...........................................................................................Fiction

ARAB TALKING

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

16 February 2002 Copyright © 2002 Richard P. Richter

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ARAB TALKING FOUR On a sunny fall day I walked in the silence of the Skippack Valley. It was a golden day, with pungent horse manure here and there on the path along the creek through woods. Gnats made small and fleeting territories on sheer sunbeams. Through the woods, I followed a berm overgrown with trees and shrub, a man-made artifact, the remains of a mill race of a century ago. I carried with me in the golden silence a consciousness of the lately dead, Juan, Ingrid, Anna. They reminded me that so much that matters does not matter in such a place on such a day. I dismissed Habermas's crabbed lament for the lost stones of transcendental certainty. "Get a life, Juergen," I said, just as a squirrel heard my footsteps in the dried leaves. It made an insane leap from one tree trunk to another to get out of my way. A little farther along, a second squirrel performed the same mad leap, as if it and the first one had learned from the same whacko choreographer. It was a good day for admitting to myself the narrow human limit of my certainties. The silence of the trees, the frantic squirrels, the fragrance of manure, the golden light on the golden falling leaves, the elegy of memory, images of good gone people and the knowledge that they lay moldering in their graves--nature and I were manifest and that was all I had to know to feel comfortable in the cosmos. I was free here for the time being from the headaches caused by concepts. It did not take long, however, for the dilemma to refill my mind. An organ chord of a word rang out. Consilience. Edward O. Wilson was there at the console, banging away and pulling out the stops. Against the imagined waves of the organ's breath, I wished for someone yet once more to cut through the irritating unclarity, to get me across a conceptual bridge once for all. To the other side, where sunbeams and horse manure could speak to the same thing. Where they could mean one thing for all time. "Shit," I said to myself, impatiently, sorry that even there in the lap of the woods I went on wanting, wishing for foundation. Still, if I had to think, thinking about Wilson's idea of consilience probably was as useful as anything, and less painful. For he seemed to allow me to have it both ways. I could be totally embodied in life and totally gone in death. However, Wilson would allow me, in my lifetime, to sustain a genetic structure that did not depend on me alone for its sustenance. There among the mellowing leaves, I stopped and stared at the meandering creek, low because rainy days had been few in the past month. The water flowed ever different and new, but it insisted on flowing in this ancient channel as the water before it had flowed and, fairly surely, as the water tomorrow would flow. I knew that the beliefs I had would no longer live when I no longer lived. But, thankful to E. O. Wilson, I realized that the codes in my genes were greater than I. One did not have to desire the oddity of transcendentalism any more, because one could imagine that he was a player in a trans-individual adventure that cast a net over the socius, the whole living, squirming enterprise. This was sheer material fact. Praise God. End of Four Go to Five ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ARAB TALKING FIVE By the time I got home, my sense of gratitude already was fading, along with my attention to sociobiology. Also, I was coming to understand that thinking is somewhat like living: it has no neat architectural form. It runs on. It goes around and comes around. It bumps into obstacles. Great loves, like great lines, rise up, often without warning, and bowl you over. You want to grasp them in your arms as you would seize an idea in the mind. Freud made us think, finally, that a great idea turns on a great feeling, and the greatest of these is desire. Desire. The start and end of it all. When I see people talking about their thoughts, I have visions of a boudoir, or a boxing ring. The more they insist upon the logic of their insights, the stronger I smell the blood of the encounter. That was why it bothered me, on reflection, to see how little motivated I seemed to be to act. To ACT. To get beyond the gabble-gabble of the thinking machine and really sink my hands in the vat. Something on the World Wide Web must have triggered this impatience with myself. In an unguarded moment, I subscribed to a muckraking discussion list out of Washington, D.C. The two journalists who ran it wrote "Focus on the Corporation." When I ran across it, I was mired in the gloomy thought that "late capitalism" was commodifying everything--even itself! This weird take on the postmodern future--promulgated by Fredric Jameson out of Duke--seemed so patently unavoidable that I wanted to stop thinking about it. The discussion list offered a last-gasp alternative. It claimed to be holding multi-national corporations up to public scrutiny. The writers, Mokhiber and Weissman, seemed to have a feeling about the power of analysis. It seemed merely quaint, old-fashioned, in the face of Jameson's Boschian vision of our future lives in a corporately commodified universe. Who did they think they were, Upton Sinclair? Jacob Riis? Well, yes, I found. They enjoyed the hoary notion behind American journalism that truth, baldly said, will expose evil and lead to a better world. Their exposure of the nefarious plots of mega-mergers acted on me like Tylenol. They relieved the pain of thinking too much about the way the world was going. Not that I thought that they had a chance of affecting anyone's behavior in corporations. They were gnats at best. But I liked their spirit. They documented their quixotic analyses well, it appeared. Their animus against the