A Nature Bibliography to Encourage Shared Inquiry

  

 

What we aspire to with our children, our friends, our students: to bring them into the inquiries that matter to us – as full partners, despite differences of experience and intellect and age. Philosophy has this potential; it’s what Socrates was trying to do with random people on the streets of Athens – to enlist them in very long inquiries. In the late sixties, the Philosophy for Children movement revived this idea about philosophy. The founder, Mat Lipman, wrote children’s novels designed to draw children in to exploratory conversations with each other and with their teachers and parents. He marketed those as skill-building, partly because of how teachers in New Jersey at that time saw themselves – as informers, as coaches, as wise guides. But this other idea of forming a community of inquiry with children was always underneath what he did.

 

As he wrote these novels, his colleague, Gary Matthews, was raising his kids, with a similar aspiration or hope, and he turned to children’s literature for material, finding those books that worked to set up questions and problems for children and adults to work on together. He reviewed these for Mat’s new journal, Thinking, and they became an archive of thought-provoking material, eventually landing in a review website, Thinking in Stories, which I now curate. This website serves an international group of teachers and parents who have this same hope of cooperating with younger people in shared inquiry. 

 

In the last few years, people have asked us to create sections within the website devoted to topics they need to talk about. The first such request came from teachers in the Ukraine, and we constructed a bibliography of stories that start discussions about war and displacement. Then, we began a long, group process to build a bibliography to help people find their way into discussions about the natural world. That bibliography – a set of categories with reviewed examples attached – is now being beta-tested by teachers and parents.

 

This is where I want to ask for help. I need readers for this bibliography – people to suggest new titles and new categories. Our experience, in developing this list, was that each new suggestion raised important issues: what is inquiry, for this area?  What relations between parents and children, teachers and children, are central? 

 

So, I can make this offer: anything you say will be thought about, and any contribution to the project will reach an engaged audience.

 

Thinking in Stories website: https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/thinking-in-stories/

 

The war and displacement bibliography: https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/thinking-in-stories-children-war-and-displacement/

 

The nature bibliography, as of today: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fse45PZhsBSzyHEtbhAfH_m7xhu6f5dEElDQj6a3OWY/edit?usp=sharing

Please send thoughts and suggestions to Peter Shea at shea0017@umn.edu. 

The Bat

 

The cold reading group did The Bat last Saturday, a three-act play from 1920 by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, anthologized in Burns Mantle’s The Best Plays of 1920-21. I was an enthusiastic disliker of this play, saying things like, “I’d be interested in looking at an anthology of the worst plays of 1920-21, just to see what the competition was like.” I didn’t warm to any characters, I didn’t find the disagreeable ones amusing, the set-up was too hard to follow, and the reveal at the end was not worth the work of getting there. No lines stuck with me; I didn’t sing any little Bat-songs when I walked the dog after. (Everybody has an off night.)

 

I realize in retrospect what-all I wasn’t allowing for: the effectiveness of the stage action, which is particularly important in this play, and also the way a play like this would hit people who had not seen hundreds of mystery plots on television, for whom the reveal at the end was much less predictable.

 

Afterward, I thought I wouldn’t think any more Bat-thoughts, but I did. I am not a mystery reader (with Agatha Christie as the lighthouse of my reading world), and so am insulated from this play’s particular charms. However, even for the devotee of mysteries, this kind of short mystery play is headed for self-destruction. The fun of a mystery is to have one’s expectations overturned: people are not what they seem, locked rooms have innumerable points of access, good people have murderous possibilities, and evil can be even worse  (and cleverer) than one can imagine. I think the possibilities for surprise are limited, so that, after a while, one has seen all the major ones, if one reads much, or goes to the theater much, and one is left with the question, “Which trick will get played on me this time?” So, if a play – or a story or a novel – depends solely on the mystery, it will deliver less jolt as people get more experience with locked rooms, secret panels, and smooth-talking strangers. One solution, obvious in P.D. James novels, is to give readers (or viewers) other things to like, besides mystery: characters and human dilemmas to engage with, recurring detectives to follow through their tortured lives. These combine very nicely with mysteries: having people confront murder is a helpful way of seeing who’s on stage, what the real relationships are, what happens to habits and personas under strain. So, this play made me aware of the pressure in the direction of “mystery plus” by being (for me) mostly mystery, not enough plus. 

