Two Reasons for the Current American Malaise

The United Sates is in decline, and things are getting worse.  Some of this is inevitable, and has to do with the rise in wealth around the world.  A good deal, if not all, of our decline, however, is our own fault.  Our political system is, to put it mildly, broken.  Our social system, that is, the current state of education, and the truly abysmal state of health care, contribute to the increasing malaise.  It’s not only our institutions that are at fault—a large part of the population knows more about Beyoncés and Gagas than they do about science and literature. Many live in a virtual world of entertainment, instead of in the real world where facts, sometimes hard facts, matter.  Integrity, dedication, life-long learning, and, most of all, working hard at something you love to do, are still the essentials.  These qualities, on the whole, seem to be getting rarer. The fault is in ourselves; if ignorance votes at the polls and indifference doesn’t even bother to show up, greed and solipsism, forsaking the common good, will win.  And they are, arguably, winning. I don’t want to give the impression that things are hopeless, because they are not, far from it.

In this article, I will briefly discuss two interrelated areas where the American decline, in my opinion, is most apparent. First a few words of introduction.

World War ll, in a way, was Hitler’s gift to the United States.  By 1945, Germany lay in ruins.  The U.S. benefited from the brain-drain of Europe, which began when Hitler took office.  Brilliant refugees, Einstein, for example, enriched the United States   World War ll ended the Great Depression, and brought about the transfer of power from Europe to North America.  Third world countries remained undeveloped.  The heady days of American prosperity had begun.

The heady days of prosperity for the majority of Americans are over.  Why? I will discuss only two of the principal causes of the current malaise, in order to keep this little essay little; this list is by no means exclusive.

1.The Decline of the First Amendment

Recently, my wife and I attended a performance of “King Charles lll” at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C.  The play begins with the funeral of the current Prince of Wales’s mother. Her son has become King Charles lll.  In Britain’s parliamentary democracy, custom requires the signature of the monarch on every bill before it becomes law.  Custom also demands that the hand must sign as mechanically as a rubber stamp, without any input from the monarch’s brain.  In the play, a bill has been passed that abrogates free speech, strengthening the ability to sue for libel.  The King, acting in a very American way, refuses to sign it, causing a crisis about the prerogatives of royalty.  It ends badly for King Charles; his eldest son, with the blessing of Parliament, deposes him, returning monarchs back to the status they have had for a long time--Once again they become figureheads, that is, as far as the state is concerned, heads that no longer figure.

Nearly all Americans would root for King Charles.  Our royalty is our Constitution.  To all true-blooded Americans, of all races and creeds, the First Amendment reigns supreme.  Adopted on December 15, 1791, it guarantees the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the right to petition for a governmental redress of grievances, and the right to choose one’s religion, including the right to choose no religion at all.

Nothing reveals the importance of these rights more than their absence. The classic example of fascism is Nazism, which, with all its pomp, can certainly be considered a secular religion, the established religion of Hitler's Germany.  The disaster of Nazism is a warning to us all as to what can result when a powerful nation has no purchase for the inalienable rights protected by the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is the most powerful guarantor of free speech in the world.  Interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that not only bills abrogating free speech cannot become laws, it limits the ability to sue for slander as well.  (Our current president has a dictator’s fondness for the First Amendment, that is, none at all.  All of Trump’s attempts, however, to sue people who say things he doesn’t like have been thrown out of court. So far.)

The mindset of cultures where free speech is not guaranteed does not understand cultures which consider free speech to be sacrosanct.  In most Muslim countries, for instance, criticism, much less caricatures, of Mohammad aren’t permitted, and sometimes are even  punished by death.  When a Dane, exercising his free speech, lampooned the Prophet in cartoons, many Muslims abroad were convinced that he did so with governmental support.  They could not fathom that democracies have laws which restrict the power of government.  That the government of Denmark refused to ban an activity which they deem blasphemous was proof enough for them that the government was in agreement.

A key advantage of free speech is that if competing ideas are allowed to mix, as cream in a butter churn, the butter, the good ideas, will eventually rise to the top. 

