the Quéstion of Québec
Il est faux de penser que la religion rend la mort plus acceptable. À preuve, les rites funéraires sont marqués par des moments d’intense tristesse. Et la plupart des croyants ont peur de la mort et font leur possible pour retarder sa venue! Demandez-lui si elle avait peur avant de venir au monde. Elle risque de répondre en riant : «Bien sûr que non, je n’étais pas là!» Expliquez-lui que c’est la même chose pour la personne qui décède. Elle n’est simplement plus là. Il existe plusieurs façons d’apprivoiser la mort. C’en est une.
Accepter sa propre finalité est le défi d’une vie, et ça restera toujours une peur qu’on maîtrise sans jamais la faire disparaître totalement.
M. Dale McGowan, auteur de Parenting Beyond Belief
No no, come back! I haven’t really become sophisticated — except in the pages of the Montréal-based public affairs magazine L’actualité, which carries an interview avec moi as its November cover story.
I was interviewed last month by Louise Gendron, a senior reporter for what is the largest French-language magazine in Canada with over one million readers. A website Q&A (in French) supplements the print interview.
So why the sudden interest among the Québécois about parents non-croyants? It’s a fascinating story. Québec has historically been the most religious of the Canadian provinces. Over 83 percent of the population is Catholic — hardly surprising, since the French permitted only Catholics to settle what was New France back in the day.
But now Québec is considered the least religious province by a considerable margin — and without losing a single Catholic.
Non-religious Catholics, you say? Oui! French Canadians are eager to maintain their unique identity in the midst of the English Protestant neighborhood — and “French” goes with “Catholic” in Canada even more than it does with “fries” in the U.S. Yet educated Catholics — I’ve discussed this elsewhere — are the most likely of all religious identities to leave religious faith entirely. There is, by all accounts, a very short step from educated Catholic to religious nonbeliever.
In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church despite having utterly lost their belief. The most striking evidence is a referendum, five years ago, to transition the provincial school system from Catholic to secular. The referendum passed easily, and a five-year transition began in 2003. This year is the last year of that transition — and to the shock and surprise of many, the entire process has taken place with very little uproar.
Until now.
____________________________
“In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois
have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing
to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church
despite having utterly lost their belief. “
____________________________
My interview was going to be a good-sized piece, but two weeks ago (in the words of Louise Gendron), “all hell broke loose” in Québec as orthodox Catholic family organizations launched a coordinated media campaign attacking the secularization of the schools. At which point L’actualité decided to make the interview the cover story and enlarge the website Q&A.
Most “cultural Catholic” parents in Québec support the transition but wonder how to explain death, teach morality, encourage wonder — in short, how to raise ethical, caring kids — without religion.
Perhaps you can understand my sudden, intense interest in Québec, and why there is talk — very early talk — of a possible French edition of Parenting Beyond Belief, to be published in (vous avez deviné correctement!) Québec!
What if she comes anyway?
Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America [over] twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary’s fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids’ drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.
from “Myths Over Miami” by Lynda Edwards in the Miami New Times, Sept. 1997
“Dad?”
“Yeah, B?” It was Erin, my nine-year-old, nicknamed “The B.”
“Can you come into the bathroom with me?”
“Why, you need to talk about something?” Our family has an odd habit: one person sits on the edge of the tub and chats up the person on the commode. A gift from my wife’s side.
“No…I’m scared to go in there.”
“It’s the middle of the day, B.”
“I know, but…Daddy, just come in with me.”
“Not ’til you tell me what you’re afraid of.”
She hesitated — then said, “The mirror.”
“What about the mirror?”
She leaned in and whispered, “Bloody Mary.”
I resisted the urge to say, No thanks, I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic. I knew just what she meant. I was a kid too, you know.
“Desirée at school says if you turn off the lights and turn around three times in front of the mirror with your eyes closed and say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, then open your eyes — a woman all covered in blood will be looking at you from in the mirror!”
A quiver-chill went through me. I was a kid again. I remember exactly how it felt to hear such ghastly things whispered by a true believer. Their wide-eyed conviction always did a fine job of convincing me as well. But in my day, Bloody Mary came crashing through the glass at you — a detail Erin didn’t seem to need to hear.
“So just go in, leave the light on, and don’t spin around or say the name, B.” I knew how hopelessly lame a thing that was to say. What if she comes anyway? Once the concept is in your head, why, the very thought of Bloody Mary might conjure her up. She might appear just because she knows I know! And she knows I know she knows I know!
“Okay, I’ll go with you. But you know what I’m gonna do.”
“NO DADDY!”
We went eye to eye. “Sweetie, tell me the truth. Do you think Bloody Mary is real, or just a story?”
She looked away. “Just a story.”
“So why be afraid of a story?” Again, I know. Lame! Yes, it’s true, it’s just a story — but ultimately, in our human hearts and reptile brains, such a defense against fear is hopelessly lame.
