From Nothing?

In the course of human urges to learn the origins of things--the earth, water, trees that shed their leaves and trees that don’t, animals with fur and animals that live underwater, and of course the humans looking in wonder at all of it--we have spawned countless stories of creation. Scholars of comparative religion sort them into various categories, among which are world-parent myths, creation from a primordial chaos, and creation of humans as the spawn of Mother Earth.

Creatio ex nihilo, literally “creation from nothing,” is familiar to most of us in the Western world with the first of two creation stories in Genesis, the one that has God simply speaking man and woman into existence, as he does the rest of creation, rather than making the man from earth and the woman from the man’s rib. The first story--the one that in English translations repeats the phrase “and God said, let there be”-- has much more recent origins than the one in Genesis 2. It’s also similar to creation-from-chaos myths in some places (“the earth was without form, and void”). It’s hard to find purity of form in human categories.

A lot of books have been written on the topic of creation myths. One, Charles H. Long’s Alpha: The Myths of Creation was first published in 1963 and is still in print.

We have a curiosity, maybe out of psychological need, to know where things come from. It helps us carve out an understanding of our place in the universe. We do this now mostly with the tools of science--astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology. And modern cosmology speculates about whether the universe even had a beginning.

Along with our curiosity about where we came from, we ponder the origins of our own creations--ideas, works of art, inventions. I have a friend, an artist who lives in Santa Fe, who is considering a series of works on creation ex nihilo--from nothing. When she told me this, I became curious myself about the wide range of this notion that something can come from what we think of as “nothing.”

People can be relentlessly inquisitive about where ideas come from, and delighted with stories about flashes of insight. In science, Mendeleev is said to have arranged the elements of the periodic table along the lines of the way playing cards are organized in solitaire. Michael Faraday’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene involved a kind of waking dream in which he saw the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros--the image of a snake swallowing its own tail.

Certainly it’s reassuring to hear of the ability of people to solve complex problems through the power of an informed intuition. Or to write a story that seems to be without an external source. P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books, tells of an interviewer who visited her once, insistent upon ferreting out the source of this preposterous character who slides up bannisters. Travers recounts part of the conversation in the Spring 1988 issue of Parabola, a magazine she contributed to for many years as an editor and writer:

“So tell me,” he said eagerly . . . “Where did you get the idea?”

“Where does anyone get an idea?”

“But it must--it can’t help it--come from somewhere.”

“Why not from nowhere?” I suggested.

“The Interviewer” (the title of the article) is looking for an Answer, one definitive locus for the source of a tale, an Answer with none of the nebulous, contingent character of so much human experience. He wants to banish uncertainty.

Near the article’s end, Travers sums up:

But let us admit it. With that word “creative,” when applied to any human endeavor, we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light--by grace one feels, rather than deserving--for it always comes as something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for explanations.

Still, we want explanations. We don’t want to have to rely on any mysterious source. We’d rather have a formula or a recipe or an algorithm. So equipped, we could summon at will our power to bring something new to the world. Having to wait for some mysterious entity to bestow “a sudden shaft of light” is anathema to busy creatures like ourselves who don’t like to wait for things.

For Travers, a story coming “from nowhere” seems to mean coming from an unknown source or sources. What’s needed is a receptive mind, which may imply a kind of meditative emptiness, a mind that’s at least relatively free of the usual mundane clutter and concern. Such a mind has, at least for a moment, set aside its role as the center of the universe. It says it can’t know where it can get anything it wants, but it knows valuable things sometimes come unbidden. And such a mind likes play.

An insight or idea from nowhere may have sources. My guess is that it’s almost certain there’s not one source, but an interplay of images, abstractions, experiences, and expressions that coalesce long enough to become something surprisingly new, and coherent enough to make sense to others. With science, such an intuition might stand up to empirical scrutiny. With art, it would resonate in the inner lives of others who see it, hear it, or read it, and say yes, I recognize that, I’ve felt its presence somehow before and couldn’t describe it.

The nothing from which something can be created is, perhaps, more an absence of the thing created, a kind of void where an almost infinite array of potentials exists, and the force of human intuition and action assembles elements in a new form. We all do this in some way as we make meaning in life. Some of us, not content with copies of constructs or received wisdom, make meaning more consciously than others.

On the other hand, some, like Travers’ interlocutor, cannot seem to accept that a physics-defying character could simply appear in the mind of a writer’s playful imagination, in spite of the rich heritage of stories in human history from Homer to Garcia-Marquez whose magical narratives not only appear, but manage to convey something deeply moving about what it’s like to be human.

Writing is a form of thinking, and I write personal essays in part to find out more about what I think about one topic or another. I still don’t have a firm position to argue for one way or another on creating from nothing. What I do find is that it’s interesting to put the notion into play, bounce it around a bit, and see if it opens any new perspectives. For the time being I’m comfortable with my agnosticism, my lack of knowledge about the sources of inspiration, and content to keep my varying thoughts in play with each other.

