Love and Sacrifice

Fifty years from now, nobody, including yourself, will care if you were hungry or full today, if you were happy or sad, if you were bored or entertained.  “In the evening of life, you will be judged on love,” said St. John of the Cross.  What if we decided to use how loving we were today as a means to “keep score”?  What kind of life would we be living?  Certainly, it is often difficult to say "yes" to love, and to sort out the conflicting demands that love repeatedly imposes upon us.  Nevertheless, it is by a willingness to accept the obligation to concretize love, that willingness to take on the difficulties, the sacrifice, that real love demands, that we become something more than ourselves.  

America, I Do Not Invoke Your Name in Vain

América, no invoco tu nombre en vano

                     --Pablo Neruda

We are witnessing the complete breakdown of democracy in America, as well as its replacement by the most shameless and hateful demagoguery. This failure seems to have at last claimed that most hardy of survivors: hope.  I will always be grateful to have been born into a time when hope still thrived, healthy and jubilant, at least among a faithful remnant that attempted to save America in the 60’s and early 70’s. I witnessed a light that allows me to believe there is still a chance, even at midnight. 

     In the social realm, we must be unconditionally committed to the creation of a new economic order, and to the belief that all human beings are sacred.  When I look at the American military-industrial complex, flailing about like a dying behemoth, I can only think of our task in the words of Krishna, “They are already killed by me.  Be but my instrument, the archer by my side.” (Bhagavad Gītā 11:33)  Let the dead bury the dead, and let the building of a new world begin.

St. John's Day

I love the moment in Hoffmann’s “Das Majorat” when der Advokat V says, "Vetter, ich weiß nicht, wie mir heute ist, ein ganz besonderes Wohlsein, wie ich es seit vielen Jahren nicht gefühlt, durchdringt mich mit gleichsam elektrischer Wärme. Ich glaube, das verkündet mir einen baldigen Tod."  ("Cousin, I do not know how to say what I feel today, a very special well-being, as I have not felt for many years, penetrates me with almost an electric heat.  I think that it announces an early death.")  The idea that death should be seen as a ripening, and accepted serenely as such—is the key to everything.  That death should bring a feeling of warmth, of well-being, instead of cold and fear, is true wisdom, a gift we should all long to possess.

That we have passed from death to life we know

because we love our brothers and sisters.

                      --1 John 3:14

December 24

I had poem for Christmas Eve that I was going to post, but I am not spending Christmas at home and don't have access to it.  Maybe next year.  Our extended family suffered a terrible tragedy last weekend, and we are spending the holidays with my wife's family in Colorado.  I hope that this season brings you a true spirit of giving, especially to those who are most in need.

A Song

The great sun, benighted,

May faint from the sky;

But love, once uplighted,

Will never more die.

Form, with its brightness,

From eyes will depart:

It walketh, in whiteness,

The halls of the heart.

    

     --George MacDonald Phantastes

A Literature of Meaninglessness

The post-structuralists, who have found a refuge and a home in American literary theory, and, indeed, in much of emerging American literature, embody philosophical virility.  They argue that we can’t really say anything meaningful about anything, but we must still say that in the most meaningful way possible.  Contrast this with the humanistic tradition that they reject:  philosophical fertility: the idea that philosophy can give birth to ideas, understanding, first principles, and the formation of the human conscience.  The implications for literature are clear: a literature of style without ideas; as opposed to a literature of ideas, hopefully with style as well.

Literature without ideas is a literature that can only entertain, shock, or puzzle.  This does not mean that it is not literature.  It simply means that it serves no greater purpose.

Many will argue that literature should not serve “a greater purpose,” that its only goal should be aesthetic.  But does this not lead to an art that—at least tacitly—supports the status quo (since it can be dismissed as irrelevant to the “real world.”)?  Should literature play some role in human progress?

Many will argue that human progress is a myth, and, as such, literature should simply ignore it.  What these writers fail to admit is that their own literacy, educational opportunities—not to mention the running water in their homes—and right to free speech are all products of human progress.

A global environmental catastrophe looms.  To loosely paraphrase Thomas Merton:  Meanwhile, writers continue to sit around defending their (a-historical, quid est veritas?, value-neutral) reputations.  Soon, there may be nothing to defend.

Still Looking

I

I felt a strong sense of apprehension about attending the reading by Elroy Bode which was part of a book tour for his eighth volume, In a Special Light (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2006.).  Bode always struck me as such a virile and energetic figure that I was afraid of seeing him in decline, of destroying the ideal picture I had formed of him.  A while back, I had heard that he was retiring from teaching after forty-eight years in the high school classroom.  Bode seemed middle-aged three decades earlier when I was one of his students, so I was afraid that he had retired due to ill-health or frailty.  It was unthinkable to me that he would ever retire from teaching; he was one of those types who would only leave the classroom carried out feet-first.  I had seen him on a few occasions since graduating from high school, but they, too, were in the distant past.

     As the large, mostly young audience waited for Bode to ascend the podium in the cozy library auditorium, I wondered how many of them even knew who he was, and what he had represented to his students and readers over the years.  (As it turned out, many in the audience were ex-students of his.)  When he was finally introduced by several individuals, one after the other (as seems to be the rule at all college speaking events), and I saw him take his place behind the podium, his classroom stance for all those years, I was shocked at how little he had aged.  His hair was completely white, but his face was the same.  So, too, was his rail-thin body.  There was no hesitation in his movements; he stood straight as a young soldier, and his voice sang out with the same strength and expressiveness that it had possessed when he mesmerized us with it back in my days as a cocky, smart-aleck student at Austin High School.  He had lost none of his power to draw listeners in—that skill that had made him everyone’s favorite teacher.  He had been for us an almost magical figure who made his students members of a select society: the Bode alumnus.  In his classroom, Bode was the consummate performer, the consummate motivator.  His energy was boundless.  It was as if he got up every day in front of five or six classes and performed Hamlet, or an entire symphony, all by himself.  His performances left us breathless and exhausted for his sake, but above all, they impressed us with the belief that we could write—that everyone had something to say.  He fiercely defended every student’s right to write, and write about what was important to that student—I remember that at one point he took me aside and told me to knock it off when my critiques of other student’s writings became coarse and viciously sarcastic.