Her forehead puckered into a plead. “But Daddy, even if she’s just a story — what if she comes anyway?”
See? I remember.
I walked into the bathroom myself and pulled the curtains. She followed, timidly, cupping her hand by her eyes to avoid the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to, B,” I said. She sat on the lid of the toilet, whimpering. I turned out the lights. Nooooohohohoho, she began to moan, with a bit of fourth-grade melodrama.
I walked to the mirror and began to turn. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary! I opened my eyes. “See?” I knocked on the mirror. “Helloooooo! Hey lady! Look B, nobody’s home!”
Erin peeled her hands from her eyes and squealed with delight. “I’m gonna do it!”
She walked slowly to the mirror, trembling with anticipation. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…Bloody Mary! She peeked through her fingers.
“Eeeeeheeheeheehee!” she squealed delightedly, jumped up and down, hugged me. But if you believe she was cured — if you think Daddy’s words were really enough to slay the dragon — then you were never a kid. Maybe we said her name too fast, you see, or too slow, or or or maybe we didn’t believe in her enough. Maybe she just can’t be tricked by skeptical dads into showing herself. Erin didn’t say any of these things, but I know she was thinking them. And sure enough, the very next day, Erin was requiring bodyguards in the bathroom again.
I haven’t tried to talk her out of it. To paraphrase Swift, you can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. For a while, it’s even a little bit fun to believe such a thing is possible. And thinking I could talk her out of it anyway would be denying an inescapable fact: that when I pulled my own hands from my eyes in that darkened bathroom and saw the mirror, the rationalist dropped back and hid behind me, just for a tiny fraction of a second, as my little boy heart raced at the question that never quite completely goes away:
What if she comes anyway?
[For one of the most hair-raising and powerful essays I’ve ever read, see the full text of Lynda Edwards’ gripping 1997 piece on the Bloody Mary story as told among the homeless children of Miami — complete with illustrations.]
on celebrity
- October 08, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, values
0
(Being the last, and least relevant, in a series of reflections on the 2007 convention of the Atheist Alliance International.)
My arrival at the AAI Convention was marked by a through-the-looking-glass moment as I heard a young woman whisper to a friend: “It’s him!”
I looked up, expecting to see them staring at Dawkins or Harris. Instead, they were staring at mere me. They smiled and held out copies of PBB for me to sign, told me how much they loved the book, etc. It was not entirely unlike me approaching Dawkins or Harris, which made me cringe just a tad. I am not worthy, believe me. Me being on the receiving end of an it’s him calls the whole concept of celebrity into serious question.
The first time I called my kids on the phone from the convention this year, Delaney answered. And she didn’t ask if I had been a fawn-ee; she knows me only as the occasional fawn-er.
And so, when she heard my voice, she immediately asked: “Daddy! Have you talked to The Scientist yet?”
In her mind, the sole reason I had flown 600 miles and spent three days away from her was to see The Scientist — Richard Dawkins. She can be forgiven for thinking this. In retrospect, I’d told her very few things about the convention. I’d said I would talk about my book a bit, I’d be close to the President’s house, and I would see a personal hero of mine, one of the most famous scientists in the world.
“Didn’t you already see him before?” she asked at the time.
Yes, I had. I’ve met Richard Dawkins precisely three times — at the AAI Conventions in 2003, 2005, and 2007. Fortunately, our first meeting in ’03 was captured on videotape, so you can hear what I sounded like as I struggled to express my admiration for his work. You can hear him laughing at me in the clip:
Later in that same convention I mentioned my admiration for Richard’s work to Margaret Downey, who was accompanying him during his visit — and she insisted I join them for lunch. I absolutely refused, feeling I would have nothing to say to him beyond the fawning gestures of fan to star, and that in the attempt (as the video makes clear), I would merely have sprayed him with strained carrots.
I’m completely immune to starstruckedness of the usual kind. I loved Corky the Clown, a local TV station character in the St. Louis of my kidhood. Then Mom took us down to the station during the 1969 Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon…and there was Corky, mugging and clowning for a captive line of petrified children on the sidewalk outside. Anyone who has seen a clown close up will know just how much I longed to put him back in our Magnavox and keep him there. Since then, proximity to the merely famous has never really made my weenie wiggle.
Thanks in part to a three-year job in a hotel in Century City, California during grad school, I rubbed elbows with every imaginable ilk of celebrity and politician of the late 1980s. It was interesting to see them in the flesh, but none of them me swoon. They didn’t move me. In many cases, their celebrity even made me nauseous.
But when I meet someone of genuine accomplishment, someone whose contributions have moved and changed me and millions of others — someone who began as I did, a squinting, squealing, clutching infant, but somehow went on to [insert jawdropping, unprecedented accomplishment here] — well, when I meet someone like that, yes, I swoon.
