The Missing Teacher: A Creative Short Story

My students were given an assignment today to write a short story and to be as creative as possible.  I came up with my own story and ran with it.  Here is my result.  (Maybe I should record it or vlog it, as performing adds a layer of fun both for me and for my audience.)

We arrived at school, and our teacher was not in the classroom.  No one knew where she was or when she was coming back. 

Our teacher had been on vacation in Cambodia.  While she was there, she was kidnapped by the Chinese and held prisoner.  The Chinese agents were in league with England’s Queen Victoria II, who was hatching a foul plot to release aborted leopard fetuses into the world’s food supply.  Our teacher was intended to be the guinea pig in their sinister culinary experiments.  The United States government would not allow such a travesty to occur.  They secretly sent their best agents—Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer—to our teacher’s rescue. 

What Chuck Norris, Jack Bauer, and the US government did not know was that our teacher had been trained by Israeli Mossad and could take care of herself.  She had gone on twelve secret missions to release kidnapped English waifs from forced labor in the mines of Ecuador.  She made short work of her Chinese captors, and when Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer found her, she was dissecting her captors’ bodies in Manchuria. 

Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer were instantly attracted to our teacher, and decided to battle to the death to win her hand in marriage.  It is not clear who won this battle, as our teacher would not be a prize and so fed the victor to her pet Komodo dragon, laughing as first the victor's beard, then his knees, and finally his feet were engulfed into the dragon’s gaping gullet. 

Deciding that the punishment was to fit the crime, our teacher kidnapped Queen Victoria II and banished her to slave in the mines of Ecuador, subsisting on the flesh of the aborted leopard fetuses she had so wickedly wanted to feed to the world.  Our teacher returned to our class and continued to instruct us in our studies. 

Little Things

Hello Friends,

This blog post by a friend of mine spoke to me.  It is so important to remember the important things in life.  I've found that it can be so easy to lose sight of the things that really matter.  Many of these are little things:  the perfect cup of espresso every afternoon, a laugh with a friend, a good movie, playing an instrument or singing songs with friends, or, if you're in my family, bathroom humor at the dinner table.  If I may, I'd like to digress to something that has been a simple pleasure for me lately.  I've been standing patiently outside in the afternoon, taking photographs of hummingbirds in my backyard.  Here's one of them, cropped to focus on the bird: 

Just yesterday, I was watching a hummingbird at the feeder when suddenly another flew up out of nowhere and chased the other away.  These feisty little birds chased each other around the yard a lot last summer, and it officially started again yesterday.  That's a line from one of my old favorite movies popped into my head:  "Aaah!  They're at it again!"  The hummingbird chaos reminded me of the scene from Mary Poppins when the gaggle of chimney sweeps is dancing on the roof.  This scene is sort of what the backyard feels like when lots of these little birds are buzzing around.  I also have a funny neighbor who is an old salt and whom I could easily picture shooting off fireworks like this, if he ever felt like it.  (And yes, I'm not ashamed to admit that I love the likes of Nietzsche, Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Wagner but still occasionally enjoy my childhood favorites such Disney movies and the Three Stooges.) 

I think what this did is suddenly remind me of things I had forgotten that were once so important and meaningful to me.  I had that experience a few weeks ago listening to a video of Anna Netrebko singing scenes from Act IV of Il Trovatore.  My grandmother played the piano, so almost from birth there was always music in the house.  Most of my childhood and youth was spent around people who played instruments or acted in plays.  When I went off to college and the people I knew went off in different directions, I put some of that musical-theatrical involvement aside to pursue my studies.  After I graduated, I went to Italy and fell in love with the sound of the mandolin.  Eventually I bought one from eBay and fiddled around with it.  Playing the mandolin was relaxing for me in a trying time.  But now I feel more than ever that music is something I need. 

There are so many questions and concerns in life, and they only increase as we grow.  What am I going to do for a living?  Where is the money going to come from?  Am I pursuing the right track for me?  We learn more about ourselves, we explore new paths that we discover, and we get lost along the way.  At least, I know I do.  But it's little things that bring us back, that remind us who we are and what we love, and what we need.  It is little things that give us pure joy.  It is laughter, it is hummingbirds, it is good food, it is good company, it is song and dance, it is a good story, it is a game of fetch with the dog.  These are the things that matter.  These are the things that make all of life's obstacles and challenges worth facing. 