 

It also made reminded me of all the good work that has been done in television police shows of a bread-and-butter sort (The Mentalist, Hill Street Blues, Bones, Crossing Jordan, Rizzoli and Isles, Monk, Astrid, and many others). It is tempting to say, “Another one of those things.” But the mysteries often work, and, when they don’t, the other story elements carry the show along nicely. We are swimming in pretty good writing, writing that stands up well next to theater pieces, which get more hype. It is hard to appreciate the cultural moment one inhabits; I can imagine people in Shakespeare’s time saying, “I suppose we have to go see this Othello thing; everybody will have an opinion about it at the horse trough tomorrow.” I can also imagine someone in 2050 saying, “What a great time it must have been, when Deadwood and The Wire were available for the first time, and lesser things of quality were showing up EVERY WEEK!”

 

Ararat by Zenna Henderson

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

 

I tried another zoom group on Monday; they’re reading at a rate of four stories a session through sci fi anthologies – now working on The Future is Female, edited by Lisa Yaszek. It is nice to talk about short stories, because it is possible for each person in the group to have them about equally in mind and well in mind – something much harder to accomplish with a book group. Also, if one just hates a story, one can have surprises as people find stuff in it that one couldn’t see. It’s great training.

 

The group re-introduced me to the world of “The People,” Zenna Henderson’s enviable humanoid aliens with powers, marooned in the backwaters and dark corners of earth after their ship exploded. I went through a phase of liking these stories very much – not so much the anthology’s choice, “Ararat”, but a story that seemed to me full of biblical longing, “Gilead”. All these stories are about people coming home, finding their people -- finding, that is, those people who understand and can value traits that, in most places, make them outcasts. It’s powerful stuff for gifted, alienated, neuro-divergent, and or queer kids.

 

Later, I came away from these books, partly because I saw them as wish-fulfillment fantasies, and dis-valued that, as a misuse of fantasy. To write a story in which a character says to you just what you have always wanted someone to say to you – qualifies as a psychological exercise, but not as a public thing.

 

Now, I’m not sure (of this, or, actually, of most things). It seems important and non-trivial to explain one’s wishes, to get complex wishes out into the marketplace of wishes. And Zenna Henderson’s wishes, unlike my Lone Ranger and Superman fantasies, are complex. There is the obvious starting point: magic powers, being special, being valuable. But she adds other things: one’s magic makes sense in the context of a community in which many other people have complementary powers, so that the magic binds the community together. Also, magic makes it possible for the community to persist as a stable, self-contained entity: the needs of the community can be served within the community, there is a depth of common exploration and growth that gives elders real authority and real power, and the basic categories of human life are clearly marked out by overwhelmingly obvious differences: one doesn’t have a problem finding one’s identity or place, because nature is set up to make identities clear to everyone all the time. One is a healer or a lifter or a seer, not by social convention but by obvious biological difference. 

 

This echoes, for me, the vision of the early Christian communities pictured in Acts and in Paul’s letters: the community is a body, and gifts are given to members for the welfare and upbuilding of the body, different gifts but the same spirit (I Corinthians 12, 4-11). Henderson, as a convert to the Mormon Church, participates in the 19^th Century American revival of enthusiasm for that vision, that package of inter-connected ideals.