Eyes of the Wild

One morning a few days ago I walked out to my car to leave for work, opened the door and then looked out from the garage about seventy feet away to a low hill at the border of my lawn where some shrubs grow and where day lilies bloom in June. Red oaks and a few birches shade the little raised bed, and stones form a border with the lawn. A creek bed lies behind it. On some ground cover between shrubs and lawn, a doe was lying down in an alert but relaxed posture, her head up and eyes toward the house where the noise of the motor, gears, and chain that raised the garage door had just caught her attention. Despite the mechanical rumbling, the deer didn’t bolt or even stand up. I walked to the rear of the garage, a few feet closer, but stopped short of walking onto the driveway. The doe and I locked eyes for a long moment, both of us unmoving, curious about the other. I felt calm in that surprising space, glad the deer remained and held my gaze.

Then I walked back to the car, started the engine, backed out, and closed the garage door from my car with the remote control. The doe remained still, while still watching. I drove slowly out of the driveway, glanced into her eyes again briefly, and drove away. I wondered that she was so relaxed. Was she hurt? Or just accustomed to human activity from living in a neighborhood where cars and garage door mechanisms make their noises, and two-legged creatures scurry busily about?

In another incident, closer to fifteen years ago, my wife and I were driving at a pace that allowed us to watch for birds on a gravel road in the National Wildlife Refuge at Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. I stopped on the road in the low-lying bald cypress woods on the lake’s northern boundary when I got a clear view of a barred owl. I slowly stepped out of the car to try for a closer look at the owl. I stopped, stood, and stared. The owl looked back, watching me cautiously, then flew away a few yards while remaining in sight, and perching in a tree where he could keep an eye on me. I walked down the road a little further and stopped where I could engage the owl again in a mutual gaze. We repeated this a couple of times, the owl and I, until the bird flew deeper into the woods and out of sight.

What did I want from the deer and the owl? The favor of their momentary attention? If so, why? My first thought is that I’m drawn to the wildness, the health and vitality, the fragility and uncertainty, of creatures that do not need to live within structures (literal or figurative) other than those dictated by their nature. I won’t speculate on whether they’re confined to their nature and unable to transcend it--they simply have the freedom to be entirely what they are. No one is asking them to be anything else.

My affinity for these fellow creatures grows from no desire to be a deer or an owl, but from a need to enlarge my sense of the scope of the world. I reach for a connection with their otherness and with their wildness. I reach for that out of curiosity, itself a form of desire, and yes, a need. What do the animals “want”? Maybe just to be vigilant in the presence of a creature they don’t understand, that often-threatening bipedal animal that takes up so much space in the world. And somewhere in the vigilance is also a kind of curiosity, a need to learn anything that might help with survival. Other animals may have no interest in probing our consciousness, but they can benefit from any knowledge of our behavior that might lead to predictions of what we’re likely to do, what we’re capable of.

We the wise (sapiens) no longer need to know only how to hunt the ones that might feed us. We can study them now, make whole academic disciplines out of knowledge about owls for the sake of knowledge about owls. We study the world, the universe, this way--objectifying it as if we weren’t part of it, distancing and detaching ourselves, divorcing ourselves from the rest of reality in order to understand it better. Stepping back this way often serves a goal of effective inquiry, but it dilutes the direct character of our experience in the world. We miss the unmediated moment.

The natural history of homo sapiens goes back in time to common ancestors of owl and deer as well as to much earlier creatures. And our eyes and theirs are very much alike. I have looked into the eyes of deer and owls and seen the spark of something I faintly recognize but can probably never name.

I see just the spark because I don’t have the sensual capacity to take in the flame behind it. But the spark, nevertheless, opens me. I feel more capacious for having the brief but timeless moments I had with the deer and the owl. It could be, though, that what I feel as new inner space is not so much extra capacity as it is different inner-space allocation. What created the feeling of new space was a relegation of my ego to the sidelines. I was absorbed enough in the wild eyes to get out of the way and let in something larger.

Getting one’s ego out of the way, even for a brief moment, is not easy, and in modern life, so full of structure, so full of navigational challenges, we may simply need to have that concern for our safety--physical and emotional integrity--out front, never far from awareness. What’s more, the myriad demands on our attention are unrelenting, ceaselessly clamoring for all our sensual space, congesting our senses with trivia of the moment, or messages about buying and selling, or information we need to guide our moving conveyances through traffic safely.

So it’s hard to stop and listen--to notice things we don’t regard as immediately essential, to feel how warm the sun is or the direction the wind is blowing, to notice whether the air smells dusty or moist, to hear birdsong over the song on the radio. Or maybe even appreciate the taste of minerals deep within a bite of fruit, brought to us by the ongoing, everyday transformation of earth, air, fire and water processed through something like an apple tree.

