Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn –the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

Freya Stark

The instinct to love is the quick of life and the flowering of it leads to fearless living. That’s the best case scenario. But the scene is strewn with the walking wounded, and flowering and fearlessness have gone the way of the dodo, it seems.

I spoke with a friend only this week about the very real and deleterious affects, thirty years and more on, of parental absenteeism, alcohol and isolation.  I don’t know why her psychic misery, which is easily traceable as she so vividly related to me, is somehow unreal and to be denied.  She described her misery and in the same breath stated that, once past the age of eighteen, one mustn’t blame. There’s a small insanity: bearing witness to the root – and saying it’s not real and that someone can’t be blamed.  Well, you only have yourself to blame these days; an almost desperate need to which she still clings.

***

A girl was selling books on her stoop and I picked up a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for $2.  Maybe it will be something like Downton, which I have been devouring – I thought.  Not two weeks later I saw the full set of Brideshead DVDs at the library and checked them out and watched all 11 episodes in three nights.

On its face Brideshead is a story, like Downton, of the waning of the British aristocracy in the early 20th century.   That’s what the reviewers and the jacket covers tell us.  But the story is really more about adolescent love, family and religion.  At its heart, it is about the thwarting of love.

Charles Ryder and  Sebastian Flyte meet as undergraduates at Oxford University.  They become fast friends and Charles is drawn in to Sebastian’s aristocratic family:  a leaky vessel threatening to capsize.  The very foundations of the Marchmain family were built on shaky ground: Lord Marchmain converted to Catholicism to marry Sebastian’s mother, and eventually left the family to escape the smothering and stultifying influence of Lady Marchmain’s faith.

Charles loves Sebastian until Sebastian, like his father before him, withers and retreats in the face of his mother’s well meaning but ultimately destructive commitment to the demands of the church.  Then, some years later, Charles loves Sebastian’s sister Julia who, although stronger than Sebastian, eventually follows him into self imposed exile from family and relations brought on by the same issues of a graceless, airless faith.

***

You can tell the author Freya Stark would have something wonderful to say about love when you read her quiet, beautiful books.  In the brief passage above, she tells us that teaching to love is the prime role of a parent, and that to thwart love will lead to sorrow.  Pay careful attention all you lovers of righteousness: she says the need to be right will surely kill love.

So say it is what it is.  A drubbing that still hurts,  a thwarting of a very human need to love.  Then let yourself fall into Love.  Know that it is instinctual to fall, a passive act, and transformative.   The poet Oliver says ”Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”   Waugh said that “to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

Whar is it?  Over thar.  It looks tard and that critter with it for sartin’s a-goin to he-it it.  This far’s hot.  Drink?  Name your pizen.  Let’s swim nekkid only you’ll eetch if you roll in a boosh or wrassle after.  Chaw your food proper, and don’t poosh and shet yer gob when yer in line.  The ba-it’s wigglin and we be-in fishin this narrer stream.  Look in that winder at poor widder Elsie an her young-uns.

Here are the words from Fischer’s book:

whar for where, thar for there, tard for tired, critter for creature, sartin for certain, a-goin for going, hit for it, he-it for hit, far for fire, deef for deaf, pizen for poison, nekkid for naked, eetch for itch, boosh for bush, wrassle for wrestle, chaw for chew, poosh for push, shet for shut, ba-it for bat, be-it for be, narrer for narrow, winder for window, widder for widow, and young -uns for young one.

Accent of the original settlers of Applachia, David Hacket Fischer

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
Anatole Broyard

Prophets walk out of deserts for some reason.  I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that lone gunmen do too; they are like prophets of a harsh, frontier religion.

The Yeatsian view of the prophet entering the scene, as the smoke and ash settled from the Great War, was of a lion- man emerging from the desert – an enduring 20th century image, poetic and grand:  ”a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi /  Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.”

On the other hand, J. G. Ballard’s view of the coming of the prophets is banal and cynical.  He says they will emerge from shopping malls.  For the author shopping malls and deserts are more or less the same thing:  places that have outlived their own reason for being, timeless in the sense of being completely unconnected to human meaning and life.  They are veritable no places from which will emerge mandarins, giants, saviors, great souls, despots, creative geniuses and mass murderers.

Yeats and Ballard are really saying the same thing:  that extraordinary people emerge from these strange exceptional places.  Once out of their placeless milieus they ravage the petty world we occupy with their clarity and beauty.  They create and destroy.  They claim divinity, rain down judgement, establish peaceable kingdoms, chart ways out, promise grace.