II

     As I sat there in the audience thirty-two years later, listening to Bode read from a variety of his works, and speak about his life and literary journey (the two major themes of his writing), I found myself a teenager again, half-worshipful of the author who was also my teacher, half desperate to prove that I was worthy of his recognition (I was mentally cataloging my own work and hoping for a chance to offer to send him something I had published over the years that would meet with his approval).  His basic philosophy had changed little since I last spoke with him, although it had been deepened by personal tragedy.  The basis of his writing and outlook on life were still the same.  As Bode himself wrote in the preface to Home Country: An Elroy Bode Reader (El Paso, TX: Texas Western Press, 1997, xiv.), writing, for him, has been an attempt to answer the most fundamental of life’s questions, to get at those messages with which even the most mundane events of existence seem pregnant.

I was stunned by the knowledge that I was alive on the earth and didn’t know what to do about it; it was as though I had been reborn, wide-eyed and vulnerable, into a world of gigantic, hidden meanings.  Others seemed to know, almost serenely, what they ought to be doing; I did not.  I was haunted by memories and almost paralyzed by the awesome shapes of reality.  What was the purpose of my life, I wanted to know—the purpose of anything, for that matter?

     As I walked through the days, as the years passed, I kept trying to find satisfying answers to the questions that plagued me.  I wanted values I could believe in, and I thought if I looked hard enough, long enough, I would find them.   I was on a quest—a private, intense search for truth, for God, for myself—and I was determined to discover, or perhaps create, some kind of order out of the chaos around me.

     Listening to him speak, so many years after he had asked those same questions, and challenged us to ask those same questions, in a high school classroom at the twilight of an America where everyone was asking those questions—almost casually—at parties, on college campuses, in tiny inner-city apartments filled with books and God’s eyes and tie-dyed sheets hanging on the walls, I realized that if Bode had still not found the answers, he was at least still asking the questions.

III

     Elroy Bode has, like so many other great American writers, been pigeon-holed as a regional writer, an unfortunate label that lies most heavily for some reason on Texas writers who write about Texas.  Some years ago, Larry McMurtry chastised Bode and others for what he saw as a deliberate cultivation of their “Texas provincialism” in his now famous (or infamous) essay, “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature” (The Texas Observer, Oct. 23, 1981, 8-9.).  The furor his polemic created has long since died down—although McMurtry has never fully withdrawn what he wrote at the time—but the attitude behind it strikes me as similar to the way in which the claim of provincialism is now being used to justify the under-representation of minorities in literary magazines, MFA programs, and publishing in general.  To my mind, the attitude, perhaps at times unconscious, that certain types of environments are by nature limited, ingrown, unimportant, and most of all unable to contribute anything to a universal understanding of the human experience, is still very much with us.  That is not to say that certain Texas writers (including, on occasion, McMurtry himself) have not generated a stereotyped, “horse opera,” kind of Texas literature (or that certain Chicano writers, for example, especially those associated with academia, have not created a picture of the Mexican-American experience that would have you believe that all Chicanos are low riders or gang-bangers).  The mistake is to believe that, in writing about Texas, one must necessarily fall into stereotypes.  Bode writes about ranch life and small Texas towns, dive bars on the Texas-Mexico border and Friday night football games, but the freshness with which he describes the smallest thing: drinking a Cuba Libre after wandering the hot and dusty streets of Cd. Juarez, Mexico, an old and stunted fig tree that stands, seemly useless, at the edge of a vegetable garden, a ceiling fan in a diner blowing a Dr. Pepper sign attached to the end of a string, is such that no one could ever mistake his words for the work of J. Frank Dobie or Chad Oliver or Elmer Kelton; or any other writer, Texan or not, for that matter.

     Part of the magic of his work comes from the fact that he seems to lack the filter which allows most of us to separate the humdrum from the exceptional in our everyday lives.  In Bode’s work, Walt Whitman’s “The Commonplace” finds an echo.  He makes literature out of irrigation canals, red bricks placed diagonally around front yard flower bed, a kitchen window shining through trees at night, and a million other living pictures that most of us miss as we go about, half-awake, through our everyday lives; but it would also be a mistake to think of Bode as simply the master of the moment, the prose-poet of places and things.  His work does not exclude the human heart in all its complex confusion.  If his writing at times seems like an attempt to realize Whitman’s “Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete,” he also follows the advice of Robinson Jeffers in his poem “Not Man Apart,” where he (Jeffers) sheds for a moment his misanthropic image and reminds us to: “Love that (nature), and not man/Apart from that” (italics added).  Those writings of Bode’s where he displays the full arc of (usually tragic) human emotion, works like “Suzy,” “Anais,” and “Looking for Byron,” pieces filled with the suffering and perversity that play such an enormous role in the fundamental human experience, are the ones that truly haunt me the most. 

     Besides falling prey to the label “provincial,” the majority of Bode’s writing didn’t fit into any widely accepted category of literary form in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, during what was perhaps his most prolific period.  The fact that his work could not be easily categorized by type (i.e. short story, essay, novel), made it hard for him to find markets in magazines, and remained a difficulty for many reviewers as his books began to appear in print.  The award-winning essays that he wrote for The Texas Observer such as “Requiem for a WASP School,” or “The Making of a Legend,” could be categorized as highbrow journalism, and Alone: In the World: Looking (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1973.), a must-read for aspiring writers, is clearly a journal.  The question was: what to make of the rest of his work?  He himself didn’t know what to call it, finally settling on the term “sketches” to describe the tiny, perfect gems that were his natural form, as smooth and innate to him as breathing.  Ironically, there was a long tradition in Europe of that sort of writing. In this country, however, it took longer to recognize the literary genre to which he belonged, and continues to belong, and give it a rightful place both in print and in the critical mind: a style which we today call “creative nonfiction.”  Bode’s work was written in large part before its time.  Were he beginning his writing career today, he would probably be seen as one of the masters of that genre by a much wider audience than the one he now enjoys.