One of the great aspects of free speech is that it fosters humility, a virtue always in short supply.  I might believe something passionately, but I acknowledge that I could be wrong.  The same thing applies to those with an opposing view.  Once opposing views pass through the alembics of many minds during unhindered debate, with time truth will prevail.

This of course is an ideal that has never been completely realized; however, in modern America, the First Amendment is under threat as never before.  Money talks while far too many keep silent.  Votes are bought.  Politicians sell themselves in order to get elected.  The heinous Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court allows rich special-interest groups to make unlimited political contributions.  Too many people are too busy with Beyoncé to realize that they are beyond say in the direction of our democracy.  Why should a politician, bought off by the rich, listen to ordinary citizens, the backbone of democracy? We are getting to a point where, manipulated by sophisticated propaganda relentlessly advertised by special interests, the unhindered exchange of ideas no longer occurs. 

The decline of the effectiveness of free speech, however, is not inevitable.  With better leaders, elected by a better-informed electorate, the practice of the First Amendment in America can be very much improved.

2.  Health Care

What a mess!  The United States, the richest country in the world, is eighth place in rank among countries in the world regarding such things as infant mortality rate and longevity.  Not bad, but we should be doing better.  Regarding health care, however, the U.S.A. ranks thirty-fifth, just above Romania.  We spend about twice as much on health care as do other industrialized countries.  Our bangs for the buck seem to be coming from handguns.  The disastrous state of health care in America threatens our respectable rankings in other areas.  If we continue to emphasize external defense while neglecting internal defense—and improving the health of all citizens is certainly an internal defense, American decline is all but guaranteed.

I am writing this the day after the Congressional Budget Office announced the likely effects of the current Trumpcare proposal.  Millions will lose coverage; the numbers of the uninsured will increase greatly.  Oh, yes, the rich will get a lot richer, since Tumpcare is limited care, Obamacare on the cheap.  The proposal is an absolutely disgraceful transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.

Mr. Trump announced that the decrease in regulation, and the return to an almost unfettered free market, will assure that the insurance industry will be able to cover everyone.  This is ridiculous.  No country has ever been able to provide affordable health coverage for all without governmental involvement; it can’t be done.

It is mere propaganda to promise coverage at no higher cost to those with preexisting conditions, if the healthy are not required to participate, and if we all, especially those of us who are very rich, do not pay our fair share of the cost.

Republicans obviously don’t consider health care to be a right.  Their primary concern is to reduce taxes. 

Among those who would be most affected by Trumpcare are the Trump voters. When will they realize that they’ve been had?  

Elected Republicans are backing—at least for now—an incompetent president, since they believe he is a means to accomplish their ends.  All politicians want power, granted; but when Republicans sacrifice the common good for the good of a few, which they are currently doing in a truly shameless way, decent conservatism becomes an oxymoron.

Threats to the First Amendment and the lack of health care for all are not the only threats to our nation.  Other factors, such as a uniformed and a politically inactive electorate, rising inequality, fanaticism, ignorance, a broken educational system, xenophobia, racism, sexism, polarization, etc., if left unchecked, will also continue to significantly contribute to a decline of a nation that still remains among a beacon of light in a darkening world.

Each of us must earn the oil which keeps the torch of liberty burning brightly.  If we don’t, night will remove an incomparable vision.

A Trinity of Absences: What We See, What We Feel, Who We Are

I wanted to pick up my cat--
Her fraught look said, "Please don't do that!"
Why did I leave her on the chair?
Gopinathan wasn't there.

1.

I just wrote this little poem.  It is not fiction--the only thing I changed was the location, for the rhyme--the phantom cat was staring at me from a bed, not a chair.  She looked quite different, as if she were woven into the surrounding tapestry.  I stood in the hallway by the entrance to a bedroom, the door of which was open.  Gopi loves to sleep on the bed in that room.  Sometimes when I pass by, she gives me a frightened look, hoping I won't go in and play with her.  (I like to pick her up sometimes and hold her over my head.  She doesn't always appreciate this, and this was one of those times.  Or was it?)

