France, Euthanasia, and Suicide Cabins

Kudos to France's continuing humanitarianism and Macron's endorsing euthanasia. Unlike Putin, Macron is one of those men who seek to lessen human suffering rather than increase it.

 The French president has announced new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” that will allow adults facing end-of-life illness to take lethal medication. He is right to want to allow euthanasia for those suffering incurable illnesses that are mentally and physically painful and often debilitating. Euthanasia is a form of suicide (assisted suicide). However, suicide is not immoral. Here is why.

Voluntary euthanasia is not immoral.

Suicide, the taking one’s life, isn’t immoral. It isn’t self-murder. Morality has to do with how people treat others—people, creatures, nature, property, etc. Emmanuel Kant offers the foundational principle of morality: the principle of autonomy. Which says that the autonomy of others should be respected. And that can be extended to people’s property. What is the defining difference between killing others and killing oneself? Choice. When a person harms himself, he chooses to do so, thus acts in accordance with his free will. The same is true if he chooses to die by euthanasia. Morality condemns violating other people’s autonomy against their will. Thus, euthanasia performed without consent would be immoral. On the other hand, euthanasia requested by someone experiencing incurable pain and suffering is not immoral. In such a case, euthanasia could be considered an act of kindness. 

Suicide is already with us, like it or not.

France experiences about 9,000 suicides each year, about 25 each day. In 2021, 48,183 people died by suicide in the US. None of these suicides were immoral. They are acts of desperation to escape suffering of some kind. However, there are two categories that need to be considered. The first involves situations that cause suffering, but the situations can be treated, remedied, and eliminated so the person no longer suffers and can go back to living a normal life. The situations are various and require different forms of treatment by doctors, psychotherapists, social workers, etc.

The second involves conditions caused by disease or old age that cannot be remedied. Years ago I read about a child that suffered from cancer. He underwent endless treatments, some experimental. And one day he said enough. Let me die. He chose death rather than more treatments because his fight for life was hopeless and too painful.

My brother John suffered lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos during the Vietnam War. He suffered painful treatments for months, though the doctors knew his cancer couldn’t be cured. (They weren’t greedy or evil, but their Hippocratic Oath would not allow them to give up.) In a moment of great pain he attempted suicide. His wife called emergency services and he died weeks later in hospice. Was his attempted suicide immoral? Of course not. Would euthanasia been a less painful and terrifying option. I think so.

A close friend of mine, Bill, died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was bedridden for months before he died. For years we were involved with judo and weightlifting and heading out to the mountains and deserts. Bill was a plumber who had spent two years in Vietnam. He was a very active guy. However, he was also a big drinker and smoker. He burnt the candle of life at both ends. Would he have opted for euthanasia? I don’t know. Should he have been given the option of euthanasia knowing he would never leave his bed? I think so.

I had a cousin farmer, Warren, who was more of an uncle to me because he was much older. He had a small farm near the Mississippi River. When he wasn’t farming he was hunting and fishing. He was a modern-day Daniel Boone, but he was a heavy smoker. He came down with incurable cancer and like Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. Would he have preferred the chemical death of euthanasia to that of death by a shotgun blast? I don’t know. Probably not. Should he have had euthanasia as an option? I think so. His wife found his body. The sight must have been horrific. Sometimes euthanasia is also a better option for the family.

The outrage against euthanasia is ironic when thousands of people kill themselves each year with knives, rope, pills, gas, plastic bags, electricity, by jumping from buildings or in front of trains or trucks. Suicide is going to happen. People deserve the option of treatment or a gentle and easy death when treatment is of no avail. 

Is Suicide a Sin?

The Bible says very little about suicide. Suicide was accepted in ancient times. Samson and Saul committed suicide, and it can be argued that Jesus sought his own death. Some early Christians sought out Christ-like martyrdom. Christians argue that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” forbids suicide, but the fact is God does a lot of killing in the Bible with floods, plagues, and fire and brimstone, so his commandment has to be taken with a grain of salt coming from the biggest mass-murdering hypocrite in history. And in the Old Testament Yahweh encourages Jews to engage in endless murder of pagans.

Murder is defined as “the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction.” Killing oneself then hardly qualifies as an immoral act, and making it illegal would be mean-spirited. Sin is a religious notion. Ingénue Eve committed a sin for disobeying God (eating forbidden fruit) and was given a death sentence by God for her disobedience. Actually, the death sentence was extended to include all human beings. That alone disqualifies God as a moral authority.

If religious people want to believe suicide is a sin or self-murder, that’s fine and dandy. Then they can avoid committing suicide. However, what is immoral (via Kant’s principle of autonomy) is imposing their beliefs on others who do not share their religious ideology. Christians have been very good at forcing their views on others using threats of burning, drowning, crushed under rocks, or various forms of torture. Once again, morality is concerned with the treatment of others, not about how one treats oneself. Euthanasia is no worse than masturbation. Of course Christians consider masturbation a sin! 

Two deaths: Socrates and Jesus

Socrates chose suicide rather than escape. In David’s painting The Death of Socrates he welcomes the cup that contains the poison hemlock:

He didn’t have to drink the hemlock. He could have left the city. Even his accusers hoped that he would. Durant says, “It still remained open to him to escape from the prison.” But he chose to stay and drink the hemlock; thus he committed suicide. And he’s considered by both philosophers and Christians a big hero for doing so!

Some argue that Socrates was looking forward to the afterlife (in the painting he's pointing upward) once his spiritual soul was set free from his lowly mundane body. This is often referred to Socrates’ four arguments for the immortality of the soul as described in in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. However, the views expressed are Plato’s, not those of Socrates. Historian Will Durant says that Socrates accepted the “relativism of Protagoras” and “refused to dogmatize” because he was “certain only of his ignorance.” He gave “lip service to the gods of the his city,” and said “of the gods we know nothing.” He “applied his skepticism even more rigorously to the physical sciences.” That’s serious skepticism. “Philosophy was for Socrates neither theology nor metaphysics.” (The Life of Greece)

Philosophy for Plato was both theology and metaphysics. Plato’s mentor was Pythagoras. Says Wikipedia, “Aristotle states that the philosophy of Plato was heavily dependent on the teachings of the Pythagoreans.” And “The historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston states that Plato probably borrowed his tripartite theory of the soul from the Pythagoreans” (“Pythagoras”). So the theory of the soul winging its way from the body to eternal bliss originated in the West with Pythagoras, who probably got the idea from the Egyptians, adopted by Plato, and from him by Apostle Paul who passed it on in his version of Christianity. Jesus speaks of the soul rarely, only in the gospels of Matthew and John written 40 to 60 years after Jesus’s death by men who never met Jesus.

Okay, let’s suspend historical evidence for the moment and assume that the view of the soul in the Phaedo is that of Socrates. If so, he apparently didn’t believe that suicide was a sin or would compromise the soul’s journey in the afterlife.

Jesus also chose to die, but his death involved excruciating pain that lasted about six hours on the cross. At one point he cries out in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-34). Suffering Christians have asked the same question over the centuries. Yet, Christians believe that everyone should face death as Jesus did—with all its excruciating pain and suffering. However, he didn’t seem to feel the same way. To Catholics suicide is considered a mortal sin that destroys one's relationship with God. Well I think God sinned against his son Jesus by allowing him to suffer on the cross rather than showing up as he does in the Transfiguration of Jesus (Mark 9:7). According to his book God’s Problem (the problem of horrific evil) Bible scholar Bart Ehrman believes that God has failed to live up to his relationship to humanity. For example, as many as 50 million people, mostly Christians, perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population, during the Black Plague. Those people could have asked “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” The Jews could have asked the same question during the Holocaust that killed approximately six million of his chosen people.

I’ll end this segment with the extinction event caused by God: “I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made” (Genesis 7:4). Of course, Jews, Christians, and Muslims point out that he saved two of each species crowded onto Noah’s ark, though I doubt a billion creatures could be herded onto an ark. How are insect herded? I assume that those left behind became extinct. And then what about the millions if not billions of humans and other creatures that drowned? Apparently, they didn’t matter. And we should worry about what God thinks about suicide when suicide harms no creature other than the person ending his or her life because its suffering can no longer be endured? Oh, says the deity's defender, the story of the Flood is just a story not to be taken literally. If so, then we can ignore anything the rest of the story (Genesis to Revelation) might say or imply about suicide.

Two of my favorite human beings—Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath—committed suicide because their lives had become unbearable to them. Yet, the goodness of those two women is infinite compared to that of the so-called omnibenevolent deity who can only be described as the greatest mass murderer in the history of the Universe.

