Free speech

Recently on facebook a friend of mine joined a group that was protesting another group called “Soldiers are not heroes.” I immediately thought to join the first group and protest the second. Regardless of my political feelings or my thoughts about the current war in Iraq, I am of the opinion that soldiers should be respected and loved. I think a lot of people consider each soldier first as a part of an organization and only second as a true human being. Therefore it’s a rather easy jump from “hate the war” to “hate the soldier.” But each soldier is an individual, and each soldier has had a life up until their joining in this war, just as every person who we meet has had a life up until our meeting them. The entire situation surrounding the war has been and is a difficult one, and these soldiers made the choice to act, to believe in an idea and go out and try to change the world. Regardless of the politics involved, I think that’s rather heroic.

It is a difficult thing for me, though, because of my feelings on the war. Plato, through Socrates, comments on how virtues can be turned into their opposite if there is an absence of wisdom. Bravery, heroism, courage, and all other such things involved with the life of a soldier, therefore, are not virtues in and of themselves, but only when they are founded in true wisdom do they become virtuous. (I’m sure I’m simplifying the argument greatly, but I think that was the gist of it…) Therefore, a person can be a hero, but can still not be doing the right thing.

I think it is here where most people who disagree with the war stop: “soldiers are doing great things, but they’re doing them for a false cause.” And of course, simply doing what someone believes in doesn’t make that action right. Many good intentions fall ill when put into action.

But something is still off to me, or at least I feel that something is missing from the argument. The idea of choice, of choosing not only to believe in something, but to act upon that belief, is an amazing thing. Many people in this generation are lethargic, not wanting to do anything and, if they hold beliefs, not wanting to act on them past a passive response. But these soldiers have made a choice to act, to act upon a world they see as threatening, as dangerous, but also as changeable, as potentially good. In such an act there is a hope for a better life not only for the people who live in America, but for those who live in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the rest of the world as well. And in that choice to act, in the self-possessed act of getting up and working in the world, there seems to be something, something important that I have taken up til now to try (possibly in vain) to explain. I don’t think we are meant to be passive in this world, to sit back and watch it as it unfolds before us. Whether we work locally or globally, to simply watch is to give up. And I don’t mean to give up “on humanity” or “on the world” or anything, but to give up on that which is an integral part of what makes us living creatures. To act is to verify that we are alive, as well as all that comes with being alive. A single blog-post is in no way capable of explaining all that “being alive” means, though I can say that, unless we are alive, unless we verify through our acts that we live and that our existence is not a lie, we will never reach the true glory of what it means to be human.

On why myths and legends are important!!!!!

The following comes from a “weekly response” on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “A History of the Kings of Britain.”  I was (before this paragraph) complaining about how stupid Freud is, though the question in general was why things like death, destruction, and drama is so appealing.  Hopefully it still flows out of context…

Yet from where, in the end, does our seemingly human enjoyment of “ruin” come? For there is much death and destruction in Arthurian literature, and for that matter most of the mythological and folkloric tales that I personally have read. The argument I propose, at least conditionally, is one in which places a rather heavy emphasis on these tales being influenced by an entire community. Modern stories are mostly all told by a single author, yet tales such as the Arthurian cycle are told and retold orally over hundreds of years, collecting ideas, images, thoughts, and many other complicating factors along the way. One telling may emphasize Arthur and Guinevere while others may focus upon the wars, all depending on the cultural ideas of the teller as well as the make-up of the listeners. Many times legends and myths appear piecemeal, but that is only because they have been told by countless numbers in their ever-continuing lives. If each retelling of a tale is focused upon both the ideas and needs of a particular community, it can be said that myths and legends are laden with the thoughts, hopes, fears and expectations of the communities it has passed through. My argument is enjoyment with “ruin” in such tales come not from a fascination with unpleasure, but because listeners hear within each tale all those things just mentioned and, in effect, they hear a search for meaning conducted over centuries.

The “Real” World

My friend Joseph recently told me a story about someone he knows in his hometown.  This person complained, it seemed, when people didn’t talk about “real” things.  To her, “real” meant purely things like “sex” and other personal details.  This got us on to the topic of what people really do mean when they say “the real world.”  I have been unfortunate to have heard it most of my life, mainly from my father.  I, of course, understand that, my father being very practical and having a romantic for son, he would want to instill in me a grounded outlook on life, rather than the outlook I held in high school (which was rather up in the clouds).

Yet, as probably every (or most) teenager, when my dad said left, I said right.  When he said “One day you’re going to have to join the real world,” I staunchly replied “No I won’t” without truly understanding him or what he meant.

When graduating from high school I heard the phrase more, and so too when graduating from college.  Then, when leaving Japan, I heard it more: “Well, time to get back to the real world” or “Time you got a job and entered the real world, huh?”  In the end, though, what exactly does that phrase “the real world” mean?  Is getting a job “the real world?”  Is not being in school more “real” than being in it?  When we begin to pay our own taxes, do we immediately enter a world more “real” than when we didn’t?