Gopi admittedly looked strange.  Her head seemed to have shrunk a bit and her eyes looked even more mysterious than usual.  It was definitely my cat, however; I assumed that the oddities were due to the fact that I wasn't seeing things clearly.  As I approached, to my utter surprise, Gopi disappeared like a pointillist portrait that becomes just a bunch of dots when seen up close.  My cat was an unmade bed; a rumpled bedspread convinced my mind that Gopi lay on it, staring up at me.  I walked over to tufts and folds, still completely convinced that it was her--until I was about three feet away.

                   Gopinath on the bed where I saw Gopinot.

This was a particularly vivid example of a frequent occurrence.  Yes, I often see what isn't there.  When I am lost in thought, say, trying to find the right word for a line of a poem, I am very unmindful of the outside world.  If I'm lucky and find the right word, the world reconstructs itself before my eyes.  Where are the keys?  I have no idea.  My wife tells me to think backwards in time and recall what I did with them, but this is impossible for me, since I was preoccupied when I put them down somewhere.  They must be on the desk, I tell myself.  And for a second or so, I see them clearly on my desk; then they disappear.  Then, for another second I might see them on the radiator.  Not there again!  I eventually find them, say, on my piano.

The previous day provided another example. At the Giant supermarket, which is gigantic, I got separated from my wife.  I saw her approaching me from the other side of the store.  As I approached her, however, her face began to dissolve into someone else's.  This happened twice.  At least I don't hear voices, I told myself.  "Tom!," she called from a distance.  I turned around immediately.  No one was there.

I am sure that we all have had similar experiences.  The brain likes to make sense of what it sees; it tends to see familiar patterns in something random, such as The Virgin Mary on a potato chip, a ghost in a photo, or a face staring at us from a rock formation on a Martian landscape.  We also sometimes see what we, sometimes desperately, want to see: an aural or visual hallucination of a newly deceased loved one, for instance.   In my case, the cat hallucination falls into the category of the brain trying to see familiar things; the keys hallucination falls into the category of seeing what one wants to see.

If we have a scientific view of the world, and if we are not mentally ill or in an acute stage of grief, these visions are brief and inconsequential.  

When Marley asked Scrooge if the latter doubted the former's ghostly presence, Scrooge told him he did: You are probably just an undigested piece of cheese, he told the spectral visitor.   Marley, in the 1951 classic film version of A Christmas Carol,  thereupon rattled his chains in such a frightful way that Scrooge became convinced of his deceased partner's reality.  The ghosts in Dicken's tale are vividly drawn, they possess the "flesh and blood" verisimilitude of his other characters.  In other words, here the supernatural appears natural.  This is, of course, fiction.  Visions sane people have tend to be fleeting and insubstantial.

There are also borderline cases.  Mental illness and mental health are to some degree social constructs; if we look at these two extremes as bookends and consider humans as books, we are all situated at different places between the two supports.  Most of us are lucky enough to have a position nearer to the mental-health bookend.  But it takes a lot of books to make a human shelf; others are in the unlucky position of being closer to the other side, madness.  The latter books are filled with hallucinations that have become the authors' reality.  Toward the mad end, hallucinations don't disappear like the brief smoke from a gutted candle; they remain a long time, like some underground fires that have been burning for years.

I had a friend, now deceased, a lovely, inscrutable book situated on the shelf of humanity more than halfway toward the bookend of mental illness.  She was a good poet, but had difficulty communicating--Perhaps she suffered from a high-achieving form of autism.  I was reading her first book of poems, when I came across the following lines:

Having arranged your own funeral,
you decided to attend it.

I liked that.  It reminded me a little of Dickinson, whose poems about the reality of death are both understated and shocking. Treating a corpse as if it were a living being in such a context brings home the reality of death.  You didn't attend your funeral, your corpse did.  I told my friend that I liked those lines and why I liked them.  She had no idea what I was talking about.  It seems that during that funeral, she had actually "seen" her deceased friend walking toward her. She carefully watched him walk through the main aisle of the church at the end of which, he, well, exited.  She had had a very close look at this apparition, who took a long time to vanish.  She was convinced, and remained convinced to her dying day, that she had seen him in the same way she had seen mourners-in-the-flesh at the service. My poet friend had a difficult time "fitting in"--if the book that was her life had been much closer to the wrong bookend, however, she wouldn't have fit in at all.