Taoism, Existentialism, and Noble Suicide

Unlike the Abrahamic religions Taoism is a humanitarian spiritual philosophy in part because it is human-centered rather than God-centered and because it seeks peace, harmony, and serenity, rather than conflict, oppression, and disquiet. It is aligned with nature in that nature allows her creatures to live freely. Religious and secular ideologies, on the other hand, are artificial, inherently oppressive and controlling. Such societies operate like bureaucratic machines. It can be argued that societies are created to benefit people; however, to oppress people, to control them as if they were societal pawns does not benefit them. Certainly, some control is necessary such as Kant’s principle of autonomy that says people should be free but should not interfere with other people’s freedom. That’s a very Taoist principle, existentialist as well.

The Taoist Lao-tzu was the wisest of the wise, even wiser than wise Buddha, who sought detachment from the world that Lao-tzu was devoted to. Buddha’s goal was to investigate of the causes of suffering and how to avoid them. Like Lao-tzu, Buddha was a humanitarian, yet his humanitarian concern included the suffering of all life forms. These two spiritual philosophies are affable cousins unlike the Abrahamic religions that have been for centuries at war with one another and the world. The principle that separates Taoism and Buddhism from the Abrahamic religions is that of letting be rather than being domineering, oppressive, abusive, and manipulative. Jesus was a bit of a Taoist-Buddhist, often protecting women from the Pharisees who sought to stone them to death. His philosophy can be summed up with the phrase “Leave her be.” Why? Because those who sought to harm her were also sinners. They became sinners when they sought to stone a woman. Unlike them, Jesus believed that control (moral = spiritual) should come from within, not from without. That is his central gospel.

The Taoist principle most relevant to suicide is wu-wei* or no-action. The idea is “letting be,” or perhaps “letting go” of life in the case o suicide. An idea that is alien to patriarchal totalitarian societies, yet essential to allow people to achieve self-realization and to allow societies to flourish. (Lao Tzu was especially concern with oppressive warmongering governments like his home country today’s communist China.) The root of the idea is to let nature take its course, but that does not mean that one must allow himself to be eaten by a tiger. It means “letting people go their own way” (J. Koller’s Oriental Philosophies 289). Imagine a person a person being painfully and debilitatingly consumed by an incurable disease or old age. The choice is to either to allow the disease/old age to take its course in tiger-like fashion or to allow the person to decide what is to be done: either to let nature take its course or to “let go” of life and embrace death.**

*Wu-wei does imply “nonintervention” and imitating “the Tao by not intervening in the course of things, thereby permitting all things to unfold in accordance with their own nature” (The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, “Wu-wei”). When it comes to suicide wu-wei appears to create a conundrum, but it doesn’t. First, wu-wei is not the primary principle in the Taoist program. It is a means to realizing the greater humane principle of creating peace, harmony, and serenity. Is this a moral principle to be achieved? That would depend on circumstances. However, it is a practical goal. So practically or morally at times it would be necessary to suspend the strict sense of wu-wei.

Second, morality overrides the principle of allowing nature to take its course. In fact, not doing nothing would be unnatural. In Stephen Crane’s short story "The Open Boat" a group of men in a lifeboat are caught in a storm at sea. If they do not struggle against nature, then they drown. For them not to struggle against nature would be unnatural.

Third, to require a dying person endure pain and suffering until death comes to the rescue would be immoral according to existentialism (a very Western philosophy) because it requires the person to relinquish freedom to become merely a victim (an object) of the malady. Only in freedom is dignity possible. In other words, noninterference must also apply to the will of the person as long as it doesn’t violate Kant’s principle of autonomy. And to a dying person the freedom to choose how to die may be the last profound free act available to him or her. It can be consider an act of defiance against disease and suffering, a rage against being treated as an object by an affliction.

**Death is not evil only tragic, more so for humans because of their awareness of what is lost and their complex attachment to life—not just to their own life but to the lives of loved ones, be they humans or other creatures. (We put animals down when they are in incurable pain. Why do they deserve such compassion and humans don’t? James Herriot of All Creatures Great and Small fame didn’t believe animals should be allowed to suffer just because their owners wanted to keep them alive. His philosophy of euthanasia was based on concern for the welfare of the creature, not on what its owners wanted. He served as an advocate for the welfare of creatures who were unable to speak for themselves. Humans, however, can speak for themselves and their freedom of choice must be considered the cardinal principle in deciding to die by euthanasia. And that moral right should not—morally—be usurped by others. Dying with dignity means to act freely in the face of pain and suffering: to choose to end one’s life or to allow nature to take its course. However, there can be no freedom if there is only one option.) Life is inherently a tragic affair because it is the nature of reality that nothing endures forever. That doesn’t make accepting death any easier but only recognizes that death is unavoidable. The tragic aspect of life should inspire a greater love and appreciation of life. It, unfortunately, doesn’t in dull-minded, egocentric males who enjoy causing others to suffer.

Such men are evil because they make life more tragic than it need be. As Lucretius points out in his poem De rerum natura (on the nature of things), all pain and suffering and evil people happen in life not in the postmortem because there is no postmortem existence, except for those who can’t face reality but believe the dead will live again, a creepy notion. As if that isn’t bad enough they add the fires of hell to the afterlife. At least Plato wasn’t so hateful as to wish or believe that suffering should continue in the afterlife.

Christianity and Islam deny the tragic side of life with a pie-in-the-sky afterlife, and by doing so commit an injustice toward the dead by falsely claiming that they are or will be in a better place. This lie is often use for the purpose of manipulation. To encourage aggression and terrorist acts Muslims are told that they will be admitted to Paradise if killed in battle or while engaging in terrorism. Russian Orthodox priests tell Russian soldiers, as they sprinkle them with holy water, that if they die in Ukraine while murdering Ukrainians they will go to Heaven with all sins forgiven, even the sin of murdering Ukrainians.

However, that is not true. They will simply die murderers, their lives wasted and lost to lies—those of Putin and those of the Russian Orthodox Church that serves him. The fancy dress of priests should not be seen as evidence of the truth of their religious ideology, though that is exactly its purpose.

Jesus’s suicide could be considered a noble suicide that rejected the malevolence of Judaism, a religion that bred hatred rather than love, compassion, and forgiveness. Russian soldiers could do the same by committing suicide rather than obeying a malevolent tyrant who oppresses his own people as he seeks to realize his blood-stained will to power. That would be a noble suicide. Taoists would say refusing to participate in a program that is contrary to achieving peace, harmony, and serenity can only be noble.That would be a noble suicide.

Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc made the ultimate sacrifice of self-immolation (June 11, 1963) to protest the oppressive Catholic regime of Diem and its persecution of Buddhists. His suicide suspended the principle of wu-wei on moral grounds. In Buddhist fashion he protested the suffering being inflicted upon Buddhists.* To him allowing evil to continue its course was unthinkable. Thus, he chose heroism rather than submission. Existentialists would say one should assert his or her freedom by refusing to be the slaves of madmen even if doing so means death. Alexei Navalny also stood up to evil and became a hero for his courage and goodness.

*Religious and secular ideologies are simply tools made to serve the masculine will to power. They are inherently nihilistic because the ideologies declare the people who reject them to be without value or to be nothing of value, thus having no moral rights. Buddhism isn't an ideology, nor was the polytheism of the ancient Greeks. An ideology is a us-versus-them system of ideas that always include an enemy to be either converted or destroyed. Thus, "letting be" is a principle contrary to religious and secular ideologies, which are inherently intolerant of other belief systems and ways of life. Native Americans found that out when Christians arrived in North America. Letting Native Americans be as pagans was out  of the question because it would have been inconsistent to Judaeo-Christian ideology.

Wu-wei is not the goal of Taoism but only the means to achieving it. The goal is a life of peace, harmony, and serenity. If incurable disease and old age reduce life to ongoing agony, then letting go of life should be an option for the sufferer.

In regard to the principle of wu-wei, existentialism and Taoism are compatible because both emphasize the important role of freedom as a categorical principle in human life. This means that people’s freedom is to be respected unless they allow their freedom to impinge upon the freedom of others. (The principle is so simple, so just and decent yet beyond the comprehension of dull-minded men.) To be human is to be free; thus, denying a person’s freedom dehumanizes the person. In his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre says that “man will only attain existence [actualization] when he is what he purposes [proposes] to be.” That is what makes existentialism a humanism: it argues that humans must be free to achieve self-realization because self-realization is the process of overcoming one’s nothingness (such as the unrealized state of infancy).

