The Cry in the Orchard

At the far end of the orchard one night, Claire was plucking apples from a tree and dropping them into a burlap bag when, suddenly, a cry from the other side of the brick wall startled her. She waited silently to hear the cry again. She couldn’t tell if it was a human cry, or the cry of an animal. The night wind trailed briskly through the long grass and the dried fallen leaves, and touched Claire’s fingertips. The cry was indistinct. It could have been a cry of pain or a laugh. But Claire would never know. Silence crept back into the corner of the orchard, and the cry was heard no more.

Jacob Bronowski's Science

Jacob Bronowski identified a modern myth whose origins, he claimed, could be traced to the Industrial Revolution: the fear that man was becoming, ever more swiftly, a machine at the hands of modern science. When Bronowski entered the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, sparked by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures—addressing the breakdown in communication between scientists and literary intellectuals — he wanted to expose this myth, dispel false and antiquated notions of science, and illuminate the human being’s unique position in the natural world. His series of essays, The Identity of Man, is a valiant attempt to humanize science, and simultaneously, to popularize it. Only by discerning, as Bronowski believed, the inextricable relationship between science and the arts — by recovering the integrity of science — could one begin to appreciate man’s extraordinary, albeit material, nature. Unlike Snow’s treatise, whose political agenda bears the marks of Cold War anxieties and personal antipathies, Bronowski’s essays constitute a total philosophy of modern life, whereby a sound education in humanistic science is the basis for self-affirmation and the preservation of citizenship and democracy.

Reflections on 1968

In 1968, the world abounded with young idealists: student radicals, third world guerillas, disaffected intellectuals, Dany Cohn-Bendits, Rudi-Dutschkes, and Adam Michniks. They came out en masse in 1968 – symptomatic of the “eros effect,” as theorized by George Katsiaficas – initially to challenge local authority structures, and ultimately to attack oppression and injustice everywhere, especially in imperialist, hyper-capitalist, Communist, and underdeveloped societies. In the global revolution that ensued, the New Left – as this emergent vanguard of the socialist movement came to be known – recognized that its own interests lay in the equality and freedom of self-determination of all people: instinctual needs that, when realized, might culminate in utopia.

And yet, while the events of 1968 were wider in scope – politically, culturally, and geographically – than the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, they ended nonetheless in disappointment, disillusionment, and shock. In popular memory, the failure of 1968 is attributed to any of several factors, like the overwhelming resistance of the state, the degeneration of revolutionary fervor into counterrevolutionary hedonism, and the lack of mass support from the working classes for the student movement. This last factor needs to be considered in detail, not least because it has provoked unwarranted criticism of the working class as an apathetic collective force resistant to revolutionary change. In reality, no single explanation can account for the breakdown of the student-worker alliances that manifested, to varying degrees of success, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The socio-political context in which each movement originated was significantly different from every other, so that each must be assessed and respected on its own terms. What these movements all had in common, however, was the student movement’s ability to identify existentially with oppressed peoples around the word, and in particular, with the working class. An alliance between these two parties, as national governments feared, could pose an irresistible threat to their dominance.

Dispatches: Remembering March 1968

As to the events of March 1968, I was in the eye of the storm, though I, like the rest of my peers, was oblivious to the political machinations and set-ups underlying the student movement. I was the classic representative and spokesperson for a spirit enslaved by communism, a national spirit, the Polish spirit—in pursuit of liberation from Soviet control, on the one hand, and on the other, freedom from the communism imposed on us by force.

I was in my fourth year of studies. One morning, on my way to a doctor’s appointment outside of the University, I picked up a leaflet on the ground in front of the library, a leaflet among many which someone had scattered like seeds. It was an announcement for a rally at 3pm that day, on that very spot in the courtyard, to protest the removal of a canonical play from the National Theatre (the play was removed for its incitement of anti-Soviet sentiment). As I returned from my check-up, I realized that all the streets leading to the university were blocked by militia squad-cars. Tension was rising.

The rally began with a protest in relation to the play, though immediately afterwards, we heard people shouting to each other to flee for the university buildings, for the militia had begun to attack.

