Dis-a-(p)point-ment

“Disappointment” is a soft word we sometimes use to describe hard experience.

When we are angry at or frustrated with someone or something, but anxious about expressing our real feelings, “disappointment” may be all we can safely say–or all we will allow ourselves to say–to others and to ourselves.

Our culture urges us to express our feelings honestly and publicly, and honesty in expression of feelings is often appropriate and even redemptive. But the unbridled spilling of every emotion creates barriers that may be harder to overcome than if we had started by expressing disappointment and encouraged the conversation to go on from there.

Diplomats, labor negotiators, and politicians use “disappointing” to describe failed attempts to resolve differences and heal divisions. No matter how heated the words that crossed the table between them and their adversary, or what was said when they gathered with their own team to review the situation, “disappointing” takes care of it in public without revealing too much. When they stand in front of cameras to report on their last session together, “disappointing” conveys their feelings while leaving a door open to the next round.

A “point” is a place; to “appoint” is to direct attention or work toward that place; to “disappoint” is not to get to that place. There are many ways for things to go wrong that result in disappointment: the “point” is not understood or agreed upon; the way to get to it is unclear, either by design or error; one or the other of the parties has no real desire to get to that place despite statements to the contrary; one or both of the parties involved does not clearly understand their own goals.

When things fall apart–do not go as one or the other or both expected–there may well be anger or frustration. The more important the issue and the more emotionally-involved the participants, the stronger the anger and the greater the frustration. But when the stakes are too high to give up trying, the more important it is that “disappointing” be used to describe how it felt to miss the point.

We cannot be disappointed unless we are working toward something, either within ourselves or with others. People with no hope for the future don’t know disappointment, or when they do it is after they realize it is too late for them to do anything to change the outcome. I recently watched some ants carrying little bits of green leaves across a wilderness of last season’s mulch and fallen pine needles. They were working very hard, probably on their way to a particular place. But I doubt they were conscious of where they were going in the way we would be, or that other ants knew they were carrying their cargos to them. I doubt that ants know disappointment, though they may experience something like anger or frustration, even without naming them. Disappointment depends upon awareness of time, and from what I know we humans are the only animals who quantify time.

One of the dangers of telling someone you are disappointed in them is that it can be manipulative to do so. To express disappointment can be an oblique way of laying the blame on them without owning up to your part in it; after all, your expectations of them were absolutely pure and clear, and they should have known that and tried harder to please you! Parents can misuse “disappointment” in this way, and often do.

Our most painful disappointments can be with ourselves. When I cannot do something I think I should be able to do, I easily flame out in anger and frustration. I get mad both because of what I could not do and because of how I reacted to not being able to do it, and either give up trying or let my anger sabotage my trying. But instead of beating up on myself for my perceived failures of personal behavior or habit, I’d do better to acknowledge my disappointment with myself in this situation, figure out what I need to do differently (even asking for help!), and give it another go.

Perhaps a judicious willingness to call ourselves disappointed with ourselves and in our relations with others would more frequently set us a path toward resolving what angers or frustrates us. It is better than pummeling ourselves or others in anger or giving in entirely to frustration. It is always worth trying.

Walt Whitman: "Dirge for Two Veterans"

Whitman's "Dirge for Two Veterans" has been set to music by (at least) Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Kurt Weill. That in itself attests to the evocative power of its rhythm and its imagery. No end of analysis is available regarding it, but listening to the musical settings on YouTube might be all you need to do to "get it." I believe Whitman based it upon the actual experience of seeing father and son buried side by side; they seem to me to represent the one-generation-to-another nature of human war-making. Makes me wonder what might happen if successive generations we able to make peace. In any case, it's all here: the music, the march, the moon, the "mother's large transparent face" ever watching--all through the prism of Whitman's experience of our Civil War.

Dirge for Two Veterans

The last sunbeam

Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,

On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,

Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,

Up from the east the silvery round moon,

Beautiful over the housetops, ghastly, phantom moon,

Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,

And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,

All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,

As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,

And the small drums steady whirring,

And every blow of the great convulsive drums,

Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,

(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,

Two veterans son and father dropt together,

And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,

And the drums strike more convulsive,

And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,

And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-bouying,

The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,

(’Tis some mother’s large transparent face,

In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!

