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“Christians Make You Earn Your Divorce”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 5, 2008
in Christianity and Divorce
. 33 Comments

I’ve been emailing back and forth with an old friend who is going through a divorce. My friend is a Christian who married young and had children early; she and her husband were enmeshed in what was, for a time, a warm and nurturing community of fellow believers. But for a variety of reasons which are not the point of this post, she and her husband found their marriage first in trouble, then irreparably damaged. And after a great deal of private anguish and almost-as-private counseling, they have gone “public” with their intent to divorce.

In a recent email to me, my friend included the line that is the title of this post. In as much as it is possible to laugh empathetically in a Facebook message, I chuckled with her as I read it. My friend has been besieged by well-meaning people, mostly from her church home, who have taken it upon themselves to do everything they can to “save” her, her husband, and their children from the disaster of a divorce. These friends are convinced that my friend is being too hasty; and as a result, keep asking the same sort of questions over and over again: “Have you really, really tried to make it work?” But have you seen a Christian therapist?” “Have you thought about what sort of impact this will have upon the kids?” And there have been a few reminders of that tired old slogan “God hates divorce”. My friend is very tired of feeling as if she has to build a legal case for her “right” (in the spiritual sense) to divorce.

I remember this well. My first two weddings were in churches (a Roman Catholic and an Episcopal one, in that order). But when these ended, few folks tried to stop the divorces. In my first two marriages, we weren’t churched; our friends were largely secular and liberal. My first wife and I were so young when we wed that in the eyes of many, our divorce was a foregone conclusion. The second marriage ended when after a period of sobriety, I relapsed on alcohol, drugs, and sexual infidelity. No one tried to talk wife #2 out of filing for a divorce! But my third divorce was very different.

My third wife and I met on Matchmaker.com in early 2000. We were both online looking for a serious relationship with a fellow Christian. I was already 18 months sober, and nearly eighteen months into my “conversion.” E and I met, had an immensely hasty courtship, and were engaged within weeks. I wanted finally “to do it right”, sure that my sobriety and my faith would at last ensure a successful marriage. E, a graduate student at Fuller Seminary, was on the cusp of 30. Virtually all of her fellow students in her program were already married, and many were parents. Evangelical Christian culture, with its hostility to pre-marital sex, often turns marriage into an idol (despite Paul’s lukewarm endorsement of the institution in 1 Corinthians 7). And for different reasons, we each felt pressured to get married. Continue reading ‘“Christians Make You Earn Your Divorce”’

Friday Random Ten: Advent is i’ cumin in

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 5, 2008
in Friday Random Ten
. 4 Comments

All sorts of covers and strange bits of goodness on here. The bonuses are not random; one of my favorite versions of a favorite carol, and one of many, many songs I loved by the late and marvelous Odetta.

1. “Rose-Colored Glasses”, The Meat Purveyors
2. “Firecracker”, Wailin’ Jennys
3. “Gravity”, Sara Bareilles
4. “Jesse”, Joan Baez
5. “St. Joseph’s”, The Avett Brothers
6. “Sloop John B”, The Beach Boys
7. “Fall Into the Night”, Eliza Gilkyson
8. “Long Black Veil”, The Band
9. “Angel Eyes”, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson
10. “Pop Life”, Prince

Bonus Track One: “The Holly and the Ivy”, Anonymous 4
Bonus Track Two: “Cool Water”, Odetta

Your loyal blogger…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 4, 2008
in Academia, Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors, Teaching and Vanity
. 6 Comments

… has had his dubious recent distinction publicized in this piece in the Pasadena City College paper. And of course, I hate the picture they took of me.

I have been teased all day at school by colleagues and students alike. Part of me loves it, and part of me feels humiliated, and part of me wonders in what particular way I am supposed to parlay this trivial but interesting distinction into something useful. It’s the sort of thing that one probably doesn’t want in one’s obituary, so I’ll simply have to accomplish enough to ensure that there’s no room to stick this “triumph” in there. But I’m not so embarrassed that I won’t note it here, and enjoy the fleeting notoriety.

