Month in Review: January

I usually don’t write journal entries for each month, but I started this year off on a roll and want to record my progress. The most exciting news of the month is an essay I wrote on Shelley and Orpheus that will be published in the journal Jesus: The Imagination later this year. The essay is accompanied by a drawing also narrowly finished this month. 

I have done a significant amount of reading. I finished Anand Giridharadas’s “Winners Take All,” Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom,” and Jill Lapore’s “These Truth’s.” All three books were revelatory, but These Truths in particular. Lapore writes of the whole of American history with passion and urgency. I need to re-read it.

Originally I had planned to write an essay on Shelley called Thinking in Images, but having unexpectedly been requested to write the Shelley and Orpheus essay, I’ve decided it best to set Shelley aside for a moment and instead focus on my next writing project, an essay on Economics and Utopia. As chance would have it, one of my favorite podcasters, "amimetobios," just started a series of lectures on Money and Literature, titled Imagining Money. (Link: https://amimetobios.podbean.com) I’m following this class as a guide (supplemented with some of my own reading). I'm also following the work of independent on the road scholar, Colin Drumm. Colin has put together a course syllabus on Patreon dealing with economics with an emphasis on literature (Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/monetary-reading-20881558).

For February I plan to read Mark Blyth’s Austerity. I started reading Richard White's history of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age, The Republic for Which it Stands, but am finding it very dry. I may set it aside for Rick Perlstein’s history of Nixon and Regan, “The Invisible Bridge.” I also hope to finish drafting at least 15 more pages of the graphic novel (which will put me up to 30, ie half-way through the first chapter). I think that will keep me more than busy enough for next month. 

Film Review--Alien: Covenant

"Who was the author of Ozymandias?"

"Byron."

"Shelley, when one note is off it destroys the whole symphony."

Alien Covenant

Shortly after I finished watching the latest Alien film I felt compelled to write something about it. I didn’t feel like Alien: Covenant was a great film, but I was curious why I was drawn to it and the other films in the series. I knew that I didn’t necessarily want to write solely about Covenant itself, but rather about its place in the series as well as within the larger genre of SF.

First of all, let it be said that I enjoyed this most recent installment and think it fits in nicely with the rest of the series. I knew going in that the reviews were mixed and not terribly high. This didn’t faze me much considering that every film, save the first two, has reviewed poorly.

                                                Metacritic:      Rotten Tomatoes:       My order of preference:

Alien                                        83                    97                                1

Aliens                                      87                    98                                3

Alien 3                                     59                    46                                2

Alien Resurrection                  63                    54                                6

Prometheus                             65                    68                                4

Alien Covenant                        65                    60                                5

There have been many criticisms launched at Covenant. I’ve heard the second half of it described as torture porn, others complained that there were not enough aliens while ironically admitting that the android scenes were the best parts of the film. It has been said to be both too serious and shallow. Like Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection it has been said to be so bad as to have turned people permanently off from the series.

Regarding the “torture porn” aspect, while I agree it is there, the depictions of torture in Covenant didn’t sink the film for me, as much as I hated having Shaw killed off. The series has always straddled the line between horror and SF. The screenwriter of Alien, Dan O’Bannon, was pretty explicit about his intention to create a film that assaulted its viewers in the most graphic means possible (see the article in Cracked).

Killing off Elizabeth Shaw and the Engineers before the movie began was a personal disappointment, although I have to admit that this too has precedent in the earlier films. The reasoning is, I assume, that each film, while obviously interconnected with the others, is also clearly a stand-alone work. One can merely note the variety of directors and tones in the first four films to see that they were never intended to be a seamless whole. 