The eyes of wild animals have provided me with a window into the place I live but fail to notice most of the time. With my human community I share a culture, a way of seeing things, which can become so much a part of my identity that I may forget humanity isn’t the whole of reality. With the deer and the owl I share membership in the natural order of things, the air I breathe, a skeletal structure, the land I live on, DNA, eyes, optic nerves, and curiosity about what other creatures are like. And, in the most fortunate moments, respite from the demands of my ego. Something in me is still a little wild, and that unnameable portion lives in an unnameable immensity. I will probably never understand much of it, but I can experience it, and that’s even better.

Such People in the Brave New World

Heraclitus was wrong when he said you can’t step in the same river twice. You can’t even step in the same river once, except for a microsecond.
 --Jim Harrison, from Returning to Earth


Even the microsecond in the quote from one of my favorite fiction writers is a fiction. Everything is in motion, in process. Some processes operate at speeds observable by us, and some are too fast or too slow for us to notice. The motion goes on, indifferent to human reaction.

I spent nine of my first eighteen years in small towns that had, in most ways, been the same for decades. But even then people were building bomb shelters against a possible change of temperature in the Cold War, and drugstore soda fountains were dismantled and hauled away after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the onset of the polarization that would characterize the sixties, however, most of the people around us still looked like us, or at least familiar to us, and that familiarity may have been reassuring.

A 2008 projection from the U. S. Census Bureau shows white Americans projected to make up less than half the population around 2042, should current trends continue. Almost 310 million people live here now, so what does it mean when people say they want “their” country back? It may, at a fundamental level, mean that the current in the Heraclitean river is speeding up at a perceptible rate, and that people are uncomfortable with that.

The idea of “my country,” or “our country,” is just that—an idea. The reality on the ground is that a large and growing number of people can use the term “my” in reference to their national home, and what people have typically meant is that they identify themselves with the nation. The use of “my” in the want-mine-back sense is possessive. It carries the presumption of ownership, and of the privilege of defining what the country is. This is not only presumptuous, but absurd. And it insists that things should stay the same, when things never have and never can.

At the moment, a controversy of the building of a mosque in New York City near the 9/11 Ground Zero has apparently stirred up protests around the country against plans for construction of other mosques. The direst predictions from mosque opponents say the Muslims are out to replace the U. S. Constitution with Islamic Shariah law. In the August 7, 2010 New York Times an article by Laurie Goodstein (“Across the Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition”) gives examples from Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California. In Temecula, California, one of the Muslims’ outspoken defenders is a Mormon who sits on the local interfaith council, so the business isn't simple.

It may be the case that some Muslims believe Shariah law is appropriate for everyone, just as there are Christians, particularly conservative evangelicals, who see the conversion of the rest of the world as something desirable, and who believe that God Himself is planning a grisly eternity for those who are outside their circle. But a lot of mosques exist in the U. S., with most of their members being here primarily for economic reasons, and building their mosques as places to preserve the culture that has nurtured them, the culture that continues to provide them with community bonds and identity.

Proliferation of mosques isn’t the only development that Tea Partiers and others find unsettling. The President’s name isn’t George or Bill or Ronald or Jimmy or Richard or even Lyndon. And he’s black, being half of African descent and half of European descent, which equates to black as we define it. The economic times are tough for a lot of people, with unemployment rates remaining high and length of unemployment at extremely high levels, and troubled economies always influence the national mood.

People who oppose rapid social change usually see themselves as conservatives. Yet it’s not as easy as one might think to define conservatism. Witness the political primary season we’ve just gone through, where battles raged in several races over which candidate was the “real” conservative. In 1971, a political scientist named Ronald Lora published his study titled Conservative Minds in America. Lora posits three foundations or primary varieties in American conservatism—psychological, possessive, and philosophical. He writes: “Since its roots lie deep in all organic life, psychological conservatism undergirds all other varieties. Its primary cause is fear; its basic objective is security.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the impulse to security represented here is dishonorable. We all want security. But how conscious are we of the attitudes we develop to preserve it? Possessive conservatism seems pretty clear. You or your class has enjoyed wealth and power you don’t want to see displaced by others. Philosophical conservatism isn’t simply about resisting change—these thoughtful types recognize the river’s unceasing current. They simply like to keep change incremental and rooted in a tradition that has what they regard as proven reliability.

A mixture of these three elements probably characterizes American conservatism, and all three may exist to a greater or lesser degree in many individuals. But it seems the philosophical element may be least prevalent. Psychological conservatism, where it’s most strident, seems to me more or less to be made of up people who are unceasingly angry because it’s not 1955 anymore. (To be fair, some strident liberals seem to have a belief, probably rooted in the Enlightenment and the positivism of Auguste Comte, that human societies are perfectible and that if we could all be reasonable and realize their ideas—the pictures of the world in their heads—then suffering would cease. That’s equally unrealistic.)

