Bah Humbug: Some Thoughts on A Christmas Carol

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons

I finally sat down yesterday and made myself read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As a scholar of Victorian literature, I should have read this story long ago, back when I was in graduate school, if not well before, but I don’t think I ever did. And really, why should I have? It’s not considered Dickens’s best work by Victorian scholars; in addition, it’s entered our culture so thoroughly, in so many forms, that it hardly seems necessary to read the original because we all know the story and characters so well. Like the story of Adam and Eve, we’ve imbibed so many versions of the original tale that we might not even recognize the original if we were, for some reason, to take it up and read it for ourselves. (Back when I taught English literature to community college students, I would make them read the part of Genesis that dealt with Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden before we tackled Milton’s Paradise Lost. The original was a tiny passage–just a few lines long–compared to Milton’s magnum opus, which is undoubtedly more familiar, at least in the way it presents the main story, to us than the original.) For most of my life, I have been content to ignore Dickens’s original story, perhaps thinking that watching the Mr. Magoo version was good enough.

So what prompted me to correct this defect in my reading at this late date? Simply this: I encountered an advertisement for an online course that promised to reveal A Christmas Carol as a story of Christian redemption, and I immediately bristled at what I thought was a misguided interpretation of the whole thing. Of course, you can find anything you want in anything you read: I was once an academic, so I can attest to this. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Presenting an entire course for the purpose of forcing this reading on Dickens’s tale seemed wrong to me, because I believed something like the opposite is more likely to be true. And so, to check my theory, I decided to read the original myself and that’s what brought me, a person who long ago tired of Christmas hoopla, to engage in that most Christmas-y of Christmas activities: reading A Christmas Carol.

It’s well worth the read, but I realize I’m probably not going to convince anyone to spend a couple of hours reading a story written 180 years ago. And also, some people–the fact astounds me–some people simply don’t like Dickens. But that’s no reason to go around saying his best-known work is something that it really isn’t. I’ll freely admit that Dickens wrote a story celebrating what he considered the spirit of Christmas: an antidote to the greed and lack of empathy, a story designed to combat the misery produced by industrial capitalism that gripped much of Victorian London. (Indeed, a mere two years later, Friedrich Engels would produce his seminal study, The Condition of the Working Class in England, focusing on Liverpool and Manchester instead of London.) This much is clear: Dickens intended to, and succeeded in, writing a powerful story that drew on the emotional appeal of Christmas.

So why do I refuse to consider the novella a Christian story? My argument is a simple one, and in fact I’d argue that the very popularity of the story (go ahead and try to determine how many recorded versions exist–I gave up, but not before I became distracted by one that must have taken place during COVID lockdown, in which surviving members of Dark Shadows read it through on a Zoom call) does much to prove that I am right.

So here’s my argument: Dickens witnessed the greed and heartlessness in the world around him. He recognized the need for a correction of sorts, and he determined that spreading the spirit of Christmas–an idea that he himself largely willed into existence–was one such creative measure to provide this correction. True, there’s a link from Christmas back to Christianity and Christ, but by the Victorian period, that link was growing ever more tenuous in an age riddled with religious doubt. Thanks to Dickens (with a bit of help from Prince Albert, who brought German Christmas traditions to England), by the end of the century, people who were not devout Christians, or not Christian at all, would be able to to take part in Christmas festivities without feeling profoundly uncomfortable.

Dickens’s genius was that he recognized that the original Christmas story, the one celebrated in many Christmas carols (pa-rum-pa-pum-pum), was rapidly losing its cachet; it was no longer performing the function it needed to in order to make society more livable. Thus, genius that he was, he set out to create a new Christmas story, one for his time. He succeeded beyond even his wildest imagination. Readers caught hold of his story, which then entered into the culture and disseminated what he had called Christmas spirit–to wit, generosity, good cheer, lovingkindness–throughout a society corrupted by industrial capitalism, in order to administer a corrective, if only for a few days at a specific time of year. In other words, A Christmas Carol was created because the original Christmas story had begun to lose its hold on an England that was no longer uniform in its Christian belief (and perhaps never had been) and had therefore lost its power to influence society.

Was Dickens aware of how ambitious his project was? Almost certainly not. He was simply trying to create a compelling story that would capture his audience’s attention and sell lots of books. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t on to something really big. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, he was setting out to create a mythology for the people of his time, since he recognized, at least at some level, that the one they had inherited had lost much of its power. But there’s an important difference between Tolkien’s project and Dickens’s: Tolkien was deliberately trying to create a new mythology for Britain and was aware of what it was he was aiming for. Dickens, I’d argue, was not. His new mythology was thus tacked onto the existing one, as a kind of appendix that would someday come to supplant, or at least threaten to eclipse, its predecessor.

So, in the end, A Christmas Carol may well have a Christian message, but if so, it’s a pretty wide definition of “Christian,” so wide as to be ultimately meaningless. Rather, its message is a critique of industrial capitalist society, subtle enough to co-exist with that society without causing too much friction. In writing it, Dickens created a new parable, actually replacing and not merely reinforcing the original Christmas story.

My takeaway from this? Stories are important. They influence the societies we live in. Our capacity to get caught up in them, to believe in them and their messages, have profound effects on societies, on culture, and ultimately, on the arc of human civilization. Sometimes, as with A Christmas Carol, a story comes along with such resonance that we are able to see, in real time as it were, how very important they can be, and how some stories that were once powerful in their own time can be supplanted by others when they begin to lose their influence. In the end, it behoves us all to understand how stories work, and how they not only describe, but actually create, the world we live in.

What I Read this Summer: Five Books I Liked, and One I Didn’t…

It was a busy summer here on the farm that is not really a farm. We had many projects, most of them incomplete, and lots of visitors–so my reading kind of slowed down a bit, but I did make a few discoveries. Almost all of my reading choices are directed by sheer accident: my reading habits resemble nothing so much as a bumper pool table with the cue ball randomly making contact with other balls, the bumpers, the edges, and not infrequently, hopping off the table onto the floor and rolling around there for a while. In other words, I’d caution my readers not to look for any kind of systematic rationale for reading in this list, because I am what I’d call the champion of random reading.

But I find, on looking back on the last few months, that a few of the books I read do stand out, so here’s a list of them, in no particular order.

1. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2012), by Mary Gabriel . Like most of the other books on my list, I read this on Kindle, and I’m glad I did, because it is a mammoth book, coming in at over 700 pages. I am a veteran reader, but even I might have been daunted by the size of this tome. My wrists would surely have been stressed by the weight, and honestly, who hasn’t been beaned by their book when they drop off to sleep unexpectedly while reading in bed? Had that happened with Love and Capital, I might have sustained serious injury. But this book had to be this long, because it’s extremely thorough, well researched, and full of interesting facts. It also provides a very cursory introduction to some of Marx’s ideas. Gabriel wrote a masterful biography of Karl and Jenny Marx, their lifelong friend Friedrich Engels, and their children. In addition to the information on Marx and his circle, it also gives an excellent picture of the places they lived, in particular Victorian London.
2. Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser. Let me start by admitting that in my younger days, I was a literary snob. I read American literature only when forced to, and I kicked and screamed the whole time. Now, in some cases this is justified; I defy anyone to say, for example, that they actually enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter. I tried to reread it about twenty years ago and, following Dorothy Parker’s advice about another book, threw it against the wall with great force. (“This is not a book to be set aside lightly,” she is reported to have said. “It should be thrown with great force.”) Be that as it may, a lot of American literature is actually good, and I have learned to overcome my Anglophilic snobbery. Case in point: I read Sister Carrie in my first year of graduate school, and I hated it. I made fun of it. I said it was a stupid, predictable book. But now, reading it again some forty years later, I freely admit I was dead wrong. This is a good book, and it is not predictable. It passes one of my tests for a good book: I can remember scenes from it clearly. In addition, Dreiser created a female character who lived by her wits and survived–more than survived, in fact, because Sister Carrie actually thrives. I feel I should apologize to Dreiser for misjudging his work, so here goes: Sorry, Ted. I done you wrong.
3. Le Debacle or The Downfall (1892) by Emile Zola. Most of us have never read anything by Zola, and if we have, it’s probably the letter he wrote in support of Alfred Dreyfus entitled “J’Accuse,” published in 1898, which resulted in Zola having to flee to England for a year to avoid arrest for libel. But The Debacle is not about the Dreyfus Affair, although that episode in history would offer great fodder for a novel. It’s set during the Franco-Prussian War, which admittedly most of us know little or nothing about. So actually I suppose it’s not surprising that it’s not read much. But I’d argue that’s a shame, because this is a book that deserves to be read. It has some of the best descriptions of war I’ve ever seen, made sharper by the attitude of the author/narrator, which is not hard to discern: that all war, and this one in particular, is a foolish and tragic enterprise. I was engrossed by the novel, and found even the translator’s footnotes fascinating, albeit intrusive. Why hasn’t someone made a musical/opera/miniseries out of this book? I mean, I like Jane Austen as much as anybody else, but it’s time to spread our wings a bit, isn’t it?
4. My Cousin Rachel (1951) by Daphne du Maurier. Here’s the deal about Daphne du Maurier: some of her stuff is great, like Rebecca and “The Birds.” Some of it is so-so; I’d put Jamaica Inn into this category. But some of it is awful, or at the very best, lackluster. It may not be popular to say so, but I was unimpressed by The King’s General, and I couldn’t even get through The Loving Spirit, her first novel, because it was so creepy. My Cousin Rachel is, like Rebecca, a great novel. The first sentences draw you into the novel, very much as the first scene of Great Expectations does, and although you know where the story is going, you’re compelled to keep reading to the end. My pet theory is that Rebecca is a response to or inversion of Jane Eyre, while My Cousin Rachel is an inversion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Read it yourself to see if you agree. As a bonus for reading this far into my blog post, here’s a link to an interesting interview with du Maurier.
5. The Queen of Hearts (1859) by Wilkie Collins. This is a collection of short stories, strung together with a nice Victorian framework narrative. Three elderly brothers live together in rural Wales and unexpectedly wind up with a young woman, dubbed “The Queen of Hearts” by her friends, as a long-term visitor. Just as she is preparing to leave and return to society, however, the narrator receives a letter from his son, who has been wounded in the Crimean War and is coming home. The young soldier asks his father to retain his visitor long enough for his homecoming so that he can propose to her. The result is that the three old men work together to create a series of stories so enchanting that the young woman is lured to stay to hear the next one. The stories are varied in theme and texture, and the narrative framework is fascinating as well.

So, that’s five books that I liked quite a bit. The one I disliked? Sorry, American lit fans, but it has to be John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935). The only thing I liked about this book was the setting. I found Steinbeck’s tone towards his characters distractingly patronizing, and just about everything in it made me uncomfortable. This is, I’d argue, a book that actually deserves to be forgotten. I’d willingly trade it in for any of the ones listed above.

Feel free to make a comment if you disagree or feel I’ve overlooked something. I’m always willing to engage in discussion, and I usually learn a lot from people with differing points of view.

And now, as we move further away from the memory of summer days, here’s to a winter filled with writing, reading, and doing whatever else brings you hygge!

Some Thoughts on Writing Poetry

Photo of Northern Michigan Woods in springtime, taken by
Dan Shumway

As I wrote in my last blog, during most of the month of April (National Poetry Month, as declared by the Academy of American Poets in 1996) I took part in a local poetry workshop. Somewhat dubious as to the outcome of my immersion in the discipline after a twenty-some year sabbatical, I had hoped only for a kind of jumpstart to my creativity, a willingness to engage in writing in a purely creative mode after many years of prosaic endeavors–by which I mean writing in prose. My writing in this blog is largely critical, relying on some degree of brain power to make connections and arguments; to a certain degree, this is the kind of writing I feel most comfortable engaging in, which is, I suppose, why I keep doing it.

But lately I’ve felt the call to be more expressive, more creative in my writing. And I suppose I should admit that that call also beckons me to be more personal as well. Yet I was stymied. After a score of years in which I wrote largely essays (of the critical or academic flavor) or comments on student papers, or–when I felt daring–novels, I found that I was very much out of practice at the task of writing poems.

Because, whatever else people say about poetry, writing it is a task. It takes some discipline as well as creativity. We can’t all be John Milton, who said that the lines of Paradise Lost came to him in the night during his dreams, fully formed and ready to be set down. I have always understood and accepted the discipline of poetry–that part of the craft made sense to me. But over the past few years, the inspiration for poetry seems to have fled from me.

And yet that’s not quite true, either. I realize now that the inspiration was there all the time. Yet I set these poetic ideas aside in order to concentrate on the prose. The reason, I told myself, went something like this: I don’t fully understand what makes a poem work, so I’d better not delve into the art until I had a better grasp of how it works. And once I began to think that way, it wasn’t long before I lost every bit of confidence I ever had in my ability to write a poem.

But I’ve had a change of heart and a change of perspective.

Something drove me to sign up for that course, and once in it, I became the pesky student who asked too many questions. But my fellow students didn’t seem to mind; in fact, they welcomed my sometimes obnoxious comments. More than that, they showed me that that virtually no one really knows what makes a good poem work. So there went one problem out the window–I was down one excuse for not writing the poems that I felt strangely called upon to write.

This morning, five days after the workshop has ended, I realized that there was always another reason I had felt incapable of writing poetry again. It’s a little complicated, and somewhat personal, so I hope the few readers I have will allow this indulgence; I think it’s important to articulate my thought process so I’ll remember it in the future, and this blog is as good a place as any to set down my analysis.

