Faith, Epilepsy and Meaning in The Idiot and Beyond

My favorite parts of Dostoevsky’s novels are those that deal with faith and meaning – the relationship between Raskolnikov and Sonia, especially the Lazarus parts, of Crime and Punishment; the dialecticals between Alyosha and Ivan, Father Zosima and Father Paissy in The Brothers Karamazov; the expository and narrative parts of Notes from Underground – essentially, I’m attracted to all the possibilities for redemption, for affirmations of meaningfulness.

That’s why a couple of chapters in The Idiot were so enjoyable for me. For context, the prince has returned to Petersburg from Moscow and is debating whether or not to go to Pavlovsk to visit Nastasya Fillipovna, the Epanchins and/or Lebedev. He stops at Rogozhin’s, where Rogozhin asks him if he believes in God.

The prince tells Rogozhin two anecdotes from his experience in Moscow. The first is the story of a peasant who killed his friend for a watch, who “went up to hi cautiously from behind, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself and, after praying bitterly to himself: ‘Lord, forgive me for Christ’s sake!’ – killed his friend with one blow, like a sheep, and took his watch.” (220)

The second is more resonant for the prince.

The next morning I went out for a stroll about town…and I saw a drunken soldier
staggering along the wooden sidewalk, all in tatters. He comes up to me: ‘Buy a silver cross, master. I’m asking only twenty kopecks. It’s silver!’ I see a cross in his hand – he must have just taken it off – on a worn light blue ribbon, only it’s a real tin one, you could see it at first glance, big, eight-pointed, of the full Byzantine design. I took out twenty kopecks, gave them to him, and put the cross on at once – and I could see by his face how pleased he was to have duped the foolish gentleman, and he went to drink up his cross, there’s no doubt of that. Just then, brother, I was under the strongest impression of all that had flooded over me in Russia; before I understood nothing of it, as if I’d grown up a dumb brute, and I had somehow fantastic memories of it during those five years I spent abroad. So I went along and thought: no, I’ll wait before condemning this Christ-seller. God knows what’s locked away in these drunken and weak hearts. An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby. She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. And the baby smiled at her, as far as she’d noticed, for the first time since it was born. I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously. ‘What is it, young woman?’ I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.) ‘It’s just that a mother rejoices,’ she says, ‘when she notices her baby’s first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.’ (220)

And then the prince follows with a generalization that resonates with me, particularly in today’s culture where any public discussion involving religion is bound to be tied to politics and exploited for the sake of attacking a conservative or liberal agenda.

…The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child – the main thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman! True, she’s a mother…and, who knows, maybe this woman was that soldier’s wife. Listen, Parfyon, you asked me earlier, here is my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there’s something else here that’s not that, and it will eternally be not that; there’s something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and the will be talking not about that. But the main thing is that once can observe it sooner and more clearly in a Russian heart, and that is my conclusion! That is one of the first convictions I’ve formed about our Russia. (221)

From here, Rogozhin will trade crosses with the prince, signifying their brotherhood, a way to set up a parallel between the two peasants perhaps, as Rogozhin will shortly try to kill the prince with a knife, and will be stopped only by the prince’s epilepsy. The prince, meanwhile, will go from his discourse in Rogozhin’s house on this particularly Russian apprehension of God and religious feeling to a wandering around Petersburg in which he is perfectly attuned to all the details of his journey without the slightest effort at consciousness. This exalted state is a presentiment of the fit he will have when he reaches Pavlovsk:

He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. the sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as
if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than second) from which the fit itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards, in a healthy state, he had often said to himself that all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal
state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?” (225-6)

Sounds like an articulate argument for taking drugs, though I’m not sure if the high of drugs is evaluated the same way “in a healthy state,” particularly if you account for the idea of drugs being for many an escape from something. There’s a bit of a difference between self-medication and transcendence. Perhaps this fits in with the idea of my previous post about the presence of biography in fiction, but Dostoevsky the epileptic has the prince connect with Mohammed’s epilepsy on the next page:

“Probably,” he had added, smiling, “it’s the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammed did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah.” (227)

Finally, the prince’s reflections take us back to Nastasya Fillipovna and the difference between his love for her and Rogozhin’s. It is the comparison of degrees, exponentially increased when thought about, between passion and compassion. While there must be an overlapping of the two for a flame of love to burn, there is a point at which passion peters out unless it is fanned by compassion.

Is Rogozhin not capable of brightness? He says he loves her in a different way, that there is no compassion in him, “no such pity.” True, he added later that “your pity is maybe still worse than my love” – but he was slandering himself.