That brings us to the question of genre—are these films SF, horror, or something else? Of course, they have obvious SF elements. SF itself has no single definition and many SF films, such as Star Wars, are more akin to romance than hard SF. Amongst SF's many definitions, the one I most prefer is Samuel Delany’s. Delany describes the work of science fiction to lie more in redefining or re-creating reality rather than in providing metaphors for reality. His famous example is of a dilating door. To describe a door as dilating is to expand our view of how doors can operate. This is the kind of work SF does best. That said, when we consider the Alien films from a literal and hard SF angle they can seem rather absurd. The earlier films pushed too hard on the idea that the aliens posed an existential threat to humanity. The refrain, most prevalent in Aliens, that if the aliens reach Earth they will wipe out humanity, is comical. The aliens’ slow reproductive cycle and the fact that they each require their own human host are evidence enough that impact would be slight. Nonetheless, they remain terrifying as images and this is why I feel the films are better seen as fables or allegories. The aliens are more threatening as metaphors than as a reality. As visions of the insatiable drive for survival they are vivid and arresting, fit horses for Shelley’s blind charioteer in his poem, The Triumph of Life.

Another criticism of Covenant is that it takes itself too seriously. The viewers who don’t mind the references to Wagner and Shelley, still find them unsubstantiated by the rest of the film. I don’t mind the references because I see them as serving two simple functions. First, they point to the Romanticism of the series and second, they work to outline the dimensions that creation has in the film. To these ends they are successful.

Covenant makes clear an argument first began in Prometheus. The pathos of Prometheus is found in Shaw’s drive to find the creators of life on Earth. Even after these creators present themselves as violent and hateful of Earth life she still holds out hope that she may be able to pry a reason for humanity's existence out of them. Just as there is an antagonism between the Engineers and humanity, so too is there an antagonism between humans and androids. Prometheus depicted the beginnings of this antagonism, showing the human crew of the Prometheus as generally looking down on David as something less-than-human. David responds, as if in spite, by making a creative gesture all his own. Covenant centers on this storyline, abandoning Shaw’s gnostic quest for knowledge entirely. There is a theme in these films of creations turning against their creators, mostly out of envy. Why? Well, if God is the creator then humans most closely approach godhood in so far as they are able to create. So why is this a horror SF film? It is interesting to observe that Frankenstein, often claimed to be the first SF novel, is also a horror novel. Just as there is an awe of god and a terror in Frankenstein’s creation, so too is their terror in the act of creation in these films. Covenant is successful for me because of how it advances these themes of biological creation with artistic creation. As far as I’m aware, the series remains unique as films in its juxtaposition of biological and artistic creation.

I’m hesitant to read too deeply into the Alien mythology. The series, for whatever intricacies it may possess, seems to be more important for the pure visceral reaction it creates. Whether this be from the disturbing sense of gestating and giving birth to an alien in the first film to the fear of an android subsuming the throne of God in Covenant. There is a great Slate article that traces the history of scholarship on the first film and can serve as a hilarious warning to the dangers of over-reading (it even includes a bibliography).

In conclusion, what was most attractive to me about both Prometheus and Covenant is not only Scott’s explicit Romanticism, but also a noticeable lowercase “g” gnosticism. The depiction of the creator as a tyrant and one’s world as a prison is central to Gnosticism. Likewise, the act of defiance seen most strongly in the films’ leading women are the central elements of the Gnostic mythos. In Covenant the colonists desire to recreate Eden. If Prometheus depicted the creations being both rejected by their creators and in turn the creations rising up against their creators. Covenant hardly seems to be a new pact being formed between creations and creators. What is being promised? What we do know is that before the promise came the flood.

Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (Part 2--Review)

I finished reading The Sea, The Sea last night. My first observation is that Murdoch deliberately avoids isolating a center or central theme for the book. The character James does become a focal point near the end, but in such an exaggerated way that we almost question his centrality. James is portrayed as being beyond saintly and is almost a transcendent magical being, like the Buddha statues that line his London apartment. He is a sharp contrast to his cousin Charles. Charles is very much of this world. Is it safe to say that James is the character in this novel who most approaches Murdoch's Platonic ideal of "the Good?"

