Jesus of Tralee

God teaches me things in the most unexpected places and times. In my late teens, I had read a book called, The Voyages of Saint Brendan the Navigator & Tales of the Irish Saints, by Lady Gregory. Beginning in the sixth century, Irish monks sailed the North Atlantic Ocean in small, ox hide-covered boats, establishing monasteries on various islands, some very remote, some otherwise uninhabited, some no more than rock hills standing above the ocean surface. The monks lived on the tops of these formations, whose ruins can still be seen today. The steep ascents to the tops of some look death-defying. A strong gust of wind could blow a man into the ocean.  Life on these almost uninhabitable rocks was rugged and harsh.

One of the tales in the above book is about a pale-skinned hermit, with long white hair and beard, who lived for years in a cave on one of those islands. He prayed constantly, and several times when he was without food, an angel brought him consecrated communion bread to eat. 

As a typical American kid, I was familiar with every kind of movie, comic book, and T.V. hero--pioneers, cowboys, Indian fighters, soldiers, spies, Batman, Superman, you name it. But to me, these Irish monks were the manliest of men, the heroes among heroes, the toughest of the tough.

When I was in my twenties, with some vacation time coming, I bought a roundtrip ticket to Ireland, with no thought whatsoever of any mythical monks. I had no particular itinerary. Upon my arrival at Shannon airport, I simply rented a car and proceeded to drive haphazardly around the country.

A few days into my trip, after touring the Dingle peninsula, I saw a sign for the city of Tralee and  having nothing better to do, decided to head there. I had heard of the name Tralee before. As a child, I once heard my father refer to a pretty girl as a Rose of Tralee, and at family parties, my mother or one of my aunts would occasionally sing a song called, "The Rose of Tralee."

As I approached Tralee in my rental car, I saw hundreds of hitchhikers heading into the city as well. People hitched rides everywhere in Ireland, but I had never seen so many in one place. After eventually finding a Bread and Breakfast place that miraculously had a vacancy, the landlord asked, "Are you here for the festival?" Apparently, the city was having a festival, which featured a beauty contest in which the winner was crowned, The Rose of Tralee.

The city was chock-a-block with tourists and young people from all over Ireland. Advertisements hung from every lamppost, tree and telephone pole. Trash from overfilled and overturned garbage cans spilled all over the sidewalks and streets. Numerous young people had camped in a park near the city center.  A few had Sleeping bags, some blankets, and others slept right on the grass.  The entrance to the park had bathrooms, of which the campers made heavy use, with soaking wet floors and toilet paper scattered all around. Young people wandered around, some without shirts or shoes, looking hung over.  It was a Gaelic Woodstock.

I went into a saloon. The proprietor crowed with delight to several patrons at the bar about the America tourists who not only tipped so extravagantly but liked to buy round after round for everyone in the house. Overhearing this, I decided that I couldn't afford to delight this barkeep, and did a quiet Irish goodbye.

Walking further in town, I came upon a Catholic church. I had a curiosity about what church in Ireland was like, so I went inside and stood in the back.  Mass was underway. A feeling came over me of the incongruity of several hundred people attending Mass in the center of a city that was in a fever of tacky commercialism and bacchanalia. The prayers of the consecration had already begun.  And I suddenly suffered a case of spiritual arrest.

The priest on the altar was the image of the hermit which I had carried in my head all these years. And as the priest said the words of consecration, he adored and prayed to the real body of Christ, with his whole voice, words, and body. He was the monk in the cave.

After the consecration, the prayers felt lifeless, and I left. But outside, as I walked the streets, my mind churned with the irony, the paradox, the complete contradictory unexpectedness of what I had just witnessed: That this is the Incarnation--that Jesus is present and lives in the heart of commercial, crowded, garbage-strewn, partying, drunken, greedy, fornicating Tralee and everywhere.

