Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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    • To the Moon – and Back Again?

      Posted at 5:54 pm by Michelle Joelle, on September 29, 2016

      Recently I have been reading Tolkien’s unpublished story Roverandom. Roverandom is a beautiful story about a dog who has been transformed into a toy, and goes on an adventure to become a real live dog again. Along the way, Rover meets wizards and mermaids, and in what I found to be the most compelling portion of the tale, he takes a trip to the moon, where dreams are made and experienced by the people of earth as they sleep. There, Rover meets the little boy who cared for him while he was a toy, and he realizes how much he misses his home.

      While I read this section, I found myself thinking about space travel, stories about adventures, and the otherworldliness of myth and faerie, and I realized that what a lot of speculative stories have in common isn’t just that they take us out into the unknown, but that they make us look at our own home – earth – with fresh eyes. In Arthur C. Clarke’s “If I forget Thee, O earth…” Marvin is struck with a nostalgia for a past that he had never known, a longing for a place he had never been. The titular reference to Psalm 137 calls up a longing for more than just a place to call home, but a return to a home that has been lost and which cannot in this life be truly regained:

      By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
      We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
      For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
      How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
      If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
      If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

      It is difficult to tell here which is the true fantasy: the home for which we long, or the idea that we can return. In Roverandom, things works out for the best, as they do also in pixar’s Wall-E, which seems to offer the desired conclusion to Clarke’s setup, and countless other tales. It isn’t necessarily a fantasy to imagine that we might physically return home, but because of our new perspective, it is possible that the home we see is no longer the same for us after our exile. It may be there, but it may not be there the way we wanted. In the prologue to her book The Human Condition, Arendt claims that space travel has changed the condition of humanity from one that was at home in its earthliness, to one that has now displaced itself with a self-imposed exile conceived as liberation. Following the 1957 launch of Sputnik, she says:

      This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. But, curiously enough, this joy was not triumphal; it was not pride or awe at the tremendousness of human power and mastery which rilled the hearts of men, who now, when they looked up from the earth toward the skies, could behold there a thing of their own making. The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” (p17)

      The call to adventure is often represented thus – not as exile, but freedom, exhilarating and liberating.

      Likewise, Rover at first finds himself enthralled with the moon and all of the adventures he has there, just as Bilbo in Tolkien’s The Hobbit is as first called to adventure by an itch of restlessness he cannot name, just as Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows is impelled by his frustration with the drudgery of his daily home life to seek the open road. Mole is driven suddenly to seek something different – something better – than the repetitive labor of daily, earthly life. The earth, in many ways, binds us with its materiality, and we carry with us the illusion that we can master such necessity in some way, either by finding a new place to live, or a new way to deal with our limitations. At least, that’s the supposition in fiction that casts us as colonizers of space and time, seeking places of refuge after we have used up the resources of earth (“If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…” and Wall-E), of heroic epics wherein the protagonist seeks to become immortal or commune with the Gods (The Illiad, for example). And for Arendt, it’s the impetus for metaphysical contemplation.

      But I find myself drawn more to tales, or at least parts of stories, where the hero returns home. Mole feels the tug of longing for his comfortable hole when he and Rat pass by it on their travels. Bilbo and Samwise the Brave return happily to the Shire. Rover finds his way back. Wall-E and the human species return to earth. But as much as we think of the adventure into the beyond as fantastic, and the return home as the mundane return to reality, it often seems like these homey resolutions are the fantasy. It’s all too neat, too much wish-fulfillment. On the other hand, there’s no resolution for Marvin, Achilles earns his immortality at the expense of his life, and Frodo, after everything, can’t really go back to his normal life. I realize that I’m mixing spiritual, political, scientific, and fantastic models of adventure and home fairly wildly, but perhaps escape is more properly to be thought of as exile, and maybe this is more realistic, if less appealing.