What is Murdoch's Platonism? At the risk of oversimplifying Plato, I will approach Murdoch's philosophy in The Sea, The Sea through Plato's allegory of the cave. Murdoch's theater group, lead by Charles, live in the world of shadows. James discovered the means of separating himself from this world to perceive a world beyond. James' transcendent reality, what Plato called the world of ideal forms, is grounded in love. Murdoch has argued that the idea of love is not adequately addressed in most of contemporary philosophy. Her work then seeks to address this omission. I remember once describing to a friend the love triangle at the heart of a Thomas Hardy novel I was reading. My friend responded, I thought you read only serious books, when did you start reading romance novels? Well, of course, Thomas Hardy is a serious author and romance is a serious subject, if done well.

Historical Romanticism (capital R) came shortly after the two great democratic revolutions in America and France. Romanticism is thus intertwined with the history of democracy. One central concern of Romanticism was to explore our desires and see if they could not be brought into harmony with the betterment of society. Rousseau famously believed all human desires were good and that it was society that corrupted them. This tension between desire and society is at the core of the Romantic argument.

One thing this novel does is to illustrate how a person such as Charles can so deceive himself that he is almost incapable of seeing the good. The novel is rich in the various ways in which Charles deceives himself, to the point that the book is almost a lexicon of self-deception. One purpose of the Pre-History is to give Charles a fair chance to present himself as fully and accurately as he can. This sets the stage for the unmasking that will occur in the History section. Charles is not a deceiving character, he wishes to be honest, however self-deceived he may be. He believes himself to be egotistical and at times dictatorial, but is personally convinced that, at heart, he is generous and humane. One example is how throughout the novel Charles continuously reflects on his depictions of other characters, usually feeling that he has not presented them as fully or as accurately as he would like. His desire to see the world truthfully and honestly is what made him the famous director that he was. Yet, nonetheless, even a well intentioned and driven man such as himself is capable of extreme self-deception.

Another theme is the futility of trying to escape the world. Charles runs away to his seaside home, expecting to leave behind his theater world entirely, but of course, he lasts little more than a few weeks before he is once again engaged in it. Charles never escapes the world. Late in the novel he refers to himself as being impotent, to have lost his sex drive. This is as close as he gets to removing himself from the world. He does not take himself out, but is rather taken out.

There is much that could be said about the novel, but I am tempted to digress from a direct confrontation and instead travel further along Bloom's direction of reading Murdoch's novels as romances. In romances characters represent not real people but states of mind. What states of mind do the characters in The Sea, The Sea represent? Let's look at some of the key figures:

• Charles Arrowy: the elderly, self-deceived, ego-maniac. He is Prospero, orchestrating his closest friends like players on a stage.
• James: the mystical, saint figure.
• Hartley (Mary Finch): the idealized object of love.
• Lizzie and George: Servants and slaves to Charles.
• Perry and Rosina: Violent lovers; extreme versions of Charles.
• Charles's father, Clement, and Titus: absent figures

Bloom has generated his own patterning of romances in a schema that he borrowed from Freud and then applied to Blake, Shelley, Yeats, and later David Lindsay. In the Freudian pattern the states of being are Narcissistic Libido, Achieved Ego, Id, Super-Ego, and Imago.

Freud                Narcissistic Libido            Id                           Super-Ego                Achieved-Ego                  Imago
Blake                Orc                                    Tharmas                 Urizen                      Los                                   Emanation
Shelley             Prometheus Bound            Demogorgon         Jupiter                      Prometheus Unbound       Asia
Yeats                Mask                                  Body of Fate         Will                          Creative Mind                   Daimon
Lindsay            Maskul                               Krag (Surtur)        Crystal-Man             Nightspore                       ...