I remembering packing for that first convention back in 2003, talking to Erin. That was her year to be the five-year-old who watched Daddy pack. “Are you nervous?” she asked. She knew I was giving a speech.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But not about my speech.” I told her I was going to meet someone who was very important to me, a scientist who wrote some wonderful books. He was one of my heroes, I said, so I was a little nervous to meet him.
“Don’t be nervous, Daddy,” she said. “I betcha he’s very nice.” But then she wanted to know why he was my hero.
What a great question — and a rare opportunity to be explicit about just what impresses and moves me.
“Well,” I said, “I guess the best way I can say it is that he helped me understand the world better.” Just being famous, or just winning an election, or merely singing or acting well can’t possibly inspire in me the same drooling idiocy I feel whenever I extend my hand to shake Richard’s.
There’s irony here. I know, partly through Richard’s work, how cosmically insignificant we are. I know that we are essentially vehicles for the transportation of DNA from generation to generation, and that we are not fallen angels but trousered apes. It seems silly that a fellow speck of dust can reduce me to Miss Teen South Carolina with a beard.
But that actually gets at the point. I’m inspired by the fact that even though we are trousered apes and cosmic specks, we still manage, on occasion, to rise above our situation and achieve something truly wonderful. Speck Einstein saw that space and time are woven together. Speck Gandhi realized that nonviolence could be more powerful than violence. Speck Darwin explained the kinship of all life. That’s the level of astonished joy that paralyzes my mind and tongue when I meet someone like Richard. I am shaking hands with Huxley and Voltaire and Vonnegut and Epicurus. I’m shaking hands with the best in all of us.
I’ve searched for the perfect metaphor of Richard Dawkins at an atheist convention, something that would capture the odd sense that a being from another realm had crossed into our little world. At last, at this convention, it hit me. If you’ve read Flatland, you will instantly understand: we’re polygons, and he is a sphere, floating through our plane. Unable to communicate with it in any meaningful way, we just stand back and ululate in amazement.
For now, my girls are swooning over Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens and Miley Cyrus. That’s fine, of course. They are practicing the fine art of admiration. Connor’s become more judicious, moving on to JK Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Richard Branson, and for quite admirable reasons.
My kids are also getting a mild version of the lesson from the other end as they enjoy our family’s (very) marginal flirtation with celebrity. I too would have squealed at the chance to walk into Barnes and Noble and find a book with my family’s picture on the back when I was a kid. Hell, I enjoy it now. but I’m also aware that in that moment is a rare opportunity to get all sorts of messages driven home to my kids about what’s important, and what’s not.
for your viewing pleasure
CONNOR ATOP BRAILES HILL, OXFORDSHIRE, OCTOBER 2004
Two new feature pages have been added here at The Meming of Life:
1. TEN WONDERFULL THINGS
I’ve grappled with the problem of how best to present links of interest. Blogrolls are fine, but short ones are incomplete and long ones make my eyes cross.
My solution is TEN WONDERFULL THINGS, an ever-evolving list of links to (always only) ten wonder-full things that relate in some way to the topics explored in the Meming of Life: parenting, the secular life, wonder, fun, sex, death, questions, kids, philosophy, humor, Atlanta, science, England, books, monkeys…things like that. No particular order. Visit often as the list slowly morphs.
2. I’M *SO* GLAD YOU ASKED
Wondering and questioning are the heart and soul of secular parenting. I’M *SO* GLAD YOU ASKED is a blog within a blog listing some of the questions and hypotheses my kids — Connor (now 12), Erin (now 9), and Delaney (now 5) — have come out with over the years. Though this page is primarily a personal family record, I’ve obviously invited visitors in, so I’ll try not to include the kind of cutesy-wootsey questions only a parent could love. I’m including it in the blogworks here because the questioning environment we build for our children is among the most important influences on their intellectual development. I’m endlessly fascinated by these questions and always thinking about how best to encourage them.
So no, in case the title led you to believe this was an FAQ, it is not. These Q’s are not frequently asked. Each tends to appear only once, giving us just that one chance to get it right, one chance to react in a way that nurtures and encourages the next question, and the next.
These are not dimly-remembered paraphrases. Each was written down within three minutes of being said. My hope in creating this page is to capture just a little of the electric thrill I get from being the father of three bighearted and curious kids who’ve never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question.
Click on the links in the upper left of the blog’s home page.
Words fail me
Love is too weak a word for what I feel – I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you.
WOODY ALLEN in Annie Hall
I was born in the Sixties. My first two kids were born in the Nineties. But try to name the decade my youngest was born in, the one we’re in at the moment, and you’re left muttering clunkers like “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” or sounding like Grandpa Simpson by referring to the “aughts.” It’s called a lexical gap, a concept for which a given language lacks a concise label. German is said to lack a precise word for a person’s “chest,” while English speakers are left speechless when it comes to Fahrvergnügen.