     Although I have not seen Elroy Bode since that reading, I continue to return to his books time and time again, for his clarity, his depth, and his profound thoughtfulness.  Elroy Bode’s world is alive.  The simple things that he loves are also the people, places, and things that I love.  And I love him for his passion, his relentless questioning, and the way that he loved and empowered us, his students. 

No Cross, No Crown

I marvel at the idea that “goodness” should lead to material happiness; at the kind of moral universe we would be living in if doing good always led to prosperity and doing evil always to failure.  What kind of morality would be left if goodness didn’t demand self-denial, sacrifice, persecution, the cross?  If doing evil wasn’t often rewarded with wealth and power?  St. Paul wrote, “Up to this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, poorly clad, roughly treated, wandering about homeless.  We work hard at manual labor.  When we are insulted we respond with a blessing.  Persecution comes our way; we bear it patiently.  We are slandered, and we try conciliation.  We have become the world’s refuse, the scum of all; that is the present state of affairs.” (1 Cor. 4:11-13.)  Becoming a Christian sure didn’t do anything for his bottom line!   

The Wrong Kind of Silence

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

                                                                                    --Martin Luther King, Jr.
                                                                                   “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

La Virgen de Guadalupe

Buenos dias paloma blanca

Hoy te vengo a saludar,

Saludando a tu belleza

En tu reino celestial.

Eres guía del marinero

Eres estrella del mar,

En la tierra y en el cielo

Yo te vengo a saludar.

              --traditional Mexican folksong

Yerba Santa

Nothing helps a cold or sinus infection like a hot cup of spicy yerba santa (Eriodictyon californicum) tea with a little white sage (Salvia apiana). The only problem is that the yerba santa leaves get sticky in hot water and are a pain to get out of the empty cup.  But, oh, how soothing to the throat and the respiratory system.  Some people find the taste a bit too strong, but if you add a little mint, it “cools” the brew.  I once had a sinus problem, and nothing else would help.  This tea gave me so much relief; it was amazing!   Use in moderation, and enjoy!

Note: It’s important to obtain white sage either by picking it yourself or by buying it from a small co-op business.  The big commercial herb companies are over-harvesting and threatening to endanger this extraordinary plant in the wild.

San Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin

Hijo del sol

y los pedernales relámpagos

hoy en la presencia

de la última rosa.

Random Thoughts

I have come to realize how much of my intellectual development I owe to my father.  He was a constant source of books and ideas for me, opening up whole worlds of inspiration and values.

     A story about my father and Ivan Illich:  Illich came to speak at the university where my father teaches, and during his visit ran up huge international telephone bills on my father’s phone.  He was, and still is, a little put out that Illich never offered to pay for them.

***

As I walk here and there on my daily rounds, I often run into Kiki (who appears—fictionalized—in Rega’s Bone.”)  He is a delivery driver.  His warmth and childlike innocence are enormously moving.

Are Fairy Tales Necessary? Revisiting G. K. Chesterton’s “The Ethics of Elfland”

In 1905, the English writer, journalist, and philosopher G. K. Chesterton published a book of essays critiquing the ideas of his literary contemporaries (even though many of them, like George Bernard Shaw, also happened to be his personal friends), entitled Heretics.  His book was aimed at a host of positions that he deeply opposed, including skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.  In fact, the trends of thought that he viewed as precarious sophisms covered a whole range of topics; some particular to his time, and some (like racism) that are still with us today.  Orthodoxy, which appeared in 1908, was intended to be a companion volume, in which Chesterton set out to present, in an unsystematic and very personal way, his own beliefs.  It, too, contained ideas specific to its time, but also set out a lasting philosophy based on Chesterton’s optimistic, common-sense Christianity, and his deep and abiding sense of wonder at the world.  In this work, so filled with the illuminating paradoxes for which he is justly famous,[1] Chesterton devoted a chapter to what he described as “The Ethics of Elfland.”[2]

     He set out to discuss “what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales.”[3]  Noting the fact that that many fairy tales are designed to teach a moral or lesson, he made it clear that his essay was “not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law.”[4]  It was not the individual message of the individual fairy tale that he was concerned with, but, “I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.”[5]  For Chesterton, fairy tales were, “in the true sense of the word, reasonable…in the true sense of the word, necessary.”[6]  This necessity arose out of the synthesis of reason and imagination that the fairy tale alone possessed.  For Chesterton, the fairy tale view was a complete and true version of the universe.  Science could only present facts; fairy tales allowed us to understand them.  “When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic.”[7]  Chesterton saw the fairy tale as a means of understanding the world around us, of giving us a sense of the underlying meaning and wonder of things.  “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’  They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.  A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree.  Water runs downhill because it is bewitched.  The sun shines because it is bewitched.”[8]

     In this paradox, Chesterton sought to awaken in us the sense that fairy tales teach us to believe in magic because life itself is magical.  Fairy tales do not reject logic; they simply extend it to the imaginary.  “If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and Fairy Land is full of it.”[9]  We have all seen birds fly, but that is not proof that dragons can’t also fly.  For Chesterton, the whole world was magical, and fairy tales served to remind us of this.

     In what is probably his best-known work, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton’s protagonist, Gabriel Syme, receives the moniker Thursday when he is given a seat on the Central Anarchist Council of Europe, whose members are called by the days of the week.  He lives through a series of bewildering adventures, culminating on the night of a great masquerade ball.  Syme sees all the forms of nature dancing before him as he beholds the costumed dancers.  He sees a man dressed as a windmill, another as an elephant.  There is a dancing lamppost, a dancing apple tree, and a dancing ship.  One reveler is even dressed as a hornbill.  He sees a fairy dancing with a pillar-box and a peasant girl dancing with the moon.  “One would have thought that the untamable tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and street dancing an eternal jig.  And long afterwards, when Syme was middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those particular objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without thinking that it was a strayed reveler from that revel of masquerade.”[10]  This is the world of the fairy tale, where a fairy dances with a pillar-box and a peasant girl dances with the moon, but it is also the “everyday” world—transformed by wonder.

