A Christmas Ghost-Story

Here is a poem, written by Thomas Hardy 114 years ago, which asks a perennial but hopelessly rhetorical question. (It was the Boer War in which the English soldier died.)

A Christmas Ghost Story

South of the Line, inland from Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies - your countryman.

Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

Nightly to clear Canopus: "I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be right, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears

In tacking 'Anno Domino' to the years?

Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,

But tarries yet the Cause fpr which He died."

Christmas Eve, 1899

Just to avoid confusion, I suppose, the term "A.D." ("Anno Domino," or"Year of Our Lord") and B.C. ("Before Christ") were dropped by many historians and archaeologists in favor of the inoffensive (to non-Christians) terms C.E. ("Christian Era") and B.C.E.

Anatomy of a Christmas Carol

Christmas Carols, songs or hymns sung during the Christmas season, have a history going back to 4th century Rome. The Protestant Reformation actually accelerated the popularity of carols, since Martin Luther encouraged music in churches and composed carols himself. The tradition in England can be traced back as far as the 17th century. One of the finest and most beautiful Christmas carol sequences was composed by Benjamin Britten in 1942. 


John Rutter (b. 1945), who has become a favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (he composed some of their wedding music) has specialized in choral music and has assembled the choral group The Cambridge Singers to perform his own as well as other favorite choral pieces in the English canon. As arranger and editor, he compiled the four volume Carols for Choirs with David Willcocks. Among them are the exquisite carols, "Candlelight Carol," "Christmas Lullaby," and "Christmas Night." 

"Candlelight Carol" became especially wondrous for me when I became trapped in a Philippine province without power after Super Typhoon Haiyan last November. I tried to make the approach of Christmas as cheery as possible by listening, throughout the sometimes unnerving silence at night, to my MP3 recordings of Rutter's carols (after charging my batteries every day using a neighbor's generator) long into the starry nights. My companion and I had candles that illumined our sala (living room), and Rutter's carol was beautifully coincidental.

But even more exquisite is what is probably Rutter's finest carol, "What Sweeter Music." (You can listen to it on YouTube here.) The original carol was composed by M. Henry Lawes (who also set Milton's Comus to music) to words written by the extraordinary poet Robert Herrick. At the start Herrick asks, 

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly king?

Herrick seems to remind us that "sweet" was one of Shakespeare's favorite words, and he uses the occasion of the birth of Jesus, a humble event in a Bethlehem barn, to present to us startlingly fresh imagery and a vision of a baby as a bringer of joy and of love to a winterbound world.

Dark and dull night, fly hence away
And give the honour to this day
That sees December turn's to May.

Why does this chilly winter's morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly shorn,
Thus, on a sudden?

Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
'Tis He is born, whose quick'ning birth
Gives life and lustre, public mirth,
To heaven and under-earth.

We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who, with His sunshine and His showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.


How could the announcement of Jesu's birth be more simply and lovingly put than Herrick's line "The darling of the world is come"? No one, to my knowledge, ever called the Son of God "darling." 

Herrick reminds us of the origin of the Christmas festival, borrowed from the pagan Roman Saturnalia - a mid-winter period of feasting, a sudden and, sadly, a brief reappearance of spring in the midst of darkness and cold. It's no accident, then, that Christmas became especially precious to Northern Europeans, for whom winters are longer and bleaker.

Of Herrick, George Saintsbury wrote: 

"The last - the absolutely last if we take his death-date - of those poets who have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in another, was Robert Herrick."

The View from the Hill

My two favorite writers are George Orwell and Albert Camus. Orwell was born in 1903 and Camus a decade later, in fact a hundred tears ago today.(1) There are a few interesting similarities between them. Both were born in colonies, outposts of empire: Orwell in British India and Camus in French Algeria. Both were teachers for s short time, long enough to learn that they hated the job. Both were Leftists who tried to avoid its orthodoxies. Both contracted tuberculosis - Camus was cured, but the disease killed Orwell. Both created striking parables on totalitarianism, The Plague in 1947 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. And both of them died at the age of 46.

Because I encountered him when I was a very young man, Camus has been with me the longest time, and I think I cherish him more because of this. Through the years, the truth in his writings has been continually confimed: "Le monde est beau, et hors de lui, point de salut." (The world is beautiful, and there is no salvation beyond it.) Despite having lived - so far - nine years longer than he, these words seem to me more true than ever.