 

I think of how this story would have hit my mother, a talented Mormon teenager growing up on a ranch a few miles outside of Scipio, Utah. She left enough writing that I have a clear picture of the pettiness and narrowness of this small town, where the religious and secular authorities were the same people and deviation was considered dangerous, where bullies got away with bullying, if they were well connected, where new ideas were suspect. I also see the intensity of family life on a ranch at the margins, the way people who worked together that hard came to care about each other. Such a teenager says, “I have to get out of here; it is suffocating me. And yet, everything I care about is here.” As more and more teenagers went away, small town ranch life could not endure. And yet, the sensitive ones among the teenagers who left knew what valuable things they were leaving – and thereby, eroding. It was a tragic situation. (World War II made the break easier, giving lots of kids patriotic and duty reasons to leave home, taking the decision out of their hands.)

 

I can imagine my mother wanting a set-up within which elders kept getting wiser, deep mysteries and profound growth were available right at home, a small community could supply its own spiritual and intellectual needs, and the natural questions one had growing up had easily accessible answers – God was right at hand, identities were written in the nature of things. That would be the sort of place one wouldn’t need to leave – and wouldn’t want to leave for long.

 

The discussion around this story made it very clear that this isn’t a utopia for everybody, that real uncertainty and real choice are important to some people, that some people would be uneasy in a world in which identities and metaphysical categories were obvious, clearly marked, uncontroversial. Even my mother might have ultimately found the world of The People confining, but I can imagine her dreaming dreams not unlike Henderson’s, as she confronted the reality that her kids would not stay home and farm, would move on to less secure lives than the ones she knew about.

 

It may be that the contemporary commitment to ideas about the fluidity of categories like gender, vocation, and authority will make these stories irrelevant fossils for readers going forward – relics of a time when people could imagine that their familiar categories were founded in cosmic principles, the unalterable will of God.

 

I wonder how Zenna Henderson felt, writing these stories. Was she expressing in a colorful and exaggerated way an experience of fulfillment and community that she had found, in her life within the Mormon Church? Was the mood perhaps bitter, instead: this is what would have to be true, for me to get all of what I want – and of course, the world is not like this?

Blithe Spirit

 Blithe Spirit

 

I got to be part of the cold reading of Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. I had just a few particular thoughts.

 

1.It has a bit where A, a ghost, is visible to B but not to C, so that, when they are all in the same room, C takes what B says to A as directed at her. It is, for me, a joke that gets old. It reminds me though of the virtuosic things that the British television show Coupling does with misunderstandings and mistakes, representing an incredible progress from the same basic idea. Watching Coupling, one has to strain to keep straight what the real story is and how each character is seeing things. This is more work than I’m used to doing for comedy, but they mostly pull off amazing tricks, and invent a kind of puzzle-drama that’s also funny.

 

2.Related to 1: it struck me as odd that Blithe Spirit would naturally be included in discussions of contemporary drama but Coupling wouldn’t, though, on every measure I can think of, Coupling is better at doing the same sorts of things, and also has taken on other interesting challenges.

 

3.When I was doing interviews, I was invited to a talk by a traveling troupe of ghosthunters, working for wealthy St. Paul people who wanted to get rid of their ghosts. (They split their time between the U.S. and Britain: Brits want to document their ghosts. It adds charm, and you can charge for charm.) Anyway, I thought I might try to do an interview after the talk, but some of the stories they told were frightening -- I didn’t want to meet any of the creatures that might have followed these people home. That’s part of the non-comic part of Blithe Spirit: this writer, having messed around with poverty, which he didn’t understand, for a previous book, is now proposing to mess around with ghosts. The picture of the writer as meddler, and even as endangered meddler, is quite powerful. This isn’t Topper. It reminds me, in a strange way, of the two good movies that came out at almost the same time about Capote writing In Cold Blood (“Capote” and “Infamous”); Capote doesn’t come out of that with a whole skin, either.