Murdoch          Charles and Friends          Sea Monster           The House               James                                Hartley

Freud's unconscious is usually depicted as an iceberg. The ego is the visible tip of the iceberg. The ego is how we view ourselves. I've listed Charles and his entire circle of theater friends under narcissistic libido because I see all of them as being stuck in variations of the ego cycle. They are all tied to the vicious wheel of desire (something Blake very powerfully depicted in his poem The Mental Traveler). The Romantics extended desire to apply to political aspirations, such as a desire for freedom. Blake divided the psyche into what he called his "Giant Forms." Freud's narcissistic libido is roughly equivalent with Blake's Orc. A revolutionary figure, Orc is someone who wishes to change the world through force. Likewise, Shelley's Prometheus wished to forcefully overthrow Jupiter. Blake has a phrase that is equally applicable to Shelley, "All Orcs age into Urizen." That is, all would be revolutionaries turn into the tyrants that had sought to overthrow.

For Freud the id composed our most basic drives and desires. Bloom argued that all the Romantics were united in their shared striving for unity with their id. Perhaps the figure that most clearly represents the id is Blake's Tharmas. As Bloom says, "Tharmas being the Zoa or Giant Form in Blake's mythology who was the unfilled human potential for realizing instinctual desires, and so was the regent of Innocence. Tharmas is a shepherd-figure."

In all of these patterns the ego as narcissistic libido is forced to mediate between id and super-ego. The imago is a vision of ideal love for the ego. The work of the Romantics and Freud was to show how one can cease this endless see-saw between the id and super-ego and achieved a renewed innocence as one had in childhood where one's desires were good and pure. Except this is not the naive innocence of a child, but a knowing innocence.

I hope to write one more post on The Sea, The Sea after I have further thought out how and to what degree Murdoch's characters fit into a Romantic or Freudian map of the unconscious. On a closing note, I should add that Murdoch herself was critical of Romanticism. In fact, she hoped that her work would function as a kind of antidote to Romanticism. As she said:

"Through literature we can rediscover a sense of the density of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy and can help us recover from the ailments of Romanticism. If it can be said to have a task, that surely is its task. But if it is to perform it, prose must recover its former glory, eloquence and discourse must return."

On the road to find out

November 1, 2016

Los Angeles, CA

I have been considering a biographical essay on “what I believe” for awhile. Ironically, I’ve only chosen to write about it now that I’ve mostly lost interest in the subject. I guess it isn't so much that I've lost interested, but rather that I want to put it behind me and move on to something more edifying and constructive. Part of the problem has to do with the subject itself. Is it really belief that I want to talk about? Why not faith, or religion, or spirituality? A better word for me would have been “gnosis” or “knowledge” but I decided to avoid extremes and go for the modest, middle of the road, concept of belief. But even now, as I settle on this term, I feel myself being pulled this way and that and am sure I will have traversed many areas before reaching my conclusion.

            So, where to begin my  spiritual biography? I was raised in a Protestant home by relatively religious parents. Both of my parents were from not particularly devout Catholic families. My mother rebelled against her upbringing and converted to Protestantism when I was only a year old. She believed Protestantism to be the more Biblical faith. That phrase, “Biblical Christianity” was something I took as a given growing up and which I find much more problematical now, having come to learn the very complex history of developing the scriptural canon and church dogmas. But, that is a whole different issue. All of us kids were fairly involved in the church growing up. My most spiritual memories are connected to reading the Bible and singing hymns and praise and worship songs.
            I remember specifically being drawn to the incantatory power of the Bible. The Bible seemed to offer a level of depth and seriousness lacking in other areas of life. At the same time, I had what I would call "creative" interests that eventually came to compete with my religious sensibility. I was always interested in writing and drawing. I loved drawing and imagining stories. I also liked designing my own role playing games, which I would force my brother to play. Later, while a freshman in high school, I wrote a 200-page fantasy novel. And the year after that, I became addicted to Japanese comics and animation. So, I had these two seemingly contradictory identities—my involvement in the church and my interest in art. There were practical questions I considered, such as, whether I should go to an art school or a local Christian school, but, more pressingly, was the whole question of what to value. I felt aware of the division and knew that eventuality I would have to declare my loyalties, one way or the other.