     Before arriving at the masquerade ball, Gabriel Syme and his companions on the Council of Days are forced by circumstances to share their individual ideas about the nature of Nature itself, and Syme cries out: “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world?  It is that we have only known the back of the world.  We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.  That is not a tree, but the back of a tree.  That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.  Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face?  If we could only get round in front—”[11]  It is only after experiencing the costume ball, “as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as grave and kind as a love story,”[12] that Syme is able to see the “faces” of the world around him—as revelers strayed from the ball.  This is the mystery of the world revealed by the fairy tale, where an object as common as a lamppost can seem like a reveler at a dance.

     Chesterton felt those ideas, he said, from childhood, before he had heard of philosophy or theology.  All children who read fairy tales secretly hope they are actually true.  Chesterton, as he grew to be a man, realized that they were even truer than the truths of science.  For him, a sunset was magic, magic accessible to all, and the Divine was a magician.  Scientists might still debate among themselves why this or that exact combination of meteorology and optics, oceanography or quantum physics, results in a sunset—but what is undeniable is that a sunset causes awe and wonder in the human heart.  For Chesterton, the sunset was a magician’s painting, a wonder greater than the conjurer summoning a glass castle from the sea.

     Hermann Hesse, in his novel Die Morgenlandfahrt, usually translated into English as The Journey to the East, told the story of a vast and timeless journey made up of all the spiritual seekers and artists, imaginary or real, of every time and place.  They form a league of searchers traveling toward the light.  Don Quixote and Parzival are members, as are Zoroaster and Plato.  Albertus Magnus and the modern artist Paul Klee are fellow travelers.  Hesse (the mysterious H. H.) and his wife Ninon take part in the journey.  The original title of the book, Die Morgenlandfahrt, has rich and complex connotations that are not easily captured in the English version.  The German title can be translated as the “The Journey to the Orient,” but it can also mean “The Tomorrowland Journey.”[13]  The story can be interpreted as the voyage toward enlightenment—as the East represents the coming of the light—but it is also important to remember that Morgenland, in addition to meaning "the East" or "the Orient," is used by several German Romantic writers as a name for Fairy Land or Jinnistan.  In this sense, the title Die Morgenlandfahrt can also be interpreted as the journey toward imagination and wonder.  Hesse described the goal of the journey as “the home and youth of the soul.”[14]  He likened the blissful experience of the journey itself to “the same secret as the happiness in dreams…the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange the outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre.”[15]  The journey brings meaning and hope with it, “as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into a Paradise.”[16]  The journey is one of internal transformation, a journey of the imagination, but its effects on all those that it touches are real.  The journey has as its goal the “home” of which Novalis spoke,[17] the Golden Age of fairy tales and universal poesy.

     Chesterton saw the world of fairy tales, the Morgenland, as a place of wonder but not unreason, of happiness but not lawlessness.  On the contrary, he saw the laws of elfland as being fairer and more reasonable than any other laws humans had claimed to discover.  At the center of the ethics of elfland is the law of reciprocity, the law of gratitude.  In order to achieve a boon, one must follow the rules, because obedience to the rules is payment for the boon.  Cinderella must return by midnight.  She must return by midnight not because it is the “law,” but because her obedience is payment for the favor she receives.  It is less a law of right or wrong than of worthiness or unworthiness.  In fairy tales, people must do all sorts of strange things, from singing a certain song to retrieving a certain sword.  They do these things in order to show their worthiness; their true-heartedness.  It is by fidelity, fortitude, and devotion to duty that magic favors or gifts are gained.  But in a greater sense, it is by using these virtues as an expression of gratitude that the gift of magic is reciprocated.

     Over and over again in fairy tales, the true heart is separated from the false by its ability to express gratitude. The boy who stops to thank the old woman is the one who discovers that she is a Wise Woman.  “For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true.  The cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.”[18]  The universe itself is a fairy tale told by a divine storyteller and “the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint…”[19]  For Chesterton, the great lesson that he learned in the nursery was humble gratitude; gratitude for sunsets, for dragons, and for all things good and extraordinary.   

[1] Quentin Lauer, S.J., G.K. Chesterton, Philosopher Without Portfolio, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 30.

[2] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1908), pp. 81-118.

[3] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 88.

[4] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.

[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.

[6] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 89.

[7] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 93.

[8] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 94.

[9] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 90.

[10] G.K.Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Capricorn Books, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960), p. 184. 

[11] G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, pp. 176-177.

[12] G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p. 186.

[13] Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 248.

[14] Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Picador Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) p. 27.

[15] Hermann Hesse, p. 28.

[16] Hermann Hesse, p. 28.

[17] Hermann Hesse, p. 13.

[18] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 116-117.

[19] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 117.

...One Big Prison Yard

a larger percentage of the population

incarcerated in our jails and prisons than

any other country

thirteen percent of

all black males

between the ages of 18 and 29

one percent of the entire adult

population incarcerated

in America

incarceration is cruel

and unusual punishment

Alastor

Earth, Ocean, Air, belovèd brotherhood!

If our great Mother has imbued my soul

With aught of natural piety to feel

Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;

If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,

With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,

And solemn midnight's tingling silentness;

If Autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood,

And Winter robing with pure snow and crowns

Of starry ice the gray grass and bare boughs; 

If Spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes

Her first sweet kisses,--have been dear to me;

If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast

I consciously have injured, but still loved

And cherished these my kindred; then forgive

This boast, belovèd brethren, and withdraw

No portion of your wonted favor now!

 --Shelley's "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude"

By the way, the caterpillar survived, and seems to be enjoying the balmy weather we are now experiencing!

Goodness

Though not as “technically enabled” as the majority of younger writers, I nevertheless have to confess that I do spend time on the web that could probably be spent on more productive pursuits.  I occasionally (while looking for inspiration, mostly) come across blogs and interviews with “emerging writers,” that is, those that are in, or approximately in, the same place as myself as far as the writing and publishing process is concerned.  What strikes me, over and over, is the personal goodness and caring that these writers, these people, seem to possess.  I may not always care for their writing, literary taste being a very subjective thing, but I find comfort in the character and social concern of these writers.  I sometimes wish that these qualities would be more evident in their writing—but then again, maybe they are, in a manner too subtle for an old duffer like me to get. 