To be human is to be free, which is why slavery is abhorrently dehumanizing. Yet, billions of people live in a state of slavery imposed by (masculine) ideologies. Ideology is made only of words. Yet, oppressive states use those words to justify the bureaucratic cages in which they imprison their citizens. It is interesting that keeping animals in cages is frowned upon, but billions of people are forced to live in societies that are essentially bureaucratic dystopias. Encaging people is immoral, of course, but that is how states based on ideologies work. Take the ideology of Judaism as an example. It says that one must do whatever God demands (according to the ideology). Thus, if God (i.e., the ideology) tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, he must do so. What about his son Isaac who is to be sacrificed? From the point of view of the ideology, he collateral damage. As with God, obedience to the ideology is supreme, and disobedience is unforgivable.

Abraham is God’s slave. Of course, like Eve he has he freedom to disobey God, but as in the case of Eve the consequences would be catastrophic. Yahweh doesn’t mess around when it comes to punishment. That he comes up horrific tests of faith (as in the case of Job as well) reveals that he is a brutal totalitarian deity—pure masculinity on steroids. Isaac represents the sacrifices that must be made in the service to God because as God is the supreme authority of right and wrong. The incident reveals the two categories people fall into according to the ideologies of the Abrahamic religions as well as secular totalitarian ideologies: those who serve the ideology and those who are sacrificed to it. As the story continues, Isaac is given a reprieve because his father is willing to kill him if demanded by God (i.e., by the ideology). However, there will be no reprieve for pagans/gentiles that God wants exterminated later in the story. Who’s to argue? In all patriarchal societies Daddy knows best, Daddy being the ideology enforced by the men who serve it.

How does this relate to suicide? First of all, neither God nor ideologies are true logically or empirically—the only two categories of truth. They are inventions in the way the game of chess is an invention. If you play the game, then you must obey its rules. But the rules of the game do not extend beyond the game itself. Secular and religious ideologies are life games, but they have no logical or empirical validity outside the ideology, just as their rules have no validity beyond the ideological game itself. And it should be noted that religious ideologies and many secular ideologies are based on myths. Religious myths are replete with supernaturals entities and events. Also with mythical assumptions such as Jews were chosen by God to introduce him to the world or Hitler’s myth that the Aryan race is inherently superior to other races thus is destined to rule the world (that’s two myths).

These myths/ideologies are either true or false. If false, they have no bearing on the issue of euthanasia. If true, they have no bearing on euthanasia. For example, let’s assume that Yahweh actually existed when he commanded Abraham to kill his son. Moral logic says that Abraham has every right to disobey the command for two reasons. First, God is not a moral authority; second, even if he were considered such does not logically or morally require an individual to obey him. Deciding to obey or not to obey is a matter of choice, requiring the individual to decide the morally right action to take.

The problem of lockstep, mindless obedience to an ideology or authority of any kind should be obvious. Putin’s war on Ukraine illustrates the nature and enormity of the problem. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers invade a nation based on the words of a single person. They are treated by Putin as robots and they treat Ukrainians as objects. Like Hitler before him, Putin represents an idea of his own invention. It is his personal ideology. He uses that ideology to program the Russian people so they will do what he says. The question that comes to mind is whether or not people are capable of acting freely once programmed. Hitler transformed Germany, one of the most intellectually advanced nations in the world, into a nation of robots. Only people of great compassion and sensitivity were capable of rejecting such programming, mostly for moral reasons.Hans and Sophie Scholl were two such persons.They were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.* Even the so-called great philosopher Martin Heidegger succumbed to Hitler’s programming. Apparently, his wife was an even more vicious Nazi. It really is quite amazing how easily entire populations can be turned into robots.

*Sartre refers to a form of suicide that is moral in the altruistic sense and truly noble. His reference is to the captured resistance fighter who commits suicide rather than face interrogation that might cause him to give up information that would compromise his comrades. Russian soldiers could do the same an act of defiance against their evil puppet master Putin, who treats the Russian people as pawns in his private game of will to power and turns his soldiers into murderous robots in Ukraine.

Suicide Cabins: from the sci-fi novel Her Quest

As we continued, I had to pee, so when I saw what looked like an old homeless woman waiting outside a small building I assumed she was waiting to enter a restroom.

“Peno, I have to pee. Can I use the restroom where that old woman is standing?”

“Oh Cora! That’s not a restroom. It’s a suicide cabin.”

“A suicide cabin?”

“The old woman is waiting to end her life.”

“Inside the cabin?”

“Yes.”

“That seems cruel. Why would she do that?”

“Because her life has become unbearable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If you stay with me long enough, you will. For many people life becomes so hard that they choose to end it. In death, there is no pain, disappointment, sadness, or despair—only the peace that comes when one no longer exists.”

“Is the suicide painful?”

“Not at all. Though I have never experience what goes on in a suicide cabin, I do know what happens. In fact, what occurs is described on the door or can be listened to for people who can’t read. You can go over and read the description for yourself.”

“No!” The woman had entered the cabin. “Still, I want to know.”

“I’m not surprised. Knowing is what you do. Okay. The suicide enters the cabin and lies on a bed. The AI tells the suicide to relax. Relaxing music begins to play and an aromatic gas is released into the compartment. As the suicide relaxes the AI asks her to choose a pleasant scene. The cabin then illuminates as various scenes or landscapes are paraded before her. Once she chooses one then another gas is released that induces a feeling of peace and happiness. Another gas puts her to sleep and the final gas causes death. The bed lowers, and the suicide is transported for cremation.”

“It sounds awful.”

“It’s not awful. It is the most pleasant way to die. What is awful is the life the suicide seeks to escape.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“No you don’t, but you will. Now let’s get you some food. First go pee.” 

  

Putin's Bloody Little Playground

 

Putin’s Playground

Any Town, Ukraine

Simon Clark says,

"I miss the playground as it used to be,

Laughter, fun and frivolity,

Sliding down and spinning ‘round,

Chasing the breeze and winning the race."

My Friend Ray Mungo

Ray can be fully appreciated only by those of us who were young during the Vietnam War. He wrote for the anti-war underground as one of those intellectuals LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover wanted incarcerated—and many were, more than in today's Russia where Russians have been brainwashed to think Putin is their Savior sent to them by Jesus Christ. America’s counterculture generation was one of a kind never to be seen again. To quote Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” They were free thinking rebels who read books and watched movies from Europe. Philosophy classes were packed with students looking for answers since they concluded that the thinking of adults who could go along with LBJ’s war and accept police dogs being turned loose on black people was as primitive as that of the Puritans who hanged women for witchcraft.

Unlike today the young were free thinkers because religious and secular ideologies had not yet imprisoned their minds. It was an age that celebrated love unlike today when Hollywood has demoted love to sex. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end but a few intellectual, aesthetic golden nuggets were produced. It was a time before Hollywood became America’s Pravda. The great movie stars and directors were departing leaving a void where once there was inspired creativity. When Ray was writing young people were reading, not comic books and graphic novels (as fascinating as they can be; I’ve read plenty) but weighty philosophical tombs by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and novels by Albert Camus,  Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy (who lived before Russia was lobotomized by Marx). That glorious time came to an end of course, and was replaced by mediocrity. (Simply consider America’s last two presidents.)

Free thinking existentialism succumbed to the hive-mind thinking of religious and secular ideologies or to the no-thinking of nihilistic anarchism. Today America lives in an age defined by social media communication via Facebook, Twitter, Tik Toc, etc. Very different from the age of the rebellious Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. Or even Fenimore Cooper who had given up on the American enterprise and escape with Natty Bumppo into the world of the Noble Savage for whom freedom and spirituality were more important than the dollar. The 1920s were anything but boring, as were the 1930s that gave birth to America’s Greatest Generation, and 1940s when that generation fought the greatest evildoer history has known (though Putin might catch up with his nukes). Even the 1950s had hot rods and the most glorious music that celebrated—not sex—but teenage love. Then there were the sixties, the apex of American culture for young people. LBJ and the Cold Warriors tried to destroy their love of life but failed. Thousands were drafted from their lives to die over there. Over here they were imprisoned or shot dead on campus by National Guard (guarding whom?) for their rejection of LBJ’s evil war, a war America started unlike WWI, WWII, and Putin’s war. Refusing to surrender, America’s youth celebrated love and life and created music that was heartbreakingly sublime.

And Ray and I were there. I was there as an observing participant, he as an anti-war activist who fought against evil men and their evil war not with a tank but with a typewriter. That is who Ray Mungo was. 