The summer after graduating I went to a Christian retreat called “The Summit” that was designed to prepare high school graduates for the secular issues they would face in college. Although I had been to many retreats in the past, Summit felt different. For one thing, it wasn’t merely emotional as most such retreats were. The typical catch phrase for these events was "be on fire for God.” The Summit was different. It was intellectual and so was far more appealing to my own interests at this time. It is interesting to note that my church at this time had a relatively new Calvinist pastor who won a lot of enthusiasm from the teens at my church. Most of us, including myself, were eager for a deeper and more intellectual understanding of religion. The Summit invited famous Christian scholars and professors. It was designed to prepare Christians entering college to combat any anti-Christian ideology they encountered there. We learned about evolution, Marxism, the basics of logic and philosophy, and Postmodernism amongst other things. Of course, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was as interested in the objects of critique as the critique itself. I learned that I had a deep craving for knowledge that, for whatever reasons, had not been fulfilled in high school. These lectures opened up new and fascinating worlds for me, worlds I had only been dimly familiar with up until then. More than that, I now felt compelled to take a firm stand, although I did not yet know on what.

            One immediate change that occurred after this trip was that I threw away my entire collection of movies, comic books, and video games so as to devote myself more sincerely to God. I later spoke with my brother, who also attended this conference, and who spoke of it as a turning point for him as well. Unlike my brother, I was grateful for the new intellectual passion the event gave me, however unintentionally, while he felt betrayed for having been given a false view of ideas he later came to empathize with. I should mention, we went to this event with two other brothers, one of whom became extremely rigid and aggressive in his faith. But, more on him later. For now, I just want to say that I eventually came to define myself (not entirely consciously) in opposition to this other brother. If he was to be rigid and dogmatic I would be open and endlessly inquiring. (For those interested, the earliest entries of this blog were prompted by debates I had had with that brother). 

After giving up videogames I found that I had a lot of free time on my hands. I always loved art and I now felt that I needed to take my passion more seriously so I decided to learn what I could about classical culture. I started paying more attention to great works of art, classical music, and literature. It so happened that my mom and aunt were reading Les Misérables around this time. It looked interesting so I picked it up. It may have taken 6 months for me to read, but I was nonetheless very engaged the whole time. The early scene where the priest’s saves the wayward Jean val Jean with that beautiful act of generosity and humanity, has remained a touchstone for me to this day.
I began hunting around for other books, greedily seeking something that would consume my imagination as that one had. I considered books I had heard of from school that I hadn't read, books like The Catcher in the Rye and The Lord of the Flies. Their mere titles intrigued me. I read both quickly and passionately, realizing now the kind of books I wanted to read. Serious books. Dark books. Books that seemed to speak a kind of evasive truth. I started asking anyone I considered learned if they had any books they could recommend. I was surprised at how uninterested in literature my childhood community was. The recommendations were both meager and dispassionate.
I had hit a dry spell. I now had a vague sense of the kind of books I wanted to read, books that were dark, transgressive, and yet ultimately profoundly humane, but I was clueless as to where to find them. I was listening to a lot of classical music at this time as well. I became interested in the great Catholic mass compositions by Beethoven, Bach, and Schubert. Bach's Mass in B Minor, in particular, was deeply moving for me. I hunted around for live performances to see with what remained of that summer and found one in the twin cities of southern Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. There I attended a performance of Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion. Later I realized there was a great orchestra in my own backyard and so I signed up for a year of concerts at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra with a college friend I barely knew at the time, Paul, who remains my closest friend to this day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I did not begin college immediately. I worked a construction job and took community college courses first. It was in an English class I took in community college where I was given my first poetry anthology. Our teacher was clearing out her office and let us students take whatever books we wanted. I greedily swiped up the anthology. A second important event occurred in that same English class. We were given a writing assignment that led me to the local library and in turn to the great Yale literary critic, Harold Bloom. I faintly remember the assignment being something about finding a work of criticism, although I don’t remember writing anything about Bloom at that time. How I would love to read that paper now. The book was, of course, Bloom’s The Western Canon. Like most people, I kept coming back to Bloom for that list in the back of the book. I’d go to the library, scan the list and slowly work my way through it, title after title. Funny thing is, I didn't actually read "The Western Canon" itself for years. I bought many of Bloom's other books before finally getting around to it.