To sum up: minds often trick.  Sometimes what we think we see is a familiar image is an illusion overlying something else.  But is it only the mind that deceives us?

2.

I am typing this essay onto my computer, while sitting at my desk.  It is a fairly large computer desk, with several drawers and a section for my hard drive.  A  half-full coffee cup rests next to my desk lamp.  I put my hand on my desk.  It is hard, strong enough by far not to give way to the pressure from my hand; it does not adjust to my weight the way a soft mattress would if I should lie on it.  I stare at the desk’s surface.  Its color is pale green.

  

Now let’s look at my desk from a different perspective.  Wood is composed of 50% carbon, 42% oxygen, 8% hydrogen and 1% of a variety of trace elements.  Molecules of wood are held together by covalent bonds.  These bonds are quiet strong.

Now let’s examine the nucleus of an element.  The nucleus is so small, it is hardly there.  A speck of dust floating in Carnegie Hall, that’s about the size of the nucleus compared to the size of the entire atom. Electrons, which give atoms their properties, are even smaller.  The atom is therefore, over, way over, 99% empty space.  How can empty space be supporting my coffee cup?  Those numerous Atlases holding it up are those tough covalent bonds—What my elbow feels as it rests on the wood is the barrier made by the electromagnetic force of these bonds.  Matter takes up an infinitesimally small amount of the otherwise vast empty space of the wood.  In a way, there is just about nothing there.

Why is the color of my desk green?  Because the paint on the surface absorbs all wavelengths of light except a certain wavelength which, reflected into my eyes and then into my brain, is interpreted by consciousness as green.  Furthermore, if we put out the lights out on a dark night, (or close our eyes), there is no color anywhere.

This is an important point: black is the way our brain interprets a certain wavelength.  Colors do not exist without brains.  Nor are they fixed; some brains, such as those of a bee, see different colors than we do, because their brains interpret wavelengths of visible light differently.

Similarly, the form and texture of a desk arise in our minds from the sensory data it receives.  The substance of a desk is, therefore, a construct of the human brain.  A thought experiment: if I were a neutrino, I would pass right through the wood without colliding with anything and without feeling any electromagnetic force.  For a neutrino, the desk isn’t there.

It seems to me that inscrutable combinations of something “out there” with something in our brains constitute the world.  But for some scientists, as well as in classical Advaita Hinduism, the entire world is a construct of the mind.  The conclusion regarding the relativity of things, however, in both cases would be the same.

The difference between the reality of hallucinations discussed in section one and the “hallucinations” of our concrete world discussed here is that while the former are often brief, the latter last a lifetime, since they are constructed by the exigencies of our bodies, which last a lifetime as well.  As far as what’s “really” out there, nobody knows. Do we stop here?  We've discussed two types of sensory interpretations of a who-knows-what?  Is there a third?

3.

Yes, there is.  Sensory activity of the brain, and perhaps factors beyond it, is the method by which you construct you.

You didn’t choose your genes; you didn’t choose when or where you were born.  What do you choose then? Truth is, any choice you make is as non-existent in an absolute sense as is the color yellow or a fleeting vision of a cat that’s not there. 

What about free will, which most of us accept as an axiom. It is an illusion as well. You in a very real sense don’t make any decisions at all.  Functional MRIs have revealed that decisions are made by the brain before one consciously decides to do something.  Everything is outside of a person’s control for one good reason: a soul, a personal I, the conscious “decider”, whatever you wish to call it, does not exist either.

This is an illusion called Kaluzska's Triangle. Think of the lines and the circles as the apparatus of the brain.  It produces the white triangle that is seen by the brain, but really isn't there.  The white triangle is you.

Thoughts just happen.  Voluntary actions just happen as well.

This is science as well as classical Buddhism and Advaita Hinduism.  If you would like to read the science that supports it, you might want to begin with Sam Harris’s excellent book, “Waking Up.”  If you want to read about the non-existence of the self from an Advaita Hinduism aspect, read the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, or you may wish to read my blog, The Near-Death Experiences of Ramana Maharshi.  

