chers---
this is a tough article, and i still find new stuff in it every time i read it. it's not perfect, either.
i will help you out: mitchell talks about ideology versus science, the same conflict in which we find ourselves caught up today. mitchell would make the case that drug czar walters is illiterate.
have fun. write home often and regularly. the picture above is of mitchell composing the underground grammarian on a movable-lead-type printing press he inherited and installed in his basement. he believed the internet was a greater printing press and mainstay of a free press for informed, literate readers who could understand metaphor.
namasté
---lyr
Hunger in
THE EPIGRAPH is, to be sure, unusual, and a bit long. Please read it anyway. Twice. Read it not with the reading of the schools, not as 'a receiver of a communication,' but as a thoughtful inquirer into the meaning of what is said, as one who intends to say something about what is said.
Read it slowly, as you would read a gnarled sonnet of Donne, moving your lips the while. Listen. Discover its voice and its tone. Judge the effects of diction, its rhythms, its curt images and its metaphors. Pronounce it, at last, not right or wrong, which is useful only with regard to 'a communication,' but good or bad, either well-wrought or ill. Consider how, if there were going to be a test, you could justify your verdict. Do all of that now, and do it well, for there is going to be a test -- every day of your life, and what follows is the dreadful tale of a man who failed it. So take your time. We can wait.
Good. All of that has made you an understander, not just a receiver.
What understanding have you of the word 'medicines'? What sorts of 'medicines' does he have in mind, who speaks those words? Is he thinking of such things as antibiotics and decongestants, or even some imaginable ancient equivalents?
In what tone and with what intent does he say those words? Are they a taunting rebuke to that 'daughter of
Or can it be that the bloody aggressions of
If that is what you have concluded from your reading of the cited passage, then you are utterly illiterate. You cannot read. It matters not at all that you know the letters and the words.
Consider now the plight of a man who knows the letters and the words, but who can not read at all. Because he can not read at all, and because he imagines that he can, he was found guilty of certain criminal acts related to the death of his son.
Bill Barnhart's child died of hunger at the age of two and a half. For five months, what nourishment the boy had been able to swallow was gobbled up by the tumor that was growing in his belly. The child shriveled and the tumor prospered, until its greed undid them both. After a meager last supper, a few dry Cheerios and a sip of grape juice, host and guest died quietly together.
Barnhart, along with his wife, was eventually convicted of endangering the life of a child, and involuntary manslaughter. He can not, for the life of him, understand why.
He is as much aggrieved as grieved. He understands the passage that you have so carefully read, along with a few carefully selected other passages that he can not read, as God's commandment to him to keep sick children away from doctors.
'I did nothing wrong,' he said. 'My conscience doesn't bother me.'
That, we do believe. Conscience is a high wall of scrawled graffiti where the world can write what it pleases, a random anthology of pet notions, unexamined sentiments, and popular slogans remarkable chiefly for their vagueness. Conscience stands always in need of editing, a job that can't be done except through thoughtful reading of the scrawls.
But something bothers Barnhart. He is baffled and vexed, all unable to account for his suffering. He wonders why not one member of the jury was willing to 'stand up for God's rights,' in which notion he sees neither the absurdity nor the irony. In a speech whose devastating and utterly unintended power makes him sound like a character in a play by Arthur Miller, he points out the very passage cited above, and says to a reporter (Michael E. Ruane, in The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, June 17, 1984):
I want you to read that and see what you expect somebody to take out of that there. I'd like you to tell me what your interpretation is. I'd like you to study the whole thing out.
How long would it take to sit down with Bill Barnhart to study the whole thing out? That is exactly what he needs: the whole thing, the whole art and power of language and thought.
Literacy is not a knack. It is a moral condition. The ability to read attentively, reflectively, and judiciously is also the ability to be attentive, reflective, and judicious. It is not an optional adornment for just and sane living. It is a necessity. It is the necessity. It is not a variety or portion of education. It is education. It is the whole thing, the wholesome nourishment of the mind, by which the mind may grow strong enough to be the master of the will and not its slave, the judge of desire and not its procurer, the censor of sentiment and not its tool, and the inquisitor of belief, not its flack. It [literacy] is our only path to whatever wisdom we can have, which is our only path to whatever goodness we can know, which is our only path to whatever happiness we can enjoy.
Bill Barnhart is not a happy man. His 'faith,' which is every bit as involuntary as his manslaughter, has not made him whole. He taketh no balm in
The Barnharts of our time, by the millions, live by the law of the belly. The belly was once believed to be the origin and dwelling place of impulse and appetite, the nettles and whips of our nature least susceptible to the governance of Reason. Orwell saluted the appropriateness of that metaphor in 'bellyfeel,' the mindless and ardent loyalty of the 'true believer,' and we acknowledge it when we have 'gut feelings.'
As to the presence of gut feelings, there is not disputation. We can not doubt Barnhart's word when he says, 'We feel that God wrote this Bible.' Although a thoughtful person would have said 'I feel,' recognizing that as to the feelings of others all evidence is hearsay, and ackowledging the possibility that Justin probably had no feelings one way or the other in this crucial matter, we nevertheless do believe that Barnhart does believe that he feels what he says he feels. And so do we all.
When he justifies his acts by his feelings, Barnhart stands where we all stand, often, every day. It is the Occasion of Education. All he needs is a true teacher to stay him a while.
In this case, a true teacher would probably start out by quoting from Isaiah: 'Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.' And he will leave aside until later, much later, the rest of that verse. He will not quarrel as to the author of the Bible, for it truly doesn't matter. He would urge only that if God had written a book, it would turn out to be a very fine book indeed. Better than anything ever done by Homer, or Dante, or Milton. Better than Shakespeare, far better. Whatever excellencies of language and thought we find in the countless books by the legions of the lesser, shall we not find in ultimate perfection in the one perfect book of the greater? Where the many plumb deepness beyond deepness, shall the one not leave us glimpses of the abyss? If the simple song of a poet can dwell forever in the mind, arising and living again and again, shining each time with new, undreamed of light, shall we knock off a line of Jeremiah and say, 'That's that'?
Just now, of course, none of that would mean anything to Barnhart. He has been to school, which is why he can not read. He knows nothing of the excellencies of language and thought, for no one could show them to him. He knows nothing of deepness in great authors, for he hasn't read them. The words of poets do not arise and live in his mind, and even the words by which he lives and requires helpless children to live -- or to die, as luck would have it -- even the words he calls 'God's' are dead slogans, bones that can not live.
Fundamental literalism is not only a sickness of religion; it is a sickness of the mind. It is essentially a Basic Minimum Competence writ large and applied indiscriminately to all supposed human 'problems' -- anything from filling out an application for a driving license to distinguishing the worthy from the unworthy. Among its components, two are essential. One is a blindness to metaphor, and the other is the nourishment of the tumor that lives in the belly, the feeling that feeling is knowing. Out of the notion that communication is the purpose of language, the schools provide the first, and out of the feeling that education is the result of 'adjustment' in 'the affective domain,' the schools provide the second. In fact, though they haven't the wit to figure it out, the simpleton religionists have no better friends than the simpleton educationists, who turn out, yearly, millions of empty children, prepared not for life, but only for the unexamined life, and so terribly hungry that they will swallow anything.
They will take no balm. In vain will they gobble up dry Cheerios and guzzle down grape juice, for they will never be nourished.
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