More Thoughts on UVU Graduation

I've received strong responses to the previous post, pretty well divided between agreement and disagreement. The disagreements are especially welcome, since they highlight important points.

There are two basic complaints:

1. That any speaker for graduation, whether he be the Mormon businessman or whether she be Mother Teresa, would naturally speak from personal experience and that shouldn't be offensive to the audience. Even if Muhammad himself were to speak, wrote one reader, I wouldn't be offended.

2. That I have misrepresented Mr. Gay's speech.

Here's the problem, at least for me, most basically:

If a prominent outsider were to come challenge the majority of us at UVU with his or her thoughts, it would be good for us.

But I'm not convinced that a graduation ceremony is the right place for that.

If Michael Moore, for instance, had been the speaker, and if he had politicized our graduation, it would have take away from the broad sense that all of us, even with our differences, are celebrating our graduations -- all of our graduations.

So I'm all for Michael Moore or Robert Gay or George Bush or Bill Clinton speaking on campus for the School of Business or for the History/Political Science Department. We ought to welcome challenge from many sides.

In this case, it was not a prominent outsider, but an insider who spoke and whose examples, like the testimony meeting example and the African mission-president examples, were drawn from the experiences of the majority.

There's no problem with that in many university settings. If my brother in law, who is a millionaire businessman and now a general authority of the LDS church were to speak about his experiences in either realm to an audience of religious studies and/or business students, it would be a wonderful experience.

But graduation is for all of us, not just for Mormons and not just for capitalists.

My mother taught elementary school in Utah Valley and, despite the legal separation of church and state, started her class with prayer until she retired. I asked her what the children thought and felt who weren't religious, or who weren't Christian, or who weren't Mormon like most of the students. That's not my problem, she said. We're the majority and the minority should not tell us what to do.

I obviously disagree. How the majority treats the minority is a good sign of whether a society will be a civil society.

If Mr. Gay had thought more carefully about his audience, or if he had cared about those in the audience who weren't religious or who were religious in a different way, he would have showed them more respect by giving a less religiously partisan, less politically partisan speech.

As for misrepresenting the speech, I wrote nothing that he didn't actually say. He did denounce Harvard liberals. He did denounce abortion, drawing applause as in a political rally. He did say that if we knew Africa we knew what would happen to the little boy when he went home without money. He did say Africans didn't know the value of service but that they learned it when they went with the Eagle Scout. He did warn us against the evils of a secular society.

And yes, he did say lots of decent things I didn't mention. In that sense, I misrepresented the speech. I also referred to his tears and to him as a simpering millionaire. Those were probably cheap shots; but they grew out of the knowledge that with Mitt Romney and others at Bain Capital Mr. Gay engaged in a particularly odious kind of capitalism, one which produces nothing (no energy, no buildings, no vegetables, no clothing, etc.) but profits. Just one example from the Boston Globe:

Bain Capital put $5 million into its purchase of American Pad & Paper and quickly began charging management and other fees. It also made payments to investors. In all, Bain and its investors reaped more than $100 million even though Ampad went into bankruptcy, workers lost jobs, and stockholders were left with worthless shares. [And creditors got less than 50 cents on the dollar.] 

White and Delightsome

Graduation yesterday at Utah Valley University. Although I skipped my own graduation ceremonies, figuring that what I had learned was enough for me, I have enjoyed attending the graduations of my own students, pleased to get to shake their hands and congratulate them and celebrate their hard work and accomplishment.

This graduation was one I'd been anticipating for over four years. When Najib Niazi arrived at what was then UVSC from Afghanistan, sponsored by Scott Carrier, for whom he had translated during the war, he brought me a chapan that looks a lot like the three chapans worn by the men at the left (photo from a Swedish blog). I told Najib that I would wear it when he graduated. Yesterday I wore the chapan as I lined up with my faculty colleagues in their colorful academic robes, proud of Najib and happy to see him wave and smile as he passed by the faculty with his fellow students.

The morning was spoiled by the graduation speech given by teary-eyed Dr. Robert C. Gay, CEO of Huntsman Gay Global Capital (and former colleague of Mitt Romney in Bain Capital).

We (and by we I mean the Atheists and Methodists and Muslims and Mormons and Buddhists and Catholics and so many others at our state University) were assaulted by a simpering millionaire who intimated that Africans do not treat children charitably and that they know nothing about service unless they are taught by the millionaire Mormon's Eagle Scout son. He said that the deviations of a secular world will lead us astray, that pitiful liberals at Harvard censored the printed version of Mother Teresa's commencement address about abortion as murder, that Jesus is the way.

I squirmed and cursed and wrote pointed obscenities in my notebook as I thought about Najib and his Muslim friends and family-to-be who were sitting in the audience.