      This isn’t necessarily as defeating as it sounds; Simone Weil implores us that “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise” (Gravity and Grace, p53), and I think for Weil we are to do this without losing our longing for a true return home, leaning into the suffering of our mortal exile from the oneness of God. For Weil, though, this contradiction of longing for the impossible is spiritually redemptive, so long as it finds no worldly resolution in illusion:

      It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains a reward.

      To draw back before the object we are pursuing. Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back (Gravity and Grace, p117).

      In their inability to return, Marvin and Frodo might offer us a truer connection to our lost home than the illusory possibilities of Roverandom and Wall-E.

      When I started writing this, I thought I’d be writing about the importance of hearth and home, taking up an Arendtian call for a return to the vita activa, but somewhere along the way I’ve, well, lost my way. But perhaps I ought to get more comfortable in my confusion. Then again, if the imaginary consolation of Mole’s home or Bilbo’s return to Bag End give us comfort even in their illusory temporality, is that not real in its own way? Marvin takes comfort in his purpose, in the teleology of his longing, even if it doesn’t mean “real” resolution for him. Perhaps that is the key for Weil; perhaps “home” remains a valuable concept in its desirability, and our desire is maintained only by the impossibility of its gratification.

      My thoughts here feel jumbled and unfinished, and if I am honest, I will likely continue to cultivate a sense of home that matches my memories and my favorite stories, dreaming of the Shire, believing that I can succeed. I am perhaps not built for the detached spirituality of Simone Weil. It makes me happy to imagine Roverandom finding his way back, no matter how unrealistic a story it may be, but I also think that the happiness I get from such dreaming of the impossible is real. It helps me frame how I experience home, family, nature, and the divine, adding to my appreciation and enjoyment of them.

      Posted in Essays | 8 Comments | Tagged adventure, home, myth, philosophy, reading, Simone Weil, spirituality, theology, tolkien, Wind in the Willows
    • Philosopher Fridays: Arendt on the Public, the Private, and Blogging

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on January 9, 2015

      Welcome to Philosopher Fridays! This series is designed to allow me to explore what I find interesting, inspiring, or even just thought-provoking about the philosophers I read. While I hope these entries can serve as an introduction to their star thinker, they are by no means meant to be comprehensive or representative of current scholarly opinion. Parts of this entry are drawn from one section of a paper I submitted for a graduate course on Ecofeminism.

      ARENDT: Hannah Arendt is a familiar figure on this blog, as I’ve covered her early on in this series. In brief, Arendt follows the Periclean view that our life sustaining activities fall into three categories: Labor, Work, and Action, the goals of each to keep us alive in some way: when we labor, we protect our biological lives and preserve our species; when we work, we create semi-permanent objects beyond what nature provides, extending our influence beyond ourselves; and through action we create lasting impressions and memories that grant us a kind of immortality through fame. All of these activities depend on creation, life, change, and natality – the opposite of the still death of philosophical contemplation.

      They also engender and require a sharp distinction between the public realm and the private home. As I’ve been reflecting on my past year of blogging, the issue of privacy has come up more than once, and I thought it time to devote a post to the topic. I often think about how much I should share here on this blog, and how much I learn about other bloggers in what they write. Sometimes, personal details can be helpful. Other times, they distract from the writer’s mission.

      What was once a question reserved for celebrities and public figures is now an everyday question for anyone with regular access to an internet connection: How much of my life should I make public, and how much should I keep private?

      And there’s no one better suited for this topic than Hannah Arendt.

      In Arendt’s The Human Condition, there can be no politics without a public audience of some kind, a backdrop of plurality in front of which an individual can stand out qua individual – the polis, or the public sphere.

      No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presences of other human beings. (Arendt, 22)

      In order to do something truly political requires a deed that stands out amongst the crowd of deeds, and leaves a lasting impression that will be remembered in its individual difference. The public realm is thus the locus of speech, of equality, and of freedom.