uncritical rise in the tide of multi-national mega-structuring cleansed me. I think I enjoyed them most when I read their review of a sociology professor's books about the "oversocialization" of paid assassins and big corporate CEOs. Young men killing for money and overpaid corporate leaders were alike under the skin. That was the professor's finding. (Charles Derber, Corporation Nation, 1998). The shock of his argument lay in what it said about the source of the criminality and violence that he found in the corporate executives. It was the same source of the criminality and violence in young assassins-for-pay. It rested in the bedrock of contemporary American values. Obsessions with success. In both cases, the obsession with success had slipped the bounds of any restraint. The young assassins said, "You have to understand, this is just a business, everybody has to make money." When the mega-corporate executives upped their salaries while downsizing in profitable periods, they said, "I feel fine about this because I'm just doing what the market requires." Said the professor, their antisocial behavior was "a kind of warping of the more healthy forms of individualism in our culture into a hyperindividualism in which people asserted their own interest without regard to its impact on others." This was enough to get my old college idealism pumping, long after I thought it had petered out. I thought of that sentimental tract by Robert Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart. They found Americans still valuing the social good. I thought of Jameson's postmodern thesis--that corporations in late capitalism left nothing uncommodified. I read the condemnation of Professor Derber: "In the most general sense, these corporate executives are hitmen who use very much the same language and rationalization. I argue that corporations are exemplifying a form of anti-social behavior which is undermining a great deal of the social fabric and civilized values that we would hope to sustain." The difference between Jameson and Derber, alas, was that, while they made similar observations, Jameson thought the process was less likely to yield to intervention than Derber. That rascal of a professor, Derber, decided it was time to go back a century and resurrect Populism. Rake the muck to a fare thee well. By gum and golly, said I, that's the stuff, that's the spirit. Lincoln Steffens, ho! Well. I had a drink. I thought about it. I called a friend. He wanted to know where we should sign up. I said I would have to get more information. I checked the market. Up again. I had another drink. Well. End of Five Go to Six ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ARAB TALKING SIX I can imagine becoming a populist. It fits with my blue-collar origins. But I wonder about the necessary passion. The commitment without qualification, without question, without thought, even. That's harder to imagine. I go back to being the Arab. I was always of the gang but I never was IN it, both feet, with no questions asked. I attribute this to the social structure of the village where I grew up from third grade onward. We moved into a neighborhood so tight that the kids were unconscious of the bonds that held them fast. Most of them attended an Eastern Rite Catholic Church. It was a gold-domed immigrant center and dominated the little streets of the village. After our public school ended for the day, twice a week they went to "Slanky" school at the church. I never knew what they were learning, and they never told me. It was too obvious to them, probably, and it would not have occurred to them to imagine someone not knowing. They could not imagine anyone caring. But watching my buddies go off to "Slanky" school twice a week had two effects on me. It made me an alien amid my friends. They had a shared experience that left me out. Conversely, of course, I conducted a secret lonely life they did not know I had. Second, it made me wary of what went on in churches--by extension, in all official places. They learned and did strange things that meant nothing to me. I had no antidote or substitute from church practice of my own, since our family had no church. The boys who were not in immigrant Catholic families went to a little United Brethren church on the other side of the village. They didn't talk about their experience either. They were fewer in number, anyway, and did not set the tone. When I grew up, this boyhood experience stayed with me. It mainly took the form of irony. I wanted to engage, and I did engage, and I pushed the world from within the tribe. I believed in my school, my college, my battalion, my university, the companies I worked for. I thought mission statements were essential. All the way through, however, I winked. I was not absolutely sure. I left wiggle room just in case the mission statement turned out to be a code for something else--something I did not understand, something that might contradict what I felt and believed. I figured I had to have the merest moment in which to jump, just in case the whole enterprise turned out to rest on mysteries I failed to understand. I was always in a lonely place of my own, even while I was in the middle of action. People used to think I defined myself in terms of my organization. They never knew how partial a reading that was. It's not that I thought I knew more than the others. I felt, in my deepest being, that I knew less. I felt that what they learned on late afternoons, while I played at home alone in my back yard, gave them the truth. I never knew the truth that they received from an authoritative voice in a legitimate place. I had to guess at the unchanging foundations of the world, which they had been privileged to see at first hand. It was as if I was always a visitor in a land that was not quite my own. It always threatened to become something suddenly different, something I would not understand or know how to control. Arab. This had a paradoxical effect on my behavior