From The Atrocity Exhibition:

“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It’s no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.”

— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

Here is some solace, within reach, that gives relief from the human habit of constant striving.  It’s in the form of a poem by Mary Oliver which tells us up front to end our ceaseless and vain attempts to justify ourselves.  Then it says to simply succumb to what we love.

There’s a yawning void between self justification and yielding to what we love.  We desperately and forever cling to our habits of guilt and self immolation.  But the suggestion here is clear, we should – and it is natural to – yield to what our bodies want.

How can we be sure?  It rains on the mountains and the geese are flying home, and all of these things – the world and everything in it – are calling to us to accept our proper place in it.  The world floods our imaginations and becomes the overwhelming evidence that to belong and to rest in it is natural and desirable.   By design it is not a place of striving but a place of belonging and rest, a place where we are allowed to love what we love.

Here is Oliver’s beautiful poem:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

There are two ideas here:  that it takes a village to desire and that we still need to believe that desire is our own discreet little activity.

“Our desires copy or mimic the desires of others.  Desire is triangular because the object of our desire—knowledge, mate, position—is made desirable by the desires of others which also converge toward it. Desire is not a straight line. It is a triangle. Its vertices are occupied respectively by the other, the object, the ego. That is what the later Dostoevsky has discovered. He has learnt also that the dissonance which results from the collision of this fact with our cherished illusion of an autonomous desire breeds conflict and mystification.”

Paul Dumouchel

Eastern Orthodox

Slobodan Milosevic
George Stephanopoulos – TV journalist.

Nicola Tesla —

Protestant

Jane Austen-English novelist; daughter of an Anglican clergyman.

Ingmar Bergman-filmmaker, son of a Lutheran minister.

Anne Brontë – novelist

Charlotte Brontë – novelist

Emily Brontë-novelist, daughters of an Anglican vicar.

Gordon Brown- Former prime minister of Great Britain, son a of Church of Scotland minister.

Pearl S. Buck-A child of missionaries with her father being a minister.

Grover Cleveland-22nd and 24th President of the United States. His father was a Presbyterian minister.

Nat King Cole-singer and jazz pianist, son of a Baptist minister.

Alistair Cooke (1908- ), British author and journalist.

Alice Cooper - Born Vincent Furnier, Musician, son of a lay preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ

Stephen Crane-Author of The Red Badge of Courage, son of a Methodist minister.

Aretha Franklin-”The Queen of Soul” and daughter of a Baptist minister.

Marvin Gaye-Musician, father and killer was minister Marvin Pentz Gay, Sr.

Carl Jung, psychiatrist, influential thinker and founder of analytical psychology was the son of pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church.

Henry Luce (1898-1967), U.S. editor and magazine publisher who founded Time, Fortune, and Life.

George McGovern (1922- ), U.S. senator from South Dakota.

Angela Merkel-Chancellor of Germany, chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (Germany), and a Lutheran pastor’s daughter.

Walter Mondale (1928- ), U.S. politician and vice-president.

Reinhold Neibuhr – Protestant Theologian. Son of a minister in the Evangelical Synod of North America, now the United Church of Christ.

Helmut Richard Neibuhr- Protestant theologians. Son of a minister in the Evangelical Synod of North America, now the United Church of Christ.

Friedrich Nietzsche-Philosopher

Sir Laurence Olivier (1907- ), British stage and screen actor.

Norman Vincent Peale (1898- ), U.S. Methodist minister and author.

Katy Perry-American pop singer-songwriter, daughter of two pastors.

The Pointer Sisters-Daughters of Church of God minister.

Condoleezza Rice–The United States’ 66th Secretary of State, daughter of a Presbyterian minister.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), French clergyman, physician, and musician who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his missionary work in French Equatorial Africa.

Nina Simone-Her mother was a Methodist minister and as a girl she played at her church.

Harriet Beecher Stowe-Daughter of Lyman Beecher, and wife of a minister, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965), German philosopher and Protestant theologian.

Vincent van Gogh, Artist.

Woodrow Wilson-28th President of the United States. His father was a Presbyterian minister.

Sir Christopher Wren, one of the greatest English architects of his time. Wren designed 53 London churches, including St Paul’s Cathedral.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), U.S. architect.

Wright brothers-Sons of Milton Wright (Bishop).

Malcolm X-A convert to Islam whose father is described as “an outspoken Baptist minister.”

Denzel Washington, actor. Son of a pentecostal preacher