| in america 4 part 3 - 2004 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
21st January 2004 Biologist at the native plant society meeting last night talking about the Santa Ysabel nature preserve, whose west bloc includes part of Mesa Grande. The room was full of people - biologists, rangers, restorationists. Not pretty people, but people who, sitting in the dark looking at slides, were saying ah excitedly when the biologist listed plants she'd found from the sensitive list. I asked a ranger about the wild paeony. He said it's not rare, and that there's a species dahlia in Mexico. I'm working on the Seeing project - the outline. Books yesterday on Roman painting. I've loved its lightness. Have never investigated it. Maybe something for Orpheus. There were books on the erotic paintings of Pompeii. A beautiful image of a young woman writer - 1st century AD - wearing dark green. It's as if a last moment of sanity before sensory confidence was shut down. The paintings are so sketchy, breezy. There are the black and brown bodies, fine large-eyed portraits of real people - ships as light and sharp as wisps of smoke. What is it about this style. A couple of colors of thin paint. The little people so elegantly scribbled in. Here are some in three colors, black on shadow side, white for highlights, a greenish mustard for the rest. The trees are very postural. Sometimes painted on black. Imaginari - painters of figures, scenes. Also easel, on board. Would have been slaves or freedmen because Roman citizens would not be artisans. The backgrounds - red, sun yellow, black. Pictor imaginarias, pictor parietarius. The latter is architectural. 22 Rowen failed English. He needs to do it the way we did it last summer, one to one, intensively, with the material organized compactly the way it is for a correspondence course. 23 What should I do about the landscape photography workshop - show my slides - show them once without talking - then talk about the relation with the place, silent seeing, finding form, attraction and seeing what you are. Roni Horn. Book design: no author name on title, no page numbers. Maybe 50 double-page spreads of the surface of the Thames. I'm ignoring the text, which can be ignored. The idea of a book of close-up photos of the surface of river water is brilliant. The great differences in skin-texture, the beautiful color, the ways light can get into just certain edges, the depth in the color, often the unwaterlike glassy or stony look. The color makes my jaw drop. It's called Another water. I pounced on it. The text panders to people's unwillingness to just shut up and look. Stories of suicides and self-conscious author observations. - What's today. Some kind of disturbed. I was working on Seeing but now I'm burnt on it. Yesterday's fit of photography books. Only a week till the res. I look so sad and plain. I go to a café and don't even look at the other clients. I read my paper and go home. There's no hope at all of what I need, not anywhere. I should be going to a gym. I don't have the money. I should be having my teeth cleaned. I should buy a tire. I'm eating into my credit cards. The res fee will be 1500 and it will all go toward debt. $1025 in taxes last year. 24 Crows, there are crows now, raveling crows. 25 The strangely stilted writing there is about photography. "Individual face as bearing the mark of a specific human destiny." Robert Bergman, A kind of rapture. "A human condition." "The specific and particular recognition of one human being by another." Bergman's photos, what I see in the East End. It's as if they are pictures of one's own soul. They so strike pity and wonder. Why do I like to live with desperate people around me?
27 I seem to be writing a book called something like Seeing: an erotic philosophy of visual perception. My readership is young women like my students. Mimosa from Balboa Park, fresh dry smell. A big clump of not very scented violet-pink sweet peas with the white moon lamp behind them; there has sometimes, when I've been across the room at the computer, been an exquisite very elusive spice that's like nothing I know. It has been them, and only when the heat of the lamp forces it. Yellow freesia I've put into a transparent glass pot so the white roots show in wet peat. My other pink scent, the cyclamen with its little twisted edges among a white pelargonium froth, that gives off a lemon scent when the sun comes around to its brass tray. I'm into 1998. Working out the seeing workshops: Seeing 1: an erotic philosophy of visual perception. Seeing 2: love eyes and landscape photography. And the convocation talk, work and innocence. It's Mozart's birthday. Yesterday was the second January 26 Ed hasn't been here for. I had a pang thinking he didn't know Mozart. 