My favorite books by Ray Mungo: 

  

The Limits of Postmodernism

Preface: The Journey that Became a Destination

Coleman College paid for me to take a train to University of Nebraska at Kearney to present a paper titled “Seeking the Postmodern Project.” The conference was “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences.” It was put on by the German language department. It became a special experience for me for reasons having nothing to do with the conference. Coleman College allowed me to take a train from Fullerton, California, to Hastings, Nebraska. The train would get me closer to Kearney than a plane would. The train let me off at about 3 AM. It was a wintery morning and the town was asleep. The car I reserved was all alone in the train station parking lot with the keys inside. During the drive to Kearney I saw migrating geese. I got out of the car to watch and listen to them as they passed over high above in the gray sky. During the conference I drove out to a prairie-grass reserve. There I stood and looked upon a remnant of the ancient prairie. A mystical experience? Perhaps.

Seeing the geese and prairie grass meant more to me than the talk about Nietzsche, though I didn’t say that to my boss Dr. Coleman Furr, though I think he would have understood because he had a desert home in Yuma, Arizona. My talk was on Nietzsche and Hemingway. But I rewrote it for its publication in the Platte Valley Review (winter 1995, volume 23, number 1). Nietzsche was still present, but having viewed the Great Plains from the train and in person I replaced Hemingway with the Pawnee Indians, the ancient dwellers of that ancient land. In the words of poet William Cullen Bryant, it was the place where, 

The red man came—

The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

The solitude of centuries untold

Has settled where they dwelt. (“The Prairies”) 

The title of my article became “The Limits of Postmodernism.” A question that came to mind was “Are our lives, more comfortable and less vulnerable to daily hazards, more meaningful than the early lives of the red and white settlers of the prairies?” 

The Limits of Postmodernism 

I want to reflect on the project of postmodernism and pay tribute to this place—the city of Kearney and the state of Nebraska. Also pay tribute to the peoples who have called this place home—Americans and the native peoples, most recently the Pawnee—and indirectly to Nietzsche, who valued perhaps most of all living simply and honestly, who understood life to be a drama of very basic forces, who believed Western culture had created a worldview so cluttered by false notions and meaningless distractions that it had lost sight of the simple yet dramatic realities of living.

Postmodernism is essentially a historical period, not a project. But once people like ourselves become aware of the postmodern condition and begin to explore it, define it, and respond to it, it evolves into a kind of project. Even if the postmodern means that all projects are finished, insofar as they no longer have final legitimacy, then learning to live meaningfully, truthfully, beneficially in such a world becomes our project.

Having a clearly defined project enables individuals and cultures to move confidently into the future by giving them a clear sense of direction. And though many postmodern thinkers suggest certain directions, certainly the postmodern condition is characterized by the lack of a universal project capable of giving definition to society or to the individual. Western society has been characterized by its universal religious and secular projects contained in grand mythic narratives. The postmodern world, on the other hand, offers no clear project that society or the individual can aspire to, no imperatives for living rooted in a general ontology.

The first task is to reconsider whether the worldview of postmodernism or modernism or the Western religious tradition can adequately serve as the basis for a new project. Western culture has taken a good deal of pride in replacing traditional cultures, even those of its own. But now in this post-modern period, when even the final projects of modernism have been called into question, it is time to consider whether or not the culture that evolved out of Western philosophy, religion, science, and technology is really truer, better, more meaningful than even those first cultures that existed before the great civilizations.

Take, for example, the Pawnee who lived in the region. Are our truths more profound and satisfying? Do they more accurately express the reality of the lifeworld? To think that these people whose relationship to the world was one of immediacy did not understand the world seems to me arrogant and misguided. Do we really understand life more clearly? I do not think we do. How can we, isolated as we are from the primordial world, that first and final world, by the clutter of our intellectual, artistic, and technological creations? I believe that we, the critics and philosophers of the postmodern, have created a complex symbolic universe that may provide us with a fascinating dwelling place but does not effectively serve the lives of most people. Do we really need all this? Do the people of this city Kearny—these farmers, merchants, parents, and children–need what we have to offer? Does our talk really get to some important truth that can lead them or anyone to a way of life that is truer and more noble than the one we see about us here on the great plains of Nebraska? Or is what we have to offer simply more of the intellectual clutter that has poured so profusely from the Western tradition?

Note the words of planting from one of the primordials, those people who dwelled in the first world, these the words of the Navaho: 

The sacred blue corn-seed I am planting

In one night it will grow and flourish

In one night the corn increases

In the garden of the House God 

The sacred white corn-seed I am planting,

In one day it will grow and ripen,

In one day the corn increases,

In its beauty it increases.[1] 

Does all of our knowledge enable us to live more truthfully, meaningfully, and appreciatively than this? What do we offer instead? This was once a world where all things and activities were sacred. This was a world where life and language were simple and profound.

Language creates, translates, and reveals reality for human beings, but I ask what greater thing our modern theoretical systems do than are accomplish by the simple expressions of the Navaho. Is our world truer? Is it more noble? Have we greater insight? Or have we created a universe of words that imprison us, that separate us from the world that is truly our flesh, our mother, our origin, and our end? Language can create the illusion of reality; it can become an artificial reality. Moderns are awash in language and yet have, it seems to me, very little experience or understanding of reality. And the postmoderns seem to have lost their way in this complex linguistic universe, and even seem to be cheerful at having become lost.

The Pawnee who once grew their corn and hunted buffalo here, the farmers who still take their living from the earth, they are not lost, and they have little need of what we offer. So what is it we as postmoderns offer? What are we about? If it is we who are the educators, then we must accept the responsibility of leadership, but the direction of that leadership remains unclear to me. Or if there is some direction but we cannot communicate it simply and clearly to ordinary people, to farmers, merchants, students, then what we do is really of little value and we have little to offer. For unlike doctors who help their patients with treatments and medicines, we have only our language to offer to those who seek some direction in the postmodern world. When I offer direction to my students, I do not send them to the texts of the postmoderns, which they cannot comprehend, but to those simple words of the believers, artists, or Native Americans, who I believe lived lives far more simple, truthful, honest, and beautiful than those of moderns or postmoderns. I fear that we have lost our way and are not really interested in finding a direction, which would, as a result, dislocate the self from the center of attention.

Is reality as complex as our philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and even religious systems would have us believe? Yesterday I drove about the countryside, walked upon a dusty road, and even walked upon a remnant of ancient prairie. What I saw was wonderful yet to very simple. Certainly the individual forms of this vast expanse—the river, sky, land, and the animals and plants—are complex, and wonderful in their complexity, even mystery; but their purpose, their ultimate reason for being, seems to me to be manifest. They simply are. It is the appearance, not its cause, that is the final and important reality.

I marvel at the red-tailed hawk that sails overhead on giant wings, its ancient head gazing keenly at the world below. If I dissect this beast and master the mechanics of its organism, do I really understand its reality any better? I do not think so. It is what it appears to be, a creature of the world that seeks to continue its being, to stay out of harm’s way, to enjoy the simple pleasures that happen to be associated with its particular form. I believe we have overly complicated our lives, and postmodern theory has simply added to the muddle. As leaders, experts in the present condition of humanity, we must consider carefully what it is we should be conveying to others. Are we leading our students to some place where the vision of life is clear, fine, and satisfying, or are we continuing the long history of complicating life and obfuscating what is real?

The Western tradition began with the complex symbolic universe of ideas created out of ancient religious narratives and Greek philosophy. The tradition has spent 2000 years adding to, understanding, verifying, and more recently, attempting to simplify itself. Postmodernism seems to be the last stage—a realization that we have been investigating a world of our own creation more than the world itself, perhaps as a result never fully living in or understanding the real world. Historically, most people continued to live in the real world in spite of the fact that philosophers, theologians, and scientists told them that they were not living in the real world and that their worldly lives were really not so very real or important.

