The Devil Goes Down to Georgia
I read to Delaney’s first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.
“There’s a chair you sit in, and I’ll sit right by you,” she said. “You have to bring three stories, but don’t be sad if we don’t get to all three.”
I promised to hold it together.
She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.
“First, you’ll read this one,” she said, handing me Rosie’s Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. “Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then”–she held up a finger, eyes closed– “IF there’s time…you’ll read Pete’s a Pizza.”
“Ooh, good ones,” I said, only really meaning it about Rosie’s Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie’s Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.
The operation commenced at 1330 hours.
“If Rosie O’Grady ever smiled,” I read dramatically, “no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind…”
The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.
Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O’Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.
Oh…shit.
I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer’s hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie’s Fiddle.
“What’s the Devil?” one kid piped up.
Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney’s magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.
“It’s a kind of a monster,” offered another kid.
“No,” said a third, “the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad.”
Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn’t even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.
I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie’s gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. “I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself,” I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.
Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:
Now Rosie wasn’t any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she’d be fiddlin’ for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil’s shiny, bright fiddle.
I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I’d walked into my daughter’s classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I’d have laid a poached egg.
The kids were riveted — it is quite a compelling story — and Mr. H didn’t seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake — pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.
Meaning and nonforeverness
Young Pastor: You speak blasphemy, sir!
Man in the Yellow Suit: Fluently.
————-
What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just… are. We’re like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.
————-
Immortality isn’t everything the preachers crack it up to be.Quotes from the film version of TUCK EVERLASTING
Back from the Hawkeye State, where I had the temerity to hold a seminar two blocks from the University of Iowa homecoming game. Went well, as did the next day in Des Moines. Met more fabulous folks including Jaime and Brian Sabel and Becky Mason of Iowa Secularists and our very own blogreader Ei! Plus some nice Amish ladies at the airport.
Driving through corn and a lovely plague of black butterflies on the way to Iowa City, I found myself thinking about a question from an earlier seminar — Cincinnati, maybe. A young man introduced himself as a quite recent deconvert from fundamentalism and told me he’d been struggling with the problem of meaning in the absence of eternal life. If we live for a while and then cease to be, what exactly is the point?
The meaning thing is a legitimate problem. I’ve written before about the ways in which we discover meaning, but that’s down here on the local level of our experience. He was asking the larger philosophical question about the Point of It All. And that’s a much more interesting problem.
Thing is, I don’t remotely see how immortality solves it.
If I live to be eighty instead of forty, is my life more intrinsically meaningful? I think most would agree it is not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These are changes in quantity that don’t seem to affect the M&P question at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic M&P question remains in place. In fact, the excellent novel and movie Tuck Everlasting convincingly makes the opposite claim — that immortality actually robs life of its meaning.
Some suggest that religion solves the problem by means other than everlasting life. Our purpose is to do God’s will, and so on. Aside from how deeply dissatisfying this ant-farm model of meaning should be to any thinking person, it only transfers the question up one level: What is the purpose of God, and why, in the grandest scheme, is this hobby of his worth the time spent cleaning our cage?
Meaning is a legitimate human puzzle. The question is whether this abstracted, higher-level meaninglessness troubles you or not. Unlike death, I don’t find ultimate meaninglessness too arresting a thought, though I have seriously struggled at times with local, personal, self-discovered meaning. As I wrote last year (You put your whole self in, 6/5/07):
I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
But for reasons I’m not sure about, that larger question — call it cosmic M&P — has never pecked too hard at my consciousness. The best I can do is acknowledge that it is legit and note that religion doesn’t cure it.
Those who aren’t as incurious as I can always imagine themselves in Yahweh’s ant farm — or engage, along with Viktor Frankl and others, in a truly difficult and probably worthwhile bit of philosophical work.
Lemme know how it goes.
Drugs are bad…m’kay?
I had an unusual interview two weeks ago.
I sleep through most media interviews now, since the questions tend to be the same, and in about the same order: Tell me a little about your book, Why do nonreligious parents need their own separate resource, How do you deal with moral development, How can you help kids deal with death without an afterlife, Isn’t it important to believe in something greater than ourselves. Before I know it, I’m being thanked for a fascinating hour I can’t quite remember.
It’s a bit like teaching. In my last few years as a college professor, I’d hear my brain stem doing the teaching while my neocortex was planning dinner. I’d come back just in time to dismiss. That’s when I knew it was time to do something else.
But the interview two weeks back snapped me out of my usual snooze. I was a little wary anyway, as the station runs syndicated neocon culture-warrior nonsense of the Medved/Prager variety most of the day. Even so, I was not prepared for the very first question to come out of the host’s mouth:
“Without a higher power,” he asked, “how are you going to keep your kids off crystal meth?”
Wha?