 

4.The descriptions of Blithe Spirit talk about it as a light thing to cheer people from the miseries of the bombing and the battles. But I don’t think that I would be all that cheered up, if I were surrounded with random death and all that unfinished business resulting from the war and the bombings, to be reminded that pettiness and grabbiness might just go on and on and on forever, that one’s faults could become one’s eternal destiny. It is a message more for a morality play than for a comedy.

 

 

The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown

 Review of The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Remy Charlip (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1938).

 

Children come upon a bird that has just died. It is still warm. They bury it, sing a song they have made up, and plant flowers. They visit the grave every day to put fresh flowers on it and to sing to the bird, until they forget. This is the story of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird. I imagine that it might leave children who hear it perplexed, at loose ends, uncertain how they are supposed to respond. Usually, books read out in story time or used in class have a direction, a moral, or some internal puzzle to solve. The adults have something in mind, with this story. But it is hard to sniff that purpose out, here. It has no adults in it, except remembered adults, adults who do things when something dies:

 

The children were sorry the bird was dead and could never fly again. But they were glad they had found it, because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it. They could have a funeral and sing to it the way grown up people did when someone died.

 

The children imagine themselves acting in grown-up roles, but what they do is not like adult funerals. First of all, adults generally don’t do funerals for non-humans. Adults might do a sort of play-funeral for a pet, but not for an anonymous bird, a bird people just happened to find. Those accidental deaths are outside the range of sympathy for most adults. And the human funerals are often about comforting or reassuring those left behind, and celebrating the accomplishments of a life. This service is addressed to the bird, mentioning only what it shared with every other bird.

 

What the children do is purely about death and loss, about the beauty of the living bird. This is a verse from their song:

 

Oh bird, you’re dead

You’ll never fly again

Way up high

With other birds in the sky

We sing to you

Because you’re dead

Feather bird.

 

The children cry at their memorial, because the bird is dead, and because their song is beautiful. They are happy to be able to do this service for the bird.

 

I can see children standing in various relations to this story. Some may have done something like this. Some may remember other ways of responding to a death, and may find this response strange by contrast: “They didn’t even know the bird.” “They don’t have anything to hope for, in this story.” Some may not have encountered death yet, and my find the whole idea of a memorial puzzling, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why do a service for something that is no longer alive? They probably didn’t notice the bird when it was alive. It would make more sense to put out extra bird seed for the birds who are still living, if they want to do something positive.” I can imagine a class in which some children like the story very much and cannot quite say why, and others find it bothersome or offensive, and cannot quite say why. The challenge in leading a discussion is to make space for such different responses, and also to feel out what question might be most important to this group, at this time. 

 

When I teach Confucian ethics in general ethics introduction, I begin by asking students for stories of rituals that are important in their lives. Almost every student has such a story. Once they are clear about their own commitments, they can begin to understand what Confucius might mean by putting ritual at the center of a decent life. It might be helpful to ask that kind of question early on, in discussing this story: which of your experiences come closest to what is pictured here? 

 

The rituals my ethics students describe are long established customs, inviting them in. The Dead Bird is about how a new ritual happens, spontaneously, out of a shared experience of grief, expressing a shared reverence for one kind of life. The children are thinking, in a way: they are keeping something in mind for a long time, in a beautiful form. But their thinking is not investigation; it doesn’t make the kind of progress that an argument makes. They repeat the initial experience, again and again, until, as they book says, “they forget.”

 

One might question this story from various directions, asking, for example, how the children’s service is different from adult rituals around death (or other endings, like graduations), or what idea the children have about the bird that makes it seem important to do this, or how the children are likely to be affected by doing this, day after day, or perhaps even: are there occasions when we might want to compose a ritual response to an event that moves us? (And what kinds of events call for a ritual response?)

 

One distinctive feature of the children’s action is that it is repeated. The children keep going back to the bird’s grave, singing the same song, day after day. One might wonder about the importance of that repetition, in contrast to actions that are done just once. What does repetition mean, or what does it do for us, to go over the same fact, and the same feelings,  many times?