When I first heard Alvy Singer struggling to express his feelings for Annie Hall, I thought it was just for laughs. But I’ve begun to struggle in recent years with precisely the same lexical gap — so much so that I’ve almost entirely stopped telling my wife and children that I love them.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The problem is the overuse of what was once, I suspect, a more sparingly-used, and therefore more powerful, word. The fact that Paul McCartney’s only response to the problem of “silly love songs” was to sing the phrase “I love you” fifteen times in three minutes seems to prove my point.
As a result of using “love” to express our feelings about everything from self-indulgence (“I love sleeping in on Sunday”) to food (“I love Taco Bell’s new Pizzaburgerrito”), I find the word “love” now entirely inadequate to describe the feeling engendered in me by my wife and kids. I don’t love them. I luuurve them.
No no, come back. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic. I’m zeroing in on a practical, lexical problem, that’s all.
Mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, twu wuv, wiw fowwow you, fowevah.
IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from The Princess Bride
Whenever I think of the reasons I luuurve my wife, I recall an event I attended two years ago — a debate between an atheist and a theist. I described the scene in PBB (pp. 96-7):
When the discussion turned to morality, [the theist] said something I will never forget. “We need divine commandments to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said. “If not for the seventh commandment…” He pointed to his wife in the front row. “…there would be nothing keeping me from walking out the door every night and cheating on my wife!”
His wife, to my shock, nodded in agreement. The room full of evangelical teens nodded, wide-eyed at the thin scriptural thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss.
I sat dumbfounded. Nothing keeps him from cheating on his wife but the seventh commandment? Really?
Not love?
How about respect? I thought. And the promise you made when you married her? And the fact that doing to her what you wouldn’t want done to you is wrong in every moral system on Earth? Or the possibility that you simply find your marriage satisfying and don’t need to fling yourself at your secretary? Are respect and love and integrity and fulfillment really so inadequate that you need to have it specifically prohibited in stone?
I first dated Becca because of conditional things. Non-transcendent things. Had she not been so unbearably attractive to me, had she not had the most appealing personality of anyone I knew, had she not been so funny and smart and levelheaded, I wouldn’t have flipped over her like I did. It may sound off to say it this way, but she fulfilled the conditions for the relationship I wanted, and I, thank Vishnu, did the same for her. I asked her to marry me in large part because of these not inconsiderable things.
But then, the moment I asked her to marry me, something considerably more transcendent began to happen between us. She said yes — and I was instantly struck dumb by the power of it. This splendid person was willing to commit herself to me for the remainder of her one and only life.
Holy (though I try to keep this blog free of both these words) shit.
No, I am not waxing, dammit, I am making a point. We were moving into the unconditional, you see. She had moved from being one of the many attractive, magnetic, funny, smart people I knew to The One Such Person Who Committed to Me. See the difference? And then, once she actually took three small packets of my DNA and used them to knit children — well, at that point, it became hard to look at her without bursting into song. I’m still not over it. What was a strong but technically conditional love moved decisively into unconditional luuurve.
So yes, there are things beyond the seventh commandment that keep me from cheating on my wife. Like the hilarity I feel at the thought of finding any other woman with any amount of those conditionals more attractive.
As for the children…
You’re an atheist? So then…you think your children are…just a bunch of…processes?
JEHOVAH’S WITNESS at my door last year
Last week a radio interviewer asked about my kids, with mild facetiousness: “So how about your own kids? Good kids, ya love ’em and everything?” In addition to the pure silliness of answering such a question, I fell head-first into that lexical gap once again — and the resulting three seconds of dead air probably did me no favors with the audience. I finally sputtered something about them being amazing kids, terrific kids, but it fell short, as it always does, of my real feelings.
I don’t make up for this lexical gap with the kids by telling them I luuurve them. Instead, almost every single day, I tell them, “I do not love you.” And they smile and say, “Oh yes you do!” — and all is understood.
They know in a thousand ways that I am transported by being their dad. They’ve become accustomed, for example, to the sudden realization that Dad is staring again. They’ll get that prickly feeling and turn to see me lost in a contemplative gawk. They’re very good about it, usually returning a smile rather than a roll of the eyes, which I think is very nice of them.
Recognizing that the love of our children is rooted in part in biology — that I am, in part, adaptively fond of them — does not in the least diminish the way I’m transported by contemplating the fact of them, and of our special connection, and of their uniqueness, of the generational passing of the torch.
But it’s interesting to note that, unlike my relationship with Becca, this meditative gawking began on day one. The order of things is reversed. My marriage started in the conditional and added the unconditional. I loved her from the beginning, but only slowly came to be so completely slain by her.
Kids, on the other hand, begin in the unconditional and add the conditional. From the moment they emerged from my wife — seriously, reflect on that for a moment — they were unconditionally wonderful to me. They were half me and half she. They were our connection to the future. Etc.
Gradually we formed additional bonds based on their actual attributes. They are smart as whips, wickedly funny, generous and kind and fun to be around. But that’s all frosting on an unconditional cake. Marriage, on the other hand — if it goes well — starts with frosting and gradually slips the cake underneath.
