CONSOLATION TWENTY-SIX: "AMOUR"

     Since posting Consolation Twenty-Five on the Newtown massacre, I've seen the French movie "Amour" (winner of this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film) by filmmaker Michael Haneke and decided to review it as Consolation Twenty-Six.  All the reviews I've seen agree the film is first-rate.  They find it a complex, non-judgmental, Rohrshach-test-like handling of harsh material  -- the murder of the female octogenarian in a long and happy marriage by her husband after she's crippled by a stroke.  I agree that interpreting the film depends, like a Rorhshach test, on what the viewer brings to it and that in it Haneke does not make a single, simple statement.
     Yet intentionally or not, he's created in "Amour" what for someone like me, an atheistic materialist myself approaching eighty and an experienced hospice volunteer, must be seen as a devastating cautionary tale on how not to prepare for old age and death.  First of all, the couple has no advance plans for dealing with what happens:  all they do is improvise within the framework of an unrealistic self-sufficiency that their highly civilized lifestyle has accustomed them to.  Second, they disastrously overestimate their ability to cope with what happens:  both are mentally and physically unequal to the task.  Finally, their response to what happens turns into a horror show of geriatric ignorance, derangement, and unintended cruelty:  from their cocoon of wealth and refinement they metamorphose into perpetrators of needless suffering.
     My discussion of these three themes will follow a brief plot summary.  "Amour" opens with the discovery by authorities of a decomposing corpse on a bed sprinkled with flowers and sealed with tape in an upscale Paris apartment.  The corpse is Anne's, the film's main female character, who's then introduced months earlier at a piano recital where she and her husband Georges hear a former student of her play.
     Home from the recital, they find their apartment burglarized, and some time later Georges discovers Anne sitting next to him in bed staring blankly into space.  At breakfast she again stares, and her inability to pour coffee shows she's had a stroke.  This leads to unsuccessful carotid-artery surgery that leaves her paralyzed on her right side but initially able to think and speak clearly.  Always afraid of doctors, she makes Georges promise never to institutionalize her again.
     Her condition worsens.  When the former student drops by, she pretends to be fine, but soon after that she has to get an invalid scooter, then falls out of bed, and eventually begins wetting herself.  Georges' efforts to rehabilitate her -- bending her legs, walking her around, and so on -- are well-meant but futile.  He has a nightmare of answering their doorbell and, finding no one, wandering out into their now-ruined and flooded front hall and being grabbed from behind by a hand that seals off his mouth and nose.  He wakes up screaming but in several visits from Eva, their daughter, refuses to admit how badly things have deteriorated.  Eva discovers it for herself when she tries talking to her mother, who can barely speak.
     Shocked, Eva tries with her American husband Geoff, also a pianist, to intervene, but Georges insists he and Anne can do better in their apartment than in a nursing home or hospice.  He does agree to hire nurses to help now and then and is shown trying to make Anne eat as she brokenly talks about her long-dead mother at a concert.  She's now in constant pain and cries out when moved or touched, for which Georges fires one of the nurses, who retorts she's done a good job and that he's a mean and pitiable old prick.  Shaken, Georges retreats to the salon and for the first time smokes there.
     This erosion of standards is underscored when he slaps Anne for spitting out water he begs her to drink, a harshness juxtaposed ironically against shots of their romantic landscape paintings.  Georges locks Eva out of Anne's bedroom on her next visit, denies they're in trouble, and makes Eva cry by finally letting her see Anne.  The downward spiral ends with Georges suffocating Anne, laying her on the bed in a dress, sprinkling her with flowers, sealing the room with tape, and hallucinating that they leave the apartment together.  Eva's finally shown in the apartment alone after Anne's body's been removed.  Georges' fate is left unexplained.
     The first theme mentioned earlier -- how disastrously unprepared the couple is for Anne's stroke and how ineptly they improvise responses to it -- appears in the opening scene when Georges' tape is ripped off the bedroom door and the windows are thrown open to air out the stench of Anne's corpse.  The tape and the flowers Georges sprinkles on Anne are part of his hasty and unhinged effort at once to hide and memorialize her death.  Throughout "Amour," both he and she are unrealistic.  They both insist on staying in the apartment, she maintaining she's fine, he they're coping well.  The tape is one of the film's many images of masking reality under futile coverings.
     Their tendency to hide facts both from themselves and others is linked to the art they perform and collect.  We first see them as members of a large, well-dressed audience facing the camera in mathematical rows and reacting with puppet-like conventionality to the recital they're hearing.  The sea of faces (at first viewing we've no idea which are theirs) listens and applauds in unison.  This ritualistic response to an artistic presentation helps define them and their values.  As performing artists and teachers and parents of artists, Anne and Georges are solid citizens of this cultural community, and their mutual civility and wittiness throughout demonstrates their commitment to its values.
     Its worldview emerges from "Amour" as strenuously polite, artful, and non-ideological.  Anne and Georges never discuss philosophy or religion, nor does anyone else.  The film focusses entirely on their re-creation (they're performers rather than composers) of music and on their consumption of other kinds of high art.  Their life together has itself become a kind of art work, with enough income to provide them everything they think they need to grow old and die together gracefully.
     "Amour" in no way argues that their artistic worldview causes the catastrophe.  It only suggests, gently, that art helps devotees like Anne and George evade and deny mortality.  It encourages them to believe, as Anne and Georges seem to, that the sensitivity and self-confidence that made them successful artists will make them die well.
In this they resemble the affluent and successful people around them in the recital audience.  Representing the core values of people like Georges and Anne, the sea of semi-identical faces suggests that their view of death -- it must never intrude on polite society, must be ignored, and must finally be met with the ease and self-assurance of successful people like Anne and Georges -- underlies their kind of civilization.
     This leads in the middle part of the film to the second theme -- Georges' and Anne's heartrending inability to cope with her breakdown.  At her homecoming from the hospital, he can barely move her from the wheelchair into her living room chair.  Then when he tells her he's sorry about what's happened, she says "me too" and makes him promise never to move her out of the apartment.  Her fear of such a move equals her incredulity at what's happened.  Often she interprets his efforts to help her as misplaced pity.  At one point he finds her helpless on the hall floor and at another on the bedroom floor because she won't accept her debility.
     She doesn't want outsiders like her son-in-law Geoff to see her, and when her former student from the recital drops by, she dresses up and then scolds him for what she interprets as his dismay at how she looks.  Meanwhile, Georges has the nightmare echoing his own fears and self-doubts despite his insistence to Eva and others that he and Anne are doing well.  After she wets herself, Anne angrily wheels her new motor scooter around the front hall and strands herself in a corner, exposing how scared and upset she too is.
     In the next scene, she's in bed barely able to speak and brokenly warns Eva, who's visiting, against selling the house.  When Eva asks what house, Anne answers dementedly "grandmother's."  Eva at once brings Geoff to help intervene, but Georges will have none of it.  When Geoff asks about a nursing home or hospice, Georges retorts that he and Anne will do fine in the apartment.  Eva's questioning of their home-care setup does lead in the next scene to a new nurse showing Georges how to change Anne's diapers.  He needs far more help than that.
     I found this to be a key section of "Amour."  It shows that Anne, having fallen off a neurological cliff, is no longer in control of herself, though indirectly, of course, she still controls Georges.  His refusal to move her from the apartment fulfills his earlier promise: he knows how much she hates medical reality, and while he's having second thoughts about their situation, as shown by his hiring the new nurse, he nonetheless rejects what's plainly needed.  I found his paralysis in face of his snowballing problems heartbreaking.
     Worse, he doesn't seem to know that dying people lose their need for food and water as their bodily systems shut down.  At one point, feeding Anne till she turns away, he wrongly interprets her refusal as a rejection of him and the will to live.  Later he slaps her for spitting out water, again mistakenly interpreting it as a spiteful act of will.
     Furthermore, neither he nor the nurses seem to realize Anne's reached a state where her body is painfully sensitive to physical contact.  When a nurse brushes her hair, she cries "mal" ("hurts"), and at other times she's clearly in pain even when not touched.  Another nurse dismisses her cries as senile "mama"s or as babble.  Their inexpertise or callousness is underscored by the fact they never give her pain medicine.
     In fact, so inept and unskillful does most of Anne's care seem that I question the quality of the medical staff she and Georges are using.  The nurses are very much a mixed bag, and behind them looms a physician whose surgery on Anne failed when 95% of such operations succeed.  While not proof of incompetence, when seen in light of his regular visits to Anne yet failure to intervene, the statistic suggests he's hardly top-notch.  Moreover, having such a staff is another sign of the insouciance and carelessness with which Georges and Anne have approached old age.  They've anticipated neither the negatives of what might hit them medically nor the positives of their access as French citizens to one of the best medical systems in the world.  Their wealth alone guarantees them medical care of the highest quality.  Yet they seem clueless about how to get such care, which Anne has preemptively rejected anyway.
     They pay a high price for their fecklessness.  The horror show of geriatric ignorance, derangement, and cruelty that is the film's third and most important theme reaches its stunning climax when Georges suddenly smothers Anne with a pillow after telling her an unhappy story of his own boyhood.  He tells the story gently and lovingly, stroking her hands, and she stops crying "mal" and is calm and trusting by the time he finishes.  To kill her so abruptly and brutally, at such a tender moment, was for me conclusive evidence of how crazy he's become.  Whether his act is premeditated or a sudden impulse is unclear, but everything to this point suggests he wants Anne to live, a fact that magnifies the grotesquerie of his murderous attack.