I think the most important lesson that I've learned recently is:  Never forget where you came from.  Who you are and what you love begins at the cradle.  You may grow and learn more, but you never change.  At least, fundamentally, I know most of my quirky traits have been with me for a lifetime.  Artistically, my palate may have expanded, but it still relishes the same movies and music it did from every previous stage of development.  Special effects master Ray Harryhausen and writer Ray Bradbury once boasted that when they met at 18 years of age, they vowed always to hold onto their childhood love of dinosaurs.  That passion for dinosaurs fueled their lifelong friendship and produced some of the finest science fiction literature and fantasy films of the Twentieth Century.  It is so important to stay in touch with the inner child, the child who knows who his friends and family members are and who lives, almost, ignorant of anything else.  Ultimately, family, friends, and the little joys are what really matter.  They make us who we are, and they become the marks that we leave behind us. 

Today I Realized the Real Role of the Catholic Church in Today's World

Last night I was reading The Power of Myth, and when I got up this morning something hit me.  It was as if all the years of doubt and spiritual quest off the path suddenly revealed to me the purpose and relevance of the Catholic Church in the modern world.  Here is the passage in question: 

CAMPBELL: ... Ortega y Gasset talks about the environment and the hero in his Meditations on Don Quixote.  Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages.  He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills.  Ortega points out that the story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero.  The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need.  
MOYERS:  A windmill.  
CAMPBELL:  Yes, but Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills.  You can do that, too, if you have a poetic imagination.  Earlier, though, it was not a mechanistic world in which the hero moved but a world alive and responsive to his spiritual readiness.  Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behaviorist psychology, that we're nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.
(Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, Chapter 5 "The Hero's Adventure") 

So Campbell points out that today's world is one of machines.  The "mechanistic world," as Campbell calls it, is the world of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, in which man is reduced to an empty shell perfoming various functions, having no real meaning and no great destiny, perhaps too forgetful or lackadaisical to yearn for more.  The problem that the physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behaviorist psychology pose for us is a world that is thoroughly dehumanized.  Biology and chemistry may reduce man to a set of processes.  Marxism reduces the individual to a cog in a machine.  And behaviorism reduces man's psyche to a set of conditioned responses that can be controlled or elicited like those of Pavlov's dog.  The whole problem of the Twentieth Century is one of dehumanization. 
In the Twentieth Century, everything began to be done en masse:  mass production (Ford), mass enlistment (World War I), mass media (radio and later television), and even mass murder (the Holocaust).  Where is the individual in all this?  Where is the name to go with the person who gets a number tattooed on his arm in a concentration camp?  Each of the 6 million Jews killed in Europe during the Holocaust had a name and a family and was something more than what the Nazis called him.  So was each of the 20 million killed in the purges of Stalin.  However, the increase in the human population did not bring with it (yet) an increase in the awareness of the value of the human life. 

Perhaps the value of Nietzsche lies in his assertion of the human will.  In the face of the sciences', Marxism's, and behaviorist psychology's reduction of man to various sets of processes, the only proper response is for a man to say, "No!  I am not merely a set of physical and chemical processes, societal functions, or conditioned responses.  I am a person with a name and a history and a purpose.  I have value, and I am going to achieve something."  The individual will is what rescues man from this reduction and dehumanization. 

With this in mind, here is the realization that I had this morning: 

The Catholic Church opposes all these things already.  The Catholic Church opposes modernism and Marxism, and we may see that this opposition may not be based on exclusively theological grounds.  Marxism is not only atheistic, it is a system that oppresses man. 

Furthermore, the Catholic Church decries relativism, asserting that man must absolutely live for something. 

To give another example:  the Church's opposition to same-sex marriage (as far as I can yet discover) is not based only on its teachings regarding sex (which, the Church views, should be unitive and procreative).  Various writings and remarks of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis on the issue show that these religious leaders have grave concerns that same-sex marriage is a new attempt by the State to usurp the humanity of man, as the State once attempted to do under Communism.  The Church's deep fears on this issue are that same-sex marriage may be the State's means of interfering in the individual's well-being, by tempting him with yet another system.  I, on the other hand, generally think the opposite:  that same-sex marriage would be potentially validating for the individuals who choose to marry so.  However, the Church fears the establishment of a pseudo-family, and for this reason opposes same-sex marriage, almost as it opposes Orwellianism. 

