Category Archives: Meditations

TELL TALE SIGNS

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My friend Mary Zahl was in New York last week and snapped these pics of a store at 83rd and Lex — sent them along to me knowing of my deep and abiding love of Coca-Cola.

I'm actually not a big fan of the Coca-Cola that's made in this country these days, sweetened with corn syrup.  The old-fashioned Coca-Cola, sweetened with real sugar, is my drink.  It's still made in Mexico, and other countries, and can be had here if you look for it.

My local chain grocery store, which has a lot of Hispanic customers, just started carrying it — to my great delight.  It's a quality-of-life issue for me.  The Cokes in the window of this candy shop look like they might be Mexican Cokes — you usually find them in these tall 12-ounce glass bottles, never in cans.



My love of the Coca-Cola logo involves other issues — memories of its ubiquity in the South of the 1950s when I was growing up, and a sense that it's a kind of alternate American flag, a symbol of my country . . . my country right or wrong.

FLOATING AWAY

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                                                                                                [Photo © Hugh McCarten]

A year ago today Oscar Fruchtman died, way before his time.  Oscar was an extraordinary presence in the lives of everyone who knew him — brilliant, hilariously funny, haunted by demons.  He was a gifted musician and songwriter, who could write funny and also write sweet.

My friend Hugh McCarten was one of the people who knew him best, and Hugh was asked to deliver the eulogy at Oscar's memorial service, which is linked to below.  But before you read it, listen to a song Oscar wrote (with Hugh contributing some to the lyrics), “Floating Away”, which is both funny and sweet — a song about Noah, about hope and rebirth and faith:

Floating Away (© 2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten)

This is a live recording from The Rose Tattoo in Key West, Florida, from March of 1979 — with Oscar and Ed “Woody” Allen on guitars, Din Allen on bass, Hugh on toy organ, Oscar singing lead and the other lads doing back-up vocals.

Here's what Hugh had to say about Oscar when it came time to bid him farewell:

Eulogy For A Luftmensch

(In the eulogy, Hugh quotes the lyrics from another song by Oscar, “Brooklyn Boy” — you can listen to Oscar perform it here.)

CELEBRATING OSCAR

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EULOGY FOR OSCAR

Oscar Fruchtman died on the morning of Saturday, March 28, 2009 in his
apartment at the Kenmore Residence on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.

This eulogy was given on Monday, March 30, 2009 at the Plaza Jewish
Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Ave.  Previous speakers at the service
were Rabbi Emeritus David H. Lincoln and Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, both of
the Park Avenue Synagogue.

My name is Hugh McCarten and I was Oscar’s longest serving friend.  I
was his best friend.  Rabbi Lincoln said we should always be prepared
for circumstances like this, but I wasn’t prepared when Oscar passed
away on Friday [from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mother:
“Saturday!”]  Oh, right – Saturday.  And I’m not prepared for what I’m
doing now, but as Oscar’s dad Carl used to say, “These are the knishes
that prevail.”  So we’re going to go ahead.  The topic is remembering
Oscar and I’m trying to think of the best way to do that.  Rabbi
Cosgrove suggested that perhaps Oscar, following Talmudic tradition,
was one of the “Lamed Vovniks”, 36 righteous individuals who are on the
earth at any given time and without whose divine presence the world
could not endure.  That’s possible, but I came across a word recently
that I am sure applies to Oscar and the word is “luftmensch”, literally
an “air man”, a dreamer.

And apparently Oscar was a dreamer from the beginning.  I first got to
know him and his wonderful family back in the early 1970s and he told
me that practically his first memory was of his parents' liquor store,
South Ferry Liquors.  As a young child, he said he couldn’t quite
understand what “South Ferry Liquors” meant and thus he envisioned some
kind of fantastic combination boat/store that went careening around the
New York harbor.  And so began his dreaming . . .