 

Mat Lipman’s starting question for discussion was always, “What’s worth talking about, here?” The Dead Bird may require more restraint from leaders than other stories, so that children can find their own ways into the realities of meaning-making and grief and poetry and shared experience. Different groups may find very different things worth talking about, in this small and exquisite story. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garden Pieces

 Over the covid time, I wrote a couple of pieces inspired by the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden for a parish magazine. These are they.

Garden pieces

 

Peter Shea

April 22, 2022

 

“For having hitherto made many strange variations in the chorale, mixing many outlandish tones in it so that the congregation has become confused thereby.” From a letter from the Church Council of Arnstadt to Johann Sebastian Bach, complaining about his work as music director.

 

Close to opening day, I went on the daily 11 am nature walk through the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden with Susan Wilkins and some of her education staff, looking at early spring plants, especially some “spring ephemerals” that do all their aboveground tricks in a brief period, then die back. It’s a good time for garden tours: new things emerge every day, plants change every day. The birds are back. 

 

Susan has been gardener since 2004. She explained the idea of a garden, and the role of a gardener. Her garden is like a zoo, a collection of Minnesota plants that would never naturally grow in one fifteen acre plot, brought together by decades of Eloise Butler’s work, expanded by later gardeners over a hundred years. Susan has to keep replacing plants that don’t like the garden very well, to keep some on display, and, working the opposite way, to constantly cut out and pull up plants that like the garden too much and keep trying to take over (buckthorn and mustard garlic are among the worst villains, but basswood also has to be watched, given its success in co-opting the squirrels). All this behind-the-scenes work produces an environment where people come and say, “This is just like walking through a natural woods and swamp and meadow, right here in the city.” But Susan knows that every square foot of the place is the product of a hundred years of thoughtful work, knows the garden likely the same way she knows her living room. Yet, for lots of people, the garden is the closest they’ll get to understanding plants and insects and animals and how they all work together. So, as an educator, Susan has the problem like what the  zookeeper in the African animals section has: to use this unnatural space to give people a glimpse of – the diversity of Africa. Susan is giving Minnesotans a glimpse of – the diversity of Minnesota. 

 

I went back for a second tour later in the week (I plan to keep going back) and one question kept insisting itself: why isn’t the world uglier and more ordinary than it is? Buckthorn and basswood are good at taking over. They have a nice, simple reproductive or spreading formula, they’re robust, and their roots go deep. So, why isn’t every natural space that doesn’t have a full-time gardener, with a staff and a budget, just a mass of buckthorn and basswood, off to the horizon? And why aren’t all the towns, everywhere, just strip malls portioned out among Dennys and Arbys and Home Depot? Why aren’t schools just divided-up bully territories, mini-ganglands? Why isn’t literature all James Paterson and Tom Clancy? Why isn’t Christianity just various sizes of mega-church? We’ve been worried about diversity for a long time, with good reason, but it isn’t dead, yet. The anti-diversity principle is quite general; everywhere, odd little things with strange habits are getting shaded out. Yet they persist.

 

There’s a sort of person that’s on the side of buckthorn, so long as it’s OUR buckthorn. Let’s drive out all the other stuff and take over. Then we can establish our own, regulated, sort of diversity.

 

I’m into something different than that.

 

There’s a guy I take inspiration from, Vaughn Kelly. He clean carpets and learns languages, compulsively. He’s got 8 solid ones down, and about 24 he can do something interesting with. School didn’t work out for him, so he doesn’t have any professional use for his talent. He just likes the “splash of happiness” people get when they hear someone speaking their language. He likes that look on people’s faces.