While Mr. Gay pretended to be Mother Teresa, they sat there dumbfounded.

As did I.

Najib, please accept my heartfelt apology. Najib, this celebrated man, this captain of capitalism, this philanthropic Mormon, this man of power and wealth -- this man is simply uneducated.

Take your honors B.S. in Business, take your MBA, if that's what you choose, take the fine education that you already have, and make more of it than this man has. Huck Finn, whom you met and wrote about in the class with me and Alex and Scott, is a much finer model for a good life.

While you do that, charitable man that you are, I'll look into the world through the less charitable face of the man to the right of the photo and think angrily about the man who brought his shameful disrespect into our celebration.

Crested Outrage

Rode my bike up the steep streets of Woodland Hills this afternoon, feeling good but a little saddle sore after yesterday's ride, the first of the spring, up to where the asphalt ends and then, muscles not happy at all and breathing like a hippo running at altitude, I turned up the steep dirt road leading to the town's water tanks and fought my way up, 10 feet, then another 10, keeping my gaze down at the front tire so I wouldn't be disheartened by how much of the hill remained. At the top, my front tire on the lip of the snow still heavy on the mountain rising up ahead, I listened to the raspy sharp outrage of a jay and looked up to see a Stellar's jay against the sky, black, blue, and crested and not happy at all at the intrusion.

mOrMoNiSm

The difficulty is in embracing what you despise and despising what you embrace while what you despise and embrace is embodied by Mitt Romney.

Old Friends, Old Profession, Old Home, Old Religion -- New Insight

Fuhrman Hall

Vanderbilt University was my academic home for most of the 1980's. It was a wonderful place for a new Ph.D. in German, an intellectual environment that stimulated and challenged and supported.

It was (and is) also a supremely beautiful campus. Fuhrman Hall, picture to the left, was home to philosophy, Germanic and Slavic Languages, and other languages. My office, shared with colleague and friend Thom Heine, was stunning with its brick walls and high windows.

When I left there, just months after having been awarded tenure, I explained to the curious Dean of Arts and Sciences that I missed the scent of sage and that I was looking forward to the chance to teach at BYU, the university that educated my fellow Mormons.

Since then, there has been a lot of water under the bridge.

Last week I returned to Vanderbilt for the first time in over twenty years. The occasion was an international symposium on the work of Heinrich von Kleist, 200 years after his death. My paper, "Erection as Self-Assertion in Kleist's 'Die Marquise von O...'" will be a chapter in my book "On Standing" someday.

The paper went well. The conference featured about 40 Kleist scholars from Germany, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Canada, and from US universities from Berkeley to Princeton. There was, of course, tedium and pedantry and narcissism (we are German scholars, after all). And there was plenty of brilliance and good humor and insight (we are German scholars, after all).


Repeatedly I was asked why I left Vanderbilt. The only two people who really understood my answer were John Lyon, a Germanist at the University of Pittsburg, and James Rasmussen, a Comparatist out of Indiana. They're both Mormons and thus understood the BYU choice. The fact that I'm no longer a member of the LDS church, that I drank coffee by the bucketful (remember the tedium and pedantry?), that, in short, lots of water has gone under the bridge in the past 20 years, set up possible tensions but didn't seem to interfere, finally, with my conversations with John and James.

I'm still Mormon, for better and worse, even after leaving the faith.

I'm also a Germanist, for better and worse, even after having left the discipline for the most part to take the job in Integrated Studies at UVU.

Things change. Things stay the same.

The trajectory from that tight scholarly focus (which culminated with the publication of my book on Freemasonry and the German novel in 1991) to the travel writing with my friend Zarko Radakovic (the two books published in Belgrade) and to work with my friend Alex Caldiero and to my ongoing work on "Immortal For Quite Some Time" has been carefully chosen, as I explained to the PBS Ethics and Religion producer who pointed out that the moves from Princeton to Vanderbilt to BYU to UVU showed an academic career in precipitous decline.

David Lowe

Some of those choices were catalyzed by Thom Heine, a fellow Germanist out of the University of Virginia. Thom was and is a brilliant teacher of German. He's also a wonderful playwrite, full of good humor and profound insight. As he balanced his job with his creative work I too found myself broadening my fields of interest.


Returning to Nashville, the two persons I wanted to see were Thom and another friend, Evan Richards, a fine poet. Although I failed to find Evan, I did squeeze out an evening to see Thom and his wife Chris. Over good food and wine we settled effortlessly back into conversation. Unknown to us as we talked, our former colleague in Russian, David Lowe, was breathing his last breaths. For days and weeks and months on end, I sat with David in a room dedicated to 4 computers (before we all had computers of our own). David was translating what became four volumes of Dostoevsky's letters ("he's just run up another big gambling debt," David would exclaim, "and he's writing again to get some help") and I was finishing the Freemasonry book. David was also a lover of and expert on opera. And he was gay, the first openly gay person with whom I was well acquainted other than my brother John. David ate carrots by the handful, hour after hour, having heard that they strengthened the immune system.