     Outside, the last of the pomegranates are gone, eaten by us or the birds.  The oranges are beginning to ripen, and a little warmer weather will see them through.  The butterflies and hummingbirds are gone for the year, although I did see a giant swallowtail caterpillar on the rue a few days ago.  I haven’t the heart to see if she survived the freeze that lasted a few nights.

A Story

There is a story I once read that was originally told by Dorothy Day.  It was about a friend of hers from her days with The Masses, Mike Gold.  Mike Gold was a prominent radical leader and successful novelist, but in his old age he often fell on hard times.  At one point he came to stay at the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality where Dorothy Day worked and lived.  She told a story about something that had happened to Gold when he was a small child.  He was Jewish, and one day a group of older boys cornered him and beat him up, yelling all the while, “You killed Christ!  You killed Christ!”  He eventually escaped from them and made his way home.  His mother washed him and tended his cuts and bruises, and took him in her arms and held him.  He looked up at her and asked, “Who is Christ?”  Dorothy Day concluded her story by saying, “Mike Gold sits at the table of Christ (the Catholic Worker soup kitchen) every day, and yet he will never become a Christian because of the way that he first heard the name of Christ.”

     Today, people who call themselves Christians continue to beat up on LGBTQ people, Muslims, immigrants, and yes, (perhaps a little more discreetly), Jews, all in the name of Christ.

     Leon Bloy once wrote, “The damned in the abyss of their torments have no other refreshment than the spectacle of the devils’ hideous faces.  The friends of Jesus see all around them the modern Christians, and thus it is that they are able to picture hell.”  (Quatre Ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne)

Advent

Jesus, word of God, our wisdom,

come, and show us how to love,

in the promised joyful kingdom,

gentle teacher from above.

Blest Lord of ancient Israel,

seen by Moses in the fire,

you gave your tribes their citadel,

with the law you did inspire.

O final flower of Jesse’s stem,

kings and nations stand in awe.

By your love and welcome rule them,

fill your peoples with your law.

Key of David and key of life,

free our world and lives from night.

Bring your quiet to end our strife,

and hate’s prison put to flight.

O fiery dawn that brings the day,

light our path for we are lost.

Give us the joy and voice to say:

come both fire and holocaust.

O King, unite humanity,

keystone of our human arch.

We are but dust and vanity,

be with us on this earth’s march.

Emmanuel, in weakness born,

let us turn our thoughts to you,

born as a babe on Christmas morn,

in weakness evil’s power slew.

The Billionaires Who Control Everything Have Finally Done It!

NWarningN

This country 

is out of order

Fair Trade

Today marks the start of the Christmas shopping insanity.  If you are going to buy gifts this year, please, please, please consider buying Fair Trade.  Here are links to some groups in the U.S. that either do mail order, internet shopping, or have local stores.  There may be a Fair Trade shop in your own town that is not affiliated with one of these groups.  I encourage you to support them, too.  Here’s a start:

http://friendsofthethirdworld.org/ click the Cooperative Trading link

http://www.serrv.org/

http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/

http://theenterprisingkitchen.org/ order early

The Automobile, Our Master

In the Great American Necropolis of today, the automobile continues to be a major source of dysfunction.  It remains a seemingly inoperable cancer that is devouring what little remains of our diminishing quality of life.  The automobile isn’t just polluting and time-wasting; it is an amazing waste of resources at all levels.  The automobile is insanely expensive to purchase and operate, and it is a sign of our desperation that no matter how costly it becomes to operate, we can’t give it up.  It is the working poor that suffer most from our addiction to the automobile.  More often than not, one needs a car to get to his or her crappy job, and gas, repairs, licensing, safety inspections, and insurance all devour a proportionally higher percentage of a poor person’s income than someone from the middle or upper class.  For those who live paycheck-to-paycheck, a major auto repair spells literal economic disaster.  Few American cities have more than laughable public transportation, and the outlays for necessary expansion will not be forthcoming unless we demand them.  The bicycle, the most efficient means of transportation in existence, is not an option for most people because a) it is just too risky to share the congested roads with dangerous, aggressive automobiles, b) one must be willing to tolerate the miasma of toxic pollutants that the cars around you are emitting, and c) freeways, the great arteries of our cities, are off-limits to self-powered transportation.  This is to say nothing of the problems the pedestrian faces.  Cities pay lip service to increasing bike and pedestrian access and safety, but usually reserve their improvements for recreational settings.  We must demand that city, state, and federal transportation plans prioritize, rather than marginalize, bike and pedestrian roads.  Public transportation, too, must be expanded to the point where it actually becomes an efficient and attractive alternative to the car.  Without expanded hours of service, increased frequency of vehicles, and better scheduling, public transportation will remain the stepchild of the automobile, and we the auto's slaves.

O Century!

How to explain the twentieth century, the century into which I was born?  The “century of crimes against humanity” is certainly how it will one day be known.  Is it any wonder that so many who reached maturity in the sixties and early seventies wanted to chuck it all and start over again?  In the twenty-first century, with our computers and our disillusionment, how much more harm will we capable of doing to each other!

     We must seek a new Golden Age, which can only begin with a rejection of war, materialism, affluence, and intolerance.  If we don’t, we may not survive at all.

     “Let us work to build the Kingdom of God, not future ruins.”
                                      --Vinoba Bhave

Adobe bricks

Anyone can make adobe bricks.  It’s fun and easy.  There are a ton of “making adobe bricks” sites on the internet.  The house that I live in was built of adobe in 1929 and seems to be surviving pretty well.  Of course, there are adobe buildings that have survived 1,000 years or more.  Adobe buildings do require a lot of maintenance, and you have to live in a fairly dry climate, but hey, all building materials have their drawbacks.  Adobe is ecologically sound and very beautiful.  The thermal mass of adobe walls makes them good absorbers of heat during the day that can then be released in the cold of night. Adobe doesn’t hold up as well as high-fired brick in earthquakes, but does better in tornadoes and other wind disasters.  It is important that the contour of the land on which you plan to build slopes away from the proposed structure.  Good drainage is very important.  Many cities have adobe building codes that must be followed for the construction of homes and other large structures.  However, if you are just building a temascal or horno in your back yard, you probably won’t need a permit.