His seminal, and central essay was The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942 concurrent with his first brilliantly serious and sensuous novel, The Stranger (2). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a mentor for Camus, was critical of the essay because of its lack of philosophical rigor. Sartre may have been a better philosopher, but Camus was by far the better artist. Sisyphus is a fascinating treatise because of its highly imaginative, personal and emotional content.

It was this work, with its metaphor of a contented - even a happy - Sisyphus fulfilling his Sisyphean task of pushing a giant rock to the top of a hill, only to watch as it rolls all the way back down to the bottom, that introduced to literature Camus's concept of the Absurd, insisting that all human endeavors are ultimately as fruitless and profitless. "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."

Faced with knowledge of the futility of his life, Man must inevitably contemplate suicide. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." Camus himself had attempted suicide. "At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face." How can he possibly be happy, knowing what he knows of the futility and hopelessness of his life? What would stop someone from suicide if he possessed such knowledge? Even thus punished for eternity by the Gods, Sisyphus's triumph lies in his rebellion - his refusal to be damned by his labors. "But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself." Camus concludes in his essay that, even if this tedious effort is his only reality, the condition of being a man, he must accept it, embrace it, ceaselessly throw himself into the effort. "What is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The image that Camus leaves us with is indelible: Sisyphus on the hilltop, turning to descend down the hill to where the rock - his rock - has rolled once again. Is it a faint smile I see on his shadowy face? "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."

For me, this is Camus's greatest achievement - making words and abstract concepts into flesh. "In the beginning was the Word," the gospel of John begins. "And the word was made flesh." And it's what distinguishes Camus the artist from Camus the philosopher. It is only because they convince one as works of art that his most philosophical essays live on.


(1) My father was born the same year, on March 13. 3-13-13. Needlessly to say, my father was a gambler all his life.
(2) The word "stranger" is a better equivalent to the French l'Étranger than "outsider," which is also gauche.

A World in Print

On further reflection (always a mistake), I find that the words I published two days ago - twenty-two days too late - on the occasion of my learning of the death of Stanley Kauffmann were helplessly inadequate. I was reading a post on John Simon's blog that he published last month, referring to Kauffmann in the past tense. Since I was already sensitive to the man's advanced age (97), I checked and discovered the news of his passing. I seem to have dropped everything since.

I can't properly gauge how much this man meant - and still means - to me, since it had a cumulative effect over most of my life. His writings on film (and it's important to remember that he wrote about much more than just films) are as heartening and restorative to read as it is to watch the films he so brilliantly celebrated, like L'Avventura, about which he wrote in 1960. 

He showed anyone who cared to read his column that, despite all the worthless prattle that about 99 % of film commentary amounts to, some films demand serious consideration. But even when he wrote about utterly forgettable films, like How to Live Forever (2009), he found something beautiful to say (italics mine):

There isn’t much new to be said about death, but that won’t stop us, all of us, from saying it. Hence this documentary—and this review of it.

How to Live Forever was made by the experienced Mark Wexler, who, an affable host, appears in it as interviewer. He visits people all over this country and in a few others who are interested, in their smiling ways, in death. They very rarely mention it: what they talk about mostly is prolonging life or rejuvenation, neither of which would be subjects at all if it were not for death.

The film begins with a visit to a trade show of funeral equipment in a huge exhibition hall through which we are guided by a sexy blonde in a clinging dress who makes winsome faces at us in front of coffins. But Wexler’s tone throughout is not satirical: he is sympathetic as he interviews a guru of calorie-counting-as-life-preserver, one of laughing yoga, one of physical fitness (Jack LaLanne, who did all that fitness could do). He gives us a glimpse of elderly porn performers in Japan. He takes us to visit a 101-year-old man who smokes and drinks, then a 114-year-old woman who did not smoke or drink—on camera at least. We hear the venerable comedian Phyllis Diller, who talks about meeting a man so old that his blood type has been discontinued. There is much, much more.