When one retires and looks back on one’s work, it’s easy to see it for what it is: pretty much unremarkable. The few things I’ve written that have been published are largely forgotten (probably deservedly so); those that are unpublished are floating around somewhere, unloved and unread. That seemed to me to be a kind of cosmic rejection of my literary endeavors, and consequently I felt I didn’t have any right to try my hand at poetry again, since it would be a waste of time.

Now, to be fair and honest, I’ve not really tried all that hard to get published. In these pages, you’ll find several posts in which I declaim that publishing is possibly the enemy of a writer. (I still believe that can be the case.) Yet while saying that publication should not be the goal of a writer, I think a part of me still believed it should be, and that the test of a decent writer was whether or not she’d been published.

I know I will be wrestling with this question for the foreseeable future, but that’s not the point here. This silly argument had the effect of feeling that I somehow didn’t have the right to write poetry, since I didn’t intend to work to get it published. It’s a ridiculous argument, made more so by the fact that my life as a professor was spent convincing people that they had both the right and the duty to raise their voices, whether as public speakers or writers. In my dissertation, which was on the representation of female insanity in Victorian novels, I argued that insane women (in life and in art) were all too often shut away and shut up because what they said was too uncomfortable to hear.

The irony is glaring. Silly me: I had become my own warden, censor, caretaker–whatever you want to call it. I shut myself up here on my farm and declined to raise my voice. Rather than Bertha Mason Rochester, whose words were incoherent to Jane Eyre but nonetheless shouted aloud, I became Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville’s antihero who responded to all prompts by saying, “I would prefer not to.” I refused to allow myself the pleasure of wrestling with words purely because I was worried about them not being accepted or understood, despite the fact that I knew–or should have known–better.

This is a powerful realization. And I owe it to the people in my workshop, who as I said above, put up with my questions, my doubts, my outbursts, and, more than that, who encouraged me to find my voice again. I am incredibly grateful to them for their help and their support. (I also had a good friend who did me the favor of reading long emails filled with endless questions and doubts and who was also incredibly helpful and supportive. Thank you, John.)

I’m not sure how many more poems I’ll be able to write. But I have a list of poetic subjects to contemplate, and the most important thing is that I’ve given myself the freedom to write about them. Perhaps “freedom” is the wrong word to use in this case; I like to think that I have the responsibility to write these poems, if I choose to accept that responsibility.

And on this sunny morning in May, I really think I will.

Volunteering as Defiance

Every Thursday I volunteer at an animal sanctuary down the road from me. This sanctuary, Last Dance Rescue Ranch, works to provide animals a safe place for the last years of their lives. It might sound like it’s full of geriatric, dying animals, although the reverse is more accurate. The place is hopping–literally! It shelters large livestock like cows, horses, donkeys, goats, sheep, pigs, alpacas, and one llama, as well small animals like rabbits, chickens, turkeys, cats, and dogs. These are animals whom no one really wants, and they’ve all found a home for the rest of their days on a little piece of land about two miles from where I live.

My job at the rescue ranch is to feed the cats. I had originally intended to do barnyard chores as a ploy to keep myself from acquiring large animals. When I moved to my own farm (I use the term loosely), I realized that I was living the dream of my nine-year-old self, who thought being surrounded by animals large and small was nothing short of heaven. But my senior citizen self realized that I have limited energy and strength (to say nothing of money), so I was hoping that mucking out stalls a couple of hours a week would keep me from acquiring any additional animals.

As it turned out, I’m not mucking out stalls: my job is to feed the cats in Catland, where anywhere from eight to twelve or so cats live. I am happy to serve wherever needed, and I happen to like cats a lot, so it’s a good fit. I am quite fond of the cats in Catland, from Sqeaky Pete (he has a screechy meow), to Pistol Pete (a youngster who is into everything), to the aged but affectionate Molly, to Eleven (who needs a pretty complicated mix of medicine), as well as a few other cats whose names I don’t know. Volunteering in this way helps me structure my week, and it gets me out of the house even on winter days when I really don’t want to emerge from my warm and comfortable cocoon.

But it’s how I came to volunteer at the Ranch that is, I think, blog-worthy. That’s because my time volunteering there is directly related to something that happened close to fifty years ago. And in this way, I feel like I’m defying time itself, forcing my distant past to stretch its thin hand all the way into my present life. In a sense, too, I feel that there is something almost holy about the work, trivial though it may be, that I do–and I’m not talking about the holiness of caring for neglected animals, or being altruistic, or paying it forward, or anything like that. Rather, I’m talking about the holy enterprise of keeping a memory alive, the memory of a person who lived only a short time on this planet–but whose memory can, and does, still have agency and a tangible effect on the world today.

And so here’s the story of how I came to volunteer at the Last Dance Rescue Ranch. When my mother died two years ago, my brother and sister and I tried to find suitable places to donate her things. Of course, a lot of stuff went into the trash, but we were able to give a lot of her possessions away to people who appreciated them. One thing that my mother had always kept on her cedar chest, wherever she was living, was a latch hook rug that she had received back in 1965 or so. It had been a gift from a little girl who lived a couple of houses down from us; she had made it specially for mom. There’s a story behind it: this little girl–I’ll call her “Jan”–was frequently ill with leukemia. We included her in our games whenever she was well enough to play, but apparently there were many periods when Jan was simply too sick to join in with us neighborhood kids in our raucous escapades. My mother, who was not always the nicest person (she actually had a pretty wide mean streak), took it upon herself to teach Jan how to knit, a pastime which kept her busy and active when she was stuck in bed, whether in the hospital or at home.

Because I was four years younger than Jan, I was pretty oblivious to a lot that was going on. I knew that Jan was sick and sometimes wasn’t home, but how could I know how serious it was? And I never knew that my mother had taught Jan to knit specifically to provide her with something to do when she was bedridden. As a matter of fact, Mom taught all of us neighborhood kids to knit, even my brother–and this in the sixties, when boys didn’t do domestic activities. I guess I’ve always thought that’s just what mothers did: teach the neighborhood kids to knit for some strange, inexplicable reason. At any rate, to thank my mother for her knitting lessons, Jan made, with her own mother’s help, the latch hook rug that mom kept for well over fifty years, always in a visible place, in all of the different homes she lived in ever since. Jan died when she was ten–my first experience of real, unalloyed grief, a difficult memory which I suppose I have mostly blocked but never forgotten.

So, when my mother died, my sister had the brilliant idea of giving the rug back to Jan’s mother. She tracked her down through Jan’s sister (Facebook is still good for something), and I had the rug cleaned, boxed it up, and sent it to the woman. I was worried that it might elicit painful memories, but my sister, and Jan’s sister, insisted it was the right thing to do. Some weeks later, I received a lovely card from Jan’s mother. In it, she thanked me for the rug and went on to attest to the impact my mother had made all those years ago, helping the family out in a variety of ways during an incredibly difficult time–one of which, of course, being those knitting lessons. In this way, I learned the precise provenance of the latch hook rug. And, along with that explanation and expression of gratitude to my own recently deceased mother, Jan’s mother enclosed a check to defray the expenses I’d incurred in sending the rug to her.