Priests and philosophers, cloistered from the activities of the earth world, studying scripture or inventing metaphysical systems, told them that reality was hidden and obscured, that it revealed itself only through their contemplative activities, mental inventions that expressed human reality as it truly is. The theologian told them that the true world lay elsewhere and that people’s lives were insignificant because they occurred in a subordinate realm of inferior reality. Native Americans, however, understood that there was nothing other than the act of living. For them the value and reality of every act of living was absolute and self-evident. This attitude is expressed in what Beverly Hungry Wolf says of the life of women among the Blackfeet: 

Let me just say that in the culture of my people the work of the woman was generally respected and honored, for the men knew very well that they could not live without them. The people of the past thought it a great honor that the women should bear and rear the children, ensuring that there would be people in the future. Equally honorable was the woman’s work of creating the lodges that made the homes, putting them up and taking down when camp moved, heating them, and providing the bedding and clothing for the household members. In the social life of my grandmothers, a household was judged not only by the bravery and generosity of the man, but also by the kindness and work habits of the woman. Even the wife of a poor man could find honor among the people by being a good housekeeper.[2] 

Do her words somehow miss the mark? Is there some hidden, essential dimension of reality if overlooked life cannot be fully lived? Is her view of the reality and significance of the lifeworld naive and unsophisticated? Again, I do not think so. Whatever we might add would be at best superfluous, at worst falsify reality. And perhaps the great tragedy of the postmodern condition is to have lost complete sight and experience of the fundamentals of life. What has the modern world invented that gives life greater meaning than the forms of being of the native peoples? In fact, if we look at the monstrous projects of modernism, we find that what continues to matter most to people are the simplest of things—love, work, pleasure, family, friends, community, the forms of nature, and a clear sense of purpose. The modern world remains in spite of its technological wonders a universe in which people still seek most those primordial elements of being human. If anything, modernism has transformed these elements into grotesque mutations. The tragedy of modern projects is that in the process of creating a world of greater comfort and security, sight of the fundamentals of being human has been lost.

Traditional Western man believed that nothing mattered so much as the presence of himself in the world, that he was the sovereign of the earth and its creatures and the object of universal, cosmic concern. On the other hand, modern man, rejecting all anthropomorphic metaphysics knows he means nothing to the universe, so he kills or captures its creatures so that his power at least makes him sovereign of the earth. If there is no God, then man will become God. To the Indian both attitudes would have seemed perverse. The Indian sought to be noticed by the great forces of the world, but did so not from a sense of self-importance but, to the contrary, from a profound sense of insignificance within the great scheme of things. The Indian knew that the universe—the “Wholly Other”[3] that was also home and mother—was the true object of wonder, not its human offspring. The Indian’s attitude was ultimately one of respect and adoration without the narcissistic egoism of the Jew or Christian. The Lakota prayer to the Great Mystery begins, 

Great Mystery, you existed from the first.

The sky, this earth you created;

Great mystery—look upon me, pity me,

that the Nation may live.[4] 

For 2000 years Westerners have suffered from delusion of grandeur and self-infatuation, which have, ironically, stripped the world of meaning for humans. Commencing with the Jewish and Greek worldviews and continued and refined by the Christian worldview, Western culture has embarked upon a process of establishing humanity as the supreme object and purpose of the cosmos. All the world leads to the human doorstep. (The religious traditions have often been critical of secular humanism, but both attitudes are egocentric and self-infatuated.) Yet, we rejected or destroyed the native cultures because their cultures and beliefs were considered nothing more than childish superstition. But it has been we who have been children, continuing to surrender ourselves to a Great Savior or wrap ourselves in ideological security blankets that negate and oppress rather than enhance life, afraid to accept our humble status in the world, misusing our technical prowess like a frustrated child angrily demanding the focus of every attention and the satisfaction of every wish. When we learn to accept the red-tailed hawk as our equal, then we will share in its nobility. But I am afraid that opportunity has already passed; the people who understood most clearly the ways of life and the place of humanity among nature’s other creatures have already existed.

Said Chief Luther Standing Bear f the Lakota, or Sioux, 

[The Lakota] loved the Earth and all things of the Earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil. They sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. 

Their tepees were built upon the Earth and their altars were made of Earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the Earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. 

That is why the Indian still sits upon the Earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. 

Kinship with all creatures of the Earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.[5] 

The focus of life for Indians was worldly rather than otherworldly. They were a people at home in the real world, the primordial world of nature. They lived in the midst of its forms and knew them intimately. They were not lords of the earth but merely one form of being among millions of others. In their struggle to survive they knew they participated in that single principle of being—to endure and survive meaningfully. They understood also that all forms of life were of one family bound together in this struggle. It was a worldview that required courage and humility—a sense that the self mattered less than the whole and the greatest virtue was humility expressed through self-sacrifice.

The postmodern, with certain important exceptions such as ecofeminism, which in fact seeks a return to the abandoned organic lifeworld,[6] is not an advancement over the follies of the traditional Western and modern worldviews. At least the older Western worldviews required some sense of humility or before some great human project. But now, with the traditional and modern projects dismantled, we are left only with our self-centeredness. And the center is empty because the periphery of the world has disappeared.  Without the world we are nothing, and modern technological society sacrificed the world long ago.

In this place, Kearney, Nebraska, one can still see the world that was once there for everyone. It is the earth. It humbled us, fed us, gave us work to do, and sustained a sense of wonder for Being—as it still does for these people. Here we can see clearly the horizon of that primordial world that invented us and will one day reclaim each of us, our ideas, and our civilizations. It is the horizon of Being, and it is neither the creation of God or a god. It is simply our home, our mysterious home, mysterious only because of its presence, just as each one of us is mysterious by the very fact that we are. To seek more than that, to seek further justification of our being, to demand a final explanation or purpose, results not only in becoming lost—and I believe that no people have become more lost than we—but also in losing a sense of wonder and mystery for the very act of living—being here and having the opportunity of seeing (as an act of reverent appreciation) the world and its magnificent forms.

We may have no ultimate purpose beyond our being here, beyond wanting to endure and to see those whom we love endure for the length of their allotted time, but that does not lessen our value, because our being is the stuff of our purpose and our values. Our eyes enable us to see the beauty of the world; our ears allow us to hear its mystery; our hearts enable thus to love our own; our hearts and minds allow us to know, appreciate, and love all the forms being—living and non-living; our families friends, and neighbors enable us to commit ourselves to others and to endure the suffering that comes with sacrificing for others.

We can still be heroes and saints. Even without God, we can aspire to the divine life of Jesus—who loved all things of the world, whose life was heroic, noble and sacred because it was a life of concern and sacrifice. It was a life of power, but not the power of control, manipulation, and destruction, not the power of accumulation and domination; it was the power of love, the power of transforming oneself into a gift for others. Such a life is needed in a world with or without God.

But this is not the message of the postmodern world. If anything the postmodern world lives in in greater forgetfulness than the traditional or modern. It is a small, claustrophobic world of illuminated mirrors that reflect only one another. The music and dance of life has become a disco of artificiality, a TechNoir,[7] where the rock music and colored strobe-lights become a formless noise that has no connection with the world beyond. Where in the artificial capsule of the technological society is one going to find a place and time to sit upon the earth in order to experience its life-giving forces? Nowhere. Life in the postmodern is completely alienated from the first world, the primordial world.

Whether we rediscover the world before we destroy most of it remains to be seen. If we do not then we will finish our existence like Sartre’s hell—condemned to live alone with one another, in a world from which the beautiful and mysterious forms of Being were driven into extinction, with what is left being displayed in in cages or reserves so curious humans can view remnants of the world they have lost. We have created a prison and then happily became its prisoners, living not even in cages but cells that would be dark were it not for electric lights and television that glimmer like the illuminated shadows that dance upon the walls of Plato’s cave. In creating the modern world we destroyed or at least eclipsed not only an older world but a universe. Certainly, if the postmodern world seeks to create a new universe, it will have to begin by searching through the ruins of the old, for as of yet it has no materials of its own to build with. 

* * * 

This journal article was published in the Platte Valley Review, January 1994. It was based on my presentation “Seeking the Postmodern Project” that I gave at University of Nebraska at Kearney for a conference put on by the German language department: “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences” (April 15-17, 1993).

The author wrote Her Quest, a science fiction novel that describes a young teenage girl who embarks on a long, arduous journey to find the wisdom of the Native Americans. She lives in Usatopia, a technological society that is so artificial that birds are tiny robots. That is her world, the one that made her. She knows nothing of the world she seeks. Her quest was inspired by the words of her father, emperor of the Usatopia. Broodingly pacing back and forth and talking to himself unaware of his daughter’s presence, he says that his society lost the wisdom possessed by the ancient people who came before technology took control of the world, eventually destroying global civilization because it was misused by men. Her journey is a return to the old ways of an ancient people.

---

[1] John Bierhorst, ed., The Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1987) 115. 

[2] Beverly Hungry Wolf, The Ways of My Grandmothers. See “Learning to Camp Like My Grandmothers” (New York: Quill, 1980) 120-129. 

[3] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London University Press, 1969) 25. 

[4] Quoted in Curtis’ Western Indians by Ralph W. Andrews (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962) 93. 

[5] Luther Standing Bear, Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, ed., T.C. McLuhan (New York: Promontory Press, 1971) 6. 