Through it all we feel a slight bewilderment—that there are so many people who treat death as if it were a problem to be solved. None of the teachers or masters in the film promises immortality, but each of them is proposing—is selling-a means of treating inevitability as questionable. The only memorable comment comes, unsurprisingly, from Sherwin B. Nuland, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine who is also a notable author (and a contributor to these pages). He says he feels that his death is a debt to the past and to the future. We can take this to mean that the past gave him a place in a tremendous procession, that he had a chance to make a contribution, and that now he must make room for those to come. This seems a bit stoic, but it has a ring to it.

Stanley Kauffmann's contribution to the tremendous procession is incalculable.

Stanley Kauffmann (1916-2013)

Stanley Kauffmann, who was The New Republic's film critic for fifty-five years (the length of my own life, so far), died on October 9, at the age of 97. I wish I could say that it has taken me this long to come up with the words to measure the depth of my sense of loss. But the awful fact is, it's taken me this long to find out. I don't have access to the internet 24-7. It's more like an hour or two a week. Here is what The New Republic published on the day of his death. At the bottom of the selection of tributes are links to other articles by and about him. His New York Times obit is here.

I expressed some of my admiration for the man on the occasion of his 97th birthday. I hope I didn't do it too clumsily. The simple fact is that I wanted to say something while he was still around, still in the same world I live in, still watching and commenting on films. Film has gone through too many dispiriting slumps in the last fifty years, shifts in taste and in the utterly fickle attention span of what Kauffmann himself called the Film Generation. Kauffmann took every slump in stride, and insisted that claims for the death of cinema were always premature. Yet he admitted to being amazed, every year, when a beautiful and intelligent film from some of the unlikeliest places in the world showed up on his doorstep in New York. And he sympathized with some of his readers who lived in places where those films would only ever reach them via netflix.

For a long time, I was one of those readers, living in the boondocks. The word "bundok" is a Tagalog (Filipino) word that refers to a remote, inaccessible place. And now I'm living in an actual bundok, in the Philippines, so removed from the world, in fact, that the news of my favorite film critic's death took three weeks to reach me.

He was in the same class of American film critics as Otis Ferguson (who also wrote for The New Republic), James Agee, and Dwight Macdonald. His long life kept alive the somewhat romantic hope that there would be a few more by now to add to that list. America has certainly been luckier with its film critics than with its films. That hope isn't exactly dashed, but it seems so much more romantic than it used to.

So long, Mr. Kauffmann.

Domestic Cruelty

A "symbiosis" is defined in the OED as

noun (plural symbioses /-ˌsēz/)

Biology

interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both.

An example of such a phenomenon is a plant that has brilliantly colored flowers and nectar that attracts hummingbirds who, while feasting on the nectar with their long, thin beaks, pollenate the plant. The plant and the hummingbird depend on each other for survival.

Humans have no such symbiotic relationship with animals or plants. We exploit nature for our own benefit. Livestock animals depend for their survival on us, but not vice-versa. Over the millennia, animals have been enlisted to provide us with fodder and hides, and also to bear our burdens.

Our relationship with dogs - easily the most privileged animals among us - has gone through numerous permutations. Originally, it is likely that wild dogs were captured and kept in human settlements, fed leftovers (giving the dog a bone), used to pull sleds across the ice and snow, and to guard against intruders. This dependence on humans brought about - in an animal more intelligent than any other domesticated animal (even if pigs are reportedly smarter) - a much closer relationship, a devotion or loyalty to an individual's family, or to a group. But the limitations of the relationship have always been clearly defined, since, for one thing, the lifespan of dogs is not even as long as one human generation.

People have shown a profound love for dogs from the beginning, but lately, and perhaps only in the most technically developed societies, dog loving has reached unprecedented proportions. As an adjunct, I suppose, to veterinary medicine, people calling themselves "dog psychologists" are popping up everywhere, and it has become a big business since the success of the "reality" TV program "The Dog Whisperer," and its star, Cesar Milan. Milan's show demonstrates - powerfully - how little dog owners understand how dog's think. It also shows the incredible amount of room that some people are prepared to set aside in their lives for their dogs.

This remarkable accommodation of dogs in people's lives is relatively new, and I think it can be traced to the fall in birthrates in the most developed countries. Single men and women and older couples whose children have grown up and left home adopt dogs for obvious reasons. Some even admit that they prefer their dogs to husbands, live-in partners, or children.(1) It's clear that an exaggerated love for animals goes hand in hand with a certain amount of misanthropy.