We’re still left with the problem of how to live together. It’s not a new issue; it’s as old as humanity, even older. And the problem of how to live together is much complicated by the pace of change. It’s fast enough right now, this pace, to disorient a lot of people and have them looking for scapegoats. With the increase in the sheer volume of “otherness,” mostly in the form of people who look different, believe different things, and even have the nerve to speak different languages, there’s no shortage of scapegoats.

Humans are tribalistic, and for the most part oblivious of the fact. So instead of talking about our tribalism we talk in terms that assume it’s as useful as it might have been when tribes didn’t encounter each other often, and may have had to fight to maintain a hunting and gathering territory. The talk we have too often comes out in accusations and self-justifications. What was once perhaps adaptive is now in some respects maladaptive.

And yet even now there are reasons to assert our own cultural territory. The mosque builders understandably want to keep their culture alive in the new places they live. It’s the source of their identity, their sense of self, their community. Their opponents, in turn, feel their own identity threatened by what they regard as an alien presence. Does it have to be like this? The opposition to the assertion of Muslim identity would have people assimilate to American ways, just as the opponents to bilingual accommodations would tell Hispanics and others to speak English if they want to be here.

But the push for assimilation recalls what we did to so many native tribes all over North America, packing their children off to schools to learn Euro-American ways, banning their religious expressions, outlawing their languages. We couldn't simply be content with taking their land and sustenance. We demanded they also yield their identity.

Certain groups can be a danger to others—there’s no denying this. But groups may be gripped by fears and enthusiasms of the moments. The Germans of today are manifestly not the Germans of the Nazi years. So it isn’t just the group that generates threat and conflict, but attitudes held by groups. Sometimes a tribe will come together under any banner. Some individuals will commandeer a religious tradition to serve their agendas of toxic tribalism. We may at some point get conscious enough as a species to dampen this tendency better than we now do, though I’m skeptical that it will ever go away completely.

We are who we are, and it’s unlikely we’ll see breakthroughs in our nature that solve all our conflicts. Can we accept that for what it is, and think about moving toward a way of being in the world that makes more sense in this world? If we can’t step in the same river twice, can we at least think about the implications of where we’re stepping?

Weather and Meteorology

Weather gets our attention like nothing else in nature, with the possible exception of more unusual and often more destructive forces like serious disease and earthquakes. We like the weather when it strikes a balance that pleases us--not too hot or cold, not too wet or dry. Soft breezes are fine, but strong winds are unwelcome, bringing with them everything from expressions of dismay to destruction of our dwellings.

Today the streams in my watershed, both large and small, natural and artificial, were momentarily overwhelmed. Heavy thunderstorms began last night, and by the early morning hours, the ground was saturated and a lot of water was following gravity down all the channels. An especially strong storm in the early afternoon overloaded the drainage systems. Water flowed over the streets, unleashing flash flooding here and there. The creek in my backyard, dry in summer except when the rain is heavy, swelled with surging currents.

Storms take us out of ourselves a little, and if they don't inconvenience us too much, they provide some welcome drama. We find ourselves in a suspenseful narrative that builds from moment to moment. Will the power go out? Will a tree fall on my house? Will tornadoes form? Will anyone die?* Local TV stations often preempt all other programming to follow the progress of severe thunderstorms, especially in tornado season. They keep saying the same or similar things over and over, and in their droning repetition overreach for their center-stage prominence as expert interpreters alerting us all to the possible dangers in the unfolding events. Yet some of their frequent updates hold crucial information, particularly when tornadoes loom, as they do at certain times and places. 

Often, though, you really don't need a meteorologist to know which way the wind blows. Outside when the weather changes, you know that the air feels different, and the color of the world changes.

We live in a time when many of us get our "nature" from documentaries. Or nature may only capture our interest when an arresting image is selected for us, perhaps artfully composed by a talented and patient photographer, and printed on the glossy paper of a calendar intended to celebrate beauty in the wild. I enjoy these photos myself, and enjoy many of the images from my own camera. But I recognize the second-hand character of carefully selected images, and similarly, I admire the willingness and ability to observe closely in the one who chose the images directly. The greater satisfaction lies in cultivating and applying the habit of observation that notices the scenes with the kind of immediacy that comes from being present to one's surroundings.

Late yesterday, before the storms came in, they were foreshadowed by the cooling air and the rising wind. In the night, thunder cracked with a raucous insistence, the kind of thunder that probably made some of our distant ancestors sit up in alarm and wonder at what the gods might be up to. The early morning, usually bright, was dark with heavy clouds and the dense downward rush of raindrops. After a few hours of intermittent sun, the afternoon's brief but intense deluge literally changed the atmosphere again. At the end of the heaviest downpour, with the last raindrops still gently falling into a liminal space, the sun emerged from somewhere around the west as the storm blew on its eastward course.