A Review of the Play, Fire on Flaming Roads, Written and Directed by Daniel Hainsworth

Set in wealthy Belle Meade, Fire on Flaming Roads, shows the dark and occasionally comic side of what sometimes happens with those who grow up in affluence and privilege. Four young adults, friends since childhood apparently, hang out on the roof of Jake's house, or rather his parent's house, where they smoke marijuana, drink beer, and pass the time talking about whatever distractions, interruptions, or entertainments have come their way recently. None express any hint of career, education, spiritual, or personal aspirations in life that we can discern.

Jake is an extrovert who reeks of entitlement and arrogance. He is rude and crude. Dylan is Jake's close buddy--a schlemiel of sorts, whose manner of dress is an insult to fashion. Sam is a bit stoic. The lone female, Tony, obviously feels comfortable hanging out with these guys, but she has a little more self-efficacy than they do and is more self-contained.

From the rooftop, off in the distance, they notice a huge fire burning along a highway. Over time, they become more concerned about the fire, and they try and find out some news about it. Dylan expresses the most curiosity, which acts as a foil to Jake's strident apathy about anything to do with the fire or anything in life other than hedonistic pleasures. Ominously, they discover that their portable radio has failed, as well as their cell phones and T.V. The profluence of the play comes from their attempts to deal with the uncertainty, worry, and fear that the fire increasingly evokes in them.

Near the beginning, Tony is reading a book, and she suddenly reads a passage out loud, paraphrasing it in terms of terror, in response to the fuming fire on the road---a sign of an imagination and alert intelligence on her part. Not too surprisingly, she emerges as the conscience of the group. As we might expect from these slackers, most of the conversation consists of short, elemental utterances punctuated with the standard vulgarities. But in mid-play, Tony suddenly delivers a long, articulate, lecture to Dylan saying, among other things, that people will not change unless they become completely destroyed and they have no other choice.

From Jake, we learn enough about his life off from the roof. We learn everything we need to know about Dylan just from seeing him and hearing him talk. The way Tony and Sam carry themselves is excellent, but both characters would benefit from an additional detail or two about them. The build-up of tension with respect to the fire is not quite dramatic enough, but the foreshadowing and the ending worked well. This is the first script from playwright Daniel Hainsworth. It is well-constructed in a dramatic and literary sense, and I am looking forward to his next production.

Company: The Untitled Theatre Collective  / http://untitledtheatreny.wix.com/home

Producer: Carly J. Bauer and the United Theatre Collective

Cast: Matt Giroveanu (Jake),  Shawn Ferrier (Dylan),  Kyle Mumford (Sam), Mary Caitlin Kelly (Tony)

Fire on Flaming Roads: Dec. 10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20.

Arthur Seelen Theatre -- basement of the Drama Book Shop

250 W. 40th St.; New York, NY 10018

The event is not wheel chair accessible and requires going down a flight of stairs.

Running Time: 1 hour

Tickets:  $12.00 / https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fire-on-flaming-roads-tickets-19150655125

Naked and Afraid - the Cable T.V. Series

Naked and Afraid: It's not the Garden of Eden! I do think it's an interesting laboratory of human behavior and how men and women get along in relationships. We can all take lessons from it.

After the initial meeting with each other, and exchange of conversation, most of the women do a personality assessment of the guy, relating to how well they expect to get along. The men rarely vocalize a personality assessment of the woman.

Once the stress of having to survive kicks in, almost every contestant, male or female, starts criticizing and complaining about the other about something. To some extent, they are just taking their own stress and victimizing the other with their blaming and condemning. The women are more vocal about it while the men tend to be more outwardly stoic, but each sex feels complaints about the other equally. Instead of blaming the other, each individual would be better off if they focused on what he/she could do to improve the situation. I see little positive communication about needs and wants and comparison of expectations of the self with that of the other.

As in real life, in most cases, the women prioritizes the importance of the relationship, more than the male, as well as managing the emotions in the relationship. On some level, the woman assumes that the importance of the relationship is integral to their joint survival and well-being.