“DO the next right thing”: some thoughts on doubt, faith, and analysis paralysis

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 4, 2008
in Christianity and Faith
. 5 Comments

It’s been too long since I’ve had an explicitly Christian post up.

Camassia links to and comments on an interesting trio of posts about doubt. Is doubt a virtue? Is it a sin? Is it neither virtue nor sin, but simply a universal obstacle to be overcome? All of the discussions — and let me add in that Lynn Gazis-Sax also has a fine post on the subject — take slightly different (though often complementary) stances.

When I was actively involved in parish life at All Saints Church here in Pasadena, I often joked that we Episcopalians had raised tortured ambivalence to the status of a cardinal virtue. Anglicans are famous for their great love of “on the one hand x and on the other, y” arguments, and, particularly among the more liberal factions of the communion, the denigration of too much passion and certainty as somehow vulgar. God is to be approached with a sense of awe, a sense of mystery, but also a keen sense that to claim to “know” rather than simply to “hope” for His will and His blessing is to presume too much. Camassia nails this:

Where I come from, if anything, the social pressure runs the other way: the desire for certitude is seen as a somewhat primitive emotion that needs to be overcome on the way to a more sophisticated, mature comfort with uncertainty.

It’s at this point I feel compelled to offer my Uncle Stanley’s favorite quote from Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the artist):

If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.

That remark, true enough as it is, does indeed suggest that a premature (or even childish) certainty, of the sort that has never known setback or despair or contrary evidence, is indeed an early developmental stage through which a believer ought to be expected to move. But it also suggests that developmentally, doubt is a middle period — a point at which previous certainties have been abandoned, while new certainties have not yet been discovered. Doubt is thus necessary, even essential; it’s like adolescence. Small children rightly revere their parents; teens rightly rebel against their parents in one form or another (not necessarily with any destructive consequence); adults come to see their parents as they really were — imperfect and yet, one hopes, loveable and worthy of gratitude if not always of emulation. In that sense, an ideal never rejected (or at least doubted) is an ideal never fully understood.

Reading through these other posts, it occurs to me that the destructiveness of doubt lies not in the lack of trust in God it reveals but rather in its capacity to paralyse us and prevent us from acting. Episcopalians joke a lot about getting stuck in “analysis paralysis”, where we endlessly debate and study the same issues, always seeing multiple possible actions as having multiple possible consequences, good and bad, and as a consequence, nothing gets done. More immediately, doubt at its worst acts as a brake on our boldest and bravest impulses, the sort which allow us to do what as Christians we are called to do, which is to follow Christ. We need impulsiveness as well as caution on the journey of faith; too much of the former and we get into heaps of trouble — too much of the latter, and nothing much gets done. In the Gospels, Peter is the most impulsive of the Apostles: think of his habit of saying whatever comes into his mind, like his refusal to let Jesus wash his feet or his cocky insistence that he will never deny Christ. Thomas is the doubter — and we know the one on which Jesus chose to build His church. (But Thomas is my confirmation name, though my ENFP Gemini personality leaves me with much more in common with Peter.) Continue reading ‘“DO the next right thing”: some thoughts on doubt, faith, and analysis paralysis’

Thursday Short Poem: Zagajewski’s “Three Kings”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 4, 2008
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

The first poem I posted in 2008 was Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. Another seasonally appropriate offering is this one from the great Adam Zagajewski, even if in its themes of confusion and loss it celebrates the tangents that distract us from our journey more than the Light that lies at journey’s end.