So yes, my kids are “processes,” whatever that means, and so is my wife. But they are also the main reasons I wake up grateful and filled with meaning and purpose every single day.
(Wax off.)
getting concrete: international day of peace
Regular readers of THE MEMING OF LIFE may begin to catch an unmistakable whiff of the concrete in upcoming posts. Don’t worry — I’ll continue to spatter the blog with incontestable pablum like “death is scary” and “thinking for yourself is good.” But I think it’s time to assert a few positions as well.
I don’t believe a secular, freethinking worldview leads to any and all possible conclusions with equal ease. I think a stated confidence in reason leads more decisively to some conclusions than to others. We will surely differ on what those conclusions are — Christopher Hitchens, for example, might dispute large whacks of this post — but he and I would presumably agree on the terms of the debate, which is the first requirement for sensible discourse.
There is a balance to be struck. If I tell my kids, “Hey, just think for yourself! Whatever you come up with is peachy,” that is indeed moral relativism. If I say, “Think for yourself, as long as you reach my conclusions,” that’s indoctrination wrapped in hypocrisy, a là Catholic intellectual tradition. (See? I’m not always nice.)
If instead I say, “Think for yourself — then be prepared to support your conclusions and to change them if necessary,” I’ve struck just the needed balance.
So freethought isn’t about declaring all conclusions equally valid — it’s about differing intelligently. Let me then begin my plunge into the concrete:
1. If war is necessary and effective, then war it is! Woohoo!
Aside from the gratuitous ‘woohoo,’ that should be fairly uncontroversial. Here’s a corollary:
2. War is rarely necessary and rarely effective.
Let’s define necessary as “something essential; something that cannot be done without,” and effective as “something that accomplishes its stated objectives.” I believe war fails to meet both of these criteria. It is unnecessary, because there are most often alternatives that have been proven to work brilliantly, and it is ineffective because it most often exacerbates the very problems it seeks to solve.
Some stats to consider:
One in seven countries are currently at war.
More than half of war deaths are civilians.There are now over 250,000 child soldiers worldwide.
Children account for two-thirds of those killed in violent conflict since 1990.An increasing percentage of world conflicts involve poor nations (formerly one third, now one half).
The average civil war drains $54 billion from a nation’s economy.25 million people are currently displaced by war.
Mortality among displaced persons is over 80 times that of the non-displaced.Half of all countries emerging from violent conflict relapse into violence within five years.
SOURCE: UN Development Programme Human Development Report, 2005
Yes, stopping Hitler was a splendid idea. Unfortunately, our public discourse now evokes WWII as the justification for all wars instead of recognizing it as one of the very few necessary wars in our history.
Time for a final assertion:
3. Except in the rare cases when war is necessary and effective, peace is preferable to war.
Seems reasonable. And one of the many voices in agreement with this final assertion is the long and noble tradition of Catholic peace activism. (See? Discernment.)
So why do I bring this up today? Because — though you wouldn’t know it from the yawning inattention of the media — today is the 25th annual International Day of Peace, an observance created by the UN in 1982 “to devote a specific time to concentrate the efforts of the United Nations and its Member States, as well as of the whole of mankind [sic], to promoting the ideals of peace and to giving positive evidence of their commitment to peace in all viable ways… (The International Day of Peace) should be devoted to commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.” (from General Assembly Resolution UN/A/RES/36/67)
Not only do the stats and history seem to support the futility of war, but the foundation of secular ethics is this: in the absence divine safety net, we are all we’ve got, so we ought to try very hard to take care of each other. If war generally fails to accomplish its objectives while impoverishing and killing millions of us, secular ethics ought to oppose it — except in the profoundly rare cases when there really is no alternative. When it comes to this standard, most of our national violence is far more analogous to the Mexican-American War than to the fight against Hitler.
So today, the flag of the United Nations is flying in front of our house, and the preference for peace was the topic of conversation at the breakfast table. Connor plans to use some of the money in his “others” jar to buy a Peace Bond from Nonviolent Peaceforce. I will donate a day’s wages to NP’s Work a Day for Peace program, which runs through October 2, the International Day of Nonviolence.
I’ll post about nonviolent action on that day. For today, talk to your kids about your preference for peace, the futility of violence, the situation of child victims of war — and the fact that all of these opinions flow quite naturally from a secular worldview. Donate to Nonviolent Peaceforce, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, or another organization that’s out there doing the heavy lifting for humanity.
(Watch Ken Burns’ powerful new seven-part documentary THE WAR beginning this Sunday September 23 on PBS. He lays out precisely the case that is needed: that WWII was “the necessary war,” and that its misuse and mythologizing is leading us to disaster. Catch a long preview here.)
far above the world
- September 16, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 23
I’m on about bedtime again— but this time it’s the soundtrack.