He told me he had been named after his grandfather, whose spirit it was
suggested he had inherited, and he told me about his grandmother Sadie,
who liked to invoke the 11th Commandment: “Don’t Get Caught!”  And about
his Uncle Louie who died in 1957 at Yankee Stadium in the middle of a
New York Giants football game and about growing up in Brooklyn on
Ovington Avenue and later on Eastern Parkway.  He told me about going to
Stuyvesant High School and becoming the International President of USY
– United Synagogue Youth.  Oscar was, as some of you know, a great
songwriter and I wish I could sing a bunch of his songs today, but we
don’t have time, so I’d like to read the lyrics of a song written in
the 1970s that sums up his youth and its title is “Brooklyn Boy”:

BROOKLYN BOY

I don’t say much but I’m a fast talker
I never look I’m a jay-walker
I guess you could say I’m a New Yawker
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

From Flatbush to Brooklyn Heights
You better not miss those Brooklyn sights
Botanical Gardens and Prospect Park
But you better lock your door when it gets dark

I used to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers
Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, the late Gil Hodges
I used to love to watch Roy Rogers
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

Coney Island, down by the sea
I just hop right on that BMT
Mom cooled Pepsi right in the fridge
And Daddy tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge!

I used to eat in a delicatessen
Turkey on club with Russian dressing
Then I would take my piano lesson
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n
I’ll probably sing it once again
I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n
Brooklyn Boy

(Music and lyrics by O. Fruchtman)

(©2010 A. Fruchtman)

[Here's a link to Oscar performing the song live — “Brooklyn Boy” .]

Then the Brooklyn Boy went to Princeton and after appearing in some
Triangle Club shows there, he started making his way in the showbiz
world.

He began playing the guitar and singing with Princeton classmate and friend Ed
(Woody) Allen and later I joined the two of them and we formed a band –
Oscar and The League Of Weenies.  In 1974 we became the first band ever
hired to play at the club CBGB and two weeks later we were the first band
ever fired from playing at CBGB.  All through the early and mid-70s
Oscar was hanging around some of the most creative people on the New
York scene, especially the folks involved in the early years of the TV
show Saturday Night Live.  At one point Michael O’Donoghue, the head
writer for the show said,” You know, all Oscar needs is a little
success.”  But Oscar never found any real commercial success and at
crucial moments he seemed to have a special knack for sabotaging his
opportunities and, frankly, manipulating and ultimately alienating
people.  I asked him once about this tendency and he said, ”Well, you
know my motto – I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” And so – he
did!

And he turned away from the traditional path  and became his own
creative universe. He was a poet, a singer and songwriter, a street
performer, a painter, a collagist . . .  A message from Oscar on your
answering machine might be a miniature masterpiece.  I’m now holding up
a business card he had made up for a fictional concern located on
Medford Avenue in Fairlawn, N.J.  And the outfit is called: “Mind Your
Own Business!“ and their slogan is “Don’t Call Us and We Won’t Call
You!”.

You didn’t hear Oscar on the radio or see him on TV, but the whole
world was his canvas.  And he travelled with a mission.  He was seeking
the essential humorous truth of life.  And this was his exacting
discipline: He was the master of taking any situation, finding the
precise comic center and putting it into words – words that made you
laugh.  In my opinion he was quite simply the funniest person ever.  Nor
did it matter if he was the butt of the joke – what was paramount was
the comic truth. And he filled his memorable songs with humor and they
overflow with warmth and humanity.

So this was a brief attempt to take the measure of my friend Oscar
Fruchtman.  He was a luftmensch who had enough adventures and burnt
enough bridges for several lifetimes.  He loved his family, he loved his
friends, he loved his music and, above all, he loved to create
laughter, that rarest ability and his special gift to all.  Oscar, you
did a lot of surprising things in your life, but what you did on
Saturday surprised me the most.  And Janet and Annie and Peter and I
will never forget you, because you are unforgettable.  And we are so
proud we had the chance to share your time on earth.

Rabbi Cosgrove said he was going to pull on his earlobe if  I was
talking too long and he hasn’t done that yet, so I’m going to get out
my guitar and sing a song Oscar and I wrote – it’s mostly Oscar, but I
contributed a little.

(While getting set up, I took a swig from a bottle of Poland Spring
[from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mom, “Drinking on the job!”])

This song is very appropriate for this setting and you’ll hear why. 
It’s called “Floating Away” . . .