      In contrast, the domestic sphere is, for Arendt, meant to be strictly private and internal. The private sphere is the world of labor – effectively, the home, where we eat, sleep, raise our children, and sustain ourselves. This is where humans, no matter how individual or free they may be, care for their animal selves through common life-sustaining labor. But those living solely in the private realm, having no access to the world outside of it, are merely possessions with no political efficacy of their own:

      What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a pre political phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity – for instance, but ruling over slaves – and to become free. (Arendt, 31)

      Further:

      The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only ‘equals’ whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality. (Arendt, 32)

      And to the point:

            …To have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human. (Arendt, 64)

      While Arendt writes poetically of the private realm as the only place where we can encounter true goodness (“Only goodness must go into absolute hiding and flee all appearance if it is not to be destroyed” (Arendt, 75), there is nothing unique to be accomplished in this realm, and as such there are no individuals to stand out amongst the crowd. The home is a space of biological urgency, respite, and life sustaining labor, while:

      the realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society…. (Arendt, 30, 31).

      Without the private home, we cannot be political agents out in the world, but neither can we be political if we dwell too deeply within it. It is axiomatically apolitical, and yet it sets the condition for political life. If we dissolve the two into each other, we lose both.

      Blogging dissolves these lines.

      WordPress is, in its own way, a polis where individuals can meet and exchange ideas, standing out, earning notoriety or fame or infamy by their contributions to the blogosphere. Some stand out more than others, some offer more personal information than other, but all of them allow us to simultaneously join the polis and stay in the safety of our own private homes. I write a lot about books and ideas and education and generally join into the public WordPress discourse more often than not, but I’ve also dipped into personal fare, talking about my writing habits, my collection of teapots, my frustrations, my goals, and more. I think a lot about how much detail I should share, considering both the integrity of my blog, and the integrity of my private space – my place of restoration. If I share too much, do I desacralize my private sphere? If I share too much, do I risk trivializing my writing?

      I don’t personally have any answers to these questions, so I’ll turn back to Arendt. Her answer to both of my questions would likely be a resounding “yes.”

      What we get when we dissolve these lines is, at best, the “enlargement of the private” (Arendt 52), better known as the Social realm, “…That curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call ‘society’” (Arendt 35).

      This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant (Arendt 52).

      In the Social realm, there is neither political Action nor the respite of privacy. In blending what Arendt says ought to be separate, we effectively create the worst of both worlds: a Society of Laborers, where everything we do, in public and private, becomes centered around the activities required for sustaining life. All of our Work and even what think of as political Action becomes subjugated to our natural necessity (Arendt 46). When we make these necessities public, we lose the privacy needed to hide ubiquitous and repetitive life sustaining tasks, and we effectively become little more than our animal species. Says Arendt:

      In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human (Arendt 38)

      And further, this makes it impossible to do or say anything truly meaningful, as all activities, both unique and ubiquitous become blended into idle curiosities, entertainments, and our “fifteen minutes of fame”. The unintentionally hilarious trailer for American Blogger – a documentary about fashion, beauty, and motherhood bloggers – exemplifies both the extreme trivialization of discourse and the utter dissolution of privacy Arendt fears. One of the women featured in the trailer says, with a straight face, ”If we’re not sharing it and we’re just keeping it private, why are we experiencing it?” As if there is no value to experiencing things privately. As if there is no difference between true political discourse and the ubiquitous everyday activities of life.

      I don’t completely agree with Arendt here; I think there’s definitely a way to politicize the private sphere without necessarily degrading either, and I think there is a way to cultivate a social sphere without necessarily trivializing the political and desacralizing the private. I’ve seen plenty of blogs that accomplish both of these tasks with ease. But I do think that Arendt’s fears are worthy of consideration. Just because it isn’t a necessity doesn’t mean it isn’t a danger.

      Posted in Series | 4 Comments | Tagged american blogger, arendt, blogging, home, human condition, philosopher fridays, philosophy, polis, politics, privacy
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