In terms of being able to handle surviving in the jungle, in many ways the women do better than the men. They are more practical and in many cases seem to adjust to circumstances more easily. For the guys that take a more macho or Tarzan type attitude, it does not necessary translate into better survive-ability. The more macho, he-man types that do well, do so because of better survival skills not because they are more macho or physically tougher. Among the guys, having a lot of muscle doesn't seem to help in survive-ability. If anything, it means they need more food and water, which isn't available, which means they suffer more and lose more weight.

Upon completion, the men tend to mostly talk about having improved their physical survival skills. The women mostly talk about improving their confidence, self-esteem, etc., though some women do comment on their physical survive-ability. One women remarked about how this goes on their list of craziest things she ever did.

Often, the woman makes some sort of make-shift clothing to cover her private parts. What's the point, since they're already naked and in the jungle, the guy and camera crew has already seen all her private parts, etc., though there is a camera crew, and one woman did refer to insects attacking her, "unmentionables," as she called it. 

It find it curious that women do this naked in front of a strange man outdoors, plus a camera crew for T.V. and then they claim that they are modest. But now that I think of it, most of the men do try and fashion some sort of covering for themselves down there.

I note that many of the woman have a preference for makeup, though it has no survival value. I do give the women credit for being willing to appear on T.V. covered in dirt and bug bites.

The women do provide complimentary skills to men, in terms of what they think is important both in terms of physical survival and getting along with the other. This is subtle and easy for men to overlook/underrate. This may be me just projecting my own shit, but in most cases I feel the male is overwhelmed by the emotional & relationship outpourings of the woman. In general, we men do not have sufficiently developed skills/brains of that sort. In a few cases, the men are appropriately considerate of the women's needs/wants, but that does not necessarily mean the same male has good survival skills in terms of being able to get food, clothing, and shelter. I conclude that for long term sustainability, survival means not just skill at getting food, clothing, and shelter, but being able to co-exist harmoniously with your partner. In general, men need women, and women need men. We need to stop pointing the finger at one another and need to work harder/smarter at getting along.

The Generation Gap

The Generation Gap: the concept, the phrase, is about as dead as the Nehru Jacket, which I had kind of liked. Of course I had heard of The Game of Thrones, but have never seen an episode. I tend to confuse it with The Hunger Games. I guess I assumed it was some sort of gamer/fantasy/anime thing. Then I found out that my older son was watching it, kind of intensely, and on his laptop of course. He convinced my younger son to start watching it too, and now he's into it. Objectively, that tells me that there is something about the show. And I did accidentally stumble upon a review that said it was rather sophisticated. But strangely, given that both of my sons were into it, any curiosity that I may have about it evaporated, like this was their thing, not mine. I feel that if I were to start watching, it would be as if it was 1969, and my parents suddenly started listening to the Beatles. The other day I asked my older son if he still watched Game of Thrones. He said yes and enthusiastically told me that I ought to watch it too. But I felt like I imagine my parents might have felt in 1969 had I enthusiastically told them that they ought to start listening to Bob Dylan.

Veterans Day

My maternal grandmother Helen V. McGuire, nee Kavanaugh, was in the Marines in WWI.  She was among the second group of women to ever be sworn into the Marine Corp.  She and a girl friend had been on the subway in New York City and read a newspaper advertisement from the Marines saying they wanted to recruit women stenographers, but that so far, no women had passed the qualifying stenography exam. My grandmother and her friend looked at each other and said, "We can pass the test!" They were only the second group of women ever to be inducted into the Marine Corps. A group in Washington D.C. had been inducted earlier. The reason the Marine Corp decided to induct women was that all of the clerical and typing work in the corps was being done by male Marines, and they wanted to free as many men as possible for combat roles. My grandmother said that when she reported to her first assignment, as a typist, it was an amusing juxtaposition to see the big, muscular male Marine she was replacing, hunched over, dwarfing a typewriter, typing with two fingers. My grandmother served as a Private from 1918-1922. Three hundred and five women served in the Marine Corps in WWI.