The Three Kings

We’ll arrive too late…
—André Frenaud, “The Three Kings”

If it hadn’t been for the desert and laughter and music—
we’d have made it, if our yearning
hadn’t mingled with the highways’ dust.
We saw poor countries, made still poorer
by their ancient hatred;
a train full of soldiers and refugees
stood waiting at a burning station.
We were heaped with great honors
so we thought—perhaps one of us
really is a king?
Spring meadows detained us, cowslips,
the glances of country maidens
hungry for a stranger’s love.
We made offerings to the gods, but we don’t know
if they recognized our faces
through the flame’s honey-gold veil.
Once we fell asleep and slept for many months,
but dreams raged in us, heavy, treacherous,
like surf beneath a full moon.
Fear awakened us and again we moved on,
cursing fate and filthy inns.
For four years a cold wind blew,
but the star was yellow, sewn carelessly
to a coat like a school insignia.
The taxi smelled of anise and the twentieth century,
the driver had a Russian accent.
Our ship sank, the plane shook suddenly.
We quarrelled violently and each of us
set out in search of a different hope.
I barely remember what we were looking for
and I’m not sure if a December night
will open up some day like
a camera’s eye.
Perhaps I’d be happy, live content
if it weren’t for the light that explodes
above the city walls each day
at dawn, blinding my desire.

Saluting Odetta, and some thoughts on a folk-music childhood

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 3, 2008
in Memories, Music, People and Politics
. 7 Comments

I was saddened to read last night of the death of Odetta, the legendary folk-singer whose deep voice inspired generations of activists and music fans alike. I am so sorry she did not fulfill her most recent ambition (to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration), and thrilled that she lived long enough to see him elected president.

As soon as I saw the obituary on the New York Times web page, sounds and feelings from my childhood rushed into my head. I was, from my earliest memories, a folk-music baby. Though my father (an amateur cellist) loved classical music, my mother had fallen in love with folk as a student at Vassar in the late 1950s. Folk music in the 1950s was the music of the political and cultural Left; it was also experiencing a major rebirth thanks to the efforts of folks like Odetta, Pete Seeger, and others. It was the soundtrack for my mother’s young adult years, and growing up in the 1970s, I listened over and over again to the records she had collected in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

The Newport Folk Festivals of the early 1960s were extraordinarily important in American musical history. My mother had virtually all of the recordings of these live concerts on LPs. On these records, which she or I (or less often, my little brother) would put on on rainy afternoons, I heard Joan Baez, Pete Seeger (on his own and with the Weavers), Ian and Sylvia, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and the young — acoustic — Bob Dylan. What had been the soundtrack for my mother’s college and graduate school years became the soundtrack for my childhood.

My liberal politics were — and to some extent still are — inextricably linked to music. I have no musical ability myself, but like many children and teenagers, I found in music an opportunity to discover emotions and ideas that I could not have felt as deeply in any other way. If, like some of my conservative friends, I had been raised listening to the explicitly evangelical music of the likes of the Gaither family, I might have embraced a much more traditional world view as a child. As it was, I came of age on protest songs. I can sing from memory every verse of “Joe Hill”, of “We Shall Not Be Moved“, and “The Banks are Made of Marble.” And Odetta’s version of “Down by the Riverside” is my favorite call to pacifism I know. Continue reading ‘Saluting Odetta, and some thoughts on a folk-music childhood’

Ed Feser on abortion and gay marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 2, 2008
in Abortion, GLBTQ and Pasadena City College
. 12 Comments

I teach in the same department as Edward Feser, who among other things, was a graduate student of my late father at UCSB. Unlike my dear Dad, Ed is a very conservative Catholic (something I had not realized until recently). He’s also recently published a book which I’ve just ordered. (Evangelical Richard Mouw was also my Dad’s graduate student. What gives? My dear, sweet, gently atheist and — even more gently, socialist — father ends up having all of these famous conservatives Christians among his former proteges. Of course, my father was close to Karl Popper for many years, but rejected that mentor’s views almost entirely. And so it goes. Cripes, I’m such a name-dropper.)

