The Cruelest Month?

T.S. Eliot

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers...

Every April I am reminded of the T.S. Eliot poem “The Wasteland.” Yes, T.S. Eliot paints a bleak picture. It’s a dark motif, but its heaviness depicts a passive brutality from which you can’t look away.

What is it about Eliot’s pronouncement on life’s futility that seems so strangely compelling? Is it his visual imagery? The dramatic style in which he turns a phrase?

He seems to have the ability to reach right through to our consciousness and slap around at our basic existential fears.

…What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust…

It’s interesting that Eliot casts such a brooding shadow of nihilism across a season that usually inspires cultures with renewed hope and excitement, as signs of new life begin to emerge in its earliest expressions. Granted, April does offer a rather unique backdrop, in that this new life is merely hinted at. In early April, the landscape is typically dominated by iconic reminders of devastation and loss - in every naked tree or bush; in the moist rich, dark color of any exposed parcels of earthen soil; in the brownish-green turf, barren of weed or wildflower. But for most, this very despondency merely heightens the glorious nature of new life, which stirs heroically and rises amid its vapid environs. This weekend's Easter celebration is a fitting demonstration of the jubilant response to this rebirth.

But Eliot departs sharply from this ethos and burrows deeply into its antithesis. For him, life seems to amount to a cruel span of pointless suffering that has as its end the terror and indignity of death. Life springing from beneath the soil, to suffer and brood, only to return once again in humiliation to the soil of burial.

…Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'…

Imagine we could map being and nothingness into a sort of binary code of existence, and that we could isolate our own link or "snippet" within this linear progression, which then could be expressed in two ways. It could look like this: 101 or like this: 010

Most cultures or major religious doctrines that address our relationship in this progression subscribe to the first model, and hold that "being" leads to "nothingness" leads to "being." Our life (1) on this earth must end (0), but will begin anew (1) in a different form or on another plane. Eliot seems to focus on the concept that "nothingness" leads to "being" leads to "nothingness." Our struggle to come forth into existence is a futile and bitter exercise, since our death is its ultimate end. From that viewpoint, life would look very much like a wasteland. It would then become so much more difficult to accept and bear life's suffering.

…'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

'What is that noise?'
The wind under the door.
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
'What shall we ever do?'
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door...

Such an existence would look as a buddha world would, if Guatama had gotten up and walked away from the bodhi tree after arriving at the first of his Four Noble Truths. Christ's death on the cross would have been dramatically altered had a previous sentence been left to stand, and that last sentence not been uttered, along with the concept that gave it meaning.

Is April indeed the cruelest month? That would seem to depend largely on how you view your calender.

Rand, Reason, and Feeble Voices

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oil on canvas

(work in progress)

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I recently discovered through a google stroll that there is such a thing as an Ayn Rand Institute. I read “The Fountainhead” about 15 years ago and really liked the novel. Ayn Rand is not everyone’s cup of tea (with one dimensional characters and uncompromising extremes), but I rather liked the dramatic style and found it’s message to be powerful and refreshing - that is, refreshing in the sense that it celebrates the nobility of human achievement in a decidedly unapologetic manner. Rand, of course, developed her own philosophy, called Objectivism, which I haven’t spent a lot of time studying. But her fictional works express some clear themes about human dignity, the role of the individual within society, a mistrust of the power of government, and a sharp rebuke of socialism.

Indeed, our government’s sudden slink from the matrimonial bed of free market capitalism for a sordid tryst with socialism got me thinking about Rands’s prophetic 1957 work “Atlas Shrugged.” I began that book shortly after finishing “The Fountainhead,” but I soon flamed out in the face of its one thousand plus pages. I picked it up again recently, and am having another go at it because of the uncanny parallels between the book and what is happening today. I am through the first third of the book and it is almost stunning how several of the events depicted could have been pulled from today’s headlines. Anyway, my renewed interest in Ayn Rand led me to an internet search which led me to the Ayn Rand Institute and its Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, whose blog fancies itself “Voices for Reason.”

“Voices for Reason” is less than six weeks old. It’s off to an inauspicious start.

The day I found the ARI blog, the breaking news was President Obama’s executive order freeing up federal subsidies for new lines of embryonic stem cell research. His order also removed President Bush’s emphasis on effective alternatives to this embryonic form of stem cell research. To be clear, we are talking about using taxpayer money - Rand would describe it as money confiscated from the personal wealth of the citizenry under the rule of law backed by the force of arms - to subsidize a morally and ethically controversial area of scientific research; research that already has private sector investment, owing to the anticipation of potential earnings.