My mother sung me to sleep for most of my childhood, and I love her for it. In hopes that my own children will profess love for me in their eventual blogs, I sing to them every night as well. And for no other reason.
At an average of two songs per child per night, that’s nearly 20,000 songs so far. Easily bored as I am, the repertoire doesn’t stand still for long: Stardust, Yesterday, Danny Boy, Kentucky Babe, Long and Winding Road, Witchdoctor, Cat’s Cradle, Unchained Melody, Stand By Me, Blackbird, Michelle, The Christmas Song, Lady in Red (not that one), Imagine, Close to You, Mean Mister Mustard, Everything’s All Right (from Superstar, with Judas’ angry outburst included), Happy Together, The Galaxy Song, Our Love is Here to Stay…you know, stuff like that.
A few nights ago, an old friend floated into my head, unbidden—and I began to sing a song that once reached further into my imagination than perhaps any other before or since:
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…
“What…in…the…world?!” Erin’s head was off the pillow. I could feel the puzzled glare cutting through the dark.
(“10”) Ground Control (“9”) to Major Tom (“8”)…(“7”)
(“6”) Commencing countdown, engines on…(“3”)
(“2”) Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you…
“This is weird,” said Delaney.
“This is TOTALLY weird,” said Erin, leaning forward on her elbow.
“This is…”
THIS IS GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM
YOU’VE REALLY MADE THE GRADE
AND THE PAPERS WANT TO KNOW WHOSE SHIRTS YOU WEAR
NOW IT’S TIME TO LEAVE THE CAPSULE IF YOU DARE
I was only slightly older than Delaney when Neil Armstrong celebrated my wedding anniversary by landing on the moon 22 years in advance, to the day. It was the same year David Bowie gave us Major Tom. I watched the moon landing with my parents, who tried very hard to impress the significance on me. I was a complete NASAholic by age eight.
As I built model after model of the lunar module and command module and watched telecasts of one Apollo crew after another in grainy black-and-white, I recall being both awed and miffed at the astronauts—awed because I wanted so much to be in their boots, and miffed because they were all business. Houston this and Houston that. Engaging the forward boosters, Houston. Switching on the doohickey, Houston. Even in elementary school, it occurred to me that there should be a little more evidence of personal transformation. I wanted to hear them say Ooooooooooooo, in a fully uncrewcutted, unprofessional way. Holy cow, I wanted. I’m in outer space.
Eventually we got golfing on the moon and some zero-G hijinks. That’s fine. But that’s not transformation. I wanted evidence that they were moved by their experience, that they would never be the same after seeing Earth from space. They wrote about it years later when I was in college, but it was in high school that a Bowie song I’d never heard before finally said what I’d waited to hear. Take it, Major Tom:
Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can doThough I’m past 100,000 miles
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.
For three days now we’ve listened to Bowie’s version rather than my own at bedtime, complete with those epic Mellotron strings, and debated what exactly happens in those final stanzas. The girls demand to know: Is he okay? What happened? Does he come back?
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can youHere am I floating ’round my tin can,
Far above the Moon,
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.
“Omigosh,” said Connor after one hearing. “He killed himself.”
“No he did not!” I was indignant, partly because it had never occurred to me.
“Yes he did. ‘Tell my wife I love her very much’—and then his circuit goes dead? Come on, Dad.”
I’d heard the song a thousand times. Yes, I thought he might not have made it, but it never once occurred to me that he’d done himself in. Huh.
It makes sense. He was moved, all right. He was so transformed by the experience that he liberated himself from Ground Control, unhooked his tether, and went careening, blissfully, beyond the moon.
Okay then. Be careful what you wish for.
Ariadne’s threads
I was seeing my girls off to sleep Sunday night when suddenly, without warning, the Bronze Age broke loose.
It was one of those breath-holding parenting moments when you can’t believe your luck at being there to capture it. Delaney (5) announced that she had made up a myth of her own. For some reason I had the presence of mind to grab my laptop and transcribe as she spoke. Read it, then we’ll chat:
The Wall of Parvati
There was a girl named Medusa. And she knew this wall, a big wall, and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat with her sharpest sword and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying, because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian), and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep, and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
Before I yak this to death, let me repaste her myth with elements cross-referenced to the myths Laney has heard as bedtime stories in recent weeks:
The Wall of Parvati1
There was a girl named Medusa.2 And she knew this wall, a big wall,3 and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat4 with her sharpest sword5 and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying,6 because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian),7 and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods8 down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes9 and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep,10 and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
1 She knows Parvati from Ganapati Circles the World (Hindu). Parvati is the consort of Shiva and mother of Ganapati (aka Ganesha or Ganesh). Parvati’s also a Gryffindor, of course.