Anyhow, thanks to Jonah Goldberg, of all people, I just learned I am not the only blogger in the Social Sciences Division at Pasadena City College! How ignorant I have been! Here’s Ed’s blog.

Ed, writing from a very right-wing perspective, offers his answer to the question (independently) I posed several weeks ago: why did so many Americans vote to protect abortion rights, while simultaneously voting to deny marriage equality to gays and lesbians? (Here in California, Proposition 4, which would have required parental notification for abortion, failed by almost the same margin that Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, passed.)

Ed, who is an absolutely delightful colleague with absolutely appalling views, offers three possibilities, the last of which is this:

Some heterosexuals who have at least a grudging respect for traditional sexual morality are more keen to see it respected by others than to practice it themselves. (Think e.g. of the secularized Beltway conservative think-tank or journalist type who heartily endorses pragmatic Burkean arguments for the social utility of stigmas against fornication and the like, but who nevertheless lives with his girlfriend.) Hence, while it costs such people little or nothing personally to vote against “same-sex marriage,” limitations on abortion might put a crimp on their own lifestyle should their less-than-conservative personal sexual behavior “punish them with a baby.”

Ed may be right. We both lament the inconsistency of the electorate, but we do so from two radically different perspectives.

Perhaps an intra-departmental debate is in order.

Of dreams and fathers: Barack Obama, growing up abroad, baseball, cricket, and daddies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 2, 2008
in Father, Foreign Policy, Memories, Politics, Race and Traveling
. 0 Comments

Among the various books I read on our trip to New Zealand was Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I’d put it off for some time, but started it on the long flight down to Auckland and finished it in a Sydney hotel room. It’s the best book I’ve read by a president (or president-elect), and I’ve at least glanced at most of what our recent office-holders have produced. (I tried to read Bill Clinton’s massive autobiography, but ended up getting overwhelmed by detail, and skipped about.)

It’s not original to note that Barack Obama is an extraordinary figure, absolutely unlike anyone we’ve ever seen in American politics — at least, absolutely unlike anyone who has risen so far, so fast. Dreams from my Father, which is all the more powerful because it seems to be written by a man without any conscious sense that his words might be used against him someday, reveals Obama to be more exceptional than I had previously imagined.

It would be a bit ridiculous to say that I identify with our president-elect. I not only have not achieved what he has achieved, I have not had to overcome the obstacles he has had to overcome. (Though addiction and mental illness posed challenges that my socio-economic and ethnic circumstances did not.) But all good autobiography contains universal themes; we all have parents, after all, about whom we have often mixed feelings. Many of us struggle to discern a purpose and direction for our lives, and go through a quarter-life crisis of confidence. Barack Obama’s journey, in a broad sense, is a common one, though in its specifics it is both unique and jaw-droppingly impressive.

One of the things that I like best about Obama is that he has lived abroad; indeed, more than any other president in recent memory, he spent a significant portion of his childhood outside America (in Indonesia). Obama doesn’t hold dual citizenship as I do, and despite the slurs of a handful of ignoramuses, his devotion to the United States is unquestioned by any serious person. But he has tasted living abroad, and not only doing so, but doing so in comparative poverty. Not all international experience is the same. It’s one thing for the scion of a wealthy family to do a junior year at the Sorbonne, living off parent’s money; it’s another thing altogether to live as Obama did as a child, playing with street children in rural Indonesia. Anyone who is going to make claims for American exceptionalism ought to have had some first-hand experiences of living in — and not just visiting — other parts of the world. Though the child is not always the father of the man, reading Obama’s biography makes me hope that it will be so, particularly in regards to how he thinks about America’s place in the world. Continue reading ‘Of dreams and fathers: Barack Obama, growing up abroad, baseball, cricket, and daddies’

After “in loco parentis”: some disjointed thoughts on student mentoring and sex education

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 1, 2008
in Academia, Sexual ethics and transformation, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 8 Comments

It’s always dangerous to write about books one hasn’t read. Still, I find that I learn a lot from book reviews. For as long as I can remember, my mother has subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Since I started graduate school nearly twenty years ago, she’s given me a gift subscription every year. I can’t say I finish every article, but I read it loyally. Like Ms. Magazine and the Economist, the New York Review is one of those staples of my youth upon which I rely still as an adult. And I learn a great deal from reading reviews about books I will never actually pick up.