Of course it’s obvious where this is going: I could not take that check, but I could use it for something good. Jan’s sister runs a farm for retired show horses, so it seemed like a good fit to donate the money to the Last Dance Rescue Ranch, which was doing good work in my own neighborhood. And then another idea came to me: this one involving a strange attempt to vanquish time. If I didn’t stop with a simple donation, I reasoned, but actually volunteered on a regular basis, then Jan’s life would not have completely ended, because it would still be having an impact–not only on my life, but on the lives of the animals I was helping. It seemed like a way to extend Jan’s own fleeting time in this world. Once I thought of it that way, I couldn’t help myself. I was determined to mess with time, and so, to make a very long story short–one that spans over fifty years, in fact–I became a weekly volunteer at the animal rescue ranch down the road.

And so now, every Thursday, I go and feed the cats. I do it for myself, because it makes me happy to see the cats well fed and to watch their antics. I do it for the cats, because they need someone to care about them. And, not least of all, I do it for Jan, who died all those years ago, after much too brief a time in this world. I do it because in this way I can defy death itself, allowing Jan to live again through my own actions, insignificant as they are, and continue an existence that was so cruelly cut short all those years ago.

An Idea for Math Teachers: Learning Logs

Image taken from a Guardian article

It’s been a busy summer for me, and I’m just getting into the swing of the school year. Some of my readers may recall that last year, for some strange reason, I decided to send myself back to school to acquire the math knowledge I never managed to master as a young adult. It’s been a struggle, but I haven’t given up yet, probably for three reasons: first, I’m a non-traditional (old) student, so I have a lot of experience being a student as well as a teacher; second, I have more patience than I did as a young person; and third, I have a lingering professional interest in how students learn. It occurred to me today, after a particularly frustrating experience which involved a trigonometry test and my concomitant inability to answer what seemed to be the most basic questions, that one thing math teachers could do is something we writing teachers have been doing for quite a few years now: asking our students to submit journals on their learning experiences. I actually think this is a somewhat brilliant idea, so, to test it out, I decided to try it out here, on my blog. So from here on out, I guess I should consider this my first entry in my math learning log.

But before I get started, a brief warning. I am horrifically bad at keeping journals. I am probably even worse at journaling than I am at math, and that’s saying a lot. From the outset, I warn any reader of this math learning log that there will huge lacunae here, because I often start a journal and then completely forget about it. Nevertheless, I am going to forge ahead with this journaling idea, because one of the reasons I started this whole math learning process in the first place was to see what happened when a person of normal intelligence but sparse math knowledge attempts to learn enough math to get to calculus. Is such a progression–from basic College Algebra to Calculus I–possible? Today, after my test this morning, I have serious doubts. But I have to set those doubts and my growing frustration aside, and remember to regard myself not as a frustrated and humbled learner who knows she should have been able to do better on this test, but as a subject in an experiment. In a sense, I’m like that scientist in a black-and-white film who decides to test out a vaccine, or an antivenom, on himself. I need to maintain a sense of calm detachment, even while knowing that the results of this test could be disastrous. And, getting back to the journaling idea, documenting my journey through writing may well be more instructive than documenting it through grades.

For the moment, I will not mention my other reason for taking math courses–the existential, ideological, philosophical, or, if you like, the religious reason for this foray into mathemaltical studies. However, I write about it here.

Now, on to the subject at hand: the trig test on basic functions. I thought I had mastered about 2/3 of the concepts for this test, but I was wrong. Even those concepts I felt sure of slipped away from me as I began the test, in exactly the same way the memory of a dream evaporates upon our waking. By the end of the test, working frantically against the clock (and I have to add here that although I’ve always been a relatively fast test-taker, today I worked up to the last second), I was both frustrated and ashamed. Yet, to be fair, my poor performance (I do expect to pass the test, but only because of partial credit and because I wrote down everything I thought that could be pertinent to each problem), is due neither to laziness nor to disinterest. I had to miss four classes because I was taking care of my grandson in a different city (okay, so that was a delightful experience, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, to be honest). I did go to the tutoring center when I got back, but after an hour or so there, I deluded myself into thinking that I actually understood what had been covered. I also watched about three hours total of various YouTube videos (Khan Academy, Organic Chemistry Tutor, Dennis Davis’s series) about the trig concepts covered, but in the end, I think they might have hurt me, making me think I understood things when I really didn’t.

The frustration is real. At my age (62), learning something new can be unfamiliar, and it’s easy to see why this is so. We oldsters found out what we are good at and what we like long ago, and we have kept doing those things for decades, getting better and better at them through the years. We tend to forget how hard it is to learn, how much energy and commitment it takes, and most of all, how very frustrating and embarrassing it can be. In other words, learning something new from scratch, without any context to fit things into, is not only intellectually challenging but also emotionally draining. I suspect young people learn more easily not only because they are quicker and more resilient, but also because they don’t know any better. Because they don’t know yet what it feels like to have actually mastered something, not mastering or “getting” concepts doesn’t produce as much cognitive dissonance in them as it does in us oldsters.

Whatever my grade on the test this morning, and I don’t expect it to be good, I have to say that I don’t think studying more would have helped me, because I know I wasn’t studying the right things in the right ways. (That’s probably where that missed week of classes hurt me.) And although I was incredibly frustrated when I turned in the test, I feel less so now, a couple of hours later, because I realize that I don’t have to pass this class to obtain knowledge from it. In fact, I know I can take the class over next semester whatever grade I get this time, and that doing so is no great dishonor or waste of time. I have the luxury of taking my time with this, and although that’s really hard to remember when I’m in the throes of studying and test-taking, it’s the way all learning, in a perfect world, should be.

Random Thoughts about TV Shows

A few random thoughts about television shows this morning, since the end of a long winter is in sight, and I have survived it largely by knitting, reading, and–you guessed it–watching television shows and movies.

On Mindless Murder: Why do detective shows always, without fail, focus on murder? Based on the detective shows I watch (admittedly, most of them are British), it seems that all cases in which both police and private detectives are called are murders. Hence the Cabot Cove paradox: a small town, Cabot Cove, Maine, has the highest murder rate in the world, because Jessica Fletcher lives there and she must solve a new murder every week. (Don’t get me wrong–I love Murder, She Wrote, but I think that if a detective is good at solving murder cases, she ought to be good at solving other kinds of cases as well.) What about the cases in which no murder has occurred? Much of a detective’s job, after all, involves sitting and watching people, trying to get evidence of adultery, or perhaps finding a missing person (who often, I would hope, turns out not to be murdered). Even Sherlock Holmes occasionally worked on cases that did not involve a murder of any kind. I would love to see a detective show that doesn’t focus exclusively on that most brutal of crimes. In fact, I find it deeply troubling that so much of our entertainment comes from postulated murder, as if the only way we can amuse ourselves is by imagining the ultimate violence done to another human being. If detective shows would only sprinkle some non-murderous episodes in with their usual fare, I think it would be more realistic, for one thing, as well as more humane, and it would do those of us who watch them a lot more good.