The three characteristics of existence according to Buddhism are dukka, anicca and anatta—namely, the inability of life to completely satisfy you, the fact that everything changes, and the fact that there is no abiding self behind our thoughts.  This can be found in many texts; I suggest you read, What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, or one of my many blogs, e.g. Buddhism Through Pictures: The Four Noble Truths, Ramana Maharshi and the Rabbi, Ramana Maharshi and Cartier-Besson, Ramana Maharshi and the Five Skandhas, The Cosmic Dance, Everything and Almost Nothing: Consciousness and the Theory of Everything.

To many Westerners, and to many Easterners as well; to all those obsessively attached to their egos, this first might appear to be bad news.  But it is good news--and a relief--to the wise.

Does being nothing mean that we do nothing and just passively let things roll?  Far from it, far from it--even though a fatalist conclusion might appear justified at first.  Why should we try to make decisions when we really can’t make decisions? How can we grow in wisdom and love if everything is determined?  

That is the subject of my next essay, which will appear in about a month on this blog site.

4. 

That’s all for now--I think I see my cat staring, waiting to be fed.  We'll see.

The Baltimore Online Book Club: " Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," by Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
by Herman Melville
Penguin Books, 1966
362 pages

"Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness."  --page 181

The book we discussed in the March, 2017 meeting of the Baltimore Online Book Club is Herman Melville's seventh novel, published in 1852, "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities." I found the novel to be uneven, yet fascinating.

                              Herman Melville,  1819-1891

I chose the last two books we read, the first being "The Insulted and the Injured," by Dostoevsky.  I selected these because I read both of them about fifty years ago, and wondered if I would consider both to be as interesting to me now as they were then.  In the case of the Russian novel, it is indeed a good read, but far from Dostoevsky's best.  Regarding Melville's novel, few of the novels we've read affected me as deeply as Pierre.  I suppose I have a lot of explaining to do, since the novel was a failure then and is rarely read now.  The opportunity to do just that pleases me.

I will discuss four reasons why I think that the novel is significant: 1) It is perhaps the first modern novel, with a content that provides a biting criticism of all those who believe life's ambiguities can be neatly resolved; 2) the quality of the language and style; 3) This one is the most important--Melville's beautiful and profound commentaries on life scattered throughout the text, and finally, 4) Melville's dark religious stance, followed by a brief discussion of what I consider to be its pertinence today.

1. Its Modernity

If a book is to be judged by the number of copies sold, this novel was a financial and critical disaster. Contemporary reviewers wondered if Melville had gone mad.   Here is a quote from the review of the book in the New York Herald as reprinted on the back cover of the Penguin Classics edition:  "Ambiguities indeed!...the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." Although modern critics have been a lot kinder, it has never been a success with the general public, and probably never will be.

One of the reasons for its initial failure is its caustic criticism of the Gothic novel, an exceedingly popular genre at the time.  In such novels, the hero might have faced chapters of suffering and tribulations, which at the novel's end are invariably and happily resolved.  (Dickens's David Copperfield, undoubtedly a work of genius, is a prime example.) In Pierre, many of the cliches of the Gothic novel are satirized; no one lives happily ever after--in fact, not one of the main characters survives the last page.

In music there is what musicians call a 5-1 cadence, such as Beethoven used in the opening section of his third piano concerto--ba-Bom, ba-Bom, ba-Bom.  This chord progression is eschewed in jazz, which has, regarding this cadence, a "been there, done that" attitude.  The Gothic novel is like a 5-1 cadence in literature; great works of art in the past  have used all-must-end-well plots, but they appear very old fashioned now.  Melville was perhaps the first to indicate the approaching death of the Gothic novel, although no one realized it at the time

Another aspect of modernity in Pierre is its deliberately absurd, non-linear plot.  Pierre gives up his future as gentleman as well as husband to hide the fact that his father had a daughter out of wedlock.  Oh, come on.  His abandoned fiance, Lucy, ignored for many, many pages while Pierre lives with his supposed half-sister Isabel, is being courted by Glendinning Stanley, the callous cousin of the disinherited Pierre. Instead of accepting his advances, she decides to live in poverty with Pierre and Isabel, without making any demands.  Oh, come on.  Isabel believes that the guitar in her possession was her mother's, although there is absolutely no proof that this is the case.  Why is Isabel convinced?  When she whispers "Mother, Mother" to the guitar, it responds with a musical echo.  Oh, come on.  Toward the end of the book, Pierre, while living in poverty, suddenly becomes a well-known author, with absolutely no indication of an ability or even desire to write in the many preceding pages of the book,  Oh, come on.