We quickly rushed to a building and barricaded the doors. From the window I could see militia officers, not dressed in their regular uniforms but as workmen, beating students with batons and throwing them into police wagons.

Meanwhile, other schools were joining the student movement, and every day the movement was growing larger.

At the University I took part in a rally in the main auditorium, then in the departmental sit-ins, and in the marches through the Krakowski section of Warsaw; when threatened with police violence, we ran into Holy Cross Church.

But these are all minor details. Most important was the hope and joy we felt, that something would change, that we were fighting for Poland’s independence, that history was being made. The ability to express one’s hatred for the Soviet regime, thrust upon us against our will. And what’s more, the knowledge that we could express our deepest convictions without fear. I remember crying from happiness and pride, ecstatic that I could sing our national anthem in protest against the Soviet regime.

We belonged to the post-war generation, fighting for freedom despite our fear of the Stalinist repressions that so severely affected those of the wartime generation, our parents and grandparents.

In later years we discovered that, far from being agents of change, we were a bunch of dupes. The declaration of martial law in 1980, after the fall of the Solidarity movement, was the final blow to my ideals. After that, everything was an illusion.

T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral

Almost no critical study of T.S. Eliot’s religious drama, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), can fail to account for the link between its author and its protagonist, St. Thomas á Becket. Indeed, the religious experience at the center of the play represents all those elements with which Eliot was deeply concerned: “the crisis of doubt, the sense of guilt, the necessity of suffering, the experience of purgation, the subjection to the divine will and the immanent destiny.” However, few readers and critics direct their attention to the play’s social and political analogues, especially in relation to contemporary events, most significant of which was the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. In 1939, five years after Murder in the Cathedral was produced, and only months before Europe entered a second world war, Eliot gave a series of lectures on “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in which he examined the state of Christianity in the modern age, while envisioning a new Christian social order.

The play’s relationship to its author’s historical context—a religiously orthodox vision in an ideologically heterodox climate—is remarkable, anticipating ideas advanced in Eliot’s lecture, particularly regarding the division between church and state. These considerations all have a basis in one of Eliot’s most pressing questions, namely, whether modern liberal democracy or fascism poses the greater danger to religious orthodoxy. In answering this question, though, we inevitably uncover the poet’s own ideological prejudices.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, Eliot’s reputation as a cultural authority changed dramatically. Until that year, he had maintained the image of a poetic revolutionary, vindicating poetry like one of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Subsequently, though, in his essays, lectures, plays, and meditative poetry, Eliot came to be identified with religious restoration and right-wing politics, a transition aptly summed up in his self-proclamation as “a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” His conversion astonished readers and friends alike, who hailed him as one of the leading proponents of the avant-garde, the cult of the new. But the seeds for religious transformation were present long before, as far back as his undergraduate years in Harvard, when the young Eliot pondered the relationship between body and soul, struggled against the distractions of physicality, and yearned for spiritual perfection through ascetic labor. His sense of sin and guilt, in particular, drew him to a stronger, more dogmatic theological structure than his Unitarian background could provide. Thus in a note that he scribbled around 1923 or 1924: “There are only 2 things—Puritanism and Catholicism. You are one or the other. You either believe in the reality of sin or you don’t—that is the important moral distinction—not whether you are good or bad. Puritanism does not believe in sin: it merely believes that certain things must not be done.” Eliot needed spiritual discipline, even self-abnegation, because he recognized the power of evil in human hearts. His conception of sin, severe and obsessive, braced him against the moral decadence, the death-in-life he perceived around him. According to biographer Lyndall Gordon, Eliot “felt the devil not so much in social wrongs, but within, and believed that the chief purpose of civilization was to cope with the notion of original sin. Lust seemed to him the most corrupting of all sins and, as a young man, he wished the flesh could be denied, burnt away by the refining fire.” Like Augustine, Eliot knew he was setting out on a path of no return, for it was a path remarkably similar to that of a saint.