On Evil Collectives: Why is a collective always represented as something bad? Take Star Trek: Voyager. While I find the Star Trek series creative and thoughtful, the Borg (a hive-mind collective that forcibly assimilates/absorbs all entities it encounters) quickly becomes a predictable and hackneyed antagonist. Of course, someone had the brilliant idea of “rescuing” 7 of 9 and integrating her into Voyager’s crew–kudos to whoever came up with that one–but the problem remains that we seem to be unable to imagine a collective association of human beings as anything but profoundly threatening to creativity, kindness, and mutual aid. Perhaps this stems from our Western distrust of collective societies and our American horror of communism. Yet this cannot be only an American issue, since Daleks–from the Dr Who series–are also portrayed as an evil, voracious collective society. My question is this: is it possible to imagine a non-threatening collective, one that is humane and caring? Why is it that we never see such a collective portrayed on television or in films? If we could imagine one (and of course non-agressive collective societies do indeed exist in nature, among bees, for example, and many other kind of animals so we needn’t go far for inspiration), perhaps we could aspire to replicate this kind of mutual aid society in our world.

On Emo SciFi: While I’m on the subject of science fiction, here’s a question that I’ve often pondered: Why are science fiction shows almost always dark? Of course, there’s a really easy answer to this question: it’s dark in outer space. I get that, but why is it that we can only imagine space travel as something in which disasters, emergencies, and threatening events occur? Wouldn’t it be more realistic to sprinkle some humor into the plot of a scifi show sometimes? I realize that we’re living in difficult times, as we move closer to tyranny and nuclear war threatens to erupt in Europe, but isn’t that itself a reason to provide entertainment that is uplifting and amusing as well as thoughtful? For that matter, why must “thoughtful” always mean “something dire is about to happen and the whole crew, or planet, or species could die?” I would very much like to see a science fiction show that occasionally has an episode focusing on disagreements between crewmates (because God knows that would happen on a long voyage–just ask any sailor who’s ever been on deployment), on equipment malfunctions, on anything but the mission ending in a fiery ball of disaster due to an out-of-control collective that is intent on committing murder.

In other words, it would be nice if someone out in TV Land got hold of a new blueprint for their plots instead of recycling the same old trite themes. But maybe that’s my own problem for expecting real creativity from an overburdened medium….

It’s pretty bad when one has to resort to doing math problems to get exposure to new ideas!

Searching for the Most Beautiful Word

Stephen Hunt/ Getty Images , from Redbook

I find it odd that J.R.R. Tolkien believed that the most beautiful sound in the English language was the words “cellar door.” To be honest, I just can’t agree with him: to me, at least, these words don’t sound lovely or inviting. Mysterious? Yes. Intriguing? Perhaps. But certainly not beautiful.

So I’ve tried my best to identify a word I do consider beautiful, and I think I’ve found one: “senescence.” I love the way the sibilant “s” sound eases through my lips. I had a serious lisp as a child, going to speech therapy throughout my early elementary school years, so maybe the word “senescence” has the attraction of forbidden fruit to me. Whatever the reason, I find “senescence” to be an elegant word, yet at the same time both humble and understated. It truly is a lovely word, with a soft, inviting sound that charms the ear.

The unpleasant reality rests in the meaning of the word: “the condition or process of deterioration with age.”

Oops. Looks like I’ve picked a word as fraught with problems as Tolkien’s “cellar door.”

But since I’m on the subject anyway (see how I did that?), let me discuss the most moving story about senescence I’ve ever encountered. Surprisingly, it’s not about human beings, but rather about octopuses. (And yes, the plural of “octopus” is “octopuses,” not “octopi.” This short article explains why, while cleverly pointing out the irony in the whole debate, since octopuses live as solitary creatures and so presumably one might never really need to use the plural of the word in a natural setting.)

Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus must be a good book, because I still remember it clearly, several years after I listened to an audio version of it. The part that I found most memorable is Montgomery’s discussion of the senescence of her octopus friend. It is one of the most beautiful, and one of the saddest, descriptions of the natural world I’ve ever encountered.

While octopuses don’t have a centralized nervous system or a brain, as we do, they seem to experience consciousness. Recent films, for example, have documented the friendships that certain octopuses have formed with human beings. Clearly, they have the capacity to make memories, as well as other complicated mental functions. For example, this video segment shows an octopus dreaming. The takeaway here is that despite its alien appearance, the octopus is much more than a scary-looking sea monster; it is a creature with feelings and opinions, at least as much as the other animals we live with, such as dogs and cats .

But an octopus has a very short lifespan, living only three or so years. And the last thing a female octopus does, as it enters this final stage of life, this period of senescence, is to produce a collection of lacy, bundled eggs and festoon her den with them. Below is an image of an octopus with her eggs from an NPR article:

Stuart Westmorland/Corbis

The octopus will then spend the rest of the time remaining to her caring for these eggs, and then, with her last bit of energy, her final breath, so to speak, she will launch these eggs into life, just as she herself leaves it.

Now here’s the thing about Sy Montgomery’s book: the octopus that Montgomery befriended was a female, so she produced eggs and draped them in her aquarium home, but they were never fertilized, because she was acquired too early in her life to have been able to fertilize them. Yet that made no difference to her. She cared for those empty egg sacs just as assiduously as if they had had baby octopuses within them.

Perhaps she just didn’t know the difference. But I choose to believe that there is a powerful lesson here. That octopus did what she had to do: her drive to create was inborn, and she could no more resist that urge to lay eggs and then to take care of them than she could resist the urge to eat, or to sleep, or, when the time came, to die. And here’s where I find an important parallel between the octopus and us, one that has nothing to do with our role as parents, but rather as creators.

Look at it this way: one of the functions of human beings is to create things, all sorts of things, depending on who we are and what kind of gifts we develop in ourselves. We might create stories, as Shakespeare did, or important bodies of research, as Jane Goodall has, or structures, like the Great Wall of China. We might create an epic poem, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, or we might make a baby blanket out of yarn and a set of knitting needles. We might build a beautiful bench, or craft a powerful speech. We might create relationships that continue into the next generation. It doesn’t matter what shape it takes; one thing that humans do, without fail, is create. The least talented of us cannot go through this life without having created something at some point during the time allotted to us on this earth.

The problem is, many of us don’t honor our creations. We don’t think our creations could possibly matter, so we fail to protect and nurture them. We throw them away, making them disposable, ultimately discounting their importance.

But the octopus teaches us a different lesson. She shows us that whether there are baby octopuses within the eggs or not, it’s important to treat them all with respect. She demonstrates that it’s the act of creation and our response to that act that matters, and not whether the product of our creative urge is a success or a failure.