St. Cecilia, Patron of Musicians

Who can sing like the cup of the lily,

filled with the low chant of bees?

Whose voice can soar like the brown coastal petrels

sailing out over the seas?

My heart, in thorns can;

still bleeding, in love,

my soul in shadows

can mourn like a dove.

A voice, fresh green water,

a burning, still cry,

allowed me to sing thus:

“I love as I die!”

In darkness, God’s eclipse,

I blinded my eyes,

I looked to my wet heart,

I looked to the skies.

“Don’t search, I am with you

in this stillness of night,

turn from the created

that blinds you to sight.

“So sing, I will hear you

from naught that you see,

I will hear you in loving

and you will hear me.”

And It's Relaxing...

A human being, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He or she carries one gram of his or her weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. A human on his or her feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his or her weight, he or she performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency humanity settled the world and made its history. 
   

                                                          --Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity

Die Christenheit oder Europa

There are many who have called attention to the fact that Novalis’ view of the Middle Ages was hopelessly idealized; but those who do so miss the point, or rather, don’t see that that is the point.  Novalis’ Middle Ages was the Middle Ages idealized, a metaphor for the spiritual richness of those times.  Novalis wrote, Die Welt ist ein Universaltropus des Geistes, ein symbolisches Bild desselben (The world is a universal trope of the spirit, a symbolic picture of it.)  Is not his golden vision of the "Middle Ages" in fact a trope of the spirit of the age?

  

Love

November 17

Today is the feast of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose life was more moving than any fairy tale.  And St. Gregory of Tours, who left us his monumental History of the Franks.  And last but not least, the great St. Hugh of Lincoln, with his swan and his heart of courage, who is one of my patrons, and who almost makes my middle name bearable. Ora pro nobis.

The Harvest of Poverty and Corruption

The drug wars in Mexico continue to claim thousands of lives, with the various factions unquestionably aided and abetted by people high in the government.  This is the harvest of so many years of poverty and corruption, made worse by Calderón and his neoliberal cronies.

Dramatis Personæ in Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East

In honor of the feast of St. Albert the Great, the “Universal Teacher,” I offer this “Who’s Who in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East.”  Some of this is conjecture, and there may be factual errors, as I can’t claim to be an expert in all the areas of knowledge that this list of characters represents.  But it is a start for fellow League members to begin exploring further…

Hugo—Fictional Byzantine Emperor visited by Charlemagne in Le Pelerinage de Charlemagne (Charlemagne’s Journey to Jerusalem and Constaninople).  Hesse may also be making reference here to Hugo Ball, Swiss writer, dramatist, cabaret performer, and one of the founders of the Dadaist movement.  After embracing Roman Catholicism, he and his wife Emmy lived a life of simplicity, mostly in or near Montagnola (where Hesse lived).  He and Hesse became intimate friends, united in their rejection of war, materialism, and bourgeois conventions.  He wrote the first full-length biography of Hesse.  His slow, painful and untimely death from cancer at age fifty affected Hesse deeply.

Mad Roland—In Italian, Orlando Furioso, the hero of the epic poem of the same name: a warrior driven mad by love.  He was one of the paladins, mythical courtiers of Charlemagne similar to Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.  Tales of the paladins include The Song of Roland, Charlemagne’s Journey to Jerusalem and Constaninople, and Ariosto’s long poem Orlando Furioso.

Count Keyserling—Philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling.  Of Estonian birth, he wrote numerous books including The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, which chronicled his journeys around the world and his observations of various cultures and philosophies.  Hesse actually wrote a favorable review of this book.  Count Keyserling founded (with his son) a society for world culture (with a New Age-y slant) called the School of Wisdom, which considers Hesse to be among its members.

Ossendowski—Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski, Polish writer and traveler, soldier of fortune, spy, and diplomat.  He wrote a number of novels based on his extensive travels in exotic places.

Albert the Great—Swabian friar, philosopher, scientist, alchemist, theologian, teacher, bishop, and diplomat.  Considered one of the first (along with his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas) to introduce Aristotle to the West; a founder of modern science (with his recognition of the autonomy of physics from metaphysics and his belief that physical science should be based on empirical observation).  Called “Albertus Magnus” (Albert the Great) and the “Stupor Mundi” (Wonder of the World) for his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from geology to mystical theology.  Saint and Doctor of the Church.  Hesse was very proud of his own Swabian origin.

Siddhartha—Title character of Hesse’s book Siddhartha.  Also the name of the historical Buddha: Gotama or Gautama Siddhartha.

Rudiger—(Possibly) Rudiger von Vaihingen, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg; Rudiger of the Knights of Limpach; or Rudiger Maness, collector of traditional Swabian folksongs, whose work had a strong influence on Swabian poetry.

Princess Fatima—Character in one of the stories found in The One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights.

Novalis—Pen name of Georg Phillip Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, German Romantic poet, essayist, novelist, and “spiritual center” of the German Romantic Literary Movement.  He believed that the Romantics were destined to issue in a poetic golden age, where science and religion, art and philosophy, would all be poetically united.  Influenced Hesse immensely—in many ways Hesse was “the last of the German Romantics.”

The Giant Agramant—Character in Orlando Furioso and other legends of the paladins, a Saracen king who engages the paladins in battle and falls by Orlando’s hand.