29 Mary turned 80 yesterday. I gave Tom's computer to Khalif and Katie this morning. Set it up, turned it on. Cleaned up files this aft, both on the laptop and on fraser.sfu. Now it's evening, 5:30 and not dark yet, pink sky with a plane dropping big and fast. I don't want to do any of the things there are to do. I've done a lot. Caught up the embodiment site yesterday. Got an outline for the seeing project. I mean the large one. Gave Kate a revised outline for her thesis. Sent copies of energy bill and Bush 9/11 complicity emails to my student lists. Worked out bibliography and rough outline for the photography workshop. Have a very rough outline of the convocation speech - that needs quite a bit more. Assembled something for the social disadvantage discussion. And then there's the seeing workshop. Bibliographies are done. But what should I do in an hour and a half with people who know no biology and dread to know any. - Talk about what it can mean to say seeing is erotic. Looking at Katie. There she was in a tight sweater moving around in her little space. She can feel I am always staring at her breasts and waist. I am transfixed. I just eat her up, though I'm sorry when I see her holding her arm over her chest. It is a lust but I don't want to fuck her, I just want to look at her. Touch her maybe but in a way that's like looking. It is as if she's a body I'm simply starved to see. She is perfect. I'd rather be it than see it, and that's how it's not sexual. I'm avid to be it by seeing it - something like that. It's rank I suppose because it's suppressed - it's adoration. What would I like to do - definitely undress her, stroke her. Well, yes, take her into pleasure. It's not about being touched, it's about touching. It's as if I'm next to being wide open. And she keeps holding out her arms to me - thank you E-llie, that's so sweet. Her wedding pictures, there she is at a resort in Jamaica wearing a strapless dress being married to a very serious very black young man by a tall black official. Her parents, divorced, thick weathered dad, mom crying, and Khalif's splendid mother in Nigerian brocade. Katie's parents look like working class folks but they're not exactly what they seem, her dad's a Syrian Arab, her mom's from Indiana. In the photos Katie is looking at Khalif with what could be true joy and desire. There's a picture of their ringed hands, small white hand, finely made larger black hand with a square turquoise ring. Katie is luminous in those pictures, she's love woman fulfilled. She stands in her small white kitchen reaching up into a shelf and I am feeling what it would be to be the man who looks at her from their other room. There's something startled in it. I'd be inspired to think how to make her happy, but she looks like that because she's happy already. 30th Some of the things Lakoff said. People vote their identity not their best interests. Powell's memo in 1971 said there should be all the changes in conservatism that there since have been, to preserve business values. (Powell called it the "enterprise system.") The left needs a vision not a bunch of programs. Clinton communicated the nurturing/equal family model with his body, and these people (Kerry, etc) don't. 31st It's tomorrow I'm leaving. Public appearances, small tasks. I'll be under pressure until the convocation talk is over. Still needing to think about Lakoff. I jumped up and introduced myself. He didn't ask what I do, so I told him. I said I'd come up through philosophy and thanked him for his forays into that horrible discipline. I said I'd done some work on the magno system and the parietal. He said he'd like to know more about that but he's just got a book coming out about the mirror system and language. In the question period he knew my face and so he pointed to me. I said that a lot of the strongest progressives I know have come up through strong (should have said strict) father families and communities and I was curious about that. Is there something in the structure of that metaphor that can be used to jet people into the other view? He said strict fathers are often harsh fathers, and then he listed the results of a child-raising study that said authoritarian parenting is the second-worst in producing people of kinds everyone agrees are good. Everyone has both models - most people have mothers too. He didn't exactly answer my question because he didn't say how the progressives could use the weakness in the structure. - Actually he had already said the people wavering between both models are the ones to get, the only ones one can get. Afterward, because I'd pushed myself into view, I felt uncertain. Did I do that well or badly? I have no idea how I seem to those people. The book says something was wrong with it but not any of the things I've checked. I wanted Lakoff to notice me so I can send him some work. I wanted practice speaking up on that campus. I simply am an alien in that community. The only thing I can do is be an alien with aplomb. It's painful to be uncertain in this way. It is because I see that community as a strict father family. Is it? Yes. And I am not able to function in it. People in strict father communities always have to project the harshness, and they are projecting it on the conservatives. What is it I'm uneasy about. I'm just writhing at behaving in ways that show that I want something from those people. Writhing, writhing. At [my college] I don't have to want anything, I just give many things well. I went into it yesterday blank, unprepared. 1st February America. Is it worse now. I look down from 37,000 feet and think all those lights are people who watch television and want to know nothing of all there is to know. I didn't think it in so many words, felt it. The captain kept coming on and telling us the Superbowl score. Now I'm in a slim small jet on the ground in Pittsburgh. I couldn't get into looking out the window. I didn't want to write here, and don't now. My beautiful eagerness, that I thought was myself, isn't here. It was depressing leaving San Diego without feeling I was leaving my sweetie and would come back to him. I was nice to the cabdriver though. He - he was a thin-faced small man called Robert, retired from being a ceramic sculpture teacher at a junior college - told me a story about having made four trips to Tijuana this morning. I parked at Eliz's, walked around the