Now I can see this kind of thing coming up at some point…but right out of the starting gate? This, of all questions, was knocking on the back of his teeth? When he heard he would be interviewing a nonreligious parent, the first thing that bubbled up was, “B-b-but how’s he gonna keep them off meth?”
I answered that instead of a higher power, I encourage my kids to engage these questions with the power of their own reason, the power of their own minds. There are many compelling reasons to stay away from self-destructive things, after all — including the fact that they are, uh…self-destructive.
He threw it to the other guest, a minister at a private junior high school, who answered confidently that the higher power was the one and only option. Without Jesus, he’d have no way whatsoever to keep his kids from whirling out of control and into the black abyss. Only by staying tightly focused on biblical principles, he said, can kids avoid utter annihilation.
Mmkay.
Ready for the follow-up? Trust me, you’re not:
“Now Dr. McGowan,” said the host with a chuckle, “I gotta tell you, when you talk about the Power of the Mind, it sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Can you tell me what if anything distinguishes your worldview from Scientology?”
What, if anything.
This is what we’ve come to as a culture. When you advocate teaching kids to reason things out, it sounds to some like the process of auditing past lives to become an Operating Thetan, casting off the evil influence of Xenu (dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) and battling the alien implants from Helatrobus that seek to control our thoughts and actions.
I apologized for being so very unclear, assured him I had intended to evoke nothing alien, supernatural, or magical by encouraging my children to think. I’ve also never “informed” them, a la Mr. Mackey in South Park, that “drugs are bad, so you shouldn’t do drugs, m’kay?” That’s commandment-style morality, and it’s weak as hell. Instead, we’ve talked about what they stand to lose, what others have lost, how addiction works, and what a fragile and fantastic thing the mind is.
I remember drawing that last connection vividly as a teenager. I knew that my mind was the key to any eventual success I might have, an asset to protect. I didn’t want to risk screwing it up for any kind of pleasure or thrill, and drugs were just too unpredictable in their effects. It was a simple risk analysis, clinched by the death of my dad as an indirect consequence of smoking. I got the message: When you put poisonous stuff in your body, you risk too much for too little. And I never touched so much as a cigarette. My kids have received that same message: Grandpa David never got to meet them because he became addicted to poisonous stuff, couldn’t stop, and paid with his life.
I came out of my study after the interview and Connor (13) asked how it had gone. “A little weird,” I said, “but fine.”
“What was weird?”
I looked him in the eye. “Well, his first question was how I’m going to keep you guys off crystal meth without religion.”
“Pfft,” Connor said. “As if it’s an issue.”
It was nice to hear his quick, dismissive snort. I know my kids really well, and though anything’s possible, I don’t see drugs as a serious threat. In addition to reasoning through it, we’ve talked about craving and addiction — that your body can be chemically tricked into thinking it needs the drugs, and that this can be hard to reason your way out of once you’re in the middle of it. That, plus a number of personal, family, and community assets, kept me from using. And all without a Savior in sight. I figure it has a good chance of working with my kids as well.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that both the host and the minister had gone through the requisite “lost years” of sex and drugs, only to be gloriously saved by coming to Christ. It can and surely does work for some. I’d just love to hear someone on that side acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there are other ways as well — ways that involve no magic, no demigods, no thetans, no fervent, focused distractions — just the ability to draw on our own natural resources.
Home again, for a sec
Back in town after two talks, one seminar, and 1134 driving miles through gorgeous country in the western Eastern Time Zone.
Though I didn’t cross into Illinois (“Land of Lincoln”), I was hardly starved for references to the 16th President, whether in Indiana (“Boyhood Home of Abraham Lincoln”), Kentucky (“Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln”), Tennessee (“The State with the Same Number of ‘N’s in Its Name as Abraham Lincoln”) or Ohio (“Home of Many, Many Pennies”).
Listened to the audiobook of The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, a presidential candidate with one year more experience in government than the man widely viewed by scholars and the public alike as our greatest president.
Cincinnati is recovering from a hurricane. That sentence shouldn’t even make sense, but sadly does.
Once again, meeting the people was the highlight, including Skeptic Dad blogger Colin Thornton, some top-notch freethought organizers in Cincinnati (FIG’s John and Fran Welte) and Indianapolis (CFI’s Reba Boyd Wooden), Camp Quest founders Edwin and Helen Kagin, children’s author and illustrator Craig Gosling and aspiring freethought author Chris Edwards — not to mention longtime blogreader and all-star PBB supporter matsonwaggs — and several others who are now mad at me for not mentioning them.
Special hat-tip to The Rathskeller in Indianapolis, a restaurant built by Kurt Vonnegut’s grandfather, where I was treated to the best traditional German meal I’ve ever had. That includes the six weeks I spent in Germany and Austria.
(This content-free blog post was brought to you by My Personal Exhaustion®. Tune in tomorrow for a somewhat more meaningful quickie before I head off to Iowa.)