toward others with whom I worked. I respected them for their certainties even while I suspected their certainties. Finally, it comes to Habermas again. He admits that modernity has disintegrated the "sacred canopies"--a wonderful phrase of Habermas commentator Thomas McCarthy. Habermas acknowledges the inescapable pluralism of the contemporary world. He disowns a special philosopher's vocation: that is, he understands that no philosopher ever again, since modernity, could see everything and confer upon all people the answer to the question of moral justice for all time. He understands that we are in community irrevocably. But then, he takes a leap. In that very community, in our very knack for arguing, in our ability to imagine ourselves not ourselves, to see ourselves in the other person's moccasins, in the prior sociability of the individual, his total dependency upon his social network, Habermas hopes to glimpse, yes, the universal. It is a breathtaking leap for someone who is willing to acknowledge that modernity has irrevocably happened, a real multiplicity no less substantial than a tree. I feel for him, with him. I want to believe that he is on to something, something that will rescue a permanence, even if it is conveyed through time on the frail bark of the human social network. He wants to hold that a universal something is attainable. But he concedes that only we can attain it through our never-ending engagement, our arguments, in all our multiplicity. Habermas mightily and humbly reaches out to mere empiricists, like Laurence Kohlberg, to buttress his belief. He wants us to go with him beyond scientific understanding to a moral understanding among human beings. But he borrows from the strength of scientific understanding. This of course makes him vulnerable to the attack of his intellectual adversaries. Barbara Herrnstein Smith (in Belief & Resistance) laughs at him for seeking support from a lesser power than philosophy. I tried to judge their argument over the power of contingency to limit our moral reach. I sooner or later saw that I was just one more little voice, believing or resisting as my wish ebbed and flowed, perhaps depending on whether I had two or three cans of beer on a given night. Since Habermas was just words on pages of a book and not someone in my presence, talking with me, I just stopped worrying. Chasing after the hope for something enduring beyond oneself still seemed like an admirable enterprise for someone as smart as Habermas, and I wished him well. I wished Barbara well also, and anyone else having difficulties with Juergen's quest. This argument too would pass. I know this sounds negative. I know a passion for transcendence in old men is desirable if only for appearance's sake. I am beyond transcendence now. I am beyond sniffing after universals. I am beyond arguing for truth and justice as unaltering pillars of the human situation. But I do not feel that this is negative. I feel that it is positive. I feel that the window is open. An unpredictability will permit a new experience for me tomorrow, even within the constraints of my narrow little life, now that I cannot move rapidly. It may cause pain and it may cause pleasure. I don't care. End of Six Go to Seven ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ARAB TALKING SEVEN I went to the little church in the town one Sunday not long ago. I knew the faces of many of the people. I could name a good number of them. Some had been my supporters and allies in past years, in past wars. I sought a seat apart, near the window, where the steam heat radiator quietly sang its own hymn, indifferent to the organ. The message had to do with the story in Ezekiel of the dry bones. We can make bones live; we are the bones that can live, through faith. That was the message. But I did not think about it. I thought of our departed loved ones and friends. They lived in a world of permanence. Belief and resistance did not mean anything to them. Here we all were, huddled up in church, contingent, vulnerable, wanting to affirm something, fearing it was not enough, or too much. The members of the congregation seemed to join together in their need. They prayed and sang with one voice. I kept my distance, as always. Something in my bones shied away from this groping for one another in a bath of words and notes. I still was Arab. End of Seven Go to Eight ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ARAB TALKING EIGHT It was three o'clock in the morning. The young woman continued to listen intently. But she was alert for a message that her grandfather was not quite conscious of delivering, despite the care of his thought and the way he tried to spread it before her. "What's the matter with Pop?" she asked, lifting the last of her beer to her lips. He could tell immediately that she had her suspicions. He decided not to tell her just then about the mystery malady that might be occupying new space somewhere in his gut. He did not know what it was, or even if it was. He knew it meant him no good if it was there and no good even if he only imagined it was there. He always tried to bring her good news. She had had enough bad news for a lifetime, he figured, the morning after her seventh birthday, when she came down the stairs and found her daddy dead of a stroke on the kitchen floor. "Nothing's the matter now," he said. "Thanks for staying for the night. I needed you to listen to my stories." "Did it have to be tonight?" she asked. And immediately she knew it did. She touched his hand as he drained his glass of beer. Then she hugged him. Sleepy, she went up to her nook. Alone in the kitchen by the lamp, he felt the advantage while others slept. The Arab would be awake when dawn arrived. End of Eight and end of story Any resemblances to real people and events in this story are coincidental. Originally written March 1999. ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT

16 February 2002 Copyright © 2002 Richard P. Richter