[6] The meaning of organic need not be limited to organisms. For the Native American all of nature was alive—rivers, streams, fire, shooting stars, the waxing and waning of the moon, the sun passing overhead, rain, snow, and clouds, wind, storms, and dust devils, the passing and arriving seasons, and so on. The earth has been an evolving organism since its birth, and it will grow old (if we don’t destroy it) and die. What the Native Americans knew that the Western tradition has forgotten with its religions, philosophies, sciences, and ideologies is that each entity of nature has a life of its own.

Who would have ever expected the beaver to be wiser than humans who killed them to near-extinction for hats and perfumes? They build their homes and care for their families. They are aggressive only toward threatening intruders; otherwise, their philosophy is live and let live. Tortoises also possess greater wisdom than humans. They too are not aggressive creatures by nature. They don’t go out looking for trouble as humans do. They are loners. Like the beaver they will protect their home territory. And like other loners they can moody. However, the greatest wisdom of the tortoise is that he/she doesn’t race though life, as we humans do. He/she seems to realize that goal of life isn’t about winning or reaching an invented destination.

The wisdom of these creatures is that the primordial raison d'être of life is simply being/existing in the world, better yet living life with the appreciative awareness possessed by Native Americans but forgotten by moderns and postmoderns who surrendered their minds and lives to invented fantasies, ideologies, and technologies.  Busily they hurry to this destination or that, often leaving trails of blood, oblivious to the world about them. It’s hardly a sign of wisdom that humans engage in war as ants and chimpanzee do. You would think we would know better. Apparently we’re no smarter than them just better armed. We even go so far as to invent religious and secular ideologies to justify our love of war, but that too is hardly an indication of wisdom but euphemized stupidity.

[7] The name of the discotheque in the film The Terminator.

Renée's Tribute to Life

 Well, I finally got my California citizenship today—in the form of a 1971 Datsun. I don’t really need a car. I don’t even use Robert’s pickup anymore. Work is but a twenty minute walk. Pacific Beach is a good place to live if you don’t have a car, but if you want to do a little exploring, then car is nice to have. Barbara has a friend she used to work with named Renée who has grown tired of California and decided to return to her home in Nebraska and is practically giving the car away—$600—and I have plenty of money saved up, so I thought why not?

It’s strange how many people you find here looking for something. I suppose many find it. I have found something, but I don’t think it has anything to do with what most people expect to find here. Most people, I think, come for the colorful and exciting California lifestyle, the beach, SeaWorld, Disneyland, Hollywood, the glamour and glitter, the sun wearing sunglasses and a straw hat! I don’t know. It’s a Mecca for some new religion, maybe many new religions and gods that are bought and sold.

But this friend of Barbara’s says she is ready to return to Nebraska. Barbara, who is from Lubbock, Texas, told her that she was crazy to leave, but Renée just smiled and said she probably was, since she was crazy to leave Nebraska in the first place. I asked her why she wanted to go back to Nebraska.

“My folks live there. I know that I won’t be perfectly happy back in Arcadia. The winters are long and harsh, and compared with San Diego, there’s not much to do. But there are moments when the earth opens her bosom to you, and time gathers like evening clouds and suddenly you feel yourself standing at the center of the world, at the center of time. And you feel you understand nothing and everything at once. There is no feeling of center here. We never stop. Nothing around us ever stops. There is no world, only city. Here there’s a million little things, some good, some bad, but nothing magnificent like geese migrating, the landscape changing colors in the fall, golden-brown fields beneath a dark cloudy sky, fields of flowers in the summer, a meadowlark singing on a fence post, men and tractors working fields of corn and wheat which become seas of yellow, green, and brown. And windmills, lots of lonely windmills waiting for the wind to pay them a visit. In Nebraska I can accept life—the good and the bad because it seems to be part of something bigger than us. There I can accept all the people into my heart because they aren’t strangers, even if I don’t know them, they aren’t strangers. Everyone, whether they’re farmers or truck drivers or seamstresses or teachers or clerks in stores, everyone seems part of a common way of life, a single great effort that we all participate in equally. Here each is alone in his or her solitary effort. Everyone is a stranger here. In Nebraska life is hard for most everyone; the weather alone ensures that. Here you don’t see the difficulty of life. People hide it behind trendy clothes and cars and silly behavior. People here don’t seem real to me. And I don’t blame them. It’s the way of life here. In Nebraska life leaves its mark on people. You see it in the faces of men and women who work upon the land. It’s the nature of the work and the weather, and people aren’t ashamed of having to work hard or not having a lot of money or not being glamorous. It’s just part of life. People out here live as if life were a TV show. They’re either spectators or playing some role. I never really made any lasting friendships out here except for Barbara, and she’s a Texan whether she likes it or not. People and relationships just seem to come and go.

“But I had to come to California to find out these things. I wasn’t getting along with my parents. I was so full of myself that I never considered them much, their needing me, or if I did I didn’t care. They were always my parents, the ones who treated me like a child when I was no longer a child. But now I understand that they’re like all other people. Having been away from them for almost three years has taught me to see them as human beings who struggle to survive and to be happy and to do the right thing. Perhaps I can see it now because I know what that struggle is. I realize they are not giants of the earth but fragile human beings. My father is a tractor mechanic at a John Deere dealership. My mother works for the supermarket. They live in a small town on the endless prairie beneath a sky the size of an ocean. They seem small to me now, and that is one reason I want to be near them. I want to be a comfort to them. I realize too that one day I’ll no longer have them.”

“Lately, I too have been thinking about the home I left behind and death,” I said.

“Yes, Barbara told me that came here recently from New Mexico. A few months ago, my mother was hospitalized. That made me see my parents in a different light. I went back for few days. It was a mild stroke. She’s fine. She’ll be okay, but it made me realized that that my parents aren’t invincible.” Renée paused a moment, smiled, and then continued. “A brush with death sheds a different light on things. I see everything differently now, Christine, not just my parents. I see the weathered faces of the farmers differently, those toilers of the earth. I see children differently. I want to be close to them, to love them, to watch them play, to enjoy their innocence. I want to say hello to my neighbors and pass the time of day with the old man in overalls who pumps gas at the Mobil station. I want to shop at the market where my mother works, where the floors are dusty and sometimes muddy from the boots of working men. Even the air in the market smells different—old and musty. New air isn’t allowed because it’s either too cold or too hot. But I miss those smells—of people, animals, old rooms, barns, the feed store, the sharp scent of the morning cold, the sweet smell of summer. I even miss the young people who I thought I had to get away from. They’re nice. No matter how wild or rough around the edges, they’ll treat you kindly if you give them the chance, and they have always been decent and respectful to my parents. And many of them weren’t so different from me—wild and aching to get away. They couldn’t wait to be someplace else, someplace bigger and more exciting. What I did many of them would do—leave. It was strange when I was there. I hadn’t been back in three years, yet those people gathered around me as if I had never left. They knew me, cared about me and my family. And here, where I have been living for three years, I’m still a stranger. I will always be a stranger here. But that’s not going to happen because now I’m going back.” Her eyes began to glisten. She turned her head and sighed.

“Your parents don’t think like you, Renée, nor do I for that matter,” interjected Barbara in a tone of maternal exasperation. Yet, right away I knew that Barbara had done what Renée had done but she never went back. Of course Lubbock, Texas, isn’t a country town but an unlovely city like Albuquerque, much worse even because Albuquerque still retains scattered memories of its Spanish and Native American past. I know because I spent a two days in Lubbock with my father who was attending a water-well drilling conference. Mother refused to go, so I did. Dad appreciated that. And I enjoyed the trip. We drove but didn’t take I-40 like I thought we would but the back roads. I enjoyed looking at the countryside. It’s empty and wild, all sky and rolling or flat prairie land. We talked off and on but Dad seemed to enjoy looking at the countryside as much as I did. I think he was remembering the good old days when he was less of a city slicker because every once in a while he’d say his company drilled a water well for so and so near where we were passing through. It’s strange how he and I are alike in some ways.

Anyway, I understand why Barbara never had the desire to return to Lubbock. It reminds me of the ugly dusty towns in Clint Eastwood westerns, but with no imagination or sense of history, perhaps because the Americans who built the city were without traditions, just a practical people who built a city in the same fashion my father would drill for water. But you would expect some sense of beauty today, that the architects would have read at least one book on the history of architecture. Perhaps the early Texans had an excuse when they had to build their towns in rough and ready fashion but not today. And the builders of Albuquerque had no excuse at all since the Indians and the Spanish had provided them with a pueblo-adobe style perfect for the region, but it seems Americans always have to do things their own way, unwilling to learn from the past, or perhaps the builders, who are usually men, believe thinking too much about beauty is unmasculine, especially when a box with a logo will do just fine.