FLOATING AWAY

‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about building a boat
'Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

Everybody laughed when he talked about building his craft and floating
He talked about taking two of each kind
He talked about leaving it all behind
And he grabbed his hat and he grabbed his coat
And he mumbled something about floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

Hey, what’s with Noah? If he don’t move that ark they’re going to tow
it away
But he just ripped up the ticket and he stowed it away
Cause he’s soon to be floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

First there came the wind – I hope he’ll let us in
Then there came the rain, maybe Noah’s not insane!

‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about building a boat
'Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about floating away

For forty days it rained then the sky was clear and the land was dry
And the bird of peace flew by and Noah got high
And again he was floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

(Music by Oscar Fruchtman/Lyrics by Oscar Fruchtman and Hugh McCarten)

(©2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten)

SAVING GRACE

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Sixty years ago, John Ford shot most of Rio Grande near the spot pictured above, a few months after I was born.  The river is still just rolling along, quite unfazed by all the intervening anniversaries of these momentous events, before which I stand somewhat amazed:

By this time I’d 'a thought I would be sleeping

In a pine box for all eternity.

I’ve escaped death so many times, I know I’m only living

By the saving grace that’s over me.

(With thanks to BD for the words and PZ for the picture . . .)

THE CORPORATE-AMERICAN

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There is something fantastical, ghastly, almost demonic about seeing a corporation as somehow equivalent, existentially, to a human being.  Could a religious person, for example, ever refer to Exxon Mobil as “a child of God,” as a “dear soul”?  The idea is profoundly unsettling.

It doesn't seem like a view one could arrive at simply by specious legal arguments or moral depravity in the service of a political ideology — it would seem to require something more, some sort of neurological disorder, some actual and fundamental damage to the brain itself.

CHRISTIANITY MUST BE DESTROYED!

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As Jesse Dylan observed on Facebook yesterday, “And the asshole of the year . . . the person with the least compassion . . . the everything wrong with religion award goes to . . .”

Who else could it be but Christian ghoul Pat Robertson, whose narcissistic wickedness knows no bounds?  Pat loves to taunt and judge the suffering people of this world, especially at the times of their greatest agony, by blaming them for their own misfortune, as proceeding from their unwillingness to worship God according his formulae.

Most recently he has blamed the earthquake in Haiti on the fact that those Haitians who fought the French for their liberty, two hundred years ago, succeeded because they made a pact with Satan, offering to worship him in return for his aid.  The nation and all its people — like the little girl below — have been cursed ever since, says Pat.  (Robertson also blamed the catastrophes of 9/11 and Katrina on the sinfulness of the victims, i. e. on their failure to endorse his social agenda.)

What any of this might have to do with the actual Christian Gospels is beyond rational conjecture.  Robertson's Jesus seems to be a zombie god, who came to gloat over the corpses of the dead, as a way of gaining converts through a kind of moral terrorism, instead of that uncanny rabbi of the Gospels whose heart ached so inconsolably for human suffering that he wanted to give up his own life to alleviate it.

CNN showed video today of people in Port-au-Prince waiting outside a medical clinic, which was only partially intact, for emergency service.  Amongst them lay the corpse of an infant under a dirty scrap of sheet.  I wish Pat Robertson had been there, so he could have lifted back the shroud and shaken his finger at the child, crying, “This is what comes of worshiping Satan!”  He seems to have cast himself as a cartoonish Hammer Film monster in some demented remake of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!  The irony of the genre and the role is apparently lost on him, though.

I don't personally believe in Hell as a literal place — only in the hells we make for ourselves here on earth.  I doubt if even Hieronymus Bosch could have depicted the hell Pat Robertson has made for himself, off in his own little hermetically sealed world of self-righteousness.  It's something that almost doesn't bear thinking about.

From a recent article in The New York Times:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians,
whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited
in the United States, arrived here in Uganda's capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan
organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” —
and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the
traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings,
thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national
politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as
experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people
straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay
movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the
marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual
promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive,
saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that
could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for
homosexual behavior.

Poor misunderstood evangelicals!  Yes, they wanted the Ugandans to hate and fear homosexuality as they hated and feared the Devil, and yes, they wanted laws against it — they just didn't want the penalties for it to be so harsh.  Forgive me if I barf.

Once, on a Polish freighter crossing the Atlantic, I met a lovely German woman of a certain age who had lost a brother on the Russian front in WWII.  So many years later she still wept when she spoke of him.  Discussing the holocaust, she said, “We knew the laws against Jews were wrong — but killing them!  We could not imagine that.”