     It is above all a grotesque parody of sexual intercourse.  Pinning her down as if maddened by lust, Georges relentlessly rides Anne's thrusts and struggles with thrusts and struggles of his own and finally collapses on her in post-orgasmic-like exhaustion as her legs also shudder with pseudo-orgasmic death convulsions.  Yet this is not the connubial, sexual amour they've always shared.  It may be a mercy-killing amour through which Georges hopes to free Anne, like the pigeons he frees from the apartment, or it may be a self-amour with which to rid himself of Anne.
     However interpreted, the harsh fact of the murder, apparently unsought by its victim, is haunting.  That the film is complex, ambiguous, and many-layered is undeniable.  But equally undeniable is the insanity, needlessness, and irony of Georges' final act of "caregiving."  For Anne's and his own good, he should have put her in a well-run nursing home or hospice where he could have stayed with or often visited her and where she'd have gotten expert care.  Instead, he mires himself in a morass of hit-or-miss amateurism that destroys them both.
     Anne's dementia is more obvious than his, but by the end they're both deranged.  After she first wets herself, he hallucinates that she's playing their piano, and when he's killed her and sprinkled her with flowers he hallucinates that they leave the apartment together.  He's also shown writing a coldly witty letter (suicide note?) after the murder.  Unshaven, he lies in bed surrounded by litter and cigarette butts.  Their world of high culture has collapsed in madness.
     Haneke's stance is not religious.  There's no religiosity in "Amour" whatsoever.  Instead, there's a complex, questioning awareness of the human repugnance to death and the consequences of that repugnance for two privileged and successful representatives of modern European civilization.  Anne's and Georges' tragedy is the tragedy we will all suffer, that of our mortality.  The couple's failure to anticipate and prepare intelligently for it is, I think, the major focus of "Amour."
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CONSOLATION TWENTY-FIVE: THE NEWTOWN MASSACRE

     On the morning of Friday, December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old caucasian named Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother with a Bushmaster assault rifle in their upscale Newtown, Connecticut home.  He then went to Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School and with the Bushmaster killed six staff members and twenty first-grade pupils.  The first 911 call from Sandy Hook reached authorities at 9:35 a.m., and as police approached the school Lanza killed himself with one of two handguns he was also carrying.
     Among the flood of consolatory responses to the massacre, most have been religious.  In his speech from Newtown, President Obama said, "God has called [the victims] home."  Religious services worldwide have made essentially the same point, affirming that the souls of the slain have survived their physical deaths and exist somewhere beyond nature.  A Christmas editorial on Newtown in the Washington Post described the religious response well: "For many people, there is no consolation and little comfort to be had, other than through some conception of God, however named or delineated.  Religious faith...remains astonishingly resilient, as does the need to perceive some order and justice and source of consolation in the world that is beyond the wisdom of judges, therapists, or grief counselors."  The Christmas rituals of church-going, carol-singing, decorating, and homecoming helped many people, including some of the victims' families, face the catastrophe.
     A less frequent consolatory response has been agnostic psychotherapy.  Here the comforters offer practical, non-religious advice on now to cope with a Newtown-like event.  Though dubious as to how much consolation survivors actually get from temporary outbursts of anonymous gift-giving and sympathy like the one that overwhelmed Newtown, the agnostics believe that such anonymous generosity, plus media hubbub, helps distract some survivors briefly.
     But soon the hubbub stops, the agnostics say, leaving the mourners alone with their losses.  The violent, senseless death of one's own child is fundamentally inconsolable.  Most parents never find closure for it and are offended if told they should.  The best they can do is find a way to live with their grief and make it bearable.  Every survivor must find his or her own therapy, among which the following sometimes work.
     Distract yourself by working towards some kind of activist goal.  For the Newtown massacre, it might be gun control, mental health, school security, or victim outreach.  Survivors can set up organizations honoring the slain and helping other survivors.  They can also volunteer to serve or help lead the kind of foundation established to memorialize virtually every U.S. mass killing in recent years.
     Accept that your life will never be the same but also that with time incurable wounds do partially heal.  Parents with children as young as those who died at Newtown may bear or already have other children, who to an extent replace -- and rechannel their love for -- their lost sons or daughters.  The changeableness of everyday life will create new and unexpected distractions: other family members or relatives may die, the survivors may divorce, remarry, and start new families, new conditions of all kinds will arise.
     The survivors can also try getting as far away from Newtown as possible.  Some agnostic comforters hold that a few survivors benefit from leaving a massacre site, like the father who left Columbine after the shooting there and lived a while alone on a mountaintop.  But most agnostics maintain that staying put and resuming activities enjoyed before the disaster, along with returning to accustomed eating, sleeping, socializing, and working patterns, tends to be more therapeutic.  For some non-religious survivors, imagining a loved one's presence in everyday things like rainbows or butterflies can be comforting.
     One interesting agnostic response to the Newtown massacre has been the heroization of the school staff members who died either confronting Lanza directly or trying to protect their pupils.  Some of the first policemen, firemen, and medics to reach Sandy Hook agreed with a colleague from a nearby city who said, "The first responders were the teachers and the students.  Their actions clearly saved lives.... They weren't equipped to deal with this at all.  They're the true heroes."  Similar tributes have been in the media often enough to suggest that millions of people outside Newtown found them consoling too.
     If consolatory responses to Newtown from agnostics have appeared less often than from religionists, still less numerous are those from atheists.  This is not because atheists were any less appalled by the massacre but because they're fewer in number worldwide and less sought after for an opinion.  Yet despite their small numbers and relative unpopularity with the press, atheists have been heard from.
     Predictably, they've been asked most about how they presented the massacre to their own children.  One atheist mother said she told hers that "some people believe God is waiting for them, but I don't believe that.  I believe when you die you live on in the memory of people you love and who love you.... I can't offer [my children] the comfort of a better place.  Despite all the evils and problems in the world, this is the heaven -- we're living in the heaven, and it's the one we work to make.  It's not a paradise."
     Other atheists, who observe rituals like Christmas, Hanukkah, mealtime grace, and even prayer in order to give their children a sense of cultural tradition, strip these rituals of religious content, arguing that familiarity with them helps their children separate the wheat from the chaff in religious responses to events like Newtown.  Other, less traditional atheists prefer a scientific approach.  "We are a science-based family," said one.  "When we don't know the answer, we say, 'We don't know.'  We don't say 'Jesus did it.'"
     Some atheists talk openly with their children about death.  One told hers that when "people die, it's just like before they were ever born.  They're not scared, they're not hungry, they're not cold.  But the people left behind miss them."  One father said his children were too young to comprehend Newtown, but if they'd asked him about it he would have told them that "the shootings were done by a young person who was mentally unstable."  Believing morality is man-made, he also would have said, "You don't have to have religion to know right from wrong."
     I found all the religious, agnostic, and atheist responses to Newtown admirable in one key way.  They all helped the survivors and the millions who empathized with them deal emotionally with their sudden shock, grief, and horror.  As a hospice volunteer, I welcome anything that helps human beings endure the ordeal of their own deaths or the deaths of those they love.  At Newtown, only survivors can be so helped, because all the victims themselves were murdered before anyone could help them.  If religion, agnosticism, or atheism helps any survivor there emotionally, I'm for it.
     That said, as a materialist I not only prefer the agnostic and atheist responses philosophically but also believe that materialism offers consolations none of the others do.  Since I've seen no other materialist comment on the massacre, I offer what follows as possible comfort.
     I prefer the agnostic and atheist approaches to Newtown because they more fully accept what I see as the three fundamental facts of human existence.  Fact Number One is that all human beings die.  Fact Number Two is that no credible evidence has ever shown a) that any human being or other living organism survives its own death other than as material residues or b) that any god, deity, divinity, or other supernatural being exists or in any way influences reality.  Fact Number Three is that the human species came into existence solely through natural processes of cosmic and terrestrial evolution.  More atheists than agnostics embrace all three facts, many agnostics claiming uncertainty as to whether gods exist, all atheists insisting they don't.
     Materialists, of course, not only take the three facts for granted but induce from them and scientific knowledge as a whole that the natural order is the only reality there is and is infinitely unified and self-sustaining.  In other words, material nature is all that exists, all the way down, and is radically non-human.  Human sentience, percipience, cognition, and rationality are freaks of insentient, impercipient, non-cognitive, and irrational forces whose ultimate substance is now and may forever be unknown.  All we can do is extrapolate from the facts of our own own cosmic history what this substance may be and how it may work.  To me, such reasoned speculation is the heart and soul of philosophy.
     So what, then, are materialism's unique consolations for a horror like the Newtown massacre?  As the preceding paragraphs indicate, materialism is not a warm and fuzzy worldview.  It sees human life as an irrelevance and aberration in an unfeeling, unthinking, and inhuman All.  It sees death, which people instinctively reject and deny, as an indifferent and inexorable fact dragging humanity back into the natural chaos it came from.  It sees life and death as insoluble existential contradictions and assumes neither is more meaningful or valuable than the other.  How then can materialism console anyone for Newtown?