...No, Rogozhin was slandering himself; he has an immense heart, which is capable of passion and compassion. When he learns the whole truth and when he becomes convinced of what a pathetic creature this deranged, half-witted woman is – won’t he then forgive her all the past, all his suffering? Won’t he become her servant, her brother, friend, providence? Compassion will give meaning and understanding to Rogozhin himself. Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all
mankind. (230)

In the margin, I copied the line, “Compassion will give meaning and understanding.” How quickly all of us move to judgment, sometimes because of passion, sometimes because of our simple weaknesses. Without passion, compassion can be nothing more than condescension, empty patronage, or so it can be argued. But passion alone is the thing that makes Rogozhin want to possess Nastasya Fillipovna and put a knife in her. It is this hatred of the prince’s compassion that makes Rogozhin try to put a knife in him. And it is the same passion without compassion that makes a man beat his wife, or makes one lover kill another. This is the desire to love without loving, it is the product of an undeveloped consciousness that fails to consider the making of meaning as essential to one’s humanity.

The passage closes with the idea of forgiveness, and given what happens in the conflagration at Lebedev’s house nearer the end of Part II, I’ll probably get at the idea of forgiveness, hopefully more briefly, in the next post.

I wrote this last Wednesday at a place where I had no internet access. Now it's Sunday night, and I'm posting it.

For the Sake of Writing Things

There’s a degree to which the master plan has backfired. Did I want time to read and write this summer? Yeah. Did I want four hours a day to read? That, my friends, is a challenge to anyone’s reading stamina. I’ve also had writing time, but I’m finding it difficult to be both a consistent reader and a consistent writer. And the evening demands of dinner, clean-up and laundry have been increased by the need to water all the flower and plant beds. Is it possible I lamented the rains of May and June?

So I’ve finished Part I of The Idiot, and I’ve been looking for some poems to read. And as I was thinking about poems I’d like to revisit, I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Afternoon on a Hill” – I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! Maybe it’s “shall.” No matter. The point is that I’ve gotten the sense that Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biography is as essential to her writing as her poetry. I don’t think that’s true, but that’s an initial impression. And when I look at the pages I’ve dog-eared of The Idiot, they relate pretty directly to Dostoevsky’s biography. For whatever reason, his thoughts about life and death, what it means to live and die, are more pleasing to me because of Dostoevsky’s imminent execution and last-second reprieve. I suppose this gives his arguments about capital punishment a little something something that I haven’t come across before.

Coming back to the summer plan backfiring, I should get at the “to a degree” part, because there have been unintended consequences, good ones, that I would gladly exchange for the time I might have spent trying to effect an air of intellectualism. Foremost among these is the significant decrease in Kate’s fits. Perhaps she is being told “yes” more often, but I don’t thik that’s exactly it, given that we have not had ice cream every day. I think the bigger issue is that she’s hanging around older people and being accepted, and that she’s learning to live with not being first all the time.

Now I usually like to keep the trivia of family life out of this blog, but the generalization that has struck me is that a lot of kids are really nice. I can’t get over how patient and kind the 12 and 13 year-old girls at the pool have been to both Emma and Kate. Not that I should want to get over such a thing. At the same time, the high school and college-age lifeguards have been genuinely, authentically and really really nice. Again, it’s not that I’m surprised, but that I’m so happy to see the effect everyone this summer has had on my girls.

The broader point is that I haven’t had to work hard at all at believing in the goodness of people, especially young people. As a teacher, this deepens my sense of the essential humanity of the kids I teach. Many of them are giving joy to younger children this summer, or trying to perfect swimming strokes, diving contortions and other important skills that define themselves. What should a teacher do but try to help these kids achieve what they want to achieve, or to help them want to achieve things they don’t yet know they value. At the same time, a rejection of the things I value – literature, writing – is not a rejection of valuing itself. My job is to communicate the essential human value so they can embrace it when circumstance allows them.

How nice it is to sit in a beach chair in the parking lot of the pool at 9:30 in the morning, a breeze blowing, the screen obscured by light pollution, the sounds of kids making swim meet signs in the midground. Moments like these, man, moments like these.

In Praise of John Orman

I find it difficult to be sad when famous people die, so I wasn't that upset when Farrah Fawcett's death was overshadowed by Michael Jackson's. As a student of John Orman's "Politics and Popular Culture" class, however, I know just how much influence these iconic figures have in our American psyche.

I found it very easy to be sad when I read that John Orman had died. He was my favorite teacher at Fairfield U., and I thought I was unique in having taken every class he taught while I was there. Then I read the comments on the Fairfield Mirror website and other newspaper sites and blogs, and realized that there were a lot of people who, after taking one class with Dr. Orman, decided to take them all. He loved politics, he loved America, and he loved young people, and he actively expressed his love for years and years and years.