St. Christopher—“Christ-bearer,” he was said to have been a giant who sought the mightiest of masters.  He carried travelers across a ford in a river, and one night carried a child who became so heavy that Christopher was barely able to make the crossing.  The child told him that he had been carrying the sins of the whole world on his shoulders, as he (the child) was Jesus Christ.  Christopher became a convert to Christianity and eventually met a martyr’s death.  He is depicted in art carrying the Christ Child and holding a pilgrim’s staff.  Large images of him were painted on church walls because of a belief that anyone who looked upon his image would suffer no harm that day.  (Ticino, the Swiss canton where Hesse spent much of his life, is famous for the “Christophers” painted on many of its churches.)  He became the patron saint of travelers, who wore medals bearing his image.  In 1969, the Vatican declared that there was no sound historical basis for this lovely legend.

Hohenstaufen—A dynasty of Germanic Kings of Swabian origin, some bore the titles King of Sicily, Duke of Swabia, Holy Roman Emperor, and others.

The Prophet Mohammed—Messenger of God.  Born in Mecca, he received his first revelation from the Angel Jibril in his fortieth year. The angel's words became the Holy Qur'an and the foundation of Islam.   He preached a religion of monotheism, of a compassionate and merciful God who would call all to judgment.  Died in Medina in A.D. 632.

Princess Isabella—Character in Orlando Furioso. Daughter of the King of Galicia, falls tragically in love with a Saracen, is convinced to flee her native land, is held captive by Moorish sailors, from whom she is rescued by Orlando, and later dies a tragic death.

The Poet Lauscher—Title character of a story in Hesse’s first published prose work, Hermann Lauscher.  A kind of alter-ego for young Hesse.

The Artist Klingsor—Title character of Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer.  Another Hesse alter-ego.  Hesse himself was a painter of some note.

Paul Klee—Major twentieth century Swiss artist.  His work is marked by whimsy, musical elements, magic, fantasy, dreamlike imagery.  He and Hesse probably never met but are considered kindred spirits.

Don Quixote—Title character in Miguel de Cervantes 1605 novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, the first great work of, and foundation for, modern fiction, especially the novel.  Although Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as a satire of popular novels of chivalry, Hesse and others saw the underlying nobility of mad Quixote’s character.  Quixote also experiences a great disillusionment with his ideals similar to that which H.H. undergoes at Morbio Inferiore.

Jup, the Magician—Hesse's nickname for Josef Englert, Swiss friend who for a time actually did seek his fortune in Kashmir.

Colofine, the Sorcerer—In the original German, Collofino der Rauchzauberer (Collofino the smoke-conjurer).  Josef Feinhals, cigar manufacturer and Latin philologist; friend of Hesse; from the Italian version of his name.

Louis the Terrible—Ironic nickname given by Hesse to his friend, the Swiss expressionist Louis Moilliet.  Friend of Paul Klee.

Anslem—Character in Hesse’s short story, “Iris.”  He searches for years for the wonder that a purple iris in his mother’s garden once awoke in him.  Hesse was probably at least partially inspired by the blue flower (a symbol of poetry) that Heinrich von Ofterdingen searches for in the novel by Novalis that bears his name.

Ninon “the foreigner”—Ninon Dolbin, Hesse’s third wife.  Her maiden name was Ausländer, “foreigner” in German.  Although much younger than Hesse, she was a remarkable woman in her own right; Hesse’s equal in both intelligence and strength of character.

Almansor—Almansor ben Abdullah, the title character of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine’s verse play, “Almansor.”  Heine was a complex intellectual who denounced Romanticism after his conversion to political radicalism, and yet, because of his poetry, remains identified with the German Romantic Movement.  It is to Almansor that Hassan speaks the most famous line of Heine’s, “Just as they now burn books, so they shall eventually burn people.”

Parsifal—The title character of German epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.  Composed in the early 13th century, Parzival is a retelling of the legend of Percival, one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.  Though based on an earlier source, it is Wolfram’s version of the knightly adventures of Percival and the Grail that has had the greatest influence on other writers.  Parzival is a story of a spiritual journey, with striking similarities to H.H.’s, as much as it is an adventure story.  Hesse may have been thinking (or also thinking) of Chrétien de Troyes unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail, an earlier source that Wolfram based his epic poem on.

Witiko—Title character of Austrian author Adalbert Stifter’s novel Witiko.  Witiko is a sprawling novel set in medieval Bohemia, where the hero seeks after and finds righteousness and beauty.  Witiko was greatly admired by Hesse.  He makes reference to Stifter’s suicide in Steppenwolf.  (He also may have borrowed the idea of using Steppen as a prefix from Stifter.)

Goldmund—Title character of Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.  The artist Goldmund represents the ideal of nature and art, as opposed to the monk Narcissus, who represents the mind and the spirit.

Sancho Panza—Loyal companion and squire of Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote de la Mancha.

The Barmekides—A powerful family of Persian administrators under the Abbasid Caliphate of Bagdad.  They figure in several tales in The Thousand and One Nights, especially the vizier Ja'far.

Hans C.—Hans C. Bodmer, friend and patron of Hesse.  Built the house where Hesse was to spend his later years.  Bodmer’s own house in Zurich was nicknamed “Zur Arch,” hence the reference to finding Noah’s Ark amid the tramways and banks of Zurich.

Max and Tilli—Max and Tilli Wassmer, Swiss friends of Hesse.

Othmar—Othmar Schoeck, Swiss composer, conductor, and close friend of Hesse’s.  He created a song cycle based on ten of Hesse’s poems.

Mozart—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer, whose musical uniqueness, virtuosity, prolific output, and mastery of practically every “classical” form makes him almost certainly the greatest musical genius of all time.  Hesse describes him in Steppenwolf as “the god of my youth, the object, all my life long, of love and veneration.”  Mozart and Pablo (see below) form a dyad in Steppenwolf, as do so many of Hesse’s characters throughout his work.

Armida—Character in the legend of the paladin Rinaldo and the witch Armida, Jerusalem Delivered, by Torquato Tasso.  At the festival at Bremgarten, Armida is depicted as singing, this is probably a reference to one of the many operas that have been based on the story of Armida and Rinaldo, most likely Handel’s Rinaldo.