garden before I called the cab. Couples are depressing. They're going to be sitting together the whole time, everywhere they go. I am going toward snow. I like that there will be four days with just faculty. Have to work out more of the seeing workshop and the convocation talk. Those last letters of Louie's - I read a line at the top and chucked them, and now I have a horror of her. I don't want to write her or speak to her. She spewed. I turn away, since Tom, I turn away when someone is unjust, I can't bear it. I am thinking that if I get the Canada Council money I would like to stay in a hotel in Chinatown. I am also thinking that I could take the car and go north, maybe take Mary. What is it, the way Americans say purchase instead of buy. It's TV-speak. It's hideous. I'm not in a good state. I'll be okay teaching, I'll put myself into it, but there's no one to look at me - ah - that's the little one speaking. No one to look at me with bright warm eyes. I'm still away in the hospital. Just be there aware of it. I've often been there not aware of it. Plainfield VT, 2nd The cab driver after midnight was a dark-faced Tamil-speaking Muslim from Madras, unintelligent, whose father was a merchant in the city, and who when he left school also wanted to "make some business," he said. He finds himself in northern Vermont. His children are Americans. That is his arc. 3rd Margo looked at me. I lay for an hour and a half in anguish because of having spoken of myself as deformed, and because of the way everyone complacently accepted it - that is a short sentence to say a monstrous thing. When we were gathering for dinner Margo looked hard at me so that I easily said, That conversation this morning was hard on me, and then she said, Is there anything we can do about it? and I said, I'll think about it. She hadn't been going to come for dinner and I said, Why don't you come and keep us company? She said, Alright I will, and I thought, she's swift, she understood I needed to be with her. I needed to sit near her, like a child who'd been humiliated and wanted to feel helped back into the circle. It is humiliating too to have been with a drug addict, and now to be alone. 4 This day is a write-off, the TLA day. Why can't I bear this discussion. I work with students. I do whatever is needed as best I can see it. My job would be unworkable if I had to get into the terms they're using. I think of these things the way an artist does? That is, I am what I am, and being that, here's what I'll do. I detest the notion of professional formation. In art, professional formation has killed reality and value. Then I say that, and there's some nodding and now Francis is going back to being male and legalistic about theory. I say there's a difference between being excellent and professional formation. And they are galloping again without talking about what would make a good practitioner. Nobody is interested in the way this is a deep question in what an education is. Is it formation of a person, or exposure to materials? Tomás says now he gets it, TLA is what used to be called literacy. The point is it's Barr-Cohen's empire and we are giving our day to it because she's a good business person and brings in students. I'm saying education is the formation of persons and none of this is forming us coherently. Barr-Cohen wants to professionalize it for business reasons. Margo is the go-between with the business interests of the college and so she wants it too. Lise wants to form persons, and feminism is her theory. Tomás wants to use his 60s radical formation. Ralph is tending to try for tidiness, ie rules and definitions. Ellie is exasperatedly trying to reframe the discussion in some way only she can understand. Jim is loose and cool but he has joined TLA as the counciling professions expert. Karen C is absorbed in her laptop screen doodling. Is there anything I'd rather be doing? Seek ye first the queendom of god and all these things will be added unto you. What's different this time. One, we have too much time for general discussion, we aren't having to move along briskly. Two, I am not excruciated by the physical presence of anyone in our group. Anything else? The way embodiment is a women's epistemology. What there has been has been a male epistemology, in the sense that it has been based on male rupture, meaning denial of the mother and the time of the mother and all that includes. Women have been mainly uninterested in it and have left it to the men, but they could be very interested in an epistemology that is based on continuing connection, because it can support what they can do in the manner of connection. But do I want to be queen of embodiment in a place that won't do science and where most of the fac are death-deniers? No. Oh what will I do. Write the seeing thing, see what happens. 5 I'm so bored with the stuff the guys are interested in - the union, the strategic plan, the faculty council. These old guys are in confab with the male president and busy being important, and the real thing is us women working with the students one to one. I'm noticing that the least of the guys are also ribbing me about everything being restructuring of the body. I ignore them imperiously. 6 Last night Rhonda, Juliana, Carolyn and I in a circle in the Manor Oak Room having the IMA party on our own, talking about Juliana's baby, my kids. In comes pain: Laura from the MFA-IA program, drunk, face in red eruption, a drinker's puff around the eyes, talking fast and loud, looking so sad I'm wanting to get behind her and pour kindness into the sides of her head through my hands. She's saying, Elliepp you're the advisor I had the best contact with last semester, it was very short, but. And then later, Elliepp you're my hero. She called herself more than a woman, and she is a thin sore boygirl, wild enough to have run naked at one of the cabarets. -