2 From Perseus and Medusa (Greek).
3 The Iliad (Greek). Much is made of the hated wall around Troy in this excellent retelling for grades 2-4.
4 Several of our recent myths included sailing quests — The Golden Fleece, The Iliad, The Odyssey (Greek).
5 Perseus killed Medusa with the infinitely sharp adamantine sword of Hermes (Greek).
6 Shiva’s pro-wrestling name is “The Destroyer.”
7 No idea. We haven’t done any Egyptian myths yet. The Disney flick Prince of Egypt, maybe?
8 This has been a theme in several of the myths we’ve read lately — the sending of surrogates on tasks — including Cupid and Psyche (Greek) and Proserpine and Pluto (Roman).
9 We’ve encountered two magical snakes recently: in the Garden of Eden (Judaic) and in the Sioux myth of the three transformed brothers. And Medusa has snakes for hair, of course, so maybe she plucked one out and sent it on a mission.
10 A jealous Venus tricked Psyche into inhaling a sleeping draught (Roman).
In that context, maybe you can see why I was all agog. My five-year-old daughter had constructed a syncretic midrash.
Midrash is a process by which new interpretations are laid on old legends or scriptures, and/or new stories are synthesized out of elements of older ones, usually for the purpose of instruction. Though early Jews freaked about syncretism across party lines–don’t make me link to the golden calf!–the construction of fictional midrash from within Judaic sources is recognized as a vital part of Jewish teaching.
In The Jesus Puzzle, Earl Doherty argues, with brilliantly grounded scholarship, that the gospel of Mark was just such a midrash, and that “Mark” did not mean it to be taken as literal fact any more than Delaney did. It was a teaching fiction.
But Laney’s work more closely resembles a deeper kind of mythmaking, one common in the Mediterranean Bronze Age and beyond: the syncretic merging of elements from different belief systems into something new and useful. There is much to suggest that the later character of Jesus is such a syncretic construct, sharing as he does the heroic attributes and biographical details of such earlier mythic figures as Mithras (born on Dec 25, mother a virgin, father the sky-god, 12 disciples, entombed in rock, rose on third day, etc), Krishna, Osiris, Tammuz, and countless others.
A fascinating tangent, believe you me, but I’ll never find my way out if I start with that.
So ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures spun new tapestries from the threads of religions all around them. Now here’s a 21st century kindergartener doing the same thing. Makes you think we’re onto something fundamentally human.
If we’d exposed Delaney to just one culture, one religion, she could be forgiven for imagining a no-kidding god on the other end of that one dazzling thread. By instead following a hundred threads, she realizes there are just lots of people on the other end — just plain folks, like Delaney — each of them spinning something lovely and new from the old threads they picked up. Follow enough of those threads and you find yourself outside the labyrinth of religious belief entirely, blinking in the sun.
The thing that left me most awestruck is that she even thought of mythmaking as a thing she could do. Picture a Sunday School kid making up his own bible story. Even though that’s just how Matthew and Luke were elaborated out of Mark, once the 4th century bishops weighed in and made it “gospel,” further creative energies have been (shall we say) discouraged. With rare exceptions, we are now receivers of that written tradition, not co-creators. That’s why the experience of hearing Delaney spin her tale moved me so deeply. She recognizes other human hands in the spinning of the mythic tapestry — so why not add her own?
the total perspective vortex
- September 10, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 0
In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
One of my favorite sillinesses (sillini?) about the human condition is the distance between our self-image and our situation — the gap between how big we feel and how small we are. It is the central joke in the human comedy. I make myself the butt of that joke just about every day.
Every time I sit down to post a blog entry, I feel a twitch of self-loathing — until I remember I’m not significant enough to hate, at which point I laugh at myself and blog about it. At which point etc.
Case in point: my self-worth continues to be joined at the hip with the Amazon rank of Parenting Beyond Belief. To see a running chart of my mood for the past couple of months, click here. Note the horrible slide during the post-Newsweek-dry-pipeline debacle of late July, which I won’t even mention.
The book launched in the second week of April in Amazon’s top 0.1% — around 3,300 out of 3.5 million. This was good, because the success or failure of this book (frankly) will determine whether or not I make a go of authoring as a second career. Just when you thought it was all about raising the next generation of freethinkers, eh? I have five other books in the pipeline, you know, dammit, three of them finished and waiting for publishers. Anyway.
Two days ago, the Amazon rank dipped for a moment to 6600. This is still outrageously good for a book of this type, especially so far after launch, and yes, I know that most authors would sell their sisters to hit 6600 at all — gee hey, how’s my novel doing? — but having become all-too-accustomed to that top 0.1%, my mood darkened several clicks anyway. I had my 4 o’clock G&T at 2:30. A mistake I had made for my favorite freelance client was crushing my conscience. I was a failure as a father, as a husband, as a provider, as a writer, as a citizen of the world.
This morning, as we entered the sixth month of availability, the rank is at 2,600, and everything reversed. I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. I am Leonardo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic, albeit better-looking.