This realization hit me powerfully when I first listened to Montgomery’s book. In fact, walking down a sunny street in Dallas, tears coursed down my cheeks, and I didn’t care whether the other people on the path around White Rock Lake noticed or not. I cried at first because the futility of the octopus’s gesture struck me like a gale-force wind. It all seemed so useless, so empty. Was life really so cruel and hopeless?

But within a few minutes I realized that the important thing here was the act of creation, not the product of creation, and there’s a big difference. It didn’t stop my tears, but it did change the cause of them. The octopus’s actions seemed so selfless, so beautiful, that her death made me ache as if I’d known her myself. Her senescence, her final actions, these seemed to me worthy of a Verdi opera or tenth symphony from Beethoven.

Because the beauty of the octopus’s dying gesture more than balances the tragedy of it.

And now, some years later, entering my own period of senescence, I realize what we human beings share with that octopus. Some of us create viable things that go on to have a life of their own; some of us create the equivalent of empty egg sacs. But it doesn’t matter. We all have engaged in the act of creation, and that’s what makes us alive.

I might never achieve an existence as beautiful as that of an octopus, but I can keep the memory of her–of her senescence combined with her act of creation–in my mind so as to give me a sense of peace as I go about my own small acts of creation, and as I proceed with my own decline into old age.

In short, I’ve discovered that senescence can be beautiful both in its sound and in its meaning as well. Take that, Mr. Tolkien!

Dream Novels

Communardes, Wikimedia

I’ve now been keeping this blog for about a decade, and I have to admit that I feel a sense of accomplishment for some degree of consistency in writing. True, I haven’t been consistent about my posts–indeed, sometimes long gaps stretch between them–but I have so far always returned to this site to write yet another mini-essay on a subject of my own choosing. It all began, I recall, when I realized that it wasn’t exactly fair of me as a composition instructor to ask my students to write on-demand essays for me when I wasn’t at least prepared to produce my own essays. So I set myself the task of writing, in a sort of public way, to honor the commitment I’d hoped my students would feel for their writing classes. After all, as Daniel Stern (the writer, not the actor) once told me, “A writer is someone who conducts their education in public.”

Over the last few years I have been doing that on steroids, so to speak. I’ve tested out strange and new ideas I’ve had here, and I’ve revealed my determination to put myself back to school in order to complete, or at least to remedy, what I consider a half-hearted education. (Hence my decision to take a math class at the local community college where I once taught English and Speech–a decision which accounts for my inconsistency in posting [as if I need an excuse!]. Algebra, it turns out, is quite time-consuming–but more on that and what I’m learning in a future post.)

Perhaps part of my original motivation in starting this blog was to try to garner readers for my self-published novels. Yet that motivation has fallen by the wayside; I’m no longer interested in trying to expand my reader base, and in fact, I’m not sure I actually want to write any more novels. I say this not from any kind of pique or bitterness, but more from laziness. If I can outline the story, in other words, and tell it to myself, what need have I to write it down and spoil it all? Yet there’s also an element of humility playing into this. The older I get, the less I feel compelled to throw in my two cents. Moreover, the older I get, the less certain I feel of anything, particularly my potential to contribute to the vast array of written works already out there. It seems just as good a use of my time to read more stories, stories that people have forgotten by obscure authors who haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve. (Perhaps this deserves a future post as well!)

And yet….

And yet there are stories I’ve thought of and have sketched out in my mind, and I hold them dear. They’re like unfinished sweaters I’ve knitted. I think I know what they’d look like if I finished them, but I’m not sure about all the intricate details. I don’t know how exactly they’d fit, either. So when I think of these “dream novels” (I’m adapting a term from the essayist Charles Lamb, from his essay “Dream Children: A Reverie,” a lovely piece of old-fashioned writing), it’s with a certain degree of wistfulness as well as some real curiosity, to see what they would become if I ever did write them. After all, as most writers know, one can never know exactly what one thinks until one sees what one has written.

Anyway, the rest of this post will be spent in listing my Dream Novels and sketching out their plots, just so that someday, when I have too much time on my hands and more confidence in my possession, I can consider coming back to one or two of these ideas. They are listed in no particular order below.

1. A novel about Princess Charlotte–not the present one, but rather the daughter of George IV (1796-1817), the heir to the throne of England, whose early death in childbirth (along with her infant son) precipitated the hereditary crisis that would result in the the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne a generation later. Her death changed history. But she was also a really interesting character, and she married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who would later, long after her death, become the first king of the Belgians. He was a huge influence on European politics, despite being a relatively unknown and unimportant German prince. And he was incredibly handsome, and was, to all appearances, heartbroken at the death of Charlotte. My twist on the narrative, however, would be that Charlotte’s life story is narrated by Cornelia Knight, who served as Princess Charlotte’s companion/governess, and who saw a great deal of the world, especially for a spinster in the early nineteenth century.
2. A novel about one of the survivors of the the Paris Commune, an historical interlude about which most Americans know very little, if anything at all. At the end of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (disastrous for the French, that is), the victorious Germans were set to enter into Paris, but the citizens revolted against their own government and refused to surrender, at which point the French government declared war against the Parisians, who had decided to rule themselves. From March until May, 1871, Paris was under siege and existed as a Commune–an experiment in democracy that bears, at least for Americans, an unfortunate name. Women were essential to this experiment, and when it was defeated by the government, they were blamed for much of it. My story follows one of these women into anonymous exile in London, where she gets involved in another political movement, all while a journalist and his sister attempt to identify the mysterious French teacher who lives down the street from them in Bloomsbury.
3. On the lighter side, a murder mystery involving a community band in a small town. One of the musicians gets himself murdered–it would be the first chair trumpet player, for obvious reasons. (If you don’t know what obvious reasons I’m referring to, then you have clearly never played in a community band.) The detective would be, naturally, a woodwind player (I’m partial to clarinets), and would weave in and out of the idiosyncrasies of the various musicians in order to solve the mystery.

That’s all I have for now. Any one of these stories could consume my creative life for the next several years, if I allowed it to do so, but I can’t quite convince myself that it’s worth the effort. After all, there’s so much to observe in this world, so much to study, so much to absorb, that I’m simply not sure that I should commit to work of this sort. And yet, while work of this sort is apparently self indulgent and ultimately pointless, I know well enough that the product of that work isn’t always the point, and it’s what one learns while undertaking it that matters.

There are so many ways of learning, and I find it sad that as a retired teacher I’m still learning so much about the whole process. Ultimately, when I’m ready for the learning that these projects offer–assuming I ever am–I’ll take a stab at it and perhaps come up with something worthy of posting here, in installments.

Until then, it’s back to studying Algebra!