I dedicated my Kleist paper to a third person I would have wanted to see, Hans Schulz, who died of cancer over a decade ago. As Hans died, we exchanged letters. This excerpt from one of his reveals a lot about us both:


"It’s been more than six weeks since I got your letter. I am only now coming out of the kind of hermetic self-referentiality which the news of my palpable finality engendered.. . . Your letter has a tone which expresses a lot about a flux of beliefs and the sense of loss that comes with it. Difficult for me to empathize because that is a whole field of beliefs I never entered and have always looked at as an indoor Hollywood landscape. But my own situation seems to subject a lot of things to revision too; in both cases, yours and mine, I think the results will be positive; in any case, staying in certain belief structures as if they were a nature-given exoskeleton has got to be boring in the long run."


That's it exactly. I left Vanderbilt because I had a clear sense (however subconscious it was) that staying in Nashville would be boring in the long run. The resultant years at BYU were never boring, composed of pleasure and aggravation in roughly equal parts; and the next decade at UVU hasn't been boring either -- with much less aggravation involved.


And then there was the sage.


Returning from Nashville to the mountains and valleys that shaped my childhood and that still thrill my soul, I realized that that scent and all it stood for, including the easing out into fields not exactly Germanic, was the scent of the life I wanted.

Early Scenes from "Immortal For Quite Some Time"

March 1950, Farmington, New Mexico

In what eventually will become our hometown, for three days running, good citizens report seeing flying saucers. Between eleven and noon each day, hundreds of the alien craft thrill builders and teachers, cooks and civil servants, farmers and trading-post operators.

I was born seven months before the aliens were reported in Farmington. John was born fourteen months after their coming.

I have never seen a flying saucer. Nor, to my knowledge, did John.

September 1954, Paonia, Colorado

            The little engine keeps leaving the tracks to frolic in meadows. Flowers snagged in his wheels betray him. Pedagogical engineers hide in a meadow and jump up with red flags when he turns their way. He gives up frolicking, stays on the tracks, and grows into a good puller-of-trains.

            I put down my Golden Book to watch flatcars stacked with fruit boxes rattle past our log house. My mother leads me across the street to a warehouse. She knocks at a side door. It slides open. She passes her warm bread and a pot of steaming pinto beans through the opening to a dark-eyed woman holding a brown-skinned baby at her breast.

1956, Montpelier, Idaho

            My friend Bernie shows me the litter of birth-wet puppies under his front porch. Their father, he says . . . my dad said their father was a dead daddy horse.

1957, Montpelier, Lincoln Elementary School

            Pots, rings, or chase. We lay out our games of marbles on the playground. I drop my winnings into a blue-and-white-striped bag Mom made from a leg of a pair of overalls. It grows fat and heavy. I knot the drawstring carefully.

            When I’m not playing marbles, I watch a girl with patent-leather shoes swing so high the chains go slack. Her shoes flash in the sun. Her black hair flies in the wind. She knows I watch her.

1958, Montpelier

            Mrs. Sharp has enrolled us in a reading contest. We write titles and authors’ names on lined paper. I speed through dozens of little paperbacks. My list grows and grows. Mrs. Sharp awards me a round steel medal engraved with my name and the number of books I have read: 129.

           

1960, Farmington, New Mexico

            If it weren’t for our fierce soccer games on Ladera del Norte’s dirt field, I would gladly skip lunch to sit in class where our teacher reads another chapter of Little Britches. He’s tough. Determined. Good with horses. Ingenious. Saves his wages.

1964, Aztec, New Mexico

            Regional competition between junior-high bands. I carry my clarinet, she hers. We suck our reeds to keep them moist. We hold hands, speak in low tones, wish there were no end to the day.

1966, Farmington, New Mexico

            Late-afternoon light diffuse in the old Mormon chapel. The sacrament meeting is already an hour gone. The man standing at the pulpit intones the word of God. Sixteen-year-old boys and girls sit thigh to thigh in the back row, pass notes, play games on paper, brush hands.

July 1967, Farmington

            DR. GENE SMITH, ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON. I have swept his parking lot, watered his shrubs, cleaned his office, transcribed his tapes, and once almost fainted while I held a basin of warm water into which he squirted fatty yellow fluid drawn from deep inside a man’s knee through an enormous needle.

