In Covenant With My Father

I’ve heard the quote “death ends a life, but not a relationship” attributed to several people. I first saw and spoke the line in 1993 when I played the role of Gene Garrison in a local community theater production of Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father, originally produced in 1968. My other regular exposure to this arresting yet quite sensible notion comes once every year, when the Unitarian church I belong to includes it in a liturgy in remembrance of the deceased. And though the service is intended most for those who were lost in the year just past, you can certainly remember anyone you’re inclined to remember.

My father died at the age of 86 just after Christmas last year--December 29, 2010. At this writing, that’s only about a month ago. I don’t expect the relationship to end before I join him in the way of all flesh. In a powerful sense, our own selves are made up of the influences of countless other selves, with our longest and most significant relationships asserting their presence insistently, in a variety of ways.

Robert Penn Warren first published his essay “Portrait of a Father” in 1987 in The Southern Review. His father had died about 32 years earlier, but of course the reflections and ruminations generated by that relationship didn’t end. In 1988, the University Press of Kentucky published “Portrait” as a book, including the longish poem “Mortmain.” The poem’s title refers to the ongoing influence of the dead on the living. Warren himself died in September of 1989.

Warren begins thusly: “My father, as the years since his death pass, becomes to me more and more a man of mystery. I do not mean to say that I do not know the man he was . . . . What is mysterious is the personal history from which that man emerged. This involves, of course, the mystery of his family, especially his mother and father.”

So it seems safe to say that Warren didn’t finish assimilating the business of his family history, as it came through his father, before he died. People talk of getting “closure” on their relationships with parents before the old ones die, or "closure" with other significant people before they themselves die. I personally see this “closure” as not only overrated, but far more elusive than generally believed. I don’t expect my own life to end as a neatly resolved narrative. My relationship with my father--one not ended by death--remains open to exploration and interpretation. The overarching story does not end.

I know very little about my father’s father, the only one of my grandparents who died before I was born. This grandfather owned a farm when my father was born, but in 1932, when my father was seven years old, the house on the farm burned down, so he sold the place to his brother-in-law and moved to town, working as a clerk at various times in a grocery store or hardware store. My father described him as a man of few words who commanded attention when he did speak.

My father’s mother I knew well, having spent a lot of time in her company, alone sometimes, and more often with members of the extended family. I remember her as buoyant, talkative, opinionated, energetic, and not averse to an occasional bawdy joke, as long as the joke didn’t transgress propriety too far. I was very fond of her.

Questions of where my father came from--his own origins and influences--bear on the question of the distance between him and me. While it’s certainly true that a historical continuity crosses generations and holds them together, it’s also the case that most of us, especially in times of rapid culture change, see gaps, if not gulfs, of perception and interpretation of the world open up between ourselves and our parents. So in the case of my relationship with my father, we spent part of our time together and apart working out various accommodations to the distance.

In the late sixties and early seventies, we argued. We disagreed, among other things, on politics, as he was traditional and I as a young man was excited by the novel possibilities offered up by the deliciously tumultuous cultural pageant around us. And in a way, he still was the authority and I the rebel. Good conditions for establishing the kind of relationship that requires a covenant--the kind of mutual obligation growing out of a well-known Biblical form. A natural extension of our father-child bond, one that often, but not always, follows into the son's adulthood. 

My father grew up in the Great Depression, and for him, work with good pay, benefits, and job security was a great blessing and all one need hope for. For me, what I’ve always seen as problematic--a system that places what’s conventionally seen as economically efficient over the needs of the human spirit--a good job would have been one I felt more at home in, one friendly to my values and natural inclinations.

His view certainly has its advantages. I’ve come more and more to feel that mine has been too idealistic, as I’ve moved in mid-life and beyond into more pragmatic territory, somewhat reluctantly toward a clear-eyed view of the world as it is rather than what I would prefer it to be. But I’ve never wanted to accept what’s there as being just and right and simply because it is in fact there.

We worked together, my father and I, in his small manufacturing business, for fourteen years, a time that ended almost 20 years ago. During those years, we intensified the informal hermeneutic of each other we’d already begun, each trying to interpret what exactly the other one was, looking for clues that were new or at least refined versions of the ones we had. I like to believe the process itself became more refined over those years. This attempt at mutual knowing, at overlapping interpretations, stretched into his last days, as we continued the longtime habitual work of knowing each other better. 

And I still had the “me” of my own earlier years, the part of my capacious, often inconsistent “self” that is certainly more varied and more malleable than I used to think it was. Memories and experience from those older regions of myself were always there to resonate in a territory of life I shared with my father.

He was good to me, and followed his lights, often if not always right, in being also good for me. As a boy I wanted what so many boys want--to be like someone who was a little farther along, allowed to do more important things. My father was in the immemorial chain of fathers who’d helped boys along that path. At one time, I’d have learned to harness a team and drive a wagon. In the time and place I lived in, I learned to drive cars. I wanted to start early, and I wanted to know not only how to drive them, but how they worked. He was helpful with both areas, as he was with bicycling and hunting. He talked seriously with me about politics, and I listened to him talk with others about it. I kept the habit of such conversations, but changed some of my allegiances.

I spoke briefly at his funeral, something I wouldn’t have thought I’d do. What came to me to talk about was what I’d learned from him about the vital importance of maintaining relationships in the presence of conflict--a vital element in the covenantal agreement. Relationships are more important than the doctrines and dogmas people cling to so desperately, as if their lives depend upon their allegiance to human constructs. Constructs must now and forever take a back seat to the fundamental need to maintain relationships. Most of us, unfortunately, aren’t very good at subordinating our ideas to the need to live with others. That’s always a shame, and often destructive. One day, it may be apocalyptically destructive.

In my remarks at the funeral service, after my father’s Baptist pastor spoke, I mentioned my own Unitarian affiliation, saying that we Unitarians are fond of quoting our 16th century European forbear Francis David, who said: “We need not think alike to love alike.” After we’d had our last conversation, it struck me that, at a deep level, my father understood this and insisted on it.

Most substantial, lasting relationships include an ongoing desire for mutual understanding. Exploring the territories of those you care about, and the territories between you, is quite possibly the most rewarding human occupation, the best thing we can do with our limited time. 

Who am I? Where did I come from? That’s too complex a question for anything like a full answer. But I know some of the contributors to my identity. I feel my father’s presence among the forces telling me who I am.

A stanza from Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Whatever You Now Are” suggests the difficulty of trying to reach some, well, closure about an answer:

Is it you that flows from distance, to distance,
With the tune of time and blood intertwined forever?
Or does the dark stream of log-ripple and stone-chance
Define the pattern of your whole life’s endeavor?
What elements, shadowy, in that dream interlace
In a region past categories of Time and Space?

The poem ends with the question open even wider:

. . . music drifts to your shadowy cave
Of consciousness, whoever you now are--
But dawn breaks soon, and that self will have fled away.
Will a more strange one yet inhabit the precinct of day?

Will a more strange self yet emerge as a “you” (or me) in that forever-entwined “tune of time and blood”? It’s altogether likely. But the blood will have its say along with, and probably over and above, the shadowy elements. Time and blood together shape distinctive people who interact with each other from different vantage points.

We are shaped first by biology, then by the human history running through a very specific--unique, actually--time and place. And chance has its say as well. We have little control over most of these things, but at least some control over the ways we relate to each other. We should remember this, take care in it, and take joy in it.

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.