So weather is hard to ignore. It doesn't allow us to pass so much of the experience to other observers. If we're in it, close to it at all, we simply can't take it vicariously. The heat on our faces in the summer sun, the cooling breezes across bare arms, the smell of dry leaves accumulating in fall, the sometimes cloying perfume of greenery and flowers in midsummer fields, the shock of cold winter wind, and the first thunderstorms of spring all press themselves into our senses. We feel them, see them, hear them, and smell them. We even taste them in rain and sweat and blowing dust. All our senses are involved.

We will hear the wind and the rain over the weatherman's observations on the radar, but the weather reports still claim a lot, if not most, of our attention. If we think about it, we understand too that even the radar, the barometers, and the maps are extensions of our own senses, tools we've cleverly contrived to help us see what's coming our way a little earlier, a little more clearly. We constantly work on increasing our ability to control our environment, and when we can't control it, we apply our efforts to predicting it. Such efforts have deep roots in human history, encompassing burnt offerings to gods as well as more practical innovations, like the growing powers of observation that eventually, long before radar and weather faxes, allowed expert mariners who could interpret signs in changing winds and skies to run for sheltered coves when such havens were available.

The direct, unmediated experience that once dominated the human condition, though, is less prominent now. Intimate contact with the elements is still unavoidable, but we nevertheless have a different experience of our world. The words that we use are different. The list of terms we use to describe being in the open air--wind, cold, heat, rain, sleet, hail, storm--all have Germanic roots. They've been in English a long time. The term "weather" is Germanic in origin; "meteorology" is Greek. The word "radar" is among the first commonly used words to have entered the language as an acronym (for "radio detection and ranging"). In my grandparents' generation, no one needed the conceptual compression such acronyms make possible.

In the world we live in today, the public trust goes most readily to approaches regarded as best able to offer a measure of control. But we are old creatures. We still need to explore our experience from our own particular vantage points. Meteorologists know about atmospheric thermodynamics, and can use their understanding of natural movements of energy in the heat engine of the atmosphere to help us figure out when we might need an umbrella. Even having the umbrella, though, won't stop us from feeling like we're walking through rain.


After the day's early-afternoon storm, the electricity has gone out, as it sometimes does on stormy days. I sit with my back to a window on the west side of the house in the last hour or two of daylight. The light on the pages of the book I'm reading is the light from the low sun streaming through wind-tossed leaves in the trees between the sun and the paper leaves of the novel in my hand. The light dances around in moving, mottled patterns for a while, against the static patterns of print on white space. Then the sun moves below the trees behind me, and the pages I'm reading are lit by dimmer, duller light. Twilight has begun. I'll read for a few more minutes, then I'll have to wait for the repair crews to get the lights back on.

When the lights have been off for two and a half hours, power is restored. If I'm curious about the weather for tomorrow and the days ahead, I'll be able to get expert meteorological advice, delivered by one electronic device or another. The world I'm confronted with wants me to open the psychic space to accommodate both weather and meteorology. I'm curious enough to try. 


*Note written the morning after the storm: I woke up to learn that ten people died in tornadoes in central Mississippi, 150-200 miles or so south of where I live. The twisters ran along a northwesterly line from Vicksburg to Yazoo City. Weather forecasts, for those who hear them in time, can provide early warnings that give people opportunity to take shelter. But tornadoes born from severe thunderstorms form quickly and move in unpredictable ways. For those in vulnerable places, they're sometimes nearly impossible to avoid. 

At Shiloh, Once More with Memory

Then the whole congregation of the Israelites assembled at Shiloh, and set up the tent of meeting there. The land lay subdued before them.
-- Joshua 18:1

The land referred to by the author of the Biblical book of Joshua is a conquered Canaan, its people divinely and militarily subdued to make room for Hebrew tribes about to move in. A shrine at the ancient town of Shiloh made it a sacred place. The name resonates across the millenia, along with the echoes of battle.

On the evening of April 7, 1862, the land around Shiloh church in Southwest Tennessee lay subdued, after two days of fierce fighting. Bodies were spread thickly across the battlefield, and it was hot, so General Grant, the victorious commander, ordered them hurriedly buried in mass graves. In 1866 a national cemetery was established, and Union dead were eventually re-interred there in individually marked graves that continue to be well-kept. Confederate dead remain in the trenches, the largest of which received about 700 bodies. Markers for the Southerners in trenches are limited to single gravestones purchased half a century later with funds raised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

My first trip to Shiloh National Military Park was in 1961. I was a 12-year old Boy Scout on an adventure--a 14 mile hike through the park. I don't remember learning much about the details of the battle. Images that remained with me described a small pond bloody with dying men trying to slake their thirst, and a peach orchard where a lot of bullets flew, dropping tender blossoms from the trees onto the ground among the fallen soldiers. I recall getting the information that the Federals won, and browsing, in the bookstore, a thin volume of Confederate lore from the period that claimed a natural superiority for the Rebel soldiers. Most shockingly memorable to me was the existence of burial trenches. I knew what graves were, but this was my first encounter with grave-digging on this scale.