Probably nothing else illuminates the true dimensions of the accommodation of dogs in people's lives than a pet cemetery. There is a scene in the unforgettable 1962 Italian "documentary" Mondo Cane (Bestial World) in which images of old ladies visiting a pet cemetery in the U.S., with old women tearfully placing flowers on the graves of their departed poodles, were juxtaposed with shots from a Singapore restaurant yelping puppies crammed into cages were on the menu, like live lobsters in aquariums at the supermarket.

The helpless, instinctive devotion of dogs to people is exploited to some extreme instances. The superiority of a dog's senses of smell and hearing is routinely employed by police and rescue personnel. When dogs are used in law enforcement or combat situations, in so-called K-9 units, the situations are potentially lethal. When these units award medals to their dogs for "valor" or "courage under fire", whether or not they're still alive, their handlers are being downright obtuse. Such ceremonies make it hard to determine who is more oblivious that the use of dogs in K-9 units is exploitation, pure and simple - the dogs themselves or their handlers. It's no different, really, from the use of dogs in scientific experiments. When the first American astronauts were asked by an obtuse reporter how they differed from the chimpanzee that NASA had shot into space, they had to point out that the chimps had no idea they were sitting on top of a rocket about to be shot into space. Before the chimp could comprehend his hazardous situation, he would have to understand how a rocket ship works and what outer space is. Similarly, dogs in K-9 units are doing nothing more than following the commands of their handlers, with no comprehension of explosives or ballistics.

When American movie productions use animals, there is usually a disclaimer from the American Humane Association stating that no animals were harmed during the making of the film. They make no mention of the occasional harm to people during the filming, like injuries to stunt-people, simply because the people are involved in the production voluntarily and the animals are not. Recently, the hit HBO series Luck was cancelled because three horses (the film is centered on a race track) were killed during the shooting.

But the exploitation of dogs goes much further than most people realize. In 2011, a documentary called Project Nim was released that was an account of a Columbia University experiment in the 1970s in which a baby chimpanzee, named Nim Chimpsky (after Noam Chomsky, who has claimed that humans are the only animals that use language), was raised among humans just like a human child. Problems started to arise as the chimp grew in size and strength. In the middle of the experiment, funding dried up and Nim's handlers were told they would have to give hand him over to an animal shelter. When one of the handlers, a young woman, started to leave the protective compound in which the experiment was being conducted, Nim turned violent and savagely beat the handler's head against the pavement. With no serious injuries, the woman later observed, "You can't give human nurturing to an animal that could kill you."

In his review of the documentary, Michael Wood, film critic for the London Review of Books, wondered:

"We can refuse to recognize the otherness of other animals by pretending they are like us, versions of us; and we can, it seems, understand their otherness only by a more refined use of the same method. But what constitutes the refinement? ... But then what I really want to know is not what a chimpanzee would feel if he was human but what I would feel if I was a chimpanzee."

But what dog owners practice all over the world is a kind of rehearsal of the experiment in Project Nim - they invite animals into their homes and treat them like family members, without for a moment comprehending what it must mean to the animal. When the chimp Nim was finally settled into a wildlife ranch where several other chimps were kept, it took him awhile to grasp the fact that he was a chimpanzee himself and that he belonged with other chimps and not with people. When one of Nim's handlers visited him years after his "resettlement" among chimps, she made the mistake of entering his enclosure. Nim, who apparently recognized her, went berserk and threw the woman around his cage like a rag doll. The woman was rescued and survived the attack.

Animal shelters reveal a great deal about what people really think and feel about dogs and what the actual status of dogs is in human society. According to American Humane Association calculations, "56 percent of dogs ... that enter animal shelters are euthanized." Actual numbers aren't available, but it's estimated that "approximately 3.7 million animals were euthanized in the nation’s shelters in 2008. This number represents a generally accepted statistic that is widely used by many animal welfare organizations, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)." Only about one-quarter of dogs that enter shelters end up adopted. This is a direct result of dog-owners' refusal to get their pets spayed or neutered.