On the way home I mentioned to my father that I thought Lubbock was an ugly city. He smiled. He always liked the fact that I spoke my mind. He agreed but said it didn’t matter because Lubbock was all about growing cotton, not attracting tourists, couldn’t if it wanted to. But what about the people who live there? I asked. They don’t matter, he said, because they don’t know any different. They’re working people, not tourists either. He looked over and smiled. I could see that he was satisfied with that answer, as if he had just given me a precious kernel of truth. I understand now that his view of the world and its people is that of a man who has worked hard all his life, often in rugged terrain and unaccommodating weather. His brother lost an arm doing the same kind of work. Perhaps Dad thought that if you wanted beauty you could always go fishing, which he still does with a couple of the men he works with. When we were younger William and I would go with him, but that was before William went off to college and came back changed. Citified is how Dad once described him to me. And once I started spending summers in Taos I never went fishing with Dad again. The few times he asked Mother she said no way. She was through and through a city slicker. She enjoyed nature when it was presented on a postcard or in painting. Poor Dad must feel like the family has abandoned him. Perhaps me most of all, and I always thought no one loved him as much as I did. The difference between me and Renée is that I’m not sure I can ever go back home. 

In response to Barbara’s comment about Renée’s parents not thinking like her, Renée said bluntly, “No, Barbara, they don’t,” but the expression on her face was full of loving patience for her motherly friend. And who knows, maybe Barbara was a constant reminder of the people she left behind and unknowingly convinced her that those were the people she wanted to be with. Life’s funny that way.

Renée paused as if expecting me to add something, then seemed to understand my interest in her story. Her smile returned, embracing us both and softening the solemn intensity of her words. In her hazel eyes shone a goodness born and nurtured in the country. It would be worthwhile having Renée as a friend, I thought, better yet as a sister.

“My thinking has been changed by California,” she continued, “by the big city. It has become the thinking of an outsider—the way of the prodigal daughter who had to repudiate everything old and conventional, who had to repudiate all the old values and all the old morality, who had to stand naked before the world, not in shame but defiantly and provocatively. But I have grown weary of it all, Christine. Living here has been like swimming in a fast, treacherous current. It has been exciting but perilous. And as with any river, there are no roots, there is no permanence, there is only current. But now I have a need for roots that only the land and sky and my parents and the people can give me. I want to go back a hundred years, Christine. I have seen and lived the present. I fear the future because it’s unknown and doesn’t seem to offer any more than what I have now. My only home is in the past and with its people, my people.”

“Do you feel that you have given up, that you have been defeated?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh yeah! But that’s okay. There are so many defeated people who remain. And I don’t want to become like them. I still have a home. Oh, I don’t just mean my parents, but also two sisters and a way of life that I can return to. I feel it’s calling me, and I fear that if I do not return soon, I will never be able to go back. I suppose it is a little like going to church. If you stop going long enough, you’ll never go back. I don’t want to end up unhappy here and no home to return to.”

“Do you go to church, Renée?” I asked.

“No, not since leaving Arcadia.”

“But won’t they expect you to go to church in Arcadia?”

“Not everyone there attends church, but my parents do. And I will probably go. I will take from it what I can use and leave what I can’t. It’s not a huge sacrifice.”

“You don’t think you’re going back to something you really don’t believe in?”

“What else is there to believe, Christine? Anyway, whatever the worship may be, it all means the same thing—the worshipping of life, its mystery, its goodness. It’s appreciating something that is not merely bigger than you are or more powerful, but appreciating that mysterious vital something which is the source of everything. God and I haven’t talked for long time, but I still love his creation and his creatures. And I love the compassionate Virgin. I love her most of all. If Christ is God incarnate, then the Virgin is love incarnate. I suppose I identify with her because I share her sorrow, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll share again the hope that Jesus offers. I was rebellious, Christine, but not in that way. I grew up going to church. Jesus and Mary are like relatives. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying whether or not it’s all make-believe. What’s the good of that? I do want to believe in something, and I’m leaving California because I’ve discovered that what I seek can’t be found here, or at least I haven’t found it. Malls, movies, restaurants, endless freeways... It’s all about getting and spending and going endlessly. That’s no longer what I want. And churches in small towns are about more than Sunday services. They are a caring part of the community, in a way the heart of the community. They help people and organize lots of activities. You know most of what people do to have fun in small towns involves the members of the community, like school sports. Even at the rodeo sixty miles away you find yourself among friends and know even some of the contestants. I once told some friends here about going to the rodeo. They laughed thinking I was making some kind of joke, but I wasn’t. I resented their laughter. In a way I had to come here to realize what I had back home. It’s not like here where people entertain themselves among strangers, hanging out at the mall or at bars or the beach. Friendship here is a revolving door, former friends leave as new ones arrive. In Arcadia you grow up with childhood friends, you are with them when they marry and have children, you watch their children grow up, and you grow old among people you have known and loved all your life. Suddenly the life here has made me sad, perhaps because for the first time in my life I’ve been thinking about the future. I realize now that I had a lot in little Arcadia, including a future among friends and loved ones I’ve known all my life. And when I return I will be welcomed as if I had never left.”

Barbara suddenly spoke up. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you, Renée?”

Renée’s eyes widened and her expression saddened. She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she seemed to regain her spunk and said to Barbara, “I should have known I wouldn’t get away without you finding out. One way or another, you find out everything. That’s okay. You’ve been like a mother to me, and I was going tell you, but later in a letter. Oh well.”

“So that’s the real reason you’re going home?” I asked.

“All that I’ve told you, Christine, are the real reasons I’m going home, but I had to get pregnant to see it. And I definitely don’t want to raise a child out here alone.”

“What about the father?” Barbara asked.

“The father doesn’t know, and wouldn’t be interested if he did. He’s a fun sort of guy, not ready for family life. Why should I burden him with the knowledge that I am pregnant with his child? It wouldn’t help any because he doesn’t make much money and wouldn’t be interested in being a full-time dad, and to be honest, I don’t want a part-time dad who takes the kid out on week-ends. Besides, I never loved him that much. We were just fucking friends, pardon my French, Barbara. And if he did find out, he’d probably insist I stay out here so he could take his child to Chargers and Padres games. In Arcadia my child will have a real family and a real community. I don’t him or her being brought up in la-la land.”

“What about his family?”

“They live in Florida. I don’t want that kind of complication raising my child.”

She smiled, but it was a smile without happiness. She seemed so forlorn. It was strange because from what she just told us I would have thought she would be happy. But then it won’t be easy returning as an unmarried, single mother to live with her parents in a small, conservative Nebraskan town. What will she say when they ask her about the father, that he was a Southern California party animal? I could see she was about to cry so I went to her and held her in my arms. I think I did so I wouldn’t cry!

“Thanks, Christine,” she said. “I’ll be okay. It’s just that all this has happened so fast.”

We talked a while longer. Barbara scolded all youth for their foolishness. But added that she hadn’t been any different, divorced from her first husband at seventeen and from her second husband at twenty-seven. “It wasn’t our fault that we were young and foolish. Foolishness came with the territory, and men took advantage of it.”

I then asked Barbara if she had had any children, regretting the question as soon as it came out of my mouth.

“None that survived,” she said solemnly. There was an uncomfortable pause, but I knew better than to ask another stupid question.

Finally Renée said. “That’s too bad. You would have been a great mom.”

“Yeah I would have, but I did have the guts to go it alone like you, Renée. You’re doing the right thing for you and your baby.” 

As I watched Renée and Barbara I felt I had met two women who, like myself, had left their homes, either to find something better or to escape some unhappiness. Renée had left in search of greater happiness and now was now returning because she didn’t find it. But what she did find was a fuller appreciation of the home she had left. For that all the trouble was worthwhile. I thought it strange how sometimes we don’t see the full value of something until we lose it. Of course, the child made a big difference. I too wouldn’t want to raise a child in Southern California or Albuquerque. From what Renée said, Arcadia seem like a better place than most to raise a child, even without the father.

I wanted to know everything about her. I had forgotten about the car, which I finally bought—it was really more of a gift. I think she just wanted to get rid of it. I asked her why she didn’t drive it back to Nebraska. She said she just wanted to get back home as soon as possible and didn’t want to take a chance of breaking down out in the middle of nowhere. She said her dad would pick her up in Omaha. That would give them plenty of time to talk on the way home. The car wasn’t that important. All that was important she carried within. I ask her if her father would be upset when he hears about the baby. She said he wasn’t that way.