Anyone remotely familiar with Ayn Rand or her writings could assert with absolute certainty that she would have rejected the infusion of federal money. Any institute bearing her name, or any such institute’s web blog proclaiming itself “Voices for Reason” in her name, should be expected to lambaste Obama’s executive order, and with good reason in light of her life’s work. That is why I was surprised to see Keith Lockitch’s commentary supporting Obama’s order. I was even more surprised to see such weak argument under the lofty banner of “Voices for Reason.”

Let's set aside, for the moment, the overall intellectual dishonesty of his blog post, and look at the problems with his argument as such. Lockitch dutifully recites the official party line when he states, “Now just to be perfectly clear, I am not praising the use of federal tax dollars to fund scientific research. I think all research should be privately funded.” But it is the next line that damns him as a charlatan as he states, “What I’m praising is the fact that this crucial area of research will no longer be hampered by state-enforced religious dogmas.”

What would Rand have to say about that? President Bush did not ban any research, contrary to what most people believe. How is it that “crucial” research can be hampered simply because it is not subsidized by the state? If a particular research were truly crucial, the marketplace would embrace its potential and rush to invest private capital. Along with another lukewarm believer, ARI executive director Yaron Brook, they seem to belie and directly contradict the professed preference for private funding. They endorse a government handout, but only after throwing around hollow caveats about their official reluctance to do so.

And, what of the moral and ethical debate? Ethics and morality are subjects that can be addressed rationally without ever once mentioning God or religion. Unless it is Lockitch’s contention that an atheist is incapable of holding moral values and ethical standards, bringing religion into this discussion is simply a red herring. In fact, if you check dictionary dot com, the lengthy result for the entry “moral,” under all the major published American dictionaries, has a single mention of the word “religious,” (definition no. 2 of the Webster’s entry) which clearly draws the distinction: “Used sometimes in distinction from religious: as, a moral rather than a religious life.” (emphasis added) The entry for “ethical” makes no religious reference at all.

At the same time, he advances that old shopworn false dichotomy that pits religion against science. Remember, it is he, the scientist, who injected religion into the discussion. Granted - in years past, religion has not always handled scientific advances gracefully. But then again, science at one time taught that the earth was flat. There has been a steady maturation of thought on both sides that enables people of faith today to discern no significant conflicts between science and their beliefs. He should concede that fact even if he is not broad-minded enough to embrace it. His rhetoric clearly demonstrates that there are still intransigent holdouts on both sides of this imaginary divide.

But regardless of whether we are talking about scientists, clergy, atheists, agnostics, or left-handed dental hygienists, no group can be excluded from crucial ethical debates. And the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights should recognize that it is up to the individual to decide which influences will inform and shape his or her ideals; be it Objectivism or "religious dogma." The state has not outlawed religious thought. Yet.

Ultimately, though, nothing on his blog post merits serious consideration, since it lacks basic integrity. I have never heard of Keith Lockitch until now, and found his bio information on the website. I don’t have practical use for the whole Theoretical Physics thing, in which field Lockitch holds a Phd., and frankly, his post doctoral work in Relativistic Astrophysics to me sounds as though it could be script writing work for the original series episodes of Star Trek. But I defer to the scientific community and acknowledge that Lockitch must be a serious academic. I can therefore only conclude that by withholding key elements of the ethical debate, he is being intellectually dishonest.

The ethical debate is real, it’s serious, and scientists themselves are struggling with its implications - including Dr. James Thomson, the discoverer of embryonic stem cells. It concerns the dignity of human life, and the rights of human beings still in their embryonic form. Lockitch will not mention that, as Al Gore would put it, the debate is over in the scientific community as to when human life begins. But unlike the Gore analogy, the debate is over because of the science (updated link), not the politics. Being a member of the scientific community, Lockitch presumably understands this full well.

But, most damning of all, and most disingenuous, is that he does not mention the recent breakthrough in infused plouripotent stem cell research, which utilizes a patient’s own skin cells instead of embryonic stem cells. In contrast to embryonic stem cell science, it holds more promise, its techniques are available now, it is patient specific (overcoming the danger of immune rejection). It's cheaper, it's more practical - and it makes the entire ethical dilemma of destroying human life in its embryonic stage a moot point.

The promising plouripotent research led Dr. Thomson to say of the current controversy, “a decade from now, this will be just a funny historical footnote.” (I sincerely believe that he meant funny “odd” and not funny “ha-ha”) It is so promising, in fact, that apparently hundreds of research labs are switching from embryonic to plouripotent stem cells. Ayn Rand would not only have a full appreciation of this, but I can’t help thinking she would honor this outstanding human achievement in the field of science that, at the same time, preserves human dignity. It just seems so reasonable.