However, as the great conserver of traditions, the Catholic Church was once a system of its own.  It was once the Church that held absolute power in the West, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Many today perceive the Church for this reason as a power to hold man back in the Dark Ages.  This is how Dan Brown portrays the Church in Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code.  The modern world has replaced Catholicism and Christianity with other systems such as those noted above, namely the physical sciences, Marxism, behaviorist psychology. 

As I see it, the Catholic Church can have two potential functions.  On the one hand, it can represent the traditional system of morals which the mechanized modern world opposes and with which modern man has broken.  However, the Church can also strenthen its role as the defender of man's humanity.  The Church has the power to focus on the mythological function of religion.  It has the power to remind man of his true human nature and call man toward the inner life.  The Catholic Church can, as indeed all churches and religions can, remind man that he "does not live by bread alone."  One minister I once met told me that he uses The Lord of the Rings (the film) to talk about spiritual birth with his youth group:  "Put aside the Ranger, and become who you were born to be."  It is this spiritual life that Joseph Campbell is talking about.  And it is a life that is open to each of us.  It may not be a life that any system, either modern or traditional, can awaken.  But the Catholic Church has within its arsenal the tools of the spiritual, inner life.  And those are the tools that the Church should develop and implement further. 

Nietzsche: A Response to G. K. Chesterton

I haven't posted anything here in a long time, but The Catholic Science Geek sent a quote by G. K. Chesterton, the Catholic Englishman, regarding Friedrich Nietzsche, and asked for my opinion. I posted my thoughts on Facebook, but for reference, here they are.  (Shout out to The Catholic Science Geek.)

"THIS, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either."

~G.K. Chesterton, 'Orthodoxy.'

I will attempt to address these points in order. If Facebook will allow me to hit enter and put them in paragraph form.

1) "No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker." This is true. Nietzsche used metaphors to varying degrees throughout his works and almost exclusively in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is why it is necessary to read 5-6 of his major works to get any sense out of any of them: they only make sense when you know what ideas his metaphors are referencing. Nietzsche's works fit together like a puzzle: no piece standing alone can reveal the whole picture.

2) "He was not at all bold. ... Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor." Yes, that's true of his presentation. He never comes out and says, to borrow from a favorite film of mine, "Zorba, come; or Zorba, don't come." Which is, in turn, my own metaphorical way of saying, "Nietzsche never says plainly what he means." Walter Kaufmann explains in the commentary to his translations of the philosopher that besides being couched in metaphor, everything in Nietzsche is veiled, qualified, and superqualified. Oftentimes, he will use words in a context so that they mean generally the opposite of what they normally mean. He will also make contradictory statements in different passages of his writing, seeming to praise in one place, while seeming to "rip a new one" in other places. Again, only by reading multiple works can one get some sense of what Nietzsche is getting at. I'd say that is the opposite of "clear and bold" in any sense of those words.

3) " 'More good than good and evil,' or 'more evil than good and evil.' " This is probably the Ubermensch concept in a clearer nutshell than Nietzsche gave in the 5 and a half works of his that I've read. An Ubermensch may be higher, but not necessarily better, and not necessarily worse, either. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes, "When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy of the heart--it is simply his duty." This courtesy was something that Nietzsche himself showed in his own dealings with those around him. The implication is that a code of morals "higher" than those currently developed or widely accepted comes with noblesse oblige. I read somewhere once (probably Wikipedia) that in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, the generosity and magnanimity of Spock's self-sacrifice come close to Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch, in contradistinction to the physical eugenics and despicable acts on the part of Khan: one is only physically developed, while the other is morally developed.

4) "He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce."

To borrow a passage in Nietzsche's own words (Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books," Section 1): "The word 'overman,' as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, to 'good' men, to Christians and other nihilists--a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word--has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent--that is, as an 'idealistic' type of a higher kind of man, half 'saint,' half 'genius.' Other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account."