The link below takes you to a blog that is connected to some of the larger Connecticut newspapers, and it is a tribute to Dr. Orman from some of his closest friends.

http://www.myleftnutmeg.com/diary/11538/rip-john-orman

The Grand Inquisitor
from Continuum’s “Milestones of Thought,” edited by Anne Fremantle, translated by Constance Garnett

Remember last summer when I wrote that I wanted to write a bunch of things about The Brothers Karamazov? Of course you do, devoted devotee of my blog. Among the things that I desired to do but didn’t was write an entry on The Grand Inquisitor. And then, surprise, surprise, as I was in Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago, what do I find but a standalone edition of The Grand Inquisitor, something I might use with my AP class, if I can figure out how to help seventeen year-olds access its ideas.

So I read it again, and it was not easy, so let me work through a process to try to figure it out. We have a logical progression running through the temptations one, two and three and leading to the Inquisitor’s Utopia, which is, as Anne Fremantle points out, resemblant of the communist and fascist dictatorships of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the Islamist theocracies that have waged their campaigns of Draconian righteousness against inadequate believers.

The process I’ll go through is to take the task temptation by temptation, first as I remember it from the Gospel, then as Ivan’s Inquisitor sees it.

The First Temptation
Temptation one is to end the painful desert fast and turn the stones into bread. In the Gospels, Jesus’s reply is that man can not live by bread alone, that the nourishing of the spirit is greater than the nourishing of the body.

To the Inquisitor, Jesus’s choice of heaven over earth, duty to God over duty to self, has doomed man to a freedom of thought and choice where, because of man’s inherent weakness, thousands will be capable of the right choice while thousands of millions will be capable of only the wrong choice. By enabling others to provide the earthly bread that man must crave, Jesus has forced man to choose earthly rulers over heavenly god. There is no debating over whether it is possible, in fact, to serve two masters. The Inquisitor posits that humanity’s “universal and everlasting craving” is to find someone to worship, and that this quest compels man to worship the person who provides him with the comfort of earthly bread.

Temptation Two
This takes place as the devil brings Jesus to the top of the temple and tells him to prove God’s power by throwing himself from the roof, thereby giving God the opportunity to save him. Jesus responds that you shall not tempt God, in essence, that faith in God is betrayed when you ask him to prove what you profess to believe.

The Inquisitor connects the imposition of freedom to choose between earthly and heavenly needs to conscience. While another can give you bread, only you can own your conscience. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of giving man not the freedom of conscience, but because He denied him bread, giving him an impossible burden, “a vague and enigmatic” sense of right and wrong whose appropriate application is “beyond the strength of man.” Because this enigma will cause “greater confusion and suffering,” it “lays the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it” (than Jesus). This observation is based on the Inquisitor’s assumption about the fundamental and profound weakness in man.

Temptation the Third
Here is where Jesus is offered “all the kingdoms of the world,” the choice once again between riches in this temporal existence and the other riches of eternity.

As the Inquisitor points out for the sake of this narrative, the significance of this temptation is rooted in the actions of the Roman Church from the time of Charlemagne to the time in which the interview is set, 1503. The Inquisitor and the editor render this temptation as addressing “the problem of unity,” the idea that Jesus’s victory over Caesar was actually a Caesarean victory 800 years in the making, as the armies of the Holy Roman Empire have attempted to impose the victory of Christ on all the kingdoms of the world. Because Jesus rejected the dread spirit’s offer of all the earthly kingdoms, he rejected the possibility of unity, and therefore peace, and left a power vacuum that leaders have repeatedly sought by exploiting the promise of heaven and cowing mankind into the obedience that it doesn’t know it craves. The Inquisitor says, “We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him.” And in the confusion wrought by free thought and the arms taken up to allay that confusion and dispel such thought, the seeds for anarchy are sown; the Church will reap the harvest of men’s souls by providing them with their daily bread. As the Inquisitor summarizes, “Freedom, free thought and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess the mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves.’” This is the process that will break man from his infatuation with freedom and steer him into the arms of a provider, much as I used to show in my dramatically oversimplified rendition of cause and effect between the fall of Rome and the start of the Middle Ages back in my history-teaching days.

And what follows is the godless dystopia, the triumph of the Devil and the subjugation of the weak by the willful. The masses have their basest (and basic) needs provided for while the elect, an approximation of the 144,000, suffer because of their knowing and their willingness to carry the burden of suffering for the beasts who are too stupid for freedom. Maybe this story would serve as an effective pretext for Brave New World.