     I'll begin an answer by stressing that all materialists, like most agnostics and atheists, believe that death leads to absolute peace and rest.  However much pain and fright the Sandy Hook victims may have felt during the massacre, they no longer do.  They're having the best and deepest sleep imaginable, one all of us will eventually share with them.
     But unlike agnosticism and atheism, materialism assumes further that the natural ingredients human beings are made of -- the elementary particles comprising their molecules -- are somehow connected to the All's material essence and are as valuable and important expressions of it as any ever were, are, or will be.  Human beings are bound to one another and the All by the essential stuff from which we and everything else in the cosmos is made.  How, where, and in what form this stuff existed before our own Big Bang is a mystery, but that it did and that it unifies all existence is axiomatic in materialist philosophy.
     What the axiom implies is that all the material objects, including human beings, in our cosmos are inextricably interwoven.  We share the same hundred-odd atomic elements and their underlying particles with the most distant galaxies.  The hydrogen atoms fusing at the sun's core are identical to those in the water we drink, despite the vastly processes they're undergoing.  The carbon, nitrate, and other residues of the Newtown victims are reintegrating with nature in whatever form their families chose, a reintegration that awes and comforts me.
     Its inhumanness awes me.  Nothing in the reabsorption of the victims' remains into the natural order has a shred of knowing, thinking, or feeling in it.  Like all inorganic matter, the victims are now forever locked in material oblivion.  Yet the very grandeur and serenity of their insensibility comforts me.  Why does it have to be humanly cognized?  I'm virtually certain that intelligent life did or will evolve either elsewhere in this cosmos or in countless other cosmos-like manifestations of the All.  Maybe in some of these it's not bound by our mortality or dimensionality, though I haven't a clue as to how or why that could be.
     I'm comforted that the Newtown victims live on in the minds and hearts of those who knew, loved, and, most poignantly, mothered and fathered them.  But they also quite literally exist in the air we breathe and the earth we trod.  I'm soothed by knowing my own cremains will someday be scattered in the Desolation Wilderness of California, where I had a near-fatal heart attack in 1995, because I like to picture them slowly blending with that magnificent landscape.  I'll then join the Newtown victims -- and their assassin -- in the peace that frees us from tragedy and madness, reunites us with the essence of being, and passes all understanding.
     Yet while the prospect consoles me, it also reminds me that the riddle of human existence has no answer.  We were born with an instinctive love of life and hatred of death because evolution blindly burdened us with it, even as it just as blindly condemned us to die.  The clash between life and death and the inhumanness of the mortal cycle as a whole was, is, and always will be incomprehensible in human terms.  Other than with humanly-contrived consolations like those I've already mentioned, there's no way to soften or rationalize Newtown.
     But not every issue raised by Newtown is so intractable.  Two kinds of pathological behavior primarily caused it, and both are remediable.  The first is psychological and will require identifying, restraining, and treating potential mass murderers like Lanza before they strike.  The second is social and will require delegitimizing the current gun culture of America.
     According to experts, the psychopathy of mass murderers like Lanza is hard to spot ahead of time.  One violence-predicting program that incorporated 106 risk factors in an interview for patients leaving mental hospitals found that 90% of the program's low-risk patients committed no violence during the next six months, while half the high-risk patients did.  But almost all such research is about people already known to be mentally ill, to be drug abusers, or to have been arrested, which is not the case with some mass shooters like Lanza.
     Yet experts agree more efforts must be made to flag potential killers, particularly those like the Virginia Tech and Aurora students who'd already alarmed campus mental health professionals.  Besides making such screenings more accessible to law and health officers so as, for example, to force potentially violent patients to take their psychiatric medicines, proposals for beefing up mental health counseling in schools at all levels are in the works.  But stopping mass murders in this way will be a long, hard, uncertain slog.
     More straightforward and effective would be a frontal assault on the constitutional guarantee to bear arms and form militias.  No other civilized nation in the world has so absurd and ridiculous a provision in its fundamental laws, one that not only condones but encourages the kind of pathological social behavior seen ever since the Newtown massacre -- thousands of U.S. citizens flocking to gun shows and stores to buy military assault rifles and oversized ammo clips of the kind Lanza used for fear they'll be outlawed.  The very idea of arming one's self against one's own government in a democracy as solid as ours is so crazy that reverberations from it like the Newtown massacre seem sane by comparison.
     The weapons needed to fight the U.S. military shouldn't be limited to assault rifles.  They should include planes, missiles, tanks, cannons, and optimally, chemical and nuclear devices.  Granted, assault rifles are more lethal than the single-shot muzzle-loaders standard back when the Second Amendment was ratified, but all they can do is kill unarmed and unsuspecting men, women, and children.  What's needed for a war with the U.S. government is every killing machine available worldwide.
     Short of curing ourselves of our Second Amendment lunacy, we should at the very least support and put in practice the tighter gun controls now being proposed all across America.  Among these are mandatory background checks for all gun buyers, banning assault weapons and oversized ammo magazines, registering all weapons and tracking them in a national database, strengthening mental health oversight, putting proven and potentially violent criminals under closer watch, and increasing penalties for carrying guns near or in schools.
     The National Rifle Association's notion of mandating armed guards in every U.S. school is even more preposterous than the Second Amendment itself.  Hendrick Hertzberg points out in the 7 January 2013 New Yorker that finding "a presentable advocate for the view that the No. 1 cause of gun violence is a shortage of guns" has been impossible since Newtown.  But the NRA and its most fanatical supporters are advocating precisely that view.  Arm all teachers, they say.  Encourage all  American citizens to carry concealed weapons.  Get rid of gun controls wherever possible.  Target all congressmen who support gun control and vote them out of office.
     This is a social sickness we can cure.
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CONSOLATION TWENTY-FOUR: SLEEPING DREAMS

     Consolation Twenty-Three argued that solitude is both a harsh and a consoling fact of human existence.  Further, it speculated that the primordial components of the All, whatever they are, are absolutely material, self-contained, and indistinguishable and that their symmetry probably prevents any exchange among them.  Their primal state of absolute flux or chaos ends when they somehow lose or break their symmetries and randomly produce asymmetrical, disordered kinds of order like that of our cosmic spacetime.
     Do sleeping dreams support a similarly materialistic explanation of the world or not?  Premodern answers have favored the opposite, non-materialistic option.   A famous example is the story of Joseph in the biblical Book of Genesis.  Joseph is introduced in Chapter 37 as a "dreamer" who offends his brothers by telling them two of his dreams in which they bow down to him as their master.  The brothers plot to kill him but end up selling him into slavery in Egypt, where Potiphar's wife has him thrown in jail for spurning her sexually.  There, in Chapter 40, he interprets the dreams of a butler and baker Pharoah has jailed, telling the butler his dream means he'll be saved in three days and the baker he'll be hanged in three days.
     The interpretations come true.  The butler, restored to Pharoah's service recommends Joseph as an interpreter for two of Pharoah's own dreams, one of seven fat cows eaten by seven starving cows,  the other of seven healthy grains eaten by seven blighted grains.  Joseph accepts the challenge but tells Pharoah (Chapter 41), "It is not in me; God will give Pharoah an answer."  His interpretation is that seven years of plenty will be followed by seven of famine, to which Pharoah responds, "Inasmuch as God has shown you all this, there is no one as discerning and wise as you" and puts him in charge of Egypt's food supply on the spot.  Seven lean years do in fact follow seven fat years.  Joseph's brothers unwittingly confirm his dreaming prowess by journeying to Egypt for food during the famine and, not recognizing their brother, bowing down to him as their master.
     To the so-called J-writer of Genesis, who called God "Jahweh" rather than "Elohim," dreams were infallible channels of communication between God and humanity, and most pre-modern writers shared his opinion.  But in classical Greece and Rome an opposing, materialistic view also had eloquent backers.  Best known is Lucretius, who shortly before the Christian era began laid out a thoroughly naturalistic explanation of dreaming in The Nature of Things.
     The fourth of the six books comprising Lucretius' great poem lays out his materialistic theory of human psychology.  The general foundations of his argument are set in Book I, expanded in Book II to corollary doctrines like void, motion, swerve, aggregation, and chance, and focussed in Book III on the physics of percipience.  Book III argues that the human soul is material, consisting of atoms small and sensitive enough to respond to the equally small and sensitive atoms constantly peeling off everything in nature and bombarding sensing atoms in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin with images of the outside world.  Book III ends with Lucretius' famous denial of immortality and his insistence that the human personality is annihilated in death.
     Book IV then argues that when we're sleepy the constant bombardment of foreign, stripped-off atoms against our body disorients our soul-atoms, making them lose contact with our sensing atoms.  The ensuing sleep is deepened if we eat just before bedtime because the digesting of food displaces and disturbs our soul-atoms even more.  Likewise, many dreams are prompted by our interests or worries: lawyers dream of court trials, generals dream of war, Lucretius dreams of his poem.  Dreams make people speak or cry out, wake up with pounding hearts, even urinate or have orgasms.  Lucretius believes animals dream too.  Twitching and convulsing in their sleep, horses often seem to be running or dogs to be hunting.