On a Tour of New Orleans During Mardi Gras

The window of my third floor walk-up in the French Quarter opens upon the shimmering slate rooftops and dormers of pastel-colored houses and the intricate lacework balconies, dripping from last night's rain. Beyond them rise the sun-bathed spires of a church, and beyond those, the blue shipping cranes on the Mississippi. From my little garret, I can hear the flourishes of a trumpet and the bellowing of a trombone, full-blooded jazz rhythms clamoring in the avenues below. From other rooms in the Vieux Carre, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams listened too, tapping away at their typewriters.

It is Ash Wednesday. The sudden downpour in the small hours of the night, which swept the merrymakers of Mardi Gras into their hotels and rented apartments, pushed the jazz musicos and washboard-and-fiddle bohemians into little dry corners, and drenched the hell-fire of the prophets of Bourbon Street, seemed appropriate, if not biblical. (I myself much prefer rain to brimstone.) I descend my serpentine staircase and go outside. The streets are nearly deserted, but the fragments of a day-long bacchanalia are scattered everywhere. Under grey skies, I and the other survivors wade through the rubbish and mud puddles on our way to the cathedral for mass.

Mardi Gras had begun early. The narrow streets, thickening and panting with life, gave me the impression of being in Pamplona during the running of the bulls. Setting out for the Marigny, where the parades were to begin, I walked through a gauntlet of men and women clad in strange and spectacular costumes. Each seemed to be a defiant gesture against something and anything: sexual norms, social conventions, traditions of decency, legacies of oppression, hierarchies of value. Never had I seen so many satyrs and fauns, pirates, crossdressers, brightly painted faces and bodies, stilt walkers -- it was as though we had all escaped from a circus!

Carnivale is a great human drama, someone told me. We cast ourselves in it, take roles, and act in them with startling conviction. If one is asked why, one might respond, "Because it's Mardi Gras! That's what is done." For one short season, we overturn the social order with aplomb, in accord with some invisible script, and when it ends, as it must end -- abruptly -- we return painfully to our former lives, to offices, classrooms, silent homes, routines, responsibilities, insecurities.

On that somber Wednesday morning, people materialize in the streets with ashes on their forehead, the church bell tolling at the beginning of another mass. The sun begins to dispel the clouds, but a vague memory of the night before remains. Why did we come here? What happens now? The jazz starts up again, but more softly. Artists again hang their wares on gates, and fortune tellers again set up tables in Jackson Square. Weaving through the few open spaces, we pass each other, see the smudged cross over each others' brows, and exchange knowing glances. But what is it that we know? Is the drama over, or does it continue?

And if it continues, when does it end?

Anatomy of Dreams

Sigmund Freud was not the first to explore the unconscious, or to analyze the origin and nature of dreams. Before him, Homer imagined gods sending men to deliver messages into the minds of unwitting sleepers. Sophocles and Shakespeare both examined unconscious motivation in their plays. Among the most popular pre-modern tracts on dreams was Macrobius’s (ca. 360) Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. In the eighteenth century, Kant asserted that humans structure their world in the unconscious realm, and in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer’s disciple, Eduard von Hartmann, wrote an influential treatise on the subject, known as The Philosophy of the Unconscious. But despite these inquiries and investigations, the human psyche remained a source of mystery, more amenable to philosophical speculation than to empirical observation.

When Freud began to study the structure of the mind, he reclaimed its properties for man. Although most modern thinkers were already doing this, Freud was committed to a medico-scientific understanding of the psyche. A rational explanation, therefore, must be free of romantic or providential assumptions, in which the mind is a medium for external forces, divine or demonic, and instead, find its basis in human psychology. By establishing a link between cognition and the operations of the body, Freud showed that the mind is distinctly human. And in one other respect, the mind is distinctly modern. “For Freud, human reason was not master in its own house but a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious desires and forces.” As such, Freudian theory is consistent with the prevailing themes of modernism: apparent incoherence and meaninglessness, ambiguity, the absence of a deity. All are ingredients for an existential crisis, and yet the predicament posed by an unconscious falls short of absurdity. Though its activity is obscure, and perhaps even irrational, it is nevertheless comprehensible, particularly through dreams. Freud, taking his cue from the ancients, demonstrated the narrative value and figurative significance of dreams, thereby enabling us to uncover truths not visible to empirical observation.