I don’t read the very conservative Touchstone very often; run by what seem to be an ecumenical bunch of right-wing C.S. Lewis aficionados, most of what appears in its pages are less eloquent versions of the sort of screeds I prefer to read in First Things. (I mean, I’m not a reactionary, but if I’m going to spend time exposing my eyeballs to 14th century ideas, I might as well make sure those ideas are well-written). Still, I managed to come across this book review recently: Ploy Meets Girl, by Nathaniel Peters.

Reviewing three new jeremiads about the “hook-up culture” on American college campuses, Peters takes the predictable tactic of lamenting the ways in which feminist bogeywomen (the omnipresent forces of darkness in contemporary social conservative discourse) have misled young coeds about the proper understanding of sexuality. But to be fair, his review offers more than the usual wails about youthful promiscuity. Rather, Peters looks at the ways in which colleges do — and don’t — provide mentoring and sexual education to students.

Though even the average secular adult would argue that sex should be about more than just the physical experience, colleges and their students focus only on sexual performance. Universities with no creedal convictions feel ill-equipped to help students address metaphysical questions like the meaning of sex. They can answer only the physical questions, and those end up being the only ones discussed.

At my freshman orientation at Swarthmore College five years ago, we were told about the Sexual Health Counselors, peers who advertised the ability to help with sex toys, contraception, or intriguing permutations of positions and partners. But the college offered no help to those who might ask deeper questions, or even to those who wondered what to do the next morning with the person beside them.

That’s not entirely fair. I’m nearly two decades older than Mr. Peters; I came of age sexually in the Reagan years, when the media predicted a full-blown heterosexual AIDS epidemic. But in those conservative times known as the mid-1980s, I worked as a sexuality educator at Berkeley. Yes, we taught folks how to use condoms, and we even “demonstrated” the not-always ridiculous dental dam. We talked about masturbation and STDs and gave little primers on what was then known as HTLV-III (the forerunner, by name, to HIV). But we also talked about values, and about relationships, and about feelings. We faciltated discussions in dorms and sororities and co-ops about faith, ideals, and romantic longing.

I remember helping to lead a panel discussion (back in 1988 or so) on the question “Why Have Sex?” It was a strange title, and it drew a good-sized audience. The premise of the talk was that too many discussions about sex talked about why folks shouldn’t have it (at least until marriage), or about how to have it properly — but no one was talking about the perfectly reasonable question of why one ought to do it in the first place. The easy answer, of course, was “it feels good.” But that raises the question — what feels good? Is it arousal? Is it anticipation? Is it emotional closeness? Is it orgasmic release? What one person likes best about sex isn’t always what the person they’re being sexual with likes best. Continue reading ‘After “in loco parentis”: some disjointed thoughts on student mentoring and sex education’

Home from the Antipodes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 1, 2008
in Traveling
. 4 Comments

I’m back in the office on a crisp Monday morning; Advent is upon us. We’ve got two more weeks of teaching and a week of finals; I give my last exam on December 18 and then enjoy some freedom until January 12.

My wife and I returned yesterday afternoon from a trip to Australia and New Zealand. In the former country, we spent a mere two days in Sydney, but enjoyed a lengthier stay on the South Island of the latter. New Zealand is as gorgeous and welcoming as advertised, and the recent resurgence of the US dollar was immensely helpful to us as we traveled about. We spent Thanksgiving in a little lodge just outside of Kaikoura, two hours north of Christchurch. No turkey for us, of course, though we missed our kith and kin.