 

I take inspiration also from Dan Everett, who trained as missionary and went out to convert the Piraha, a tribe in Brazil not much visited by westerners. Missionary work for such small tribes is labor intensive: you have to learn the language, produce writing for them, translate the bible, and then get them all to believe the bible. Dan got as far as the translating part, but the Piraha aren’t very interested in abstractions or in the future, so lots of biblical ideas have no Piraha equivalents. All the time he was realizing this, Dan was getting fond of the Piraha – about the happiest and most decent people he’d met. So, eventually, he abandoned Christianity,  his marriage fell apart, and he went on to a distinguished career in linguistics. The point is: although he was sent out to conquer diversity, to rout out a little pocket of individuality in the Brazilian jungle, something made it possible for him to let things be, and, more than that, to take these people seriously, even though in every global game, they are destined to lose.

 

Iris Murdoch put words to the fundamental attitude I’m admiring here: Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. From “The Sublime and the Good” by Iris Murdoch (echoing Simone Weil, from whom she got central ideas).

 

“The perception of individuals” – There’s so much research work to be done about that. Gardening in all its forms is vital: to maintain spaces for difference and variety and peculiarity. Also, mercifully, not every diverse and vibrant and interesting community needs a gardener, to keep the invasives in their place, to keep replanting the strange and interesting specimens. Sometimes, things work out so that the participants self-limit, or limit each other, and mutually promote an extremely rich world. That’s the story Wes Jackson tells about the natural prairie, in Becoming Native to this Place.

 

So, if we want love -- that is, for Murdoch, a whole bunch of beings who mutually recognize that they are not everything, and are glad about that -- we have to, in the first instance, learn something from gardeners – from those people who keep cutting back the invasives and replanting the strange stuff. But then, also, we have to find those places where individuals are “perceived” and welcomed naturally, regularly, without strain. We need to figure out how that happens. There are clues all over the place: in natural prairie restoration, in the patchwork history of small-scale democracy, in the ecosystems and natural balances established at many biological levels.

 

I think the most dangerous idea right now, the one that will decisively kill us, is the idea that we know what we are doing, that we somehow have a handle on love, already. That idea, which drives science and church apart, has been doing us mischief for a long time. 

 

It goes along with the idea of Jesus as the great Know-It-All, which we’d also be well rid of. 

 

There was a garden…

Peter Shea

October 15, 2022

 

I want to tell a story about trying out a new attitude, over the covid pause, and what came of that.

 

In my grade school and high school, teachers were always starting over from the beginning, as if they expected that we wouldn’t remember last week or last year. (“We probably failed to get you to remember this last year, so we’re going to try again.”) We never got very far. That made me hostile to repetition: I wanted to learn new things, to make progress.

 

I also scorned introductions – the settled lead-ins to geometry or the stock market crash or the castles of Germany. I didn’t want my information pre-chewed, at least if these people were doing the chewing. There’s an old television ad with the punchline: “mother, please, I’d rather do it myself.” I felt that way about learning things. 

 

Then, in April, I had a problem: all the things I wanted to do were under roofs, and I wanted to actually avoid covid, not just gesture at safety, so I went to the safest social thing I could find, the inaugural tour of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, just after it opened for the season. 

 

I had, just then, one of THOSE ideas (I’ve had about six, in my life, all causing endless trouble.): what if I go on almost all the tours, through the whole season. What if I listen to the introductory spiel about the founding of the garden (“Eloise was a plucky lady who found a way to work in botany when women were usually excluded”), the special fun facts (“if you touch these seed pods, they explode!”) and the ecological take-aways (“you too can preserve diversity, where your lawn used to be”) – lots of times, noticing how the garden changes, incrementally, how the story changes, maybe, how I change.

 

I had never studied anything incrementally. I’d been going to the garden for thirty years, but only in seasonal spurts. What would I see, if I went every day?

 

It was a big shift: lots of repetition, and lots of introductions.