Sometime in the mid-19th century, a handful of people built a log church in southwest Tennessee, and called it Shiloh, after the ancient Hebrew town. The battle came to be known by the name of the church. In out time, it's a peaceful setting, undulating low hills beside the Tennessee River. I have strained to think what it must have been like during that brief local cataclysm. It would have been recognizable, yet arrestingly different.

In the first day's fighting, a lot of the troops formed on opposite sides of a road that had become sunken by wagon travel, the Union to the east with the river behind them, the South to the west, near the route they'd marched up from Corinth, Mississippi. Southern troops spent the day trying to take the ground Union soldiers were defending, which, at very high cost, they finally captured, driving the Federals back to the river. The next day, reinforced Union forces would push the Confederates back to the west across the ground they'd taken the day before, and send them in retreat back to Corinth.

On a trip there several years ago, my wife and I walked along the sunken road and had what I will call a fleeting feeling of presence in the dark time of the long-ago battle, a sense conjured out of what had happened there, with the relentless firing of weapons, the screams of the injured and dying, and dense clouds of black-powder smoke adding their confusing influence to the chaos.

No, I don't believe in ghosts, or in strange, lingering "energies" that leave physical or supernatural traces perceptible by people with keen sensitivities decades or centuries later. And I don't think I'm a reincarnated soldier who died there and "remembers" the battle, as George Patton's character does in the very compelling 1970 film on that quintessential soldier's WWII experiences. Early in the film Patton, on landing in Tunisia after Rommel had thrashed the ill-organized Allied troops there, heads out with an entourage for a tour of the battlefield. He directs his driver to a site that he declares to have been where "the battle" was. But Patton's battlefield is not where Rommel fought the Allies. The soldiers with him are puzzled until Patton reveals that he's talking about the final battle between the Carthaginians and Romans at the end of the Third Punic War in the 2nd century B.C.E. "I was here," Patton said. And he believed it.

That's a good story, and adds color and interest to the character. But my wife and I see our ephemeral moment on the Shiloh battlefield differently. I mentioned it to her after a trip to Shiloh just a few days ago, our second visit since the striking and unexpected wave of emotion at the sunken road. In the last two trips, we hadn't had the same experience. I thought as I was talking about it that it's possible for the human mind, in its inseparable bundle of cognition and emotion, to extend itself in an empathetic way across history. Historic episodes are stories, and we enter into stories of history as we do into novels and films when we allow ourselves to become immersed in them. In a deep tragedy, it may lead to something like Aristotle's notion of cartharsis, the release that comes from an emotional identification.

The U.S. Civil War is tragedy writ large. And it's on our soil, and among our people. It's a good example of what Faulkner pointed out in Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Our sources of tragedy are far from being limited to Aeschylus telling tales of Greeks fighting Persians, or Shakespeare's Lear raging his devastation into the stormy moor.

But back to Shiloh, that bucolic spot a couple of hours from my house. I thought I might, in writing these musings, discover something about why I've made several trips to that particular spot. It has a natural beauty that, for me, is congenial with the kind of country I have seen as beautiful all my life. It's not the only beautiful country, just the kind closest to me. My body feels at home here, and in places that look something like this place. I am situated naturally within stories that unfold here--the story of a battle, stories shared through day trips driving and walking around the space.

And what time do I really live in? Stories that came from my parents, grandparents, and others who lived in rural places where mules pulled plows and wagons and houses were lit by coal oil lamps describe a time for me that remains vivid, a time of made of memories from years before I was born. The fact that the memories are transmitted memories rather than my own primary memories removes them only a short distance from my own experience. These kinds of memories place me in a time little changed from the late 19th century.

The moment on the sunken road, filled somehow with impressions that connected me to a larger time than the span of my own life, was brief as we generally reckon time, yet the experience of it felt timeless. In that moment, however long it might have taken, I went out of the realm of my own ordinariness. I was conscious of something more than I'm typically aware of and able to attend to in time and space. The moment came unbidden, and took me out of myself, which is to say out of my own narrative and into a more capacious one.