Private Clavel: My Private Marathon

One of the things that kept me going through the dark days of following Trump’s election was translating an entire French novel, as I wrote about here. I started my translation at the end of November, 2016, and finished it in December of 2017, so it took slightly more than a year of work. Yet I never knew quite what to do with my translation. I made a few half-hearted attempts to publish it, submitting a chapter to several reviews, but nothing took, and so I put it high up on my shelf and tried to forget about it.

However, last summer I discovered that a translation of the book had been published, back in 2019. I greeted this news with mixed feelings, as can well be imagined. I had long determined that no one else was interested in Leon Werth’s Clavel Soldat, that it was too dated or obscure for publication. I also knew that I was a novice translator, and that my chances of publication were very slim. But seeing that someone else had managed to get their version into print still evoked a spasm of writerly envy–short-lived, true, but envy nonetheless–and made me, for the about a day or so, sullen and bitter.

Then, however, I did what any honest writer/translator would do: I ordered the book from its publisher, Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd. Then, in the brightest days of summer, I crushed my sour, envious attitude, and when the book arrived, I placed it on my desk, determined that when winter came and I wasn’t busy with gardening, hiking, mushrooming, and visitors, I would read Michael Copp’s translation (which he calls Private Clavel’s War on War) and compare it to mine, word for word. I was convinced that there would be much to learn from this exercise, and I felt that Mr. Copp, as well as Leon Werth, deserved this much attention from me.

For the last two months, I’ve been engaged in this activity, and I have indeed learned a great deal. True, there are times when I thought it seemed a pointless exercise, but then I realized that many people engage in pointless activities for fun and for health. As an example, consider running. Lots of people run several times a week, working to increase their endurance. What was I doing, if not working to increase my mental endurance, my ability to use every atom of intelligence and memory and reasoning I had in my poor, beleaguered brain in order to make it stronger? So I compared what I was doing to training for a marathon. After all, most runners never expect to win the marathon races they enter–merely finishing is the point. For me, finishing my translation of Clavel Soldat had to be the point, not publishing it, and reading Copp’s translation in conjunction with mine would prove that I had, indeed, completed my own private marathon.

I have indeed learned a great deal from this exercise. First of all, on a purely practical level, I learned to use the Immersive Reader / Read Aloud tab on MS Word. This function allowed me to listen to my version of the translation at the same time that I read Copp’s book, speeding up the whole process. I can see how the Read Aloud function would be a real benefit to anyone proofreading their own work and I’m sure I’ll use it again.

As far as the actual translation goes, here are a few things that I’ve learned. Most important, translation is an art, not a science. This is a truism, but it bears repeating here. I will just post two versions of the same passage from Chapter VII (page 182 of the original) to illustrate:

The next day, Clavel receives a package of newspaper clippings. He knows. Those who write far from the front lines fight in their logical citadels, everyone for his or her own lie. He knows now that there is nothing but an immense vertigo within a great cataclysm. He is in the midst of this cataclysm that the people look at from a distance, like a tourist watching the eruption of a volcano from several kilometers away.

The next day Clavel received a packet of newspaper cuttings. He knows. Those who write in the rear carry on their fight in their citadel of logic, each one supplying his own lie. He now knows that there is only a great frenzy in a great catastrophe. He is in the middle of the catastrophe that the people in the rear contemplate, as a tourist contemplates the eruption of a volcano from a distance.

And another, longer, passage, this one from the last page of Chapter XV (page 300) of the original:

The division headquarters, with its gleaming officers and its clerical workers. A field near the cemetery is chosen for the execution of Private P., from the colonial infantry.
“What did he do?...”
“He didn’t want to go into the trenches…”
It is dawn. Six hundred men are lined up: his company and parts of other units.
An ambulance wagon has been prepared in case Private P.  faints or resists.
The wagon is not needed. Private P. walks to his spot. Twenty men, bayonets at the ready, escort him. He has just as much the look of a soldier as the other men. The only difference is that he doesn’t have a rifle. He looks straight ahead. He has the face of a sick man being taken out of the trenches. 
Private P. and his escort come to the field where the troops are waiting at attention. 
Private P. is there with the other twenty men. No one has come yet to take him. 
A warrant officer orders: “Left side, line up…”
Then, “Right side, line up…”
And Private P., who is going to die, seems bothered only by not knowing how to stand. He turns his head to the right, puts his left fist on his hip. Private P. follows the order “Right side, line up” with the other soldiers.
Twelve soldiers have fired. Private P. is dead.

It's the division with its gleaming officers and its pen-pushers. A field near the cemetery has been chosen for the execution ceremony of soldier P.... of the colonial infantry.
'What did he do?'...
'He didn't want to go to the trenches'...
It is dawn. Six hundred men are drawn up; his company and parts of other troops.
An ambulance has been prepared in case soldier P.... should faint or resist.
The vehicle is not needed. Soldier P....marches to his rank. Twenty men, with fixed bayonets, escort him. He looks a soldier, just like the others. He has no rifle, that's all. He looks straight ahead. A sick man, coming back from the trenches, has this look. 
Soldier P...is there with the other twenty. They haven't yet come to take him. 
An adjutant gives the order: 'Left turn'...
Then: 'Right turn'...
And soldier P...., who is going to die, seems bothered by not knowing where to stand. He turns his head to the right, puts his left fist on his hip. Soldier P...., along with the others, carries out the order: "Right turn."
Two soldiers fired. Soldier P... is dead.

The differences are minimal, but they are there. The only major difference is a bona fide mistake in the second selection, where the French “douze” is translated as “two.” This is something I noticed by comparing translations: mistakes do happen. Sometimes words are mistranslated, and not only when there is debate or obscurity about what the word means. Even more unsettling, sometimes whole lines or short paragraphs are left out: both Copp and I are guilty of this error. Translating an entire novel is a laborious task, so it makes sense that such mistakes happen.

But this led me to another discovery, one that unsettled me more, if possible, than finding that someone else had beat me to the punch and had published an English translation of Clavel Soldat. Mistakes such as the ones I noted above are inevitable in a long scholarly work, but editors should be able to find and eliminate them; after all, that’s what they’re payed to do. Why had this not happened in Copp’s translation? The answer is simple: I believe Copp had no editors, because it turns out that Grosvenor House Publishing Limited is what was once called a “vanity press”: it is essentially the same as self publishing on Amazon (which I have done myself and, to a certain extent, now regret), and there appears to be little quality control. This discovery floored me, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But regarding the errors in the text, I’d still argue that Copp did an excellent job on his translation. The fact that it differs from mine attests to the finesse and subtlety required in translation itself. Like so much in life, there are no right or wrong answers, and it is important to remember that diversity is a gift, not a curse. What this does mean, however, is that any time we read works that have been translated, the translator has made choices, most of them unconscious, that reflect how he or she sees the world, and this inevitably skews the purity, so to speak, of the original words. Again, that is not necessarily a problem; it’s just important to be aware of it when reading literature in translation. When a translator creates a translation, it’s as if all his or her past reading, thinking, even life experiences, work to color the words he or she chooses, and so it makes sense that each translation would be as individual as the person who produced it.