There are so many "Oh, come ons" in the book that we can only conclude that Mellville did not take the plot seriously, in the usual way at that time; he in no way intended to write a "typical" novel. What he did write was perhaps the first modern novel ever.

Three hundred plus pages of satire would prove to be boring, and this book is anything but.  We will explore the glories of the novel in the next two sections.

2. Melville’s Use of Language

The scholar Henry A. Murray described the writing style of Pierre as being a “miscellany of grammatical eccentricities, convoluted sentences, neologisms, and verbal fetishisms.”  When I read that, I said to myself, “This man has a prose, if not prosaic, mind.  While I was reading the book, before I read Murray’s opinion, I said to myself, with joy, “This man (Mellville) was a poet!”

If you love poetry, you will see Melville’s writing style differently.  You will fall in love with the verbal invention, the rhythms, and the imagery. 

An example:

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floating of the eyes.  Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls.  The eye is Love’s own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light.  There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes.  In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover’s cheek.  Love’s eyes are holy, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all.  Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover’s eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth.  Love is both Creator’s and Saviour’s gospel to mankind, a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.     

                                                                             pages 33-34

Only a poet could write like this.  Notice the rhythm of the sentence that begins with “The eye of Love”.  Any lover of poetry will read this line metrically.  It begins with four iambs, followed by the spondee, “All things”; then--the unaccented “where” should be swallowed, that is, not counted--the line proceeds with an anapest and an iamb.  Then the rhythm is broken again just where you want it: on “glide”, which is followed by three dactyls ending with an emphasis—again, just where you’d want it, on “light.”  There are many such examples of an impressive rhythmic musicality, which is characteristic of poets, throughout the book. 

I don’t doubt that Melville’s description of love as sometimes leaping out of the organs of sight like “eye-fish with wings” would have been classified by Murray under the rubric of “convoluted sentences and verbal fetishisms,” but to those who love poetry, the image, not to mention the rhythms of the sentences, works.

Examples like this one abound in Pierre.  This one is by no means the best of them. (There are, admittedly, obscure and convoluted passages as well.)

Another important concept to mention here is found in the subtitle of the book, “The Ambiguities.” For Melville, perhaps the first major modern writer, there are no longer any certainties.  Melville doubts everything, including his own worth.  The above passage demonstrates another achievement of Melville’s: deep down there, he believes in the transcendence of love, but can only permit himself to state and negate his faith at the same time.  The passage is both serious and ironic; it mocks all overblown paeans to love while confirming them at the same time. A strange combination of irony and conviction—a poetic ambiguous hymn to Love. Simultaneous praise and disdain which succeed on both levels is characteristic of Melville's mature style. 

I must note here that the language of the dialogues is very stilted.  Nobody says such things as “Yes! Yes!—Dead! Dead! Dead!—without one visible wound—her sweet plumage hides it.—Thou hellish carrion, this is thy hellish work!  Thy juggler’s rifle brought down this heavenly bird!  Oh, my God, my God: Thou scalpest me with this sight!” (page 362.)  Here Melville is mocking the writing style of would-be Hamlets who are in real life merely Peter Quinces.  Ironic passages like this, without poetic beauty, however, get to be rather tiresome.

It’s important to note here that Melville was no dramatist, and was probably incapable of writing effective dialogue.  The exchanges between Isabel and Pierre, when not viewed with irony, resemble the work of a third-rate writer, rather than the work of a first-rate one. 

When I had that “aha!” moment of realization that Melville was a poet, I ordered a book of his poems. Some are very beautiful indeed.  No doubt about it, Melville was a very competent poet.  In Pierre, pace scholar Murray, it shows.