8 Sunday morning. The way I felt better from the moment yesterday morning when I decided to read my outline before my [convocation] talk. That's in three hours approximately. And then first advising group, and then at supper talking with Joan and Anne. What's happened is that I'm loosening up after the isolation of the months in my jail on the roof. I woke at 5 this morning from a dream where I was in a bubble-zoo, I mean one with different areas enclosed in round clear plastic. We would see the animals from the inside of the bubble. Against the light I could see a single elephant running the perimeter in a corridor high above, toward the left. Looming almost overhead on the right there were three apes as big as rooms. They were squeezed tight into cages with open sides. It was as if they could drop down on us. But they were also frozen or paralyzed, disjointed, the parts of their bodies disconnected. When I remembered this dream I thought immediately of politics - that our small space where emotion can be shared openly and honestly, and in the hard discipline of working there can be a product of joy, is surrounded by those other places where appalling things are being done and planned. So the talk can't end without acknowledging those other realities - the desperation that attaches to disfunction in the relation of innocence and skill. My grateful bow is to the many of you who are doing what you can to get it right. Rob Gurwitt "Circus Smirkus" Double Take Fall 2000 - How it was. The logic held me up. The work I did Friday morning, yesterday morning, yesterday evening, and this morning. I wasn't frightened and I didn't look much at my notes. I wasn't frightened! I had figured out how to relax myself. That happened when I decided to read my outline and made up an outline with titles I liked.
Talking about innocence and skill in work. What innocence wants is a whole skilful life, it wants to grow up into skill that is rightly founded in innocence. Afterward Sally, Emily, Anne, Joan, "You look hot." That was about the leopard-trimmed jacket. I unbuttoned it and flashed the monk. A thin small girl with big pupils said she did not drift away for a single word. Beautiful and handsome Jen Collins in her black Mao suit said she liked it. Now it's two o'clock and I might have a nap in the sun. Later it's the seeing workshop.
11 I put the slide in the holder and there's Tom looking at me in agony. I feel the photo is showing me him now. When I see it I simply love him. Prentiss said Mark the pres said my talk was the best of all the 21 convocation addresses he has heard this year. On the other side is the photo Scott emailed me this morning. There I am on Sunday smiling in my sexy jacket, alright except for my face, which is grotesquely ugly. 12 Ed Dalpe. His goodness. The softness in his eyes. I want to just walk into his arms. I saw the fiddler folksinger too with a kind of hunger. I want a man's arms, I want good bodies I can touch. 13 A shy wish for loving arms. Not shy but very quiet. And so today the hugs have been realler. Juliana's poem. She sat in pink in a block of sun and read her poem to Margo. The pink glow of Juliana, whose poem ends by saying, I don't know if you can see it, but there is a woman whose eyes are taking photos, slowly, her breath is moving in and out of her center of balance. A landscape photograph is a self-portrait. At that point Mark the president stands rubbing his hands in front of me, shy, and says less in praise than he said to Prentiss. The visualization I made up this morning for the advising group. Picture a point of white light anywhere ahead of you, any distance, any direction. Feel your relation to it. Feel a flow in both directions to and from the center of your chest. Just for this moment think of that point as the moment when you're standing at graduation. What do you want to have done, what do you want to feel? Now put yourself at that viewpoint and look at something in any direction you want, backward, forward, sideways. I left them there in the silence of the computer humming and waited to see whether I could reach a point of my own and look out from it. I saw a perfectly calm ocean, nothing but ocean and sky. A living silence very deep in space. It brought tears to my eyes. It was as if I were looking at death. I saw all the faces quiet and waited to see them start to open their eyes. Come back when you're ready. There we were in the quiet after. Just sitting. Shall we leave it at that? I look at Jeanne. She's saying yes. Okay, let's go home. Burlington airport. Men on cell phones conducting business in public, a bunch of doctors on the way home from a conference. That one in the Yankees cap. "Have you taken an overdose of the medicine? So what medicine have you taken today? What are you doing, have you been sleeping? How did you and Dawne leave it yesterday? Why don't you sit up, it's hard for me to hear you, you're talking so slowly ... and how are you doing mood-wise, how are you feeling? Hm? How are you doing today compared with yesterday? Okay. I'm sorry, what did you say, I can't hear you ... have you had any problems with the medicine? You've been on the Paxil for about a week this coming Monday ... we'll increase the Paxil to 50 milligrams ... I'll be back a week from Monday ... take care of that for you ... I said I know it's a stressful time ... alrighty? Yes, take care thanks, goodbye." He's an evil psychiatrist, hard egotistical young face. San Diego 14 Catherine died Jan 6 Luke said. Her gallant long life. - I was happy to see my jeep. I was happy to feel the softness of the air. The evergreen pears are blooming thick. I was eager to say so, have been eager to say almost nothing. Leftover notes from the res:
Astro was there cabaret night in a red satin shirt with a tie. He rabble-roused in the skit with Sally. Sally flinging herself about the stage, juicy and lovely. Carolyn a perky girl, winsome, sitting on the edge of the stage telling a dream about coming to a motor court and rising beside the trees so that, down below, she could see the word FLY. People are reserved with me. I mean I'm reserved with them. I see them greeting and saying goodbye to each other differently than they do me. I'm loose and natural with the students but none of it is personal - is that how it should be? Not attached. Except Ed Dalpe, though that isn't attachment but heart. Vivian at my slide show [Peace River slides] suddenly said (of the trees with a wisp departing), Georgio would like that. Armani. She lives in Italy and knows him. Steve Huston. I remember him in my office in the Manor the night he first arrived, a big ol' boy. And there he was at the graduating reception kissing my cheek very sweetly. What about showing the slides. They had the kind of wonder I wanted people to have. The dark slide of the four weeds and the curly grass. When I got to the res I was so tense with political and other kinds of loneliness - from my life here - but now I'm glad to be back. During the deadly faculty development days in which the men talked rules and union, etc, Lise and I were walking back to our dorm and I said how much I hate it when they talk, and Lise quoted Mary Daly saying something like, Men's talk is all just doo-doo. I cracked up. Karen Campbell's springiness, like a cricket, sweet chirpy thing. She can drop into British intellectual administrator very firmly, as if her center drops, but then she springs up into silliness again. She's bored. Or doesn't want to impress. Margo so smooth and even, so alert. In meetings I look at her when someone speaks and she always catches my gaze. Her strength is her swiftness in the moment, and her godlike niceness to students. I won't describe the men. - Is that it? Six o'clock Sunday morning, still dark. Was it Texas? The most beautiful ground I saw today was like a tantric painting of colored circles, every one a subtly different color, very pale, whited with thin snow. Palest green, turquoise, yellow, charcoal, buff, some with a mottle in them. They were circles on, and filling edge to edge, a grid of squares, sometimes a larger circle filling four squares, sometimes a large or small half-circle. Further on there was an even flatter plane like marble tiles. It had an almost glazed polish, but with a white bloom that was given by the intervening air. The edges of the tiles, which were different sizes, were often black: fence lines. Over all the seepage patterns of marble. At one point there was a red gash below, Grand Canyon I think. Just before the plane of circles, when we were coming out of the ravine country with its feathered dark forms like electricity taken through iron filings, there were squares and rectangles erosion-contoured, with white blown against the contour lines. Pale daylight. 16 Email from an Indiana computer science professor: "Extended analog systems might interest you. Of course, you are an interesting system yourself. Unusual website." Mid-February, three weeks before the packets come in. What's to do. Pile of flab on my belly, toning is the first thing. Go on transcribing journal. Start Nora's garden? Clean up Taft, work with Todd at Dawne, get Scott's bubbler in. If I have money, pay debts fast. Arrange scanner for slides. Start reading/writing for Seeing. Deal with taxes. Do I have money? Don't know till tomorrow, door's locked downstairs, it's Presidents' Day. 17 Did not get the grant. 18 Here is something I haven't written. A moment at the student/faculty reading when Jen Collins had read a sexy piece about whipping off her friend's shorts and fucking her in the brambles. I had come in late after working on the convocation talk and was sitting against the wall on her far left. As she finished reading - just before she looked up from the page to the audience in front of her - her eyes slid sideways, slid, like someone skidding into home plate - toward me. Ah, I thought, Jen likes me, though she never talks to me. That reminds me of a breakfast conversation early in the residency. I was at a table with Lise but got talking to Goldberg and Devora at the table behind me, so I had my back to my own table. Goldberg was talking about 'spiritual' experience and I was challenging her about whether she meant non-physical experience. I was saying we could understand paranormal experience as forms of physical knowing, and so on. And then I heard Danielle's accent behind me, Will you turn around? Because we are lis-sen-ing. Clear proud Danielle's brown eyes. 19 Third day sick - that monster woman coughing in the shuttle - I said I'd be sick when I got home. Hot or cold, thick-headed, box of kleenex since yesterday, slime in my lungs. Apart from that, without the grant I'm still in my little box with no plan. Barely enough money to live, no sweetie, no community, no enterprise, no Joyce. Still holding off from Louie.