     Aside from some of its quirkier and more primitive psycho-physical notions, Lucretius' assumption that sleeping dreams are natural, self-generated phenomena in sentient organisms has become the norm worldwide since the Renaissance.  Although many people doubtless still believe in the kind of divine intervention propagated by the J-writer of Genesis -- that is, dreams are imprinted on human souls supernaturally -- informed people today agree with Lucretius.
     They follow him and other ancient Greek and Roman poets, playwrights, and philosophers whose ideas came to prominence during the European Renaissance after having been suppressed by Christianity for a millennium.  Chief among these post-Renaissance thinkers were writers like Shakespeare, who never, to my knowledge, created a character with a prophetic, Joseph-like ability to foretell the future on the basis of dreams.  Reverse evidence that Shakespeare's London audiences no longer believed that dreams were supernatural is the fact they still did believe in ghosts, as the famous ghost scene in Hamlet proves.  There, several people see and hear Hamlet's father, proving Hamlet himself does not dream the ghost up.
     In other words, the fact that Shakespeare still used "corroborated" ghosts for dramatic effect but not divinely-inspired dreams strikes me as a fair measure of how far European urbanites had moved away from the J-writer's assumptions.  No longer were dreams considered conduits of divine inspiration.  They were now, as Lucretius had argued, seen as natural products of human animals.  This is apparent in Shakespearean characters like Lady Macbeth, whose guilty conscience makes her try to wash blood from her hands as she sleepwalks, or Richard II, whose victims torment his dreams the night before his final battle.  Shakespeare uses their dreaming to make the orthodox moral point that Lady Macbeth and Richard II deserve to die for their heinous crimes.  But their dreams, and those of the rest of Shakespeare's characters, are always self-generated and self-reflexive.  No deity sends them from heaven.
     Furthermore, the hallucinatory, delusory quality of sleeping dreams began appearing in stories about people whose waking lives were more dream than reality.  Cervantes' Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of a poor old knight whose sanity's been undermined by medieval romances -- too many giants, abducted ladies, and heroic knights.  The Don transforms the real world of Spanish windmills, peasant girls, and itinerant barbers into a constant waking dream of knightly adventure.  Cervantes' satire depends on the reader's seeing Don Quixote's waking life as in effect a sleeping dream.  His assumption is that the sleeping human brain works more or less as Lucretius had argued.
     In tales like The Scarlet Letter and Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne is similarly averse to giving dreaming supernatural credence.  Though some of his stories, like these two about puritan New England, create symbolic resonances that suggest the supernatural, they never require us to see putatively supernatural events as anything more than products of a character's imagination, especially if he or she might be asleep.  This is true of the famous twelfth chapter of The Scarlet Letter, in which Dimmesdale, the town minister and unconfessed father of Hester Prynne's daughter Pearl, climbs the public scaffold at midnight to ease his guilt.  Hester and Pearl happen by and join him on the scaffold, a comet shaped like an A illuminates the scene like lightning, and Chillingsworth, Hester's former husband and sworn discoverer of Pearl's paternity, appears nearby in the flash.  This dramatic scene, literally in the novel's center, hints of supernatural overtones, but Hawthorne elaborately points out that Dimmesdale probably dreamed it.
     So too Young Goodman Brown.  Here Hawthorne portrays another troubled New Englander, this one anxious about his "Faith" -- literally his wife and metaphorically his religion.  Brown goes at night into the forest to find his Faith, discovers and joins her and the rest of the village in lurid devil-worship, and wakes up next morning alone in the woods.  Again Hawthorne makes the dream option explicit, concluding this time that, dream or no, the experience changed Goodman Brown from an optimist to a pessimist. For Hawthorne and many other Euro-American writers of the Romantic era, the importance of dreaming lay in the kind of psychological self-revelation these two New England stories dramatize.
     The heyday of dreaming as psychological self-revelation arrived in the early 1900s with Jungian and Freudian dream theory.  Jung held that dreams are expressions of a collective unconscious evolved and transmitted over countless generations.  Their primordial images of fear, pleasure, success, and failure have been passed along through biological reproduction and lodged deep in the human brain as archetypal memories.  Arguing that dreams of water or reptiles, for instance, did not reflect simply the dreamer's own experiences but also archetypes buried in his or her collective unconscious, Jung denied immaterialism.  Everything we are and dream, he held, is a product of natural evolution.
     Freud's theory was even more materialistic.  It assumed human beings are driven more by libidinal urge than self-preservation, because reproduction counts more than personal survival towards species success.  That's why Freud's id, or primal sexual instinct, is the hot lava on which the ego, or primal survival instinct, floats.  The ego in turn supports the super-ego, or consciously reasoning, socializing, and moralizing self.  Dreams are products of these conscious and unconscious drives and are vitally important in treating psychiatric disorder in general and sexual psychosis in particular.  They are natural, physical events without a shred of supernatural content.
     Freud's view of human civilization as a thin veneer over volcanoes of human amorality, irrationality, and selfishness was widely shared by Euro-Americans of his day and helps explain his profound influence on them and us.  His dream theories represent the apex of a psychological realism friendly to Lucretian materialism and hostile to J-writer supernaturalism.
     If, then, dreams consist of nothing but electro-chemical neuronal firings in the brain when we sleep, how are they caused?  No one yet knows.  We do know that when we're awake our brains constantly re-image and re-create the external world with the help of the body's sensing mechanisms, subject it to countless kinds of measurement and judgment, and interact with it in ways so "experiential" and "intentional," to borrow some  existentialist terms, that we not only imagine put can pretty well prove we're alive.  This feeling of being alive -- of perceiving, intuiting, imagining, and gloriously existing -- is caused by countless neuronal and synaptic events in our brains that, individually, are no more capable of thinking or feeling than is a campfire spark.
     Collectively, though, they can do wonders like landing human beings on the moon, writing and playing Corelli concertos, and finding the Higgs boson.  Of course they can also massacre schoolchildren, pollute and overheat the planet, and become addicted to heroin or reality TV, but I'll defer negatives like these to future posts.  The point here is that, given the fantastic complexities and capabilities of the human brain, dreaming isn't one of its more remarkable accomplishments.
     Although how and why we dream is currently no better scientifically understood than most other brain processes, dreams themselves often seem fairly easy to comprehend in terms of proximate causes.  When I'm sleeping and need to urinate, I often dream of being in or near water, and when I badly need to urinate I may find myself in a house where all the toilets are occupied or clogged or where I'm wandering naked among strangers.  Usually the unpleasantness and embarassment I feel corresponds to my urinary needs.
     Or I may have been sleeping in one position too long and developed arthritis pain in a shoulder, hip, or knee.  Here the dreams vary widely.  I may be lost in a city I vaguely recognize but can't remember my way around in.  Or I may be driving a car that keeps stalling or falling apart.  Or I may be a student taking a test in a class I've never attended or done any work for.  Or I'm a teacher teaching a class whose subject matter I don't know.  The list goes on and on, but what matters is that the moment I wake up I know the dream was mostly a reaction to the pain in one of my joints.  The same is true of some dreams I have of snow or skiing.  Waking up, I realize the blanket's fallen off or the bedroom's cold.
     Academic dreams of the kind just mentioned often recur.  They stem, I suppose, from some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome I developed during my sixty years in academia as student and teacher.  Often nightmarish, they're sometimes pleasant, even euphoric, and I suspect these nicer dreams indicate how much I enjoyed some aspects of academia despite my dislike of many others.
     Not all my recurring dreams have any links I'm aware of to my waking life.  One dream takes place in a landscape that begins in a valley containing a village-like cluster of houses and rises to a bluff where elegant governmental or commercial buildings block the way and force me to find a route through.  Doing this isn't hard, and beyond them rise attractive hills from which I can look back and admire the architecture of the buildings I've passed and the village cluster beyond.  Sometimes I'm going from village to hill and sometimes the other way, but I always find an easy path through the mid-buildings.
     I have no idea what the dream means, nor do I know why I sometimes dream I'm renting the front, left, second-floor room of a run-down, almost furnitureless house somewhere in a seedy, semi-rural area.  The first dream's more agreeable than the second, yet in both I seem to recognize where I am and feel at home despite never having seen either place in my entire waking life.
     But this lack of connection between my recurring dreams and my waking life may be more significant than all the links I make between my dreams on the one hand and my worries, bodily functions, and bedroom conditions on the other.  In the final analysis, I'm convinced the brain-body is too complex a material system to explain in simple cause and effect terms.  Even when sleeping, the brain bubbles with tremendous energy, superfluity, and redundancy.  If its network of neurons and synapses can re-image and re-process the empirical world so well that we know we exist, it can easily manufacture dreams full of things and events we've never seen or known.  In fact, most dreams are probably nothing but aimless, random doodlings of the brain's circuitry.

                                                                      ********

CONSOLATION TWENTY-THREE: SOLITUDE

     My last five posts have had self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and going-it-alone at their core.  Number eighteen described my forty-year suppression of a UFO sighting in the 1970s for lack of personally convincing evidence.  Nineteen argued for self-education over formal, purchased education.  Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two chronicled my private war with academia, religion, and the military at the University of Rochester and the U.S Naval Academy during the 1960s.