            Today, I’m working in the red glow of the darkroom, developing a set of x-rays. I pull the film from the chemical bath and hang the sheets to drip dry. I turn on the fluorescent screen behind them.

Gistening reproductions of Claudia Colter’s spine.

The bones curve ever so slightly from the delicate vertebrae of her neck down to the right and then back to the left before disappearing between the bright wings of her hips.

The bright wings of her hips.

            Again I trace the scoliostic curve, ghostly against the black film, deviating so beautifully from the strictly vertical. I study the dim arcs of ribs that frame her spine, the cunningly articulated vertebrae snaking down between the ribs. I picture Claudia in the next room, naked under the examination gown.

The thoughts arouse me, confuse me. I’m feeling what I’ve learned, in church, to distinguish as the fire of the Holy Ghost. I worship these pale images.

The door opens. It’s Dr. Smith: So what have we got? 

Immortal For Quite Some Time and A Reasonable Dictionary: Avoidance as Anti-Teleology?

A thoughtful email today from college roommate and friend Chuck Hamaker that points out a pattern in a couple of things I've written:

Scott

I just read your piece on your brother John from "Immortal For Quite Some Time," the one posted in BEPRESS as "Our Feet Are the Same"[http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/7/]. I was struck by how similar what you wrote then was to what you wrote when you reported on your and Zarko's trip with Peter Handke [http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/01/biography-celebrity-and-identity.html] -- the full account is here under the title "A Reasonable Dictionary": [http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/5/].

In both instances, though it seemed you started with a goal of uncovering something about your subject, you consistently chose not to pursue the person of interest, through declining to meet or even to talk with anyone who actually knew them. You were an accidental tourist in an intentional location.

The places you go give a structure but the content is hardly circumstantial and hardly even tangential to the ostensible subject. I don't know if that's truly what happened or what you invented, it doesn't matter.

I am struck by the similarity of the modus operandi and the extreme "staying away" from the supposed subjects of your attention.

You mention in the Handke piece that you're worried about being a sycophant. I think it's something else, but not that.

In the piece supposedly on John, but not about him in reality, you encounter and interact with people, seem to stumble through, stay out of the way or don't really look, i.e. do not intentionally interact with anyone who really might have had some history of him. Ditto for Handke.

Anyway, for what its worth.

Cheers
Chuck

It's worth a lot Chuck, especially now that you connect the two and give me a chance to think about the similarities and the reasons. Let me add a couple of lines from the opening section of Immortal For Quite Some Time that was published last week in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:

I look back at “Autopsy,” at my first attempt to tell this story. When I described the visit to the T&A Café I said that “we” went in, that “we” spoke with the owner. But the truth is: I remained in the car while Christy and Mom went inside. I didn’t want to talk with anyone about John. I didn’t want to talk period. Still, I wrote “we” and reported what my mother and sister told me. Caveat lector.


And here are some of the lines I think you were referring to:

11 p.m. Sitting in my motel room, I decide not to call, not to try to talk with Van. It’s a feeling that grew in me while I ate dinner. It became a conscious thought just minutes ago.

Van’s accounts would divert me from the faint traces I’m following. Life moves on. The immutably described, the absolutely defined is fixed like the butterflies I pinned to felt in a cigar box, wrong even when it’s right.

As you suggest, my reason for writing has mostly to do with a wish to understand myself in order to figure out how to live a decent and productive life. While I would like to know my brother in ways his early death made impossible, and while traveling with Peter Handke was memorable in part because of who he is, I have been using those trips, those investigations as a kind of scaffolding for my own discoveries. I'm the kind of detective who will never solve the crime because the facts of the crime remind him of other things.


Which gets me to the anti-teleology of the title of this post. In my experience, it is the people who claim to know the most who know the least. And claiming to know the most often has to do with claiming to know the pattern of history, to know how things will end. As I see it, our understanding is so full of holes that our only hope for understanding is to have a sense for how little we understand. Thus my distaste for straightforward biography.


No new thought that. It's been around since the pre-Socratics in many forms, some of my favorites in the German Romantics' penchant for fragments in lieu of systematic thought, and more recently in the work of Brian Evenson (Evenson’s recent story “Knowledge,” by the way, is a description of “precisely why I have still not written my detective novel”: “attempts to substitute another way of thinking about knowledge always end up derailing the genre").  But it guides me in a lot of ways, at least one of which you've discovered here.


The sketch is one I made of the statue "Victoire de Samothrace" in the Louvre. Looking at the support structures that keep it standing despite its frailty, I was struck by how this perfect and powerful statue is subject to entropy like everything we create. Our thoughts and our works are contingent and ephemeral. And that's to be celebrated, not papered over with lies.


thanks, my friend.