 

I tried a few visits, got to know the naturalists, and, quite soon, I was watching the naturalists as closely as the plants and birds. The guides started off rehearsing their college botany, got gradually up to speed on a particular season of the garden, then re-tooled, several times, as the garden changed. They developed, as the garden matured. The surface theme of the tours was identifying flowering plants, and sometimes insects and birds, but aps (Seek and Merlin) have taken over the ID-game pretty much, and so the real center of gravity for tours has shifted; they are about attitudes, and noticing things. These people like plants -- and birds and insects. A frog on a cup plant leaf makes their day. They stop to pet the bees. They cheer when the chicory hangs on through the whole season, when some long-gone flower reblooms in the late fall, when the berries look perfectly the way they are supposed to look. I told the head gardener, “I come on these tours so often because I don’t like plants” – meaning, ‘I don’t like plants the way your naturalists like plants.’

 

I sometimes got tired of hearing the same garden-story, over and over. But, the 90^th time I heard something, it changed. I heard different meanings and saw beyond the party line to the questions that weren’t answered yet. My habit, touring the garden before, had been to think my ordinary thoughts with the garden for stage-setting. On a tour, the patter helped me keep focused on things along the path. It was more fun to have someone tell me things, usually, than to just walk. Sometimes, I’d get the guide all to myself, and we could admire our favorite plants.

 

When I was growing in Forest City, my mother maintained several sorts of garden – some for market, some just for fun – in large plots on the farm. I helped out, but I was always impatient. I never saw the point of tracking a plant, day by day, through its growing season. Now, when she isn’t here to explain why that was important, I find myself trying to retrace her project and to understand what she got out of it, why she kept doing gardens, all those years.

 

One thing I have come to: a garden is a summary of how living things work, in this universe, of all the possible universes. It is partly a giant clock: this is how time moves, how one thing succeeds another – and partly a design laboratory: here are lots of ways that different beings solve their basic problems of maintenance and growth and reproduction. And that has a consequence: if you don’t like gardens, you probably don’t like the predicament of being a living thing in this universe, because a garden shows how it goes, how fast it goes, what kinds of possibilities open up for you, in this universe.

 

I am always puzzled by the way that the psalms are so effusively pro-God. I am not up to that, but I do think it is important to give life a chance to show us what it’s up to. It is not ok not to like plants, if one can like plants, because plants show us the basic story of life and maturity and death and renewal without any sentimental frills. At the end of the season, there’s no renewal of baptismal vows, no altar call: one likes the whole thing exactly as much as one does, one wants the story to continue, or not so much. One comes back the next season, or one moves on.

 

The story in Genesis is that humans’ interaction with the source of life begins in a garden, in a tamed piece of nature, and that the first action of humans is to name the various things. This must track the evolutionary account pretty well: after humans got this extra jolt of intelligence and clarity, for thousands of years they became gradually more familiar with some stretch of land, tracking the changes, getting to know the variety of things, and coming to some attitude or other about whether it was, all in all, good. These repeated tours through the same landscape of growth and flourishing and decline are the early stories of human thought – long before most of what we call science.

 

When I was 23, I went to Münster, Germany on a scholarship. The first weeks I was there, in September, I stayed with Ernst Niesert and his wife, Marianne. Ernst was the age I am now, about 70. He had lived in Münster much of his life, taking the same walk through the little cemetery, along the green belt circling the town, to the market square. Every market day while I was there, he went to the square to buy flowers for Marianne. I remember him saying, “Walking through the fallen leaves makes me sad because it reminds me that I am going to die before long.” Then, it seemed like an ordinary sentiment; hundreds of poems say that. But it is, I now think, what every conscious person bumps up against: the same universal way things go that is obvious in the gardens and the forests is obvious in our own bodies, only on a slightly different clock – slower than daisies, faster than oaks. And there’s a question you don’t avoid whatever religion or non-religion you adopt: how ok are you with all that? Does this venture of life in time seem beautiful, or stupid?