     Today I'll explain the philosophical basis of my belief in the solitariness of human existence, a belief underlying my point of view in the past five posts and throughout these Consolations.  I see human solitude both as a tragic fact of life and as one of life's major consolations.
     I start from the assumption that human life is a random accident in a basically non-human All, "All" being my term for the material order whose essence is absolute Being and from which all subsidiary being like that of our own cosmos has emerged.  In our cosmos, this process of emergence is now so well understood that everyone who accepts modern science knows how it happened.  Some thirteen billion years ago, an unexplained, probably random burst of infinite heat and density broke the symmetries among time, space, and the four fundamental forces of whatever material state preceded it and, in a fraction of a nanosecond, swelled and cooled into the physical realities that produced the cosmos and us.
     At the instant of the Big Bang, everything that was to become the cosmos existed in chaotic relationship to everything else.  Time, space, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces were in some unfathomable way symmetrical.  They did not interact.  Their imperviousness to reciprocity -- their resistance to exchanging, blending, or sharing with each other in any way -- was, in its perfect symmetricality, also of course perfectly chaotic.  It was a state of absolute mutual isolation, in which everything was absolutely cut off from everything else.  From this initial state of cosmic symmetry, I infer that the All as a whole is is some ultimate way similarly symmetrical and chaotic.  Further, I infer from the fact that our cosmos is materially unified that the All is also materially unified.
     Though how everything can be at once both chaotic and unified is an impenetrable mystery, it's a mystery everywhere manifested in the natural order surrounding us.  In physical nature, for example, photons and quarks are both waves and particles.  Particles randomly decay into other particles.  Gravity bends space and time.  Order everywhere produces disorder and vice versa: galaxies coalesce and collide, gravity crushes protons into neutrons that then, given sufficient mass, explode into supernovas; stars and human beings are born and die as much through probablistic chance as deterministic cause and effect.  From observing, experiencing, and learning  facts like these, I've deduced that ultimate matter is similarly chaotic and unified.  That is, from the cosmic materiality I see everywhere around and within me, I extrapolate an absolute metacosmic materiality.  All of this is speculative, of course, but it rests on proven science rather than hope, faith, or charity.
     Further, it's led me to think that the All's state of absolute Being must also be a state of absolute solitude.  The ultimate, material components of the All, whatever they may be and do, do not, I believe, interact.  Infinitely separate, they comprise a featureless, oblivious ocean of material Being whose individual drops, or parts, are absolutely unique, identical, and symmetrical.  Radically separate from each other, theirs is the solitude of chaotic flux, which, as in the Big Bamg, inexplicably and randomly breaks its essential symmetries and somehow effuses itself into the disorderly order of subsidiary, asymmetrical existence like that of our cosmos.
     If so, human solitude may not be just next to but the same thing as godliness.  Sensing your aloneness among the galaxies may be analogous to being one of those drops of featureless, identical matter in the All's primal flux.  Imagining myself as such a drop actually consoles me:  I share in the All's fundamental materialness and at the same time in the infinite separateness and uniqueness of each of its ultimate parts, whatever they may be: -- infinitely dimensional or non-dimensional "objects"?  metacosmic "energy fields"?  vibrating "strings"?  "membranes"?  quantum vacuum "ripples"?  infinitessimal "uncertainties"?  I'm also consoled to think I'll be nearer that absolute state of Being after I die than I am now.
     In other words, my conception of ultimate reality -- that is, as a state of complete disconnection and non-interaction among bits? traces? waves? loops? of material stuff whose symmetry is so perfect that nothing but their featureless sameness, paradoxically enough, binds them -- raises solitude to the level of a primal absolute.  As one of a handful of such absolutes (others are infinity and eternity), solitude seems alien to humanness only if humanness is defined as somehow immaterial, as containing some kind of supernatural ingredient or essence.
     Philosophical materialism rejects any such definition.  Existence is just as material, natural, irrational, and chaotic beyond our cosmos as within it.  Nature here shares some kind of insentient essence with everything else in the All.  Sentient life is rare, accidental, and aberrant everywhere it appears.  No supernatural planner or designer creates it.  It evolves randomly from the flux.
     Obviously I set great philosophical weight on solitude.  But I value it in mundane, human terms too.  For one thing, it often helps me understand and accept death in general and my own death in particular.  Walking alone through forests, deserts, or mountains, or contemplating bodies of fresh or salt water by myself, leads me sooner or later to the problem of dying.  While birds and animals may notice me at such times, usually to keep as far away as possible, the rest of the wilderness ignores me.  Leaves flutter, clouds hang and drift, rain or snow falls, the sun moves overhead, all without reciprocating a single thought or feeling I may have about them.
     They're as unaware of and indifferent to me as I'll be to them when I rejoin them as part of inorganic nature.  Though their masses and energies will continue interacting with the masses and energies of my corpse, as they do now with my living body, I'll know and feel nothing of it.  In becoming as unconscious as they, I'll in one sense have become vastly more like them than I am now.  But in another sense I'll have radically distanced myself from them by entering the solitude that's a primal attribute of every material object.
     It won't be a disagreeable solitude.  There, ignorance really is bliss.  The lack of self-awareness all inanimate things have is an existential condition most human beings long for in one way or another.  Addicts try to achieve it through alcohol and other narcotics.  Many people crave it as a way of overcoming shyness and loneliness.  If only I could forget myself, they hope, I'd be more confident, likeable, and popular.  Many want to get away from self-consciousness for other reasons -- they think they're too fat, too thin, too tall,, too short, too dumb, too smart, too garrulous, too quiet, too glib, too serious, too good, too bad.  Some mystics try to transcend selfhood to states of depersonalized being.  And almost everyone at one time or another gets tired of making a living, coping with illness and other mundane problems, or simply being alive.
     Above all, the solitude of death will be restful.  Having already, at age seventy-six, lived an active and reasonably happy life, I look forward to leaving the clamor of human existence.  I long to escape the dissatisfactions of daily life, its pain, frustration, disappointment, and unhappiness.  To me, one of materialism's greatest comforts is on the one hand its denial of personal immortality and on the other its insistence that sentience and cognition are permanently extinguished at death .  There is no heaven, hell, or afterlife, merely the natural peace that passes all understanding.
      Countless other thoughts also occur to me when I'm alone.  Hiking by myself, I've often found myself admiring the splendors of nature itself.  Few of the places I've been to in the world have failed to show me how magnificent our planet is.  Coastal and mountain California, the Rockies and the Tetons, the Mississippi basin, the Louisiana and Florida swamps, tidewater Maryland and Virginia, Appalachian New York and New England, and the maritime provinces of Canada have all revealed breathtaking landscapes, waterscapes, and seascapes to me.
     The territories of western Europe, especially Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Greece, have impressed me too.  There, however, nature has been more often modified and enhanced by conscious human effort than in North America.  Awesome as the Swiss Alps are as a wilderness filling horizons with rows of jagged peaks, they're also unforgettable as a human habitat.  Massifs of rock and snow tower over valleys softened at lower altitudes by evergreen forests and fields and farms that have been worked into them with immense human effort.  I find this combination of inhuman, invulnerable wildnerness and human, vulnerable agriculture moving.
     Another stunning mixture of humanness and wildness is the ancient Greeks' building of gorgeous structures on spectacular natural sites.  Everyone's seen photographs of the Parthenon in Athens, but fully to appreciate it you must see it live.  So too the amphitheater at Delphi and the stadium at Olympia.  Best of all, for me, is the temple of Poseidon near Athens at Cape Sunion, which has stood for more than two thousand years in the splendid isolation of its seaside promontory.
     This habit of preserving and enhancing nature is evident everywhere in European town zoning and especially in Germany.  Villages and cities there follow much stricter rules about what can be built where than in the U.S.  Almost all German villages are marvels of compactness.  Residential, commercial, and agricultural buildings are tightly bunched on central streets, while surrounding fields and forests lay unbroken on all sides.  Cities and industrial zones are less tightly controlled, but even there cows graze next to factories and forests are within walking distance of downtown centers.  A major reason for Europe's heavy subsidization of agriculture is that Europeans are willing to pay to keep their living space green.
     Besides recharging my love of both wild and humanized nature, getting away from people and being alone consoles me in yet another way.  It helps free me for a time from the bedlam and mayhem of humanity's greed, stupidity, selfishness, and cruelty and get over the anger, frustration, and depression they often cause me.  Like many earlier materialists, I do not adore much of what I see in myself and the rest of my species.  The surviving writings of Epicurus, the earliest materialist documents that exist, recommend friendship mainly as a safeguard against human viciousness.  Lucretius, whose Nature of Things was the only full exposition of classical materialism to survive the first millennium and a half of Christianity, ignores Epicurus' doctrine of friendship and instead recommends science and reason as the best defense against the "howling rage" of the religious masses.  And d'Holbach's 1770 System of Nature, the first great materialist treatise after Lucretius' poem, concludes that atheistic materialism isn't "suitable to the great mass of mankind."
     By disposition and circumstance, I too have always been a loner.  Though probably reinforced by my being orphaned at thirteen, my lonerism stems mainly, I think, from my having gotten used to living alone with my mother during my Vermont boyhood and, after she died, from having pretty much made my own way through high school, college, and graduate school into college teaching.  Yet I've also always needed close or intimate relationships with at least one other person.  I always had at least one close male or female friend before I met my wife in graduate school, after which she was my best friend till our separation twenty-three years ago.  Our children remain two of my best friends, and she and I maintain contact.  I met my current best friend, my partner, six months after the separation, and she and I have been virtually married ever since.