This excuse won't wash any more.  Dehumanizing and demonizing people, identifying them as agents of the Devil, always leads to murder, eventually, along a path too well marked in human history to be followed innocently, except by moral imbeciles.


The “gay agenda”, if such a thing exists, isn't dark.  I've known scores of gay people and not one of them has ever had the slightest interest in “converting” straights to homosexuality, having sex with children or destroying the institution of marriage.  The mere fact that so many gays want to participate in the institution of marriage shows a respect for it that's harder and harder to find among straight people.  You can see their aspirations as misguided, but not dark.

The “Christian” agenda, by contrast, is often, and repeatedly, as dark as it gets.  The Catholic bishops who shuttled child-abusing priests from parish to parish to protect the name of the church belong in jail, and could easily be put there if there were the political will to apply the RICO laws concerning criminal conspiracy against them.


The Mormon elders (like chief prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, above) who committed tax-exempt church funds to defeat the law in California granting the civil, secular rights of marriage to gays need to be prosecuted, too, for misuse of funds.  At the very least, the Mormon church should have its tax-exempt status revoked immediately and permanently.  I am perfectly content for the Latter Day Saints to function as a political action group — they're welcome to meddle in Caesar's things to their hearts' content, defying the teachings of Jesus with all the scorn and contempt they can muster.  I am not, however, content to subsidize them in this role.


There are many good people who believe
that consensual sex between adults of the same sex is perverse, morally
wrong — but does anyone in their right mind really believe that it falls into the same category of moral depravity as conspiring
in the rape of children?  The mere fact that Rick Warren suggested a
moral equivalence between these behaviors was enough in itself to
identify him as an unbalanced kook.


The pathetic evangelical homophobes (like Scott Lively, above, and Don Schmierer, below) who incited the Ugandans to murder probably broke no civil laws, just the laws of God, upon which they defecated publicly.

I hesitate to speak for Jesus, but since very few seem inclined to these days, I'll just say this — I think he would be richly pleased, and truly served, if every “Christian” church on the face of the earth just quietly disappeared.  Only then, I suspect, would there be a chance of his message being heard.

GRATEFUL LAYS

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I went to a prep school once upon a time — just me and five hundred other bewildered boys off in the woods of New Hampshire.  We were required to attend chapel eight times a week in the building above.

On the last night of every term, “The Last Night Hymn” was sung there.  These are some of the words:

Saviour source of every blessing,
Tune my heart to grateful lays:
Streams of mercy never ceasing,
Call for ceaseless songs of praise.

It's a song for Thanksgiving, too.  The phrase “count your blessings” has never had much resonance for me.  With streams of mercy never ceasing, you might as well count the drops of water in a river flowing past you.

The image of the streams of mercy was called into my consciousness three times a year from the time I was thirteen to the time I was eighteen.  It's taken all the rest of my life to begin to understand what it means.

STEPLADDERS!

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They lurk in closets, utility rooms, sheds and garages — seemingly innocent, ordinary home implements . . . and yet they hold the potential for doom, sudden and ghastly.

Do we take the warning labels on them seriously?  No!  We laugh at them — until we tumble backwards into nightmare, into injuries, multiple, grievous injuries . . . or death!

JESUS AS CAESAR

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Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.

                                                                         — Matthew 22:21

Somebody didn't get the message!

You have to wonder if anybody on the extreme Christian right ever actually reads the Gospels.  I personally suspect that many of them just get briefings with all the out-of-context quotes that seem to support the social and political goals they've already embraced and would embrace even if Jesus had never set foot on the earth.

Jon McNaughton, the guy who painted the image above (and whose narrative ambition I sort of admire), has depicted Jesus as a kind of President of Presidents, the über- generalissimo of the American state.  This Jesus is presenting the republic with a copy of the Constitution, instead of a copy of the Sermon On the Mount, as though he's the actual author, or Holy Ghostwriter, of the document.

There's no doubt that the Constitution owes a lot to the Christian tradition, with its radical respect for the worth of each individual before God, but really — if Jesus wrote the Constitution, or even Ghostwrote it, do you think he would have left in the original clauses allowing slavery, which evaluated the worth of a slave at three-fifths the worth of a white person?  A perusal of the actual Gospels would suggest otherwise, which may be one reason the extremists can't afford to peruse the actual Gospels.