 

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about basic education, what one generation can offer the next without foreclosing their options or ignoring their obvious freedom. We can’t save our kids. We aren’t likely to be able to hold them in our own community, or protect them from scandal as they watch adults behaving very badly. But – how about this: we give them a reasonably clean experience of how the universe tends, how it keeps wanting to do things, so they have a clean and a clear choice. 

 

 

The Front Page: Amateur Hour Democracy

 The Front Page: How Democracy is Fragile, Exactly

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

 

The first cold reading play I did was The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1928). It was on the light side: the banter in a courthouse newsroom: a man scheduled for execution that night who has escaped. All the parties in the justice machine, including the reporters, have some motives that are very far from justice: catching the late train, keeping one’s fiancé happy, selling newspapers, rising in the profession, closing the case, winning votes, not making work for themselves. The question is whether a bunch of people with these various motives can come together to do justice: to prevent the death of a man whose guilt has not been established. Put another way: can a bunch of ordinary people, with limited commitment to doing justice, approximate what a brilliant, totally dedicated, authoritarian could accomplish – Batman, or the hero of lots of police shows. The play’s answer: justice is done, but just barely.

 

This reminds me of one of my favorite plays, which I saw in Lumet’s film version, Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose (1954). Again, someone is accused of murder: the action of the play happens entirely in the jury room, after his trial. Again, the jurors have many agendas: getting out in time to go to the ball game, defending the honor of immigrants, fitting in, not rocking the boat, giving their favorite speeches, exercising their bullying muscles. The question this asks: can people with such different agendas come together in this structured activity and actually deliver a just verdict? The alternative is a judge, paid and trained and conditioned to be “above all that” during robe-time. The answer, here also: justice is done, but just barely. The key event: they find the switch for the fan, cool down the jury room a bit, and decide to take another hour to deliberate.

 

Each play enacts the fragility of democracy, of having big decisions made by part-timers with conflicting loyalties, which is one core democratic idea. In Athens, there were rules to keep people from occupying public roles very long, and to force lots of people into governing and decision-making activity – an extension of the jury idea to “water commissioner.” The hunch behind this was that, out of the mess of different motives and experience and conditioning, good government would happen, enough of the time.

 

Drama was important in Athens in a way that might seem foreign to contemporary people. There were huge theatres, and citizens attended these performances, perhaps partly out of religious duty. The plays were a baseline, common experience. (I think of the way television worked in the early days: you could count on people having seen last night’s Lucy episode.) 

 

Antigone, by Euripides (441 BCE), which I encountered most recently in Seamus Heaney’s 2004 adaptation, The Burial at Thebes, is also drama about political fragility. It features two strong characters, Antigone and Cleon, both of whom are right, in a way, and both of whom are unwilling to lose an argument. Antigone wants to properly bury her brother. Creon wants to assert the supremacy of his new government over merely personal concerns, to enact strict justice, by leaving the bodies of traitors to the vultures. The situation very clearly allows each of them options in how vigorously they pursue their projects, and the terrible consequences happen because neither is able to take the off-ramp, to take advantage of opportunities to get most of what they want. This seems to me to be in the same spirit at The Front Page and Twelve Angry Men: here is how our political set-up is fragile, and here is what must be preserved, if it is to work – in Antigone, the possibility of compromise between absolute positions.

 

I have been watching for this kind of political drama, this kind of drama as civic education, in contemporary television, following especially the career of Aaron Sorkin, who gets better from The American President through the West Wing to Newsroom and then to the movies Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago Seven – developing a capacity to communicate what is at stake in American political life and what must be preserved, if it is to be rescued. The 2023 series The Diplomat, created by West Wing veteran Deborah Cahn, seems promising as a continuation of Sorkin’s project – if only it can temper the impulse to do high speed chases and blow things up.

 

This is a thread worth following, in contemporary media: the serious efforts to help people think about the virtues that hold a complex political entity together and the forces that will push for simplification – for martial law and authoritarian saviors and government by decree – as these manifest in communities, in companies, in families, and in great nations.