     So despite my somewhat hermit-like avoidance of cocktail and dinner parties and holiday gatherings like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July and, more importantly, of humanity in general, I still manage to amuse myself with communal activities like golf and poker that require contact, however superficial, with others.  I find I enjoy such contact in limited doses.  I much prefer it to the virtual socializing that more and more pervades the internet and other kinds of social media.  However anti-social and misanthropic my kind of lonerism may seem to others, it strikes me, at least, as a lot more friendly than communicating via Twitter, Facebook, and the like.  Yet I do like writing and sharing this blog with others.
     And despite my philosophical and personal bias in favor of isolation, separateness, solitude, and aloneness, I'm finally and powerfully aware of how comforting and consoling it has been to me to be able, however briefly, to reciprocate love and affection with other human beings in a universe that seems to be primordially incapable of such feelings.  Though humanness is evidently inessential and accidental to the All, it has as much validity and reason for being as anything else.  Material existence, which is the only kind there is and can never not exist, is also infinitely self-justifying and valuable no matter what form it takes.  I'm delighted I've had the extremely rare and improbable chance to live, know, think, and feel with human clarity and passion.  I look forward to the calmness, serenity, and solitude awaiting me when I die, and I look back just as contentedly to the interactions I've had with everyone and everything here on earth.  The view strikes me as sublimely mysterious in both directions.
                                                                     **********

CONSOLATION TWENTY-TWO: MILITARY SERVICE (3)

     In Consolation Twenty-One, I narrated my first year of military service as a civilian teacher at Annapolis.  I'll conclude the saga of my war with the Navy there by chronicling my second and final year, which made the first year seem like a stroll in the park.
     After my 1965 summer of six-day work weeks at the Library of Congress, during which I began expanding my dissertation into what I hoped would be a publishable book, I returned to fall classes at the Academy in no mood to tolerate sleeping mids and rotten classwork.  I yelled, threw chalk-filled erasers, ordered pushups, gave F's like they were going out of style, and made life miserable for my already miserable plebes.  Like all short-timers, I was counting the days till my hitch was up.
     The grade fixing of the past spring had slithered off into administrative tall grass.  Having juiced grades enough to get past its immediate problem, the Navy now seemed to be holding grade-fixing in reserve against inconveniently low grading in the future.  The almost honest grades I'd given spring semester had been swallowed up in the generally adhered-to grade quotas like a drop of chlorine in a sewer.
     In October, I submitted a second article, this time to Journal of American History.  Knowing I'd scarred what little academic sex appeal I'd had when I left Stanford by my antics at Rochester and Annapolis, I also sent out scores of job applications to the kind of school I'd disdained at Stanford -- state universities between the coasts.
     Although half the places I wrote offered me job interviews at the upcoming MLA convention in December (academia was booming back then), for months I'd had my eye on Maryland at College Park.  My wife and I liked the Washington-Annapolis area, where we'd met several congenial College Park teachers and graduate students.  A week after they got my application, Maryland invited me to an on-campus interview and a week after that offered me a job.  I accepted on the spot.
     Within a day of the Maryland offer, I was the star of  Bull (midshipman slang for the English, History department, aka EH&G).  Outside offers, however modest, were the stuff dreams were made of in the Bullpen.  Now that they knew I wouldn't be around to rock the boat anymore, even the senior Bull professors who'd supported the grade quotas began lamenting to me about all the other promising civilians they'd seen pass through Bull to greener academic pastures.
     After relatively smooth sailing (compared to the year before) with my plebe sleepers during  the fall, I found an official-looking envelope waiting for me in my Bullpen mailbox at the end of Christmas break.  The letter inside, dated December 29, 1965, was a From - To - Subj notification of "Non-renewal of appointment to U.S. Naval Academy Faculty," as the Subj rubrick put it.  They'd fired me.
     My first impulse was to laugh.  Getting fired struck me as a fitting climax to the Punch and Judy show I'd been starring in for almost a year.  Because of my protest to the dean last spring, the letter said, in which I'd threatened to resign if grade quotas weren't disavowed, Bull was asking the dean not to rehire me.  "This decision," it continued, "will give you even greater freedom in pursuing employment elsewhere and will allow this Department to seek a replacement for you."  The letter acknowledged my excellent ratings but added, "your own decision to leave the Naval Academy indicates that you will be far more satisfied in a position elsewhere."  It ended with good wishes.
     It was signed by a new Captain of Bull who'd replaced the Rhodes Scholar over the summer.  But the true authors were the members of a "committee on promotions and reappointments" alluded to in the letter, a committee consisting of the half-dozen civilian full professors really in charge of running Bull.  Since they'd all known for a month I'd accepted the Maryland job, why hadn't they just asked me to resign?  Everyone in academia knows from day one what the protocol for changing jobs is:  you submit a letter of resignation to accept a new job, as I'd done at Rochester, and you're instantly released from your existing contract.  No one resigning to take another job gets fired.
     The only sense I could make of the letter, as I read and reread it in baffled outrage, was that it was deliberately meant to damage my career by booting me from a civil service job involving FBI clearance.  And it did so in face of work ratings a notch below extraordinary (one of my three performance areas was rated outstanding; two of three would have qualified me for special raises, bonuses, and promotions.)  Canning me like this apparently satisfied two aims.  It punished my boat-rocking disloyalty, and it affirmed the military chain of command.
     I immediately vowed to do whatever it took to expunge the letter from my record.  Within the hour I was in Captain Bull's office, demanding to be allowed to resign.  Fresh from commanding a cruiser and of course ignorant of academic niceties, he called in Bull's senior senior professor to listen.  My parting shot was to tell them both I was going straight to AAUP (American Association of University Professors) for redress.
     The man I met two days later at AAUP headquarters in Washington was interested because AAUP, never having dealt with any of the service academies, would, as he smilingly put it, welcome the opportunity.  He was even more interested when I mentioned the grade quotas.  Within a couple of weeks I got a copy of a letter he'd sent Captain Bull.  It wondered innocently whether the Captain had had a chance to confer with me about the firing letter, which it described as a "problem that can be so easily remedied that we hope it might be handled without undue delay."  It offered to send someone to the Academy to "facilitate arrangements" and ended by assuring the Captain that AAUP was "quite willing to extend its good offices for such a constructive purpose."
     Ouch.  To a Navy man such a letter, coming from mysterious realms of civilian academic power, would seem as "constructive" as a torpedo about to hit his ship.  Almost as I was reading my copy of the AAUP letter, I got an anguished call from Captain Bull, who prostrated himself over the phone.  He said he'd been waiting for me to call, afraid of offending me by calling first.  What should he do?
     I spelled out my demands.  All copies of the original letter were to be removed from the files and destroyed.  In their place, I'd send him a letter of resignation, backdated to before the date of the firing.  He not only agreed but sweetened the deal by offering to give me all the copies of the firing letter so I could destroy them myself.  Within a week, the exchange was made like something out of a spy thriller.  I sent him a letter of resignation, dated December 15, to take the Maryland job.  He then sent me a letter dated December 17 praising my "effective teaching, research, and publication," saying my services at the Academy had been "deeply appreciated" and offering me "best wishes" at Maryland.  Finally I sent him my copy of the December 29 firing letter, whereupon he sent me the original and three copes with an initialled note of the back of the original:  "All copies for your personal destruction -- if you wish."
     All the while, grade quotas never came up.  Then, early in March, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post set the Yard abuzz by initiating a series on the Academy.  At first his articles were unfocussed, questioning in a general way whether taxpayers were getting their money's worth at Annapolis.  He made no mention of the grade-fixing, and I concluded the Academy had probably closed ranks and decided to try to keep its worst potential scandal in years hidden from him.
     Then in late March he quoted an assistant professor in Dago (midshipman slang for Foreign Languages), who said that in his field, Spanish, quotas were still in effect and that he'd been fired at the end of fall semester for protesting it to his civilian chairman.  He also claimed he'd been ordered to change a failing grade he'd given the son of a former Academy superintendent to pass.  Till I read the article, I thought I'd been the only member of the faculty to protest grade-fixing to the point of getting canned.  Discovering the Spanish teacher's plight, and confirming it by meeting with him and seeing his evidence, rekindled my own outrage at the whole business and convinced me to join him against the Navy, especially since I'd managed to clear my own record.
     The Navy countered the Spanish teacher by flatly denying his grade-fixing charges and by painting him as an incompetent being fired for weak teaching and credentials.  By the first week in April, it looked like the Navy was succeeding in isolating him and halting the momentun of the Post series.  So on Friday, April 8, I called the reporter and arranged to meet him in the Jefferson Annex of the Library of Congress next day.  At ten a.m. I carried a folder full of documents down to a snack bar in the building below ground level.  With its dim lighting and windowless walls, the place looked and felt conspiratorial.