We may be grateful for the Christian influence on the Constitution, but while we're at it, how about a little gratitude for the Masonic influence?  Many of the Founding Fathers were Masons, and the Masonic tradition has always incorporated a radical respect for all religions.  As President, George Washington, a Master Mason, the highest rank in the Fraternity of Freemasonry, met with Jewish leaders and told them that Jews would not just be tolerated in the new republic but welcomed as full citizens of it.  That attitude, which is one reason America has, to an almost unprecedented degree among nations, risen above violent religious strife between its peoples, is not one which has normally characterized the Christian tradition, with its long history of virulent anti-Semitism.  It is quintessentially Masonic, though, and also, one might add, most perfectly in tune with . . . the actual teachings of Jesus.

It might be good to start thinking of the Gospels as “the lost books of the Bible”, and to deal with the irony of this, since the world would probably be a better place all around if they were the only books of the Bible.

OUR TOWN COUP DE THEATRE

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                                     [Image©James Estrin for the NYT]

I noticed first that the dead characters were all facing different
direction in the space.  They weren't lined up in rows, but were at
angles with one another.  I noticed too that when the stars were
mentioned — and here Wilder sounds like Spinoza, whom he loved, and
Thomas Carlyle, whom he does not mention — the characters all looked
up as one at the sky.  All of them are sitting there looking for
something.  The play states this, and the director has gotten all of
the dead characters to stare in front of them, slightly up, with faces
of intense, determined concentration.  They are not resigned nor are
they really at peace.  They are looking forward.  They never deviate
from this, except when they look up, as one.

 

Then Emily takes her famous fantasy journey back to the morning of her
16th birthday.  (Here I begin to cry even as I write this.)  And then
the surprise happened.  I wasn't ready for it, I wasn't looking for it,
I wasn't expecting it.  I didn't even realize it was happening — until
I smelled something.  Bacon and eggs!  A curtain in the back of the
theater opened, revealing the morning of Emily's birthday, but this
time… the characters were in period dress, the kitchen was decorated
and fitted exactly as a kitchen would have been in 1910, and the snow
was falling outside the kitchen window and the sun was rising, with its
beautiful rays penetrating and lighting up the scene.  This time, no
exaggerated gestures, no 'inwardness' at all — just a family breakfast
on a beautiful winter's morning, with real bacon and eggs being cooked,
and Mrs. Webb looking as if she had stepped out of an old family
photograph.  What is going on here is the physical beauty and
historical specifics of a day in the life, a concrete day in the life
— and the characters are completely lost in it.  No inwardness, no
'feeling', no reflectedness; and yet all the unnoticed loveliness of a
Spring morning in Chevy Chase, or on Macomb Street with Brutus the dog
and an overnight seventh-grade blood brother.

 

Thus when Emily gave her famous speech — 'Goodbye, Grovers Corners' — she
did not turn to the audience, nor even to the poignant, vivid, colorful
scene before her (hitherto, all the actors had been in grays and browns
and blacks, all muted and blending into each other.) Rather, Emily
turned inward and bowed her head and turned away from the audience, and
grieved for what she never saw.  And then the Stage Manager bade us
good night, and the lights went out.  Fade to black.

 

What I take this all to be about is exactly what Charles Isherwood said
in his review for the Times — “… a feat of stagecraft that transmits
the essence of Wilder's philosophy with an overwhelming sensory
immediacy.”  It's not just the bacon and eggs — it is the alienation
of human existence.  We neither see what's happening on the surface nor
do we see what's happening below the surface.  The characters in the
breakfast scene at the end of the play are completely unaware of the
beauty and actual lyricism which exists all around them.  The
characters in Act Two are aware of the emotions underlying everything,
but not of any “God's-eye” cutaway that is required for the meaning of
those events to be understood.  The characters in Act Three  are
looking forward — there is a little teleology here and I was reminded
of John Steinbeck's 'loss of teleology' in his mid-career — but to
what?  They are certainly not looking backward.  The dead have, to use
Kerouac's phrase, 'retired from Samsara'.  They don't 'like it' —
Wilder's line — when the living come to call on them on their windy
hill.  They are definitely not looking backward.  And they are so far
from the particularities of the winter light of a 16th birthday, and
the 'odorama' of the memory, that Emily can barely express her loss, so
absorbing and consuming it is.