What more have I learned from this grand, marathon-like exercise of mine? I still think Clavel Soldat is a good book, and an important one. Leon Werth created a character who despised war and dared to write about it during the war. His depiction of life at the Front in 1914 is ruthless in its clarity and in the sense of betrayal Clavel feels as he witnesses both the horrors of war and the hypocrisy of those participating in it. I understood the First World War much better after reading the novel, and so I am despondent and, to be honest, disgusted about the fact that its translation appears to be unpublishable today and that self publishing is the only recourse for a novel of this type. Consequently, few English speakers will ever read it. My conclusion — which I hope is not the result of a sour-grapes attitude — is that publishing, like so many things today, is a grand game of popularity and attention-grabbing. In times past, there was room for less popular works, if they were deemed important. Now, however, we live in an attention economy, and important works are bypassed for those works that get a bigger, louder splash.

We lose so much by this. History fades away, covered up by the clamor of contemporary voices, all competing for the biggest slice of an economic pie that really doesn’t matter in the long run. What we lose by this is access to history, is the abililty to understand, so to speak, what the long run is and how it affects us. We become more provincial in our thinking and less capable of forming big ideas because we are only able to access those works deemed most liable to get the biggest bang for publishers’ bucks. It’s a tragic situation, and I’m not sure what we can do to fix it.

In the end, I have to be selfish and say that I’m glad I spent a year plowing through Clavel Soldat, as well as the six additional weeks comparing my translation to Michael Copp’s. True, it may be time that I’ll never get back, but it was time well spent, because it has enriched my knowledge of history, literature, and not least of all, the art of translation. All of these things are valuable, and because of that, I’m satisfied.

Zero and God

Warning: this is a philosophical, and deeply weird, post. If I’m lucky, it will go unnoticed in the holiday rush and I won’t have to answer any difficult questions; if not, I can just say that the end of the year has always been the time when I am most prone to consider deep and philosophical thoughts. (Of course, that is patently untrue; deep thoughts, ones about the meaning of life or the passage of time or the inexorable approach of death, come to me at the most inopportune times, such as when I’m watching repeats of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or when I’m ironing a shirt.) At any rate, the thought I’m about to articulate in this post is a doozy, even for me, so you might want to put on some heavy waders, because we’re about to plunge into some fairly deep shit.

First, a little background. Some months ago, I listened to an episode of the BBC’s fantastic radio show In Our Time that focused on zero. Full disclosure here: I have not really considered mathematics seriously in any capacity since, well, since ever. It has always been a tool for me, something that I have to do in order to cut a recipe in half, average students’ grades, or create a grading system with weighted assignments. So why I listened to this podcast, other than simple curiosity, is a bit of a mystery. But listen to it I did, and I have to admit it fascinated me. I learned all sorts of things about zero: when it was invented and who invented it and when it came into general use in the Western World. I mean, to start with, I didn’t realize zero actually had to be discovered; I always thought it just appeared, like the rest of the numbers, with all of its properties neatly attached to it. But apparently zero was invented, or discovered, by the ancient Babylonians, who needed it to keep track of tax records, as a place-keeper along with numbers that were set out in rows for easy and quick addition and subtraction.

You can listen to the podcast to find out more about the number zero, or you can read a book I just finished, Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife, which provides a thoroughly understandable overview of the subject. I find it all interesting, intriguing even, but what got me really thinking was how useful zero is without actually being anything. Calculus and physics, for example (not that I know anything about them) are apparently impossible without a concept of zero. The ancient Greeks and early Christians were averse to considering zero, being terrified of the idea of nothingness; Babylonian and Indian culture had no problem dealing with the idea of a void, so they ran with the idea of zero. It would take the Western world until the middle of the Renaissance to really begin to experiment with the concept of zero, and the Industrial and Technological Revolutions simply couldn’t begin until zero became accepted as a legitimate number.

For the first time in my life, I could see that zero is really, really important. And here’s the interesting thing about zero: it means nothing–literally. It is nothing. But without the idea of it, things just don’t work right. We can’t achieve a level of mathematical knowledge that allows us to have computers, space travel, medical breakthroughs–almost anything we associate with the kind of lives we live today. Zero, while being nothing, is a critical idea around which the entire universe as we encounter it seems to hang.

So I began to think about this, and how intriguing it is that the our concept of the universe depends on something that isn’t there. Maybe my age is showing–I went to graduate school during the heydey of deconstructive criticism, after all–but I find this to be a really satisfying conundrum. Zero is nothing. Yet it is in fact incredibly important, and without a concept of it, we can’t really understand anything beyond elementary mathematics; without it, we can only make fairly simple and elementary natural observations. In short, the nature of zero is a puzzle, and it’s so contradictory that I find it pleasant and satisfying to consider it.

But thinking can be dangerous, especially if you have a lot of time on your hands and allow your mind to wander. Thinking about zero in this way led me to another idea, one that is heretical but at the same really intriguing, namely, what if the concept of God is analagous to the concept of zero? In other words, what if having God as a kind of moral placekeeper is more important than having God as a real entity? God, in this scenario, would be nothing–an evanescent, empty idea–but the concept of God would be all-important. Without this concept of God as simple place-holder, nothing works as it should. The idea of empathy, of ethics, of morals, of duty, or of simply “doing the right thing for the right reason,” these things are easily jettisoned without a belief in or a sense of a higher being. The concept of God as a placekeeper, though–that could be just as useful, and perhaps less prone to corruption and deviance, as the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of God as an all-knowing, all-powerful divinity.

Consider: God is zero. It seems like nothing, but without this zero, the entire trajectory of human existence simply doesn’t work right. Belief in God would then represent not a belief in a traditional deity with superhuman powers, but rather an acknowledgement of the role of God, which in turn grounds human experience in a meaningful way. I think Seife comes close to saying something like this early in his book when he writes: “Yet through all its history, despite the rejection and the exile, zero has always defeated those who opposed it. Humanity could never force zero to fit its philosophies. Instead, zero shaped humanity’s view of the universe–and of God” (p 3). My theory is similar but not exactly identical to Seife’s, however. Rather than suggest that our concept of God was shaped by our view of zero, I’m arguing that zero and God could, with a little bit of imagination, occupy the same location in their respective theoretical frameworks.

Ultimately this theory is important only to those people who, like me, struggle with a belief in God. It’s easier for me to think of God as a function or a place than as an omnipotent Being. But I think my theory might be fun for anyone to think about , even those with a strong traditional faith. It turns traditional religious ideas upside down, which, after all, is always fun.

At any rate, I’ve thought about this idea long enough to cause me to change my behavior in a real, and hopfully, a positive way. I’ve actually signed up for a college algebra class at the local community college this coming semester. That in itself is nothing short of a veritable Act of God, which I owe to a belief in the power of zero.

Thanks, Meredith, for encouraging me!