I gave a lecture on Kabbalah and Christianity to a small audience at the Crowne Plaza hotel in central Auckland on Saturday night, and on Sunday, before heading to the airport, had a coffee with my cyberfriend John Fox. John was one of my very first commenters at my old blogspot place; he’s been a steady reader since 2003. It was a delight to meet him in person, and chat about the state of the Anglican Communion and the new NZ prime minister, amongst other topics.

And I can now say that not only have I set foot on all seven of the world’s continents, I have gone for a run on all seven. My late uncle Peter was part of that small and mad group who have done marathons on all seven (including the great frozen one in the south); I cannot say the same, having confined all my distance work to the USA and Europe. But when we were in Antarctica in January, I jogged — for about ten minutes — up and down an icy hill. Last week, I went for a run around the Sydney Harbour, and can now claim to have strutted my proverbial stuff on each continent. My wife, I should note, has had a very busy year: she has been on all seven continents in 2008 alone, which is impressive. Fear not; carbon credits for all of this flying about have been purchased.

We’re going to be homebodies for a bit; the longest trip we have planned for December is a drive up to Northern California over the Christmas break. Lectures need giving, papers need grading, book proposals need still further revamping, chinchillas need feeding, and — certainly not least in importance — the house needs decorating for the season.

More soon.

Auckland Lecture

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 27, 2008
in Kabbalah
. 2 Comments

I’ll be in Auckland, New Zealand, this Saturday night for a lecture. Same topic I’ve lectured on in the past eighteen months in Los Angeles, London, Tiberias, Antwerp, and Manila: “Kabbalah and Christian practice”.

If you’re a Kiwi near your largest city (or just a visitor in town), and have nothin’ to do on a Saturday night, come on by the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Albert Street.

Away until the 1st

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 20, 2008
in Blogging
. 1 Comment

A mini-autumn hiatus begins today; blogging resumes December 1. I’ll be hither and yon, but will try to moderate as best I can.

The old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” lie, take 197: a response to Kay Hymowitz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 20, 2008
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 16 Comments

I wish I had more time to respond to this Kay Hymowitz piece: Love in the Time of Darwinism. (Cap tap to Rudy.)

Hymowitz is best known as author of Marriage and Caste in America, one of the less-unfortunate texts in the cottage industry of publications devoted to the notion that lifelong heterosexual union is all that stands between us and the apocalypse. Those who want government to abjure responsibility for providing protections for the vulnerable are always quick to see marriage as the panacea for a host of problems. In some sense, arguments about what marriage ought to be are indeed very close to the core of some of our biggest contemporary cultural debates. Four times married — and in this last one, happily so — count me in the corner of those who argue against the over-promotion of the institution!

In any case, in this article Hymowitz takes on the modern dating scene, which offers any commenter of any political persuasion much opportunity for lamentation. But Hymowitz is primarily worried about the impact on we men-folk, who are apparently overwhelmed and bewildered:

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

Oy. All of those women going to college and playing sports? They want husbands and babies and little fluffy puppies. But not money, independence, strong bodies, or that nasty sex stuff. And if they pretend they want money or orgasms, they are poor deluded dears who have bought into the lies promoted by… by… by women’s studies professors, of course.

In any event, Hymowitz catalogs the bad behavior of SYMs (single young men) and — this is strikingly original — lays the blame squarely on women.

Adding to the bitterness of many SYMs is the feeling that the entire culture is a you-go-girl cheering section. When our guy was a boy, the media prattled on about “girl power,” parents took their daughters to work, and a mysterious plague seemed to have killed off boys, at least white ones, from school textbooks. To this day, male-bashing is the lingua franca of situation comedies and advertising: take the dimwitted television dads from Homer Simpson to Ray Romano to Tim Allen, or the guy who starts a cooking fire to be put out by his multitasking wife, who is already ordering takeout. Further, it’s hard to overstate the distrust of young men who witnessed divorce up close and personal as they were growing up. Not only have they become understandably wary of till-death-do-us-part promises; they frequently suspect that women are highway robbers out to relieve men of their earnings, children, and deepest affections.