The Astrologer Longus—Josef B. Lang, disciple of Carl Jung and pioneering Swiss psychoanalyst in his own right.  Hesse underwent an intense course of psychotherapy under Lang in 1916 and the two remained lifelong friends.  The character Pistorius in Hesse’s Demian was based on Dr. Lang.

Henry of Ofterdingen—Title character of Novalis’ unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen; he seeks the blue flower, symbol of poetry, also adopted as a symbol of the German Romantic Movement as a whole.

Puss in Boots—Character in a fairy tale, a cat who cleverly helps his impoverished master become wealthy and marry a princess.

Hans Resom—the Swiss writer Hans Albrecht Moser.

Charles the Great—Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Lombards, ruler of the Carolingian Empire, given the title Emperor of the Romans by the Pope, first major empire builder in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, considered in legend to have been the champion of Christianity in the West, his reforms in secular law, church law, education, and economic policy shaped Western Europe for centuries.

Pablo—Major character in Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, he is a handsome, polyglot, sensual, drug-using, seemingly shallow Latin American Jazz saxophonist.  But he is also the master of the Magic Theater and Mozart’s double.  It has been surmised that he was in part based on American Jazz musician Sidney Bechet, whom Hesse heard play and who was his introduction to Jazz.

Hugo Wolf—Austrian composer, primarily of songs based on poetic texts.  He was a favorite of Hesse’s.

Brentano—Clemens Brentano, German Romantic poet and novelist; later Roman Catholic lay monk, (and, along with his brother-in-law) folklorist.

Hoffmann—Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (Amadeus) Hoffmann, also known as E.T.A. Hoffmann, late German Romantic writer and composer.  He is best known for his short stories and novellas, which often emphasize the pathological, fantasy, horror, and mystery.  In his own life, Hoffmann lived a dual existence: as a responsible jurist and administrator, and as an artist of the supernatural and the weird.  This dualism is found in much of his work: in "Der goldne Topf " (“The Golden Pot”), one of his Märchen (fairytale-like stories), the subject is the struggle of a young man between the pull of the world of reality and the world of poetry.  This theme of the incompatibility of the artist’s world and everyday life is also found in Hesse’s work.  Hoffmann was “small and elfish,” and quite a drunk.

The Archivist Lindhorst—Character in E.T.A. Hoffman’s story “The Golden Pot.”  Although he has taken the human form of an Archivist, Lindhorst is in reality a salamander, an Elemental Spirit of Fire.

Paladins of Charles the Great—(see Mad Roland).

Lukas—Martin Lang, Swabian poet and editor, friend of Hesse.  Lukas was the name of the author of a gardening book that Lang used to consult when looking after Hesse’s garden in Gaienhofen, a town on the Bodensee where Hesse lived with his first wife.

Zoroaster—Founder of the religion Zoroastrianism, one of the most ancient beliefs still practiced today.  Zoroaster is the Greek form of Zarathustra.  Tradition places him somewhere around 660 to 583 B.C.  He was a religious reformer in Bactria.  His teaching spread to Persia, where it enjoyed success until the coming of Islam.  There are still small groups of Zoroastrians, usually called Parsis, in India and Iran.  Hesse was probably drawn to Zoroaster because of the complex dualism that is part of the theology attributed to Zoroaster and the Avesta, a collection of religious writings at least partially ascribed to him.  Because of the ancient nature of Zoroastrianism, there are questions as to how much of the rigidly dualistic belief held today can actually be attributed to Zoroaster.

Lao Tse—Literally “old master,” a Chinese sage born in 604 B.C.  He is considered the founder of Taoism, and the authorship of the Tao Teh Ching is attributed to him.  One of the three great teachers in Taoism.

Plato—Greek philosopher, born around 428 B.C.  His ideas, along with those of Aristotle and Socrates, form the basis for Western philosophy.  He is best-known for his Dialogues, a series of conversations on philosophical subjects, nearly all of which are led by Socrates. There is dispute as to whether the ideas attributed to Socrates in the Dialogues actually belonged to him, or were primarily the work of Plato.  Plato helped found the Academy in Athens, the first “university.”

Xenophon—Ancient Greek soldier, historian, and political philosopher.  Contemporary of Plato and Socrates.

Pythagoras—Greek philosopher and mathematician of the late fifth century B. C.  What we know of him comes strictly from secondary sources.  He is believed to have headed an esoteric mystical and ecstatic religious cult, making his name synonymous with cryptic or mysterious beliefs.  He is also credited with discovering important basic mathematical theorems and formulae, which he believed to have divine significance.

Tristram Shandy—Title character of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768.)  Supposedly the autobiography of Shandy, it is a comic novel filled with digressions, non-sequiters, blank pages, and other strange devices that made it unique until the avant-garde modern novel.  It influenced Goethe and many of the German Romantics.

Baudelaire—French Symbolist poet, 1821-1867.  A common theme in his poetry is the conflict between reality and the ideal, a theme found in Hesse’s work as well.

King David—In the Old Testament, he is depicted as a shepherd boy who eventually rises in the favor of Saul, King of the Israelites, due to his harp playing and defeat of the giant Goliath.  He becomes a great warrior, and, after Saul’s death, King of Israel.  He, along with his son Solomon, are often thought of as the noblest of the kings of Israel, although both eventually “did many really wicked things;” in the case of David these included adultery and murder.  Nevertheless, David was seen as a forebear and symbolic reflection of Jesus Christ.

Saul—In the Old Testament, first King of the Israelites.  He was troubled by “evil spirits,” a kind of madness that threw him into rages that could only be pacified by the harp playing of David.  He eventually became fiercely jealous of David’s prowess as a warrior and was rejected by God for disobedience.  After defeat in battle, Saul attempted to kill himself, but was actually finished off by one of his soldiers.  David succeeded to the kingship after his death.

The Ferryman Vasudeva—Character in Hesse’s Siddhartha.  The ferryman Vasudeva acts as a spiritual guide to Siddhartha, showing him the way to understand his life and find enlightenment as he works beside him as a ferryman and they listen to the mystical chanting of the river.  He also demonstrates to Siddhartha the non-existence of time and the unity of all experience.