The eye-rollingly pathetic lunacy of both of these reactions is plenty clear to me without help, thangyavurrymush. But help was present nonetheless on the same screen that brought me both ends of that silly-monkey emotional spectrum:
It’s M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, among the more elegant things in space and (lucky it) my current desktop background. And it doesn’t care what my Amazon rank is. It doesn’t care what I am. Nor do any of the quadrillion intelligent beings who most likely live in M104 know or care that one of the species on one planet in the galaxy they call “that smudge” has named their galaxy after a hat.
It is some comfort to realize that they surely have their sillini, too.
I’ll close with a perspective booster that made each of my three kids say OMIGOSH, NOWAY, or YOUGOTTABEKIDDING three times in one minute:
It’s not a Total Perspective Vortex, but as Douglas Adams pointed out, don’t even wish for that.
the long habit, part I
What, me worry?
Epicurus of Samos, philosopher
The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.
Thomas Browne, dead person
If you haven’t visited The Death Clock, you really must. Enter your date of birth, height, weight and Body Mass Index — a measure of fitness, or more to the point, fatness — and the Death Clock spits out the day and date on which you’ll hear the galloping hooves of the pale horse.
Mine is Tuesday, December 9, 2036.
Until that date I can step whistling into the paths of all manner of passenger and freight vehicles. I can season my steak with asbestos and press my vital organs against the microwave oven as it cooks.
Unless, here at midlife, I absorb the other, far more important, more honest and less entertaining message of the Death Clock. You’re probably not going to Die today, goes that message — but you are, most assuredly, on some actual date in the easily-conceivable future, going to Die.
The difference between death and ice cream — and yes, there is one
I am afraid to die. This puts me in the company of most sane people, Christians included. It’s something to leave off the résumé should I ever apply for a position as a suicide bomber, but aside from that, I don’t think it should count against me.
Reporters always (always) ask how, in the absence of religion, I intend to make the contemplation of death go down my children’s conceptual gullets like butter brickle ice cream on an August day. Or words to that effect. Depending on my mood, I either pretend that’s possible, or I don’t, since it isn’t. Death is hard to take, and it always will be. Darwin rather insists on it. And I like seeing a bit of the fear of death in my kids’ eyes now and again. Makes crossing the street so much easier.
And I can tell by the applause all around me — ancestors behind, descendants ahead — that “I don’t wanna die” is just the sort of thing that I, as the ziploc-baggie-of-the-moment for my family’s genetic material, am supposed to feel, for their sakes. I’m the keeper of the keys.
Wait a minute. Come to think of it, that’s no longer true. Between 1994 and 2000, I lent my wife the keys enough times to produce three new bags of DNA, then went under the knife to ensure that, genetically speaking, I would be of no further use. My shift is over. I can clock out any time.
As a result of having completed my sole genetic responsibility, my fear of death no longer serves any real purpose. Perhaps vasectomies will eventually engender a population-level selective response whereby the severing of the vas deferens leads the now-superfluous man to impale himself, thornbirdlike, on the surgeon’s waiting blade, thus relieving the tribe of thirty additional football seasons of pressure on the stocks of Cheetos and Michelob. Until then, boys, fear death and eat up.
Doubting (Dylan) Thomas
I do think there are ways to diminish the fear of death and dying, and a post last spring (Milk-Bones for the Immortally Challenged) included a tip or two from Epicurus, who has now had 2,277 years to test his hypotheses. (No word yet on how it’s going, which tends to support his point.) But there are others, and a recent conversation with my boy reminded me that I hadn’t blogged death in awhile.
I don’t remember how it came up, but Connor and I were talking about the last moments of life. Though I don’t want or expect my kids to ever find death yummy, I’d like to keep their concerns about it manageable, and I’ve always found understanding to be the best path away from fear. In this case, I was able to draw on another in my arsenal of death-softeners — the fact that most people, by all accounts, don’t go out kicking and/or screaming, but do, in spite of Dylan Thomas, go gentle into that good night.
Here’s another Thomas — doctor, biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas — writing in one of the most profoundly wonderful popular science books of the past century, Lives of a Cell:
In a nineteenth-century memoir on an expedition in Africa, there is a story by David Livingston about his own experience of near-death. He was caught by a lion, crushed across the chest in the animal’s great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot from a friend. Later, he remembered the episode in clear detail. He was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them through in a haze of tranquillity.
I have seen agony in death only once, in a patient with rabies; he remained acutely aware of every stage in the process of his own disintegration over a twenty-four-hour period, right up to his final moment. It was as though, in the special neuropathology of rabies, the switch had been prevented from turning.
Lewis isn’t the only witness against Dylan. There are countless testimonies suggesting that the process of dying is more often a peaceful, tranquil one than not. And that’s some darn useful consolation — since Epicurus really (truly) cured me of the worst of my fears of death itself, only the fear of dying remains to be dealt with. For that, I’ll turn next time to my favorite little Frenchman.