O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!

O my soldiers twain!  O my veterans passing to burial!

What I have, I also give you.

The moon gives you light,

And the bugles and drums give you music,

And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,

My heart gives you love.

Walt Whitman

Our Collective Binge

“We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge, and the earth couldn’t support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn’t do much. We didn’t turn our lives around the prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.”

Bill McKibben, quoted in The Sun, May 2012, p. 48

The Letters Hold Their Course

I was sorting through materials I’ve collected over the years when I came across a mimeographed copy of author and critic Edmund Wilson’s On First Reading Genesis. It had first appeared in the May 15, 1954, issue of The New Yorker. I knew exactly how it had come into my possession, and I immediately sat down to read it, as if for my first time.

During my first semester in seminary, Dr. James Muilenburg distributed On First Reading Genesis to his “Introduction to the Old Testament” class. Dr. Muilenburg, a master teacher, often gave us “extra” readings to supplement our textbooks. Perhaps because of his own experience as an English teacher, he wanted us to appreciate the full power of the original language of scripture.

Wilson’s essay is a wonder of insight, wonder of the kind that only first-time readers of anything worth reading can know. Himself a writer, Wilson delves into how the Hebrew language works, and specifically into how the Hebrew verb tenses reveal a very different understanding of time that we have. I am no longer sure if Wilson has everything “right” about Hebrew, and probably our understandings of it are different now than they were 60 years ago, but many lights of recognition came on in my head as I re-read On First Reading Genesis.

After describing the Hebrew language’s bold written consonants attended by dots and dashes (“pointings”) to represent vowel sounds, Wilson writes:

“Our first look at the text of the Bible, when we have mastered the alphabet, is likely to give us the feeling that this system is extremely impractical. It required what must seem to the beginner an annoying and easily avoidable effort to coordinate with the heavy consonants the elusive little dashes and dots that hover about them like midgets ...

“Even the printing of these signs is difficult, impossible for a linotype machine (!), since they appear in innumerable combinations. The result is that, even in learned books, the consonants are, if possible, written without the ‘pointings,’ and what you get is a kind of shorthand. You must already know the words extremely well in order to be able to recognize them.

“Yet some further acquaintance induces respect, and a perception that this method is appropriate, an inalienable element of the Jewish tradition. The characters themselves are impressive -- not fluent like the Roman or Greek, but retaining still, as these have not, the look of having once been cut in stone. To write out Hebrew vocabulary, with black ink and stub pen, affords a satisfaction that may give one a faint idea of the pleasures of Chinese calligraphy, as well as a feeling of vicarious authority as one traces the portentous syllables. ...

“These twenty-two signs ... from which, in their Phoenician form, all our European alphabets have been taken, have, austere in their vowelless terseness, been steadily proceeding from right to left, over a period of two thousand years, among peoples that read from left to right; and in the Bible they take on an aspect exalted and somewhat mysterious: the square letters holding their course, with no capitals for proper names and no punctuation save the firm double diamond that marks the end of a verse, compact in form as in meaning, stamped on the page, like a woodcut, solid verse linked to solid verse with the ever recurrent ‘and’ the sound of which is modulated by changes of vowel, while above and below them a dance of accents shows the pattern of metrical structure and the rise and fall of the chanting, and, above and below, inside and out, the vowel pointings hang like motes, as if they were molecules the consonant breathed.

“Difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and completely indifferent to this, they have withstood the drive toward assimilation, to their Spanish and Germanic neighbors, of the Jews of the Middle Ages; and in the dialect of German that is Yiddish, in newspapers spread in the subway, they still march in the direction opposite to that of all the other subway newspapers, English or Spanish or Italian, Hungarian or Russian or Greek, with only a light sprinkling of pointings to indicate Germanic vowels. And we have seen them reassemble in Israel, reconstituting their proper language -- not embarrassed in the least by the fear that the newspaper reader of our century, even knowing Hebrew perfectly, may have difficulty in distinguishing, in the British reports, a vowelless Bevan from a vowelless Bevin. (to what is that a reference?) They march on through modern events as if they were invulnerable, eternal.