     The reporter was an unsmiling man about thirty years old.  At a table in a secluded corner, he interviewed me for an hour, listening non-committally and occasionally asking questions.  At the end he said,  "You say you have supporting documents.  May I see them, please?"  Thumbing through the folder, he paused at points to read more carefully.  While the rest of his face remained expressionless, his eyes widened and narrowed, widened and narrowed.  Feeling parental affection for my stuff, I wanted him to like it, but when he finished he simply said, "I have your permission to use everything?"
     "Whatever you like."
     He thought a moment.  "Would you wait while I call my editor?  It won't take long."
     Five minutes stretched to ten, ten to fifteen, fifteen to twenty.  When he finally reappeared, he apologized for taking so long and held out his hand.  "Thanks for coming forward," he said.  "I'll get this back to you as soon as I can."  Then he left.  I was disappointed at his lack of enthusiasm.
     Next day, my wife and I scoured the Sunday Post.  Nothing.  Chagrined, we concluded the editor had decided against me.  In our eyes, the Sunday paper would have been the ideal place to reach the most readers.  So sure was I they weren't going to use my material that next morning I didn't even look at the paper when I brought it in before breakfast, merely glancing after breakfast at the front page headlines to see what was going on in the world.
     Halfway down the page, my eyes hit the words, "PROFESSOR LEAVING NAVAL ACADEMY IN DISILLUSIONMENT OVER GRADE QUOTAS."  Omigod.  The lead sentence:  "An assistant professor of English who is praised by his superiors as a fine teacher is leaving the U.S. Naval Academy in disillusionment."  Holy shit.  It didn't sound like me, but there was my name in black and white.  On and on it went, making me sound like Socrates himself and the Academy like a gang of psychopaths.  It quoted liberally from the memo I wrote to myself after my first semester at Annapolis, which was full of the kind of inflammatory rhetoric the Post reporter put near the end of the article:  "One comes to prize what other schools call mediocrity, for at Annapolis mediocrity is excellence, incompetence is mediocrity, and mindlessness is worth a D."
     I had no idea what to expect at the Yard.  Imagining mids throwing rocks at me, I was relieved  when I arrived that no one in the sea of blue uniforms scurrying to 8 o'clock class even noticed me.  My own eight o'clock was a plebe elective called The Literature of Democracy that I was teaching for the first time.  Stomach tightening as I neared the classroom, I stopped ten feet from the door, took a deep breath, and stepped in.  To my astonishment, I was greeted with a standing ovation.
     Heartened, I confronted my colleagues after class in the Bullpen.  Predictably, most of the officers and younger civilians who'd seen the article liked it, warmly shaking my hand and razzing me.  The bitter comedian, who'd become one of my best friends at Annapolis, gave me a long, benevolent look.
"Well, young man," he said, "you've really done it this time.  Our lords and masters will not be pleased."  On the other hand, many of the senior civilians shunned me.  One turned on his heel and stalked off when he was sure I'd seen him.
     The air was humming with excitement.  On my desk lay a pile of memos already hand-delivered by the department secretaries.  CBS and NBC wanted television interviews.  Half a dozen newspapers, including the New York Times, asked me to get in touch ASAP.  A television crew from the CBS affiliate in Washington owned by the Post had already arrived, obviously to scoop the story, and was waiting to interview me at the Academy administration building.
     Clearly, national and even international notoriety was mine for the taking.  I could have extended my fifteen minutes of fame for some time if I'd wanted.  But as I walked the hundred yards to the administration building, I decided to give no interviews at all.  I'd gotten everything I wanted and needed from the Post article, and making myself a pseudo-celebrity would only have made my life at the Academy, where I had to finish the year, and maybe later on at Maryland more difficult.
     So even though the television reporter was furious with me, I stuck to my guns then and throughout the following week, when phone calls from TV networks, newspapers, and magazines like Time and Newsweek never stopped pouring in.  The Spanish teacher did a fine job filling the interview vacuum caused by my refusal.  Interviewed by the Post TV station in my place, he did so well that network TV had him on the next day.  AP and UP picked up the story.  Though coverage subsided in a few days, he'd already knocked the Academy reeling.  Several Congressmen were calling for an investigation.
     The hullabaloo ended as quickly as it began.  As soon as the media saw I wouldn't cooperate, they dropped me cold.  I got back to my humdrum duties, and most of the senior civilians stopped snubbing me when they saw I wasn't chasing the spotlight.  But I will never forget the reaction of the senior midshipmen in my first-class English course (the one requiring Homer, Virgil, Dante, et al) on April 11, 1966, the day the Post article appeared.
     The plebes in my elective course may have applauded me, but the seniors in World Lit did no such thing.  I've never felt such hatred as I did in that room, a hatred etched in the scowling, white-lipped faces glaring at me from the rows of classroom chairs.  I had the oddly calm sense that, if they could, those men would have killed me on the spot.  They had closed ranks in true military fashion, shutting their minds unalterably against me for having rocked the boat they'd spent four years learning to sail unquestioningly.  What I saw in those homicidal glares was the real goal of a Naval Academy education:  to obliterate all challenges to military tradition and the chain of command.
     This unwillingness to tolerate skepticism toward or deviation from orthodoxy is the main source of the fraudulence I found at Annapolis and continue to find in all military, academic, and religious organizations.  By inculcating blind faith among their followers in the rightness and needfulness of the institution's viewpoint, they not only continually distort and deny reality but often, as in the Annapolis grade quotas, academia's publish-or-perish dogmas, and Islamic terrorism, pursue vicious,  stupid, and ultimately self-destructive ends.  In other words, their fraudulence stems as much from self-deception as from efforts to deceive others.  Academia is arguably less prone, for many reasons, to this kind of fraudulence than is religion or the military.  But forty years as a professional academician convinced me plenty of it exists there too.  After all, the Naval Academy is both a military and an academic institution.

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CONSOLATION TWENTY-ONE: MILITARY SERVICE (2)

     In my last post, I explained how disillusionment with fulltime teaching at the University of Rochester in 1962-64, along with discovering that the Bible was an entirely human artifact, experiencing Kennedy's assassination in fall 1963, and chancing across a recruiting letter from the Naval Academy, led me to leave Rochester for a civilian assistant professorship at Annapolis in fall 1964.
     When I and my wife moved into our waterfront rental near Annapolis with our two pre-school children in July 1964, we felt we were escaping from a nightmare to a sunshiny morning.  We joined the Academy clubs -- officers', sailing, swimming, golfing -- and enrolled the kids in the Academy's K-3 primary school, all at no cost.  After being processed through a series of personnel offices, I underwent a battery of physical exams and an FBI security check.
     In the large, high-ceilinged, Victorian room that I and the twenty other English teachers, many of whom I got to know during the week before classes, shared as an office, I heard from the editor of American Quarterly that the article I'd submitted back at Rochester had been accepted.  Enclosed in his letter were clips from the anonymous readers' reports, the first typifying the rest:  "Boring, but okay."  Thrilled though I was by the acceptance, which I felt vindicated me against my Rochester detractors, I was cynical about it too.  "Boring, but okay" -- some showpiece of academic thought and care that.
     The Academy was very sociable.  In no time my wife and I had met a dozen young couples, civilian and military, whom we liked.  Near the end of August the social season officially got under way with an afternoon cruise on Chesapeake Bay in a fancy launch the Academy maintained for just such events.  Those of us new to the Navy were dazzled by the lavish food and drink served aboard by white-gloved Filipino orderlies.  As we disembarked, bursts of alcohol-fueled laughter filled the dusk.
     Even more impressive was the superintendent's reception, held a week later in the mansion, located next to the Academy chapel, that served as the superintendent's residence.  All the officers were in formal dress, the Navy people in white tunics with full braid and ribbons, the Marines in their extraordinary red, white, blue, and gold costumes.  Most of the women wore long gowns, most of the civilian men tuxedos.  We were greeted at the door by a receiving line of the Academy's top brass and their wives, anchored by the superintendent himself.  His residence was a three-story palace full of chandeliers and floor-length draperies, with formal gardens out back.  To the strains of a string quartet, scores of elegant couples moved through the halls, salons, and flowers, sipping champagne and sampling hors d'oeuvres.  The mansion, the music, the calling cards dropped from gloved hands into a bowl at the entrance were part of a centuries-old tradition that could mean getting killed, as countless plaques, tablets, and monuments on the Academy grounds testified.  Beneath all this gossamer finery lurked mortal danger.  I was snowed.
     My first day of teaching was a rude shock.
     We new teachers had been given an orientation of sorts to plebe English by the professor who chaired the course, an articulate Yale Ph.D. who, like most of the tenured EH&G civilians, had begun his career at Annapolis during or just after World War II.  He'd said just the kind of thing I wanted to hear -- our teaching mattered because these men would control nuclear weapons, we had to teach them to think, read, and write clearly, we had to instill in them the humane values of western civilization --, and he'd said it amusingly and convincingly.
     He'd also told us the rituals to expect, like the mids standing at attention while reporting attendance.  But he'd barely hinted at what turned out to be the central fact of every one of my four plebe English sections from the start.  Half the men in  every class were too tired to stay awake.  The first day, many simply put their heads down on the writing arms of their chairs when I gave the at-ease signal and fell asleep.  Others sat upright with their heads slack-jawed on their chests, likewise oblivious.  Still others made a pretense of propping a book or notebook on the writing arm, then scrunched down to sleep behind it.  One pale, sick-looking mid unnerved me by rolling his eyeballs up into his skull whenever he nodded off.  Another held his eyelids open with his fingers and stared at me with blank, bloodshot, saucer-like eyes.  One snored so loudly I had to stop the class to wake him up.  Books and pens kept clattering to the floor, nudged off desks by unconscious heads and arms or dropped from unconscious hands.  One mid barely caught himself from falling out of his chair.