Back on the blue roads
No Meming for a while–I’m back on the road. Seminar in Cincinnati Saturday morning, a talk to Free Inquiry Group in the afternoon, then a talk in Indianapolis for CFI Indiana. Best of all, I’m actually driving, not flying. Gas didn’t creep over $2 a gallon while I was in my study, did it?
Listening material on the road: Audacity of Hope audiobook; Radiohead; Imogen Heap; conservative talk radio of Tennessee and Kentucky; and the heartbeat of America (or, at the very least, the muffled gurglings of its gastro-intestinal tract).
Upcoming posts: The strangest opening interview question ever; Best Practices 2; Name the Brazilians!; Age stories; Vox populi (or why we can relax).
Need something to look at? I’ve added two pages in the menu: Videobamarama (a collection of videos and other graphics in support of Obama and, yes, opposed to McCain) and Why I support Barack Obama.
Reminder: the First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition is heading into the final weeks. Your entry should tackle a subtopic within nonreligious parenting (as opposed to the topic on the whole) or a personal story from your own experience. Submissions should be attached in a Word document 600-800 words in length PLUS a bio of no more than 75 words, and emailed to column [at] parentingbeyondbelief dot com with the word COLUMN in the subject line. Because Labor Day delayed the announcement in Humanist Network News, I’ve pushed the deadline back to October 6.
See you Tuesday.
David Foster Wallace
- September 16, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, reviews
- 20
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
–from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Just twice in my life have I not wanted a book to end. Twice. No matter how much I love the book I’m reading, I reach a point where I get it, I’ve had my fun, and I start looking forward to looking back at the experience of reading it.
The two exceptions: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
In both cases, the author had put me into a space so compelling and original that I hated to leave. In both cases I riffled the remaining few pages with such regret as the end approached that I actually backed up, rereading previous pages, slip-stepping on a wet hillside to avoid the inevitable.
That was all the more surprising in the case of Infinite Jest, which runs to 1,079 pages (including nearly 100 pages of footnotes, some two words long, some four pages) with a vocabulary like the OED and famously dense sentence structures. But I knew, as I read the maddening last sentence, that every other book in my life would be in its shadow. I wasn’t at all surprised when TIME Magazine named Infinite Jest one of the top 100 English language novels.
I dedicated Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, my own first novel, to Wallace. It was only fair, since his influence is on every page, from namefreaks like Genevieve Martin (the Dean of Faculty, therefore Dean Martin) to sentence-pairs like my description of Martin’s voice:
Half a dozen words in that stainless steel Voice and ambiguity evaporates, padlocks fly open, and underlings collide headlong, Stoogelike, in a frenzy of wish-fulfillment tinged with an inexplicable but highly motivating terror of consequences.
Lovely thing, really.
A shameless theft of technique. Same with Chapter 10, a play rehearsal within a play. Then there’s one of my favorite devices of his, the ellipsis as passive placeholder in unmarked dialogues. Here’s a conversation in Bernadette’s Bluff between two college roommates (an aggressive atheist and a gentle Christian) that is pure homage to Wallace, right down to the speakers’ identities being revealed only in context:
“I know you’re awake.”
“…”
“You forgot to switch your halo off.”
“…”
“Never did answer the Question of the Day, you know.”
“…”
“Ooo looky, there’s an angel hovering over the TV!”
“Ha ha.”
“I knew it. Now answer the Question.”
Even the unresolved ending of CBB was shoplifted in spirit from Wallace. And my travel writing is full of self-referential footnotes, something I learned at his literary teat.
I’m offering my own derived material rather than quotes from Wallace’s work because, as one blogger recently put it, his work “resists encapsulation.” And how. It is the most context-dependent stuff I’ve ever read.
It’s not too much to say that I’m a writer because of the way David’s writing blew my mind in every possible meaning of that phrase. My fiction, my nonfiction, my satire, my talks, and this blog are soaked in his influence. (Example: “I start looking forward to looking back at the experience of reading it” is me channeling Wallace. I don’t even know I’m doing it anymore.)
His nonfiction is frankly incredible in its ability to strip a subject to its essence. He has written about cruises, state fairs, television, tennis, depression, infinity, oblivion, and American material culture, and I’m jolted over and again with the shock of recognizing something I had never seen before. A brilliant piece of reportage about the McCain campaign of 2000 ( “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”) has been called one of the most incisive looks at modern politics ever written — and also underlines the tragic difference between the John McCains of then and now.
In the span of a few seconds yesterday, I learned that David Foster Wallace had taken his own life at 46 and that he had suffered from crushing clinical depression for over 20 years. His wife came home and found him hanging.
I don’t give much of a damn that “the world has been deprived of his immense talents and his future literary masterpieces,” as someone somewhere is surely saying. Like Harper Lee’s Mockingbird, Infinite Jest was more than enough. I never needed another thing from him.
But I wish like hell — for him, not for me — that he hadn’t been consumed.
Best of David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Oblivion