Back to the main body of Paul Zahl's report on David Cromer's production of Our Town (scroll down for the conclusion).

WATER

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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
“Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

This is an excerpt from a commencement speech given a couple of years ago by the writer David Foster Wallace (above), who committed suicide this week at the age of 46.  I don't know Wallace's writing, although it has quite a reputation, but I've been struck by many of the quotes from it that have appeared in various notices of his death.

The quote above is particularly resonant.  It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's notion of the “phantasmagoria” associated with each age in history — those dreams that a whole epoch dreams and can't recognize as dreams, because everyone is having them.  He's referring to cultural assumptions so profound and so unexamined that they're simply experienced as part of the environment, like water, or air — things noticed only when they're absent.  (Curiously, Benjamin, pictured above, also committed suicide, in much different circumstances.)

It seems to me that the principle task of any critic, of art or culture, is to discover the phantasmagoria of his or her time and disenchant people out of it — so it can be seen.  It is, as I've written before, a delicate task — like letting a dreaming person know he's dreaming without waking him, because as soon as he awakens, his defenses, his unexamined assumptions about things, will reassert themselves.

Phantasmagorias exist in the regions of our culture unexamined or devalued by the official, that is to say, the conscious, culture.  In the 20th Century, for example, the official culture dreamed that the Victorian Age had been left behind in Modernism's dust, and thus it could not see how the central art form of the age, movies, was essentially Victorian.  The official culture dreamed that certain kinds of movies, like musicals, were frivolous and escapist, and thus could not see that they represented some of the century's most radical experiments in cinematic form.  The official culture dreamed that Las Vegas was a vulgar cultural aberration, and thus could not see that it was the one place where the 20th Century was anticipating the future of our cities most perceptively (while also, paradoxically, keeping the Victorian tradition of the “universal exposition” alive.)


                                                                                              Image © Paul Kolnik

These observations will seem like clichés a hundred years from now, in retrospect, when we've awakened from our current dreams.  It's the job of a cultural critic to get inside our dreams while we're dreaming them.

So how's the water where you are?

A T. S. ELIOT QUOTE FOR TODAY

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. . . damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation — of salvation from
the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to
living.

This comes via Tony D'Ambra and his films noir web site.  Its application to film noir is perhaps obvious, but it has a profound relevance to the modern age in general.  Without knowing the quote, I wrote something similar in a previous post on this site, WHORES: A VALENTINE'S DAY MEDITATION, about Baudelaire's obsession with prostitutes.  Eliot's observation comes from an essay on Baudelaire and it sheds a terrifying light on many otherwise baffling phenomena of our time.  It explains why middle-class American teens sometimes go ballistic and murder their schoolmates, then kill themselves.  It explains why hopeless Palestinian kids strap on bombs and martyr themselves in order to kill Israeli civilians.

Our culture values survival and comfort above all other considerations, and denies the horrifying truth that life without meaning, without transcendent purpose, is worse than death.  Anything that promises meaning, even if it's the meaning inherent in damnation, or in a spectacular pursuit of oblivion, is better than a life spent, as Blake puts it, “wailing on the margin of non-entity.”

NO ROOM AT THE INN

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When
very young kids hear the Christmas story for the first time, and you
then ask them what they remember most about it, they will invariably
say, “There was no room at the inn.”  That looms larger than the
cute animals, the happy shepherds, the magical gifts.  Kids know
what the story is really about, where it really begins — in rejection,
exclusion, humiliation.  These are subjects that preoccupy very
young kids.  Growing up, we tend to find ways of managing these
preoccupations, but they never leave us.

Christmas is not just about the hope renewed by the birth of a child —
it's about the ways hope is lost.  If sorrow and despair don't
figure into your understanding of Christmas, the story of it won't add
up to much.  Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the happiest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature precisely because it is the saddest Christmas story in post-Biblical literature, may be the best proof of that.

Here's an incredibly powerful holiday tale from the Flickhead blog — a most appropriate meditation for the season.