy of the body is back. The gods have returned. 

** 

Post-script:

Here is a quotation from an earlier blog post about Milosz's two souls (one Catholic, the other pagan):

In A Year of the Hunter, Milosz reminisces: “I had even published in Verbum [a liberal Catholic periodical, in contrast to “the hideous Catholicism of The Knight of the Immaculate Virgin”]. Jerzy Andrzejewski [the author of Ashes and Diamonds] and I used to go retreats there, without any good results, but at least we honestly confessed to each other that the ascetic, prayerful atmosphere produced in us a wild craving for vodka and steak.” (p. 197) This craving for sensory satisfaction, rejected by Catholicism as sinful, is part of the pagan love of life, of carpe diem rather than the hope for heaven, which another liberal Catholic described as “only another hell, a hell of boredom” (Karol Koniński, quoted on p. 193).

And I was reminded of what Mary Krane Derr (now sadly gone from us) said: the life-hating, body-hating theology grew out of historical trauma, e.g. the Great Famine in Ireland. I think it didn't take anything as extreme as the Great Famine or the Black Death, though such disasters certainly induced the most theological cruelty, since disasters were seen as divine punishment. But let’s face it, in the past, everyday life was full of suffering (frequent war, disease, children dying; a lot of dying all around). Life was “short and brutish,” especially (but not only) for the poor, that religion naturally focused on the afterlife, rejecting the earth and the body as evil.

It's interesting, though, that the Greco-Roman civilization gave us the alternative: love of this life. The pagan gods were happy; no deity was centered on suffering.  

Hyacinth:

Just finished a biography of Tolstoy, and in the photos he appeared tall and in this he appears short. I picture him as commanding.

I liked the faint "lantern of our reason." When we are so soaked in our respective religions the reason is indeed faint and discouraged. I strongly believe life should be full of joy and laughter (the best medicine) and the arts bring me joy even the works based on religions. They are still beautiful  and treasures.

Even as a child I had difficulty accepting a cruel and jealous god and hell. Self-torture and punishment are so distasteful to me. I think of Dimsdale and the Scarlet Letter. Sickening.  

Oriana:

The photo I used shows Tolstoy in old age. He was pretty tall for his times, and certainly long-lived. But note how miserable he looks. Here is another photo of him in old age, scowling:

 
Tolstoy at 80, Yasnaya Polyana

Though my mother, intimidated by my iron-willed grandmother, let me be raised as a Catholic, when I was ten or so she said, out of nowhere (perhaps she was reacting to my obvious anxiety and brooding), “There is no hell. God wouldn’t be so cruel.” I realized this was a huge blasphemy, and not believing in hell would be enough to doom you to hell for eternity. The pious view was that god would indeed be so cruel, except that the word for it was “just.” Even now, I think, many people speak of “justice” when they mean “vengeance.”

Religion of course has a vested interest in putting down reason.
At first the church wasn't entirely against reason; during the Middle Ages it even encouraged learning, based on the naive idea that reason would provide proofs of god's existence (and medieval scholars did come up with some, easily refuted). And the church was a patron of the arts, which eventually blew up in its face.

I too love beautiful churches and beautiful religious art. Most religious art is awful, but the masterpieces are ours to enjoy forever.

It took cruel men to invent a cruel god. The idea of compassion took a long time to evolve -- and even now cruelty is a heavy problem (Islam, Christian fundamentalists who do not “spare the rod” and carry posters threatening hell). Nietzsche: “Religions are, at bottom, systems of cruelty.”

Hyacinth:

I had problems with the threats in the Bible. Sounded too much like bullying. As for swearing I'm the worst though I did it silently when my children were little but that is what I heard growing up and even though my mother washed my mouth out with soap the words were there. Now I voice my frustration with the inability to do the most normal things such as opening a can or peeling an apple.  I do it a lot. Dropping thing brings on a swathe of bad language. I'm not proud of it but it's a fact, especially if it makes a mess to clean up, as in knocking over a pitcher of OJ.
 
Oriana:

The threats: let’s face it, religion works through intimidation more than anything else. Keep them scared, and you don't really need to invent an attractive heaven. Just make sure that hell is vivid. Monotheism in particular is fear-based, hell-based. As that Christian correspondent put it, he believes because faith is “fire insurance.” How pathetic!

In a matter of half a century, we have indeed moved a long way toward the joy of life, toward tenderness. As for swearing, what's so terrible about that? Is this a sin for which you’d send anyone to hell for eternity? It’s just so ridiculous, the things that got called a sin. I hope the word eventually disappears from the language.

But I used to worry for real. After communion you're supposed to be in the state of grace, and in old-time Catholicism, you went to communion only if you were in the state of grace, and not in the state of sin. But within a few days I might slip and fall, use a bad word, and oh, no! Sin! I'm back to being a wretched sinner! A child doesn't have a clear understanding of what constitutes "sin." I assumed that pretty much everything was sin. I was reluctant to get out of bed because I thought oh, no! soon I'll be sinning again! Funny now, but it was truly distressing back then.

Luckily for us, the gods have returned.


Scott:

Enjoyed your blog as usual, always thought provoking. Especially enjoyed the pictures and commentaries on Tolstoy. I have a book of his writings that has the picture you have of him, seated, on the cover. He is a source of endless fascination to me; rich, titled, talented, long life, loving wife, large family, fame in his own lifetime.....and utterly miserable! His many attempts at piety; no sex, no meat,  no smokes, making his own shoes, his strict code of ethics all failed to satisfy and reduced him to fleeing the safety and love of family to die in a train station...horribly tragic. As much as I admire Melville, he too was always running from wife and family; several sea voyages, a romp through Virginia during the Civil War and his latter years spent in a morose solitude...though he did write his best poetry in that period.

Oriana:

Both Melville and Tolstoy had not only discordant marriages, at least in later years, but also what I’d call “unresolved metaphysical obsessions.” Dostoyevski was blessed with a wonderfully supportive second wife with whom he remained passionately in love; he adored his children also, and they him. True, he admitted to being a doubter, but because of his personal attachment to Christ he managed to have a lot of positive emotions. And he freely expressed his doubt through some of his most memorable characters, so there was the joy of constant inspiration.

Running away from his wife and dying at a train station as a closure to a great writer’s life -- I know what you mean. I want to produce that blog I’ve been thinking about since my e-apocalyptic summer: The Day Dostoyevski Died. It’s an amazing story, filled with love.

Charles:

The quarrel between (faith, obedience) and (reason, beauty) is more complicated than what it appears on the surface.

"One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is not a Judeo-Christian value but that is what is taught in public schools today. Is that reason?

This concept of not knowing the difference between good and evil is winning in this world we live in. That can't be a good thing.

On the other hand, putting the fear of God in the mind of a child is child abuse.

After reading this blog it would be very difficult for an open-minded person to still be a believer in the doctrines of the church.

Looks like St. Jerome pounded a stone in his own chest.

My favorite section in the blog is NOT ONLY SCIENCE, BUT ALSO ART.

"Practical Atheism" is an entire book.

This is one of my favorite blogs. Congratulations.

Oriana:

I especially agree that indoctrinating a child with “the fear of God” is child abuse.

I also agree that Jerusalem versus Athens oversimplifies the conflict, and we most definitely need clear ethics. I am not a moral relativist. There is absolute evil, and we must not be silent about it.