Bold emphasis mine. My head is starting to hurt. It’s Ray Romano’s fault? No, it’s all down to divorce — the kind where hard-working and reliable men get abandoned by flighty women who, with the help of a unjust legal system designed by the pantsuited and the predatory, steal everything from their husbands, who are (like all men, really) naive babes-in-the-woods. Wise young lads, these, to learn such important lessons! As the kids said in my day, gag me with a spoon. Continue reading ‘The old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” lie, take 197: a response to Kay Hymowitz’

Thursday Short Poem: Milosz’ “On Angels”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 20, 2008
in Poetry
. 8 Comments

I don’t believe — and never believed — in the angels of the spirituality section at the bookstore. I never believed in the cherubim I see clustered about in rococo churches. But at least in some sense, I do believe in angels like Gabriel who spoke with Mary and Muhammed, and like the one who wrestled with Jacob and wounded him on the thigh. Those are angels with serious messages!

I’ve met some whom I cannot help but call angels, always in the guise of humans or animals. Ten years ago this past June, one of them — a tall and tired nurse in a psych ward, younger than I am now — told me it was time for me to live, and live without ambivalence. And I heard the angel, and I started to live.

In earthy vernacular or some strange and divine tongue, they speak. And if we’re lucky, we listen. This Czeslaw Milosz poem reminds us of that.

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

Obeisance to Big Ag dressed up as personal liberation from body fascism: how Paul Campos gets it wrong

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 19, 2008
in Eating disorders and Food
. 17 Comments

I’ll admit that it isn’t easy to be a vegan and an animal rights activist on one hand, and an advocate against eating disorders on the other. Obviously, these commitments should be compatible, as the issues aren’t necessarily linked. Yet in a culture where repressive images of female beauty are used to make veganism alluring (say what you will about the generally excellent content of the book, the title “Skinny Bitch” for a text designed to encourage vegan eating is at best problematic), and in a culture where more than a few young women with body dysmorphia “hide” their eating disorders behind the more socially-acceptable facade of veganism, it’s clear that there are some problems to work out.

I’m not going to post about animal rights for a while yet. But I did want to respond to this piece from columnist Paul Campos in the Rocky Mountain News: Fight food fascists’ effrontery. (Let’s leave aside the asinine reference to fascism.)

Campos makes the case, popular with the fat acceptance movement and with at least some feminists, that the “war on obesity” is misplaced. Campos gives talks:

My talk involved points I’ve made hundreds times over the past few years, to audiences ranging in size from a dozen high school students to a few million TV viewers.

I spoke about how the definition of “overweight” used by our public health authorities is a bunch of completely unscientific garbage, created by pharmaceutical companies eager to push the next generation of diet drugs through the regulatory pipeline.

I described the absurdity of various widely held ideas about weight: that we know how to make people thinner (we don’t); that haranguing people about their weight is doing them a favor (it isn’t); and that the reason there are fat kids in America is that fat kids haven’t been informed that it’s considered desirable in this culture to be thin.

This last bit of rampant insanity, which is at the center of the government’s current response to the panic over “childhood obesity,” makes about as much sense as arguing that poor people are poor because they haven’t been informed it’s considered desirable in this culture to be rich.

Fair enough. But there’s one teensy-weensy problem with Campos’ argument. He presents the dynamic as innocent (and hungry) consumers being browbeaten by haughty fashionistas and hysterical policy wonks. The public, apparently, is shamed out of the pleasure of eating by Vogue magazine and state assembly members. And while there’s much to be said that is critical of both government food policy and the fashion industry, Campos ignores the biggest and baddest villain of them all: the agriculture industry. Continue reading ‘Obeisance to Big Ag dressed up as personal liberation from body fascism: how Paul Campos gets it wrong’