In the Autumn of 1998 I went to the Christian college, William Tyndale. There I decided to major in English literature, which I did for my first two years. I remember being very excited to take a philosophy and psychology course my first semester. The psychology course ended up being fairly soft and not impacting, but the philosophy course, like the English course earlier, proved pivotal, if only because it introduced me to my next obsession, Dostoyevsky and Russian literature. We read the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter from The Brothers Karamazov. A few years later I would start up a Russian literature club with a guy named Ryan. Ryan, it so happens, would connect me with my friend Paul. The Russian club didn't get far, we got stuck on Dostoyevsky though and spent the year just reading his four great novels.
Around this time I met up with the friend who I went to Summit with and saw he was reading Dostoyevksy’s Notes from Underground, which he was rather turned off by. His disinterest in the book only further confirmed its greatness to me and I eagerly and greedily picked it up the next day.  I also took several English literature classes those first two years at Tyndale and so was exposed to many of the greatest works of world literature. I also continued to read a lot on my own. Notably Don Quixote, Paradise Lost and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad.

It was at this time that I realized how difficult writing was for me. Writing would remain an anxious undertaking for all of my undergraduate and graduate school days as well. I write like I draw. I begin very sloppily and painfully. The words come out awkward and ill-formed. Then begins a process of endless revision where I occasionally catch glimpses of the imagined form.

These first two years I was also visiting a lot of churches and continued questioning my faith. I wavered between trying to rationalize Christianity and desiring to have some kind of religious, quasi-charismatic, experience. I felt there was too much that I could not rationalize and I also knew that I lacked the deep emotional and spiritual conviction of the charismatic believers. I knew that I did not like the idea of believing that the whole world needed or should be converted. I desired diversity. I enjoyed living in a world with disparate views. It seemed like a kind of hell to have a world full of single minded people. What I could believe in was the aesthetic power of reading literature.

My junior year I transferred briefly to Eastern Michigan University. I had become unhappy with the English department, which I felt was too small and not very challenging. I signed up for several classes at EMU and then, my first week, the whole school went on strike. This ended up being a very fortuitous turn of events. I had already learned that many credits would not transfer from Tyndale and, feeling like I might be delayed a semester as well, I decided this was all too much and so went back to Tyndale. I’m not sure how it happened but I ended up in a conversation with the head of the Middle Eastern Studies Department, Dr. Judith Mendelssohn Rood. I told her my situation and she quickly recruited me into Middle Eastern Studies program. All the magic and challenge that was missing from the English department was found in abundance in her courses. Although she, by and large, led the whole department on her own, the classes were still very rich and individual. For example, our class on Middle Eastern Literature met at a local Lebanese restaurant, and our class on Jewish, Christian, Muslim relations met at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington. I was amazed at Judy’s endless energy and enthusiasm. I felt like I finally found the intellectual environment I had been searching for.