The poem at the end of Robert Penn Warren's Audubon: A Vision is titled "Tell Me a Story," and appears after the poet has told a richly textured story of John James Audubon, a story based on an event reported in Audubon's journals, and extended into a vaster territory by the poet's vision, or perhaps the interweaving of the experience and vision of Audubon and Warren, with the event and Warren's tale over a hundred years apart. Here's the poem, where Warren wraps up his particular tale by talking about a more universal conception of story:

[A]
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
the great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

[B]
Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.
- -

I have had a small number of other sunken road moments in my life. During those moments, "I did not know what was happening in my heart." I can speak of Time when I recall these experiences, but pronouncing its name fails to deliver a description of what it felt like--naming the Time I knew in any meaningful way is a task I'm just not able to perform. The delight I take in those experiences is no mere burst of exuberance. It's deep.

What could be delightful about such a bloody event as a battle? In its etymology, the OED defines delectare, the Latin root of "delight," as "to allure, charm." What is alluring may well be something one takes a kind of joy in. Tennyson's aging Ulysses fondly recalls having " . . . drunk delight of battle with my peers . . ." Again, the film version of Patton, on seeing his army on the move: "I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life. "

Even the gentle Walt Whitman, who was a nurse during the war, writes of a soldier's good moments in "Song of Joys":

O to resume the joys of the soldier!
To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer--to feel his sympathy!
To behold his calmness--to be warm'd in the rays of his smile!
To go to battle--to hear the bugles play and the drums beat!
To hear the crash of artillery--to see the glittering of the bayonets
and musket-barrels in the sun!
To see men fall and die and not complain!
To taste the savage taste of blood--to be so devilish!
To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.

Finally, General Robert E. Lee, speaking to his subordinate General Longstreet at the battle of Fredericksburg: "It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

I don't think I personally would ever be in danger of growing too fond of war. But the remarks by these poets and generals reveal a passion for its drama. And Homer's Iliad stands at the beginning of Western literature with one of the greatest war stories ever told.

My own attitude is less a fondness for war than an affinity for the human struggle with tragedy. Tragedy has its allure, its charm, and thus a kind of delight. It allures--draws us in--by way of the depth and range of universal human feeling it portrays. It shows us that folly is not only universal, it is often "mightiest in the mighty," to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In the U.S. Civil War, the Southern folly involved a handful of rich people convincing or coercing millions of ordinary people to defend the lavish way of life they'd built on owning human beings, buying and selling them and using them as we use farm machinery today. The phenomenon of powerful people managing to convince the less powerful to fight and die for their interests is, unfortunately, all too common in human history.

The war was costly, well over 600,000 dead, hundreds of thousands more sent home maimed, mostly with amputated limbs. The Southern economy was devastated. A huge number of the small farmers who, by their lights, fought to defend their invaded homeland, were dead or, maybe lacking an arm or a leg, returned home unable to work their farms. The institution of slavery was wiped away, but some of its residue remains with us, a Faulknerian past that isn't dead or even past.

So in this level of tragedy, we feel with the players on that long-ago stage, deepening our sense of the human condition through our identification with the characters in the great drama.

The spectacle of the entire war is complex and in a way overwhelming. It may well be that its human impacts are most easily seen through particular stories that describe what it was like to be in a particular place at the time these events were unfolding. Shiloh, the quiet place in West Tennessee, is one place to do that.

The Foggy Filter of Ideology

Most of us subscribe to a set of ideals, ideas about the best ways to understand and accomplish things. We need ideas about the world, conceptions that help us map things out and understand the way they relate to each other. At some point, however, ideology often becomes just another way to steer clear of the difficult thinking that's required for understanding a rapidly changing, complex world. In this light, ideology can and often does function like stereotyping and prejudice.

If ideals always did what they said they were going to do, generating no unintended consequences, and no destructive clashes with other ideals, they might be more likely to produce the better world their adherents claim for them. But many if not most idealists just seem to want to rid the world of other people whose ideals conflict with their own. They're going for ideological purity, as they see it. All the world's people must become Chrisitans, atheists, humanists, capitalists, socialists, rationalists, pacifists, militarists--the list could go on indefinitely.

But it's varied human experience that goes on indefinitely, generating myriad ways of seeing the world. Every cultural variation and every historical moment contributes to a distinctiveness of individuals and groups that's really beyond the ability of individuals to comprehend. That kind of variety and its associated complexity seems to alarm a lot of people.

"The meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience, whether passive or active." That's William James's formulation of the "pragmatic maxim," an American contribution to philosophy first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce. In other words, the meaning of a notion is the effect it produces in the world.

Even when an ideal is clearly just, as in the abolition of slavery in the U. S. during the time of our Civil War, one can see human action begun in a morally clear ideal spilling through the unintended ravages of ideology and into moral ambiguity.

In Civil War poetry, Whitman is widely remembered and still widely read, at least in schools. Melville, who also wrote compelling poems about the war, gets little attention for his contributions to what the experience of that war was like.

