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.)
36 days ’til Sex Day!
- September 26, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Science, sex
- 24
from Fraknoi, Voyages through the Universe, © Harcourt, Inc. 2000.
(That post title should do wonders with the search engines.)
Once in a while, a meme comes along that is so cool and worthwhile it simply HAS to catch fire — like “Chocolate Rain,” if it didn’t make me want to squish a puppy after three minutes.
Now Friendly Humanist Tim Mills in Edinburgh (no no, not “Eddinberg” — it’s pronounced “Eddinbudda.” Rhymes with “bread ‘n’ budda,” for no reason) Scotland has come up with the solution to the many humanist attempts to forge new, meaningful holidays — most of which, let’s face it, are weak and self-conscious, even if well-meaning.
First Tim posted this at the PBB Forums:
I’m currently in the thrall of Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar analogy – scaling the entire history so far of the universe into a single year.
It has occurred to me is that this is potentially a cool source for a few humanist holidays. The two biggies (to me) are Big Bang Day (January 1, 15 billion years ago) and the Arrival of Humans (December 31, from 10:30pm on – the last 2.5 million years).
Other good ones would be:
May 1: Milky Way May Day, formation of the Milky Way galaxy 10 billion years ago
September 9: Sun Day, formation of the Solar System 4.7 bya
September 25: Abiogenesis Day, origin of life 4bya
November 1: Sex Day, evolution of sexual reproduction, 2.5 byaAnd most of December, from the establishment of an oxygen atmosphere on the 1st (1.3bya) through the Cambrian Explosion on the 15th (~700mya) and then almost daily celebrations of new life (worms, trilobites, fish, land plants, land animals, insects, flying insects, …). We could have the coolest Advent calendars!
(If you aren’t familiar with Sagan’s Calendar, go here before reading any further.)
He elaborated in a recent blogpost:
A source of many potentially awesome holidays, at least in the final few months of the year, is the Cosmic Calendar, brainchild of the great Carl Sagan. In it, the entire 15-billion-year history of the cosmos as we know it is scaled into a single year, with the big bang at the start of January 1st and the present moment at the end of December 31st. Along the way you get events like the formation of the Milky Way galaxy (May 1), the Solar System (September 9), and the Earth (September 14), the origin of life (September 25), on up through our ancestors: eukaryotes (November 15), worms (December 16), fish (December 19), insects (December 21), dinosaurs (December 24), mammals (December 26), primates (December 29), hominids (December 30), and then down through the evening of December 31.
Tim’s idea hit me as brilliant, just as quickly as most such attempts hit me as lame. Pro-life Christians would quickly take over Life Day (Sept 25), of course — just like they took the solstice and the vernal equinox and turned them into…into… *Sigh.* It’s too fresh. I still can’t talk about it.
At least they’d keep their mitts off Sex Day!
The Cosmic Calendar is busy busy busy in December, so it’s the Advent calendar concept that I find particularly rich — celebrating the advent of complex life!
The advent calendars of my youth had little windows for each December day, behind which was a tiny toy or stale bit of chocolate. I picture a Cosmic Advent Calendar with gummy worms on December 16th, gummy fish on the 19th, Pop Rocks to represent the dinosaur-smacking asteroid on the 28th, chocolate monkeys on the 29th…and Flintstones vitamins on the 31st! Okay, help me out with that last one.
Imagine the educational potential in such a thing. I intend to mock one up for my family this year. Many thanks to the Friendly Humanist!
i’d like to buy another consonant
Went with Delaney to the “Dads ‘n’ Donuts” event at her school the other day. A fine selection. We finished eating and socializing in the gym a bit early, so we sauntered back to her kindergarten classroom. A couple of dads were already there, being toured by the hand around the classroom by their progeny. Laney grabbed my hand and we joined the conga line.
“This is where alllll of the books are,” Laney said. “And that’s the whiteboard. Here’s the globe, and the puppets…and this,” she gestured proudly, “is my desk!”
I barely heard the last two, since I was still riveted on the whiteboard — which, oh-by-the-way, had THIS on it — scroll ye down:
.
.
.
.
.
.
THIS WEEK!
I am neither making this up nor exaggerating its appearance. Much. The actual medium was dry-erase markers, not tie-dye, but that is amazingly close to the actual appearance of the glorious crux splendidior on the whiteboard in my daughter’s public school classroom.
And what a cross it was! Every color of the rainbow! I’d have burst into a chorus of Crown Him with Many Crowns if not for eleven or twelve things.