     At the end of the day I staggered back to my desk in the bullpen, stunned.  I and several other new teachers, civilian and military, gathered in a knot of disbelief and began swapping atrocities.  Suddenly a gray-haired man I hadn't met joined us and launched into a deadpan harangue.
     "My good fellows," he said, "welcome to the United States Naval Academy.  The other day, our lord and master" -- meaning the course chairman -- "told you of the glorious rewards of teaching midshipmen.  What he did not tell you, indeed, what our Navy lords and masters never tell anyone, is that the real aim of the United States Naval Academy is to transform the average, decent, acne-plagued, eighteen-year-old American adolescent, within the space of four short years, into a perfect monster of ignorance and incivility.  They begin the process, gentlemen, by depriving the plebe fresh from farm, suburb, or city, during the first six months of his naval career, of a modicum of the sleep he needs, which naturally gets him in the habit of sleeping through anything irrelevant, like his classes, to his becoming an accomplished lout.
     "The pitiable creature must quickly learn, if he is to survive, to accept stupefaction as the norm of his Naval Academy existence.  Stupefied, he stumbles from one class to the next, not knowing whether he's in Bull, Steam, or Dago," -- he hissed the mid slang for EH&G, engineering, and foreign languages melodramatically -- "seeing his teachers as nothing but diabolical tormentors who will not let him do the one thing he longs from the bottom of his heart to do --  sleep, sleep, sl-e-e-e-e-p.  Sooner or later he must accept his destiny, if he is ever to graduate and get his commission, and become the brute our lords and masters want."
     I liked this bitter comedian at once.  My first months at the Annapolis gave me a similarly sardonic opinion of the place.  Though plebe hazing eased and some of my students did marginally acceptable work, I was appalled at what I faced every day in the classroom, where the war against "stupefaction," as the bitter comedian put it, never ended.  In one unusually drowsy section, I was struck dumb when, having had my eyes on the blackboard a minute, I turned back and found more than half the class wandering around at the rear of the room like restless zombies, which they were allowed to do to stay awake.
     The sleeping was symptomatic of an anti-intellectualism that pervaded the Yard, one that followed seamlessly from what I came to understand was the Navy's top priority at Annapolis -- training the mids to follow orders.  Plebe hazing was the system's bedrock.  Though the harshest kinds of hazing had supposedly been outlawed during the decade before I arrived, they were all still secrectly practiced, as several mids confided to me.  Plebes were still ordered to swim to Baltimore after lights out:   lie on their bellies and pretend to swim the crawl for hours.  Or their gear was trashed just before inspection.  Or they were ordered on illegal scavenger hunts over the wall into downtown Annapolis to steal public or private property.  Or they were given far more trivia to memorize than officially allowed.
     Learning to fear, depnd on, and live by the chain  of command was the ultimate reality of a midshipman's life.  In most respects, plebe English and, as I gathered from colleagues in other subjects, the entire Academy curriculum was more like that of a second-rate high school than a college or university.  In January, at the end of my first semester, I wrote myself a memo of everything I disliked about teaching at Annapolis.
     Yet shaken as I was,  I began the second semester looking forward to my section of first-class English, a semester-long survey of world lit required of all senior-year midshipmen.  Designed to expose them to works like the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Inferno, Hamlet, Candide, Faust, Moby Dick, and The Stranger just as they were getting their commissions and joining the fleet, it represented what I most wanted to do as an Annapolis teacher.
     But however hardened I'd been by my first semester with the plebes, I was cut to the quick by how many first classmen settled down to sleep before we were two minutes into the class.  What galled me most was that they didn't even look tired.  They were so used to sleeping in class that they did it automatically.
     All but a couple of the fifteen men in the section proved in succeeding weeks to be utterly uninterested in the material and unprepared for the reading and writing assignments.  It was as though Homer, Shakespeare, and Camus were from another universe.  All that mattered to these elaborately fed, dressed, exercised, and trained young animals was escaping from the Yard.  They thought of nothing else, they lived for nothing else.  I and my babble about life and death, war and peace, appearance and reality was to them no different from inspection or forming for chow.  It was all part of the same enchainment, one that after four years had become so trivial, boring, and banal that they found no meaning in it save for the one great commandment:  fuck off whenever possible.  Trying to make them read Virgil was like trying to make a pack of wild dogs eat celery.
     What to do about their mid-term grades?  As in my first-semester plebe classes, I knew that on the basis of their tests and papers I should fail almost everyone.  Not to fail at least half would be a travesty of the academic standards I'd absorbed from a decade at Amherst, Harvard, Stanford, and Rochester.  Stretching, straining, and fudging as generously as I could, I came up with a grading curve centered at  D plus/C minus.  My three second-semester plebe sections were better:  they bell-curved roughly around C.
     Thus I was caught completely off guard by what happened two weeks later.  We were all summoned by the chairman of plebe English to a meeting in the bullpen, where he told us that, because low grades threatened to keep too many mids from making the C averages they needed to graduate, the Navy's Bureau of Personnel (BuPers) had ordered the Academy to raise grades instantly and across the board.  What this meant for plebe English, he explained, was that at least fifteen percent of all final grades must be A, at least thirty-five percent B.  In other words, half the plebe class must get B's or better in English.
     From the way he announced it, he plainly saw nothing odd or wrong in the order, winding up his briefing on a cheerful, let's-all-pitch-in note:  "We don't have to give fifteen percent A's and thirty-five percent B's in every section," he said.  "A bad section can get less, a good section more.  We've got lots of flexibility."
     Dead silence.  Finally the bitter comedian stood up and peered around at our frozen, open-mouthed faces.  "Gentlemen," he said, "our lords and masters are about to lead us into exciting new realms of academic infamy.  The least we can do is follow like good little sheep."  He sat down.
     Uproar.  No one came to the chairman's defense.  Among the loudest protesters were the officers.  Sputtered one jg, "The whole time I was in the fleet, I was trying to find the real Navy.  I thought for sure I'd find it at Annapolis.  Have I ever!"
     A Marine captain:  "Outrageous!  Absolutely outrageous!  What the hell do they think they're doing?"
     So furious and insubordinate were the cries that the bullpen doors and windows were shut in order to prevent any outsider from hearing.  Clearly, further protest would be dangerous -- for the officers, impossible.  Having gotten a direct order, they could be court-martialled for disobeying.  Only the civilians were legally free to act, yet everyone knew that resistance would be seen by the administration, including the new civilian dean who'd signed the order, as grounds for dismissal.
     From the moment I grasped what the chairman was saying, I knew I'd not only have to fight the quotas to the bitter end but also, in all probability, leave Annapolis.  Obviously the Navy had decided it needed as many officers as possible for the Vietnam war buildup, then at full throttle.  My opposition to that buildup heightened my revulsion at the grade-fixing scheme.  Both seemed to me perfect reasons for not allowing any military establishment to determine policy.  The essential fraudulence, self-delusion, and stupidity of the military mind seemed clear to me in both cases.
     After a month of stonewalling and sandbagging, the Academy chain of command finally routed my protest through to the dean.  It read, "1.  Several weeks ago [the course chairman] announced to the Fourth Class Committee your instruction on grade quotas, and since that time I have been demoralized as a teacher of midshipmen and disillusioned with the Naval Academy.  2.  I feel it is my duty to inform you that if the device of grade quotes is not disavowed by the Academy I will resign my position of the expiration of my contract next year.  I have reached this decision with regret, since I have enjoyed many aspects of my work here.  Respectfully."
     Common sense told me the gesture was futile, yet deep down I hoped it might help bring the Navy to its senses.  A week later such illusions were blown to bits.  The dean told me by letter that since grade quotas were the result of "most careful consideration," the faculty would "have to abide" by them.  If I couldn't, he'd be "pleased" to accept my resignation but would like "reasonable notification" if I meant to resign before my contract expired.
     So much for heroics.  Fortunately, the academic job market back then was still good, and the dean's letter convinced me that the only way to avoid even murkier backwaters than Annapolis was to re-commit myself to the academic ratrace I'd left at Rochester and publish.  I started serious work on a project I'd been toying with since my article was accepted -- expanding my dissertation to include two more authors and getting it placed at the best university press I could.
     My motive for trying to get my name on a scholarly book was hardly love of learning.  It was to get tenure and a leg up on a full professorship at a decent school.  Convinced literary scholarship was incurably self-reflexive, I was nevertheless willing to do it to escape from the Academy to the kind of place that at least wouldn't fix grades.
     With this goal in mind, I plunged during the summer vacation into ten-hour research and writing days.  Aiding me were the extraordinary privileges I had as an Academy faculty member at the Library of Congress in Washington, where I proceeded to put in three solid months of six-day work weeks.  If all went according to plan, a year hence I'd be teaching anywhere but Annapolis, with everything but the writing done for a publishable book.
     But of course nothing ever goes exactly according to plan.

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