Robert Penn Warren, a writer of uncommon insight in the arena of history, edited a collection of Melville's poems (Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader's Edition, NYC, Random House, 1970). In his introduction, Warren notes: "Even if an ethical distinction is to be made at the level of the cause for which war is being waged, at another level such a distinction is irrelevant" and then quotes from Melville's "Conflict of Convictions":

Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?

So be it; but they both were young--

Each grape to his cluster clung,

All their elegies are sung.

Warren's commentary continues:

Each was doomed to cling to his cluster, and in this fact is implicit the polarity of "ideology" ("Law," "Right," or even "Destiny") against human values, human suffering, human aspiration, and qualities of personality and spirit.

The human bond may be as important as the bond of ideology. . . .

A recognition of the human as distinguished from the ideological makes magnanimity possible . . .

As regards "the polarity of ideology and human values" Warren is careful to point out:

We cannot be too schematic about such polarities as we have been discussing. One pair shades into another. One pole does not cancel out its opposite. All belong to the complex texture of life as lived, to the density and equivocalness of experience. But to live in any full sense demands the effort to comprehend this complexity of texture, this density and equivocalness of experience, and yet not forfeit the ability to act. The man who "sees through it," but who, at the same time, can act, who has a sense of tragedy of the human plight--that is the hero for Melville. . . .

In many poems this idea of the ever-presence of evil--evil, shall we say, as the cost of good?--appears: for instance in [Melville's] "Commemorative of a Naval Victory," a poem which one is tempted to call great:

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen

Unmixed with pensive pansies dark:

There's a light and a shadow on every man

Who at last attains his lifted mark--

Nursing through night the ethereal spark.

Elate he never can be;

He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,

Sleep in oblivion.--The shark

Glides white through the phosphorous sea.

As I read Warren and Melville here, they both recognize a kind of bad faith (or maybe just ignorance) in the sanctimonious, uncomplicated comfort that comes with seeing yourself perfectly aligned with the Right Ideals, no matter who gets killed and maimed (physically, emotionally, or spiritually) in the process. The heroes, as noted, are those who recognize the multivalent flux of reality, and understand that efforts to "fix" things have mixed results, yet act in the world anyway, guarding against the insistent need for facile self-congratulation.

Common humanity is already a fact, and has been since humanity's appearance. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world, however, have never been held in common across groups dispersed in time and space, and they never will, unless humans become automatons. Ways of seeing and interpreting the world are not even common in the same workplace, the same religious group, or the same family.

Maybe this failure of agreement is so hard for people to accept because our belief systems are so integral to our identities. We need to recognize this, but we also need to understand that it's all right to adjust belief systems when their actual effects on the world (see the pragmatic maxim above) are not what our ideals lead us to think they will be.

The claims of human dignity and compassion are simply not always served by what so many people regard as "high ideals." It's time to evaluate claims to truth not by the abstractions of ideologues, but by what happens when the ideas are forced on the world.

Getting government "off the backs" of businesses in the U.S. has not led to a stronger, more stable economy through miraculous innovations like derivatives and credit default swaps. The U. S. healthcare system costs more per capita or as a percentage of GDP than any system in the world, and by a large margin. Yet life expectancies are lower here, and infant mortality higher, than in nations that are our economic peers. Where does the "best healthcare system in the world" mentality come from? It can only come from ideology, since it doesn't conform to what happens in the world. The forces of the U.S. military were not "welcomed as liberators" in Iraq, as the panglossian silliness of the neocons predicted. They were welcomed with IEDs.

Such examples of ideas failing in application are certainly not confined to any spot on the ideological spectrum. The years of planned economies did not create a worker's paradise in the Soviet Union or Maoist China. Instead, the "people" on the ideological pedestal got widespread famine and mass murder. Court-ordered busing to achieve racial integration in U.S. schools is highly correlated with the resegregation of those schools, and that effect is not confined to the South. The War on Poverty, as it was known in the 60s, has turned out to be a little more complicated than its proponents in those days believed.

It may be that our ideas often fail us, or at least fall far short of our expectations, because our ability to control the flow of events in the world is more limited than we like to think. Our actions often produce effects, but we don't like to admit how mixed those effects can be.

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . And from what I can see it bends toward justice." This observation is from the 19th century Unitarian minister and fervent abolitionist Theodore Parker, though it was made known in the late 20th century by Martin Luther King, Jr. It may be a true observation, and certainly has been true of improvements in racial justice in the past 150 years, though the work of justice, of course, goes on.

But human history is indeed a long arc, and in its long course things have sometimes improved for hundreds of years at a time, then decayed. We don't know what's coming. But whatever it is, we can do better at addressing universally shared human values. One value we might consider more seriously is the notion that relationships are more important that propositions. Most people, I believe, prefer to be treated like they themselves are more important than ideas.