22nd Book against God. Literary journalism guy, Brit. Why is this book sticking. Thomas Bunting is Tom and is me too, and my credulity of any first person voice means I'm reinterpreting the day after. I feel, which mostly I don't with novels, that I could learn something if I look close. And it's London and an English village. Thomas is Tom in lying and evading, and I'm Thomas in not earning money but wanting fine things. And philosophical lollygagging should I say. "I surrender a lie with great unwillingness and feel instantly nostalgic, once it has gone, for the old comfort it offered me." He does something in the last chapter that keeps an ambivalence about the man's value. His ex-wife the pianist has him over for dinner to test possibility of reconciliation. She puts on a recording of a piece she was playing at the concert where he first met her. He listens very well, but not to what she intends him to hear. The melody was, above all, very stable, neither joyful nor melancholy; instead, it seemed to be the essence of knowledge itself, the gold of truth, constant behind our stormy extremes as the sun is behind clouds. Yet there was another sound, not musical. Something like a man sniffing. It was the pianist breathing! - Heavy, almost impatient, as if he were wrestling with the music to secure its great medial serenity ... It was the sound of hard work, but it was also the sound of existence itself ... The evidence of human effort, of pain, was intensely moving, and I hung my head as I listened. How strange, the combination of Richter's strong, masculine, working butcher breath and the delicate impalpable music. "Thomas, my darling, you have tears in your eyes?" "It's the pianist breathing," I said simply. "That's what you wanted me to hear." But that truth is the undoing of his chance with Jane, because she hasn't heard the breathing and he has forgotten earlier hearing her play the piece. What it is about that is that it has something of the no-but-yes of my time with Tom. "Oh, Father, there were days so exciting when I was a little boy that each morning was a delicious surprise, a joy adults can only mimic when they are fortunate enough to make the long journey by night and rise in an undiscovered place in the morning and see it in first light." That "Oh, Father" is the religion in the book brought to its home. Reading the last chapter - Thomas alone on the dole in a hideous bed-sit on the Finchley Road, his wife and friend having given up on him - I feel what I often felt with Tom, that it's wrong to carry him, and he's rightly left to the losses his fecklessness brings him, but still - here, approximately here, in the thought, I look up and see a moving sheet of water on the roof opposite, a spot of silver motion in among the grey pipes and the whole fixed scene - but still his silver motion has a value to be kept. Is that it? When Thomas's clergyman father dies, Thomas stands at a pulpit to deliver the eulogy. He says what is true, that he has wanted since childhood to stand where his father stood. During his father's lifetime he has not dared tell him he doesn't believe, and now that his father is dead he wants to deliver an anti-sermon. He does not have the good sense to realize that the occasion is wrong. He is stopped. I have given two anti-sermons, the last on skill and innocence in work, which James Wood's book for-and-against god is also about. Thomas's father the village priest got it right in his work, and the musicians get it right in their work, and James Wood in his work is getting it right, but his character Thomas is not at all getting it right. Why not? For the reason I said, that he is so afraid of losing innocence that he daren't risk skill, which in the end is needed to support innocence. His difficulty is in the shift to self-responsibility for innocence. But that's saying almost nothing. The theology in the book doesn't seem worth reading, I mean the anti-theology too. Why? Because the argument from the existence of evil is an argument about god's nature, really. It as if assumes divine creation. It takes no pleasure in the thought of a universe creating itself. I have religious love for a different anti-religious hypothesis. Thomas somehow ignores science, because he stays within his father's cult of graceful commentary. He loses intimacy with his father when he backs down with him, but loses wife and friend when he tries not to. It's good as a demonstration of complex consequence. James Wood 2003 The book against God Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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