Déjà vu. I flashed back to the near-encounter with FAITH at Curriculum Night. But this one was in full view. If anyone else had me in view, they’d have surely assumed I’d suffered a small but effective stroke. I was completely frozen and trying to stay that way.
I knew that if I came to, I’d leap onto a chair and point and squeal “CROSS! CRAWWWWWWSSSSS!!” I’d have no choice: the point-and-shriek is mandated for all encounters with crosses in the by-laws of the Atheist-Vampire Accords of 1294.
A little girl entered my periphery, guiding her father by the hand. “And this,” she said, pointing to the cross, “is what we’re learning about this week!”
She paused for dramatic effect, then announced, with pedantic precision, “Lower-case t!”
since you asked
A quick reply to a few recent emails and comments:
I read your August 15 blog entry and really enjoyed it, because you always have interesting and well thought-through things to say. I love soaking in your posts. But when I reloaded the page a few days later (to see if you’d posted anything new), I saw that your post had been modified. And I know this isn’t the first time (even excepting the forced deletions). So I would like to say, “No Fair!!” Now I will need to read through the post again and try to figure out which tasty morsels are new and which were already there.
I would like to encourage you to post your entries when you’ve decided they’re done enough for public consumption, then LEAVE THEM ALONE! If you want to say something else, put it in a new post so that all of your faithful readers will be sure to notice and to read it. I really really don’t want to miss anything that you have to say.
Except for the undeserved implication that my posts are interesting, I SO deserve that one. I do indeed make changes after posting, which is a blog felony — but here’s the deal. One of the only ways I can justify spending time on the blog is by using it to fulfill other needs. A writer needs to write every day and to practice revision every day. I never undertook this important discipline until beginning this blog, which now serves as an ongoing writer’s workshop for me. I write an entry, then edit, then post when I think it’s good enough. But I’ll return to an entry over and over to practice the tinkering arts.
I do not make substantive changes — I just replace a word or phrase here and there, or clarify, or tighten up, for the purpose of practicing the craft. I just changed the title of the previous post, for example, from “clever boy!” to “outfoxing the buddha.” Sometimes I make tiny changes in posts that are weeks old. If I waited until a post was really “done,” I’d never post.
Let us know when you’re going to be giving a talk, ’cause a lot of us would like to hear you speak. When I was first checking out your pages I came across one saying that you’ll be in DC on Sept 22 [sic], but I recently looked for that info again and couldn’t find it. At least make it easy for us, huh?
I promise to do better with this. After a burst in early summer, I actually haven’t done any speaking for awhile. It heats up again in the fall, though most dates are still up in the air. CONFIRMED AT THE MOMENT: Secular Parenting Discussion Panel at the convention of Atheist Alliance International in Washington DC this Saturday Sept 29 (which is sold out) and a talk at UUC Atlanta, one of the largest UUs in the country, on November 4 at 2 pm. Still nailing down Austin, Albany, Amherst, Raleigh-Durham, and San Francisco.
One reader says:
FYI I always enjoy the blogs with the kids experiences in them.
And another reader says:
I especially appreciate the posts that dig deeply and thoughtfully into a given topic.
As long as neither minds the other type too much, we should be fine. I’m trying to keep a good mix. I do notice that the posts involving my kids get the most comments.
More frequent posting is good!
I’m almost up to daily posts at the moment, though every other day is more likely in the long run. There may be a lull at the end of this week while I’m in DC — or I may be typing like mad in my hotel room. Who knows.
At any rate, thanks for reading, and for commenting.
outfoxing the buddha
THE LEGEND OF THE THREE WATERFALLS
1,000 years ago, on a moonlit night, a priest dreamed that Buddha told him where to find three springs with magical powers. This gave the priest much happiness.
Later, when the sun was shining, Buddha turned these springs into three wonderful waterfalls surrounded by trees. Each waterfall confers a different blessing on one who drinks of its waters. One confers health, another wisdom, and the third, love. But no one knows which waterfall brings which blessing.
If you are greedy and drink from all three, you will receive no blessing at all.
* * *
“So,” I asked Connor, my twelve-year old. “Suppose you want one of these blessings really bad. Let’s say health. What do you do?”
He smiled — he loves puzzles — and sank down into himself for a full minute.
At last he emerged. “Okay, I’ve got it.”
“Hit me.”
“Bring a friend who is sick. Have him drink from two of the waterfalls.” He flashed his braces at me. “If he gets healthy, drink from the same two waterfalls. If he doesn’t, drink from the other one.”
Clever boy!
Connor in Upper Brailes, Oxfordshire, UK
October 2004
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.)