Animal shelters use the word "adoption" when people remove a dog, for a small fee. there is never any real confusion about the nature of a dog owner's ownership of the animal. The dogs are property, pure and simple. They wear collars identifying the names of their owners. They don't "run away" from their owners so much as they escape their captivity. To facilitate their recovery, many dog owners are having microchips implanted in their animals.

More and more in prosperous countries, people are bestowing on dogs a status far above all other animals, while never quite redeeming them from their condition as animals. In his inimitable way, Rilke caught the heartbreaking poignancy of our relationship with dogs, and the full extent of the crime we unwittingly, and repeatedly, commit on them: "We help them up into a soul," he wrote, "for which there is no heaven."

(1) When I left home for the Navy, and after my father died, my mother, who always called me "Danny Boy," adopted a West Highland Terrier that she named "Donny Boy." She could've been more subtle, but I suppose that might've ruined the symbolism.

Shadow Union

Last Friday, when Saudi Arabia was offered a 2-year membership by the United Nations Security Council (an inner circle of the most powerful and influential nations in the world), it took the unprecedented step of refusing the honor, citing the UN's failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and the war in Syria.

In 1946, a year after the United Nations had been established, George Orwell was one of the few observers to point out what was to him the obvious:

"In order to have any efficacy whatever, a world organization must be able to override big states as well as small ones. It must have power to inspect and limit armaments, which means that its officials must have access to every square inch of every country. It must also have at its disposal an armed force bigger than any other armed force and responsible only to the organization itself. The two or three great states that really matter have never even pretended to agree to any of these conditions, and they have so arranged the constitution of U.N.O. that their own actions cannot even be discussed. In other words, U.N.O.'s usefulness as an instrument of world peace is nil. This was just as obvious before it began functioning as it is now. Yet only a few months ago millions of well-informed people believed that it was going to be a success."(1)

Orwell knew the importance of the UN, but doubted that it would be allowed to perform its mission, which was to defuse further wars. In 68 years, one has only to look around the world to see that the UN has failed to fulfill its mission. The list of its more spectacular blunders is a long one: Sri Lanka, the "veto power" used by obstructionist regimes in China and Russia to stop much-needed interventions, the Srebrenica Massacre, Cambodia's Killing Fields, Darfur, and Rwanda. The latest disgrace was "inadvertently" committed by UN soldiers from Nepal sent to Haiti to assist in the nation's reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake. The soldiers dumped human waste into a river that was used by Haitians for bathing, washing clothes, and water to drink. A cholera epidemic erupted that has so far killed more than 8,000 people and sickened nearly 400,000. The UN, while acknowledging responsibility for the deadly mistake, now insists their charter makes them immune from criminal liability.

It is a terrible legacy, and yet when Saudi Arabia announced its rejection of the Security Council seat, all the experts could say was that Saudi Arabia's king is old and out of it, that it is a rich but decaying kingdom. I interpreted it as the first admission of the truth of the UN's uselessness. Its timing may have been suspect (the UN had just finished criticizing Saudi Arabia's human rights record), but its truth is undeniable.

But why must every effort to limit war or to make war untenable end in failure? Despite all of its shortcomings, its many embarrassing compromises and miserable failures, the UN as an ideal - even an impossible ideal - remains a perfectly sensible one. It seems to me the inevitable solution in a sane world to the threat of military aggression. War would be unthinkable if every nation, even the smaller, "emerging" nations, contributed money and manpower to an international organization whose sovereign power could override that of any single nation, big or small. Nations would be bound, not by just treaty but by common sense, not to interfere with the territory, trade, or treasury of its neighbors simply because to do so would impel every other nation, in the form of one united body, to come to its defense. It would require, however, a partial surrender of national sovereignty, which the most powerful nations of the world have refused to do.

Clearly, the UN has only so much power as its member states choose to allow it. Many Americans - the ones who call themselves "patriots," even though they're actually nationalists - oppose the UN on principle, believing that the United States must never relinquish any of its sovereignty because to do so would bring about the destruction of the American way of life. Their argument has always seemed out of date. The parallel wars fought by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rebellions in Libya and Syria, in which many Americans have felt obliged to intervene, have seriously weakened Americans' appetite for being the "policemen of the world." Someone else will have to be called on to fulfill that role as long as the UN remains powerless to resolve world conflicts.

(1) "In Front of Your Nose," Tribune, 22 March 1946.