George Orwell on the Modern Age

"On April 6, 1940—coincidentally, the same day the first papal plot against Hitler failed—Orwell published an essay containing an insight that could stand as an epitaph for the whole modern age. He recalled a cruel trick he once played on a wasp that was sucking jam on his plate. Orwell cut him in half. The wasp paid no mind, merely went on with his meal, while jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. 'It is the same with modern man,' Orwell wrote. 'The thing that has been cut away is his soul.' We’ve sawed off the moral branch on which we sat—divine sanction for absolute ethics—and then we’ve fallen into a cesspool, and we’re surprised. "

-Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler.

My Encounter with the Novel Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon

Having never read Thomas Pynchon, I read a review of Vineland when it came out in 1990 and bought the hardcover, for twenty dollars plus tax. However I lost interest after I read the first chapter or two.  But for some mysterious reason, the image of the main character, Zoyd, watching T.V. in his living room, with the flickering of light from the T.V. casting shadows on the walls and ceiling stayed with me. Many years later and mysteriously unable to forget that image, it occurred to me that it was a metaphor for Plato's Cave. Perhaps Pynchon was going somewhere with this, that he might have something to say about modern life, and I thought that someday, maybe, I'd give the novel another try. After all, I paid twenty dollars plus tax for the damn book.

Scroll ahead to the fall of 2015. I just tried to read it again. In terms of the use of words, and the construction of sentences, and paragraphs, Pynchon is a master literary craftsmen. But I found the text even more mind-numbing than before, like trying to read wallpaper. I could not get past the first chapter. Giving the narrative every possible benefit of the doubt, every possible chance at redemption, I fingered and shuffled forward, hunting in various places at random, hoping to find some interesting image, character, or slice of narrative, and I came up dry. With mixed feelings of exasperation, failure, and resignation that a scrupulously honest college student might feel after bombing an important final exam, I lowered my nose and tail enough and read the Wikipedia entry on the book, trying to find out why the high-brow literary crowd thinks so much of Pynchon, or at least Vineland, or else, why I shouldn't find a new, more worthy home for this book in the recycle dumpster.

But as Wikipedia explains, the characters in Vineland are former members of California's counterculture of the 1960's, only one generation later, in the of Ronald Reagan's presidency, still living the un-established life.  But even I can see that every character in the book is dysfunctional.  And I'm sorry, if I failed to make the connection that former hippie but still hippie equals psychologically and socially dysfunctional.

Nevertheless, I kept asking myself, where is the literary value here?  And it occurred to me that, at least in the parts I read, not a single character in the book had any hint of an interior life, self awareness or self-knowledge. Each character is living largely from their lizard brain, trying to get through the day merely seeking pleasure and ease while avoiding suffering and pain, in the context of their own specific circumstances. Dear Lord, what a lot of sorry characters.  No wonder I can't relate.  No one aspires to be anything other than a biological blob.

Yet, I felt resolved that Pynchon will not defeat me. I felt determined to climb mount Vineland again--because it's there, of course, but you heard that coming didn't you? I know what to look for this time--I will be hunting for any character with an inner life or self-awareness, and hunting for any shred of a sign that a character has any meaning or purpose in their life.  And when I don't find any such thing, I can look down on Pynchon and the whole narrative, the modern life that it represents, feeling smug and self-righteous about it all.  But cheating again,  I just looked up and read the original New York Times Book Review of Vineland, from December 26, 1989. The critic couldn't make much more sense out of the novel than I.  But what he did see, and I missed, was the alleged humor, that this was supposed to be a zany book.  From Pynchon's perspective, the joke was on me, for not seeing that, but as far as I'm concerned, the character are too pathetic to be funny.