To counter Chesterton's idea that Nietzsche "wants evolution to produce [a sort of man]," here Nietzsche writes that the Ubermensch idea does not have to do with Darwinism or evolution. Does Nietzsche ever come out and say what his idea of the Ubermensch really is? Not in the 5 works of histhat I've read. Does Nietzsche himself have an idea in mind? I do not know. However, from what I can gather, the Ubermensch is closer to the idea of an "aristocrat," which ties in with the noblesse oblige mentioned in my previous post.


To conclude, I would say that Nietzsche was in some ways more of a prophet than a thinker, as Chesterton calls him. He was an outspoken critic of the anti-Semitism and German nationalism that he saw accrete around the person of Wagner, and that snowballed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the regime of the Nazis. He posed the question of power vs. morality for our own time. In identifying nihilism as the main sickness with which modern man is afflicted, he foresaw what so many traditionalists today describe as the "moral decay" into which the 20th century tumbled further and further.

He also prescribed a sort of remedy to this nihilism: "You call yourself free? Your dominant thought would I hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. Free from what? As if that mattered to Zarathustra! But your eyes should tell me brightly: free for what?" The key is to live FOR something, and not to rebel if you cannot handle that responsibility.

I think Nietzsche was light years (or at least decades) ahead of his time. He provides a valuable lens through which to understand the 20th century and the continuing developments in our own society and culture. If you can only get through his metaphors, contradictions, and rants, he actually has something worth hearing.

A Wonderful Evening

Well, after a three to four month hiatus, I have returned. These four months have been filled with activity, mostly of a studious nature. However, I have had an opportunity to socialize, and I have had some rich experiences.

This weekend I went to an eatery in Princeton with a new friend of mine who is Chinese. We went to a Chinese restaurant, perhaps not very ironically since I love Asian cuisine. We had a good time.

This was my first time having Chinese steamed buns. I ordered the pork buns, and my friend ordered buns containing a pork-crab mix. I also ordered a mango bubble tea, which was tasty, if a little warm. I already knew what I wanted before I came in, but my friend and I waited to order because we were enjoying ourselves looking at the menus, comparing the Chinese characters of the names of the dishes. 

The restaurant had beautiful decorations, booths, place settings, and woodwork. There was a large paragraph in Chinese written on one of the walls. My friend told me the paragraph was a series of compliments to the restaurant. I wish I knew Chinese! The waiters were speaking in a dialect which my Mandarin-speaking friend did not quite make sense of. As we were talking, there was an HDTV set on the wall opposite from us. CNN was showing maps of the nationwide flu epidemic and footage of President Obama and President Hamid Karzai discussing the future of the US's military involvement in Afghanistan. I wish now I had taken pictures--I even had my camera with me, but my friend and I were having so much fun that pictures did not matter to me.

Steamed buns in a bamboo steaming box. (Photograph from Global Bhasin.)

The buns arrived in two round bamboo baskets. A Chinese bun is similar to a dumpling. It is a hollow piece of dough containing a piece of meat and some fatty broth, like a piece wrapping paper rolled up around a baseball. I reached out with my chopsticks, pinched one of the buns at the middle, and dipped it in a small plate of soy sauce and vinegar. As I lifted it to my lips, my chopsticks poked through the doughy membrane, and spilled out all the delicious broth onto my plate. My friend, as a seasoned and native expert at eating these, showed me how to eat them: by gripping the bun by the top with your chopsticks, cradling the bottom in your spoon, then biting through the top and sucking out the broth. I have to admit, this technique was easier, but I still had trouble at it! After a hilarious attempt in which I dropped the bun into the dipping plate and spilled soy-sauce vinegar all over the white table cloth, I decided it would be best if I used a fork.

It was a fun and delicious experience. The pork was so tasty, and the broth even more so. But most of all, I had a delightful evening with my friend. For a few hours, everything else seemed to fade away. I remember the little details and distractions, but the substance of our evening was what made the experience so memorable. What mattered was who we were and where we were, and everything else was incidental. I think I learned something. I hope my friend and I will have many more good times, and I hope you, my reader, will have many good times such as these as well.