I could say much more about these years, but I'm trying very hard to be brief. 9/11 happened, and I gave a talk to the local community on Afghanistan, which was prompted by a paper I had written earlier that year. My junior year began auspiciously enough. By the end of that school year Judy would be gone, a presage of the dark times Tyndale was headed for. Leadership roles were changing quickly in the school as it sought to shift away from the liberal arts to a, the school board felt, more lucrative model of business degrees. But that was only the surface issue, the school had also been illegally investing money in other ventures. The fallout of these dealings would eventually lead to the school's going out of business, but that happened several years after I graduated. Nonetheless, the first signs of trouble were occurring my junior year.
During this time, I continued to read Bloom and visit different churches. I remember distinctly that by my senior year I was convinced that I was no longer a Christian. I now consider myself a gnostic and so, in a kind of whimsical manner, think of myself as one of the rare "true" Christians. But in truth my religion is Goethe's religion, one of art and science. I wrote a paper for my class on World Religions where I expressed this. The professor tried to give me a D for the course, surely on the grounds that it was “un-Christian” although I was able to negotiate him into a low B. That last year was chaotic at Tyndale. With Judy gone, most of the excitement of school for me was gone as well. I trudged through, doing a lot of reading on my own. I started reading more poetry, I read more of the modernists including Yeats and Joyce, but also other figures like T.S. Eliot who I now feel ambivalent about. I read Bloom’s book, Omens of Millenium, which I sometimes consider, along with Agon, to be my favorite book by him (I would not read Agon until I returned from the Peace Corps three years later).

As I approached graduation I didn’t know what I wanted to do. After high school I had flirted with being a missionary. As graduation approached I considered the army or the navy. I thought that at least these options could give me the chance to focus on languages and so perhaps eventually lead to an academic career. I ended up choosing the Peace Corps and going to Uzbekistan.

Now that I've touched on the Peace Corps I realize that whole new worlds of events and experiences are before me and that if I hope to make this biography at all brief I will have to rush over most of them. So, to be brief, the most important intellectual development to occur during my time in the Peace Corps was my introduction to the Romantics. I had brought two Bloom books, The Visionary Company and Bloom’s commentary on Blake in The Complete Poetry of William Blake. Along with these I had an anthology of English literature that included the first three cantos of The Faerie Queene, all of Paradise Lost, and most of the major High Romantic British poems. I also brought a lot of Shakespeare and would later come across some Emerson, Whitman, and Nietzsche. With this reading behind me, I finished the Peace Corps in 2005 and promptly applied to Wayne State University, eventually to enroll in a masters degree in English literature. Once again, many years passed, I kind of dream like period of my life. I did not graduate until 2012. After receiving my MA in English Literature I moved to Boston and eventually ended up getting married, having a daughter, and becoming an English teacher.

I want to stop there and reflect on the evolution of my thinking over the years and so, hopefully, come round to the purpose of this essay—my feelings about belief, faith, religion, spirituality, gnosis. The best thing I did in those early years was read widely, and memorize poems. I expanded my horizon immensely and continue to do so. For many years I primarily shared the interests of Bloom, especially his gnostic and apocalyptic tendencies. The first poet I latched onto, oddly enough, was T.S. Eliot. Modernism in general was very appealing to me. I liked the density of the images. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The sense it gave me was that in linking modernity with the past it was in some way giving a full picture of life, a glimpse of the whole. Joyce, more than anyone else, epitomized this method for me. This was my earliest vision of what literature could be. It inspired a passion that has continued to evolve until today.

I was always fascinated with the idea of the epic and the promise that one could somehow capture the fullness of reality. It did not matter whether this was possible or not (of course it’s not). But the promise of it, the drive towards it, remains endlessly fascinating and moving for me. There is a line from the famous Renaissance author, Sir Thomas Browne, “Methinks there be not miracles in religion enough to merit an active faith.” This Faustian craving for more knowledge is what has inspired and driven me more than any other. But it is not merely an endless parade of facts, it is the belief that one shapes a vision of the world out of this knowledge that has most inspired me. This drive to both expand one’s view of the world, but in so doing consolidate and bring together one’s knowledge so that one forms an image of the world. It is what Shelley meant when he referred to poetry as being both the center and the circumference of knowledge. That is my understanding of the work of poetry. That is my belief.


In closing, I have just reread this essay and while mostly satisfied with what is here I would like to expand considerately upon it. I'd like to say a lot more about my time after the Peace Corps and even some things about my time in Boston. But that will have to wait until another day. For anyone reading this, I think I will write a second part to this detailing those later years.