“But in the meantime, the Bible confronts us, in the dignity and beauty of its close-packed page.”

I think James Muilenburg intended his students to take those paragraphs to heart. They stand in the center of the essay, making clear why this ancient language still matters, still makes a difference, still comforts and confronts men and women in all cultures and times.

Congress as Choir

When I read in last Sunday’s Plain Dealer about Rep. Tim Ryan (representing Ohio’s 17th Congressional District, which includes Youngstown and Akron) practicing mindfulness, I asked myself how that practice could be shared with his colleagues. I am genuinely impressed with his discipline and commitment.

Here’s what I came up with: form Congress into an excellent musical group - a “Congress Choir” - and thereby spread the benefits of mindfulness to the whole institution.

Singing well together demands intense mindfulness. You have to know where you are, and to listen to yourself in the context of listening to those around you. You must measure your own priorities by the priorities of the whole group.

Every session of Congress - both House and Senate - will begin (after prayer) with a ten minute choir rehearsal. Now it will mostly be a men’s choir, but a good director will find useable musical arrangements until more women are elected. Every Congressperson and Senator will be required to participate.

After brief warm-ups, rehearsal will begin on a single piece of music. It will take some learning, because the members will have to sing at least four parts...unison singing is not expected nor even desired. Not everyone knows how to sing different parts together, but everyone - even our most partisan reps - can learn.

Once a month the two branches will convene in the House chamber to perform the piece they’ve been learning. They will all stand (if able) and with great joy and fervent conviction they will will voice the results of their bipartisanship. Packed galleries, an eager nation, and a hopeful world will hear them via every audio and visual means. We will watch and listen in awe as Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and John Boehner and the whole of lot of them take deep, deep breaths (just doing that would be a good thing), and lift their voices together in one singular song of praise for the land they profess to love but spend most of their time trying to tear apart.

I would start with “God Bless America.” Everyone at least knows the words, and no one will dare disagree with them. “My Country ’Tis of Thee” will be a good follow up. Their British equivalents in Parliament can sing that with them - different words, of course, but we are used to that. I’d like to hear Congress sing “American the Beautiful,” though the need for “mending flaws” might be difficult for some to admit or for any of them to agree upon. The National Anthem must wait until vocal range has increased significantly.

In the third or fourth month Congress Choir’s selection will be “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” followed by something appropriate in Spanish or an Asian language. Songs celebrating ordinary laborers will frequently be programmed, though union songs might raise some hackles. Songs praising bankers and lawyers will have to be commissioned, but finding funds for that will be easy.

Despite a short time to rehearse, the high point of the season will come in January when the President takes the podium to give the State of the Union Address. The first sound out of the Presidential mouth will be a solo, accompanied by a humming Congress. How sweet that will be when the President is a soprano or alto.

No other solos will be permitted. Divas of both sexes will be discouraged. An occasional small group (called a “Super Group”), such as a quartet, will be tolerated. Mostly, it’s best to hear Congress sing together.

When people sing together it is hard for them to despise or denigrate one another, even when they disagree. Group music-making builds ties that will be broken only with great pain. I suspect that’s why visions of heaven always include heavenly choirs. How else could the Lord possibly keep peace among all the various kinds of saints?

My plan could be derailed by internal jealousy about who gets the best parts, or conflict over repertoire or stylistic interpretation. And more than a few choirs have been stressed to breaking by personal relationships gone awry. But a top-notch director can overcome much of that.

The effect upon our nation and world will be stunning. After hearing Congress sing beautifully together, we will demand legislation as harmonious and satisfying as their singing. They will give us what we demand because, after all, they are primarily politicians, not musicians.

If I were in Congress, Rep. Ryan and I could co-sponsor a bill to create a “Congress Choir.” Until I get there, contact your elected representatives and urge them to get behind this idea. It will hardly impact the budget, and its bang for the buck will be triple forte.