In the end, everything people mean when they refer to a “real world” is cultural.  For what, truly, is real?  Is sitting at a desk real?  Sure, but is it more real than walking in the forest?  Or spending a lazy afternoon in the sun?  Sadly, though, it seems that whenever a person uses the phrase “the real world” their voices have a hint (at least) of depression.  The “real world” is something that must be taken, not enjoyed.  Lived, but not thrived in.  Succumb to, not choose openly.  To enter the “real world” is to suffer it.

Of course we all must, in the end, eat (at the base of life), and therefore we all need to have some way of getting food, and thus do really need jobs.  And not all jobs are horrible things; this is not what I’m saying.  I’m writing about how people see life, for when the phrase “real world” appears, generally people are talking about anything but the actual real world.  The world has its ups and downs, its sufferings and its horrors; this is well understood.  But we have one life to live, and to live it believing that we must succumb to some culturally accepted idea of how the world works is ludicrous.  Give me a thick book before a cubicle; my soul thirsts more than my longing to please American culture.  For it is our developments, our growth, how we thrive on the very air we breathe that is real.

My father retired from his job a few years back, happy about the years he put in yet wishing for some rest.  Now he plays golf and takes care of two dogs.  If asked, he would still probably claim that some “real world” existed out there, maybe among the economic types, maybe in business, maybe just out in the tax-payer society.  Yet I know that he loved his job not because it was “the real world,” but because he loved his job.  That is why he can retire without regrets, and that is why, I think, he is living happily now.  I hope to one day do the same.

Recent Thoughts

In an essay on Beowulf, Tolkien considers the act of the tale of Beowulf as a sort of tower.  A man has in his yard many stones from an ancient structure, and with those stones he builds a high tower.  Those who come after him are puzzeled by this and wonder why he didn’t build something else.  They knock it down and try to figure out what the stones made before.  One even finds oil underneath the tower and begins to dig for it.  No one is able to figure the man out, even his descendants.  In the final line of the allegory, Tolkien writes that, from the top of the tower, “the man had been able to look upon the sea.” I think this short tale of his own is at the center not only of Tolkien’s art, but also his approach to literature as a whole.

For me, it gets to the heart of why literature is important at all.  All over the world there are people who can’t even read, let alone pick up a book, and at times I feel that my own intended profession of an interpreter of literature seems somewhat away from the way so many people lead their lives.  I don’t need the people who ask what the purpose of literature teachers and professors are; I ask myself the question.

Yet ever since I was young I have been enamoured with stories, and the wonder I have felt from them has lead me to many amazing places in the world.  I feel as if there is something in tales and stories that is more important than the common, modern (or post-modern, whatever self-named period we’re currently living in) idea of the utilitarian need for literature.  I have heard that literature allows us a “window into the past,” or that by learning about how people thought by what they wrote, we can reconstruct how our culture got to be the way it is, and therefore somehow learn about humanity as a whole.  Yet all these things seem to be doing something with the tower other than climbing up it and looking at the view.  What is the importance of literature, pure and simple, as literature?

I remember reading somewhere in Josef Pieper’s books that philosophy has no true utilitarian usage.  At the time I read that I felt somewhat unsure what he was trying to describe as the importance of philosophy, but I think I better understand him when I look at literature.  I can’t quote him, as I’m sure Mike has the book I’m thinking of, but his idea that things are “good” without being “useful” really goes against the grain of our present day culture.

I had considered at a time that philosophy leads one to God.  I could say the same thing about literature.  I think this is still true, but there is a complication, details that range from large to unbelievably minute that make each of these sentences wholly…almost wrong.  They’re right, but they miss the point, and it is in the examination and the deepening of their main idea that I think their true meaning comes out.  It’s strange…very strange indeed.  When I truly began to think about philosophy and the meanings behind things, I thought I had a lot about life figured out.  Rather pompous of me, but I think I was very near the mark with many of the ideas I had.  Though getting near the mark and examining, through the act of living, that mark is where we truly learn what everything is about, and no truth can fit into any maxim, no matter how far we refine our thoughts, languages, or ideas.  Truth is wholly unspoken, but experienced, lived, acted. The act of reading literature, I believe, is a type of that act.

Good literature, when read correctly, is an act that can lead to truth, though in no case is it a truth that we as humans are able
to grasp even in discussing the supposed “theme” of a novel.  To
correctly read a story, in the same way to correctly do anything,
is to engage the full self in the act, to allow the story (or
painting or person or the night sky) affect oneself as deeply as
is possible.  Only then does anything objectively real become
subjectively real, and it is when the objective and the
subjective become one that we as humans see a truth.  We see
reality for what it is.

And, still, why is this important?  I can easily stop, for
myself, and say that it is, simply important, that seeing reality
for itself is important.  But, again, simply saying that, stating
it as a “rule of life” of some sort, won’t get me anywhere.
There is more depth to dig, and the something below begs to be
discovered.  The digging must continue.  Though I will have to save that for a different day, for now.