Ivan may be moved when he finishes his poem, as Alyosha’s Jesus is not burned as a heretic in what seems to be an afterthought; to really get at a weighty counterpoint to Ivan’s argument that God doesn’t exist (and therefore, everything is permissible and there is no crime ), you probably need the context of Father Zosima’s homilies. Still, the ending, with its kiss and its pardon, if you can call it that, presents the possibility that Ivan may one day be redeemed by love and forgiveness.

Violence in Poetry

I can see where this elliptical thing and this blog thing are going. I’ll be on the machine, iPod in ears, visions of me replacing Bono and Bruce on some concert stage, and I’ll think a school thought or a poem thought. Of course, I won’t be able to stop ellipticizing, so now brilliant thoughts can get lost in my basement as easily as they get lost in the car.

Undaunted, I shall try to reconstruct: a few years ago – time flies! – seven or eight years ago – I was presenting a session on writing assessment at the annual conference of the Connecticut Conference of Teachers of English (not that I’m some recognized expert in the field, but if you know how these things work, you know that the organizers sometimes scramble for presenters). After I had finished my spiel, I had time to attend someone else’s, so I decided to go to a teaching/writing poetry session, as poetry was even more mysterious to me at the time.

I had high hopes, and while I went through it in a spirit of cooperation, I was nagged by a sense that it was all bullshit. The presenter was a teacher from Lyme or Saybrook or one of those coastal towns. First, he went through some exercise I could never do, but which had some profound effect on some lines that James and Joanna wrote. It was all very English Journaly.

Then came the part that I was most interested in, the part that left me most deflated: the part when he talked about writing poetry. I don’t know where he started, but I know when I wished I could have found a polite way to leave. He located himself in his solarium, surrounded by clichés of flowers and tea and other accoutrement conducive to writing bullshit poetry. Then he proceeded to act out his vowel sound making noises – elongated OOOOOOs and UUUUUUUs that were designed to evoke feelings of melancholy; IIIIIIs and EEEEEEs to induce joy.

Now I’ve re-read Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry, so I understand the fundamentals of sound relative to content, but I could never imagine myself ooh-ooh-aahing to inspire a feeling, or to sharpen my own sense of an experience. The words for the feelings already exist; if you make it your mission to faithfully communicate the content, you’ll find the words that already contain the sounds. I know what was missing from that discussion of poetry that day: the violence, the energy, the force that makes someone want to journey with you in your poem.

Let me clarify what I mean by violence. Force and energy create some kind of violence, an effect that challenges the self or the will and changes the shape of a thing to make an impact you’re likely to remember. I may forget being moved by something like watching little Kate win her first ever swimming race, but tell me that acts of violence are easily forgotten and I’ll call you something verbally violent.

I’ll use a great poem as an example of what I mean by violence.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Such violence so suddenly: the bird of prey, the unraveling of order, anarchy with its baggage of disorder and the resultant blood on the tide, right-minded men who are weak and strong men blinded by their passions. And then the transition to the ultimate violence: the apocalypse.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:

Let me pause mid-line to appreciate the violence. First, Revelation, with its incomprehensible Nostradamian gobbledygook of this transitional part of the poem takes us from the contemporary violence of Yeats’s Rising Ireland and connects it simultaneously backward to Biblical times and forward to the End of Days (how unpleasant). The transition takes us to another set of birds almost frantic in a place of former glory and utter destruction.

Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

Around this sphinx reel shadows, shapes without substance, the things that pass for souls in Dante’s Inferno, not the birds themselves. These shadows are reeling, which can be suggestive or a circular pattern, an energetic dance, and what happens to a fighter after he has absorbed a heavy blow. More anger and predation: indignant desert birds, a lion-man. And now my favorite transition in all poetry:

The darkness drops again.

I mean, talk about words that sound like what they say – those low syllables come dropping down on the poem, a four word sentence that scares all the reeling and turning and general chaos with its understated authority.

And then the sounds of the poem’s ending, the S’s and the CK’s, sharpen its conclusion and carry the last sound back to the first in born/turn, reinforcing the cyclicality of the gyre and unifying contemporary and historical violence with the mystery of redemption or destruction.

But now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

So take your vocal exercises and your tea and your solarium to some writer’s workshop where people like the idea of being a writer and leave the rest of us to whatever it is we do to try to make sense of our nightmares. In another poem, Yeats writes that “in dreams begin responsibilities;” the writer’s responsibility is expression of manifest content, not contrivance masquerading as expression.

Geez, seven, eight years later, and I’m clearly pissed off. I need a hobby.