“When I think of my dad I think of country roads. Being a tractor mechanic about once a week he’d have to drive out to a farm to fix a farmer’s tractor or bring it in if it couldn’t be fixed there. He called himself a tractor veterinarian. Summers when I was a little girl I’d often go with him. Sometimes I’d hang out at the farmhouse with the farmer’s wife and kids and dogs. There were always dogs. On the way back we’d sometimes stop at the Dairy Queen for hamburgers or the Colonial Inn Restaurant, my dad’s favorite hangout because it’s the hangout for the farmers, cattlemen, mechanics, crop dusting pilots, anyone who had anything to do with raising crops or livestock. It’s like the hub of the town. It was everything I wanted to get away from, but now want to go back to. Maybe it’s having a kid that makes the difference. My child might never have a father but he will have a grandfather and grandmother and lots of local aunts, uncles, and cousins because that’s the way the town is—one big family.”

It seems I’ve taken Renée’s place. How strange, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just the way life is today, leaving one’s hometown, returning years later, or not. I hope I don’t hurt Robert’s feelings, getting a car now that he’s sick. What am I thinking? Well, right now I need to stop thinking and try to rest a little before going to work. It’s been an interesting but unsettling day—like so many others.

From Frank Kyle’s not yet published novel Christine & the Remarkable Lives of Ordinary People.

Death

 XIV

 July 16, 198- 

Death is easily ignored until it appears like a black sun created by an eclipse, casting a shadowy glow upon the world, chilling body and soul alike. Being young and too full of life, Christine had never thought much about death. When the little Mexican man held a knife to her throat, she was too frightened to contemplate her death, and even when she tried to take her life, she was filled with thoughts of living, not death. Death is ignored until it speaks through the living, whether the living be a human being, a tree, or a rock. It is the shadow of absence that follows unnoticed every being until its time has come. Death speaks through the absence of things once known. It speaks in whispers so can be heard only by those who wish to hear. Ruth is such a person, and of course Mr. Rieneau, who sees life as a dream coming from and returning to nothing. Thus to him life is both a dream and a nightmare. No wonder he wishes to spare Christine his vision of things. Through Robert invisible, whispering death has begun to reveal itself to Christine, and from this time on she will continue to see and hear it in all things. The experience has been an epiphany of sorts, the meaning of which she does not yet fully understand. What is there to understand about death? is a reasonable question. Things are and then cease to be. It all seems very simple. Yet, it isn’t, or at least human beings have been unwilling to accept the simplicity of ceasing to be. Just consider how dramatic the word death is compared to the phrase ceasing to be. And given their stake in process who can blame them? If there isn’t some deeply important meaning to be found in that dark abyss, if dying is nothing more than a natural occurrence, then what would that say about the meaningfulness of human existence? Is it any wonder then that most flee from contemplating death. Some simply do not accept it; others ignore it. Christine will not flee from it, not because she is fascinated by death but because she cares about the living. What I mean of course is that the fascination with death is rooted in love—not indifference, not hate, but love.

Death—the word is forbidding like a strange, mysterious looking hooded man dressed in black standing in a darkened doorway. People fear him because his appearance is menacing. 

“Keep away from him!” children are told.

“Who is he?” they ask.

“He is the one who kidnaps the living.”

“Where does he take them?” asks the child.

“We don’t know but we pray it’s a good place.”

“But if it is a good place, then what is there to fear?”

“You ask too many questions. It’s not good to even think about him. He will come soon enough. That’s all we really know.” 

The mysterious taker of life, death, the one who takes what only God can give. Is it any wonder that people avoid even the thought of death, fearing, I suppose, that just thinking about him will attract his attention. He will come soon enough, yes, so why let him spoil today? And if he doesn’t know you, perhaps he will forget about you for a long while. One day he’ll arrive like an intruder, either as a thief in the night or a party-crasher. So it’s best to avoid his doorway. Avoid even his street and you will forget about him—at least until he pays a visit to someone near you. But death is restless, ever prowling about, unexpectedly showing up where he is not wanted. One hopes he is just passing by, but then he decides to move in the apartment next door and everyday one sees him standing at the door as if contemplating what he will do next.

And isn’t that what has happened to Christine. Death has entered Robert’s apartment, a terrible uninvited guest. His presence is tormenting to Robert and depressing to Christine, yet he is there to neither torment nor depress. He simply is what he is, but now cannot be avoided. So from this moment on when Christine comes home she will see death standing at Robert’s doorway. She hates his presence but is also fascinated by him, and so will begin Christine’s conversations with death. She knows she should ignore him, put him out of her mind, but she cannot. And as the conversation progresses she will feel herself falling, not as if into a dark hole, as Alice in Wonderland does, because it is not she who is falling. It is the old securities and certainties of childhood, or what is left of them, that are falling away from her, leaving her disoriented. Perhaps that is the reason children are kept away from death, because to look upon his face causes one to suddenly become old. And once that happens, there is no going back. In the Book of Genesis isn’t mortality one of the truths Eve learns from the Tree of Knowledge. And once she does there is no returning to Paradise.

Eve was warned not to seek knowledge, to be content with appearance, but hers was an inquisitive and courageous nature, and in that way Eve and Christine are sisters. Christine could never be satisfied just with the appearance of death and leave it at that. It would be unfair to the dead and dying. She is too loyal to abandon Robert, yet she is also a seeker of truth, and for that reason as well will not abandon the conversation with death. It seems as if death has come to speak with Christine, almost in a kindly way because he knows she will listen. And why not speak to Robert? Death will do that as well, but in a different voice. Isn’t it odd that death speaks to everyone in the same voice, but is heard differently. To Christine his voice will be solemn, but terrifying to Robert. It is easier to contemplate the terrifying aspects of life from a distance. The poor man does not want to know the meaning of poverty but to escape from it. The sick man does not want to know the meaning of illness but to recover from his illness. And the lessons of death are of greater value to the living, especially the young, than to the dying. So death will linger a while in hopes of perhaps befriending Christine in exchange for dispossessing Robert of life. Ironically, death is a friend of the living to whom its existence is unavoidable. Death takes forever that which is valued most—existence. It’s a very high price for knowledge, but the price is even higher for ignorance. The old fisherman believes that the Greek gods were incapable of fully appreciating life because they were immortal.

So the conversation has begun and Christine’s journey now includes an excursion into the meaning of death, not just for Robert but for all things. She will not choose to exist in forgetfulness. She will not be false to Robert or to herself, even though the cost to her will be the loss of a happier state of mind. But perhaps happiness is not in every case the greatest good. Can one, for example, ever fully grow up without confronting the significance of death? Much of the happiness of children is based on the false belief that the world is better and kinder than it really is. So if that childlike happiness is to be preserved, one must remain ignorant of life’s painful truths.

Christine, however, is one of the inquisitive souls who understand that the price for complete happiness is self-deception, a price most people are more than willing to pay, but one that is too dear to those who value truth. However, there is a danger here because not everyone is ready or capable of enduring the truth, just as a child of six is not ready for the truth that death awaits all things. So it seems that the quest for truth should be a quest for personal enlightenment that respects others’ right to remain ignorant or deceived, as long as their ignorance or self-deception doesn’t interfere with the lives of others. I think that is why Mr. Rieneau is reluctant to be Christine’s mentor—though he is unable to refuse an inquiring mind. He has been a truth seeker most of his life, yet sometime during that quest he came upon what he considers to be a truth more valuable than truth itself, which is to avoid causing suffering because there is already in the world too much unavoidable suffering. As you have already discovered, the old fisherman is a fan of Buddha, who seemed to believe that lessening suffering was more important than acquiring enlightenment. Yet, Buddha came to this understanding as a seeker of truth, and his enlightenment into the nature of things was the foundation of his altruistic moral philosophy. This seems a paradox to me, one that I will let my reader unravel for I have allowed this philosophical rambling to distract me from my main concern, which is not death but the life of Christine, so I shall return to her.

As I have said before, Robert will not be forgotten by Christine. She will not simply continue on her way. Like all romantics she is overly preoccupied with her own feelings and thoughts, but also like them she is drawn to the suffering of others. As she says in the letter, Robert is her friend; she likes him. And yet he has become more. He has become death standing at the door, beckoning Christine to enter, but doing so will require leaving outside the last happiness of her childhood. Christine will enter because life itself seems to be telling her that it is time to seek something more than happiness. It is time to seek wisdom if she is to make sense of a life that is rapidly becoming more confused and enigmatic—her own. It’s time for her to enter the very heart of things, even if it be a dark, lonely place. The journey will not be pleasant. Already she is beginning to feel that she is falling. And what truths will she find? Many, one of which is that God is powerless to protect his creation from death, at least in this world. And perhaps death even waits at God’s door. 

From Frank Kyle's unpublished The Girl and the Philosopher.