3. Melville’s Reflections on the Inner Life

The same scholar we quoted above wrote, regarding Pierre, that Melville “purported to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel.”  Although Murray missed the mark regarding Melville’s style, here he scores a bull’s eye. Melville thought deeply and profoundly about life, and expressed its sometimes otiose ambiguities after a process of what  Germans might call Auseinandersetzungen mit der Wirklichkeit, confrontations with reality, in truly beautiful passages throughout the book.  These “asides,” these commentaries, provide by far the best parts of the novel.  All of them are deeply personal and universal at the same time.

Melville was dissatisfied.  At the time when Pierre was written, his reputation as an author was in steep decline.  Melville wrote profoundly—not always, but after Moby-Dick, more and more so; the public, however, wanted lighter entertainment.  He played Bach while the public demanded Telemann. 

As is the case with many unhappy people of genius, Melville sought something better.  He had a deep religious yearning—he states in the book a variation of Hopkins’s "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”  Yet he was unable and unwilling to flout reason to find an unambiguous source of transcendence.  This is the source of his parody of the Gothic novel.  Many people—then as now—believed/believe in Providence, the concept that behind all suffering, the answer abides.  We may not see or understand it, but God is behind everything, and, with a case of faith, we, happily inebriated, become convinced that everything will work out for the best.  Melville, however, like many moderns, concluded that existence reveals no certainties, only deeper and deeper ambiguities.  Pierre is sort of a boxing match of the soul, Ambiguities  (modernity) vs. Providence, (the Gothic novel)--Ambiguities wins, having soundly blackened the eyes of Providence—including its mystical third one.

Melville beautifully expresses the absolute silence behind nature, including human nature, in the following passage:

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.  What a silence is that with which the pale bride precedes the responsive I will, to the priest’s solemn question, Wilt thou  have this man for thy husband?  In silence, too, the wedded hands are clasped.  Yea, in silence the child Christ was born into the world.  Silence  is the general consecration of the universe.  Silence is the invisible laying of the Divine Pontiff’s hands upon the world.  Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature.  It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate.  Silence is the only Voice of our God.

                                                                         --page 204

Another example is this truly remarkable passage:

In those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light.  Viewed through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted, the very heavens themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited.

But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them and we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind, for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.

                                                               --page 165

Have the indifference of nature and the dangers of meaninglessness ever been more beautifully expressed?  How modern Melville sounds!

I will close with another of my favorite passages:

Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round.  Strike at one end the longest conceivable row of billiard balls in close contact, and the furthermost ball will start forth, while all the rest stand still, and yet the last ball was not struck at all.  So, through long previous generations, whether of births or thoughts, Fate strikes the present man.  Idly he disowns the blow’s effect, because he felt no blow, and indeed, received no blow.  But Pierre was not arguing Fixed Fate and Free Will no, Fixed Fate and Free Will were arguing him, and Fixed Fate got the better of the debate. 

                                                                                 
                                                                            --page 182

So much for the common view that humans have an abiding self, independent of nature!  The modern view, espoused by many scientists, that free will is an illusion, finds an early and beautiful expression here.

Quotes like these are what makes Pierre unforgettable.  The novel is replete with such passages.

Conclusion

In Melville we find ambiguities, and the absence of God; in many modern writers, such as Roth, however, the question of God doesn’t even come up.  I am reminded here of a statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan, namely, that he was comfortable with ambiguity and can live well without the security of final answers. Melville couldn’t.  Despite all the modern aspects of this novel, Melville's  futile search for a hand beyond the stars, as it were, strikes many of us as being somewhat atavistic.  Perhaps he was looking in the wrong direction, outside rather than inside. 

Searching for meaning and failure to find absolute answers, however, has been part of the human condition since time immemorial.  The uncompromising pressure of catechisms has tried their best, throughout history, to crush the sphere of intelligence.  Sometimes, under intense pressure of the will to believe, the sphere disappears; sometimes it has enough stuff of its own to respond to the unrelenting gravitational force of irrational faith by converting its original elements into something more substantial.  It then becomes a star, and infuses the darkness with light. The resultant luminescence might not be what we want; it might seem cold and inhuman at first, yet it is light nevertheless. This light, photons of which spotlight a central component of Melville’s genius, informs much of the novel, making Pierre, at least for some readers, an albeit uneven, yet unambiguous delight.